You all know what I think of David Frum: he’s an idiot. And people just love him! He’s that most beloved of figures in the mainstream media: a “reasonable” Republican. And what did he do to get that? Oh, a few things here and there. He isn’t a ranter; that’s probably the most important thing. But he’s also for minor forms of gun control. And after decades of being against same sex marriage he came out for it two years ago. But he’s still against legalizing cannabis. He wrote, “If somebody could prove to me that marijuana was harmless or that legalization would not lead to an increase in marijuana use, I’d change my mind about marijuana legalization.” So when no reasonable person anywhere can argue a point, Frum is right there to sign up. He’s a special kind of follower: always last.

When it comes to economic and international policies, Frum is as bad as they get. So I’m not inclined to think that he’s reasonable. Now if same sex marriage was the most important issue in the world to me, I might think differently—even though Frum came to the party pretty late. Ditto for gun control. And other than that, what exactly does he offer? He doesn’t question President Obama’s birth certificate? Whatever.

Today at The Daily Beast, Frum wrote a very strange column, How Ted Cruz Can Win in 2016. After reading it, I doubt that most people will have any idea if it is supposed to be ominous or encouraging. He really doesn’t tip his hand. But if you look at other things he’s written, a pattern emerges. First there was, Why Does Ted Cruz Inspire Such Animosity? Then there was, Can Ted Cruz Win by Losing? Frum doesn’t lay it on thick, but he clearly likes Cruz and would appreciate working for him in the White House. (Alright, I’m speculating about that, but even I’d rather work for Cruz than Bush Jr.)

The actual winning plan is pathetic. Basically, the Democratic Party gets split between Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren. There is an economic crisis. Cruz picks Chris Christie as his running mate, and they squeak into office.[1] What makes this really pathetic is that the only thing that matters in the story is the economic crisis. If things take a major turn for the worse, whatever Republican runs for president in 2016 will probably win. That’s just political science fundamentals. We all know that if everyone is out of work, they will throw out the party in power. That will mean that the party that is most responsible for the bad economy will be rewarded. That sucks, but that’s America.

So this is what the prototypical “reasonable” Republican uses his very big platform for: dreaming about a world in which food is denied the poor, healthcare is denied the sick, and war with Iran is imminent. It also shows you just how important gun control and same-sex marriage is to him: Cruz is very much against both. I suspect that Frum would say the same thing I do, “Those issues are not as important as economic and foreign policy issues.” The problem is that making the economy and international relations worse is what Frum is willing to trade these issues for.

[1] He doesn’t mention the rest of the sad story. On inauguration day, Christie has a heart attack and falls on Cruz. Neither survives. Nancy Pelosi becomes president.

Lt John Pike is back in the news. He’s the pepper spraying copy from the Davis protest two years ago. Yesterday, it was announced that Pike will receive $38,056 for a workers compensation claim. There is understandably much outrage in the liberal world about this. But I don’t go along with it.

According to the Davis Enterprise, “John Pike, 40, of Roseville, reportedly suffered depression and anxiety brought on by death threats he and his family received after the Nov. 18, 2011, confrontation at an Occupy UC Davis encampment.” I don’t doubt it’s true. If his claim were with regard to being a very public joke, I wouldn’t sympathize. For one thing, any harm that came to him in that regard would be totally offset with stuff like this:

But death threats and personal attacks are wrong. I understand why people do that and I am not innocent of it myself. But I don’t think that Pike is a monster. I’m sure in his mind he was just doing a job. And watching the video, I don’t get the impression that he is taking pleasure in what he’s doing. In fact, it seems almost robotic.

I find myself increasing at odds with both conservatives and liberals on these kinds of issues. Everyone wants to personalize it. Was Pike a good cop or a bad cop? To me, it is very simple: John Pike was a cop. We have a real problem with policing in this country. But it isn’t about what any particular cop does, although clearly, sociopaths show up in any line of work. The system itself is corrupt.

It is clear why a lot of cops think that they are being picked on by management and the public at large. I think there is something wrong with dumping all over one cop for stuff that they all do. Still, there is a satisfying irony of selective enforcement that is used everywhere in law enforcement coming back to bite those very same officers. But clearly, they would see it differently.

The bottom line is that focusing on Pike—regardless of his culpability—misses the point. Pike is gone from Davis. But the police still behave the same, because as a culture we seem to be all right with the idea that the police should largely be above the law. Or at very least, we don’t care.

Afterword

Here is a typical and very understandable liberal reaction from The Young Turks:

I don’t think people appreciate just want an amazing man Pat Robertson is. Because he is cloistered away at the Christian Broadcasting Network, he has been allowed to simultaneously become a national figure while having the same old crazy beliefs of a regional phenom. There is his Bible approved weight-loss shake. And his claim to be able to leg press 2,000 pounds. And his claim that all good Christians should be in favor of assassinating Hugo Chavez. He’s a colorful guy!

But the big thing with him is faith healing. I find the fiction of faith healing really interesting. It is the most bizarre form of magical thinking. It is useless for broken bones. Just ask the Christian Scientists! And there’s that whole thing about God never re-growing limbs. It seems if the ailment is obvious, God is absent. But when it comes to things like cancer which come and go, God is right on it!

Well, yesterday, Brian Tashman at Right Wing Watch noted, Robertson: Mother Who Can’t Heal Son’s Deafness Must Be Doing Something Wrong. A mother named Debbie wrote to him, “My son is hearing impaired and cannot hear at all. I have prayed for his healing; it seems as if God is hearing-impaired. What am I doing wrong?” The title of the article makes it sound like Robertson shames the mother, but that clearly isn’t his intent. But it is a shaming thing to say.

As cultures advance, they tend to move from belief in magic to belief in prayer. There is a clear reason for this. If you have a shaman who can do miracles, he is either successful or he isn’t. If he dances for rain and it doesn’t rain, everyone see him for the useless pretender that he is. But praying to God provides the ultimate out. If you pray for God to heal your son and he isn’t healed, it isn’t God’s fault. God’s there; he hears you; it is just that you aren’t worthy.

But Pat Robertson had some ideas. First he said that she should “rebuke” the “spirit of deafness.” But if that didn’t work, “Try something else.” He and his co-host then laughed. To me that said, “If you try enough things, eventually something will work and you can credit God with it.” And if nothing works, maybe you aren’t worthy, or your son isn’t, but regardless, God works in mysterious ways.

What’s most interesting about this is that Robertson is going back to a very primitive approach to this kind of stuff. It seems very much like a shamanic thing. It’s very much the kind of thing that would have gotten him killed by the church a thousand years ago. Because this is not prayer. This is spell casting. And I think it is very telling of modern American evangelical Christianity. The movement is very confused theologically. And thus nothing is true and everything is permitted. As long as you claim that the power comes from Jesus.

Afterword

To go along with the article, here is the Jim Carroll Band doing “Nothing Is True”:

H/T: Crooks & Liars

Matt Yglesias published a really good article yesterday, What Do Conservatives Like About Health Care in Singapore? He’s confused, you see, because he actually knows something about the Singapore healthcare system. And based upon that, conservatives ought to hate it because it is a far more intrusive and “socialistic” system than Obamacare. In fact, like almost all countries outside the third world, Singapore has a healthcare system that liberals would gladly exchange Obamacare for.

This is nothing new. Conservatives are always talking about some other country’s healthcare system. It doesn’t matter what it is. Back in February, Aaron Carroll wrote, I Don’t Think the Swiss Health Care System Is What They Think it Is. That was about how the conservative healthcare wonks (such as they are) were all excited about Switzerland. For example, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy wrote, “While most Americans view their healthcare system as ‘free-market,’ Switzerland actually has the most market-oriented healthcare system in the West.” But alas, no. So I guess the next in line is Singapore.

All this is grasping at straws. As I’ve noted before, the Republicans really screwed up when they decided that their very own healthcare reform idea was too liberal. For some, I’m sure this is a good faith effort to find a way out of the corner they’ve painted themselves into. But mostly, it is just yet more cover. “We hate Obamacare. Let’s repeal it and then we’ll get that Swiss system. Or Singaporean. Or…” The weird thing about it is that they really think if they ignore our country’s healthcare problems long enough they will just go away. Eventually they are are going to have to face the problem, but in the meantime people are dying.

In the case of Singapore, the confusion seems to be that conservatives think that it is based upon Health Savings Accounts (HSA). These are the Holy Grail of conservative healthcare reform. The idea is that an individual buys a catastrophic insurance policy with, say, a $2,000 deductible. Then they put money in a special non-taxed savings account for a total of $2,000 per year. Then they pay for their medical treatment out of the account up to the deductible. If they don’t meet the deductible, they get to keep what is left over in the account. Thus, people won’t just run to the doctor, because they have an incentive. It really is the ultimate libertarian policy: perfect in theory, useless in practice.

Well, it turns out that part of Singapore’s healthcare system is called “Medisave, a compulsory individual medical savings account scheme.” But it isn’t really an HSA. It is more like Social Security, “Singaporeans and their employers contribute a part of the monthly wages into the account to save up for their future medical needs.” Yglesias explains, “As best I can tell, these Medisave accounts are deposited into the Central Provident Fund, a government-run investment pool, rather than constituting private savings as we would understand them.” Aaron Carroll sums it all up nicely:

What this means is conservatives will continue to call for anything but. They are willing to consider any healthcare system, as long as it absolutely positively cannot be done here. So even if Singapore had the perfect libertarian Holy Grail of healthcare, it would be abandoned as soon it became an actual bill in Congress. Conservatives only want perfection and that only exists in their minds. From a practical standpoint, that means they want to do nothing. Everything else is bloviating.

Simon Wren-Lewis at Mainly Macro tries to answer the question, What Is Wrong With the USA? He teaches at Oxford, so he sees things from an English point of view. And he’s seen that in the United Kingdom, the conservative press have pushed their far right to act in ways that are similar to the Tea Party here (although the issues are different). He suggests that most of the problems come from the right wing echo chamber.

What I think he misses is that this is not a problem with the far right in the United States. It is a problem with the entire right. I’ve written far too many articles over the last two years that are very much like, Moderate Republicans Really Are Extreme. There really is no distinction in ideology. They are all hardcore anti-choice, anti-entitlement, pro-tax-cut… I could go on for thousands of words, but I doubt there is a reason because you probably could too. The only distinction in the Republican Party is whether such policies need to be enacted today or whether they can wait a year or two.

But Wren-Lewis provided a graph that shows all anyone should need to see about what’s wrong here and there:

US and UK? Pretty bad. Italy and France? Pretty good. Looking at the graph you have to ask: have the rich done something really great the last three decades to justify getting so much more of the nation’s income? That’s a rhetorical question; of course they haven’t. These huge increases are the result of government policy. England had Thatcher. America had Reagan. And Italy and France did not.

Wren-Lewis notes that bad economic times and high levels of inequality bread angry right wing movements. And that’s what we are seeing now. Sure, the Tea Party are a bunch of racists, and let’s be honest, so are most of the other Republicans. But why are they so angry? Things are not going well. And who better to blame than the poor with darker skin.

This is why Democrats need to push actual liberal policy. We need things that will make the country better. As it is, with the 25 year New Democratic “we’re not quite as bad as the Republicans” approach to governance, we have at best slowed the growth of bad conservative policy. The people should get a clear choice. When another 2008 comes around, it is time for the Democrats to be bold. Because that is what the people will have voted for. If they want Republicans-Lite, they can look elsewhere. A vote for Obama was not a vote to end Entitlements as we know them.

Mike Konczal has written the most insightful thing I’ve read this month about the problems with the Obamacare exchanges, What Kind of Problem is the ACA Rollout for Liberalism? He argues that the failure of the exchanges is not the result of liberalism; it is the result of neoliberalism. Or to put it more clearly: New Democratic ideology. We could have had an old fashioned approach to healthcare reform: a single payer health insurance system. That would have been simple. And I have had many frustrating conversations over the last two years with conservatives who complain about Obamacare and ask why we couldn’t just have a single payer system. The answer, of course, is that after Fox News started shouting about “socialized medicine” these same conservatives would be absolutely positively against single payer. But I digress.

Obamacare is so annoyingly complicated because it is designed to be a kind of public-private partnership and that no one thinks will be as good at reducing costs as a single payer system would be. If we had the simple government insurance system, the exchanges would be trivial. You would log on, enter your information, and the program would spit out how much it was going to cost you. Or even better: there would be no exchanges; the correct amount of money would just be taken out of your paycheck. Instead, we have a system that interacts with multiple private insurance systems and then these have to communicate with the government to figure out how much it will pay. And in the end, you have a totally messed up system that tells you to try back later.

The issue now is as it has been since Obama first became president: why do the Democrats make their laws more conservative when the Republicans block everything? The Democrats in Congress never even considered a single payer system. We were on track to get the conservative Heritage Foundation plan long before Kennedy died and the Democrats lost their super majority in the Senate. But as a result of the Democrats big rush to make the law more conservative ends right here with an over-complicated law that the Republicans can point at and say, “See! Liberalism doesn’t work!”

Well, in fact, we haven’t tried liberalism. For the last 35 years, Democrats have tried to “get along” with Republicans by moving more and more and more to the right. And the response? The Republicans just move more and more and more to the right. In fact, as the entire political system has moved rightward, the ideological divide between the parties has grown. For each step the Democrats have taken to the right, the Republicans have taken two steps to the right. Nice going guys!

Konczal pointed out something else that I really like because I’ve been saying it for a long time. Let me quote myself, because I think I put it better:

This is a very big problem for conservatives. The mess that our previous healthcare system was will not go away if Obamacare fails. The remaining conservative healthcare “reform” ideas either nibble around the edges or actually make things worse. The people will not stand for this—not for long anyway. So the only alternative to Obamacare is some kind of single payer system. This is yet another example of conservatives demanding everything and as a result, actually losing ground.

Like most liberals who have been paying attention, I’ve never liked Obamacare. The idea that the government would require people to buy into a broken health insurance market strikes me as an authoritarian overreach. But such theoretical considerations are not that important to me. What is important is getting a system that works. I’m sure the government will make Obamacare work. But it is a conservative policy, and I have always wanted a liberal policy: a single payer system, which would have worked far better.