I’ve been biding my time on this whole business with Rick Perry and his actions to get Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg to resign. Over the weekend, Jonathan Chait wrote, This Indictment Of Rick Perry Is Unbelievably Ridiculous. Now, I often disagree with Chait who is awfully neoliberal in many areas. But he is also incredibly smart, informed, and thoughtful. But the truth is, I think that Chait and others are jumping to a lot of conclusions. The truth is, we still don’t know what evidence Perry was indicted on. The dominant media narrative seems to be the one that Rick Perry wants.

The most troubling part of the narrative is that this is part of some Democratic witch hunt. That doesn’t really fly. As USA Today mentioned in an editorial criticizing the indictment, “It is being brought by a special prosecutor appointed by a Republican judge.” So I wish that liberals would stop arguing things such as that it helps Chris Christie by implying that all questions about Republican corruption are politically motivated. This one just doesn’t seem to be.

As for the main argument that the indictment is based upon nothing, well, we just don’t know that. Most interestingly, My San Antonio reported, Perry Aides Offered Lehmberg a Job for Resignation. This muddles everything. On the one hand, Perry’s office allegedly offered Lehmberg a different job in the DA’s office. But they apparently also offered to replace her with a Democrat. That last bit of information would seem to eliminate Perry’s primary motive. Or maybe he felt any other Democrat would be less effective than Lehmberg. Or maybe he was just looking for a way to save face. Who knows at this time?

And that’s the point: we don’t know. James Moore at Huffington Post did a good job of laying out the potential problems for Perry, Why Rick Perry Will Be Convicted. In the article, he noted a bit of an inconsistency in Perry’s claim that Lehmberg was unfit for office because of the drunk driving conviction. Moore wrote:

In addition to this, the special prosecutor Michael McCrum has indicated to Vice that the case isn’t about the veto threat itself. He said, “I’m investigating the circumstances surrounding the veto and whether the governor’s actions were appropriate or not under the law.” And Jeffrey Toobin at the New Yorker has indicated that at this point, it doesn’t much matter if what Perry did was common, “[C]ourts respond to the argument that ‘everyone does it’ more or less the same way that your mother did.”

In the end, I don’t suppose it much matters. Rick Perry was never going to be the next President. No one on the left likes him. And on the right, he’s been an outcast ever since he indicated that he had a soul in the 2012 primary, “If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart.” The Republican Party, in fact, does not have a heart and they won’t forget that.

So whether or not Rick Perry gets convicted doesn’t much matter outside of Texas. But I do wish that my fellow liberals would stop arguing that this is partisan and that Rick Perry is some kind of victim. It’s nothing like that.  It’s just Texas.

Michael Hiltzik brought my attention to a new education outrage, Republicans Throw a Conniption Over the Teaching of US History. Sadly, this one is particularly bad not because of the conservatives—I’m so used to anti-intellectualism on the right that it hardly registers. This one is terrible because of the total spinelessness of one very prominent educator.

The whole thing is about the new history outline for Advanced Placement classes issued by the College Board. It seems that retired teacher and AP test guide author Larry Krieger is unhappy because the outline doesn’t push his own personal view of American greatness. He is upset, for example, that Benjamin Franklin isn’t even mentioned in the outline. Can you imagine?! This is a historical figure that all American children have crammed down their throats from the first grade. What possible reason could the outline have for not mentioning him by name? I mean, other than the fact that students get college credit for AP courses and would be expected to have a pretty good understanding of both the man and his importance in the history of America?

What Krieger is really up to is clear in his reaction to this photograph by Jacob Riis of tenement conditions in New York in 1890:

Hiltzik describes the test question and Krieger’s objection:

All of this has led to the Republican National Committee passing a resolution calling the outline “biased and inaccurate” and asking for Congress to defund the College Board. But what is terrible is that the new College Board president, David Coleman, more or less caved as one would expect from the conservative stereotype of a liberal academic:

Thankfully, the teachers who actually wrote the outline are fighting back. Their open letter is the kind of sharp attack that is critical if we are not going to allow ever more knowledge to fall into the black hole of “He said—she said—who can possibly say?” reporting that has now engulfed climate science and constantly threatens evolution theory.

American politics is out of balance. On the right we have ideologues who see everything as a threat to their carefully crafted vision of the nation. That might be okay if it were balanced on the left with a bunch of ideologues who see everything as a threat to their carefully crafted vision of the nation. But the right is not so balanced. Instead, it is “balanced” by practical centrism. As a result of that, we run into these problems all the time where basic knowledge gained from science and other disciplines is attacked as bias precisely because it isn’t biased.

Afterword

It is also possible that Larry Krieger is just using right wing outrage. As I noted above, he is a writer of test preparation material and he seems to own the company Insider Test Prep. So he could see the changes as threatening. On the other hand, nothing is so good for writers of educational materials as changes in standards. It allows used books to become far less valuable, thus increasing sales of new books. So, as Newsweek would tell you, “Who can possibly say?”

Like thousands of other undocumented Honduran children deported after having journeyed unaccompanied to the US, Sosa faces perilous conditions in the violent neighborhood from which he sought to escape.

“There are many youngsters who only three days after they’ve been deported are killed, shot by a firearm,” said Hector Hernandez, who runs the morgue in San Pedro Sula. “They return just to die.”

At least five, perhaps as many as 10, of the 42 children slain here since February had been recently deported from the US, Hernandez said…

In one case, a teenage boy was shot to death hours after arriving in San Pedro Sula on a deportation flight, according to the boy’s cousin, who refused to identify himself or the boy to The Times for fear of reprisal from neighborhood gangs.

—Cindy Carcamo
In Honduras, US Deportees Seek to Journey North Again
H/T: Charlie Pierce

This image was posted on Google+ last night by Forever Palestine. I have no context for it. I assume it is a father kissing his dead daughter before he buries her. It is a heartbreaking image.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I’m highly sympathetic toward the Palestinians. But I don’t particularly take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is a mess. I think lowly of the belligerents on both sides. But it is the Palestinians who are dying in such large numbers. And I don’t think that takes away from what Israeli civilians are going through. The random rocket fire does create terror, and for the people harmed or killed, it doesn’t matter what the numbers are.

But this image reminds me of Benjamin Netanyahu’s comment on CNN that Hamas “use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause. They want the more dead, the better.” Undoubtedly, the corpses do have a PR value. But the statement is entirely typical of war propaganda: dehumanize the enemy. I think you can say that Hamas’ actions are shortsighted. (You can say the same thing about Israel’s actions.) But you can’t say that Hamas doesn’t love its children.

Another problem is that Americans tend to make assumptions about Hamas that are not valid. While the group does use terrorism as a tactic, the group is a lot more than that. Treating the group as a monolith is a mistake. Another false assumption is to equate Hamas with the people of Gaza. And blanket statements like Netanyahu’s only reinforce these false assumptions, which is probably why they are made.

Would it be so hard for us all to agree that all the peoples of the world value life? Or at least that we all love our children? This seems the very least we can do. But the dehumanization of the enemy is very important in allowing the killing to continue. And I don’t expect either side to acknowledge the humanity of the other any time soon. Meanwhile, the anguished man in the photograph is real. The child is dead. And regardless of PR or ideology or property right, this is wrong.

I’ve avoided talking too much about the murder of Michael Brown, because there really isn’t much to say. It is very much like school shootings: these are avoidable tragedies, but the power elite aren’t interested in doing anything about them. I did write an article about it last week, Michael Brown Murder Uncovers Deeply Flawed Local Policing. In that article, I compared Michael Brown to Andy Lopez, a young man in my home town who was killed by an officer who mistook his toy gun for a real one.

In the article, I noted that the officer shot Lopez seven times in six seconds. When the shooting was investigated, the authorities found that the officer acted appropriately. But here’s the key, “And if you check the internet about the killing, most of what you will see is that Lopez was high on cannabis, as though that has anything to do with the situation.”

So I was not surprised when I read in the Washington Post, County Investigation: Michael Brown Was Shot From the Front, Had Marijuana in His System. This has no obvious relevance to the shooting. Just like the release of video from a convenience store robbery, it is being used to tarnish Brown’s reputation—to throw doubt into the public discussion.

Note how callous this is. The unstated message is that Michael Brown was a bad kid (or might have been) and therefore it was justified to kill him. And for a large swath of America, their only real experience with cannabis is government propaganda that is one step up from Reefer Madness. For them, someone under the influence of the drug could have done anything. It’s like all those old scare stories about PCP. So suddenly Michael Brown was some wild man who could have broken out of handcuffs.

To make matters worse, the man who did the autopsy for Brown’s parents, Michael Baden was on Fox News speculating about the toxicology report that he hadn’t seen. The whole thing is very much the way that Fox News wants to push this. Greta Van Susteren asked, “Does the fact that they found marijuana, does that exclude the fact that there might be other drugs in his system or even that the marijuana was laced with anything?” We don’t even know that the cannabis levels indicate that he was high. It is possible that the drugs are from days or even weeks before.

This is all so predictable. It’s like they teach this in police training, “After you needlessly kill a young man, do everything you can to vilify him, even if you have to make stuff up. Then wait a few months, release a report that exonerates the officer. And hold a press conference about starting a dialog and the need for healing.” It is sickening in its premeditation. It is boring in its familiarity.

Over the weekend, Martin Longman (AKA: the handcuffed frog blogger) made an interesting observation, Why Presidential Horserace Pieces are Boring. I think what he really meant is that horse race pieces are stupid. And his reasoning is interesting: regardless of who the Republicans nominate, they will lose. I don’t agree with that logic. I’m a fundamentals kind of guy, and I think that as bad a candidate as Newt Gingrich could be elected president in 2016 if the economy crumbles in the months leading up to the election.

But I’m in agreement with Longman: I’m not very interested in presidential horse race articles. And that’s why I’m going to write one. Because I think I know who the Republicans are going to nominate for president in 2016: Rand Paul. But don’t worry, I haven’t lost all sense. I certainly don’t think that he will get the nomination because the Republicans have turned libertarian. Instead, he will get the nomination because he claims to be a libertarian without actually acting like it.

A big part of this is the fascination that Republicans have for the libertarian brand. And everyone knows that Rand Paul is a libertarian—whatever that might mean. When I was a libertarian, I hated what I saw as pretenders like Rand Paul. As it was, I didn’t vote for his father when he ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket, and his father is a hell of a lot closer to an actual libertarian than Rand is. His reputation is based on his isolationist foreign policy ideas, lukewarm support of LGBT rights, and his kinda sorta support of cannabis legalization.

The problem for Rand Paul is that the things that make him the new poster boy of libertarianism are things that the base of the Republican Party hates. But this is a minor problem for Paul. As each day goes by, we find him pushing himself further and further away from any libertarian positions into a nice comfortable conservative place. So by this time next year, he will have massaged every position so that it still sounds libertarian, while still being full of conservative red meat for the base.

For the Republican voter, Rand Paul will be the ultimate candidate. He will have the official George Washington seal of approval without having to take on any of the actual ideas of the first president or any of the other founders of the nation. This is what the Tea Party is all about and they will vote for Rand Paul as long as he doesn’t keep saying things that upset their sense of American exceptionalism. It will be perfect: conservative elitism in the clothes of libertarian idealism.

A lot of people seem to think that Paul will have problems with things he’s said in the past. But as we’ve seen over and over, Paul has no problem just ignoring the past or claiming that he misspoke in the past. All politicians try to do that, of course. But the Republican base seems awfully forgiving about this. Just look at the transformation that Mitt Romney went through. The problem with Rand Paul’s father was always that he was too wedded to his ideology. The son learned not to do that from his father’s failure to inspire the Republican Party. So Rand Paul very clearly doesn’t believe in anything other than that he ought to be president. And I think that will see him through to the nomination.

Let us hope to God that he doesn’t win the general election.

Jonathan Chait wrote an article today with a really interesting title, No, the Founders Were Not Tea Partiers. And then he went on to write a totally different article. What he’s actually writing about is how the anti-democratic structure of the Senate was not something that the framers wanted; it was something that they had to accept to pacify the smaller states who thought that the big states would walk all over them. As Alexander Hamilton said in the debate over the new Constitution, “But as States are a collection of individual men which ought we to respect most, the rights of the people composing them, or of the artificial beings resulting from the composition.”

In a general sense, Chait is pushing against the conservative idea that the country was meant to held in check by a small percentage of the population is little states who effectively have a veto on any legislation that they don’t like. He also makes the point that the fact that people like Hamilton and Madison were willing to compromise to get the Constitution ratified show how they aren’t like the all-or-nothing Republican base. This is all very true, but I think there is a more fundamental issue here.

People have a tendency to see people from the past in a modern context. But that makes no sense at all. The Magna Carta is bizarre to the modern reader. Pointing out that the king is not above the law when it come to feudal lords seems self-evident. But in 1215, it was the most liberal of documents. Similarly, in the minds of modern conservatives, the founding fathers are sealed in Amber. It is only in this way that they can claim Hamilton and Madison as their own.

But the historical context of our country’s founding was the effort to expand equality. These men where thus liberals. And by that I don’t mean “classical liberals” in the sense that libertarians like to use it. Most of them were that, but it gives the wrong impression. The important point is that “classical liberalism” was a reaction against hereditary rule. And that makes it liberal as we think of it today.

In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin argues that what makes a conservative—regardless of time—is their opposition to the expansion of equality. So conservatives were at best apologists for slavery. Conservatives were at best for stealing native lands, if not for full scale genocide. Conservatives were at best hostile to allowing women the right to vote. And the most notable things about modern conservatism are: easing the taxation of the rich, limiting reproductive freedom of women, and not allowing the LGBT community rights to marriage or even to jobs in some extreme cases.

So it is always galling to me to hear conservatives grab onto the founding fathers as though they are part of the same historical movement. When it latches onto the mantle of the country’s founding, modern conservatism is just trying to brush away over two centuries of progress. But the Constitution itself shows the lie of this. The preamble says “in order to form a more perfect union,” not “in order to form a perfect union.” Those men did not expect the country to ossify. It was conservatives then and now who want to stop the powerless from gaining more power: from George III to Ted Cruz. The founding fathers were liberals, and the state of the art in modern conservatism is 227 year old liberalism.

Tomorrow’s Paul Krugman column is a little unusual, Why We Fight Wars. It is based on some economics: namely that for advanced economies, wars are always a loser. It reminds me of my days in graduate school. We were looking carbon dioxide emissions throughout the 20th century. And we were all surprised that they went way down during World War II. But soon enough, we realized: even though there was a lot of war going on, the amount of commerce actually went way down. Bottom line: wars are bad for the economy.

Krugman’s interest is mainly in why we continue to fight wars when it isn’t in our national interests. Think about Hitler for a moment. He had a very strong economy and he could have kept the Rhineland and consolidated his power. It’s not like Poland was that great a prize. But as Krugman noted, wars are usually good for the leaders of countries:

But I think the issue is more general, and it isn’t limited to war. It is often in the best economic interests of some part of the population to harm the economy. For example, war is very good for weapons manufacturers. In his film Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore presented a nice sequence about all the money to made in the aftermath of 9/11 as well as before, during, and after the Iraq War. So even though the Iraq War cost our country at least a trillion dollars, it worked out really well for some people.

Last week, Krugman’s column was on a related issue, Inequality Is a Drag. It was about the Standard & Poor’s report, How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening US Economic Growth, and Possible Ways To Change the Tide. But neither the article nor the report made the obvious point about the reason we have ever rising inequality: it is great for a small group of very powerful people: the oligarchs and those who do their bidding.

The issue that we will eventually need to deal with is the power of these oligarchs. They don’t have the interests of the country in mind. And it simply isn’t true that by distorting the political system to benefit themselves they make everyone richer. It’s even possible that their own long term interests are harmed by this behavior. This kind of short term thinking without regard to its effects has led to historically low taxes on the rich, extremely high inequality, and a crumbling middle class. But at the same time, the rich seem to think that they are excessively put upon. As I wrote the other day in StarPower: the Game That Shows We’re All Doomed, over the last three decades “we have gotten a class of [rich people] who have convinced themselves, not that the game is fair, but that it is unfair—to them.”