Ed Kilgore provides a good rundown of one race we haven’t heard much about: the Republican primary election in Alabama’s first congressional district—the Mobile area, In Alabama GOP, It’s Hard to Be Too Radical. It is an election between Tea Party nutcase Dean Young and the Republican establishment candidate Bradley Byrne. What’s important here is that from a policy standpoint, there is pretty much no light between these two men. So the question is, how exactly is Byrne the “reasonable” Republican?

The answer is that he isn’t. Over the weekend, I discussed this very issue as it applied to Virginia, Business Will Not Give Up on GOP. The business community is not for moderate or reasonable candidates. They want candidates who will do exactly as the big corporations want. The only concern they have about the supposed extremists is that they won’t win. Otherwise, they are fine with them.

The same thing is true of the Republican establishment. In fact, we might as well say that corporate America and the Republican establishment are the same thing. They want the same policies and their only real concern is winning elections. If there is a difference, it would simply be that the Republican establishment are slightly more willing to compromise in the pursuit of their goals.

Kilgore sums up the situation in Alabama, but the same thing could be said about any Republican primary anywhere. You may remember Roy Moore, the Alabama judge who put a two-and-a-half ton Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama Judicial Building. He’s supporting Young. Here’s how Kilgore puts it:

Exactly! And I’m glad to read more and more people saying this. Now if we can just get the mainstream press to stop saying that Chris Christie is “reasonable” we’ll be onto something!

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. To many people in the United States, nothing (And I do mean that: nothing.) is more important than stopping people from using drugs. You know, Jaycee Lee Dugard could be held as a sex slave in a backyard shed for 18 years. How could the police have known? And really, they have priorities. Like the cops in Deming, New Mexico. They thought a guy they pulled over, David Eckert, was “clenching his buttocks.” The cops burst into action: there might be drugs in that thare anus! So off to the court they ran to get a judge to okay a cavity search. And why not? After all, the cops thought the man was clenching his buttocks. It’s a good thing we have courts to look after the our rights!

Off the police went: a doctor shopping they did go! They finally found one who didn’t have an ethical problem with ripping into the guy’s ass. It didn’t take long. It is normally a lot harder to find a doctor with ethics, not without. So they prodded him, then x-rayed him, then penetrated him, then enema-ed him, then colonoscopied him. Along the line they made him defecate for them. No drugs were found. Of course, you would think that after him defecating, they would have been satisfied. But maybe at that point, it wasn’t about the drugs. I think it was to send a message: stop clenching your buttocks!

In addition to everything else, the search—even so far as the ridiculous court warrant is concerned—was illegal. The doctor shopping took the police outside the county where the warrant was legal. So hopefully there will be some small amount of justice. After all, the guy was proven as not guilty as anyone ever could be. And the search was illegal. But even if the guy gets a nice settlement, all the police department will have learned is, “When you are giving a suspect an anal probing, make sure you are in the right county.”

Oh, and the topper of the topper: the medical clinic that did the prodding, x-raying, penetration, enema-ing, and colonoscopying? They are charging the man for the procedures and claiming that they will take him to collections if he doesn’t pay up. Quick!

And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!

Here’s a great report from KOB 4 in New Mexico:

Afterword

I know my tone on this article was glib, but regular readers will know that I am livid. This is the kind of shit that conservatives brush aside as an exception—no kind of indictment of the whole system. Well, that’s not even true. But they say such things at the same time that they claim that it is tyranny to increase the taxes of the rich by a couple of percent. Of course the New Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (both admitted felons) are also to blame for this kind of thing.

I’ve been reading Joe Muto’s excellent (And funny!) An Atheist in the Foxhole, which is subtitled, “A liberal’s eight-year odyssey inside the heart of the right-wing media.” One of the things I learned is that Fox News was not always the way it is now. Of course, they were always going after the right wing hate radio listeners. But at first, their focus was on “news you can use!” By this he means that they had more segments on consumer issues and religion which have since gone away. Why would they need them? They can use the commercials for consumer information. And Christ is the one true way and anyone who doesn’t believe that (along with being anti-choice and anti-fag) is an agent of Satan.

I was thinking about this last night. The Fox News coverage of Obamacare has explicitly been: news you can’t use. The biggest story out this last week has been that insurance companies are using their ended policies to mislead customers into buying much more expensive policies. This is the kind of stuff that conservatives normally get outraged about. They have this childish notion that capitalism would work fine if it weren’t for those occasional bad apples. That’s right: most conservatives do not understand how capitalism is supposed to work, much less how it actually does work.

Now Fox News wouldn’t say anything about these practices regardless. It’s only the conservative voter who believes such fairy tales. The elites know what conservatism is all about: keeping the weak down and funneling as much money to the powerful as possible. But in this case, Fox News has an even higher calling: destroying Obamacare. So it is with great relish that they are reporting insurance company malfeasance as a problem with Obamacare.

So Fox News is purposefully keeping their viewers in the dark about news that actually affects them in order to push their ideological agenda. For most Fox News viewers it won’t matter because they are already on Medicare. But the behavior is still disgusting. For a small partisan advantage, the network is more than willing to cost each of its “young” viewers thousands of dollars per year.

I remember a poster in my high school library that read, “Ignorance is NOT bliss!” Maybe yes, maybe no. But one thing is for sure: ignorance is expensive. And anyone who chooses to feed his angry id rather than filling his empty cortex is getting a very bad deal. And so are we. Remember: such people vote!

Afterword

It is election day in many parts of the nation. If it is election day where you are, please vote! And remember the next general election is 4 November 2014. It’s important!

Ed Kilgore provided a good rundown of, The 2012 Campaign Books. I am knee deep in this stuff. I’m trying to get my hands on all of the campaign books from 1976 onward for a book that I am working on. But I was around for the 2012 campaign and I think I have a very good take on what happened.

Now, I understand that there are lots of other people who paid just as much attention as I did. And they’ve come to different conclusions. Fine. But most of them are totally wrong and this is well on display in the books. Three of the books are the usual insider nonsense: The Center Holds, Double Down, and Collision 2012. But The Gamble is right in line with what I think—not just about 2012 but about pretty much all elections.

This is due to the fact that The Gamble is written by two political scientists: John Sides and Lynn Vavreck. I’ve written about both of them various times here because I am what people call as “fundamentals guy”: I believe that broad demographic trends determine elections, not clever campaign tricks. In fact, I probably take it too far because I don’t much care about anything else.

Apparently, they argue that the Republicans don’t need to make any fundamental changes for 2016. This goes along with what I’ve been saying. If the Republicans nominate a reasonable candidate and the economy tanks, the Republicans will win in 2016. In fact, even an unreasonable candidate would probably win. People don’t like to think this kind of thing. Neither do I! But what are you going to do? We didn’t elect Reagan because the country was suddenly conservative; we got him because the economy was bad. We could get Ted Cruz for the same reason.

Looking back, people want to think that there was lots of back and forth between Romney and Obama. It’s a myth. Obama led throughout the general election. What’s more, things like Romney’s surge after the first debate don’t mean what people think they mean. All that happened (and I wrote about this at the time) is that people who were going to vote for Romney but who had claimed to be undecided simply decided. People in the same position about Obama simply waited until later. As a result, it looked like had surged, but it had no actually effect on the election.

What Republicans need to worry about in 2016 is that the demographics will be so bad for them that even a bad economy and a good candidate won’t save them. And I wonder more and more if the Republicans aren’t smart to not change. Are blacks and Latinos and the young really going to get behind the Republican Party just because they start talking nice? A change is going to have to come from the base of the party. They are going to have to see California Republicans start to make sense. As it is, regardless what anyone says, Darrell Issa is still an extremist asshole who seems interested only in trumping up scandals. Who is going to look at that and say, “The Republican Party has changed!” So they might as well focus on the base.

Another thing: is someone like Chris Christie the savior of the Republican Party? I don’t think so. In a general election, his extremism would come front and center. He could certainly become president, but I don’t see his chances as any better than those of Ted Cruz. So there are two questions for 2016: How is the economy? And what is the demographic advantage of the Democrats? It may simply be hopeless for the Republicans in 2016. And no amount of Willie Horton ads are going to change that.

I am going to be out pretty much all day, so there won’t be anything up until tonight. However, I wanted to mention a really good article by Dean Baker, You Can Keep Your Insurance: Washington Post Fact Checker Assessment. It follows after Glenn Kessler’s assessment of Obama’s statement that if you liked your insurance you could keep it. Kessler gave the statement “four Pinocchios.” It’s all pretty pathetic, because he has to go pretty far out of his way to find the statement that misleading.

It does remind me that Politifact will undoubtedly use this as their “Lie of the Year.” It is so rare that these supposed fact checkers get an actual lie from the left side of the political spectrum, they are going to use it for all it’s worth. And more, as we see with Kessler.

Baker put the whole thing in perspective. The truth of the matter is that insurance policies that were in effect when the law took effect can, in fact, keep being sold. They were fairly restrictive about how they could change them going forward, but they were most definitely not required to end them. How it looks to me is that the companies preferred to end those policies. Given that everyone is now required to get insurance, why allow someone to buy a cheap policy when they could force them into a higher cost policy.

This gets down to the evil essence of the Affordable Care Act. Requiring everyone to buy overpriced and inefficient health insurance from a private company is the height of crony capitalism. From a constitutional or libertarian standpoint, straight government run single payer is actually a more justifiable system. Not that I expect any flavor of conservative to admit that. But we are, at least for now, stuck with this system and it is what it is.

The main thing is that although Obama was largely wrong when he said people could keep their existing insurance, it wasn’t especially a lie. It was more along the lines of what we’ve all come to expect from Obama: naivete. What’s more, it is the wrong way to think about this. We should be thinking in terms of people getting decent insurance. But the media system just can’t resist this story. For once the Republican Party has a talking point that has a real kernel of truth. It’s very much a kind of false equivalence, however. Since the Republicans are usually on about nothing, the media make a big deal when they are a quarter right. Hopefully we can get past all this and onto some real news this week. But it is unlikely.

As regular readers know, I used to be a libertarian. I was even involved with the Libertarian Party and went to various events held by it and by other libertarian groups. So I understand the movement as a whole and to a lesser extent, I understand conservatism. One thing that all libertarians understand is that theirs is not a popular ideology. And it never will be. That’s one of the great sadnesses of being a libertarian: as much as you think the philosophy is perfect, you know that most people will never agree with you.

Make no mistake, libertarianism as well as conservatism are elitist beliefs. Almost all fellow travelers agree that it is best if fewer people vote. The idea that voting should be as easy as possible goes against their interests, but I doubt that most of them think this is the reason they are not fans of democracy. Instead, arguments go something like this: people who aren’t willing to go out of their way to vote don’t pay much attention to politics anyway and thus shouldn’t vote. For these people, voting is privilege, not a right, much less an obligation of citizenship.

As a result of my experiences, I’m not at all surprised that conservatives have taken to voter suppression with such abandon. They think it is not only okay, it is right. They think that democracy is a bad thing that must be stopped as much as possible. Now, there is a lot of racism and sexism buried deep in this. But it is not what voter suppress is all about at its core. I recommend reading Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. In that book, he shows that what really defines conservatism from Edmund Burke onward is a resistance to the expanded inclusion of people who count as eligible voters. And modern conservatives have never really gotten over the idea that the votes of the poor ought to count as much as the votes of the rich.

This is well on display in the Supreme Court. In an excellent article, The Right to Vote, Norm Ornstein sums up the recent decision gutting the Civil Rights Act:

All it really means is that Roberts and the other conservatives on the court are not keen on democracy and so they found a justification for allowing Republican controlled states to go back to the bad old days when only the “right” kind of people were able to vote.

Ornstein thinks the solution is a constitutional amendment. Although I think that would be a good idea, it isn’t going to happen. And the reason it isn’t going to happen is that conservatives don’t believe in democracy. A lot of people think they can be shamed out of this belief, but I think if we give them enough pressure, they will start proclaiming their distaste for the foundational basis of our republic. As it is, much of the conservative movement now wants to repeal the Seventeenth Amendment that made Senators elected directly by the people. This is not a group that will have a problem publicly dismissing democracy as “mob rule.”

I wish I had a solution to these problems. More and more, our nation seems to be trapped by our outdated Constitution. As it is, far too much power is given to sparsely populated states. These conservative “taker” states will never allow the nation to reform itself itself. Apart from the big states cutting themselves up, I don’t see a normal way forward. I think about this every time I hear some conservative politician claim that the US Constitution is the greatest document ever written. One could only think that if he had never read another country’s constitution. Many improvements have been made. But the very basis of ours keeps from enactment any of the great innovations over the last 226 years. This is how great countries die: when a selfish minority stops the majority from leading it into the future. Of course, I say that because I’m a liberal. I believe in democracy.

Martin Longman over at Political Animal has been writing about how the business community might try to take back the Republican Party. He also mentions how they are interested in a third party. You know, all that Third Way bullshit. Now, I think from a practical standpoint, there is absolutely nothing to it. The business community may have backed away from people like Ken Cuccinelli, but that’s not because they are freaks and extremists; it’s because they see that they are unlikely to win.

But on the broader point, I agree: a lot of business leaders are unhappy with the Republican Party. The problem is that they always have been. In general, they don’t like the social conservatism on the right. They prefer the supposed libertarian leanings of the Republicans. So they want to pay less taxes and they want zero regulations. But they also want the crony capitalist side of the party. They want the government to grease the wheels of the market with safe transportation systems, a solid currency, and those lucrative government contracts. So they don’t want the Defense of Marriage Act and anti-abortion laws? Big deal! They’ve been grumbling about this kind of stuff for decades but it’s always been a small price to pay for all the goodies the Republican Party gives them.

I understand where Longman is coming from. Having a totally crazy, extremist Republican Party is bad for the Democratic Party. It is bad for America! And I would very much like to see the Republicans become more reasonable. But it just isn’t the case that this is going to happen via the “adults” in the party. I get so tired of talking about this, but would someone please show me how it is that the supposedly reasonable Republicans are anything but extremists? The business leaders may want immigration reform, but that’s about the only reasonable position they hold. And even there, they want reform that is almost entirely for the benefit of the business community. A decade and a half path to citizenship doesn’t show any concern for the actual people. And if the business leaders could get reform without any path to citizenship, they would.

What we are seeing is the same old attitude of the business elites: they want it all. That’s what Third Way is all about: a conservative movement without the rough edges. One where business interests don’t have to compromise on anything. Well, that’s just not the way that politics works. And the hybrid libertarian-crony-capitalist ideology that corporate America wants is really, really unpopular. So they are going to have to compromise with someone and there is no indication that they think the government shutdowns and Debt Ceiling threats are not worth everything that the Republicans will give them.

One of my main historical observations is that the New Democratic movement has destroyed both liberalism and conservatism in this country. And it did it by moving the Democratic Party far to the right on economic issues. The Democratic Party is now more pro-business than the Republican Party. Yet the business community hasn’t noticed this. There would be compromises if they moved over to the Democratic Party, but no more than there currently are with the Republican Party. But they continue to hang around in the Republican Party, hoping that it will move to the left on the issues they want them to. But if the party did that, it would have no constituency. If the Republicans moderated on abortion rights, they would lose half of their voters.

The United States has long been screwed up in the way we see business. Hollywood stars are not our aristocracy. Business leaders are. All you have to do is watch an episode of Shark Tank to see how we’ve been trained to see these billionaires as our betters—even as the people seeking money are clearly their betters. And this obsession with wealth and power hurts the wealthy and powerful most of all. It turns them into immature idiots who think the world is out of kilter if they don’t get everything they want. Well, in terms of the Republican Party, they will never get all they want. Their power is dependent on hating gays, women, and immigrants. And that’s a deal they’ve lived with this long, and they will continue to live it. Or they will as long as the Republicans continue to win elections.