Republican Rationalizations: When Up Is Down

Is the Republican Party schizophrenic? Are its members and supporters bipolar? The fight over sequestration, the party’s efforts to remake itself and the recent embrace of Obamacare by several Republican governors seem to answer both questions in the affirmative.

In the 2011 debt ceiling deal, Republicans and Democrats agreed to place a sword of Damocles over their heads. At the time, House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders hailed the sequester as a “Two Step Approach to Hold President Obama Accountable.” Now that the across-the-board budget cuts loom large on March 1, Republicans claim that it is all the President‘s fault. In addition, Republicans, who for months decried the cuts as ominous, now argue that maybe the cuts aren’t so bad after all. Yes, the sequester could lead to 700,000 people losing their jobs and major cuts to state aid, but that is a small price to pay for shrinking the size of the federal government, they now argue.

“The sequester is something of a political phenomenon,” Ed Rogers, a Republican political consultant who worked in the presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, wrote in The Washington Post in declaring that the sequester may not be a disaster. “When it goes into effect, it will be one of the most significant things to occur in Washington in the last four years and oddly, none of the Congressional leadership nor the president is for it. Again, something big is about to happen that no one in power supports. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned here. Perhaps we should write more laws that declare if the president and Congress don’t act then spending cuts will ensue. We have never been particularly successful in slowing spending any other way.”

Boehner, who once embraced the sequester as a hammer that could be used to force spending cuts, now argues that the bipartisan agreement is actually “Obama’s sequester.” Instead of negotiating a deal to eliminate the sequester or even to delay it, Boehner and other Republicans have spent the last few weeks blaming the President.

“It’s pretty clear to me that the sequester’s going to go into effect,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said recently. “I have seen no evidence that the House plans to act on this matter before the end of the month.”

Faced with the sudden Republican shift on the sequester – remember Republicans and Democrats said the sequester should never, ever, ever happen – the party’s sycophants have been forced to engage in mental gymnastics in an effort to shift the blame to the President.

In a recent column in The New York Times, David Brooks argued that neither the Republican Party nor President Obama has a plan to avoid the sequester. That such a statement is patently false – the President and Senate Democrats have come up with a plan that calls for new revenue and budget cuts – does not matter to Brooks.

To Brooks, the sequester allows Democrats and Republicans to “dance the moves they enjoy the most:” the Permanent Campaign Shimmy for Democrats and the Suicide Stage Dive for Republicans.

“The conservative press is filling up with essays with titles like ‘Learning to Love Sequestration,’” Brooks wrote. “Of course, Republican legislators are screwing up their courage to embrace it. Of course, after the cuts hit and the furor rises, they are going to come crawling back with concessions as they do after every Suicide Stage Dive.”

Ron Fournier, of the National Journal, was even more schizophrenic is his recent column. Fournier, unlike Brooks, acknowledges that Obama has “reached farther toward compromise than House Republicans.” But Fournier says that while seeking compromise makes the President right, it does not negate his failure to reach a deal with a party that refuses to compromise.

“Is this fiscal standoff (the fifth since Republicans took control of the House in 2011) just about scoring political points, or is it about governing? If it’s all about politics, bully for Obama,” he wrote. “A majority of voters will likely side with the President over Republicans in a budget dispute because of his popularity and the GOP’s pathetic approval ratings.

“If it’s about governing, the story changes: In any enterprise, the chief executive is ultimately accountable for success and failure. Sure, blame Congress – castigate all 535 lawmakers, or the roughly half you hate. But there is only one President. Even if he’s right on the merits, Obama may be on the wrong side of history.”

Such thinking is why so many are urging the Republicans to remake themselves, not just repackage their ideas.

In making his argument, Fournier quoted an op-ed in the Green Bay Post-Gazette by Rep. Reid Ribble, a Wisconsin Republican. Ribble argued that Republicans must accept that new revenues must be considered if we are to deal with the nation’s debt. “Neither party is without fault,” Ribble wrote. “Republicans must confront their own conventional wisdom that says ‘The only way to shrink government is to starve it of resources.’”

Ribble is not the only Republican advocating that Republicans rethink their party and its ideas. In an article for Commentary magazine, Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner argue that GOP leaders must recognize that that they cannot lash out at middle-class Americans as an undeserving 47 percent as Mitt Romney did. Instead, they must come up with ideas that help the bulk of Americans.

One way would be to seek policies that help “individuals attain the skills and values – the social capital – that allow them to succeed in a free economy,” the two wrote. “The Republican goal is equal opportunity, not equal results. But equality of opportunity is not a natural state; it is a social achievement, for which government shares a responsibility. The proper reaction to egalitarianism is not indifference. It is the promotion of a fluid society in which aspiration is honored and rewarded.“

They later added: “Instead of signaling that America is a closed society, which it is not and never has been, Republicans would do better to stress the assimilating power of American ideas – the power whereby strangers become neighbors and fellow citizens. In this connection, they would also do better, for themselves and for the country, to call for increasing the number of visas issued to seasonal and permanent farm workers; to champion a greater stress on merit and skill in admitting legal immigrants; and, for the 12 million or so undocumented workers in the United States, to provide an attainable if duly arduous path to legal status and eventually citizenship.”

Mostly, they argue that Republicans must begin to see themselves as champions of the collective, which may have been what drove some Republican governors to accept Obamacare after spending several years fighting it.

“This country is the greatest in the world, and it’s the greatest largely because of how we value the weakest among us,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in announcing that his state will expand Medicaid under Obamacare. “It shouldn’t depend on your Zip Code or on your tax bracket. No mother or father should despair over whether they have access to high-quality health care for their sick child.”

“I cannot in good conscience deny Floridians that needed access to health care,” he said.

Apparently Scott wasn’t the only Republican governor to grow a conscience. Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, urged his fellow lawmakers there to “examine your conscience” before opposing his plan to embrace the Medicaid expansion.

“I can’t look at the disabled, I can’t look at the poor, I can’t look at the mentally ill, I can’t look at the addicted and think we ought to ignore them,” Kasich said. “For those that live in the shadows of life, those who are the least among us, I will not accept the fact that the most vulnerable in our state should be ignored. We can help them.”

Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan and Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona also joined the chorus of Republicans singing the praises of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion

Yet even as they do, the party of Lincoln and its apologists continue to suffer from a personality disorder, unable to determine which way is up.

Rubio and the GOP's Big Gulp

There was a very good reason why Sen. Marco Rubio took a swig of water during his reply to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night: Even the Republican Senator from Florida could not swallow the political bane he was peddling to the American public.

Rubio, as expected in his official response for the GOP, labeled Obama in a way that fits neatly into the Republican myth about the President – he is a taxing, big spending, liberal, Democrat, Socialist – but has little to do with the political reality. Then Rubio offered no realistic alternatives to what the President suggested. Instead, he offered the same tired and faulty Republican bromides.

“Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity,” Rubio said. “But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems. That the economic downturn happened because our government didn’t tax enough, spend enough and control enough. And, therefore, as you heard tonight, his solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.

"This idea – that our problems were caused by a government that was too small – it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies,” the senator said.

On Wednesday, Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, assailed that argument.

“OK, leave on one side the caricature of Obama, with the usual mirror-image fallacy (we want smaller government, therefore liberals just want bigger government, never mind what it does); there we go with the ‘Barney Frank did it’ story,” Krugman wrote. “Deregulation, the explosive growth of virtually unregulated shadow banking, lax lending standards by loan originators who sold their loans off as soon as they were made, had nothing to do with it — it was all the Community Reinvestment Act, Fannie, and Freddie.”

In his Wednesday post to Wonkblog in The Washington Post, Mike Konczal noted that the housing crisis was driven by subprime loans in the private market, not mortgages from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or the Community Reinvestment Act.

“The fly-by-night lending boom, slicing and dicing mortgage bonds, derivatives and CDOs, and all the other shadiness of the mortgage market in the 2000s were Wall Street creations, and they drove all those risky mortgages,” Konczal wrote.

To support his contention, Konczal cited data that showed “more than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions… Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.”

He went on to quote David Min, a University of California, Irvine law professor, who said the argument that the government directly created either the housing bubble or subprime loans has a serious problem with the timing:

“From 2002-2005, [GSEs] saw a fairly precipitous drop in market share, going from about 50 percent to just under 30 percent of all mortgage originations. Conversely, private label securitization [PLS] shot up from about 10 percent to about 40 percent over the same period. This is, to state the obvious, a very radical shift in mortgage originations that overlapped neatly with the origination of the most toxic home loans.”

Of course Rubio’s arguments fly in the face of other realities. Republicans are quick to say that the government creates regulations and laws that destroy America. They also argue that government, especially on the federal level, is incapable of getting things done. 

No Child Left Behind was passed to improve education, yet our schools continue to flounder. The Environmental Protection Agency and several presidents have pushed to reduce carbon emissions from industry and cars, yet those emissions remain high. The government is trampling the people’s right to bear arms, yet gun sales continue to climb. The Obama administration is pushing socialist ideas, yet the markets continue to climb and many companies are enjoying large profits.

But somehow a federal government that cannot get anything else done was able to force private bankers to give housing loans to undeserving families at great risk to the banks. How could such an incompetent government get private banks, which seek to maximize profits, to put those profits at risk?

The point is the government was not able to accomplish that.

“Did Fannie and Freddie buy high-risk mortgage-backed securities?” Min asked. “Yes. But they did not buy enough of them to be blamed for the mortgage crisis. Highly respected analysts who have looked at these data...including the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission majority, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and virtually all academics, including the University of North Carolina, Glaeser et al at Harvard, and the St. Louis Federal Reserve, have all rejected the Wallison/Pinto argument that federal affordable housing policies were responsible for the proliferation of actual high-risk mortgages over the past decade.”

The sub-prime lending leaders among private banks in 2008 were Countrywide Financial, HSBC, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo, according to data from Inside Mortgage Finance. In 2011, the Center for Public Integrity reported that “mortgages financed by Wall Street from 2001 to 2008 was 41/2 times more likely to be seriously delinquent than mortgages backed by Fannie and Freddie.”

Yet Rubio and other Republican sycophants continue in the misguided meme that the housing crisis was the fault of Fannie, Freddie and the CRA. Never do they mention the removal of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law that banned banks from gambling with depositor’s money.

Rubio also argued that more government will not “help you get ahead;” will not “create more opportunities;” will not “inspire new ideas.” Of course, history tells us that argument does not hold water. It was through government programs after World War II that many returning veterans were able to attend school and make themselves more valuable to employers.

While one may not be able to say definitively that the computer industry would not be at its current level without government, one cannot honestly claim that government research and contracts did not help to support the industry as it grew. Can one claim that the Internet would have been created without government support? Maybe, but one cannot honestly claim that the government did not play a major role in its development. 

And the Republican Party cannot claim to support innovation in education, as Rubio did in his comments, after vowing to eliminate the Department of Education, seeking to cut PELL Grants, and denigrating the teaching of critical thinking skills.

Rubio was correct when he said that we need to “incentivize” local school districts to offer more advanced placement courses and more vocational and career training. He also was correct in saying that the cost of college must be contained if we wish to have an educated workforce and populace. Yet, Republicans cannot make those arguments without looking like hypocrites. They cannot claim to be for education when they are the party of cuts to the education budget, are dismissive of science, and unwilling to reign in the biggest abusers of education funding – for-profit colleges that offer students a GED and an associate’s degree or certification, but only give them a large federal loan bill that cannot be forgiven.

“I believe in federal financial aid,” Rubio proclaimed. “I couldn’t have gone to college without it. But it’s not just about spending more money on these programs; it’s also about strengthening and modernizing them.”

Indeed, much of that may be true. The problem is that it is hard to swallow when it comes from Republicans.

Obama's Drone War: A Bourne-like Identity

The President, in wanting to keep the nation “safe” from terrorists, asks a few select members of his staff to put together a list of people to be targeted for death. Once the list is compiled, the President and his staff meet secretly in the White House where the President goes through the list, listens to suggestions then decides who will be assassinated. To make his acts legal, the President has his lawyers draw up a secret memorandum justifying his decisions. That would be an excellent plot for a Robert Ludlum-like novel or movie – if it were not so true.

President Barack Obama’s drone war has taken us beyond the point in which art imitates life and dropped us squarely in that realm where life imitates art. Using drone strikes, the Obama administration – through the Central Intelligence Agency and the military – has made assassination a regular part of the presidential routine. Members of the President’s national security team meet to discuss the administration’s kill list.

We have known about this for some time. (The New York Times and The Washington Post have written news articles as far back as 2010 detailing different aspects of the international drone war.) But many of us have been too obtuse to its particulars. That is until 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awalki was killed in a drone attack in Yemen several weeks after his father, Anwar al-Awalki, was killed.

The al-Awalkis were United States citizens. The father had been identified as a senior al-Qa’ida operative, a man plotting to kill Americans. The son seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but because of the secrecy of the drone program and the mystery of his death we cannot be sure.

Since January 2009, the Obama administration has conducted six times the number of drone attacks as the Bush administration. Most of the Obama administration attacks – 283 as of September 2012 – have been CIA operations in remote parts of Pakistan. There have also been attacks in Yemen and Somalia. Most Americans – liberals, conservatives, and moderates – support the drone strikes, according to several national polls. (A Washington Post-ABC poll from February 2012 found that 83 percent of Americans approved of the Obama administration's use of unmanned drones against suspected terrorists overseas. Two-thirds of those surveyed even agreed with strikes against U.S. citizens.)

And there lies the rub.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President George W. Bush sought, and received, from Congress a naked declaration of war. According to that declaration:

The “President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent future acts on international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

That declaration — as well as other events – led this nation into armed conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. The declaration was also used to redefine a battlefield and war, and what the United States could do to protect its people – warrantless wiretaps, rendition and torture. To rationalize its actions, Bush had his own lawyers draw up the legal precedent under which he could act. Much of the public was rightly outraged.

Since then, President Obama has not only embraced the very same tactics and definitions the Bush administration used to justify its actions, he has expanded those tactics and definitions to make White House ordered assassinations legal – even on U.S. citizens – without any outside oversight. The President – to borrow from conservative author and professor, George W. Carey – has ratcheted up his presidential powers.

“An incoming president will assume whatever advances in presidential power were made by his predecessor,” Carey wrote recently in The Imaginative Conservative. “In turn, an incumbent will strive to accrue new powers that can be passed on.”

And that is what makes this so scary. Who or what will stop the next president from going even further. Bush pushed the envelope when he had John Yoo, a lawyer at the Office of Legal Counsel, draw up a legal opinion justifying “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Obama, even while drawing down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, has embraced too much of the Bush doctrine on what constitutes a battlefield and what is a war in explaining how and where the Federal government gets the authority to target people for death.

A white paper explaining the Obama administration’s reasoning states that the “United States retains its authority to use force against al-Qa’ida and associated forces outside the area of hostilities that targets a senior operational leader of the enemy forces who is actively engaged in planning operations to kill Americans. The United States is currently in a non-international armed conflict with al-Qa’ida and its associated forces. Any U.S. operation would be part of this non-international armed conflict, even if it were to take place away from the zone of active hostilities.”

And who identifies who is a “senior operational leader” of a terrorist group?

It only takes “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government,” according to the white paper. It does not matter if the accused is a United States citizen or not. The discussion of who will be targeted in a drone strike can be initiated by a “high-level official” in the secrecy of the White House, without outside oversight, without what we in this nation have come to know as due process. Under this policy, the accuser, jury, judge, and executioner are one in the same.

When the Bush administration created its own legal opinions to justify its questionable actions, Democrats were up in arms. Several leading Democratic lawyers, such as Dawn Johnsen who Obama considered for his Office of Legal Counsel, declared that the “Bush administration’s excessive reliance on ‘secret law’ threatens the effective functioning of American democracy” and “the withholding from Congress and the public the legal interpretations by the [OLC] upsets the systems of checks and balances between the executive and legislative branches of government,” according to an article by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian last week.

For years, many of us ignored the events unfolding around us, leaving the questions about the drone war to a few. It left us not knowing who we were as a nation. Then three American citizens – Anwar al-Awalki, Samir Khan and Abdulrahman al-Awalki – were killed, and some of us recoiled at what our President was doing in our names. According to the White House, Anwar al-Awalki was a senior al-Qa’ida operative. What was his son’s alleged crime? As far as we know it simply may have been that he was the son of a man who the President and his committee of secrecy had declared a terrorist.

Considering our government’s track record on getting things right in this post-9/11 world, that may be the scariest scenario of all.

Naysaying the Economic Naysayers

Things are starting to look better economically in the United States. Not because of any particular thing that is going on, but because of several things that spark guarded optimism for 2013. Of course in expressing this optimism we cannot be naïve, nor can we ignore or deny the extreme resistance that remains in some quarters – particularly among the naysaying, sky-is-falling denizens of the Republican Party.

But as we acknowledge that resistance we cannot be distracted from the facts. The nation is, indeed, a long way from experiencing robust economic growth. (After all, we just learned this week that fourth quarter GDP was a negative 0.1 percent.) Yet, there are signs all around us that we are making steady strides toward coming to grips with what ails this nation economically. In doing so we may finally be able to make some fixes if we can just get enough people to accept policies over politics.

America is not in decline, no matter how often the extreme declare it. America is not on the verge of bankruptcy, no matter how loud the extreme proclaim it. America is not headed toward “European-style Socialism,” no matter how forcefully the extreme assert it.

How do I know this? Why do I express such optimism?

For one, the amount of investment some companies are pouring into their businesses. Just recently, General Motors announced that it plans to invest $1.5 billion in its plants around the country. The company said $600 million of that will go into its complex in Kansas City. Although the improvements will not result in more hiring at the plant it should help several businesses that supply the plant and will be assisting in its makeover. At the same time, Ford, Daimler and Nissan announced that they will work together to build fuel-cell electric cars by 2017, and Ford and Toyota have partnered to develop hybrid rear-drive trucks.

We also have more people recognizing the need to create an infrastructure bank to pay for numerous much needed projects, which should lead to jobs and economic growth, as Mark Thoma argued in his Fiscal Times article, "One Investment That Can Reduce Our Long-Term Debt." And even though the fourth quarter GDP numbers were not impressive, there were some impressive things in the report. For example, "real disposable personal income increased 6.8 percent," leading to a rise in both personal consumption and personal savings. There were also increases in nonresidential fixed investment (up 8.4 percent.) and residential investment (up 15.3 percent).

The icing on the cake came Friday when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its January jobs report. According to the bureau's preliminary numbers, the nation added 157,000 private sector jobs last month. The bureau also revised its jobs numbers for November (247,000) and December (196,000). That means the country has experienced more than 30 months of positive job growth. Included in those January numbers were 28,000 construction jobs and 33,000 retail jobs. The education, health care, and business services industries each added 25,000 jobs.

In addition, for what might be the first time in many years, economists across the ideological divide have come to grips with one of the most argued points since the start of the Great Recession: It’s not about the national debt; rather it is about revenue, jobs, and economic growth. While that could be seen as a minor adjustment in emphasis, it is an important one because it removes the cover that so many hid beneath.

Economists from Paul Krugman to Bruce Bartlett to Jan Hatzius to Richard Koo to Alan Blinder to Lawrence Summers to James K. Galbraith to John Makin and Daniel Hanson have declared that the way to worry about the nation’s long-term deficit is to not worry, to stay calm, to deal with it in a few years when the economy is better.

“The federal government is not on the verge of bankruptcy,” economics columnist Martin Wolf said last week in the Financial Times. “If anything, the tightening has been too much and too fast. The fiscal position is also not the most urgent economic challenge. It is far more important to promote recovery. The challenges in the longer term are to raise revenue while curbing the cost of health. Meanwhile, people, just calm down.”

According to E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post, Wolf, a “thoroughly pro-market economist," offers excellent advice. Wolf is not alone.

In the same column, Dionne quotes conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, a former White House advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, saying: “In fact, our long-term deficit situation is not nearly as severe as even many budget experts believe. The problem is that they are looking at recent history and near-term projections that are overly impacted by one-time factors related to the economic crisis and massive Republican tax cuts that lowered revenues far below normal.”

In his Jan. 29 column, “Outsourcing, Insourcing and Automation,” for The New York Times, Bartlett wrote that one of the major issues facing the nation is unemployment, in particular cyclical unemployment that is turning into structural unemployment. Cyclical unemployment, Bartlett argues, does not have the same long-term impact as structural unemployment, which occurs when workers’ skills do not match the jobs being created.

“The longer someone is out of work, the less likely that person is to find a job,” Bartlett wrote. “Skills deteriorate, younger workers tend to be hired for available vacancies, jobs move to new geographical locations and so on.”

According to former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, we cannot “lose sight of the jobs and growth deficits that ultimately will have the greatest impact on how this generation of Americans live and what they bequeath to the next generation.”

Even the International Monetary Fund has admitted that it underestimated the damage poorly-timed austerity has on economic growth.

Meanwhile, economic analysts at Goldman Sachs recently told clients that this country still has the world’s strongest economy. Goldman’s analysts also said there are “key economic, institutional, human capital and geopolitical advantages the U.S. enjoys over other economies.”

For example, gross domestic product in the U.S. is almost $16 trillion, “nearly double the second largest (China), 2.5 times the third largest (Japan).” Goldman also says America will continue to enjoy an advantage over other nations because this nation's work force is younger and more energetic; America has greater natural resources, including oil, gas and arable land; America performs the greatest amount of research and development; and America is still the land of choice for motivated immigrants, including those who are highly educated.

So as James K. Galbraith said: Stop worrying about our long-term deficit problem because we don’t have one.

“Foggy rhetoric about ‘burdens’ that will ‘fall on our children and grandchildren’ sets the tone of discussion,” Galbraith wrote in an Aug. 9, 2011, article for The New Republic. “The concept of ‘sustainability’ is often invoked, rarely defined, never criticized; things are deemed unsustainable by political consensus. Backed by a chorus of repetition from the IMF, headline-seeking academics, think-tankers, and, of course, the ratings agencies.

“But there isn’t, in fact, a ‘long-term deficit problem.’ So long as interest rates stay below the growth rate, as they are, debt-to-GDP levels eventually stabilize and even decline. The notion that there is a big problem is pure propaganda based on pseudo-debate, pitting two viewpoints that nevertheless converge on the practical issue.”

Galbraith’s point from more than a year ago was recently supported by Makin and Hanson of the conservative American Economic Institute. The two concluded that trillion dollar deficits are sustainable for now because of low interest rates.

“The Chicken Little ‘sky is falling’ approach to frightening Congress into significant debt reduction has failed because the sky has not fallen,” the two wrote. “Interest rates have not soared as promised… Trillion dollar federal budget deficits have continued to be sustainable because the federal government is able to finance them at interest rates of half of a percent or less. Two percent inflation means that the real inflation-adjusted cost of deficit finance averages -1.5 percent.”

Indeed, it's about jobs and growth.

Republicans Say the Most _______ Things

Art Linkletter was right – kids do say the darndest things. If he was alive today he could start a new show – Republicans say the scariest, most dangerous, most asinine things.

That is especially true when it comes to guns, rape, and anything Obama.

Take a look at some of the recent statements from Republican leaders and their followers, particularly the Tea Party and evangelical Christians.

The National Rifle Association, whose top leaders have pushed arming teachers across the country in response to the Newtown, Conn., shooting, have vowed to fight any gun control legislation and have been warning members that President Barack Obama is coming after their guns. That argument has led to a right-wing declaration that a civil war is brewing in this nation.

For example, James Yeager, the chief executive of Tactical Response, which teaches people weapons handling and other tactical skills in Tennessee, produced a YouTube video in which he declared that he will kill anyone who tries to confiscate his weapons. In the clip, Yeager said increased gun measures would “spark a civil war” in which he would be “glad to fire the first shot.”

“If it goes an inch further,” he said, “I’m going to start killing people.” While he now states that his pledge to “start killing people” was just overwrought anger, he has not backed away from his overall claims.

No wonder since Fox has become the major purveyor of the gun control will lead to insurrection meme.

Bill O’Reilly recently warned that we could have a civil war if Obama uses executive orders to alter gun control laws. O’Reilly said Obama could “chose to be a good President or whether he just wants to have blood in the streets.” O’Reilly went on to suggest that the President should cut spending on such things as Medicare and Social Security to avoid armed conflict.

O’Reilly was not the only rabid Fox employee to talk about insurrection. Several conservative – is there any other kind? – Fox contributors compared the President to Hitler and Stalin, and cited Nazi Germany to argue against his policies. They also warned of civil war, revolution, and insurrection if Obama’s policies on guns, spending, and entitlements are enacted.

Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy told their Fox and Friends audience that if the Obama government tried to confiscate guns nationally “there would be an insurrection.” A short time later, Todd Starnes, a Fox radio host tweeted: “I can assure you the federal government will not be confiscating the Starnes family guns,” which seems reasonable since there has been no recommendation that federal officers go door to door taking guns out of people’s homes.

Columnist Arthur Herman wrote in a Jan. 3 op-ed on FoxNews.com that riots in Argentina foreshadowed a coming civil war in America.

“Some have said my warnings about a coming civil war between makers and takers are exaggerated,” Herman wrote. “It’s true that Argentina’s politicians have been waging class warfare since Juan and Eva Peron – and they aren’t fazed when it turns bloody. Obama and the Democrats are relative newcomers to the game. But Argentina reveals who really suffers when those who create a nation’s wealth get mugged by those who spend it.”

Then there are the rape comments.

Months after Todd R. Akin and Richard Mourdock destroyed any Republican chances of picking up U.S. Senate seats with asinine comments about rape, Republican Rep. Phil Gingrey of Georgia decided to come to Akin’s defense by saying Akin was “partly right” in his declaration that in the case of legitimate rape, women’s bodies have the ability to shut down to avoid pregnancy.

“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things,” said Gingrey, a former OB/GYN. “It is true. We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he? But the fact that a woman may have already ovulated 12 hours before she is raped, you’re not going to prevent a pregnancy there by a woman’s body shutting anything down because the horse has already left the barn, so to speak. And yet the media took that and tore it apart.”

As if such wild comments are not enough, Republicans have threatened to shut down the government or default on the nation's debt in an effort to force the President and Democrats to cut the safety net.

But the most egregious attacks may revolve around Obama’s efforts to fill his cabinet. Republicans have attacked him for seeking like-minded appointees. They have also assailed him for recommending a former Republican Senator, Chuck Hagel, for a major security post. Apparently, reaching across the aisle for talented people is against the rules.

Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, says Hagel should not be confirmed as Secretary of Defense because Hagel was against imposing economic sanctions on Iran. One would think that would make Hagel a good candidate in the eyes of the GOP since its members spent the last election saying the sanctions are weak and ineffective. The Iran sanctions, according to Republicans, made Obama weaker than Jimmy Carter.

Then there are the attacks against feeding poor children in America. Guest on Fox Business’ Varney & Co. spent a great deal of time recently claiming that children receiving food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are becoming a “group of entitlement nation children.” Feeding those kids through the SNAP program, the Fox contributors said, means those children will grow up with a sense of entitlement that will hamper their productivity throughout life.

We can’t forget the comments concerning same-sex marriages. According to one conservative preacher, an acceptance of homosexuality and same-sex marriages mark the end of time. The pastor, Scott Lively, who is on trial for inciting human rights abuses against members of the LGBT community in Uganda, recently said that the great flood of the Bible was caused by people writing songs about same-sex marriages.

“We need to remember that in the time leading up to the Flood what the rabbis teach about the last straw for God before He brought the Flood was when they started writing wedding songs to homosexual marriage and Jesus said that you’ll know the End Times because it will be like the days of Noah,” Lively said in an interview with Sandy Rios of the American Family Association.

“I think this is the issue of the End Times, homosexuality,” he continued in the interview. “It’s present, if you do a careful investigation of all the scriptures dealing with this from the beginning and all the way to the end, God is painting a very clear picture that this represents the outer extent of rebellion against Him in a society and the last thing that happens before wrath comes.”

His comments echoed those of another conservative southern preacher, Aaron Fruh of Alabama, who also blamed the biblical flood on homosexuality. Fruh said God “knew that the people on the earth were going to destroy themselves through same-sex marriage.”

Of course, there is also the denial of climate change (Fox asked if the government faked the hottest year on record data released recently); Wyoming’s effort to nullify any federal firearms regulations by making it a felony punishable by up to five years in prison for any federal official to enforce any gun laws; the downplaying of a government default on the nation and the world economy; the hostage style negotiations over the debt limit; and Sean Hannity’s attacks against John Brennan.

Indeed, Republicans say the scariest, most dangerous, and most asinine things.

On the Redolence of Washington

There is a repugnancy that permeates our political system, a malodor that wafts from Capitol Hill across this vast nation. It hovers not only in the air around us, but also reaches deep into our social consciousness, and leaves a stench that overwhelms ours and the nation’s souls. Occasionally, though, a strong wind comes through providing us with a cleansing or a reprieve.

The deal to avert the so-called fiscal cliff was such a moment. For a short time, it seemed that Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill smelled what the rest of us had smelled for the last four years. Our lawmakers in Washington came together, albeit at a late hour, to keep us from plunging in what many had described as an economic abyss. Although the deal was less than perfect, it gave many a moment of hope, a sense that the best way to pass meaningful legislation is to begin in the U.S. Senate.

Of course, it was a fleeting moment. Before the fiscal cliff bill could reach President Barack Obama’s desk for signature Republicans had already returned to their recalcitrant ways.

House Speaker John Boehner, who had thrown the fiscal cliff debacle to the President and Senate, announced to the nation that his party would again use the debt ceiling in seeking to wrest spending cuts from the President and Democrats.

His statement was reinforced by Sen. John Cronyn of Texas, who declared that the GOP is willing to shut down the government in order to extract concessions from Obama.

“The coming deadlines will be the next flashpoints in our ongoing fight to bring fiscal sanity to Washington,” Cornyn wrote in an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle not long after a fiscal cliff deal was reached. “It may be necessary to partially shut down the government in order to secure the long-term fiscal wellbeing of our country, rather than plod along the path of Greece, Italy and Spain. President Obama needs to take note of this reality and put forward a plan to avoid it immediately.”

Cornyn, like many of his GOP colleagues, has decided that the only way to go is to slash the safety net that helps to support as many people in the red states as it does those in the blue states.

“Republicans are more determined than ever to implement the spending cuts and structural entitlement reforms that are needed to secure the long-term fiscal integrity of our country,” Cornyn wrote days after Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, said Republicans should be ready to tolerate a partial government shutdown in the battle over the debt limit.

The declarations by Boehner, Cornyn, Toomey, and other Republicans of course sent the pundit class into a tizzy. Within hours of the fiscal cliff deal and the Republican announcements, pundits began debating, pontificating on, and dissecting the winners and losers of that deal as if the obstinate players were the only ones that mattered.

But while the talking heads search for new ways to describe the game they help promote the rest of us should look deeper for answers and connections. The problem is we may not find many.

The Jan. 1 deal does bring much needed revenue – granted not as much as desired – to the federal coffers. It also preserves unemployment insurance – while not a substitute for employment – for 2 million people without incomes. It will keep the cost of milk – already high – from rising through the roof. And it will allow poor, working, and middle-class people to continue using the child and tuition tax credits to lower their tax bills.

But what price will we have to pay?

Indeed, the fiscal cliff deal fell short on many fronts. It failed to include a stimulus package. It failed to avert another battle over the debt ceiling. It allowed the temporary payroll tax cut to expire. It did not raise taxes on capital gains and estates high enough. And it did not solve any long term fiscal problems.

More important, it put us back where we were 18 months ago, preparing to fight another battle with a political party that believes not only in taking hostages, but in executing them as well.

That is why we may not find those deeper answers and connections.

The fact that the deal was negotiated by Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signals just how bad things have become in Washington in general and the House of Representatives in particular.

That so many urged the President to allow the Bush-era tax cuts to expire in an effort to gain greater negotiating leverage over the Republicans shows that too many people in Washington fail to recognize the real consequences of such actions. Theirs are arguments steeped in politics not policy.

For the millions of people whose unemployment ran out a few days before the deal was struck, it was no game. Yes, Congress could have passed a bill after Jan. 1, resulting in retroactive benefits. But unless one has lived from paycheck to paycheck one does not understand how a delay, even of a few days or weeks, can create havoc. Allowing those benefits to expire would have caused real harm to real families, something lawmakers should avoid at all costs.

The problem of course is that Washington is unable to do anything – even the things on which all parties agree – until the last moment

“Debt-ceiling dilemma: In the short run, it enables Republicans in Congress to excite their base about entitlement reform that base doesn't really want. (After all, it's the over-65 Republican base that collects most entitlements.) In the long run, it hardens the image of the congressional GOP as a collection of desperadoes who can never safely be trusted with power," David Frum, a The Daily Beast writer and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, said after the fiscal cliff deal.

The debt-ceiling dilemma and the Republican response so far also remind us that the slightest shift in the wind can bring back that fetid aroma emanating from inside the Beltway.