Month: November 2010

From The Whatabunchacrap Files

by digby

Isaac Chotiner at TNR reports:

Jonah Goldberg, author of the book Liberal Fascism, on C-Span this weekend:

One of the great failures of my book is that it has popularized the use of ‘fascism’ as an epithet. And one of the things I was hoping to do, and I failed miserably, is shut down the use of the word ‘fascist’ as an epithet. Instead it’s become bipartisan. And I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s all that helpful. It might help my books sales, but that’s not what I had hoped to do.

Yeah, wank harder Jonah.

He wrote that book to further a longstanding phony right wing trope — the stupid notion that because the word “socialism” was in the name of the Nazi party, they were obviously left, not right. I’ve heard that nonsense from Birchers and wingnuts for as long as I can remember. You can’t blame them for wanting to distance themselves from Hitler. He’s been quite unpopular ever since oh, 1938 or so by most people. (There were a few American Republicans who thought he was just dandy for quite a bit longer however — quite the embarrassment looking back at it.)

This silly argument about fascism being a leftist ideology was brought into modern discourse by Lil Jonah, who got exactly what he was looking for (besides big bucks):

Ron Radosh of The New York Sun wrote:

“Mr. Goldberg presents a strong and compelling case that the very idea of fascism emanated from the ranks of liberalism. … He has read widely and thoroughly, not only in the primary sources of fascism, but in the political and intellectual history written by the major historians of the subject. …Some will rightfully take issue with Mr. Goldberg when he describes the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton as fascist. On this, he strains and pushes his evidence too far to convince the reader that these paragons of liberalism can be called fascist in any sense of the term. Mr. Goldberg makes a stronger case when he accuses the New Left of classic fascist behavior, when its cadre took to the streets and through action discarded its early idealism for what Mr. Goldberg correctly calls ‘fascist thuggery.'”

Marvin Olasky of World Magazine wrote,

“Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is a flawed but useful attempt to redraw the political map. Goldberg shows how Woodrow Wilson began and Franklin Roosevelt amplified an almost-fascist concentration of power in Washington. FDR boasted of his ‘wholesome and proper’ buildup of power because he was leading ‘a people’s government.’ Goldberg shows how liberals came to believe that authoritarian government is fine as long as representatives of ‘the people’ — themselves — are in charge.”

He is simply full of gaseous nonsense when he says that he was trying to remove “fascism” as an epithet. He was clearly trying to shift the “epithet” from its proper use as a description of a right wing ideology to the fallacious notion that it sprang from the left. Anyone who’s read the book knows that it’s absurd on its face.

But then the banal “both sides do it” refrain is so reflexive among the chattering class these days that I’m not surprised to see it spring from his vacuous mouth. I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually believed it by now.

*For a list of refutations of the book’s silly thesis, click here.

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The Man Who Can Close All The Rifts On The Right

by digby

Right Wing Watch’s latest entry in the “Ten Scariest Republicans Heading to Congress” series (how did they pick just 10, I wonder?) is truly blood curdling:

In one of the Tea Party’s biggest victories, Florida’s Allen West defeated incumbent Democrat Ron Klein in a rematch of their 2008 race. West, an Army veteran, became a YouTube sensation by criticizing “this tyrannical government” and crying out: “if you’re here to stand up to get your musket, to fix your bayonet, and to charge into the ranks, you are my brother and sister in this fight.” He said that the country was engaging in “class warfare” between “a producing class and an entitlement class,” which is composed of Obama supporters. While serving in Iraq, he was forced out of the Army for his violent handling of an investigation of a police officer. During the interrogation, West dragged “him outside, pushed his head into the sand, and fired a gun next to his face to get him to sing.” According to West: “It wasn’t torture. Seeing Rosie O’Donnell naked would be torture.”[…]

West encouraged his supporters to use violence in suppressing the votes of opponents, saying, “You’ve got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house.” He maintains that it is “unfortunate” that gays and lesbians are serving in the military, and compares homosexuality to adultery. West is also radically anti-choice. On abortion rights, he has said “I believe all future discussion on this issue should move us toward the elimination of abortion except in the most extraordinary of circumstances,” and accused pro-choice groups of “promot[ing] abortion as a means of birth control.” West wants to eliminate the progressive tax system. He supports tax cuts for the rich, and calls Wall Street Reform a “sham.” He’s advocated for eliminating the Departments of Energy and Education. On immigration, he claims that illegal immigrants should not have access to care in emergency rooms, and that Muslim terrorists are coming through the border with Mexico. Radio talk show host Joyce Kaufman, who is slated to be West’s chief of staff, called for illegal immigrants to be “hung on the central square.” A Republican partisan, West said: “I hate big-tent. I hate inclusiveness. And I hate outreach.” West uses extreme rhetoric against Democrats and liberals. He said that liberals resented the fact that he saved the lives of American soldiers. On the anti-Islam blog Atlas Shrugs, he wrote that progressives “detest anyone who has the courage of conviction and love of America, something which they find unconscionable.” In the same post, he wrote, “”Liberals seek to destroy any institution of intrinsic value: God, country, family, honor, valor, courage, VIRTUE… Why? Because if such things exist, then they must be defended, which brings them back to their fear of action.” He also claims that Democratic combat veterans Joe Sestak and Patrick Murphy “hate the military.”

Read on, there’s more much more. In a way, he’s refreshing. He’s letting it all hang out and there’s do doubt about his agenda.

West was touted not long ago as one of the libertarian darlings of the Tea Party (someone even liberals could work with) until the fourteen libertarians among them figured out that he’s a warmonger and a psychopath. The rest of the Tea Party didn’t mind that at all. In fact, it’s what they love about him.

West raised more money than any non-incumbent in a House race, making it the second-most expensive House contest in the country. He received major backing from the Republican Party and its major players — he was named a “Young Gun” by the National Republican Congressional Committee, was endorsed by Sarah Palin, and got a campaign visit from Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), the presumptive Speaker of the House.

He is also black which proves that Tea Partiers have nothing against good African Americans who adopt their homophobic, xenophobic, anti-feminist hatemongering. It’s “the bad ones” they don’t care for. (I have been hearing some unhappy rumblings about West’s decision to try to join the congressional black caucus, so he may end up being one of the “the bad ones” regardless of his Teabag orthodoxy. I don’t think he’s allowed to fraternize with other black people, much less with liberals.)

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Enlisting Sarah Palin

by digby

The bankers have obviously decided they need to enlist the gullible teabaggers with know-nothing gibberish for their latest gambit:

Now that the midterm elections are history, Sarah Palin is setting her sights and rhetorical skills on the Federal Reserve and its easy money policy.

On Twitter, the former Alaska governor and possible 2012 presidential contender said she would begin a round of discussions at school events to teach children about quantitative easing to prepare them PALIN-RALLY/for the results of the Fed’s plan to boost the sluggish U.S. economy.

“Today:trade speech;tmrw school event 2 start discussing QuantitativeEasing w kids around US so they prepare 4 Feds experiment w their future,” Palin tweeted.

More than a few kids may be baffled by quantitative easing.

In an effort to boost lackluster growth the Fed has been injecting cash into the economy by buying up government securities in what it calls quantitative easing. It announced a fresh round of $600 billion in purchases last week and the action was welcomed by the stock market which moved higher on the news.

But critics, such as Palin and conservative Republican Ron Paul who is likely to head a House monetary policy subcommittee when the new Congress is seated in January, say the Fed’s move will do little to encourage economic growth and will ignite inflation.

Palin’s “economic analysis” was challenged by a WSJ report and she responded like this:

Mr. Reddy takes aim at this. He writes: “Grocery prices haven’t risen all that significantly, in fact.” Really? That’s odd, because just last Thursday, November 4, I read an article in Mr. Reddy’s own Wall Street Journal titled “Food Sellers Grit Teeth, Raise Prices: Packagers and Supermarkets Pressured to Pass Along Rising Costs, Even as Consumers Pinch Pennies.”

The article noted that “an inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants…Prices of staples including milk, beef, coffee, cocoa and sugar have risen sharply in recent months.”

As Columbia Journalism review reports, however, she’s just completely wrong:

What that WSJ article said—which you can in fact discern even from her selective quoting—is that food prices may be beginning to rise. And when I say selective quoting, I mean selective quoting. Note where the ellipsis in her WSJ quote there. That’s from the lede of the story, which says, in full:

An inflationary tide is beginning to ripple through America’s supermarkets and restaurants,threatening to end the tamest year of food pricing in nearly two decades.

So, Palin is hammering the Journal and Reddy for pointing out that she’s flat wrong about grocery prices going up significantly in the past year. What does she do? She quotes a separate Journal story that confirms what Reddy is saying—and cuts out that part with three dots. Nice!

What’s the point of this? Well, it’s to get it out in the teabag ether. And it’s working. I just caught a short segment of Ali Veldshi on CNN telling us all that prices of “commodities” are skyrocketing. Except of course, they aren’t. Here’s Krugman:

Wow — so the official right-wing line seems to be that all the talk about falling inflation is a leftist plot — that real people know that prices of real things like groceries are soaring. I should have guessed that from the ravings of our resident troll (singular — internal evidence suggests that there is only one).

Anyway, I thought it would interesting to see how much the price of groceries has diverged from other measures of inflation, in particular the core inflation whose logic, no matter how often explained, never seems to get across.

So, the following figure shows inflation measured at different time horizons. It asks, what is the average inflation rate over the past 10 years, the past 9 years, etc., if you look at core prices versus looking at food consumed at home, aka groceries.

What we see is that grocery prices have tended to rise faster than inflation as measured by the core CPI, but not by all that much: over the past 10 years the grocery inflation rate has been about half a point faster than the core inflation rate. If you look at more recent data, what you see is that grocery prices have bounced around; if you’re asking about the one-year inflation rate, grocery prices have risen somewhat faster than the core rate, but over the past two years grocery prices are actually down.

Does this look to you like a situation in which real people experience soaring inflation, never mind what the pointy-headed types say? Not to me. But then, my head is especially pointy.

Krugman, of course, knows that reality doesn’t matter in these debates. If enough gasbags sound the alarm about grocery prices, people will begin to believe they are paying more for groceries (just as enough caterwauling about taxes going up makes peopple feel like their own have been hiked even when they haven’t.)

The Big Money Boyz are enlisting the Teabag freakshow on this for a reason. It’s not just the inflation boogeyman either. They clearly want to stop any kind of economic recovery program other than tax cuts, which they know will not work. (They’ve been tried several times by both Bush and Obama since 2008.)So what’s the real point of this?

The political strategy has long been clear — keep the economy distressed in order to unseat Obama. The ideological purpose is clear too — discredit Keynesianism once and for all so that democratic government will no longer have any role to play in economic crises. But obviously, this is about more than politics or ideology. Krugman thinks it’s a mindless herd of political and financial elites running over a cliff. Others think it’s traders being traders, making money where ever they see the opportunity. My personal opinion is that this is disaster capitalism at work. Somebody always makes a lot of money when the world goes mad, and there’s nothing like confusion and anxiety to coerce people into acting against their own interests. If they can use ignorant and delusional “validators” like Palin and Beck, the job becomes much easier.

I’m not sure about that, though. Watching these Masters of the Universe and the Banksters over the past few years, you just can’t imagine that they are competent enough to put this together. The traders are just trying to get as many hookers and as much coke as they possibly can before passing out and the John Galt wannabes have shown themselves to be perfectly willing to shoot the golden goose in the face out of sheer avarice. So is it just happening because it’s happening? Or is there a method to the madness?

Maybe the truth is much simpler than any of that — these people have backed themselves into a political and ideological corner and nobody knows how to get out of it, so they’re actually following the teabag ethos rather than leading it. Which brings us back to the mindless herd going over the cliff …

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Still Dreaming of a Codpiece

by digby

Behold the literary genius of Dana Loesch, “editor” of Andrew Breitbart’s Big Journalism.

I love how his face seemingly peeks out from the black-and-white news columns of the day to defiantly whisper: “PSSST. HEY. Still heeeeere.” His existence may have been obscured by the hubris surrounding the current administration, an increase in terrorist attacks, a movement born partly because of several Bush policies, and an election; the sudden appearance of Bush across all the networks and on the front and cover pages reminds us that even though he isn’t the sort of GOPer grassroots adore, he was infinitely better than the man currently in the White House, a man who bows to anything with a pulse.

The excerpts from his book give insight into the process leading up to the decisions what the rest of the world would see and whether you agreed with him or not (I’ve long been on record abhorring NCLB; also the prescription drug act was neither “compassionate” or “conservative,” and neither was TARP) the man would make a decision and stick with it. Mainly though, I love how fist-in-the-air defiant he is in the book.

That’s like totally deep.

I didn’t highlight that just to show the writing skills of the right wing new media, although that’s entertaining. What this illustrates is the fact that these so-called Tea Partiers are just typical blood thirsty wingnuts. When bush passed NCLB, there was no grassroots outcry. When he passed the prescription drug benefit, ther was no grassroots outcry. TARP produced some push back, but remember that by that time Bush was a popular as e coli and it was hardly fashionable to be one of his slavering fangirls.

They loved that guy. And it had to do with this which Loesch bizarrely says are “layman’s terms”:

Waterboarding?

“Damn right.”

That he prevented another 9/11?

“My most meaningful accomplishment.”

On Cheney?

“The more I thought about it, the more strongly I felt Dick should stay. I hadn’t picked him to be a political asset; I had chosen him to help me do the job. That was exactly what he had done.” Mr. Bush wrote that he trusted Mr. Cheney, valued his steadiness and considered him a good friend. So, “at one of our lunches a few weeks later, I asked Dick to stay and he agreed.”

Defiance on steroids. Balls! Refreshing change from a President who wants to meet sans preconditions with tiny fist-shaking dudes plagued with short-man syndrome.

They do love a codpiece, don’t they?

I can’t prove it, but I would bet money that the very people who now decry deficits and spending and say they were horrified by Bush’s domestic policies are the same 30% who stuck with him to the end. What they loved about him was his crudeness and cruelty and — more than anything — that he inspired such loathing from liberals. It’s the in-your-face defiance that they admire, the eagerness to be politically incorrect, the exclusion from the process of those whom they see as not fully “American.” It’s a defining characteristic of the right. Domination, exclusion, and eliminationism are what animates their thinking, not deficits, taxes or the constitution.

h/t to @ericboehlert

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Give ’em an inch

by digby

This is interesting:

House GOP Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) threw cold water on the proposed plan, which would temporarily extend tax cuts for the wealthy while permanently extending tax cuts for the middle class. “Taxes shouldn’t be going up on anybody right now,” Cantor said.
Cantor’s comments Monday evening on Fox follow similar remarks from Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the incoming senior Republican on the Senate’s tax-writing committee. While Hatch expressed an open mind to extending tax cuts past the 2012 election rather than permanently extending the rates, he also ruled out the decoupling proposal.

Cantor, needless to say, is incoherent since temporarily extending the tax cuts for the rich means that taxes aren’t “going up on anybody right now.” But that’s not the point. It would appear at the moment that they would rather take the tax cut win now than have it around for the 2012 election, which I find surprising. Perhaps they are afraid that some populist sentiment might creep in over the next two years and people will balk at extending those rates beyond 2012. Or maybe they’re scared that the deficit talk will eventually lead to the need to raise revenue and they’re afraid that if they don’t get their piece now, they never will.

I find that hard to believe, though. The tax argument always works in their favor. If the economy is still in the gutter, they can use the same argument they’re using now, namely that raising taxes will make things worse. If the economy is improving, they’ll say we shouldn’t rain on the parade. Indeed, no matter what happens, their answer is always tax cuts.

And “deficits” are simply a code word for spending on anything but the military industrial complex and the police state, the two sacred government functions. People who are agitated about deficits are people who believe that the government is spending too much money on people who don’t deserve it, not that it’s not taking enough in from the wealthy.

Who knows? It’s all fluid. But since the administration already offered up extending the tax cuts temporarily and the TeaBag party has rejected it, I think we can fairly say that’s not going to be the end of it. Either they will end up extending them permanently or they will get something else they dearly want in exchange for “agreeing” to something they want just as much. Most likely both.

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Democrats are like an infection

by digby

Now this is a huge surprise:

There was a moment, during the Bush years, when frustrated libertarians thought they could form new coalitions with whatever party was in power. And now they’re forming coalitions with the GOP. But, wow, did the alliance with Democrats ever collapse quickly. I asked Angle supporter Andrew Rothbart, who was very concerned about sound money, whether he thought the Senate was losing anything by losing a Democrat who opposed the Patriot Act and TARP.

“No, it’s a good thing,” he said. He held out his arm and pointed to an imaginary wound. “That ‘D’ is like an infection. You need to get rid of it.”

If you want to know what the Tea Party really cares about, there you have it. And it isn’t TARP or even Obamacare.

I wonder if it’s better to be seen as an infection or a disease? I guess it doesn’t matter since it’s all basically a simple matter of “getting rid of it”

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Issa vs Issa

by digby

Being in the mendocracy majority means never having to say you’re sorry:

Issa spokesman Kurt Bardella said Friday that the committee has “no intention” of issuing subpoenas for Clinton, Sestak or anyone else involved; he said similar job offers happen all the time.

“This isn’t isolated to the Obama administration. This goes back to everyone since Andrew Jackson. If you’re going to go down that road, you have to go back to every administration,” he said.

But Issa’s campaign sent out an e-mail in May saying the Clinton job offer could amount to three felony charges of bribery and corruption, and he blasted the White House for “arrogantly and wrongly” assuming the matter could be swept under the rug.

“This may be the way business is done in Chicago, but it’s not the way things are done in our nation’s [C]apitol and I am intent on getting to the bottom of this,” he said at the time.

I don’t suppose the fact that the Republicans are openly bribing Joe Manchin to switch parties (just a day after it was reported that he was going ahead) might have anything to do with his sudden change of heart. After all, he’s a man of principle.

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The Rich Are Different From You and Me

by digby

Years ago I heard a caller on Limbaugh say that he wanted his boss to get a tax cut so that he (the caller) could make more money some day. The multi-millionaire Limbaugh, of course, patted him on the head and told him that’s the kind of thinking that made America great.

That was just the beginning:

A Morgan Stanley wealth manager will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because Colorado prosecutors don’t want him to lose his job.

Martin Joel Erzinger, who manages more than $1 billion in assets for Morgan Stanley in Denver, is being accused only of a misdemeanor for allegedly driving his Mercedes into a cyclist and then fleeing the scene, Colorado’s Vail Daily reports. The victim, Dr. Steven Milo, whom Erzinger allegedly hit in July, suffered spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and, according to his lawyer Harold Haddon, “lifetime pain.”

But District Attorney Mark Hurlbert says it wouldn’t be wise to prosecute Erzinger — doing so might hurt his source of income. Here’s Vail Daily:

“Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it,” Hurlbert said. “When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay.”

“We have talked with Mr. Haddon and we had their objections, but ultimately it’s our call,” Hurlbert said.

Of course. These Master of the Universe are the producers, the people who make this nation’s wealth so that parasites won’t starve. They can’t be held to the same silly standards of behavior to which the rest of us are held — if they have to take something as prosaic as “risk” into account, the whole system will break down. And if these Very Superior People (also known as “Gods”) are kept down by some bourgeois notions of “personal responsibility” it will be the poor who end up paying the price because there won’t be any small change available to help the unfortunates they runs over with their Bentleys.

Unfortunately the liver transplant surgeon he ran over seems less concerned with getting some fast cash than with justice:

“Mr. Erzinger struck me, fled and left me for dead on the highway,” Milo wrote. “Neither his financial prominence nor my financial situation should be factors in your prosecution of this case.”

We have known for quite some time now that the wealthy have different rules. Every once in a while they throw one of their own into the maw of the legal system in order to keep the rubes from rising up in anger but for the most part they have always bought themselves expensive lawyers and make political deals on the QT. Lately, however, they are just outright arguing that they are too important to the world to be subject to the US system of justice — and they seem to have convinced the people of just that. This is what refusing to look into the rear view mirror gets you.

h/t to JJ

Perlstein’s “Mendocracy” and Shock Doctrine Economics

by digby

Rick Perlstein wrote a fascinating article for The Daily Beast over the week-end about what he calls out “mendocracy” — which means a society ruled by liars. He discusses the fact that most Americans believe that Obama raised their taxes when he actually lowered them and uses Limbaugh’s admonition to his audience that Obama always means exactly the opposite of what he says as an example of how that kind of thing comes to pass.

(a) A mountebank teaches his millions of followers that everything the president says is a priori a lie;b) The mainstream media that acts as if anything his millions of followers believe is a priori deserving of respect as heartland folk wisdom (note the cover article lionizing Limbaugh in this week’s Newsweek);(c) The president unilaterally renders himself constitutionally incapable of breaking the chain between (a) and (b), such that, (d), the assumption that Obama raised taxes when he really lowered them becomes hegemonic for a majority of the electorate, and even a large plurality of Democrats.Q.E.D.: Governing has become impossible.And dammit, the essence of Obamaism as an ideology is that it is Uncivil to Call Out Liars.

Limbaugh basically says up is down and black is white and millions of people believe him because he’s telling them a story that makes sense to them. Of course Obama raised their taxes — he’s a Democrat and that’s what they always do. He’s just pretending that he didn’t.

But I have a question for Perlstein and others who study history. While it’s possible to call out liars for lying — and I agree that it’s necessary — what in the hell do we do about total lunacy like this?

BECK: Here’s what’s coming: Inflation. Now, you listen to the people on television, and look, I’m not an economist. I’m a high school educated guy. And maybe that’s why I can see things that other people can’t. Because I don’t have that big old head where I’ve been, it’s been filled by the so-called experts. I pursue these things myself. I try to figure it out myself. And I look at what’s happening in our country. And I listen to the experts saying ‘Oh no, that’s fear mongering, there’s no inflation happening. Did you see last month, we had the lowest increase since WWII?” Well that was last month.

[…]

As a result, QE2 Americans will have to endure a lower standard of living. It is a tax on all Americans. Prices are going through the roof. Basic cost of living, food, clothing, energy, is all going up. And there will be a QE3 and QE4. That’s Peter Schiff. How about doctor doom? The guy who is one of the only people who got it. Leading economist Nouriel Roubini, he tweeted this. I love my global economists tweeting: “QE2 will be followed by QE3 and QE4 as QE2 will fail to revive the real economy and to prevent deflationary pressures.” There you go. So when does it stop? When does it stop? The price of your house? Deflation. The price of food? Inflation.

Does your head hurt? (You can click the link above to get the refutation of the Beckian gobbledygook.)

On his radio show today he said “governments are conspiring to keep gold prices down; you have to think like a German Jew in 1934” while a Republican banker put some (completely unbelievable) words in Sarah Palin’s mouth about inflation in which she parrots Reagan as if his words have the same meaning in today’s situation. It entirely possible that banker (through intermediaries) was the president of the World Bank, Bob Zoelick, one of George Bush’s “Vulcans,” who today called for a return to the Gold Standard. Beck, Palin, Zoelick. A trifects.

Get out your copies of The Shock Doctrine and pour yourself a strong drink. Our Mendocracy has finally enabled full blown disaster capitalism. Perhaps the method to the billionaire financed Tea Party madness is finally coming into focus. The willing acquiescence of the Democratic party will only make it sweeter.

Update: Brad DeLong calls Bob Zoelick the stupidest man alive.

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Planning For The Future

by digby

So a bunch of defeated Blue Dogs are running to Fox with a letter they say they are circulating to beg Nancy Pelosi not to become minority leader because she was the reason they lost and they want to run again. (No word on when they are asking Obama to step aside and just let the Republicans have it in 2012.) Meanwhile we have navel gazing of the silliest kind among the Democratic Villagers who are now complaining about Obama’s “arrogance” (that one’s been building for a while) and complaints that he’s personally dissed them like anyone gives a damn.

And every Republican in the land is strutting around, as usual, proclaiming that this election signal the new thousand year reign and insisting that unless Democrats immediately bow down, pledge their fealty to the Tea Party and admit that they have been wrong about everything, they will not have “gotten the message” of this election. (That wouldn’t be enough, of course, but it would be a small start in the right direction…)

The contrast between this kind of caterwauling from the GOP bullies and the Democratic wingnuts (who are more than welcome to become Republicans and primary those who won their seats, I’m sure) and the postmortems in 2006 and 2008 is stark. I had been planning to look for examples similar hand wringing and garment rending among the Republicans when they lost and then saw that William Saletan had already found what I suspected. There was none:

In November 2006, the GOP lost 30 House seats and six Senate seats, forfeiting its majorities in both chambers. Two years later, voters handed another 21 House seats and seven Senate seats to the Democrats. In the presidential race, voters chose Barack Obama over John McCain, 53 percent to 46 percent. In the 2008 exit poll, 75 percent of voters said the country was seriously on the wrong track, and 51 percent agreed that “government should do more to solve problems,” while only 43 percent said “government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” That was a shift from the 2004 exit poll, in which voters had preferred less government by a margin of 49 percent to 46 percent. Self-identified moderates, who had split evenly on more vs. less government in 2004, favored more government in the 2008 exit poll by a margin of 55 percent to 39 percent.So Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell took those results to heart, right? They listened to the voters and changed course?Don’t be silly. They did just the opposite. They stuck to their principles and rejected partisan interpretations of the election. On Nov. 9, 2008, Cantor went on Fox News Sunday to declare:

This was not some kind of realignment of the electorate, not some kind of shift of the American people toward some style of European social big government type of philosophy. … You can look at some of the things that people are upset about, whether it was the latest in the financial crisis, whether it was the handling of the response to Hurricane Katrina, or whether it was the continued ratcheting up of federal spending in Washington. … It really is not about left versus right. It’s not about conservative versus liberal. … [The people] want to see a government that works for them. And we still believe very strongly that it is our commonsense conservative principles of a limited government, of lower taxes, of reining in federal spending that will provide the type of solutions to the challenges that face American people.

When FNS host Chris Wallace pointed out that voters had shifted from an even partisan split in the 2004 exit poll to a seven-point preference for Democrats in 2008, Cantor used the same empathy dodge for which he now chastises Obama. “We have to demonstrate, number one, that we understand what people are going through,” the congressman pleaded.

Here’s the kicker:

Two weeks later, Boehner went on the same program and was asked why he should remain in charge of the House GOP after his party “lost more than 50 seats in the last two elections.” He replied:

If I thought that I was to blame for those losses, I wouldn’t have run for this job. And I can tell you my colleagues would not have reelected me. We’ve got a long way to go. The American people have issues. They’ve got concerns. We need solutions, solutions to the issues that the American people care about that are built on our principles.

McConnell took the same steadfast view. In his speech this week, he explained his party’s thinking:

While the media was still groping to define the 2008 election, Republicans were taking stock. We knew the principles that had made our party great were the same principles that had made America great, and that if we were going to solve the problems of the day, we would have to embrace and explain those principles, not discard or conceal them. So we renewed our commitment to our core principles—win, lose, or draw. If we had not done this, the administration would never suffer the consequences for pushing policies Americans opposed, and Americans wouldn’t have a clear alternative. And that is why this, in my view, was the single most important thing Republicans in Congress did to prepare the ground for Tuesday’s election. By sticking together in principled opposition to policies we viewed as harmful, we made it perfectly clear to the American people where we stood. And we gave voters a real choice on Election Day.

With the willing acquiesence of the establishment and the support of the billionaire plutocrats, they not only held the line, they doubled down and went even more radical right before our very eyes. And dues to a number of factors, some not entirely in their control, the Democrats lost to them.

I would never advocate blindly following the tactics of the TeaGOP. But they are ahead of the Democrats in figuring out how to navigate this new political landscape (which they pretty much invented.) They don’t fool themselves that there’s consensus, they accept that we are polarized and that there will be frequent turnovers of power. And they plan accordingly.

Whether in the minority or the majority, they always work to move the country to the right. And by failing to understand the game they are playing, the Democrats end up moving with them. That’s how Bob Dole’s health care plan from 1996 became a communist takeover of the health care system in 2010.

Update: Perhaps there’s a little dirty trickery in that defeated Democrat letter. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

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