People like Kayla Mueller give me hope for the future of humanity. She was the humanitarian aid worker captured by the Islamic State who died one way or another on 6 February. Even if I didn’t agree with Mueller’s politics (although I do), I greatly respect people who care about the state of the world and go out and do something about it. Some call such people naive, I call them the best of who we are. But there are a few things about her death that I think ought to be discussed.

How Mueller Died

There is the question of how Mueller died. The Islamic State has claimed that she died as a result of a Jordanian airstrike on a building where the young aid worker was being held. The United States has been very aggressive in dismissing this claim. It noted that similar claims are typical of terrorist groups. But the truth is that the government doesn’t actually know. Personally, I don’t see what the Islamic State would get out of lying about this. The group has no problem with murdering people on camera — including burning a man alive. What purpose would they have in trying to hide their savagery?

In the end, it doesn’t matter. The Islamic State abducted her — taking someone doing humanitarian work and thrusting her into the middle of a war. So they are ultimately responsible for her death. And if she was killed due to an airstrike, it was one that was directly the result of their murder of Muath al-Kasasbeh. So I really don’t see why the United States government feels the need to counter the claim that Mueller was not killed directly by the Islamic State. And given what we know the Islamic State capable of, it’s somewhat comforting that Mueller was killed quickly.

Slander Back Home

Aside from the unjust death of this idealistic young woman, back here at home, some conservatives are attacking her. For example, Debbie Schlussel wrote on her website, Kayla Mueller: Dead ISIS Hostage Was Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel Bitch. Of course, Schlussel actually has no facts to back this up. It is just that for many on the right, disagreeing with Israeli policy or helping the Palestinian people means you are a Jew hater. Talking Points Memo provided a couple of other examples of conservatives who think it is great when any liberal dies.

I don’t much get it. Certainly, I wasn’t at all sad when Andrew Breitbart died. But that was largely due to the fact that everything Breitbart did was bad for society. Even if Schlussel and other vile commentators don’t like one part of Mueller’s work, that doesn’t change all the other good work that she did. What these right wing loons really hate is that people are trying to make the world a better place. So they look for anything that people like Mueller might do for something they can complain about. Mueller worked to help African refugees in Israel. It doesn’t sound like she hated Israel or Jews. But conservatives don’t believe in helping other people — especially those people. So they must applaud Mueller’s death. It isn’t enough that she was wrongly killed at a young age after living the kind of life we should all strive for. They need to turn her into an antisemitic monster based upon nothing but a lack of full-throated support for Israel and everything that it does. It’s the same old thing: protesting Israel is protesting “the Jews.” This kind of thing is ironic: racism masquerading as anti-racism.

The death of Kayla Mueller is a tragedy. And it is made all the worse by the conservative hit job on her character. A hit job by a bunch of pundits who do nothing but sit in their well appointed offices with nothing to fear except a car crash while being chauffeured in a Lincoln Town Car. Kayla Mueller worked to make the world a better place. And the world is diminished because of her absence. The same will not be true when Debbie Schlussel and her ilk leave this world. Kayla Mueller was the best of who we are.

There’s another showdown in Washington between Obama on one side and John Boehner and Mitch McConnell on the other. But unlike in the great westerns of old, Obama will be sitting in the saloon drinking a whiskey, and it will be Boehner and McConnell on the street riddling each other with bullets. Now why would the Republican leaders do that? After all, this is all about funding for the Department of Homeland Security — one of the things that conservatives think the government should be spending on — and spending and spending and spending some more. It all comes back to the old saying that Democrats hate their base and Republicans fear theirs.

Normally, when I mention that saying, it is to complain about the way that the Democratic Party treats liberals like myself. But in this case, I have to admit that the attitude of the Democratic Party leadership at least makes sense. The Republican leaders are a pathetic lot — quaking in their boots about what a tiny slice of their base wants. And what that group wants doesn’t make a lick of sense. The argument is always the same: if the Republicans just held strong and didn’t give in, the Democrats would cave. If shutting down the government for a week doesn’t work, do it for a month! If a month doesn’t work, do it for a year!

It would be one thing if such displays of stubbornness hurt the Democrats as much as they did the Republicans. But of course, they don’t. It’s like what Joe Biden said during the last vice-presidential debate, “Look, folks, use your common sense. Who do you trust on this?” As a liberal, I may complain that the Democratic Party is too quick to compromise. But as a result, the folks know that when there is a stand off like this, it’s the Republicans who are to blame. And so the Republicans will eventually cave. And the Republican base will grumble that the party doesn’t act like “The Zax”:

This is about the level of conservative thought in this country. “The Zax” was written to show five year olds that compromise was a good thing and that stubbornness doesn’t get you anywhere. But let’s look at a little history shall we.

After the 2008 election, Republicans responded to their defeat by claiming that they hadn’t actually lost because President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus wasn’t qualified to be president. After they won the 2010 election and took over the House, they acted as though that meant that they controlled the whole government. Sadly, the Democrats in large part went along with this and allowed for some pretty bad policy. In 2012, the Republicans against lost. In fact, they lost the vote in the House of Representatives, but the Republicans still managed to control it because our system is not very democratic. They still felt that they controlled all of Washington and shut down the government. They even threatened to crash the economy. And after the 2014 election, they got control of both houses of Congress. And they are really mad that Obama doesn’t just abdicate and make Boehner president.

The Republicans can’t get everything that that they want because they don’t control all of the government. But rather than compromise a little, they behave like The Zax. And their base cheers them on. They stand there in the middle of the field and refuse to move when the smallest of compromise would allow them to move along and accomplish things they care about. Meanwhile, the world around them continues on. And this, my friends, is how great empires fall: not by catastrophe, but inch by inch — doing nothing. And the Republican base cheers that just one more election cycle of doing nothing at all will allow them to finally do something. Of course, its been over thirty years since the Republicans Party has known what it is they want to do. Once in power, President Ted Cruz will yaw after his first good night of sleep in the White House and think, “What should I do? What did Bush do before me? Oh, that’s right: tax cuts for the rich. That’s what I’ll do!”

Last Monday, Paul Krugman wrote, The Long-Run Cop-Out. That’s a reference to Keynes’ observation that it is meaningless to talk about the “long run” because in the long run, we are all dead. In fact, before he wrote the column, I wrote an article following off one of his blog posts, “Serious” Economics Is Just a Stalling Tactic. That’s what all that “long run” and “structural reform” is all about: avoiding doing anything that might help, and more important, might cause the rich a couple of bucks.

But while reading it, I began to wonder about something else. I’ve noticed that the Republicans have started to sound a whole lot more reasonable about matters economic. Namely, they are starting to talk about things that actually would help the economy. And why is that? Well, it’s no secret. Obama is at the end of his time as president. They are hopeful that they will control the White House as of 2017. So they are laying the ground work now. They are getting ready for more of their traditional work as The Wrecking Crew. It’s the same thing we saw with economist Greg Mankiw who was for stimulus under George W Bush, against it under Obama, and then again for it in the middle of 2012 as a Romney advisor — looking forward to a Romney presidency.

Later that week, Jonathan Chait wrote, Will Republicans Stop Beating Around the Bush? As with Krugman, he isn’t writing about this subject. But he did mention an important part of it:

Maybe I’m just too cynical. I don’t think that the Republicans have just woken from their fever and now understand that they were mistaken. All that’s changed is the environment. And if a good economy sweeps Hillary Clinton or another Democrat into the White House, the Republicans will find that actually, that “Hell no!” position was right all along. They will convince themselves that the real reason they lost was that they had the wrong candidate and that what they really should have done was run a True Conservative™. If only they had run on a platform of ending abortion except in the case of legitimate rape, starving the darkies, and cutting the taxes of the only oppressed minority in America — the rich! Then they would have won!

It would seem that only far left cranks like me are supposed to mention this clear reality that what the Republicans actually think about government spending is only dependent upon who’s doing the spending. But it is well established. The Republicans aren’t for a small or even smaller government. They want a big, invasive government. They want to pick the winners. They just want those winners to be their wealthy friends. There is no reason to avoid saying this. It’s just the truth.