AROUND THE HORN.
Some quick thoughts before everybody heads out for Memorial Day weekend to whatever little slice of heaven (I remain here in the pestilential Capital, watching the frontier):
• The American Spring folks who decidedly failed to overthrow ObamaHitler last Friday were good for a laugh, but I have to say I feel for them. Granted, when they're united in a reactionary electoral force to keep the country down, as they have been for decades, they're harder to sympathize with. But when I see them in small numbers howling on the Mall, unable to do America much damage and maybe even livening up some tourists' day, my resistance is reduced and I can see that they have genuine complaints. For example, they're pissed about the VA hospitals and a lot of other things that leaders who gave a shit about America might help fix. But they don't send that kind of people to Congress -- they send instead flim-flam men who make things worse, then tell them it was the dad-burned Gummint that made it bad because it can't do nothin' right nohow. And they tell them all would be well if the Kenyan Pretender and his socialist comrades were turned out of office, and encourage them to imagine themselves the heirs of the original Tea Party: Revolutionaries with the right and the means to overthrow. Fox News does its bit, announcing that "a group of self-described revolutionary-style patriots with a million mobilized militia members are heading to downtown Washington, D.C.," as if it were something other than a pathetic delusion. "A million" perhaps share the fantasy, but their suburban inertia will always keep them from exerting themselves to realize it, apart from hanging a confederate flag in the garage or yelling at the teevee -- only this ragtag band actually walked the walk, and they raged for the cameras, crying that they'd been betrayed, but not knowing, as I once observed of the Sarah Palin Army, that they were marked for betrayal all along.
• I've been asking on Twitter but maybe you guys don't go in for microblogging, so: Can someone tell me what gives with the Right's recent hard-on for the Export-Import Bank? I've seen it on and off for years but in the past few months there's been a buttload of ecrasez-l'infame among the brethren -- including this typically muddled Jonah Goldberg thumbsucker, which all but screams "did I get the talking points right, Mr. Koch? I added some of my signature farrrrrrRRRt." My best guess is, 1.) Victory is easy -- the authorization expires in September, and 2.) the major complaint about the Bank seems to be "crony capitalism" -- which is a major Obama-era propaganda theme among conservatives -- and deauthorizing the Bank is one of the few things they can do that (as they believe) will show the voters that they're not just tools of big business without getting their hands slapped by major donors. What do you think?
• Conservative "reformers" like Ross Douthat with big plans to attract the masses to the GOP (remember the Party of Sam's Club? Good times!) have a hard row to hoe -- sensible people keep pointing out that Republicans crush the poor because they find the poor easy to crush, and even voters outside the reach of these sensible people are brought to the same conclusion by observation and common sense. In this blog post, Douthat acknowledges such observations "prove the case that the GOP includes a strong ideological tendency that cuts against what some of the reform-conservative essayists want to do." But -- I just love this -- "What they don’t prove, however, is that the current Republican Party could never be a vehicle for such a policy agenda." Don't stop believin'! For example, "The Democratic Party of the late 1970s and early 1980s stood rather firmly for all kinds of ideas (price controls, middle class tax increases) that the Democratic Party of the 1990s deliberately backed away from." In other words, the Democrats got more conservative, so Republicans should be able to get more -- not liberal, certainly, but conservative-with-an-explanation. Electoral gold! Interestingly, Douthat acknowledges that the "internal party debate... swung in [a] more Randian direction in 2009-2012," which leads one to wonder where Douthat thinks it's been swinging in 2013 and 2014. The Party of Rent-a-Center? Or of Singapore?
UPDATE.
• "They had a dream," starts Noemie Emery at the Weekly Standard (interesting allusion, under the circumstances). "For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth..." Obama is the first person like this to rule since, it would seem, John Quincy Adams (Emery is unclear on this point), and Obama made Obamacare which everyone hates, so the judgment of history is clear: "They wanted their chance, and they got it. They had it. They blew it. They’re done." Back to electing haberdashers and Nixons! Unfortunately the part where a disgusted electorate threw Obama out in 2012 is missing from the essay. Editing error?
• The American Spring folks who decidedly failed to overthrow ObamaHitler last Friday were good for a laugh, but I have to say I feel for them. Granted, when they're united in a reactionary electoral force to keep the country down, as they have been for decades, they're harder to sympathize with. But when I see them in small numbers howling on the Mall, unable to do America much damage and maybe even livening up some tourists' day, my resistance is reduced and I can see that they have genuine complaints. For example, they're pissed about the VA hospitals and a lot of other things that leaders who gave a shit about America might help fix. But they don't send that kind of people to Congress -- they send instead flim-flam men who make things worse, then tell them it was the dad-burned Gummint that made it bad because it can't do nothin' right nohow. And they tell them all would be well if the Kenyan Pretender and his socialist comrades were turned out of office, and encourage them to imagine themselves the heirs of the original Tea Party: Revolutionaries with the right and the means to overthrow. Fox News does its bit, announcing that "a group of self-described revolutionary-style patriots with a million mobilized militia members are heading to downtown Washington, D.C.," as if it were something other than a pathetic delusion. "A million" perhaps share the fantasy, but their suburban inertia will always keep them from exerting themselves to realize it, apart from hanging a confederate flag in the garage or yelling at the teevee -- only this ragtag band actually walked the walk, and they raged for the cameras, crying that they'd been betrayed, but not knowing, as I once observed of the Sarah Palin Army, that they were marked for betrayal all along.
• I've been asking on Twitter but maybe you guys don't go in for microblogging, so: Can someone tell me what gives with the Right's recent hard-on for the Export-Import Bank? I've seen it on and off for years but in the past few months there's been a buttload of ecrasez-l'infame among the brethren -- including this typically muddled Jonah Goldberg thumbsucker, which all but screams "did I get the talking points right, Mr. Koch? I added some of my signature farrrrrrRRRt." My best guess is, 1.) Victory is easy -- the authorization expires in September, and 2.) the major complaint about the Bank seems to be "crony capitalism" -- which is a major Obama-era propaganda theme among conservatives -- and deauthorizing the Bank is one of the few things they can do that (as they believe) will show the voters that they're not just tools of big business without getting their hands slapped by major donors. What do you think?
• Conservative "reformers" like Ross Douthat with big plans to attract the masses to the GOP (remember the Party of Sam's Club? Good times!) have a hard row to hoe -- sensible people keep pointing out that Republicans crush the poor because they find the poor easy to crush, and even voters outside the reach of these sensible people are brought to the same conclusion by observation and common sense. In this blog post, Douthat acknowledges such observations "prove the case that the GOP includes a strong ideological tendency that cuts against what some of the reform-conservative essayists want to do." But -- I just love this -- "What they don’t prove, however, is that the current Republican Party could never be a vehicle for such a policy agenda." Don't stop believin'! For example, "The Democratic Party of the late 1970s and early 1980s stood rather firmly for all kinds of ideas (price controls, middle class tax increases) that the Democratic Party of the 1990s deliberately backed away from." In other words, the Democrats got more conservative, so Republicans should be able to get more -- not liberal, certainly, but conservative-with-an-explanation. Electoral gold! Interestingly, Douthat acknowledges that the "internal party debate... swung in [a] more Randian direction in 2009-2012," which leads one to wonder where Douthat thinks it's been swinging in 2013 and 2014. The Party of Rent-a-Center? Or of Singapore?
UPDATE.
• "They had a dream," starts Noemie Emery at the Weekly Standard (interesting allusion, under the circumstances). "For almost a hundred years now, the famed academic-artistic-and-punditry industrial complex has dreamed of a government run by their kind of people (i.e., nature’s noblemen), whose intelligence, wit, and refined sensibilities would bring us a heaven on earth..." Obama is the first person like this to rule since, it would seem, John Quincy Adams (Emery is unclear on this point), and Obama made Obamacare which everyone hates, so the judgment of history is clear: "They wanted their chance, and they got it. They had it. They blew it. They’re done." Back to electing haberdashers and Nixons! Unfortunately the part where a disgusted electorate threw Obama out in 2012 is missing from the essay. Editing error?