Men Love Darkness Rather than Light: Republican Response to Dark Money

Campaign finance reform? Republicans aren't for that anymore. Now that the Supreme Court has armed them with Citizens United and their Wall Street financiers and billionaires are supporting the GOP with millions and millions of dollars, Republicans want to keep citizens in the dark about who is contributing to whom and why. The whole "Obama's enemy's list" talking point is all about that: convince folks that campaign donations should not be public knowledge:

So this is the world conservatives now want to create—unlimited donations, and we’ll never know from whom. That’s the goal. Trying to gin up a blog post into an enemies list is merely a device, a handy way to try to attain the goal. There is no enemies list. There is only, as usual, a lie, and a vast propaganda machine pushing it. [Michael Tomasky, "Stop the 'Obama's Enemies List' GOP Lies," posted 19 June 2012, on The Daily Beast]

some history here: Andy Kroll, "Follow the Dark Money," Mother Jones, July/August 2012 issue.

more info here: Alex Seitz-Wald, "GOP Senators: No Disclosure, Please," Salon, posted 19 June 2012.

Jumping Ship

Once a month I attend a local meeting of Democrats who gather to talk, to drink, and to eat, finding fellowship (as the Baptists would say) with like-minded folks in a parish dominated by Republicans and the far-right. During the course of our conversations, several of us have confessed to having voted for a Republican president at least once; others have confessed that they were once fiscal Republicans. Now they sound like--and are--Democrats, concerned about public education, the rights of women, the economy, unemployment, the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, corporate domination of politics, the environment, climate change. It's not that these folks have changed that much--it's that the Republican party has changed significantly. Once, I think, we could have counted on both parties at least to do the best they could to steer the ship of state; they might differ in exactly to what degree to turn the wheel, but there was a balance of power that held the ship on a fairly reasonable course (not that there weren't mistakes).

That's no longer the case, and  Republicans who are publicly and loudly jumping ship indicate just how far right the Republican party has turned.

The latest conservative to publish a screed against the far-right turn of the party is Michael Fumento, who writes in Salon that

Apart from gaining fame and fortune for a select few, all the new right is accomplishing is turning Bismarck’s words upside down, making politics the art of the impossible. It demonizes the opposition even as it brutally enforces “team loyalty.” So nothing gets done, and bad trends just get worse. ["My break with the extreme right," posted 24 May 2012.]

Fumento joins the ranks of David Frum , who writes that he is "haunted" by his experience in the Bush administration. Frum is no liberal, no Democrat; he penned the phrase "axis of evil" that the Bush administration used so well in its march toward war with Iraq.  But here is what he writes about Fox News and Talk Radio:

Extremism and conflict make for bad politics but great TV. Over the past two decades, conservatism has evolved from a political philosophy into a market segment. An industry has grown up to serve that segment—and its stars have become the true thought leaders of the conservative world. The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel). As a commercial proposition, this model has worked brilliantly in the Obama era. As journalism, not so much. As a tool of political mobilization, it backfires, by inciting followers to the point at which they force leaders into confrontations where everybody loses, like the summertime showdown over the debt ceiling...[snip]...We used to say “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.” Now we are all entitled to our own facts, and conservative media use this right to immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information. ["When Did the GOP Lose Touch with Reality?," in New York Magazine, 20 November 2011.]

Another conservative who has jumped the ship of extremism is Michael Lofgren, who retired after 28 years as a Republican Congressional staffer last year and publicly let loose his inner frustrations over the far-right turn of his political party:

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. [in "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative who Left the Cult," Truthout,  3 September 2011]

Lofgren does not pull any punches; he has plenty to say about Democrats, too, and notes that he is not a supporter of Obama, but that when Barack Obama won the presidency, he wanted Obama to succeed because he wanted his country to succeed. But his harshest criticism is leveled at his own party:

It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant...[snip]...Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

The number of such apostate Republicans is growing. Before Lofgren, Frum, and Fumento, there was Bruce Bartlett, President Reagan's domestic policy advisor and a critic of his own contribution to Reaganomics [The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward]. Bartlett, an old-time fiscal conservative, makes no friends with today's Republican extremists with his criticisms of Republican fiscal irresponsibility. On Hardball with Chris Matthews, Bartlett reminds us that "[t]the Obama plan, the Affordable Health Care Act, was essentially the same thing that Republicans had been pushing themselves only a few years earlier"  and that higher taxes in the 80s and 90s actually led to a booming economy rather than to recession that Republicans had predicted. "I think the dirty secret," Bartlett says, "is actually that Obama is a moderate conservative, and if I were a liberal Democrat I would be pretty upset" [segment posted on Raw Replay, titled "Bruce Bartlett: Chunk of GOP either stupid, crazy, ignorant, or craven cowards," 28 July 2011].

While those of us meeting once a month at a local restaurant to discuss Democratic policies and the ship of state may feel vindicated by these criticisms aimed at the Republican party, how can we derive real comfort from our united concerns? They just reinforce our own fears that the ship may soon crash on the shoals of extremism.

Why Support Crazy?

So I've been thinking and writing about why not to vote Republican, and at the top of my list today is that voting Republican seems to be voting for crazy. Here are some examples:

• Top of the list--the birther nonsense. Really. The Iowa GOP platform "calls for presidential candidates to 'show proof of being a ‘natural born citizen’ of the United States'" because there are many really unbelievably idiotic people who think Barack Obama is not a 'natural born' citizen. [h/t, "Political Animal.] There is ol' Sheriff Joe Arpaio sending his posse to Hawaii to take a gander at the President's official birth certificate. (But since one of the "posse" members is writing a birther conspiracy book with birther conspiracist Jerome Corsi, you can bet he won't believe what he sees. Otherwise, he won't be able to sell that book, huh?) And then there's Arizona's secretary of state blustering about keeping President Obama off Arizona's ballot in November unless Hawaiian officials send him some more proof of Obama's citizenship. Um....Hawaiian officials have already verified Barack Obama's birth certificate, idiot. Of course, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett is also a Republican and Mitt Romney's Arizona co-chair, so he has a vested interest in the birther histrionics.
• Then there's the rejection of science, which I had meant to address in a stand-along post, but I just don't have the energy to write about how stupid I think Republicans are for their know-nothingness. Recent example? The House Republican vote to eliminate the American Community Survey, a survey that "has been around in some form since 1850, either as a longer version of or a richer supplement to the basic decennial census" and that serves as the "country’s primary check for determining how well the government is doing — and in fact what the government will be doing." According to The New York Times, "[i]t is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health." The article describes other important uses of this survey, too. And here are the stupid comments by one Republican house member, Daniel Webster, "a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation":

  “This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators..... “We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

  Let's parse crazy: programs that intrude on peoples' lives--Really. Does anyone remember acid rain? Love Canal? lead poisoning? mercury poisoning? If you don't, look up those phrases in Wikipedia. Yes, the EPA affects people's lives, idiot man. Oh, and bank regulators? Have we so easily forgotten the last financial crisis which exploded during the Bush administration and the aftereffects with which we are still coping? 
  not a scientific survey, but a random survey--Really. A random survey IS a scientific survey. Who is voting for people like this?
  
  
  And don't get me started on the whole climate change denial of the Republican party. That craziness alone deserves a separate blog post. I'm just not sure I've got the patience to go there.
  
  
  These are not people I want leading my country in tough times. But evidently a lot of people think crazy is just hunky-dory.
  
  

  links

  "President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate", at www.whitehouse.gov

  
  

  "Zombie Birtherism: The Conspiracy that doesn't Know It's Dead," Eric Lach, TPMMuckraker

  
  

  "Hawaii verifies Obama's Birth For Arizona Secretary of State"

  
  

  Left Action's Mitt Romney is a Unicorn petition
  
  "Time to Wean the Birthers"

Reasons not to Vote Republican, Part 2a: Demonizing the Opposition

Reason #2a: Demonizing the Opposition
I'll talk policy in a later blog. For me, the extreme demonizing of the opposition and the refusal to disavow conspiracy theories get to the emotional heart of my viewing the current Republican Party as a party on the fringe of reason. * [update below]  Now, I understand that there is always going to be a bit of mudslinging in political races. I don't like it, but I get it. People are not truly rational; they are motivated by emotion. Candidates want to move the emotional meter in their favor, so they dredge up anything about the other candidate that might not be too shiny and besmear their opponent's image some more. However, the Republican Party and its advertising allies have taken this besmirching to new lows.  The now iconic Willie Horton ads of of George H.W. Bush's campaign against Michael Dukakis relied upon racial fear for their effectiveness, and that method has been used over and over again in campaigns since then: associate the opposition with some scary figure, with someone or some group that will activate racial or ethnic fears.

When we were living in Georgia (the first time), we witnessed Republican Saxby Chambliss's senate campaign against Democrat Max Cleland, a man who had lost both legs and one arm fighting in Vietnam. Chambliss's ads followed the pattern established by those Willie Horton ads. This time, the scary figure was Osama bin Laden. The personal attack ads began with bin Laden's photo ("scary Muslim"), followed by a photo of Max Cleland. The ads questioned Cleland's courage and leadership and distorted Cleland's voting record on Homeland Security. They also illustrate another tactic that I've seen over and over again in Republican ads: question the patriotism of the Democratic opponent. It was an irony evidently lost on a majority of Georgian voters that Chambliss, who received student and medical deferments to avoid the draft, was questioning the courage of a man whose limbs were blown off while fighting for his country.

Questioning the patriotism of an opponent descended to new lows in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (an ironic title if there ever was one) attack ads on the military career of John Kerry, in the 2000 presidential campaign. While the ads weren't official ads of the Republican Party and were heavily financed by a billionaire known for his financial support of Republican causes, Houston home builder Bob J. Perry, funding was also supplied by President Bush and Tom Delay. And George W. Bush and the Republican Party didn't repudiate the ads, did they? Again, the irony is that the one whose military career raised real questions was George W. Bush, who landed a cushy appointment with the Texas National Guard while John Kerry was fighting in Vietnam. But those attack ads, vicious and untrue as they were, worked: questions about Bush's military career were dropped while Kerry's military career was smeared.

And this is the way Republican campaign ads work: question the patriotism of the opposition, associate the opposition with people who arouse ethnic or racial fears, and label the opposition as "elitist" and "other." Barack Hussein Obama is a Republican campaign advertiser's dream: the Muslim name, the black father, the childhood spent in a foreign country, the Harvard degree. Have a Muslim name? You hate Christians. Not wearing a flag pin in your damn lapel? You hate your country. Have lived in a foreign country (even though as a child and your living situation wasn't of your choosing)? You hate your country. Have an Ivy League degree? You hate your fellow citizens. Have a dark face? You hate whitey.

In 1996, Newt Gingrich compiled a list of emotionally-laden words and provided that list to a conservative Republican group to distribute to Republicans for use in their campaigns. The title of his memo is revealing: "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." Controlling whom? You, dear citizens. Us.

"Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party," Gingrich advised:

anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs; betray; bizarre; bosses; bureaucracy; cheat; coercion; 'compassion' is not enough; collapse(ing); consequences; corrupt; corruption; criminal rights; crisis; cynicism; decay; deeper; destroy; destructive; devour; disgrace; endanger; excuses; failure (fail); greed; hypocrisy; ideological; impose; incompetent; insecure; insensitive; intolerant; liberal; lie; limit(s); mandate(s); obsolete; pathetic; patronage; permissive attitude; pessimistic; punish (poor...); radical; red tape; self-serving; selfish; sensationalists; shallow; shame; sick; spend(ing); stagnation; status quo; steal; taxes; they/them; threaten; traitors; unionized; urgent(cy); waste; welfare. [my emphasis]

(Your homework: find a political speech by Newt Gingrich on You-Tube and see how many of these words and their derivatives he uses to describe Democrats or other opponents.)

I'm not advocating abolishing emotive words in campaign speeches. But when someone uses language to distort reality, to manipulate emotions so as to distort the truth, that's a serious problem. Demonizing the opposition (calling them "traitors," labeling them as anti-flag, anti-family, claiming they endanger life and decency) suggests to me an inability or unwillingness to grapple the serious issues of governing a democracy.

Update:
I mis-wrote here, I think, in saying the Republican Party is on the fringe of reason. Republican Party leaders are pandering to the unreasonable fringe within the party (more discussion in a later post) to gain power and are using language effectively to appeal to emotion in order to circumvent reason. Studies in neuroscience are showing us just how much emotion and the use of emotional code words affect our reason. Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, discusses the results of such studies in his book The Political Brain: How We Make up Our Minds Without Using Our Heads. Folks need to be made aware of how they can be manipulated. Emotion AND reason are required to make good decisions (or so I think). A review of Westen's book is here: The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation, by Richard M. Waugaman.

More on this kind of stuff, if you're interested:

• "Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives," Andrea Kuszewski guest-posting on Chris Mooney's blog The Intersection on the Discover Magazine web site.
• [more to come--got to do some other stuff now]

Reasons not to vote Republican--Part 1: Uncompromising, Filibustering

Reason #1: Moving Goal Posts, Refusing to Compromise for the Good of the Country, and Taking Filibustering to Incredibly Belligerent Lengths

Especially in the last few years, Republicans have moved the goal posts over and over again as Democrats have sought compromise on issues. As Kevin Drum writes in a blog post today: "Is it any wonder that so many Democrats are no longer in any mood to appease the right?" 

Drum links to Matt Steinglass's May 1st post in The Economist, in which Steinglass writes that Democrats have moved toward (and past) the center and away from issues they pursued in the past: "gun control, defence budgets under 3% of GDP, banning oil exploration off America's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a public option or single-payer solution to universal health insurance."

Steinglass continues:

Today these positions have all been abandoned. And we're talking about positions held under Bill Clinton, a "third way" leader who himself moved Democratic ideology dramatically to the right, the guy responsible for "ending welfare as we know it". Since then, Democrats have moved much further yet to the right, in the fruitless search for a compromise with a Republican Party that sees compromise itself as fundamentally evil. The obvious example is that the Democrats in 2010 literally passed the universal health-insurance reform that had been proposed by the GOP opposition in the Clinton administration, only to find today's GOP vilifying it as a form of Leninist socialist totalitarianism. [my emphasis]

The fight over the debt ceiling and Republican vilification of "Obamacare" were the final straws for me. I just quit taking the Republican party seriously as a party working for the good of the country. Though there are individual Republicans who think and act responsibly, the party as a whole has gone too far right and has become intransigent.

Republican leadership is fond of claiming that they have tried to work with the President, that they are open to compromise, but the claim is a lie. (There. I've written the word--lie) On the very evening that Barack Obama was celebrating his inauguration, Robert Draper records in his new book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, a group of Republican leaders were meeting to map out a plan to stymie Obama's legislative leadership. (Newt Gingrich was present.) Kevin McCarthy (Republican Rep., Calif.) is quoted as saying, "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign." 

As Draper says in an interview, this group of Republicans began to strategize, and what they ultimately came up with was a plan to attack the president's agenda, say no to everything and stick together." Now, of course each party should work to pass legislation it thinks is best for the country, but this is pigheadedness to the extreme, with a focus on one party's one-upmanship rather than on governing and doing the will of the people. 

Saying "no" to everything also means distorting the constitutional power of the majority in the Senate. As Thomas Geoghegan points out in his New York Times op-ed, "Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution," "the Constitution explicitly requires supermajorities only in a few special cases: ratifying treaties and constitutional amendments, overriding presidential vetoes, expelling members and for impeachments." However, in the last few years, and especially during the Obama administration, filibustering has increased exponentially in the Senate, with Republicans being the worst abusers of the filibuster. And supermajority vote has become the norm in passing legislation rather than the outlier.

Geoghegan writes that "[t]he filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent." [my emphasis]

He continues:

". . . we now have to take what a minority of an inherently unrepresentative body will give us. Forty-one senators from our 21 smallest states — just over 10 percent of our population — can block bills dealing not just with health care but with global warming and hazards that threaten the whole planet. Individual senators now use the filibuster, or the threat of it, as a kind of personal veto, and that power seems to have warped their behavior, encouraging grandstanding and worse.

Simple legislation or judicial appointments that should pass with a simple majority are now filibustered to the extreme by the minority party so that a supermajority is required to break the filibuster. (And Senators don't even have to be present to say they're filibustering; they can call in their "filibuster.") What is truly ironic about this unconstitutional use of filibuster votes is that Republicans are really big about holding up the Constitution and the intent of our founders as inerrant, yet they are the worst abusers in filibustering, thus bringing the work of the government to a grinding halt in order to force the political will of a MINORITY in the Senate. [See more statistics that show the rise in unconstitutional use of the filibuster vote here: The U. S. Senate's posted chart "Senate Actions on Cloture Motions."]

James Fallows has written extensively on his blog about the increasing use of the filibuster to circumvent majority rule in the Senate. His blog posts on the filibuster are here: Filibuster

Do Democrats use the filibuster vote? Yes, of course. But Republicans have carried that use to the extreme. And now, we might expect a future Democratic minority in the Senate to do the same because the procedure has become so commonplace.  

As Norman Orntein writes in  his article "Worst. Congress. Ever.,", in Foreign Policy:

Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters' rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics -- the filibuster and the hold -- in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier.

"House Republicans," Ornstein writes,

are adamant about refusing to compromise with the president, and are able in most instances to make good on the threat. When they are not able to maintain this unity, they are simply unwilling to bring up or pass measures that would lose significant GOP votes and require as many or more Democrats in support. This is a formula for gridlock, or worse is the Republicans are simply declining to govern.

[See also Thomas E. Mann's and Norman J. Ornstein's recent article in The Washington Post: "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem." ]

Republicans' admitted plan to say "NO" to everything, to "challenge every single bill," has not been good for the country. Why reward them by voting for them?

Low Information Voters and Republican Strategy

Some of the most distressing descriptions of American citizens I've read lately have been detailed by two retired Congressional staffers, one a 28-year veteran of the Republican party and the other who worked for a moderate Democrat. These are not people on the fringes of the right or left. And now that they have retired, they feel free to write what they really believe, what they have actually experienced and observed. This is what Mike Lofgren, who served 28 years as a Congressional staffer and "16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees," writes :

There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

Lofgren goes on to describe how "the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends." People who think government doesn't work decide that their vote doesn't count, too. And so they stay home while the far-right minority, "whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News" increases its clout in elections. This strategy of weakening trust in government institutions to create citizen malaise goes hand in hand with another Republican strategy, that of disenfranchising voters who are more likely to vote Democratic:

Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies)**; by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

Lofgren says that other folks are very upfront about these strategies:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption [the more recent Republican strategy to filibuster every confirmation and routine procedural motion] .... By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

 So what Republicans cannot succeed in doing by rigorous debate of the issues and communication of those issues to constituents, they plan to win by subterfuge and destruction of democratic institutions. Again, this is not some leftie talking; this is a guy who witnessed Republican strategy for years from the bullpen and who mourns the demise of Republican virtue (if virtue exists in politics). He is no supporter of President Obama, he says, but he wanted Obama to succeed in the worst economic crisis the country has faced in years because he wanted his country to succeed. The Republicans--those leading now--want the country to fail so that Obama will fail. The country fails, millions of Americans suffer--but they will blame the current president. Why? Because they are low information voters who have no idea how government works.

The second negative description of American citizens comes from a Congressional staffer who worked for years for a moderate Democrat. This staffer wrote in response to James Fallows' post about Mike Lofgren's essay.

The mainstream media absolutely fails to understand how little attention average Americans really pay to what goes on in all forms of government. During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24 years to learn this) that the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress. All the millions of dollars of TV ads, all the thousands of robo-calls and door-knocks, and it all comes down to having a message that will stick in the voters' minds during the 5 minutes before they walk into the voting booth.

 Although the pollster mentioned above is referring to Congressional races, I grimaced a little when I read how inattentive voters are in making their choices. While I understand my own ideals and how those ideals have affected my voting record in national elections and state level elections, I have been less attentive to local elections. Yet that's where many politicians get their start, in their being elected to the school board or to mayor. From the city level, they may go to the state level and then the national level--though, more often than not these days, the already-rich jump directly to representing us at the state and national level.

If anything should convince those disaffected voters to get out to vote, this should: there are people hoping that you won't vote so that their ability to whip up the anger and fear of the fringe will have a stronger impact. And that's not good for our country...or for ordinary Americans.

**I have read that the push in Wisconsin to close Department of Motor Vehicles offices has been tabled. A spokesman said that there was no intention to shut down offices in Democratic constituencies, but a Democratic spokesman said that a look at which offices were planned to be shut down counters that claim. However, a recent Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles memo came to light in which employees were directed to provide material when people ask for the free ID but that they should not readily provide information if not asked. So it's pretty clear what the intent is.

More on the Wisconsin voter ID conflict: This guy evidently should have used his personal e-mail to send out his message, but....."Wisconsin Employee Fired for E-mail Defying Voter ID Policy," posted on TPM. More at the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: "State Employee Fired After Telling Co-Workers about Photo ID Policy," 8 Sept. 2011.

Sane Conservative Voices I: Bruce Bartlett

As many mainstream Republicans have been echoing the anger and paranoia of the far-right, some sane conservative voices have been trying to break through the static. In an essay posted on the Capital Gains and Games blog, written in response to the death of Irving Kristol (the father; the son, as the writer points out, is another matter altogether), Bruce Bartlett writes:

The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. But as Kristol correctly understood, right-wing populism has no future and fundamental changes in the direction of government policy must be based on serious research and analysis that is grounded on hard data; that is to say, reality.

Bartlett is no liberal. He was domestic policy advisor to President Reagan and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1988-1993 (under President Bush). He has served on the staffs of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp. I disagree with some of Barlett's economic theories and with his (very unscientific) understanding of climate change, but I certainly agree with his assessment of the Republican party today. Sane people on either side of the political spectrum are alarmed by the lack of civility in public discourse, the paranoia manifested in the outrageous myths circulated about current domestic and international policies, and what amounts to demonization of the President.

In a recent column in Forbes, Bartlett addresses the Republican mantra that cutting spending will ameliorate the fiscal problem. It won't work, he writes, because Congress will resist cutting spending, no matter which party is in control of Congress, because the nature of the federal budget has changed, and because the population has changed (aging population will resist cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicare). And Republicans, he points out, never seriously address cutting entitlement programs:

On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.

He also addresses the oft-repeated lie that Reagan cut spending:

When I raised these facts [about Medicare and the increasingly aging population] with a prominent Republican recently he counted that Reagan had cut spending. But he didn't. Spending rose from 21.7% of the gross domestic product in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983 before declining to 21.2% in 1988. And that improvement came about largely because favorable demographics caused entitlement spending to temporarily decline from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. (Last year it was 12.5% of GDP.)

In a column on fiscal responsibility, Bartlett addresses the myth that tax cuts always illustrate fiscal responsibility:

Beginning in 1982, [Reagan] supported higher taxes almost every year of his presidency.....Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, promised during the 1988 campaign that he would never raise taxes--read my lips: no new taxes, he said at the Republican convention. But faced with large deficits and the need for Democratic congressional support for deficit reduction, he abandoned that pledge in 1990 and supported a large tax increase in return for tough spending controls.

Bartlett goes on to discuss how Clinton's tax increase, roundly criticized by Republicans, triggered "a huge economic expansion" and a surplus that George W. Bush inherited and then squandered:

Taxes were cut willy-nilly throughout the Bush years, and spending shot up for wars, new entitlement programs and any Republican-sponsored pork barrel project. Bush left office with a deficit of 3.2% of GDP--a reversal of 5.6% of GDP compared to the surplus he inherited."

In his article "The GOP's Misplaced Rage," Bartlett addresses the anger of those town-hall meetings we saw over the summer:

I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.

Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.

And Bartlett puts forth the idea that this Republican anger is not born out of any real disenchantment with liberal policies but out of the petulance of having lost an election:

In my opinion, conservative activists, who seem to believe that the louder they shout the more correct their beliefs must be, are less angry about Obama’s policies than they are about having lost the White House in 2008. They are primarily Republican Party hacks trying to overturn the election results, not representatives of a true grassroots revolt against liberal policies. If that were the case they would have been out demonstrating against the Medicare drug benefit, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and all the pork-barrel spending that Bush refused to veto.

There is plenty with which I can disagree with Bruce Bartlett, I'm sure, but his sane conservative voice reminds us that liberals and conservatives can find common ground in order to make our republic truly strong. Loudly supporting fringe behavior such as Joe Wilson's shouting out to the President of the United States "you lie" is not the way to do that. The Republican Party needs to back away from the abyss.