Ed Kilgore brought my attention to a new conservative meme: liberals are afraid of Scott Walker. Now that Republicans everywhere are excited by union busting, education destroying, rich people’s tax cutting wunderkind Scott Walker, Democrats must be afraid of him. After all, he’s won several elections in a blue state. The American people must be just all excited to vote for him. California will go red in 2016! It will be Ronald Reagan 2.0! Happy days are here again! And why not?! It isn’t like the American worker really has anything more to lose at this point.

Let’s just start with the idea that Walker’s golden boy status is going to last for another year and half to get him nominated. I don’t buy it. Ultimately, the guy just isn’t that interesting. His big advantage is that he is clearly a favorite of the big money Republican donors. And that may be enough. But his recent makeover really has nothing to do with that. He was always really loved by these people. And I suppose the Republican voters will go along with him. But there is no reason to think that he poses any special threat to the Democratic Party. It really won’t matter if the Republicans nominate Walker or Christie or Bush. It’s all going to be the same thing.

The comparison with Chris Christie is particularly apt. Even at the height of his popularity in New Jersey, Christie still wouldn’t have won his own state in a presidential race. There are two aspects of this. First is the fact that people think differently about governors and presidents. Liberal leaning voters will go with a “moderate” Republican as governor when they wouldn’t consider the same candidate for president. Look at Mitt Romney. He was governor of Massachusetts. And in 2014, the Republican candidate won the governorship by two percentage points. Yet in 2012, Romney lost the presidential election by over 23 percentage points.

The other issue is that more people vote during presidential election years. Republicans get an extra advantage in governorships by running in off year elections. Scott Walker became governor in 2010 and then was re-elected in 2014 — two very good years for Republicans. If he gets the Republican nomination for president in 2016, he will lose the state of Wisconsin — and he will lose it badly.

But there is a more important issue. That is just the political science of it. Within limits, there are no good candidates and no bad candidates. There is no doubt that Scott Walker is a good enough candidate. If the economy tanks in the first nine months of 2016, the Republican candidate will win the presidency, as long as he isn’t some freak. So sure, if the Republicans nominate Louie Gohmert or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin, then they will lose. Scott Walker isn’t in that league. But few Republicans are. That doesn’t make Democrats fear him. And that’s because Democrats aren’t idiots. They don’t expect that the Republicans are going to nominate a true loon. So Scott Walker worries us as much as any “mainstream” Republican. And at this point, that isn’t much at all.

Speaking as a Democrat, I can tell you want scares me: the American electorate. These are people who don’t understand anything about economics. These are people who vote for whichever party they associate with good economic times. If the economy is doing well, they vote for the party that is in office. If the economy is doing poorly, they vote for the party that is out of office. This doesn’t make any sense at all. I don’t like the idea that the party in control of the nation is based on random chance. That’s what scares me. But Scott Walker? Give me a break!

People like Kayla Mueller give me hope for the future of humanity. She was the humanitarian aid worker captured by the Islamic State who died one way or another on 6 February. Even if I didn’t agree with Mueller’s politics (although I do), I greatly respect people who care about the state of the world and go out and do something about it. Some call such people naive, I call them the best of who we are. But there are a few things about her death that I think ought to be discussed.

How Mueller Died

There is the question of how Mueller died. The Islamic State has claimed that she died as a result of a Jordanian airstrike on a building where the young aid worker was being held. The United States has been very aggressive in dismissing this claim. It noted that similar claims are typical of terrorist groups. But the truth is that the government doesn’t actually know. Personally, I don’t see what the Islamic State would get out of lying about this. The group has no problem with murdering people on camera — including burning a man alive. What purpose would they have in trying to hide their savagery?

In the end, it doesn’t matter. The Islamic State abducted her — taking someone doing humanitarian work and thrusting her into the middle of a war. So they are ultimately responsible for her death. And if she was killed due to an airstrike, it was one that was directly the result of their murder of Muath al-Kasasbeh. So I really don’t see why the United States government feels the need to counter the claim that Mueller was not killed directly by the Islamic State. And given what we know the Islamic State capable of, it’s somewhat comforting that Mueller was killed quickly.

Slander Back Home

Aside from the unjust death of this idealistic young woman, back here at home, some conservatives are attacking her. For example, Debbie Schlussel wrote on her website, Kayla Mueller: Dead ISIS Hostage Was Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel Bitch. Of course, Schlussel actually has no facts to back this up. It is just that for many on the right, disagreeing with Israeli policy or helping the Palestinian people means you are a Jew hater. Talking Points Memo provided a couple of other examples of conservatives who think it is great when any liberal dies.

I don’t much get it. Certainly, I wasn’t at all sad when Andrew Breitbart died. But that was largely due to the fact that everything Breitbart did was bad for society. Even if Schlussel and other vile commentators don’t like one part of Mueller’s work, that doesn’t change all the other good work that she did. What these right wing loons really hate is that people are trying to make the world a better place. So they look for anything that people like Mueller might do for something they can complain about. Mueller worked to help African refugees in Israel. It doesn’t sound like she hated Israel or Jews. But conservatives don’t believe in helping other people — especially those people. So they must applaud Mueller’s death. It isn’t enough that she was wrongly killed at a young age after living the kind of life we should all strive for. They need to turn her into an antisemitic monster based upon nothing but a lack of full-throated support for Israel and everything that it does. It’s the same old thing: protesting Israel is protesting “the Jews.” This kind of thing is ironic: racism masquerading as anti-racism.

The death of Kayla Mueller is a tragedy. And it is made all the worse by the conservative hit job on her character. A hit job by a bunch of pundits who do nothing but sit in their well appointed offices with nothing to fear except a car crash while being chauffeured in a Lincoln Town Car. Kayla Mueller worked to make the world a better place. And the world is diminished because of her absence. The same will not be true when Debbie Schlussel and her ilk leave this world. Kayla Mueller was the best of who we are.

There’s another showdown in Washington between Obama on one side and John Boehner and Mitch McConnell on the other. But unlike in the great westerns of old, Obama will be sitting in the saloon drinking a whiskey, and it will be Boehner and McConnell on the street riddling each other with bullets. Now why would the Republican leaders do that? After all, this is all about funding for the Department of Homeland Security — one of the things that conservatives think the government should be spending on — and spending and spending and spending some more. It all comes back to the old saying that Democrats hate their base and Republicans fear theirs.

Normally, when I mention that saying, it is to complain about the way that the Democratic Party treats liberals like myself. But in this case, I have to admit that the attitude of the Democratic Party leadership at least makes sense. The Republican leaders are a pathetic lot — quaking in their boots about what a tiny slice of their base wants. And what that group wants doesn’t make a lick of sense. The argument is always the same: if the Republicans just held strong and didn’t give in, the Democrats would cave. If shutting down the government for a week doesn’t work, do it for a month! If a month doesn’t work, do it for a year!

It would be one thing if such displays of stubbornness hurt the Democrats as much as they did the Republicans. But of course, they don’t. It’s like what Joe Biden said during the last vice-presidential debate, “Look, folks, use your common sense. Who do you trust on this?” As a liberal, I may complain that the Democratic Party is too quick to compromise. But as a result, the folks know that when there is a stand off like this, it’s the Republicans who are to blame. And so the Republicans will eventually cave. And the Republican base will grumble that the party doesn’t act like “The Zax”:

This is about the level of conservative thought in this country. “The Zax” was written to show five year olds that compromise was a good thing and that stubbornness doesn’t get you anywhere. But let’s look at a little history shall we.

After the 2008 election, Republicans responded to their defeat by claiming that they hadn’t actually lost because President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus wasn’t qualified to be president. After they won the 2010 election and took over the House, they acted as though that meant that they controlled the whole government. Sadly, the Democrats in large part went along with this and allowed for some pretty bad policy. In 2012, the Republicans against lost. In fact, they lost the vote in the House of Representatives, but the Republicans still managed to control it because our system is not very democratic. They still felt that they controlled all of Washington and shut down the government. They even threatened to crash the economy. And after the 2014 election, they got control of both houses of Congress. And they are really mad that Obama doesn’t just abdicate and make Boehner president.

The Republicans can’t get everything that that they want because they don’t control all of the government. But rather than compromise a little, they behave like The Zax. And their base cheers them on. They stand there in the middle of the field and refuse to move when the smallest of compromise would allow them to move along and accomplish things they care about. Meanwhile, the world around them continues on. And this, my friends, is how great empires fall: not by catastrophe, but inch by inch — doing nothing. And the Republican base cheers that just one more election cycle of doing nothing at all will allow them to finally do something. Of course, its been over thirty years since the Republicans Party has known what it is they want to do. Once in power, President Ted Cruz will yaw after his first good night of sleep in the White House and think, “What should I do? What did Bush do before me? Oh, that’s right: tax cuts for the rich. That’s what I’ll do!”

Last Monday, Paul Krugman wrote, The Long-Run Cop-Out. That’s a reference to Keynes’ observation that it is meaningless to talk about the “long run” because in the long run, we are all dead. In fact, before he wrote the column, I wrote an article following off one of his blog posts, “Serious” Economics Is Just a Stalling Tactic. That’s what all that “long run” and “structural reform” is all about: avoiding doing anything that might help, and more important, might cause the rich a couple of bucks.

But while reading it, I began to wonder about something else. I’ve noticed that the Republicans have started to sound a whole lot more reasonable about matters economic. Namely, they are starting to talk about things that actually would help the economy. And why is that? Well, it’s no secret. Obama is at the end of his time as president. They are hopeful that they will control the White House as of 2017. So they are laying the ground work now. They are getting ready for more of their traditional work as The Wrecking Crew. It’s the same thing we saw with economist Greg Mankiw who was for stimulus under George W Bush, against it under Obama, and then again for it in the middle of 2012 as a Romney advisor — looking forward to a Romney presidency.

Later that week, Jonathan Chait wrote, Will Republicans Stop Beating Around the Bush? As with Krugman, he isn’t writing about this subject. But he did mention an important part of it:

Maybe I’m just too cynical. I don’t think that the Republicans have just woken from their fever and now understand that they were mistaken. All that’s changed is the environment. And if a good economy sweeps Hillary Clinton or another Democrat into the White House, the Republicans will find that actually, that “Hell no!” position was right all along. They will convince themselves that the real reason they lost was that they had the wrong candidate and that what they really should have done was run a True Conservative™. If only they had run on a platform of ending abortion except in the case of legitimate rape, starving the darkies, and cutting the taxes of the only oppressed minority in America — the rich! Then they would have won!

It would seem that only far left cranks like me are supposed to mention this clear reality that what the Republicans actually think about government spending is only dependent upon who’s doing the spending. But it is well established. The Republicans aren’t for a small or even smaller government. They want a big, invasive government. They want to pick the winners. They just want those winners to be their wealthy friends. There is no reason to avoid saying this. It’s just the truth.

The generic slogan of American police forces is, “To protect and serve.” It has long been a slogan that has annoyed me. And I’m not alone. Most liberals bristle at it. In particular, it is never clear just who it is that our police officers serve. When an officer shows up on the scene, he is less likely to help out than an average person. His presence usually fills those involved with a feeling that the officer will find some reason to start arresting people.

For example, suppose a fight breaks out at a party. The police are called. They will arrive long after the fight is over. Those involved in the fight will likely have left. But the officers might notice that illegal drugs are being used at the party. So the people at the party aren’t being protected. The people at the party aren’t being served. Liberals like me have always thought the slogan was nothing more than a sick joke. My friend Jim Hogshire always says, “I can’t imagine a situation in which I would feel safer with a cop around.” When I first heard him say that, I thought he was being hyperbolic. But over the years I’ve come to agree with him completely.

Last week I read a great article by Sam Mitriani at Alternet that greatly clarified my thinking, The True History of the Origins of Police — Protecting and Serving the Masters of Society. The mistake that we liberals make is to assume that the police slogan applies to us. But it doesn’t. The police are committed to protecting and serving the power elite. If they do from time to time manage to protect and serve us plebeians, it is just because the interests of the power elite temporarily overlap with ours. There is nothing more to that.

As Mitriani explained, in the 18th century, there were “elected constables and sheriffs” who were directly responsible to the people. (In the south, ever the shining light of modernity, they had slave patrols.) It wasn’t until after the Civil War that the modern police force came into being. And it certainly wasn’t for the purpose of protecting the masses from marauding gangs intent on raping and pillaging. No, it was to keep the working classes in their place — namely working 12 hours per day, seven days per week for slave wages. The American Dream!

The thing in the article that most struck me, however, was the way that the law was applied. The idea of police neutrally was always a shame:

But that wouldn’t happen today, right? Right?! Of course it would. One of the shocking things that I’ve learned over the years is that the police don’t have a very good idea of what the law actually is. They have this feeling that if they don’t like what you are doing, it must be against the law. And the truth is that local, state, and federal legislatures have really helped them out in this regard. Basically, anything that an officer claims is illegal is illegal.

This is the ultimate authoritarian cudgel: have a lot of laws on the books that are never used — except when you threaten the power elite or their representatives. And this is why I get really angry when people talk about how unions are violent and how they have ties to organized crime. The police have always been the ultimate weapon of the power elite to stop workers from unionizing. And they were very violent — involved in, among other things, the assassination of labor leaders. Yet in the modern imagination, it was the the unions and their representatives who were violent. Somehow workers are just violent by nature and all the good business owners are are lambs who want nothing but a peaceful and equitable settlement.

From the murder of Anna LoPizzo to the Columbine Mine massacre to the murder of Eric Garner — the police have always been around to protect and serve the interests of the power elite. That’s why the phrase “to protect and serve” has no object. Americans wouldn’t be too keen to know who and what the police are paid to protect and serve.

The more I read about King v Burwell, the more it seems clear to be defeated. It is the most recent attempt to destroy Obamacare — this time by disallowing subsidies to people purchasing insurance on federal exchanges. The net result would be to harm middle class people in Republican led states. The idea is apparently to make people so angry at the arbitrary injustice that they would demand the law’s repeal. I’ve always thought it just as likely that the people would be angry at the Republicans who did this, and demand that the state level Republicans stop being so spiteful and take the free money from the federal government.

Aside from that, the case is just bad. It is based upon a single sentence in the 20,000 page healthcare bill. Consider an analogy. Suppose I made a statement:

This is clearly a statement against murder. And that is the case, even though one of the sentences mistakenly read, “But it is always wrong to be against murder.” Clearly, that sentence is a mistake. It would most likely have been an editing error, combining “it is always wrong to murder” and “I am completely against murder.”

This is what the plaintiffs in King v Burwell are doing. Now some have countered that this one sentence changes what the bill means. The problem is that the sentence doesn’t exist in isolation. An enormous amount of the bill assumes just the opposite. It uses “state run exchanges” as a synonym for any exchange run by a state government or the federal government. In other words, the word “state” is used as a synonym for the government.

What this all means is that if a number of justices find for the plaintiffs, it’s going to look really bad. No one is going to find it shocking that many of the justices are nothing more than partisan hacks. But it will be another nail in the coffin of the Supreme Court’s good reputation.

What is more telling, however, is what it says of the conservative movement generally. Even if this challenge to Obamacare goes down in flames with a 0-9 finding, it will still be the case that a majority of the conservative movement thought and will continue to think that this was a reasonable challenge to the healthcare law. And that shows a shocking lack of belief in democracy. It doesn’t matter that the law was enacted using all of our democratic processes — in the full light of day. And it did that despite the organized and unethical efforts of the power elite. Yet they are willing to use absolutely any tactic to destroy the will of the people. And that includes harming their very own constituency.

We aren’t talking about zoning laws here. If the conservatives manage to prevail in this effort, it will result in untold disruption. As it is, many poor people who would now have health insurance don’t because of the spitefulness of state level Republicans. Some have died who wouldn’t have otherwise. If healthcare becomes unaffordable because of King v Burwell, they same thing will happen — and even more will die. And that’s a price that conservatives think is worth paying for winning a single battle in their fight against the president.

The conservative movement in this country is committed to their ideology. But that ideology is vacuous. It believes in “freedom” but doesn’t care at all for practical effects of its policies on freedom. Thus we get policies to increase the freedom of those who are already the most free, while it greatly reduces the freedom of the rest. It believes in “life” but doesn’t care at all for the practical effects its policies on life. So it pushes for laws that reduce the number of legal abortions, which manage to be more than offset by the number of illegal abortions.

Ask almost any conservative about healthcare and they will tell you that they want everyone to have access to healthcare. But the current healthcare law isn’t how they want to do it. So they are willing to deprive tens of millions of Americans of healthcare in the name of providing Americans access to healthcare. Because the practical consequences never matter. If Dick Cheney might have to pay an extra dollar for his next heart transplant, the conservatives are there to protect his freedom to low cost heart transplants. If that means that poor children die of unnecessary illnesses, nothing can be done. We can do anything we want to help the poor — as long as it doesn’t harm the power elite in the slightest. And that “slightest” includes even the potential for harm.

If you want to understand what is wrong with the conservative movement, you need look no further than King v Burwell. The poor and the middle class just don’t matter. If they could bring back droit du seigneur, they would. Because they know that the rich are just better. And they should be treated accordingly.