Right after the first Republican debate, Reed Richardson tweeted out that there were six important issues that simply weren’t mentioned: income inequality; minimum wage; climate change; voting rights; parental leave; and mass shootings. Last night, he tweeted again, “So, tonight CNN only got to two — minimum wage & climate change — of these six issues ignored by Fox News.” The context is an interesting one. I didn’t watch the first debate. But I watched last night’s debate, and I was shocked at how much they went on about the same things over and over again.

This morning on The Majority Report, Sam Seder mentioned that if a space alien came down to earth and his introduction was just the Republican debate, it would conclude that the world was on fire. The rhetoric was so extreme — and not just about the Middle East. It was extreme about everything. And I’ve got to wonder how effective it is. I understand that the Fox News and Rush Limbaugh fanatics eat it up. But I think people who aren’t that into politics just see it as bizarre. Things aren’t great, but no one is afraid to get in the car and drive to pick up some ice cream at the super market.

Listening to the Republicans made me think that they are a lot like police officers: always and everywhere very afraid. One of their favorite lines is about how the United States is not respected and not feared. This is meant to be an attack on Obama. But we would have to be a pretty fragile country if one president could destroy our standing in the world. Of course, they don’t care one piece of used chewing gum about how American is perceived in the world, they just want something to complain about because they are running against the current president’s party. But this is all so lame.

There’s also the constant contradiction: America is the greatest nation the world has ever know; and it is terrible, fragile, basically the new Soviet Union. I wrote about this earlier this year, What Is This “America” Conservatives Love? Because it certainly isn’t the aspirational America that I love. It isn’t even the “my country, right or wrong” America. Instead, it is some gauzy notion of “America” that never existed and never could exist. It’s an America where they get everything they want and they don’t have to compromise with anyone else.

But what the Republicans decide to talk about does tell us something. The only reason that minimum wage was brought up was to allow Scott Walker and Ben Carson to argue over it. And even there, Carson hedged. It’s not clear how much he might be willing to raise it. But whatever it is, he wants to then tie it to inflation and never discuss it again. Wages traditionally went up at the rate of productivity growth — not inflation. So Carson’s idea is to effectively make the minimum wage irrelevant within a couple of generations.

The broader issue is that Republicans don’t want to talk about economics because they know that the economy isn’t that bad. And most of all: it is great for the rich, which is the only group that the candidates really care about. So of course they are going to avoid the issue. They only talk about the economy in the same gauzy way they talk about “America.” At the same time that Ben Carson seems to think that keeping up with inflation is good enough for the American worker, the rest of them think raising the worker up is all about increasing productivity — even though we’ve seen rising productivity for the last 40 years without wages going up for most people.

Hillary Clinton put out a great ad mocking the the Republican debate on these issues. It’s well worth watching. And it shows just what the Republican Party has to offer to the average American family: nothing.

Matt Yglesias is more angry than I think I’ve ever seen him, Why is the Media More Interested in Hillary’s Email Than in Jeb’s Profoundly Dishonest Tax Pitch? It’s understandable, “The formative experience of my political life was the 2000 presidential campaign, in which the media mercilessly persecuted Al Gore over a series of trivial exaggerations and now-forgotten pseudo-scandals while giving George W Bush a pass on the fact that the central premises of his economic agenda were lies.” And he’s afraid that the same thing is going to happen in this presidential campaign.

It’s not surprising that it goes like this. The Hillary Clinton email “scandal” is like a good true crime story. What classified information got through? Who knew about it? Were laws broken? And then there is the larger narrative about the Clintons and how they just can’t be trusted. I’m sure in the minds of some conservatives, Bill Clinton’s two very conservative terms as president were just a ruse, to allow Hillary to become president so she could turn the country into the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, the details of tax “reform” are boring. It’s all about math and facts. Who’s interested in that? Of course, if reporters were not so incredibly lazy, they would find that there is a really interesting narrative in Jeb Bush’s tax plan. In fact, I think it is much more interesting that the email narrative — even if you grant that the email story is compelling. Here’s the narrative: Jeb is pushing a tax plan that would both increase the deficit and cut the taxes of the rich. He claims that this will cause the economy to boom. But this is exactly what his brother said. The taxes of the rich were cut, but the boom never came.

I don’t think this is an issue of reporters not wanting to wade into the questions of policy. After all, both stories are about policy. It’s the same as with Al Gore: the reporters just think it is fun to go after Hillary. The question is not about whether it was smart for her to have her own email server; it is about whether she is a liar. Will one of them get their Perry Mason moment and be elevated to the stature of Woodward and Bernstein?! Oh happy day!

There’s also a bit of the expectations game going on. Everyone takes it as a given that the Republicans will push for regressive tax cuts that don’t do what they claim. But this kind of cynicism does not serve the American public well. The public apparently doesn’t know that Republicans do the same thing every time they get into office unless they are constantly reminded. And doesn’t this sum up the mainstream media? Because the Republican Party is so horrible, it isn’t reported on because it is “dog bites man”! It doesn’t matter that Jeb Bush’s plan would greatly hurt America in an absolute sense; in a relative sense — compared to his brother — it wouldn’t be that bad. This is just nonsense.

Yglesias put together a list of things that we could do rather than cut taxes (mostly on the rich) as Bush wishes to do. It is worth listing. For one thing, in the article, it isn’t clear. We could do all of the following, all combined, for the price of Bush’s tax cut:

• Create subsidized job opportunities for 80,000 adults per year ($10 billion)
• The Center for American Progress’ plan for high-quality day care ($40 billion)
• A bipartisan plan to boost the EITC to help the working poor that’s held up in Congress because of disagreement on how to pay for it ($60 billion)
• Barack Obama’s proposal for universal preschool ($75 billion)
• Eliminate the Highway Trust Fund fiscal gap ($168 billion)
• Hillary Clinton’s plan for debt-free college ($350 billion)
• A national high-speed rail network ($500 billion)
• End sequestration, and adopt the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s wish list of domestic discretionary funding increases ($1.9 trillion)
• End hunger globally ($300 billion)

So there’s you’re narrative: Jeb Bush is pushing a tax “reform” plan that is focused on cutting the taxes of the very rich. His brother did this and it did not bring prosperity. Instead of doing this, we could instead do all kinds of other great things that would not only make the nation and the world better — they would also stimulate the economy more.

I didn’t pay as close attention as I should to of last night’s debate. Who am I kidding? I shouldn’t have paid any attention to it. Other than Trump who was hilarious — and I mean that mostly in a good way — it was really aggravating. But probably the worst of the night was Carly Fiorina. At first she seemed really prepared — very corporate. I could see how she did well in that world. But she quickly slipped on that account. And the content of what she said was just ignorant and crazy. I’m talking Ted Cruz’s dad level of ignorant and crazy.

She said something that blew me away. She mentioned that in the Planned Parenthood “sting” video was “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” I literally couldn’t believe my ears. I figured that I had to have misheard it. Certainly, I would have known about such a thing. And she wouldn’t say something that was utterly wrong. It was only much letter when I asked someone on Twitter and was referred to a Sarah Kliff article that was written in response, Carly Fiorina Is Wrong About the Planned Parenthood Tapes. I Know Because I Watched Them.

This is the right wing echo chamber in action. Fiorina made a point of mentioning that President Obama should watch all 12 hours of the video. This seems calculated to me. She’s sending out that the message that what people have seen isn’t nearly as bad as it gets. It’s really bad in those 12 hours. But she knows that almost no one is going to watch the videos. And certainly, there isn’t a Sarah Kliff at Fox News putting out an article telling conservatives that actually this isn’t true. That would make the ridiculous amount of time and demagoguery spent on the Planned Parenthood issue seem stupid.

There was another Fiorina moment that really struck me. That was when the candidates were asked what woman they would like to see on the $10 bill. Just as Ben Carson can say things that the white Republicans have a hard time with, Fiorina can say things that the men have a hard time with. So she said, “I wouldn’t change the $10 bill or the $20 bill. I think honestly it’s a gesture. Don’t think it helps to change our history.” Of course, this makes no sense at all.

First, history is continuing on. Just because Hamilton isn’t going to be on the $10 bill, doesn’t mean we are erasing him for history. If the United States exists for the next 10,000 years (which I’m sure most conservatives believe), maybe Ronald Reagan would be seen as the father of our country. There wouldn’t be much difference in time from that vantage point between Washington and Reagan. So to equate changing who’s on our money with changing history is just stupid.

But more than that, Hamilton is a fairly recent addition to the $10 bill. Now, it can get confusing to talk about paper currency. There are Demand Notes and Treasury Notes and silver certificates — to name but a few. But taken all together, there have been over a dozen people featured on the $10 bill — including Pocahontas and Lewis and Clark. Currency changes over time.

This is one thing that really bugs me. People are so ignorant of history. It isn’t even the point of not knowing what has happened before. That is somewhat forgivable, given that so much happened before. But most people I run into have no idea that anything has ever changed. Alexander Hamilton is on the $10 bill now so he must always have been on it. It’s nonsense. But when public figures — people who want to be president — show this same ignorance, it’s stunning. Fiorina should have been laughed off the stage. But instead, I’ll bet that most conservatives were cheering, “Right on! Screw those PC people who were changing the $10 bill every couple of years in the 1860s!”

The initial reaction seems to be that Fiorina “won” the debate. But I think she showed herself to be at least as bad as Donald Trump. In the Republican field, however, they are two of a kind: ignorant but forceful. And that’s what passes for knowledge in the Republican Party.

Brian Beutler wrote quite an interesting take on tonight’s big event, What’s at Stake in the Second Republican Debate: Full Panic in the GOP. In it, he discussed Ramesh Ponnuru’s contention that eventually the party would “consolidate behind a consensus choice” and thus make Trump “a nuisance, not a nightmare.” That’s a reasonable narrative. That’s more or less the narrative of 2012. Mitt Romney was attacked again and again, but he prevailed because he was the establishment — the “electable” — choice. (Fun fact: he wasn’t elected.) But as Beutler pointed out, Romney was always doing better the current establishment candidates, and his numbers only grew over time.

The best option for the Republicans, at least according to Beutler who I think is right, is for the establishment candidates to go after each other. The big problem is not so much Trump but the fact that there are four establishment candidates: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Scott Walker. Together, those four now have 17% of the vote according CBS News / New York Times poll. That is certainly something that could be built on. The Christie and Fiorina voters would probably join in. And so too might a number of Ben Carson’s supporters.

Of course, it is kind of sad that the four establishment candidates combined manage only a fairly crummy third place. And I don’t think this is just a matter of the Republican base wanting change or whatever. What we are seeing in the presidential nomination contest is what Republicans have stood for my entire life: this idea that politics is not a skill and all we need is someone to stand firm. Or as Grover Norquist put it back in 2012, “We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget… We just need a president to sign this stuff.” (Fun fact: this is not what most Republican voters want; just what Norquist and his plutocratic friends want.)

So we have the top two candidates with not a second of political experience in the traditional sense. As I’ve noted before, Ben Carson is just racial Valium for a certain part of the GOP base — a candidate who reduces their anxiety that they are a racist party without requiring anything at all from the voter. And Trump is performing a standard Republican trick of claiming that he has special, but vague, skills that will save the nation. It’s like Richard Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War or Reagan’s refusing to say what he would do on foreign affairs because he wasn’t president yet and didn’t have all the information.

There is a bigger problem, I’m afraid, with the four establishment candidates: not one of them is very charismatic. I think the most charismatic is Kasich, and he’s the one who accepted Obamacare and comes off as a (relatively) decent human being. There ain’t a big appetite for that among the GOP faithful. I’ll admit: if any one of them put in a “memorable performance,” it could help. But imagine if that is memorable in the way that Rick Perry’s performance was memorable when he said that people against the DREAMers had no heart. I don’t see their supporters running directly to one of the other three candidates.

The Devil went down to Lynchburg. Okay, it was Jewish, but not very religious, Bernie Sanders. And he went down and spoke to the kids at Liberty University. Or as Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig put, Bernie Sanders Isn’t Crazy to Court Evangelicals. But Here’s Why It’s a Tough Sell. I think it speaks really well of Sanders to give a talk there. One of Sanders’ greatest attributes is his authenticity. There is no doubt that he believes in what he says. And he didn’t hide the fact that he disagreed with most of the students on the issue of abortion.

But as Bruenig pointed out, there is a lot that Sanders believes that is right in line with what the young evangelicals believe. And those mostly have to do with economic justice. And that is basically Sanders’ whole campaign. That’s the stuff he cares most about. And there’s something interesting about abortion anyway: it’s a crummy single issue. Regardless of who becomes the next president, abortion isn’t going to be made illegal. But there are a lot of matters having to do with true family values that can change. So are these kids really going to vote for Scott Walker because he agrees with them about that one issue and pretty much nothing else? (Well, yes — most likely.)

There’s another issue: if people really care about the unborn, then they ought to be interested in economic policies that will limit abortions. For example, paying women to carry their pregnancies to term is an idea that would decrease the number of abortions. Mandating paid leave for pregnant women and new mothers would do the same thing. The Republican Party only promises the stick: to make abortion illegal. And as mentioned, that’s a promise it can’t deliver on. So what is it that they are actually willing to vote for? I smell a rat.

I don’t doubt that most of the anti-choicers are sincere. But they are mostly operating based upon the vision of a third-trimester fetus. Yet they are absolutists. Not only is abortion wrong in all cases, even the IUD is wrong. That is some seriously messed up thinking. As we know, the leaders of American protestantism didn’t much care about abortion as an issue as recently as Roe v Wade. So I mostly see the students at Liberty as being naive — manipulated to vote for a party that mostly doesn’t deliver for them except on one issue.

But the only way this changes is if people like Bernie Sanders talks to them. He seems to have made a good case that there is more that they should care about than abortion and same sex marriage. Young evangelicals have a choice to make. They are not going to get everything they want from either party. And I’m glad that Sanders is reminding them that the Democratic Party has a lot to offer.

Yesterday marked the end of Jade Helm 15. Martial law was not imposed. No guns were seized. Real patriots were not housed in abandoned Walmart buildings. But should we be making fun of people like Chuck Norris who claimed it was “more than a military exercise”? Or Texas Governor Greg Abbott who ordered the state guard to monitor the operation? Or Texas Senator Ted Cruz who said people were right to be suspicious because of all the lies Obama told? (This from a Republican after eight years of George W Bush!) Sure. But don’t expect any of them or the “concerned citizens” who bought into all this nonsense to think they were wrong.

In 1956, the book When Prophecy Fails was first published. It was written by three social psychologists, who looked into the Seekers UFO cult that predicted the end of the world by flood on 21 December 1954. The believers were to be picked up by spacecraft at midnight and the flood was to come at 7:00 am. Very well organized this apocalypse! But of course, the world did not end. So the Seekers decided that God changed his mind. Up until the failed prophecy, the Seekers were fairly private. After the failed prophecy, they went very public. In other words, as is normally the case in these situations, the believers became more convinced because of the failure of their prophecy.

It’s not like yesterday marked anything special. Jade Helm 15 has been going on for two months. So gradually, those certain of its nefarious nature have gradually changed their characterization of its true nature. This makes the whole thing much easier. One of the ways that the Millerites dealt with the Great Disappointment (Jesus not returning by 21 March 1844 — these people do love their solstices and equinoxes!) was to say that Jesus actually did come back but then decided to put off all that end of the world business.

I’m not sure what the Jade Helm 15 people will tell themselves. As early as May, Jim Shea reported that conspiracy theorists were offering the ultimate “get out of jail free” card, “That Jade Helm 15 is actually a psychological operation aimed at getting people used to seeing the military on the streets so they will not be tipped off when the invasion actually happens.” That’s it! Of course, Jade Helm was something that happened in the desert, so this one doesn’t make sense. But look at that operation map! It’s clearly preparing the people for something! Stockpile canned food and ammo!

As a fairly reasonable guy, I often find myself falling into the trap of thinking that Republican voters and Alex Jones listeners will eventually turn around because they figure out that none of the promises and prophecies turn out. But that is “gut thinking.” That’s just how it seems like it ought to be. Like all those who came before them, those who thought that Jade Helm 15 meant that the government was coming for their guns are only going to become more certain that the government is coming for their guns. Jade Helm 15 was just a feint; the next time they really will take the guns!

Just wait till next year, Charlie Brown. You’ll see! Next year at this same time, I’ll find a pumpkin patch that is real sincere and I’ll sit in that pumpkin patch until the Great Pumpkin appears. He’ll rise out of that pumpkin patch and he’ll fly through the air with his bag of toys. The Great Pumpkin will appear and I’ll be waiting for him! I’ll be there! I’ll be sitting there in that pumpkin patch, and I’ll see the Great Pumpkin. Just wait and see, Charlie Brown. I’ll see that Great Pumpkin. I’ll see the Great Pumpkin! Just you wait, Charlie Brown. The Great Pumpkin will appear, and I’ll be waiting for him…

Afterword

Now that I think about it, what people will mostly say is that it is only because the patriots called attention to what the government was up to that it wasn’t able to take all the guns away. But it does depend upon the person. The main thing is that there will always be a reason why failure means they were right all along.