I didn’t pay as close attention as I should to of last night’s debate. Who am I kidding? I shouldn’t have paid any attention to it. Other than Trump who was hilarious — and I mean that mostly in a good way — it was really aggravating. But probably the worst of the night was Carly Fiorina. At first she seemed really prepared — very corporate. I could see how she did well in that world. But she quickly slipped on that account. And the content of what she said was just ignorant and crazy. I’m talking Ted Cruz’s dad level of ignorant and crazy.

She said something that blew me away. She mentioned that in the Planned Parenthood “sting” video was “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” I literally couldn’t believe my ears. I figured that I had to have misheard it. Certainly, I would have known about such a thing. And she wouldn’t say something that was utterly wrong. It was only much letter when I asked someone on Twitter and was referred to a Sarah Kliff article that was written in response, Carly Fiorina Is Wrong About the Planned Parenthood Tapes. I Know Because I Watched Them.

This is the right wing echo chamber in action. Fiorina made a point of mentioning that President Obama should watch all 12 hours of the video. This seems calculated to me. She’s sending out that the message that what people have seen isn’t nearly as bad as it gets. It’s really bad in those 12 hours. But she knows that almost no one is going to watch the videos. And certainly, there isn’t a Sarah Kliff at Fox News putting out an article telling conservatives that actually this isn’t true. That would make the ridiculous amount of time and demagoguery spent on the Planned Parenthood issue seem stupid.

There was another Fiorina moment that really struck me. That was when the candidates were asked what woman they would like to see on the $10 bill. Just as Ben Carson can say things that the white Republicans have a hard time with, Fiorina can say things that the men have a hard time with. So she said, “I wouldn’t change the $10 bill or the $20 bill. I think honestly it’s a gesture. Don’t think it helps to change our history.” Of course, this makes no sense at all.

First, history is continuing on. Just because Hamilton isn’t going to be on the $10 bill, doesn’t mean we are erasing him for history. If the United States exists for the next 10,000 years (which I’m sure most conservatives believe), maybe Ronald Reagan would be seen as the father of our country. There wouldn’t be much difference in time from that vantage point between Washington and Reagan. So to equate changing who’s on our money with changing history is just stupid.

But more than that, Hamilton is a fairly recent addition to the $10 bill. Now, it can get confusing to talk about paper currency. There are Demand Notes and Treasury Notes and silver certificates — to name but a few. But taken all together, there have been over a dozen people featured on the $10 bill — including Pocahontas and Lewis and Clark. Currency changes over time.

This is one thing that really bugs me. People are so ignorant of history. It isn’t even the point of not knowing what has happened before. That is somewhat forgivable, given that so much happened before. But most people I run into have no idea that anything has ever changed. Alexander Hamilton is on the $10 bill now so he must always have been on it. It’s nonsense. But when public figures — people who want to be president — show this same ignorance, it’s stunning. Fiorina should have been laughed off the stage. But instead, I’ll bet that most conservatives were cheering, “Right on! Screw those PC people who were changing the $10 bill every couple of years in the 1860s!”

The initial reaction seems to be that Fiorina “won” the debate. But I think she showed herself to be at least as bad as Donald Trump. In the Republican field, however, they are two of a kind: ignorant but forceful. And that’s what passes for knowledge in the Republican Party.

Brian Beutler wrote quite an interesting take on tonight’s big event, What’s at Stake in the Second Republican Debate: Full Panic in the GOP. In it, he discussed Ramesh Ponnuru’s contention that eventually the party would “consolidate behind a consensus choice” and thus make Trump “a nuisance, not a nightmare.” That’s a reasonable narrative. That’s more or less the narrative of 2012. Mitt Romney was attacked again and again, but he prevailed because he was the establishment — the “electable” — choice. (Fun fact: he wasn’t elected.) But as Beutler pointed out, Romney was always doing better the current establishment candidates, and his numbers only grew over time.

The best option for the Republicans, at least according to Beutler who I think is right, is for the establishment candidates to go after each other. The big problem is not so much Trump but the fact that there are four establishment candidates: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Scott Walker. Together, those four now have 17% of the vote according CBS News / New York Times poll. That is certainly something that could be built on. The Christie and Fiorina voters would probably join in. And so too might a number of Ben Carson’s supporters.

Of course, it is kind of sad that the four establishment candidates combined manage only a fairly crummy third place. And I don’t think this is just a matter of the Republican base wanting change or whatever. What we are seeing in the presidential nomination contest is what Republicans have stood for my entire life: this idea that politics is not a skill and all we need is someone to stand firm. Or as Grover Norquist put it back in 2012, “We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget… We just need a president to sign this stuff.” (Fun fact: this is not what most Republican voters want; just what Norquist and his plutocratic friends want.)

So we have the top two candidates with not a second of political experience in the traditional sense. As I’ve noted before, Ben Carson is just racial Valium for a certain part of the GOP base — a candidate who reduces their anxiety that they are a racist party without requiring anything at all from the voter. And Trump is performing a standard Republican trick of claiming that he has special, but vague, skills that will save the nation. It’s like Richard Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War or Reagan’s refusing to say what he would do on foreign affairs because he wasn’t president yet and didn’t have all the information.

There is a bigger problem, I’m afraid, with the four establishment candidates: not one of them is very charismatic. I think the most charismatic is Kasich, and he’s the one who accepted Obamacare and comes off as a (relatively) decent human being. There ain’t a big appetite for that among the GOP faithful. I’ll admit: if any one of them put in a “memorable performance,” it could help. But imagine if that is memorable in the way that Rick Perry’s performance was memorable when he said that people against the DREAMers had no heart. I don’t see their supporters running directly to one of the other three candidates.

The Devil went down to Lynchburg. Okay, it was Jewish, but not very religious, Bernie Sanders. And he went down and spoke to the kids at Liberty University. Or as Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig put, Bernie Sanders Isn’t Crazy to Court Evangelicals. But Here’s Why It’s a Tough Sell. I think it speaks really well of Sanders to give a talk there. One of Sanders’ greatest attributes is his authenticity. There is no doubt that he believes in what he says. And he didn’t hide the fact that he disagreed with most of the students on the issue of abortion.

But as Bruenig pointed out, there is a lot that Sanders believes that is right in line with what the young evangelicals believe. And those mostly have to do with economic justice. And that is basically Sanders’ whole campaign. That’s the stuff he cares most about. And there’s something interesting about abortion anyway: it’s a crummy single issue. Regardless of who becomes the next president, abortion isn’t going to be made illegal. But there are a lot of matters having to do with true family values that can change. So are these kids really going to vote for Scott Walker because he agrees with them about that one issue and pretty much nothing else? (Well, yes — most likely.)

There’s another issue: if people really care about the unborn, then they ought to be interested in economic policies that will limit abortions. For example, paying women to carry their pregnancies to term is an idea that would decrease the number of abortions. Mandating paid leave for pregnant women and new mothers would do the same thing. The Republican Party only promises the stick: to make abortion illegal. And as mentioned, that’s a promise it can’t deliver on. So what is it that they are actually willing to vote for? I smell a rat.

I don’t doubt that most of the anti-choicers are sincere. But they are mostly operating based upon the vision of a third-trimester fetus. Yet they are absolutists. Not only is abortion wrong in all cases, even the IUD is wrong. That is some seriously messed up thinking. As we know, the leaders of American protestantism didn’t much care about abortion as an issue as recently as Roe v Wade. So I mostly see the students at Liberty as being naive — manipulated to vote for a party that mostly doesn’t deliver for them except on one issue.

But the only way this changes is if people like Bernie Sanders talks to them. He seems to have made a good case that there is more that they should care about than abortion and same sex marriage. Young evangelicals have a choice to make. They are not going to get everything they want from either party. And I’m glad that Sanders is reminding them that the Democratic Party has a lot to offer.

Yesterday marked the end of Jade Helm 15. Martial law was not imposed. No guns were seized. Real patriots were not housed in abandoned Walmart buildings. But should we be making fun of people like Chuck Norris who claimed it was “more than a military exercise”? Or Texas Governor Greg Abbott who ordered the state guard to monitor the operation? Or Texas Senator Ted Cruz who said people were right to be suspicious because of all the lies Obama told? (This from a Republican after eight years of George W Bush!) Sure. But don’t expect any of them or the “concerned citizens” who bought into all this nonsense to think they were wrong.

In 1956, the book When Prophecy Fails was first published. It was written by three social psychologists, who looked into the Seekers UFO cult that predicted the end of the world by flood on 21 December 1954. The believers were to be picked up by spacecraft at midnight and the flood was to come at 7:00 am. Very well organized this apocalypse! But of course, the world did not end. So the Seekers decided that God changed his mind. Up until the failed prophecy, the Seekers were fairly private. After the failed prophecy, they went very public. In other words, as is normally the case in these situations, the believers became more convinced because of the failure of their prophecy.

It’s not like yesterday marked anything special. Jade Helm 15 has been going on for two months. So gradually, those certain of its nefarious nature have gradually changed their characterization of its true nature. This makes the whole thing much easier. One of the ways that the Millerites dealt with the Great Disappointment (Jesus not returning by 21 March 1844 — these people do love their solstices and equinoxes!) was to say that Jesus actually did come back but then decided to put off all that end of the world business.

I’m not sure what the Jade Helm 15 people will tell themselves. As early as May, Jim Shea reported that conspiracy theorists were offering the ultimate “get out of jail free” card, “That Jade Helm 15 is actually a psychological operation aimed at getting people used to seeing the military on the streets so they will not be tipped off when the invasion actually happens.” That’s it! Of course, Jade Helm was something that happened in the desert, so this one doesn’t make sense. But look at that operation map! It’s clearly preparing the people for something! Stockpile canned food and ammo!

As a fairly reasonable guy, I often find myself falling into the trap of thinking that Republican voters and Alex Jones listeners will eventually turn around because they figure out that none of the promises and prophecies turn out. But that is “gut thinking.” That’s just how it seems like it ought to be. Like all those who came before them, those who thought that Jade Helm 15 meant that the government was coming for their guns are only going to become more certain that the government is coming for their guns. Jade Helm 15 was just a feint; the next time they really will take the guns!

Just wait till next year, Charlie Brown. You’ll see! Next year at this same time, I’ll find a pumpkin patch that is real sincere and I’ll sit in that pumpkin patch until the Great Pumpkin appears. He’ll rise out of that pumpkin patch and he’ll fly through the air with his bag of toys. The Great Pumpkin will appear and I’ll be waiting for him! I’ll be there! I’ll be sitting there in that pumpkin patch, and I’ll see the Great Pumpkin. Just wait and see, Charlie Brown. I’ll see that Great Pumpkin. I’ll see the Great Pumpkin! Just you wait, Charlie Brown. The Great Pumpkin will appear, and I’ll be waiting for him…

Afterword

Now that I think about it, what people will mostly say is that it is only because the patriots called attention to what the government was up to that it wasn’t able to take all the guns away. But it does depend upon the person. The main thing is that there will always be a reason why failure means they were right all along.

When I was very young, I was naive. I wondered why it was that so many countries seemed to hate us. Weren’t we the Good Guys™, after all? As I got a little bit older, I started to notice something: our country supported a lot of governments that were really terrible. Why did we hate Fidel Castro and love Augusto Pinochet? And then later, why did we hate the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and love the Salvadorian military government? These are the sorts of things that made me a liberal. If America really did stand for the things it claims, I’d probably be a conservative.

I always imagine that’s what went on with Chelsea Manning. She was a true believer — an American idealist. And the actual truth came as a shock to her and so she did what she could. And the attitude toward her is amazing. She was committed to our ideals. Those who blast her are cynical. They think that everyone is just supposed to know that all our rhetoric about freedom and democracy is just a cover — a way to further American corporate interests and empire. To me, the worst thing you can say about Manning is that she was naive. But we could use more of that kind of naivete.

I’ve written about this a lot. Our government really doesn’t care at all how any government treats its citizens, as long as it keeps its markets open to us. Just look at Venezuela, which has its problems, but which is most clearly a democracy. And we hate it and the media are all over it. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship that is simply awful, but they are our friends, so anything they do is a-okay — even when many rich people in the country provide financial support to terrorists who attacked us.

Glenn Greenwald published an article recently that pretty much sums up our hypocrisy on such matters, Two Short Paragraphs that Summarize the US Approach to Human Rights Advocacy. He’s referring to a 2013 article in The Washington Post where an anonymous senior government official was quoted as saying:

That’s right! That’s exactly what we do. And that’s what I’m not willing to support for a higher standard of living. Of course the irony is that our vile foreign policies do not provide me with a higher standard of living. They provide people who already have about as high a standard of living as one can have with even more money. And that is what it is all about: money. Venezuela is still more than willing to sell oil to us; they just aren’t willing to allow Exxon to suck out billions in profits. So we are hypocrites so that Exxon shareholders can make a bit more money.

But there was one thing that Greenwald wrote that I think nails the whole situation for me:

But it is basically tribal. Chelsea Manning wasn’t supposed to focus on what we say about ourselves. She was supposed to support the US in whatever it did. You know the conservative’s favorite line, “My country, right or wrong.” Of course, what the great American Carl Schurz actually said was, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” If it is naive to want this country to live up to its stated ideals, then we need a lot more naivete.

Forgive me for ranting, but I’ve just got to get this out. I am really angry at the way many liberals are responding to the election of Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour Party in the UK. Apparently, the correct approach to four decades to rightward march — on both sides — is to push for a minor correction to the left. I believe it was most likely be that the new Labour Party leader would be proto-Tory Liz Kendall if Corbyn hadn’t radically changed the race. As it was, she ended up with less than 5% of the vote. Corbyn got almost 60% of the vote. How is that so bad?

For a lot of liberals here in the US, this brings to mind Bernie Sanders. And of course, all good liberals know that Sanders just can’t win the general election. And so a lot of people are freaking out that the Democrats just might nominate someone who actually represents its base. And I’m not immune to that thought. I’m aware that Sanders is likely a weaker general election candidate than either Clinton or Biden. I also know, of course, that who wins is going to be determined primarily by the state of the economy and not the mythical swing voters.

The conservative movement has had an unending string of victories over the last 40 years — both here and in the UK. And that is despite the fact that Democrats and Labour have been in control for a lot of that time. It was not a Republican president who ended welfare. It was not a Republican president who repealed Glass–Steagall. It was not a Republican president who turned the Espionage Act into his own little play thing. This is how politics works. And it is something that liberals seem to be clueless about. It doesn’t matter if your candidates are elected if they lead within the context of the other side.

At this point, I just wish that people would shut up about all of this. We are months away from our first primary. We are a month away from the first debate. I’m a Sanders supporter, but I like Clinton just fine. I’d like to see how the debates go. I’d like to see how the candidates go about distinguishing themselves. In other words: I’d like to have a primary. But I think a lot of liberals don’t want to have a primary. I think they are so convinced that they know what will happen in a general election, that they don’t want to allow the process to work. They must stand up and announce, “Danger, Will Robinson!”

Political scientists have found that 40% of the results of presidential elections are determined by the economic trend of the three quarters leading up to the election. In Lynn Vavreck’s book The Message Matters: The Economy and Presidential Campaigns, she found that the only exceptions to that occur when a challenger changes the conversation from its default: the economy. And even then, the challenger only manages to get the weakest of victors. Think Jimmy Carter in 1976.

With Corbyn, I think a case can be made that he is too liberal. But that is not because of his economic policies; it is about his foreign policies. That’s not true in Bernie Sanders’ case. So the only thing that the Republicans are going to have to complain about Sanders with regards to his being a “socialist” are a bunch of really popular policy positions. But even if they manage to use this against him, will it be enough to throw the election to Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio or Donald Trump? It’s possible.

But the main thing that we don’t know. But I feel like I’m in a hell of a lot better a position to talk about this than most liberal ranters. That’s because I actually take the political science seriously. And it appears that liberals continue to be afraid of their own shadows. I don’t intend to blow this election. I also don’t intend to surrender over a year before it happens.