Month: June 2013

Gay-Baiting Josh Barro, Ctd

Conor takes apart another trope in Erick Erickson’s attack on Barro, the disdain for reformists from “Washington and New York, the two places least likely to lead any version of conservative reform”:

One minute, it’s inside-the-Beltway types who are worthless. The next, it’s disqualifying to have never had a job in policymaking. … It’s that “those of us outside Washington and New York” that really gets me. Erickson doesn’t live in Washington or New York, but is much more implicated in the conservative establishment in the northeast than Barro, for goodness sake; and much more of a media elite himself, with his regular gig on Fox News. That isn’t where Erickson started, of course; and it’s convenient for him to maintain the fiction that he is still an outsider relative to a 28-year-old editor at Business Insider. Barro is, in fact, going to rise in influence and prominence, given his intellectual honesty and smarts. Perhaps then Erickson can accurately attack him as more elite.

The tactic described in this post is one you’ll often see deployed against heterodox reformers.

Don’t ever fall for it.

Philip Klein defends Barro and Northeastern conservative reformers more generally:

For conservatives to have any chance of advancing their agenda, it’s not going to be a matter of whether reformist ideas are coming from inside or outside of the NY/DC corridor, as if it’s an either/or situation. It’s going to require conservatives from all regions — who bring their unique bases of knowledge, skills and backgrounds — working together to generate good ideas, hone them, write about them and then fight for them.

Krugman – surprise! – tells Barro to give up on the GOP:

[T]hings are actually a lot worse than Barro is yet willing to acknowledge; for the GOP’s derpitude doesn’t just involve the Ericksons and the Limbaughs, it extends to the party’s supposed intellectuals. … I feel for Barro; really I do. But he has no home in today’s GOP, which simply has no room for the non-derpy, and to all appearances never will.

Byers contrasts Krugman and Erickson:

I’m not sure what Barro is capable of achieving, but I am entertained at how Erickson and Krugman seem to be playing tug-o-war over his soul, both with the intention of destroying his raison d’être. Erickson is basically saying Barro isn’t a conservative; Krugman is basically telling him he can’t be. Still, they’re both taking seriously his effort to push the rock up the hill. Which is something.

Opening Up Heaven To All

American Catholics overwhelmingly agree with the Pope that non-Catholics can gain access to heaven:

Catholics Heaven

Hertzberg appreciated the Pope’s recent comments:

Something that has always puzzled me is the stated belief of some Christians in a God who is simultaneously (a) good, kind, forgiving, etc., and (b) capable of condemning people who lead virtuous lives to eternal torment (or even some lesser punishment) solely because they do not happen to believe He exists; or because they do believe He exists but decline to accord Jesus the status of supernatural savior, personal or otherwise; or because they regard the Bible as an admirable collection of folktales but no more divinely authored than any other purportedly sacred text or, for that matter, than the works of Shakespeare or the music of Mozart; or because they do not agree with this or that tenet of a particular religion.

If such a cruel, vain, and tyrannical God did exist, I can’t for the life of me see how the proper response would be to worship or even praise Him. Wouldn’t a more logical, more morally sound, more self-respecting response be to join a rebellion against Him—the Hell Liberation Front or some such—and try to overthrow Him?

He follows up here.

Correction

I misread Chris Geidner’s piece on the Michelle Obama protestor. It was not about the Employment Non-Discrimination Act; it was about an executive decision not to discriminate in federal government contracts on the grounds of sexual orientation. Obama hasn’t signed it. But, unlike ENDA, it is a legitimate issue which the executive can deal with, and so the protest was completely legit, if a little misdirected. My apologies to Ms Sturtz.

Chris Christie’s Long Game?

The far-right is furious that Christie opted for a special election to fill Lautenberg’s now vacant Senate seat. Here’s Dick Armey:

Sean Trende, on the other hand, thinks Christie might be a “genius”:

Christie’s choice was basically a special election in October or a special election in November. Why October? This is simple: He doesn’t want to just win, he wants to win overwhelmingly. Right now he is leading his opponent by over 30 points in the RCP Average. A victory that big would be headline-grabbing, and would send the message that Christie can carry unfriendly territory. Perhaps more importantly, southeast Pennsylvania gets a lot of southern New Jersey news, and a Republican who runs well in southeast Pennsylvania has a very good chance of winning that state.

Moreover, a big win could have coattails. While Republicans are unlikely to pick up the five seats they need to take over the state Senate, and are very unlikely to pick up the nine seats they would need to control the General Assembly, Christie has been very successful implementing his agenda with a fairly unfriendly legislature. Even moving the ball slightly in his direction could make a big difference in what he can accomplish in the next few years.

A reader suspects a long game is at work:

I’d like to pose a question no one seems to be asking about Chris Christie’s recent moves that have caused so much anger among the Tea Party/GOP base: What if Christie doesn’t want the 2016 nomination?

Personally, I think Christie is positioning himself to be the leader of the GOP after it repudiates the far right, xenophobic, racist and christianist wing of the party. Obviously, you’ve written a lot about when or whether that repudiation is going to happen, but it looks to me like Chris Christie is betting it will, but not until after 2016.

Imagine this scenario:

Christie, again, refuses to run in 2016. The nomination goes to one of the young, far-right, “next generation” leaders of the current GOP like Rubio or Rand Paul or Ted Cruz or even Santorum. Such an inexperienced candidate wouldn’t have the clout or the confidence to stand up to the same GOP super PACs and consultants that bled the Romney campaign dry and offered up terrible advice, alienating ads and skewed polls. Once again, against undeniable demographic change, the GOP runs a campaign that alienates young people, minorities, immigrants, etc. The democratic nominee (Hilary?) uses President Obama’s/David Plouffe’s campaign machine and wins with a margin that closely resembles the 2012 election.

If there was ever an event that could give the GOP the will to break the deal with the devil that was the Southern Strategy (both the racist aspects and the alliance with hard-right evangelicals), it would be a 3rd straight loss to a non white male candidate. If anyone is in position to lead the insurrection within the GOP against the people who ran it into the ground, it’s Chris Christie.

That’s a big if. In my opinion, the Rove’s of the GOP have too much power and money behind them and they’re not going to give that up without a major fight. With Fox News on their side, the base won’t be willing to revolt against the people they have come to trust almost blindly. But if the base does get frustrated enough to look for a less offensive alternative, Christie is their man.

Chris Christie is smart. He’s proven that. He knows that the base won’t be ready to nominate someone who really wants to change the party in 2016. I think he’s decided that he doesn’t want to be the leader of this Republican Party, he wants to be the leader of the next one.

Christie’s poll numbers indicate that he currently has strong bipartisan support:

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows 41 percent of Americans view Christie positively, compared to just 12 percent who view him negatively. And he gets equally strong marks from across the political spectrum, with 43 percent of Democrats viewing him favorably. That 29-point split is the best among any politician studied, including longtime leader and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who is viewed positively by 49 percent and negatively by 31 percent.

Malkin Award Nominee

“Racial groups like African Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime,” – 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Edith Jones, as reported in a complaint against alleged judicial misconduct in a speech she gave on Feb. 20, 2013, at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law.

Jones was on a shortlist for the US Supreme Court under the last two Republican administrations. Here’s what the complaint against her alleges she stated that day:

That claims of “mental retardation” by capital defendants disgust her, and the fact such persons were convicted of a capital crime is itself sufficient to prove they are not in fact “mentally retarded”;

That Defendants’ claims of racism, innocence, arbitrariness, and violations of international law and treaties are really nothing more than “red herrings” used by opponents of capital punishment;

That certain “racial groups like African Americans and Hispanics” are “’prone’ to commit acts of violence,” and get involved in more violent and “heinous” crimes than people of other ethnicities;

That Mexican nationals would prefer to be on death row in the United States rather than serving prison terms in Mexico, and it is an insult for the United States to look to the laws of other countries such as Mexico; and

That the imposition of a death sentence provides a positive service to capital-case defendants because defendants are likely to make peace with God only in the moment before their imminent execution.

Every now and again, you get an unvarnished glimpse of the current Republican soul. And it is rank.

The Never-Ending Jihadist War Cycle, Ctd

BRITAIN-ATTACKS-MILITARY-MURDER

Thomas Hegghammer encourages counterterrorism agencies to refocus their efforts:

[F]oreign fighters as a group pose somewhat less of a terrorist threat to the West than is often assumed. The widespread view of foreign fighters as very dangerous stems from their documented role in several serious terrorist plots in the past decade. However, this reasoning selects on the dependent variable, because it considers only the small subset of foreign fighters who returned to attack, disregarding the majority who were never heard from again. A related, but equally flawed assumption is that all foreign fighters leave for training, as part of a cunning strategy to “come back and hit us harder”. The fact that some foreign fighters trained and returned does not mean that all foreign fighters departed with that intention. …

A first step toward a more efficient counterterrorism strategy is to differentiate between outgoing and homecoming foreign fighters and focus resources on the latter. Some countries might consider going a little lighter on outgoing foreign fighters. The US government today spends considerable resources investigating, prosecuting, and incarcerating Muslims who merely attempt to join conflict zones like Somalia. While there should clearly be sanctions in place to deter foreign fighting, the deterrence effort could be better calibrated to the documented threat. By contrast, Islamists returning from conflict zones or neighbouring countries should be watched very carefully. This is hardly news to Western intelligence services, but the fact that the last two major attacks in the West, the Boston bombings and the Woolwich murder, involved unsupervised returnees – from Dagestan and Kenya/Somalia respectively – suggests an even greater effort is needed.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

(Photo: A man wearing Help the Heroes hoodie on May 24, 2013 looks at floral tributes left at the scene where Drummer Lee Rigby of the 2nd Battalion was killed outside Woolwich Barracks in London. The brutal murder on May 22 has the hallmarks of a militant Islamist attack but one conducted by ‘lone wolf’ operators – a security nightmare, experts said. Counter-terror police are investigating the attack in which two men hacked the soldier to death in broad daylight. They were shot and wounded by police and are now in hospitals under armed guard. By Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images)

Roy Vey, Ctd

Tyler Cowen, as ever, offers a judicious post worth reading in full. Money quote:

I think there is quite a good chance we will see rate shock, as I have defined it above. I also think we still don’t know. I also see rhetorical bait and switch from ACA defenders. I also see that Roy is too quick to jump on possible negative information about the California rates without nailing down the case. I also don’t think these are the most important issues for ACA, though they are issues worth discussing.

Overall this is not a debate which is going very well.

Ask Josh Barro Anything: The Recent Evolution Of Conservatism

Yesterday, Josh explained why he still had hope for the GOP. In today’s video, he gets into his own ideology, as well as surveys the past few decades of conservative policy thinking:

I would add that Burke would not have been a Burkean as Josh describes it (and he accurately details the common perception). Yes, Burke was one of the first to realize that social organisms are resistant to intellectual overhaul based on external, abstract principles – and that the sunny view of the Enlightenment needed some necessary correction.

But he was more like a neo-liberal than Josh notes. Burke was not a Tory, after all, but a Whig. He supported American independence, he defended religious toleration of Catholics, and was a ferocious critic of the burgeoning occupation of India, and its concomitant abuses, an enterprise, he said, which “began ‘in commerce’ but ‘ended inempire.'” The key to Burke, it seems to me – and I recommend the new compulsively readable biography by Jesse Norman – is that he saw society as always changing, and the statesman’s role as understanding those changes, and NPG 655,Edmund Burke,studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds adjusting policy to meet them. What Josh is doing is adjusting to the realities of our time, as Burke would have.

There  are two kinds of “conservatives”at large in America today. The first, and most prominent, are those whose worldview stems essentially from the pivot of the late 1970s and those – far fewer in number – who are actually grappling with the world as it now is. We are not in an era of stagflation as we were in 1979; timidity abroad against another dangerous super-power is not our challenge; a churning multicultural society cannot be shoved back into the tiny-necked bottle of the late 1950s.

Our predicament today is one of post-depression recovery, soaring social and economic inequality, imperial over-reach, energy policies that could change – perhaps permanently – the conditions of life on this planet, and the collapse of the very economic structures that once made a prosperous middle class possible. A real Burkean would be doing exactly what Josh is doing: tackling these problems, rather than chasing abstractions down the Ailes rabbit-hole. And he would not in any way be ashamed to be called an educated man, prepared, if necessary, to tell his constituents to buzz off. When you remember all this, you see just how pseudo pseudo-conservatism really is: a cauldron of paranoia, bile, and ludicrously Manichean ideology.

So let’s call Josh what he actually is: a conservative Whig. Just like Burke. Welcome to the club. And meet the other six members.

Previous Dish on Chait’s recent profile of Barro here and here. Our Ask Anything archive is here.

Quote For The Day

“That fear of difference led us to massacre Protestants, deliver Jews to the Nazis, throw Arabs in the Seine and now become violent in the opposition to ‘marriage for all.’ There is a minority of open-minded cosmopolitan French people, similar to the minority that resisted the Germans during WWII. I salute them, but in the meantime I feel blessed I was able to leave my country and start a life in the U.S.” – a French ex-patriate commenting on the vehemence of the hostility to marriage equality in France.