Month: September 2010

Chait's schadenfreude would be almost unbearable if I did not share it myself:

[M]ost elite Republicans understand that the red meat fed to the base isn't exactly right. It's useful to scare the daylights out of the activists, but writers for the Standard and the Journal editorial page understand that "freedom," as most people understand the term, is not really at risk. They understand as well that politics is a little more complicated than "if Republicans stay true to conservatism, they cannot lose."

But the conservative base is not in on the joke. And so Republican elites found themselves with just a few frantic days to undo the toxic and intoxicating effects of 20 months of relentless propaganda. Vote for the man who compromised with evil!

The cynicism of the neocons and Straussians in whipping up the masses they think are useful for the republic can occasionally, it appears, backfire. You have Yuval Levin sounding like Mark Levin on Adderall, while Kristol and Krauthammer and Rove suddenly try to put the brakes on the O'Donnell and Tea Party express. It's a cognitive dissonance too far. One day, even the tea-partiers will understand that these Village pundits and activists have as much quiet contempt for them as they do actual religious believers. And then maybe conservatism can find a serious voice again.

Nate Silver on what the Tea Party's success has done for GOP chances in "the first state":

Delaware is a blue state, and the electoral prospects of Mr. Castle and Ms. O’Donnell there are wildly divergent. Whereas Mr. Castle is nearly a 95 percent favorite against the Democratic nominee, Chris Coons, according to last week’s FiveThirtyEight forecasting model, Ms. O’Donnell would have just a 17 percent chance of winning a race against Mr. Coons.

On the other hand, she's more likely to succeed than the Reverend R.C. Helfenstein, who yearns for more Delaware school children to sing the state song. I wonder if this doesn't represent some kind of tipping point for the right, the moment their asinine, vacuous Palinist blather really did meet the reality of this country's profound problems and the need to confront them rather than escape into a fantasy world of cultural paranoia, religious extremism and neurotic nationalism.

I thought it would get worse before it got better. It has happened more quickly and more drastically than I imagined. We went from the obvious fact that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are farcical comic figures to the notion that they are the de facto leaders of a once-great political party. We've now seen the vile propaganda of Dinesh D'Souza embraced by Newt Gingrich, an Arizona candidate seeing headless bodies, and a victorious unelectable Delaware candidate who, among other things, opposes masturbation. 

Maybe the lunacy peaked so soon the transparent unseriousness of the current GOP leadership will be unmasked before November. And maybe some seriousness (Daniels? Ryan?) could emerge from the wreckage.

Tim Heffernan compares the Midwestern governor to the celebrities surrounding him:

Politico reports that Mitch Daniels is now openly laying the groundwork for a presidential run. This is not the coy bid for "optics" routinely pulled by presumed candidates Palin, Romney, and Gingrich — not a trip to Iowa or New Hampshire to meet the demos, not a shiny new book full of apple pie and empty promises. It's a sit-down with a dozen of the Republican party's machers. It's as serious as a heart attack. And I think it means we've just met the party's 2012 presidential candidate. Daniels is, among other things, the only inarguably successful politician in serious contention. Palin quit office, Romney flubbed 2008, Huckabee likewise, Gingrich retired in disgrace, and Pawlenty is leaving office amid tanking approval ratings. Daniels is and long has been enviably popular in his home state of Indiana (current approval rating: 65 percent), largely thanks to what can only be called his prudent conservatism.

In a less charitable take, Chait threw cold water on Daniels' budget proposals last week.

Pasadena, California, 2.38 pm

Dave Weigel hails from Delaware, a state with a single area code. He insists that the Tea Party candidate who stole its Republican primary doesn't have a chance in the general election:

I see a lot of conservatives arguing tonight that Christine O'Donnell's victory shows that she can upset the establishment and win this seat. These conservatives are not from Delaware. O'Donnell won a slim majority in a race with around 58,000 Republican voters. She won Kent and Sussex counties, the conservative parts of the state. But even in scoring a massive upset, she lost New Castle County. That's where 2/3 of the state lives, and where, in the past, I saw yards with Obama/Biden and Castle signs, Kerry/Edwards and Castle signs, Gore/Lieberman and Castle signs — you get the picture. There are tens of thousands of Delawareans who were expecting to vote for Mike Castle who are now given a choice between their workmanlike county executive, Chris Coons, and a woman who spent two weeks on the cover of the News Journal for stories about her trouble paying college fees, her lawsuit against her former employer ISI, her appearance in a MTV special about abstinence, etc, and etc, and etc.

Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson would've voted Castle. Weigel scores Tea Party performance in other races here.

Building off Ezra Klein's column on the recent American Political Science Association meeting, Steven Hayward suggests that political science shouldn't endeavor to be economics:

The real problem with academic political science is its insistence on attempting to emulate the empiricism of economics and other social sciences, such that the multiple regression analysis is considered about the only legitimate tool of the trade. Some regressions surely illuminate, or more often confound, a popular perception of the political world, and it is these findings Klein rightly points out. But, on the other hand, I have often taken a random article from the American Political Science Review, which resembles a mathematical journal on most of its pages, and asked students if they can envision this method providing the mathematical formula that will deliver peace in the Middle East. Even the dullest students usually grasp the point without difficulty.

Bernstein takes aim at another leg of Klein's argument.

Jack Ewing checks in on global inequality:

The United States remains by far the nation with the most wealth, with 101,762 euros ($130,764) per person in stocks, bank accounts and insurance, Allianz researchers said Tuesday. Some 39 percent of the world’s wealth belongs to Americans, while Western Europe accounts for another 31 percent.

But American dominance of the world’s financial assets is slipping. United States wealth has plunged 12 percent since 2007, as Americans’ stock portfolios lost value and people diverted assets to pay off mortgages.

Bradford Plumer noted yesterday that "only one of the 37 Republican candidates for Senate supports climate action – Mike Castle in Delaware." And Castle lost his primary last night:

Odds are … climate legislation will be pulseless for the next two years. In the House, Joe Barton may well reclaim the chair of the energy and commerce committee. Barton, recall, is the guy who apologized to BP in the wake of the oil spill, and the last time he ran the House energy committee, in 2005, he helped author a bill whose defining feature was billions of dollars in oil and coal subsidies. For most greens, simply preserving the status quo will be the rosiest scenario with Barton in charge. (And even if Barton, who is technically term-limited, doesn't get the chair, there's not a ton of daylight between him and the other Republican candidates.)

James Parker reviews the new Jackass movie and the genre:

Viewed critically and retrospectively, the show’s genius stroke was to connect skater humor, which is violently lowbrow and absurdist (skaters love watching other skaters wipe out), to a slapstick tradition that went back to the rougher end of vaudeville, to Joe Keaton—Buster’s father—doing his act “The Man With the Table” at Huber’s Museum in New York City: crashing into the table, flying off the table, fervently and bodily intervening in the existence of the table. (Remember Steve-O jumping into his ceiling fan?) Maybe that’s what they were in the end, the jackasses, under their Ritalin antics: hard-core vaudevillians. No narrative, minimal setup—“My name’s Johnny Knoxville, and this is the poo cocktail!”—just one bone-breaking or atrociously humiliating skit after another. Gravity, if you like, was their straight man: the crunching comedown, the bathos of impact.

A reader writes:

I've read a lot of these posts suggesting that George Bush could calm down the anti-Islamic hysteria by speaking out much as he did in the months and years after September 11th, but I'm pretty doubtful. It seems to me that the angry right has already moved on from Bush. Maybe others have a better read on the pulse of conservatives than I do, but I imagine that if Bush spoke out in favor of the Cordoba house, thereby taking a public stance against Palin and the official FOX party line, he'd be strongly and quickly rebuked by the right. If Bush does support Cordoba house, or if he does oppose the recent rise of Islamophobia on the right (both big ifs to begin with), he'll never come out against them because it would be a huge public embarrassment to demonstrate how little clout he retains even among the religious right that used to worship him.