Trump Is An Illegitimate President And Everything He Has Done In Office Must Be Undone-- Starting On Day One With The Removal Of Coney Barrett

 

Has Trump's Damnatio Memoriae Already Begun?

Amy Coney Island Baby will be an illegitimate Supreme Court justice since the Republicans broke the Senate rules to ram through a hasty confirmation [and by an illegitimate president]. The rules are clear, there can be no report from the Judiciary Committee without at least two members of the opposition party present. None were present. Biden and the new Congress absolutely must remove her the first day they take over. The confirmation process was tainted. The fascists must not be allowed to get aways with this.

But Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staffer for John Kasich in the House and later the chief analyst for military spending on the Senate Budget Committee, argues in a piece for Common Dreams that Congress "must wipe the slate" by "rescind[ing] all acts signed by Trump, all of his executive orders, and all of his appointments to federal positions," including judicial appointments. He wrote that the new government the voters are empowering must prepare a plan, and the sooner the better, to address the long-term damage that Trump and his paladins have caused, "steps that go far beyond holding one man and a few of his campaign aids and appointees legally accountable (although I certainly endorse prosecuting their potential crimes)... [I]t is a time to start planning the immense job of clearing away the rubble and achieving something like public sanity. Yet a magic return to the post-Cold War status quo of a fossilized 'normalcy' that disguises festering social dysfunction is neither possible nor desirable." That status quo ante of fossilized normalcy, of course, has always been the very heart and soul of Biden's candidacy.

What Lofgren argues is that Trump was an illegitimate president, from day one, and that the Biden Adminsitration "must patiently and persuasively make every effort to demonstrate to the public that the process by which Donald Trump became president was tainted, and not sweep the unpleasant facts under the rug, as the Obama administration did with the lies and crimes of his predecessor’s invasion of Iraq." Underlying all that must come next is the point that "if the election process itself was tainted, then all of Trump’s subsequent acts in office must logically be poisoned according to a reading of the legal doctrine of “unjust enrichment”-- if Trump’s policies remain, he would still be imposing the burden of his tainted election upon the American people while continuing to benefit his co-conspirators and donors. Whether foreign interference shifted enough votes to change the [2016] election result is, besides being impossible to establish beyond doubt, irrelevant: the law does not give 'attempted' bank robbery a mulligan as compared to successful heists. The goal must be to wipe the slate clean of acts and policies of the Trump regime that by their very nature are illegitimate, as they are based not on consent of the governed but foreign interference and illegal trickery."

Dynasties throughout history have retrospectively declared as an interregnum those periods ruled over by a usurper, and the interloper’s acts and decrees were considered illegitimate.

The same applied even to more democratically determined governments. There were several European parliamentary countries that were occupied for years by Nazi Germany. After the war, these reconstructed democracies realized that, in addition to purging their systems of wartime collaborators and their policies, things could not return to the status quo of the 1930s. The slate had to be wiped clean for society to move forward.

Trump’s removal from office is only the first step. A new administration and a fresh Congress must wipe the slate in much the same manner that the Romans used damnatio memoriae (the condemnation of memory) to literally erase the record of a traitor or a usurper by removing any trace or mention of the evil doer. While it is hardly practical for an updated version to make someone an “un-person,” in that sense, the spirit of undoing their acts should be employed, both as a transition to better governance, and to serve as an admonition to those who would rule America as dictators.

A new Congress should pass a law of repeal covering the period of Trump’s regime since January 20, 2017 at noon; it would rescind all acts signed by Trump, all of his executive orders, and all of his appointments to federal positions. Congress would also specify that all government documents referring to Trump or his administration clearly carry the denotation that the period was a legal interregnum without constitutional legitimacy. This practice would follow the example of Germany’s Federal Archives; even archived official photographs from the Nazi era all contain a disclaimer warning that the original captions supplied with the photos may be “erroneous,” “biased,” or "politically extreme.”

Is this feasible? Can Congress undo judicial appointments without a formal impeachment and trial of each incumbent? Yes, Congress has the constitutional power to reorganize the judiciary; removing all of Trump’s judicial appointees would be the temporary use of such reorganizational power.

Would this seize up the functioning of government? No worse than Trump and congressional Republicans have already done. Trump’s administration has had an unprecedented number of vacancies in senior positions, and many agencies have limped along with acting directors for much of his term.

Congress, with Republicans backstopped by Trump obstructing any worthwhile initiatives, has been less productive than any Congress in living memory; it is hard to think of any law of much significance it passed other than the GOP’s beloved tax giveaway to the rich.

Doubtless, there will be exceptions to blanket nullification, but a new Congress must specifically exempt them. Likewise, it is impossible to unspend money already spent in appropriations bills, but any legislative riders attached to those bills can certainly be rescinded.

This kind of nullification will of course raise difficult issues, such as how to deal with White House and agency records generated when Trump occupied the Oval Office. Correcting the suppression of data, or in some cases its potential falsification in agencies like NASA, the EPA, or the CDC under Trump appointees, will be a matter of concern for Congress and the executive branch for years to come. The National Archives will have its work cut out for it, categorizing executive branch records, and separating the genuine from the spurious, so that an accurate history of the Trump years can be written.

Trump had his own lame version of Damnatio Memoriae

Some will object that this is not the American way, which traditionally ascribes good faith to political adversaries and lets bygones be bygones. But the old way of doing things too often degenerated into mutual backscratching and the urge to forget inconvenient facts (a syndrome that is part of what Gore Vidal called “The United States of Amnesia”). It is part of what got us to this sorry present state: too many people refused to take Donald Trump seriously, considering him either a harmless jackass or someone who when handed power would magically grow in maturity.

Others may think that a thirst for justice too readily descends into vengeance-seeking, and might compare it to regime change in banana republics. But after Watergate, the norm has been to avoid justice entirely, such that blatantly criminal acts like Iran-Contra and the Bush administration’s unconscionable lying when it committed unprovoked aggression evoke a yawn from the Great and the Good. Does Trump’s deliberate sabotage of public health measures leading to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths (when he was fully conscious from an early date of coronavirus’s danger) now merit the same treatment? When will our political establishment ever draw the line about illegal conduct by the powerful?

Denmark now, as it was 75 years ago, is an example of an enlightened and humane country, with mild criminal laws and a remarkable level of social trust. But after enduring five years of brutal occupation in World War II, thousands of collaborators were purged and 46 of the worst were executed. The least we can do is undo Trump’s misdeeds and foster a sense of national shame that too many of us took self-government for granted, while a surprising number actively tried to subvert it.

Damnatio memoriae is already playing out in towns across the Old Confederacy, including Virginia, where I live. Just up the road in Alexandria, a Confederate memorial has sat for decades, smack in the middle of the town’s main thoroughfare. Or it did until one day in June, when it vanished.

Obama Did Real Good On Cuba Yesterday But... There Are Some Serious Problems Elsewhere He's Involved With

You may not be aware that there's a lot of evidence coming out that the whole mess in Ukraine was, is essence, a CIA coup. A few days ago Eric Zuesse talked about it in the context of how American media avoids reporting on stories the military-industrial complex don't want to see out in the open. "How many Americans," he began, "know that the current regime in Ukraine was installed in a very bloody February 2014 coup d'etat, that was planned in the U.S. White House, and overseen by an Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, and run by the CIA, and carried out for the White House by one of Ukraine's two racist-fascist, or nazi, political parties, whose founder and leader still controls Ukraine though not officially, even these many months after his coup, and which nazi party has been up to their elbows since then in a genocidal policy to exterminate the people in the region of Ukraine that had voted approximately 90% for the man whom Obama and those nazis overthrew in February?

The implications to any semblance of any open/informed democracy, if Zuesse is even partially correct, are absolutely chilling. And the secrecy around U.S. policy in Ukraine is hardly unique. The other day we looked at the secrecy around the TPP negotiations. And obviously, the blatantly unconstitutional spying on Americans by the NSA and the CIA running a rogue torture regime for Dick Cheney. Mike Lofgren has long been our favorite Republican ex-staffer/operative. Tuesday he wrote about the implications of the torture report for Truthout. It's pretty heavy... scary even.

"Hysteria" does not arise from groundless causes, but from a guilty and conflicted id seeking to displace blame from itself onto others. The reaction to the senate study is as significant as the facts that the study uncovered in providing a window on the psychology and methods of those who run the Deep State-- the hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with limited reference only to the consent of the governed as it is normally expressed through the formal political process. This essay will discuss some of the implications of that reaction.

President Obama is an operative of the Deep State, but it is unclear whether he is its master or its prisoner. The president's role in this affair has been extremely puzzling. On March 11, 2014, when the torture issue blew up in the senate because of Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein's allegations of CIA spying on her committee's staff members, she said that the White House had been supportive of her committee's probe of CIA activities. That may have been true, but that is still only what she said she believed. It is hardly beyond the realm of plausibility that the president or one of his aides told her that the White House was supportive of her committee's investigation while at the same time tolerating, or even encouraging, CIA obstruction. But suppose the president did support the committee's probe? That would imply that the White House does not really control the CIA. In either case, whether from obstruction or lack of control, the implications of the CIA's spying on Congress merited Senator Feinstein's description of it as a constitutional crisis.

Obama showed a similar split personality nine months later when the report was finally released. The president, and his White House press secretary, insisted that he was in favor of the public seeing the study (or at least the redacted summary of it). Yet on the Friday before its release, John Kerry, the most senior cabinet official in the government, called Senator Feinstein and urged her not to disclose it.

Shorter Kerry: "Lots of things going on in the world; not a good time for disclosure." But when is there ever not a lot of things going on in the world? Kerry seems to have travelled a great distance since he was the young Winter Soldier who proclaimed that you can't ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake. Did Obama authorize Kerry to make that call? If not, did he care that Kerry was contravening stated White House policy? Or does Obama have any say in the matter?

...General Hayden waxed positively lyrical about the blessings of torture, as he has been doing virtually nonstop since he stepped down as CIA director in 2009.

It was all hogwash and misdirection. The rebutters produced no concrete evidence that torture brought worthwhile results. Blaming the revelation of the crime, rather than its commission, on anything bad that might happen in the future is to stand ordinary ethics, not to mention common sense, on its head.

It requires only a moment's thought to realize that mistreated detainees who were subsequently released knew exactly what was happening to them, and they would tell their family, friends and anyone else in their home countries, including local media, what went on in those prisons. The only people who would not know, absent official disclosure, would be the American people. That, however, is how the Deep State operates: It forces through its agenda by appealing to the elemental fear of terrorism so that it short-circuits the logic of the listener.

The news media are complicit. The rebutters' gaps in logic and evidence have almost never been challenged by the bulldogs of our gloriously free and adversarial press. During the two or three days prior to the senate report's release, the media were awash with unbalanced stories trumpeting the (hypothetical) damage disclosure would cause, all based on interviews with former government officials with an obvious interest in keeping the report under wraps.

This is in part because the media maintain an incestuous relationship with their current and former government sources. One of the most egregious examples was CBS News; one of its national security consultants is Michael J. Morell, a former acting CIA director. The network actually permitted Morell to inveigh against the report's release under color of being a news consultant, despite the fact that he was one of the former CIA big-shots who had prior access to the document and had worked on a rebuttal to it! The mortal remains of Edward R. Murrow are presumably spinning like a rotisserie.

"We're the real victims here." When they are caught in the act, it is a frequent psychological ploy among bullies and con men to accuse other of the crime and to play the victim. The senate study has been accompanied by a torrent of such behavior on the part of the Deep State's current and former operatives. Several former CIA directors and other former intelligence players have even launched, with suspiciously miraculous speed, a website devoted to attacking the senate report and portraying themselves as victims.

The themes were predictable: senate Democrats were just picking on dedicated public servants doing their patriotic duty to keep Americans safe. The program they administered was lawful. CIA officers now have to worry about shifting political winds. We got bin Laden, didn't we? Those sloppy senate staffers didn't even interview us. And so on. Let us examine those assertions.

False appeals to patriotism have become so common after 9/11 that they are almost an involuntary reflex. But, as Samuel Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In reality, however much of the rebuttal brigade see themselves as patriots, they were actually senior operatives of the Deep State, deeply imbued with an ideology that is neither specifically Republican nor Democrat, and certainly not the beliefs necessary for the maintenance of a constitutional republic under law and the informed consent of the governed.

The ideology of the Deep State is about maintaining and enhancing power-- and cashing in afterwards. It is worth noting that almost all senior national security operatives never retire after leaving government; they cash in with consultancies and board memberships with security-related corporations. It's not that no one ever truly retires, but like snakes in Ireland, they are a vanishingly rare phenomenon. It is profoundly in the material interest of these operatives to defend the Deep State so as to keep the cash flowing.

When they complain about the CIA being subject to shifting political winds, they are expressing distaste for the very processes of elective politics that constitute the democracy they once swore to defend. Their demand for secrecy is really a penchant for self-dealing without public scrutiny. It is exactly what James Madison warned about: "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

Mike Lofgren Willing To Say Aloud What Few Dare: The Roberts Court Itself Is Corrupt

Stuck on awful for the next decade?

Our favorite ex-Republican staffer and operative, Mike Lofgren, was busy at Truthout yesterday, making clear what we all know intuitively, namely that "Even in the absence of what Justice Roberts narrowly defines as 'quid pro quo corruption,' a court that consistently decides all relevant cases on behalf of corporate interests-- most recently McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission-- undermines its own legitimacy as well as the Constitution." The case, Lofgren explains was about how one defines the word "bribe," something we've been looking at for years, since the whole political finance system is rooted in bribery and corruption. He pointed out that "The Roberts court, or five of its nine members, adopted the misanthrope's faux-naïve pose in ruling that private money in politics, far from promoting corruption, causes democracy to thrive because, money being speech, the more speech, the freer the politics. Anatole France mocked this kind of legal casuistry by saying 'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.'"

Roberts knows he was appointed to be a Supreme Court justice for one reason: to decide relevant cases on behalf of corporate interests. This explains why he made a political move to salvage the Affordable Care Act: The case was a matter of partisan politics before the court. Business interests were roughly divided on the law-- some disliked its mandates and provisions that might drive up their costs, while others saw its potential for allowing them to dump insured employees into pools, or, alternatively to benefit from tax subsidies. Still others may have seen it as a license to mint money. ACA was a costly and convoluted way to insure more people, but Republican hacks saw only one aspect: It was Obama's initiative, so it must be opposed. Roberts saw it as a political squabble involving the other two branches, but on which there was no unified business position. It was a law whose philosophy had a Republican pedigree-- the Heritage Foundation had proposed something like it more than a decade before. If a Republican were president, he might have proposed a similar bill; after all, the president who nominated Roberts engineered the Medicare Prescription Drug Act.

Roberts perceived the deeper dynamic beneath the ideological posturing over ACA, and that is why he had to be the deciding vote of a divided court to save the act. Overturning it would cause millions to question the court's legitimacy on a matter that was not crucial to business interests. Best to save one's powder for more relevant fights. That said, the four dissenting votes also had to vote as they did to render the decision subjectively moot in the minds of Republican jihadists, who would continue to fight the act tooth and nail. As it was, Roberts threw a valuable bone to the Republicans by vitiating the Medicaid mandate to the states. This made it harder to implement the law and permitted Republican governors and legislatures to work all manner of mischief.

McCutcheon was a more relevant fight, and here we see Roberts the avatar of corporations rather than Roberts the tactician. Viewing other justices' decisions through this lens also tightens the focus on an otherwise blurry image. Observers wondered why, during oral arguments in the Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby case, Scalia’s questions implied he was taking a position on religious views in the workplace opposite to the one he had taken in the 1990 Employment Division v. Smith case. In that case, Scalia ruled against employees whose firing for smoking peyote caused them to sue based on alleged violation of their first amendment right to free exercise of religion. But Scalia was perfectly consistent: In the Smith case, and as he appears likely to do in the Hobby Lobby case, Scalia upholds the rights of employers.(2) Neither one is a case about religion per se; they are cases about the superior prerogatives of employers over employees. In like manner, McCutcheon and Citizens United are not cases about campaign finance laws, nor are they, despite the artful smokescreen about free speech on the part of the court's majority, cases about free speech and whether money constitutes speech. They are cases about upholding the superior political privileges of rich interests in society as opposed to poorer ones.

We now have an algorithm to crack the Enigma Code of the Supreme Court. Once there are five members of the court who accept as self-evidently valid the 19th century concept of "freedom of contract," other issues become subsidiary. This framework explains hundreds of cases before the court and clarifies the seeming anomalies like ACA. It explains the court's position in Vance v. Ball State, which made it more difficult to sue employers for harassment, and Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., which barred remedy for pay discrimination (even Congress subsequently saw fit to redress the bias of the court’s decision). In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the court rejected a class-action suit of women denied raises and promotions. The Roberts court also took the side of corporations against consumers in Mutual Pharmaceutical Company v. Bartlett and AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. The Roberts Court declared unconstitutional a 1988 law that subjected corporate officers to fraud charges if they could be shown to have deprived clients of honest services.

…Sometimes, like Humbert Wolf's British journalist, judges can be corrupted even in the absence of what Justice Roberts narrowly defines as "quid pro quo corruption." Fallows recommends that Congress enact a fixed term of office for Supreme Court justices. I think that is a good idea, although not just to obviate senescence on the court. It might also wake up citizens to the whole sorry con game if they were forced to contemplate retired honorable justices giving speeches at $500,000 a pop to corporations eager for enlightenment on the finer points of judicial interpretation.

Mark Karlin, also writing at Truthout yesterday, interviewed Nomi Prins, a former Goldman Sachs executive who authored All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power. Prins' point, in brief, is "that US domestic and foreign policy is largely driven by the interests of economic hegemony and consolidated wealth." Yeah… the whole system is rigged. I know you're not surprised but Prins is a rigorously intellectual insider writing about the symbiotic relationship between the men who run the White House and those who run Wall Street-- over the course of a century. "[F]or the past century," he explained, "mutually reinforcing relationships amongst the most powerful men in the past century were drivers of American domestic, national and foreign policy than just the government was, no matter who the president, or what the party in the Oval. I found that every president had connections of various degrees of closeness with the most influential bankers during his term. I knew these associations existed throughout the decades, but I was surprised to discover just how prevalent they were." What becomes perfectly clear is that these are the people the Roberts Court is working for-- these people and only these people.

Q: Reading your new book, I get the feeling that the privileged few in the private sector who control most of America's money, de facto, don't really give a whit about democracy. What they are focused on is free markets for the plutocracy like a laser. Is that your perspective?

A: The notion of free markets, mechanisms where buyers and sellers can meet to exchange securities or various kinds of goods, in which each participant has access to the same information, is a fallacy.  Transparency in trading across global financial markets is a fallacy. Not only are markets rigged by, and for, the biggest players, so is the entire political-financial system.

The connection between democracy and free markets is interesting though. Democracy is predicated on the idea that every vote counts equally, and in the utopian perspective, the government adopts policies that benefit or adhere to the majority of those votes. In fact, it's the minority of elite families and private individuals that exercise the most control over America's policies and actions.

  The myth of a free market is that every trader or participant is equal, when in fact the biggest players with access to the most information and technology are the ones that have a disproportionate advantage over the smaller players. What we have is a plutocracy of government and markets. The privileged few don't care, or need to care, about democracy any more than they would ever want to have truly "free" markets, though what they do want are markets liberated from as many regulations as possible. In practice, that leads to huge inherent risk.

…Q: How did Bill Clinton, who campaigned on a platform of lifting up the middle class, become an acolyte of Robert Rubin?

A: Every Democratic presidential hopeful campaigns on a platform to help the greater population, or more recently the middle class. Woodrow Wilson campaigned against the concentrated power of Wall Street, though never named names. Yet, it was Jack Morgan he called to the White House before WWI to talk war-financing strategy, and it was Paul Warburg, one of the Federal Reserve architects, that Wilson appointed as one of the Fed's first board members. FDR campaigned against the bankers but worked with them to restructure the banking system to sustain capitalism and supported their open international trade desires because it suited his own. LBJ talked of the Great Society once he was in office, but traded favors behind the scenes with the big bankers to get his policies passed and helped them in return.

So Clinton had historical company. His treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, was a link to substantive funding and the new Eastern establishment elite. Clinton correctly calculated that he needed money and Wall Street legitimacy to get elected. Without Rubin and his friends presenting Clinton through Wall Street, like a debutante, to score funding and support, all the middle-class promises in the world might not have gotten him elected.

Separately, and this is where the like-minded alliance holds, Clinton truly believed in everything Rubin believed in. As Clinton wrote in his memoirs, he got "early invaluable support" from Goldman Sachs executive Ken Brody, who introduced him to various "high-powered business people," including Rubin, whose "tightly reasoned arguments for a new economic policy," Clinton later wrote, "made a lasting impression on me." It's no accident that the swipes at Glass Steagall that George H.W. Bush and his team set in motion, became reality under Clinton. The wheels were in motion already, and Clinton and Rubin sealed the deal. I found records in the Clinton Library of full-scale jubilation in the White House at the way Rubin navigated the repeal of Glass Steagall that are documented in my book. Rubin used the same exact argument and words as Bush's treasury secretary, Nicholas Brady, to fight that deregulation battle-- and they hinged on the need for America to "remain competitive", and if its banks couldn't do what European banks could in mixing financial services, then it would be a blight on the nation as a whole. Parties don't' matter. Power alliances do.

It's also no accident that Hillary Clinton has received hundreds of thousands of dollars to speak at Goldman Sachs gatherings and let them know that Wall Street was treated too harshly in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

Then you had Barack Obama campaigning on a platform of change and throwing the K Street lobbyists and bankers out of the White House. Instead, he gives them the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Exactly, how does a transformation like that happen?

After Washington, Clinton's treasury secretary Robert Rubin went to make millions as a vice chairman at Citigroup. Obama's treasury secretary, Tim Geithner (who had worked as assistant treasury secretary to Rubin under Clinton), went to work for a private equity fund, an enterprise whose now-deceased founder was related to Paul Warburg, one of the architects of the Federal Reserve System and donor to Woodrow Wilson's campaigns, a century ago.

Obama's response in the aftermath of this crisis has been one of coddling the big banks as they've grown bigger. His "sweeping reform," the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, is a joke. It does nothing to constrain the power of the financial elite, because the true political-financial alliance that has allowed the big banks to become bigger, is more powerful than the actions of Congress, even if Congress had been set on doing something real, which it hasn't been. Now, America's largest banks enjoy extensive government backing, not just for deposits, but for their bad bets. The Federal Reserve is carrying a more than $4 trillion book of debt that was never raised to help the population, while it maintains near zero percent interest rates to provide the big banks cheap money.

A transformation certainly doesn't begin with a president who populates his administration with the same people whose philosophy of less rules for their friends brought us to our current situation.  It won't change with Hillary Clinton for the same reasons. It wouldn't' change with Jeb Bush. Honestly, I think we're "stuck on awful" for the next decade.

Yes, stuck on awful

Duck! National Republicans And Virginia Republicans Have The Same Motives, The Same Goals

This afternoon we took a look at the dystopian vision encompassed in the growing American Deep State. I know it was long-- apologies-- but, well… it's important and I cut it in half several times before publishing it. But even if you just scratched the surface, there was a compelling quote by Mike Lofgren about how the Republicans'-- both their Selfishness and Greed obsessed Establishment and their hate-filled fascist Tea Party wings-- insistence on the illegitimate nature of the Obama presidency has manifested itself in terms of government dysfunction. "As I wrote in The Party is Over," explained former GOP operative Lofgren, "the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress."

This morning, the Washington Post editorial board, which hasn't exactly shown itself to be at variance from the exigencies of the Deep State, inadvertently drew the comparison between Lofgren's revelation of the Republican Party agenda for American governance to what the GOP has also been doing in the increasingly purple Commonwealth of Virginia.

Virginia Republicans, having been swept from power at the hands of an electorate alienated by their tilt toward extremism, retain just one bastion in Richmond: the state House of Delegates. From that redoubt, they have resorted to political stunts and budgetary gimmicks as a means of derailing Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s proposal to extend health coverage to hundreds of thousands of Virginians by expanding Medicaid. They seem content that the impasse may end in a state government shutdown, from which they evidently hope to gain political advantage by blaming it on Democrats. We doubt it’s a winning strategy for Republicans. It’s certainly a losing strategy for Virginia.

In Richmond, House GOP lawmakers have made it clear they are not interested in compromise, nor do they wish to be bothered much with the facts. Mr. McAuliffe (D), in office barely a month, has tried schmoozing and executive mansion hospitality; he is nothing if not a deal-maker. The Republicans have responded with derision and fighting words. For them, it is enough to demonize Medicaid expansion as a function of Obamacare, and hope the resulting slogans carry the day-- no matter what the cost to hundreds of thousands of struggling state residents who have no health insurance.

State Senate Democrats, joined by a few moderate Republicans, have passed a budget that would unlock nearly $7 billion in federal funds to be spent on health care in the Commonwealth over four years. The Senate plan, by extending coverage to hundreds of thousands of the uninsured, would be particularly helpful to hospitals struggling to serve large numbers of indigent patients with charity care; many have been hit hard by funding cuts under the Affordable Care Act. In the Senate’s budget, those hospitals, including Inova Health System facilities in Northern Virginia, would receive nearly $700 million over the two-year-budget cycle beginning this July.

…To demonstrate their resolve, House Republican leaders on Thursday staged a vote on expanding Medicaid. In a purely symbolic exercise, all but one GOP member voted it down. In fact, the expansion, one facet in a two-year budget of $96 billion, cannot be extracted from the Senate’s spending plan and killed. Like it or not, Republican conferees from the House will eventually have to sit down with Democratic conferees from the Senate to hammer out a way forward.

Republican lawmakers like to cite the rapid growth in recent years of Medicaid spending as justification for refusing further expansion without what they call major reforms to fight waste, fraud and abuse. In fact, the program has been subject to about 60 audits over the last decade, according to Secretary of Health and Human Services William Hazel, a holdover from the previous administration of Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell. In reality, Republicans are far more interested in partisan warfare than a fact-based effort to help the uninsured find coverage and good health care.

Republicans not interested in furthering the nation's general good? Oh, Lord, get me the smelling salts; I feel faint. Let's turn again to that fount of intelligence on Republican Party intentions, Mike Lofgren, who worked furthering them for close to 3 decades on Capitol Hill, who wrote about how the GOP he worked for concocted "an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages." He termed it and other Republican agenda items "political terrorism."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.



A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s-- a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).



The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"



Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers-- bless their hearts-- seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side-- or a sizable faction of one side-- has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.



This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions-- if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.





This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians. Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.



Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.



This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.



You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black. Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.



It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink.

The Dangers Inherent In The Deep State-- And Partisan Politics

Mike Lofgren had been a GOP operative and congressional aide for nearly 3 decades when he retired in 2011 and penned the book The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted the following year. His critique of his former party is that they care solely and exclusively about their rich contributors-- "The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public"-- and that they are war mongers who pander to primitive religionist fundamentalism. For most of us at DWT that was the first time we became acquainted with his work.

This weekend, an essay he penned for BillMoyers.com, Anatomy of the Deep State should rocket him to national fame. It won't. American conventional wisdom has no room for his uncomfortable, jarring revelations about a shadowy, indefinable "invisible" government that is easily dismissed as a "conspiracy theory." He reminds us that since Obama was elected, the mass media conventional wisdom "has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system… The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction."

As I wrote in The Party is Over, the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (a goal that voter suppression laws in GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish). President Obama cannot enact his domestic policies and budgets: Because of incessant GOP filibustering, not only could he not fill the large number of vacancies in the federal judiciary, he could not even get his most innocuous presidential appointees into office. Democrats controlling the Senate have responded by weakening the filibuster of nominations, but Republicans are sure to react with other parliamentary delaying tactics. This strategy amounts to congressional nullification of executive branch powers by a party that controls a majority in only one house of Congress.

Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented-- at least since the McCarthy era-- witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions-- with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either-- even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.

These are not isolated instances of a contradiction; they have been so pervasive that they tend to be disregarded as background noise. During the time in 2011 when political warfare over the debt ceiling was beginning to paralyze the business of governance in Washington, the United States government somehow summoned the resources to overthrow Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime in Libya, and, when the instability created by that coup spilled over into Mali, provide overt and covert assistance to French intervention there. At a time when there was heated debate about continuing meat inspections and civilian air traffic control because of the budget crisis, our government was somehow able to commit $115 million to keeping a civil war going in Syria and to pay at least £100m to the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters to buy influence over and access to that country’s intelligence. Since 2007, two bridges carrying interstate highways have collapsed due to inadequate maintenance of infrastructure, one killing 13 people. During that same period of time, the government spent $1.7 billion constructing a building in Utah that is the size of 17 football fields. This mammoth structure is intended to allow the National Security Agency to store a yottabyte of information, the largest numerical designator computer scientists have coined. A yottabyte is equal to 500 quintillion pages of text. They need that much storage to archive every single trace of your electronic life.

Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude.

How did I come to write an analysis of the Deep State, and why am I equipped to write it? As a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance, I was at least on the fringes of the world I am describing, if neither totally in it by virtue of full membership nor of it by psychological disposition. But, like virtually every employed person, I became, to some extent, assimilated into the culture of the institution I worked for, and only by slow degrees, starting before the invasion of Iraq, did I begin fundamentally to question the reasons of state that motivate the people who are, to quote George W. Bush, “the deciders.”

Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

…Petraeus and most of the avatars of the Deep State-- the White House advisers who urged Obama not to impose compensation limits on Wall Street CEOs, the contractor-connected think tank experts who besought us to “stay the course” in Iraq, the economic gurus who perpetually demonstrate that globalization and deregulation are a blessing that makes us all better off in the long run-- are careful to pretend that they have no ideology. Their preferred pose is that of the politically neutral technocrat offering well considered advice based on profound expertise. That is nonsense. They are deeply dyed in the hue of the official ideology of the governing class, an ideology that is neither specifically Democrat nor Republican. Domestically, whatever they might privately believe about essentially diversionary social issues such as abortion or gay marriage, they almost invariably believe in the “Washington Consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century “American Exceptionalism”: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground and to ignore painfully won international norms of civilized behavior. To paraphrase what Sir John Harrington said more than 400 years ago about treason, now that the ideology of the Deep State has prospered, none dare call it ideology. That is why describing torture with the word “torture” on broadcast television is treated less as political heresy than as an inexcusable lapse of Washington etiquette: Like smoking a cigarette on camera, these days it is simply “not done.”

…We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.

But, there are signs of resistance to the Deep State and its demands. In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the House narrowly failed to pass an amendment that would have defunded the NSA’s warrantless collection of data from US persons. Shortly thereafter, the president, advocating yet another military intervention in the Middle East, this time in Syria, met with such overwhelming congressional skepticism that he changed the subject by grasping at a diplomatic lifeline thrown to him by Vladimir Putin.

Has the visible, constitutional state, the one envisaged by Madison and the other Founders, finally begun to reassert itself against the claims and usurpations of the Deep State? To some extent, perhaps. The unfolding revelations of the scope of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance have become so egregious that even institutional apologists such as Senator Dianne Feinstein have begun to backpedal-- if only rhetorically-- from their knee-jerk defense of the agency.

Reading the rest of Lofgren's essay is a luxury you should treat yourself to tonight. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want to remind DWT readers that we support candidates who are not just instinctively progressive but instinctively indepedent-minded as well. Independent thinking may not show up in a questionnaire candidates are asked to fill out-- and we may not get it right 100% of the time-- but it's a trait we look for in our candidates and we shy away from backing any candidates who don't exhibit it and appear to us to be the kinds of men and women likely to "go along to get along." We're looking for more people like Alan Grayson, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. These are our House candidates and our Senate candidates, vetted for independent thinking and ability to resist the Deep State that Lofgren warns us about. The DCCC and DSCC-- like their Republican counterparts, the NRCC and NRSC-- vet candidates who look like they will happily submerge their instincts into the Orwellian GroupThink that is a prerequisite for the Deep State. It's the opposite of what Blue America does. It's why we don't support the same candidates. It's why they back Military Industrial Complex stalwarts like Kevin Strouse, John Lewis, Jennifer Garrison, Suzanne Patrick, and Jerry Cannon and easily manipulable, weak-minded boobs like Pete Aguilar, Domenic Recchia and Ann Callis, while Blue America is working towards electing strong, independent-minded candidates like Shenna Bellows, Daylin Leach, George Gollin, Paul Clements, and Rick Weiland. It means one thing to be endorsed by the DCCC and something else entirely to be endorsed by Blue America. And, like we often say, there is no such thing as a contribution being too small.

Advice For Democratic Candidates From A Recovering Republican Operative

September seems so long ago and our brief discussion of former GOP operative Mike Lofgren was buried in a post about then seemingly formidable GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry. Perry is buried now, his "campaign" event Monday hosting Rovnag Abdullayev from Azerbaijan's state (i.e, socialist) oil company. Lofgren, on the other hand, is very much alive-- this time with some formidable advise for The Democrats. His interview this week at Truthout is provocatively titled I Know How To Beat Republicans. He was a GOP congressional staffer and he does. But first Democrats need to do a little self-examination:

The problem is that, for years, liberals coasted on the coattails of FDR, got very complacent and generated no new ideas. So, when the GOP came to the waterhole and stole their clothes, they didn't know what to do; they thought they had hegemony. Group one retreated to the ivory tower: effete crybabies, they became useless politically. Group two, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), became GOP-lite and a pure fundraising operation... [Obama] slid in as a center-right president who pretty much followed George Bush in everything.

And who knows what his present new rhetoric portends, whether it actually means anything. And even so, it's awfully late in the game. He's not going to score any touchdowns now.
 
It's all money-driven for both sides now - and until you get the dollars out of politics, it's not going to end. Karl Rove's one political action committee (PAC) is going to raise $250 million dollars. [Washington Post columnist] George Will says it's all free speech and that more is spent on potato chips than campaign advertising. Well, a quarter of a billion dollars is a lot of potato chips. There needs to be a complete ban on corporate contributions.

...I know how to beat Republicans. Progressives do not know how to beat Republicans. You have to stick with a simple theme and keep pushing it.
 
The Occupy Wall Street movement was studiously ignored until the police in New York City started using violence and now it's gone viral, so you need to seize the moment, not have too many mixed messages, because that is just not going to play with Joe Average. If you're underwater with your mortgage, you understand the Wall Street thing. That was the whole point of the GOP: "Our propaganda has to be simple and repetitive."
 
People who are not authoritarian by nature are not going to march to the beat of the same drummer, but it's tricky. It can't be identical in style to the GOP-- which is now directly appealing to irrational impulses-- so there is a natural tension between keeping the message simple and not insulting the intelligence of an educated person, as so much of the GOP's recent messaging does.

The Republican Health Care Plan... Same As It Ever Was

I hope you had the time and concentration to read today's second post (long but lots of pictures). Originally, this one was supposed to be part of it. Then I realized it was already way too long and intimidating. So... let's pick up where we left off-- the very well-articulated Republican plan to destroy democracy and, alas, America. (You realize that's the theme of the DWT blog, right?) Anyway, you may have missed Kevin Sack's article in Saturday's NY Times about how those sneaky Republican candidates' stances on health care mask their gubernatorial records.

Like the worst and most deranged of the current crop of extreme right GOP governors-- your Kachichs, Snyders, Brewers, Corbetts, Cristies, LePages... your Rick Scotts and Scott Walkers-- the current Texas governor and two former governors running for the Republican presidential nomination all want to repeal what they derisively refer to as Obamacare. Scratch the surface and they would all-- governors and former governors alike-- also prefer to wreck and replace Medicare and Medicaid, something right-wing ideologues have always seen as "socialist." As Mike Lofgren explained in his post for TruthOut Saturday, "You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. 'Entitlement' has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is 'entitled' selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them 'earned benefits,' which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them?" Ending these earned benefits is part of the Republican Party jihad against the American middle class-- or what's left of it-- something we should be referring to as what it is-- a class war.

Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.

When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes-- among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire.

All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.

And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."

But what Sack points out in his Times piece is that as governors they haven't exactly lived up to their crazy, base-and-Koch-pleasing rhetoric.

The place of health care in the Republican primaries will necessarily be defined by Mr. Romney’s skill at neutralizing criticism of his landmark Massachusetts experiment and its paternity of “Obamacare,” as opponents have dubbed the law. But each of the governors has vulnerabilities, and they have sought thus far to credential themselves less by their own past records than by their current opposition to what is officially known as the Affordable Care Act.

“They are more focused on expressing that view than showing how their health care records as governor reveal what they would do as president,” said Alan Weil, executive director of the National Academy for State Health Policy.

The politics of the primaries have made toxic any consideration of once-conservative concepts like health insurance mandates and marketplace exchanges, because of their association with Mr. Obama’s plan. But in a different day and environment, Mr. Romney in Massachusetts and Mr. Huntsman in Utah embraced those very devices as state solutions, to differing degrees.

Mr. Perry, by contrast, eschewed direct efforts to expand coverage in Texas and cemented its status as the state with the highest rate of people without insurance.

When Mr. Perry succeeded George W. Bush in December 2000, about 22 percent of Texans had no insurance, second only to New Mexico. After Mr. Perry’s decade in office, Texas now claims the highest uninsured rate, at 26 percent, as well as other distinctions like the lowest rate of prenatal care.


...Mr. Perry continues to pay a political price for one decision he made to impose a health care mandate-- an executive order in 2007 that made Texas the first state to require young girls to be vaccinated against cervical cancer with Gardasil. The order infuriated conservatives, and the Legislature quickly passed a bill to overturn it, which Mr. Perry allowed to take effect without his signature.

The governor, whose former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Merck, the maker of Gardasil, defended his “pro-life decision” in a debate last year. But after announcing his bid for president last month, he began describing it as a mistake.

One day before Mr. Romney signed his landmark 2006 health care bill amid pomp at Faneuil Hall, he declared victory in a column in the Boston Globe: “Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced.”

Mr. Romney is batting .500.

For the 10 percent of residents who had been uninsured, the commonwealth’s coverage mandate, coupled with government subsidies for the poor, has proved a striking success. A study last year concluded that 98.1 percent of residents, and 99.8 percent of children, had health insurance, leading the country. The state also found, to the surprise of some, that the share of employers contributing to their workers’ coverage (rather than accepting a modest penalty for not doing so) had risen.

But the law was not intended to make a serious assault on the state’s above-average health costs. A recent state report concluded that growth in private insurance premiums since 2006 had outpaced the increase in national heath care spending.

In pushing for the law, which features an exchange and requires insurers to cover pre-existing conditions, Mr. Romney championed an insurance mandate as the “ultimate conservative idea.” The targets of his “personal responsibility principle” were the free-riders who gambled by not buying policies and then relied on taxpayers, hospitals and the privately insured to cover the cost of their uncompensated care.

Mr. Romney could not have known then that his legacy would become such a bludgeon, with Mr. Perry, Mr. Huntsman and, impishly, Mr. Obama crediting him for the blueprint of the federal overhaul.

Tax increases have been needed to keep the Massachusetts plan afloat. But they have not been back-breaking, largely because the federal government underwrites much of the subsidized coverage. Mr. Romney is quick to remind voters that the Democratic-led Legislature overrode his veto of the requirement that employers contribute to their workers’ coverage and of benefits he considered gold-plated.

As a national candidate, Mr. Romney has argued that the law was appropriate for Massachusetts but is constitutionally prohibited as a federal solution. He does not, however, disown it.

Then there's some stuff about Huntsman but since he's only polling around 1% it makes no sense to cover him as a serious presidential candidate, and certainly not one more serious than Michele Bachmann, who the Republican Establishment and the Beltway corporate media hope to make disappear by ignoring her, the way they do Ron Paul. The person who had right-- and had it right first-- about the Republican health care plan was Alan Grayson. Remember, "don't get sick" and "die fast?" Here's the video... it's worth watching again-- and it helps explained why they spent more money on negative ads in Grayson's district than on any other district in the country:

If Only Every Voter Could Read This One... Gadarene Swine And All

Who'da thunk! An Ohio Republican governor!

You would certainly not know it from the laughable Sunday Inside-the-Beltway corporate media gabfests, but this weekend's most talked about political story was a piece Saturday by former Republican Party operative and congressional staffer, Mike Lofgren, Goodbye To All That: Reflections Of A GOP Operative Who Left The Cult. You know how we're all always saying how the two corporate Beltway parties absolutely suck but the other guys are even worse than ours. Lofgren's broken free from that perspective. I gather he feels that though they both suck, his is now far, far worse-- beyond the pale. "Both parties," he avows, "are rotten-- how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests-- no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma." But, he doesn't leave it there-- not at all. In all those years working for the Republicans he;s noticed something-- a big, big change that's come lately. "Both parties," he explains, "are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP." The party, he writes is now full of lunatics, lunatics way beyond even the California crackpots of yore like B-1 Bob Dornan and Bill Dannemeyer (best known for this speech he insisted be part of the Congressional Record: "activities peculiar to homosexuality include: rimming, or one man using his tongue to lick the rectum of another man; golden showers, having one man or men urinate on another man or men; fisting or handballing, which has one man insert his hand and/or part of his arm into another man's rectum; and using what are euphemistically termed 'toys' such as one man inserting dildoes, certain vegetables, or lightbulbs up another man's rectum"). Crazier than that? Maybe not crazier than John Schmitz, who Lofgren never got around to. He just says that "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." He knows his Members!

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. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel-- how prudent is that?-- in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might-- the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

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.

...[V]irtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

"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."

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

...[The] constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians. Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.

You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black. Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink.

...The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class-- without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.

What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.

While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.

How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what?-- can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?

You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.

It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending"-- which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

...[T]he Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction-- and even less spending reduction!-- than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass.

...2. They worship at the altar of Mars.  While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia-- a nuclear-armed state-- during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember?-- "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

...3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."

...Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.

The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter-- God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass-- and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.

It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.

Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett.

I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.

If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices"-- and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.

During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency-- a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.

If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.