There’s no crying in baseball and there’s no crying in ideological struggles for the soul of the nation either. Whether the rest of us like it or not, several strands of largely fringe radicalism have merged, and now emerged as the dominant ideology, nee fanaticism of one of our major parties. And hulking bummer though it is, inconvenient and unavoidable hard fact, this now prominent absolutism doesn’t compromise, doesn’t moderate, doesn’t give a whit about two-parties, nor will it accept anything short of full ideological purification, not to mention full domination of the country. It sucks mightily, and get used to it.

Indeed, the ferocity of this new right-wing and Republican determination to assert the preeminence of ideological reality over material and scientific truth, to unashamedly impose a brutal social order (with the same attendant doublespeak about liberty and will of the people and freedom, along with many of the same scapegoats) skirts uncomfortably close to the absolutist extremism of the grotesque European isms of the last century.

But the time for merely remarking upon its odiousness, bemoaning the depravity of its methods and the vastness of its blithe deceit, or for exposition of the boundlessness of its freakishness has passed. It is time to match it in the only area that really matters at this stage: raw power. Which brings me to the news today that a Texas bank, and a couple of right-wing think tanks have embarked on the new go-to play for the Republican right seeking the overturn of democratically achieved laws, which is resort to litigation in largely friendly federal courts, including the highest court in the land. This time it isn’t health care it’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau established under Dodd-Frank. Essentially, the poor, poor banks and the woefully put upon financial institutions believe essentially that nobody is the boss of them, and at bottom any restriction or oversight that prevent them from doing whatever they damn please to consumers is, oh my, unconstitutional.  We’ll see. But the point is that friendly courts, including the big one is what you get with raw power… and elections are how you get that power.

There is no better example of course of the triumph of raw power than the 2000 presidential election in Florida.  All but a coup, it was a legal coup, legal because all of the power was stacked in such a way every democratic mechanism was subservient to one political party and its own interest. Own the governorship, the top state election official, the state legislature and ultimately the highest court in the land and the actual vote count, or even counting of the votes or the expressed will and intent of the people themselves are beside the point. There’s democracy and then there’s democracy.

The point of this really is that liberals and Democrats must at last fully comprehend the stakes and behave accordingly, no matter how often and insipidly CNN insists it’s all just two perpetually equivalent polarities or sides of the same coin. They must embrace the stale and unoriginal reduction of it all to the political process and leave behind their distaste for the laborious and grimy work of aggressive advocacy and electing people.  They must, where lacking, develop an appetite for political blood, hand-to-hand combat and trench war… for the thrill of a political kill. Anything short of angry defiance at attempts at punking you, gutting you or sliming you by this borderline personality disorder masking itself as philosophy is unacceptable. Ownership by venal doughboys like the Koch Brothers or fey authoritarians like Scott Walker, or rule by amoral tinker toys like Mitt Romney should be repudiated with extreme prejudice.

Take power and keep taking it.

Impressing voters with their capacity to incessantly embark upon partisan larks extraneous to voters’ lives and concerns, to fly ideological kamikaze missions such as causing debt default or passing legislation with zero ability to survive in the Earth’s soil beyond the House chamber, the Republican majority in the House has been nothing if not consistent. This week the Republican majority of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee sought to reinforce that impression by giving the world another memorable straitjacket moment: voting Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress.

There was never any expectation the next Three Stooges movie would diverge from buffoonish slapstick and there is no expectation the Republican House will suddenly do something sensible or barely sane. If you want representatives whose actions mirror the obsessions of pale folks dressed in tri-cornered hats holding badly-spelled signs and poorly reasoned, ill-informed opinions, Republican members of the House are your cup of kooky tea.

Politically speaking, this latest uncontrollable House Republican urge to advertise its own estrangement from the mainstream concerns of American citizens is highly beneficial to Democrats and to the re-election of President Obama, and I thank them for their lack of self-control.  Reminding voters once again that the Republican Party in power invariably becomes preoccupied with ideologically self-indulgent theater, unrelentingly partisan obstructionism and sabotage of good faith efforts to address the challenges facing United States citizens is doing God’s work for Democrats.

The Fast and Furious program was an effort begun by the ATF during the Bush administration intended to track illegal gun sales in the United States to drug cartels in Mexico. Though Attorney General Holder terminated the program and though reasonable people might conclude that determining the lethal consequences of these sales (Remember that Arizona has justified all manner of barbaric immigration policy with the specter of border violence) was a worthy project, the far right construed this as an affront to the sanctity of the National Rifle Association and an act of blasphemy toward the role of firearms as holy icons in the Republican spiritual system, faulty American history and fetishism playing their part.

Demanding documents from Holder it was understood by Republicans he was obligated to keep secret in order to protect the lives of agents and the viability of operations ongoing was the basis of the Republican con that Holder was failing to cooperate, all in the service to a phantasmagorical gun control plot by the Great Black Socialist. Still, the only thing really important here is that Americans are offered yet another example that Republicans should not retain their House majority, nor for that matter be allowed to handle sharp objects, have unsupervised time with small children or keep the laces in their shoes.

At the very least, the reality-based community owes House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Republicans a debt of gratitude for their unintentional, yet luridly vivid  warning of the perils, frivolities and disorders of elected Republicans, and their distant remove  from ordinary Americans’ priorities and basic mental health.

Republicans typically dwell in some combination of antiquity and mythological Candy Land, their long, loving gaze often coming to rest on the pre-Enlightenment era and the pre-capitalist days of feudal economic structures and aristocratic hegemony. Ayn Rand tried to gussy them up for a newer time with her Objectivist philosophy, but only adolescents and screwballs really buy it (including numerous Republican members of congress).

So when Senate Minority Leader and oratorical lightning bolt Mitch McConnell attempts to lay it on President Obama by charging that the Affordable Care Act is the first step toward “Europeanizing America” one wonders whether the last he heard about Europe was the big war that reduced the place to rubble, or perhaps given the degree to which Republicans inhabit the olden days of the earlier war of the 14^th Century when the French subsisted on an exclusive diet of turnips. One of Republicans’ most desperate requirements continues to be that those low information voters upon whom they depend never figure out what modern Europe is like.

Of course when the epidemic of malpractice and criminality on the part of America’s real estate and financial sectors spread throughout the world it crippled Europe the same as it crippled us. Unfortunately, most European countries responded by adopting Republican economics, Europe Americanizing itself in the worst way.  The Bizarro World economic response to recession of obsessing about debt and cutting spending rather than stimulating first and cutting later has made austerity about as popular among citizens of Europe as Eva Braun. Republican economics have Europe stuck in a muck of stagnation, recession and joblessness that make America’s current economic conditions look scintillating by comparison.

But McConnell lapsed into a perhaps medically dangerous seizure of irony when he attempted to condemn Obamacare through association with the mythically dystopian Europe Republican brains have been trapped in for several decades now. This would be in contrast to the actual Europe, where quality of life in innumerable key areas has become superior to ours, due in large part to a pragmatic, realistic addressing of contemporary problems across the ideological spectrum, absent any equivalent of our uniquely influential, zany dogmatic weirdos on the Luddite right.

Please, Mr. McConnell, don’t throw me into that Europeanized Briar Patch of gleaming new infrastructure, revitalized transportation systems, blazing fast internet, bullet trains, long vacations, economic mobility, lower infant mortality rates, longer life spans and affordable health care for every citizen. Please.

Americans understand that during Republicans’ joint control of congress and the executive branch no health reform was put forward, no proposals to end the moral abomination and economically crippling  persistence of millions uninsured, of skyrocketing medical costs and exorbitant premiums, of a national epidemic of bankruptcies due to medical bills were proffered. Republicans’ irresponsibility and immoral indifference to Americans’ health are now so far beyond the pale and past the point of moral defensibility, so defiant to common sense and societal efficiency for a modern nation Republicans should refrain from comment on the subject out of simple common decency.   Sadly, the Teabagger Republican Party and common decency went their separate ways years ago.

For the record though, if Obama is Europeanizing America I’d prefer he did it a little faster.

Only persons afflicted with an optimism of the clinical variety found in DSM-IV would expect modifications of any kind in the thinking of America’s Republican right, any response to reason, facts or an occurrence in material reality out of the question, in the latter case, up to and even beyond a hunk of plywood against the side of the head one imagines. Economists, scientists, theologians or mere election results are no match for this implacability.

The first sobering lesson to be taken from this realization is that the behavior of one segment of the American polity is set in concrete for the foreseeable future (in other words, some period between the end of the Mayan calendar and the death of the sun). This leads to the second sobering lesson, which is that successful appeals to a tiny, still malleable segment of voters will be critical to empowering Democrats, Democrats’ political muscle all that stands between a modern, ideologically eclectic welfare state and altogether housebroken American society, and the full calamity of a right-wing cultural revolution.

The ‘revolutionary vanguard’ already is present in the House of Representatives, to a lesser extent in the United States Senate, as well as in governors’ mansions and state legislatures across the nation. With its harsh ideological strictures, rigid conservative political correctness, economic feudalism and banana republic economic structures, and not least, regime of oppressively draconian social policies enunciated with arrogant pseudo-pieties, this radicalism should strike even the semi-conscious as a clear and present danger. To be benevolent, some of our fellow voting citizens may not always be, let’s say, fully conscious.  This remains the Mother of All Built-in Political Advantages to the right wing.

I retain affection for my fellow Democrats; and while there are many capable and battle-ready Democratic politicians and operatives, I would be frankly negligent if I failed to disclose that I am not entirely confident of the combat-readiness of the party in general, tendencies toward defensiveness, crippling cautiousness and a lack of philosophical and ideological sure-footedness a real concern. In some cases this is simply a lack of aggressiveness, and in others it is the absence of an instinctive feel for the urgency of the requirement to take the political and philosophical offensive.

In some cases, as pointed out by cognitive linguist George Lakoff who tirelessly reminds progressives of the necessity for and instructs them in the how-to of effective framing in political communication (and I somewhat tirelessly or tiresomely recommend Lakoff on this blog) the fault lies in an inability to penetrate the miasma of falsehood, distortion, misinformation and    screaming inanity spewed into the political atmosphere by the right’s vast and efficient and ungodly-funded propaganda arsenal in a compelling and impactful way.  What Democrats can’t do instinctively in this regard they had better learn. Even with its undeniable and abundantly remarked flaws, for all its amorphousness, quirkiness and oddities Occupy Wall Street drove income inequality, financialization and the bamboozling and maceration of the middle class to a salient place in the American consciousness, and with a very Lakoff-like adeptness and effectiveness at moral framing.

The public at large (in other words voters) is hardly oblivious, nor are they resigned when the right brusquely transforms their states into laboratories of anti-democracy in places like Wisconsin, Ohio or Florida for instance, turning them into something reminiscent of Khmer Rouge reeducation camps, as the uprisings by citizens in those states have demonstrated with various levels of success at polls. Citizens, when they actually find out, whether by a now nearly miraculous transmission of bare truth through the mainstream media, or via organs of progressive activism, that radical Republicans intend to subject them to something akin to prison sex they are neither receptive nor are they resigned.

When it comes to informing the electorate, if the quaint connotation of inform is to communicate credible, truthful and factual information and distinguish it from that which is none of those, then in large part the mainstream press does a great deal more harm than good. With Big Media’s two sides to everything  model strongly in force, the public is left with a muddle, more confused than enlightened by what they get. Given the massiveness of the right’s alternate reality apparatus and the timorous waywardness of our current media, disabusing facts and truthful correctives must be all but forced into the media’s narratives, which naturally means Democrats and liberals must be resourceful, ingenious, indefatigable and aggressive…did I mention aggressive?…in forcing them in.

At this point anything less is a concession to Republicans’ remarkable marriage of dogmatism and cynicism, their renunciation of modern realities and their malevolently dishonest propaganda.   In other words all but appeasement of an intractableness and vehemence that is a declaration of civil war in all but its public designation.

When the Great Misfortune struck back in the year 2000, and an unsuspecting and undeserving nation was afflicted with the maledictory rule of George W. Bush, it wasn’t really fair, in both the human sense and the democratic sense. Bush came to office legally; but he certainly wasn’t elected: call it a legal coup. Those maligned exit polls turned out to be correct: Al Gore received the most votes in Florida, just as he did in the national popular vote.

Recounts confirmed that in addition to thousands of undervotes (the machinery failed to detect the vote that was there) there were many thousands of legitimate overvotes (ballots on which a voter marks the ballot and in addition writes the candidate’s name) that should have been counted and weren’t, though they still would have been had the Supreme Court not kaboshed the recount. If you throw in the botched ballots that shouldn’t have been counted yet clearly indicated a preference for Al Gore Florida wasn’t especially close, at least to the extent the expressed will of the people is concerned. Of course, timing is everything: the consortium conducting the recount had its result days after 9-11, major media outlets either minimizing or all but burying the story, a concerted and conscious effort to refrain from undermining the legitimacy of a new president while the nation was tense and raw from being attacked.

No such mitigating circumstance exists this time. Press coverage of the current election cycle is the predictable and soporific stew of polls and pundits, presumably two presidential candidates vying for the presidency and the two political parties competing for power across the land. Slightly beneath the surface or perhaps occasionally off to the side, anywhere but in the foreground where it belongs is the monumental development:  seriously loony people are trying to take the country over, and attempting to do so using manifestly undemocratic and un-American methods: another legal coup.

Having observed America’s young and minorities inundate the polling places to elect Obama, Republicans asked the expected question: no, not, “How can we broaden our appeal to more Americans?” but “How can we stop large swaths of the population likely hostile to our increasing radicalism from making it into a voting booth?” Hence, Republican-controlled state governments launched their flurry of voter suppression measures, all manner of obstacles to voting for targeted demographic groups introduced, passed and signed.

Florida, fearing no amount of irony has been the very worst. Send 180,000 Democrats letters declaring them non-citizens (180,000 non citizens managed to register to vote?) forcing them to PROVE their citizenship in order to remain on voter rolls. Those who fail to respond to the letter are simply purged. I ask this in all seriousness: what’s next? I also ask this in all seriousness: what does it take to get the major media organs in this country to take a hold of this like the extraordinarily consequential story it is? This is about as close to authoritarian usurpation of the democratic franchise as one can get without physically threatening harm to potential voters or members of the opposing party. Again, what’s next?

One would like to avoid getting all Weimar and Christopher Isherwood, but unfortunately, it is time for getting all Weimar and Christopher Isherwood. Better before than after to wake up and ask, “How could such unsound and dangerous and destructive people ever get control of a modern democracy?” Typically the latter would be the simultaneous Newsweek and Time covers after the fact.  How unsound is this radicalized segment seeking control? Mike Lofgren, who resigned after 30 years as a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill published an essay in which he recounted the radicalism that drove him away

“To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy. It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.

“It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.”

In his essay, Lofgren included the following quote from John Judis of The New Republic, offering his own assessment of the current Republican Party:

“Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today’s Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery.”

And of course the conservative SCOTUS that was such a sound investment in the year 2000 gave Republicans their money’s worth in the Citizens United case, guaranteeing that what voter suppression cannot manage, a billion dollars worth of television propaganda paid for by anonymous donations from corporations and the very wealthy can.  For anyone seeking a persuasive answer to the question, “How could such unsound and dangerous and destructive people ever get control of a modern democracy?” these are two of the ways: suppress the vote and buy it.

One of those not really a secret secrets as closely held as Lindsay likes to party is that while public birther activism is confined to a relative fringe it is a welcome and essential component to the wider Republican insurrection. There’s a Grand Canyon’s worth of difference obviously between John Boehner or Mitch McConnell offering up the customarily cutesy pie, “I take the president at this word,” non-affirming affirmation of the president’s citizenship, and behaving morally and patriotically, which means denouncing an assault on the president’s legitimacy emphatically as the sickness it is, a racist and un-American plague. From Boehner you get, “It’s not my job to tell the American people what to think.”  Well okay, then it is MY job to tell them what to think. And I’m telling them that burrowing rodents such as John Boehner and Mitch McConnell and Reince Priebus are unworthy of American citizenship, moral eunuchs fit to be flung from polite society, much less political leadership. And I’m going to do everything I can to see that it happens.

In the meantime it is important to remember that most of America has no use for these atavistic kooks when it learns what they’re really up to. Which is why your modern Republican Party is all shadows and ducking and winks and weasel words. The plan to dismantle Social Security is The Plan to Save Social Security because they don’t actually have the balls to tell America what they really believe and what they really want. And what cannot be accomplished forthrightly can be accomplished otherwise is virtually the Republican motto of the last thirty years. These rich folks funneling in the money are delicate flowers, if truth be told, the Captains of Industry and Finance are rather publically shy and they run like tiny spiders when the light exposes their dirty work.

In fact, outlawing unions, sanctifying corporations, rejecting ideologically inappropriate scientific or economic research and conclusions to the point of excising them from school textbooks: you really do have something from mid-Twentieth Century Europe. And history tells us you can end up living under it if you’re not careful. And if the media you depend upon has the energy of noodle soup and the fortitude of dandelions.

In one regard at least, conservatives’ mortally dubious presumptions about their synchronicity with the nation’s founders actually may be justified. When the colonists proclaimed human equality and the right to resist tyranny in the Declaration, they listed among the abuses suffered at the hands of the King that “He has excited domestic insurrections against us,” meaning Britain had promised freedom to slaves who abandoned their owners and declared loyalty to Britain. The temerity of the British Crown interfering with their right of ownership over their slaves was an infraction against liberty far too unspeakable to stomach. Remind you of anyone?

So perhaps it is something of the Spirit of ’76 that motivates the Koch Brothers to lament the gall of regulators and environmentalists to challenge their liberty to befoul the air their neighbors and fellow citizens breathe. The frequent and self-righteous citations of liberty in defense of a more powerful entity’s liberty to exert its will over a weaker one is the right-wing inculcation and abuse of liberty in a nutshell.  Indeed in situations that pit the safety or well being of employees against the insistence of employers, liberty invariably is on the side of employers, intervention to mitigate employees’ treatment a trespass against liberty, if not a literal trespass, according to this radical and perverse interpretation of liberty.

Many would find the assertion that attempting to interfere through regulation with the manufacture of a product that causes bodily harm or dangerously malfunctions an infringement upon the liberty of the manufacturer, an assertion fit for mirthfully acidic ridicule. Yet, such is today’s conservative construing of liberty.  In this universe your liberty to continue respiration is trumped by the manufacturers’ liberty to manufacture as he sees fit. While the condition of being deceased may impede your future exercise of market choices at least those who witnessed you keeling over may exercise their own freedom of choice in the marketplace not to buy the product that killed you. Feel better? How’s that for some liberty.

The American colonists were very promiscuous in their use of the word liberty while retaining the right to own slaves and reserving the choice to be indignant toward the British Crown for a colonial relationship that made colonists feel as subordinate as slaves, of all abominable things. And of course our Republican and Libertarian friends, while championing the bigfoooting of American consumers, neighbors and ordinary folks are equally promiscuous with use of liberty, virtually every right-wing or Republican or Libertarian organization, group, klatch, pac or gathering appropriating the word liberty for its name.

Goldman Sachs may induce you into an investment that it knows is doomed at the same time it bets against it, and while you may feel swindled when you lose your shirt, any legislative effort, say, Dodd-Frank for instance to prevent such theft prior to it taking place is according to this version of liberty an unacceptable infringement upon Goldman Sachs’ precious liberty to conduct its business practices free of interference. One may feel secure in the freedom or liberty not to abide by the tyranny of the religious doctrine that insists life begins at the instant of conception, and that early stage fetal life is indistinguishable from born human beings or even viable fetuses at a later stage.  In this situation the right is much less impressed with your assertion of liberty.

Samuel Johnson wrote during the period of revolutionary foment, “Why is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?” Tell me about it, Sam.

Guns, Goons and Gravy

The particularly stench-heavy toxic brew of corporate largesse and far-right political ambitions known as ALEC got at least some modest comeuppance over the last week, as applied muscle from a panoply of progressive organizations caused a string of sugar daddies to cut their ties.  It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of anti-democratic Crustaceans.

ALEC is famous for providing slow-witted Republican legislators with pre-written legislation allowing them to submit bills furthering the whims of their fatted campaign contributors without working up a sweat writing them themselves. More time for golf and shooting bunny rabbits in the woods I guess.

ALEC drew fire and began taking on water when it came to light that the organization helped cook up the Stand Your Ground laws that morphed the Castle Doctrine (one is legally permitted to defend oneself with a firearm in one’s home without retreating first) into Permissible Public Murder Due to Jittery Nerves laws, one of which was adopted in Florida and seemed to have played a role in the reluctance or lassitude of the Sanford, Florida police department when it came time to arrest George Zimmerman after he stalked and murdered  17 year old Trayvon Martin for the heinous and terrifying act of publicly eating Skittles while black.

ALEC also has been cranking out those Republican Stop the Vote laws popping up like Kudzu in the fully reddened states, designed to limit voting to the geriatric white cranks who comprise the party’s base. It’s sort of like the Golden Girls teaming up with Archie Bunker to rid the neighborhood of blacks, Latinos, gays and progressive taxes. One would think Republicans would quit carping about the horribleness of Medicare and spitting out plans to gut it since in many cases it may be the only thing keeping its voters alive…and the Republican Party.

So far Coca-Cola, Pepsico, McDonalds, Mars Inc., Blue Cross Blue Shield, Wendy’s, Kraft and the Gates Foundation are among the wealth-concentrated players who have flown the ALEC coop. Now the heavy pouting has begun. An ALEC PR flack told a “bloggers briefing” (hey, nobody called me) at the Heritage Foundation that these progressives acting mean were “part of a wider effort to shut all of us down.”  This is sadder than Beaches, Old Yeller and Terms of Endearment in a triple feature. The flack moaned, “We’re getting absolutely killed in social media venues—Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest. Any and all new media support you guys can provide would be so helpful, not just to us but to average people who don’t know much about this fight but are seeing us really get heavily attacked with very little opposition.” Alas, we have reached the level of Shakespearean tragedy.

Most important in all this is that ALEC has backed down on Stand Your Ground and foresworn participation in efforts to promulgate more. One large setback for insufferable douchebags, one small step for breathing things.  None of this was lost on the NRA busy having itself a convention around the same time.  The biggest news out of there was that Ted Nugent, who plays guitar like a gorilla and runs around with a bow and arrow as though chronologically frozen at the age of 13 funkified his Pampers with a rant about President Obama that got the attention of the Secret Service (I repeat: Let them have hookers!).

NRA blowhard Wayne LaPierre began pissing unsteadily from la pissoir, spewing on the media for having the temerity to cover the Trayvon Martin case, calling them, “irresponsible, duplicitous and dangerously dishonest.” One can only dream that someday American media will be so effectual. Wayne also sputtered, “Right now, there’s a reporter out there writing the NRA is paranoid and that I’m crazy.”  Well, true dat, multiplied by about 100. Then he said, “That reporter should think of what it must have felt like on that fateful September day in the World Trade Center.”  I don’t have the faintest friggin’ idea what he was talking about but I still laughed till I cried.

The best news is that at least for one bright shining moment the craphounds who spend all that time the rest of us don’t have, and all of that money they are making sure we never get our hands on rigging our democracy against us, took a sharp, swift kick in the jewels. Be merry my friends, be merry.

The enormous wealth America possesses and the reality that consumers in America are tapped out is less a paradox than an economic cover-up. Conservatives rail incessantly and boorishly about how America can’t afford, well, anything, other than trillions of dollars and counting in tax reduction for the one-percent and a regularly scheduled war. What they’re actually saying is that the government is starved of revenue because tax rates on the people with the real money are at historically pampering levels; while tax revenue collected from the corporate sector remains at equally generous historic lows, and Republicans are fine with, if not giddy about that. It’s high time for government haters, and the one-percent: Grover Norquist is regularly orgasmic.

For the rest, life is not so grand. Republicans exhale a huge cloud of smoke with the intent of obscuring a terribly inconvenient fact: While wheelbarrows of money are parked all around the country,  government lacks enough to pay for the programs and the investments the nation so desperately needs because Republicans seek to protect the rich,  successfully so. Likewise, CEO’s and management at the highest levels keep every dime of profit for themselves, and an ever more productive workforce garners less. Naturally the appropriate response from every red state whose government has turned obscenely red is to assault the labor unions doggedly working to put a little of this wealth in the pockets of the middle class.

Only yesterday Senate Democrats attempted to address this woeful state of affairs by introducing the Buffet Rule, a plan so tepid it would be practically soothing for the wealthy to swallow: a minimum thirty percent tax rate for incomes of a million or more. Of course Republicans had another of their poor, poor Marie Antoinette moments and filibustered. The goal of Republican economics, with its advancement of wealth disparity and diminished public investment would appear to be another era as dolorously underachieving and finally disastrous as Bush’s was, the conservative economics still pushed by the same crowd that ruled the roost and soiled the nest.

If one didn’t know anything about today’s Republicans one probably would be certain Republicans would understand, or care, that with an economy 70% of which is consumer-driven it would be mildly intelligent to fortify, or even to uplift broad consumer demand once in a blue moon. Nah. Republicans’ capacity for short-term cons that are self-defeating in the long run is seemingly boundless. When middle class wages and income rose, when labor unions thrived, when CEO salaries were comparatively tame and the wealth was spread during the Fifties, Sixties and much of the Seventies our economy was a juggernaut. Now?  A wheezing pulmonary case.

The nation that is home to Exxon, Apple, Google, Goldman Sachs and Boeing, whose major financial institutions have more capital stashed away than ever before, whose wealthy have so much lucre they can’t gamble it away on derivatives fast enough has a middle class and working class whose wages have been all but stagnant for several decades now; who can’t afford to see a doctor, who can’t produce enough consumer demand to push the economy out of a sluggish funk. Republican Mazola Oil to the contrary the country can afford a lot.

Another paradoxical gem is not only does spending more make the country wealthier it is indispensable to any broad prosperity.  Spending on education produces a greatly more capable workforce; spending on transportation and infrastructure makes it easier for workers to get to jobs and to access their places of employment, not to mention the boon of construction jobs. In other words empowered consumers buying houses, cars, electronics and every other consumer good makes the economy hum. The right’s inclination to perpetually stiff them is a question for the ages or the shrink perhaps.

Healthy unions, not under assault by one-percent- subservient governors would help. Increases in the minimum wage would help: Adjusted for inflation the minimum wage is where it was in 1968. Public spending, yes, government spending would help enormously. Hiring back teachers and municipal workers tossed out of work during recession cutbacks when Republican members of congress refused to cooperate in providing additional stimulus aid would be a fantastic jolt.

Of course the only answer Republicans have is another chair for Louis XVI.

The Republican Party’s presidential primaries and the Republican Party itself have become, besides stand-up comedy sudden death competitions, gladiatorial wet noodlefests over who has the purest, most undiluted, unapologetically reactionary and regressiveconservative principles. The 2010 congressional primaries with their Tea Party repertory of witches, riflemen, Queens of the Rodeo and ideological missionaries, besides being a Marx Brothers movie with a cast of Minnie Pearls, offered Americans the oh so human metaphysical and existential dilemma of finding Absolute Right on the ideological thermometer and trying to get below it.

Some of the cuckoo clocks actually ended up in congress (Hi, Rand). But for a collection of people who preen with such fastidious braggadocio about principles they certainly do become shrinking violets when it comes to talking publicly about the intents and consequences of their very principled policy recommendations.

Paul Ryan for instance regards Atlas Shrugged as gospel, so much so his staffers are required to read it. And he admits the cult-beloved fantasist Ayn Rand remains his guiding star. His Ryan Plan could accurately be called the Objectivist Manifesto for the United States of America, over several decades evaporating government and all its evil away, nothing left but a Defense Department and a bulging dumpster. His mentor cockily referred to the masses, to ordinary workers, the non-wealthy, non-producers as moochers, parasites and looters in Atlas Shrugged, and advocated for a small elite class of producers ruling the great unwashed.  Ryan doesn’t seem to possess his swami’s capacity for saying publicly what in her mind and presumably his, is the unvarnished truth. Yes, she was an intellectual guru and he is a mere politician, but if the principles are so pristinely brutal (which is the appeal of Rand to the hierarchical conservative brain) wouldn’t they deserve, even demand to be said aloud?

While Ryan’s plan allocates all of the ever flowing tax relief, and as much of GDP as the already wealthy and powerful can help themselves to, he doesn’t possess the testicular fortitude to tell you so explicitly, to tell you this is how the world is supposed to divide up, according to his principles; nor that the producers, the one percent are the only beneficiaries of this grand vision. The avatar of principled conservatism wants to wipe away the safety net, purify the world of awful dependency, yet promotes his epic vision only with mealy-mouthed talk of reform and weasel words about saving the safety net. Why does principled conservatismalways have to hide behind Orwellian doublespeak?

Mr. Principles doesn’t mention anything about the extraordinary levels of elderly poverty and child poverty that afflicted the nation prior to implementation of Social Security and Medicare and Great Society government aid, and also certain to return, and with even more of a vengeance in the utopia of unbridled jungle capitalism he envisions and elevates.  What’s so principled about failing to acknowledge the levels of elderly poverty and poverty across the demographics prior to the evolving of an effective safety net?  What is so principled about simply pretending none of this is even worth a mention when magisterially banishing the American safety net, or about pretending none of this will be a compelling national dilemma again, in fact virtually a plague of new hardship and renewed suffering in the social Darwinist paradise of de-facto feudalism?

In many ways the new Republican ultra-conservatism is a machinery built for turning millions of Americans into human garbage, those seen as simply too witless or lacking avariciousness to become wealthy and powerful matter-of-factly disposable, hence relegated to spotty healthcare and struggle instead of security: rather than a prosperous middle-class, an undignified class of drones. How many times does a Republican governor and legislator have to go after the quality of life of teachers, cops and government workers before it is clear even without any Republican principled boldness or honesty that these are considered Americans who belong, according to this vision, among the lesser class: moochers, parasites and looters, too lame to become wealthy, born to serve the elites. If your heart directs you to teach kids or fight fires or direct church choirs or cook in a local restaurant you lack the virtue required to be healthy, safe or comfortable in our newly privatized world.

If conservatism is so grounded in principle, why cannot its politicians whose attitudes regarding for instance health care favor the status quo, one that by its very nature restricts access and which is entirely synchronous with the interests of  health insurance companies, simply tell us it is the health insurance companies who are their priority, whose interests are important to them, rather than rain down a lot of laughable blather about how patriotically sacrosanct the private health insurance system in America is? Where’s the courage of those principles? When a debate moderator asked Ron Paul if a theoretical uninsured thirty year old in need of medical intervention to save his life after an auto accident should simply be left to die, those real conservatives in the Republican base shouted: YES. Republican politicians rather pathetically fail at summoning the courage of the base’s convictions.

The private education which is the conservative replacement for those awful public schools, as with all things private is reserved for those able to pay the price of admittance. That’s an awful lot of American children left for educational dead. Throw them in the dumpster along with a vibrant middle class, modern infrastructure and all the rest present in other modern democracies after government has been reduced to the size it can be drowned in Grover Norquist’s bathtub. It’s bold thinking, but the proponents are not so bold about telling us what it’s really going to look like. It’s one thing to tout failed trickle-down economics and 18^th century sized government in the 21^st century for raw political reasons, it’s another to actually believe it. Either they actually believe it, or they lack the principled courage to tell it like it is.

Naturally, from a political standpoint viewing a sizeable contingent of your fellow Americans as contemptible is inherent in the vision, and so it would be fitting for those selling a glorious vision to contemptibly shine on those they view as unworthy of being owed the truth anyhow, snatching their votes with advertising tricks what the drones deserve. You don’t owe anything, much less truth to looters, moochers and parasites. Though this still strikes me as a little unprincipled, with my admittedly pedestrian moral thinking.

Of course, Ayn Rand herself did not have the courage of her convictions in the end either, learning the hard way why Social Security and Medicare are so integrally important to the old and sick and vulnerable, relying on  them in old age though not so boldly drawing on them using her married name rather than her famous one. Utopian theory, even nasty utopian theory is one thing, reality is another. That’s why sane and intelligent and civilized peoples evolved the modern welfare state. And while quite obviously the safety net in the modern welfare state wasn’t manifested out of altruism but the overwhelming self interest of societies and their people, one is reminded that Rand once famously said, “If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.” Let’s see you sell that, Paul “Mr. Big Shot Principled Conservative” Ryan.