Regular readers of this blog are well aware that I am a Francophile and an Anglophile. What I am not is a Germanophile, or as I would put it (because I’m not a nice man) a Krautophile. The amazing thing is that it is not because of the Nazis. But I’ll come back to that issue. The problem for me is that culturally the Germans have an attitude—an attitude that I am familiar with because of individuals I have known.

No one walks around thinking that they are morally superior because they are really good at math. They might be obnoxious in many other ways but not in that way. But when it comes to things like diet or credit rating, many people really do think in terms of morality. I know from my own experience of being thin throughout my life that there was nothing I was doing that make me thin. Similarly, most people with stellar credit ratings have never been tested: they have had easy, affluent lives and have never been forced to make a decision about which of too many bills to pay.

But it is worse than this. Many people develop a kind of addiction to feeling morally superior. These are the kinds of people who will pass up a drink in order to feel superior to those who don’t. I don’t especially have a problem with these people. Everyone has mechanisms for feeling special. But the mere fact that they are acting as they do to feed this feeling of moral superiority means that they are not, in fact, morally superior. It’s like people who think religion is a game where they behave in order to get into heaven. What kind of lame-ass God wouldn’t see through that?

This is the impression that I’ve always had of Germany. As a culture, it seems to act as though it is better than everyone else. And this has really been on display since 2008. To a large extent, Germany is the European Union. It is over 20% of the whole economy. And it hasn’t been hit that hard by the recession. Yet it’s attitude toward the other countries in the EU (especially in the south) has been like a cross parent toward a naughty child. If only the other countries would behave like them, everything would be fine. Of course, that isn’t true. And as Paul Krugman likes to say, “Economics is not a morality play.”

Germany stands as the naturally skinny broccoli-loving girl looking down her nose at the pudgy girl with her unfortunate genetics and attraction to fatty foods. But as usual, it’s even worse than that. Because in the case of Germany, its smug attitude toward the other EU countries is harming those countries. It would be like the skinny girl, instead of eating a slice of pizza force fed it to the pudgy girl.

Paul Krugman posted a number of articles the last couple of days on this subject. It all started when the US Treasury Department released a report that showed that Germany’s trade surplus was hurting the global economy. I haven’t read the report, but Krugman produced a graph that showed that since the financial crisis, Spain’s account balance has gone from -10% to about +1%. That’s what we would expect. But during the same time, Germany’s account balance has been constant at about 6%. This is very simple: the way to recovery is not for everyone to have a positive account balance because that can’t happen. Germany is a rich country; they should be importing more. But instead, they are pointing a finger at the poorer countries and complaining they aren’t more like Germany.

In another article, Krugman notes that the European Commission (EC) estimates of structural unemployment in Spain are way wrong and this is forcing the country to do more austerity than even it thinks is reasonable. So the EC was going to change the way it was calculating this rate, but Germany stepped in and blocked it! It’s almost unbelievable.

That brings us back to the Nazis. I think that the German people were largely victims of the Nazis. But you can see how a culture that thinks itself morally superior to everyone else might breed a political movement like the Nazis. Regardless, that attitude is now not only hurting Europe, it is hurting the whole world. Germany has nothing to feel superior about.

Afterword

For the record, the United States is very much like Germany in this regard. I could definitely see fascism taking root here the same way it did in Germany in the 1930s. And we as a people have a tendency to think of ourselves as better than other people. We aren’t the biggest economy for historical reasons. We are the biggest economy because we are “exceptional”! And look, I’m very fond of many of our eccentricities. But every country has its own style and things that make it special. Being simply better than other countries in an absolute sense is not one of them. I am not a fan of hubris and this is something that both Germans and Americans have in abundance.

I read a great article by Colin Woodard over at Ten Miles Square, Violence Is a Regional Issue. It is based on the work in his book, American Nations. In it, he divides the United States up into eleven regional cultures. I haven’t gotten the book yet, but he provides historical and sociological reasons why the the regions are different.

For example, he notes that “Puritans, Quakers, and Dutch farmer-artisans” settled the northeast and the midwest. Their sense of working together for the common good resulted in a more liberal culture. Compare this to the deep south that was settled by “swashbuckling Cavaliers of noble or landed gentry status, who took their values… from the knightly, medieval standards of manly honor and virtue.” Hence the conservative attitude of that region, “Every man for himself and if you become a slave, well, you deserve it!”

What most struck me was this map:

In my lifetime, I’ve only ever lived in three places for any amount of time: San Francisco, Portland, and Settle. So The Left Coast really stuck out to me because Woodard is absolutely correct: we are a distinct culture. And although we share a lot with our El Norte neighbors below, we are distinct from them. And we are utterly distinct from The Far West. So I’m inclined to take his theory very seriously and I look forward to reading the book.

Most of the article is simply about another piece Woodard wrote, Up in Arms. You should check out the whole article because he describes each of the regions. But he highlights how conservative areas are also more violent: both in terms of legal and illegal violence:

He doesn’t make any value judgments about this. But it is interesting that the regions of the United States that are most inclined to consider themselves the “real America” are the places that are the most violent and intolerant. Think about that they next time you hear Sarah Palin or Ted Cruz demagogue about Red State America.

As I discussed this last week, the Benghazi “scandal” is back in the news because of a really terrible bit of reporting by 60 Minutes. It was based primarily on claims made by Dylan Davies (referred to in the report as Morgan Jones as though he really has to worry about retaliation). I’ve been amused by a number of reporters being surprised that he managed to luck out and get the 60 Minutes interview the same week his book on the same subject came out, The Embassy House. Do they really not know how books are publicized? Just to be clear: 60 Minutes ran its story because the book was coming out this week.

But there is more than yet another writer using 60 Minutes to sell his book. Karen DeYoung at the Washington Post got hold of Davies’ report to his employers. This was submitted three days after the Benghazi attack and it paints quite a different picture. In it, there is no scaling of 12-foot walls and no knocking out of terrorists. There is mostly just, I was unable to get to the compound because the roadblocks. Davies is supposedly sick, but his ghostwriter was around to speculate that the real lie must have been the report he filed. He said that Davies probably just said that because his supervisors told him not to go to the compound.

There is another possibility, of course. Davies could be lying now. I don’t say this just because he’s pushing a book that he undoubtedly got paid quite a lot for. Everyone who can seems to be selling out; that alone doesn’t make them liars. What I find more suspicious is how Davies paints himself as a fucking Rambo in this book. His superiors said to stay away. But there were people in trouble. So without a thought to his own safety, he rushed to the compound, scaled the wall, defeated a terrorist, and was an eyewitness to history! Give me a very big break.

Regardless what you think of this guy, you have to question his veracity. After all, lying on a two and a half page official report is not the kind of everyday lying that people do. And there are details in the report. For example, in the book he say that he made an unauthorized trip to the hospital to view Christopher Stevens’ body. Ah, another clandestine operation for our Rambo Does Benghazi narrative! But according to DeYoung, in the report he provided a much less exciting version, “He learned of Stevens’s death, Davies wrote, when a Libyan colleague who had been at the hospital came to the villa to show him a cellphone picture of the ambassador’s blackened corpse. Davies wrote that he visited the still-smoking compound the next day to view and photograph the destruction.”

None of this especially matters. Benghazi is still a non-story. And the revelations that Davies is probably a guy trying to be in fantasy that soldier he never was in fact doesn’t matter to the Republicans in Congress:

So it doesn’t matter if Davies is a liar, his story agrees with the narrative we are pushing, so it’s all good. But the Republicans didn’t need any of this. They just make it up as it goes along. But how far the mighty 60 Minutes (which is standing by the story) has fallen. It is a totally irrelevant “news” program unless you want a heads up on the next week’s big books and television series.

What happened in Texas this last week is really bad. And I am not especially talking about what it means for reproductive rights. As you have probably heard, on Monday, the US District Court in Austin stopped part of Texas’ new anti-abortion law from going into effect because it was likely unconstitutional. Then today, the US Court of Appeals overturned that finding, claiming that the law likely was constitutional. What this reversal says to the people is that the judicial system is not objective in the least and will come to wildly different partisan decisions one on top of the other.

I’m not claiming that the original court decision was politicized. As it was, abortion rights activists were unhappy with it. It was a pretty typical, middle of the road, decision based upon the law. It only struct down a small part of the law as it was. But what it looks like to outsiders is that there are pro-choice judges on the district court and anti-choice judges on the appeals court. The second half of that is true. And the terrible thing is that the conservatives win when the people decide the whole system is rigged. But then, we’re pretty used to this. The conservative have a long history of making sure the government doesn’t work and then turning around and screaming, “We need to get rid of the government! It doesn’t work!”

Of course, the last thing that conservatives want to do is get rid of the government. There is no doubt that the conservatives want as big a government as the liberals. More and more, I think the conservatives want a much bigger government. They want an ever increasing military, despite the fact that we spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined. They want everyone spied on all the time. They want lots of big government contracts for rich industrialists. They want welfare to be a bunch of big checks cut to fundamentalist churches. And most of all: they want a government worker in every operatory to make sure no woman ever gets an abortion!

Let me speculate a bit toward the future. Let’s suppose that the Christ fanatics got their way and Roe v. Wade was overturned. What would they do? The first thing would be to get the Supreme Court to find that all abortion is illegal. The anti-abortion crowd will not be happy that innocent “children” are being “murdered” in California and New York. Once they got that, they would move on to birth control. We are already seeing that. A large faction of the anti-abortion movement is against birth control and it doesn’t take much to figure out what they are really about. After that: no abortions anywhere and no birth control, there would still be more to do. They would want to make sure that all pregnant women took care of themselves. Can you say, “Death penalty for pregnant drug addicts”? I thought you could! Bottom line: much of the anti-choice movement is fascist.

The appeals court decision found that the law did not cause an “undue burden” on women’s right to get an abortion. But with the closed clinics, women in west Texas will have to travel hundreds of miles to get care. If that is not an undue burden, when why not just make abortion illegal throughout the United States. The women would still be able to go to Catholic Italy and get a legal abortion. I don’t see the big distinction between 600 miles and 6,000 miles.

Regardless, the whole thing is a mess. I’m sure that the anti-choice ideologues are certain of the justness of their cause. But it really bothers me. To me, it is all about compassion. In the name of the unborn—proto-humuns without lungs, brains, or (if you ask Thomas Aquinas) souls—these people seem to be willing to inflict the worst cruelty on actual breathing, thinking, and (if you listen to them) soulful people. What’s more, the Biblical justification for banning abortions is not at all clear. But the Bible is very clear on hubris—on what God thinks of people who put themselves in his position. In the end, their argument against abortion is very simple: their pastor told them it was wrong. There’s no God there—no Jesus there. Just their hubristic certainty that they and those around them know what God wants.

Unfortunately, we have some of the same kinds of thinking coming from our highest courts. Maybe the fundamentalist Christians are right: Satan has come to America, but he dressed to look like Jesus.

Let me see if I can put some perspective on this week in politics. Today, 47 million Americans are seeing their Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits cut as a temporary program comes to an end. Of these, 47% are children; 8% are senior citizens. But according to the Republicans in Congress and on Fox News, 100% of them are loafers who refuse to get a job because of the SNAP gravy chain. Never mind that 41% of SNAP-receiving households have at least one employed person.

You aren’t going to see much reporting on this issue in the conservative media echo chamber. That’s because they will be too busy wringing their hands about all those unfortunate people who are losing their health insurance because of Obamacare. In case you haven’t heard, these are people who currently buy really bad insurance on the individual market. Obamacare dictates that if companies are going to sell insurance, it has to be of a certain level. So all of those useless policies that people think cover them but end up abandoning them when they go to use them will be gone—or close to it. In 2009, the New York Times reported that roughly 75% of people filing for bankruptcy for medical bills had insurance. One of the biggest things that drives this—and the reason Obamacare is forcing some insurance policies to be canceled—is yearly and lifetime limits on the amount of care that will be paid for.

A lot of people misremember what Michael Moore’s film Sicko was about. It starts with a rundown of how many people in the United States are uninsured and how horrible the system is. And then he said, “This film is not about them.” Sicko is about how even those lucky enough to have health insurance are screwed. So the fact that there are some people in America who currently live with the delusion that they have insurance should not be seen as a good thing. Forcing them to get insurance that will actually do what they think their current policies will do is a feature of Obamacare and in no way a bug.

But how many people are we really talking about? Listening to Fox News you would get the impression that half the people of the nation are losing their current health insurance plans. Luckily, economist Justin Wolfers put together a chart to show what we are talking about:

So we are talking about 3% of the population. And as I’ve discussed, those people really aren’t losing. Rather than paying for a false sense of security, they will be paying more for a real sense of security. Still, that it upwards of 10 million people. But that is 20% as many people as are seeing their food budget go down today. And those who are being forced to get better insurance can afford it. The conservatives don’t even have crocodile tears for the 47 million poor people who cannot.

It’s been a quiet week in Washington, where all the staff members are strong, all the pages good looking, and all the Republicans well below average. It has been a quiet week. The big story of this week is the same as it was last week: the Obamacare website. Normally, reporters claim this kind of stuff isn’t worthy of coverage. It’s old news! But they keep at it because the Republicans keep pushing it. Of course, it isn’t the only old news. Benghazi is back thanks to a really pathetic bit of agitprop by 60 Minutes. And that brings us back to the oldest of stories: the continuing Republican use of the filibuster as de rigueur.

First, there was Lindsey Graham’s stupid tweet Monday, “I’m going to block every appointment in the US Senate until they are made available to Congress.” One has to be surprised, “Oh! So you’re saying that you have reasons for your filibusters now?! How exciting!” Of course I’m just being silly; the occasional politician may claim a reason for a filibuster, but they were planning on it regardless.

And right on schedule, we have filibusters of non-controversial nominations. The Republicans filibustered Patricia Millett for the DC Court of Appeals. In this case, the faux reason isn’t that she is too liberal. As usual for Obama nominations, she’s a moderate. The reason is that the court leans conservative. If Obama is allowed to fill the three vacancies, the court will lean very slightly liberal. So the Republicans have come up with a argument that says the court already has enough judges on it. I won’t get into the specifics because (1) it is highly misleading; and (2) it’s not their real reason anyway.

To blunt the charge that the Republicans are sexist, they also filibustered Mel Watt to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency. You can say a lot of things about him: a sitting member of Congress; an African-American; extremely well qualified. But he is not—and I’m sure that Mr. Watt will confirm this—a woman. It appears he is the first sitting member of Congress to not be confirmed since before the Civil War. But I think it is wrong to say that Republican racism towards Watt is the reason. Much more likely is that it is Republican racism towards President Obama.

Rick Ungar over at Forbes wrote, Enough! GOP Once Again Proves Too Irresponsible to Handle the Filibuster. He notes that during the hearings for Millett, no Republican expressed any concern about her. He’s exactly right when he says, “The use of the filibuster to deny Millet’s nomination is but one more example of the Republicans simply refusing to recognize and accept that Barack Obama won the 2012 election and, having done so, gets to appoint people to fill vacancies in the federal court system.”

But here’s the thing. We can have a friendly game of chess. Or, if you are black and not that good a player, you can bring out the rule book and use every technicality against me. In fact, this used to happen. In the very old days of professional chess, some masters would simply take forever to move in order to force a draw in a lost game. As a result, clocks were introduced. If the game is important enough, people will throw out the norms of fair play and exploit the holes that exist in any rule book.

What’s going on in the Senate is very important. And the Republicans have not only been losing for a long time, they are likely to be losing a long time into the future. (Their only real chance is in 2014.) So they are quite understandably doing the only thing they can to exert force. But the filibuster dates from better times when the Senate was engaged in a much more friendly game of politics. Its time has gone. Actually: long gone. That was clear as soon as the nightly television news announced things like, “The Senate blocked Patricia Millett’s nomination by a vote of 55-38.” That’s right, she got 17 more votes and 59% of the vote but she didn’t succeed. And most observers just accept this as the way things ought to be.

My argument about this stuff has always been different than this. I see it only from a tactical standpoint. Minority rights are great and the Senate has a natural tilt toward conservatives. But once the Republicans have the White House and all of Congress, the Senate will eliminate the filibuster. (They did it before.) They will not stand for the minority being able to do to them what they have done to the Democrats the last 5 years. So the filibuster is going away. So why not at least get the advantage of pushing the courts a bit further back in the liberal direction? But no. It seems that Democrats would rather stand up for a very vile tradition (pdf), and then when the Republicans eliminate it, they can scream about how unfair it is.

What this whole thing shows is that the Republicans really do respond to power. When Harry Reid was hopping mad, the Republicans caved. Now that he’s cooled down, they are back to their old ways. The only way the abuse of the filibuster ends is if the filibuster ends. Sadly, the party who ruined the filibuster, will almost certainly be the party that ends it—gaining all the advantages that go along with that. Think the courts are conservative now? Just wait until President Cruz fills every open seat with nary a word from the Senate.

I just saw a segment on All In talking about why it is that the Democratic Party hasn’t gotten behind Barbara Buono for governor of New Jersey. Steve Kornacki was guest hosting and he was on with E J Dionne. I admire both of those men and usually agree with them. But I thought they both demonstrated the problem. Democrats just don’t seem to give a shit. They are so used to dealing not just with extreme Republicans, but politically clueless Republicans. Chris Christie is an extremist but he is anything but clueless. Most Democrats mistake this for being reasonable.

Both Kornacki and Dionne talked about how the Obama administration didn’t want to attack Christie because they were grateful to him for the nice things he said during Hurricane Sandy. There are a couple things they’re missing. First, Obama was leading Romney during the entire general election. I believe the nadir of his campaign was when he had a two-thirds chance of winning and Romney had a one-third chance. That was the worst that Obama ever did. By the time of Sandy, he was doing far far better—he was almost certain to win.

The second reason this narrative is ridiculous is that Christie didn’t do any of that for Obama; he did it for himself. What’s more, he likely enjoyed poking Romney in the eye. As I reported right before the election, Christie did want to be Romney’s VP, so he was probably a bit angry about not getting picked. But more to the point, I’m sure that Christie (who is not an idiot) understood that Romney was going to lose. He used Hurricane Sandy to look good on the national stage. And that was mostly about getting along with Obama and not seeming like some ideological dick.

In general, when a very popular politician runs for re-election, it is hard to find good candidates of the opposing party to run against him or her. But in this election, the Democrats got a great candidate: Barbara Buono. She is currently only a state senator, but she has the polish of a national politician. And she’s run a good campaign. No one expected her to win. It would have taken a major error on the part of Christie to allow that. But it is absolutely unconscionable the way the state and federal Democratic Party have abandoned her. “Unconscionable” but hardly surprising.

In the modern Democrat Party, overrun as it is with New Democrats, standing for anything really is an uncomfortable notion. And it’s not a party that rewards loyalty. You know the old saying: Republicans fear their base and Democrats hate theirs. Well, that’s not just true of the base. Where is Obama in New Jersey? I guess we liberals can add it to our long list of things the president has done to show his contempt for us. What does it matter if the Republicans take the White House in 2016 as long as Obama has his “legacy” as a bipartisan deal marker? The whole party disgusts me.

I’ve been more or less on Rand Paul’s side in the whole Wikipedia plagiarism scandal. From a legal standpoint, there is nothing because Wikipedia is not copyrighted. And from an ethical standpoint, it just isn’t that big a deal. The obvious (And correct!) reaction would have been for Paul to admit that one of his speech writers screwed up. But now he is claiming that he did not plagiarize and that this is all about footnotes. No! You lifted exact sentences from Wikipedia and pretended they were your own work. That’s not that big a deal, but pretending that you didn’t do that very much is.

One of the great things about this is that Rand Paul is supposed to be this good old fashioned politician who really believes in things. Well, I never bought that load of crap. But one thing I am constantly impressed with is just how slippery Paul is. He is one of the very best at avoiding questions and, as in this case, finessing questions so that they sound like something wholly other than what they clearly are. He is the most corrupt of politicians and he is every bit as dangerous as Ted Cruz.

Here is The Rachel Maddow Show on the latest:

Update (1 November 2013 9:58 pm)

Now it appears that Rand Paul plagiarized copyrighted material from the Associated Press. If he had just admitted to error in the first place, none of these new bits of plagiarism would have been uncovered. What it looks like to me is that Paul has an extremely lazy staff who aren’t good at their jobs. But then we’ve long know that he doesn’t have the highest standards.