Earlier this week, I wrote about Marco Rubio’s pathetic excuse for moderating the Republican message at the Jack Kemp Foundation dinner. Basically, he didn’t change anything about his speech, he just claimed that things he would normally say helped “job creators” now helped the “middle class.” But Ross Douthat was very impressed with the speech.

In his column yesterday, Douthat writes, The Years of Senator DeMint. It is basically a comparison of what Jim DeMint did the last four years and what he hopes Rubio is going to do the next four. He rightly points out that it is normal for a party that receives a drubbing to go all Stalin and purge their ranks. Now that this is done, DeMint’s protege Rubio will lead the Republican Party out of the darkness. Something like that.

My problem with this is that the Republicans have been all reform talk and no reform action. And even Douthat accepts this. He writes, “The speech didn’t offer the kinds of policy breakthroughs the party ultimately requires.” But I think all the optimism about the party just comes from Douthat’s hope. Like most Republicans, Douthat has no problem with Republican policies. He just wants them to talk nice. And let’s not forget that Douthat was peddling this same bullshit four years ago with Reihan Salam, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

The Republican Party has fundamental problems that are going to stop them from rethinking their policies—at least for a while. The biggest is that they have this very weird coalition of economic libertarians and social medievalists. Almost any substantial changes will destroy one of these groups. Another problem is that they are still fairly popular; why should they change when they can still get roughly half the vote nation wide. (This, of course, is why they rightly continue to think that they can finesse their way to victory with pretty talk about bad policy.) And still another problem is that they are committed to destroying the government, and that isn’t a very compelling argument in being put in charge of it.

So Ross Douthat can continue to dream. But the future Republican Party looks very much like the past Republican Party.

Afterword

In Douthat’s festival of praise for DeMint, he pushes a canard that I hate, “DeMint—and the larger Tea Party wave he rode—also succeeded in making Republicans more serious about limited government than the party had ever been under Bush.” This is bullshit. The truth is that whenever the Democrats hold the White House, the Republicans become fiscal conservatives. As I wrote many times during this last election, if Romney had won, he would have passed loads of ordinary Keynesian stimulus. DeMint didn’t make the Republicans fiscally conservative, Obama did.

I have been getting a lot of very compelling spam. I call it “guilt spam.” It very politely asks for help. Some of it is clearly spam. In fact, there are two oldies along these lines that when first seen are greatly concerning. The first is something like, “Great website! But there seems to be a problem displaying in Internet Explorer.” The first time I saw that, I opened up Internet Explorer, saw there was no problem, and deleted the spam. The other is even more evil, “Great website, but you really need to check your spelling.” What is terrible is that writing a blog is a slapdash endeavor, so spelling and grammar errors make it through all the time. (Recently, a reader emailed me that I used “cite” when I meant “site.”)

But recently, I’ve been getting more sophisticated guilt spam. Normally, it is asking me to do something. And it can be quite good. In fact, the last one I got, I’m not even sure is spam:

For the record, my web hosting company is HostGator.com, and they are only okay. I plan to move on to someone else at the end of my contract.

But there are a number of things that are bothersome about this comment. First, it was placed in an old article. Second, the article had nothing to do with the subject at hand. Third, my email address is not hard to find.

Even still, the comment did make me feel guilty enough to write this whole article about it.

As agitprop goes, this little cartoon, Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale, from the California Federation of Teachers is quite good. I disagree with some of it. In particular, it greatly understates how much the middle class self-oppresses. I’m well aware of how the Tea Party was largely a marketing campaign from the rich. But there was lots of grassroots organizing that went along with it. There are still a lot of people who think that the financial crisis was caused by the government forcing Fannie Mae to give loans to poor people. And it isn’t just that Fox News has pushed this canard ad nauseam. It is that there are a lot of people who want to believe it.

The cartoon also implies that the rich are so much richer just because they game the tax system. If that were our only problem, there would be reason for much hope. Unfortunately, the rich are able to game just about every aspect of the government, so they are way ahead long before it gets to taxation. In fact, if we treated capital gains as regular income and raised the top marginal tax rate up to 70%, I think the rich would still be getting a large and unfair advantage from the government.

But watch the cartoon; it’s good. And it’s being attacked by Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. So there’s that.

H/T The Daily Kos This Week in the War on Workers

Sheldon Adelson says, “I’m basically a social liberal.” You better believe it. The only thing that is surprising about this admission is that he thinks this will shock anyone.

Rich people understand better than anyone else that the only thing that matters in life is your own happiness. In fact, I would say that this and luck are 99% of what makes the rich rich. So Adelson is just voting for his own interests. Adelson supports gay rights even as he backs a party that is horribly against them. How can this be? Let’s imagine that Adelson was gay. What would marriage equality mean to him? Nothing. He is too rich and famous to be affected by any of the problems caused by lack of marriage equality. Ditto for reproductive rights.

That’s the thing about our country: social issues only matter if you’re poor. In many areas in the United States, abortion is already illegal in a practical sense. If you are poor. In most places in the United States, gay people have much bigger problems than not being able to get married. If you are poor. And almost nowhere do you have educational choices. If you are poor.

The problems associated with social issues really come down to economics. This is why rich assholes like Sheldon Adelson “support” liberal social policies even while they vote and pay for politicians who are against them. Social issues don’t affect Adelson or anyone he knows. And this is why my focus is on economic justice. Everything flows from it. And without it, no amount of liberal social policy will matter.

But it is logical to ask why Adelson is making a big deal of his social liberalism. It’s because he doesn’t want people to think he’s an asshole. He wants people to think of him as “independent” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg—the conservative rich asshole who liberals just love. Neither man should get any kudos for their stands on social issues. In fact, we should hate them all that much more. They clearly understand the issues, but they don’t give a fuck about them. And that makes them hypocritical conservative rich assholes.

Yesterday, Charlie Crist made it official: he’s a Democrat. Earlier this year at the DNC, he said, “Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn’t leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate.” So now we are supposed to think that he stood still. I’ve been inclined to accept this narrative in the past. Now I think the process works a little differently. Guys like Crist have just been going along to get along.

I could never be a politician. I’m just no good at the bullshit. I can compromise. In fact, I think I am very good at finding common ground with others. What I couldn’t take is all the bullshit within my own party. I couldn’t support the “continuous war” policies of my party. I couldn’t accept “spare change from the rich” economic policies. I couldn’t go along with the policies claiming to “get tough on crime by destroying the lives of drug users.” I’m not saying that this makes me better; we need people who go along to get along—as long as the going along doesn’t involve too much villainy.

Looking at Charlie Crist’s history, it is clear that there was a lot that he didn’t accept about the Republican platform. Let’s face it, it is harder to be a Republican than it is to be a Democrat. It requires almost unimaginable cognitive dissonance. Look at poor Rick Santorum. (Yes, him!) His impulses on economic matters are populist. I rather like him when he’s talking about the economy. But he suppresses all that for the sake of his hellscape dystopia of God’s kingdom on earth. And if he were elected, he would not govern as an economic progressive. He would go along to get along.

When Charlie Crist was a Republican, he was explicitly a pro-choice Republican. And yet, on his website, there was lots of anti-choice rhetoric. But as soon as he turned Independent, he removed all that anti-choice garbage. I don’t think he did this to pander. What we see now is the real Charlie Crist. He was just going along to get along.

The Democratic platform on economic issues is extremely conservative. The Republican platform, on the other hand, is medieval in as much as it is coherent at all. So it just makes sense for economic conservatives to move to the Democratic Party. The truth is that if the Tea Party really believed in economic liberty, they would have fit at least as well in the Democratic Party as the Republican Party. They would have supported Ron Paul rather than Rick Santorum in the Republican primary. They would have elected representatives who cared about economics more than abortion and birth control. But given who they are, they were right to act as they did. Just don’t call them economic conservatives.

So I’m perfectly happy to welcome Charlie Crist into the fold. But this is not because he’s changed or the Republican Party has changed. Who he is is who he’s been. He should have been in the Democratic Party back at the start 20 years ago. If he had been, he wouldn’t have had to go along quite so much to get along.

H/T The Reaction A.M. Headlines

Even by the standards of That Mitchell and Web Look, this is very strange. But funny:

Of course, it is from their earlier series, The Mitchell and Webb Situation.

I had a thought tonight about how Republicans see their position. The Republican focus is on ideology. It’s strange, but if you look closely, they are united in a weird kind of thinking that is based on the idea that how things are is almost perfect. From this we get the libertarian talk that keeps the economy stagnant and the Christian talk that keeps social power stagnant. I’m not sure that most Republicans realize this, but this is how you get a party that draws together a religion founded on a guy who didn’t like the rich with a religion that worships the rich.

Democrats have been ideological in the past, but they are a very practical group now. But even at their most ideological, Democrats always depended upon results. We could certainly quibble about the social policy, but when it comes to economics, there is no question: Democrats favor policies that work. There is no doubt in my mind that if Ted Kennedy had not gotten sick and died, we would have got a second stimulus and that the economy would be far better today. (It might even have been far better in 2010 and would have prevented the Republicans retaking the House and so many state legislatures.)

Earlier today, I saw Rand Paul saying that the Republicans should allow the Democrats to have their tax increase. He said that way, they would own it and when the economy goes to hell, the American people would know who to blame. But if Republicans really believed that, they would have done it before. They would have allowed the Democrats to dig their own grave. But they haven’t and they won’t.

The fact that Democratic policies work scares the hell out of Republicans. They know they can’t just let Democrats have their way because if they do, it will be a long time before they are back in power. So they stop the Democrats from doing anything—even things they would normally agree with. We’ve seen this for the last four years, and not just from politicians. Many conservative economists have made the argument against stimulus even as they had argued for it when Republicans were in power. And this is not a case of changing their minds. We know this because recently (when they thought Romney was going to win) they backtracked.

What’s more, every liberal I know hates conservative economic policy because it is bad for the country. But they take a certain amount of solace from political defeat knowing that before long the Republicans will screw up the economy and give it back to Democrats. This is the opposite of what educated conservatives worry about. And so they have no choice but to oppose everything Democratic administrations want to do.

Afterword

This all makes me wonder about something. If conservatives really do know that their policies don’t work as advertised, why don’t they change sides? I have a few thoughts. First, I think that conservatives see politics as nothing other than a power struggle. They want to keep their power. Second, they see success differently than the rest of society (and frankly the rest of Republican voters). Success is making the rich even richer, it is not making the people generally richer. Either way, I don’t know how they live with themselves.

If you really want to understand me (And why would you?) you would first need to understand that I have no idea who Christina Aguilera is. Well, that’s not exactly true. Based upon my research for this article, I have come to think that she is a singer. But I don’t care. I’m sure she’s either some American Idol screamer or Justin Bieber technological phenomenon. That is to say that I’m sure she is just another example of everything that is wrong with our culture. I’d be pleased if I were wrong and if I am, I’m sure I’ll get mail telling me that, “No! She’s great. She’s a modern fucking Janis Joplin.” But I doubt it.

Anyway, this morning I got this tweet:

ho. ly. shit. RT @davestopera: this is the alpha and the omega of google searches google.com/search?q=dying… (h/t @impaulgale)

— Ryan Broderick (@ryanhatesthis) December 7, 2012

So I clicked. The alpha and omega of Google searches? I’m a sucker for a good techno come on. And what I got was this:

If you can’t make it out, click on the image to see it in all its glory. But you don’t really have to. It is a Google image search of “dying grandparents” and pretty much all the results are pictures of a blond woman I have since learned in Christina Aguilera.

This all goes back to June when the Huffington Post reported, Christina Aguilera Snubs Dying Grandparents, Says Estranged Uncle. Apparently, she hates all of her family. I don’t know. I don’t care. But it does kind of sum up even the best search engines. A search for “dying parents” really shouldn’t bring up a bunch of pictures of a young singer. Oh well.

At least you got to see a detail of Samuel Richards’ Evangeline Discovering Her Affianced in the Hospital. See the whole thing on Wikipedia!

Here’s a question for you: am I wrong to say that companies that care only about profits, and not about employees, are assholes? Before you answer: no I am not. Companies that care only about profits, and not about employees, are assholes. This is at the core of my hatred of the existence of corporations. I think we should make them illegal. I realize this would be hugely disruptive, but unlike free trade agreements, getting rid of the corporation would have great long-term benefits.

Thus it is with Darden Restaurants. It is the corporation that owns Red Lobster and Olive Garden. Typical of the anti-human thinking of a corporation, it decided to look into the possibility of making all their employees full time so that they wouldn’t have to provide them with healthcare. All they would have had to do was contact the “people” at Walmart who are experts at keeping employees just below the number of hours they need to get healthcare.

This is typical of how corporations not only screw their employees, but also the government. Under Obamacare, those part-time Darden employees will still have to get insurance. And almost certainly they will not make enough to buy it themselves. Thus the government will pay for what (in our fucked up society) is an employer’s responsibility. So we all pay higher taxes, the people eating at Red Lobster get slightly lower prices, and the Darden owners make more money.

This is not free market capitalism!

There is good news, however. The word got out about Darden’s evil plan and there was a backlash against it. Sarah Kliff reported earlier this week, “Darden Restaurants, the company that owns Olive Garden and Red Lobster, revised earning projection downwards today.”

Yesterday, she reported on how it is hard for companies to do this kind of thing. If hundreds of chains did it, where would people go for their disappointing dining experiences? But I think there is something important here that she doesn’t acknowledge: companies will continue to work to get around the law, just not in a wholesale way.

And this is another problem with the twisted compromise that is Obamacare. By withholding one extra hour of work from an employee, a manager will be able to save a thousand bucks. And so managers everywhere will do it. It would have been best for employees and the businesses they work for to have had a single payer system. But of course, we couldn’t have that because there was one industry that would have been harmed. It is like reverse Christianity: we all suffer for the sins of the insurance industry.