On Morsi, Democracy and the "Freedom Agenda"

What better day than the Fourth of July to discuss yesterday's events in Cairo, which saw Egypt's first elected president deposed.

I carry no water for the Muslim Brotherhood, but there's no shortage of supposedly conservative nonsense out there that begs responding to. Fox News Republicans and their moronic fellow travelers in the idiot blogosphere have managed over the last year, and especially in the last 24 hours, to be both hypocritical and hysterical. And like most bitches with the vapors, they need to be sent to their fainting couches for a good long time.

Although I thought it would have something to do with a change in foreign policy toward Israel, I predicted that the Egyptian military would depose Mohammed Morsi since he was first elected. Most of my freedom loving friends thought me a knave, a fool, or both. Y'know, because Obama.

The unmitigated balls of some of these people, talking about freedom in the Middle East! The simple fact is that the single greatest retarding factor for democracy in the Muslim world has been American foreign policy. But lets look at places where "freedom" has been imposed at gunpoint, specifically Iraq and Afghanistan. Are things looking good in either country? I think the consensus is that they are not. Any country that requires a massive foreign military presence to sustain its "freedom," absent third-party aggression, is ultimately doomed.

My friend Richard at Eye on a Crazy Planet wrote about this earlier today. Sadly, he was almost spectacularly wrong and wildly ahistorical on almost all of his points.

Richard does hint at a couple of things that I generally agree with, specifically that some dictatorships are better than others and that freedom just isn't for everyone, but he never actually comes out and says so. Instead, he seems to believe that the rest of the world should get a vote on the kind of government a given country should have, Israel excepted.

Here are some of his sillier points;

Though bolstered by support from the foolish and ineffectual administration of US President Obama,  Morsi's slip into acting like a democratically elected dictator made him more popular in The White House than it did in Cairo. Massive nightly demonstrations that exceeded those at the end of the reign of Hosni Mubarak were proof of the popular discontent in Egypt.

Um, not exactly. The U.S foreign aid under Obama changed not at all than that from Nixon through Bush 43, meaning that the overwhelming majority of it went to the military.  Oh, and that's the same military that deposed Morsi yesterday. Think that would happen with its money cut off? I don't. And didn't most of the Right go ape when Obama "abandoned" Mubarak, when it wasn't giving credit for the Arab Spring to President Bush?

Something to remember when considering that is that elections don't always lead to democracy. The other duly elected Muslim Brotherhood government, that of Hamas in Gaza, proves that once in power, Islamists, like fascists before them, will suspend democracy to retain their power for as long as they can hold on to it by force.

Though the so called "Arab Spring" in Egypt happened in the 21st Century, that country was less prepared for democracy than the American Colonies were more than two centuries earlier.

When was Hamas elected again? Oh right, in 2005, when the Bush White House ignored the protestations of both Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon as part of his idiotic "freedom agenda."

And why was Egypt "less prepared for democracy than the American colonies were more than two centuries earlier"?

Well, in part, that's because the American colonies didn't have the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA  constantly subverting the necessary conditions for democracy in the decades prior to 1776.

Furthermore, lets not pretend that the early days of the Republic, where anyone other than landowning white males were disenfranchised for decades was particularly Athenian.

But things are different now, right? They sure are. There are no shortage of people howling about a supposedly unreconstructed Kenyan Marxist routinely steal elections through the offices of the ACORN and the New Black Panther Party.

Jokes aside, history is sort of import here. And the history is chilling.

Institutions that are essential to democracy, like an educated population, a healthy system of rival political parties, a constitution that safeguards rights and an independent judiciary are all democratic facets Egypt had.  The only political organization that was organized was the Muslim Brotherhood, which used mosques and madrassas to force-feed subservience to the faithful and a country that is more than 95% Muslim.  Rural Egyptians welcomed Morsi's tyranny of devout Islamism that was a bludgeon to the cosmopolitan citizens of Cairo who have spent the last weeks protesting en masse.

The embarrassing fall-out of the Egyptian coup is that after decades of the west acting superior and lecturing the Muslim world about democracy, the reality is that both they and we are better off if, in Egypt, it takes a time-out.

Until the death of GamAl Nasser, Egypt was in the Soviet sphere of influence. When the United States took over as its patron, Nasser's designated successor, Anwar Sadat, was give the same free reign to suppress his people by Washington that Moscow had. In fact, the CIA had trained Egypt's secret police to crush any democratic alternatives to regimes of Sadat and Mubarak. That left only groups like the Muslim Brotherhood  as any kind of governing alternative.

Because of Cold War politics, America foreign aid was never predicated on Egypt's developing the kind of social conditions necessary for the kind of democracy that it took the United States 180 years to perfect. Successive American administrations - and especially traditionally conservative ones - wanted a police state in Egypt.

This is exactly what we saw in Iran, after the United States overthrew the only democratic government it ever had. As the great Dan Carlin has said, when you replace Mossedegh with the Shah, you wind up with Khomeini.

Richard's idea of a democratic "time-out" is as adorable to me as it is fascinating. After all, it's worked out so well in Pakistan, with its eight military coups in sixty years. On top of all their fantastic democracy, we also have their nuclear weapons and the Taliban, all subsidized - albeit indirectly - by the American taxpayer.

What Richard doesn't do is show us where a democratic time-out has worked in anybody's interests, particularly the country being put in the corner. That certainly wasn't true in Iran.

But, Richard tells us ... Hitler!

Morsi is a maniac who adheres to the murderous Muslim Brotherhood creed. Though we seem hypocrites to welcome his removal, what if the same had happened in Germany in 1934?

Adolf Hitler came to power the year before that in a fair election. The last fair election Germany was to have until after the Second World War and the millions of deaths to which the result of that election eventually led.

Certainly there would have been an outcry from some quarters in the west if the German Army, seeing Hitler's insanity, had chosen to remove him the year after he was elected. But millions of innocent lives and untold devastation would have been averted if the Wehrmacht had taken such a bold step.

There are a few problems with this theory.

First, Weimar Germany was an almost total democracy that didn't persecute democratic alternatives to the existing government, which was the case in Egypt.

Secondly, the rise of the Nazi Party was due entirely to economic conditions, not political ones. Absent hyperinflation and the Depression, it's unlikely that an Austrian misfit like Hitler would have ever come close to power in Berlin.

Third, the Treaty of Versailles made such a theoretical coup by the German military, which was limited to 100,000 troops, impossible. The army was actually outnumbered by Hitler's political army, the SA, which was three million strong.

It was only after Hitler's clandestine remilitarization of Germany that he disposed of the SA on the Night of the Long Knives, at which point, the SS was a professional military force sworn personally to him.

Lastly, there's no guarantee that if Hitler hadn't subverted Germany, the communists wouldn't have. The economic conditions in 1930s Germany made democracy all but impossible. And since remilitarization was the clearest path to economic recovery, as it was under the Nazis, it's difficult to see how a gutted army would revolt against that.

I really don't want to be a prick to Richard, who I actually like a lot, but history is sort of import in discussing matters like this.

Things Fall Apart: Rob Ford's Continuing Crack-Up

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Syria is Awfully Complicated

It's hard to take seriously those who don't understand even recent history. Even worse are those who consciously ignore it, or worse still, lie about it. All three groups of ahistorical shitheads are overly represented in today's Republican Party.

The neoconservative ideology was tested in Iraq and was found lacking by any sane and fair observer. If you want to decide whether to take a given Republican seriously about current foreign policy challenges, I'd advise you to take a look at what they say about Iraq.

First, the U.S invasion did not bring democracy to Mesopotamia, but it did bring more than it's fair share of chaos. Democracy was always a foolish goal in an unnatural country comprised of competing ethnic and religious groups. As soon as you lift out of tyranny those who very much want to kill one another, you shouldn't be at all surprised when they actually start killing one another.

Second, like everything else about the Iraq War, the 2007 "surge" did not accomplish it's stated aims. If you look back on the statements of the surge's supporters, you learn that the aim was to provide enough security in the country (and especially the famously murderous "Sunni Triangle") to allow for political reconciliation. That did not occur. Suicide bombings that kill hundreds of civilians are routine in Iraq.

What the surge did create was what the Nixon Administration called a "decent interval" in Vietnam that allowed the United States to withdraw without being humiliated.

Third, President Obama didn't withdraw from Iraq, President Bush did. In the summer of 2008, Bush signed a status of forces agreement that called for the last American troops to depart by 2011. There was to be no residual force left behind because the Iraqis would not exempt U.S forces and contractors from Iraqi law. Obama merely implemented that agreement, although you'd never know it from listening to Fox News or reading Republican blogs.

Then there's the Arab Spring. During the entirety of the Bush years, Republicans contended that the liberation of Iraq would speed the growth of democracy through the Middle East. In the earliest days of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, they actually sought to take credit for it.

But democracy didn't work out exactly the way they had planned, and Islamist-leaning governments were elected, just as Hamas had been in 2005 elections in the Palestinian Authority that Bush insisted on, despite the protests of Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas.

Anyone who thought that a Thomas Jefferson was going to rise up in the region is a fool. The true Democrats had long ago been murdered or exiled by the (often American-supported) tyrannies that the revolutions displaced. Just as nature does, politics abhors a vacuum, and the most organized forces were destined to win the democratic elections, and that the most organized forces were affiliated with the Islamist movement was the most predictable thing in the world to anyone that was paying attention.

So the neocons did exactly what they did in the wake of their failure in Iraq; they blamed Obama.

Now moron Republicans like John McCain want to make Syria an issue.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta acknowledged that he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, had supported a plan last year to arm carefully vetted Syrian rebels. But it was ultimately vetoed by the White House, Mr. Panetta said, although it was developed by David H. Petraeus, the C.I.A. director at the time, and backed by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state.

“How many more have to die before you recommend military action?” Mr. McCain asked Mr. Panetta on Thursday, noting that an estimated 60,000 Syrians had been killed in the fighting.

And did the Pentagon, Mr. McCain continued, support the recommendation by Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Petraeus “that we provide weapons to the resistance in Syria? Did you support that?”

“We did,” Mr. Panetta said.

“You did support that,” Mr. McCain said.

“We did,” General Dempsey added.

Of course, the implication is that Obama isn't listening to his national security team, which in this case, he thankfully isn't. And Obama isn't alone among presidents in this regard. Had President Truman listened to his national security advisers, the United States would not have recognized the State of Israel.

There are a couple of points that most Republicans won't make about Syria that you should hear;

• There is no shortage of weapons in Syria.
• The civil war there is already a regional proxy war that American allies in Turkey and Saudi Arabia are already hip deep in.

Too many people who don't know what they're talking about say that when the House of Assad falls, it will precipitate the same kind of chaos that overwhelmed Iraq a decade ago. That's actually not true. The fall of Assad will more exactly precipitate the kind of chaos that overwhelmed Afghanistan twenty years ago.

When the Soviet-sponsored regime of Mohammad Najibullah disintegrated in 1992, the various rebel groups that toppled it immediately went to war with one another. Most of the factions were sponsored by foreign intelligence services, most notably Pakistan's ISI and the CIA.

Those in the cult of St. Ronald of Reagan prefer to ignore this inconvenient truth today, but the Reagan Administration's poster boy of the Afghan "freedom fighters" was one Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The fact that Hekmatyar rallied his troops into battle with Soviet forces chanting "Death to America" was somehow overlooked at the time. Hekmatyar is now wanted by the United States as a war criminal and a close associate of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

In wanting to arm Syrian factions, people like McCain risk doing the same thing all over again. And please don't tell me that the United States will rally around a figure like Ahmad Massoud because there likely isn't one, and the U.S  pointedly ignored Massoud until the closing days of the Clinton Administration, nearly a decade later.

Just as happened in Afghanistan, American aims in Syria are at odds with the other regional players. . In the 1980s, the Carter and Reagan Administration, along with the Chinese, sought to humiliate the Soviets, whereas the Pakistanis wanted Afghanistan to use as "strategic depth" in a possible future war with India.

The U.S wants stability and a possible Syrian accommodation with Israel. What the Turks, Saudis and Iranians want is for their preferred ethnic allies to prevail. The Turks and Saudis want a Sunni power base in Damascus, whether or not its jihadi is a secondary concern. The Iranians want to maintain their Alawite ally, and their Syrian bridge to both Lebanon and the Israeli-Occupied Territories.

In any event, none of the Syrian rebels share American national security aims and, to one degree or another, all of them will probably seek thwart them at some point in the not too distant future. While it's a fable of the left that the United States created the Taliban or al-Qaeda in the 80's, it did directly arm and train more than a few of their allied groups.

Toppling Assad is not going to stop the killing. Indeed, his overthrow is almost certain accelerate it as the competing rebel groups go to war with one another in a battle to control the country. Just as they did in Afghanistan, the neocons and liberal supporters of intervention steadfastly refuse to recognize that horrible reality.

Having said that, Syria threatens to destroy the very delicate situations in both Lebanon and Iraq. That's something that the United States should do everything in its power to avoid, either with air forces or, in a worst case scenario, ground troops. Neither country can seal their borders on their own.

If McCain wants to be somehow useful, he can introduce a resolution in the Senate holding Turkey and Saudi Arabia responsible for the actions of their proxies if they take the fight outside of Syria. Their American aid can be held hostage, along with Turkey's NATO membership.

The U.S has tried playing Great Game politics in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and failed miserably both times, to the great benefit of the Pakistanis and Iranians.

Republicans universally mocked the 2006 Biden-Gelb Plan, which would have divided Iraq into a loose federation of three countries. What they've chosen to ignore is that the Iraqis themselves have essentially implemented it on their own.

Because it should be by now apparent that you cannot have democracy or stability in artificial nations comprised of tribal ethnic groups that want autonomy from one another, Biden-Gelb should be at least looked at as a model for most of the Middle East.

With the exception of Israel, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, these countries were political creations of the various Versailles Conferences of 1919-1922 and maintained as expedient client states during the Cold War. They will eventually disintegrate on their own, the only question is how.

If the United States wants to extract itself from the morass of the Middle East, which it very much should, it should use its diplomatic influence to hasten the creation of a new, more homogeneous Arab states that better represent the national aspirations of their people.

Anyone who knows anything about the isolationist nature of American history should know that Americans are the very last people who should be involved in the poisonous pit of Arab politics. The region is likely to be eventually dominated by Egyptian and Iranian "superpowers" anyway, so why not expedite that?

All the status quo is likely to produce is more frequent revolutions that will be impossible to manage from outside the region. Such revolutions will make it impossible for Israel to have anything other than a war economy and remain forever dependent on an American ally that is rapidly approaching bankruptcy and irrelevance.

The map is eventually going to shake itself out. It is much better for everyone if it does so unopposed from the outside.

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?

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.