Gaza: Close to breaking point

By Ben Cohen

“The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages. Only then will Israel be calm for forty years,” – Eli Yishai, Israel’s Interior Minister

The continued Israeli assault on the Gaza strip that now counts 96 Palestinians dead, 50 of them civilians, is being backed explicitly by President Obama who told reporters at a press gathering in Thailand:

“Let’s understand what the precipitating event here that’s causing the current crisis and that was an ever-escalating number of missiles that were landing not just in Israeli territory but in areas that are populated, and there’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.”

Jay Carney, the White House spokesman made the following statement to the press on the official US line:

We strongly condemn the barrage of rocket fire from Gaza into Israel, and we regret the death and injury of innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians caused by the ensuing violence. There is no justification for the violence that Hamas and other terrorist organizations are employing against the people of Israel. We call on those responsible to stop these cowardly acts immediately in order to allow the situation to de-escalate.

So much for a balanced approach.

The US retelling of the conflict really is astonishing if you look at what actually happened, and given only 3 Israelis have died during the latest episode of violence, it borders on the grotesque. Obama’s argument that Israel has the right to attack Gaza because ‘no country would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens’ is patently absurd when you look at what Gazans deal with on a daily basis. The minute land strip that houses roughly 1.7 million, most of them refugees, is a virtual prison suppressed by continuous economic and military blockades, routine incursions and attacks from its Israeli neighbors. It cedes control of its borders, sea and airspace to Israel, and is almost completely reliant on foreign aid to exist. Would any other country on earth tolerate that? Would the US allow Canada or Mexico to do the same to them without retaliation or resistance?

Of course they wouldn’t. But because Palestinians are dark skinned Arabs, apparently they must.

It is important for people to understand that while politicians and the media paint Arabs as uncivilized barbarians incapable of human feeling and committed to frenzied Jihad, Arabs do not of course view themselves this way. Arabs are mothers, fathers, sons and daughters who feel emotion, pain and love the same way everybody else does. They love their countries and have pride in autonomy and self reliance the same way Americans do and want peace and prosperity for their children the same way Israelis do.

It’s easy to pretend that Palestinians don’t feel loss of life like Israelis. It makes the incredibly disproportionate violence unleashed upon them that we see on live television a more palatable process. It’s ok, because Arabs don’t respect human life, so killing more of them is fine. And given Arabs only understand force, the only way to deal with them is through force. If they are continually subjected to humiliation and violence, they will cease wanting the same things Israelies do. Or so goes the logic.

The problem with this narrative is that the Palestinians will not comply with it. They are resisting the slow colonization of their land by any means necessary, and they are paying a huge price in human lives.

The US could put a halt to the occupation quite easily. It bankrolls the Israeli military to the tune of $3.1 billion a year, and could threaten to cut funding as long as it illegally occupies Palestinian land.

But it won’t, and it is highly unlikely Obama will deviate from what is now fairly entrenched US policy towards the conflict.

What Obama can do, however, is to use Egypt to prevent the violence from escalating. With its new government, Egypt is now a far more important player in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis as it will not cede as easily to US demands as was the case under Hosni Mubarak. Egypt’s new President, Mohamed Mursi has openly supported the Palestinians and condemned Israel’s assault on Gaza, giving him far more credence in the Arab world than Mubarak did, who did little to stop Israel’s continual attacks on Gaza in the past. Since coming to power though, Mursi has made efforts to keep good relations with Israel, understanding the impact of jeopardizing important trading relations. Israel does not want to put those relationships at risk either, and will listen to Egypt if it intervenes in its action in Gaza.

According to Reuters, the Egyptian government believes a truce between the two sides is imminent, having spent days pressing both sides to pull back. While publicly backing Israel, President Obama is clearly aware that another war on Gaza is not good for US interests in the region and has been urging Egypt (and Turkey) to negotiate a truce.

It isn’t much to get excited about – given the leverage the US has over Israel, the conflict needn’t have occurred in the first place – but putting a stop to the violence is an absolute necessity. Because Gaza is close to breaking point and can’t take much more.

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It really is a guilty pleasure, but I do love it when clever, funny writers take on not so clever, humorless writers. Intellectual slap downs are like junk food to journalists, and Matt Taibbi has provided years of unhealthy food to people like myself, largely at the expense of the New York Time’s resident metaphor butcher Tom Friedman. I try not to poke fun at other writer’s too much, but with Friedman it’s hard to resist.

In his latest Rolling Stone blog, Taibbi takes apart Friedman’s latest attempt to explain the crisis in Syria with a series of metaphors so absurdly convoluted you wonder whether Friedman might be having his readers on. Inexplicably, Friedman seems to have changed his views on the state of Iraq post America’s invasion and occupation, at least in comparison to what we’re now seeing in Syria. Friedman had once used described Iraq as a “pottery barn” that had been “broken” by “1,000 years of Arab-Muslim authoritarianism, three brutal decades of Sunni Baathist rule, and a crippling decade of U.N. sanctions.” Friedman described the pottery barn (Iraq) as being “held together only by Saddam’s iron fist,” that was subsequently smashed by the US invasion. Friedman then argued that Iraq was a disaster in part because the US didn’t give it “political therapy” during its occupation.

But now the emotionally stunted broken pottery barn once held together by Saddam’s iron fist looks rather appealing, at least in Friedman’s eyes. Writes Taibbi:

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In an astonishing segment on his show, Bill O’Reilly goes on a rant about ‘far Left’ elements in America that can only be described as an epic bout of cognitive dissonance. The segment starts with O’Reilly plays a clip of himself pre-election stating that:

“20 years ago, President Obama would be roundly defeated by an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney. The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that this economic system is stacked against them, and they want stuff. You’re going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama, overwhelming black vote for Obama, and women will probably break President Obama’s way”.

O’Reilly then argues that the Leftist media spun his words to make him look like a white supremacist. Of course, O’Reilly doesn’t explain what he meant by “They want stuff”, and goes on to accuse the extreme Left of a witch hunt. Hilariously, O’Reilly argues that there are ‘Entire media operations that exist solely to promote ideology’ – a statement so brilliantly hypocritical, it can only be described as Orwellian. I lost the will to watch any more after that one (when I stopped he was bringing out Alan Colmes to provide the Leftist perspective), but you can check out the segment below to get the gist of it:

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The distortions flooding the internet and airwaves regarding the latest Israeli assault on Gaza are familiar and depressing. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has managed to frame the latest episode in the conflict as Israel ‘defending itself’ from incessant rocket attacks from the Gaza strip. The truth of course is far more nuanced and complicated. Predictably, the mainstream media in the US has run with the official Israeli narrative of events towing the line that Israel is merely defending itself from Arab terrorism. The truth is that the latest outburst of violence began when Israeli tanks made an incursion into Palestinian territory, and killed a 12 year old Palestinian boy playing football. Hamas then responded by sending rockets into Israel, and the violence has spiraled since.

My friend Ahmed Shihab-Edlin hosted a discussion on the Huff Post Live this morning discussing the increasingly brutal attack on Gaza, putting the conflict into perspective and looking at both sides of the story. I have to give a huge amount of credit to the Huffington Post for giving Ahmed a prominent platform to air views from a Palestinian perspective – historically a mortal sin in the American mainstream media. I highly recommend watching the very civilized discussion that doesn’t demonize either side:

I’ll be posting a more in-depth analysis about the conflict tomorrow, so stay tuned.

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Richard Nixon: Socialist?(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: I’ve been having a series of arguments with a friend of mine about the competing economic theories in mainstream American politics. My friend takes the view that government is not the answer to America’s economic or social problems, and I take the view that in many cases it is. I’m not a fan of labels, but in the American political spectrum, my friend would be viewed as center right with libertarian leanings, whereas I would probably be classified as a socialist. In America, I’m the odd one out with no one in mainstream political circles outside of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders who really represent my views. My friend on the other hand would be right at home in the mainstream of the Republican Party.

In any other industrialized western nation however, I would be considered well within the mainstream. In the UK I’d be fairly mainstream left, in France, the center left, and in Sweden or Norway probably around the center. My friend would be considered far out of the mainstream of political discourse with his views on the role of government in society.

While I don’t want to denigrate my friends views, I think there is a huge misconception in America about where the political center really is, and I believe this makes modern Republican economic theory extremely dangerous. Moderate Republicans today would not only be considered far Right in Europe, but in relation to other Republicans throughout US history. To put it in perspective, the Obama administration is further to the Right on most issues than Richard Nixon’s government was. Writes Eduardo Porter in the New York Times:

The Nixon administration not only supported the Clean Air Act and affirmative action, it also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the agencies the business community most detests, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to police working conditions. Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”

Nixon bolstered Social Security benefits. He introduced a minimum tax on the wealthy and championed a guaranteed minimum income for the poor. He even proposed health reform that would require employers to buy health insurance for all their employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it.

Just think about how that would go down with politicians like John Boehner or Paul Ryan.

It wouldn’t.

The shifting of the political center is an interesting phenomenon with both Democrats and Republicans offering their competing theories. While it’s unclear why the shift happened exactly, we do know that it has happened. As Porter notes:

The rightward drift in economic thinking becomes apparent in surveys asking about specific issues. In surveys 25 years ago, 71 percent of Americans believed it was the government’s job to take care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, according the Pew Research Center. This year the share is down to 59 percent. And most of the shift reflects a decline among Republicans.

Republicans’ support for labor unions has fallen sharply since the late 1980s, according to Pew’s research, as has their support for protecting the environment. Their drift fits the position of Congressional Republicans, whose views on the economy have been shifting right for the last quarter-century while Democrats’ views have remained roughly still. And as Republicans have moved to the right, economic policy has followed.

The Right believes that its economic theories were better and beat Keynesian economics through the power of free markets and innovation. The Left believes that there has been a concerted effort from the Right to discredit government and minimize its achievements in creating and maintaining economic growth. There is however, a simple way to test the Right’s explanation, and that’s to look at the success of the economy under a neoliberal, orthodoxy and compare it to that under of a more interventionist approach. Sadly for the Right, their argument falls apart pretty quickly. As Noam Chomsky notes, the Bretton Woods system of monetary management that established the highly interventionist rules for commercial and financial relations among the world’s major industrial states from 1945 to the early 1970′s, marked a period of extraordinary economic growth:

From roughly 1950 until the early 1970s there was a period of unprecedented economic growth and egalitarian economic growth. So the lowest quintile did as well — in fact they even did a little bit better — than the highest quintile. It was also a period of some limited but real form of benefits for the population. And in fact social indicators, measurements of the health of society, they very closely tracked growth. As growth went up social indicators went up, as you’d expect. Many economists called it the golden age of modern capitalism — they should call it state capitalism because government spending was a major engine of growth and development.

And when the system fell apart in favor of deregulation and speculation, calamity ensued leaving markets prone to boom and bust, weak economic growth, and spiraling wealth inequality:

In the mid 1970s that changed. Bretton Woods restrictions on finance were dismantled, finance was freed, speculation boomed, huge amounts of capital started going into speculation against currencies and other paper manipulations, and the entire economy became financialized. The power of the economy shifted to the financial institutions, away from manufacturing. And since then, the majority of the population has had a very tough time; in fact it may be a unique period in American history. There’s no other period where real wages — wages adjusted for inflation — have more or less stagnated for so long for a majority of the population and where living standards have stagnated or declined. If you look at social indicators, they track growth pretty closely until 1975, and at that point they started to decline, so much so that now we’re pretty much back to the level of 1960.

The Left’s thesis that the Right embarked upon a sustained effort to discredit regulation, protectionism and intervention is harder to prove, but you only need look at the US corporate media system to see why it is a highly plausible theory. The US media is almost wholly owned by an increasingly small number of ultra wealthy conglomerates (Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom control most of the US media). They are for profit entities that benefit hugely from the US tax code that favors big corporations, and lax anti trust laws that allow them to destroy or swallow smaller companies. It would be suicidal for any of their news outlets to disrupt the status quo and question the system that keeps them in business, so they don’t. Issues pertaining to poverty, unions, international trade agreements and wealth inequality are given little attention in the mainstream media, and for good reason. If the public were aware of the economic injustices foisted upon them from above, they wouldn’t accept it and the system would come crashing down. Corporate media outlets have no interest in this happening, so they don’t report on it.

The mythology that pure free markets are the key to economic success is then repeated dutifully by reporters and news programs over and over again, to the point where many Americans genuinely believe that the collapse of a highly deregulated Wall St can only be rectified with more deregulation.

This mythology is incredibly dangerous when enacted at the highest level of government. We narrowly avoided a Romney Presidency where austerity and tax cuts would have been implemented to solve the country’s problems, but there is a Republican Congress still bent on ensuring government stays out of the economy. The Republicans claim that government spending is out of control, and markets should be allowed to correct themselves naturally. The damage this would cause would be immense, and only the Democrats stand in their way to ensure minimal levels of regulation and intervention.

The truth is, the center needs to be redefined in America if it is to experience another period of sustained, equitable growth, and avoid another crippling recession.

And it can’t go any further to the Right.

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Rush Limbaugh Cartoon by Ian D. Marsden of marsdencartoons.com (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Ben Cohen: Listening to the Right wing fallout after President Obama was re-elected has been absolutely fascinating to say the least. From Karl Rove’s extraordinary meltdown live on election night to Sean Hannity’s one-eighty on immigration, it’s fair to say that the GOP is a party with an extreme identity problem. Most people in the party are aware that they have a huge, huge problem going forward – the population is changing in both color and culture, and they are fast becoming demographically irrelevant. If the Republicans want to have electoral success going forward, they are going to have to find a way to attract women, Latinos and African Americans – groups they lost in overwhelming fashion last week.

The problem is that the party is split into so many extreme factions that it will be close to impossible to unify the party under a new, more inclusive platform. The party is comprised of moderates, Libertarians and Tea Party activists, traditional conservatives, neo cons and evangelical Christians. And while there is considerable overlap, each group have their own objectives that are often at odds with each other. Hardcore conservatives don’t want more immigrants while libertarians and moderates understand the need for reform. Evangelicals will never accept gay marriage while moderates and libertarians would, neo cons want more wars, while traditional conservatives do not, and Libertarians vehemently oppose any tax hikes, while moderates understand it to be an occasional necessity.

Most worrying for the Republicans is the prominence of loudmouth media characters like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh – virulent conservatives who influence millions of voters with their fear mongering rhetoric. Without their stamp of approval, Republican candidates lose a vital marketing tool that can seriously affect voter turn out. Had Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin not gone out to bat for Mitt Romney, it’s likely his loss would have been even worse.

In the wake of defeat, the Right wing noise machine is still out in full force because it is not in the business of self reflection. It is in the business of fear and hate – two tried and tested ratings winners that may destroy the Republican Party, but keep the multimillionaire mega mouths on air for eternity.

Rush Limbaugh went on an epic rant after last Tuesday, sarcastically suggesting that Republicans should advocate pot legalization and start their own ‘abortion industry’. He said on his show:

The youth vote! I tell you what we should do, let’s announce, starting around Christmastime, so that we can get close to being Santa Claus ourselves, let’s announce that we are for the legalization of marijuana, and that as a party we’re in favor of forgiving all student loans . . . Is that how we do it?

All these examples . . . Latinos! We’re not going to get the Latino vote by opening the borders and saying, you know what? Let anybody in who wants to come in.

Women. Let’s start our own abortion industry. Let’s go out and get the women’s vote. I just want you to think, would that work?

Not exactly encouraging. And if you thought that was bad, Mark Levin, one of the most nauseating fear merchants had the following to say about the lessons the Right should take from electoral loss:

We conservatives, we do not accept bipartisanship in the pursuit of tyranny. Period. We will not negotiate the terms of our economic and political servitude. Period. We will not abandon our child to a dark and bleak future. We will not accept a fate that is alien to the legacy we inherited from every single future generation in this country. We will not accept social engineering by politicians and bureaucrats who treat us like lab rats, rather than self-sufficient human beings. There are those in this country who choose tyranny over liberty. They do not speak for us, 57 million of us who voted against this yesterday, and they do not get to dictate to us under our Constitution.

We are the alternative. We will resist. We’re not going to surrender to this. We will not be passive, we will not be compliant in our demise. We’re not good losers, you better believe we’re sore losers! A good loser is a loser forever. Now I hear we’re called ‘purists.’ Conservatives are called purists. The very people who keep nominating moderates, now call us purists the way the left calls us purists. Yeah, things like liberty, and property rights, individual sovereignty, and the Constitution, and capitalism. We’re purists now. And we have to hear this crap from conservatives, or pseudo-conservatives, Republicans.

This ‘purism’ is a recipe for complete disaster, and the sooner the GOP exiles braggarts like Limbaugh and Levin, the sooner it can reform itself into an electorally viable political party. The problem is, letting go of the extremists means taking considerable short term losses. Republicans draw huge support from fearful white Americans who believe they are in imminent danger from marauding Mexicans, gay couples and black Muslims. They are a reliable voting bloc, and losing their enthusiasm would be very detrimental. Their economic platform has to change too – it can no longer be the party of tax cuts and deregulation at all costs – they are no longer trusted to run the economy and their inability to evolve on the issue is becoming a serious electoral burden. Again, the problem is that changing their economic principles would mean massive short term losses. The party is essentially a mouthpiece for big business, and big businesses want tax cuts. Without big business, there is no money to win elections, making it a hit the party cannot afford.

Is there a way out of this conundrum?

Frankly, it’s hard to envision one. The reforms needed will be incredibly painful and will entail some very serious action from prominent Republicans who will have to confront the militants in the party. Tokenism won’t do going forward – the changes will have to be wide reaching and meaningful – and much of the party will hate them. The Republicans will have to redefine conservatism and market it to the new America. We’ve yet to see any evidence that there is serious intention from party members to do so, making their prospects for 2016 all the dimmer.

In short, they’re screwed, and there’s not much they can do about it.

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Bill Maher explains why Romney lost the election:

Mitt Romney lost because of the Republican brand and Republican policies. There are other reasons, of course, like Mitt being unlovable to anyone not named Ann Romney, but nothing trumps the idea that 2/3rds of America thinks the other 1/3 is a frightening conglomerate of Bible-thumpers, xenophobes, and vaginophobes. (Not a word, but should be.)

Take Mitt’s pivot from being “severely conservative” to being “the white Barack Obama.” Sure, everyone tacks to the middle after the primaries, but Mitt’s performance was different: it was a full-scale repudiation of just about every idea that conservatives hold dear. The positions were changed. The rhetoric was completely different. He was basically Barack Obama, Caucasian Edition.

Now I know what you’re saying: this is what Mitt Romney always does. Being a shape-shifting phony isn’t an act; that’s who he is! And this is true.

But it isn’t who Michele Bachmann is. When it comes to nutty right-wing beliefs that are completely false, she’s a true believer. And yet what was Michele Bachmann saying during the waning days of her too-close-for-comfort campaign? She was putting out an ad distancing herself from her own Party — even her conservative district:

“Michele Bachmann is an independent voice working for us, saying no to big spending by both political parties but bringing them together…”

Then Michele pops on the screen and says, “That’s why I’ve been an independent voice working for you…”

Wow. …I’m just saying. When even Michele Bachmann can’t run as a proud Republican, your brand identification has reached “pink slime” territory.

Maher hits the nail on the head here – the Republicans are going to continue to have a hard time electorally because their party has now divvied off into so many extreme factions, there’s no coherence whatsoever. Romney was always going to have a hard time getting elected given the ideological gymnastics he had to play just to get through the primaries. He had to shore up the crazy Right and disown 99% of his record to become the Republican nominee, then pretend that it never happened in the general election in order to pick up votes from the center. The Democrats simply sat back and ran Romney’s own words against him making their job relatively straightforward (bar Obama’s atrocious first debate performance).

Obama has successfully re-branded the Democratic Party to encompass right wing foreign policy with a center left economic platform, giving it electoral coherence that doesn’t require too much shape shifting when running for office. Agree or disagree with what the Democratic Party now stands for (and in regards to foreign policy, I certainly don’t), it’s definitely working.

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Crowd in support of Gay Marriage (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Daily Banter Headline Grab (from Mercury News):

Gay marriage rights were supported by popular vote on Tuesday in Maine and Maryland, and Washington state joined Wednesday afternoon, making it the first time gay men and lesbian rights were approved at the ballot box.

In Minnesota, voters rejected a constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage, marking another victory for gay rights advocates, even though gay marriage remains illegal in the state.

“When the history books are written, 2012 will be remembered as the year when [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] Americans won decisively at the ballot box,” said Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign. “The dreams of millions of fair-minded Americans were realized as discrimination crumbled and equality prevailed.”

HRC raised and contributed millions of dollars to advance marriage equality in all four states voting on gay marriage rights come Nov. 6. The group contributed at least $800,000 to advance marriage equality in Maine and $2.8 million in Maryland. The group also sent thousands of e-mails to supporters of marriage equality, as well as recruited hundreds of volunteers.

On Tuesday, 53 percent of voters in Maine voted in support of gay marriage versus 47 percent who voted against. In Maryland, the referendum question 6 allowing same-sex marriages passed 52 percent to 48 percent. And in Washington, about 52 percent of voters approved of same-sex marriage, versus 48 percent who voted against it.

In Minnesota, with 95 percent of precincts reporting, 51 percent of voters opposed the constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage.

The outcomes in Maine, Maryland and Washington broke a 32-state streak, dating back to 1998, in which gay marriage had been vetoed by voters. The decisions made across the four states could influence the U.S. Supreme Court, which soon will be considering the law that denies federal recognition to same-sex marriages.

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Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong

By Ben Cohen: If you listened to any prominent right wing media outlet during the week leading up to the election, you would have thought it was in the bag for Mitt Romney. Right wing pundits like Karl Rove, William Kristol  and Charles Krauthammer predicted a close but definitive victory for Romney, Dick Morris boldly predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes, and incredibly, George Will thought Romney would take a whopping 326 (Romney won 206 electoral votes). In fact, the Right wing media was positively giddy with excitement believing they had finally unseated the Muslim Communist presiding in the White House.

Meanwhile, the supposedly ‘liberal’ media was projecting a fairly decisive win for the President, in large part due to the predictions of the New York Time’s polling expert Nate Silver.

Why the difference?

In short, the Right used ideology as the intellectual underpinning of their projections, while everyone else used facts. Nate Silver isn’t a mystic or the modern incarnation of Nostradamus – he’s an extraordinarily thorough polling analyst who bases predictions on a formula that accounts for real world margins of error and reporting discrepancies. It isn’t perfect, but the methodology is pretty airtight when it comes to projecting accurate odds. That’s why every half decent political analyst took Silver’s projections seriously and discounted the Right wing noise machine when it came to picking a winner.

This theme of fantasy vs reality goes far deeper than picking the winner in Presidential elections. It goes to the heart of what now constitutes conservatism in America, and why it is in perpetual decline.

As Conor Friedersdorf writes in the Atlantic, conservative ideology in the US is now so far removed from reality that it now only exists as a money making machine for loudmouths like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity:

In conservative fantasy-land, Richard Nixon was a champion of ideological conservatism, tax cuts are the only way to raise revenue, adding neoconservatives to a foreign-policy team reassures American voters, Benghazi was a winning campaign issue, Clint Eastwood’s convention speech was a brilliant triumph, and Obama’s America is a place where black kids can beat up white kids with impunity. Most conservative pundits know better than this nonsense — not that they speak up against it. They see criticizing their own side as a sign of disloyalty. I see a coalition that has lost all perspective, partly because there’s no cost to broadcasting or publishing inane bullshit. In fact, it’s often very profitable. A lot of cynical people have gotten rich broadcasting and publishing red meat for movement conservative consumption.

How long can this go on? The libertarian economic orthodoxy that has polluted American politics for over 30 years has wrought havoc on the economy, creating gigantic wealth inequality, a dangerously powerful and unregulated financial system, and most impressively, the biggest economic disaster in 80 years. Yet Republicans insist it works and we need more of it to get out of the mess it created. Mitt Romney believed he could present a tax plan to the American public that didn’t add up, because his philosophy of cutting taxes and allowing big business to do as it pleases was self evident. The Right believes that because it believes something, it must be true. And they keep finding out that is doesn’t.

It seems that no matter how hard reality hits, mainstream conservatism finds a way to avoid it and curl back into its ideological ball. The Right has been wrong on climate change, economics, and now their own chances at electoral success, yet they continue to ignore hard facts and proceed selling the same nonsense to an increasingly skeptical public.

I would have paid money to be in the Fox News studio with Karl Rove last night to watch the fallout after it dawned on them that Romney was going to lose, and lose badly. Just watch this incredible clip of Rove, unable to confront reality, as Fox called Ohio for Obama:

Writes Andrew Sullivan:

Last night, Roger Ailes’ walls came tumbling down. Because their foundations were not based in reality, just ratings. Fox deserves a great deal of credit for re-electing president Obama. Because they refused to see who he actually was, they could not effectively counter him. They countered a figment of their imagination – and it was a particularly nasty, bilious, mean figment. Their universe became a black hole last night, sucking almost all of them in.

Perhaps the Republicans will reinvent themselves taking reality into account – it’s a long shot given their recent history, but the only way they’ll maintain any sort of electoral viability in the future.

But it’s about as safe a bet as Romney’s chances were of winning the White House.

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Matt Taibbi: Romney has America's best interest at heart?

Anyone who reads this blog knows I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi – his mixture of acerbic wit and penetrating insight is a rarity in journalism these days, and I pretty much agree with his stance on most issues. That’s why I was little alarmed to read this from his blog on Rolling Stone today:

When push comes to shove, we all should know most Americans want the same things, but just disagree on how to get there, which is why it should be okay to not panic if the other party wins. If some foreign agent attacks us, I seriously doubt a president Mitt Romney would wave the white flag and invite the enemy in. Right? He’ll try his best as Commander-in-chief, just like Obama has, and just like Bush did, and Clinton did, and Reagan did and so on.

That should be the way we think. We should be confident that whoever wins has our collective best interests at heart, even if we don’t agree with his or her ideology, the same way we reflexively assume that the pilot of any plane we board doesn’t want to fly us into a mountain.

Perhaps the storm has affected Taibbi’s memory a little, but here’s what he wrote about the prospects of a Mitt Romney economy a few weeks back:

Obama ran on “change” in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It’s a vision of society that’s crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it’s running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender.

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