The Cognitive Dissonance, It Burns

Here are just three unrelated, and yet somehow related, stories, that make me wonder how any Republican can keep all these ideas in their head without it exploding.

• The fiscally responsible House GOP, always railing against how President Obama is spending "the people's money," is funding their re-branding effort with taxpayer dollars by using Eric Cantor's House account.

• Bill O'Reilly, who has made a cottage industry out of ambushing liberals by directing reporters to accost them on the street, actually recorded a video where he decries the loss of privacy from public figures. Really.



• And in the most insane example, Rush Limbaugh tries to explain the "quest for power" by a group other than him, in this case the Democratic Party, by referring to his own drug addiction, assuming of course that every single person in the party has exactly the same obsessions as, well, him.



I really don't even know what to say about that one.

Adventures In File Naming

Not that Steny Hoyer and Eric Cantor had to remove doubt that, with respect to Middle East issues, they are shills for the hard-right Israel lobby. But this is a helpful reminder:

Speaking of Iran and that region, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) sent out a “Dear Colleague” e-mail Tuesday asking for signatures “to the attached letter to President Obama regarding the Middle East peace process.”

The letter says the usual stuff, emphasizing that Washington “must be both a trusted mediator and a devoted friend to Israel” and noting: “Israel will be taking the greatest risks in any peace agreement.”

Curiously, when we opened the attachment, we noticed it was named “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf.”

Seems as though someone forgot to change the name or something.

The letter's substance is no better than the title, by the way. On a bipartisan basis, this Congress remains in hock to a far-right ideology that rejects peace and prefers expanding settlements and ruthless occupation exhibited by the Netanyahu government. Simply put, the letter is designed to undercut the Obama Administration's efforts at peace.

Waiting for the "J Street Dear Colleague Letter May 2009.pdf." It may be a long wait.

Don't Worry Be Happy Conservatism

Eric Cantor thinks everyone should chill out.

GOP Whip Eric Cantor thinks his party can retake the House in next year's midterm elections -- and accused Democrats like Rahm Emanuel of "overreacting" to the economic crisis by embarking on a federal spending spree.

The Virginia Republican, speaking to reporters at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast Thursday morning, praised Rush Limbaugh for his "ideas" and for avoiding the Democratic error of "overreacting, if you will, which this town often does, to crisis. ... Rahm Emanuel said, 'We're not going to miss the opportunity to take advantage of this crisis because we're going to do all the things we couldn't get done before."

I think Steve Benen is largely right. Regardless of the specific context of Cantor's remarks, he is broadly saying that the biggest worry at a time of massive unemployment and financial turmoil is that policymakers do too much. Therefore doing nothing, by contrast, is seen as a greater virtue than doing something. I just don't think that the 669,000 people tossed out of work and onto unemployment last week would agree.

This can be seen with the jockeying-for-position conservative governors who want to reject stimulus money to look "tough":

WINNSBORO, S.C. -- By Friday, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford must decide whether to accept $700 million of federal stimulus money that he considers wasteful, or risk the wrath of residents in a state with the nation's second-highest unemployment rate.

Mr. Sanford's dilemma underscores the web of fault lines running through Republican and conservative circles, especially in the South. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal are among a handful of GOP governors who have protested at least some of the federal stimulus money. In response, some lawmakers in Alaska and Louisiana have promised to request the federal money even if their governors don't [...]

And as South Carolina's unemployment rate rose to 11% in February, second only to Michigan, even his supporters have expressed dismay.

"I'm real disappointed in the governor that he's doing what he's doing for political reasons, apparently," said Lexington County Sheriff James Metts, a Republican who echoed the rising indignation among the governor's core base of conservative voters. "We have programs that are being cut, school teachers being cut, jobs being lost by the thousand across the state."

Jimmy Ray Douglas agreed. The 66-year-old owner of Carolina Furniture Co. whose donations to the national Republican Party earned him Christmas cards from former President George W. Bush, said: "We need every cent we can get in South Carolina."

Cantor and Sanford aren't simply expressing an unpopular opinion, but the wrong one. Economic stimulus, in historical terms, works. Aggressive government intervention does disrupt and stave off economic crises.

The best takedown of Ms. (Amity) Shlaes’s thesis came from Eric Rauchway, a historian, who pointed out that her favorite statistic did not count people employed by New Deal programs to be employed. Excluding the effects of the medicine, the patient is as sick as ever!

When Roosevelt stuck to a stimulus program, unemployment fell markedly, and the biggest stimulus of all — World War II — did the rest. It’s true that economic models say the economy shouldn’t work this way. When resources are sitting idle, businesses should find a way to use them profitably. But they often don’t.

People become irrationally pessimistic during a downturn. They are driven by what Keynes called animal spirits. Only government can typically change the dynamic.

Could the government spending eventually lead to inflation and crippling debts? Absolutely. But the mistakes of the last 80 years have gone in the other direction. During the Great Depression, Japan’s lost decade, the Asian financial crisis and even the last 18 months, governments didn’t act aggressively enough. Deflation and lack of growth ended up being the real risks.

The Obama Administration is playing a game of chicken with these GOP governors, arguing that they cannot be bailed out by their legislatures, and that they must request stimulus funding in order to receive it. Sanford and his pals wanted to look tough on stimulus without passing the effects on to their constituents. Obama's team shut off that option. So they must have the courage to tell their citizens they refused help for them. After all, they can just relay that they don't want to overreact.

Watch The GOP Blow This

House Democrats offered the excise tax for bonuses from firms that took TARP Money, the "Stuff AIG Act," and based on the chatter on the floor this morning, it looks like the Republicans will block it, which is frankly AMAZING. Because the bill came up without a rule, it requires a 2/3 vote, so this is a rare opportunity for House Republicans to obstruct and they can't miss out on that. But with the country pretty dead-set against AIG execs keeping their bonus money, you have to wrack your brain to think of a stupider position that allowing the bonuses to go forward.

Looks like the Republicans may throw their weight against the TARP bonus tax.

Yep. Boss Limbaugh has issued his veto, and the GOP pays fealty.

But talk about trying to have your cake and eat it too! Limbaugh says they have to reject the bill as excessive, but Republicans are afraid to do that. Despite being idiots, they're not idiots.

So what's the hook? They oppose the 90% tax, they claim, because... it's not 100%!

Yep. That's actually it. That's what Boehner just said on the floor.

Republicans are upset because they wanted higher taxes. Mark your calendars [...]

Not looking good. Simply not enough GOP votes to get this through, so far. Sometimes they don't come to the floor to speak when they're afraid, so there could be some hidden GOP votes out there, hiding from Boss Limbaugh. But we'll need about 60 of them.

Just hilarious. The ads write themselves.

Check out team laundry collector Eric Cantor this morning unable to commit to any solution, wanting to sound all fiery and populist but without a clue how to actually produce:



When faux populism runs up against bank lobbyists and rigid ideology, I think we can divine who wins. Somehow they believe they can turn this into a confiscatory taxation issue. Um, allow me to let you in on something: nobody in the country cares if AIG executives have to pay a lot of taxes. I mean, good luck with it, I'm sure you'll be just as successful as you were in the 2006 and 2008 elections, but here on Planet Earth, the proper political move is clear.

Late on today I can explain why bonuses representing a pittance of the overall bailout matter. For now, let us savor the implosion of the GOP, who found a nicely wrapped present under their tree and threw it in the garbage.

...Barney Frank said this two years ago during a similar vote on the Executive Compensation Act, which gave shareholders more say over CEO pay. It applies today:

I often disagree with my colleagues on the other side, but I have rarely been as baffled by the illogic of their arguments as I am today. I do not recall the last time I heard such a hodgepodge of inconsistency and innaccuracy. This is a bill that has been condemned for being A) bullying and intrusive and B) toothless. The toothless bully is, I guess, a new concept.

...Grover "Thou Shalt Not Tax" Norquist:

Grover Norquist, the top anti-tax activist in the Republican Party, has given ABC an answer about whether Republicans can vote for the AIG-bonus tax and still be in accordance with the anti-tax pledge that the vast majority of them have signed with Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform.

The answer: Yes, you can -- but only if it includes additional offsetting cuts in taxes or spending, too. Norquist seems to acknowledge here that the AIG tax is itself a kind of spending decrease -- the government is taking back money it already spent -- but he wants more tax decreases, too.

"If your goal is to recoup the resources that you've given people that you hadn't thought would be spent this way, you can make it not a tax increase simply by having an offsetting tax cut on honest taxpayers," Norquist explained. "Or you could do the same thing by cutting the amount of money that you were going to give AIG in the next tranche that they'll demand, so you can have the withdrawal of the resources done in less spending."

Regardless of the particular matter at hand, it's fascinating to watch Republicans drown in a pit of their own ideology.

Wolverines!!!

Only through the lens of Republican Party up-is-downism can a "success" like Eric Cantor be studying the "success" of Newt Gingrich:

As Republican whip, Mr. Cantor succeeded again on Friday in denying the White House the support of a single House Republican on the stimulus bill. That was a calculated challenge to the president, who, in his weekly address on Saturday, hailed the bill as “an ambitious plan at a time we badly need it.”

Mr. Cantor said he had studied Mr. Gingrich’s years in power and had been in regular touch with him as he sought to help his party find the right tone and message. Indeed, one of Mr. Gingrich’s leading victories in unifying his caucus against Mr. Clinton’s package of tax increases to balance the budget in 1993 has been echoed in the events of the last few weeks.

“I talk to Newt on a regular basis because he was in the position that we are in: in the extreme minority,” he said.

Newt Gingrich went from the Republican Revolution to having to resign as Speaker within four years, losing a Presidential election and a midterm in the process. The long-term result was an ideological retrenchment in the Republican Party that has confined them to regional backwaters. This is the MODEL for GOP success. And so they marched into the slaughter, allowing themselves to vote in unity against the largest middle-class tax cut in American history, and to go all early '80s with maybe the most pathetic backslapping-for-nothing video in the history of modern politics. As Jason Zengerle notes:

[I]t's basically a litany of every tired, failed GOP buzzword (from ACORN to golf carts), all set to the tune of ... Aerosmith.... [Y]ears from now, when historians are trying to sort out what went so terribly wrong with conservatism in the early twenty-first century, I really hope this little video doesn't get overlooked.

That SNL skit this weekend wasn't all that funny, but it did capture the conservative echo chamber pretty well. They are too busy high-fiving to see the rest of the country laughing at them.

By the way, Mr. Cantor, you know less about Winston Churchill than you do about Newt Gingrich. See Josh Marshall for that one.

Everything Is Good For Republicans

I'm trying to unwind the CW logic in this paragraph:

"The obvious winner here, of course, is Obama, who will get the first big victory of his four-week-old presidency. Other winners are Collins/Snowe/Specter (who proved that they will control what passes in the 111th Congress), Harry Reid (who got the 60-plus votes he needed), Joe Lieberman (who helped behind the scenes with Collins), White House aide Phil Schiliro (who played an unsung role on the Hill), the Republican Party (which demonstrated unity after its big losses in November), and No.2 House Republican Eric Cantor (who raised his profile during the debate, although he took a BIG hit yesterday for that profane AFSCME video his office released)."

"The losers, in our opinion, are Nancy Pelosi (some House priorities lost out in the end) and governors (who didn't get all the money they wanted and will have to make some tough cuts before a re-election year)."

You can say what you want about the stimulus bill, although if David Sirota is calling it a success, it can't be the most reactionary thing in the world. I think most progressives see this as a down payment with a lot of noble parts to it and a minimum of the worst corporate tax cuts (they really gutted the "net loss carryback" tax break), and while the inclusion of the AMT patch makes this essentially a $720 billion dollar bill, with some perspective that's a big number, with a core that is quite progressive:

Aid to the Poor and Unemployed

$40 billion to provide extended unemployment benefits through Dec. 31, and increase them by $25 a week

$20 billion to increase food stamp benefits by 14 percent

$3 billion in temporary welfare payments.

$14 billion to give one-time $250 payments to Social Security recipients, poor people on Supplemental Security Income, and veterans receiving disability and pensions.

Infrastructure

$46 billion for transportation projects, including $27 billion for highway and bridge construction and repair

$8.4 billion for mass transit

$8 billion for construction of high-speed railways and $1.3 billion for Amtrak

$4.6 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers

$4 billion for public housing improvements

$6.4 billion for clean and drinking water projects

$7 billion to bring broadband Internet service to underserved areas.

Health Care

$21 billion to provide a 60 percent subsidy of health care insurance premiums for the unemployed under the COBRA program

$87 billion to help states with Medicaid

$19 billion to modernize health information technology systems

$10 billion for health research and construction of National Institutes of Health facilities.

Education

$54 billion in state fiscal relief to prevent cuts in state aid to school districts, with up to $10 billion for school repair;

$26 billion to school districts to fund special education and the No Child Left Behind law for students in K-12

$17 billion to boost the maximum Pell Grant by $500 to $5,350

$2 billion for Head Start.

$13 billion to provide a $2,500 expanded tax credit for college tuition and related expenses for 2009 and 2010. The credit is phased out for couples making more than $160,000.

So, then, how are Republicans "winners" in this thing? They put out a parade of misinformation and lies that the public eventually saw through, and eventually they arrogantly refused to do anything to aid the struggling economy as if they were all Hoover reincarnated. Only to the Village would that be seen as a victory.

Amusing, too, that the rare Democratic hissy fit is the only chink in the Republican armor, as if they will bother to remember the Eric Cantor AFSCME thing a week from now.

The idea that Collins/Snowe/Specter "control" what passes Congress, too, and that it's a given and there's nothing that can be done about it, also kind of amusing. Also the way the Village likes it. Wouldn't want the dirty hippies running amok.

Not Aware Of All Internet Traditions

This AFSCME video has been making the rounds on YouTube for a long time. I've posted it on multiple occasions. I know that taking it out of the joke viral email forward and into the political arena changes things a bit, but are union leaders really upset that Eric Cantor sent over the video as a "response" to their ad blitz targeting neo-Hooverist GOP leaders?



I think the unions are just being opportunistic. And obviously, Cantor and the GOP's constant pro-family, anti-obscenity crusades shows a bit of hypocrisy here. But it's a funny video. And an Internet fave. Maybe I'm being thick, but I don't see the problem.

...Cantor's spokesperson had to apologize, which is fun. It's a rare Democratic hissy fit that worked. Imagine that.

Slugging Back

Sometimes we in the netroots are too impatient, I will admit. I still think that the stimulus bill was unnecessarily pre-compromised to gain Republican support that was not coming no matter what. But at least Obama and his team appear to be seizing the rhetorical and political opportunity from the big goose egg that Republicans put on the board yesterday. Robert Gibbs previewed the strategy this morning:

Pushing back against the unanimous House Republican vote against President Obama’s stimulus plan, the White House plans to release state-by-state job figures “so we can put a number on what folks voted for an against,” an administration aide said.

“It’s clear the Republicans who voted against the stimulus represent constituents who will be stunned to learn their member of Congress voted against [saving or] creating 4 million jobs,” the aide said.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the lawmakers will have to answer to their constituents.

“I do believe that there will be people in districts all over the country that will wonder why, when there’s a good bill to get the economy moving again, why we still seem to be playing political gotcha," Gibbs said.

In addition, surrogates for the Administration are slamming Republicans with a new ad that has a simple tag line: "Support the Obama plan for jobs, not the failed policies of the past."



That's bound to be helpful. And MoveOn has gone to their membership to help fund it.

I mean, this is elemental. More people are receiving unemployment benefits than at any time in history. Other economic indicators are bleak. New home sales are way down. Durable goods orders from businesses are way down. Without a massive stimulus the country will sink into something approaching a depression. And the GOP would rather root for failure? There's a very broad canvas here, and Obama has his sterling personal approval ratings on his side as well.

In response, House Republicans are whining, and trying again to use Obama's post-partisan unity shtick against him.

House Republicans are reacting strongly to reports that the White House plans a political onslaught to pressure Republicans into supporting the stimulus package and to punish those who don't.

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) will soon issue a statement contending that Obama's promise to "put an end to petty politics" is "threatened" as the White House and their allies "are making political threats rather than crafting a bipartisan economic stimulus plan."

He'll call on Obama to "immediately disavow" plans by liberal interest groups who have announced their intention to run attack ads against the Republicans. These groups, organized under the Americans United for Change umbrella, coordinate regularly with Congressional Democrats and are in touch with White House officials.

But look, everyone who went up against Obama in the election tried this, making the argument that "post-partisanship" means Obama can never criticize anyone, and it didn't work. With discredited Republicans making the argument, it won't work now either.

Better still, there are rumblings in the Democratic caucus that Republicans had their chance and now the bill must make sense instead of being targeted to appeal to their narrow interests.

Sen. John Kerry says Democrats should ignore Republicans’ demands about the stimulus plan if they’re going to vote against it anyway.

Reacting to Wednesday night’s vote in the House -- where not a single GOP member supported the stimulus package -- Kerry told Politico that “if Republicans aren’t prepared to vote for it, I don’t think we should be giving up things, where I think the money can be spent more effectively.”

“If they’re not going to vote for it, let’s go with a plan that we think is going to work.”

If this ends with Democrats and the White House learning that bipartisanship is a phantom and ultimately they'll be judged on effectiveness, so every decision from this point forward had better be based on what will work, then we'll end up in a pretty good place.

UPDATE: I want to see a story like this about a Republican every day.

A reliable source tells us that after voting against the economic stimulus package that would preserve and create jobs, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann sat in First Class on her way home on a Northwest flight from Washington to Minneapolis, via Detroit.

Upgrade with frequent flyer miles? Self-indulgence?

The disconnect between what real people are facing and Republican do-nothings should be made. It's not a cheap shot, it's political reality.

Wherefore Republicans?

The most entertaining parlor game in the media is figuring out where Republicans go from here, because a new Administration facing major challenges at home and abroad just isn't sexy enough, I guess. And so you have some jockeying for power among the leading lights of conservatism. I was a little worried that some of them were catching on after reading this:

Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, poised to ascend to House Republicans' No. 2 leader this week, said the Republican Party in Washington is no longer "relevant" to voters and must stop simply espousing principles. Instead, it must craft real solutions to health care and the economy.

"Where we have really fallen down is, we have lacked the ability to be relevant to people's lives. Let's set aside the last eight years, and our falling down in living up to expectations of what we said we were going to do," Mr. Cantor told The Washington Times in his district office outside of Richmond. "It's the relevancy question."

That's pretty much right, and one could see a new Republican Party with legitimate, free-market solutions on things like health care and the environment. This is how the Tories under David Cameron, waving a green banner, are rising to prominence in England.

Fortunately, far more conservatives are focused on taking the party back into the distant past.

Lee Edwards, a historian of the conservative movement at the Heritage Foundation, said that in meetings with conservative leaders since the election there was an emerging consensus that the Republicans had been hurt by drifting away from conservative principles and that religious conservatives, economic conservatives and strong-military conservatives had seemed to realize the need to unite to regain power.

“It isn’t a question of stressing economic issues or stressing social issues,” Mr. Edwards said. “What we have to do is to go back to what Ronald Reagan did and put together a coalition.” [...]

Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, scoffed at calls for the Republicans to move left, which he said had followed Republican defeats in 1964, 1976 and 1992. And he suggested that some calls to update conservatism — by taking global warming more seriously, for instance — were essentially disguised calls to move the party to the left.

“They will be cheerfully ignored,” Mr. Norquist said.

Whew!

Then there are others who don't think they have much of a problem.

Older party hands pointed to John McCain’s lackluster campaign and the difficult terrain on which Republicans found themselves battling this year, and they eschewed any sky-is-falling rhetoric. The up-and-comers, meanwhile, sounded the alarm of impending permanent minority status unless the party changes.

“I have looked down at the grave of the Republican Party, and this ain’t it,” assured Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who was RNC chairman in the 1990s. “I’ve seen it a lot worse."

Thank you Haley Barbour!

There's a certain justice to this. Republicans have spent the last decade tossing out apostates and using loyalty oaths and purity tests to make their party monochromatic and completely ideological. Now when they hit hard times, OF COURSE they can't figure out the way back, because they all have the same failed ideas and principles.

I think I'm going to tune out of this "debate" for the next several months and just go back to Matt Stoller's dead-on precis.

The GOP is going to do is futz around for awhile with the fake moderate versus conservative argument and then eventually find a way to tap into the newly emergent overt racism. It may happen in 2010, and it's impossible to predict whether the issues will be framed around 'law and order' as the millions of unemployed young people inevitably do what young people do when they are bored and disempowered in a recession, or some sort of stabbed in the back narrative around Iraq or Afghanistan, or some new set of issues focused on the fallout from this very scary financial crisis. Whatever happens the party will reorganize on the internet and that's going to seem really cool and innovative and counter-intuitive except that it will be perfectly normal for a political party to reorganize using a culture's mainstream medium for organizing, which is the internet. The right already did it once, with Drudge and the Free Republic in the 1990s.

The animus for the new Republicans, though, will not be fake conservative principles like low taxes, a strong military, and family values, because Republicans like taxes on non-rich people, they like hollowing out the military, and the GOP leadership is full of sexually tortured souls. It's going to be racism, as it always has been. There, soul-searching over. And this blog post only took you five minutes to read, which is probably a bit shorter than it will take for the Republicans to find and manufacture millions of new right-wing dog whistles.

Good English

Yes, it's pathetic to see how the right wing protects and defends their movement conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh, while Democrats let the progressive movement twist in the wind. But I want to highlight the first sentence of this missive from Eric Cantor, Chief Deputy Republican Whip in the House, in this NRCC email pitch (which I assume was proofread):

One failure after another, Washington Democrats have built a record of legislative failure.

One sandwich after another, Washington Democrats have eaten a lot of sandwiches.

Good Lord, are they all this dense?