"... Condemned to Repeat It:" The Cuban Missile Crisis in Perspective

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

- George Santayana

History is important, but what people do with that history is more important. To mythologize history is to make it important and, worse, may cause it's worst mistakes to be repeated.

For a president who didn't do all that much, the mythologising of John F. Kennedy is a little odd and a lot terrifying. Most people, when pressed, can't name three things that he did in office and several of them count his assassination twice.

The assassination perverted the history of a man who shouldn't have been president at all. He was a liar and a thief. The evidence strongly suggests, although doesn't definitively prove, that the 1960 election was stolen through wholesale vote-rigging in Cook County, Illinois and South Texas, where Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson stole his Senate seat twelve years earlier.

It wasn't known at the time, but when Kennedy commenced his campaign for the Democratic nomination, he had been administered the last rites of the Catholic Church four times. We also now now that the 35th president of the United States and Commander-In-Chief was regularly dosing himself with a combination of steroids and amphetamine. This was not yet twenty years after another president who hid the perilous state of his health from the American people, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died suddenly as the country was preparing to use nuclear weapons for the first time.

The American people seem to know none of this, or not care if they do. Poll after poll of non-historians regularly puts JFK in the top four chief executives, above George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. Given the paucity of Kennedy's accomplishments, it represents the triumph of style over substance more than anything else in modern history.

Other than his murder in Dallas, the event most often associated with JFK is the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Benjamin Schwarz writes about in great detail in this month's Atlantic.

On October 16, 1962, John F. Kennedy and his advisers were stunned to learn that the Soviet Union was, without provocation, installing nuclear-armed medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba. With these offensive weapons, which represented a new and existential threat to America, Moscow significantly raised the ante in the nuclear rivalry between the superpowers—a gambit that forced the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. On October 22, the president, with no other recourse, proclaimed in a televised address that his administration knew of the illegal missiles, and delivered an ultimatum insisting on their removal, announcing an American “quarantine” of Cuba to force compliance with his demands. While carefully avoiding provocative action and coolly calibrating each Soviet countermeasure, Kennedy and his lieutenants brooked no compromise; they held firm, despite Moscow’s efforts to link a resolution to extrinsic issues and despite predictable Soviet blustering about American aggression and violation of international law. In the tense 13‑day crisis, the Americans and Soviets went eyeball-to-eyeball. Thanks to the Kennedy administration’s placid resolve and prudent crisis management—thanks to what Kennedy’s special assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. characterized as the president’s “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated, that [it] dazzled the world”—the Soviet leadership blinked: Moscow dismantled the missiles, and a cataclysm was averted.

Every sentence in the above paragraph describing the Cuban missile crisis is misleading or erroneous. But this was the rendition of events that the Kennedy administration fed to a credulous press; this was the history that the participants in Washington promulgated in their memoirs; and this is the story that has insinuated itself into the national memory—as the pundits’ commentaries and media coverage marking the 50th anniversary of the crisis attested.

The first time I had seen the official mediation of the Missile Crisis challenged was in Gary Wills' The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Mediation on Power, which was first published in 1982. Since then, more and better literature has come out, including Kennedy's own secret presidential recordings. But the narrative remains mostly intact, due largely to a continuing flood of adoring Kennedy biographies and a singular unwillingness of Americans to study their own history.

Very few American non-scholars have bothered asking even the most basic questions about the Missile Crisis. "What's behind the half-century long obsession with a piss-ant country like Cuba?" "Why would Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev place the missiles there?" "Could the United States have resolved the crisis in a way that didn't risk a nuclear holocaust?" "What were the long-term consequences of it?"

Richard Nixon was remembered as a world-class red-baiter. In his first political campaign, Nixon tied his opponent, Representative Jerry Voorhis to the suspected Communist infiltrated Congress of Industrial Organizations' Political Action Committee (PAC,) although Voorhis refused to accept their endorsement. In his 1950 campaign for the Senate, Nixon called Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas "pink right down to her underwear" and compared her voting record to that of the avowed Socialist New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio.

In 1960, it was NIxon's turn to be red-baited in a particularly insidious way. From roughly 1948 onward, the GOP enjoyed an edge on national security issues, due largely to the "loss" of China, the successful testing of a nuclear bomb by the Soviets and the stalemate of the Korean War.

During President Eisenhower's second term, the Democrats invented a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union out of whole cloth. Had they bothered to ask the Pentagon or the CIA, they would have learned that the United States had a vast ICBM superiority that would last, ironically, into the presidency of Richard Nixon. But the news media and the public believed it.

Kennedy sought to capitalize on the missile gap by making Cuba an issue. He insisted during the presidential debates that he would do more to roll back communism in Cuba than would Nixon. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to receive classified CIA briefings. He knew that the Agency under Eisenhower was planning just that. Determined not to reveal that, Vice President Nixon publicly argued against Cuban intervention, even though he was its strongest advocate in the government.

Once he was sworn in as president, Kennedy was stuck with, and haunted by, the issues of the missile gap and Cuba. JFK immediately began the largest peacetime defense build-up in American history up to that time. He also dramatically increased the nuclear arsenal, despite the U.S having as many as nine times the warheads the U.S.S.R had. In what was perhaps the most fateful decision of his presidency, he ordered Jupiter missiles deployed to Turkey, near the Soviet border.

The Jupiter missiles were an exceptionally vexing component of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Because they sat above ground, were immobile, and required a long time to prepare for launch, they were extremely vulnerable. Of no value as a deterrent, they appeared to be weapons meant for a disarming first strike—and thus greatly undermined deterrence, because they encouraged a preemptive Soviet strike against them. The Jupiters’ destabilizing effect was widely recognized among defense experts within and outside the U.S. government and even by congressional leaders. For instance, Senator Albert Gore Sr., an ally of the administration, told Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they were a “provocation” in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1961 (more than a year and a half before the missile crisis), adding, “I wonder what our attitude would be” if the Soviets deployed nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba. Senator Claiborne Pell raised an identical argument in a memo passed on to Kennedy in May 1961.

Given America’s powerful nuclear superiority, as well as the deployment of the Jupiter missiles, Moscow suspected that Washington viewed a nuclear first strike as an attractive option. They were right to be suspicious. The archives reveal that in fact the Kennedy administration had strongly considered this option during the Berlin crisis in 1961.

It’s little wonder, then, that, as Stern asserts—drawing on a plethora of scholarship including, most convincingly, the historian Philip Nash’s elegant 1997 study, The Other Missiles of October—Kennedy’s deployment of the Jupiter missiles “was a key reason for Khrushchev’s decision to send nuclear missiles to Cuba.” Khrushchev reportedly made that decision in May 1962, declaring to a confidant that the Americans “have surrounded us with bases on all sides” and that missiles in Cuba would help to counter an “intolerable provocation.” Keeping the deployment secret in order to present the U.S. with a fait accompli, Khrushchev may very well have assumed America’s response would be similar to his reaction to the Jupiter missiles—rhetorical denouncement but no threat or action to thwart the deployment with a military attack, nuclear or otherwise. (In retirement, Khrushchev explained his reasoning to the American journalist Strobe Talbott: Americans “would learn just what it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at you; we’d be doing nothing more than giving them a little of their own medicine.”)

At about the same time that Kennedy deployed the Jupiters, he ordered the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation, thereby giving Khrushchev the predicate he needed to give the Americans " a little of their own medicine" by moving their own missiles into Cuba.

As for Castro, he would have been crazy to refuse the missiles after after the Bay of Pigs and the numerous subsequent assassination attempts by the CIA known as Operation Mongoose. When he learned about it after becoming president, Lyndon Johnson said "We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean." Needless to say, a foreign plot - let alone several attempts - to assassinate a sitting American president would be seen as an act of war and responded to forcefully. That they didn't see their attempts on Castro's life similarly is but one of America's interesting post-war double standards.

Moreover, as Schwarz reports, the Cuban missiles didn't change the strategic balance a bit and Kennedy's Executive Committee (ExComm) knew it.

Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance. Although Kennedy asserted in his October 22 televised address that the missiles were “an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas,” he in fact appreciated, as he told the ExComm on the first day of the crisis, that “it doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was 90 miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” America’s European allies, Kennedy continued, “will argue that taken at its worst the presence of these missiles really doesn’t change” the nuclear balance.

That the missiles were close to the United States was, as the president conceded, immaterial: the negligible difference in flight times between Soviet Union–based ICBMs and Cuba-based missiles wouldn’t change the consequences when the missiles hit their targets, and in any event, the flight times of Soviet SLBMs were already as short as or shorter than the flight times of the missiles in Cuba would be, because those weapons already lurked in submarines off the American coast (as of course did American SLBMs off the Soviet coast). Moreover, unlike Soviet ICBMs, the missiles in Cuba required several hours to be prepared for launch. Given the effectiveness of America’s aerial and satellite reconnaissance (amply demonstrated by the images of missiles in the U.S.S.R. and Cuba that they yielded), the U.S. almost certainly would have had far more time to detect and respond to an imminent Soviet missile strike from Cuba than to attacks from Soviet bombers, ICBMs, or SLBMs.

“A missile is a missile,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara asserted. “It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile from the Soviet Union or Cuba.” On that first day of the ExComm meetings, Bundy asked directly, “What is the strategic impact on the position of the United States of MRBMs in Cuba? How gravely does this change the strategic balance?” McNamara answered, “Not at all”—a verdict that Bundy then said he fully supported. The following day, Special Counsel Theodore Sorensen summarized the views of the ExComm in a memorandum to Kennedy. “It is generally agreed,” he noted, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.”

Sorensen’s comment about a surprise attack reminds us that while the missiles in Cuba did not add appreciably to the nuclear menace, they could have somewhat complicated America’s planning for a successful first strike—which may well have been part of Khrushchev’s rationale for deploying them. If so, the missiles paradoxically could have enhanced deterrence between the superpowers, and thereby reduced the risk of nuclear war.

It stands to reason that the whole matter could have been dealt with through quiet diplomacy. Kennedy wanted the Soviet missiles out of Cuba and Khrushchev wanted to be rid of the provocative  Jupiters on his doorstep. In fact, that was the deal they ultimately reached, but only after the world was taken to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

Moscow was unaware that the missiles had been discovered until Kennedy announced it to the world in a televised address to the nation on October 22, 1962 and announced a naval blockade of Cuba. Knowing that the blockade was an act of war and that the missiles were legal under international law, the United States referred to it as a "quarantine," instead.

Wouldn't it have been easier (to say nothing of less dangerous) to have sent a back-channel message to the Kremlin that the Cuban installations were unacceptable to the United States? Nikita Krushchev himself offered to trade the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters in Turkey in the wake of Kennedy's October 22 address.

But Kennedy had cynically used both the missile gap and Cuba as wedge issues in the 1960 election and he was going to be publicly seen as having solved them, even after he knew just how catastrophic the slightest miscalculation might have been.

And it was nothing short of a miracle that there wasn't a miscalculation because JFK's negotiating posture seemed to be designed to humiliate the Soviets. Even when the trade of the Cuban missiles for the Jupiters was agreed to secretly, through Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, the Kennedy brothers insisted that the Jupiter part of the agreement not be announced publicly, fearing that such an agreement would politically damage the president.

Amazingly, Krushchev agreed to it. And he was removed from power less than 18 months later, becoming the first (and until Gorbachev, the only)  Soviet leader to leave office alive. It isn't a stretch to assume that sent a powerful message to Nikita Krushchev's successors. They would not be played by the Americans. Superpower relations went into a deep-freeze for a decade afterward.

Prior to Kruschev's March, 1964 removal, the Soviets were basically conservative in the conduct of foreign policy. Yes, they sponsored revolutionary movements; most notably in China, Korea and Vietnam, but the only used their own military within what they considered their traditional sphere of influence to put down uprisings. Beginning with Brezhnev, the Soviets become much more aggressive and far more intractable.

Would that have been the case absent the missile crisis? There's no reason to believe so.

As Schwarz points out in the Atlantic, the missile crisis had even greater consequences on the conduct of U.S foreign policy.

Although Kennedy in fact agreed to the missile swap and, with Khrushchev, helped settle the confrontation maturely, the legacy of that confrontation was nonetheless pernicious. By successfully hiding the deal from the vice president, from a generation of foreign-policy makers and strategists, and from the American public, Kennedy and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, and the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, makes for a successful national-security strategy—really, all but defines it.

The president and his advisers also reinforced the concomitant view that America should define a threat not merely as circumstances and forces that directly jeopardize the safety of the country, but as circumstances and forces that might indirectly compel potential allies or enemies to question America’s resolve. This recondite calculation led to the American disaster in Vietnam: in attempting to explain how the loss of the strategically inconsequential country of South Vietnam might weaken American credibility and thereby threaten the country’s security, one of McNamara’s closest aides, Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton, allowed that “it takes some sophistication to see how Vietnam automatically involves” our vital interests. Kennedy said in his address to the nation during the missile crisis that “aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged, ultimately leads to war.” He explained that “if our courage and our commitments are ever to be trusted again by either friend or foe,” then the United States could not tolerate such conduct by the Soviets—even though, again, he had privately acknowledged that the deployment of the missiles did not change the nuclear balance.

This notion that standing up to aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) will deter future aggression (however loosely and broadly defined) fails to weather historical scrutiny. After all, America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t deter Muammar Qaddafi; America’s war against Yugoslavia didn’t deter Saddam Hussein in 2003; America’s liberation of Kuwait did not deter Slobodan Milošević; America’s intervention in Panama did not deter Saddam Hussein in 1991; America’s intervention in Grenada did not deter Manuel Noriega; America’s war against North Vietnam did not deter Grenada’s strongman, Hudson Austin; and JFK’s confrontation with Khrushchev over missiles in Cuba certainly did not deter Ho Chi Minh.

How many American troops would have been spared in the last half century were it not for Kennedy's duplicity before, during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis? U.S policymakers learned exactly the wrong lesson from the October crisis. And the brinkmanship of the Cuban Missile Crisis is almost exactly what we're seeing today in relation to Iran's nuclear program, albeit in slow motion.

The United States has had bad presidents both before and after John Kennedy, but none nearly ended life on earth as a result of his own deliberate and cynical machinations. In that, he might be the most dangerous man ever to have lived.

Yet he remains a hero to tens of millions of Americans and a worldwide icon, due largely to the machinations of his own lies and the personality cult developed over several decades by his palace guard.

Unless the real history of the Cuban Missile Crisis is more widely known, there's a very real chance that there will someday be another president as reckless as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As George Santayana wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The next time we might not be so lucky.


Benjamin Schwarz's piece in the Atlantic is actually a book review of The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality by Sheldon Stern, which I very much look forward to reading. However, Schwarz's article is impressive on its own and can be read for free here, which I encourage you all to do.

Lance Armstrong's Moment of Self-Realization

Mercilessly stolen from Antiquiet

Confirm Chuck Hagel

Presidents, regardless of who the president is at any given time, can and should be afforded broad latitude in who he chooses to sit in his Cabinet. Cabinet officers are different from Supreme Court nominations in that the president sets policy and the Cabinet leaves with the president, neither of which is true of the High Court. Unless there's something in a nominee's history that is indisputably disqualifying, the president should have whomever he wants.

Again, you don't have to like the nominee or be happy about the nomination, but elections, as they say, have consequences. Congress should not be dictating executive policy - especially war policy - to a duly elected president, which I remember any number of Republicans telling me about a decade ago.

That's particularly true of a nominee who comes from the Senate. Sitting and former senators are afforded extraordinary deference during confirmation hearings. The only former senator denied confirmation that I'm aware of was John Tower, who the first President Bush had nominated to be Secretary of Defence. Tower had a drinking problem, which reasonable people can see as a disqualification for someone in the military chain of command.

It would be unprecedented for Republican senators to vote against the confirmation of President Obama's nominee for Defense, former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.

If you're a modern Republican, you see Hagel as a contrarian pain in the ass, especially if you're of the neoconservative foreign policy school. Senator Hagel was an early opponent of the Iraq War (although he voted for the Authorization of the Use of Military Force in October 2002), he's for cutting the Pentagon's budget, and he has interesting views on America's relationship with Israel.

All three of these things are not only perfectly defensible, they're admirable.

LIke Hagel, I initially supported the Iraq War. This was mostly because Saddam was going to have to be taken out sooner or later, and better to do it when he was weak than after the sanctions disintegrated and he strengthened his military capability. But I thought that the Bush Administration was lying about all of that democracy nonsense. I also assumed that enough force would be deployed to secure the peace after the war. Had I had known otherwise, I would have opposed the war.

Iraq is more like Yugoslavia than any other country. It was thrown together against the will of the ethnically diverse population and held together by tyrannical force. Just as happened in Yugoslavia, when Iraq's people were given a measure of freedom, they immediately began slaughtering one another.

Traditionally, when the United States overthrows a foreign government, they install a military junta that governs the country to the satisfaction of the White House. Sure, there are exceptions to that rule, such as Germany and Japan, but there aren't many, and none in countries as confounding as Iraq.

Instead, Bush's Coalition Provisional Authority called for elections, disbanded Iraq's police and military, and implemented a flat tax before there was even the most basic security in Baghdad, let alone the rest of the country. In attempting to turn an unnatural country into a laboratory for the Heritage Foundation's ideas, Bush created the ideal conditions for the civil war that would soon engulf Iraq, cost 4,500 American lives and create upwards of 4 million refugees. Moreover, it turned Iraq into a magnet for foreign jihad insurgents who are now set to overrun neighbouring Syria.

The single biggest reason that the Democrats have the upper hand on the issue of national security (which they haven't enjoyed since at least the Kennedy Administration) is the GOP's reflexive and wrongheaded support of George W. Bush's disaster in Mesopotamia. Had Republicans not had such a herd mentality over the war, they wouldn't have all gone over the cliff together. Hagel was almost alone among Republicans for calling it exactly as he saw it early on.

As I've said repeatedly in this space, because military budgets are wholly dependent on a given nation's foreign policy, they are the very definition of discretionary spending. A country that will soon be unable to pay its own bills has no business "remaking the world in its image."

For all of the talk about Hagel's ideas being "out of the mainstream," it is the Republican Party itself that has moved out of the mainstream. In the last dozen years, the GOP has shunned the foreign policy conservatism of Eisenhower and Reagan, to say nothing of the Weinberger and Powell doctrines, and adopted an almost evangelical Wilsonian foreign policy. The Republican answer to any foreign challenge seems to be "bomb first and ask questions later." And we've seen how well that worked in Iraq.

An interventionist American foreign policy was excusable during the Cold War, when the economies of the former great powers were shattered by the Second World War. That is no longer true. There is no threatening global hegemon that requires an American military presence in each of the world's time zones. Even at the height of their power, al-Qaeda did not pose the threat that the Soviet Union did, and anyone who suggests otherwise is not to be taken seriously.

Republicans, as enamoured as they are with "the Founder's intent," should be the first people to recognize this. The Founders didn't agree on much, but they were in universal agreement on what President Washington later called "foreign entanglements." The Constitution gives Congress the power "To raise and support Armies" (note the plural) specifically because the Founders unanimously opposed a permanent standing army and repeatedly warned against the establishment of one.

The idea that entitlement spending can be slashed while defense is increased as a proportion of GDP is ridiculous and politically suicidal. That supposedly conservative politicians make assertions to the contrary is further evidence of how delusional they've become.

To avoid a wholesale meltdown of the U.S economy, deep and immediate cuts are going to have to be made, but the Pentagon cannot be spared. This is obviously going to require a fundamental reassessment of American foreign policy and what constitutes a "vital national interest."

For most of America's history, its vital national interests were limited to Mexico, Canada and keeping sea lanes open for international trade. The Middle East only became a factor during the Second World War, and only because denying Nazi Germany the region's oil was a military necessity. Afterward, the Soviet threat to the region necessitated U.S engagement. However, the blowback of American support for despotic Arab and Persian regimes was the jihadi threat the United States faces today.

Then there's Israel, which seems to be the epicentre of Republican opposition to Senator Hagel.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the U.S foreign policy establishment understood that American support for Israel had to be balanced against its interests in the Arab world.

There is a difference between a moral interest and a strategic interest. Support for Israel couldn't be more of a moral interest, which very few sane people would dispute. However, there are 100 million Arabs, who have oil and would very much like nuclear weapons. There are another 80 million Persians of whom the same thing could be said. That is the the definition of a strategic interest.

As a supporter of the Jewish state, I question the the morality of  backing Israel regardless of the wisdom of its policies and how damaging they might be to U.S interests in the Arab world.

First, it's ahistorical. The presidents that took the hardest line on Israel were Eisenhower, Reagan and the first Bush. All of them, to one degree or another, threatened the continuing relationship to protect America's Arab interests and none of them were labelled as anti-Semites, as Chuck Hagel recently has.

For all the rhetoric regarding the Obama-Netanyahu relationship, Obama hasn't threatened the diplomatic abandonment of Jerusalem (which Eisenhower did over Suez,) describe their military actions as a "Holocaust" (which Reagan did regarding Lebanon,) or cut off loan guarantees (which Bush 41 did when Israel expanded settlements.) Obama has been more tolerant of Israel's conduct than any Republican president except Nixon and the second Bush.

Second, unquestioning American support for Israel; military, diplomatic and financial is only significant if there's a reasonable chance that that support will always be there, and that can hardly be guaranteed at this point. We're are not long from the day when serious people will begin to question whether the United States can afford to provide $3 billion in foreign aid every year. Without that aid, Israelis will be forced to choose between their defense and their economy because they won't be able to afford both.

Washington has to persuade Jerusalem that it is in its long term interest to make a deal with both the Palestinians and the hold-out nations of the Middle East, if only because they can't and won't be subsidized forever. Europe is less accommodating of Israeli intractability every day, and the Chinese and Russians are fully allied with the Arabs and Iranians. Who does that leave in Israel's corner?

It's hard to imagine many Americans tolerating cuts to their Medicare and Social Security benefits while their government provides billion in military aid to an ally that thinks that it doesn't have to make a serious bargain with its neighbours. I believe that's more than the domestic political traffic will bear once America's economic decline becomes a recognizable reality.

Israel can make a tolerable deal now, or a considerably worse one later, when they've been financially and diplomatically abandoned. It is deeply immoral for a nation rapidly facing bankruptcy to provide assurances to the contrary to Israel.

Senator Hagel's views on a possible conflict with Iran are not unlike my own. Military will not destroy the Iranian program, only delay it and paradoxically prove to Tehran that it's necessary. Even if the current theorcacy were replaced tomorrow, Iran's security situation would still be such that it would feel it needed a nuclear deterrent because any country in Iran's position would feel that way.

Given the geography and demographic facts, war with Iran would be much more challenging than the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan are by several degrees of magnitude. The American people might support armed action in theory, but the reality is almost certainly going to be quite different. Sending troops in there when public support will evaporate almost immediately isn't just unfair to the military, it's immoral.

Bob Woodward wrote an interesting article about Hagel in yesterday's Washington Post;

This worldview is part hawk and part dove. It amounts, in part, to a challenge to the wars of President George W. Bush. It holds that the Afghanistan war has been mismanaged and the Iraq war unnecessary. War is an option, but very much a last resort.

So, this thinking goes, the U.S. role in the world must be carefully scaled back — this is not a matter of choice but of facing reality; the military needs to be treated with deep skepticism; lots of strategic military and foreign policy thinking is out of date; and quagmires like Afghanistan should be avoided.

The bottom line: The United States must get out of these massive land wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and, if possible, avoid future large-scale war.

Although much discussion of the Hagel nomination has centered on his attitudes about Iran, Israel and the defense budget, Hagel’s broader agreement with Obama on overall philosophy is probably more consequential.

Hagel has also said he believes it is important that a defense secretary should not dictate foreign policy and that policy should be made in the White House.

He privately voiced reservations about Obama’s decision in late 2009 to add 51,000 troops to Afghanistan. “The president has not had commander-in-chief control of the Pentagon since Bush senior was president,” Hagel said privately in 2011.

The Republican party line on Hagel is that "his views are out of the mainstream." But if there's one thing that's proven indisputably true over the last fifteen years, it's that the "mainstream" isn't just wrong, it's increasingly dangerous and unaffordable.

How well has "the mainstream" served American strategic interests in Iraq and Afghanistan? Both countries are almost certainly going to worse than the United States found them a decade ago, and the potential for both destabilizing their neighbours in unpredictable ways is enormous. "Mainstream thinking," particularly in the GOP, is precisely what put America where it is today: broke and militarily broken.

Hagel describes himself as an Eisenhower Republican. President Eisenhower also stood outside of the mainstream and in direct conflict with the military he commanded and the prevailing political attitudes of both his party and the country. Ike understood that the greatest threat America faced was the unintended consequences of poorly considered action.

Had Eisenhower remained in office, it's impossible to imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis occurring because the series of events that led to it never would have been set in motion. It's entirely possible that the Soviets would have reacted militarily to the British, French and Israeli hostilities in the Suez Canal if Eisenhower hadn't stopped it first.

If the United States is to survive as anything resembling the country we recognize today, it had better start adopting views "outside the mainstream" immediately.

For that reason, the Senate should confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.

Dear Conservative Politicians: Please Don't Defend Fascism, Okay? Thanks.

The rap on me is that I'm often seen as being too hard on conservatives and don't defend them nearly enough. My view is that I'd be more than happy enough to defend them if they chose to do something that's actually defensible once in a while. That'd be pretty great.

But one thing I'm not going to do is destroy my own credibility of self-esteem by giving my stamp of approval to things that are stupid, offensive or stupidly offensive. That makes me a pretty shitty team player, I know.

One of things that I decided early that I wasn't going to associate myself with is the recent conservative (and particularly the Glenn Beck, Breitbart asshole, Tea Party variety of conservatism) revisionist history that paints fascism as a left-wing ideology.

That's actually part of a larger trend in modern conservatism, which refuses to recognize any of its evils, either ancient or recent. Watergate, for example, is an inescapable reality, so Tea Partiers point to Richard Nixon's creation of the Environment Protection Agency and establishment of affirmative action to paint him as a liberal and thereby absolve conservatism of his sins. Of course, that ignores the fact that every Republican in America vigorously defended Nixon until the last minute, but whatever.

Look, just because The National Socialist German Workers Party had the word "socialist" in it did not mean that the Nazis were left wing. They decidedly were not. Because fascism, first in Italy, then in Germany was a response to the rise of communism, Actual communists and socialists didn't do especially well in either regime. They were largely killed or imprisoned before the fascists went after the Jews. In fact, fascist anti-Semitsm was largely predicated on the canard that communism was a Jewish ideology, which is pretty hilarious when you consider that they also believed that the Jews controlled all of the banks.

The fascist economic model was a command economy, to be sure. But it wasn't an example of the people controlling the means of production, which is a foundational tenent of Marxism. Fascism was the partnering of government with big business, and business did very well indeed under that arrangement. The folks at Krupp, for example, only pretended that they were victims of persecution after the war.

It's also important to remember that fascism was premised on expansionist wars of conquest. Even in Western capitalist democracies employ command economies in wartime. One can make a very credible argument that in spreading their production facilities into every congressional district in America, defense contractors have created a virtual form of fascism. The United States government therefore cannot effectively review its interventionist foreign policy without immediately throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. Defense contractors also operate on a "cost plus" model, which guarantees profits regardless of cost overruns and inefficiencies. This is one of the reasons that President Eisenhower warned against the establishment of a "military-industrial complex."

Fascism is nationalist, while socialism and communism decidedly are not. The latter two movements are internationalist and believe that nationalism impedes the advancement of the ideology.

Having said that, just because conservatives shouldn't lie about fascism doesn't mean that we should run around defending it. And it's particularly regrettable that no one gave Silvio Berlusconi that memo.

Former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi praised Benito Mussolini for “having done good” despite the Fascist dictator's anti-Jewish laws, immediately sparking expressions of outrage as Europe on Sunday held Holocaust remembrances.

Berlusconi also defended Mussolini for allying himself with Hitler, saying he likely reasoned that it would be better to be on the winning side.

The media mogul, whose conservative forces are polling second in voter surveys ahead of next month's election, spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a ceremony in Milan to commemorate the Holocaust.

I never thought I'd have to say this out loud, but not only should you not defend fascism, it's the height of bad manners to do so at a Holocaust commemoration ceremony. People get awfully touchy about that sort of thing.

“It is difficult now to put oneself in the shoes of who was making decisions back then,” Berlusconi said of Mussolini's support for Hitler. “Certainly the (Italian) government then, fearing that German power would turn into a general victory, preferred to be allied with Hitler's Germany rather than oppose it.”

Berlusconi added that “within this alliance came the imposition of the fight against, and extermination of, the Jews. Thus, the racial laws are the worst fault of Mussolini, who, in so many other aspects, did good.”

Berlusconi ignores a couple of important facts in his apologia of fascism.

First, Il Duce was the senior partner in Europe's fascist alliance, having come to power almost a full decade before Hitler did. Hitler looked to Mussolini for support, but was not taken seriously. It was only after the militarization of the Rhineland that he became Hitler's second banana.

Second, the Italian fascists were engaged in a war of conquest long before the German invasion of Poland, having attacked Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935. Mussolini also intervened on the side of the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

Berlusconi seems to imply that Mussolini feared a German invasion of Italy had he not allied with Hitler which is nonsense. As we have already seen, the Italian Fascists were no strangers to foreign aggression. Moreover, the German high command had absolutely no respect for Italian forces, seeing them as more of a hindrance than anything else.

Yes, there was a German occupation of Italy, but that came only after Mussolini was dismissed and arrested by King Victor Emmanuel III.

Berlusconis's assertions to the contrary aside, the Fascist Italians were racist almost a decade before the publication of Hitler's Mein Kampf, endorsing a policy eerily similar to lebensraum. As early as 1920, the future Il Duce endorsed the taking of lands from the "inferior and barbarian" Slavs. Throughout the 1920s, long before the Beer Hall Putsch, Mussolini spoke about the "hierarchy of races." While it's true that the Manifesto of Race wasn't enacted until 1938, the seeds of it were always present in the Fascist movement.

As you might imagine, pretty much everybody's pissed at Silvio right now.

Reactions of outrage, along with a demand that Berlusconi be prosecuted for promoting Fascism, quickly followed his words.

Berlusconi's praise of Mussolini constitutes “an insult to the democratic conscience of Italy,” said Rosy Bindi, a centre-left leader. “Only Berlusconi's political cynicism, combined with the worst historic revisionism, could separate the shame of the racist laws from the Fascist dictatorship.”

Italian laws enacted following the country's disastrous experience in the war forbid the defence of Fascism. A candidate for local elections, Gianfranco Mascia, pledged that he and his supporters will present a formal complaint on Monday to Italian prosecutors, seeking to have Berlusconi prosecuted.

It should be noted that defence of Fascism is one of the very few things that Silvio Berlusconi isn't currently on trial for. He was convicted of tax fraud last October and is currently on trial for prostitution and statutory rape. If nothing else, it's pretty impressive that a 76 year old man can be the one-man crime spree that Silvio is.

Even more incredible is the fact that Berlusconi's People of Freedom party is running second in next month's national elections. With one-third of the electorate undecided, there's a very real chance that he can be elected to a record fourth term of office, just 15 months after having resigned.  Being that he's Berlusconi, he's made several differing and conflicting statements on whether he would be premier if People of Freedom wins the election.

One thing that People of Freedom has going for it, and this goes to Berlusconi's political genius, is that it's populated with wall-to-wall hot chicks, recruited mostly from his television empire. Imagine if, say, Vanna White was Senate majority leader in the 1980s. Italy is well on its way to having its fourth government like that. Were it not for the fact that she's Czech, Denise Milani would be the ideal head of the Italian government.

And that's probably the way it should be. If you live in an ungovernable country with a criminal prime minister, you might as well have an aching hard-on to distract you from your impending doom. If the government can't meet your needs, you should at least be able to jerk off to it. That only seems fair.

The GOP and the Electoral College: A Bad Idea, or the Worst Idea Ever?

I promised myself that with the re-election of Barack Obama that I would spend more time attacking him and other liberals. The main purpose of the time and attention I've given to alleged conservatives is that they make it easy for people like Obama to win and there's very little point in shit-talking the other team when ours handicaps itself before a campaign even starts.

But Republicans insist on being what the military calls "a target rich environment." It's sad and serves only to create a virtual one-party state, but it is what it is. There's really no changing that until the party is ready to start changing itself in ways that don't horrify voters.

You know why Obama won twice? That's simple. The GOP has gone insane and elevated stupidity into a virtue. In a single sentence, that's it. As the demographics of America have changed, the Republican Party clung harder to its base of elderly white people, snake-handlers and the mentally ill. If things keep going the way they have for the last decade and a half, the only people voting the GOP line in 2016 will be potential school shooters.

2008 was bad, but understandable. Overcoming the debacle of George W, Bush's presidency would have been difficult under ideal circumstances and the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the coming of the Great Recession couldn't have been worse.

Last November was different. Even though I never thought there was much hope of beating Obama, the 2012 election was even worse than I suspected (or predicted) it would be. Instead of winning the Senate, like most of the smart folks expected them to, the Republicans managed to lose two seats. And they lost the popular vote for the House of Representatives by over a million votes, retaining control only as a result of gerrymandering.

The popular vote is becoming an existential problem for the GOP, having lost it in five of the last six presidential elections. If there's any one thing that suggests the party needs reforming, it's that.

So what do Republicans want to do? Change the rules of the game in such a way that they wouldn't have to persuade the majority of the electorate to vote for them.

Long story short, the want to change the Electoral College so that its votes are apportioned by congressional district, much like Maine and Nebraska does today. If the system worked that way last year, Mitt Romney would be president.

That idea is as desperate as it is dumb. Basically, it would mean that voters would no longer choose their representatives, representatives would choose their voters. It's almost impossible to imagine a scenario where the public would accept that because it fundamentally undermines the concept of popular democracy.

It also only works as concept so long as Republicans control the statehouses and governor's mansions. Once that's no longer the case, you wind up with even bigger Democratic majorities and the GOP ceases to exist.

It's striking to me that this idea is taking hold in states that are naturally blue, but elected Republicans in 2010: Florida, Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

The problem with that is that the Republican governors in all of those states have approval ratings more common to pedophiles than chief executives. So far as I'm aware, not one of them (with the exception of Virginia's Bob McDonnell, who happens to be term-limited) is currently above 40%, which makes it extremely likely that none of them are going to win re-election. That being the case, it wouldn't be shocking if their legislatures went down with them.

If that happens, the Democrats draw the congressional districts. And after what Tom DeLay and Rick Perry did in Texas in 2002, there's nothing stopping them from doing it as soon as they take control. It's an idea that almost seems designed to blow up in the GOP's fucking faces. Republicans could change the law in those states this year, lose next year, and the Democrats could use it to tilt the election for them in time for 2016.

The party, including chairman Reince Preibus, has given up on the idea of not running psychopaths for national office, so they want to do the next best thing: Rig the system so it works like the House and rewards lunatic candidates with districts that favor that sort of thing.

Not only would popular vote losers taking office become far more common, it would be a disaster for the country. You think crises like the debt ceiling are bad now? Just wait and see what happens if this plan is adopted

Could they really be that goddamned dumb?

For the most part, they aren't. McDonnell and the likely nominee for governor this year, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett and Florida's Rick Scott are all running away from the idea as quickly as they can. Scott Walker in Wisconsin is saying only that idea is "interesting," ignoring the fact that not only did Mitt Romney not win Paul Ryan's congressional district, Paul Ryan nearly lost it. Only Michigan's Rick Snyder, who seems determined to get kicked out of politics and might actually be insane, is whole-heartedly for it. Ohio's John Kasich, who's delirious enough to think that he might be president someday, is strangely silent on the issue.

The University of Virginia's Larry Sabato characterizes the entire sick, stupid scheme better than I ever could.

Republicans are struggling to right their ship after the defeat of 2012. The unfavorable demographic trends for the GOP that we describe in our new book, Barack Obama and the New America, have sunk in, and the party knows it must do something. We have solicited ideas ourselves, believing that it is vital for America to have vigorous party competition. You will see some of those ideas, offered by our readers and Twitter colleagues, here. But nestled among the constructive ideas is a truly rotten one, the proposal to fix and game the Electoral College to give a sizable additional advantage to the Republican nominee for president.

We have asked Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz, Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University, to examine the proposal and outline its likely effects. As we suspected, it would permit a GOP nominee to capture the White House even while losing the popular vote by many millions. This is not a relatively small Electoral College “misfire” on the order of 1888 or 2000. Instead, it is a corrupt and cynical maneuver to frustrate popular will and put a heavy thumb — the whole hand, in fact — on the scale for future Republican candidates. We do not play presidential politics with a golf handicap awarded to the weaker side.

Republicans face a choice that can best be characterized by personalizing it. A healthy, optimistic party is Reaganesque, convinced that it can win the future by embracing it, and by making a positive case for its philosophy and candidates to all Americans. A party in decline is Nixonian and fears the future; it sees enemies everywhere, feels overwhelmed by electoral trends, and thinks it can win only by cheating, by subverting the system and stacking the deck in its favor. Whose presidency was more successful, Reagan’s or Nixon’s? Which man made the Republican brand more appealing?

Wynne Win? The Establishment and Media Got It Wrong

Last October, Ontario's Liberal premier, Dalton McGuinty finally saw the writing on the wall. The gas plant and ORNGE scandals could no longer be swept under the rug. It was clear that McGuinty's minority government was going to be defeated on a confidence motion and and election was going to be forced. And that was an election that ol' Dalton almost certainly was going to lose.

My Liberal friends like to tell me what a gifted politician McGuinty is, but that's always been nonsense. Like Stephen Harper and Barack Obama, McGuinty has been gifted with the opponents he had. He's never actually beaten anybody that impressive. Ernie Eves was discredited after a decade of Conservative rule. John Tory is a great man, but an impressively bad politician. And Tim Hudak, as I've long said, is the Dumbest Motherfucker on Earth. It seemed that as long as the Ontario Progressive Conservatives insisted on being the Ontario Progressive Conservatives, Dalton McGuinty would keep winning.

But something changed in the last 18 months. The NDP under Andrea Horwath began an improbable rise in public opinion. In my opinion, there was a very real chance that Horwath could have replaced McGuinty's minority with one of her own.

So the premier exercised the only option left to him. He quit. But he went further than that. He also prorogued the legislature until a replacement as Liberal leader could be elected. And the very same people who were outraged by Harper's prorogations couldn't stop congratulating McGuinty for his, mostly because they're shameless hypocrites and assholes. I condemned both, and rightly so.

Anyhow, the second McGuinty's resignation was announced, Liberal Party insiders started lining up to get former MPP Sandra Pupatello in the race. Then the media got on board. That everybody could be so spectacularly wrong was striking to me. That so many "experts" could misread the atmosphere out there was nothing less than amazing.

First, Pupatello is from the more conservative wing of the party, and that just isn't where the next election is going to be fought. The only way that Tim Hudak is ever going to elected premier of this province is by accident. He polls incredibly well when there's no chance of anyone voting for him, but as soon as he opens his stupid fucking mouth, he drops fifteen points.

My feeling is that the Ontario Tories are barely going to be a factor in the next election. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they dropped to third place at Queen's Park, although that's not an official prediction. The battle over who forms the next government is going to be between the Liberals and the NDP, and the Grits weren't going to pull that off with someone like Pupatello staking out positions to McGuinty's right.

Second, as the media and the party machinery began lining up behind her, Pupatello grew arrogant. She said that she wouldn't bring the legislature back into session until she won a seat, which could have taken months. As it is, Queen's Park has been shuttered for four months now and the public is only getting angrier.

The Liberal brand has been so badly damaged over the last couple of years that it would have probably been better for the party to have a leader outside of Queen's Park. They're going to need a ton of money and a superior effort to convince people that they're no longer the McGuinty Liberals. The chances of pulling either off while taking shots in Question Period over the remaining McGuinty scandals are not good. And that assumes that the legislature sits for any length of time. My guess is that the Grits get taken out in a confidence vote on their Throne Speech.

I thought that Gerard Kennedy was probably the best leader the Liberals had. He's personally very popular and he could do battle with the NDP and probably win. He also has the added benefit of not having been associated with McGuinty for years. The last thing the Grits need is ads morphing their new leader into McGuinty and, having been in federal politics since 2006,  Kennedy makes those hard to produce.

For reasons that I still don't understand, Kennedy never gained any traction and the left wing candidate became Kathleen Wynne. And that's where everybody got a bad case of the stupids.

Wynne's opponents, mostly from the Pupatello camp, couldn't really go after her for the most obvious reason: her long tenure in the McGuinty cabinet. So they hit her on being from Toronto, which was a bad idea. If the Grits want to stay in power, they can't afford to lose any Toronto area seats. I don't see how they do it without picking up Peter Shurman's Thornhill riding.

And then there were dark mutterings about Wynne's lesbianism. I had no idea that she was gay until a Pupatello spinner went on the Internet to condemn a whisper campaign that no one else had heard of. Here's how cynical politics is, folks. If you want to draw attention to someone's homosexuality, you pre-emptively highlight non-existent efforts to make it an issue by saying how ugly they are.

It worked, too. When the Toronto Star endorsed Pupatello last week, they made Wynne's sexuality part of the column in a way that managed to insult pretty much everybody.

The convention delegates weren't buying it and Wynne won on the third ballot tonight. Sandra Pupatello managed to piss away what was increasingly looking like a sure thing. As the other candidates dropped out after the first two ballots, the majority of them went to Wynne and took their delegates with them. When Pupatello didn't win on the first ballot, she fell apart rapidly, which is pretty much what I expected to happen.

Does it make any difference in the coming election? I don't think so. Wynne has the right politics to fight the NDP, but she lacks Kennedy's charisma and popularity. Worse, for all intents and purposes, she is Dalton McGuinty, or she may as well be when the NDP and Tories get through with her. As someone who was so senior in cabinet for so long, she can't just walk away from the McGuinty scandals.

Because she has a seat, Wynne has no credible way of avoiding calling Queen's Park back. I expect that we'll start hearing calls for that by Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest. If she doesn't have a throne speech ready to go by the second or third week of February, she isn't going to have a honeymoon as premier and the public could very well start agitating for an election, which the NDP will be more than happy to give them.

While she won't get crushed as badly as Sandra Pupatello would have, I still think that she'll lose. Not having given this a great deal of thought, we'll start talking about the next Liberal leadership race by the first of April.

The only way that can be avoided is through a Liberal coalition with the NDP. Not an accord, which the Dippers have been burned by before - an actual coalition complete with seats at the cabinet table. The problem with that scenario is that most Liberals are too arrogant to share power with anybody and it could very well start a civil war.

The ultimate responsibility for the coming decline and fall of the Ontario Liberal Party rests with Dalton McGuinty. He could have lost an election and resigned, giving the party time to rebuild under a new leader. Instead, he's ending two careers at once: his and that of his successor.

It's hard to see how Wynne survives as leader after losing to the NDP. What's likely to happen is that there'll be an endless stream of Liberal leaders, not unlike what we're seeing with the federal party. And you just can't win government under those circumstances.

The next couple of months are going to be fun to watch.

Sun News Network & the Marketplace of Ideas

I don't support public subsidies of most things, particularly in the cultural arena. As a practical sort of fellow, I recognize that when you pay for something, you get a vote in how it's done. For obvious reasons, government should be kept well away from culture, which I would include news as a part of.

I also don't believe that running a television network is an essential function of government, and it's almost impossible to argue that otherwise. You may have been able to make a case for the existence of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the early years of radio and television, when it simply wasn't profitable for private industry to service large parts of a huge and sparsely populated country. But that hasn't be true for decades now. The federal government's sponsorship of the network has long outlived its usefulness and the CBC should be either sold or abolished.

I also oppose the government regulating the cable industry, especially as it pertains to programming. Cable does not utilize "the public airwaves," at least not as traditionally understood. The market, rather than the CRTC, can and should determine the fate of individual broadcasters.The CRTC retains jurisdiction over cable simply because it can.

As things currently stand, the government mandates the carriage of certain channels by the cable companies, who are then forced to pay the broadcasters for the privilege. Worse, individual households are forced to pay for the channels, whether they want them or not. I could probably list off dozens of channels that being artificially kept alive by CRTC policies in an age where it's getting harder and harder to justify the CRTC's very existence.

And that's where the Sun News Network comes in. The Sun started off as a newspaper chain for people who can't read. In 2011, it started a television news network for people who don't enjoy thinking very much.That network is losing money hand over fist and it's owner, Quebecor, appears to be gutting the newspaper business to keep it alive.

To say that Sun News is bad television is unfair. It's actually spectacularly bad television. It took all the worst aspects of Fox News and MSNBC and made them look like they were produced by a high school AV club. The on-air personalities, such as they are, are exclusively people who are genetically incapable of getting a job outside of Canada. The chances of a Peter Jennings or John Roberts emerging from the mess of Sun News are somewhere between slim and none.

One of the mantras of cable news is that all perspectives should be treated equally, which is nonsense and they know it. There are any number of opinions that are just stupid. But cable news thrives on what they call they call "diversity of opinion" because it allows them to put freaks on the air, and freaks are good for ratings.

Cable news - both liberal and conservative - isn't news. It's political propaganda, which is fine, but it shouldn't be treated as anything other than that, and certainly not by government regulators. But Sun News has spent the last few weeks agitating for mandatory carriage from the CRTC. These champions of the free market are demanding the same government cheese that everybody else gets.

SNN is unique, at least in Canada. The other broadcast networks at least pretend to maintain the pretense of professional neutrality. Sun News doesn't bother presenting itself as anything other than the house organ of the Conservative, Republican and Likud parties.

Like MSNBC and Fox, there's almost no wall between their "news" and "opinion" programming at Sun News. And like Fox, Sun devotes an incredible amount of time bitching about its competition and how unfairly it's treated by the world. In that, it is a perfect representation of what the conservative movement has become. Like modern conservatives everywhere, Sun News has embraced the cult of it's own victimhood and hilariously does so under the banner of "personal responsibility." .

Initially, I opposed granting Sun News mandatory carriage because I'm against the involuntary subsidization of political activity. Not only do I think that political parties shouldn't receive public money, I would eliminate the tax deduction for contributions to them, which is an indirect subsidy to both the parties and their contributors. If I don't believe in the involuntary subsidization of the parties, it stands to reason that I would oppose it for their broadcast mouthpieces.

That shouldn't suggest that I agree with Sun's liberal critics. They've been wildly dishonest in this debate. They oppose carriage for Sun simply because they're conservative. I can guarantee you that if there were a network blatantly supportive of the NDP or Liberals, they'd reverse their position in a heartbeat. They also don't seem to mind mandatory carriage for CTV or CBC, which I do. Were there a Canadian version of MSNBC, they'd be making exactly the same noises Sun's supporters are.

Denying SNN carriage does little more than play into their pathetic sense of victimhood and reinforces their argument that they're being unfairly treated because of their politics.

Look, Sun News is going to fail, and probably within two years. Not only are its ratings pathetic, its core demographic - old people - is one that advertisers don't care about. Mainstream advertisers are also awfully reluctant to support a network that goes out of its way to piss off so many of their potential customers. Advertising on SNN makes businesses boycott bait, and it's hard to see how that fits into any sane business plan.

Carriage is going to keep Sun News on life support, but not for as long as people tend to think it will.

I'm not signing any petitions for those hypocritical monsters, and I'm not asking any of you to, but I've very reluctantly come to the conclusion that Sun News should be granted mandatory carriage.

However, that should be accompanied by rescinding the CRTC's jurisdiction and a wholesale deregulation of the cable industry in this country. If a cable provider decides for whatever reason that it doesn't want to carry Sun News (or any other channel) or pay them what they want, they can drop them without the federal government getting involved. Cable companies would also be required to compete, and I would drop the ban on foreign ownership. If Rupert Murdoch wants to buy Sun News and make it profitable, like he has with his anti-Semitic and anti-American Rotana network in Saudi Arabia, he should be free to.

Will anyone at Sun News support my ideas for deregulation? Of course they won't. Once they get mandatory carriage, they'll take the money and find new ways to pretend that the world is out to get them.

But they won't be able to pretend that they've been forced off of the air for any reason other than they produce an unwatchable and hackish product.

Obama Uber Alles, Republican Whining and the Road Ahead

So I've had indescribable fun watching Fox News for the last few weeks. It's actually been more enjoyable than I thought it would be. In fact, it struck me as kind of creepy because Republicans in America are starting to sound exactly the same way that Canadian Liberals have for the last decade.

Back when Stephen Harper's supposedly Conservative Party was elected to its first minority government in January of 2006, Liberal stalwarts started muttering about a dark Tory plot to "destroy" the Grits forever. That reached a crescendo in 2011 when the party under Michael Ignatieff was utterly humiliated by voters. They still won't shut the fuck up about it.

Smart Republicans - and more than a few stupid ones - finally reached the obvious conclusion that November 6 presented them with an undeniable existential crisis. They either get their shit together and stop acting like lunatics, pronto, or they cease to exist within a decade.

Four years of GOP, Fox News and fuckhead blogger assertions to the contrary, Barack Obama isn't an idiot and he noticed this, too. He's been using the chaos and infighting in the Republican Party to do whatever the fuck he wants. Even as they hilariously say that he didn't win a mandate at the polls, Republicans are effectively giving Obama one in being unable to sensibly oppose or effectively deal with him. This has lead the usual suspects to decry the President's plot to "destroy" the Republican Party or reverse Reaganism.

One certainly gets that sense from watching and reading Obama's second inaugural address. It was a fantastical wishlist of liberal nonsense that would have little chance of passing a Democratic Congress, let alone the one that is there, but it does seem to ignore the very existence of the GOP. I will grant you that.

The obvious question is "What the fuck did you expect him to do?"

From the very first day of his presidency - and we know from Robert Draper's Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives that the Republican leadership discussed this while Obama was attending his 2009 inaugural balls - the GOP made the very deliberate decision to cooperate with him on nothing, regardless of what he actually proposed. If Obama decided to enact unedited the entire 1996 Republican platform, Republicans would obstruct him for the sole purpose of making him "one-term president."

Well, in Obama's own words, he won. And Republicans not only lost, they lost in the most humiliating way possible. Not only did a do-nothing community organizer kick the shit out of the Republicans twice, he left them divided against themselves.

So I'll repeat my question: "What the fuck do you expect him to do?"

Let's not pretend that the GOP was particularly magnamimous in victory. I remember how, between 2000 and '06, chronic dickheads like Karl Rove and Bill Kristol were crowing triumphalist nonsense about "a permanent Republican majority" to anyone stupid enough to listen.  And when Democrats timidly suggested keeping TSA workers unionized, Rove ran ads against Max Cleland - who left three of his fucking limbs in Vietnam - starring Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Can we please stop pretending that conservatives are victims here? It's embarrassing. No self-respecting person wants to identify themselves with a cabal of bed-wetting losers.

I'd like to tell Republicans exactly the same thing that I've been telling Liberals here at home for the last six years. The whole point of politics is beat the other side to the maximum possible extent. It's usually not possible to destroy them completely, but when the opportunity presents itself, you fucking well take it. And you sure as shit don't apologize for it afterward.

I've shit-talked the guy endlessly, so it's only fair that I highlight when Erick Erickson says something that I wholeheartedly agree with.

We have too many outrage pimps on both sides of the aisle whipping the respective bases into a frenzy and fury against the other side. I don’t have enough time or energy to be outraged about it all. There are things to be outraged by, but not everything, and certainly not with full energy dedicated to every perceived slight and grievance.

What I am finding is that among conservatives there is too much outrage, piss, and vinegar. It makes our ideas less effective. We have become humorless, angry opponents of the President instead of happy warriors selling better ideas. We are not even selling ideas.

Conservatives, frankly, have become purveyors of outrage instead of preachers for a cause. Instead of showing how increasing government harms people, how free markets help people, and how conservative policies benefit all Americans, we scream “Benghazi” and “Fast & Furious.”

We’re off key and off message. We’ve become professional victims dialed up to 10 on the outrage meter. Who the hell wants to listen to conservatives whining and moaning all the time about the outrage du jour? Seriously? Mitt Romney ran a campaign on just how bad things are, but he was rejected by a majority of Americans who felt like he really did not care about them and really had no plans to improve their lives.

I'd honestly like to congratulate Mr. Erickson on both his eloquence and his honesty. Given his audience, I imagine that he'll take endless shit for having written that. God knows that I've been saying exactly the same thing for far longer, much to the displeasure of some of my friends, who are several degrees of magnitude saner than the fans of Red State.

I could care less if the Republican Party survives the Obama years. But I do think traditional conservatism can and should. But a few things are going to be necessary for that to happen.

First, come up with governing ideas that don't sound like they were lifted from a tenth grader's book report of Atlas Shrugged. Only sexless geeks and the mentally ill take that kind of shit seriously. Moreover, the left will demagogue us to death with it, each and every time.

You know why geriatric Tea Partiers loved the Ryan Plan so much? Because it didn't affect them. They were exempted from it's harsher provisions, and it's pretty easy to tell everybody to go fuck themselves when they have no skin in the game. Before the second Ryan Plan, these same assholes were marching on Washington with "Government hands off Medicare" signs. The best ones spelled "government" wrong, too.

Second, if you believe as I do that the debt is an existential crisis, start fucking acting like it. That means that your goddamned political base doesn't get a pass. The GOP presented the War on Terror as an existential crisis, but only asked one half of one percent of the American people - those in the volunteer military -  to do anything about it. Everybody else could go shopping. And now they're doing exactly the same thing with the budget.

And please don't say that "at least we're better than Obama." All that does is convince me that nobody's serious.

Third, poll after poll after poll is showing that Americans are getting more libertarian on social issues. Not only that, they're getting that way faster than anyone could have expected. Just look at how attitudes have shifted on gay marriage and marijuanna legalization in eight years.

Conservatives can no longer say that government is the problem, but only until it comes out against something we don't like. You're either for a small government with limited powers, or you aren't. And you sure as shit can't be taken seriously about the size of government when your presidential candidates and media types are endlessly rhapsodizing about fuck pills!

Are you going to lose Evangelical Christians that way? Maybe. But you've already started losing everybody else. If American conservatism doesn't become younger, duskier, more libertarian and less religious soon, it will become a fringe.

Fourth, the American people couldn't have been clearer in preferring Obama to the perverted mess that American conservatism has become. You need to work with that and persuade them otherwise. Cooperate when you can, negotiate when you should and oppose when you must. You've had it your way for four years and what did it get you? A Democratic president and Senate and Republican House that's at war with itself is fucking where.

Fifth, not everything is an outrage or a threat to the Republic. Stop acting like it is. You sound like liberals. For example, the Affordable Care Act might be incredibly bad policy, but it isn't "an effort to destroy capitalism itself."  That's doubly true when you campaign saying that you're going to keep all the popular (and ungodly expensive) parts of it.

Unless somebody changed the literature when I wasn't looking, retarded hysteria is not a conservative virtue.

Sixth, "personal responsibility" is more than a goddamned slogan. When you fuck up, cop to it. When was the last time you saw a Republican take responsibilty for anything at all. And it's not like there's been a shortage of Republican fuck-ups in the last dozen years.

You can't, for example, say that the Goddamned Liberal Media is irrelevant and ineffective, yet capable of thwarting you at every turn. Well, I guess you can because you won't stop. But it makes you look like a shithead and no one will take you seriously.

Seventh, if you only do it once (and I wouldn't recommend doing it much more than that) listen to people like Jonah Goldberg when he says things like this.

The good is obvious. The ill is less understood. For starters, the movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can come only with persuading the unconverted.

A conservative journalist or activist can now make a decent living while never once bothering to persuade a liberal. Telling people only what they want to hear has become a vocation. Worse, it’s possible to be a rank-and-file conservative without once being exposed to a good liberal argument. Many liberals lived in such an ideological cocoon for decades, which is one reason conservatives won so many arguments early on. Having the right emulate that echo chamber helps no one.

We do ourselves no favors when we enrich and enable hucksters or reward the ignorance of our fellows. Unless and until we start calling out the shysters and the stupid among us, the left will continue to do it for us, and tar us all with that brush. Because we stupidly insist on embracing and defending idiot deejays and everyone ever associated with Brietbart.com, we give our opponents the club with which they beat us.

Eighth, it would be great if we stop defending the indefensible. There's nothing funnier to me than Canadian conservatives that take every shot they can at Obama, but defend Stephen Harper for doing exactly the same things he did, only more so. Canada's Conservative government is still running expensive television ads touting a massive stimulus program that ended four years ago. Over a third of the Obama stimulus was tax cuts, which wasn't true of Harper's old-timey "throw a blizzard of money at every pothole in the country" program. We don't just look stupid when we do this, we look dishonest.

It's also time to face the fact that Republicans are just as responsible for the debt explosion as Democrats, if not more so. Admitting that doesn't enable our opponents nearly as much as continuing to lie about it does. If you insist on hanging a Paul Ryan poster over your bed, you should understand that he voted for every single debt-creating bill Congress passed between 1997 and 2008. Period.

A wilderness period isn't just good for the soul, it's good for the mind. Richard Nixon said that losing the 1960 election made him a better president in 1968. Reagan almost certainly would have been a worse president if he was nominated and elected in 1968 or '76. Churchill also wrote pretty extensively about the virtues of a wilderness period.

Having said that, a wilderness period does you no good if all you do with it is build a bigger a echo chamber with which to feed some insane persecution complex. If this time is used to do nothing but humor those who see this as something other than satire, we're fucked.

The GOP's Biggest Problem

As President Obama is inaugurated to a second term this afternoon, the Republican Party is facing what I believe is an existential crisis. If things continue the way they are, it's not  outside the realm of possibility that there won't be a Republican Party at all by 2024.

This is because the party of Lincoln and Reagan has been overrun by a cabal of populist Neanderthals who haven't the slightest idea how politics is supposed to work. Winning elections, particularly when you happen to be the minority party, is about expanding the electorate.

On issue after issue, in race after race, the GOP has done everything it can to contract it. That's fine if you contract the entire electorate through negative campaigning. It makes sense to disgust swing voters and independents enough that the election becomes an exercise in base turn-out. But it's important to shrink the other guy's vote more than you shrink your own.

Republicans haven't done that in years now. In their silly quest for ideological purity, they've driven votes to the Democrats. If supposed "conservatives" want to blame anyone for the Democrats holding the Senate and the White House (and the only managed to hold the House last fall because of gerrymandering,) they should start by looking in the window.

And please don't tell me about "the lessons of Reagan," okay? Those goddamned people don't know the first thing about Reagan or how he won in 1980.

Because John Anderson was a third-party challenger that took almost all of his votes out of Jimmy Carter's hide, Reagan started with a six point advantage in the general election. Give Anderson's votes to Carter and Reagan still wins, especially in the Electoral College, but you have a much closer election than '80 turned out being.

Not only was Carter unpopular with the general electorate, Ted Kennedy's primary challenge hurt him deeply with the Democratic base. The surest way to determine if an incumbent president is going to lose is if he faces a primary challenge. Of the five presidents that lost re-election in the last century, only Hoover didn't have a primary.

After Watergate, the registration advantage Democrats enjoyed over Republicans was even broader than it is today. Given that, Reagan knew that he couldn't win with Republican votes alone. So he went after union households (a trick picked up from Richard Nixon) and made strong inroads with Catholics. If you think that the fabled "Reagan Democrats" were created by Reagan antagonizing everybody in sight, you're wrong. In fact, the Gipper had the added challenge of convincing most voters that he wasn't actually crazy.

Reagan instinctively understood that there's a sweet spot between the requirements of governing and the ideological purity of your electoral base that needs to be found and held onto if you plan on being successful. Tea Partiers and other "Cult of Reagan" conservatives look at Reagan's rhetoric far more than they do his record, which goes a long way in explaining what a mess they are today.

People also forget that the Democrats gave Reagan the greatest gift of all in nominating Walter Mondale, the last of the New Deal Democrats, in 1984. Had Gary Hart won the nomination, '84 might have been very different, and I'm not convinced that Reagan would have won as easily as he did.

Republican fortunes began declining in 1988, which was an unbelievably stupid and mean-spirited campaign that did nothing to expand to GOP's electorate, despite the weakness of Michael Dukakis. While George H.W Bush remains one of my heroes and is the last actual adult to be president of the United States, he never should have made that stupid "Read my lips, no new taxes" promise to placate the Grover Norquists of the world.

The pledge was completely unnecessary. Bush had already won the nomination when he said "Read my lips." Yes, he was 17 points behind Dukakis when the New Orleans convention opened, but taxes was a play for the base, which was already on board. The general electorate never punished Reagan for his eight tax increases - including the largest in American history - so it stands to reason that Bush could have been silent on the issue. The lingering questions over Iran-Contra were a much bigger threat to Bush than marginal tax rates were.

But when Bush the Elder had no option but to renege on the pledge and sign the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, the base went crazy. Pat Buchanan softened Bush up in the primaries and Ross Perot handed the presidency to Bill Clinton in the general election. Buchanan further damaged the party with his base-driven "culture war" speech to the Houston convention and marked the beginning of the end of the GOP as a reliable presidential party.

That happened just as the Democrats were learning the beauty of triangulation. Clinton and his advisers understood that if they could run credibly on traditional Republican issues, such as crime, national security and fiscal responsibility; combined with their own traditional stronghold issues of education and Social Security, they could win forever. The Democrats began creating "Clinton Republicans" out of Reagan Democrats just as the GOP started concerning itself entirely with its own base.

George Walker Bush's campaign was an indication that Republicans were learning how to triangulate. At the end of the Clinton Administration America was relatively prosperous and peaceful, so the campaign was largely about domestic issues that traditionally favor Democrats. Knowing that, Bush and his strategist Karl Rove triangulated what Chris Matthews calls "SHE" issues (Social Security, Health care and education) into his platform to make him appeal more to a centrist electorate.

It can be argued that Bush indeed narrowly lost the popular vote, but without triangulating it is almost certain that he couldn't have won in the Electoral College. If he had run a hard-right campaign in the America of 2000, Bush might very well have been demolished as thoroughly as Barry Goldwater had been in 1964. The fact remains that Bush, alone among post-1992 Republican nominees, ran a mostly non-ideological campaign and won.

The problem arose not from Bush's campaign, but from his presidency. He massively increased discretionary and entitlement spending without cutting anything else to pay for it. Worse, he put the biggest tax cut in human history and two wars on the national credit card. And on top of everything else, he destroyed the GOP's traditional edge on both national security and fiscal responsibility, perhaps forever. And unlike Reagan, he didn't have a Democratic Congress to blame it all on.

Social conservatives and Tea Partiers engage in the most easily disprovable thinking ever when they assert that Republican "moderate" nominees lose presidential elections. The second Bush ran to the centre and won. Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney were all pushed to their right and lost by pretty stunning margins.

The silly assertion that "moderates lose" retains significant traction, both on cable news and the congenitally wrong blogosphere. Worse, those who make it ignore both the history and the politics. Was there a candidate in the Republican primaries who were going to do better than Dole, McCain and Romney did? Does anyone seriously think that Pat Buchanan, Steve Forbes, Fred Thompson or Newt Gingrich could have beaten Clinton or Obama? They were the "conservative alternatives" in those elections and they were all born losers. I remain convinced that Jon Huntsman might have beaten Obama, but I harboured no illusions that he was going to be nominated.

However, you can make a very well supported case that as the Republican platform has drifted further and further toward the fantasist right since 1992, their electoral map has largely vanished. The southwest and Mountain states are all reliably blue and New Hampshire, Virginia and North Carolina have joined Ohio and Florida as swing states. Even Georgia is becoming closer than it has any business being. By 2020, Texas will become purple and it will be mathematically impossible for the GOP to win a presidential election.

The Tea Party learned all the wrong lessons from their successes in 2009 and '10, beginning with the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Massachusetts hadn't elected a Republican senator since Edward Brooke in the early 1970s, so it was something of a big deal and something that the Tea Party was eager to take credit for.

But they never seemed to understand that Brown campaigned without once describing himself as a Republican or considered what would be necessary for him to stay in office. For reasons that still escape me, they honestly believed that Brown could vote in lockstep with knuckleheads like Jim DiMinit and win re-election. When Senator Brown disabused them of that notion, they started muttering about challenging him in the next primary.

And they did that over and over throughout 2010. Thinking that the entire country was Mississippi or Utah, they took out credible candidates and incumbents in states like Delaware, Nevada and Colorado, essentially surrendering easy seats to the Democrats. They won the House, but lost any chance of reclaiming the Senate or the presidency in the process.

Not having learned any lessons at all from the last few years, now they're targeting New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

I'm not entirely convinced that Christie can win the presidency, but I can't pretend that he's anything but one of the very best national candidates the GOP has. His approval ratings in New Jersey are almost unprecedented for a Republican and that at least suggests that he can be competitive in states where few other Republicans can. And being competitive in improbable states is about the only realistic way left for the party to win in the Electoral College.

If the Republicans want to wage the 2016 campaign solely in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina, they should save themselves the money and not bother nominating a candidate at all because they'll lose again. But if they have a strong candidate who puts New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania in play, that consumes time and resources that the Democrats can't throw into the swing states. He has roughly the same path to 270 that I thought Mitch Daniels would have had last year.

If Republicans insist on continuing to run populist campaigns, they probably won't have anyone more credible doing it than Christie. He's not a career politician, like John McCain, or a zillionaire plutocrat, like Mitt Romney. He's plain-spoken and has a record that appeals to the Rust Belt, which the GOP absolutely has to do well in of they have any chance of surviving at all. More importantly still, he's been largely silent on issues that have alienated women and Latinos from the Republican Party.

Chris Christie has probably the best shot of winning the presidency of any Republican, so the Tea Party is trying to kill him off.

There's no shortage of Republicans who are running for the pin-up of innumerable idiot radio talk-show hosts, like Mark Levin and Laura Ingram. God knows that both McCain and Romney courted them to the exclusion of almost everyone else, and where did that get them? The GOP still doesn't seem to have figured out having Sean Hannity love you is maybe the single best indicator that you're about to get your ass kicked in a national election.

Here's the thing about Tea Party populism: it isn't as populist as they would like you to believe it is. The very same people who piss and moan about "the Republican Establishment" have been busying themselves creating their own establishment of functional retards like Sarah Palin, talk-show jackals and lobbyist swine. And don't start me on the wrongheaded bloggers that any candidate has to suck up to if they want to go anywhere.

But what exactly has that gotten them, other than the honor of losing badly to Barack Obama? How many presidents have those dopes elected?

In my opinion, Christie is uniquely positioned to not only bypass them on the way to the nomination, but run against them to victory. If he wins re-election by as big a margin as I think he will this fall, the governor can build a counter-base of sane people who like winning. We all know that Christie won't be a mealy-mouth sycophant to conservatism's worst caricatures, like McCain and Romney turned out to be. And it's been a good long time since a Republican has had a "Sister Soljah moment."

Sure, he'll lose Iowa that way, but he won't win there under almost any circumstances. However, it does give him a respectable chance at winning primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan and Florida. If he places second or third in South Carolina, it becomes almost impossible to stop him from winning the nomination.  

And why is the idiot wing of the party so pissed at Christie? Well, he wouldn't leave his disaster-plagued state to enable Romney's delusion that he could win Pennsylvania. Then he said reasonably nice things about a president that he was trying to get tens of billions of dollars from. And he called out the Tea Party fanatics for changing the rules of disaster relief in a way that they didn't for the Gulf states or the Carolinas. He's also unwilling to hug the NRA real tight as it sets itself on fire.

The only way Chris Christie was ever going to win the approval of the Tea Party was by destroying himself in New Jersey. And keep in mind that the only thing the Tea Party controls outside of AM radio is the House of Representatives, which currently has a lower approval rating that genital herpes, date rape and school shootings. If nothing else, those three things at least have the potential of building character and Congress can only be realistically expected to destroy it.

I like Rand Paul a great deal more than I expected to, but his chances of winning the Republican nomination are only slightly better than mine are. When your life's ambition is to win an election in Kentucky, you have the luxury of pandering to simpleton deejays and moron bloggers. But as the last two cycles have taught us, that isn't true in national politics. At least not anymore.

There aren't very many people that I think are capable of preventing the American conservative movement from committing collective suicide, but Chris Christie is one of them. But these people are so determined to make themselves an endangered species that they'll do whatever they can to stop him.

Populist conservatism is not unlike Nancy Spungen and there isn't much anyone can do to keep them away from their Sid Vicious. And that love story is almost guaranteed to end the same way.