Tag Archives: GOP

R.I.P. GOP….

I often disagree with Bret Stephens of the New York Times on the issues, but I appreciate his intellectual honesty. Stephens is a genuine political conservative, appalled by Donald Trump and clear-eyed about the transformation of the GOP from a center-right political party into an unrecognizable cult held together by grievance.

As he observed in a recent exchange with liberal columnist Gail Collins:

If there were truth in advertising, Republicans would have to rename themselves the Opposite Party. They were the party of law and order. Now they want to abolish the F.B.I. They were the party that revered the symbols of the nation. Now they think the Jan. 6 riots were like a “normal tourist visit.” They were the party of moral character and virtue. Now they couldn’t care less that their standard-bearer consorted with a porn star. They were the party of staring down the Evil Empire. Now they’re Putin’s last best hope. They were the party of free trade. Now they’re protectionists. They were the party that cheered the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which argued that corporations had free speech. Now they are being sued by Disney because the company dared express an opinion they dislike. They were the party that once believed that “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande,” as George W. Bush put it. Now some of them want to invade Mexico.

The party that used to defend the right of businesses to run their own affairs–the party that, as Stephens notes, was committed to free trade– is relentlessly attacking corporations that have recognized the importance of diversity and inclusion, and is in the process of embracing tariffs–aka trade war tactics.

According to the Washington Post,  in a recent interview with Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow, Trump explained that he favors a universal 10% tariff on all goods imported into the US:

“I think we should have a ring around the collar” of the U.S. economy, Trump said in an interview with Kudlow on Fox Business on Thursday. “When companies come in and they dump their products in the United States, they should pay, automatically, let’s say a 10 percent tax … I do like the 10 percent for everybody.”

The Post reported that Trump and his advisers are promoting the imposition of a universal tariff on all imports as “a central plank in his 2024 bid for a second term.” 

As virtually all economists–conservative and/or liberal– will insist, tariffs are a terrible idea. (In his daily newsletter, Robert Hubbell characterized a 10% universal tariff as “an economy-destroying debacle of generational proportions.”) Hubbell quoted one expert  on the subject who characterized the idea as “lunacy.”

What is wrong with tariffs, you ask? Well, other than leading other major economic powers  to conclude the United States cannot be trusted as a trading partner, tariffs are basically a hidden tax ultimately paid by US consumers. Also, history confirms that the imposition of tariffs by one country inevitably triggers retaliatory tariffs by others.

We saw the effects of such tariffs when Trump imposed a number of them on China during his disastrous Presidency. They wreaked havoc on U.S. farmers. The impact was so severe that the administration had to make massive grants to farmers to offset the losses.

As  Forbes reported at the time, 

The Trump administration gave more taxpayer dollars to farmers harmed by the administration’s trade policies than the federal government spends each year building ships for the Navy or maintaining America’s nuclear arsenal, according to a new report. A National Foundation for American Policy analysis concluded the spending on farmers was also higher than the annual budgets of several government agencies. “The amount of money raises questions about the strategy of imposing tariffs and permitting the use of taxpayer money to shield policymakers from the consequences of their actions,” according to the analysis.

According to experts, the value of US imports in 2022 approached $4 trillion. A 10% universal tariff imposed on that amount would cost consumers $400 billion.

This insane tariff proposal is just one more bit of evidence–as if we needed any– that Trump hasn’t the foggiest idea how economies work. His behavior during the four years he was President convincingly demonstrated that he also lacks any understanding of how government operates. He may well be the most profoundly ignorant person ever to occupy the Oval Office (and we’ve had some clunkers…)

Given Stephens’ entirely accurate description of the “Opposite Party,” and given the loyalty of MAGA Republicans to a self-obsessed clown whose positions are, indeed, “opposite” of those traditionally held by the GOP, all I can conclude is that grievance–primarily racial grievance–has Trumped sanity. (Double-entendre intended..)

The GOP that once was is dead. R.I.P.

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Petty feuds, Outsized egos, and Monumental Ignorance

About a year ago, my sister urged me to subscribe to Robert Hubbell’s Substack newsletter. I did, and have appreciated his lawyerly approach to the issues we wrestle with on this blog. I’ve also appreciated the clarity of his writing–but the other day, that writing hit a new high!

Hubbell was reacting to reports that Kevin McCarthy is “warming” to the idea of impeaching Joe Biden.

I took the headline of this post from his introductory paragraphs:

Speaker Kevin McCarthy is reportedly warming to the idea of an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. Do not waste time fretting over that possibility. Don’t get me wrong; such an inquiry would be an outrage of grotesque proportions. But it would be a counterproductive clown show that will further damage GOP prospects in 2024. And if recent history is a guide, Democrats will run circles around hapless, outclassed Republicans attempting to manufacture a crime out of swamp gas and wishful thinking.

          Like the Wizard of Oz—who created distractions from behind a curtain to conceal his impotence—House Republicans must distract the public’s attention from their inability to legislate. Republicans hold the majority in the chamber of Congress that must originate all spending bills, but the GOP caucus has been rendered impotent, riven by petty feuds, outsized egos, and monumental ignorance. What better way to distract attention from their shortcomings than to chase wild conspiracies that forever recede into the distance like mirages, conveniently disappearing when Democrats demand evidence to support baseless charges?

Hubbell proceeds to analyze the likely consequences of a (further) GOP descent into irrelevance and lunacy: as he notes, the grounds for impeaching President Biden are unclear (to put it mildly–perhaps just being Hunter Biden’s father?), but that really doesn’t matter to the far Right crazies pursing this approach.

Any excuse will do because the point of the exercise is to create soundbites for Fox News that contain the words “Biden” and “impeachment” in the same sentence. The vote on a resolution to initiate an impeachment hearing will further damage Republicans elected in districts Joe Biden won in 2020.

Hubbell references leaked reports coming out of a GOP caucus meeting, in which  vulnerable Republicans argued strenuously that they should not be forced to vote on a resolution to initiate an impeachment inquiry.

Hubbell argues that–given the performance of the GOP pro-impeachment House members– hearings would be disastrous for them. Among other things, Democrats would certainly call on Rudy Giuliani’s co-conspirator, Lev Parnas, who has already offered to testify that the “allegations about Hunter Biden and Burisma were fabricated with Giuliani’s encouragement.” Parnas has promised to testify that “Never, during any of my communications with Ukrainian officials or connections to Burisma, did any of them confirm or provide concrete facts linking the Bidens to illegal activities.”

The truth is that everyone, from Giuliani [to] Devin Nunes and his colleagues, to the people at FOX News, knew that these allegations against the Bidens were false. There has never been any factual evidence, only conspiracy theories spread by people who knew exactly what they were doing.

And about that laptop….Commentators familiar with the GOP’s extensive efforts to “prove” Hunter Biden’s culpability (and by implication, his father’s) have pointed out that Rudy Giuliani and the repair shop owner would inevitably have to testify under oath about Giuliani’s efforts to get Hunter Biden’s laptop from the Russians years before it turned up in the repair shop. (I have no idea where the Russians fit into this recital, but it certainly sounds interesting…at least, if one cares about the problems of pathetic Hunter Biden, who–after all–is not and never has been a government official.)

More interesting, such testimony “would require forensic experts to say that additional folders were created on Hunter Biden’s laptop after Giuliani obtained it, and months after the FBI got a copy.”

Hubbell quotes Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo who summarizes GOP insanity:

Impeach Joe Biden? Go for it. See you at the trial. And good luck with that.

I see nothing wrong with a trial based on transparently nonsensical claims. In fact, every time Freedom Caucus weirdos hold the floor and national spotlight it hurts Republican standing. Public opinion polls and election results leave little doubt about this. Air the whole thing. Remove whatever sting it has left.

Hubbell clearly relishes the prospect of allowing the Democrats’ “skilled lawyer-legislators” like Jamie Raskin, Adam Schiff, and others the ability to torch the “incoherent yammerings of vapid culture warriors whose only strategy is to stamp their feet and shout.”

As he says, in a world where Republicans are willing to mimic those old Soviet show trials, Democrats shouldn’t fear impeachment.

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A Truly Alternate Reality

You’d think that sweltering temperatures, raging fires, the pending collapse of ocean currents, and multiple other signs would convince the dubious holdouts who continue to deny the reality of climate change.

As Time Magazine recently reported, you’d be wrong. Instead, extreme weather is actually fueling the crazy Right.

Rather than climate extremes forcing skeptics of climate policy to “get with the program, “conservative backlash around the world to climate policy may have also reached a fever pitch.”

In the U.S., former President Donald Trump has turned electric vehicles into a major attack line targeting President Joe Biden. In a late June speech, he called Biden’s policies “environmental extremism” and claimed they were “heartless and disloyal and horrible for the American worker.’

As the article notes, it is abundantly clear that partisanship matters.

A 2020 paper in the journal Nature Climate Change pointed to a clear dividing line in the U.S. Extreme weather tends to reinforce the link between climate change and weather effects in Democratic and/or highly educated communities—and less so elsewhere.

This dynamic means that extreme weather may actually be creating an opportunity for conservatives to cater to their base. As heat waves or flooding raises the specter of climate change for certain groups, others can use it to raise the specter of the costs of climate policy to rally their most loyal supporters who are primed to oppose it anyway.

It’s relatively easy to dismiss Trump’s rantings on the subject (okay, on any subject), but for most rational individuals, it is simply inconceivable that political operatives would ignore the dangers of climate change in order to play on the ignorance of their supporters–a strategy they must know increases the very real threats to humanity. (Perhaps none of them have grandchildren…)

Inconceivable or not, according to a story in the Guardian, that strategy is deliberate.

An alliance of rightwing groups has crafted an extensive presidential proposal to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition, it has emerged. Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying think-tank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch.

Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president, writes Dharna Noor. Climate experts and advocates have criticized planning that would dismantle US climate policy. The guide’s chapter on the US Department of Energy proposes eliminating three agency offices that are crucial for the energy transition, and also calls to slash funding to the agency’s grid deployment office in an effort to stymie renewable energy deployment, E&E News reported this week.

The plan is nothing if not thorough; electing a Republican President who would implement it would be nothing short of suicidal. 

The part of the plan dealing with the Department of Energy (which would also hugely expand gas infrastructure) was authored by Bernard McNamee, formerly a senior advisor to Ted Cruz. McNamee previously led the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation, which fights environmental regulation.

Another chapter focuses on gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and moving it away from its focus on the climate crisis. It proposes cutting the agency’s environmental justice and public engagement functions, while shrinking it as a whole by terminating new hires in “low-value programs”, E&E News reported. The proposal was written Mandy Gunasekara, who was the former chief of staff at the EPA under Trump.

Efforts to undermine existing environmental safeguards aren’t limited to Rightwing think-tanks. GOP members of the House continually attack federal climate funding in their spending bill proposals, putting numerous governmental functions at risk.

Earlier this month, the Clean Budget Coalition– – composed of more than 250 advocacy groups – warned that Republican representatives were slipping restrictions on climate spending into the government’s annual spending bills, bills that must be passed before current funding expires on 30 September to avoid a government shutdown. This week, the coalition found that House Republicans had added additional “poison pills” to spending bills, including ones that target environmental funding.

The ragtag group of Republicans running for President are echoing this insanity–none more enthusiastically than Indiana’s “gift” to the nation, Mr. Piety Pence.

Pence–a longtime climate-change denier who (fortunately) has about as much chance of being President as I do–recently unveiled an economic proposal that includes eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency and reversing President Biden’s efforts to curb the impacts of climate change.

This Republican attack on sanity raises the stakes. Voting Blue is no longer “just” about fighting racism and homophobia, regaining women’s autonomy and protecting democracy.

It’s not hyperbole to say it’s about protecting life on Earth.

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Diagnosis And Prescription

In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, David French shared his theory that the recent, astonishing number of sign-ups to Meta’s Threads occurred–at least in part– “because Elon Musk did to Twitter what Donald Trump did to America.”

Not that Twitter was so great before Musk acquired it–as French quite accurately notes,  understanding what Musk did to Twitter doesn’t require an exaggeration of Twitter’s virtues before Musk, “any more than we should exaggerate the health of our body politic before Trump.”

Even before Musk, Twitter had become a toxic force in American culture, so toxic that I wrote last year it might be beyond repair. The site lurched from outrage to outrage, and the constant drumbeat of anger and crisis was bad for the soul.
So, yes, when Musk purchased Twitter, it needed help. Instead, he made it worse. Much worse.

For all of Twitter’s many flaws, it was still by far the best social media app for following breaking news, especially if you knew which accounts to follow. It was also the best app for seeing the thoughts of journalists, politicians and scholars in real time, sometimes to our detriment. It wasn’t the American town square — there are still many places where we talk to one another — but it was one of our town squares. Twitter mattered.

French enumerates the numerous decisions that have made the platform much worse–decisions that rather clearly rested on Musk’s flawed understanding of its strengths and weaknesses.

French’s essay makes a point that is applicable not just to the marketing of a social media platform, but to policy–and for that matter, human decision-making–more generally. As he says,

The new right’s theory of culture and power is fundamentally flawed, and both Trump and Musk are now cautionary tales for any conservatives who are willing to learn.

According to French,

The new right’s theory of power is based on a model of domination and imposition, and it just doesn’t work. In the new right’s telling, the story of contemporary American culture is the story of progressive elite capture of the nation’s most important institutions — from the academy to big business to pop culture to the “deep state” — followed by its remorseless use of that institutional power to warp and distort American values.

And what’s the new right’s response to its theory of the left’s use of power? Fight fire with fire. Take over institutions. They tried to cancel us? Cancel them. They bullied us? Bully them.

The “cautionary tale” to which French alludes is actually pretty simple: in order to fix a problem, you need to diagnose it properly. Medical personnel understand that–duh!– if the disease being treated isn’t the disease from which you’re suffering, you won’t be cured. If a social dysfunction is rooted in X and policymakers insist upon addressing it by attacking Y, the likely result will just be additional dysfunction.

That axiom is simple, but of course, its application can be complicated. The actual roots of many social problems are complex. That said, a significant cause of America’s political divisions can be found in the wildly different diagnoses of the country’s problems offered by the GOP cult and by more thoughtful Americans.

The cult is convinced that America’s problems are rooted in a modernity that has discarded “tradition,” by which they mean the dominance of White Christian males. The cult’s frantic efforts to outlaw abortion and its attacks on efforts to increase diversity, inclusion and equity grow out of that diagnosis. The most recent example: House amendments to the bill funding the military– funding that passed only after the far Right attached provisions limiting abortion rights, gender transition procedures and diversity training in the armed forces.

When a diagnosis–an explanation of causation–is rooted in fantasy, the medicine prescribed is likely to make the condition worse. Gun violence won’t be ameliorated by making more guns available to “good guys;” the working poor won’t be helped by reducing taxes on presumed “job creators;” history won’t disappear if we pass laws against teaching it…

What happens when a sizable portion of the polity misdiagnoses reality–when the “medicine” imposed by people in power is exactly the wrong prescription? We’ve seen the result. As French put it, a government that needed reform “encountered a politician who broke far more than he built. A social media platform that needed repair was purchased by its most prominent troll. The results were predictable.”

We inhabit a complicated world. It isn’t always easy to locate the roots of our problems–but government by people whose diagnoses and prescriptions are  reliably simple and just as reliably wrong won’t cure what ails us.

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What About Whataboutism?

There are two kinds of “whataboutism.”

We’re all familiar with the first, which became fashionable thanks to TFG and is now a repeated response by those defending him. Did he try to overturn the election? Endanger American security by stealing classified and highly sensitive documents? Brag about grabbing women by the you-know-what?

Well, what about Hilary’s emails?

That particular expression of what has come to be called “whataboutism” is considerably less effective as the evidence of Trump’s activities has mounted; rational folks (granted, a smaller part of the population than I used to think) understand the difference between traitorous behavior and inadequate attention to the rules governing electronic devices.

Another form of whataboutism seems to be growing, however, and it is far more destructive of the civic landscape. It is manifested by otherwise reasonable people–many of whom hold progressive political values, but for one reason or another, have given in to cynicism and embraced a “plague on all their houses” viewpoint.

Has Republican A expressed a particularly racist or misogynist worldview? Critics of Republican A are met with “well, what about Democrat C, who once made a Polish joke?”

Is a Republican officeholder accused of criminal behavior? Well, there are undoubtedly Democrats who are just as crooked. Or just as greedy. Often, expression of those sentiments is followed by a pledge to abstain from voting, or an equally counterproductive plan to vote for a doomed third-party candidate.

Here’s the thing: the cynics aren’t wrong when they point out that no party has a monopoly on virtue. Are there dishonest, greedy Democrats? Sure. Does the Democratic Party include officeholders who shade the truth, act in less than honorable ways, harbor prejudices, and (horrors!)fail to prioritize your pet issue? Undoubtedly.

Excuse me, but– except in very rare, very outrageous cases–it shouldn’t affect your vote or your other  political support.

Talk about a double standard: non-insane Republicans who recognize the lunacy of the contemporary MAGA base repeatedly excuse the pandering and lying of the party’s candidates by telling themselves that candidates “have to” feed the prejudices and support the conspiracy theories of the GOP base in order to win elections. They assure themselves that those candidates really do know better, and they obediently march to the polls and cast ballots for anyone sporting an “R” next to the name.

On the other hand, Democrats all too often consider themselves too pure to do likewise.

Those who embrace a “pox on all your houses” view ostentatiously wash their hands of the political process, nursing their offended virtue. The offending candidate doesn’t even need to be dishonest or bigoted–in many cases, the mere fact that he or she once took a position with which the critic disagreed is enough to justify a self-righteous withdrawal of support.

This display of ideological purity isn’t simply immature. Given the agendas of today’s political parties, it’s suicidal.

Today’s Republican Party embraces an agenda that represents a U-turn from the principles that once characterized it. It is now the party of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis,  Marjorie Taylor Green, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. (When even a thoroughly corrupt Mitch McConnell begins to look statesmanlike by comparison, the GOP rot is all too evident.)

The current Democratic Party is all that stands in the way of control by a cult that wants nothing more than a return to the “good old times”– separate drinking fountains for Whites and Blacks,  LGBTQ citizens consigned to the closet, and women dying  from back-alley abortions.

Some wise person coined the a phrase that’s appropriate to the choice Americans face in upcoming elections: Never let the perfect become the enemy of the good.

We got Donald Trump because a lot of Americans didn’t like Hillary Clinton. They didn’t agree with positions Bill had taken, or they found her personality unpalatable, or they just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a woman…So they stayed away or voted for Jill Stein in states where those decisions made a difference.

And America got Donald Trump and an alternate reality that continues to appeal to a  number of  Americans whose lives aren’t going the way they wanted and who desperately need someone or something to blame for their problems.

Joe Biden has been an impressive and consequential President. It is a travesty that more Americans don’t recognize the significant achievements of his administration. It hasn’t been perfect, but it has been considerably better than good.

I’m confident that more Americans will vote for Biden than for whatever mean-spirited candidate emerges from the chaos of today’s GOP, but–given the Electoral College–Biden could be defeated by the “whatabouters” who consider themselves too pure to cast a ballot for an old guy who’s less than perfect.

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