GOP Fearmongering

Remember those heady days after 9/11 when all the Republicans had to do to win an election was invoke Osama Bin Laden or the Twin Towers? Well, John Boehner certainly does.



This is Exhibit A in the intellectual bankruptcy of the GOP. On the major questions of the day - the banking/economic crisis, the healthcare crisis, the energy/climate crisis - they have no answers. They quite literally have nothing to say except for no. Well, that's not entirely true: they still recycle their old talking points, insisting that cutting corporate and capital gains taxes will be an economic panacea; that every American has adequate healthcare since they can go the ER; and that despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, global warming is not man-made.

So what's left for the Republican party? Answer: trying to scare the crap out of people. Unfortunately for them, it's not 2002 anymore. Voters by and large rejected this type of crass fearmongering during the past election, when conservatives played on fears that Barack Hussein Obama was a Muslim-terrorist-communist. But Boehner & Co. did not get the memo. Either did not notice that these scare tactics have lost their effectiveness, or it's simply all they know or have left at this point. It's a sad commentary on a pathetic political movement.

If Someone Called Matt Lewis a Homophobe to His Face, Would He Notice?

Apparently not. But while the wingnuts at Townhall are easy fodder for lampooning, Lewis's incoherence speaks to the disintegration of the conservative movement. Social conservatives are rapidly finding that as the economy falls off a cliff, no one really cares whether gays are allowed to marry. Not even in Iowa. Far right crazies like Lewis have not made their peace with this reality yet. Meanwhile, foreign policy conservatives are busy claiming Obama's policies amount to a continuation of their own. And economic conservatives - Wall Street conservatives - have been completely discredited. Tax cuts for the rich and financial deregulation haven't been this out of vogue since the Kingfish was advocating his "Share Our Wealth" plan.

What's the future of the GOP? Who knows - but it's probably a Republican Party that acknowledges global warming, doesn't bash gays/use race as a wedge issue, and actually commits itself to running the welfare state responsibly. Something like David Cameron's Tories. It's going to take quite awhile for the GOP to modernize itself that much. Let's just hope they let the grownups govern without obstruction (and that the Democrats stop being so beholden to Wall Street too) while they work out their issues.

Conservatives Still Want to Privatize Social Security?

Bad ideas die hard, apparently. You might think that the whole global financial crisis thing would make conservatives rethink the wisdom of putting even a portion of Social Security into the markets. You would be wrong. Over at AEI, Andrew Biggs, for one, is still trumpeting the supposed superiority of the would-be Bush private accounts over Social Security. Biggs observes that under the Bush scheme

Total Social Security benefits would increase if personal accounts returned more than the interest rate on government bonds.

Is it so hard to imagine a scenario where Treasuries would beat the stock market? Of course not - we're in such a period right now! (note: the below chart compares the S&P 500 vs 3-month Treasuries. Longer term government bonds would obviously look even better).



Over the last five, ten, and twenty-five years, government bonds have beaten the S&P 500. Furthermore, imagine a situation (let's call it Japan), where there's a huge asset and stock bubble. Twenty years later, stock prices are roughly a quarter of their highs. Workers with private accounts who entered the workforce a few years before the crash would have their holdings wiped out and remain depressed. And even if the stock market began to recover after twenty odd years, because the private accounts have a "life-cycle portfolio" that phases out stocks as retirement nears, these workers would not even catch the upside. They would be better off with the guaranteed benefit of Social Security.

Providing a modicum of economic security in old age is the purpose of Social Security. After all, that's why it's called "Social Security". Why scrap a system that successfully does this for one that might do it? Social Security itself does not face nearly the funding problem its critics like to claim it does. All that's required to fix its long term problems is a payroll tax hike and perhaps some sort of benefit cut. This isn't rocket science. You might even say it's bedrock conservatism - after all, it's what Ronald Reagan did in 1983.

Fair and Mentally Unbalanced

These reports that Glenn Beck is a neo-Nazi vampire-zombie who feasts on the blood of illegal immigrants - I'm tired of hearing about them. I wanted to debunk them. Well, I've now for several days done research on them. I can't debunk them.

See how difficult it is to prove a negative? It's impossible, really. Maybe that's why Glenn Beck is having such a hard time debunking the absurd talk of FEMA camps around the country (or maybe it's because Glenn Beck is an idiot playing to the tinfoil hat crowd). For those of you not keeping up with your right-wing conspiracies, Beck is referring to the rumor that Obama is using FEMA to set up concentration camps across the country where political dissidents will be sent. Sane conservatives like David Frum are reduced to saying WTF?



With the nation facing the economic equivalent of war, the Republicans - who still have enough votes to block major initiatives/bailouts due to the unreliability of Evan Bayh's Blue Dogs - are going off the deep end. Of course, Glenn Beck is just an entertainer - but he's the highest rated talking head on the Republican channel. And as we've seen with Rush Limbaugh, the Republican leadership is unwilling to stand up to the crazy folks in their base. So if Glenn Beck tells his viewers to call their representatives and tell them to boycott any Obama economic agenda, because it's the first step on the road to serfdom...well, you can guess what John Boehner, Eric Cantor and the rest of the A-Team will do. Now they'd almost certainly obstruct Obama's agenda regardless, but having a minority party that has clearly lost its mind that can still block legislation is a tremendous obstacle to getting the right policies in place. At a time of national peril, the Republicans are arguing about realities that only exist within their heads. Bush would be proud.