The GOP Peddles Economic Snake Oil - Thomas Frank in The Wall Street Journal

Suddenly Republicans are against market values?

By Thomas Frank

OK, let me get this straight: The central axiom of conservative Republicanism is that government is inherently corrupt and can't do anything right.

Over many years of ascendancy, conservative Republicans have filled government agencies with conservative Republicans and proceeded to enact the conservative Republican policy wish list -- tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing federal work, and so on.

And as a consequence of these policies our conservative Republican government has bungled most of the big tasks that have fallen to it. The rescue and recovery of the Gulf Coast was a disaster. The reconstruction of Iraq was a disaster. The regulatory agencies became so dumb they didn't even see the disasters they were set up to prevent. And each disaster was attributable to the conservative philosophy of government.

Yet now we are supposed to vote for more conservative Republicans because we learned from the last bunch of conservative Republicans that government just doesn't work.

That is the advice of Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential nominee, in last week's debate with her Democratic counterpart, discussing the dread prospect of universal health care: "Unless you're pleased with the way the federal government has been running anything lately, I don't think that it's going to be real pleasing for Americans to consider health care being taken over by the feds."

Conservative misrule, prompted by conservative disdain for government, proves that government cannot be trusted -- and that the only answer is to elect another round of government-denouncing conservatives.

"Cynicism" seems too small a word for this circular kind of political fraud. One reaches instead for images of grosser malevolence. It's like suggesting that the best way to recover from pneumonia is to stand in the rain for three hours. It's like arguing that the way to solve nuclear proliferation is by handing out weapons-grade plutonium to everyone who asks for it.

Consider also the perverse incentives that such a logic would establish. If we validate Mrs. Palin's thoughts on federal bungling by electing her to the high office she seeks, we are encouraging her to bungle everything that comes her way. After all, by her thinking, such bungling will not discredit her doctrines but rather confirm them, demonstrate the need for more Sarah Palins down the road. We will be asking for it, and it's not much of a stretch to predict that we will get it.

In the three-ring circus of conservative blame-evasion, however, that's only one act. Over in the House of Representatives, a new breed of Republican idealists spent last week dazzling the faithful by taking a bold stand against the Wall Street bailout. The administration's plan was a "slippery slope to socialism," declared their leader, Jeb Hensarling of Texas.

One might have admired their pluck but for the breathtaking opportunism of their own counterproposal, the "Free Market Protection Act," which is described on the Web site of the Republican Study Committee. True, it is not a "slippery slope." It is a headlong stampede over a precipice, a running leap out a skyscraper window.

It starts by calling for "voluntary private capital" to solve the problem of bad mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Several sentences later it asks for a "mandatory" fee to be levied on all MBS, good or bad, and apparently without regard for whether it's held here or overseas, where American law doesn't apply. I asked William Black, the University of Missouri-Kansas City professor of economics and law whom I quoted last week, what he thought of this scheme. He replied, "This is significantly insane as a matter of finance -- and unconstitutional as a matter of law. This clause would cause a world-wide financial panic were it implemented."

Back at the study committee's Web site, I see conservatives call to "Suspend 'Mark to Market' Accounting." Suddenly our "free-market protection" gang has decided it's unfair to make companies value their MBSs at . . . the market price. Somehow the all-seeing market has gone irrational, and so companies must be allowed "to mark these assets to their true economic value," meaning, one might say, to mark them however they please, a practice that, to put it shortly, is what got us into this mess in the first place.

Space prevents me from discussing the plan's provisions to temporarily suspend capital gains taxes and repeal the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act. But I will note that, in discussing the derring-do of Mr. Hensarling and his hard-core colleagues, the New York Times chose to refer to them as "populists" -- friends of the common people. As an indicator of the confused state of our political discourse, the signals don't flash any brighter than this.

Years ago, conservatives realized that to destroy the legitimacy of your adversary's concepts is to destroy your adversary. Today we are surrounded by the wreckage. Much depends on our success in rebuilding.

Write to thomas@wsj.com

Swampland, Embarracuda - Joe Klein, political columnist for Time magazine

October 6, 2008

Posted by Joe Klein at time-blog.com

I'm of two minds about how to deal with the McCain campaign's further descent into ugliness. Their strategy is simple: you throw crap against a wall and then giggle as the media try to analyze the putrescence in a way that conveys a sense of balance: "Well, it is bull-pucky, but the splatter pattern is interesting..." which, of course, only serves to get your perverse message out. I really don't want to be a part of that. But...every so often, we journalists have a duty to remind readers just how dingy the McCain campaign, and its right-wing acolytes in the media (I'm looking at you, Sean Hannity) have become--especially in their efforts to divert public attention from the economic crisis we're facing. And so inept at it: other campaigns have decided that their only shot is going negative, but usually they don't announce it, as several McCain aides have in recent days--there's no way we can win on the economy, so we're going to go sludge-diving.

But since we are dealing with manure here, I'll put the rest of this post below the fold.

It is appropriate that the prime vessel for this assault is Sarah Palin, whose very presence on a national ticket is an insult to your intelligence. She now has "credibility," we are told, because she managed to read talking points off notecards in the debate last week with unwitting enthusiasm.

Over the weekend, she picked up on an article in The New York Times, which essentially says that Barack Obama and the former terrorist Bill Ayers have crossed paths in Chicago, served on a couple of charitable boards together, but aren't particularly close. To Palin--or her scriptwriters--this means that Obama has been "palling around" with terrorists. Now, I wish Ayers had done some serious jail time; he certainly needed to pay some penance for his youthful criminality--even if most people in Chicago, including the mayor, have decided that he has something of value to say about education. But I can also understand how Obama, who was a child when Ayers was cutting his idiot swath, would not quite understand the enormity of the professor's background. (I got to know Alger Hiss twenty years after the fact--he was a printing salesman then, a friend of my father's--and thought of him as a sweet old man, if a good deal more liberal than dad's other friends.)

In any case, this is rather rich coming from Palin, who is married to a man who belonged to a political party--the Alaskan Independence Party--that wanted to secede from the union. (I should add here that the Times may have been overreacting to the McCain campaign's attack on its fairness here: the Ayers story was a nothingburger, but it was placed prominently in the top left hand corner of page one--a position that would seem to indicate that it contained important news, which it didn't.)

Then we have the ever-reliable Bill Kristol, in today's New York Times, advising Palin to bring up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Palin, of course, believes that's a darn good idea:

“To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

So then, I'd guess, it would be appropriate to bring up some of the nuttiness that passes for godliness in Palin's religious life. Leave aside the fact that The Embarracuda allowed herself to participate in a cermony that protected her from witchcraft, how about her presence--she didn't "get up and leave"-- at a sermon by the founder of Jews for Jesus, who argued that the Palestinian terrorist acts against Israel were God's "judgment" on the Jews because they hadn't accepted Jesus.

Speaking of Jews, the ever-execrable Sean Hannity has been having intercourse with a known Jew-hater named Andy Martin, who now wants to expose Barack Obama as a Muslim. According to the Washington Times:

In 1986, when Mr. Martin ran as a Democrat for Connecticut's 3rd Congressional District seat under the name "Anthony R. Martin-Trigona," his campaign committee filed papers saying its purpose was to "exterminate Jew power in America and impeach U.S. District Court of Appeals judges in New York City."

Calling all Podhoretzs! Where's the outrage? I mean, don't the hateful doings at Palin's church and Hannity's perfidy deserve a lengthy exegesis from Pete Wehner or Jennifer Rubin or one of the other empretzled ideologues over at Commentary?

As I said, I'm of two minds about this. I don't want to give currency to this sewage, so it will remain below the fold. And I'll try to devote the lion's share of my time to the issues--the war, the economic crisis, the fraying health insurance system, the environment--that should define this campaign. But what a desperate empty embarrassment the McCain campaign has become.

A McCain Fan

A teacher in Jackson, Mississippi asked her 6th grade class how many of them were McCain fans..

Not really knowing what a McCain fan was, but wanting to be liked by the teacher, all the kids raised their hands except for Little Johnny. The teacher asked Little Johnny why he decided to be different ... again.

Little Johnny said, 'Because I'm not a McCain fan.'

The teacher said, 'Why aren't you a McCain fan?'

Johnny said, 'Because I'm a Democrat.'

The teacher asked why he was a Democrat.

Little Johnny answered, 'Well, my Mom's a Democrat and my Dad's a Democrat, so I'm a Democrat.'

The teacher asked, 'If your Mom was a moron, and your Dad was an idiot, what would that make you?'

Little Johnny replied, 'That would make me a McCain fan.'

I am an elitist...

I'm an admitted elitist. Yep, me, John Ater. I believe in elitism. And here is why.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word "elite" as "a group of people considered to be the best in a particular society or category, esp. because of their power, talent, or wealth."

And I would add because of their intelligence, common sense and abilities.

Life, even for us simple folk, often proves to be very complicated and presents us with myriad choices that often change the courses of our lives. In my older years, I have come around to the belief that those choices hold no moral weight of "right" or "wrong", "good" or "evil" but hold a more karmic and immediate weight of consequences.

We are watching the consequences of our choices play out in today's world. The consequences of electing senators and representatives and presidents who allowed financiers to regulate themselves finally arrived at our doorsteps in the past few weeks. The consequences of electing (or rather having a Supreme Court elect) a president who decided (probably at the urging of his vice president) that the Constitution of the United States did not apply to his presidency are now abundantly clear even to most of his die hard supporters. The consequences of blindly following that same president's lead in a "war on terror" played out in an unrelated war with a country which we know now had nothing to do with the attacks of September 11th. Those consequences we all have watched play out on the news in body counts and human rights violations and loss of respect for what our country once meant to those around the world.

I could not agree more with Bill Clinton's words.

"People around the world have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power."

But Dr. Martin Luther King said it best.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

As I have aged, I have learned those lessons, finally. And in learning them, I have become a believer in the elite; the elites like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abigail Adams, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, W.E.B Du Bois, Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, Hillary Clinton, Maya Angelou... The list is too long. You know. Those elites.

For our nation, I want an elite as president. In fact, I want elites running this country and the world. I want the best and the brightest, the smartest, the ones who have character and some common sense, the ones who can and do actually think beyond their own lives and bank accounts, who consider seriously the consequences of their actions and how those actions will affect the people who sent them to office. I may not agree with them. I may even oppose them. However, because they are the elites, I will know they believe in their choices and they will think beyond their own selfish interests and those of their rich friends.

We are standing at a turning point. We, as individuals and as a people, will live with the consequences of our choice in this presidential election. No matter who is elected, the president will make mistakes. That is the curse and the blessing of being human. What I desire is not someone who blames everyone else for the mess but a person who can own up to those mistakes and chart a course out of whatever quagmires those mistakes create. Give me an elite. Give me someone who is smarter than I am. Give me someone of character and of thought and of compassion. Give me someone who is willing to shoulder the weight of the world and give us their best shot.

Call me an elitist. I can think of no more honorable a title.