So, a brief thought I had about Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan today: it sucks. Pretty much everyone with a brain thinks that it sucks. But I think I came up with a way that it sucks even more than it was previously thought to suck. Walk with me, will you?
The 9-9-9 plan consists of three taxes: a nine percent income tax, a nine percent sales tax, and a nine percent "business tax". The business tax is a receipts tax rather than a profits tax (as the current corporate income tax is). What this means is that you don't get to deduct anything except "investments, all purchases from other businesses and all dividends paid to shareholders." In other words, you're now taxed nine percent on all wages and salaries paid to employees.
Under the current system, an employee whose pre-tax salary is $50,000 actually costs an employer $53,825 once FICA taxes are added. (For the purposes of this post, all we're concerned about is the employee's pre-tax salary and the employer FICA contribution.) This is because the employee pays 7.65% of their income in FICA taxes, and the employer matches with another 7.65% contribution. The 9-9-9 plan would do away with FICA taxes, and one of Cain's promises is that your employer will pay you that 7.65%. He claims to have worked in private industry before, but that statement makes me doubt this claim.
Anyway, there's no FICA tax under the 9-9-9 plan...but there is a business tax. And the money used to pay your $50,000 salary is subject to a 9% tax. That means the cost of paying you is actually $54,500. Using powers of math, the cost of employing you is $675 higher under 9-9-9.
Amazingly, the problem gets worse the more you're paid. FICA tax is not assessed on wages over $106,800. For someone paid $250,000 a year, the total employer-side FICA charged is $8,170.20, for an effective employer rate of 3.26% and a total cost of $258,170.20. Under 9-9-9? Your employer would pay $22,500 in taxes on your salary for a total cost of $272,500.**
Not only do poor people get a drastic tax increase, but every single person in America would instantaneously become more expensive to employ!
...Pizza joke!
**Figures changed (I accidentally used the lowered 2011 FICA withholding rate).
Herman Cain has risen through the Republican ranks...well, not meteorically, but at least like something that's natural and rises and isn't racially problematic or in any way black. As he's become relevant in the race, there was a moment you knew was going to arrive. A moment where Cain would have to make a fateful decision pitting his identity against his aspirations. A moment where Cain would have to decide if he was a black Republican or a Republican who, incidentally, was of the negro persuasion.
That moment was Niggerhead. You're likely familiar with the story, but the short version is that Rick Perry owns a ranch formerly named Niggerhead, and was at best lax about changing the name to something that didn't involve a racial slur. As these things go, this is fairly low hanging fruit on the "that's racist" tree. In general, [racial slur] plus [head] doesn't result in something that's not racist.
While on Fox News and This Week, Herman Cain called the name Niggerhead "very insensitive" and "plain insensitive". Al Sharpton, he is not. But through the magic power of the race card, he actually pretty much is. Except Cain is worse, because this is a betrayal of the very never-talking-about-race promise he held. Instapundit:
Redstate's commenters decide to not just attack Cain but, yes, to defend Niggerhead, because we're apparently entering into a white supremacist fantasy novel. From "izoneguy":
As a technical term
“Ni**erhead” was, among others:
* a former British term for a black iron post for mooring ships, made from an old cannon partially buried muzzle upward, with a slightly oversize black cannonball covering the hole
* a former sailors’ term for an isolated coral head, notorious as navigation hazards
* among some American stonemasons, a term for a large smoothly rounded stone
* an antiquated term for a large round rock sticking up from the surface of a logging road, used by loggers and log truck drivers in the Pacific Northwest
* an old U.S. Navy term for a small winch, a Capstan
* a coal miner’s term for blackish iron disulfide nodular rock occurring at the top of the coal seams, often visible in coal mine roofs. Because of their density, they can fall from the roofs, injuring or killing the miners below
* an archaic term for the striking weight on a pile driver
* a term for a steam manifold, fountain, turret or header on a boiler, particularly that of a locomotive
------------
The rock in question at the Perry Hunting Camp was painted and turned over soon after Rick objected to it. That term goes back hundreds of years.
For Cain to pick up on a drive-ny media story and run with it shows the man likes to play fast & loose with the facts. Someone like this cannot be trusted with the Presidency or any position in Federal government. And that is the thanks Rick Perry gets from Herman Cain, the only candidate who was considering him for VP!
You see, racism was actually so prevalent that we entered into a realm of post-racial racism, and to pretend that this racism was actually racial is so racist that fuck it I'm gonna go watch Do The Right Thing. The common use of a racial slur to describe things that just happen to be the same color as the group of people being slurred is proof that nothing racial was meant at all. Coal miners didn't play the race card with each other, so why should we?
Herman Cain will, ultimately, end up being the most tragic figure of this election cycle. He has the burden of being the GOP's Great Black Hope, but failed his first major test. He's black - dark black, even - and Southern, a little bit folksy and a little bit preachery. And for months, he's been running without ever mentioning his race or the GOP's problems with minorities. It was perfect, because not pointing out the problems is the equivalent of admitting they don't exist. By entering, however tentatively, into the realm of race, Cain's broken the illusion that nothing's wrong. That illusion, by and large, was the main expectation on him and the primary benefit he brought to this election cycle.
That Cain decided to state the obvious is, honestly, a credit to him. The smart money was in attacking the Washington Post as a liberal smear rag and then going on to call two-thirds of black people "brainwashed" by Democratic slave masters (which he did anyway). By opening his mouth and speaking the truth, Cain likely destroyed any chance he had of winning the GOP nomination. But for a brief moment, someone in the Republican Party stopped lying about race. That's the boldest thing anyone has done in this field of candidates by far.
If you haven't seen this video yet, it's truly worth the next two minutes of your time.
It's particularly aggravating to me when politicians from Texas bash immigrants, because the state culture owes so much to the contributions of much-vilified immigrants. Going right back to the early days of Texas when central Texas was built up largely by German immigrants who were despised and vilified by what was basically the Tea Party of the time to now, when Mexican immigrants add so much culturally and economically and are shit on by our conservatives.
Needless to say, the reason that the creators of Superman made him an undocumented immigrant who struggles to find his place in the American dream is that they themselves were the children of immigrants, and that was in fact their families' dreams.
Digby is skeptical about Karl Rove all of a sudden singing "Kumbaya", going on Fox News and denouncing the Christian right, saying we're not a "Christian nation", because we're a nation that has Jews, Muslims, and non-believers (and others, I'll add). Digby's take is that Rove is being a pure anti-Perry political operative:
I'm not saying that, by the way, because Mormonism is "weird" or that it's not Christian. I'm saying it because Rove is indirectly appealing to Republicans who are not members of the Christian Right Tea Party to come out and vote for the one guy who isn't speaking in tongues on the campaign trail. Rove would not say this out of turn.
I'm also guessing that there's quite a bit of bad Texas blood at play here between the Bushes and Rick Perry. (He went after Perry for his remark about Bernanke and he could have easily swept it under the rug.)
I think that's an accurate guess. Perry takes constant potshots at Bush, often in terms that aren't necessarily that obvious to people who don't speak "resentful conservative" or Texan. If you're from Texas, it really adds a layer to this sniping of Perry's:
Rick Perry on how he is different from former President Bush, a fellow Texan: "You know, they’re not all carbon copies in Texas. I tell people – I say one of the quick you can tell the difference is that he’s a Yale graduate; I’m a Texas A&M graduate.
On the Slate political podcast, Perry was described as going to a "land grant university", which really undersells how extremely redneck A&M is. Let me put it this way: in Austin, it's occasional said that you spot Aggies visiting from out of town because they have jaw problems that lead them to catch flies. Perry might as well have said that Bush isn't a real Texan, since that's the implication here.
Anyway, Karl Rove is an atheist, so maybe he's actually speaking for himself for once. But he's the one who really pumped up the religious right in order to get votes for Bush, and so this is the bed he's made, and he should sleep in it.
Jeff at Alas, A Blog blogged about this irritating, smug idiocy from Firedoglake's Janet Rhodes, who blogs about how she is completely willing to destroy this country in order to punish Barack Obama for not running the debt ceiling discussions in the way she believes he should have. She claims to have told a representative from the DNC that she's so mad at Obama for "caving" that she'll be voting for the Republican in November, even if that Republican is Michele Bachmann.
Now, I personallly have little patience for people trying to prove how hard they are generally speaking, and especially when said people are highly privileged liberals preening like they're tough because they'll "punish" the Democrats with their precious, precious votes---didn't you know their votes count five times as much as yours? Well, they should anyway. The belief that the choice is to do things 100% your way or to give up altogether is what drives the Tea Party, which is why Rhodes has functionally become a Tea Partier, who will give the resentment vote to whatever asshole the GOP runs. I'm not going to argue the relative merits of Obama over fucking Bachmann, or Perry, or Romney. That just creates more opportunity for idiots and assholes to preen about how they're lefter-than-thou, so left that they're willing to destroy this country in order to make a point about how superior they are to everyone else.
Instead I'm going to talk about the illusion of control, which also feeds this ridiculousness. The illusion of control is the belief that you (or one of your allies) personally has the power to make everything go your way, and having complete control of the eventual outcome is just a matter of making the right move. In this case, Rhodes has convinced herself we can elect Republicans until Democrats, chastised for being too conservative, start acting right, even though the whole of history tells us that Democrats look at Republicans winning elections and think, "What I need to do is move to the right, because that's where winning happens." But in reality, you don't have control. You have power and you have influence and you have hard work, and these can affect outcomes, but some times shit is out of your control. Refusing to believe this can drive a person around the bend, as demonstrated by Rhodes, as they become increasingly irrational, looking for that magic bullet that's going to make everyone else start behaving the way they want them to. If you let go of the illusion that you can, if you play your cards right, determine the outcome with certainty, you can actually be more effective. You can shift your attention from trying to control the outcome to trying to exert influence and accumulate power. But in order to do this, you must be willing to lose.
I would recommend a little memento mori to rid yourself of this toxic illusion of control. if you start thinking, "If I could just make him realize how mad I am at him, Obama would suddenly turn into a superhero who could get Republicans who literally believe he's Satan to cow before his mighty powers and his newly invigorated progressive agenda," it's time to step down, and think about the fact that one day, you will be dead. Not just in the abstract---I recommend thinking about how your death will come with a lot of suffering. Most of us don't just get to pass away gently in our sleep. You might be crushed in a car accident or come down with cancer that causes you to be so mangled by pain that death starts to look like sweet release. Now that you've pictured one of the many horrible possibilities that is the end of your life, remind yourself there's nothing you can do to stop it. You can take measures minimizing how bad it's going to be: you can eat right and wear a seatbelt and go to the doctor regularly. But one day, crushing pain will overcome you, your heart will stop, your bowels will release, and the people who loved you will be torn with grief. And there's nothing---nothing---you can do to change that outcome.
If that doesn't work, then I recommend you thinking about how the human race will eventually die out, and at best, we can delay this outcome, but one way or another, all species go extinct eventually, and that also means our species. And there's nothing you can do to stop it. Influence it, sure. Accumulate power that will increase your influence, sure. But control it? Nope.
I find this personally allows me to let go of the illusion that the only thing between me and the way I wish things would be is taking the right measures. If you're going to lose the same battle with death that everyone else loses, then it makes it a lot easier to grasp that the reason that government isn't working the way you wish, it's because there are too many factors in play to give you control. And that you cannot gain that control by preening like you're so hard core you're willing to vote for the Republican rather than allow a Democrat to make decisions that you disagree with, especially when it's based in having knowledge you may not have.
I'm personally becoming more convinced every day that our political culture is so toxic in this country because suffering from the illusion of control. I notice, too, that people who fall into illusion-of-control thinking---the Nader constiuency on the left, the Tea Party on the right---tend to have relatively high levels of privilege. I'm not "calling out" their privilege, which is a useless exercise in guilt-tripping to no avail. It's more that I think people who are used to things working out for them get easily frustrated in politics, where almost nothing ever goes completely your way, because there's so many groups of people with different agendas influencing the outcome. The notion that there's some way to just get your way in a hot hurry is widespread on the left and the right.
*It's created the Tea Party, people who are sincerely convinced that being big enough assholes will somehow make the country go back to being completely controlled by white Christians, preferably conservative ones.
*Many of the more irritating tendencies on the left also go back to this. For instance,the belief that changing the language around a concept will have a dramatic effect on meaning, even though, for instance, replacing "liberal" with "progressive" simply made right wingers start bashing progressives like they did liberals.
*God knows on the right you see this with sex. One reason the culture wars are so out of hand is that right wingers just continue to insist that by withdrawing education and access, you can actually bring an end to fucking for pleasure. Talk about illusion of control!
*It also causes liberal tendencies to misread who the Tea Party is. No matter how much evidence you pile up to show that Tea Partiers tend to be wealthier than average Americans, liberals continue on portraying them as economically stressed people. The reason is that it feeds the illusion of control---if Tea Partiers are under-privileged somehow, then we can write off their anger as an irrational response to real stress. And that therefore the removal of that stress will shut them up and get this country back on track. But if we look at the facts, we realize these people aren't being driven to be douchebags, but that's their natural state. And we have to accept that there's nothing we can actually do to change their minds or shut them up, and that therefore the possibility remains that we can lose.
I could go on, but this post is getting long enough. I just want to point out that the illusion of control ironically diminishes your power in the world. Time spent chasing phantoms is time not spent doing the hard work of trying to exert influence. I realize that working with the ultimate understanding that you can easily fail no matter what you do can be demoralizing. The cure for that is, in my experience, to give yourself permission to enjoy small victories even if they fall short of perfection. So, for instance, someone who has relinquished the illusion of control can look at the HHS requiring full coverage of contraception and say, "Hurrah! We got one!" And someone who is still stuck in the illusion of control says, "Sure, that's good, but the Christian right is still out there and as long as we haven't wiped them out completely, it's not time to break out the champagne." The latter person no doubt styles themselves as a cynic and a hardcore progressive, but in reality, they are someone who retains the illusion that perfection is achievable, and that therefore being happy with "good" is selling out. They, in other words, are an idealist trapped in the illusion of control, and their inability to accept incremental victories is demoralizing to the people around them who are willing to fight through many losses and enjoy even minor victories. Meanwhile, the person who allows themselves to feel good about achieving something, even if it fell short of perfection, is someone who can get up the next day and fight for the next incremental change.
There's so much to comment on from this clip, but what really struck me about this report on Boehner's visible loss of control over the Tea Party idiots in his party is that the teabaggers, as an act of aggression against him, started praying. Being from Texas, I'm really familiar with praying as a form of passive aggressive emotional warfare, but even I was mildly surprised to see a bunch of grown men doing it to other grown men who they claim to be on the same team as. As a psychological weapon, it's really grown past the pinched mouth "i'll pray for you" disapprovals I grew up witnessing.
I think this whole situation should put to rest all the hand-wringing about what the "Tea Party" is. Whatever diverse shit people are saying on the ground, people who are taking leadership roles are religious fanatics with very small minds who would rather burn this country down to the ground rather than share power with the kind of folks who would vote for Barack Obama. Or, to put it another way, the teabagger relationship to the country is like a wife-beater to his wife: what they call "love" is actually a desire to exert control and complete ownership. And now the wife-country has run off with a handsome and charming black man.
Of course they're going to pull the trigger.
The religious fanaticism angle is fascinating to me, and I think goes a long way towards explaining why the Tea Party types are going to tank any deal. Basically, once you start saying that god is telling you what to do, what you mean is you're making 100% of your decisions based on knee-jerk emotions. And not just any emotions, but fundamentalist Christian ones---i.e. paranoia, grandiosity, etc. A lot of these folks probably believe Obama is the Antichrist. But even if they don't, they definitely believe that anyone who isn't their version of right wing conservative is in thrall to Satan. What this makes them is impervious to reason. That's why I think they really, seriously do believe that Obama, Boehner, the pundits, etc. are lying when they say the shit hits the fan if we don't raise the debt celing. That is, in the fundie eye, a lie fueled by Satan to keep this country away from the path of the Lord. Everything the demonized mainstream media and the Democrats say is, in their view.
This is what religious fanaticism does to the body politic. I think a lot of people have, for a long time, imagined that the fundie right wasn't that big a deal, because hey, they just want to ban abortion and gay rights, right? As long as people considered these second tier issues, the fundies could grow their power unchecked. The mainstream Republican party thought they could use the Bible thumpers to get a caucus together, throw them some abortion bones, and then use their warm bodies to get votes for the stuff Wall Street really cares about. But what they've found is they've created a monster.
So, I posted earlier today about what jackass crazy fuckwits run the Republican party and that's why we're in this current crisis, I suppose the inevitable thing happened in comments: I got scolded about my priorities. Apparently, I'm supposed to be focusing like a laser on how Obama is actually a double agent for the GOP and this was his evil plan all along to gut important social programs. Okay. I can actually sympathize with that point of view, since I remember being a newly minted lefist in college and feeling the allure of "rah rah Nader, Bush and Gore are no different". It was a fairly useless point of view, but it made me feel self-righteous, and at 21, that felt really fucking good. Now I'm older and tired and I look back at Clinton and realize I was being unfair, because while he's far from perfect, suggesting he was the problem is like having cancer and suggesting your hair falling out is your major problem. I was thoroughly cured by 8 years of Bush of this kind of thinking, and am mildly surprised to see how quickly everyone forgot about all that.
Either way, I reject the notion that the complete batshit craziness of the Republicans is merely a distraction from the Real Problem that our who-knew dictator Obama isn't so benevolent. For one thing, I seriously don't think he has as much power, due to the constitutional republic thing, as his angry critics are attributing to him and therefore the theory that he's selling the farm in a desperate bid to stop the crazies from driving this country over the cliff remains a persuasive theory. But more importantly, I don't think it matters.
Yes, I'm saying it right here: whether Obama is a secret Republican or whether he's a well-meaning Democrat who is simply being blackmailed is irrelevant. The problem, either way, is Republicans.
Let's look at the competing theories to see what I mean.
Theory #1: Benevolent Obama Theory.
This theory holds that Obama is a moderate Democrat who, while made uncomfortable by deficits (which isn't unreasonable, per se, but should be a secondary concern in an economic crisis) , still believes in a more liberal economic theory when it comes to recessions, due to the fact that history proves those theories correct. In this theory, he's offering deep cuts to beloved and necessary programs because the Republicans are holding the very state of the world economy hostage, willing to plunge us into a Depression if he doesn't start giving away the farm.
The problem: Well, basically the Republicans. If it wasn't for the batshit crazy Republicans willing to destroy our economy to get their way, none of this would be happening.
Theory #2: Evil Obama Theory.
This theory holds that Obama passed himself off as a moderate Democrat to get elected, but is in fact a secret conservative who has been aching for a chance to destroy Social Security, amongst other programs. I found this theory a little confusing at first, because it seemed to me that his secret plan would have been easier to enact when he had a majority party in Congress, so I asked around on Twitter, and this is the explanation I got: he couldn't destroy Social Security then, because there's enough liberals in the Democratic Party that they could have stopped him. It was only after Republicans got control of the House and went crazy that he had enough cover to do what he always hoped he could do.
The problem: Well, basically the Republicans. If the batshit crazy Republicans weren't there giving secretly conservative Obama cover, none of this would be happening.
So, from my point of view, no matter what evil or non-evil lurks in Obama's heart, the problem is that this country keeps electing frothing-at-the-mouth crazy Republicans, and if voters would stop doing that, we wouldn't be having one politically provoked crisis after another. Sure, if Obama is a secret conservative, that is a problem. But we can't actually know that. But what we do know for a fact is that no matter what lurks in Obama's hearts, none of this would be happening if Republicans didn't win the House. So I think that my priorities are just fine, thank you very much.
And because I'm going to be accused of being a partisan shill for Obama, I just want to say that I'm really not. If he's a secret conservative, that concerns me greatly. But even if he's not, I do think he's failed repeatedly to present his best game in negotiations with Republicans. But at the end of the day, I'm unconvinced that the greatest negotiator on the planet could beat people who are willing to pull the trigger on the entire world economy.
Also, I'm just generally trying to let go of the intoxicating illusion of control. Quick fix solutions that will roll back decades of this country moving to the right appeal to that illusion, but don't actually do much good. So I'm trying to let go of that and start thinking more broadly about what good can actually be done with the tools that are actually at hand, with the full realization that some times, the bad guys do win.
Increasing numbers of Republicans are making it clear that they think that concerns about the U.S. going into default on August 2nd are just a hoax being played on the public in order to convince Congress to borrow more money to pay for abortion parties and caviar for welfare recipients. I was deeply alarmed by how widespread this narrative is getting, according to Rachel Maddow's coverage.
It's hard to single out the most moronic Republican moron in all this, but I think MVP in the Stupid Olympics should go to Louie Gohmert, one of the many representatives in Congress whose sole purpose in life is to make those of us from Texas wonder when the state turned into Oklahoma. Gohmert's reaction to all this is, well, special.
"[W]e find out the president has a big birthday bash scheduled for August the 3rd, celebrities flying in from all over," Gohmert told Newsmax TV yesterday. "And lo and behold, August 2nd is the deadline for getting something done so he can have this massive, the biggest fundraising dinner in history for a birthday celebration." That's right: This whole "idiot Republicans are taking the world economy to the brink of financial ruin" ferrago is just a way for Obama to raise money... from celebrities. "Isn't that amazing?" Gohmert wonders. "The timing of this?"
Let's think about what Gohmert is saying about the President by saying this. First of all, he's claiming the President is stupid and doesn't understand the economics of this. Second, he's claiming the President is deceitful, a casual liar who will bring the nation to a crisis situation with his casual inability to ever speak the truth. (Sounds like projection to me.) But most of all, Gohmert is portraying the President as an irresponsible, self-indulgent layabout who tricked the public into electing him so he could have big parties on the government dime. That move right there is out of the ex-Confederate-responding-to-the-Reconstruction playbook. Remember, Republican expressions of blatant idiocy, misogyny, and racism are like cockroaches: for every one you see out in public, there are hundreds, even thousands behind closed doors.
In all the coverage over this, I think one thing that's really being neglected is how much of what's motivating Republicans is culture war. There's a tendency to think this is only about slashing taxes for the rich and pushing the have-nots deeper into economic deprivation, but there's more than that going on. (As if that wasn't enough, I know.) The voices of sense continue to point out that if we default on our loans, this will cause economic collapse, and we wonder if Republicans really are being serious when they act cavalier about raining destruction on the country they claim to love. And the answer is yes. It's clear their "love" of their country is similar to the love a man has for the wife he murders for leaving him. As I noted before, the belief appears to be that if they---they being white Christian conservatives---can't have complete control of the U.S., then the U.S. as we know it doesn't deserve to exist.
"If I can't have you, no one can!" seems to be the mantra of Republicans with regards to this country. I think everything about this debt ceiling debacle can be understood in those terms---if Real Americans® have to share power with the pointy-heads, black people, gays and lesbians, Mexican immigrants and their families, feminists, Muslims, and hippies who run organic food stores, well, they're not going to do it. Teabaggers are always talking about a revolution; did we honestly think that it wouldn't matter that they believe that it would be better to burn the country to the ground than to share it? What's nice about this debt ceiling debate---whether they force the U.S. to default on its loans or whether they just get a deal that's so terrible it functionally destroys the economy for at least a generation---is that they get their revolution without having to marshal an army of elderly Glenn Beck fans waving guns and screaming about how Thomas Paine was a creationist. I want to offer a novel interpretation of teabagger nonsense. When they insinuate they'd rather be the complete rulers of a shitpile than share power over the greatest nation on the planet, believe them. That appears to be exactly what they mean.
It's worth remembering how much of an existential crisis white, Christian conservative America is feeling. The writing is on the wall; they are losing numbers. I realize it's beating a dead horse to some people to remind everyone that this country has gotten so far past their way of viewing the world that we elected a black President, but the election of Obama is the primal scene from which everything else follows. You can sense that the nation is changing in the little ways: More women in leadership positions, gay couples having big weddings and inviting their entire families, there being black professors at Harvard for the cops to harass, decent Mexican food joints opening up in the Midwest. But electing a black President basically proves everything you were worried about, if you're a teabagger, is happening on a large scale. And right now, the only thing they can see that will turn the boat around is burning the place to the ground. They sense that their opportunity to tear this country to pieces is limited and that their hold on power might permanently slip out of their hands in response to demographic changes, and so there's a sense of immediacy that just feeds their panic.
You can see this attitude in more than the debt ceiling fight. God knows it's what's compelling the "kill Planned Parenthood" frenzy. It's also feeding a surge in passing legislation that openly defies the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both in letter and in spirit. The idea is to disempower the groups that threaten them the most and ideally, to keep enough of them from voting or organizing as to artificially depress the effects of these demographic changes. Poor women on Medicaid marshalling around an extra child or two they don't want aren't really in a position to fight the power, or at least, not as much as they could be if they weren't so burdened.
But destroying the economy is just pure rage and hate, I suspect. And, at the end of the day, Republicans don't see it as something that's going to hurt them that badly. The housing bubble bursting was something the rich recovered from and then got a bonus---the gap between them and everyone else grew dramatically. The sickest part of all this is that they don't even have to personally pay any price for their revolution. Most revolutionaries have to sleep in tents, suffer illness and injury, face arrest, and see their comrades get killed. They just get to see the gap between the rich and everyone else grow larger.
I'm somewhat reluctant to feed the beast on this. Every story based around "Michele Bachmann doesn't know her history/the meaning of words/how to work door knobs!" is a story where we're not talking about how Michele Bachmann is a fire-breathing Bible thumper who can't wait for her husband to have a handmaid of his own so they can keep having babies. While I think folks like Matt Taibbi overrate the damage of making fun of Bachmann for being stupid---yes, it makes stupid people like her more, but it does help her lose support amongst those who still have functioning brain cells, which was why Sarah Palin so dramatically damaged John McCain's campaign----mixing some other narratives (Iranian-style theocracy supporter comes to mind) into the mix will help hurt her chances even more.
Anyway, despite all this, I want to point out that Bachmann is pulling a Palin, i.e. when she got history wrong, her supporters (with her blessing) decided to rewrite history rather than let Dear Leader be wrong. "We've always been at war with Eurasia" is no longer hyperbole! Her supporters changed John Wayne's birthplace on Wikipedia in order to bring it in line with her erroneous statements, which I found especially amusing, because I'd bet a large sum of money that whoever did that believes that Obama faked his birth certificate to become President. And now her supporters are claiming that John Quincy Adams was a "Founding Father", even though he was a small child when the Declaration of Independence was signed.
The reason they're doing this goes back to---as it often does with this crew---this nation's ugly history of racism and their inability to deal with it that stems from their role as people who are continuing it. Bachmann was trying to find a way to justify her ridiculous claim that the Founding Fathers "fought tirelessly" to end slavery, and what she happened upon was to put all that statement on one guy who wasn't actually a Founding Father, though he was the son of one.
By this line of argument, I'm going to say that the citizens of West Texas in the 1970s work tirelessly to keep my cats' water bowl full in the summer. Hey, if your parents and all the people around them get to take credit for the work you do, then the possibilities are endless. As are the Wikipedia rewrites.
I think at this point it's worth pre-locking certain Wikipedia pages every time a Republican says something blatantly wrong on the topic. Clearly, shame isn't going to prevent the volunteer propagandists from rewriting history, but access could stop them.
Also, with regards to the manufactured flap over the word "flake", I will say this: probably in the future it would be wise, when using accurate descriptors for Michele Bachmann, stick to ones that tend to be used mostly or only to describe men. "Flake" is applied to men and women, which is enough for the wingnuts to round that up to "sexist", since they don't actually give a flying fuck about real sexism. I recommend "lunkhead" and "asshole" for future use.
Matt Taibbi has an excellent profile up about Michele Bachmann, and why she's no laughing matter (not that this has ever stopped me). It's tempting to quote it at length, but then that would imply I had just the best parts, and really you should read the whole thing. Just read it for the part where Taibbi describes Bachmann fancying herself a spy and hiding in the bushes at a gay rights rally.
But I will quote a couple of relevant parts:
Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies......
Given how Bachmann's stature rises every time she does something we laugh at, it's no wonder she's set her strangely unfocused eyes on the White House. Since arriving in Congress, she has been a human tabloid-copy machine, spouting one copy-worthy lunacy after another. She launched a fierce campaign against compact fluorescent lights, claiming that the energy-saving bulbs contain mercury and pose a "very real threat to children, disabled people, pets, senior citizens." She blasted the 2010 census as a government plot and told people not to comply because the U.S. Constitution doesn't require citizens to participate, when in fact it does. She told her constituents to be "armed and dangerous" in their resistance to cap-and-trade limits on climate-warming pollution. She insisted that Obama's trip to India cost taxpayers $200 million a day, and claimed that Nancy Pelosi had spent $100,000 on booze on state-paid flights aboard military jets.
She has a real knack for self-mythologizing that far exceeds Sarah Palin's, as well. I think it's because she hasn't ever really tried to put some air between herself and the Bible-thumping shit, but Palin has her eye on mainstream fame and that tends to compromise her. You can't be stitching crosses onto Bristol's "Dancing With The Stars" costumes, you know. As I noted yesterday at Double X, Bachmann has at least half a dozen origin stories, which are manipulated to suit different audiences. Taibbi discovered a few more. I blamed evangelical culture for it, because it's a culture that encourages repeated "conversions" and other blatant lies in order to heighten emotion; I'm sure they justify it as a "higher truth" sort of thing. But I'm stubbornly stuck on that "real truth comes first" thing myself.
Anyway, the one quarrel I have with Taibbi is he believes Bachmann's appeal is strictly towards the overtly religious fanatics, or at least the people who still think the commies put mind control substances in the drinking water. I think there's a possibility that she pulls in some of the cultural resentment vote, too. It's that light bulbs thing. When I first heard Bachmann screeching about the evils of fluorescent light bulbs, I thought, "That there is the stupidest thing I've ever heard." And it is! I think it's the combination of paranoia plus resentment plus the smallness of it---we're in two wars and the economy is in tatters, but Republicans like her and Rand Paul can't get over the fact that their light bulbs are twisty now, like some kind of queer weirdo hippie light bulbs.
But what I've since found is pretty much every conservative in the country, whether they're a social conservative or a get-off-my-lawn-and-go-to-jail-hippie conservative (or some combination), is full blown pissed off about those fucking light bulbs. The theme that unites right wing populists is that they all imagine themselves to be mini-Attila the Huns, and their god-given right as Americans is to suck up resources and lay waste to the planet, just to show that they're the kings of the world. Which goes a long way to explaining the surge of purchases of gas guzzlers during the early days of the war. The signal was, "Hey, we should poach other country's resources so my car can be the size of a house. This will make us feel powerful, and will go a long way towards making up for the fact that we can't, as a nation, cross a parking lot without wheezing or remember the last time we had mind-blowing sex." Just a guess, anyway. But Bachmann really appeals to that.
Plus, while she's scary and has a past of doing shit like obsessing over gay people so much she gazes at them from behind bushes, she's really learned some poise in the past few years. At Right Online, she was glitter-bombed, and she reacted in the most smooth, appropriate way possible.
She walked right through it and acted like it didn't happen. That's basically the best and only way to deal with this, is to treat it like the harmless prank it basically is. The way not to react is to make like Mike Huckabee and act like the gays are raping you with their glitter. You can just imagine what would happen if Sarah Palin got glitter bombed: a five week freak out across Twitter and Facebook where she accused LGBT radicals of stealing her children with their glittery weapons of mass destruction.
But Bachmann? She's acting like someone who's got this. We should be scared.
Before the gap between the tedious shit onscreen and my need to get actual work done before Netroots Nation, I noticed that a handful of candidates---especially Michele Bachmann---were playing the Youstabee card, i.e. I or others used to be Democrats, then we saw the light and changed sides. To hear some of the Republicans talk, upwards of 95% of Republican voters pulled the lever for Carter, Clinton, or even Obama, but now are chagrined and ready for redemption through the destruction of Medicare. I found it interesting, because the Youstabee thing, well, used to be a lot more popular on the right but it's faded in recent years and a lot of people who were play-acting like they had liberal sympathies until some trial by fire put them on the Republican path just gave up on it. Now it's come back with a vengenance; it's clearly the trend with Republican campaign consultants. The people in the audience seemed to be eating it up, too. My favorite part was when Bachmann implied that the Tea Party is mostly made up of Democrats and independents who converted. In fact, 66% are Republicans, and the rest are probably lying to pollsters about it because they're invested in the conversion story narrative.
I've never completely wrapped my mind around why the conversion story is so important to Republicans, especially conservative Republicans. I mean, on one hand, everyone likes a convert to their cause. There are certainly outspoken Democrats who used to be Republicans, including Arianna Huffington, David Brock, and well, myself. And Charles Johnson and John Cole, too. But on the whole, most of us decline to trumpet the fact that we were persuaded and changed our minds. David Brock is the exception, but he was such a rat when he was a Republican that only a very public atonement would even begin to get people to trust him. I'm sure many of you are surprised that I ever considered myself a Republican, because I don't talk about it. That's for two reasons. One, I was really young and stupid and like most people was just following in my parents' footsteps, and the period didn't even last that long because the incongruity between who I am and what Republicans stand for was far too great, which means I don't really consider that period of my life to be one that counts in any meaningful way. I converted in time to vote against Bush for Texas governor in his second term. I may have been a virgin longer than I was a Republican, though I can't remember for sure. The second reason is that it's shameful. It makes me cringe to think that I even considered the possibility that Republicans made sense, though to my credit, they still let reasonably sensible people in the party back in the 90s.
The other big difference between people who converted left and those who converted right is that the former group doesn't have a bunch of pretenders in it. Statistically, it's impossible for there to be as many Youstabees in the Republican party as people claim. Social science has amply demonstrated that party switching isn't really that common. People who are actually persuaded by the evidence are really rare (and tend to move from right to left anyway). Most people pick a party affiliation and then rationalize their choice. The number one predictor of your party affiliation is your parents.
So why does the belief that their ranks are full of people who used to be Democrats have so much sway over Republicans? I think part of it is that conversion actually did play a big role in shaping the modern Republican party. The one exception to the "people generally don't switch" rule is when the Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act and racist white voters in the South stampeded to the Republican party in protest. Without that, they wouldn't really have much of a party, so I think there'a lingering sense that they need to replenish their ranks with people who might have Democratic inclinations, but who, at the end of the day, choose their bigotry over common sense. But I don't think that's really true; the question was never, for bigots, a matter of their bigotry vs. their other concerns. It was always what party was welcoming to bigots, and up through the 50s, the answer was "both". When that stopped being true, they flocked to the Republican party, and that's basically become their brand.
I think another part of it is that there's a lot of Baby Boomers in the Republican party who are envious of their hipper, more liberal Boomer brethern. They've never gotten over the fact that it was the more liberal, hippie cohort of their generation who "won" the 60s. The Boomers that people think of when they think of that era weren't the Haley Barbour and George Bush sorts, jocks and rednecks lurching around in pick-up trucks threatening to beat up hippies and civil rights activists. The people who are the icons of the era were the people who rioted at the '68 Democratic convention and went to Woodstock. By pretending that the modern Republican party is a bunch of converts, the unhip Boomers who make up a large percentage of the party can pretend they were right there with the hippies, and totally cool too! They had Beatles records, that counts, right? But let's face it. It doesn't.
I also think that the association of Republicanism with bigotry and small-minded stupidity has a lot to do with the allure of the conversion story. There are definitely Democrats who play the "I'm a progressive, not a Democrat" card, but it's not really that big a thing. There's a huge amount of psychological energy on the Republican side in trying to distance themselves from their images as small-minded bigots. One strategy is declaring yourself a "libertarian". (Ron Paul clearly not knowing what either a Blackberry or an iPhone is probably was another nail in the coffin for using "libertarian" to try to pass yourself off as a hip Republican.) Calling yourself the Tea Party is a new version of this, though it's definitely of a more populist and less trying-to-be-hip flavor. And then you have the conversion story. If you claim you used to be a Democrat, but then saw the light, you're basically claiming (falsely in many cases) that you actually considered liberal arguments seriously, but decided the President is a secret Muslim anyway.
Of course, needless to say, there's an evangelical Christianity component to all this as well. If you read a lot of evangelical writing, you'll find that like half of them used to be Satan worshipping drug addicts who spent their weekends at orgies, but now Jesus is their savior. Conversion is a language that evangelicals speak fluently, and it's spread to the rest of the Republican party.
Jesse, I'm with you on the idea that Cain's popularity is inexplicable, mostly because the man has no name recognition. But his speech where he announces his run for President explains so much:
He ends the speech---no joke---by saying, "Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, this nation is free at last again." You know, quoting the only MLK speech your average Tea Partier has passing familiarity with.
You know, even setting race aside, since I think most people can figure what's going on there without me having to spell it out, what's clear here is that Cain is a genius at refighting the 60s. And that, more than anything compels the teabaggers. It's sort of the purest version of sticking it to the liberals. The national historical consensus on the 60s is that liberals were right. We were right about civil rights, we were right about women's rights, we were right about the war. And they've never gotten over that. Three quarters of conservative energy probably goes to trying to get around this problem. Even though most conservatives would be wailing about MLK is a communist agent if this were the 60s, they love to pretend that they would have somehow supported him.
To me, the most telling thing about the teabaggers was how many Woodstock references got thrown around during the heyday of their protests. I'm embarrassed for them, because it's basically a gathering of the terminally unhip angrily pouting that they're cool, too. There is basically nothing more embarrassing than people protesting too much in this way. There's a strong streak of me-too in the American psyche, and god knows liberals aren't above it, as the flamewars that erupt here when I dare suggest, say, that Lou Reed might be cooler than Bob Seger. But wingnuts get completely out of control on it. They know the 60s was a heyday for liberals, and even though they oppose that, they want a piece of it because god forbid they don't own everything.
Cain shamelessly panders to that urge. He allows conservatives to feel the thrill of MLK's soaring rhetoric without having to do anything like support MLK's actual views. He tells them that they're right to do this, because they're the one who are actually oppressed. I'm sure he's happy to throw in hand jobs while he's at it.
Even though the conventional wisdom right now is that Tim Pawlenty is too much of a snooze to really win the Republican nomination, I'm still putting my money on him. Being an iron butt goes a long way in Republican politics, for one thing, but the reason that he'll beat out the wild-eyed Bible thumpers and people you suspect tortured animals as children is that, believe it or not, people who still consider themselves moderate Republicans vote in presidential primaries. And they're going to be enough to kill off Palin, Gingrich or whatever other nutters have passed my mind. Pawlenty will win by being the last man standing. He's both not hated by more moderate Republicans and not hated by the fundies. If anyone has any suggestions on where I could bet on this, I would appreciate it because I like winning.
But what about Mitt Romney?!, you may ask. Well, maybe. But I wouldn't bet the house payment on him. First of all, while I doubt he tortured animals as a child, he is on record as a grown-up Fido abuser. He should call Michael Vick and ask him how well that works out for someone trying to stay in the public's good graces.
But more than that, Mitt Romney is a Mormon and a bunch of conservatives think he has liberal inclinations. That's going to kill him with the evangelicals. There's already a lack of trust for Mormons that Glenn Beck didn't do nearly enough to resolve. But I'm thinking the fears that he's a secret liberal are going to matter even more. First of all, Romney has flip-flopped on abortion, moving from pro-choice to anti-choice as soon as he wanted to be taken seriously for national office. This isn't, in and of itself, a problem. In fact, I'd point out that evangelical Christianity actually gives bonus points to converts to the heavy-duty misogyny cause. But if you convert, it had to look like a conversion, preferably with tears and speaking in tongues and stories of how you were lost but now you're found and all that other crap. This is what it looks like for Romney:
M. ROMNEY: Well, Ronald Reagan was also pro-choice and then became pro-life. And George Herbert Walker Bush was pro-choice and became pro-life. And they became pro-life as they took the responsibility of — of leading. And — and in that circumstance, they recognized that they…
MORGAN: How many times –
M. ROMNEY: — they did not — they could not simply sign up for — for the taking of unborn life.
He might as well say, "I don't give a fuck either way, but this is what I need to do to get elected. And you owe it to me, because you let other politicians get away with it." That doesn't really sell it, even to people who really want to believe. Not when they have alternatives like Pawlenty, who actually does seem like a member in good standing of the Christian right.
MORGAN: Do you personally think homosexuality is a sin?
ROMNEY: Nice try, but I’m not going to get into –
MORGAN: That’s a valid question, isn’t it?
ROMNEY: It’s a valid question and my answer is nice try.
In fact, Romney is really adamant that one shouldn't govern based on religious dogma. Which I can't really admire, since like everything else the man stands for, it's completely self-serving. He's Mormon and so wants to wrap himself up in Kennedy's defense of his Catholicism in the 1960 election in order to make his Mormonism a non-issue. I mean, I agree with him that we shouldn't automatically assume someone's faith will dictate their governance, but I also think if his Mormonism worked in his favor with Republican voters, he'd be screaming about letting god decide our laws right along with them.
This kind of question-dodging might work on a lot of Republican primary voters, whose main motivating desire is to stick it to the liberals, and so whenever they see a politician get prickly with a journalist (and unless it's Fox, they're all assumed to be liberals), they usually like it. But with Romney, dodging the sin question is just going to reinforce existing concerns that he's not One of Them. And being One of Them is the number one most important thing to the Republican base. For the religious right, the fact that you personally believe anything is a sin is reason enough to want the government to get involved. Their entire reason for existing is to break down the difference between "what my personal religion teaches me" and "what should be the law of the land that everyone has to adhere to, even if they have drastically different religious beliefs than mine". Forget the "daughter test". The "Jesus test" has been a right wing staple for decades now.
Seriously. In our post-Weinergate era where we're letting it all hang out, I will admit I enjoy a spot of gambling on occasion. So if anyone has recs on where I can put some money on Pawlenty for the GOP nomination, I'd be much obliged.
So, I posted 
"If I can't have you, no one can!" seems to be the mantra of Republicans with regards to this country. I think everything about 
Before the gap between the tedious shit onscreen and my need to get actual work done before Netroots Nation, I noticed that a handful of candidates---especially Michele Bachmann---were playing the Youstabee card, i.e. I or others used to be Democrats, then we saw the light and changed sides. To hear some of the Republicans talk, upwards of 95% of Republican voters pulled the lever for Carter, Clinton, or even Obama, but now are chagrined and ready for redemption through the destruction of Medicare. I found it interesting, because 
Even though the conventional wisdom right now is that Tim Pawlenty is too much of a snooze to really win the Republican nomination, I'm still putting my money on him. Being an iron butt goes a long way in Republican politics, for one thing, but the reason that he'll beat out the wild-eyed Bible thumpers and people you suspect tortured animals as children is that, believe it or not, people who still consider themselves moderate Republicans vote in presidential primaries. And they're going to be enough to kill off Palin, Gingrich or whatever other nutters have passed my mind. Pawlenty will win by being the last man standing. He's both not hated by more moderate Republicans and not hated by the fundies. If anyone has any suggestions on where I could bet on this, I would appreciate it because I like winning.