(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)
Happy Monday! From Professor Krugman, “Republicans Against Reality“:
… How did the G.O.P. get to this point? On budget issues, the proximate source of the party’s troubles lies in the decision to turn the formulation of fiscal policy over to a con man. Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, has always been a magic-asterisk kind of guy — someone who makes big claims about having a plan to slash deficits but refuses to spell out any of the all-important details… What’s happening now is that the G.O.P. is trying to convert Mr. Ryan’s big talk into actual legislation — and is finding, unsurprisingly, that it can’t be done. Yet Republicans aren’t willing to face up to that reality. Instead, they’re just running away.
When it comes to fiscal policy, then, Republicans have fallen victim to their own con game. And I would argue that something similar explains how the party lost its way, not just on fiscal policy, but on everything.
Think of it this way: For a long time the Republican establishment got its way by playing a con game with the party’s base. Voters would be mobilized as soldiers in an ideological crusade, fired up by warnings that liberals were going to turn the country over to gay married terrorists, not to mention taking your hard-earned dollars and giving them to Those People. Then, once the election was over, the establishment would get on with its real priorities — deregulation and lower taxes on the wealthy.
At this point, however, the establishment has lost control. Meanwhile, base voters actually believe the stories they were told — for example, that the government is spending vast sums on things that are a complete waste or at any rate don’t do anything for people like them. (Don’t let the government get its hands on Medicare!) And the party establishment can’t get the base to accept fiscal or political reality without, in effect, admitting to those base voters that they were lied to…
What makes this frightening is that Republicans do, in fact, have a majority in the House, so America can’t be governed at all unless a sufficient number of those House Republicans are willing to face reality. And that quorum of reasonable Republicans may not exist.
***********
Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
raven
This Kentucky picnic was quite a brawl.
“`If doctors told Sen. McConnell he has a kidney stone, he’d refuse to pass it,” said Grimes, drawing cheers from her supporters and jeers from McConnell’s at the raucous event.
Read more: nydailynews.com/news/politics/kentucky-sen-mitch-mcconnell-challenger-alison-lundergan-grimes-face-p…
BillinGlendaleCA
Well, that explains his pained expression.
BillinGlendaleCA
Oh, great Morning Ho is going to talk about a cheater in a city I don’t care about in a sport I don’t give a fuck about. When does college football start?
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: 24 days.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Thank FSM. Hey my CongressCritter was just on.
Hal
Hey GOP! I have a great idea for creating a lasting political party. Try gerrymandering district so that you have to be an incredibly conservative Republican to get elected. It’s a surefire way to have a congress that is capable and works incredibly well together.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: People in these parts don’t take kindly to discussing MJ.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: HEH. They’ll live. Yurtle the Turtle sure sounds lame.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: I have a buddy that sounds exactly like him.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: I was thinking content as well. “Check to Weiner”? Even Scar didn’t get it. Is Yurtle running against the daughter or her dad, he seems confused.
raven
@BillinGlendaleCA: I don’t think it mattered at that thing.
Betty Cracker
@raven: It will be hilarious if the Senior Senatortoise from Kentucky gets tossed out on his butt.
MikeJ
@raven: Off the Wall was the last good album he did, but it was awesome.
NickT
@Betty Cracker:
Let’s hope his shell game comes to an end at the hands of Alison Grimes.
WereBear
Small, but significant event:
I live in one of those New England Republican districts; the Democratic website is usually a pathetic mess. And there’s an election where the former Mayor is running unopposed.
As an Independent. Not a Republican.
The Republicans truly have lost the North.
NickT
@WereBear:
This is what is so frustrating – that the Democrats can’t even get their act together enough to run a credible challenger, not to mention fixing their crappy website. What’s wrong with the people in that district?
Schlemizel
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Why, are there cheaters you care about in cities you give a fuck about in college football?
jayackroyd
@Betty Cracker:
It’s be even better if the Dem leadership put half the effort the GOP did in taking down Daschle or Foley.
Baud
@jayackroyd:
You know the election is over a year away? We don’t even know if McConnell will survive his primary.
Elizabelle
Raven (and all): Good morning.
Raven: did you succeed in making contact with Dennis/Higg’s Bosun Mate? Are there any updates?
It’s cool September weather this morning in Northern Virginia. Crisp. Eerie, really.
Botsplainer
I’d like to make a request to AL, Mistermix, John or anybody else from the moderating team to delete that thread from yesterday in order to safeguard some aspect of the man’s privacy in what was for him, a very unguarded, raw moment.
Also, it may not be helpful to him to be able to revisit that comment as he recovers, because it may cause a rush of those feelings he had.
NotMax
@Elizabelle
Here.
raven
@Elizabelle: It looks under control.
Elizabelle
@NotMax:
Excellent. Good on Mary G.
Elizabelle
@Baud:
I live a few hours from Kentucky and am HIGHLY motivated to go do some canvassing and volunteer work against McConnell.
Campaigns can generally find (often very nice) supporter housing for you, and you get a lot of meals at HQ. Quite an inexpensive trip, save for gas and incidentals.
I’m thinking Turtle Senator No has personalized this campaign for a lot of us. And he’s vulnerable.
aimai
I don’t understand the impliction that this kind of smoke and mirrors accounting and governance are at all new things for Republicans. Doesn’t anyone remember David Stockman, FFS? And after him we had Bush’s “fuzzy math” and his assertion that Social Security was nothing but “paper IOUs” in file cabinets. And of course we had Dick “we proved deficits don’t matter” Cheney. Ryan is just one in a long line of mathematical and accounting frauds.
daveNYC
Well, technically the trust fund is just paper IOUs in a filing cabinet (or the digital equivalent), but there is the minor point that those paper IOUs are US treasuries. I loved the fact that Bush was so gung-ho to privatize Social Security that he was willing to call US sovereign debt ‘worthless’.
And this from a guy with a Harvard MBA, speaking of worthless paper.
low-tech cyclist
It’s much worse than Krugman says: it isn’t just that the base believes the stories they’ve been told for the past eon or two, it’s that a hefty proportion of the GOP contingent in Congress grew up on those stories and believe them. So they’re retelling these stories because they believe them, and it’s become a self-perpetuating con.
It’s like a very perverse mathematical induction proof.
Ahh says fywp
Worse than Krugster thinks: GOP base won’t react in rage that they have been lied to when the truth is told. Instead, they will burn the heretic.
jayackroyd
@Baud: TJOP.
jayackroyd
@low-tech cyclist: Yeah. Ryan is the poster child for the GOP rank and file brought up with the Big Lies.
MattF
Here, Professor K. omits the fact that one of the sources of PBS Newshour conventional wisdom is a certain David Brooks:
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/structural-humbug/
But we, on the other hand, can name that pundit, David ‘Humbug’ Brooks.
Villago Delenda Est
@jayackroyd:
“The Children of Reagan”.
gogol's wife
@NotMax:
Thank you! That is such good news. I’ve been very upset.
handsmile
I was away for an offline weekend and only this morning I am learning about what transpired here over the past few days.
Far above all else, the immediate and compassionate response of this community to HBM’s crisis last night is one of the finest and most inspiring moments I’ve encountered since first participating here in 2010. Much of the best of human virtues has been sadly called upon and abundantly evidenced on this blog in recent weeks.
On a rather different emotional note, now that the magnificent Peter Capaldi has been selected as the latest incarnation of Dr. Who, I guess I’ll finally have to watch that show.
Best wishes for a satisfying week to all fellow Juicers!
Trollhattan
@NotMax:
Gosh, I’d missed that. This makes my
daymonthyear. Can’t describe what a helpless feeling that was, being witness to the orignal thread.Ken J.
@Villago Delenda Est: One of my favorite sayings for years is that Reagan’s legacy to America was destroying the ability to talk rationally about public finance.
The House Republicans’ inability to stomach the appropriations cuts called for in the Ryan budget — well, we’re there.
The downside is that we are now approaching the sort of failed-government conditions which put us on a path to a military coup.