Here’s the beauty of Paul Ryan’s new budget, the one saving grace amongst all the horrific awfulness it promises for the country: nobody gives a shit about it.

If you’ve been plugged into the political wing of the internet at all over the past couple of days, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking it was 2012 — or even 2011 — all over again. That’s because Paul Ryan has rolled out the new GOP budget for this year and it looks suspiciously like every other budget he’s rolled out since the Republicans put him in charge of such things and the beltway media inexplicably decided that he deserves to be taken seriously rather than laughed out of town. At this point, Ryan budgets — all middle-class-screwing austerity in the name of tax breaks for the rich and attempts to gut America’s social safety net — drop with the regularity of a beloved series of Hollywood epics filmed back-to-back. It’s like the GOP is Peter Jackson and the Ryan budget is The Lord of the Rings — if The Lord of the Rings sucked.

What’s interesting about the new Ryan budget, which is, again, the old Ryan budget, is what it says about the way the GOP thinks in general. There’s been a lot of talk in the wake of the budget release that points to the fact that the Republicans are behaving as if they never lost the election, as if the ideas they ferociously campaigned on weren’t summarily shot down by a large portion of the American public. The truth is, the Republican mindset post-election should surprise no one because it’s pretty much par for the course when you look at the overall GOP philosophy of the past few decades. It’s like this: the Republicans are intransigent in their ideas because they consider any ideas not theirs — any legislative or electoral victory for their opponents — to be illegitimate and not what the American people really want. If the Republicans fail, it’s because of bad messaging or a bad candidate — not because their policy notions are shit.

It’s easy to see this when you consider the number of losses the conservative movement has suffered over the past fifty years that it’s not letting go of, that it’s continuing to fight and refight no matter how many times it gets smacked down. It boggles the mind to think that the GOP is still trying to whittle away at Roe v. Wade. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And women’s rights. And gay rights. And Social Security. And so on and so on. These are things that were ostensibly decided decades ago but as far as conservatives are concerned, the defeats they endured were only temporary setbacks. They’ll never just walk away and accept that they lost and that most voters like the abortion laws the way they are; they want Social Security and the social safety net to remain in place; they think all Americans deserve equal treatment and protection under the law. The very thought of this is anathema to conservatives and the party that represents them.

The truth is that the battle to see America remade in their image will never end. We’ll be fighting this culture war forever because, barring some Saul-on-the-Road-To-Damascus-style conversion that’ll make conservatives wake up and realize that this country is about compromise, that not every political battle can be fought and won, and that their way isn’t the only legitimate way, they’ll simply never give up.

The new Ryan budget not only offers the same ideas that were soundly rejected by the voters back in November, it also assumes, with near-comical arrogance, that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act will be repealed. Why this presupposition? Because Ryan knows what many conservative political adversaries don’t seem to grasp: the Republicans will never stop fighting to make it so. The battle over “Obamacare” will be going on 40 years from now. You can count on it. It’s the way it always has been and likely always will be.

The best we can hope for is, as with the new Ryan budget, nobody will care because we’ll have heard the same tune played many times before.

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This is my donkey tattoo.

Seeing as my post supporting Senator Rand Paul‘s (R-KY) filibuster on Wednesday, received some responses that made me feel like my Democratic bona fides were being questioned, I thoughtI would respond and am am showing them to you.  This photo is a tattoo I have.  It is the Democratic donkey.   And the responses I am talking about are not the comments on the page where the post was published.

I feel like there is an almost knee jerk reaction liberals have to any criticism of President Obama or his administration.  The comments I received here are not the first I have received about this.  Yeah, I have been called a DINO (Democrat in name only).  That is why I am so sensitive about this issue.  There is an old adage: Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.  It has seemed recently like we are trying to be more like the Republicans.  I don’t need to fall in love but there’s no way I am ever going to “fall in line.”  Criticizing a president — of either party — is what our First Amendment is all about and it is also the patriotic thing to do.

Teddy Roosevelt said:

““Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”

My criticisms of the right don’t have a lot of merit if I am not willing to praise that side when I agree with them or if I am not willing to criticize my side when I see fit.  I have been active in Democratic politics since I was eight years old.  And, truth been told, I have been one who has lamented the fact that we do not have a more parliamentary system where one side gets the ball to run with.  Maybe under that sort of system, we’d have a single payer health care system.  Maybe.  Then I think about administrations that I don’t trust as much as I do the current one.  George W. Bush, I am looking at you.  What other misadventures would the neocons in your administration taken us on?  Would we be at war in Iran? North Korea? France?  And that brings me back to see the value in our system and even the current set up.  Yes, the House seems hell bent on letting nothing constructive happen but it is possible to have a constructive conversation with people whose point of view differs from your own.  Just because we are on the left does not mean our echo chamber is any better than theirs.

For whatever it may be worth, I am not alone in supporting Paul’s right to do a full on, old school, in your face filibuster.  Chris Matthews said, “I may not have the same attitude of a Rand Paul but I worship his right to have it.  I would never put that down simply because there is a little right wing paranoia attached to that guy.”  Ron Reagan, Jr, had this to say, “The Dick Cheneys of the world will get into power and you do not want to set the precedent.” (He was talking about the first letter Eric Holder sent Paul on the subject. Agreeing with Paul on this issue — that the drone program needs more transparency and that we need clarification on when the administration thinks using drones against US citizens is permissible   Wanting a conversation on this subject does not make you a right wing nut job.

Ps.  I have to think that this week’s dinner President Obama had with 12 Republican Senators had a real impact.  It’s the only reason I can think of that it was Senators Graham (R-SC) and McCain (R-AZ) came out to criticize Senator Paul’s filibuster and defend the president.  In fact, Graham said, on the floor:

“I welcome a reasoned discussion but to my Republican colleagues, I don’t remember any of you coming down here suggesting President Bush was going to kill anybody with a drone.  I don’t even remember the harshest critics of President Bush on the Democratic side, they had a drone program back then. What is it about this drone program that has every Republican spun up?  What are we up to here?”

Oh, and I am also happy that the House passed the Senate’s Violence Against Women reauthorization bill, which included the provisions to protect partners in same sax couples.  Good for you, House.  See?  Not everything they do is crazy.

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As a political writer, being pissed off about certain issues and policies is like rocket fuel. I’m not an angry guy by nature, but there’s a universe of things in politics that piss me off and, combined with an involuntary need to seek and disseminate the truth, I’m never really at a loss for topics to cover.

But the sequestration issue has been one of those rare items that frustrate me to the point of being incapable of spending time on it. When I read about sequestration, my brain seizes. The stupidity of it all simply confounds me to the point of being speechless. For me, this is a shocking and rare predicament.

It’s not even the chronic brinksmanship — the reoccurring doomsday countdowns and the Republican-manifested economic sabotage that’s behind it all. It’s not the Keynesian in me who opposes the very notion of deficit reduction during a sluggish recovery. Granted, these are both points of irritation, but the characteristic of the sequester that ought to force us all into complete apoplexy and subsequent outrage-induced catatonia is the epidemic of ignorance regarding the status of the federal budget deficit.

There are two sides to this deficit idiocy. Firstly, the completely inexcusable conflation of the deficit and the debt, and, secondly, the total failure to acknowledge actual deficit reduction. The press, and especially the Republicans, refuse to acknowledge that not only has the deficit been reduced by more than half-a-trillion dollars since 2009, but also that the deficit will continue to drop with or without the automatic cuts that appear to be inevitable by the end of the week. As a result, deficit hysteria is based on nearly unprecedented stupidity and deliberate deception. And very few players are innocent in this endeavor.

Turn on cable news and you’ll hear the words “deficit” and “debt” used interchangeably as if they’re the same thing. Not too long ago, Fox News Channel ran a segment in which they aired a clip of the resident discussing in his State of the Union address how his proposals won’t “add a single dime” to the deficit. Then, with a satisfied gotcha tone, they showed how the debt — the debt, not the deficit — has increased by $5.86 trillion since Obama took office. Therefore the president must be lying about the deficit. He’s actually spent a crapload of dimes, they said. 58 trillion of them.

The dishonesty and cynicism is astonishing, even for Fox News. This was a deliberate attempt to deceive its audience into believing the, I don’t know, deficitdebt is not only the same thing but that the president lied to the tune of $5.86 trillion dollars.

On top of the ridiculous lies and inability of too many people to use the correct word to match the numbers, when was the last time you heard anyone on cable news or the Sunday shows, much less the White House press room, note with emphasis that the deficit has been reduced by $555 billion since 2009. Let’s go through this again: the final Bush administration budget bill authorized spending for 2009, creating a deficit of $1.2 trillion by the time President Obama was sworn in. An additional $200 billion was added by Obama by the end of that year, creating a total of a $1.4 trillion deficit. From that high water mark, the deficit has steadily decreased to a projected $845 billion by the end of this year. The CBO projects that by the end of 2016, the deficit will have dropped to $433 billion, for a total of nearly a trillion dollars in deficit reduction in six years.

Here’s a fantastically disgusting example of an obvious lie about deficit reduction. Last week, the president said, “Over the last few years both parties have worked together to reduce our deficits by more than $2.5 trillion.” He’s clearly referring to cumulative long-term deficit reduction and not the year-to-year reduction. But CNS News, a right-wing outfit, claimed, like Fox News, that the president was lying because the debt has gone up. Furthermore, the author, Terence P. Jeffrey wrote:

In fiscal 2008, the federal deficit was $454.8 billion. In fiscal 2012, it was $1.2967 trillion. By this measure, President Obama did not reduce federal deficits by $2.5 trillion. He increased the annual deficit by $841.9 billion.

Needless to say, that’s a complete distortion. The 2012 deficit was $1.1 trillion. Not nearly $1.3 trillion. And, as I wrote earlier, the first deficit Obama ought to be responsible for is 2010 — not 2008 or 2009.

Ultimately, all of the dumbstupid about the deficitdebt has resulted in an American electorate which is utterly clueless on the deficit. Via JM Ashby and Steve Benen, the results of a new Bloomberg poll:

A 62% majority believe the deficit is getting bigger, 28% believe the deficit is staying roughly the same, and only 6% believe the deficit is shrinking.

In other words, in the midst of a major national debate over America’s finances, 90% of Americans are wrong about the one basic detail that probably matters most in the conversation, while only 6% — 6%! — are correct.

I think you get the idea… even though everyone else most definitely does not.

The entire sequestration debate is based on the premise that the government needs to reduce the deficit or else we’re all screwed — and debt and insolvency and Greece. Run for your lives! Thus we either have to come up with a deal or slash an additional $85 billion. Add into the mix the fact that we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place if the Republicans hadn’t played games with the debt ceiling because of similar misrepresentations of the facts and total lies about the deficit.

Yet David Brooks and others believe that both sides are to blame for it, in spite of the fact that it was the Republican effort to sabotage the economy and, therefore, the Obama presidency, and the party’s reckless decision to use the debt ceiling as a political cudgel for the first time in history. Yeah, the both sides meme is part of the sequestration insanity. All told the sequester is a huge shit sandwich with all the trimmings — everything that’s infuriating and stupid about the current political and fiscal debate, stacked high and tasting appropriately, you know, shitty.

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For a while now I’ve contemplated this: A specific weekly column that catalogs for posterity the latest examples of the Republican party and conservative movement in general’s descent into absolute, painfully stupid chaos. Last week, an entire piece could’ve been written on the unprecedented filibustering of Obama defense secretary nominee Chuck Hagel — notice how many, usually shameful and embarrassing, things have happened in American politics over the past few years that have never happened before? — and the fact that it stemmed from the ongoing apoplexy over conspiracy-minded Republican House-members’ Great White Whale, Benghazi. But certainly there was more than that last week. There always is. And I think that’s why I haven’t really bothered trying to keep track of the madness: It would take up too much of my time. A column detailing the damn-fool lunacy that is the modern Republican party on a week-to-week basis would probably take two full days to write and be 8,000 words long. Who has the time, or the miraculously regenerating supply of Tylenol, for that?

So I guess the best thing to do is keep it to only the biggest, most pronounced embarrassments of the week. I realize that even those will be up for debate by many, but I’ll do my best to highlight what I can and if I leave out your favorite example of conservative stupidity on occasion, my sincerest apologies.

So, let’s begin.

With Friends Like These…

For those who still insist on playing the both-sides-are-equally-screwed-up game, please stop. Democrats and progressives do dumb shit all the time, true, but very little these days on the level of basing an entire campaign of political righteous indignation — one that’s helped to halt the confirmation of a presidential cabinet nominee — on a misinterpreted joke. Last week, conspiratorial rumors began circulating among Republicans on the Hill that Chuck Hagel had received money from a shadowy group called “Friends of Hamas.” This, as far as they were concerned, gave them even more reason to hold up Hagel’s confirmation besides simply the need to take a hostage in a desperate attempt to make somebody finally give a crap about Benghazi. One problem: there is no “Friends of Hamas.” The group doesn’t exist. And this week, we learned where the rumor, and the reference to the non-existent group itself, came from. Dan Friedman of The New York Daily News admitted that during a conversation with a GOP aide a few weeks back, he had asked, jokingly, what the Republicans were looking for that could be considered “anti-Israel” in fellow Republican Hagel’s background:

“So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the ‘Junior League of Hezbollah, in France?’ And: What about ‘Friends of Hamas?’ The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed.”

Ah, except that these days to give the benefit of the doubt to the Conservative Entertainment Complex is to court disaster. Hilarious disaster, but disaster nonetheless. The “Friends of Hamas” tip was quickly leaked to the Keystone Kops who now run Brietbart in the absence of its late namesake and the site’s Ben Shapiro ran with it, trumpeting it as a major exclusive. The meme was picked up by the usual suspects like Hugh Hewitt, Fox News and the increasingly adrift National Review and within days it was a talking point for giddy Republicans on the Hill. Again, a joke. A joke became an honest-to-God point of contention in the ugly and shameful fight over Chuck Hagel’s confirmation.

But here’s where it goes from profoundly stupid to fucking spectacularly stupid: When Friedman explained how the rumor had started, rather than accepting that explanation, Shapiro doubled-down on his hyper-serious indignation, writing:

“Since the original ‘Friends of Hamas’ story was written, the media has downplayed or ignored the myriad of borderline anti-Semitic Hagel comments regarding Iran and the State of Israel, as well as the ‘Jewish lobby.’ They have deliberately obstructed news coverage of Hagel’s well-documented supported base among friends of Hamas. Instead of asking Hagel to release the requested documents, the media has attacked Breitbart News.”

Yes, the responsible media haven’t paid attention to the story that was based on a joke, about a group that doesn’t actually exist, because they’re the responsible media and not an online fan ‘zine for idiots. The “Friends of Hamas” miasma perfectly typifies the current state of Republican thinking — namely, there is no thinking. There’s just a lot of knee-jerk reacting by grifters looking for viewers, readers and listeners and the very powerful men and women trying to avoid having their cushy D.C. jobs taken away by the millions of rubes who believe the word of those grifters as gospel.

Sleeper Sell

I already know that if I do continue to do this on occasion, most of what I post will be whatever latest conspiracy theory the right has either conjured out of thin air or desperately latched onto. But really nothing illustrates the state of a political organization better than its willingness to eat any amount of bullshit that’s ladled onto a plate in front of it, absent any evidence whatsoever that what it’s being asked to scarf down isn’t, in fact, bullshit.

Case in point: Al Jazeera America might possibly activate Al Qaeda terrorist sleeper cells in Detroit.

Yesterday on Fox News — of course — regular network contributor Lisa Daftari offered up the worrisome suggestion that Al Jazeera’s expansion to American markets would include Detroit, and Detroit, as you know, has a large community of expatriate Muslims who could be secret members of Al Qaeda and could therefore be, I guess, subliminally flashed the Queen of Diamonds by Al Jazeera and turned into active killers bent on the destruction of America. Or something. Daftari implored viewers to Google information about sleeper cells in Detroit. Unfortunately, if you do that, the dominant story that will come up is about a group of men who were accused of plotting to blow up Disneyland in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 but who were eventually cleared because the prosecutor may have purposely withheld exculpatory evidence.

Regardless, there are Muslims in Detroit and there are Muslims at Al Jazeera and since Muslims aren’t to be trusted because they’re all potentially terrorists be afraid — be very afraid. It’s the conservative way these days.

Macy Bray

I try to avoid any story about Donald Trump, mainly because nothing he does is of any consequence and everything he does is carefully engineered to keep people talking about him, and secondly because — well, fuck him, that’s why. Still, his recent suing spree has been so over-the-top desperate that it’s actually worth commenting on simply because it’s just that indicative of Trump’s cultural, to say nothing of intellectual, bankruptcy.

You probably already know about Trump’s suit against Bill Maher for breach of contract because the comic refused to pay him after making a joke on a late night show offering $5-million in exchange for proof from Trump that the alleged billionaire isn’t the son of an orangutan. As Maher responded perfectly, it speaks volumes about Trump — whom Maher calls a “rich idiot” — that for a little publicity he’s willing to actually allow a public debate to continue over whether he has his family reunions at the zoo.

Well, now Trump’s no doubt exhausted and embarrassed lawyer has issued a cease-and-desist letter — taking the gun out of his mouth long enough to do so — threatening to sue Angelo Carusone, who started an online and brick-and-mortar protest campaign aimed at getting Macy’s to drop Trump’s name brand from its stores and dump Trump as a celebrity spokesperson in commercials.

According to Trump and Trump’s attorney, Carusone owes the reality TV star $25-million for “mob-like bullying and coercion” and “intentionally disseminating misinformation.” If you’re quizzically staring at your screen right now and thinking, “Gosh, that sounds an awful lot like all Donald Trump does these days,” congratulations, you’ve graduated Summa Cum Laude from Irony U.

I mention Trump as an example of the stupidity of the GOP this week simply because, inexplicably, he continues to be coddled by Fox News and held up as a hero by its mercifully dying-off demographic of angry old white people. He’s brashness without brains and indignation without intellect — and, best of all, he puts on a good show. And that’s all that those who are easily enticed into the tent by the carnival barker really need these days.

Okay, that’s it — time to go take another handful of Tylenol. Or maybe Vicodin. Anyway, see you next week, I’m sure.

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For several weeks following Election Day, the Republican Party decided it was time to evolve (irony intended) and to reach out to various demographic groups as a means of reinvigorating the future of the party.

As we’ve discussed, the Republicans have become increasingly regionalized and monochromatic, with dwindling support among women and nearly zero support among minorities. Beyond that, their messaging on issues like gun control is increasingly archaic and voters are generally fed up with their continued economic sabotage and brinksmanship on the economy — the fiscal cliff, the debt ceiling and so on.

So, naturally, a Republican Outreach Effort (previous posts here and here) was engaged as a means for the party to repair its image before it’s too late and it goes the way of the Whigs. However, the tea party base and the conservative entertainment complex, as David Frum calls it, will never allow the party to soften its posture on core positions like reproductive rights, immigration and the social safety net. 30 years of bumper sticker marketing and simplistic, kneejerk, opposite-day nonsense has become embedded in the party’s overly-mutated, inbred gene pool.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, and perhaps good for the rest of us, the outreach effort isn’t going very well. In fact, I would suggest it’s basically over. And many of us knew that would be the case the second they began to talk about it.

Prepare to get your schadenfreude on — here’s how badly it’s going.

More Brinksmanship. The Republicans allowed us to temporarily careen over the fiscal cliff by delaying a vote in the House on the final deal in by nearly one full day, and now they’re continuing to flirt with the ridiculous idea of not passing an increase in the debt ceiling. It’s 2011 all over again, and definitely not a positive move towards more adult behavior, as if that would ever happen with this crew. Strike that — it’s actually the middle 1990s again, with Republicans threatening another government shutdown even though it worked out horribly for them the first time around (President Clinton was re-elected and Newt Gingrich’s speakership began to fall apart). Ironically, it’s Newt Gingrich who’s pitching the idea this time around. Come to think of it, Gingrich was suggesting the same thing in 2011. If I was the president, I would dare the Republicans to listen to Gingrich this time. Then, as soon as a pile of Republicans came out in support of it, I’d invoke the 14th Amendment and raise the debt ceiling without them.

Latino Outreach. Chairman of the Republican Crazy Caucus, Rep. Steve King (R-IA), introduced his first unconstitutional bill of the new Congress. Specifically, it’s a law that cuts to the heart of the 14th Amendment — this time the birthright citizenship clause. King’s bill strips citizenship away from children of undocumented immigrants, so called “anchor babies” — children born inside the United States. Not only will this further anger Latino voters, but it also emphasizes how the Republicans simply aren’t interested in protecting children after they’ve been successfully birthed. King has 13 Republican co-sponsors. You know, because of the outreach effort.

Reproductive Rights. In addition to passing new and increasingly radical laws against women at the state legislative level, Ann Coulter proposed an idea that probably won’t help to rally other women around the far-right Republican cause. On Sean Hannity’s show last week, and during a discussion about gun control, Coulter proposed that the government make a list of all women who’ve had abortions. Yes, that’s right, during one of the most difficult ordeals of a woman’s life why not force her to become a humiliating and dangerous public target for threats, assault and domestic terrorism by putting her name on a government list. And if you think Coulter’s just a lone nut seeking attention, Texas just moved another step closer to this idea. By the way, Coulter also accused women of using Medicare to get abortions — you know, all those pregnant 65-year-olds getting abortions. (Never mind the Hyde Amendment that prohibits the use of federal money for abortions.) Oh, and good job allowing the Violence Against Women Act expire, Republicans. Smart.

Gun Control. In spite of Joe Scarborough’s passionate case for reversing the Repulblican posture on gun control, the party has not only resisted proposals for new laws banning assault weapons, but Republicans across the country have proposed arming school officials: teachers, principals and other staffers, thus turning schools into war-zones — an escalating arms race, with children in the crossfire. Meanwhile, Senators Lindsey Graham and John Barrasso more or less pledged to vote against another assault rifle ban.

While Republicans are definitely weakened and appear to be self-destructing, they’re still capable of making sure all of these things get passed. You can call it death rattle or a last desperate move to cling to their Uncle-Rico-from-Napoleon-Dynamite quest for time travel — in this case, to return to their long, lost white, Christian 1950s Utopia. But they continue to carry enough weight, enough numbers and enough crazy-strength to seriously foul up the works.

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The Daily Banter Headline Grab. From TPM:

Democratic leaders are worried enough about Republican debt limit threats that they’re counseling President Obama to circumvent the entire debate by invoking untested and unconventional executive powers.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) have both implored Obama to ignore the debt limit, if Republicans refuse to increase it, by citing the 14th Amendment, which holds the validity of U.S. debt essentially inviolable.

Another outside the box idea, first proposed during the 2011 debt limit fight, holds that the administration should exploit a legal loophole allowing the Treasury secretary to order the minting of platinum coins of any value and use the funds available upon deposit of those coins — likely trillions of dollars — to meet federal obligations. That idea has picked up enough enthusiasm online in recent days that Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) has introduced legislation to close the loophole.

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For the first part of New Year’s Day, I thought the far-left “Obama caved” crowd would take the prize for the most insane political faction of the day considering how, as soon as a deal was reached, they accused the president of capitulating to the Republicans, even though the deal was quite good given the alternatives. But then the House Republicans stepped onto the stage and posed a serious challenge to the insanity on the far-left by engaging in further sabotage and brinksmanship before finally voting to pass the deal.

So no, the “Obama caved” left wasn’t responsible for the only infuriating responses to the deal, but they were infuriating nevertheless because, after all, liberals are supposed to be the smart, rational ones. Sadly, that wasn’t the case. Again.

As soon as the deal was announced on New Year’s Eve, the far-left kneejerked into its predictable boilerplate apoplexy: calling for the president’s head with the scripted refrains of “He betrayed the left! IEEEEEE!” even though the fiscal cliff deal is mostly composed of a 4.6 percent tax hike on the top tax bracket returning it to the Clinton-era level, along with an extension of unemployment benefits for long-term jobless Americans, and $15 billion in spending cuts. $600 billion in revenue versus $15 billion in cuts. By the way, the $30 billion in unemployment benefits will result in $48.6 billion in economic growth, per Moody’s calculations. Good news and a good investment in the economy.

In addition, the payroll tax holiday will expire, and the estate tax will increase to 40 percent from the Bush-era 35 percent. This, evidently, is the president “caving” to the Republicans — the reversal of 20 years of Republican tax policy. The party that pledged to never raise taxes voted for a nearly 5 percent tax hike on the rich, while extending an import section of the social safety net for another year.

Now, I have a sense of what some on the left would’ve preferred, but, as usual, what the left wants and what’s politically achievable are often two different things, considering the intransigent congressional Republicans. It’s clear the Republicans would never have voted for the ideal liberal package. They came closer than ever before, but they’ll never break the zero barrier. Not these Republicans. They wanted Social Security and Medicare cuts. They wanted to renew all of the Bush tax cuts. They wanted severe spending cuts to everything except defense. Instead, the Republicans voted for practically no cuts at all, and a tax hike on earners who George W. Bush famously referred to as his “base.” $41 in revenue for every $1 in spending cuts. That’s exceptional.

Given the contentious eleventh-hour outcome, it’s safe to assume the Republicans wouldn’t accept any further demands, and we can assume that if the president had held out for the most liberal version of a deal, there wouldn’t have been a deal at all. Consequently we’d risk a recession; a Wall Street sell-off today; the loss of unemployment benefits for millions of Americans; and a 50% tax hike on the lowest bracket — workers earning $0-$8,700 per year. For reasonable liberals, this is totally unacceptable. Coincidentally this is exactly what the House Republicans were willing to risk. Once again, as with the Affordable Care Act, the characters farthest to the left have somehow met up with the characters farthest to the right. I joked on Twitter that perhaps the usual liberal suspects would revive the effort to team up with Grover Norquist to kill the bill.

Throughout the day, the same phrase popped up: the president continuously moved his “line in the sand.” Paul Krugman, who I generally admire, wrote, “He kept drawing lines in the sand, then erasing them and retreating to a new position.”

Two things about this. First, drawing a line in the sand is a negotiation tactic and not the ultimate expectation for a deal. Unless you’re a dictator. Negotiators draw a line in the sand in order to get their enemies as close to their position as possible, though obviously the Republicans, and especially the House variety, would never agree to everything the president or the left were demanding on that side of the line. Never. Second, Krugman also admitted that the president basically won the negotiation with many of the things he wanted. In response, John Aravosis wrote:

We got what you wanted, but you [Krugman] still feel we lost because you don’t like the way the President got what we wanted. What was wrong with the President’s approach, I ask? He caved on his promises, you say. But if the President caved on his promises, then how did we end up with what you wanted?

Negotiations are fluid affairs: chess-matches with fake-outs, gambits and uncertainty. If the president had drawn a line in the sand, the only thing left at the end would’ve been a really, really principled line in the sand. Everything else would’ve disintegrated.

This is one of the reasons why I strongly believe there are those on the left who would’ve screeched the same “Obama caved” gripe no matter what. Why? Peer-pressure and liberal cred. Because if they were to ever full-throatedly praise an Obama accomplishment, other liberals would shout them down as Obama-apologists and capitulators. Resistance is futile, and so forth. Admittedly, though, if the deal had included chained CPI on Social Security or cuts to Medicare, or an across-the-board renewal of the Bush tax cuts I probably would’ve lined up against the deal. But it turned out to be a far better result than I thought, and I honestly don’t care how the president got there at this point.

In the real world where there are real people coping with real problems, a deal was mandatory, as was a few concessions to the Republicans since they happen to control the House and nearly half of the Senate. If there was a whip count for everything the “Obama caved” liberals wanted, I’m happy to hear about it, but I don’t think it existed. It’s fine to try to push the president towards your personal legislative priorities, and the elimination of the chained CPI idea is probably a result of that effort, but liberal advocacy and activism shouldn’t include risking damage to the incomes and lives of the people who liberals are otherwise trying to help. That’s the same kind of sabotage and hostage-taking used by the congressional Republicans, and I don’t want any part of it.

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Mitt Romney: Not a model for future Republican candidates.

I’m not sure how I missed this incredible gem, but if you want to understand why the Republicans lost the election this year, look no further than Stuart Steven’s astonishing article in The Washington Post last week. In probably the best example of the fantasy thinking that has plagued the Republican Party Stevens argues that contrary to popular opinion, voters actually really liked Romney, and by some creative number analysis, he really beat Obama when it came to the votes of true Americans. Here he is on Romney’s shining personality:

I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s Green Room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought he would win the nomination… Nobody liked Romney except voters.

This is despite Romney having the lowest personal approval ratings for a presumptive presidential nominee dating back to 1948. Steven’s also argued that although Romney lost, he actually beat Obama because he got more votes from the middle classes:

Let’s remember that any party that captures the majority of the middle class must be doing something right. When Mitt Romney stood on stage with President Obama, it wasn’t about television ads or whiz-bang turnout technologies, it was about fundamental Republican ideas vs. fundamental Democratic ideas. It was about lower taxes or higher taxes, less government or more government, more freedom or less freedom. And Republican ideals — Mitt Romney — carried the day.

That is of course because poor Americans don’t actually count as voters – a point made clear by Romney in his 47% speech to a room full of rich people.

Interestingly, Stevens also thinks that the campaign Romney ran should serve as a template for the future as Obama only won because he had the charisma and money to get minorities to vote:

There was a time not so long ago when the problems of the Democratic Party revolved around being too liberal and too dependent on minorities. Obama turned those problems into advantages and rode that strategy to victory. But he was a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?

In reality, Obama won because campaign strategist David Axelrod insisted on fighting an extremely smart campaign that focused on key battle grounds to take the electoral college. Yes, Obama’s appeal to minorities was an important factor, but most importantly, his re-election team understood that the Republicans were woefully unprepared on the ground in key states and ran sophisticated operations to drive the vote out and smash Romney with negative ads.

Republicans lost because as one Romney aide discovered after listening to David Axelrod’s postmortem of the debate at a Harvard conference last week, “We weren’t even running in the same race.”

But if Republicans want to take Stevens’ analysis of what happened, they should go right ahead. They just won’t win any more elections going forward.

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By Ben Cohen: In an incredibly long winded and monotonous rant on his Guardian blog Glenn Greenwald lambasts the progressive media for making hollow promises to hold President Obama more accountable after beating Mitt Romney in the general election. Greenwald makes some interesting and valid points, but the lecturing aggressiveness is unbelievably tiring to say the least.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: Glenn Greenwald is an exceptional journalist who has done an enormous amount of good on issues pertaining to civil liberties in the US. His work is well substantiated, cogently argued and often powerfully written making his contribution to the national dialogue extremely important. But Greenwald makes himself completely inaccessible to the very people he should be trying to reach if he wants to have real impact, and confines himself to the self congratulating rantosphere alongside fellow ideologues like Jane Hamsher and the rest of the FireDogLake bloggers.

Here’s Greenwald on the progressive media that he argues blindly follows President Obama regardless of the ethical implications:

As for the vow that media progressives will now criticize Obama more and hold him more accountable, permit me to say that I simply do not believe this will happen. This is not because I think those who are taking this vow are being dishonest – they may very well have convinced themselves that they mean it – but because the rationalization they have explicitly adopted and vigorously advocated precludes any change in behavior.

Over the past four years, they have justified their supine, obsequious posture toward the nation’s most powerful political official by appealing to the imperatives of electoral politics: namely, it’s vital to support rather than undermine Obama so as to not help Republicans win elections. Why won’t that same mindset operate now to suppress criticisms of the Democratic leader?

I don’t necessarily find fault with Greewald’s argument here – he is provably right that the mainstream progressive media failed to draw attention to serious civil rights and foreign policy issues leading up to the election, but his relentless hounding of the left wing media and wild generalizations about their aims says more about him than anything else. Greenwald believes that the Left wing media is guilty by omission – they don’t overtly criticize Obama’s foreign policies or civil rights abuses, so therefore they must support them. The logic is completely ridiculous given Greenwald could be found guilty of supporting Republicans using the same line of thinking. Greenwald (very) occasionally writes about Republicans and the right wing media, but spends most of his time attacking the hypocrisy of the Democrats and the left wing media. All well and good. He has the right to do that, and I don’t think the lack of attention he pays to the Republicans means he supports their agenda. But the same goes for left leaning publications and media figures. Just because many of them choose to focus their attentions on the dangers posed by the Republican Party does not mean they explicitly support drone killings or Obama’s policies towards the Palestinians.

Generally speaking, I am supportive of President Obama and have written extensively on why it is crucial he remains in office. I believe the threat posed by the Republican Party is extreme, both from a domestic and foreign policy point of view. I won’t go into detail, but I think there is a strong argument to made that the Democratic Party is the only institution left protecting the country from complete capitulation to corporate interests and the military industrial complex, and must be kept in power in order to preserve what is left of functioning government. That does not mean that I support the President and the Democrats when it comes to their ties to Wall St, his acquiescence to the military chiefs, the use of drones, the signing of the NDAA or the unconditional support of Israel. I don’t specialize in civil rights issues or international law, so don’t spend massive amounts of time writing about them. I have particular interests that I like to cover, and I won’t try to pretend to my readers that I am an expert on issues I haven’t researched thoroughly. This doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions on those issues, I just don’t tend to cover them as much. I do regularly criticize Obama on Israel and the economy, because those are topics are have a particular interest in. That’s my business and I don’t expect everyone to share my interests or take on them.

The problem with Greenwald is that just because he believes Obama’s failings on civil liberties issues and the sorry state of the American media are the most important topics on the planet, everyone else has to agree with him.

Objectively speaking, both mine and Greenwald’s interests are small fry in comparison to environmental issues. Obama’s use of drones and the treatment of Bradley Manning in prison aren’t exactly pressing when compared to the wholesale destruction of vital life sustaining eco systems and the rapid heating of the planet. I’m sure Greenwald cares about these issues, as I do, but probably isn’t as interested in them as he is his own pet topics. And just because we don’t write about them doesn’t mean we don’t feel they are incredibly important.

Personally, I see Greenwald’s excessive ranting against the President and other progressives as counterproductive, not because he’s wrong, but because it gets harder and harder to listen to him.

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Neoconservative pundit William Kristol. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

By Robert Parry: The decisive defeat of Mitt Romney in the presidential race and the forced resignation of ex-Gen. David Petraeus as CIA director have marginalized America’s neoconservatives more than at any time in the past several decades, confining them mostly to Washington think tanks and media opinion circles.

The neocons bet heavily on a Romney victory as they envisioned a return to power, like what they enjoyed under President George W. Bush when they paved the way for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and dreamed of forcing “regime change” in Iran and Syria. During the campaign, Romney largely delegated his foreign policy to a cast of neocon retreads from the Bush era.

Yet, amid the wreckage of the past week – with Romney blamed for a disastrous campaign and Petraeus embarrassed by a tawdry extramarital affair – the neocons now find themselves without a strong ally anywhere inside the Executive Branch. And with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who sometimes sided with them, expected to leave shortly, the neocons could be even more isolated in the weeks ahead.

This reversal of fortune has led some key neocons to send out what amount to peace feelers to the Obama administration. The Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and Washington Post columnist (and Brookings Institution senior fellow) Robert Kagan have joined in urging Republicans to show more flexibility regarding their opposition to tax hikes on the wealthy.

Kristol made his views known on weekend talk shows, declaring on Fox News: “It won’t kill the country if we raise taxes a little bit on millionaires.” Kagan penned an op-ed column for the Washington Post that stated: “It seems pretty obvious that a compromise will require both tax reform, including if necessary some tax increases, and entitlement reform, since those programs are the biggest driver of the fiscal crisis.”

Some on the Left have cited the tax flexibility of Kristol, in particular, as an indication of Republican willingness to compromise seriously with President Obama in a second term. However, the truth is that neocons have never been economic conservatives. Instead, they have favored lavishing money on military programs and financing warfare to implement their imperial strategy of imposing political change by force. The budget has never been a high priority.

A Split on the Right

Over the past three-plus decades, the neocons have joined with cultural and economic conservatives more as a marriage of convenience than as a sign of true affection and shared values. Now, as the Religious Right and the Ayn Rand ideologues face harder times politically, the neocons are pondering a trial separation, if not an outright divorce.

The signs of a split among conservatives may be welcome news for President Obama who has been contemplating a number of controversial foreign policy moves in the post-election environment, including reaching an accommodation with Iran over its nuclear program. Harsh economic sanctions on Iran appear to have made Iranian leaders more serious about striking a deal and Obama is expected to seek a resolution in the weeks ahead.

However, the neocons have remained hostile to any concessions toward Iran. If Mitt Romney had won the presidency, the neocons likely would have hijacked the sanctions from their stated goal of achieving Iranian concessions on nuclear issues and transformed them into an economic club to bludgeon “regime change.” That could have set the stage for another Middle East war.

The significance of Petraeus’s resignation as CIA director is that the ex-four-star general was one of the neocons’ last insiders who could be counted on to frustrate Obama’s negotiations with Iran. Last year, Petraeus complicated U.S.-Iranian ties by pushing a dubious story about Iran planning a terrorist attack in Washington.

The White House and the Justice Department doubted that Iranian leaders were implicated in the harebrained scheme to assassinate the Saudi ambassador by blowing up a Washington restaurant. But Petraeus’s CIA embraced the suspicions and won over the Washington press corps, which largely swallowed the story whole.

It has since turned out that the central figure in the plot, an Iranian-American car dealer Mansour Arbabsiar, was diagnosed by doctors from his own defense team as suffering a bipolar disorder. In other words, his lawyers say he has a severe psychiatric ailment that affected his grasp of reality.

Nevertheless, the blaring news of the terror plot – echoing across U.S. front pages and American TV screens – strained the delicate negotiations between the Obama administration and the Iranian leadership. So, Obama’s inner circle saw a silver lining in Petraeus’s sudden departure: this neocon ally will not be around to sabotage talks again.

The Accommodating Obama

After winning the presidency in 2008, Obama extended an olive branch to the Republicans, the neocons and much of the Washington Establishment by retaining President George W. Bush’s last Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Bush’s military high command, including Petraeus who was then head of Central Command and thus overseeing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Amid media applause for this “team of rivals,” Obama also picked Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. As a New York senator, Clinton had developed close ties to the neocons and generally supported their hawkish positions on Iraq and Afghanistan.

Obama’s generosity, which included a decision not to seek any accountability for war crimes committed by the Bush administration, won him little reciprocity, however. Secretary Gates and Gen. Petraeus, with the tacit support of Secretary Clinton, blocked Obama’s interest in hearing less aggressive options on Afghanistan. They essentially steered him into support of a major troop “surge.”

Behind the young President’s back, Gen. Petraeus even mounted a P.R. campaign in support of a larger and longer Afghan War. In 2009, when Obama was weighing what to do about Afghanistan, Petraeus personally arranged extraordinary access to U.S. field commanders for two of his influential neocon friends, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute.

“Fears of impending disaster are hard to sustain … if you actually spend some time in Afghanistan, as we did recently at the invitation of General David Petraeus, chief of U.S. Central Command,” they wrote upon their return when they penned a glowing report in about the prospects for success in Afghanistan – if only President Obama sent more troops and committed the United States to stay in the war for the long haul.

In mid-2011, Gates finally left the Pentagon, with Obama replacing him with CIA Director Leon Panetta, who had emerged as a trusted Obama adviser. To fill the CIA job, Obama named Petraeus partly to prevent the ambitious general from launching a political career as a Republican, including possibly becoming the GOP’s presidential standard-bearer in 2012.

Obama’s move was risky, in that Petraeus could use his position at the CIA to leak out information to his neocon allies that could undercut Obama’s foreign policies, a possibility that appears to have come to pass in the alleged Iranian assassination plot.

So, when the White House learned that Petraeus had entangled himself in a sex scandal, there was no rush to help the CIA chief extricate himself. Rather than sweeping the scandal under the rug and letting Petraeus stay on – as he apparently expected – or concocting a cover story for a graceful exit, the Obama administration let the story play out in all its messy details.

Decks Cleared

Between the outcome of the election and the departure of Petraeus, President Obama now has the chance to take full control of his foreign policy. The neocons also find themselves sitting on the outside looking in more so than at any time since the 1970s when they emerged as a group of hawkish ex-Democrats and embittered ex-Leftists who defected to Ronald Reagan.

Many neocons worked on Reagan’s presidential campaign in 1980 and were rewarded with prominent jobs on President Reagan’s foreign policy team, the likes of Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Frank Gaffney. Though their influence ebbed and flowed over the 12 years of Republican rule, the neocons established themselves as a potent force in Washington policymaking.

Even after President Bill Clinton took office, the neocons retained some measure of influence in his administration and became favorites on newspaper op-ed pages and at powerful think tanks, including some that were regarded as center and center-left, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution.

The neocons reached the apex of their power under President George W. Bush when they persuaded the inexperienced Bush to respond to the 9/11 attacks by invading and occupying Iraq, which had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or 9/11.

Iraq had long been on the neocon target list as a threat to Israel. The neocons also envisioned using occupied Iraq as a base for forcing “regime change” in Iran and Syria, with the ultimate goal of allowing Israel to dictate peace terms to its near-in enemies, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Palestine’s Hamas.

The neocon hubris in Iraq contributed to the geopolitical disaster there as nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers died and hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted. Finally, neocon power began to recede. By the end of his administration, Bush was resisting pressure from Vice President Dick Cheney and the neocons around him to bomb Iran.

Still, when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, the neocon influence remained strong enough in Official Washington that the new President left in place a number of key neocon allies, especially Gates and Petraeus, and named Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

Though Obama upset the neocons by completing the military withdrawal from Iraq, he accepted their plan for an expanded war in Afghanistan, and he continued much of Bush’s “war on terror,” albeit without the name.

Turning on Obama

Obama’s concessions garnered some favorable neocon commentaries in important news outlets, such as The Washington Post, but the neocons still rallied behind Mitt Romney’s campaign to oust Obama in 2012. Romney assembled a team of Bush retreads to write his foreign policy white paper, “An American Century.”

The title was an obvious homage to the neocon Project for the New American Century, which in the 1990s built the ideological framework for the disastrous Iraq War and other “regime change” strategies. Romney recruited Eliot Cohen, a founding member of the Project for the New American Century and a protégé of prominent neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, to write the foreword.

Romney’s white paper chastised Obama for pulling out the 30,000 “surge troops” from Afghanistan by mid-2012 and conducting a gradual withdrawal of the remaining 70,000 by the end of 2014. Instead, Romney’s white paper argued that Obama should have followed the advice of field commanders like then-Gen. David Petraeus and made withdrawals either more slowly or contingent on U.S. military success.

However, like Napoleon seeking to regain his former glory through an audacious challenge to his entrenched adversaries, the neocons encountered a Waterloo instead. Their strategic defeat began with Romney’s loss to Obama on Nov. 6 but it then grew worse with the humiliating resignation of Petraeus from the CIA. Now, the neocons are left with no major foothold within the Executive Branch.

But no need for tears. The neocons still retain their lucrative niches at prominent think tanks, as talking heads on TV and on influential op-ed pages.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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