Ted Cruz is Stupid, Cynical or Both, And I Want Him to be the Republican Presidential Nominee

 

I've never met Ted Cruz, so I can't say as an absolute certainty that he's a psychopathic retard. But because he's a Republican and a Tea Partier, he can't honestly object to either characterization, since both are such a central part of his political base.

Republicans and Teapers get awfully pissy when I say things like that, but I'm hardly the one that's been in the trenches finding new and ever more self-defeating ways to turn superstition and stupidity into conservative virtues.

Even before the advent of the Tea Party, supposedly conservative politicians have equated self-promoting ignorance as folksiness, which explains the non-sexual appeal of Sarah Palin perfectly. Christ, when I try to explain to reasonable, intelligent people why I hold conservative positions, I have to bend over backwards to demonstrate that I'm not a fucking yahoo. And that's exhausting because people like Ted Cruz have made it their life's mission to make it exhausting.

I'm going to explain the antics of the junior senator from Neverland this week as succinctly as I can.

Cruz filibustered for 21 hours - reading Dr. Suess and comparing everyone that isn't him to the goddamned Nazis - on a day when there weren't any bills pending in the Senate, which makes it less of a filibuster and more a spectacular at of public masturbation. By the way, he did this on a measure that he said that he supported and ultimately wound up voting for. It was the single most bizarre spectacle I've witnessed in my 35 years of studying American politics.

Cruz has so entranced the stupid that Erick Erikson hasn't been able to get his head out of Ted's lap long enough to write a coherent blog post in over a month. He's made Mark Levin even more insufferably Mark Levin.

But people with normal cognitive functions - including most rational Republicans - have come to loathe Cruz with the power of a thousand suns. Jon Dickerson of Slate explains why;

He wasted precious time: Republicans don’t want to get the blame for a government shutdown. By soaking up valuable Senate time with no-win maneuvers, Cruz has left House leaders with less time to follow their legislative strategy—one that might have won limited concessions from White House. Or, with significantly more time, House Speaker Boehner might have been able to produce a funding bill that would have at least included a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act. That would have put Democrats up for re-election in vulnerable states in a tough spot; at the very least, red state Democrats would have had to take an unpopular vote. Now the GOP looks fractured, time is short, and Boehner may only be able to pass the funding bill passed by the Senate Democrats—which he’ll almost certainly have to do with Democratic votes, offering even more leverage to the enemy.

Ego: He has used his colleagues to elevate himself in the furtherance of his 2016 presidential ambitions.

He made Obama’s critique look accurate: For years, President Obama has said a minority faction of zealots controls the Republican Party. By hijacking the system for a cause that had no chance of success, Cruz confirmed Obama’s cartoonish vision of a party controlled by a wing unconcerned about practical results.

He turned a tactical fight into a purity test: The majority of Republican senators agreed with Cruz on the importance of defunding Obamacare, but they disagreed with him on tactics. He characterized those with whom he had a tactical disagreement as ideological turncoats.

He blunted the GOP’s best plan of attack on Obamacare: The Affordable Care Act was falling under its own weight as stories of rickety implementation, layoffs, and companies dropping coverage of their employees continued to be published. By linking the “defunding effort” to continued funding of the government, Cruz distracted the public from Obamacare’s inherent problems. That distraction undermined Republican efforts to chip away at the legislation through smaller attacks, like a one-year delay that might have led to a full repeal if the GOP took back control of the Senate in 2014.

Let's try to look at this dispassionately, shall we? Cruz took something really unpopular (Obamacare) and attached it to something even more unpopular (a government shutdown.) The GOP is on the record as being against the former, but they know that they can be seen as favouring the latter.

This ain't 1995, teenagers. When Newt Gingrich convinced his party to commit ritualistic suicide back then, there were continuing resolutions to fund all but the most trivial parts of the government. America wasn't at war with three-quarters of the world and threatening to bomb the rest. And nobody was crazy enough to threaten to not raise the debt ceiling and destroy what's left of the world economy. Bill Clinton wasn't afraid of a government shutdown. Shit, he used it as a opportunity to get suck-started by the unpaid help.

The ramifications are so much worse now than they were then, and Senator Cruz and his shithead brigades couldn't care less. "We can let it burn now or later," is one refrain I've heard a lot from supposed "patriots" and "conservatives." These people are actually willing - no, eager - to drive their own interest rates through the fucking roof just to score points in some idiotic ideological beauty pageant.  They honestly believe that the ruination of the full faith and credit of the United States is a credible electoral path. And shitheels like Erickson say that if Obama doesn't want a shutdown, he should just give the Tea Party everything they want, which would make him a fantastic terrorist whisperer.

They aren't just assholes, They're out of their fucking minds.

But what did Cruz actually accomplish this week? Well, he wasted time that serious people could have used to make a deal. Oh, and he was on TV a lot.

Aside from that, not much. He actually wound up voting for the cloture motion that he was supposed to be (but actually wasn't) filibustering. Everything he wanted is going to be eviscerated in conference, but now it's going to happen with malice. Ted Cruz is singularly a man without friends in Washington. Good luck with having a career that way.

On the other hand, he's now the number one choice for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination among people without teeth or common sense. And you know what? I'm with them 100%!

Establishment tool Jonah Goldberg thinks it unfair to compare Cruz to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. I don't, because neither actually did anything to further their stated aims. McCarthy never actually named an actual communist and Cruz has done nothing in real terms in stopping Obamacare. McCarthy and Cruz are both third-rate demagogues who were just smart enough to know that they could only further their own careers by exciting mouthbreathers.

And that's exactly what the GOP needs in a presidential nominee this year. I wasn't so silent in wanting Sarah Palin to be the nominee last year, and I want Cruz for the same reasons.

There needs to be a Great Cleansing in a conservative movement, and that isn't going to come through the wingnuts forcing sane nominees to act like lunatics, as happened to John McCain and Mitt Romney. And Reagan wouldn't have passed the Tea Party's schizophrenic purity test. Neither would Barry Goldwater.

They want the first Bircher nominee, never mind that most of the country knew that was a horrible idea 65 years ago. Jesus, they've made Barack Obama - who would have fit well in Gerald Ford or George H.W Bush's Cabinets - into a Maoist Antichrist.

I'm suggesting that sensible conservatives give them exactly what they want and nominate Ted Cruz. The apocalypse will take care of the rest.

I figure that Boy Ted will lose about 39 states. In the last ten years, the GOP has seen Colorado, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida slip away. Indiana, Georgia and Arizona have all been tighter than they should be, and the demographics suggest that even Texas is going to start turning purple in the next decade.

I've spent three years trying to make a map where a Tea Partier wins the presidency, and I can't. In the last two cycles, those idiots have thrown away perfectly good Senate seats in Delaware, Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, Missouri and (if it weren't for Linda Murkowski running as an Independent,) Alaska - all of which, except Delaware, used to be pretty reliable Republican states.

There's no reason to believe that a Tea Party presidential nominee will be any more successful than their Senate nominees were in Republican-leaning states.

The Republican Party doesn't have many more elections in them to lose until they become the Whigs. The GOP only survived FDR because they Eisenhower was willing to save them. But no one with the seriousness of purpose of Ike would ever carry the idiotic standard of the Tea Party. Who needs to throw away their dignity with their professional prospects?

The Tea Party needs to run, win or lose, on their own. They can't be allowed any excuses, such as being hindered by a "moderate", which hasn't actually happened yet, or a lack of institutional support, which they say they don't want.

In an ordinary time, I'd support someone like Chris Christie, Jon Huntsman, Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush (assuming that we could collectively forget who his brother is) - considered conservatives that can win - for president. Hell, I even like about half of what Rand Paul says, depending on my mood.

But I'm not. I'm tired of the Tea Party horseshit, and willing to give them their turn. Let them nominate a hack like Ted Cruz. It'll be fun to watch him struggle to win by 10 points in a cesspool like Mississippi, where the Republicans usually win by 25.

I don't want to see Cruz turned into Robert Taft, the serious conservative that wasn't given a chance. He needs to be Alf Landon, the guy who got beaten within an inch of his fucking life.

Then, and only then, does the Republican Party have a real chance of surviving the decade.

Besides, how bad could President Biden really be?

Reince Priebus isn't Very Bright

You what a good sign that the Republican party has finally gotten it's shit together would be? When they stop running against the media.

Too many of my fellow conservatives embrace the conflicting positions that the mainstream media is dead and ignored by everybody, yet still powerful and nefarious enough to foil the GOP at every turn. You can believe one or the other, but not both.

Well, I guess that's not entirely true. You can argue both positions if you're appealing solely to inbred yokels and the recently head injured. They loves them as much anti-intellectual populist fuckheadery as they can stuff inside their little pin heads.

And that brings me to Reince Priebus, the singularly ineffective chairman of the Republican National Committee. I thought that anyone would have been an improvement after Michael Steele's reign of error at the RNC. I thought wrong.

Priebus was supposed to be the Godhead brought to earth. Under his stewardship, the GOP was supposed to expand its margin in the House, win control of the Senate and banish forever the vulnerable Barack Obama from 1600 Pennsylvania Boulevard.

None of which actually happened. Republicans wound up losing two seats in the Senate, eight in the House and Obama put Mitt Romney down like a rabid cur. Oh, and the party came out of last November looking more like wild-eyed dipshits coming out of the election than they did going in. Not a spectacular result, to say the least.

So Republicans did what they always do: Blame the media for their own bad performance.

Now Priebus is getting pre-emptive with his retatded nonsense, declaring the RNC won't partner with NBC or CNN for the 2016 primary debates if the networks go forward with planned Hillary Clinton-centric projects. 

The liberal media is on notice: If you’re in the business of spending millions to promote Hillary Clinton, you will not take part in Republicans’ primary debates in the 2016 presidential election.

On Monday, I sent letters to NBC and CNN informing them that the RNC will not sanction any primary debates they sponsor if they do not cancel their plans to promote Hillary Clinton.

NBC is planning a miniseries, CNN a documentary. If they don’t cancel these poorly disguised political ads by August 14, they can plan on watching Republican debates on networks other than their own.

Oh, fucking spare me.

I'll ignore for a moment CNN, which no one watches. But it should be pointed out that young Reince wasn't bitching too hard when CNN ran a Mitt Romney documentary last year.

The NBC mini-series (starring the always hot as fuck Diane Lane as Dame Clinton) is being produced by NBC's entertainment, which is a largely separate entity from the news division. You know how I know that? The entertainment division is located in Hollywood and news is run out of New York.

Moreover, who gives a shit if the RNC doesn't play with the networks? I can almost assure you that the networks don't.

The freakshow primary debates are expensive to produce, a nightmare to coordinate and don't do much in the way of ratings. There's a reason the broadcast networks stopped running them years ago. They can make more money with re-runs of a snuff movie or Saved By the Bell.   The only reason that they run the hour a night of the convention coverage that they do is because their FCC licenses demand it.

The presidential debates between the nominees are vapid and pointless enough. The primary debates are little more than an excuse for the candidates to show off how dumb and psychotic they are. And there are literally dozens of the fucking things now.

From there, Priebus just starts lying outright.

I called out NBC and CNN because I refuse to let biased networks turn the 2016 debates into the same traveling circus they caused the 2012 debates to be. This is just one step toward creating a better, fairer debate system. But this is also an opportunity for us to begin to do something even bigger.

The networks didn't turn the 2012 debates into a "traveling circus." The candidates did more than an adequate job of that all on their own. 

The fact is that all of the halfway smart Republicans stayed as far the fuck away from the 2012 nomination as they possibly could. The '12 primaries were so sad that at various times the main challengers to Mitt Romney were Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, some pizza lobbyist who likes pussy, and the stupid and stoned governor of Texas. How can that be anything but a travelling circus?

Furthermore, the shithead base of the GOP, as exemplified by blogs like RedState, has served only to force the candidates to marginalize themselves - and their party - to the point that they're almost incapable of winning a presidential election. People watch the Republican primaries for the same reason they stop to gawk at car accidents; Because blood has a certain glimmer to it when it's mixed with gasoline.

The fact is that you can't put a dozen third-tier mutants like Michele Bachmann together on stage and not expect people - including even the media - to not point out that they're third-tier mutants.

Were it up to me, the primaries would be abolished in their entirety and the nomination would be decided in the "smoke filled rooms" of yore, by people who at least have some idea of how government and politics work. No party that considers people like Erick Erickson power brokers can be taken seriously by anyone else.

But I think we all know that I'm not going to get my way, don't we? I rarely do.

However, there is a way to make the primary debates at least a little less self-destructive

1. Have fewer of them: Look, whoever decided that having upwards of two dozen debates that no one watches should be committed.

Dozens of debates serve only to provide dozens of opportunities for the eventual nominee to make mistakes that will kill him or her in the fall. Or the losing candidates will launch attacks that will cripple the nominee later.

As much as Republicans like to pretend otherwise, the Democrats didn't make Romney's ties to Bain Capital an issue, Newt Gingrich did. And Rick Perry, not Barack Obama, coined the phrase "Vulture Capitalism." They set Obama up for the layup that destroyed Mitt Romney forever.

2. Have no more than five: Primary debates are no being held upwards of seven months because the first primary, which is insane. All that does is take unelectable misfits like Bachmann and Herman Cain and make them national figures with access to the money they need to cause irreparable harm to the party. Say what you will about the Democrats, but they've never run a collection of monsters like the Republicans did last year.

If you deny the real freaks national TV time, you deny them the money to keep their campaigns going. And if they're out, you allow yourself to present what passes for your party's best face right from the get-go. That wouldn't have stopped Gingrich and Santorum from clearing that bar last year, but I suspect that 2016 will be different.

Since there are only five primaries that matter, there should only be five debates. Those would be within two weeks of voting in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and Super Tuesday. If the nominee isn't decided on Super Tuesday, the party has problems that will only be amplified by more debates.

3. Have the most antagonistic moderator you can find, or none at all: Political swine and their shithead consultant-lobbyist enablers aren't really interested in debates, they want an infomercial. That's why Priebus wants them turned into ball-washing exercises conducted by idiots like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

But that doesn't prepare you for a general election. Sure, it'll thrill the practically retarded primary base of the party, but it doesn't get the nominee ready for the attacks that they'll face from increasingly disciplined Democratic nominees.

If it were up to me, I'd find the smartest, most viciously liberal Harvard professor in all of Christendom to moderate the Republican debates. Or I'd have no moderator at all, and just let the candidates beat each other to death with their podiums.

The Conventions became infomercials after 1976, and the broadcast networks carry the minimal amount they can get away with, and the cable networks only carry them because they're starved for content. That will happen to the debates if fuckheads like Reince Piebus get their way.

Why a Balanced Budget Amendment is Silly

I like the idea of a balanced budget amendment to the U.S Constitution. Columnist George Will certainly outlines the need for one. Unfortunately, no Republican has ever proposed one that wasn't balls-out stupid.

Proponents for an amendment usually fail to point out that debt-ridden basket cases like California and Illinois have balanced budget amendments. They, like most of the states, just use accounting tricks to make their books appear to be balanced, when in fact they're a shocking mess and only likely to get worse.

Conservative proponents of an amendment also display an almost incredible level of dishonesty when they compare deficit numbers from the Bush years to the present day in an attempt to demonstrate that Republicans are more fiscally responsible. A cursory look at the charts they present seem to make their case clear, but they neglect to tell you about the accounting tricks that the GOP employed from 2001 through the beginning of 2007.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are prime examples of the budgetary chicancery they used. The Bush Administration didn't primarily fund the wars through the usual annual budget process. They instead went to Congress several times a year to seek military funding through emergency supplemental bills. Remember the $87 billion that John Kerry voted for before he voted against it? That was an emergency supplemental. And the costs of the wars through 2009 was roughly a trillion dollars.

The beauty of those those bills is that because they aren't part of the budget, they bypass annual deficit reporting numbers. Instead, they are added directly to the debt. So, when you're shown graphs listing deficits from the Bush years, you're only getting half the story. You're being lied to without the people doing it actually lying. But it's really no different from Enron accounting. It's the same kind of math that the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments used to prove that the Too Big To Fail banks were solvent when they weren't.

I mention this because these are the same people who most strongly advocate a Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA). You shouldn't take anything these people say on faith, given their demonstrated history of ignorance, duplicity, or both.

For an amendment to be effective, it would have to be clean. The language should have to look something like this: "Congress shall each year enact a budget that is in balance without exception." Another option is to require balance over three or five year periods, but there cannot be exceptions.

The lack of exceptions is key. If there's an emergency, such as a war, natural disaster or financial calamity that requires deficit spending, that money should be subtracted from the following year's budget (or the next three or five.) Or there would have to be an automatic tax increase to pay down the deficit.

I have yet to see a "clean" amendment proposed by anyone. More often than not, they're riddled with exceptions that Republicans like spending money on, or spending that is politically advantageous to them. It's important to note that the biggest deficits in U.S history were created by Republican presidents. Even the current Obama deficit is driven mostly by the wars, the Bush tax cuts, and program spending, such as Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind that the GOP categorically refused to pay for when they controlled the process. The Obama stimulus (to date, his biggest ticket spending item) was a one-time outlay, whereas the Bush programs were structural and almost impossible to repeal.

More importantly, most of the Republican BBA proposals I've seen require a supermajority (usually three-quarters) vote to raise revenue. By 2016, just the cost of servicing the debt will be roughly equal to the Pentagon's budget, making balancing the budget by spending cuts alone almost impossible. New revenue will be absolutely necessary to avoid a catastrophe, and the denial of same demonstrates the singular unseriousness of most Republican proposals.

If a supermajority is necessary anywhere, it would be in passing emergency supplemental spending, which bypasses the budget process entirely and would also presumably get around any proposed amendment. Since most such spending tends to be military in nature, it would also make lawmakers think twice about going to war. At a minimum, it would make them be more forthright about the costs of war.

Before a balanced budget amendment is introduced, Congress is going to have to be serious about its accounting practices, which currently do not factor the single largest threats to the U.S economy: the unfunded liabilities of future Medicare and Social Security spending. Democrats point to the "balanced budgets" of 1998-2000, but if a private business or individual budgeted that way, they would find themselves being indicted. The unfunded liabilities might cost as much as $75 trillion by 2050 and no reasonable person thinks that the American economy is going to grow at anything near the rate necessary to absorb that cost.

An amendment will finally have to recognize that tax cuts actually are spending, and will require other spending costs to offset their cost. The single biggest driver of the deficit today remains the Bush-Obama tax cuts, which cost over $3 trillion over the last decade and produced almost nothing in economic growth.

From 2001-07, the Republican Party proved beyond any doubt that "fiscal responsibility" is nothing more than a rhetorical wedge for them. They say they deserve another chance, but their continued lies about the nature of the Obama deficits undermine that case. For that reason, they shouldn't be trusted about a BBA.

I believe that a balanced budget amendment is going to be necessary, but not before Congress undertakes a number of significant and painful reforms. Otherwise, it's nothing more than a rhetorical stunt and all of the trick accounting in the world isn't going to fool the international markets.

Praying for the Apocalypse: Dispatches From the GOP's Last Stand

One of the great joys of this past week has been watching the Tea Party-Republican reaction to the fiscal cliff deal reached on Tuesday morning. I wrote about my displeasure with it here and I have many of the same grievances with the bargain that hardcore Teapublicans do. The only difference is that I'm telling the truth and they aren't.

Most of the commentary that I've seen railed against the tax increase and the $4 trillion in new debt. The only problem with this critique is that if the GOP got it's way, the debt would have been much worse.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that almost all of the $4 trillion comes from the expansion of the Bush tax cuts for those making under $400, 000 and the permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax. The "new spending" (and that term requires that you believe that tax cuts that aren't paid for aren't spending, which they are) equals about $300 billion.

But Republicans generally, and the Tea Party in particular, wanted all of the Bush tax cuts made permanent, plus the patch of AMT, which would have made CBO's deficit projections larger still. That's the math, folks. Arguing with it doesn't change it.

That would have been fine if Republicans had a plausible way of paying for it. Luckily for them, Republican dogma dictates that tax cuts aren't spending, so the deficits that result from them, in the immortal words of Dick Cheney, "don't matter."

Of course, that brings us to loophole reductions highlighted in the various Ryan plans and the Romney campaign. These of course were nothing short of blatant lies, which we know because no one ever presented a list of deductions to be eliminated or the math behind them. The only reason to leave that information out is because you know that it would be politically impossible to pass. Romney and Ryan would have gotten their tax cuts, to be sure. But they either wouldn't have been paid for or the burden of doing so would have fallen squarely on the middle class.

And if deductions and loopholes are such a wonderful way of paying for tax cuts, why wasn't the idea explored in 2001 and '03? It had been done rather successfully in 1986 and there was certainly no shortage of economists in the Bush White House. My guess is - and this is only a guess because I'm not aware of anyone else asking the question - is that they either knew that the math didn't work or the optics of having the middle class pay for it would be politically worse than the deficits themselves.

But you can cut spending to pay for tax cuts, right?

Yes, that's theoretically possible. But Republicans have never actually tried it before. Neither Reagan or the second Bush tried cutting spending anywhere close to the costs of their tax cuts. In fact, both dramatically ramped up defense spending, which obliterated the savings from domestic spending cuts. But that too was okay because the GOP doesn't believe that defense spending is "spending," either. Indeed, Mitt Romney promised a third surge in security spending without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it.

Nor has anyone complaining about Obama's budgeting bothered to come up with anything close to $4 trillion in domestic cuts over a decade. They've promised a lot of reforms, but none of those take effect for a decade after enactment and are guaranteed to have monstrous transition costs. President Bush's 2005 Social Security plan was estimated to cost a trillion dollars in the first ten years, and I expect that Medicare reform based on personal plans would cost at least that much, and probably much, much more.

If the Grover Norquists and Erick Ericksons of the world had their way and everyone in the U.S government was suddenly a Republican, the projected deficits over the next 10 years would grow faster and larger than those currently on the table. Though they like pretending otherwise, their policies have costs, too. Both history and simple arithmetic teach us that.

As I've said before, I was fine with the sequester with its brutal, wide-ranging and immediate cuts. It was the GOP who objected to it most strongly because half of those cuts came directly from the Pentagon's hide, and the Republican platform calls for a dramatic increase in military spending. Another ideological perversion of the Republican Party is their failure to understand that defense spending, being wholly dependent on foreign policy, is the most discretionary spending of all. And at over $600 billion a year, it's the biggest discretionary program of all.

So when Republicans refuse to pay for their tax cuts or cut spending in a serious or timely way, they're left with one fallback position - shut down the government and possibly default on the debt.

You get a good idea of how unserious these people are when you read something like this;  "Specifically,( Pennsylvania Senator Pat)  Toomey tells Joe Scarborough, “We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean, and insist that we get off the road to Greece because that’s the road we’re on now.”

Excuse me, but what in the fuck is a "temporary partial government shutdown?"

My guess is that it means that the parts of the government (which also happen to be the biggest parts of it) that Republicans like, such as the military and the CIA, continue conducting business as usual. The GOP might be stupid, but it isn't as suicidal as you might think, so Social Security checks will continue to go out and doctors will keep getting paid under Medicare and Medicaid. All "a temporary partial government shutdown" means is that there's no urgency to reach a deal.

Not being a real government shutdown, that allows people like Erickson to think that Republicans have room to maneuver. This is because people like Erickson don't know how life works outside of their silly ideological bubbles.

Friends, this isn't going to be a replay of 2011. Back then, both sides were negotiating before the government hit the debt ceiling and continued as Treasury was juggling existing money to pay the bills. In this case, the ceiling was reached on Tuesday morning, Obama is on the record as saying that he isn't going to negotiate serious spending cuts and Boehner has said that he isn't going to negotiate with Obama at all. In addition to that, I expect the intellectual misfits in the Tea Party to start calling for a default by the end of next week.

The timing of this suggests to me that a default is a serious possibility this time. In fact, I think it's probable.

The markets freaked out in 2011 just because the GOP talked about defaulting and America's credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history. Can you imagine what will happen if those crazy bastards actually do cause a default?

Remember the meltdown following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? This will be much worse. At least the government had access to $1.6 trillion for TARP and the Recovery Act then, which it won't this spring because no one will lend America money at anything less than ruinous interest rates. The economy won't "slow down," it'll come to a screeching halt and the United States could start losing a million jobs a month immediately.

By the way, do you know how hard killing terrorists will be when Congress doesn't even have change for the bus? China might also use the opportunity to ramp up its ambitions in the South Pacific, and God only knows what signals Iran will read into a U.S default and Depression.

And all of it will happen at the insistence of alleged "fiscal conservatives."

It's time to finally, finally admit that these people are fiscal conservatives the same way that Lindsay Lohan is sober and chaste. They are to sound economic policy what snake handling is to modern spirituality.

These people are willing to usher in Armageddon based solely on the factually unsupportable belief that Jesus will be waiting at the other side.

If you live outside America, you would be wise to get whatever money you have there out soonest. And if you live in the United States, know that Glenn Beck is probably right and you should start stockpiling gold, canned goods, firearms and explosives forthwith

The Republican Party is going down and they're fixing to take America down with it.

The Tea Party is Keeping it Classy!

One of the great things about the Tea Party is that it claims to be leaderless. There are also many factions of it that are constantly warring with one another over who actually represents the movement. In that they aren't unlike the Communist Party split in the days immediately after the Russian Revolution.

So why is that a great thing? Well, if you're the Tea Party, it allows you to avoid responsibility for anything! For a movement that never tires of advocating personal responsibility, when was they last time you saw them accept direct responsibility for anything that their members have said or done?

The correct answer is "never." Not once. It's always the fault of the mainstream media or some nefarious socialist plot (when the mainstream media itself isn't part of some nefarious socialist plot,) but it's never, ever their fuck up. That's the first reason that you shouldn't trust these people. The second reason is that they're idiots.

Timothy Birdnow is with Tea Party Nation. He has posting rights on their website, so I assume that he speaks for them in some way. And he sure is efficient. In this post he manages to cram so much crazy and stupid into such a small space, just 2,875 words, that you can't help but be impressed!  To give Mr. Birdnow his proper due, he also manages to stuff a healthy dose of small government rhetoric while calling for big government solutions. You really have to read it to believe it.

The takeaway from the Birdnow commentary that Mediaite is running with involves George Zimmerman. You remember George, right? Good. I'd rather not devolve into re-explaining his sad story, nor do I want to re-litigate it.

Birdnow says this about Friday's mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School; "Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive."

Let me repeat that in case you missed it. "Had George Zimmerman been at the front door instead of some mechanical card reader those children would still be alive."

That's a highly debatable point, actually. Were those children carrying skittles and iced tea? If they were, that could have been a problem.

The fact that Mr. Zimmerman has been charged with second degree murder at least suggests that he isn't exactly judicious with a firearm and is perhaps best kept away from children. Mr. Birdnow also never explains how Zimmerman would have dealt with Adam Lanza's body armor. A head shot, you say? He shot Treyvon Martin in the chest.

It's really too bad that Mediaite focused on the Zimmerman angle because there's just so much other crazy in Birdnow's piece that it should be dealt with at length. He has a list of suggestions, few of which have anything at all to do with gun violence but are almost all paranoid, comic or both.

1. Homeschool. Take away the power of the radicals in the classrooms. Makes your kids safer, too.

Well, it makes your kids safe from strangers, I'll grant you that. But since most murdered kids are taken out by a close relative, why shouldn't they all be?

 2. Back Right to Work legislation for the public sector. Teacher’s unions have helped cement much of this in place. As long as we have group think in the classrooms we will never see the end of this.

Huh? Do non-union teachers have some ninja powers that I'm unaware of. It would be kind of cool if they did. Also, the unionized teachers were shot trying to protect the kids.

3. Engage in more frank discussion of race and culture. For far too long we have tiptoed around these issues, fearful of being branded a racist. If black thugs kidnap and rape a woman, ask if there is something in the black culture that fostered that. If an evil white kid murders a bunch of children at the school, ask the same question of the white community. What was it that spawned this behavior? What was this kid taught? We have to stop hiding from our respective national sins.

I'm not sure what "black thugs" kidnapping and raping a (presumably) white woman have to do with this, but okay. And what exactly does severe mental illness have to do with "national sins?"

It should also be pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators of mass public shootings are white men. And the violence is rarely ever racially motivated.

5.Call evil out. We have to stop being sorry and start being angry. This is not a time for national grief so much as a time for national anger. We should stop tolerating this sort of thing. Indeed, stop tolerating any bad behavior. If you see kids jumping ahead in line, say, call them out. If you see punks bothering their neighbors call them out. Say something to the idiot blaring his car stereo. Say something to the foul-mouthed teens. Tell the brats to pull up their pants; nobody wants to see their filthy underwear and pimply behind. We have to start saying something, stop ignoring it. The first way any society maintains order is through social pressure from individuals. We have insanely given that up.

You know, in a nation where everybody is armed, I'm not sure that's very wise. This is, I think, the "broken windows" theory with one important difference. Every loudmouthed hillbilly like Timothy Birdnow gets to be a cop.

6.Work to devolve power back to the parents, the local officials, and the communities. A society that is top-down will inevitably lead to alienation of the sort we have seen here. This young man was twenty years old, and his actions were neither spurious nor random. As an FBI profiler said on television last night, he undoubtedly felt powerless and sought to remedy that. Why does a twenty year old feel powerless? He could leave his mother’s home at any time at his age. He feels powerless because he has lived in an over-bureaucratized society, one run ultimately from a far-away central location. He sees his life as at the mercy of others, and sees himself as having no real input or control. He has been coddled all his life, given free rein to indulge his senses but not to face the responsibilities that freedom necessitates. He was an eternal juvenile, a child who was not allowed to grow up. He lived in a world of the Progressives making, not in reality.

The family is the fundamental building block of civilization, and from it all power originates. The Left has systematically destroyed the family for the purpose of empowering the State, and this has destroyed so many lives. Individuals - especially immature individuals - need to be taught how to live, how to think, how to believe. Man’s animal passions must be placed in check and his rational faculties engaged. His moral compass must be set. Liberalism sought to destroy all the controls by destroying the family and community, centralizing power in meta institutions and granting the individual absolute moral autonomy without giving him the wisdom he needs to exercise it. . It is a recipe for disaster, as we have seen.

Um, wow.

Birdnow thinks the solution is a devolution of power from the federal government. He then cites the opinion of an FBI profiler and plasters his own opinion over that of the profiler. I've read a lot about profilers. Never once have I heard them cite "Progressives" as a cause of anything.

Moreover, who do you suppose that Birdnow wants to empower the family to triumph over the dastardly Left? My guess is Congress. I know, I can't follow his fucking logic, either.

7. Restrict the sex in movies, television, on the internet. There is a reason why young people commit these sorts of crimes, and sex plays no small part. Their passions are eternally inflamed, and they wander the Earth with no outlet for their overstimulated glands. People have understood the close relationship between sex and violence through history; sex was an inducement to military service in ancient times (and modern, too) and it has traditionally been understood that a sexually robust individual will fight harder and more aggressively. We are engaging half this equation, overstimulating our youth while denying them a planned outlet. Even if they were to live promiscuously (a very bad thing for society) they still cannot find adequate outlets for their passions, which have grown to titanic volume. Fighting is the traditional outlet. Societies have always carefully planned ways to release this tension constructively - through physical labor, through hunting, through military service, sometimes even through intellectual pursuits. Now we have nothing, no place for this pent-up frustration to go. The only answer is to follow the other societal coping mechanism, which is to tone down the sexual stimulation, encourage chastity and modesty. Our society has conveniently thrown that away as well. We have to restore it.

Parents, monitor what your children watch, what they look at on the internet. Make sure they dress modestly.

You have got to be fucking kidding me. These guys are going ape with an AR-15 because they're horny?  Are you serious?

Again, who is to be restricting "the sex in movies, television, on the internet?" This guy likes the government a whole lot more than he's letting on. And I love how "intellectual pursuits" can "relieve tension," but only "sometimes."

Birdnow obviously holds the Second Amendment very close to his heart, so much so that he sometimes forget that there's one right before it. Or would he prefer that it be stopped at the distribution point, which is government interference in business and exactly what the Tea Party is supposed to be fighting against.

You know what else relieves sexual tension, Tim? Furious masturbation and hardcore, animalistic fucking. Want proof? I'm the least excitable person I know.

Finally, making sure children dress modestly has certainly gone a long way in preventing Afghanistan into a violent and chaotic shithole. Oh, wait ....

8. Control drugs. Do not think that puffing a joint is harmless. Several American states decriminalized Marijuana, and it is actually legal in Washington and Colorado. Is it a coincidence that this shooting just occurred? Probably, but not in the long haul. Drugs and crime and violence go together. Trayvon Martin, the youth shot and killed by a neighborhood watch captain after he was assaulted , was likely high http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2888655/postswhen he was shot - and George Zimmerman has claimed Martin assaulted him, something backed by medical testimony. Martin had trace amounts of marijuana in his system, http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-05-17/news/31753474_1_medical-... should be pointed out. Would Martin have done that had he been sober? And medical marijuana is a joke; there are far better substances that can be used. It is nothing but a way to backdoor legalization.

Again with the government! Remember, it's the state and local governments that are decriminalizing marijuana, precisely the people the people that these Tea Party types are supposed to trust more than the diabolical tyrants in Washington that they need their semi-automatic weapons to defend themselves against.

I know that you teenagers are hip enough that I don't need to point this out to you, but Mr. Birdnow doesn't understand that potheads are too busy giggling to attack anyone.

10.Go back to church. We need God more than ever, need prayer. It’s time the Ten Commandments were taught again. It’s time the Bible was taught. It’s time people learned the examples of the heroes of our Judeo-Christian heritage - heroes like Moses, who gave up his life as an Egyptian noble to become a shepherd and eventually lead his birth mother’s kin out of slavery, or David who spent years hiding from King Saul, and who, at one point, had Saul completely under his power (in the cave of Adullum) but would not smite the Lord’s anointed, or of John the Baptizer, a man who spoke the truth until his head was cut off, or of any of the Apostles who died for their faith. Most of all they should learn of Jesus, who refused to turn from the Truth and allowed himself to be sacrificed in the most painful manner possible for other people’s sins.

This evil can be fought, but not by any methods likely to be proposed by Progressives or imposed by our government. At best it will entail a top-down approach that will impose greater restrictions on the individual, on the family, and on the community. The solutions will be more of what caused this in the first place.

"Well, we obviously need the tyrannical and probably Marxist federal government to stop the porn and pot, but once that's taken over, the churches can take care of the rest."

You know what scares me even more than monsters like Adam Lanza walking among us? The fact that otherwise intelligent people support and vote for ideological nonsense like this.

Holy Shit, Newt Gingrich is Right About Something, Remains Wrong!

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy that's wrong about almost everything that he opines about. It's actually really amusing to watch. His ego, combined with his lethal allergy to humility, makes for some awesomely hilarious positions and political postures.

Always remember that Newt is a guy who left his first two wives when they were desperately ill (the first with cancer and the second with MS) for his mistresses, yet continues to have the balls to rail about the assault on the American family and cultural decay. He made his name saying that Democrats were essentially responsible for Susan Smith drowning her children, but that didn't stop him from complaining about the meanness of politics when Mitt Romney blasted him directly into hell.

Newt isn't just the worst person in American politics, he might be the worst person alive today. Not only was it a foregone conclusion that Romney was going to rain almost sexual levels of humiliation down on him, Joseph Kony probably would have, too. God knows, Kony probably has higher personal favourability numbers and is a demonstrably better Christian.

It's been said that Gingrich will have ten ideas at any given time. One of them will be brilliant, three will be balls-out crazy, and the last six will be built on intellectually faulty foundations, if not completely wrong.

But on Meet the Press this morning, Gingrich said something that desperately needs to be said;

Newt Gingrich told David Gregory on Sunday’s Meet The Press “the Republican party of today is incapable of competing” with a 2016 presidential run by Hillary Clinton. Gingrich thinks “every Republican” should be focused on 2016 because of the severity of their defeat in 2012. Gingrich said that if Clinton were to run in four years, “supported by Bill Clinton and presumably a still relatively popular President Barack Obama, trying to win that will be, truly, the Super Bowl.”

And the GOP is almost certain to get their asses kicked, especially if Hillary is the Democratic nominee.

Rightly or wrongly, American voters now look back fondly on the Clinton years of relative peace and prosperity. The almost manic levels of criminal narcissism that both Clintons embodied have been forgotten. And Hillary's once impressive personal negatives have evaporated because of her better than expected performance in the non-political position of secretary of state.

While it's true that she ran the greatest clusterfuck of a presidential campaign in recent memory in 2008, both Clintons are formidably smart and have long histories of learning from her mistakes. The odds of her staffing a potential run with lobbyist assholes who are more interested in beating each other than winning the nomination are nil.

Hillary learned four years ago that caucuses and small state primaries can bring as many (or more) convention delegates as big state primaries. Clinton's tactical mistakes were drilled into her by an incredibly disciplined Barack Obama and taught her lessons that are not likely to need repeating.

Anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn't know the history of the Clinton family. Say what you will about them (and I could go on all day about Bill and Hillary,) but they do not make the same mistakes twice.

On the other hand, I don't think Hillary is going to run. I think she wants to, but history is going to stop her.

All you have to do is look at Joe Biden and you can see how badly he wants the nomination. This will be Biden's fifth (and presumably final ) national campaign and the single best shot at the nomination that he's ever going to have.

Here's some important history for you good people. The last sitting vice president that was denied the nomination of either party was Alben Barkley. At 74, Barkley remains the oldest serious candidate for the presidency. He was nearly blind and he had recently been dignosed with heart issues. Furthermore, Truman's job approval rating in the spring of '52 was just 24%, which hurt Barkley considerably. His campaign lasted just two months.

The only three incumbent VPs who sought the nomination - Nixon, Bush 41 and Gore - all won it. More importantly, they were the only vice presidents in a two-term administration since FDR. With the exceptions of Nixon and Bush 43, two-term presidents since Truman tend to leave office with high job approval ratings, which, historically at least, sets Biden up nicely.The deeply unpopular Lyndon Johnson\s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, came within less than a point of winning  the presidency in 1968

Both Nixon and Mondale were nominated as former vice presidents, leaving Dan Quayle as the only one to run and lose. And Quayle didn't survive longe enough to contest a single caucus or primary.

The Democrats of today are just smarter than the Republicans are. There were any number of reasons that Obama could have faced a primary challenge this year, but they knew that one would have sealed his fate and Romney would have won. Presuming that Biden goes for it - and I have no reason to believe that he won't - I can't see the party engaging in their historic practice of killing the frontrunner and risk giving the White House to a Republican.

The GOP, on the other hand, is new to that practice. Before this year, they avoided damaging their frontrunners so badly that it impacted his ability to win the general election. Even John McCain wasn't so bloodied that he was implausible before the Lehman Brothers collapse. McCain might very well have won a foreign policy referendum election, but he was the last guy who could have prevailed in the midst of an economic collapse.

The right-wing of the party changed that this year. They pushed Romney into positions that practically guaranteed that he couldn't beat an incumbent president that wasn't challenged in the primaries or facing a third party.

And if you look around, even today, you'll see that those Tea Party assholes haven't lost their appetite for launching primary challenges against perfectly electable incumbents. If they come anywhere close to beating Saxby Chambliss in the 2014 Georgia senate primary, I personally guarantee you that the 2016 Republican presidential nomination fight is going to be an indescribable bloodbath.

The Tea Party is not going to give up until they're handed a Goldwater-sized ass-kicking with one of their own at the top of the ticket. I was not-so-secretly hoping that the Republicans would have gotten this out of their system this year and nominated Sarah Palin, who Obama would annihilated before the Republican convention was even over.

If you assume that Democrats are sane, you have to assume that there's no reason for them fight a bitter primary when the GOP is going out of its way to make themselves as unelectable as they can.

I expect that Biden's incumbency will bigfoot Hillary out of the race, a process made easier by the personal regard both Clintons are known to have for him.

If that doesn't work, Obama's control of the party machinery will do it for him. Lyndon Johnson gutted the DNC to avoid a rival power base that could later challenge him, something that I'm sure isn't lost on the current president.

There are other issues for Hillary to consider.

She has the same problem Jeb Bush does. In recent American history, there is a decided paucity of presidential campaigns that don't have candidates named Nixon, Dole, Bush or Clinton in them. The idea of Bushes or Clintons bookending other presidencies is going to be a powerful weapon against whoever runs against them.

Then there's Secretary Clinton's personal legacy. She's already lost to a nobody in Obama. If she goes on to lose against Biden, which she probably would, the family brand is damaged. If Chelsea decides that she ever wants to run for something, that could leave a mark, especially when it comes to raising money and building a campaign team.

I don't see a scenario where Hillary runs, or beats Biden if she does. Of course, I could be wrong about that, but it hardly matters. Newt Gingrich's point still stands.

The Tea Party faction of the GOP, which is still more powerful than you might think, given their ability to make a giant fucking mess of the primaries, still thinks that you can subtract from the electorate and win. That's about 80 different kinds of stupid, but those assholes believe it.

They think that if they just have a "Reagan figure," the turnout models and demographics that heavily favor Democrats won't matter. The truth is, that they may be right, but it still doesn't matter.

Americans, more than anyone else, respond to personalities more than positions. President Reagan ran more on what was possible tomorrow much more than he did on what was wrong today. You could see that, at the core of his being, Ronald Reagan really did believe in the American people. Reagan's individual policies were never as popular as he personally was, and there are decades of data that back that up.

Reagan understood that addition will always trump subtraction in politics. That's how he won the union vote. He knew that he had his base, but he also understood that the conservative Republican base was never going to enough to win the presidency. That's why you almost never saw Reagan deploy wedge issues that would only serve to keep voters coming to him.

That hasn't been true since Reagan. Republicans are so scared of themselves that they have to divide the electorate with nonsense so that they can keep their base. Clever deployment of wedge issues drew enough undecideds that they could win 50% plus 1, which was still enough to win, given the demographics through 2004.

Reagan at least looked like he liked you. Since 1994 - with the possible exception of George W. Bush in 2000 -  that hasn't been true. Beginning with Gingrich, Republican candidates have built their platforms around just how disgusted they are with everybody except regular churchgoers in the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama.

It's too cute by half that Newt blames the "cultural thing with our consultants."

 And it’s part of this cultural thing with our consultants. I mean, if you start out thinking giving away 47 percent of the country, by the way, which included retirees, it included veterans. You know, it was an absurdity. And-- and I think this is-- this is much more than Mitt Romney. We didn’t blow it because of Mitt Romney. We blew it because of a party which has refused to engage the reality of American life and refused to take-- to think through what the average American needs for a better future.

Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!

In large part, the "consultants" saw how well that model of politics worked for Newt Gingrich. Gingrich saw how well wedge issues worked for the late Lee Atwater and kicked it up several notches.

Even as late as this year, Gingrich deployed the phrase "food stamp president" more than any other candidate, at least implying that that the problem was with those on food stamps as much as it was with the president who presided over the economy that made the food stamps necessary at all.

I have no doubt whatsoever that Mitt Romney believed his nonsense about the 47%. But it shouldn't be overlooked that it was Newt Gingrich, and people like him, that pushed him into saying it out loud in the first fucking place.

Consultants like Atwater pioneered tactics like this, but they were strategically used in ads that never once featured the candidate himself. Gingrich himself made it not only possible for candidates themselves to say these things out loud, but a tactical necessity. More than any other single politician, Newt Gingrich made it acceptable for candidates to declare their open contempt for half of the American people.

Reagan was seen as running for the American people. That progressed into Atwater, Pat Buchanan, Gingrich and Karl Rove, who ran against gradually larger segments of them.. By this year, Republicans were put into a position where if they didn't run against the American people, they were doomed beyond recognition.

And just like a good Republican, Gingrich isn't accepting a molecule of personal responsibility for any of it. To watch Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press this morning, you would think that the Newt Gingrich of just six weeks ago never existed.

Here's the thing; Newt is every bit the narcissistic monster that Bill Clinton was. He will run again. But unless he accepts his share of responsibility for American politics has become, Republicans will never right the course that they're on and they'll continue to lose. An optimist like Ronald Reagan will never flower in the garden of ruin that Newt Gingrich built.

Christianity teaches to "love the sinner, hate the sin." The GOP has embraced the latter at the expense of the later, at least rhetorically.

And if there's a single reason that you should get used to saying "President Biden," that's it.

It Keeps Growing and Growing: The Ballad of Stu Stevens and Demographic Death

It was pretty clear by 11:00 pm on November 6 that the Republican Party was having a bad night. That shouldn't have been a huge surprise to anyone, but GOP true believers had been living in an alternate reality for months and had thoroughly convinced themselves that faith mattered more than math, which tells you everything you need to know about the party. It was actually really funny to watch.

Everybody pretty much stopped paying attention after Mitt Romney conceded Florida two days after the election, but something odd was still happening. Barack Obama's vote kept growing.

This is important because Republicans everywhere are continuing to insist that Obama has no mandate, despite winning more popular and electoral votes than George W. Bush and a greater share of the popular vote than Bill Clinton did.

The margins are getting hard to argue with though.

 Obama’s victory was more decisive than Bush’s in ’04: And here’s one final observation about the 2012 race. Per the excellent work by the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, Obama’s national lead over Romney continues to expand as votes keep on coming in. It’s now Obama 50.9%, Romney 47.4%. That’s a bigger (and more decisive) margin than Bush’s victory over John Kerry in 2004 (which was Bush 50.7% and Kerry 48.2%). What’s more, the president’s lead has grown to close to 3 points in Ohio, 4 points in Virginia and 6 points in Colorado. One doesn’t win Colorado by six points without winning swing voters; there isn’t a big-enough Democratic base to make that argument.

When I made my prediction on November 2, I was upfront about giving Colorado to Obama based solely on a gut feeling I had. I awarded New Hampshire, Virginia and Colorado out of a sense of caution and pity, but I also said that I wouldn't be at all surprised if all three went to Obama.

I was privately telling friends, just as I was telling you, that this race would be between 3 and 5 points for the President, and he wound up winning by 3.5%. But the shocker is Colorado, where I never would have predicted a six point margin of victory. That's a huge margin for a swing state that every poll aggregator listed as too close to call right up until election day.

By all rights, the GOP should have gone into this year expecting to pick up a net of three or four Senate seats. Indeed, I only downgraded my prediction over the summer. But they underperformed even beyond my expectations, losing a net of two seats.

Then there's the House, where Nancy Pelosi was hallucinating when she said that they would win 25 seats and control. Redistricting after 2010 was never going to allow for that. But I figured that the Tea Party, which is concentrated in the House of Representatives, was unpopular enough that the Democrats could pick up between two and five seats. Instead, the won eight, taking out Tea Party heroes Allen West and Joe Walsh in the process and coming awfully close to beating Michele Bachmann. Up-and-coming Tea Party star Mia Love, who was supposed to be anointed rather than elected, lost her race in Utah.

As those House races are being finalized, I find myself reminded of 1998, when the GOP was supposed to pick up something like 20 or 30 House seats in the wake of the Clinton fellatio scandal. When the Republicans wound up only winning five, Newt Gingrich was forced to resign by the end of the week.

Having said all of that, I don't blame Mitt Romney for this. Did he make a number of unforced errors? Absolutely, although it is hilarious that he wound with 47% of the vote. As I've said over and over again, Romney was probably the best candidate running that wasn't Jon Hunstman, who was never going to be nominated. To this day, no one has been able to tell me which declared candidate was going to do better than Romney did.

Presidential nominees also don't historically have "reverse coattails" in Congress. George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis all lost by much wider margins than Romney did, but the Democrats held on the House. Even as George H.W Bush was losing the presidency, the GOP managed to pick up congressional seats.

This is different, but don't try telling Romney's chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, that.

There was a time not so long ago when the problems of the Democratic Party revolved around being too liberal and too dependent on minorities. Obama turned those problems into advantages and rode that strategy to victory. But he was a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?

Yes, the Republican Party has problems, but as we go forward, let’s remember that any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right. When Mitt Romney stood on stage with President Obama, it wasn’t about television ads or whiz-bang turnout technologies, it was about fundamental Republican ideas vs. fundamental Democratic ideas. It was about lower taxes or higher taxes, less government or more government, more freedom or less freedom. And Republican ideals — Mitt Romney — carried the day. 

While I'll grant you that Mr. Stevens does an awesome job of self-justification, the numbers suggest something different.

Having an African-American at the top of the ticket does not cause a disaster like the GOP faced in the Senate, nor does it cause the party to lose more House seats than it should have. The spread in Ohio shouldn't have been three points and Colorado most definitely shouldn't have been six.

I've been saying for years now that the strongest thing Barack Obama had going for him was the lack of a primary or a third-party challenge from the left. Without those two things, an incumbent president would have had to be Herbert Hoover to lose. Everybody sing it with me, "Incumbent presidents don't often lose."

As for Obama's money, the abandonment of federally funded presidential races pretty much guarantees that every major party nominee is going to have at least a billion dollars. With Citizens United as the law of the land, the starting cost for a presidential election is going to be about $6 billion. So what?

To be fair, Stevens isn't wrong, at least not historically. But the changing demographics of America are making the history irrelevant. Since 1964, Republicans have relied on the white vote more than they should. But as James Carville explains, that's no longer tenable.

Even Democrats thought the Republicans would have more success in turning out people who hate Obama. But according to the numbers, Romney's vote may not even match McCain's. Why weren't people fired up and ready to go on the right-wing side?

It looks like the turnout was a little down. What was surprising to me is the model they used for the white vote. The white vote in '08 was 74 percent of the vote, and that's what they were counting on this time. But according to population trends, the white vote should be 72 percent – and it actually came in at 72. And it will be under 70 in 2016. What the Republicans have is some form of a progressive disease, like diabetes – it's just going to keep getting worse until they address it.

The demographics are a creeping cancer for them, in other words.

Yes. Every four years, the white vote goes to minus two – and it's picking up steam. From 1948 to 1992, it went from 91 to 87 percent. From '92 to 2016, it's going to go from 87 to 70.

Combine that with the youth vote. It was 54 percent for Kerry, and it was 66 for Obama in '08. This year it was 60 for Obama. Remember, the greatest predictor of how you're going to vote when you're 54 is how you voted when you're 24.

The Republicans don't have any choice but to deal with this. The question is how they deal with it. Older whites are like bloody marys when you have a hangover – you just have to go back to them, but eventually they're going to catch up with you. You go down to the hotel lobby and say, "I'm shaking – I have to have a bloody mary." The Republicans keep drinking them, and they're very productive in off years, like 2010.

I'm not even sure that the white vote is going to create tsunamis like 2010 for very much longer. Redistricting and gerrymandering has pretty much locked in the House for the next decade, give or take maybe ten seats. And it should be remembered that suicidal Tea Party primaries were causational in the GOP under performing in a wave year, like 2010.

The trend in Republican primaries isn't as likely to reverse as it to accelerate. As older and whiter voters become even more powerful in primaries, the candidates they nominate are likely to be less and less electable in general elections. In the last two cycles, the party has thrown away perfectly good Senate seats for no reason at all. My prediction is that you'll see more lunatic Republican general election candidates like Todd Aikin, Richard Mourdock, Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller, not fewer of them. 

Look no further than what the activist wing of the party is proposing. They now want to take out Senator Saxby Chambliss in the 2014 Georgia primary. And Georgia is getting a lot closer than it has any business being. John McCain only won it by 8 points four years ago, and Mitt Romney did marginally worse. George W. Bush won Georgia by twelve points in 2000 and seventeen four years later. If dragging the party further to the populist right is showing diminishing returns in Georgia, imagine how well it'll work everywhere else.  If they succeed in beating Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, I now predict that seat will go to a Democrat.

Scott Brown was pushed by the Tea Party to the point that Elizabeth Warren was elected. Olympia Snowe was so frustrated with the idiot wing of the party that she quit altogether and essentially gave her seat to Angus King. That's six seats, enough for the majority. If Lisa Murkowski didn't choose to caucus with the GOP out of the goodness of her heart, it would have been seven. And Republicans were lucky that Arlen Specter lost the Democratic primary after he was forced out of the GOP because he might have held that seat, too, bringing the total to eight.

Conservatives are no making the same stupid mistake that liberals used to. They're subtracting from the electorate and thinking they can win, while the other side is adding to it. If you want to know why the Democrats lost seven out ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004, look no further than that. But the Republicans won the popular vote in only one of the last six, which is an even more worrying trend.

Instead of looking at what I've just written seriously, Stu Stevens writes an op-ed for the Washington Post that basically says, "Don't worry. We just lost to a colored with bank. It happens." That sounds a lot like "The fundamentals remain strong." But they aren't, as anyone with a passing familiarity with math can tell you.

Yes, Romney won the middle class. Yippie! But the middle class in America has been diminishing for twenty years now, largely evaporating with the manufacturing base that created it in the first place. Bringing the middle class back to the level of the electorate that they were in just 1996 is going to require levels of economic growth so unrealistic that it looks more like wishful thinking than political strategy.

Not only did Romney hit a historic low with non-Cuban Hispanics, the GOP lost Cubans for the first time that I'm aware of. And not only are they continuing to lose blacks (by 93%), Jews (by 31) and Catholics (by 7), they're losing Asians, too (by 26).

All of those groups are growing as a percentage of the population, and several are concentrated in key swing states, like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado.  Ignore all the nonsense of national polls showing a "50-50 country." The Electoral College and the composition of the Senate make that meaningless.

You're starting to hear the right noises from some factions of the GOP, but I fully expect them to be drowned out or threatened into silence within about a month, maybe two.

If you think "We don't have to change anything" is a sound political strategy, I look forward to seeing what the future has in store for you.

Rush Limbaugh Presents the Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard

Republican types like to bemoan comedians like Jon Stewart for "activism" and then berate his response that he's primarily a comedian. They call it "clown nose on-clown nose off." In fairness, there actually is something to that. I don't doubt that Stewart has an agenda. Most political comedians do, that sort of being the point of becoming a political comedian.

On the other hand, it quickly becomes clear just how full of shit these people are when Rush Limbaugh says something incredibly stupid. Then you see these assholes employ precisely the same defense of him that they attack Stewart for using himself. It's deeply amusing to watch and I'm actually surprised that no one's called them on it before.

Most Tea Partiers don't just view Limbaugh as a deep political thinker, they see him as something as a spiritual forefather. And god knows that elected Republicans don't dare cross him. The second that they do, the fat man goes on a tirade and within 24 hours the politician is calling in to grovel at Rush's feet.

But the second that Limbaugh goes over the line - and the Sandra Fluke tirade is as good an example as any - the party line becomes "Rush is just an entertainer. He's not a spokesman for the Republican party." Except, y'know, for the rest of the time when he is. Limbaugh certainly brings them to heel in ways that the RNC Chairman, the House speaker or the Senate minority leader can't. You tell me what that says about his power, or if there's a Democratic equivalent to it.

In my opinion, there's been such a lack of principled leadership in the GOP for so long that a collection of goddamn deejays have taken over. Limbaugh just happens to be the most prominent and powerful of them, but you've also got raving dickheads like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin following up the rear. And these people aren't the spineless shills they used to be. They actually set the agenda these days, and they will forcibly de-ball any supposed "leader" that crosses them.

Look, it's easy to brook no dissent when you're a glorified deejay because you have nothing to lose. As a matter of fact, it's often professionally better for afternoon radio types and Fox News talking heads when Republicans lose elections. As you might imagine, it's easier (to say nothing of more entertaining) to oppose than propose. There's a considerably higher level of difficulty in going on 45 minute long lunatic tirades about Marxist and Alinskyite conspiracies when the GOP is in charge without sounding like the late Robert Welch.

But for weapons-grade stupidity, obliviousness and outright hypocrisy, this is tough to beat.

RUSH: We got this piece in The Daily Beast: "A Scarlet Letter -- the Monica Lewinsky-ing of Paula Broadwell -- When powerful men stray, the press continues to ogle, and shame, the women they do it with, writes Allison Yarrow." And this whole story got me to thinking about how the country's changed in terms of simple things like humor. What used to be harmless, clever humor, today is heard by the people who've been educated the last 30, 35 years, today causes legitimate anger and indignation and charges of cruelty and insensitivity and bigotry or sexism or what have you. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this.

(...)

You could say cool versus uncool, hip versus unhip. But they've been brainwashed. I don't mean that in a communist way. I'm just saying they have been indoctrinated. And you can find evidence of it everywhere. I mean, for example, one of the things that I get in the most trouble on this show for is that what I say is really controversial? No. It is they haven't the slightest understanding of a traditional sense of humor. You see, you don't laugh at what they believe. It's just not done. And people who do that are considered reprobates or what have you. But most of the things that I get in, quote, unquote, trouble for, you know, I'll say something here, it gets all over the media and people, "You need to apologize, that's outrageous. You mean-spirited..." And you who listen every day know full well all we're doing here is entertaining, we're just having fun.

They don't get it. I'll give you one of my favorite examples. I love stereotypical humor. But you can't do that anymore. Stereotypical humor, top of my head, mother-in-law joke. You know what a real dichotomy is? Your new Cadillac you see driving off the cliff, but your mother-in-law's in it, so jeez, is it good or bad? You tell that joke today seriously, and these people are going to be out of their gourd. They don't see one thing stereotypically humorous about it. They just think it's entirely insensitive and mean-spirited and anti-woman. And that's cultural, not political. You couple this with the fact that they're preternaturally arrogant and cocky with what they think, so it's gonna be a daunting task. 

Oh, good! Rush is thinking!  And in a single monologue, he's already been able to completely misrepresent the way the conservative movement has acted over the last five years.

Limbaugh is right when he suggests that you couldn't tell a joke around liberals without being subjected to indignant, politically correct, endlessly boring lectures and wildly annoying indignation. But that's every bit as true of modern conservatives today as it was of liberals.

Try telling a joke about Sarah Palin's stupidity, Allen West's mental illness, Chris Christie's weight or Limbaugh's attempt a decade ago to transform himself into a wealthier version of Keith Richards. You'll immediately learn that shithead conservatives have bought into political correctness and identity politics every bit as much as shithead liberals have. Conservatives are actually even more insufferable about it because they're pretending that they're not doing it. Both sides have their golden calfs and they're all too often created on racial and gender lines. Yes, liberals are assholes about it, but conservatives are assholes and hypocrites.

I really think that we've gotta adopt a very, very long game if we're going to recapture the country, and we have to do what the left did. And I don't know how yet. But we are going to have to recapture the public education of this country, because that, folks, is where decent, honorable, really good, normal people like Mitt Romney end up being thought of as despicable human beings. It is through 30 or more years of public education run totally by liberals and the way they have characterized their opponents. I see it every day.

Please.

This idea that the left indoctrinates people to think of Republicans as assholes is true, but Republicans are hardly innocents. The right has been painting Democrats as traitors for 80 years now. The few Republicans that survived the 1932 election spent the following twelve years declaring that FDR was establishing an unconstitutional dictatorship. Then the Truman administration, which established the very policies that won the Cold War, was painted as willing dupes of the Soviet Union and a den of spies, to boot. As recently as this spring, Allen West said that 80 members of the Democratic caucus (or fully 50% of it) were members of the Communist Party.

And when the average Republican isn't trying to convince you that the Democrats are selling out the country, he'll have you believe that they're determined to destroy the family and even Jesus his own self!

Look at the nonsense issues that the GOP have run on the last 25 years. These include the death penalty, Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance in schools and school prayer - none of which involve the federal government, let alone the executive office of the president.

And then there are the perennial issues of abortion and gay marriage. This year, Rick Santorum, along with any number of Republicans in Congress and the state legislatures made birth control - which was settled all the way back in 1965 - a wedge issue, only to be stopped by Democrats doing a better job of it first.

The fact is that Republicans have been running on little other than cultural issues for decades now. "Gays, Guns and God" has been their boilerplate platform since at least Nixon. And for a good long time, it worked for them, if only because Democrats were ideologically divided among themselves, and weak demographically and geographically.

As you might have noticed, that's no longer true. Not only were Bill Clinton and Barack Obama able to still win, they won in large part by turning those issues against the GOP. Worse, the demographics and geography have caught up and now strongly favor the Democrats, which I've only been warning about for five years now.

Republicans went so far on abortion and birth control in the last 12 months, that a new Rasmussen poll shows that the percentage of pro-choice voters has gone up during the campaign.That's all the evidence you should need that it's backfiring in a significant way. Remember, the GOP has won the popular vote exactly once since 1992 and they increasingly face annihilation in the Electoral College. If Texas so much as turns purple, it becomes mathematically impossible for Republicans to win the presidency.

Unfortunately, cultural campaigning is all the Republicans have left. The sad legacy of the second President Bush is that he single-handedly destroyed his party's natural advantage on foreign policy and the economy.

But let's go back to Limbaugh because he's hilarious.

As you know, I'm a big technophile, and I read every tech blog there is, particularly those related to Apple. And all of these people contributing and writing and posting these blogs are under 30. And they live in a different world than I do and they live in a different world than I grew up in. The things that they just assume are true, like there is no doubt whatsoever that we are destroying the planet with global warming, no doubt. They can't even conceive of what you and I both know to be the truth, and that is, the whole global warming thing is a hoax. They do not even think it's a political issue. They do not realize that everything they believe in has been totally corrupted by politics.

If Republicans believe this, they're fucked. It's all over. Look around the world. You will not find another major conservative party that engages climate change denialism as a part of its electoral platform. Not one.

Most of international conservatives take global warming positions that are variations of my own, which is as follows: "Is climate change real and man-made? Well, most of the really smart people who devote their careers to studying it seem to think so. So the balance of probabilities suggests that it is. Unfortunately, there realistically isn't a whole lot we can do about it without completely destroying the economy, which we sort of need right now."

What do the Republicans do? Why, they just deny that there's a problem at all and suggest an international conspiracy to undermine capitalism. The goofier ones say that they know that there isn't a problem because the Bible tells them so, which is amazingly funny when you realize that they're on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Sure, they know that they sound like yokels when say shit like this, but they don't care because they're so afraid of their yokel primary voters that it doesn't matter if the rest of the country and world thinks that they might be retarded. But if this past election has taght them anything, it should be that the law of diminishing returns is kicking in.

What they think is science is nothing more than corruption by the left, but they don't know any better. It's what they've been exposed to from as early on in their lives as their brains were capable of learning anything. And that happens to be the kind of thinking that populates the entertainment culture and so forth. I really think that the solution to our problems are not really political. I think conservatives are seen by young people and the left and the pop culture the way they are not because of what these people have been taught about conservatism. It's purely cultural. They don't know ideology. They don't know liberal versus conservative. They've not been told, for example, that Romney is a skunk or whatever because he is a conservative. It goes far deeper than that. 

So the battle that we face is not really an ideological one. I must confess, I think the solution will be found in ideology, but I must confess, I think I've been a little wrong. I have waxed eloquent here on this program. I have longed for the day where people understand what liberalism is ideologically. I have begged the Republican Party to campaign on ideology and to explain to people what liberalism is by pointing liberals out. You want to see liberalism, look at Detroit. You want to see liberalism, look at California. You want to see liberalism, look at Cuba. You want to see liberalism, look at Venezuela.

There's more than enough blame to go around regarding California. It managed to pay its bills just fine until Proposition 13 passed. And it still pays Washington more in taxes than it gets in services, thereby directly subsidizing any number of welfare case red states. As a rule of thumb, the redder the state, the more it receives from Washington. That's just a mathematical fact. If Alabama and Mississippi are so fucking fantastic, why aren't they keeping, say, Illinois afloat, instead of the other way around?

By the way, wasn't the Republican-driven embargo of the last 55 years supposed to have taken care of Cuba?

The Republicans haven't done it. I don't know why, don't care right now. But the young people do look at Cuba, and they lionize Che Guevara. They wear his T-shirts. They look at Cuba, they don't see any big problem there. They don't know. My only point here is I'm just scratching the surface on this, by the way, so I'm speaking off the top my head here, but I really think that the way this is going to have to be attacked and dealt with is not to set politics aside. I'm not saying that none of this is political, but it's a cultural problem we face. The reason conservatives have been so maligned and are so maligned, the reason people who don't know us think of us the way they do is not because they understand politics. It's a cultural thing.

Are you fucking kidding me? Americans of high school and college age aren't just bad at world history, they're spectacularly, blindingly so! I doubt that they know who Che Guevara even was. Christ, I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that they wear those t-shirts because they think Che's the guy in My Morning Jacket. News flash: Hipster assholes believe stupid shit because hipster assholes are stupid.

But maybe there is a Grand Cultural Conspiracy underway that I'm unaware of. Maybe, just maybe, Hot Topic is giving those Che t-shirts away as part of a plot instead of selling them for profit, like good capitalists. Who among us can really say?

But maybe, just maybe, young people see Republicans as preening assholes that want to use the force of the federal government to impose their own, wildly inconsistent, morality.

Anti-abortion Tea Party crusaders, like Scott DesJarlais - a former doctor - is found to have fucked vast numbers of his female patients and counseled them to get abortions when he knocked them up, a theme that's confirmed by his own first wife. Or Larry Craig, who castigated Bill Clinton's being "a bad, naughty boy" only to be found trying to get suck-started in a Minneapolis airport men's room. Guys like Joe Walsh, who can't pay their bills or child support, are going to lecture us on personal responsibility. Or Mark Foley ...

The "Party of Family Values" had a presidential primary debate in 2008 where the only guy onstage that was only married once was the Mormon. Leading Republicans like Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich and, yes, even Rush Limbaugh are on their third wives.

Oh, I'm sorry. I made a factual error there. Limbaugh is actually on his fourth wife. The infernal cultural distractions make it hard for me to keep track.

Yes, the same Rush Limbaugh that was dropping hundreds of OxyContins a month and trolling the Internet for wives sees the culture as a problem.

No one has a lower regard for the intelligence of young people than I do, but I do think that they have pretty good bullshit detectors. Maybe more than any generation before them, they know when they're getting played, especially by dickhead political advocates. I like to think that I'm a hero to the young because I make it clear that I love strange pussy, non-prescribed pharmaceuticals and balanced budgets.

Limbaugh never actually comes out and says what his point is, or how it can be addressed. But by the sounds of it, he sees the GOP's political problems as cultural, and that those cultural problems should be addressed politically, which is circular logic.

The whole point of politics is to form government and shape policy, which you decidedly can't do if you keep losing elections. So Limbaugh seems to want to use the power of the government to shape the culture in ways that would allow conservatives to win the elections that they're losing now. How he plans to do this without winning elections is something I've given up trying to figure out because the entire idea ( as much as there actually is one) is fucking insane.

More insane still is the fact that he wants to do this to further the idea of a smaller government.