Plowing Through More Republican Horseshit, IRS and NSA Edition

Most of you remember my old blog, dont'cha? I spent shitloads of time there from 2005-2008 bitching endlessly about the power of the US federal government and the potential abuse thereof.

And you know what I got for my fucking trouble? A endless amount of nonsense about the Unitary Executive Theory and the righteousness of George W. Bush. Most of those people would describe themselves as Tea Partiers today, and not readily admitting to knowing who Bush even was, let alone ever having supported him so throatily.

Then there's the Citizens United decision, which I've always had a mighty bug up my ass about.

I'm on the record as having said that political activity should get no preferential treatment under the tax code, from deducting lobbying costs right on down to deducting political contributions from your taxes. Shit, I don't even support the charitable deductions for charities that actually accomplish something other than shitty commercials.

If you're interested in knowing why, I'll tell you.

The more deductions you allow in the tax code, the higher the rates have to be to generate the revenue the government needs to operate. And if you want a government with the capability of both providing accessable health care to everyone and being prepared to bomb everyone from Jakarta to Winnipeg, we're talking about a fair bit of revenue.

Advocates of a flat tax have never been able to answer that basic fact. The more you deduct for yourself, the more everyone pays in higher rates. And this is what made the Ryan-Romney tax proposals last year such a bad fucking joke to anyone with a basic grasp of arithmetic.

My personal hero, Velociman, has one of the most misguided things I've ever seen up here.

A Redress of Grievances
That was, and is, the crime of the Tea Party groups. They are loose, and unaffiliated. When anyone attempts to wrest control of the Tea Parties at any level above the community they are whipsawed, and lashed.
That was the fearful thing. That is what keeps Obama awake at night. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of assembly and the right to redress grievances not as a sop of government, but as a natural right of man. From God, if you will. The Tea Parties were actually fomenting during the Bush bailout leading up to the 2008 election. They have never been specifically anti-Obama. Merely anti-spending. And yet they have been targeted and reviled as mutants, and racists.

There are any number of factual errors in those paragraphs, not least of which is that the Tea Party isn't almost wholly constituted by mutants.

Firstly, nothing calling itself the "Party Party" existed before Rick Santelli's retarded rant of February 2009, and that addressed relief to underwater homeowners under the thumb of the cocksucker banks, who themselves were just bailed out. And that Santelli said this from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade went almost completed unnoticed by everyone that isn't me.

Second, it's almost impossible to know if Tea Party groups are "loose, and unaffiliated" in light of Citizens United, which restricted disclosure of their donor base.

Thirdly, this isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment.

Let me repeat that. This isn't about a redress of grievances or even the First Amendment. The Obama administration never shut down the right of Tea Party groups to speak and, if they tried, they did a godawful job of it, since I couldn't escape those mutants last year.

It's actually about administrative tax law.

The Tea Parties weren't asserting a right, they were seeking a favour from the government in the form of non-profit tax status. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of the right to tax-exempt status for anyone but Indians in the Constitution. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either ignorant of lying.

My ultimate problem with these shithead Republicans is that they want other taxpayers to subsidize the cost of their bitching about how taxes are so high. Their right to free speech isn't inhibited as much their ability to get other people to pay for it is, so fuck them.

Now, do I think that that the administration specifically targeted conservative groups through the IRS? Sure I do.

Is that "Watergate," like so many idiots suggest it is? No, it is not.

President Nixon specifically targeted individuals for IRS harassment,  just as Johnson and Kennedy did before him. The difference is that they weren't organized groups seeking deductions in a post-Citizens United world, which begs such scrutiny. Nixon went after individual members of groups, journalists and sundry political enemies, which is a clear abuse of power and something no one has accused Obama of.

Then there's the recent NSA scandal, to which I ask ...... What did you think was going to happen? 

Most of you will remember that I went apeshit when I first heard about the Bush NSA program that was implemented in secret, without congressional authorization, after 9/11. I went on about it for years, actually.

But the people who were fine with it then - and in some cases demanded the prosecution of journalists that reported on it - are out of their tiny pinheads about it now. Of course, these are almost universally the same twats that want a secret war in Syria, so go figure.

However there are a couple of important distinctions.

First, Obama sought a FISA warrant for the records, which Bush never did, and Republicans insisted that he didn't have to under Unitary Executive Theory, the Authorization to Use Military Force Resolution of 2001 and the "Because ....Lincoln!" argument that they deploy whenever it fucking suits them.

Second, the GOP voted to change the law to to allow for exactly what Obama is doing today. Something I would advocate impeaching Obama for, Republicans legitimized way back when.

And that goes back to the tax case. Do you want to pay higher tax rates just because shiityy people with dishonest thinking don't wantto pay any at all?

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.

Joe Biden is a Big Fucking Deal

It used to be that Democrats underestimated Republicans to their detriment. Eisenhower, they said, was lazy and not very bright. Nixon was sweaty, shifty and a two-time loser. Reagan was an amiable dunce. The first Bush was wimp and the second a classic case of nepotism. And the Democrats lost to all of them, in some cases by devastating margins.

Since 2004, the tables have turned rather dramatically. Instead of acknowledging just how badly the GOP ruined America's foreign policy and economy between 2000-'06, they chose instead to underestimate their opposition. In this, they remind me of no one as much as the Democrats during the tail-end of the Johnson Administration.

"It doesn't matter how unpopular LBJ and the war are," they told themselves. "There's just no way that the American people will elect Richard Nixon." If that sounds familiar, it should. That's almost exactly what Republicans told themselves in 2008. Instead of learning from their mistakes, they doubled down on their wishful thinking last year, with even more catastrophic results.

Much was made of Barack Obama's resume, as if that actually mattered. If experience was all it took to win a presidential nomination, Jon Huntsman would have faced Obama last fall instead of Mitt Romney. Not only was Huntsman a much more effective and popular governor, he had vast foreign policy experience that Romney didn't.

That's why conservatives should start taking Vice President Joe Biden seriously soon. He's almost certain to win the 2016 Democratic nomination and I'd give him better than even odds of ascending to the presidency.

"But what about Hillary," I'm sure you're asking. Well, I don't think that she's going to run for several reasons;

First, history tells us that the nomination is Biden's for the asking. The last three Democratic vice-presidents - Gore, Mondale and Humphrey - all won it, despite strong challengers. The last vice-president to run for the nomination and lose was Truman's, Alben Barkley in 1952, and he was practically a corpse when he announced.

Second, the Clinton legacy is something to be protected. Losing to the first serious African-American candidate for the nomination is one thing. Losing to Joe Biden, which she almost certainly would, is quite another. It may well be that Chelsea wants to run for something someday, which would be complicated if her mother decides to become Harold Stassen.

Third, Hillary is just a terrible national candidate. Yes, she was elected to the Senate twice, but she did it in a deeply blue state and beat two nobodies. Her presidential campaign was notable for the infighting within it, which was more focused than the goal of winning the nomination. And beating an incumbent vice-president is considerably more difficult than winning an open nomination.

Fourth, she's seen how much money her husband has made since leaving office, and she'll be leaving the State Department at least as popular Bill was when he left the White House. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Hillary has been talking to Colin Powell about how lucrative the private sector can be for a popular former secretary of state. Why damage that by running for a nomination she's unlikely at best to win?

Look, mocking Joe Biden is a lot of fun. I get that. I do it all the time. The difference is that I'm not running against him.

Also, as Ezra Klien points out in Bloomberg this morning, Biden is increasingly seen as a serious player;

In the continuing drama that is the Obama presidency, Biden often appears as comic relief. He’s the zany neighbor, the adorable uncle. As a result, his presidential ambitions, which burn brightly even today, have mostly been laughed off. Somehow, the sitting vice president of the United States, the former chairman of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, a man who’s on a nickname basis with many of the world’s most powerful leaders, is seen in many quarters as lacking the gravitas to be president.

Yet just a few days before he was giving dating advice on C-SPAN2, Biden again proved himself perhaps the most effective member of the Obama administration. He reprised his role as the White House closer, the guy who can cut a deal with the Republicans after everyone else has failed. In the end, Biden got Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to strike a deal that the White House was happy with. That’s something neither Obama nor Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner had achieved. And it wasn’t the first time. Biden also helped close the 2011 deal that lifted the debt ceiling and the 2010 deal that extended the Bush tax cuts in return for fresh stimulus.

Biden’s skills as a campaigner are also considerable. According to Nielsen, his speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention won better television ratings than the addresses of either Bill Clinton or Obama (or Republicans Mitt Romney and Representative Paul Ryan, for that matter). His debate performance against Ryan bucked up anxious Democrats and arguably stanched the bleeding from Obama’s hapless initial appearance against Romney.

Republicans would do well to study Biden's performance in his debate against Ryan. Paul Ryan was presented as the GOP's most serious thinker, and Biden managed to dismiss him as if he were a contender for vice president of his junior high school class instead of the United States. And the chances aren't good that the Republican Party will put up a nominee even as smart as Ryan in four years.

Therein lies another serious problem for Republicans: The GOP's ongoing civil war.

The Tea Party and the Religious Right maintain that when the party nominates sane people (Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney,) they lose. Of course, they forget that George W. Bush ran well to the left of the party's platform and won twice.

Those elements of the party control enough of the primaries that, if they manage to work together, they can deny the nomination to someone actually capable of beating Biden. Jon Huntsman and Chris Christie seem to already be disqualified for the nomination, and I can't see another Bush being nominated anytime soon. Between his performance as Romney's vice-presidential nominee and his vote for last week's fiscal cliff deal, I'd suggest that Ryan is out, too. If someone like Marco Rubio stays on the Tea Party right, he can't be elected. But if he moves to the center, he can't be nominated.

Then there's the party's "next in line" tradition for the nomination, which heavily favors Rick Santorum. But Santorum would be crushed everywhere but the Deep South, and there's a very real chance that he'd lose the Carolinas and possibly Georgia, especially if Biden picks a Southerner as a running mate.

Republicans have also adopted the old Democratic playbook that cost them seven out of ten presidential elections between 1968 and 2004. In 2008, McCain had to run to the base so hard that he couldn't move to the center after the convention. And last year Republicans started playing the old Democrat game of "kill the frontrunner," which made Romney all but unelectable in the fall. It should also be remembered that almost all of Obama's attacks against Romney were first deployed by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry during the primaries.

When I look at a hypothetical election, I look at the likeliest winner and ask myself "Who's going to beat him?" Combine that likely scenarios and conditions, and you'd be surprised how often it works.

It's almost unthinkable that President Obama will leave office anywhere near as unpopular as either Bush did, although I can't see him having approval ratings like Reagan or Clinton did. If Obama starts 2016 with a job approval of about 45%, that puts Biden way ahead of the GOP, who are almost certain to have another ruinous primary. Since I believe this economy is "the new normal," employment and GDP growth numbers will only have to be slightly better than they are now for the Democrats not to be hurt too badly by them.

Then there's the Republican brand. The Tea Party penchant for nominating unelectable Senate candidates is going to cost them their third consecutive clear shot at that body in two years. There's also a better than even chance that they'll lose more House seats when they historically should gain a lot of them.

And that goes to the single biggest problem conservatives had last year: Their outright refusal to recognize reality. They managed to convince themselves that they couldn't lose against Obama when the history and the facts told them something very different. When they didn't rationalize away evidence contrary to the narrative, they ignored it completely or ascribed it to some nefarious media plot.

Every instinct in my body tells me that they're going to the same thing in a race against Joe Biden. And I can't see how that ends well.

Joe Biden Knows What Girls Like

As a lifelong Lothario, I know something that most of you don't. I know what women really want. I shouldn't ruin my own game by sharing this with you, but I like creating challenges for myself.

What broads look for in a mating partner is a senior citizen with hair plugs, a history of plagerism and no real power. There's something about such a dude that sets female pheremones off like fucking fireworks. I've seen chicks claw one another to death with their fingernails to be near a stud like that. Young and old alike, they feel their crotches tighten, quake and leak love in the presence of men like Vice President Joe Biden.

I think we all learned the power of the Biden sexuality earlier today, as he swore in the new members of the Senate. And some us, such as North Dakota's Heidi Heitkamp, learned more directly than others.

Newly sworn in Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) got an early introduction to the humor of Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday. After taking the oath of office and posing for a picture with the vice president, Biden told her to “spread your legs” because “you’re going to be frisked.”

“Drop your hands to your sides,” Biden commanded. “You say that to somebody in North Dakota, they think it’s a frisk.”

At on point or another, all of us are going to be subjected to the Biden frisking. There's no point in resisting it, so we may as well just lie back and try to enjoy it. The man is, after all, most likely going to be the next president of the United States. And if Bill Clinton could get away with what he did, by god, just wait until we see what ol' Joe has up his sleeve. As you go to bed tonight, kiss your wives and hug your children. You might not know how long it will be before the vice president gets his sexy, sexy hands on them.

And thank whatever God you worship that you're not Mister Heitkamp this good eve. If I know Joe like I think I do, I'd put money on Biden demanding that the senator's spouse smell his fingers after the oath was administered.

He's the "presiding officer" in more ways than one.

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.

"The Freaks Come Out at Night:" The Mourning After and an Ungracious Victory Lap

"A willing patsy." "Another elisa, programmed by it's masters to parrot the gameplan." "Wingnuthead." "Mongrel."

Those were just some of the things I was called in the comments of one post at one blog for making the entirely predictable observation that the GOP was going to get their asses handed to them last night. And my longer-term readers will know that I've been making the same prediction for years now. 

Were I not so lazy, I'd go through my archives and those of other blogs I frequent and do a full round-up of the more amusing invective directed my way for my speaking what has turned out to be prophecy. And yes, I actually am calling myself a prophet! I rather like the sound of it, and prophets have an impressive record of getting themselves laid. And so too shall I. The poontang will fall upon me from the sky, begging for my attention and redemption. I am indestructible this morning. Verily, I am golden God!

Yet I remain humble.

Of the 49 states that have so far been called (Florida, being Florida, remains undecided and should very properly be vaporized by the Strategic Air Command) I correctly called 47 of them. And I said that there was a very strong possibility that the other two would go the other way. I've been saying for months that the polls were generally right and, go figure, they were. I said that the Republicans would blow another shot at a perfectly good Senate takeover and fail to move the needle in the House.

On the other hand, I'm not bragging. I'm just demanding my due, which is that everyone who shit-talked me as ignorant, insane or both give me blowjobs. Slow, loving blowjobs. And I don't want to hear about how tired your jaw is getting, either. Like Mel Gibson before me, I deserve it! I demand satisfaction. Other than that, I'm pretty magnanimous in victory.

Look, when I put something out there, I'm not just pulling it out of my ass, even in the rare circumstance that I happen to be wrong. I do think these through and have reasons behind the predictions that I make, which I'm not exactly shy about sharing. I've been studying this nonsense, to the exclusion of almost everything else, for thirty years now.

I thought about being less of a prick about this, but then I remembered how much fun some folks have throwing my rare mistakes in my face. Rob Ford's victory comes to mind.

I couldn't resist the temptation of watching the returns on Fox News last night. Witnessing the smug narrative of whorish and wrong blowhards like Karl Rove and Dick Morris being viciously deflated in real time was just too alluring for me. If I thought things were going to go the other way, I would have watched MSNBC. Nothing nourishes me quite like the tears of my enemies, and I view almost everybody in cable news as my personal enemy. Liberal or conservative, I don't care, If you're on TV, there's a better than even chance than I'm smarter than you are.

As soon as what was happening became clear, you see the panic in their little animal eyes. I swear to God, if I wasn't relaxing with a canister of ether, I would've been as hard as a fucking rock. It was almost as if they understood that the silly notion of a loving god had been exposed for the fantasy that it is to them and that they would receive exactly the same mercy that they would show if they were on the other end of the sword.



When Fox called Ohio for the President, Rove almost systematically burned down the network from the inside, refusing to recognize the validity (to say nothing of the math) behind the decision. That resulted in 90 minutes of balls-out fucking chaos. In those 90 minutes, we learned that Megyn Kelly can talk live to someone in Benghazi, but can't hear Brett Baier from across the goddamned hall. It was a beautiful thing to witness.

Fox's ethical standards being what they are, they rarely (if ever) mentioned through the campaign that Rove runs a partisan Super PAC called Crossroads GPS that had invested hundreds of millions of dollars in beating Obama. Therefore, Fox let him waste an hour and a half of their time and endless reservoirs of credibility because he was afraid his zillionaire donors were going to be pissed. It was nothing less than magical.

The real story of last night is just how full of shit the GOP and their sycophants actually are about everything they say they stand for. For decades, Republicans have declared themselves the "party of personal responsibility" and ruthlessly ran against the "Blame America First" crowd.


But even before Ohio was called, from Sarah Palin all the way down to the lowliest shithead commenter at Erick Erickson's Red State, they refused to recognize what a magnificent fuck-up their party has become and blamed the country for the loss. As I've been saying for years, these people are congenitally incapable of accepting responsibility for anything. And why should they? After all, it's much easier to simply lie.

It was the pollsters' fault. It was the media's fault (which is hilarious, when you also consider that they're never shy about reminding us that the "Lamestream Media" is irrelevant when they're not also the most effective conspirators in all of Christendom,) then it was Chris Christie's fault for not abandoning his hurricane-devastated state for some fool's errand in Pennsylvania and finally, it was the American people's fault.

Of course, if you're Bill O'Reilly, you acknowledge the disappearance of the "white establishment," which is hard to describe as anything other than racist. And that's a hard thing for me to say. When was the last time you heard me describe anyone as racist? That's a card that I'm proud of never pulling. But I'm a conservative cat and I believe that words actually mean something. O'Reilly wasn't saying anything that he absolutely doesn't believe. I nearly choked on my drink when I heard the words "white establishment" fly out of my TV last night, but I'm not going to pretend that he didn't say them.



What happened last night wasn't just a beating, it was a systematic fucking assassination of both the Romney campaign and the Tea Party as a whole. Some of the biggest names in the Tea Party; including Joe Walsh (not the cool one from the James Gang) and everybody's favorite war criminal, Allen West, found themselves  horse-whipped right out of office. Michele Bachmann only hung on by her fingernails. Their "rising stars," like Mia Love, were convincingly beaten. Even Paul Ryan had the closest race in his district of his entire career. If you want to understand how much trouble these people are in, look no further than that.

In all honesty, I can't for the life of me figure out what these goddamned cretins thought was going to happen. They built a national campaign based almost entirely on demonstrable lies, social issues that were settled at least forty years ago, and economic plans that could only have come from an acid flashback.

Poll after poll after poll for at least the last two years told the GOP that even most Republican voters thought that it was time for the Bush tax cuts to expire, so what did Romney-Ryan do? They said that not only would they make them permanent, they'd further cut rates by another 20% with no plausible way to pay for it. But like most polls, Republican fuckheads saw them as "skewed."

They painted Latinos as criminal and vaginas as selfish, yet they were surprised when Hispanics lashed out in record numbers and only the most delusional cunts lined up behind them. They were running in an alternate reality and when voters pointed that out to them, they got pissed at America.

And these assholes aren't done. Not by a friggin' long shot. Internationally famous punchline and guy who managed to bankrupt a casino, Donald Trump went to Twitter to demand a "revolution." Yes, Trump might be so unaware of history that he actually doesn't understand what traditionally happens to plutocratic shitheads like him in revolutions. Maybe his hair helmet will protect him from the guillotine, but it might not.

But my all time favorite talking head from last night was Charles Krauthammer, who has turned out to be every bit as good at political prognostication as he is at diving.



Never mind that Obama has twice won more Electoral College votes than George W. Bush ever did, he has no "mandate." Bush, according to Krauthammer, did get a mandate in 2004, despite a considerably more shallow Electoral College victory. Indeed, Bush's 2004 "endorsement was resounding." But not for Obama.

If you folks aren't getting my subtlety, I'll spell it out for you. Charles Krauthammer is a fucking psychiatrist who is insisting that the Republican party do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result, and insist that it's something other than insanity. That, my friends, is your GOP!

Was I being more than a little churlish and cunty in the first eight paragraphs of this post? Sure I was, if only for comedic effect. But the difference is that I was right. I've taken endless shit over it for years, but I won.

The people who lost, on the other hand, are being even more delusionally arrogant and stupid than I am, and they aren't pretending to be adorable and funny. Those bloviating, lying cocksuckers really do believe that they would have won, if only the country hadn't stabbed them in the back. And you know what? I've seen that attitude before. It was in Hitler's Mein Kampf, describing Germany's loss of the First World War.

Sure, Germany "rose again," but it very quickly found itself smacked down even harder that it could've possibly imagined shortly thereafter. The supposed "conservative movement" exactly mirrors the lack of self-awareness that the German people did between 1918 and 1945. And that tells me that precisely the same fate is going to befall them.

There's just no helping people that won't help themselves. And the GOP is in no mood to do the hard work that might actually make them fit to govern again. There was literally no end to the appeals to the identity politics that liberals made famous last night. Nor was there an end to the whining, bitching, moaning and blaming everybody else that defined the Democratic Party between 1968 and '88 last night.

It was nothing short of a catastrophe. But it wasn't the fault of Barack Obama, pollsters, the media or the American people. It was the fault of a movement that actually seems to believe that the John Birch Society and prevalent, rampant and seemingly contagious ignorance were positive forces in American life.

If you expect that's going to change anytime soon without some serious self-examination, you're part of the problem, and not the solution. If the attitude I saw last night persists, it doesn't matter how much of a disaster Obama's second term is going to be. I seriously believe that there could be another FDR-like era of twenty-year, one party rule.

I don't expect the Republican party to survive it. The GOP returned to prominence after the war because it had a pragmatic figure in Dwight Eisenhower to lead them out of the darkness and into the light. Figures like Eisenhower are punished in today's conservative movement, condemning the movement to feed off of it's own inbred stupidity until it finally dies.


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Epilogue: I would be remiss if I didn't share with you the funniest and most prescient I thing I read on the Internet last night, if not ever.

It comes from my friend and beloved spiritual mentor, the great and good Dr. Reverend's Twitter feed. He spoke about the Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock wing of the party, which has come to dominate it, in ways that I wish I had thought of first.

(Click to embiggen)

 

Libertarians for Romney?

Not only was I not a fan of Andrew Breitbart's, I was of the considered opinion that he was tremendously damaging to conservatism. Although he was far from being solely responsible for it, Breitbart became the face of a movement that serious conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley wouldn't recognize.

As Buckley or George Will have repeatedly demonstrated over the decades, there is no shortage of serious and factual ways to criticize liberals. But with the ascendancy of Breitbart, it became okay to mislead, selectively edit and, when all else failed, lie outright. He and his followers regularly engaged in hysterical rhetoric that more closely resembled what you would have heard from Democratic activists in the 1960s and 70s.

However, nothing succeeds quite like success, so Breitbartism spread like wildfire, first through the Tea Party, then the GOP as a whole. If you know anything about history or political science, it's virtually impossible to take these people seriously. People whose intellectual forefathers (and I use the word "intellectual" advisedly) were castigated and shunted aside by Buckley are increasingly taking over the movement and driving it into the ground so rapidly that it staggers the imagination.

One of the reasons that Barack Obama is winning this election instead of being ten points behind is the hysteria with which supposed conservatives attack him. Descriptors like "collectivist" and "communist" are used to attack the President, and most sane people just don't see it. Actual socialists despise Obama, to say nothing of doctrinaire Marxists.

In fact, President Obama isn't even an especially liberal Democrat. He could have used the TARP "stress tests" in the early months of his administration to nationalize or break up the criminal banks that destroyed the economy, and there were no shortage of liberals and Democrats who implored him to do just that. It's easy to forget this, but Cap and Trade and the Affordable Care Act started their lives as Republican policy proposals in the early 1990s. Bill Clinton refused to even debate either because he saw them as too "right-wing."

Average voters might not know that, but they certainly feel it. They instinctively feel that Barack Obama isn't anything even close to being the second coming of Leonid Breshnev or Raul Castro. Christ, he doesn't even match the rather tepid socialism of Salvador Allende.  Obama's lowest-ever job approval rating was in the mid-30s, and there's just no rational way to assert that roughly 37% of the American electorate is Marxist. I would actually have a hard time believing that that large a segment of the population actually knows what Marxism is. God knows that most Republican bloggers don't.

You haven't heard much from the Bretibart Empire since its founder's passing in March. This is mostly because Andrew himself was a showman. He knew how to play the media and make it pay attention. Without him, all that's left is paranoid raving on a very flashy and expensive blog. It's writers are little more than a collection of intellectual misfits who regularly insult the intelligence of anyone with a high school diploma. Oh, and they have a few radio talk show hosts, just to make sure that folks who didn't make it through high school get their intelligence insulted.

That brings me to Kurt Schlichter, one of Bretibart.com's writers. Over the last week, he's posted a missive so breathtakingly dishonest that it really does have to be read to be believed. It is in two parts, which you can read here and here.

Mr. Schlichter seems to understand that Mitt Romney's bid for the presidency is an increasingly losing proposition. With all of his nonsensical wailing about "collectivism," he seems to understand that he isn't going to draw many conservative Democrats and independents to his cause. So, he's going to the last place left to him, libertarians, who he also refers to interchangeably as "Ron Paul fans."

Before I go further, I should describe myself for newer readers. Because I oppose radical or revolutionary change, I describe myself as a conservative, as opposed to a libertarian. I'm also of the mind that several libertarian proposals are simply impractical. But I have strong libertarian leanings. I don't believe that government - and especially federal governments - should be doing between a third and half of what they currently are.

I don't believe that the government should be involved in social or lifestyle issues, since those are always better left to even the most irresponsible of individuals than they are to a bureaucracy. In recent years, I've come to the conclusion that American foreign policy has become too expansive to be either militarily practical or economically affordable.

Just as Schlichter refers to libertarians and "Ron Paul fans" interchangeably, he also does so with "conservative," "Republican" and "Tea Party." I believe that's misleading.

When you explore their positions, you quickly learn that Republicans aren't interested in small government at all. The Tea Party, which was supposed to be a reaction to "big government conservatism," let their mask slip after their success in the 2010 midterm election. For all intents and purposes, they're little more than an extension of the religious right that failed a few courses in introductory economics.

Three quarters of the Republican coalition doesn't differ with the "collectivist" Democrats on the imposition of government power, just on what areas of life it should be applied. There's no end to the ways that Republicans want Congress to impose its will on both the states and the individual. A party that truly believed in the Tenth Amendment would never have passed the Laci Peterson Act. No libertarian would reverse four thousand years of legal tradition, to say nothing of "family values," in a vain attempt to raise Terri Schiavo from the dead.

Even after two disastrous military adventures in a single decade, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Republicans still want to go to war with practically everyone in sight, the consequences be damned. And when libertarians (and about a third of traditional conservatives) object, they're dismissed out of hand and ridiculed.

There's no separation between military and budget policy in the GOP, either. As much as they howl about the coming economic doomsday, Republicans insist on not only preserving current (and ridiculous) levels of Pentagon spending, they want to expand it, precisely so they can bomb first and ask questions later.

The GOP, as we saw from 1981-'86 and 2001-'06 don't represent libertarian values in the budget. Republicans, to their credit, are fantastic at cutting taxes. However, they unfailingly increase spending while doing so, thereby giving birth to awesome deficits. I've said this over and over again, but most of "Obama's five trillion in new deficit spending" is neither new or even Obama's. They reflect the growth of policies passed by President Bush and the Republican Congress combined with the exploding disparity between spending and revenue that resulted from the Bush tax cuts.

Few things are as amusing as the supposed Republican devotion to the constitution. Like GOP appeals to libertarians, you only see any evidence of that during even numbered years. Whenever given the chance, Republican presidents violate the Bill of Rights, often without consulting Congress, in the name of the "unitary executive theory," which also only seems to apply when Republicans are in office. If you believe in Republican fidelity to the Constitution, you just haven't been paying attention.

Kurt Schlichter, like Republicans generally, has a very childish and historically inaccurate view of libertarianism in the GOP. First, he seems to think that dissatisfaction with Romney is predicated on the treatment of Ron Paul. That serves magnify his arrogance and that of his party.

Of course, he brings nothing to the table for libertarians to support Romney other the boogeyman of Obama. He almost seems to admit that as soon as the election is over, the snake-handling and war-mongering wings of GOP will resume their control and libertarian policies and philosophies will return to being ignored when they aren't actively abused. The best part is that Mr. Schlichter spends a minimal amount of time pretending that anything other than that will happen.

Schlichter posits that libertarians have more in common with Republicans than they do Democrats. Of course, this is utter nonsense. Republicans and Democrats have a more common view of the role of government than either does with libertarians. I suspect that more and more libertarians are coming around to that view. It's hard to disagree with the Libertarian assertion that a choice between Democrats and Republicans is really no choice at all.

If Romney loses, it won't be because of anything that libertarians did or didn't do, although it would poetic justice if it worked out that way. If Barack Obama get's reelected, so what? Obama and Romney are both going to blow apart the military and destroy the economy, they're just planning on doing it in slightly different ways.

On top of being incredibly patronizing, calling libertarians who refuse to support Romney "the pouters, the angry and the attention seeking," Schlicther makes profoundly illogical argument: that libertarianism can't survive without Republicans.

More likely, the opposite is true: libertaianism can't survive being associated with Republicans. Libertarians have a constant world-view and, as we saw through the Bush years, Republicans don't. To this day, the GOP refuses to accept responsiblity for anything that happened during those years except in the most dismissive way. Continuing to associate politically with people like that ultimately makes libertarianism irrelevant.

Moreover, Schlichter's argument presupposes that the the Republican party itself survives as a long-term proposition, and I'm far from convinced that's the case.

All the way back in 2007, I wrote that demographics are going to be the death of the GOP. Republicans have insisted on being increasingly hostile to Latinos, just as Latinos were becoming a larger part of the electorate in key Republicans states. It wasn't all that long ago that California was a swing state, having voted for Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan twice. Proposition 187 fixed that forever.

Then the Democrats got smart and wrote off their quixotic struggle to win back the South and started focusing on the Mountain West and Southwest. And it worked, too. By 2010, you could drive from the Canadian border right into Mexico without setting foot in a state with a Republican governor. In doing so, they're also gaining ground in the former Confederacy, having a surprisingly good chance of winning Virginia and North Carolina this year.

Bush's 2007 immigration reform bill, McCain-Kennedy, was supposed to fix that, but the Republican House caucus was overtaken with animalistic stupidity and vitriol. Consequently, McCain did twenty points worse with Hispanics than Bush did, and Romney's taking 10% less of the Latino vote than McCain did.

New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado are becoming deeper purple and Arizona is becoming increasingly competitive. In less than twenty years, you're going to see that happen in Texas, at which point the GOP simply ceases to exist as a winning national political party. There just aren't enough Electoral College votes in the Deep South and the plains states to elect a president.

If you've been paying attention to Fox News and Republican blogs, you've already gotten a preview of what's going to happen when Romney loses. The narrative that he isn't far enough to the right is already developing, and the psychopaths are more than strong enough to fix that in the 2016 primaries. To keep a base that doesn't know that Medicare is a government program happy, the GOP is going to nominate a completely unelectable Neanderthal. As I write this, my money's on Santorum.

Schlichter makes a wholly unconvincing argument that if libertarians don't submit to a one-sided marriage of convenience with Republicans they'll become the Greens. In actual fact, that couldn't be further from the truth. In order to keep the supply-siders and snake-handlers in their tent, they've managed to dramatically shrink their demographic and geographic reach over the last decade. And there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that they'll reverse that suicidal trend once Romney loses and every reason to believe that they'll double down on it.

Maybe I'm overstating my case about the death of the GOP. But you'd do well to remember that I made exactly the same noises about the Liberal Party of Canada. I'd tell you to ask them how they're doing, but I'm afraid they wouldn't hear you from inside their oxygen tent.

Like power, history abhors a vacuum. Just as the abolitionists created the GOP out of the ashes of the Whigs, something will rise from the ruins of the GOP. Libertarians are uniquely positioned to do that in the next twenty years.

Kurt Schlichter speaks a great deal about libertarian principle but goes on to erect an endless parade of straw men in an effort to convince them to abandon it. And for what?  To elect somebody that most of the Republican party can't stand?  Mitt Romney isn't better than Barack Obama, he's just a different kind of bad. The fact that he has an R beside his name only matters if you're utterly without principle.

Were I able to cast a ballot in this presidential election, I would do so for Gary Johnson on the Libertarian ticket. If you're reading this, I hope that you'll consider doing so, as well.

After bin Laden, part two: "There goes the neighborhood"

If there's one thing that cable news excels at, it's whipping up a frenzy of populist stupidity without taking the time to think through the consequences of what it proposes. Moreover, there's never a shortage of politicians out there willing to give a helping hand. That's bad enough when the topic is something like deficit reduction, but it can be deadly when we're talking about foreign policy, as we have been all week.

I've been keeping a pretty close eye on the cable networks - primarily Fox News and Sun News Network here in Canada - since last Sunday, night when it announced that bin Laden had been taken out in Pakistan. I had a pretty good idea what was coming and I knew that no good could come of it.

If you've paid any attention at all to the networks, you know that their personalities have a much more profound relationship with their goddamn blow dryers than they do with international affairs. As a matter of fact, they're only slightly more informed about the topic than their audience is, and that's only because the audience doesn't have the benefit of a research staff and a teleprompter. As for the political types, they lie. A lot.

When I first saw Geraldo, of all people, first report the rumors that bin Laden had been located and killed in Abbottabad, I found myself thinking "wait for it, wait for it ...."

I didn't have to wait long. First thing Monday morning, every half hour started with the same question from some blond-headed anchorbot: "Should we cut off aid to Pakistan?"

"Great," I thought. "The stupidity is starting to take over, and it's eventually going to bite us directly on the fleshiest part of already ample asses." Stupidity, especially in foreign policy, is a lot like a malignant cancer. If it isn't aggressively countered early, it destroys the systems that keep us fully functional. As the body retards itself, an agonizing death becomes all but inevitable. I'm terrified that this is what's starting to happen with South Asian policy.

One of the thoughts that immediately gripped me upon hearing about the hit on Osama is that it pretty much means the end of the war in Afghanistan. I've supported getting out for since December of 2009, but only because it had by then become crystal clear that the United States and NATO had never taken Afghanistan seriously and never would.

In my opinion, that's a terrible mistake and one that we might live to forget, but the only thing worse than abandoning a war is fighting it by half-measures. And anything less than a full counterinsurgency strategy, complete with approximately 300,000 - 500,000 troops on the ground, is a half measure. If we're going to keep throwing our kids into the meat-grinder of Afghanistan, we had damn well better accomplish something for the trouble.

That's never going to happen, and I can't continue to ask kids in their late teens and early twenties to get dead by the thousands just so that we can lose a little more slowly than we otherwise would. The so-called "light footprint" strategy means that we have to overly rely on bombing, which is contrary to the purpose of counterinsurgency and primarily serves to create even more insurgents. For domestic political reasons, we're never going to have a larger force there than we do now, and that's pretty clearly not enough.

Political support for the war has collapsed over the last three years. And that was with bin Laden alive. Now that he's not, most folks will see 9/11 as having been avenged and the remaining popular support for the Afghan mission will evaporate completely. I'm guessing that it'll take less than six months for it to drop below 20% in the United States.

The death of Osama bin Laden may have the perverse effect of ensuring our ultimate failure in Afghanistan, which means that, yeah, he won. He might not be around for the trophy ceremony, but he achieved his strategic goal of getting the United States bogged down and humiliated in Central and South Asia. Bin Laden saw the Soviet Union beaten and bankrupted in Afghanistan and, although he won't survive to see it, he knew that the United States was headed directly in the same direction.

Having said that, we'll be able to ignore Afghanistan once again, letting it spiral into chaos until it again explodes in our face. That's not true of Pakistan and it never will be. It's simply too dangerous. South Asia makes the Koreas look like the more boring parts of Northern Europe. India and Pakistan have already fought four wars and nearly fought three more since both countries successfully tested nuclear weapons in the late 90s. Unless some sort of strategic accommodation is reached, there will be a full scale nuclear war, sooner rather than later.

With very few exceptions, American foreign policy over the last six decades been conducted on the mistaken premise that everyone shares the same interests with the United States. That's definitely not true in Pakistan and never was. Americans were concerned first about Soviet expansionism, then global terrorism. Pakistan's first, last and only concern is India.

And they aren't wrong, necessarily. Imagine if the Soviet Union was ten times as powerful as the U.S, but was situated where Mexico is and had cut America in half as recently as forty years ago. Do you think that Washington wouldn't be every bit as paranoid as Islamabad is? Now imagine that America's closest and most powerful ally had deepened relations with Moscow and made the unprecedented move of exempting it from the nuclear non-proliferation rules that bind everyone else. Looked at that way, Pakistan's conduct makes infinite sense.

Afghanistan matters to Pakistan only because it provides Islamabad "strategic depth" in the event of an overwhelming Indian invasion. Because the native terror groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan (as opposed to the Arab imports) are primarily Pashtun and tribally allied with the Pakistanis, they aren't Islamabad's primary strategic concern. Their military has been, just as it always was, mostly deployed to the east and south, to deter New Delhi. As long as they face an existential threat with severely limited resources, they have no interest in fighting America's wars - which happen to be against what Pakistan considers strategic assets - for them.

Islamabad has also been down this road with America in Afghanistan before. During the Carter and Reagan administrations, Pakistan was the conduit for American, Saudi and Chinese aid to the anti-Soviet mujaheddin. This was of great benefit to the Pakistanis, in that the aid allowed them to build influence with various groups in Afghanistan and allowed them to build training camps that could later be used in their own anti-Indian campaign in Kashmir. An unknown amount of the Afghan aid (I've seen accounts that put it at as much of half) was diverted to Islamabad's nuclear program.

Well, after the Soviets bugged out, the U.S abandoned Pakistan and imposed nuclear-related sanctions on it. Worse, the Clinton and second Bush administrations moved to strengthen ties with Pakistan's mortal enemy, India, which had been a Soviet ally during the Cold War. From this, Islamabad concluded that Washington cannot be trusted. It shouldn't surprise anyone that events in South Asia truly began to spiral out of control; with the jihad in Kashmir, the nuclear tests, Indo-Pakistani brinksmanship and the ISI's sponsorship of the Taliban, between 1989 and 9/11.

After September 11, Pervez Musharaff rightly concluded that he couldn't overtly obstruct the United States without running the very real risk of being wiped out. But he did know that he could hedge his bets so that Pakistan's options would be preserved when America inevitably betrayed Pakistan again. As we're seeing now, he wasn't entirely wrong.

To understand the situation, you need to understand the political dynamics in Pakistan. Because the threat from India is so grave, the military and ISI don't answer to the civilian government and the population likes it that way. There have also been eight military coups in Pakistan's sixty-five year history, none of which were broadly protested by the people. And if my analogy of the Soviets being on the U.S border was a reality, the same would probably be true of America.

Long story short, Osama bin Laden was able to hide in the suburbs of the Pakistani capital because finding him was far down on the list of Pakistan's national priorities.

The government of Asif Ali Zadari, which succeeded Musharraf's military dictatorship in 2008, is wholly dependent on American aid, but it only has so much room to maneuver with the army and ISI. if Zadari oversteps those bounds in ways that the military thinks compromises Pakistani security, they'll depose him. And if the United States withdraws from the region, abandons Pakistan again, or even tilts further to India, they'll depose him.

Either way, the situation returns to what it was between the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and 9/11. If that happens, the United States will have spent a trillion dollars and thousands of lives for essentially nothing. Within months you'll see exactly the same dominoes lined up exactly the same way, except that this time you won't see Arab terror groups like al-Qaeda threatening American interests, it'll be South Asian groups, trained and armed by the ISI, which will be more dangerous by several degrees of magnitude. And that ignores entirely the possibility that a threatened Iran could seek to expand its influence to their east, just as it has to the west.

Had the United States not abandoned the region after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan 9/11 probably wouldn't have happened. The change in policy set into motion that made the rise of al-Qaeda and the attacks on New York, Washington and Shanksville all but inevitable. And now congressional idiots and cable news ghouls want to do exactly the same thing again.

Put another way, the United States needs Pakistani stability a lot more than Pakistan needs the United States. Hopefully, someone will sit Bill O'Reilly and the Republican congressional caucus down and explain that to them.

After bin Laden

As of Monday morning, the picture to the left is what you'll see if you look for Osama bin Laden on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitive list at the FBI website. That boy is, to paraphrase, Monty Python, an ex-terrorist. That Norweigen Blue isn't fucking resting. Not this good eve, friends. he's on thelongest squat of them all. This might be news to some of you folks, I know. The story really didn't get much press.

"Deceased," my friends! The bad guy has finally lost, blown directly into Hell's fireiest circle by the brave boys of Seal Team VI. The fixed his little red wagon for fucking good. And you know what? I hope it hurt. If there actually is a God, he'll have felt the pressure of his brain exploding against the back of his eyeballs before his skull blew apart.

Bin Laden may or may not have met his great reward hiding behind a girl, which should really surprise no one. Terrorists are rather famous for their ignominious ends. Abu Nidal was found dead in Baghdad seven months before the U.S invasion. Iraqi officials reported that he had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head ... multiple times.  The regime of Saddam Hussein had a deeply ironic sense of humor that was never really appreciated by us in the West.

Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, formerly known as Carlos the Jackal, was captured as he was recovering in a Sudanese villa from surgery that fixed a varicose vein in his nuts. It happens to the best of us, but few os us deserve it like he did.

It's humiliating, to be sure, but nobody signs up for the game without knowing that the dice ain't gonna roll their way forever. At some point, most terrorists are going to be taken out in the most unflattering ways. The job description almost demands it.

Osama was different from those that came before him in that he succeeded where Nidal and Carlos failed. Only geeks like me know who the latter two even are these days, but bin Laden is going to live forever. That son of a bitch changed history. He succeeded beyond what must have been his wildest dreams and, in the end, he might very well have won.

Bin Laden always overplayed his role in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. He was an engineer and a money man. He built roads and hidey-holes. He moved construction equipment in and out of the country and provided medical services. The only time that he was known to have engaged the Russians, he nearly got his ass shot off.

But what he saw there informed the rest of his life and his three-quarters wrong, misunderstood view of history; combined with his being charismatic and a gifted manager, changed the way the rest of us live. He changed the way we're going to live for a good long time, and his newly ventilated cranium really does nothing to change that.

He and his twisted brethren saw the imperial Russian bear storm into a Muslim neighborhood and how his coreligionists from across the globe answered the call to jihad. It took nearly a decade and untold carnage, but that bear was beaten back. Three years afterward, it vanished from the face of the earth entirely. How could they not conclude that this was Allah's divine vengeance? It doesn't matter that the mujaheddin were almost uniformly illiterate goat-herders with a profound nostalgia for the 7th century. That's what they believed. And they weren't wrong, at least not completely.

After the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, bin Laden's new group, al Qaeda,  turned its lonely eyes to the other great atheist superpower, the United States.

Being as they were, seventh century nostalgists, al Qaeda never really understood that the guns, money and Stinger missiles that they used to bring the Russians so low were provided by the Americans, Saudis and Chinese. They thought that they came from the Pakistanis, which in a roundabout way, they did. The ISI controlled the operation and they alone determined who would enjoy the weapons and the power they brought them. It should surprise no one that the mujaheddin forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar went into battle against the Soviets yelling "Death to America."

After the Soviet takedown, it was only logical that the jihadis would take a poke at the other great power that supported, financed and trained the apostate regimes that repressed and tortured believers. It wasn't just a failure of imagination that no one saw it coming, it was a failure of common sense.

The U.S government, being the U.S government, misrepresented the new threat almost from the minute it took shape in the street of Lower Manhattan in February of 1993. "They hate us for our freedom," we heard from Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. And virtually no one is willing to point out that they were lying. These people weren't willing to die because they were overly aroused by the way Britney Spears looked in her early videos. Slutty Catholic schoolgirl outfits are famous for a few things, but war isn't one of them.

The jihadis are pissed at American foreign policy. Period. But if a president actually had the balls to go on TV and say that, most Americans - who are genuinely peace-loving to point of having an almost  studied ignorance of the rest of the world - would say "Well, why don't we change our foreign policy?" And that can be problematic for a people who like buying their oil at fifty cents a barrel.

If the Bush administration knew anything, they knew that anything worth doing was worth overdoing. Even after 9/11, they never relented in telling us that we were making war to ensure that girls were going to school eight times zones away, which had never before happened in all of human history. The inhuman incineration of nearly 3,000 innocents in New York City was just no longer enough. The war in Afghanistan wasn't long about retribution. It became, by the military' s own branding, a "just crusade."

The historical problem with a crusade is that they tend not to go well unless they're won quickly. If they aren't, they tend to become problematic. Assuming that you're going to forcibly change anyone's religious virtues is about as silly as thinking that they'll change yours.

And that's really what the "War on Terror" comes down to. "Terror", in and of itself, isn't an enemy. It's a tactic. The United States didn't win the War of Independence by fighting against outflanking maneuvers any more than they'll win a War in Terror. If you think about it really hard, you might just understand that you're an idiot for even having thought very hard about it in the first fucking place.

Al Qaeda is the enemy today, every bit as much as the Nazis were in World War Two. Well, when you kill bin Laden, you defeat the enemy. Unless you don't. Then you're fucked, just as you would be if you thought that killing Boy George would have prevented the 1980s.Then you're you're in a position where you think that you're a hero, until Kajagoogoo rises in to destroy us all and there's no one to defend us because you're off collecting your trophy.

Yeah, we got bin Laden. But when you really think about it, that's like thinking that murdering Donald Trump is going to cancel The Apprentice. No one ever counts on NBC's bringing Warren Buffett out of the darkness, do they?

Doing a Fredo on Osama is important, have no doubt about it. But in the grand scheme of things, he's only Fredo. It doesn't matter how many times that you dump him off of the rowboat if his ideas survive.

I was going to go into great depth about the international ramifications of this story, but I've already gone on for a long time, and more importantly, I'm bored. Maybe I'll come back to it tomorrow. I'm still exhausted by the goddamn Canadian election.