Rejecting Donald Trump is an Act of Patriotism

This evening I ran into a "friend" who voted for Donald Trump who asked me if I was going to be going to the inauguration on Friday.  My response was that I would sooner slit my wrists.   Since the Vietnam War era I have always believed that rather than fall into the mindlessness of the "America Right or Wrong" crowd, true patriotism involves standing up for principle and demanding that America live up to its ideals and that the Constitution be defended.  Now, faced with an incoming president who lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, exhibits contempt fort conflict of interest rules, and seeks only to satiate his voracious ego, it is more important than every to stand up for America and the ideals of equality and equal justice under the laws. A column in the New York Times argues that resisting Donald Trump as Congressman John Lewis has done and refusing to recognize him as a legitimate president is an act of patriotism.  The far right will shriek and scream, yet they had no problem striving for 8 years to legitimize Barack Obama which merely underscores their hypocrisy.  Here are column excerpts:

[L]et’s ask whether Mr. Lewis was right to say what he said. Is it O.K., morally and politically, to declare the man about to move into the White House illegitimate?

Yes, it is. In fact, it’s an act of patriotism.

By any reasonable standard, the 2016 election was deeply tainted. It wasn’t just the effects of Russian intervention on Mr. Trump’s behalf; Hillary Clinton would almost surely have won if the F.B.I. hadn’t conveyed the false impression that it had damaging new information about her, just days before the vote. This was grotesque, delegitimizing malfeasance, especially in contrast with the agency’s refusal to discuss the Russia connection.

Was there even more to it? Did the Trump campaign actively coordinate with a foreign power? Did a cabal within the F.B.I. deliberately slow-walk investigations into that possibility? Are the lurid tales about adventures in Moscow true? We don’t know, although Mr. Trump’s creepy obsequiousness to Vladimir Putin makes it hard to dismiss these allegations. Even given what we do know, however, no previous U.S. president-elect has had less right to the title. So why shouldn’t we question his legitimacy?

And talking frankly about how Mr. Trump gained power isn’t just about truth-telling. It may also help to limit that power.

It would be one thing if the incoming commander in chief showed any hint of humility, of realizing that his duty to the nation requires showing some respect for the strong majority of Americans who voted against him despite Russian meddling and the F.B.I.’s disinformation dump. But he hasn’t and won’t.

Instead, he’s lashing out at and threatening anyone and everyone who criticizes him, while refusing even to admit that he lost the popular vote. And he’s surrounding himself with people who share his contempt for everything that is best in America. What we’re looking at, all too obviously, is an American kakistocracy — rule by the worst.

What this means is that Mr. Trump must not be treated with personal deference simply because of the position he has managed to seize. He must not be granted the use of the White House as a bully pulpit. He must not be allowed to cloak himself in the majesty of office. Given what we know about this guy’s character, it’s all too clear that granting him unearned respect will just empower him to behave badly.

And reminding people how he got where he is will be an important tool in preventing him from gaining respect he doesn’t deserve. Remember, saying that the election was tainted isn’t a smear or a wild conspiracy theory; it’s simply the truth.

Now, anyone questioning Mr. Trump’s legitimacy will be accused of being unpatriotic — because that’s what people on the right always say about anyone who criticizes a Republican president. (Strangely, they don’t say this about attacks on Democratic presidents.) But patriotism means standing up for your country’s values, not pledging personal allegiance to Dear Leader.

No, we shouldn’t get into the habit of delegitimizing election results we don’t like. But this time really is exceptional, and needs to be treated that way.  

I agree. #NotMyPresident.

How the Media is Helping Donald Trump

I have rallied against the irresponsibility of the mainstream media before, particularly its penchant for assigning a false equivalency between today's Republican Party and the Democrat Party.  Now, with Donald Trump, the danger from this irresponsibility, especially the media's failure to question Trump, demand answers, and expose his endless lies threats the nation.  The same irresponsibility allowed Bush/Cheney to take America to war based on lies.  The danger now is vastly more serious as a man with mental health issues stands as the nominee of the Republican Party.  This isn't a reality TV show.  This is immensely serious, yet the media continues to fail to do its job.  If America falls to Trump's form of fascism and misogyny, the media will bear a significant part of the blame. A column in the New York Times looks at this existential danger.  Here are highlights:

When Donald Trump began his run for the White House, many people treated it as a joke. Nothing he has done or said since makes him look better. On the contrary, his policy ignorance has become even more striking, his positions more extreme, the flaws in his character more obvious, and he has repeatedly demonstrated a level of contempt for the truth that is unprecedented in American politics.

Yet while most polls suggest that he’s running behind in the general election, the margin isn’t overwhelming, and there’s still a real chance that he might win. How is that possible? Part of the answer, I’d argue, is that voters don’t fully appreciate his awfulness. And the reason is that too much of the news media still can’t break with bothsidesism — the almost pathological determination to portray politicians and their programs as being equally good or equally bad, no matter how ludicrous that pretense becomes.

[T]the fact is that voters who don’t have the time or inclination to do their own research, who get their news analysis from TV or regular news pages, are fed a daily diet of false equivalence.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. During the 2000 campaign George W. Bush was flatly dishonest about his policy proposals; his numbers didn’t add up, and he claimed repeatedly that his tax cuts, which overwhelmingly favored the 1 percent, were aimed at the middle class. Yet mainstream coverage never made this clear.

Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, has a reputation as a policy wonk, committed to fiscal responsibility, that is utterly incomprehensible if you look at the slapdash, fundamentally dishonest policy documents he actually puts out. But the cult of balance requires that someone on the Republican side be portrayed as a serious, honest fiscal expert, so Mr. Ryan gets slotted into that role no matter how much a con man he may be in reality.

Still, there are con men, and then there are con men. You might think that Donald Trump, who lies so much that fact-checkers have a hard time keeping up, who keeps repeating falsehoods even after they’ve been proved wrong, and who combines all of this with a general level of thuggishness aimed in part at the press, would be too much even for the balance cultists to excuse.

But you would be wrong.

And in the last few days we’ve seen a spectacular demonstration of bothsidesism in action: an op-ed article from the incoming and outgoing heads of the White House Correspondents’ Association, with the headline “Trump, Clinton both threaten free press.” How so? Well, Mr. Trump has selectively banned news organizations he considers hostile; he has also, although the op-ed didn’t mention it, attacked both those organizations and individual reporters, and refused to condemn supporters who, for example, have harassed reporters with anti-Semitic insults.

Meanwhile, while Mrs. Clinton hasn’t done any of these things, and has a staff that readily responds to fact-checking questions, she doesn’t like to hold press conferences. Equivalence! 

As I said, bothsidesism isn’t new, and it has always been an evasion of responsibility. But taking the position that “both sides do it” now, in the face of this campaign and this candidate, is an act of mind-boggling irresponsibility.

Be very, very afraid.

Bernie Sanders Over the Edge

Some of my friends who are Bernie Sanders supporters will not be pleased with this post, but a column in the New York Times by Paul Krugman who is certainly no big supporter of Wall Street and the Republican worship of vulture capitalism gets to the heart of my problem with Bernie Sanders: he is largely a one over arching issue candidate who I worry could not hold up in a brutal campaign against a Republican candidate who will say and do anything to win.  Both Cruz and Trump fall into this category as does Kasich if one looks behind the false facade he is painting for himself.  That's not to say that I in love with Hillary Clinton.  One simply has to sometimes pick who one believes will do the best job and be able to get the most of what needs to be done accomplished under adverse conditions (meaning a GOP controlled House and possibly Senate as well) even if it is less than ideal in a perfect world.  Sanders supporters are, in my view, losing sight of this reality.  Here are column highlights:

From the beginning, many and probably most liberal policy wonks were skeptical about Bernie Sanders. On many major issues — including the signature issues of his campaign, especially financial reform — he seemed to go for easy slogans over hard thinking. And his political theory of change, his waving away of limits, seemed utterly unrealistic.

Some Sanders supporters responded angrily when these concerns were raised, immediately accusing anyone expressing doubts about their hero of being corrupt if not actually criminal. But intolerance and cultishness from some of a candidate’s supporters are one thing; what about the candidate himself?

Unfortunately, in the past few days the answer has become all too clear: Mr. Sanders is starting to sound like his worst followers. Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro.

Let me illustrate the point about issues by talking about bank reform.

The easy slogan here is “Break up the big banks.” It’s obvious why this slogan is appealing from a political point of view: Wall Street supplies an excellent cast of villains. But were big banks really at the heart of the financial crisis, and would breaking them up protect us from future crises?

Many analysts concluded years ago that the answers to both questions were no. Predatory lending was largely carried out by smaller, non-Wall Street institutions like Countrywide Financial; the crisis itself was centered not on big banks but on “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers that weren’t necessarily that big. And the financial reform that President Obama signed in 2010 made a real effort to address these problems. It could and should be made stronger, but pounding the table about big banks misses the point.

Yet going on about big banks is pretty much all Mr. Sanders has done. On the rare occasions on which he was asked for more detail, he didn’t seem to have anything more to offer. And this absence of substance beyond the slogans seems to be true of his positions across the board.

You could argue that policy details are unimportant as long as a politician has the right values and character. As it happens, I don’t agree. For one thing, a politician’s policy specifics are often a very important clue to his or her true character — I warned about George W. Bush’s mendacity back when most journalists were still portraying him as a bluff, honest fellow, because I actually looked at his tax proposals. For another, I consider a commitment to facing hard choices as opposed to taking the easy way out an important value in itself.

But in any case, the way Mr. Sanders is now campaigning raises serious character and values issues.

It’s one thing for the Sanders campaign to point to Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street connections, which are real, although the question should be whether they have distorted her positions, a case the campaign has never even tried to make. But recent attacks on Mrs. Clinton as a tool of the fossil fuel industry are just plain dishonest, and speak of a campaign that has lost its ethical moorings.

And then there was Wednesday’s rant about how Mrs. Clinton is not “qualified” to be president.

This is really bad, on two levels. Holding people accountable for their past is O.K., but imposing a standard of purity, in which any compromise or misstep makes you the moral equivalent of the bad guys, isn’t. Abraham Lincoln didn’t meet that standard; neither did F.D.R. Nor, for that matter, has Bernie Sanders (think guns).

And the timing of the Sanders rant was truly astonishing. Given her large lead in delegates — based largely on the support of African-American voters, who respond to her pragmatism because history tells them to distrust extravagant promises — Mrs. Clinton is the strong favorite for the Democratic nomination.

Is Mr. Sanders positioning himself to join the “Bernie or bust” crowd, walking away if he can’t pull off an extraordinary upset, and possibly helping put Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the White House? If not, what does he think he’s doing?

The Sanders campaign has brought out a lot of idealism and energy that the progressive movement needs. It has also, however, brought out a streak of petulant self-righteousness among some supporters. Has it brought out that streak in the candidate, too?

I have been involved in politics for a number of decades - first as a GOP activist before the GOP went off the rails and was hijacked by the Christofascists and for later for quite a few years now as a LGBT rights activist.   Throughout this period I've learned that one must focus on pushing for what is possible and within reach of achieving.  I feel that many Sanders supporters are losing sight of this reality.  Worse yet, their attacks on Hillary Clinton could end up putting a Republican back in the White House which would be a worse case nightmare for anyone who likes Sanders' progressive ideas.  

Sanders Supporters' Magical Unicorn Problem

Having been in the political trenches for well over two decades, one of the issues that must always be kept in sight is that of what is realistically possible versus some idealized vision of what would be nice if we could have whatever we wanted.  While I like many of Bernie Sanders' proposals in concept, the problem is that many are not realistically possible even if Sanders were to win the Democrat primary and then go on to win in November.  The further concern is that Sanders' fantasy vision make render him un-electable in November.  And if a Republican wins the White House, the consequences will be horrific, including potentially three conservative appointees to the U. S. Supreme Court.  Paul Krugman lays out the dilemma in a New York Times column.  Here are excerpts:

It has been an interesting few months on the progressive side of the political debate, and I mean that in the worst way. A significant number of progressives are very, very excited by the unexpected support for Bernie Sanders, and are shocked and horrified to find many — I think most — liberal policy wonks rather skeptical. For me this is somewhat familiar territory: I was skeptical about Barack Obama’s promises of transcendence back in 2008, too. And then as now a fair number of enthusiasts took no time at all to declare that I was a corrupt villain, a tool of the oligarchs, desperate for a job with Hillary etc.. OK, this too shall pass. But I thought it might be worth saying a bit more about where people like me find ourselves.

First of all, to say what should be but sometimes apparently isn’t obvious, what you would ideally want and what you think can be achieved — and even what you think should be an election platform — aren’t the same thing. What I and most of my wonk friends would like to see is . . . . a strong social safety net that protects everyone against avoidable misery, workers with substantial bargaining power, strong environmental policy; not an equalized society, not a Utopia, but someplace where basic decency is a fundamental principle. But nothing like that is going to happen in America any time soon. 

[E]ven the incremental changes Hillary Clinton is proposing are very unlikely to get through Congress; the radical changes Bernie Sanders is proposing wouldn’t happen even if Democrats retook the House. O’Brien says that the Democratic primary is “like arguing what’s more real: a magical unicorn or a regular unicorn. In either case, you’re still running on a unicorn platform.”

[W]hy not go for the magical unicorn? A couple of reasons.

One is that there are degrees of realism: a program that could be implemented in part if Democrats retake the House might turn out to be a useful guide relatively soon, while a program that requires a political revolution won’t. 

Another is that, perhaps inevitably, the Sanders insistence on the need for magical unicorns has led to invocations of economic as well as political magic. I warned a while back that even Sanders wasn’t willing to level with voters about what his ideals would require — that, in particular, he was assuming unrealistic savings in order to gloss over the reality that quite a few middle-class Americans would be net losers from a transition to single payer.
And this could matter a lot in a general election. For sure the Republican, whoever he is, will be offering plans that are obvious nonsense; but if the Democrat is also offering a plan that doesn’t add up, you know that the media will portray the situation as symmetric, even if it isn’t. . . . This is why it’s important to bring up the criticisms of Sanders now, not wait until later — and it’s also why the campaign’s knee-jerk response of attacking the messengers is such a bad one. It might work in the primary, but it definitely won’t work later on.

OK, so I’m not happy with magical unicorns as a campaign strategy. But I understand the problem, which is also the problem Clinton faces: among young people in particular, being a wet blanket is no way to be hugely popular. . . . . She’s not going to be able to promise magic without being obviously false. Sanders, on the other hand, probably believes what he’s saying; the rude awakening still lies ahead.

Now, Clinton will probably get the nomination — in part because African-American voters, much more than young whites, know all too well how hard it is to achieve change. . . . . And, as I said, she’s actually pretty well-positioned for the general.

But you see the problem. It’s a rough time for progressives who don’t believe in magic.

The Core Differences between Clinton and Sanders

I generally agree with Paul Krugman's views and in a column today in the New York Times he takes a look at the descent into insanity in the GOP fueled by unlimited money, but just as importantly, racism and other bigotry.  He also reviews the competing views of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton on needed change and the route needed to get there.  I like many of Sanders' proposals but continue to worry that the socialist label that the GOP would wrap around him might not be fatal in the general election.  Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has all her much discussed baggage.  Here are column highlights:

Every time you think that our political discourse can’t get any worse, it does. The Republican primary fight has devolved into a race to the bottom, achieving something you might have thought impossible: making George W. Bush look like a beacon of tolerance and statesmanship. But where is all the nastiness coming from?

Well, there’s debate about that — and it’s a debate that is at the heart of the Democratic contest.

Like many people, I’ve described the competition between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as an argument between competing theories of change, which it is. But underlying that argument is a deeper dispute about what’s wrong with America, what brought us to the state we’re in.

To oversimplify a bit — but only, I think, a bit — the Sanders view is that money is the root of all evil. Or more specifically, the corrupting influence of big money, of the 1 percent and the corporate elite, is the overarching source of the political ugliness we see all around us.

The Clinton view, on the other hand, seems to be that money is the root of some evil, maybe a lot of evil, but it isn’t the whole story. Instead, racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice are powerful forces in their own right. This may not seem like a very big difference — both candidates oppose prejudice, both want to reduce economic inequality. But it matters for political strategy.

As you might guess, I’m on the many-evils side of this debate. Oligarchy is a very real issue, and I was writing about the damaging rise of the 1 percent back when many of today’s Sanders supporters were in elementary school. But it’s important to understand how America’s oligarchs got so powerful.

Crucially, the rise of the American hard right was the rise of a coalition, an alliance between an elite seeking low taxes and deregulation and a base of voters motivated by fears of social change and, above all, by hostility toward you-know-who.

Yes, there was a concerted, successful effort by billionaires to push America to the right. That’s not conspiracy theorizing; it’s just history, documented at length in Jane Mayer’s eye-opening new book “Dark Money.” But that effort wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as it has without the political aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, and the resulting flip of Southern white voters to the G.O.P.

Racial dog whistles, demagogy on abortion and so on would be rolled out during election years, then put back into storage while the Republican Party focused on its real business of enabling shadow banking and cutting top tax rates.

But in this age of Trump, not so much. The 1 percent has no problems with immigration that brings in cheap labor; it doesn’t want a confrontation over Planned Parenthood; but the base isn’t taking guidance the way it used to.

If the ugliness in American politics is all, or almost all, about the influence of big money, then working-class voters who support the right are victims of false consciousness. . . . .
On the other hand, if the divisions in American politics aren’t just about money, if they reflect deep-seated prejudices that progressives simply can’t appease, such visions of radical change are naïve. And I believe that they are.

[T]here’s still a lot of real prejudice out there, and probably enough so that political revolution from the left is off the table. Instead, it’s going to be a hard slog at best.

[O]ne reason the right has gone so berserk is that the Obama years have in fact been marked by significant if incomplete progressive victories, on health policy, taxes, financial reform and the environment. And isn’t there something noble, even inspiring, about fighting the good fight, year after year, and gradually making things better?

Republicans Are Panicked, Stupid And Cruel

The caption of this post was too good to pass up - especially since it is true in its description of far too many of today's Republicans.  Sadly, the party base embraces ignorance - - actually, celebrates it - gushes bigotry, and is motivated b fear: fear of gays, fear of blacks, fear of Hispanics, fear of Muslims and fear of modernity itself.  Enter the GOP clown car of GOP presidential candidates and the result is almost guaranteed to be a train wreck.   A piece in Politicususa.com looks at the the fruits of the failed policies of the GOP and the bigotry and hysteria of the GOP base which has only intensified since November 13, 2015.  Here are highlights:

It is really difficult to discern what kind of character flaw is driving a fair number of Americans to abject fright and dependency on being in a near-perpetual state of panic; most recently over a single incident in Europe that is repeated around the world at the same frequency as mass shootings in America, almost weekly.

At first blush one assumes that social conservatives are pathologically addicted to fear, but it is so much more than that because a primary component of irrational fear is ignorance. The Republican base are also inherently stupid and it is a fact not lost on their leaders who are again taking advantage of that indisputable fact to manipulate them like a herd of terrified sheep.

[I]f the right were not so stupid, they would realize that the Republican fear mongering over Syrian refugees is precisely how George W. Bush convinced Americans to support invading two Middle East nations who did not attack America. They also supported giving up their privacy, opening the door to al Qaeda in Iraq, and creating the object of the Republicans’ fright du jour; the Islamic State (IS, ISIS, ISIL).

In his Friday column, Paul Krugman noted that since Barack Obama was sworn in as President, Republicans and conservatives have done nothing but “warn about imminent catastrophe.” Of course none of the fiscal crises, hyperinflation and economic collapse due to health insurance, gun confiscations, or imposition of Sharia Law have happened as predicted. And yet, the same Republican panic-mongers have their stupid base terrified of allowing refugees who are not “proven Christians” into the country.

All of this Republican-created panic and fear is going on in America while Parisians who were actually attacked are staying calm and going out to cafes to show that they are not intimidated like terrified Americans. President François Hollande even reaffirmed that, because France is a humanitarian nation, they will continue taking in Syrian refugees and increased the number.

According to right-wing social conservatives, all they require to be courageous and intimidating is god and guns, and although they have those in abundance, a tough guy like Erickson is too much of a coward to venture out to the local multiplex. All the while, Parisians are back to their routines and Republicans are terrified of refugees; unless “they can prove beyond a doubt that they are Christians.”

Krugman is not alone in his assessment of Republicans and their conservative punditry. President Obama rightly mocked Republicans for claiming they intimidate world leaders and yet are “scared of widows and orphans.”
Mr. Krugman makes a very valid point in noting that panic is the only thing Republicans have and that the presidential nomination will go to “whoever can most effectively channel that panic.” Krugman comprehends, like Republicans and their conservative pundits, that their social conservative base is driven by fear, stupidity and cruelty; especially toward Muslim people whether they are Syrian refugees or American citizens.

There is a major election coming up and with nothing to run on Republicans are reverting to what they know works best; frightening Americans who are too cognitively challenged to know they are being manipulated yet again. It is not a testament to Republicans’ expertise at reading the people, just a revelation that a fair portion of the population is stupid enough to fall for the exact same fear tactics. If they were not imbecilic morons they might be embarrassed but they are not; that in itself is embarrassing.

Paul Ryan: Memories of Con Jobs Past

As past posts make clear, I view Paul Ryan as a liar and hypocrite, especially when it comes to his feigned allegiance to Christian values even as he restlessly presses the GOP's reverse Robin Hood agenda. Now, with the increasingly insane Republican Party in disarray, some are seeing Ryan as the white knight needed to same the GOP from its self-wrought chaos.  Sadly, too many in the media continue to call Ryan out for what he really is: a con man.  Paul Krugman, fortunately,  doesn't display such reticence.  Here are highlights from his spot on column in the New York Times:

As the Paul Ryan clamor gets louder, a public service reminder: he’s a con man.

I don’t mean that I disagree with his policy ideas, although I do. I mean that his reputation as a serious thinker is based on deception, both about what he has actually proposed and how it has or hasn’t been vetted.

Take, for example, the famous “fiscally responsible” budget plan. As I explained way back when, what Ryan did was to present a sort of vague fiscal outline to the Congressional Budget Office that envisioned implausibly large cuts in spending and mysterious increases in revenue, and stipulated for the purpose of the exercise that CBO take those numbers as given. The budget office hinted broadly in its report that it didn’t believe any of it, e.g.:

That combination of other mandatory and discretionary spending was specified to decline from 12 percent of GDP in 2010 to about 6 percent in 2021 and then move in line with the GDP price deflator beginning in 2022, which would generate a further decline relative to GDP. No proposals were specified that would generate that path. [My italics]

Ryan is to budget analysis as Carly Fiorina is to corporate leadership: he’s brilliant at self-promotion, but there’s no hint that he’s actually able to do the job. There is, in particular, no example I know of where he’s actually been right about anything involving budgets or economics, and some remarkable examples — like his inflation screeds — of being completely wrong, and learning nothing from the experience.

So is this really the GOP can do? And the answer, sad to say, is that it probably is.

Congressional Republicans: Trillion Dollar Fraudsters

The GOP shysters in Congress have yet again prepared a smoke and mirrors budget that would attack the social safety net - or what's left of it - for millions of Americans while yet again cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthiest Americans.  While labeled as a deficit reduction plan, the same old trickle down economics would instead explode the deficit.  Time and time again the GOP pushes the same old policies expecting some miracle to make the numbers work even though they never will balance.  It's a classic example of insanity.  Yet their heads are so far up their asses - or up the asses of the Christofascists and vulture capitalists - that they remain blind to objective reality.  Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman has a piece in the New York Times that rightly rips the Congressional GOP a new one.  Here are excerpts:

By now it’s a Republican Party tradition: Every year the party produces a budget that allegedly slashes deficits, but which turns out to contain a trillion-dollar “magic asterisk” — a line that promises huge spending cuts and/or revenue increases, but without explaining where the money is supposed to come from.

But the just-released budgets from the House and Senate majorities break new ground. Each contains not one but two trillion-dollar magic asterisks: one on spending, one on revenue. And that’s actually an understatement. If either budget were to become law, it would leave the federal government several trillion dollars deeper in debt than claimed, and that’s just in the first decade.

The modern G.O.P.’s raw fiscal dishonesty is something new in American politics. And that’s telling us something important about what has happened to half of our political spectrum.

So, about those budgets: both claim drastic reductions in federal spending. Some of those spending reductions are specified: There would be savage cuts in food stamps, similarly savage cuts in Medicaid over and above reversing the recent expansion, and an end to Obamacare’s health insurance subsidies. Rough estimates suggest that either plan would roughly double the number of Americans without health insurance. But both also claim more than a trillion dollars in further cuts to mandatory spending, which would almost surely have to come out of Medicare or Social Security.

[B]oth budgets call for repeal of the Affordable Care Act, including the taxes that pay for the insurance subsidies. That’s $1 trillion of revenue. Yet both claim to have no effect on tax receipts; somehow, the federal government is supposed to make up for the lost Obamacare revenue. How, exactly? We are, again, given no hint.

Remember the jeering when President Obama declared that he would cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term? Well, a sluggish economy delayed things, but only by a year. The deficit in calendar 2013 was less than half its 2009 level, and it has continued to fall.

So, no, outrageous fiscal mendacity is neither historically normal nor bipartisan. It’s a modern Republican thing. And the question we should ask is why.

One answer you sometimes hear is that what Republicans really believe is that tax cuts for the rich would generate a huge boom and a surge in revenue, but they’re afraid that the public won’t find such claims credible. So magic asterisks are really stand-ins for their belief in the magic of supply-side economics, a belief that remains intact even though proponents in that doctrine have been wrong about everything for decades.

I’m partial to a more cynical explanation. Think about what these budgets would do if you ignore the mysterious trillions in unspecified spending cuts and revenue enhancements. What you’re left with is huge transfers of income from the poor and the working class, who would see severe benefit cuts, to the rich, who would see big tax cuts. And the simplest way to understand these budgets is surely to suppose that they are intended to do what they would, in fact, actually do: make the rich richer and ordinary families poorer.

But this is, of course, not a policy direction the public would support if it were clearly explained. So the budgets must be sold as courageous efforts to eliminate deficits and pay down debt  . . . 

We’re looking at an enormous, destructive con job, and you should be very, very angry.

There are two takeaways: (i) the lying and dishonesty of the GOP has increased as the Christofascist have gained power in the party (no one lies more than the "godly folk") and (ii) the GOP's use of racism and feigned support for "religious freedom" is used to dupe the other cretins in the party base to support policies that will directly harm them.  Cynical doesn't begin to describe the GOP con job.

The GOP's Bizarre Disregard for Facts

More and more the one of the hallmarks of today's GOP - in addition to its transformation into a largely sectarian party ruled by Christofascists - is that objective facts simply do not matter.  Instead, it is all about adhering to an ideology driven by hate, fear and often greed.  The examples of this contempt for facts ranges from GOP denial of climate change to the growing acceptance of gays by a majority of Americans to the constant refrain that the Affordable Care Act is a failure.  On this latter issue, Paul Krugman rips the GOP a new one and in the process also sheds light on the cynicism of some on the right who ought to know better, but continue to lie and misrepresent the truth.  Personally, I blame the GOP's retreat from honesty and objective reality of the Christofascist take over - after all, no one lies more than the "godly folk."  Here are highlights from Krugman's column:

Have you been following the news about Obamacare? The Affordable Care Act has receded from the front page, but information about how it’s going keeps coming in — and almost all the news is good. Indeed, health reform has been on a roll ever since March, when it became clear that enrollment would surpass expectations despite the teething problems of the federal website.

What’s interesting about this success story is that it has been accompanied at every step by cries of impending disaster. At this point, by my reckoning, the enemies of health reform are 0 for 6. That is, they made at least six distinct predictions about how Obamacare would fail — every one of which turned out to be wrong.

[T]o be that consistently, grossly wrong takes special effort. So what’s this all about?

Many readers won’t be surprised by the answer: It’s about politics and ideology, not analysis. But while this observation isn’t particularly startling, it’s worth pointing out just how completely ideology has trumped evidence in the health policy debate.

What was especially odd about the incessant predictions of health-reform disaster was that we already knew, or should have known, that a program along the lines of the Affordable Care Act was likely to work. Obamacare was closely modeled on Romneycare, which has been working in Massachusetts since 2006, and it bears a strong family resemblance to successful systems abroad, for example in Switzerland. Why should the system have been unworkable for America?

But a firm conviction that the government can’t do anything useful — a dogmatic belief in public-sector incompetence — is now a central part of American conservatism, and the incompetence dogma has evidently made rational analysis of policy issues impossible.

It wasn’t always thus. If you go back two decades, to the last great fight over health reform, conservatives seem to have been relatively clearheaded about the policy prospects, albeit deeply cynical. For example, William Kristol’s famous 1993 memo urging Republicans to kill the Clinton health plan warned explicitly that Clintoncare, if implemented, might well be perceived as successful, which would, in turn, “strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.” So it was crucial to make sure that reform never happened. 

But that was before conservatives had fully retreated into their own intellectual universe. Fox News didn’t exist yet; policy analysts at right-wing think tanks had often begun their careers in relatively nonpolitical jobs. It was still possible to entertain the notion that reality wasn’t what you wanted it to be.

It’s different now. . . . . And let’s be clear: While it has been funny watching the right-wing cling to its delusions about health reform, it’s also scary. After all, these people retain considerable ability to engage in policy mischief, and one of these days they may regain the White House. And you really, really don’t want people who reject facts they don’t like in that position. I mean, they might do unthinkable things, like starting a war for no good reason. Oh, wait.

Marco Rubio and the GOP Zombies

In previous posts this blog has noted the absence of any change in message of the Republican Party evidenced by Marco Rubio's less than inspiring GOP response to President Obama's State of the Union address.  The GOP continues to believe that all it has to change is the face of the messenger and the "tone" of the message.  Paul Krugman has a column in the New York Times that looks further at the zombie like state of today's Republican Party and its refusal to face the reality that it was the GOP's polices that lead to the 2008 economic meltdown.  When one refuses to accept reality, one is doomed to repeat past insanities.  Here are excerpts:

[T]he G.O.P. reply, delivered by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, was both interesting and revelatory. And I mean that in the worst way. For Mr. Rubio is a rising star, to such an extent that Time magazine put him on its cover, calling him “The Republican Savior.” What we learned Tuesday, however, was that zombie economic ideas have eaten his brain. 

In case you’re wondering, a zombie idea is a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both. The classic zombie idea in U.S. political discourse is the notion that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves, but there are many more. And, as I said, when it comes to economics it appears that Mr. Rubio’s mind is zombie-infested. 

Start with the big question: How did we get into the mess we’re in?   The financial crisis of 2008 and its painful aftermath, which we’re still dealing with, were a huge slap in the face for free-market fundamentalists. Circa 2005, the usual suspects — conservative publications, analysts at right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and so on — insisted that deregulated financial markets were doing just fine, and dismissed warnings about a housing bubble as liberal whining. Then the nonexistent bubble burst, and the financial system proved dangerously fragile; only huge government bailouts prevented a total collapse. 

Instead of learning from this experience, however, many on the right have chosen to rewrite history. Back then, they thought things were great, and their only complaint was that the government was getting in the way of even more mortgage lending; now they claim that government policies, somehow dictated by liberals even though the G.O.P. controlled both Congress and the White House, were promoting excessive borrowing and causing all the problems. 

What about responding to the crisis? Four years ago, right-wing economic analysts insisted that deficit spending would destroy jobs, because government borrowing would divert funds that would otherwise have gone into business investment, and also insisted that this borrowing would send interest rates soaring. The right thing, they claimed, was to balance the budget, even in a depressed economy. 

Now, this argument was obviously fallacious from the beginning. As people like me tried to point out, the whole reason our economy was depressed was that businesses weren’t willing to invest as much as consumers were trying to save. So government borrowing would not, in fact, drive up interest rates — and trying to balance the budget would simply deepen the depression.

[M]ore than five years into the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, and one of our two great political parties has seen its economic doctrine crash and burn twice: first in the run-up to crisis, then again in the aftermath. Yet that party has learned nothing; it apparently believes that all will be well if it just keeps repeating the old slogans, but louder.  It’s a disturbing picture, and one that bodes ill for our nation’s future.

Mitt Romney: Amnesia Candidate?

Paul Krugman has a timely column in the New York Times that looks at Mitt Romney's apparent hope that voters are not only stupid - probably a good bet with the GOP base - and that they have amnesia to the fact that the country's current economic problems track directly back to the failed GOP policies that Romney wants to bring back on steroids.  Budget cuts and huge tax cuts for the wealthy are not going to turn things around but rather will make things only worse for all but the 1%.  One need only look to faltering economic growth in European countries that jumped onto the austerity bandwagon.  But facing objective reality and the GOP agenda seem to have become increasingly mutually exclusive.  Here are some column highlights:

Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are? If you’ve been following his campaign from the beginning, that’s a question you have probably asked many times.

But the question was raised with particular force last week, when Mr. Romney tried to make a closed drywall factory in Ohio a symbol of the Obama administration’s economic failure. It was a symbol, all right — but not in the way he intended. 

First of all, many reporters quickly noted a point that Mr. Romney somehow failed to mention: George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, was president when the factory in question was closed. Does the Romney campaign expect Americans to blame President Obama for his predecessor’s policy failure? 

Yes, it does. Mr. Romney constantly talks about job losses under Mr. Obama. Yet all of the net job loss took place in the first few months of 2009, that is, before any of the new administration’s policies had time to take effect. So the Ohio speech was a perfect illustration of the way the Romney campaign is banking on amnesia, on the hope that voters don’t remember that Mr. Obama inherited an economy that was already in free fall.

I guess accusing Mr. Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery is a better argument than blaming him for the effects of Bush policies. However, it’s not much better, since Mr. Romney is essentially advocating a return to those very same Bush policies. And he’s hoping that you don’t remember how badly those policies worked.   For the Bush era didn’t just end in catastrophe; it started off badly, too. Yes, Mr. Obama’s jobs record has been disappointing — but it has been unambiguously better than Mr. Bush’s over the comparable period of his administration. 

Overall employment in the Obama years has been held back by mass layoffs of schoolteachers and other state and local government employees.  .   .   .   Oh, and where have those mass layoffs of schoolteachers been taking place? Largely in states controlled by the G.O.P.: 70 percent of public job losses have been either in Texas or in states where Republicans recently took control. 

So am I saying that Mr. Obama did everything he could, and that everything would have been fine if he hadn’t faced political opposition? By no means. Even given the political constraints, the administration did less than it could and should have in 2009, especially on housing. Furthermore, Mr. Obama was an active participant in Washington’s destructive “pivot” away from jobs to a focus on deficit reduction. 

[T]here is a valid critique one can make of the administration’s handling of the economy. But that’s not the critique Mr. Romney is making. Instead, he’s basically attacking Mr. Obama for not acting as if George Bush had been given a third term. Are the American people — and perhaps more to the point, the news media — forgetful enough for that attack to work? I guess we’ll find out.

Today's GOP: Ignorance is Strength

I frequently bemoan the lobotomy like process that seems to be sweeping the GOP and driving thinking individuals - at least those not motivated most by personal greed - out of the party. The result is a party base that is increasingly ignorant and delusional - something the base seems to even revel in. And, in my view, it's not a coincidence that this exultation of ignorance has coincided with the rise of the so-called Christian Right - a group synonymous with ignorance in my view - within the GOP. In keeping with this almost worship of ignorance and superstition, the GOP is increasingly hostile to both public education and higher education which are viewed as places for "indoctrination" and where the falsity of the beliefs held dear by the Christianists is exposed. Paul Krugman looks at this sad state of affairs in a column in the New York Times. Here are highlights:

One way in which Americans have always been exceptional has been in our support for education. First we took the lead in universal primary education; then the “high school movement” made us the first nation to embrace widespread secondary education. And after World War II, public support, including the G.I. Bill and a huge expansion of public universities, helped large numbers of Americans to get college degrees.

But now one of our two major political parties has taken a hard right turn against education, or at least against education that working Americans can afford. Remarkably, this new hostility to education is shared by the social conservative and economic conservative wings of the Republican coalition, now embodied in the persons of Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney.

About that hostility: Mr. Santorum made headlines by declaring that President Obama wants to expand college enrollment because colleges are “indoctrination mills” that destroy religious faith. But Mr. Romney’s response to a high school senior worried about college costs is arguably even more significant . . . Here’s what the candidate told the student: “Don’t just go to one that has the highest price. Go to one that has a little lower price where you can get a good education. And, hopefully, you’ll find that. And don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on.”

For the past couple of generations, choosing a less expensive school has generally meant going to a public university rather than a private university. But these days, public higher education is very much under siege, facing even harsher budget cuts than the rest of the public sector. Adjusted for inflation, state support for higher education has fallen 12 percent over the past five years, even as the number of students has continued to rise; in California, support is down by 20 percent.

One result has been soaring fees. Inflation-adjusted tuition at public four-year colleges has risen by more than 70 percent over the past decade. So good luck on finding that college “that has a little lower price.”

Another result is that cash-strapped educational institutions have been cutting back in areas that are expensive to teach — which also happen to be precisely the areas the economy needs. For example, public colleges in a number of states, including Florida and Texas, have eliminated entire departments in engineering and computer science.

The damage these changes will inflict — both to our nation’s economic prospects and to the fading American dream of equal opportunity — should be obvious. So why are Republicans so eager to trash higher education?

[Mr. Santorum is] right to feel that our higher education system isn’t friendly ground for current conservative ideology. And it’s not just liberal-arts professors: among scientists, self-identified Democrats outnumber self-identified Republicans nine to one. I guess Mr. Santorum would see this as evidence of a liberal conspiracy. Others might suggest that scientists find it hard to support a party in which denial of climate change has become a political litmus test, and denial of the theory of evolution is well on its way to similar status.

But what about people like Mr. Romney? Don’t they have a stake in America’s future economic success, which is endangered by the crusade against education? Maybe not as much as you think.

After all, over the past 30 years, there has been a stunning disconnect between huge income gains at the top and the struggles of ordinary workers. You can make the case that the self-interest of America’s elite is best served by making sure that this disconnect continues, which means keeping taxes on high incomes low at all costs, never mind the consequences in terms of poor infrastructure and an undertrained work force.

And if underfunding public education leaves many children of the less affluent shut out from upward mobility, well, did you really believe that stuff about creating equality of opportunity?

So whenever you hear Republicans say that they are the party of traditional values, bear in mind that they have actually made a radical break with America’s tradition of valuing education.

It's a depressing picture and one that the "greatest generation" would find troubling I suspect. But not so if one doesn't want an increasingly archaic religious ideology challenged.

GOP Economic Madness

Personally, I am fairly convinced that most of the Republican Party is out to destroy the nation's economy solely for the purpose of trying to block Barack Obama's re-election. Sadly, the damage done to families and workers doesn't appear anywhere on this purely partisan radar screen. Average Americans are purely disposable to this element in the GOP. In addition, there are those in the GOP that put economic ideology over objective reality and similarly threaten the lives and economic well being of many Americans who, unlike the very wealthy so loved bu the GOP, are not in a position to fall back on their wealth and ride out the economic storm. Paul Krugman looks at this bleak picture in a column in the New York Times. Here are some highlights:

Apparently the desperate search of Republicans for someone they can nominate not named Willard M. Romney continues. New polls suggest that in Iowa, at least, we have already passed peak Gingrich. Next up: Representative Ron Paul.

In a way, that makes sense. Mr. Romney isn’t trusted because he’s seen as someone who cynically takes whatever positions he thinks will advance his career — a charge that sticks because it’s true. Mr. Paul, by contrast, has been highly consistent.

Unfortunately, Mr. Paul has maintained his consistency by ignoring reality, clinging to his ideology even as the facts have demonstrated that ideology’s wrongness. And, even more unfortunately, Paulist ideology now dominates a Republican Party that used to know better.

Mr. Paul identifies himself as a believer in “Austrian” economics — a doctrine that it goes without saying rejects John Maynard Keynes but is almost equally vehement in rejecting the ideas of Milton Friedman. For Austrians see “fiat money,” money that is just printed without being backed by gold, as the root of all economic evil, which means that they fiercely oppose the kind of monetary expansion Friedman claimed could have prevented the Great Depression — and which was actually carried out by Ben Bernanke this time around.

[T]here has, indeed, been a huge expansion of the monetary base. After Lehman Brothers fell, the Fed began lending large sums to banks as well as buying a wide range of other assets, in a (successful) attempt to stabilize financial markets, in the process adding large amounts to bank reserves.

Austrians, and for that matter many right-leaning economists, were sure about what would happen as a result: There would be devastating inflation. One popular Austrian commentator who has advised Mr. Paul, Peter Schiff, even warned (on Glenn Beck’s TV show) of the possibility of Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation in the near future.

So here we are, three years later. How’s it going? Inflation has fluctuated, but, at the end of the day, consumer prices have risen just 4.5 percent, meaning an average annual inflation rate of only 1.5 percent. Who could have predicted that printing so much money would cause so little inflation? Well, I could. And did. And so did others who understood the Keynesian economics Mr. Paul reviles. But Mr. Paul’s supporters continue to claim, somehow, that he has been right about everything.

Still, while the original proponents of the doctrine won’t ever admit that they were wrong — my experience is that nobody in the political world ever admits to having been wrong about anything — you might think that having been so completely off-base about something so central to their belief system would have caused the Austrians to lose popularity, even within the G.O.P.

What has happened instead, however, is that hard-money doctrine and paranoia about inflation have taken over the party, even as the predicted inflation keeps failing to materialize.

[I]t’s still very unlikely that Ron Paul will become president. But, as I said, his economic doctrine has, in effect, become the official G.O.P. line, despite having been proved utterly wrong by events. And what will happen if that doctrine actually ends up being put into action? Great Depression, here we come.

I guess it must be the Christianist influence on the GOP that explains this lunacy. After all, who more than the Christianist make ignoring objective reality (and scientific fact) a matter of doctrine and policy?

Paul Krugman - We Are the 99.9%

Once again, Paul Krugman gets to the heart of what's happening to the middle class in America and the soaring inequalities in wealth and power that are making the USA look more and more like a 1950's banana republic rather than a nation of opportunity and liberty for all. It's not a pretty picture - especially for the early 20's generation that is facing bleak employment prospects and which is likely to never see the economic security know to my parent's generation. Most distressingly, the power holders in Washington seem to care little about acting in any meaningful way to address the middle class' downward spiral. Here are highlights from Krugman's column in the New York Times:

“We are the 99 percent” is a great slogan. It correctly defines the issue as being the middle class versus the elite (as opposed to the middle class versus the poor). And it also gets past the common but wrong establishment notion that rising inequality is mainly about the well educated doing better than the less educated; the big winners in this new Gilded Age have been a handful of very wealthy people, not college graduates in general.

If anything, however, the 99 percent slogan aims too low. A large fraction of the top 1 percent’s gains have actually gone to an even smaller group, the top 0.1 percent — the richest one-thousandth of the population.

And while Democrats, by and large, want that super-elite to make at least some contribution to long-term deficit reduction, Republicans want to cut the super-elite’s taxes even as they slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the name of fiscal discipline.

The recent Congressional Budget Office report on inequality didn’t look inside the top 1 percent, but an earlier report, which only went up to 2005, did. According to that report, between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted, after-tax income of Americans in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. The equivalent number for the richest 0.1 percent rose 400 percent.

For the most part, these huge gains reflected a dramatic rise in the super-elite’s share of pretax income. But there were also large tax cuts favoring the wealthy. In particular, taxes on capital gains are much lower than they were in 1979 — and the richest one-thousandth of Americans account for half of all income from capital gains.

[I]f you look at who really makes up the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, by and large, the members of the super-elite are overpaid, not underpaid, for what they do.

For who are the 0.1 percent? Very few of them are Steve Jobs-type innovators; most of them are corporate bigwigs and financial wheeler-dealers. One recent analysis found that 43 percent of the super-elite are executives at nonfinancial companies, 18 percent are in finance and another 12 percent are lawyers or in real estate. And these are not, to put it mildly, professions in which there is a clear relationship between someone’s income and his economic contribution.

Meanwhile, the economic crisis showed that much of the apparent value created by modern finance was a mirage. . . . . So should the 99.9 percent hate the 0.1 percent? No, not at all. But they should ignore all the propaganda about “job creators” and demand that the super-elite pay substantially more in taxes.

The GOP's Phony Fear Factor

The GOP always has to have someone or something to blame for the state of society or the state of economy. In respect to the state of society, it's gays, blacks, immigrants (both legal and illegal), non-Christians, etc. who always bear responsibility in the GOP/Christianist warped world view. In economic matters, it's almost always taxes and/or government regulation. The fact that none of these supposed culprits and causes is not true never matters in the GOP/Christianist fantasy land. Many business owners would increase hiring if the business demand was present - I would do so personally if anyone in Washington would make the effort to stabilize the housing market and get real estate sales flourishing once again. Unfortunately, in that realm, there's too little regulation to require banks and mortgage lenders to restructure loans and stop pushing loans to foreclosure where they know they will be bailed out by FHA, HUD, mortgage insurers, etc. - leaving taxpayers to bear the expense and generating legions of evicted families and further depressed housing prices as the end product. In the New York Times Paul Krugman looks at the GOP phony mantra that government regulation is blocking economic recovery

The good news: After spending a year and a half talking about deficits, deficits, deficits when we should have been talking about jobs, job, jobs we’re finally back to discussing the right issue.

The bad news: Republicans, aided and abetted by many conservative policy intellectuals, are fixated on a view about what’s blocking job creation that fits their prejudices and serves the interests of their wealthy backers, but bears no relationship to reality. . . . . The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes.

The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false.

[I]sn’t there something odd about the fact that [big] businesses are making large profits and sitting on a lot of cash but aren’t spending that cash to expand capacity and employment? No.

After all, why should businesses expand when they’re not using the capacity they already have? The bursting of the housing bubble and the overhang of household debt have left consumer spending depressed and many businesses with more capacity than they need and no reason to add more.

Republican assertions about what ails the economy are pure fantasy, at odds with all the evidence. Should we be surprised? At one level, of course not. Politicians who always cater to wealthy business interests say that economic recovery requires catering to wealthy business interests. Who could have imagined it?

Yet it seems to me that there is something different about the current state of economic discussion. Political parties have often coalesced around dubious economic ideas . . . . but I can’t think of a time when a party’s economic doctrine has been so completely divorced from reality. And I’m also struck by the extent to which Republican-leaning economists — who have to know better — have been willing to lend their credibility to the party’s official delusions.

[T]his reflects the party’s broader slide into its own insular intellectual universe. Large segments of the G.O.P. reject climate science and even the theory of evolution, so why expect evidence to matter for the party’s economic views?

The truth is that we’re in this mess because we had too little regulation, not too much. And now one of our two major parties is determined to double down on the mistakes that caused the disaster.

The New Tea Party Message - Please Go Die

A number of surveys have shown that the so-called Tea Party movement in the GOP is pretty much made up of conservative Christians. You know, those folks who claim to honor Christ and live their lives according to Christ's Gospel message. The funny thing, however, is that they in fact do the exact opposite. By their actions they reject the Gospel message and instead embrace the worse aspects of the Old Testament where the abuse and murder of men, women and children is glorified as God smites his supposed enemies. Nowhere is this perversion of Christianity in the political realm becoming more obvious than in regard to the issue of health care for the uninsured, poor and sick. The Tea Party messages is basically "do us a favor and just go die." Of course this religion of hate and division is not limited to the issue of health insurance coverage. We LGBT Americans, non-Christians, non-whites, and a host of other groups are incessant targets of contempt and hatred. Returning to the issue of health care, Paul Krugman has a piece in the New York Times that underscores the fallacy that those who lack insurance are simply irresponsible or in search of a free ride. Here are some highlights:

Today, “free to choose” has become “free to die.” I’m referring, as you might guess, to what happened during Monday’s G.O.P. presidential debate. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Representative Ron Paul what we should do if a 30-year-old man who chose not to purchase health insurance suddenly found himself in need of six months of intensive care. Mr. Paul replied, “That’s what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.” Mr. Blitzer pressed him again, asking whether “society should just let him die.” And the crowd erupted with cheers and shouts of “Yeah!”

Now, there are two things you should know about the Blitzer-Paul exchange. The first is that after the crowd weighed in, Mr. Paul basically tried to evade the question, asserting that warm-hearted doctors and charitable individuals would always make sure that people received the care they needed — or at least they would if they hadn’t been corrupted by the welfare state. Sorry, but that’s a fantasy. People who can’t afford essential medical care often fail to get it, and always have — and sometimes they die as a result.

The second is that very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical individual who could and should have bought insurance. In reality, most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions.

So would people on the right be willing to let those who are uninsured through no fault of their own die from lack of care? The answer, based on recent history, is a resounding “Yeah!” Think, in particular, of the children.

So the freedom to die extends, in practice, to children and the unlucky as well as the improvident. And the right’s embrace of that notion signals an important shift in the nature of American politics. In the past, conservatives accepted the need for a government-provided safety net on humanitarian grounds.

Now, however, compassion is out of fashion — indeed, lack of compassion has become a matter of principle, at least among the G.O.P.’s base.

And what this means is that modern conservatism is actually a deeply radical movement, one that is hostile to the kind of society we’ve had for the past three generations — that is, a society that, acting through the government, tries to mitigate some of the “common hazards of life” through such programs as Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

Are voters ready to embrace such a radical rejection of the kind of America we’ve all grown up in? I guess we’ll find out next year.

As noted before, modern day "Christians" and Tea Party adherents make the Pharisees of the Gospel look like pretty nice folks in comparison. Conservative Christianity is proving itself to be nothing short than a moral evil in the world.