Today, Hillary Clinton is testifying before the House Select Committee on Benghazi. It’s an amazing display. It’s such a joke. They’ve been beating this drum for three years now. They’ve found nothing. All they’ve managed to do is convince those in the right wing echo chamber that there must be fire, because if there is one thing the Republican Party is good at, it is creating smoke. But if that weren’t enough, we had Kevin McCarthy putting the hearings in the context of how it damaged Clinton’s approval rating. And over the weekend, we learned, Republican Chairman Of Benghazi Committee Caught Making Bogus Accusation Against Hillary Clinton.

It all involves Trey Gowdy. Earlier this month, he sent out a letter claiming that Clinton had revealed the name of a CIA source in some of her private email. Gowdy wrote, “This information, the name of a human source, is some of the most protected information in our intelligence community, the release of which could jeopardize not only national security but human lives.” On Sunday, the ranking Democrat, Representative Elijah Cummings hit back. Hard. It’s worth quoting at length:

It turns out that the information is not classified. But before releasing it to the press, Gowdy redacted the name of the CIA source, adding “redacted due to sources and methods.” This was certainly all done to make Clinton look bad. And as Cummings noted in his letter, “Predictably, commentators began repeating your accusations in even more extreme terms…” Of course they did! Just the same, you would think after the same thing happens again and again (as it has with selective leaks from various Benghazi committees), the the press would wise up.

What’s perhaps most important, is that a day after this story broke — showing malfeasance on the part of Trey Cowdy — Google News had nothing about it among its top news items. In fact, if you did a search on “Benghazi,” the first thing that came up was a Fox News article, “Ambassador Sought Security Staffing Before Benghazi Attack, Cable Shows.” It’s understandable that for the last 40 years, the Republicans have been looking for something to redeem them for Nixon and the Watergate scandal. They look for scandals everywhere, even while they find them nowhere. (Unless marital infidelity is as important as running a crime syndicate out of the White House.)

I hope Brian Beutler was right earlier this week, The Benghazi Witch-Hunt Against Hillary Is Backfiring Just Like Bill Clinton’s Impeachment. But is it really? I question that. It seems to me that the press is only waking up to the fact that there is nothing to all this Benghazi thing. The Republicans have had more than 13 hearings on it. That ought to be enough to come to that conclusion. Instead, it takes clear acts of malfeasance to make the press figure there is nothing to see. Of course, there is something to see. If the Democrats acted like the Republicans have, it would be a huge thing. Instead, given that this is simply what the Republicans have become, it is ignored. The Republicans are just awful, so there is no story.

Bill McBride has a question about, Ornithology: What is a “deficit hawk”? It might seem easy: a deficit hawk is someone who cares a great deal about the deficit and is willing to make a lot of compromises to get rid of it. But is that really what a deficit hawk is? McBride has noticed what I have: deficit hawks don’t seem to care much about the deficit; they just seem to care about using the deficit to push other things they actually do care about.

How else do you explain the fact that almost all the prominent deficit hawks are for lowering taxes? Yes, they claim that this will create growth that will decrease the deficit. But as McBride noted, “All data and research shows that at the current marginal rates, tax cuts do not pay for themselves and lead to much larger deficits.” Speaking of economic growth, these are the same people who don’t want to do anything to head off recession. And how do you explain that they are generally for budget-busting wars? The only “sacrifice” that these deficit hawks seem to be willing to make is cuts in spending on the poor and middle classes.

I think the answer really comes back to one of my favorite analogies: Matt Yglesias’ Quaker budget hawks:

But somehow, in our society, rich people must be given the benefit of the doubt — regardless of how absurd that becomes. My favorite example doesn’t even come from the United States. Back in 2013, France was being forced to do austerity — because balancing the budget is so important in a recession. (Note: sarcasm!) But when France met its budgetary target through tax increases rather than spending cuts, European Commissioner Olli Rehn was upset. He said, “Budgetary discipline must come from a reduction in public spending and not from new taxes.” And why is that? It certainly isn’t because the economics dictates this. In fact, the economics probably point in the opposite direction. It’s just that Rehn’s conservative ideology dictates it, but like almost all of the deficit hawks, he doesn’t actually care about deficits.

I should be clear: I don’t care about deficits. In a booming economy, they are a problem, of course. But when was the last time we had a booming economy? For two years at the end of the 1990s? And that was such an aberration that people still talk about. It was also a time when the deficit was gone because of the boom. But I’m willing to talk about deficits if we can get a political system that shows it is actually interested in creating jobs and not just more income for the very richest among us.

But what’s clear is that those who want to use the deficit as an excuse for their conservative ideology are not honest brokers. We can’t deal with them because they won’t say what they want. And we know why that is: what they want is truly unpopular. It sounds so much better to say that we must screw the poor in order to help the poor. And somehow, that’s an argument that has worked for four decades now — even as the poor are doing worse than ever.

I continue to be amazed that we in the west live in democracies and yet we don’t experience much democracy. And I thought it might be useful to go through a number of videos by the great CGP Grey that deal with these issues. He has a great way of explaining the problems with these system. And one thing I like about him is that he isn’t clearly partisan. I assume he is a liberal, but that doesn’t come from his videos. He seems to be a liberal because: (1) he is interested in facts; and (2) he believes in democracy. Those are two things that conservatives — in American anyway — are against.

We will eventually get to the United Kingdom, but let’s start with the United States. There are lots of antidemocratic aspects of our system. There is money in politics and there is gerrymandering. But we also have it cooked into our system in the form of the US Senate. The people who live in Wyoming get 66 times as much representation in the Senate as I do in California. That isn’t just a quirk; that’s thoroughly antidemocratic. There is no way that one can justify it, except for the lame, “It was the only way the Constitution got ratified!” That’s an explanation, not a justification.

Of course, we also have presidents elected via the electoral college, which is potentially deeply antidemocratic. Think about the 2000 election. In that case, it is clear that if a recount had been allowed, and the Supreme Court had not found that the Constitution contained some equal protection clause that only applied to George W Bush, Al Gore would have won the electoral college as well as the popular vote. Gore won over a half million more votes but still lost 266-271. But luckily, Bush governed in a humble manner. (Note: sarcasm!)

But it’s worse than that. As CGP Grey notes in the following video, it is possible for someone to win the presidency by getting less than 22% of the vote. This is totally unacceptable:

He also points out that three people who won the popular vote lost the electoral college vote. That’s a 5% error rate. Would we accept this kind of thing in any other place in our lives? As it is, Republicans go around saying we must have voter ID laws based upon a tiny faction of that. But they don’t care about the electoral college because at least right now, they think it is to their advantage. It turns out it is currently to the advantage of the Democrats. But as I am fond of saying: I believe in democracy. I want it changed.

Another great CGP Grey video is, The Problems with First Past the Post Voting Explained. It is about another aspect of our system: winner take all elections. We really should be past this. During George W Bush’s term, we heard a lot from Karl Rove about “50% plus 1 vote.” The idea was that it didn’t matter that one represent everyone; just get the bare minimum you need to win the election, and then lower taxes on the rich and start pointless wars. Well, there are better systems as explained here:

There are a number of other videos that he mentions in that one, and they are well worth checking out. But I want to move onto another video, which focuses on the recent UK election, Why the UK Election Results are the Worst in History. The situation is screwed up. I wrote about it at the time. The Conservative Party managed to win 51% of the seats in Parliament — a straight majority, so no coalition government — but they only got 37% of the vote. That’s unacceptable, yet there was almost no one writing about it. It was just a given that this is the way it ought to be. I was glad to see CGP Grey as outraged as I have been:

Our problem is that the people managed to get democracy and to expand it. The power elite never liked that. So over time, they’ve managed to make democracy anti-democratic. And they’ve tricked most us into accepting it. But it isn’t right. And if we have any hope for the future, we must change it.

I am often reminded of Joe Biden’s finest moment. It occurred during the 2012 vice-presidential debate. Paul Ryan was using the usual deceptive claim that Obamacare took money away from Medicare. It was deceptive because while it was technically true, it wasn’t actually taking resources away from the program. But what was flat out wrong was Romney and Ryan’s claim that this meant that the Democratic Party was trying to destroy Medicare. Biden didn’t get into the weeds, as I just did. He simply said, “Folks: use your common sense! Who do you trust on this?!” That’s the thing: we don’t need studies, we know what the Republicans are all about, because they tell us all the time.

One of the great supposed ironies that I’ve been hearing my whole life is, “Actually, the Democrats are the party of the rich!” There are reasons to think this might be true. For example, Democratic support is more clustered in cities. And it may have been true at one time — at least if you massaged the data and squinted the right way. But it certainly isn’t true today and it hasn’t been true for a long time. All you have to do is use your common sense! Who do you trust on this?!

But Jim Naureckas over at FAIR did more than that, Democrats Depend on Affluent Voters? That’s Rich. It appears that Thomas Edsall has been pushing a slightly different narrative: the Democrats are as dependent upon the rich as they are the poor. This comes from the 2012 election, where Obama got as many votes from the upper two quintiles as he did from the lower two quintiles. Now this is a bit of a trick, because it depends upon the fact that richer people vote at greater percentages than poor people do. As you can see below, Obama killed it with the poor.

Naureckas noted something else that is critical: “elections aren’t won by getting a lot of votes, but by getting more votes than your opponents.” So it doesn’t matter the total number of votes of one group compared to another. The critical issue is how well the two parties do with any given group. And on that score, it is simply wrong to imply that Democrats are the party of the rich, as Edsall’s headline does, “How Did the Democrats Become Favorites of the Rich?” But let’s be clear, Edsall’s intent — as a New Democrat — is to say, “Stay away from Bernie Sanders because the Democratic Party still needs the votes of those upper two quintiles!”

There may be reason to think that, although as always, I think most people — even a fair number of Republicans — agree more with Bernie Sanders than anyone else. But it’s just so ridiculous to talk about Democrats in this way. When people talk about Republicans being the party of the rich, they aren’t talking about voters; they are talking about policies. The Republican Party pushes policies that preferentially help the rich. That’s true to some extent of the Democrats too. But not nearly to the same extent. And based on last week’s debate, the party is moving away from that.

Regardless, no one is making that argument when claiming that Democrats are the party of the rich; they are just pushing some idea of what Democratic voters are. What they are talking about is what Geoffrey Nunberg lampooned in the subtitle of his book Talking Right, “How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.” But as the table above shows: the strongest Democratic support is not from “latte liberals”; it’s from lower class workers. There are a whole lot more “crème brûlée conservatives” than than “latte liberals.”

Afterword

Nunberg documents in his book the fact that most of the stuff in his subtitle are actually done more by conservatives. For example, conservatives are more likely to drive Volvo cars than liberals. Myth is powerful.

As you have probably heard, Jim Webb has dropped out of the Democratic presidential race. I was planning to write an Onion style article, “Jim Webb: Running for President Harder Than Killing Gooks.” But I thought better of it. The truth is, I admire people like Webb who are willing to put themselves out in the public. That takes a hell of a lot more courage than trying to stay alive in a war. And the fact that he came off as a serial killer when he wasn’t complaining about no one calling on him was more a function of his relative inexperience than of any dysfunction on his part.

Of course, there has been buzz that Webb is considering an independent run for the presidency. And at the press conference this morning, he didn’t rule it out. If he does that, then I might go ahead with an Onion kind of article. Of course, the big reason he’s dropping out is not his curious debate performance; it is his lack of funds. So maybe the Third Way folks will flock to him. After all, that’s what they do. They know that the Republicans are terrible. And they posit that the Democrats are the same. So someone more conservative than Hillary Clinton and less conservative than Ted Cruz is just right.

Last night on All In With Chris Hayes, Third Way’s Senior Vice-President for Public Affairs Matt Bennett was on to talk about how America would never vote for someone who calls himself a socialist. He actually made that blanket statement. It was not that Americans would not vote for Bernie Sanders unless he was running against Donald Trump or Ben Carson. It wasn’t that he would lose unless he was running against a fascist (which the Republicans may well nominate). It was just that he couldn’t win.

That’s the point of Third Way: to guard against the Democratic Party’s left flank. They don’t seem much interested in doing the same for the Republican Party’s right flank. In fact, other than setting up the Republicans as the equal and opposite of the Democrats, they don’t seem much interested in the Republican Party at all. Right now, the Third Way gang seems fairly happy with Hillary Clinton. But that’s just because of Bernie Sanders. If he hadn’t run, I’m sure that Jim Webb would be just what they wanted — not because of anything about him, but because he just seems to the right of what the Democratic Party wants.

But the main thing that I hate about Third Way — and actually a whole lot more people than that — is how they claim to speak for the American people. In the All In segment, they quoted from a poll that showed that only 47% of Americans would vote for a socialist. I’ve seen it before. And I think it means absolutely nothing. Back in June, an Iowa poll found that only 34% of Republicans would even consider voting for Donald Trump. The Real Clear Politics average now has Trump at over 22% in Iowa — 5 points ahead of his nearest rival. It just is no longer true that only 34% of Iowa Republicans would never vote for him. The same is true of their support for “socialist” — which means a lot less given it is an out of context word and not a person.

The truth is that Third Way and others like it are not telling the truth. It is not that Bernie Sanders could never be elected. It is that they are terrified that he could get elected. Sanders has caused the Overton window to open a bit. And Third Way hates that. They want to limit the world of political discourse to Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. And if they could just get rid of Bernie Sanders, they could narrow the debate even more: to Jeb Bush and Jim Webb.

This last week, there has been lots of chatter about George W Bush and the claim by his brother that he “kept us safe.” Paul Campos wrote a good overview of the issue, Let Us Now Blame George Bush: Trump and Jeb Force a Long Overdue Debate About 9/11. But I have a slightly different take on the matter. I think it is quite reasonable for people to have not held Bush accountable for the attack at the time.

Having said that, since that time, it has become clear that at least some blame ought to be leveled against him. Most of what I know came from Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies. And the thing I remember from that was Bush’s total lack of interest in terrorism. The Clinton people stressed how important terrorism was. But they were part of reality-based community. Bush and company made their own reality, and it was that the big threat to the United States was Russia and Iraq.

There was also the revelation that after being given the presidential daily briefing titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” Bush told the briefer, “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.” It shows how important it is to have serious, competent people run the country. Bush has always reminded me of the end of Primary Colors, where Jack Stanton says, “You know as well as I do, that plenty of people playing this game, they don’t think that way. They’re willing to sell their souls, crawl through sewers, lie to people, divide them, play on their worst fears for nothing! Just for the prize.” That’s Bush: dad was president, so he needed to be. He wasn’t much interested in doing the job.

But when I think about it, I’m not at all sure that 9/11 would have been foiled if we lived in a democracy and Al Gore had been president. So I have a hard time blaming Bush for that specific event. But where the whole thing went on tilt was when Bush and company — including the whole the Republican Party — came up with the meme that he “kept us safe.” As Campos noted, ” Jeb is merely repeating many years of GOP dogma.” I’m not sure that it was the same words, but I remember in the 2004 election, a big deal was made of the fact that Bush would keep us safe whereas Kerry would not.

The whole thing goes back — as so much does — to Kissinger on Revolutionary Power. No normal political party would make that claim after it had overseen the murder of 3,000 citizens. And the media reaction to this claim is just what Kissinger indicated: stunned silence — an inability to do anything because what was being done was so outside the bounds of normal behavior. But that is exactly why we need to talk about it. As long as Bush didn’t try to make political gain out of it, sure: let’s not hammer on him because it is hard to see his direct fault. (Again: for that one act, because he was totally incompetent and disengaged in a general sense.)

In addition to this, Bush and the Republicans can’t have it both ways. Either he gets credit for both what happened before and after 9/11, or he gets credit for neither. I don’t see the president as that powerful, so I would give him credit for neither. But it isn’t even true that he kept us safe after. It is only true that there wasn’t another 9/11. And that seems to be the case only because there wasn’t another 9/11 attempted. There were lots of other terrorist attacks of varying degrees of success. There is a tautology here: George Bush kept us safe because George Bush kept us safe. It is like William Lane Craig’s defense of God against the attack that he is evil: whatever God does is by definition good. And so with Bush: whatever Bush did was by definition keeping us safe.

I’m not inclined to hammer on Bush. But if Republicans are going to keep claiming that Bush “kept us safe,” we need to push back. He didn’t keep us safe before 9/11. He didn’t keep us safe afterwards. That’s just partisan nonsense.

I read an interesting article by Daniel Drezner at The Washington Post, The One Question That Hawks Need to Answer About Syria. The point he made was that war hawks always talk about all the great things they are going to accomplish. But they can never explain how it is that more arms shipments, more bomb dropping, more invasions are going to accomplish those goals. Drezner went through the list: Iraq, Libya, Yemen. In each case, we just made things worse. Why would this time be any different? That’s an important question that we never get an answer to.

The more fundamental question is why these kinds of people are constantly pushing for yet another invasion. I don’t buy what Drezner says, “There is a strong and bipartisan 21st-century record of US administrations applying military force in the Middle East with the most noble of intentions and then making the extant situation much, much worse.” I italicized the significant part. We go to war for the most noble of intentions?! This is the crap I was taught growing up — it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. This is what a “professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University” thinks?! No wonder we are so screwed up.

What we do is to claim the “most noble of intentions.” This is just like American presidents always claim that war is the last thing they want. This is discussed in good depth in, War Made Easy (pdf). You could not pick a more premeditated war than the Iraq War. Yet George W Bush said, “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly.” He also said, “We seek peace. We strive for peace.” And most telling of all, “American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.” Yeah, that was just what the Iraq War was about!

But what do people like Dick Cheney get out of calling for war as the solution to every international conflict? I think it is tribalism. People like that see the world as a struggle between good and evil. In this case, the Iraq War wasn’t a disaster at all. They went in to deal with Saddam Hussein and now he’s dead. Everything else was just a necessary sacrifice. And if a despot rises from the ashes of that damage, well, there’s always another war to fix that.

So the problem is not that going to war to solve these problems is a bad idea — although of course it is. The problem is that those who drag us into war are doing it for different reasons than they say. And it is a real problem that an academic buys the official line and doesn’t dig any deeper. I doubt very seriously that Daniel Drezner thinks that we went into Iraq for the “most noble of intentions.” Indeed, we know that the Bush administration came into the White House looking for any way it could to go to war with Iraq.

Increasingly, I see our country’s political problems not as the result of a Republican Party gone mad, but of a media infrastructure that just accepts the myths of the country and never calls out nonsense for what it is. I’m glad that Drezner is against intervention because it doesn’t work. But that just provides the intellectual groundwork for support of the next conflict that a president says is really, really important — the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a blah blah blah.

Jonathan Chait brought my attention to something interesting, Why Are Republicans Suddenly Fixated With Urban Failure? His take on it is that Republicans are fleeing from the “Obama is destroying America!” meme, and have gone back to their tried and true meme, “Democrats have created scary urban areas!” I think this is actually not true. What’s happening is that Republicans know that Obama is at the end of his term. In the past their argument was, “Just you wait!” It’s like the Paul Bibeau satire, What If They NEVER Come For Our Guns? So the Republicans are just marking time until they can explain that it is really Hillary Clinton who is destroying America.

But Chait does note the most important issue: where “big government” is a problem is not at the federal level; it is at the state and local level. That’s where we have problems with onerous business regulations and zoning that causes rent to be exceptionally high. It is also, it seems reasonable to note, where county clerks refuse to marry people because of their hatred of gays and where minority groups have had the most problems with the law. So it is ironic that Republicans would claim that cities are dysfunctional as a justification for stopping the federal government from repairing bridges.

What Chait completely leaves out is the Ultimate Republican Idea™ — that everything is better at the local level. So we need no national education standards, for example. But most of all, there is Block Grant mania! By this logic, the federal government doesn’t need to tell states what to do; it just needs to give them block grants and the states will innovate in ways that we just can’t imagine! So there’s no need for Medicaid: just give money to the states and figure they will sort it out.

But if that’s the case, how does highlighting dysfunction at the local level help? Well, that’s the great Republican trick. They don’t actually believe that local control is better. Block grants are all about destroying these programs that they don’t like. Making Medicaid a block grant is a way to defund it. They know that they can’t just eliminate it. They’ve tried and there is too much support for it. But making it a block grant, allows them to slowly kill it, since Congress won’t be keen on properly fund it when it isn’t really their program. So year by year, Medicaid would have less and less purchasing power to the point where it was effectively repealed.

But as for the likes of George Will, this is just a period where they relax and complain about little things. They will be back. They just don’t yet know who will be the next Liberal Destroyer of All That Is Good™. Once that person arrives, it will be back to usual. In fact, George Will can just go back and use his columns from the 1990s. It will be especially great if Hillary Clinton is the next president — he will be able to recycle some articles without even a search and replace. “President Clinton is destroying America…”

Last week at Vox, Sarah Kliff wrote, This Study Is Forcing Economists to Rethink High-Deductible Health Insurance. High deductibles were supposed to be a way to keep healthcare costs down by incentivizing patients to get cheaper care. This is what “health economists” thought. It goes along with something that should have been clear for a long time: most economists are so far removed from reality as to be useless.

Think about deductibles. They don’t cause people to shop around. For one thing, it is hard to shop around (I’ll come back to this in a moment). But more to the point, this isn’t how people look at their deductibles. If people have a $1,000 deductibles (roughly half of Americas have deductibles this high or higher), then they see it as something getting in the way of their insurance. It is just a barrier that stops the insurance company from actually providing care.

But most economists are above such real world considerations, so they had to study the question. And a great opportunity came back in 2013, when a company decided to shift “tens of thousands of workers into high-deductible insurance plans.” But to offset the cost, they provided “new shopping tools” that allowed the employees to compare prices. So at least the study did look at the question of whether or not people would shop around if they had an easy way to do so — the way they do when buying groceries. And the result was clear: no.

And it is worse than even this. What the company did was provide health savings accounts for the employees. So they really had an incentive to shop around! Generally, you get to keep whatever you don’t spend (although you would have to pay taxes on it). This is, of course, the Great Conservative Idea™. High deductibles and health savings accounts would solve all our problems — or so the story goes. But that story comes to us from reality deficient economists.

The new policy did work in that it reduced spending. And let’s face it: that’s all that conservatives care about. But it didn’t reduce spending because it made the market more efficient. And remember: that’s the key issue. We pay roughly twice as much for healthcare as people do for equivalent care in other advanced economies. So the fact that we can bring healthcare costs down by forcing people to consume less of it misses the whole point. By that logic, we should eliminate all healthcare availability — that would really bring down costs!

The study also found that the sickest people were the ones who reduced their spending the most. Again: this wasn’t because they were getting a cheaper MRI, but rather because they were getting no MRI at all. So the reduction in healthcare spending resulted in a reduction in health. This is not a solution to our healthcare problems — unless your point is to appear to be addressing the problem but to actually do nothing.

After sick patients reached their deductibles, however, they spent normally. Kliff wonders why this is, and presents a few possible reasons. But is it really that complicated? Isn’t it just that humans aren’t that rational? They don’t live in a world of perfect competition and information. And they have other things to do besides try and hunt down a great deal on their next procedure. Not surprisingly, one of the economists who did the study thinks it might just be a matter of time before people get used to the system and it starts cutting down on costs the way it was intended. Because we should never forget: people serve markets, not the other way around.