"'Cause it Runs in the Family:" Thoughts on Krista Ford, Whores and Stupidity

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On Senator Joyce Fairbairn

Anyone who has seen Alzheimer’s up close (and, at this point, I would imagine that almost everybody has) knows just what a cruel disease it is. It effectively kills a person years before they physically die and causes the patient's family untold anguish. Alzheimer’s is among the very ugliest things that can befall a human being and anyone who suffers from it, and especially their families, has my deepest and most sincere sympathy.

The date of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis is almost wholly irrelevant. A diagnosis merely creates an opportunity for treatment that might slow the destructive progress of the disease. But the decline of patient's facilities is apparent for months, and often years, before that dreaded diagnosis comes. As Monica Crowley recounted in her book Nixon Off the Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics, Richard Nixon commented on Ronald Reagan's apparent befuddlement more than a year before Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. As a matter of fact, President Nixon died almost six months before President Reagan's final letter to the American people was written.

As much as some people would like to pretend differently, the story of Senator Joyce Fairbairn isn't about Alzheimer’s. It isn't even so much about Senator Fairbairn herself, despite the wishes of certain partisans to make it so. More precisely, it is about how politics is often crueller than even Alzheimer’s.

Canadians were told last week that Senator Fairbairn was declared legally incompetent in April, and a declaration to that effect was signed by her party's leader in the Senate, James Cowan. Such a declaration would prevent Joyce Fairbairn from buying or selling a home or stock, or testifying in a trial. I can't imagine that she would be legally allowed to drive a car. It did not, however, prevent her from voting in the Senate.

By the point that someone is declared legally incompetent from dementia - something that doctors and judges decidedly do not do frivolously - they often don't know where they are or why they're there. People that they've known their entire lifetimes are strangers to them. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my grandmother spent several years thinking that I was my grandfather, who died about six months before I was born.

Being taken to the Senate chamber every day and sitting there must be a terrifying ritual for the Ms. Fairbairn. God only knows what air travel to and from Alberta must out her through, Remember, this is a woman that requires 24-hour-a-day constant care. And in her moments of clarity, she is very likely tortured by what's happening to her by being reminded of the honourable office that she holds to this day and her inability to carry out its duties. I cannot possibily imagine what this must be doing to her, despite having seen it in close proximity myself.

When I first heard the story, I wondered to myself why the Senator was still in office. If her disease progressed so rapidly that the declaration of legal incompetence was a shock to her and the Liberal Party, that would be one thing. It would also be highly unusual, since Alzheimer's - a slowly degenerative disease - almost never works that way. I suspected that something deeper, and more darkly political was afoot.

In this morning's National Post, Jonathan Kay confirms my suspicions.

“Jim Cowan [is] a serious guy who was appointed to the Senate Liberal leadership by Paul Martin,” he told me. “He has no control over the Senate Liberals, because the most active are Chrétien appointees who have nothing but contempt for the Martin gang. So even if Jim wanted to do the right thing, my bet is the Chrétienites … insisted that [Joyce Fairbairn] be kept in the Chamber despite her illness. They are [allegedly unprincipled individuals] who sent a member of Joyce’s staff to her house every day; to bring her to work when they knew she was ill. All this not to help her, but to delay [Stephen Harper] from appointing another elected Alberta senator to replace her. Watch what happens next. They will try to claim she is on ‘sick leave’ for the next two years. Just another way to [delay] the pick, and use her office budget to hire staff to work on party politics.”

“Their game now,” he added, will be to “attack the nasty Tories” for making an issue of Fairbairn. “These guys have no shame.”

He also added that “the PMO is urging us to keep quiet, because they fear the Liberals will find some way to blame us.” Thus his refusal to let me use his name.

According to this veteran Conservative Senator, Fairbairn’s saga has been going on at least since 2009. Since then, he says, “we [Senators] have been quietly asked not to challenge Joyce in Committee or the Chamber, because she wasn’t well. This game of being ‘nice’ has been going on for too long.”

Kay's source, it should be noted, is "a veteran Conservative Senator," so his motives might be less than pure. But it certainly conforms to how politics works. And I include in this the allusion to "being 'nice.'"

This isn't, according to the Conservative Senator, a matter of party politics, at least not entirely. It's a continuation, in the most inhumane way imaginable, of the Chrétien-Martin civil war within the Liberal Party of Canada itself. That makes this story even more repugnant than it otherwise would be. And it would otherwise be plenty repugnant.

It seems logical to conclude that Senator Fairbairn is being kept in office for no other reason than that the Liberals want to hold her seat for as long as possible. My foreign readers should know that the Canadian Senate is an body appointed by the Prime Minister, in this case the Conservative Stephen Harper.

Of course, that only delays the inevitable. Under Canadian law, Senators are required to retire at 75, which Senator Fairbairn does in the fall of 2014, well before the next federal election. Harper will name her replacement, sooner or later. Until then, her staff is literally dragging her across Ottawa and sometimes across the country. And at any given time she might not know who those people are, where she's being taken, or why.

But there's money involved. Even if Joyce Fairbairn is on medical leave, the Grits will continue to be allowed to exploit her office budget to the party's political ends. And that's truly despicable. A political party that can't get along with one another is using a desperately ill woman for money and politics. This might be one of the more personally awful things that I've heard about in politics. And if Jonathan Kay and his Conservative source are correct, this has been ongoing since sometime in  2009, not this past April.

But it gets worse. Because Liberals are Liberals, they're hiding their own conduct behind the shield of Senator Fairbairn's savage suffering. Their more rabid partisans are threatening to exploit the frailties of Conservative MPs and Senators should anyone treat l'affaire Fairbairn with anything other than complete silence.

To that I say, "Good."

I haven't voted for the Conservatives in well over a decade, and everything about Harper's governance has affirmed the correctness of that decision. I carry no water for them whatsoever. If anything, the Tory insistence on becoming the Liberals causes me to hold them in even greater contempt than I hold the Grits. And I wasn't sure that I was capable of that.

More importantly, the people need to know if their constitutional representatives, whether elected or appointed, are in any way impaired from carrying out their duties, either physically, ethically or morally. An uninformed democracy isn't a democracy at all, and we're plenty uninformed without some insider code of silence that prevents us from knowing everything we should.

You might recall that I didn't share the conservative (large or small "C") outrage when Public Safety Minister Vic Towes' divorce pleadings were leaked by a Liberal staffer. That's exactly the kind of thing the people should know about those at the very top of the legal establishment of the nation, especially when they consciously compare their political opponents to child pornographers.

As a Manitoba Cabinet minister, Towes was responsible for naming judges to the bench and he presumes to become a Court of Appeal judge himself. And the Conservatives who were outraged by the Towes story are themselves hypocrites, given the fun they had with the story of Jack Layton's massage parlour arrest in the 90's, which was almost certainly leaked by the Liberals.

I'm of the opinion that Adam Carroll (aka Vikileaks) and Anonymous performed a valuable public service. If the Liberals want to seek "vengeance" by exposing lawmakers in situations similar to Senator Fairbairn's, I'm actually okay with that.

But I know they won't. They'll report seeing a Member drunk in a bar or doing something that in no way impairs their legislative duties. The Liberals (and in fairness, the Conservatives increasingly) are masters of false equivilience.

I have yet to see anyone, anyone at all, treat Senator Joyce Fairbairn unfairly except the Liberal Party of Canada. To keep her in Ottawa when she's been legally declared unable to fulfill her constitutional duties is nothing short of a national disgrace. And to do it for reasons of political advantage and money should tell you everything you need to know about the people doing it. This has nothing to do with Senator Fairbairn and everything to do with the political apparatus that surrounds her.

At this point, I would normally go on a 300-plus word, wildly entertaining rant about why the Liberals no longer deserve to exist. Today, I don't have to. Their actions make my argument far better than I ever could.


Update - 4:19 PM: Ah, I see it's already begun. I do hope that this column names names, gives dates and cites specifics, allowing those involved to defend their reputations in a court of law against its author and the media conglomerate that publishes him. If the column doesn't do that, then you again know everything you need to about the author and publisher.

It's very probably yet another chickenshit attempt to defend the indefensible without having the courage to do it honestly, instead relying on blackmail.

Of course, the coulmn could cite dead politicians, cleverly protecting himself and his publisher from libel action. I wouldn't expect anything less.

OPSEC Hypocrisy

There's nothing more adorable than partisan Republicans running around screaming about leaking classified national security information at this late date. You really just want to ruffle the hair on their little pin heads and congraulate them for learning to lie like adults.

For the record, I'm not suggesting that you have to like these kinds of political leaks, although I often do approve of unauthorized leaks. For example, I have yet to write anything condemning Wikileaks or classified operations (such as the NSA's then-illegal domestic surveillance) winding up in The New York Times.

I'm not a big believer in the idea that you can have a secret government in a democracy. I recognize that some things need to be classified, but those instances should be few and very far between. If the government can't proudly admit that it has done something, it should almost always avoid doing it.

Republicans were horrified when President Obama publicly acknowledged that the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossedegh in 1953. Of course, any American who was interested already knew that the CIA had done it, and it did sort of shape the history of the region from that day forward, but it made the United States look bad.

And that's where one of the primary dangers of the classification culture lies. Did you know that, for just one example, the American government continues to classify documents from the First World War? I somehow doubt that there's any real danger of the Kaiser or the Austro-Hungarians using that information to the detriment of America's national security, but try convincing Washington of that. Not long before his retirement, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a seminal book on the tens of millions of documents that have been unnecessarily classified and the culture that breeds.

When something can be easily classified, you find that everything can be. In November of 2001, President Bush amended the Presidential Records Act with Executive Order 13233, which made access to records by historians (begininng with the Reagan Administration's) virtually impossible. 13233 extended the same protection to vice-presidential records, as well. In a directive to the US Archivist, Bush explained that he might "may claim a constitutionally based privilege" over the records. And Executive Orer 13233 was above and beyond the usual classification process.

Classification can also be a gateway to criminal behaviour by presidents. The aforementioned NSA program was clearly illegal under both the Foreign Surveillance Act of 1978 and the National Security Act of 1948. But it was classified, so there wasn't much anyone could do about it. Even referring the matter to the House Judicary Committee for impeachment proceedings could very well have constituted a federal crime.

Operation Stellar Wind almost created a constitutional crisis of another kind in 2004.

There were internal disputes within the Justice Department about the legality of the program, because data is collected for large numbers of people, not just the subjects of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants. In March 2004, the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft ruled that the program was illegal. The day after the ruling, Ashcroft became critically ill with acute pancreatitis. President Bush sent White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andrew Card Jr. to Ashcroft's hospital bed, where Ashcroft lay semiconscious, to request that he sign a document reversing the Justice Department's ruling. However, Ashcroft was incapable of signing the document. Bush then reauthorized the operation, over formal Justice Department objections. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Robert Mueller, Acting Attorney General James Comey, and many prominent members of the Justice Department were prepared to resign over the matter. Valerie Caproni the FBI general counsel, said, "From my perspective, there was a very real likelihood of a collapse of government." Bush subsequently reversed the authorization.

Simply put, the entire top echelon of American law enforcement could have resigned overnight and not been able to tell the public why. That would have made the Saturday Night Massacre seem mild in comparison and would have crippled the government in the middle of two wars.

You can even argue that Watergate itself was a result of extensive secrecy within the Executive Branch.

Most scholars believe that the scandal began with the leak of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg. But the memoirs of both President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, show that Nixon wasn't concerned about it. Nixon had nothing to do with the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of the Vietnam War through the end of Lyndon Johnson's presidency. The material Ellsberg leaked, Nixon thought, would only embarrass his lifelong enemies in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

But Kissinger pointed out to Nixon that they were involved in sensitive and highly secret (so secret that even Vice President Agnew wasn't aware of them) negotiations that would lead to the "China opening." Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, according to Kissinger, wouldn't deal with an American president who couldn't keep his own secrets. It was only then that Nixon set in motion the events that would ultimately lead to his resignation of the presidency. He created the "plumbers unit" that famously broke into the Watergate, but only after a "black bag" job at the office of Ellsberg's Los Angeles phychatrist.

Granted, it should be noted that by the time the Pentagon Papers were leaked, Nixon and Kissinger were illegally wiretapping, through the good offices of J.Edgar Hoover, several journalists and members of Kissinger's own staff in relation to other leaks. No one was fired, let alone prosecuted, for those leaks, although they did greatly complicate Kissinger's own confirmation as Secretary of State.

Secrecy, classification and leaks are the way Washington does business and has for generations. You may not like it, but there's very little getting around it.

What I find problematic is the Republican Party's new-found obsession with integrity when it comes to national security-related information. And that's where the Special Operations  Political Action Committee enters our discussion.

 

Even though the above video is the creation of fevered GOP hacks, I encourage you all to watch it, if for no other reason than it's hilarious. Former Navy SEAL, Ben Smith in particular might be the most transparent hack on the face of the earth.

Actually, sir, Obama did whack Osama bin Laden. You know how I know that? Because if the operation went sideways and a bunch of SEALs get killed instead, he alone would have been blamed for it. Ask Jimmy Carter how that works. So spare me the sanctimony, you prick.

Before I go further, I should state my opinion on the bin Laden operation. When Barack Obama said during the 2008 campaign that he would go into Pakistan to get him, I joined Hillary Clinton, John McCain and, yes, even Mitt Romney in thinking it was a fantastically bad idea. I still think it was a bad idea because we may not know the real consequences of it for several more years. The Pakistanis are unpredictable folks, and they're pretty much going to be running the show in Afghanistan after the rest of us get out. Humiliating the ISI may yet have consequences that outweigh the benefit of putting a plug into bin Laden's noggin. And President Obama will be held to account for those consequences, as well.

First, almost every accusation that OPSEC PAC makes has been carefully disassembled by Peter Bergen, who knows more about al-Qaeda than almost anyone else on the planet.

Second, Obama might not have had to announce the bin Laden attack if the SEALs didn't crash their own secret helicopter. Does anyone think that the Pakistanis would have kept that secret for them after a foreign military invaded one of their heavily populated cities? Really?

Third, Republicans sure react differently about retired military speaking out against their civilian masters depending on which civilian masters are being spoken out against.

The Night of the Generals was as instructive as anything possibly could be. In 2006, a number of retired senior military and policy advisors publicly called for the resignation (or firing) of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the growing debacle in Iraq. These were incredibly serious people with centuries of experience between them. Some were close personal friends and ideological allies of Rumsfeld himself. Nobody in the OPSEC PAC rises to the level of rank or experience as those who participated in the "Generals' revolt" of 2006.

Practically every Republican house organ compared what the generals were doing as something akin to treason, "preening" for the "Leftist press" and the "defeatist" mainstream media. Of course, as soon as President Bush did fire Rumsfeld, those criticisms went down the memory hole.

At this point, I should bring in some more history.

For example, we know that President Bush very selectively declassified the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to further the case for removing Saddam Hussein. The declassification was selective in that it gave the impression that America's intelligence community was unanimous in its assessement that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Left out of the declassification was the fact that the intelligence branches of the Air Force and the Department of Energy dissented. The community also had a much lower level of confidence in the findings than the administration presented them as having.

Then there was the deliberate leak of Valarie Plame's identity as a CIA operative. We now know that the intial leak came from Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who admitted the leak immediately to investigators. But there's hardly a journalist alive who would run a story like that with only a single source. Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff (and Counsellor to the President) Scooter Libby and Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff - and political consigliere - Karl Rove helpfully confirmed the Armitage leak. In Libby's case, it was confirmed to several reporters, including Tim Russert and Matthew Cooper.

Upon Libby's conviction in relation to the Plame leak, President Bush committed what I consider to be a disgraceful act in commuting his sentence, which most Republicans applauded. But even that wasn't enough. In the closing days of the administration, Vice President Cheney, again supported by innumerable Republican partisans, repeatedly asked the President to pardon Libby outright.

While we're on the topic of the selective outrage over national security leaks, there's a story just today that highlights it.

The author of a recently announced insider account of the raid that killed Usama bin Laden has been identified to Fox News as a 36-year-old former Navy SEAL Team 6 member from Alaska who also played a role in the high-profile rescue of an American captain kidnapped by Somali pirates.

The book, "No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden," is set to hit shelves on Sept 11. It is penned under the pseudonym "Mark Owen," according to the publisher, but multiple sources told Fox News his name is in fact Matt Bissonnette, 36, of Wrangell, Alaska. Bissonnette could be exposing himself to legal trouble, as the Pentagon has not vetted the account.

The tell-all book also has apparently upset a large population of former and current SEAL members who worry about releasing information that could compromise future missions. One Navy SEAL told Fox News, "How do we tell our guys to stay quiet when this guy won't?" Other SEALs are expressing anger, with some going so far as to call him a "traitor."

Because the bin Laden raid was actually a CIA operation that was carried out by the SEALs, not sending the manuscript of "No Easy Day" to Langley for security review may (or may not, the structure of the hit makes it legally questionable) a federal crime.

But you know what else is a crime? Knowingly revealing the name of someone who participated in two classified operations, which "multiple sources" did and Fox News ran with. Moreover, they very helpfully told the extremists who might want to exact revenge, where he lives.

Of course this, like other national security leaks that  don't help the GOP politically, is registering very low on the Republican Outrage Meter. Why, I'll bet that Sean Hannity doesn't devote 1.100th ofthe time to the leak of Matt Bissonnette's name as he did to ball-washing OPSEC PAC and their retarded theories of how life really works.

And that's why these people can't be taken seriously. Fox News, along with innumerable blogging morons, can't throw around classified names while still presenting themselves as Patriotic Protectors of National Security.

Well, I guess that you can. but you expose yourself as being nothing better than what you accuse Barack Obama of being: a partisan glory hound that holds the fortune of his own party above that of the national security of the United States.

In the end, OPSEC PAC and it's birther leader, should be viewed for what it is: a ridiculous (if well-financed and connected) Republican joke.

The Retired Cocksuckers of America Have Spoken - UPDATED

So I've spent most of the last week watching the fallout of Jenna Jameson's endorsement of Mitt Romney on Twitter. It's actually been every bit as entertaining as you would think it is.

While at a San Fransisco strip club earlier this month, the Artist Formerly Known as Jenna Marie Massoli told a CBS reporter that, "When you're rich, you want a Republican in office."

There's no disputing Jenna's wealth. Far and away the most successful performer in pornography's storied history, she was reported to have earned $24 million by the time she was 24 years old. By 2005, her website, ClubJenna, was generating annual revenues of about $30 million and profits of roughly $15 million. A year later, she sold it to Playboy for a metric shit-ton of money.

If I knew that cocksucking could be so lucrative, I likely would've rethought my priorities when I was a much younger man. I too once had a really pretty mouth.

However, she's superior to me in almost every way. In the late 90s, Jenna Jameson was the ultimate porno slut. Her body was the very definition of perfection. Sure, she had D cup implants, but they weren't obnoxious or comical in the way that most smut fakers usually are. Her ass was heart-breaking, which she acknowledged with a "Heart Breaker" tattoo on the upper right cheek. She was also blessed with one of the prettiest cunts I've ever seen, either in person or on film. And I'm renowned the world over for my extensive studies of cunt. I've buried my face in so much of it that I'm actually recognized as an expert by courts in multiple jurisdictions.

Jenna's real money-maker was her face. She was the perfect "Girl Next Door," in a way that no porn star has been, before or since. Women in the industry now are, on average, far more beautiful than they were even in Jameson's heyday, but you can't imagine any of them being the corn-fed cheerleader that Middle America instantly falls in love with. Jenna did project that, which is what made watching her swallowing a gigantic wang feel so wrong that it just had to be right. To this day, she remains the ideal that industry never again matched.

I could write a New Yorker- length expose on the things that I've done to myself while watching Jenna's fine films, making it a mystery while David Remnick hasn't hired me yet. I can easily match his 15,000 word essay to the majesty of Bruce Springsteen with my own equally florid testament to the little slice of heaven that lives between Jenna Jameson's legs.

That Jenna Jameson, the one that caused me to beat off to the point of functional illiteracy, I would follow directly into hell, irrespective of her asinine opinions on politics and economics. I know that it would be factually wrong, but following the instincts of my groin hasn't led me wrong yet, has it?

The only problem is that that Jenna died somewhere around the time that she started ClubJenna with  her erstwhile husband, Jay Grdina (formerly Justin Sterling.) At that point, her porn started to become arthouse projects, with fast cuts and bizarre breakaways. I love Belladonna the way that most Christians love their bible, but the editing in Bella Loves Jenna distracted me from truly savouring watching her eat Jenna's pussy and finger her asshole.

Like respectable conservatives everywhere, I take a hard line against artistic elitism. It's really, really hard to beat off when I have think about what I'm beating off to. Were it up to me, most porn would be filmed by Kevin Smith, all static shots, intricate dialogue and Rosario Dawson. Also, Belladonna would be fucking herself with the business end of a baseball bat in all of them. Again, like most conservatives, I consider myself a traditionalist. I'm pretty sure that Bill O'Reilly feels the same way.

Worse, Ms. Jameson started to fall apart in a big bad way around 2005. Even though she's four years younger than I am, she started looking a decade older. Granted, I'm remarkably well-preserved, which I credit to my copious intake of cocaine and scotch, along with a truly strenuous fuck regime, but I also don't have a make-up staff and an editing suite at my disposal.

Jenna lost a ton of weight, took her tits out and got some awesomely odd lip implants that made her look like an emaciated duck. After shitting out a couple of some MMA guy's kids, her transformation into a well-coiffed Holocaust survivor was complete. By 2009 she passed by the MILF market and went into a stage that only someone with a necrophilia fetish could love. It was one of the most terrifying things I've ever witnessed. It's a safe bet that her 2006 retirement from professional cocksucking wasn't entirely voluntary.

As you might imagine, I have no problem criticizing the political and economic ideas of a girl who wound up looking like that. Intellectual discourse is considerably easier when you're taking issue with a woman whose ass you don't want to slide your tongue inside. That's just good science, people.

You would think that modern Republican economics would work out nicely for the rich. In fact, the opposite is true.

Back when Jenna Jameson was the hottest thing on Earth, I was dating a woman in California. Going to see her between 1999 and 2002 was insanely expensive, given the exchange rate between the U.S and Canadian dollars. To buy a dollar's worth of something in California then cost me about $1.43.

During the last three weeks of the 2004 presidential campaign, I was with a woman in Michigan. By then my funny-looking money was worth considerably more; a dollar's worth of American stuff only cost about a buck twenty five.

By the time Barack Obama was elected the Canadian dollar was trading about even with its American counterpart. And it's pretty much stayed there ever since. I was slamming crotches of some broad from Pennsylvania at the time, and she couldn't stop complaining about how expensive Toronto had become.

I'll let you in on a little secret. Giant bronze coins with loons on them don't actually have magical powers of appreciation. The fact is that the Greenback has depreciated dramatically, due almost entirely to Republican economic policies. The Bush Administration's (and that of the Republican Congress) allergy to money cut the value of the dollar almost in half.

During the Clinton Administration, Jenna was under contract to Wicked Pictures, who paid her a fortune. Not long after the first Bush tax cut passed, she was working for herself under the ClubJenna banner. So yes, she was bringing in more take-home money under the Bush regime because there was no middle-man and she was paying about 3% less in federal taxes, but the money she was bringing home was worth less and less in real terms.

Were it not for the Euro crisis and interest rates that have been at nearly zero for almost five years, the money ClubJenna made would be almost meaningless. In terms of real purchasing power, she was probably making more working for Wicked under Clinton than she was working for herself under Bush. In terms that almost anyone can understand. every cumshot that Jenna Jameson took to the face after 2003 was worth about half as much as the ones she took in the 90's.

I'm of the considered scientific opinion that each blowjob I get is more priceless than the last. But for Jenna Jameson, it was different. Every knob she polished over the years (And the only one she polished during the years she worked for herself was her loser husband's)  had a lower rate of return than the one's she had worked a decade earlier.

Joesph Kennedy, Sr. had a great way of ignoring the way he made his fortune. Despite becoming rich from bootlegging and stock manipulation, he ignored the fact the fact that FDR closed those loopholes for everyone else as he supported him.

Jenna Jameson is essentially doing the same thing in supporting the GOP. Richard Nixon buried the 1969 President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography as soon as it revealed that porn was among the five most wonderful things on Earth. Nixon then sent to prison a cat who thought it humorous to print an illustrated version of said report a year later. The only dissenting opinion in the report was written by the anti-porn activist, and later celebrated fraudster, Charles Keating. Keating was Nixon's only appointee to the Commission.

The Reagan Administration's Meese Report (The 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography) was also heavily skewed to the religious right's point of view and ignored most available scientific evidence and lead to increased federal obscenity prosecutions in the late 1980s.

The greatest obscenity ever was what happened after 9/11. Flush with new money, Attorney General John Ashcroft directed the Department of Justice to increase the resources devoted obscenity prosecutions. After all, it wasn't as if the United States wasn't at war or faced with near-constant terrorist threats, or anything. In taking the Miller test to a retarded new level, DOJ managed to put Max Hardcore away in the federal hoosegow for a good long time.

The case of United States of America v. Paul F. Little is instructive. DOJ ordered Hardcore's material through the mail from the northern district of Florida, instead of prosecuting him where the material was actually produced, California. Remember, it wasn't the state of Florida - who would've had the controlling jurisdiction - that filed charges, it was the federal government. They went jurisdiction shopping solely in order to get a conviction.

Despite listening to years of supposedly conservative voices bitch about the "chilling" effects of First Amendment guarantees by private persons and institutions, not a single Republican voice that I'm aware of spoke out against the Federal government's abuses in the Little case. Not one.

The facts are clear. Republicans are far more likely than not to shithammer pornography with the full force of the federal government simply because it pleases their superstiitous base. There doesn't seem to be much of a debate about "small, limited government" in federal obscenity prosecutions, even though the controlling case law, Miller v. California, seems tailored to state and local cases, which almost never happen.

While you can an (albeit counter factual) argument that " "When you're rich, you want a Republican in office," you can't argue that Republicans are anything but detrimental to way that professional cocksuckers like Jenna Jameson got rich in the first fucking place. Well, I guess you can, because she does. But you can't do it honestly.

Update - 23 August 2012: Ms. Jameson responds via Twitter:

I read your half ass piece you wrote on me. It was vapid and sad, a lot like your appearance

Now, if you know anything about me, you know how much that hurts. I'm epecially sensitive about looking "vapid and sad." That's a congenital defect and not something I can do anything about.

Or can I? Maybe if I dropped 40 pounds and got my lips done, I could take a smouldering mug shot, too!

Paul Ryan Sure is Eloquent

Uh, yeah. About that.

My Republican friends have been sort of pissy about my pointing out just how new-found the fiscal conservatism of their heroes actually is. It's harder for them to go nuts on me because I have a ton of archives that show that I've been doing this a lot longer than they have. I was using phrases like "banana republic" to describe the United States as far back as 2004. I'm not aware of another blogger with a record on the issue of deficit spending that matches mine. And I read a lot of blogs back then.

When Paul Ryan first came to prominence in 2009, I was surprised to learn that he had first been elected in 1998. So I got really curious about how much of a "fiscal hawk" he was through the Bush years.  I wasn't surprised to learn that the answer was "not very." Of the Bush programs that exploded the debt (and continues to today,) Congressman Ryan voted for precisely all of them.

I don't dislike the man necessarily. It's just that I don't take him all that seriously. He had every opportunity to stand up for fiscal discipline during the Bush years and, if he had, he would've immediately become my hero. But it seems awfully expedient to wait until noon on January 20th, 2009 to discover your principles.

Because liberals are dipshits, they want to paint Ryan as an ideologue, when nothing could be further from the truth. If they were smart, they'd play him as the consummate opportunist, which is much closer to reality.

Conservatives are rightly distrustful of the human condition. We know that if you give somebody an opportunity to fuck up without consequences, they'll very likely do so over and over again. This is where the "law and order" part of the movement comes from, as well as the inflexible opposition to the nanny state.

But most of the movement never holds their own standard bearers to that standard. Republicans spent the whole of the 90s bitching endlessly about the relatively tight-fisted spending of the Clinton Administration. But they just couldn't wait to vote for the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush, with his No Child Left Behind, Medicare schemes, gigantic tax cuts and plans to give federal money to church groups in ways that I'm shocked weren't found unconstitutional.

By 2004 it was clear just what these people were doing to America's future. The U.S dollar had already by then begun it's long slide into oblivion and the country was experiencing its weakest growth since the Depression. So what did these "fiscal hawks" do? They gathered around and worked their little hearts out to reelect George Bush.

It wasn't until the following year, during the Terri Schiavo mess, that I broke with those idiots forever, but I learned to keep a very close eye on what they said and did as it pertains to money. And I haven't gone wrong since.

I know that I'll likely catch endless shit from dishonest hacks for using a video from Chris Hayes and MSNBC, but watch that video. Watch the eloquence and passion with which he argues for Keynesian stimulus spending. He seemingly couldn't get enough of it. And if you think that his 2002 vote was a youthful indiscretion, know that he voted for the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which also helped accelerate the disintegration of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are political operators, who will say and do whatever plays well in the cheap seats, where nobody can see what's really going on. In my heart of hearts, I actually want to see them win with both houes of Congress because I know exactly how they'll govern. They'll pass their giant tax cuts, but no spendng cuts will follow. They'll always find some "emergency" to delay doing that.

And if you're thinking that they'll "repeal and replace" ObamaCare, you're fucking kidding yourselves. There's just no way for them to pay for the popular parts that they've promised to keep without the individual mandate. Besides, Romney's already passed an individual mandate. What makes anyone think that he'll repeal another one?

We already know that Paul Ryan is a giant pussy when spending is involved when he's in the majority. Why does anyone think that he wouldn't revert back to that as vice president?

Over the last several years, I've come to the painful conclusion that the truly "small, limited government" that I want in all respects (sorry, social conservatives) simply isn't possible in a democracy absent a fiscal disaster. Allegedly conservative politicians (such as the second Bush and Canada's Stephen Harper) will dilligently do whatever they can to buy voters with their own money, albeit in different ways than liberal politicians do. But the money's gone just the same.

But what I can do is insist that you actually pay for your vote buying schemes. Given that times are actually pretty dire, I'm of a mind that voters be presented with a bill for what they're projected goodies are gonna cost. Itemized and everything.

"You paid this much into Social Security and Medicare. Here's what we expect you to collect in benefits unless we get lucky and you die young. Here's the difference. And just because we're helpful, we adjusted the difference for inflation because your 1960s and '70s dollars were worth shit the second we collected them. Here's your share of our innumerable wars and the crippled kids that are going to require lifetime care as a result of them. Here's the projected cost of fixing the bridge that you very much not want to fal on your fucking noggin when you drive under it."

At the bottom, there would be several columns. One would be "What This Costs." The second would be "What You're Paying For It Now." The third would be "What You Would Pay For It Under Candidate A's Crazy Ass Tax Scheme." Then "Canadidate B's Crazy Ass Tax Scheme." and so on. Under each candidate's column, you'd see how much each scheme is going to cost your kids and grandkids in higher taxes, lower benefits and an expected lower standard of living.

I don't expect that'll make much of a difference (especially with Tea Partiers, who'll scream about "biased math") but it will stop idiotic voters from pleading ignorance about what their government costs as opposed to what they're paying for it.

In a perfect world, this tax notice would come a week before election day. In the following budget year, services would be apportioned exactly according to the election results. And the law would be written in such a way that no earmarks would granted to districts that voted to cut taxes and slash services. The federal government would be lawfully bound by the Budget Act to distribute more funds to a congressional district than they paid into federal taxes if said district also voted to cut taxes.

I would support a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution if it said the following "The Congress of the United States shall, under no circumstances, spend more money than it takes in." The catch is that there would be no loopholes. If a given president decides that he's absolutely hot to go to war with some country that three-quarters of the population can't find on a map, then he eliminates other shit from the budget to pay for it, including, if need be, Medicare and Social Security payments. If a hurricane wipes out a major city, no tax cut this year.

That would nicely prevent folks like Paul Ryan from demagoguing against stimulus money in public that he repeatedly ought out in private. But we know what Paul Ryan argues for when he's in the majority, don't we? By the way, why should defence contractors be operating in Wisconsin? Are they really in any imminent threat of invasion?

The only way to solve that horseshit is through my plan: Where you see what the government takes in, what the nonsense you want from it cost, and what the imbalance is.

If you want a generation of actual fiscal conservatives, as opposed to lobbyist tool Tea Party assholes, you'll get it really quick my way. Furthermore, nobody will be happy, which is the way it oughta be. If you're happy with the government, you're and asshole!

How to Lose an Election

There are some elections that it seems that you're just born to lose. No matter how strongly the public sentiment seems to be with you or how massively the polls suggest that you'll kick the other guy's ass, you'll somehow figure out a way to lose.

The Republicans did this with the Senate in 2010. The writing was so clearly on the wall that a number of Democratic incumbents up and quit, rather than face certain humiliation. It seemed almost impossible for the GOP to fuck up anything short of a outright takeover of the upper chamber.

But fuck it up they did. Full of hubris, ideological fervor and abject stupidity, Republican primary voters decided to take out respected incumbents in safe seats and nominate psychopaths, idiots and sundry other defectives instead. This is where people like Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller and Ken Buck came from and not, as legend has it, a laboratory in Center Earth that specializes in creating unelectable candidates.

Miller and Buck were actually leading in the polls for most of their respective races. In such a situation, a sensible frontrunner will the do the sensible thing: shut the fuck and hug their lead all the way through election day. Tea Party candidates are singularly incapable of doing that. They mistake general elections for primaries and think that the wider electorate believes the same superstitious nonsense that Republican primary voters do. Those people seemingly had to explain all the goofy shit they believed, and they had to do it in the most inarticulate way possible. They saved the Democrats a lot of time, money and effort in opposition research because these people wouldn't shut up, insisting on saying increasingly crazy things.

So Harry Reid lived to lie another day. Clear pick-ups in Delaware and Colorado were thrown away. The funniest outcome of all was in Alaska. After the primary defeat by Miller, Senator Lisa Murkowski ran as a write-in candidate and won, the first person to pull that off in a Senate race in over half a century. This came with the added benefit of humiliating Sarah Palin in her own backyard.

So when you hear a Tea Partier bitch about Reid and the Senate Democrat majority, do me a favor - slap them on the side of the head and remind them that it's their fault. The GOP had a really good shot of winning control, but the Tea Party - for no other reason than they're the Tea Party - decided to sink that by nominating mutants for the most easily winnable seats.

And, of course, it's not like the Tea Party is famous for learning from their mistakes. After all, why do that when you can blame the media? So now they're poised to ruin another election and the Republican party seems incapable of doing anything about it.

On November 7, 2006, incumbent Richard Lugar was unopposed by any major party candidate as no Democrat filed for the May 2006 primary. He was re-elected to his sixth six-year term with 87.3% of the vote.

You know, there was a time when if, in your previous race, you ran unopposed and won nearly 90% of the vote, no sane party would bother you. There was almost a time when Dick Lugar was one of the most conservative Republicans in Washington. But neither is true any longer, so the Tea Party took out Lugar and gave the nomination to some guy named Richard Mourdock instead.

As I write this, Mourdock is tied with Democrat Joe Donnelly, which isn't a good place for an Indiana Republican to be two months before the election. It's even worse when you consider that Mourdock has already been elected statewide twice and nobody knows who Donnelly is. Mourdock might pull out the narrowest of wins, but my spidey sense tells me that he probably won't.

Then there's Maine, where Olympia Snowe was unbeatable. She regularly won with huge margins, some over 70%, and in her thirty-four years in Congress, no Democrat had come close to beating her in one of the most liberal states in America. But the Jim DeMints of the world so pissed her off that she dropped out of her reelection race at the last minute. This pretty much guarantees that Independent former governor Angus King will win the seat and caucus with the Democrats.

Now we have Missouri, which might be the single most spectacular Republican fuck-up of all. In the run-up to the Republican primary, polling showed that the Democratic incumbent, Claire McCaskill, wasn't just going to lose, she was going to lose to any of the Republicans in the primary. Hers was the single most endangered seat the Democrats had. I heard rumours that the national party was going to throw her over the side and write the seat off.

Todd Akin won the Republican nomination a couple of weeks ago and wasted no time in blowing himself up.



That went over about as well as you would expect it to.

I'm not pro-choice, I'm pro-abortion, but I'm going to be honest with you. Akin probably has the only intellectually respectable pro-life position you can hold. To suggest that you believe in the sanctity of life also suggests that there are no exceptions for abortion except possibly the life of the mother. Otherwise, you're saying that some lives are just a little more sanctified than others, which pretty much makes you pro-choice. Watching pro-lifers tie themselves into intellectual knots over this has been one of the great joys of my life.

Akin would have been fine if he just said "Look, I believe that all unborn life is sacred. While rape and incest are horrific crimes, I don't believe that abortion is the answer to either of them." I would have disagreed with him, but would concede that his is a legitimate point of view.

Instead, he started opining on "legitimate rape" (which never fails to set off alarm bells in the heads of most women voters) and going into some crazed theory of reproductive biology that I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he picked up from some demented Japanese cartoon.

Todd Akin is fucking dead, folks. Not only do I know it, but Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS and the National Republican Senatorial Committee know it, too. They just cut off his money. As a matter of fact, the NRSC wants Akin out of the race entirely by close of business tomorrow.

Beating Claire McCaskill was supposed to be the easiest thing in the world. Well, as of today, it ain't so easy anymore. If Akin stays in and runs without money, McCaskill will bury him alive. But if drops out, the GOP is going to have to build a campaign from the ground up with just over two months to go and manage to beat an incumbent who appears to have gotten a second wind, which is easier said than done. Oh, and there's no guarantee that the replacement candidate won't go on TV and have crazy shit pop out of his or her mouth.

Rove and the NRSC probably know something I also do. John McCain won a pretty shocking (and unappreciated) upset in Missouri four years ago. As a national bellweather state (Missouri had only gone the wrong way in one presidential election since Dwight Eisenhower was president,) and given the Obama landslide, McCain should have been crushed there. Instead, he won a very narrow victory.

While McCain's carrying of Missouri can be built upon, it is a very fragile thing. Because Obama lost there in 2008 and because McCaskill was considered dead on her feet before yesterday, the President abandoned Missouri months ago.

There might be reason for his campaign to revisit that decision.

First, the Akin fiasco - and when you get your money cut off within 24 hours, the term "fiasco" is rather mild - could damage the GOP brand in the presidential race there. If Claire McCaskill can rise from the dead at this late date, who's to say that she can't grow a set of coat-tails, too?

Second, while it's true that Mitt Romney condemned Akin's remarks in what is pretty strong language for Romney, there's another small problem for him. That is that Todd Akin's position on abortion is exactly the same as Paul Ryan's. The Obama campaign would be out of their friggin' minds if they didn't make huge ad buys in St. Louis and Kansas City listing all of the crazed abortion bills that Akin and Ryan voted together on. And God help everyone if there's videotape of Ryan uttering the phrase "legitimate rape" floating around out there.

If Romney-Ryan has to start fighting for Missouri, they're in bad trouble. That means that they'll have to spend time and money that can't be spent in Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and Florida, where they're not doing as well as they should be. As of right now, I'd still give the state to Romney, but if he has another front opened up on him, I don't see how he survives it.

Am I holding the Republicans to  higher standard than I do anyone else? Sure, I do. To begin with, the GOP pretends to hold itself to a higher standard than they do anyone else. And, since almost the first day of the Obama Administration it shouldn't have been very hard for Republicans to win up and down the ballot. All they've had to do is smile, wave, kiss a baby, eat some pie, not get caught trying to suck-start another dude in airport bathroom and keep their fucking mouths shut.

You know why Ronald Reagan always pretended that he couldn't hear questions from reporters? Because he knew that an unforced error wouldn't help him, so he kept his fucking mouth shut. He also knew that when your opponents are less popular you than you are, you keep your fucking mouth shut.

In race after race after race, the GOP has screwed itself out healthy, majority-building victories because the Tea Party sucks at strategic planning and because their candidates just can't keep their fucking mouths shut.

Damning With Praise: The Revenge of John Boehner

In a lot of ways, I feel sorry for House Speaker John Boehner. Despite being a complete mediocrity, he strived mightily to get where he is today. And to think that it only took the indictment of Tom DeLay, the collapse of the Republican majority and resignation of Dennis Hastert, and the overreach of Barack Obama to do it. It really is a Triumph of the Will.

On the other hand, he became Speaker in the wake of the 2010 Tea Party wave. Tea Partiers hate Boehner almost as much as they do President Obama, probably because he's coloured, too. The House freshmen, working closely with Majority Leader Eric Cantor (who has been openly lusting after the speakership himself) have frustrated virtually everything Boehner has wanted to do.

His rhetoric aside, John Boehner comes from a pre-Tea Party era when Washington wasn't completely insane. He's an operator who knows that the most effective way to get things done is to cut deals, especially when the opposition party controls the White House. But because the freshman class is so large, he's effectively at its mercy, much like Newt Gingrich was before him. If Boehner makes deals that he believes are good for the country, he faces the prospect of the same kind of revolts that Gingrich did in mid-1997 and late 1998.

If you ever wondered why he's crying all the fucking time, now you know. John Boehner might be the first Speaker to effectively not have any real power. And don't think that the Obama White House hasn't noticed this. Over the last year they've learned that deals with Boehner are meaningless because he can't sell them to his own caucus, so they ignore him completely.

One of the most powerful actors in the Tea Party effort to undermine Boehner has been Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan. Ryan Lizza helpfully detailed that in The New Yorker a couple of weeks before Ryan was selected to be Mitt Romney's vice presidential nominee.

Whatever benefit the White House had seen in raising Ryan’s profile, his increasing power, and his credibility as the leading authority on conservative fiscal policy, soon made his imprimatur essential for any Republican trying to reach a compromise with Democrats. Ryan helped scuttle three deals on the budget. He had served on the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission but refused to endorse its final proposal, in December, 2010. When deficit negotiations moved from the failed commission to Congress, Ryan stuck with the extreme faction of the G.O.P. caucus, which withheld support from any of the leading bipartisan plans. In the summer of 2011, when a group of Democratic and Republican senators, known as the Gang of Six, produced their own agreement, Ryan’s detailed criticism helped sink it. And, also that summer, during high-level talks between the White House and Republican leaders, Cantor and Ryan reportedly pressured Boehner to reject a potential deal with President Obama.

Ryan had aligned himself with Cantor and the self-proclaimed Young Guns, who made life miserable for Boehner, their nominal leader. They were the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ryan plan, while Boehner had publicly criticized it. Cantor’s aides quietly promoted stories about Boehner’s alleged squishiness on issues dear to conservatives, and encouraged Capitol Hill newspapers to consider the idea that Cantor would one day replace Boehner. As the Republican negotiations with the White House fizzled in the summer of 2011, Barry Jackson, Boehner’s chief of staff and a veteran of the Bush White House and Republican politics, blamed not just Cantor, who in media accounts of the failed deal often plays the role of villain, but Ryan as well.

“That’s what Cantor and Ryan want,” Jackson told a group of Republican congressmen, according to Robert Draper’s recent book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do.” “They see a world where it’s Mitch McConnell”—as Senate Majority Leader—“Speaker Cantor, a Republican President, and then Paul Ryan can do whatever he wants to do. It’s not about this year. It’s about getting us to 2012, defeating the President, and Boehner being disgraced.”

Say what you will about Paul Ryan, but he's an incredibly canny politician. Even as Tea Partiers increasingly look at Cantor with suspicion, they can't get enough of Ryan's insane supply-side economics,"aw shucks" charm, angel blue eyes and dynamically cut abs. Ryan made a very deliberate bet early on that the future of the GOP was with the Tea Party, and if Boehner had to be humiliated to usher that future forward, well, you need to break some eggs to make an omelet.

It's impossible for anyone, including the Speaker, to ignore the ball-washing that Ryan has received from the national media over the last five days. Everyone's been told that young Paul worked at McDonalds and drove the Oscar Meyer "weinermobile"  after the death of his father, but it isn't often pointed out that he comes from a very wealthy family. Running relentlessly on Obama's "You didn't build that" gaffe, most people would be shocked to learn that the Ryan family business was heavily dependant on government contracts. Fox News and even CNN haven't reported that Ryan repeatedly sought Obama stimulus money, even as he voted and vigorously demagogued  against it.

Then there's Chairman Ryan's dissonance with Mitt Romney's own positions, none of which are being touted by the Goddamned Liberal Media. Just three months ago, Romney seemingly
endorsed a constitutional amendment requiring the president to have at least three years experience "in business."



Carefully left out of the narrative by almost everyone is the fact that Paul Ryan has a grand total of one year's experience in business, with his family firm, which he only took as "resume padding" after he'd already decided to run for Congress. Yes, Ryan is only running for vice-president, but Romney's own metric for his running mate is whether he's "ready to be president on Day One."

Romney is on the record as saying that the Simpson-Bowles Commission as the model for deficit and debt reduction. What isn't widely reported is that Ryan was on the commission and was singularly responsible for killing it.

Explaining that takes some getting into the weeds, so forgive me.

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was originally supposed to be a creation of Congress. A majority vote on its findings would then be introduced for a "clean vote" - without amendments and bypassing a Senate filibuster. But then even the six Republicans who sponsored the creation of the commission (including John McCain) voted against it in final passage. Obama responded by creating it by Executive Order.

The Romney campaign has repeatedly tagged Obama for "killing" Simpson-Bowles. While it's true that Obama didn't send the report to Congress on his own, there's very little reason that he should have. Firstly, it wouldn't have been a clean vote and would've been tied up for months and loaded down with poison pill amendments. Second, the final Commission vote - engineered largely by Ryan -  telegraphed that there would be no Republican support for it. Why then would the President tie up his agenda for months on an item that he was destined to be humiliated on? Does any president knowingly do that?

Ryan's voting record on the Bush programs that created the massive debt America faces and are, even today, driving forces of the deficit is being studiously ignored by conservatives. From 2001 through the end 2008, if something cost a shitload of money and wasn't paid for, Paul Ryan voted for it. Like the overwhelming majority of Republicans, he only became a fiscal hawk on January 20, 2009. It was only on that day, precisely at noon, that people like Ryan determined that America was in a fiscal death spiral.

I've been arguing about the Troubled Asset Relief Program with Tea Party types for almost four years now, which is entertaining because what they don't know about the 2008 financial panic is virtually all-encompassing. The Tea Party, as a general rule, blames the Great Recession on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. This displays an impressive level of either ignorance, dishonesty, or both.

Fannie and Freddie date back to the Depression and the CRA was 30 years old when everything went to shit. Truly bad things didn't start happening in the real estate market until about 2002. Furthermore, the government didn't create NINJA (No Income, No Job or Assets) loans, the banks did. Nor did the government force the investment banks to buy those loans from commercial banks and mortgage brokers and securitize them into highly complex financial instruments, which they subsequently traded among themselves, sold to the wider market and (in some cases) bet against with credit default swaps even as they sold them.

Having said that, Alan Greenspan did encourage poor folks to buy adjustable-rate mortgages ... months before raising the prime rate in 2004. But Greenspan hadn't previously been painted as the Voice of Liberal America and a stalwart of government intervention. Unless, that is, investment banks and hedge funds needed bailing out, as they repeatedly did during Clinton Administration and the many Mexican, Asian and Russian currency crises. Greenspan was a driving force behind those bailouts.

The financial sector would have taken a huge hit in the event of a mortgage meltdown, but it wouldn't have faced the possibility of a complete meltdown absent their own trading and leveraging practices.

Lehman Brothers went down on September 15, 2008. By then it was clear that AIG, which issued the credit default swaps that the banks used as a hedge on their wildly over-leveraged trades, was on the brink of collapse. Merrill Lynch was within days of falling apart, which would have precipitated a systemic annihilation of the banking sector. As it is, even Iceland was bankrupted by that mess, almost entirely due to banking practices pioneered in the United States.

I couldn't agree more with the premise of "the creative destruction of the marketplace" but to this day, no Tea Partier has been able to adequately explain to me how you maintain a modern civilization without a financial services industry. And everyone who knows anything about anything has said that the entire market would have been utterly destroyed absent TARP. It was just like the domino theory of communism, except that it was actually real and imminent.

In the most backhanded way possible, John Boehner wants to remind the Tea Party base just how responsible Paul Ryan was in voting for TARP.

VAN SUSTEREN, FOX News: People think of him as hawkish on the budget, on expenses, but he voted for TARP. He voted for the auto bailout, voted for two stimulus in '08, voted against the '09 -- February '09 President Obama stimulus. How does -- I mean, how does he explain those, or I mean, how does -- politically, how does he sell that?

BOEHNER: I mean, I think that he's a practical conservative. He's got a very conservative voting record, but he's not a knuckle-dragger, all right? He understood that TARP, while none of us wanted to do it, if we were going to save -- save our economy, save the world economy, it had to happen. I wish we didn't have to do it, either, but he understood that.

Turns out that Boehner isn't as politically helpless as I thought.  This is a truly impressive use of a strategically-placed sharp elbow that I seriously didn't think that John had in him.

As a matter of fact, it's brilliant in that it places Ryan (and by extension, Romney, who was also for TARP before he was against it) in the very bad place of having to explain to his knuckle-dragging base why he voted for TARP, while delicately trying to rationalize why they aren't knuckle-draggers for opposing it.

Within hours of making that remark, it was clear that Boehner had pissed off all the right people.

The fact is that you can't rationalize Ryan's pre-2009 record with his current status as Tea Party messiah, any more than you can Romney's. Yes, the pandering and whorish Republicans at the top of the ticket are going to make every effort to make whatever twists and turns of logic they deem necessary to do so, but Speaker Boehner isn't going to make it easy for them.

Like Obama, Boehner seems to have finally understood that you just can't work with these people. And if you can't work with them, you need to destroy them before they destroy you. Romney said as recently as this past Sunday that Ryan would be his Man on the Hill, and interesting idea given that the Chairman has passed a grand total of two bills in his thirteen years there. Don't get me wrong, if you want a post office renamed or philosophically like the idea of cheaper arrows, Paul Ryan is your guy. Otherwise, making him your de facto legislative affairs director can be construed as nothing less than a diminishment of Boehner's role as Speaker.

Tea Partiers, without any substantive evidence whatsoever to back them up, believe that the selection of Paul Ryan is the beginning of the Obama presidency's Götterdämmerung.

The Speaker pretty clearly believes otherwise. In my opinion, he knows as well as I do that Romney is going to lose, and quite possibly lose badly. While Ryan won't likely be held responsible by the public (or even the Tea Party movement, who would joyfully blame Mitt) for that loss, it will almost certainly diminish his influence in the House, particularly since this election is now going to be fought entirely on his ideas. Once Ryan gets taken down several notches by a doomed campaign, Eric Cantor - the real threat to Boehner's continued tenure - becomes much easier to contain.

The Romney and Ryan budget plans are a sad fucking joke. They blow giant multi-trillion holes - even bigger than the ones Bush and Obama did - into the budget over their first decade and neither approaches balance for decades afterwards. The fact that the Tea Party believes so strongly in them tells you everything you need to know about the Tea Party.

Boehner isn't going to say this out loud, but I think he knows (as I do) that he's much more likely to get a rational plan that balances the budget in a much shorter time frame from Obama than he is from Romney and Ryan. The same is true of meaningful tax reform. If the Ryan plan is seen among the professionals in the House as being instrumental to losing this election, it becomes much easier for Boehner to move him out of his chairmanship.

You know why Obama-Biden 2012 has very carefully avoided mentioning John Boehner by name? Because they know it, too. They know that while the Romney ticket was almost born to lose, the Democrats' chances of winning back the House are almost zero. It would therefore stand to reason that they would prefer a Speaker Boehner to a Speaker Cantor in the aftermath of the election. And discrediting the fiscal fantasies of the Tea Party are in the interest of Obama and Boehner.

This might be an overly broad and possibly racist assertion, but it might just be that orange people have a built-in survival mechanism that other humans lack. Lindsay Lohan clearly has it, and so apparently does John Boehner.

Meet the Power Twins of Fantasy Budgeting

Here's a good rule of thumb when reading about politics: If you see someone describe a liberal program as "Marxism," you can safely conclude that they haven't got a clue what they're talking about or they think that you're an idiot. When someone says "This is Marxism," you can automatically be sure that it actually isn't.

One of the central tenants of Marxism is the workers controlling the means of productions, usually through the mechanism of the state. Say what you will about North American liberals, but very few of them have ever actually advocated that. But the very same people who get enraged when they're compared to Hitler cheerfully associate their political opponents to Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. I'm not aware of Barack Obama ever saying that he wants to collectivize farming, although both parties have essentially done that through price supports and subsidies for some 70 years now.

That being the case, you can automatically dismiss Fox News, the Sun News Network and roughly three-quarters of Republican and Conservative Party blogs as ignorant, dishonest or both. All you need do to understand the fallacy of their argument is look back to 2003 when the Republican Congress passed - and President Bush the Younger signed - Medicare Part D. They gave boner pills to grandpa and still managed to turn that into a welfare program for the pharmaceutical industry. That, my friends, takes talent.

It doesn't end there, either. "Limited government conservatives" also doubled the size of the Department of Education, which their own party platform once regularly called for the abolishment of; fought two Asian ground wars off the books; passed enormous tax cuts without cutting any spending whatsoever and enacted into law monstrous highway and farm bills. All told, the GOP of 2001-'07 spent trillions of dollars that the country didn't have.

The Bush programs are the biggest drivers of the deficit even today. The tax cuts alone cost close to $4 trillion every decade that they remain in place. Medicare D costs about $700 billion, which will only increase as more seniors become eligible.

And Mitt Romney's newly minted running mate, Paul Ryan voted for it all. He says that he was "miserable" during the time of Dennis Hastert's wild-spending speakership, but he went on to vote for the 2008 Bush stimulus, TARP and the $14 billion Bush bailout of GM and Chrysler (full disclosure: I supported the last two and still do.)

No one forced Representative Ryan to do any of this. He was independently elected and never faced a close race in his district. He very well could have stood on principle. He just didn't want to.  Throughout his seven terms in Congress, Ryan has been to balanced budgets what Genghis Khan was to being a "people person."

His various plans are living testaments to ideological wishful thinking, each and every one of them.

Let's start with his 2005 plan to partially privatize Social Security, shall we?

The version of the plan that Bush introduced would have cost a trillion dollars over a decade to implement, none of which was paid for in any way. Ryan's original proposal would have cost twice that, again with no financing included.

Coming as it did so soon after the Enron-Arthur Andersen scandal, the GOP was very careful to always point out that retirement funds would only go into "government-approved stocks," which is the very definition of "picking winners and losers in the market." But that's apparently okay when Republicans do it.

Then there's the moral hazard involved. Most of the GOP can't stop screaming about TARP, but that bailout program would be dwarfed by the bailouts necessitated by a market crash with trillions of dollars of Social Security money involved. Because the stocks involved would be "government approved" the government would have an obligation to maintain their solvency. You'd suddenly have dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of companies that essentially operate under the same guarantees that Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac used to.

What would happen to the companies whose stocks weren't "government approved?" I'm not guessing that it would be something good.

Oh, and as we learned in the aftermath of the 2008 financial panic (and as the great Screed of Momus points out), the markets are driven almost entirely by fraud, which the Republican party is adamantly against doing anything about.

Let's move on to Ryan's Medicare proposals.

Originally, the program was to be turned into a voucher program of about $2,500. This is silly for a number of  reasons.

Firstly, I'm not aware of a single comprehensive insurance plan for young, healthy people that costs as little as that. From what I understand, they average between seven and thirteen grand. Nor is there any indication that these vouchers would be indexed to the explosive inflation of the health care market.

Second, no insurance company in their right mind would sell coverage to seniors, who are usually riddled with preexisting conditions and as a risk group are only slightly behind suicide bombers. Furthermore, your average senior would hit the coverage cap in his or her plan in about 20 minutes.

The only way that you could make sense this fantasy from a business perspective is to incorporate most of the elements of ObamaCare, including the individual mandate, into it and Ryan seems to be against doing that. The United States might as well just include the cost controls from Logan's Run. They're actually more practical than anything Paul Ryan has proposed.

Third, no one over the age of 55 at the time of passage would be impacted. This means that you'd be running the current system for tens of millions of current and incoming seniors with less revenue while also implementing the massively expensive transition. In the short to medium term, the Ryan plan is even more expensive than doing nothing at a time when the country can least afford it.

Paul Ryan's ideas about the tax system are even more stupendously fantastic, relying more on faith than on logic and experience.

The idea of lowering rates and paying for it by closing loopholes and eliminating deductions is actually a good one. What sets off alarm bells in my head is that neither Romney or Ryan will tell you which loopholes they'll close or deductions they'll eliminate. Ryan laughably dodged the question by saying "I'm not on the Ways and Means Committee."

That answer should automatically disqualify him from being taken seriously because it makes his program impossible to score. You don't know what it will cost or if it balances because you're left to guess what half of it actually is.

You should then assume that no loopholes will be closed or deductions eliminated. And you can also be assured that that won't stop anyone from passing the proposed tax cuts anyway. As Jay Batman at Screed of Momus says, tax cuts always pass. Spending cuts and structural reforms to the code almost never do, especially by themselves.

If I know Republicans half as well as I think I do, I can almost guarantee you that they'll pass the tax cuts first, with their solemn word that they'll do everything else "later," which means "when we're finally broke and the international bond market makes us." So, on top of the existing Bush tax cuts, you'll get another round of cuts that are at least as large (and probably larger because of a 10% cut at the top rate) costing a total of at least $9 trillion over the next ten years when combined with the 2001-'03 cuts. They're promising that they'll eat their asparagus for dessert if only they can have their cotton candy for dinner.

Finally, both the Romney and Ryan plans both assume GDP growth of 4%, this despite the fact that the average rate of growth since the end of World War II has only been 3.2%. Despite his gigantic tax cuts, the economy only averaged 2.09% growth under George W. Bush. Neither candidate provides any evidence that they'll achieve this rate of growth. You just have to take their word for it. But we know that both Romney and Ryan's plans (and especially Ryan's) cause the deficit to skyrocket in the short term.

That raises an interesting question. If the Republicans control both houses of Congress after November, will they continue raising the debt ceiling again and again for President Romney and Vice President Ryan?

There are a lot of ways that you could describe these two, but no serious person would use terms like "fiscally conservative" to do it. If anything, they're worse than the statist liberals because they bankrupt the country faster.

There's a well-known way to contain entitlements, but no one in the United States is serious about doing it. First, you immediately raise the retirement age for everyone under, say, sixty. Then you scale benefits to average income earned during the last ten or twenty years. Getting rid of the payroll tax cap is also a pretty good idea because you'll need the revenue. Once that's done, you means-test the entire mess so that no one who retires with a net worth of more than, say, two million dollars collects benefits at all.

That way you can cover the people who actually need the programs while people more serious than Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan figure out a way to gradually phase the entire blight out of existence. If we've learned anything about government involvement in retirement planning and providing health care, it's that they've made them unbelievably expensive.  But it will (and should) take several decades to phase out the government role in them.

If you're an American that actually cares about these kind of things, I don't know what to tell you other than that you should seriously consider voting for Gary Johnson. He's the one candidate for the presidency this year (and, in actual fact, in the last fifteen years) who actually has balanced a budget.