I remember during the 1988 DNC, there was conflict. Jesse Jackson got almost 30% of the popular vote. Michael Dukakis did not intend to have Jackson be a major part of his campaign. And so there was a meeting between Jackson and Dukakis. And Jackson came out of the meeting talking about how they had had a substantial discussion about important issues. And it was pretty clear that what he got was nothing. He was putting on the best face in a bad and extremely embarrassing situation. I felt bad for him and I was a Dukakis supporter. Wasn’t there any way that all those smart people in the Democratic Party could come up with a better way to support the man that came in a very good second place? (Dukakis only got 42% of the vote.)

But I suspect that the idea among the Democratic elite was to hang Jackson out to dry. This was the proto-Sister Souljah moment. Liberals, it seems, can’t be taken seriously unless they they make a firm commitment to stand up against the black man. Or at least, that seems to be what elite opinion is in the Democratic Party. And now, I’m feeling the same thing about the situation in Greece. The whole thing strikes me as pathetic.

The Greek parliament just voted (narrowly) for Alexis Tsipras’ proposal to give the Troika… exactly what it wants. Oh, yes: there are some very small changes. This is pretty much the deal that Tsipras had wanted to get before the referendum: total capitulation with something — Anything! — he could use to save face. Who knows if the Troika will even give him what he’s asking for now. They seem instead to want him to do a Jesse Jackson: have him come out of a meeting and claim that everything is good because they had a substantial discussion about important issues.

But the whole thing seems bizarre. What Tsipras is pushing seems to be what he would have pushed if he had lost the referendum. Is that what he was expecting? Did he think that he would lose so that he could capitulate and it would be no big deal? Was the huge win last weekend actually a disappointment? Why did Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis resign? It really is looking as though Tsipras and the majority of Syriza are just a bunch of wimps who do not have the strength of their convictions.

And here’s the thing: I understand that doing what Greece is now doing is the least painful thing to do for the immediate future. But that’s the point! Yes, Greece can make another deal and limp along for another couple of years. If they are very lucky, they might get the unemployment rate down to the high teens. But more likely, they get the unemployment rate down one point or two — still in the mid-twenties. And yet they will still be just as indebted as they have been — maybe more so. There isn’t a time when the Troika says, “You’ve suffered enough! Now we’ll let your economy heal!” That’s not going to happen. It’s just going to be years and year and years of pain.

I think the whole world should be afraid of this. Right now I’m wondering that if a true leftist party like Syriza is so easily co-opted by the Troika, maybe it will take a far right party to get Greece out of this mess. And if I’m wondering that, you’ve got to be certain that a lot of Greeks are wondering the same thing. The current situation has got to have been the best thing that ever happened to Golden Dawn.

Lee Fang wrote a really good article over at The Intercept on Monday, GOP Officials Publicly Denounce Bernie Sanders’ Obamacare Expansion, Quietly Request Funding. It is about Sanders’ work since his days as the mayor of Burlington on community health clinics. And while he’s been in the Senate, he’s been very successful at getting funding for clinics. That is most true of all regarding the ACA (Obamacare) where he managed to get $11 billion of funding “extending the number of people served by clinics from 18 million before the ACA to an expected 28 million next year.”

The great thing about these clinics is that they provide a kind of universal (if rationed) healthcare. They accept all people who come, regardless of their ability to pay. I used one of them myself a few years ago. It required showing up at the clinic before 6:00 am to stand in line in the cold winter air. (Yes, it was California, but Californians are wimps!) And the treatment I received was excellent. Obviously, such clinics make sense in a nation that refuses to even consider a single-payer system. This is a far more efficient way to provide healthcare than having people show up at hospital emergency rooms.

Fang provided some history of these clinics. I had assumed they went back forever. But that’s not true at all. They started in the early 1960s. Apparently, people who came to the south to work on voting and other civil rights were seen as “outside agitators.” As a result, the good doctors of these areas refused to treat them. (That’s one way of interpreting the Hippocratic Oath!) This lead to the formation of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR). They set up clinics. But the doctors noticed that the African American populations did not have much or any access to medical care. Eventually, this grew to providing clinics throughout the nation in poor communities.

As with most things involving Obamacare, of course, the funding of clinics is not branded. So the great expansion of clinics over the last couple of years has not been seen as due to Obamacare — for good or bad. But as Fang noted, “That relative invisibility has shielded health clinic funding from the hyper-partisan attacks faced by other provisions of the law. But it has also allowed Republican opponents of Obamacare to play a two-faced game.” Every single Republican in Congress has voted to Repeal Obamacare — that’s why they’ve voted on it so many times. It is like a rite of passage: all Republicans in Congress must have the experience of voting to repeal the law. (Yes, it is silly — even pathetic.)

But that means that these Republicans have also voted to repeal this funding for the clinics. Of course, there are all kinds of things that everyone loves in the law. But Republicans are not deep thinkers. If you had to describe what Republicans are in one word, it wouldn’t even be close: demagogues. But these same votes to repeal funding for the clinics has gone along with — What a surprise! — these same politicians taking credit for the clinics.

Of course, conservative hypocrisy is hardly news. But unfortunately, the fact that Bernie Sanders is a highly successful legislator generally is news — even to his supporters. I’m troubled by what I see as the Dennis-Kucinich-ization of Sanders. That’s the idea that he’s just ideologically correct but that he doesn’t have great skills outside of that. And Sanders isn’t just a good legislator; I’ve been impressed with just how good a politician he is. This doesn’t mean that he’s going to win the nomination, much less the presidency. But I think people should take him more seriously and look at who he really is.

Brian Beutler wrote a very insightful article, The Republican Party Is Still Trying to Decide if Minorities Matter. He noted that the Republicans had three options regarding outreach to minority voters. The first was to actually, you know, reach out to minority voters. They obviously didn’t do this. I wrote about this a lot after the 2012 election. The truth is that it wasn’t an actual option. Reaching out to minority voters would have required embracing policies that are anathema to the party.

So the only practical options for them were the two others that Beutler mentioned. First, they could reach out in purely symbolic ways and generally not try to offend them. Let’s call that the “Pretend!” approach. Second, they could try to offend minority voters and believe that all the Republican Party needs is an ever increasing percentage of the white voter. Let’s call that the “Screw you!” approach.

Beutler provided two examples of politicians pursuing these options. Donald Trump is pursuing the “Screw you!” approach. But he isn’t alone: Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Ben Carson are right there with him. Now, I don’t think it is any coincidence that none of these four is a serious candidate. The “Pretend” approach is exemplified by Rick Perry, who gave a campaign speech on the issue highlighting the fact that the Republican Party has been too focused on the Tenth Amendment (limit of federal powers) and not focused enough on the Fourteenth Amendment (equal protection under the law). I would quibble with the conservatives fetishization of the Tenth Amendment; they almost always mistake it for a similar sounding part of the Articles of Confederation. But Perry’s speech was good, and to some extent, the viable candidates are following in the same vein.

But it doesn’t really matter which approach is being used by the Republicans, they all amount to the same thing: trying to win with almost exclusively white voters. Since the Republicans are willing to do basically nothing of any substance for oppressed minority groups, their push for a “kinder and gentler” rhetoric is intended for consumption by whites. These are the whites that don’t actually care about minority groups, but who still don’t think they should be actively insulted and don’t actually think that they are all rapists (with some, I assume, good people). So as it has been for the last 45 years, the Republican Party is devoted to a southern strategy.

Clearly, the “Pretend!” approach is better than the “Screw you!” approach. But the most important point about the Republican Party at this point is that there is no advantage to truly courting minority voters. I think that is why a lot of people in the media were excited by Ron and Rand Paul. Their kind of Republican libertarianism seemed like an easy way for the party to move so that it remained conservative but could appeal to a broader base. But this was always a pipe dream for two reasons. First, the base isn’t fooled. The base is defined by its anger and fear. Libertarians might as well be hippies. But on the other side, it is even worse. What defines minority groups is not race. Race is just a concept made up to justify the oppression of certain groups. Minority groups are defined by their relative poverty. And what, after all, does the Republican Party stand for if not helping the rich?

There has been a lot of chatter on the left that people like Donald Trump actually help the Republican Party by making people like Jeb Bush seem moderate. I doubt that’s the case. Overall, people like Trump just feed into a narrative that although all Republicans may not be bigots, the Republican Party is where bigots are welcome. And that taints the party. Regardless of who gets the nomination, they will be washed clean by the nomination and given the official media stamp as “not a bigot.” So it hardly matters that Trump is around.

I am well aware that I often appear to be anti-German. That’s not entirely an incorrect assessment. Germany reminds me very much of the United States. Both are countries filled to the brim with undeserved self-righteousness. They say to anyone who will listen, “If only you were more like us, you would be fine — or at least better.” I hate this attitude in individuals and when I see it in countries, it frightens me. But is it really the case that Germany is behaving so badly toward Greece because of their pigheaded self-delusions about the German work ethic and frugality? Let’s say that it is at least a bit more complicated.

On Tuesday, Simon Wren-Lewis wrote, Why Germany Wants Rid of Greece. The title itself reminds me of World War I. There was a sense of relief among the power elite of Europe once the war came. Up to then, there had been all this messy and difficult negotiation. And as always, the power elite don’t like to negotiate. They are of the “all or nothing” persuasion (given that they are used to getting “all”). And there is little doubt that Germany would like to get get rid of Greece, as though that will get rid of the problem, and even more, as though that will be good for Germany.

Wren-Lewis confirmed what I’ve long thought:

The reason I’ve thought this was so is because people over here repeat that kind of nonsense. In 2011, Thomas Friedman wrote, “Germans are now telling Greeks: ‘We’ll loan you more money, provided that you behave like Germans in how you save, how many hours a week you work, how long a vacation you take, and how consistently you pay your taxes.'” David Brook similarly wrote, “[Nations like Germany and the US] believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.” Far be it for these two over-paid pundits to actually do a little research when they can just base whole articles on stereotypes. Matt Yglesias responded with facts, Are Greeks Lazy? He noted:

Wren-Lewis has an interesting argument to explain why it is that the Germans can believe such patently false things. He says that Germans have never liked Keynsian economics. They prefer marginal economic ideas like expansionary austerity, because it goes along with how they see themselves. But Greece represents a great problem to this. Despite what you will hear on the right, Greece has done almost exactly what the Troika has demanded for the last five years. The result: economic catastrophe with unemployment above 25%. The Germans have only two choices here: either admit that their economic theories are bunk or blame the patient. We know what their choice is.