"Beyond cutting edge"

Steve Benen reviews the new GOP website:

• The site includes a new two-page section on Republican "heroes." It features quite a few historic African Americans -- note to the RNC: you're trying way too hard -- including legendary baseball player Jackie Robinson, who wasn't actually a Republican.
  
  
• Steele has a blog on the site. It's called "What Up." The first sentence reads, "The Internet has been around a while, now." Seriously, that's exactly what it says.
  
  
• The site features a timeline of Republican Party "accomplishments," dating back to 1860. The last entry is from 2004, and refers to directing federal funds to private religious schools in D.C., in a voucher program that's failed in a variety of ways. The previous "accomplishment" was the launch of the Iraq war in 2003 (the piece also spells "Iraq" incorrectly). According to the RNC's own new website, the Republican Party hasn't had any accomplishments in the last five years.
  
  
• The RNC created a page for "future leaders" of the party. It's literally blank.
  
  
• Steele's first blog post asks readers, "Why are you are Republican? Think about that for a minute."

I'm not sure what comment you can really make at this point. I actually feel pretty bad for Michael Steele these days. He obviously didn't deserve his job and he simply can't do it. And his self-appointed role as the "cool" Republican couldn't have been executed better by Ricky Gervais. It's like he got all his information on being black from watching VH1 ten years ago.

But the Iraq war as an accomplishment? Larison continues to be right--they really don't get it.

Well, they asked for it...

An ironic submission to the Washington Post's Next Great Pundit challenge.

Sullivan's wishful thinking

Andrew Sullivan engages in some wishful thinking:

The ideals of small government, individual freedom, fiscal sanity and prudent foreign policy are appealing to many gays - a third of whom voted for McCain last time around. But Rove and Bush used us as a wedge to build a fundamentalist coalition, a coalition that has inevitably now become a rump.

Look, I'll admit that I find it annoying when people just tell gays and lesbians to just wait and be patient and hope something will emerge from Congress. They shouldn't have to wait. But I think this is rather disingenuous.

For at least fifty years, the GOP has been an organization dedicated to excluding large groups of people from contributing to America. It started with blacks, moved thenceforth to women, and it's finally landed on gays for some time. American conservatism was never built on a platform of letting people just do what they want and keeping the damn government out of their hair. Sure, Barry Goldwater believed that, but he was not the leader of conservatism after 1964. That was Ronald Reagan, who made a career out of the culture wars and, in essence, telling people how they should live their lives. Nixon just synthesized it well enough to get elected in 1968.

This is a group that gets by on fear and loathing. They need to have enemies, and they need to be able to think that these enemies are the worst people in the world. Witness the zombified 2010 Republican strategy to center attacks on Nancy Pelosi for the third straight election. (I guess because it worked so well before?) It might well be that Republicans will stop the anti-gay campaign at some point in the future, but if history is any guide, it will only be because there's a better, more divisive target for their hatred to find. In many ways, hating the gays is sort of the apotheosis of right-wingery--they're a very small group so the political ramifications are small, they've been stereotyped and denigrated for generations, and while racism might or might not be endemic to the human condition homophobia almost certainly seems to be, and getting people to overcome that particular bias requires a great deal of personal work that many people simply aren't that willing to do. Plus, there's a verse or two in the Bible that lets people totally sidestep the issue. So, unless the right's DNA completely changes to such an extent that they're totally focused on putting forward a positive agenda and not on hating unAmerican groups--something unprecedented in history so far--it's unlikely they'll drop these attacks for a while. At least, not until enough of the oldsters watching Fox and listening to Rush keel over and they need to find a new angle to promote conservatism.

Then there's this:

How long before Ted Olson's view manages to make its way back to the center of the GOP? The news of the HRC sell-out reveals just how important that now is for the future of civil rights. And if the GOP had any idea how to get back to the center, they'd do in America what the Tories have in Britain and outflank interest group politics by embracing civil rights for all individuals, regardless of any identity, as non-negotiable.

I actually find this mostly reprehensible. Back to the center? Since when has gay marriage been the center of the GOP? And in what universe is giving a speech broadly supportive of gay rights to a major gay rights group considered a sell-out? A sell-out would be if Obama had said that there's just too much going on, and we're fighting two wars, and so repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell will just have to wait until Iraq ends. This didn't happen. And if the Republicans actually did what Sullivan is suggesting they'd get about 15% of the vote nationwide tops, after every religious rightist bolts to the Constitution Party or some such.

I think the thing to understand here is that the predominant complex on the right is victimhood while the primary complex on the left is betrayal. Liberals are frequently very cynical about the political leadership on our side, and this often manifests itself in shouts of "betrayal" (the right, of course, equivalently shouts "treason"). Of course, if substantive healthcare reform occurs and if something real on energy gets passed, liberals will be confronted with something unusual: victory. That might change mindsets a bit.

I generally like Sullivan, but I always have to mentally remind myself that when he says "conservatism", he's using a definition of the term that merely exists in his own head. I totally support Sullivan's boldness in pushing equality, and I truly wish that Republicans were much better on this issue than they are. But I think his tendency toward wishful thinking and his bias against liberalism--which is sometimes merited but often not--is getting the better of him here.

Obama wins the Peace Prize

A few points:

1. It's admittedly way premature.
2. The right wing's response to the news reminds us, once again, that it is made up of petty and loathsome creeps.
3. This (via Sullivan) is hilarious.
   

A review of Windows 7

You know you want it.

Jon Stewart = Glenn Beck?

Jon Chait smacks down an inane post by fatuous tool Jonah Goldberg. As always, Goldberg tries to draw false equivalencies with the other side instead of dealing with the issues on his own.

Oblivious

It's not just that it's been about two and a half years, but I find this hilarious: "After 4 years of Democrats running this country's finances, Americans are fed up with the lack of accountability and the worsening economic indicators."

So, vote Republican? I think Americans just want more jobs. The party of the financial crisis and the spending freeze can't quite deliver them, I suspect.

The more I think about it, the more this Grayson thing bothers me. It is hypocritical for the GOP to be shocked, shocked about this, but while I support left populism I think this is not the way to do it.

The curious Alan Grayson problem

Matt Yglesias nails it:

I think the real issue—and the real import—of Grayson’s statement is that it involved breaking one of the unspoken rules of modern American politics. The rule is that conservatives talk about their causes in stark, moralistic terms and progressives don’t. Instead, progressives talk about our causes in bloodless technocratic terms. This is also one of the reasons that Ted Kennedy’s stark, moralistic attack on Robert Bork’s legal theories are for some reason often cast by the MSM as some kind of illegitimate smear campaign. The reality is that it was just him talking about a conservative the way conservatives relatively talk about liberals. Like Grayson he characterized his opponents’ views polemically, but wasn’t offering any kind of wild factual distortions. But moralism from the left is very unfamiliar to American political debates.

The media will hate this, because it's made up of self-loathing lefties who can't stand left-populism. Indeed, it seems like most liberals tend to be skeptical of populism, seeing it as a province of the right and somehow unintellectual and undignified. But this is silly, and a liberal politics that doesn't include populism isn't a liberal politics with any future. Yglesias grasps this point as well:

I think there are some real limits to how far it does go. For one thing, it puts you at a permanent kind of rhetorical disadvantage. But for another thing, it’s just very hard to do big things without a certain amount of moralism. In particular, you really can’t talk about the climate change issue in a sensible way without mentioning the irreducible wrongness of residents of a large developed nation endangering the lives and livelihoods of a couple billion people in the developing world with our industrial activities. When you think about it, it’s really wrong! Wrong in a way that transcends the fact that it would be inconvenient for some key states and industries to recognize that fact.

The right, needless to say, is going ballistic at this development, but I doubt they're going to get as much mileage out of it as the Wilson remark gave the Dems. It's all about context. Wilson did his insanity during a speech by the president, Grayson did it during an ordinary House speech. Furthermore, as Marin Cogan notes, "It’s hard to see these two situations as equal. Grayson is being tongue-in-cheek; unlike the Republicans, who took up the death panel lie in earnest, no Democrat is seriously saying that the Republicans want you to die." Then again, conservative appreciation of irony is limited. Just Karl Rove's columns.

Personally, I wouldn't have said exactly what Grayson did, but are the Republicans really on solid ground here? Does hyping this do anything other than just remind people that the Republicans have no plan on healthcare?

Rand vs. Hayek

Mark over at The League makes an interesting point:

"This is why, for all the bluster about “death panels,” and health care reform
being an irreversible step on the road to socialism, it is the Randian vision of
the world that animating the Right’s position on reform at the expense of the
far more rigorous, thoughtful, and classically liberal vision of Hayek."

I'm more familiar with Rand's work than Hayek's, but I suspect there's a good point here. How anyone could find Rand compelling is beyond me--she's every bit as dogmatic and unmoored from reality as any of her Communist antogonistes were. The major difference, so far as I can see, is that at least Marx and Lenin were trying to solve problems of social justice, and while their solution was deeply flawed it's not hard to see how it appealed to a lot of poor and powerless people. Rand pretty much dismisses any notion of social justice and prefers to see the world as a brutal, zero-sum struggle between people where helping others is merely a sign of weakness, and it's always obvious where her sympathies lie--with the virtuous rich instead of the scum-sucking poor. I'll admit this though: she did have a comprehensive worldview, as the sex scenes in her books can show. Ugh.

What I find interesting about the right's enduring Rand crush is that Rand was a notorious antitheist, and her philosophy is essentially a negation of the entire Christian enterprise. Rand would have thought Christ an idiot because he chose to sacrifice himself for others, instead of feeding his own desires and not letting people stand on their own two feet. How can one believe both of these ideas? I guess it's not new news that conservatism isn't exactly a coherent philosophical system, but the irony here is delicious.