Last weekend, I was at a birthday party for an in-law of an in-law. I’ve been at them many times before. They have a great place and they put on great parties. And I am invited, largely because I make some dynamite side dishes. It is basically on a farm and it has its own bar. I bring my own beer, however, because they never have what I consider acceptable beer. The image above is from the bathroom of this private bar. I don’t present it because it is unusual. It is quite common, and I mean that in many ways.

The thing is, the people who own the place are quire comfortable. Both husband and wife have good, high paying jobs, even though I don’t think either of them have college degrees. I assume together, they bring home about a quarter million a year. They both work in professions that are highly regulated by the government. I mean that not in the “they just can’t get ahead” sense. I mean it in the “these are professions that are highly lucrative because of government interference” sense. They both have expensive hobbies, which they not only have no trouble affording, but they aren’t so exhausted from their jobs as to be unable to do them.

I’m not saying they are bad people, because they aren’t — at all. And they are good neighbors. They are the kind of people who help out their friends and neighbors. But they are representative of what I think of as the last gasp of the American middle class. They are the very last generation who have been able to live the American dream without being enormously lucky or skilled. And every time I go to one of their parties, I see a bunch of people who are just the same. Each and every one of them is convinced that they did, in fact, build that.

So sure: piss on Obama. Of course, why not piss on Bush when he was in office? I went to parties at their place when Bush was in office, but I didn’t see any George W Bush urinal targets at that time. No, it’s just the Democrats who have to be peed on, even though it is overwhelmingly the Republicans who are responsible for making the world enormously worse for people just like them who showed the bad judgement of being born just ten years later. But the sticker didn’t make me angry — just sad. What foolish people.

Before seeing this splendid example of urinal art, I overheard two in-laws discussing Donald Trump. They agreed that they liked Trump, because he was telling it like it is. I said nothing. I wanted to say, “I think Trump is the best Republican candidate out there.” That’s what I actually think. I like the fact that Trump wants to protect Social Security and Medicare. And I like that he is skeptical of trade deals. But I knew these guys weren’t talking about that. In fact, I knew these guys didn’t have a clue as to what Trump thinks about these matters.

It became all the more clear when they started badmouthing Mexicans. That was really interesting, because we were on this little farm. My in-law isn’t a farmer. He grows grapes, but it is more accurate to say that he has other people grow grapes for him. And that very morning, there had been a crew of Mexicans picking the grapes — getting poorly paid for it, no doubt. But these two guys talking get paid really well and don’t work that hard. But they were sharing their contempt for how hard these Mexicans worked who made perhaps one-fifth as much with no benefits whatsoever.

Conservatives love to talk about future generations and what we need to do for them. But these two conservatives don’t give a damn about future generations. They don’t even have a clue how well they have it. They can pass off the fact that younger people are struggling as the result of them not working hard enough. But I knew all of these people when they were young, and if anything they even bigger slackers and drug users.

They are right to want to urinate on pictures of Barack Obama. Despite all of his deficiencies, Obama really does want a more fair society. And in a more fair society, these jerks would be doing far worse.

I was writing about an article on Breitbart, Iran Deal Likely to Pass, Says Senator Who Made it Impossible. This refers to Bob Corker. The brainiacs at Breitbart apparently think there was some way for Congress to have set thing up so that they could just kill the Iran nuclear deal by not voting for it. The whole point of the deal was to sidestep Congress, because everyone knows that the Republicans there wouldn’t approve of anything other than starting another pointless war, allowing the poor to starve to death, or giving more money to the rich. So their contention that Bob Corker screwed everything up is just dumb.

But I noticed on the article, that Bob Corker has a “liberty score” of just 51%. After the mention of any politician, Breitbart sticks in the score so you can know who the “good guys” are. But it’s interesting that it is a thing and not just some kind of advertising. The scores come from a group called Conservative Review. So on their Bob Corker page, they give him a grade of “F.” This is roughly the same score that most Republicans get. Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch (who was once considered uber-conservative) get exact the same grade (F) and almost exactly the same score. John McCain gets a score of 43%. Lamar Alexander gets 24%.

The only people who get high scores are very special kinds of extremists. Rand Paul gets 93%. Ted Cruz gets 96%. And Mike Lee gets 100%. It’s just ridiculous. And the thing is that none of these guys disagree in any substantive way. It’s like the NRA scores. If you are extremely pro-gun like my Representative Mike Thompson, you get a C- from them. That’s because it isn’t just about policy; it’s about fealty to the cause. It’s about taking votes that don’t make sense to anyone just to show that they own you. So it doesn’t matter if it is the NRA or the Conservative Review.

This is what the conservative movement is about in this country. They decide to set up scoring so that only those politicians who actively want to prostrate themselves to these movements look good. Even Marco Rubio gets only 80% from the Conservative Review. And the truth is that a lot of people (this is especially true with NRA members), just look at the scores and base their votes on them. As is usually the case, when a Democrat and a Republican are running against each other, the Democrat has views about guns that are more in keeping with the NRA member. But they don’t look at the issues; they just look at the score. It’s like people who buy The New Rolling Stone Record Guide and decide to like all the 5-star rated albums. Turn off your mind and let the “experts” tell you how to vote.

I don’t see this on the Democratic side. I know there are liberals groups who score candidates. But first, it is almost always on a specific topic. And second, no one on the left goes around quoting such nonsense. And this, I would say, is part of what’s wrong with the Republican Party. They’ve set up so many partisan groups that do nothing but this kind of thing that they’ve ended up with a party that can’t legislate. Anyone who actually does the work of politics would get a single digit score from Conservative Review. As it is, such a towering figure in the art of making the Senate useless, Mitch McConnell, only manages to get a 52% score — and a grade of F.

Even by the standards of dying empires, this is madness. We should really just admit it: the Republican Party is treasonous. It wants to destroy the country. It isn’t that the individual members want this. But it has set up institutions that serve no purpose but to hurt the country. And I’m afraid that all the reformacons in the world won’t be able to fix it.

After all the posturing and faux concern, it looks like the Iran nuclear deal is going to happen. Politico reported, White House Pushes for Iran Filibuster. It had looked like the anti-deal bill was going to fly through Congress and Obama would have to veto it. And at times, it looked like he mightn’t even be able to sustain the veto. But now it is looking like the Democrats may have the votes for a filibuster in the Senate so that it won’t even come to a veto. This would be a good thing, because we really don’t need this deal to look like something so fragile that a simple change of presidents will kill it.

(There is something to think about in that regard, however. Imagine if it does come down to a veto and there is a Republican president on 20 January 2017 and he does as most of them say they will: kill the deal. This is not going to change anything regarding our other P5+1 partners. So the one thing that the US can do that will make Iran most likely to get a nuclear weapon is for some nimrod like Scott Walker to talk tough and destroy the deal. But of course, the Republican attacks on the deal have nothing to do with Iran getting a nuclear weapon.)

Jonathan Chait noted something loony and quite frankly, hilarious, in that same Politico article, Republican Senator Discovers Minority Can “Filibuster,” Is Outraged. Said Republican in Bob Corker, who is not, you know, new to the Senate. He was part of the gang in the early days of Obama’s presidency who filibustered everything short of the least controversial post office names. When he found out that Harry Reid was trying to build a filibuster, Corker said, “Are you kidding me?”

Chait went into some depth about how Corker doesn’t seem to even understand what a filibuster is. Corker is saying that it will be used to stop the Senate from talking about it. But it is the opposite. The filibuster keeps debate going and stops the Senate from voting on it. As Chait put it, “Every senator who wants the chance to read their canned talking points on the Senate floor while the other senators ignore them will have the chance to do so either way.” I can’t say if Corker is ignorant or disingenuous, but I wouldn’t be surprised that it is the former. Among Republicans, it seems to be the case that anything that allows them to “win” is acceptable. Believing in norms requires understanding the purpose of them. You go a long way to destroying them by not understanding their purpose.

I’m not a believer in the filibuster because it is totally out of hand and has been for a long time. But I’m not against the idea of the filibuster. There was a time when the filibuster was only used to stop things that Senators really hated. Sure, the bigots filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But they didn’t filibuster everything else just because they disagreed. I think the Iran nuclear deal is an issue that is important enough for people on both sides to filibuster. (The way things are, there is no point to the anti-deal side filibustering; but if things were different, I would be against them, but I would admit that the issue rose to the level of filibuster importance.)

So what we have here is a case where Republicans filibustered executive branch nominees who would later be approved unanimously. And that was something that Bob Corker was fully supportive of. But the moment the same tactic is used against him, he’s outraged. That, my friends, is the very height of the maturity of the Republican Party.

Ed Kilgore wrote a really good article over at Political Animal, Tell Us What You Really Mean By “Political Correctness,” Conservatives! It is mostly an attack on little brain SE Cupp. (I mean that: she is dimwitted; she wouldn’t have a job if she weren’t conservative.) She claims that the rise of Donald Trump is because of political correctness on college campuses. “If not for the loony sensitivities foisted upon us by the left, someone like Trump would be immediately dismissed as unprofessional and unserious, an incoherent blurter.” That’s actually quite funny. Because school kids aren’t able to shoot pretend guns, old people are voting for Trump. There is something unprofessional and unserious here, but it ain’t Trump.

Kilgore fired back, “Is that the source of all this hysteria?” Of course, it isn’t. It is just another excuse for a conservative pundit to blame the dysfunction of the Republican Party on the liberals. According to this view, if it weren’t for liberals being such meanies, the Republicans would be nominating people like Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Well, Kilgore called bunk on that:

That’s exactly right. Since the 1970s, I’ve been hearing the same thing about the LGBT community: “I don’t care, but do they have to rub it in my face?” This same exact thing was told to me less than a month ago by a young social conservative who was about to go into the military. What the “it” that is rubbed in everyone’s faces is the fact of their identity. When we see an old heterosexual couple holding hands, it is charming. But two old gay men?! Oh. My. God! It’s somehow not a sign of personal affection but a political statement. “Look at us! We’re gay!” And this is what Kilgore is getting at: conservatives want those gay men back in the closet.

This goes along with what I’ve long argued about the supposed war on Christmas. It isn’t enough to be inclusive of Christians, they must be held up as uniquely right. It’s perfectly fine for there to be atheists and Muslims — as long as they are quiet and don’t mess up the illusion that everyone is a Christian. But this is part of a broader conservative complaint. And it is what is behind the “take our country back” meme. This is because they actually think that “our country” belongs to white Christian men and the women who are subservient to them.

But I have an idea for how we can maintain at least a little of our homogeneous culture: we can make up outsiders. And I recommend the Oompa Loompas. As Paul Bibeau reminds us, they are just “green-haired freaks.” So let’s take my very favorite joke when I was a kid. It was originally an Italian joke. When I got older, I made it a Portuguese joke, because my family is from Portugal. But it works great with the Oompa Loompas:

So you see: we can maintain our hateful bigotry at almost no cost to society. That is assuming that we don’t discover of a orange faced green-haired freaks. Oh my God! I just thought: what if John Boehner starts swimming in over-chlorinated water? Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

I’m well aware of just how self-impressed I am. It’s because whenever I see someone writing what about what I’ve been thinking, my impression is, “What a brilliant thinker!” That’s what I thought when I saw Branko Milanovic’s article, Did Socialism Keep Capitalism Equal? What he’s getting at is the idea that as long as there was the Soviet empire, capitalists in the west had to be careful. They couldn’t allow inequality to get out of hand for fear that the people would just choose the other side. But now, without the threat of communism, the capitalists are going wild, because, hey, what options do the people have?

Well, there is one obvious answer to that: there was no communism before there was communism. There was no French Revolution before the French Revolution. This is part of a lesson that I’ve been trying to teach conservatives for years. It is hard to find a serious conservative who doesn’t think that FDR turned our capitalist utopia into a dystopian socialism. They just can’t see that what FDR most likely did was save capitalism in the United States. Otherwise, there probably would have been a revolution. And the US would have become a fascist state. (Because let’s face it: that’s where we tend to go as a people.)

But I think that Milanovic is really onto something. The rise of the whole “greed is good” mentality went along with the decline of the Soviet empire. In the 1950s, many people in the US government were worried that the Soviets could win the Cold War because of its centralization of power. It might not be so wonderful to live under, but such a system could — in theory — have been more effective in accomplishing its strategic goals. And that was a valid opinion — especially after Sputnik.

But by the 1970s and 1980s — regardless of the rhetoric of Nixon and Carter and Reagan — everyone knew that wasn’t true. And as a result, the rich grabbed more and more wealth and more and more power. As Milanovic points out, “Now, this idea comes from the fact that rich capitalist countries experienced an extraordinary period of decreasing inequality from around 1920s to 1980s…” But of course, the decline and fall of the Soviet empire is not the only possible reason for this. But I think the union story is hard to refute: the true decimation of unions is not due to skills-based jobs and globalization.

Ultimately, I think that Milanovic thinks that the threat of the Soviet empire (basically: fear of revolution) wasn’t the reason that we saw a decrease of inequality until about 1980 and then an increase. But it is certainly one of the reasons. And it is something that we who are not part of the power elite need to think about. We need something that will keep the rich in line. But the only thing that I can think of is solidarity. And the power elite have been fiendishly good at keeping the rest of us at each other’s throats, rather than focusing on how it is the power elite itself that is keeping us down. It would be sad indeed if we needed another Soviet empire for ordinary Americans to share in the wealth of this country.