I thought I was done for the night, but I made the great mistake of reading David Brooks repugnant column, Obama the Dealmaker. In it, he says that Obama shouldn’t use his leverage against the Republicans. Why? Because that will cause them to not make deals later on in Obama’s second term.

At best, Brooks’ contention is idiotic. The only reason the Republicans will make a deal now is that the Democrats currently have leverage. After this crisis abates, they will be as intractable as they ever were. Brooks claims this isn’t true. He says some great wave of reasonableness has come over them. Besides, writes Brooks, “Today’s Republicans no longer have an incentive to deny Obama victories. He’s never running again.”

Really?! Is that what this last four years have been all about? It was just Obama? They would have behaved differently if there had been some other Democrat in the White House? This is rubbish! I will allow that if Joe Biden had been president, there wouldn’t have been all this birther business. But otherwise: it would have been the same. Actually, it might have been worse because Biden is actually more liberal than Obama. Regardless, Republicans will want to deny Obama victories because they want to stop whomever runs after Obama. This isn’t graduate level political science!

But I don’t think Brooks really believes this idiotic argument. Instead, he’s lying through his high income-earning teeth. He is trying to convince the nation—especially important “liberals” in Washington—to go easy on the Republicans. “Sure, you could kill these guys, but have a little heart!” It would be one thing if in the future they would return the favor, but you know the story of the scorpion and the frog[1]: it is Republican nature to push every advantage to the limit.

Let’s be very clear here: Obama has learned his lesson. After the debt ceiling debacle, he finally learned that the only thing that the Republicans respect is power. When he plays hardball with them, they respond well. When he is “nice” they dump all over him. So I think the truth is exactly the opposite of what Brooks is selling. Only if Obama pushes for the most extreme deal imaginable will the Republicans work on other things with him. If he caves and plays “nice” they block him at every turn.

Are you listening, Mr. President?!

[1] Here is my favorite version of the story, because I like frogs a lot more than I like scorpions:

I think that liberals are being a bit optimistic about the future. It is still very likely that the Republicans will kick our asses in 2014. They will keep the House and take over the Senate. To me, the most important thing for us to do is work on increasing voter registration and getting all registered voters to the polls. If all registered voters voted, we would have a permanent Democratic majority. But regardless of this, we tend to do all right on presidential election years because Democrats show up and then lose big during off-year elections because Democrats do not show up. And the last time this happened was on a census year so that the Republicans basically have us fucked regarding the House and state legislatures for the next 8 years.

And note: if 1.5 million Obama votes had gone to Romney, he would have won the popular vote. If they were the right votes, he would be the next president. And if that happened, all the commentators would now be talking about the death of liberalism. They’d be talking about how Democrats really need to rethink their communist ways and turn even more to the right.

So remember this, because I do not feel that this election was at all reassuring. It was a surprisingly close election. The economic fundamentals were in favor of the Democrats—not against them. Don’t go thinking that we prevailed against tough odds. The election was Obama’s to win. And then, the Republicans ran an anemic candidate with a load of heavy party baggage. I’m glad we did fairly well, but it is not enough. And we need to do so much more, both inside and outside the party.

We should not be celebrating; we should be organizing.

This is a good example of a fact check from PolitiFact: “Michael Moore [s]ays during George W. Bush’s administration ‘we were losing millions of jobs per month,’ while under Barack Obama we have ‘three years of gaining hundreds of thousands of jobs per month.'”

Their verdict, “False: Tweet, later corrected, exaggerated in both directions.”

The problems I have with this are numerous. First: a tweet? Really? That’s what you’re wasting your time on? Okay. Whatever.

Second, wasn’t it clear Moore was exaggerating? Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the numbers knows we don’t lose millions of jobs per month. I took his statement to mean lots of jobs. Technically, it is wrong. Is the overall idea wrong? No really: we lost jobs under Bush, we gained them under Obama. Is this a good economic argument? No. Do you really turn to Michael Moore for serious economic analysis? Regardless, PolitiFact isn’t at all interested in whether it is fair to compare the two administrations in this way.

Third, PolitiFact takes issue with the claim that under Obama we have been gaining hundreds of thousands of jobs per month. In fact, there were only 132,000 jobs created on average. They claim that the plural “hundreds” required at least 200,000. I’m not sure about the grammar here, but even if true this is an odd nit to pick. I mean, if there had been 200,0001 jobs created, it would have been true? That’s the difference between true and false? This is entirely typical of the organization and it is not at all partisan. I often see them calling conservatives out for very minor details or odd definitions. Such behavior makes them all the more useless.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, Moore corrected the tweet 5 hours later (before being told he was wrong by PolitiFact):

So who cares? And that gets to the main problem with PolitiFact or any of the other fact checking groups: they are too afraid of being called partisan to do their jobs properly. If both sides lie equally, what is the point anyway? And their assumption is always that they do lie equally, regardless of the facts.

But given that there is a lot more misinformation on the right than the left, what are they to do? They can’t just say that! They have to find the balance that they define to be there. So they make a big deal out of nothing on the left, and make nothing out of a big deal on the right. Hence, “Michael Moore was wrong in a tweet!”

Pathetic.

Jonathan Cohn wrote an excellent, punchy article today on the conservative meme that says that Obama won re-election because he promised “free stuff” to all those lowdown no goodnicks, Stuff White People Like.

Forget all of the racism, Cohn says. The conservatives just aren’t making any sense. (Imagine that!) As we all know, retired white people are one of the biggest constituencies of the Republican Party. And they get as much free stuff as anyone—more actually. And what was Romney biggest and clearest promise to this voting block: we’re not screwing you!

What Cohn does not discuss is all the “free stuff” that is given to the very wealthy. He does mention the fact that they usually pay less in taxes than the middle classes do. But it is much bigger than that. There is direct corporate welfare, for example. Even more important I think, there are the various ways that government allows corporations to take advantage of individuals. There are regulations that hardly punish corporate wrong doers—on those occasions they are even caught. And on and on.

Cohn ends with a great distillation of the pandering wars:

FactCheck.org or PolitiFact.com should look into this. I’m sure they would say it was a toss-up.

After the election, libertarian Republican Eric Dondero got really mad. He has severed ties with all Democrats—apparently just because his party lost the election. This doesn’t make a lot of sense. If three million more people had voted for Romney, he’d be fine with the 100 million plus Democrats. But because this did not happen, he would not save a Democrat from drowning.

On one level, there is no story here: wackjob Republican says wakjob things. Dog bites man. Nothing to see here.

What I do think is interesting is that Dondero considers himself a libertarian. I think this is another example of just what a sham libertarianism is. In order to flip out because Obama rather than Romney won, you have to care about one-half of the libertarian ideology: economic libertarianism. (Note: this is not how Republicans are, but it is their claim.) You would have to think that the greatest threat to personal liberty is taxation. And how could you? I mean really: in just about every place at just about every time, governments have oppressed people with their military and their police and their secret services. Any oppression due to high taxes has been modest.

This goes right along with my argument—dating back 20 years when I actually was a libertarian—that Ron Paul doesn’t have that many libertarian ideas. Sure, he has a few. But the things that he gets the most credit for are not even particularly libertarian. All the gold standard, abolish the Fed nonsense? That’s a widely held belief system of modern libertarians, but there is nothing fundamentally libertarian about it. It’s just crazy and paranoid. All the isolationist talk? Again, that’s probably more a sign of political naivete than anything. (Not that there isn’t much to like in the idea.)

I’m not claiming that Ron Paul and Eric Dondero are not libertarians. I think they are. And that is one of the big problems with libertarians: they don’t think too seriously about their beliefs. Mostly, libertarianism is just a movement of followers. They like the gold standard because everyone else does and they’ve never heard a serious argument about it. This is why a lot of libertarians are anti-choice. (If you really think a zygote has equal civil rights to an adult woman, then something is seriously wrong with you.) And this is why libertarians almost never even discuss the “barbarian at the gates” argument. Libertarianism only works in the naive with minds that are far, far away.

Update (12 November 2012 4:11 pm)

I was just reading over Dondero’s rant. He writes, “Some may choose to push secession in their state legislatures. Others may choose to leave the U.S. for good (Costa Rica, Switzerland, Italy, Argentina, Hong Kong, Israel).” I thought it was a joke when conservatives claimed they were going to move to Canada to escape Obamacare. But apparently not. All of the countries that Dondero mentions are more liberal (“Communist!”) than the United States. Costa Rica, for example, has a kind of single payer healthcare insurance. Argentina makes more sense, but not because it is conservative; it just has a history of opening its doors to failed fascists.

Update (20 November 2012 1:19 pm)

FJM has written a hilarious take down of this idiot over at Gin and Tacos, Eric Dondero Gets the FJM Treatment But Is Probably Too Busy Hoarding Ammonium Nitrate to Care.

Over on (I don’t know) Matt Yglesias’ corner of ThinkProgress a couple years ago, Ryan McNeely wrote a really good article, Will The Debt Commission Listen to Young Americans Who Didn’t Go to Phillips Academy? It is about the group Concerned Youth of America who seem to now be called The Can Kicks Back. Everyone should care about this group because no one should care about this group.

The group claims to be concerned about all the young people of today who will be saddled with government debt in the future. But this is not what the group is really about. McNeely points out that the group was founded by seniors at Phillips Academy, a $40K per year prep school for the kids of the wealthy. And just like their parents, they are concerned about the debt—and for the same reasons. They are concerned about debt because they associate it with inflation and if there is one thing rentiers hate, it is inflation.

These young people at Phillips are not going to depend upon Social Security. (Although you can bet they will draw it when they qualify.) So the idea of entitlement cuts is a-okay with them. If they are worried about debt that their generation will have to pay, it is because they are worried that this would force the rich to pay their fair share of taxes.

What is perhaps most troubling about these young people at The Can Kicks Back is that they are just useful fools. I doubt very much that they’ve looked seriously at all sides of the issue and come to their current state as deficit hawks. In fact, I’m sure of it, because back in 2010, Executive Director Yoni Gruskin was on CNN bemoaning the lack of jobs for recent Ivy League graduates. The fact is that austerity and good new jobs are inconsistent, at least in the medium term. But that’s not the kind of thing that the Peterson Foundation teaches to its interns.

But as we know: rich kids like Yoni Gruskin are not allowed to fail. And that’s why the whole The Can Kicks Back routine is so vile. It’s just another group of rich people pushing for policies to enrich themselves. The fact that they are young does not make them any more worth while.

Afterword

Jamelle Bouie says much of what i did:

One of my favorite songs is Bruce Cockburn’s Nicaragua. In particular, I like the refrain, “In the flash of this moment / You’re the best of what we are.” I think about that a lot when I see people doing great or noble work. And I think about this most in relation to scientists. Here is a TED talk of one such endeavor: decoding the original text that was used to print a prayer book. The talk is by William Noel, Curator of Manuscripts and Rare Books at the Walters Art Museum.