Ryan’s Goal To Eviscerate And Discard Medicare Is Closer Than Anyone Thinks

Before Bruce Barlett served in George H.W. Bush’s Treasury Department, he was a Reagan economics advisor and before that he worked as an advisor to Ron Paul. He labored away as a tax specialist for the Heritage Foundation. Since then he’s quit the Republican Party and is now an independent, although, he likes to say, an independent Reaganite. A few days ago David Sirota, writing for the International Business Times, interviewed Bartlett for a podcast on what the repercussions of the Ryan-Trump Tax Scam are likely to be, particularly in terms of Ryan’s goal to destroy the social safety net and end Medicare. Bartlett’s point was that the Scam was designed “not only to deliver big tax cuts to the wealthy, but also to create large budget deficits to manufacture the budget conditions that will justify cutting larger social programs… [T]his is the culmination,” he warned, “of everything the right has been trying to do, literally, for decades. I would compare it to, in terms of the right, to the Great Society, in terms of liberalism. It is they have been talking about these things for a long time, and finally had the votes and presidential leadership that they needed to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. And of course, one could characterize the right’s agenda, since that day, as trying to undo all of that.” He sounds like he’s been following Stephanie Kelton’s economics work, doesn’t he? He sees the tax bill as a deliberate step to create more debt, which can then be used as a justification to cut major social programs.

The right, a long time ago, figured out that they couldn't assault the welfare state head on. It was too strong. So they've assaulted it through a back door, which is to systematically and consistently drain the government of revenues, and force, even Democratic presidents, such as Obama and Clinton, to do a lot of their dirty work for them by cutting spending, and holding back on new initiatives that are, in many cases, badly needed, and they're simply continuing. The problem is, I think they've gone past the point of sanity. They're simply doing things now that don't even make sense.

…Many Republican presidents were willing to raise taxes if necessary to reduce the deficit. And Proposition 13 changed their philosophy because they could see that there was very large support from the general public for just slashing taxes and not giving a damn about spending. In fact, the authors of Proposition 13, [Howard] Jarvis and [Paul] Gann, said, "Cutting spending's not our problem. We just want taxes cut. If you care about spending, if you care about government, you fix it."

Immediately after that, Republicans glommed on to the idea that we should just cut taxes anytime, anywhere, anyway. And of course, Milton Friedman and other Republican economists agreed with them on that philosophy, but there was still a problem that some reputable Republican economists, such as Herb Stein and Alan Greenspan, had reservations about cutting taxes, increasing the deficit intentionally, at a time when inflation was high. This was one of the main reasons why they thought spending needed to be cut when you cut taxes because the deficit was inflationary.

They rationalized their party’s movement towards rampant tax cutting by inventing this idea that I call starve the beast… When the deficit gets really, really big, then even Democrats have to join in cutting spending to reduce the deficit because of course, Republicans will never support a tax increase.

The last [Republican] president to who supported a tax increase was George H.W. Bush, and his own party destroyed him and intentionally sought to have him defeated in 1992 for that sin. I think this was a very intentional and deliberate strategy on the part of Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich, in order to purge the last of the responsible Republicans from the party and get total control by what are essentially nihilists.

…Ronald Reagan himself, reversed course on the tax cut almost immediately in 1982, he supported the tax equity and fiscal responsibility act, which was the largest peacetime tax increase in American history. He supported a very large tax increase for social security in 1983, and lesser tax increases almost every other year of his presidency. By the end of his presidency, he had raised taxes by about half the amount that he cut taxes, you see.

So he took back about 50 percent of the 1981 tax cut, and it was half the size, in terms of its impact on the deficit and revenues, as it was when it was first enacted. I think this was an act of responsibility and courage, and leadership. Most Republicans today, either don't know about it, or just pretend it never happened.

…[B]ecause of gerrymandering, and the enormous money advantage that Republicans have, it will be extraordinarily difficult for Democrats to even get control of the House next year, and the Senate looks out of reach.

And even if they got control of both, Trump would veto anything, or Pence if that is the case, will veto any effort to raise taxes, and even after 2020, when maybe they'll be a Democratic president, it's highly unlikely that he will have enough, or she, enough votes to really do much except around the edges.

My point is, that they have put fiscal policy to a very large extent, on automatic pilot for many, many years to come, and I think Republicans think long term, in the sense that we're willing to take one step backwards in order to be able to take two steps forward. I think anything Democrats do to fix the fiscal mess, to cut spending, or raise taxes, will be very, very unpopular and help put Republicans back in power. And anything Democrats do to restore a fiscal responsibility, to reduce the deficit, is like putting money into a savings account that Republicans will then use to cut taxes again when they get back in power.

Really, the Clinton years is the perfect example of this. Clinton, to his great credit, had the courage to raise taxes, this led to budget surpluses, which Bush and his party then completely disappointed into ... Completely, economically worthless tax cuts that helped starve the beast and make Obama's life very difficult once he took office.

They know this history. They know that Clinton's 1993 tax increase, led almost directly to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. They're thinking, "Fine. Let's have a Democratic Congress and Democratic President in 2021 who will pass big tax increases, and spending cuts, and get the budget under control. We will take control again in 2022 and 2024, and we'll start all over again." Cutting taxes, and doing everything that they're doing right now.

David Gill, an emergency room doctor and stalwart progressive for decades, is running for the central Illinois congressional seat held by Republican rubber stamp Rodney Davis. The ultimate goal of Ryan’s tax scam didn't take him by surprise. “My Republican opponent, Rodney Davis, has been fully supportive of the GOP tax scam,” he reminded us. “And given that he has long been complaining about the federal deficit, it’s obvious that he is poised to be a full participant in the painful budget cuts to come. With his scandalous vote on healthcare reform this past spring, he made it very plain that he cares little about our social safety net or the well-being of the citizens of IL-13. As an emergency room physician, I bear daily witness to the impact of our shredded safety net, and watching disaster after disaster has long moved me to demand that the millionaires and the billionaires pay their fair share at long last. I have been advocating for a single-payer healthcare system for 25 years, and I look forward to taking Mr. Davis’s seat and helping to lead the charge toward such a system.”

Another midwest progressive Democrat from a district in which Trump beat Hillary, Iowa’s Austin Frerick, has a similar perspective. This morning he told us that he’s “getting really tired of being lectured by CEOs of large corporations and their crony David Young who wants to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits in exchange for tax breaks. It is time to expand Social Security and enact Medicare-for-all, not cut them."

Did Franken Make A Mistake By Resigning? Some Want Him To Reconsider, Including Republicans

The Democratic Party-- or at least the DCCC-- loves to recruit so-called "ex"-Republicans to run for Congress. Normal Democrats know better than to listen to a Republican about Democratic Party strategy... at least most of the time. That excerpt from Arne Carlson is worth considering though, even if he was Minnesota's Republican governor from 1991 through the end of 1998. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and two years later endorsed independent Tom Homer for governor and Democrat Tim Walz for Congress. He was purged by the GOP and prohibited from participating in party events for 2 years. Oh, yeah... and last year he endorsed Hillary against Señor Trumpanzee. So when he says we should all "sober up," maybe we do need to listen. I hope Franken does, but I can't imagine he would.

Bruce Bartlett used to be a Republican too. In fact he worked for Ron Paul and Jack Kemp and was a Reagan domestic policy adviser and a Treasury official under the first Bush. He attacked the second Bush and his policies frequently and quit the Republican party 10 years ago. Yesterday he did an OpEd for the New York Daily News, Toughen up, Democrats: Why the party will live to regret its hasty purge of Al Franken. "It will be recorded," he wrote, "that he was pushed out by his own party even as a man guilty of more serious sexual misconduct sits in the Oval Office and Senate Republicans prepare to welcome sexual predator Roy Moore with open arms."

This division between the two parties isn't just about morality or hypocrisy; it's about having a fundamentally different view of the world.

Democrats are idealists while Republicans are realists. Of course this isn't true in all cases; Republicans idealistically claim to love liberty, worship the Constitution as James Madison wrote it, and assert that sacred principles guide their policies rather than crass pandering to their contributors and primary voters, which is really the case.

But they know they are lying and it's all for show.

By contrast, Democrats seldom ever climb down from Mount Olympus to engage in political hand-to-hand combat. They whine and wring their hands about the dirty tricks Republicans constantly play on them, but on the rare occasions when they have some political leverage, they seldom use it effectively.

In the end, Democrats are constrained by responsibility while Republicans will do whatever it takes to win at all cost. It's not a fair fight.

This is not a new problem. All democratic governments that respect individual rights, permit free speech and assembly, and are responsive to the will of the people expressed in free elections are vulnerable to ruthless enemies from within, who use democratic freedoms to undermine and destroy those very freedoms.

It's worth remembering that Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany quite openly and legally, as were other dictators and strongmen around the world.

It is hard for small-D democrats to respond to internal threats without believing they are sacrificing their core principles in the process. Sometimes a foolish consistency makes those who support liberal values balk at actions clearly needed because they necessarily involve illiberal policies.

Not funny, kids

Going to war is the most obvious example, and great Democratic presidents like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and, yes, Lyndon Johnson struggled with the inherent contradiction between their ideals and their actions.

Republicans, of course, have no such qualms. They are like the ancient followers of Manichaeism who saw everything as black and white, dark and light, good and evil. There was never any gray, no nuances to confuse issues. There was one path and it had to be followed.

The Republican attitude succeeds in part because it is easy to understand. Most people have neither the time nor the expertise to study an issue well enough to have an informed opinion. They depend on political parties to sort through the issues for them and tell them what to think.

It's like following a movie reviewer. If over the years you have found that you enjoyed and hated the same movies, you are inclined to trust her judgment. So too with parties. When the acquisition of information is costly, it is reasonable to economize.

The problem is that unscrupulous people or those with poor judgment sometimes get control of your party and lead otherwise good and honest people down the wrong path.

That has happened to the Republican Party, my former party and also the former party of a growing number of my friends from the days when I worked for Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

...While obviously Republicans deserve primary blame for the disgusting state of their party and have principal responsibility for fixing it, Democrats are not without blame.

In many cases they have offered poor opposition to Republican policies, put up bad candidates in winnable elections, fallen back on time-worn slogans rather than finding creative new ways to advance their agenda, failed to create organizations and institutions to counter the Republican echo chamber, turned their attention too quickly to new issues and given Republicans a second shot instead of finishing the job, and permitted their ideals to overwhelm political common sense.

The Franken problem is a perfect example. Over the last two months, ever since the New York Times broke the story of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's sick sexual behavior, a number of stories have detailed indefensible sexual behavior by many others in the entertainment industry and politics. Many more will follow.

Franken, a longtime professional comedian, straddled both worlds and was an obvious target for those in the media and Republican dirty tricksters like Roger Stone to dig up dirt on. Sadly, they found incidents that could perhaps have been defended or overcome in the pre-Weinstein era, but were indefensible in today's political environment.

I am not going to defend Franken's actions, and of course I agree that sexual misconduct must be punished. But it doesn't follow that forcing Franken to fall on his sword was the right way to handle his situation.

As many others including Cathy Young here in The News have pointed out, Franken was essentially tried, convicted and sentenced without any semblance of due process. There was no investigation. The charges against him, some of which were anonymous and some of which he denies strongly, were simply accepted at face value.

This is not only wrong but politically stupid. Democrats now have no defense against completely bogus charges ginned up by nefarious right-wing characters such as James O'Keefe, who has already tried once to manufacture a phony sex scandal.

Moreover, the political situation in Minnesota is such that Franken's departure has now put his seat in jeopardy. It may well go to a Republican next year, according to political analyst and Minnesota native Norm Ornstein.

Democrats are convinced that they have seized the high ground and this will hold them in good stead when they oppose seating Roy Moore, should he win his Alabama Senate seat.

Maybe so, but they may also lose the support of reasonable people who believe Franken was railroaded and made the victim of obsessive Democratic identity politics. Conservatives like Fox's Laura Ingraham and Newt Gingrich are already reaching out to such people by defending the liberal Franken.

Many Democrats insist that Franken's treatment is demanded by having to do the right thing regardless of the cost. But as MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell eloquently pointed out last Thursday, where were these principled Democrats when New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez went to trial for corruption?

Surely the evidence required to bring him to trial exceeded the threshold of the hearsay and anonymous charges that got Franken thrown under a bus. The only difference, it seems, is that a Democrat will name Franken's replacement while a Republican would have named Menendez's.

A competent political party would at least have tried to get something in return for Franken's sacrifice. For example, Democrats could have used the occasion to call attention to Donald Trump's admitted sexual indiscretions or those of other Republicans such as Representatives Joe Barton, Trent Franks, and Blake Farenthold.

Franken made glancing mention of Trump and Moore in the floor speech announcing his retirement.

But for the most part, Democrats decided instead to adopt a policy of unilateral disarmament, making Republicans pay no price for their hypocrisy in continuing to defend Trump and Moore.

During the Cold War, Democratic Presidents understood that even if you are willing to disarm unilaterally, you should still try to get something in return. But for Democrats today, virtue-signaling is its own reward.

I know Democrats think they will be rewarded-- perhaps not instantly, but over time, including in 2018-- by voters for their principled stand against sexual harassment.

I don't buy it. Trump's "Access Hollywood" tape, in which he bragged about groping women against their will, was known to virtually all voters before the election, and it didn't seem to have any impact except on people who had already decided to vote against him.

I think Democrats need to toughen up if they hope to win in the Trump era. Yet many Democrats seem to think that being tough requires being mean, underhanded and unethical.

I often joke that Democrats are the class nerds while Republicans are the school bullies. Maybe in the long run, the nerds will become the rich software developers while the bullies are doing manual labor, but in the short-run, the bully is winning.

The nerds must study the martial arts if they hope to win.

Republican success today is built on a foundation they have built since the 1970s, financed by right-wing billionaires such as Charles and David Koch, Robert Mercer and Rupert Murdoch.

They are systematic, and they are ruthless. They created institutes, organizations and media outlets that relentlessly promote their agenda and give well-paid employment to professional right-wingers.

Democrats and progressives depend on the universities, the mainstream media and ineffectual organizations like the AARP, which went AWOL during the recent tax fight.

The Republican strategy can be copied without sacrificing progressive principles to create a more powerful, effective and aggressive opposition to GOP efforts to restrict abortion rights, slash programs that aid mothers and children, despoil the environment, gut consumer protections and take other actions that hurt women just as sexual harassment does.

In my opinion, sacrificing the best and brightest of the Democratic Party in a vain hope that some uncommitted voters will care and reward them looks like another losing strategy.

I was hoping he'd suggest that opportunist Kirsten Gillibrand resign instead. That would stop this insanity fast enough-- but, let's face it, the insanity is still needed to move our sicke society along in the right direction towards killing off extreme patriarchy once and for all.

Let's Turn To The Tax Reform Plan-- Trump Is Lying Again

Is Chris Wallace allowed to say this on Fox News Sunday: "But Director Mulvaney, independent experts say what the president just said there isn't true." Obviously he could have been talking about Putin-Gate, about Trump's spat with the NRA, about Puerto Rico, about anything at all Trump has said to the public... ever. But he was talking about the Trump/Ryan tax plan. Remember Bruce Bartlett, a Jack Kemp economist who was one of the Reagan advisors responsible for the mythical Reagan tax cuts. Over the weekend he published an OpEd in the Washington Post, I helped create the GOP tax myth. Trump is wrong: Tax cuts don’t equal growth. Apparently Mick Mulvaney hasn't read it-- nor anything like it. Nor have any of his Trump Regime colleagues. "The best growth in recent memory," wrote Bartlett, "came after President Bill Clinton raised taxes in the ’90s."

Four decades ago, while working for Rep. Jack Kemp (R-NY), I had a hand in creating the Republican tax myth. Of course, it didn’t seem like a myth at that time-- taxes were rising rapidly because of inflation and bracket creep, the top tax rate was 70 percent and the economy seemed trapped in stagflation with no way out. Tax cuts, at that time, were an appropriate remedy for the economy’s ills. By the time Ronald Reagan was president, Republican tax gospel went something like this:

• The tax system has an enormously powerful effect on economic growth and employment.
• High taxes and tax rates were largely responsible for stagflation in the 1970s.
• Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, which was based a bill, co-sponsored by Kemp and Sen. William Roth (R-Del.), that I helped design, unleashed the American economy and led to an abundance of growth.

Based on this logic, tax cuts became the GOP’s go-to solution for nearly every economic problem. Extravagant claims are made for any proposed tax cut. Wednesday, President Trump argued that “our country and our economy cannot take off” without the kind of tax reform he proposes. Last week, Republican economist Arthur Laffer said, “If you cut that [corporate] tax rate to 15 percent, it will pay for itself many times over. … This will bring in probably $1.5 trillion net by itself.”

That’s wishful thinking. So is most Republican rhetoric around tax cutting. In reality, there’s no evidence that a tax cut now would spur growth.

The Reagan tax cut did have a positive effect on the economy, but the prosperity of the ’80s is overrated in the Republican mind. In fact, aggregate real gross domestic product growth was higher in the ’70s-- 37.2 percent vs. 35.9 percent.

Moreover, GOP tax mythology usually leaves out other factors that also contributed to growth in the 1980s: First was the sharp reduction in interest rates by the Federal Reserve. The fed funds rate fell by more than half, from about 19 percent in July 1981 to about 9 percent in November 1982. Second, Reagan’s defense buildup and highway construction programs greatly increased the federal government’s purchases of goods and services. This is textbook Keynesian economics.

Third, there was the simple bounce-back from the recession of 1981-82. Recoveries in the postwar era tended to be V-shaped-- they were as sharp as the downturns they followed. The deeper the recession, the more robust the recovery.

Finally, I’m not sure how many Republicans even know anymore that Reagan raised taxes several times after 1981. His last budget showed that as of 1988, the aggregate, cumulative revenue loss from the 1981 tax cut was $264 billion and legislated tax increases brought about half of that back.

Today, Republicans extol the virtues of lowering marginal tax rates, citing as their model the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which lowered the top individual income tax rate to just 28 percent from 50 percent, and the corporate tax rate to 34 percent from 46 percent. What follows, they say, would be an economic boon. Indeed, textbook tax theory says that lowering marginal tax rates while holding revenue constant unambiguously raises growth.

But there is no evidence showing a boost in growth from the 1986 act. The economy remained on the same track, with huge stock market crashes-- 1987’s “Black Monday,” 1989’s Friday the 13th “mini-crash” and a recession beginning in 1990. Real wages fell.

Strenuous efforts by economists to find any growth effect from the 1986 act have failed to find much. The most thorough analysis, by economists Alan Auerbach and Joel Slemrod, found only a shifting of income due to tax reform, no growth effects: “The aggregate values of labor supply and saving apparently responded very little,” they concluded.

The flip-side of tax cut mythology is the notion that tax increases are an economic disaster-- the reason, in theory, every Republican in Congress voted against the tax increase proposed by Bill Clinton in 1993. Yet the 1990s was the most prosperous decade in recent memory. At 37.3 percent, aggregate real GDP growth in the 1990s exceeded that in the 1980s.

Despite huge tax cuts almost annually during the George W. Bush administration that cost the Treasury trillions in revenue, according to the Congressional Budget Office, growth collapsed in the first decade of the 2000s. Real GDP rose just 19.5 percent, well below its ’90s rate.

We saw another test of the Republican tax myth in 2013, after President Barack Obama allowed some of the Bush tax cuts to expire, raising the top income tax rate to its current 39.6 percent from 35 percent. The economy grew nicely afterward and the stock market has boomed-- up around 10,000 points over the past five years.

Now, Republicans propose cutting the top individual rate to 35 percent, despite lacking evidence that this lower rate led to growth during the Bush years, and a drop in the corporate tax rate to just 20 percent from 35 percent. Unlike 1986, however, this $1.5 trillion cut over the next decade will only be paid for partially by closing tax loopholes.

Republicans’ various claims are irreconcilable. One is that the rich will not benefit even though it is practically impossible for them not to-- those paying the most taxes already will necessarily benefit the most from a large tax cut. And there aren’t enough tax deductions, exclusions and credits benefiting the rich that could be abolished to offset a cut in the top rate.

Even if they had released a complete plan-- not just the woefully incomplete nine-page outline released Wednesday-- Republicans have failed to make a sound case that it’s time to cut taxes.

Nor have they signaled that they’ll commit to a viable process. It’s worth remembering that the first version of the ’81 tax cut was introduced in 1977and underwent thorough analysis by the CBO and other organizations, and was subject to comprehensive public hearings. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 grew out of a detailed Treasury study and took over two years to complete.

Rushing through a half-baked tax plan, in the same manner Republicans tried (and failed) to do with health-care reform, should be rejected out of hand. As Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has repeatedly and correctly said, successful legislating requires a return to the “regular order.” That means a detailed proposal with proper revenue estimates and distribution tables from the Joint Committee on Taxation, hearings and analysis by the nation’s best tax experts, markups and amendments in the tax-writing committees, and an open process in the House of Representatives and Senate.

There are good arguments for a proper tax reform even if it won’t raise GDP growth. It may improve economic efficiency, administration and fairness. But getting from here to there requires heavy lifting that this Republican Congress has yet to demonstrate. If they again look for a quick, easy victory, they risk a replay of the Obamacare repeal fight that wasted so much time and yielded so little.

I'd like to suggest you give Barlett's interview on NPR's All Things Considered a listen to help you better understand how the Trump Regime is just simply lying about their plan to cut taxes for the 1% at everyone else's expense. It's short and very easy to understand:

Was It The Lobotomizing Of Conservative Intellectualism That Guaranteed The Rise Of Trumpy-The-Clown?

The end of the GOP?

Friday, writing for The Atlantic, former Bush staffer David Frum noted the “mounting evidence” that Putin inflicted Trump on us by putting him into the White House and asked a poignant question for all Americans: What Happens When A Presidency Loses Its Legitimacy?. For many millions of Americans, perhaps most Americans, that’s already happened. Frum points to a n”thick cloud of discredit over the Trump presidency” that grows darker by the day and reminded his readers that, unaware he was being taped, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy admitted his his members that Trump is on Putin’s payroll.

It’s not seriously disputed by anyone in a position of authority in the U.S. government-- apart from the president himself-- that Donald Trump holds his high office in considerable part because a foreign spy agency helped place him there. So now what?

…The U.S. government is already osmotically working around the presidency, a process enabled by the president’s visible distaste for the work of governance. The National Security Council staff is increasingly a double-headed institution, a zone of struggle between Kushner-Flynn-Bannon types on one side, and a growing staff of capable, experienced, and Russia-skeptical functionaries on the other. The Senate has voted 97-2 to restrict the president’s authority to relax Russia sanctions. It seems the president has been persuaded to take himself out of the chain of command in the escalating military operations in Afghanistan. National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently assured the nation that Trump could not have done much harm when he blabbed a vital secret to the Russian foreign minister in the Oval Office, precisely because the president was not briefed on crucial “sources and methods” information.

In their way, these workarounds are almost as dangerous to the American system of government as the Trump presidency itself. They tend to reduce the president to the status of an absentee emperor while promoting his subordinates into shoguns who exercise power in his name. Maybe that is the least-bad practicable solution to the unprecedented threat of a presidency-under-suspicion. But what a terrible price for the failure of so many American institutions-- not least the voters!-- to protect the country in 2016 from Russia’s attack on its election and its democracy.

I don’t think he was responding to Frum yesterday, but Bruce Bartlett, another former Republican staffer-- this one for Reagan and then Bush’s father-- wrote in Politico that he only endorsed Trump-- and voted for him in the primary-- last year because he “thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton, disastrously, and that his defeat would cleanse the Republican Party of the extremism and nuttiness that drove me out of it. I had hoped that post-2016, what remained of the moderate wing of the GOP would reassert itself as it did after the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and exorcise the crazies.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, the crazies are in running the GOP asylum.

Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the inverse of what I’d imagined. Trump didn’t lose; he won. The Republican Party isn’t undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling, perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.

Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish it. Every day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions institutes some new policy to take incarceration and law enforcement back to the Dark Ages. Trump’s proposed budget would eviscerate the social safety net for the sole purpose of giving huge tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.

And if those policies weren’t enough, conservatives-- who, after all, believe in liberty and a system of checks and balances to restrain the government to its proper role-- have plenty of reason to be upset by those actions Trump has taken that transcend our traditional right-left ideological divide. He’s voiced not only skepticism of NATO, but outright hostility to it. He’s pulled America back from its role as an international advocate for human rights. He’s attacked the notion of an independent judiciary. He personally intervened to request the FBI to ease up on its investigation of a former adviser of his, then fired FBI Director James Comey and freely admitted he did so to alleviate the pressure he felt from Comey’s investigation. For those conservatives who were tempted to embrace a “wait-and-see” approach to Trump, what they’ve seen, time and again, is almost unimaginable.

And yet as surprising as this all has been, it’s also the natural outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common denominator in American politics. Trump is what happens when a political party abandons ideas, demonizes intellectuals, degrades politics and simply pursues power for the sake of power.

…Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 after nationalizing the election into broad themes and catchphrases. Newt Gingrich, the marshal of these efforts, even released a list of words Republican candidates should use to glorify themselves (common sense, prosperity, empower) and hammer their opponents (liberal, pathetic, traitors); soon, every Republican in Congress spoke the same language, using words carefully run through focus groups by Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Budgets for House committees were cut, bleeding away policy experts, and GOP committee chairs were selected based on loyalty to the party and how much money they could raise. Gone were the days when members were incentivized to speak with nuance, or hone a policy expertise (especially as committee chairs could now serve for only six years). In power, Republicans decided they didn’t need any more research or analysis; they had their agenda, and just needed to get it enacted. Only a Democratic president stood in their way, and so 100 percent of Republicans’ efforts went into attempting to oust or weaken Bill Clinton and, when that failed, elect a Republican president who would do nothing but sign into law bills passed by the GOP Congress.

…Republican policy analysis and research have virtually disappeared altogether, replaced with sound bites and talking points. The Heritage Foundation morphed into Heritage Action for America, ceasing to do any real research and losing all its best policy experts as it transformed from an august center whose focus was the study and development of public policy into one devoted mainly to amplifying political campaign slogans. Talk radio and Fox News, where no idea too complicated for a mind with a sixth-grade education is ever heard, became the tail wagging the conservative dog. Conservative magazines like National Review, which once boasted world-class intellectuals such as James Burnham and Russell Kirk among its columnists, jumped on the bandwagon, dumbing itself down to appeal to the common man, who is deemed to be the font of all wisdom. (For example, the magazine abandoned the ecumenical approach to immigration of Reagan, who granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants in 1986, to a rigid anti-immigrant policy largely indistinguishable from the one Trump ran on.)

One real-world result of the lobotomizing of conservative intellectualism is that when forced to produce a replacement for Obamacare-- something Republican leaders had sworn they had in their pocket for eight years-- there was nothing. Not just no legislation-- no workable concept that adhered to the many promises Republicans had made, like coverage for pre-existing conditions and the assurance that nobody would lose their coverage. You’d think that House Speaker Ryan could have found a staff slot for one person to be working on an actual Obamacare replacement all these years, just in case.

With hindsight, it’s no surprise that the glorification of anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism that has been rampant on the right at least since the election of Barack Obama would give rise to someone like Trump. Anyone who ever read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, which imagined a fascist dictator taking power in 1930s America, recognizes that Trump is the real-life embodiment of Senator Buzz Windrip-- a know-nothing populist who becomes president by promising something for everyone, with no clue or concern for how to actually accomplish it. Windrip was “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic,” Lewis wrote. “Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only the wings of a windmill.”

…Having so badly miscalled the 2016 election, I’m not going out on a limb here and predicting a 1974-style defeat for GOP members of Congress next year, and I am fully aware that Democrats are always capable of seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. But the preconditions are falling into place for a political transformation between 2018 and 2020 that could result in the type of defeat that I think is necessary for my old party and the conservative movement to rebuild themselves from the ground up.

Ideally, I’d like to see an intellectual revival on the right such as we saw after the Goldwater defeat and the Watergate debacle. Freed from the stultifying strictures and kowtowing to know-nothing Trumpian populists-- perhaps building on new outlets and institutions that celebrate intellectual rigor and reject shallow sound bites-- a few conservative thinkers can plow a path toward sane, responsible conservative governance, just as people like Irving Kristol and Jack Kemp did during the Carter years. (Some conservative thinkers, such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, speculate that Mitt Romney may emerge as the leader of a sane, modern, technocratic wing of an intellectually revitalized GOP.) If a leader doesn’t emerge, moderate Republicans-- many of whom did not and will not support Trump-- could be lost to the Democratic Party for good.

God forbid! Although the Rahm Emanuels, Steny Hoyers, Chuck Schumers, Joe Crowleys, Cheri Bustoses and Wasserman Schultzes-- that whole Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- would gladly welcome them into the hierarchy of the party, they Democratic Party brand is tarnished enough without taking in the conservative dregs of an increasingly fascist GOP.

In The Wake Of Trump... How Bad Will The Destruction Be?

Bruce Bartlett was a Kemp guy who went on to work for Reagan and Bush I in policy positions that pushed the GOP's economics. During the Bush II term he strayed firther and further from Republican Party party line and helped write Bush II out of the conservative movement.

Last year he started warming to the idea of a Trump run for the presidency as a way to cure what ails the GOP. "I love Donald Trump," he wrote at the time, "because he exposes everything about the Republican Party that I have frankly come to hate. It is just filled with people who are crazy, and stupid, and have absolutely no idea of what they are taking about. And the candidates, no matter how intelligent they may be, just constantly have to keep pandering to this lowest common denominator in American politics."

Simon Maloy discovered that he's developed that theme as the months rolled forward and Trump started looking more and more inevitable, which Bartlett sees as a death sentence for the Republican Party as it has developed since the Reagan days. Bartlett hates those developments so much that he actually voted for Trump, who he clearly detests, in the Virginia primary. "I think the Republican Party is sick," he told Maloy. "it just doesn’t know it. And I think anything that speeds up its demise is to the good, because then it can reinvent itself and return as something healthy. Or you could use an addiction metaphor, where people have to hit bottom so that they can reach out and ask for help before they can cure themselves. I think that Trump is a symptom of a disease of rampant stupidity, pandering to morons and bigots and racists and all the sort of stuff that defines today’s Republican coalition. And I just think it’s awful. It’s terrible for the country in a great many ways that I don’t need to tell you. And I think that we need to have a healthy two-party system. We need to have a sane, functioning conservative party and a sane, functioning liberal party. And I think that half of that equation, at least, is not working, and it affects the other half."

He also told Maloy that "giving Trump the nomination is the surest path to complete and total destruction of the Republican Party as we know it. And I look forward to him getting the nomination for that reason. I think he will have a historic loss. I think he may well bring in a Democratic Senate. But more importantly, my hope is, at least, that he will lead to a really serious assessment of the problems of the Republican Party, and lead to some opening of thought, opening of discussion, conversation among groups that have been sidelined for quite a long time. Mainly moderates and people of that sort who have been just pushed to the sidelines in favor of ever more rabid, nonsensical, right-wing authoritarianism."

Better yet, he says he doesn't think it matter whether Trump gets the nomination or not at this point "because he’s already succeeded in destroying the Republican coalition as far as the general election is concerned. Because, look, if he doesn’t get the nomination, he’ll probably do everything in his power to guarantee that whoever does get the nomination is defeated. So either way the party is looking at historic losses, historic defeat. And I think that is really, really a wonderful thing." He goes so far as to say some conservatives will just give up on the GOP altogether and vote for Hillary.

Maloy: "One name I wanted to bring up is that of the House Speaker, Paul Ryan, who’s been positioning himself of late as this Trump alternative, a voice of reason and rational discourse. He’s very popular within the party and seems like a natural candidate to shift into that post-Trump leadership role. Do you see any way in which someone like Ryan who has that popularity but is still extremely conservative, particularly on economic policy, do you see him as being able to effectively reform the GOP at all?" Barlett's response should send shudders down Ryan's spine:

No. I think Ryan is in a much more serious position than people think he is. He’s slowly sliding into the same problems that destroyed John Boehner, which is he has a bunch of lunatics in his caucus who are effectively able to be the tail that wags the dog. What Ryan would have to do is make peace with the Democrats and be willing to have a governing coalition made up of Democrats and enough Republicans to get legislation passed and be a Speaker for not just the majority party, but for some kind of fusion party.

But I don’t think he’s got the support and I also don’t think it’s in his nature to be that kind of leader. The only way he could get reelected as Speaker would be with Democratic votes, and that sort of thing simply doesn’t happen. So he would just be signing his own political death warrant if he tried to do something like that, and then he would disappear from view.

Imagine How I Felt When I Found Myself In One Of Hillary's E-Mails! I Hope I Don't Have To Testify

Friday night there was a news-dump of more Hillary e-mails. For reasons that will be obvious in a moment, one particularly interested me. Longtime Clinton Family retainer Sidney Blumenthal is a really good writer and a very strategic thinker. In September, 2010, in the run-up to the disastrous midterms he sent Secretary Clinton a memo about how the elections could be less disastrous. One of his proposals included turning John Boehner into a piñata. And he included a chunk of a DownWithTyranny post on Boehner's corruption as an example, along with this link for the Secretary. He didn't include any of my signature attacks on the DCCC but he did suggest Hillary read this and the linked post from Digby's blog:

By the end of the day, Boehner was hysterical and backing away-- full throttle-- from his cavalier remarks about letting the taxpayers pick up the tab. Digby thinks he must be drunk on Man Tan and nicotine. "Boehner," she wrote, "is walking back his comments about having the government pay for the BP spill, but let's face facts. He was just on autopilot, echoing the Chamber of Commerce line verbatim and then got caught... Boehner is so out of touch and servile to Big Business that he's making mistakes.

One feisty Member of Congress who read the e-mail, called me last night and told me if Hillary had paid attention to Blumenthal and had shaken up Obama, Pelosi and the inept DCCC Chair, Chris Van Hollen, perhaps the Democrats wouldn't have suffered a net loss of 63 seats, elevating Boehner to the Speakership.

But that was hardly the only e-mail released Friday worth mentioning. There were some that demonstrate-- once again-- why no one trusts her as she lobbies senators on anti-worker trade bills she was pretending to oppose. (No, she didn't evolve on everything since her days as president of the Wellesley College Young Republicans.)

Other emails show Clinton seeming to personally lobby her former Democratic colleagues in the Senate to support free trade agreements (FTAs) with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. She had previously told voters she would work to block the Colombian and South Korean pacts.

An email Oct. 8, 2011, to Clinton from her aide Huma Abedin gave notes about the state of play in Congress on the proposed trade pacts. The notes provided Clinton “some background before you make the calls” to legislators.

Two days later in an email titled “FTA calls,” Clinton wrote to aides indicating she had spoken to Sens. Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Jim Webb of Virginia, both Democrats. She told the aides she had talked with “Webb who is strong in favor of all 3” trade agreements, and then asked, “So why did I call him?”-- indicating she was otherwise phoning  to try to convince wavering lawmakers to support the deals.

Only three years earlier, Clinton wooed organized labor during her presidential campaign with promises to oppose those same deals. She called the South Korea agreement “inherently unfair.” She also said, “I will do everything I can to urge the Congress to reject the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.” Clinton has lately courted organized labor’s support for her current presidential bid by pledging to oppose the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a deal she repeatedly touted while secretary of state.

Saturday, the most progressive member of the Colorado state legislature, Joe Salazar, made the courageous (and dangerous) decision to break free of the Machine and endorse Bernie, saying "I think (Sanders) has a better vision, and he's been talking about it the past 40 or 50 years. He's not the politician who accepts campaign contributions from the wealthiest of America. I have a high degree of respect for Secretary (Hillary) Clinton, but I think Sanders best represents what is needed in Colorado... We have to dream big because America is built off big dreams," he added. "I'm not hearing that from Secretary Clinton. What I hear from her is typically what I hear from the other side of the aisle: 'You may have big dreams, but they're not realistic.'"

And that brings us to our favorite ex-Reagan/ex-George W. Bush advisor, historian Bruce Bartlett. Over the weekend he penned a kind of open e-mail to Hillary via The Atlantic, Jack Kemp's Power Lesson for Hillary Clinton. "Lately," he wrote, "Hillary Clinton and her supporters have been criticizing Bernie Sanders’s proposals not so much because they are wrongheaded, but because they are too utopian to pass Congress. I find this to be a curious line of attack because, in effect, Clinton is playing by Republican rules-- saying that Democrats should only propose things that could be enacted by a Republican Congress. Economists would call this an example of static analysis, assuming that circumstances will not change or that leadership is incapable of altering political possibilities. If Republicans had held this same point of view, Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut never would have been enacted and, very likely, they would never have gained control of Congress. The 1981 tax cut fundamentally altered political dynamics. This was not a result that anyone would have predicted when the Reagan tax cut was first conceived by Representative Jack Kemp of New York in 1977. At the time, he was a junior congressman much better known for his career in professional football than for his legislative accomplishments, which were modest." When Kemp proposed it, it was opposed by every member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, on both sides of the aisle. "Even those who thought Kemp’s plan was a good idea in principle thought it was pie-in-the-sky that would never be enacted by a Congress in which Democrats held large majorities in both the House and Senate." You see where this is going by now. Four years later, Kemp's big impossible dream was signed into law.

The relevance to today’s policy debates is that what may at first appear to be politically impossible can quickly become possible with the right leadership, changing circumstances, and a little luck. I’m not saying that Sanders’s ideas are necessarily good or politically doable. But I am saying that it’s wrong to oppose them simply because they could not pass Congress today. If Republicans had taken that view in the late 1970s, the world today would look very different, both politically and economically. Sometimes it’s necessary to throw the bomb and see what happens.

Perhaps you agree with Hillary and think Bartlett lacks understanding of the situation and that Bernie's big dreams aren't going anywhere, ever. If you don't feel that way, though, please consider contributing to Bernie's campaign and, perhaps, to the campaigns of some of the congressional candidates who share his dreams. Just tap on the thermometer below:

It's Not About Trump-- It's About His Supporters

We keep getting told not to demean Trump because if you do, you'll be demeaning his supporters. Yeah, so? Isn't that the point? 

No one with an ability to exercise a modicum of critical thought would take Trump seriously for two seconds. Every word out of his mouth is a lie or is so twisted that its relationship to reality is approximately equivalent to the reality on reality TV-- mixed with the prescription drugs that inhabit the tiny brains of the people who drool over Trump's simple-minded nonsense. Watching him in New Hampshire yesterday (see the video above) almost had me feeling sorry for Jeb Bush, Rand Paul and the Republican Party Establishment. Almost-- they created these people and they deserve what they're getting back now.



Bruce Bartlett, a supply-side economist who worked for Ron Paul, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, nailed Trump and his supporters a few days ago:

Oh, I love Donald Trump because he exposes everything about the Republican Party that I have frankly come to hate. It is just filled with people who are crazy, and stupid, and have absolutely no idea of what they are taking about. And the candidates, no matter how intelligent they may be, just constantly have to keep pandering to this lowest common denominator in American politics.

Trump is all manipulation, bombast and bluster. And I imagine his supporters have the collective IQ of a guppy. Even when he's briefed by his advisers and he says something correct-- like Iraq being a colossal error-- he sounds like he has the communication power of an angry, egomaniacal 11-year-old. "And who's better at infrastructure than Trump?" I guess that's based on... the Central Park skating rink?

In his glorification of Douglas MacArthur he went off on a typical Trumping tangent:

I went to the greatest school. You had to be really smart to get into that school. The Wharton School of Finance. You've got to be really smart! And that was before I was Trump! You've got to be really smart. That's like the hardest one.

Forbes lists the top business schools in the country, and Wharton, part of the University of Pennsylvania, came in at #4 after Stanford, Booth (University of Chicago) and Harvard. The average GMAT score is 720, lower than the 740 at Stanford or the 730 at Harvard. So, there he was, twisting the truth again, for one purpose: self-aggrandizement... which his pathetic supporters just eat up.

Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Dave Weigel spent some time looking at why Trump is legitimately making sense to some voters-- including Democrats-- among hard-hit Michigan workers. Trump is, insists Weigel, "the candidate talking most directly about the loss of manufacturing jobs to foreign countries." He acknowledges that Bernie Sanders "has adopted a similar theme," not bothering to mention that Bernie's entire political career going back several decades has centered on these concerns and that Trump's concerns are ego-driven psychosis, probably because that isn't how disaffected Michigan voters he talked to see it. "Trump's appeal here," he wrote, "captured something that went beyond policy: a brew of impossible nostalgia coupled with a pledge to destroy other countries, most notably China, in negotiations."

“Back when our economy took a dump, I had to go to Afghanistan,” said Bob Parsons, 51. “I had to work there as a product relations manager, just to build our retirement back up. There were no jobs in Michigan to be had. They’re not fair to what’s coming over, as far as the trade goes. For example, 100,000 cars come over here; 5,000 go over there. I like what he says: If they don’t let us send them there, we don’t take their stuff.”

Parsons’s wife, Brenda, who’d been nodding her head, interjected to explain why she trusted Trump.

“He’s a businessman,” she said. “Being a businessman, he knows the ways around. I don’t think he’d go to Congress and ask. I think he’d just do it.”

Bob Parsons explained that Trump could ignore lobbyists. It was lobbyists, hungry to sell out America for a buck, who weakened the trade deals, he said.

“You wouldn’t believe how many young kids I met in Afghanistan who have their degrees but can’t find jobs at home,” he said. “I compare Donald Trump to Ronald Reagan. He lets people know what he’s going to do, not what to ask for.”

When he hit the stage, Trump delivered. He went after China. He played out one of his favorite scenarios, in which he works the Oval Office phones, ignoring the president of Ford-- and his lobbyists-- and wages tax war on his company for shipping jobs to Mexico.

“Ford is building a $2.5 billion plant in Mexico,” he said.

Booooo!

“I’ll actually give them a good idea. Why don’t we just let the illegals drive the cars and trucks right into our country?”

Yaaaaaay!

“I would say, the deal is not going to be approved, I won’t allow it. I want that plant in the United States, preferably here. So then I only have one question: Do they move the plant to the United States the same day or a day later?”

The crowd burst into fresh applause.

What Italian workers saw in Benito Mussolini and his Fascist Party in the early 1920s is what Michigan workers like Brenda Parsons see in Trump. Mussolini opposed class war and replaced it with nationalism and a yearning for Rome's glory days as an empire. He demonized Slavs in the same way Trump demonizes Mexicans. In a speech Mussolini gave in 1920, a year before he was first elected to parliament, he told the crowd in Pula:

When dealing with such a race as Slavic-- inferior and barbarian-- we must not pursue the carrot, but the stick policy... We should not be afraid of new victims... The Italian border should run across the Brenner Pass, Monte Nevoso and the Dinaric Alps... I would say we can easily sacrifice 500,000 barbaric Slavs for 50,000 Italians...

Mussolini pursued imperialistic policies in Africa with the same reasoning: Blacks are "inferior."

In 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III asked Mussolini to form a government in the hope of avoiding a civil war. A year later Mussolini invaded Corfu, a Greek island in the Adriatic. Italians ate up the cult of the strong man which Mussolini promoted through propaganda. He bragged about how smart he was, what a great athlete he was, a skilled musician and a gifted philosopher. I bet Brenda Parsons doesn't know squat about Mussolini-- if she's even ever heard of him.



Trump was at the Iowa State Fair Saturday-- for a few minutes. Philip Bump wrote about it for the Washington Post and summed up the press conference in a couple of lines:

Donald Trump loves Iowa. He loves children. He'll spend as much as it takes, up to a billion dollars. He'll bend Congress to his will as he bent the New York City Zoning Commission. Jeb Bush is a puppet of lobbyists and Scott Walker ran Wisconsin poorly.

All bullshit-- other than the last line.

The guy who wrote the song "Ahab the Arab" in 1962, Ray Stevens, thinks all Mexican "illegals" should be forcibly removed from this country. He didn't mention undocumented immigrants from other countries. But he's been telling anyone who will listen that he thinks Trump is the only one who can get America back on track. And speaking of tracks, this is the last one he released:

Is Allen West Disappearing Down A Right Wing Rabbit Hole In Dallas?

Many Floridians were looking forward to inindicted war criminal and torturer Allen West running for Marco Rubio's Senate seat if Rubio decided to run for vice-president, something which has been looking increasingly far-fetched as Rubio descended into the realm of national joke with his childish, tantrum-like response to President Obama's decision to change the course of U.S.-Cuba relations. No one really thinks Rubio is running for anything-- except reelection. And West has decided to take a job as CEO of a Koch-sponsored right-wing fringe think tank, the infamous Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. He did one last fundraising event for his PAC on Saturday in Pal Beach Gardens before taking his clown show off to Texas. He leave as a plagiarism scandal swirls around him-- perfect for a think tank-- and right after going on Sean Hannity's Fox hate segment to denounce former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who he termed "a big government progressive Republican running against a bigger government progressive socialist Democrat."

"I think the challenge for Gov. Bush is going to be his policies on illegal immigration and also Common Core," West continued.

The GOP nominee, he said, will need to be able to communicate clearly and directly with voters in the party’s conservative base and explain how his or her views line up with theirs.

"I don’t think you’re going to be able to go out and win a presidential nomination without, I don’t want to say kowtowing to, but proving to conservatives that limited government, fiscal responsibility, individual sovereignty, our free market and free enterprise system, and also our strong national defense" are important to protect, he said. "Those are five key points that any Republican nominee is going to have to stress."

West helped elevate Debbie Wasserman Schultz to undeserved national prominence by pointing out that she's "the most vile, unprofessional and despicable" member of the House and a "coward," and by telling her to "shut the fuck up," insisting she had "proven repeatedly that you are not a Lady." He's the Republicans' public idea of an intellectual although behind the scenes many sneered at him as a trained minstrel show performer for their entertainment.

So he's packing up his family and moving west in search of greener redder pastures. The National Center for Policy Analysis is just the kind of outfit you would expect to hire someone of Allen West's calibre as their CEO. Established in 1983, by a right-wing British turtle farmer, Antony Fisher, its top policy objectives are cutting taxes for the rich, denying climate science, and, most important, privatizing Social Security and Medicare (as well as education, the EPA and criminal justice) and eliminating the estate tax for multimillionaires and billionaires. Along side the rich British turtle farmer, now dead, other founders included wealthy right-wing crackpots Russell Perry (CEO of Republic Financial Services), Wayne Calloway (CEO of Frito-Lay), John F. Stephens (CEO of Employers Insurance of Texas), and Jere W. Thompson (CEO of the Southland Corporation). The group claims to have written the basis of Gingrich's Contract With America. Although wealthy Republicans have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars on an individual basis, most of the operation's budget comes from the insurance industry and just seven far right anti-democracy family foundations: Koch, of course, as well as Scaife, Olin, Earhart, Bradley, Castle Rock and JM.

About a decade ago these kooks made the national stage when one of their spokesmodels, Bruce Bartlett, turned on his former employer, George W. Bush, and wrote a book, The Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. The National Center for Policy Analysis, scared of offending right-wing mega-donors, immediately fired Bartlett. Something tells me if Bartlett couldn't keep a job at this organization, Allen will soon be running for office again, somewhere in Texas this time. And... for your edification, some excerpts from Chapter One of the book that so offended the National Center for Policy Analysis big-wigs. While you read Barlett's critique of George W. Bush, keep West's critique of Jeb in the back of your mind.

I Know Conservatives, and George W. Bush Is No Conservative

George W. Bush is widely considered to be one of the most politically conservative presidents in history. His invasion of Iraq, his huge tax cuts, and his intervention in the Terri Schiavo case are among the issues where those on the left view him as being to the right of Attila the Hun. But those on the right have a different perspective-- mostly discussed among themselves or in forums that fly below the major media's radar. They know that Bush has never really been one of them the way Ronald Reagan was. Bush is more like Richard Nixon-- a man who used the right to pursue his agenda, but was never really part of it. In short, he is an impostor, a pretend conservative.

I write as a Reaganite, by which I mean someone who believes in the historical conservative philosophy of small government, federalism, free trade, and the Constitution as originally understood by the Founding Fathers. On that basis, Bush clearly is not a Reaganite or "small c" conservative. Philosophically, he has more in common with liberals, who see no limits to state power as long as it is used to advance what they think is right. In the same way, Bush has used government to pursue a "conservative" agenda as he sees it. But that is something that runs totally contrary to the restraints and limits to power inherent in the very nature of traditional conservatism. It is inconceivable to traditional conservatives that there could ever be such a thing as "big government conservatism," a term often used to describe Bush's philosophy.

...Traditional conservatives view the federal government as being untrustworthy and undependable. They utilize it only for those necessary functions like national defense that by their nature cannot be provided at the state and local level or privately. The idea that government could ever be used actively to promote their goals in some positive sense is a contradiction in terms to them. It smacks too much of saying that the ends justify the means, which conservatives have condemned since at least the French Revolution.

George W. Bush, by contrast, often looks first to government to solve societal problems without even considering other options. Said Bush in 2003, "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move." A more succinct description of liberalism would be hard to find.

...George W. Bush brags about never even reading a daily newspaper. Having worked in the White House, I know how cloistered the environment can be and how limited its information resources are-- much of what White House staffers know about what is going on in the White House actually comes from reporters and news reports rather than inside knowledge, which is frequently much less than reporters imagine. It's distressing to contemplate the possibility that the president's opinion about the worthlessness of outside information sources is widely held within the White House. Unfortunately, I know from experience that the president sets the tone and style for everyone in the White House, suggesting that it is more likely than not that this view does indeed permeate the West Wing-- a suspicion confirmed by the memoirs of those who have worked in this White House.

Reagan, on the other hand, had a conservative distrust of his own ability to know all the facts and arguments before making important decisions. That is one reason why he was so tolerant of leaks from the White House during his administration. Reagan knew that this was an important safety valve that allowed dissenting viewpoints to reach him without being blocked by those with their own agendas. Deputy Chief of Staff Dick Darman, who controlled the paper flow in and out of the Oval Office, for example, was often accused of preventing Reagan from seeing memos that argued against positions Darman favored.

...Traditional conservatives had grave doubts about George W. Bush since day one. First, he was his father's son. George H. W. Bush ran as Reagan's heir, but did not govern like him. Indeed, the elder Bush signaled that there would be a sharp break with Reagan-style conservatism in his inaugural address, when he spoke of being "kinder" and "gentler." Conservatives immediately asked themselves, "Kinder and gentler than whom?" To them, the answer was obvious: Ronald Reagan. In effect, Bush was accusing his predecessor and the philosophy he stood for as being the opposite of kind and gentle-- nasty and brutish, perhaps. As columnist George Will later put it, Bush was determined "to distinguish himself from Reagan by disparaging Reagan."

George H. W. Bush's break with Reagan quickly became apparent in other ways as well. For instance, he fired virtually every Reagan political appointee in the federal government just as thoroughly as if he had been a Democrat. Of course, the Reagan appointees all knew that they were liable to be replaced at some point, but the suddenness and thoroughness of the purge caught them all by surprise-- there had been no forewarning before Inauguration Day. It created a lot of ill will that came back to haunt the elder Bush when he got into political trouble later on. Most of the Reagan people sat on their hands rather than come to his aid.

I was spared the purge only because Reagan had appointed Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady in the last days of his administration, knowing that he was a close friend of then–Vice President Bush. Since Brady stayed on, that spared Treasury the "transition" that other departments underwent and thus avoided a purge. Within a year or so, most of the senior political appointees moved on anyway and Bush had his chance to appoint their successors. The same thing would have happened in all the other departments, too, thereby saving Bush a lot of unnecessary antagonism from the Reagan crowd. It would have helped Bush govern as well, since many of the purged positions remained vacant for some time for various reasons and were often filled with less competent and experienced replacements. Moreover, many of the so-called Bush people turned out to have no meaningful connection to him and were nothing more than friends of friends, serving in government just to get a line on their résumés and not because they had anything to accomplish in terms of policy.

One of the first things I noticed when the new crowd came in in 1989 was that they would very seldom mention Ronald Reagan's name. When necessary, they always referred to the "previous administration." And it was quite clear that they viewed Reagan's "hard-line" conservatism as passé and counterproductive to governing. They, on the other hand, thought themselves to be much more politically astute and believed that they would be far more effective by jettisoning Reagan's ideological baggage.

The problem was that having abandoned Reagan's principles, they had nothing to replace them with except political expediency. This culminated in the infamous abandonment of the no-new-taxes pledge in 1990. The Bush people thought they were being so clever by simply posting a notice in the White House pressroom on June 26, 1990, which said that budget negotiations with congressional Democrats would take place and include discussion of "tax revenue increases." They seem to have thought that no one would notice this fundamental reversal of Bush's position on taxes. Needless to say, it was noticed instantaneously, causing an almost immediate decline in Bush's poll ratings.

I was told by one of the key participants in this decision that they never intended it as a repudiation of the pledge, but merely as an acknowledgment that in a growing economy taxes automatically rise. If this is true, it certainly is not evidence of political sophistication, but rather its opposite. Being the only Reaganite left in the Treasury Department, apparently I was the only one who knew how negatively Bush's concession would be perceived by the Republican rank and file. Unfortunately, no one asked my opinion before the decision was made.

I bring all this up because when George W. Bush first came on the radar screen as a potential presidential candidate, all that most conservatives knew about him was that he was the son of a president who had abandoned a successful conservative governing philosophy in favor of what they saw as squishy moderation, and was appropriately punished by voters for his sins. So when the younger Bush started talking about "compassionate conservatism," therefore, traditional conservatives immediately were suspicious of another Bush betrayal. As Richard Miniter wrote in the conservative Manchester Union Leader, "Bush's 'compassionate conservatism' strikes some as insulting and signals a return to his father's 'kinder and gentler' conservatism, which led to tax hikes and the loss of the White House."

As National Review's Andrew Stuttaford later put it, compassionate conservatism is an idea that should have been "strangled in the cradle." To even call it an idea is "flattery," he said. For the most part, it is little more than "pork wrapped up in schmaltz."

Right from the beginning, George W. Bush made it clear that he was not a conservative in the Reagan mold. In a speech in Indianapolis on July 22, 1999, he called the idea that our problems would be better solved if government would just get out of the way a "destructive mind-set." Government is "wasteful and grasping," Bush said, but "we must correct it, not disdain it." Commenting on this speech, Cato Institute president Ed Crane said it could have come straight out of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank allied with the Democratic Party.

Even in front of explicitly conservative audiences, Bush continued his theme that government was not the enemy, but just wasn't being used for the proper ends. In a speech to the Manhattan Institute on October 5, 1999, Bush put it this way: "Too often, my party has confused the need for limited government with disdain for government itself." He went on to complain that the government was too weak to do what was needed. It was "grasping" and "impotent," he said.