The Last Stand of the Modern GOP

Posted by BooMan | Sep 29, 2012 | 38 |

Jonathan Chait wrote a nearly perfect piece back in February for New York Magazine. It was an attempt to explain the strategy (and a bit of the psychology underpinning the strategy) that the Republicans adopted in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2008 victory. Why go for total obstruction? Why move to the right on immigration? Why nurture the most far right elements of the party? Why embark on a massive voter suppression plan? Chait covered it all, and I think he nailed it. At its simplest, they know that the America they once knew and dominated is slipping away. They know that the GOP, as it has existed since 1980, is going to have to adapt or die. But they decided they should roll the dice on one more chance at glory. If they could pin the economic downturn on the president and gin up enough racial and class resentment, they might be able to take back the House in 2010 and the Senate and White House in 2012. With the trifecta for at least two years, they could make their last stand and perhaps stall the coming progressive revolution for a decade or more. Here’s a particularly good part of Chait’s piece:

Last summer, Obama was again desperate to reach compromise, this time on legislation to reduce the budget deficit, which had come to dominate the political agenda and symbolize, in the eyes of Establishment opinion, Obama’s failure to fulfill his campaign goal of winning bipartisan cooperation. In extended closed-door negotiations, Obama offered Republicans hundreds of billions of dollars in spending cuts and a permanent extension of Bush-era tax rates in return for just $800 billion in higher revenue over a decade. This was less than half the new revenue proposed by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission. Republicans spurned this deal, too.

Instead the party has bet everything on 2012, preferring a Hail Mary strategy to the slow march of legislative progress. That is the basis of the House Republicans’ otherwise inexplicable choice to vote last spring for a sweeping budget plan that would lock in low taxes, slash spending, and transform Medicare into private vouchers—none of which was popular with voters. Majority parties are known to hold unpopular votes occasionally, but holding an unpopular vote that Republicans knew full well stood zero chance of enactment (with Obama casting a certain veto) broke new ground in the realm of foolhardiness.

The way to make sense of that foolhardiness is that the party has decided to bet everything on its one “last chance.” Not the last chance for the Republican Party to win power—there will be many of those, and over time it will surely learn to compete for nonwhite voters—but its last chance to exercise power in its current form, as a party of anti-government fundamentalism powered by sublimated white Christian identity politics. (And the last chance to stop the policy steamroller of the new Democratic majority.)

That is a B-I-N-G-O, right there.

I’d argue that the Republicans’ dedication to total obstruction had become obvious by the time the budget deal was under discussion. The administration wasn’t fooled into thinking John Boehner could deliver on his promises, so they were free to make as generous an offer as they wanted. The game was to highlight the Republicans’ intransigence, which required pissing off the Democratic base. That’s not to say that there won’t be a deal that the Democratic base doesn’t like, but it won’t ever be half as generous as what Boehner walked away from last year.

The more important point is that the Republicans haven’t made any deals, and haven’t made any concessions to women or gays or Latinos or blacks or scientists or environmentalists because they want one last shot at governing without any of those folks. They are thinking about the future in an apocalyptic way. They can’t stop armageddon from coming, but they can put it off for a little while. The modern GOP is on death’s door, but it can have one more shot at governing the way it wants to govern.

In a way, it has been a giant gamble. Every demographic trend that is working against the GOP has been exacerbated by their strategy of total obstruction, opposition to immigration reform, gay and women’s rights, science, and their pursuit of voter suppression. But the strategy worked brilliantly for them in 2010, and it hasn’t completely flamed out yet this year, although things are looking bleak. There was some rational basis for what they did. At least, there was until they decided to vote en masse for the Ryan Budget and then put the man himself on the ticket. That was the equivalent of a Berserker attack. Here is a visual demonstration of what went wrong with the Republican leadership’s brilliant plan:

Any questions?

About The Author

BooMan

Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.

38 Comments

seabe on September 30, 2012 at 12:27 am

You’re giving them too much credit. It worked out brilliantly for them in 2010? What have they achieved that is long-standing policy? They failed in every imaginable way. I criticized the admin for The Deal that was made where brendan mocked you with, “it isn’t the end of the world” as his signature, and I still think it was dumb to do. But in the long-run, it was marginal and will not have long-lasting effects on government policy if they’re staved off.

Even at their damnedest, they did absolutely nothing except get our credit down-rated. None of their agenda was enacted.

I’d say the one area where it’s worked brilliantly, if I’m being charitable, is at the state-level which I think is often overlooked. But nationally, they’re done, and they have nothing to show for it.
- hz on September 30, 2012 at 1:59 am
  
  The state level is really all they’ve got to point at, but that’s quite a lot. It looks like the red states are going to stay deep red for the foreseeable future, even if they don’t hold the majorities at the federal level.
hz on September 30, 2012 at 1:48 am

I’d argue that the Republicans’ dedication to total obstruction had become obvious by the time the budget deal was under discussion. The administration wasn’t fooled into thinking John Boehner could deliver on his promises, so they were free to make as generous an offer as they wanted. The game was to highlight the Republicans’ intransigence, which required pissing off the Democratic base. That’s not to say that there won’t be a deal that the Democratic base doesn’t like, but it won’t ever be half as generous as what Boehner walked away from last year.

Well, that’s the big question, isn’t it. I’ve seen this argument restated and gone into detail here enough times, no need to go back into it.

I wish I shared your certainty that this was the game plan behind the scenes, but I keep coming back to that press huddle that Obama did right in the wake of the news that his deal with Boehner had gone flat. When I get a chance later I’m going to go dig up the video, because I’m pretty certain that PBHO was genuinely surprised and pissed off, that he wanted that deal and had been fooled by his long negotiations that it was going to happen.

This President has the most remarkable capacity for keeping his cool at all times, and you never really see frustration or anger in his facial expressions or body language, but it creeps into his voice at times. This little presser (at one of the WH entrances, can’t think which one offhand) was one of two events where you can hear that anger. The other one was when the reporter from the Daily Caller interrupted his preliminary address on, what was it, the Dream Act to the WH press corps before the Q&A session began.

Anyway, we’ll have our answer when the bargain is struck after the election, probably in the Lame Duck session depending on how the House and Senate races turn out. I hope your assessment is the right one, but there was a lot of talk about Simpson-Bowles at the DNC.
- hz on September 30, 2012 at 1:56 am
  
  And on the subject of the Grand Bargain, I wonder what all this talk about a “balanced” approach looks like up close.
- BooMan on September 30, 2012 at 9:10 am
  
  I assume there will be a deal struck eventually that dings Medicare. There is a basic consensus that Medicare costs needs to be contained, and even though the Dems could theoretically solve that using reforms acceptable to the progressive base, that’s only in theory.
  
  A comparison could be made to the tax reforms on 1986 which were written by Democratic Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, and not by the Reagan White House. Marginal rates were brought down dramatically, as the Republicans wanted, but those changes were paid for by eliminating all kinds of “loopholes” that the Republicans liked. If the Democrats hadn’t controlled the House of Representatives, Reagan never would have signed off on all those concessions. He was able to get it done because there was a consensus that the tax code needed to be cleaned up, and because he was willing to make concessions that angered his base.
  
  The difference will be that Obama will not offer anything so generous if he thinks the answer might be ‘yes.’ But there will be an offer because almost no one in Washington thinks that Medicare costs can just be ignored.
  - seabe on September 30, 2012 at 9:48 am
    
    Cut how? Republicans signaled willingness to sign off on Medicare drug negotiations, and Obama fucked it over with a deal. Why not bring that into the mix? They actually had the votes…
    - BooMan on October 1, 2012 at 12:47 am
      
      You have a very skewed view of reality.
      - seabe on October 1, 2012 at 12:54 am
        
        Dude, Harry Reid had the votes, cancelled the voting when Obama told him to, whipped support against it, and then it failed to pass because the Dems split 26-26. And sorry, it was drug reimportation. We could have passed it, but Obama’s way of closing the donut-hole involved a deal with pharma. Maybe Obama made the right call, maybe without such a deal it couldn’t be passed, but don’t sit there and act like he didn’t get Reid to whip against it.
      - BooMan on October 1, 2012 at 10:51 am
        
        When you retract or qualify half your statement, and the only half that does any work for your argument, then you lose.
priscianus jr on September 30, 2012 at 1:50 am

I think he’s come close, but I would give it a different emphasis. Chait still makes this sound like a rational choice — risky, but rational. I don’t think rationality has anything to do with it. I think the base (with the Kochs, Adelsons, et al.) is a tiger, and the leadership is just riding it and are about to be eaten by it. This is what Obama probably didn’t understand either, at least until the last year and a half. He thought Bohner could deal. Maybe even Bohner thought he could deal. But he can’t.
Chait says it’s fear, not paranoia. Actually the GOP leadership unleashed the paranoia and is now afraid of the paranoids.
MNPundit on September 30, 2012 at 4:05 am

And yet, the longer the Dems hold the presidency the more like they are to lose it since there are only two parties and the American people sometimes just want to switch. If the country isn’t in a disaster or a muddle that Republicans have 0 solutions for, if it’s in fact doing somewhat well, then they might.

And certainly the Dem voters are much less likely to vote in the midterms. So they will keep on doing well (if maybe not as well as 2010) in the midterms.

So I basically don’t see this as a last stand at all. It will get here eventually, though the world will be cooked before that happens.
- Errol on September 30, 2012 at 4:19 am
  
  ongoing demographic shifts and the fact that the radicalized GOP has thrown out all its moderates means the situation you describe won’t occur without creation or resurgence of a new or reconstituted second major party – not clear right now what is the trajectory for that
- wvng on September 30, 2012 at 8:29 am
  
  I agree. I think the winger base will remain radicalized as long as Fox and Rush are out there to keep them outraged. And they will vote in every midterm as complacent or “I didn’t get my pony” Dems stay home – and that will keep them in a position to gum up the works.
  - jwb on September 30, 2012 at 1:16 pm
    
    Purity purging eventually exacts its toll as circular firing squads eliminate possibility of consensus governing. At 27% the nuts can run the asylum in the GOP, but when that number drops below 20% that is no longer the case.
Errol on September 30, 2012 at 4:16 am

Interesting. Explains the war on women aspect of GOP strategy that I have never understood. Re: Obama and the grand bargain – Obama’s only [? best?, but I think only] route forward was to make clear Republican obstructionism and the 1%’s underlying agenda – which he, with the help of Mother Jones and OWS, has done. Evidently he hoodwinked some democrats as well as the obstructionists with that move.
Arthur Gilroy on September 30, 2012 at 4:48 am

Like the dinosaurs as they headed for extinction, the Ratpublicans simply became more and rapacious. More teeth, more violence. It was last stand time. Kill everything that moves!!!

And then the tarpits.

Bet on it.

But…not to worry.

Now we have the DemocRatpublicans. A kinder, gentler, more mammalian breed of predators.

Smarter.

Check this out, please:

Professor Obama Lectures the Muslim World
by ESAM AL-AMIN

On Sept. 25, Professor-turned President Barack Obama lectured the Muslim World and world leaders during his annual address before the United Nations.

The beautifully crafted speech of the Nobel peace laureate would have been believed – and better received–had it simply been genuine. The president’s appeal for rejecting violence, spreading peace among nations, while emphasizing the vital use of diplomacy in international relations, as well as his call for respecting the rule of law, due process, and cultural understanding were remarkable. But unfortunately, they were simply not credible.

In his speech, the president admonished the Muslim World by underscoring the important belief that people must “resolve their differences peacefully” and that “diplomacy” should take “the place of war.” Laudable words, but only if America practiced what it preaches.

In his seminal work “A Century of U.S. Interventions,” based on the Congressional Records and the Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Services, Zoltan Grossman chronicled 133 U.S. military interventions by the most active military in the history of the world, between 1890 and 2001. Similarly, William Blum’s study “A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower,” covered 67 interventions between 1945 and 2000 that, according to him, resulted in the deaths of 13-17 million people. In his book “The Fall of the U.S. Empire – And Then What?,” European intellectual Johan Galtung listed 161 incidents of American overt political violence between 1945 and 2001, including 67 military interventions, 25 bombings, 35 political assassinations (or attempted ones), 11 foreign countries that were assisted with torture, and 23 interferences with elections or the political process abroad. And all that was before the 9/11 attacks.

Since then, the U.S. military has been extremely busy, invading Iraq in 2003 under false pretenses and causing hundreds of thousands of casualties while creating millions of refugees. Before that, it invaded Afghanistan in 2001, causing tens of thousands of casualties in the longest war in U.S. history while still maintaining to this date over 70,000 soldiers on the ground. The U.S. has also been waging open warfare with the whole world as its theater of operations in the so-called “war on terror.” This endless war allowed the U.S. military to engage in undeclared military operations, violating the sovereignty of many countries in Asia and Africa including Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Djibouti, and numerous Sub-Saharan and West African countries. So much for peaceful conflict resolution and mutual respect between nations.

During that period, the Bush administration allowed (and the Obama administration has since refused to prosecute) the CIA to violate the sovereignty of allied countries including in Europe by authorizing the use of prison black sites, rendition, and torture. In one case, Italy tried and convicted in absentia twenty-three CIA operatives who violated its sovereignty when they kidnapped and rendered an Egyptian cleric to be tortured by the former Egyptian regime. Likewise, Germany condemned the U.S. intelligence agency for kidnapping and torturing one of its citizens of Lebanese descent. While Canada regretted and apologized for its role in rendering one of its citizens of Syrian descent, the U.S. – the country that actually carried out the rendition knowing that the subject would be tortured by the Syrian regime that it now enthusiastically condemns- still refuses to acknowledge its role, let alone apologize for the gross violation of its human rights obligations under international treaties.

Moreover, no American senior officials were ever held accountable for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and torture in Iraq, or for waterboarding and other “harsh interrogation techniques” (read: torture) used against Muslim prisoners (the overwhelming number of whom were innocent bystanders according to legal and human rights organizations) at Guantanamo, Bagram, or elsewhere.

President Obama further stated in his scolding of Muslim world leaders that they needed to emulate the behavior of civilized nations that respect “the rule of law and due process that guarantees the rights of all people.” But such lofty rhetoric from the president might be very difficult to accept since he himself acted as prosecutor, judge, and executioner when he ordered the murder of several American citizens, including a cleric of Yemini descent and a magazine editor of Pakistani descent with a drone attack in Yemen. People across the Muslim world wondered why the rule of law was absent in these cases and why their due process rights did not apply. Even two weeks after their death, the cleric’s sixteen-year old son, also an American citizen with supposedly constitutional protections, and a child by international standards, was also assassinated in a separate drone attack. So much for due process or respect for human rights.

In fact, since Obama became president in 2009, dozens of innocent civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and else where have been killed each year. But rarely does the civilized nation apologize for killing innocent Muslim civilians because “America does not apologize” as many American politicians repeatedly love to say.

Furthermore, Obama’s commendable call for mutual respect among nations may have fallen on deaf ears because it was considered by many as disingenuous. As noted above, for years the U.S. has disrespected the sovereignty of Pakistan and Yemen as it assassinated many individuals, including U.S. citizens, on their soil without any regard for the national sovereignty of the host countries, which are not at war with the U.S. But Obama could not have dared to use a drone attack in the U.K. to kill a cleric of Egyptian descent, who the U.S. has been after for years. In the U.K., the U.S. simply asked the British to extradite him so that he could be tried on U.S. soil. So the U.K. gets every consideration while the administration only shows contempt for Yemen or Pakistan.

In his speech, the president lauded the “enshrined” American values of constitutional protections and freedom of speech, as he reminded his world audience that “citizens cannot be thrown in jail because of what they believe,” and that they should be allowed to “speak their minds and assemble without fear.” He then emphatically stated that in the U.S. “our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.”

Yet Muslims around the world wondered where were these protections of freedom of speech when several American Muslims were indicted and sentenced to as much as life in prison in the U.S. for exercising First Amendment activities, including an American Muslim pharmacist of Egyptian descent in Boston who was sentenced to seventeen years in 2012 for translating passages and uploading videos to the internet, and a cable operator of Pakistani descent who was sentenced to almost six years in 2004 for connecting his New York customers to Hezbollah’s satellite channel.

In many of these cases, government prosecutors speculated that the speech of the Muslim defendants was not protected because it could have led to violence even though no evidence was ever presented to support such a theory. Contrast that with the proven record of hate speech spewed by numerous American Islamophobes, many of whom were quoted extensively by anti-Muslim extremist Anders Breivik, who deliberately killed in cold blood 77 people in Norway in July 2011. In his 1500-page manifesto, Breivik cited many American anti-Muslim haters such as Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Pamela Geller, Martin Kramer, and others. They apparently inspired him to commit the atrocious killings, though none were ever held, even morally, accountable, or subsequently condemned for their hateful inciting anti-Muslim speech.

Moreover, President Obama proudly affirmed his belief in “freedom and self-determination” and expounded that such concepts are “not unique to one culture,” since they are “not simply American values or Western values; they are universal values.” But these words ring hollow as the American president failed to explain to peoples around the world why the U.S. and its Western allies while steadfastly declaring that they “believe in these values” have continuously blocked freedom and self-determination, even symbolically at the United Nations, to the Palestinian people who have been suffering for over six decades either under brutal military occupation or in squalid refugee camps.

He further failed to justify why America has continued to fully arm and finance the tools that maintain and sustain the Israeli military occupation for decades, while shielding Israel’s atrocious policies against the unarmed Palestinian civilian population. Or why it protects Israel from any accountability for its illegal settlement activities and occupation in flagrant violations of international law and the Geneva conventions.

Towards the end of the speech, President Obama accused the Iranian government of supporting “terrorist groups” in the Middle East (none of which is known to have targeted the U.S.), while his administration has just delisted the Iranian terrorist group MEK, which has a bloody history and in recent years has been responsible for many terrorist attacks and assassinations inside Iran including the targeting of government officials, scientists, and academics.

Overlooking the fact that he started his speech by emphasizing peace and diplomacy, the president ended it by implicitly threatening Iran with war unless it accepts the dictates of the West as he stated that “the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon” since “it has failed to take the opportunity to demonstrate that its nuclear program is peaceful.”

Most Americans might simply be deceived by Israeli propaganda in regard to the Iranian nuclear program, but most of the citizens of the world are not oblivious to the facts or the double standard applied to this issue by the American administration and its Israeli ally. So here are the facts that the president is fully aware of but conveniently decided to totally ignore.

Israel is the only country in the Middle East that actually possesses nuclear weapons- over 300 nuclear heads along with their delivery systems. Israel is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), while Iran is. Under the NPT, Iran not only has the right to have a robust civilian nuclear program, but the five recognized nuclear power countries have the obligation to help Iran develop one.

Moreover, Iran’s nuclear facilities have been fully and are currently under the IAEA inspection regime. Iran has repeatedly disavowed the use of nuclear arms and has only enriched its uranium stockpile to the civilian use level of twenty percent- not the ninety eight percent needed for weaponization. Moreover, since at least 2007 the consensus of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies has been that Iran abandoned any steps towards building a nuclear arms program. Finally, it was Iran that accepted the conditions set by President Obama in 2010 in his communication with the president of Brazil and prime minister of Turkey for Iran to prove its civilian use intentions. But it was Obama who subsequently backed away from the diplomatic solution as soon as Iran agreed to it, the same plan that he himself outlined to the world leaders.

When Obama arrived on the world stage in 2009, people the world over including many in the Muslim World had high hopes for real and genuine change. People were ready to turn the page on the painful years of the arrogant behavior of George W. Bush. But apparently the empire’s inertia overpowers the raised hopes of any false prophets.

Regrettably, with such self-aggrandizing posture, Obama’s tenure, whether it ends in four months or four years, will not conclude in celebration or optimism. Rather, in all likelihood its ending may follow T. S. Eliot’s words: “This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.”

I watched this speech in horror and amazement. It was as blatantly obvious as it could possibly be…communicated through his body language, his tones of voice and his general act…that President Obama was both lying and simultaneously not even trying to act as if he was not lying. The speech was a full-frontal dare to any and all that said in essence “I am highly intelligent and also extremely well informed about the real situation in the world, and I am spewing this democratic, poplulist bullshit for the plebes to swallow. But you who know better…believe it. America will fuck you up if you attempt to oppose our wishes on any level whatsoever. We are right and you who oppose us are wrong. Try it and see what happens. I dare you.”

The Dems are about to ascend to the catbird seat in America, I think.

Or will it the ratbird?

We shall see, soon enough.

Meanwhile…let us pray.

For real!!!

Later…

AG

P.S. And…wake the fuck up while you’re at it.

Please.

Four More Years!!!

Four more years of murder and barefaced lies?

How long do you think we can get away with it?

The chickens always come home to roost eventually.

Bet on it.

Please.
Oscar In Dallas on September 30, 2012 at 7:25 am

What is your name?
- Xantar on September 30, 2012 at 8:56 am
  
  What is your favorite color?
  - Richard Bachman on September 30, 2012 at 9:14 am
    
    Blue…….No, red….AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!
    - jdw on September 30, 2012 at 9:29 am
      
      What is the airspeed velocity of a swallow?
      - DerFarm on September 30, 2012 at 10:42 am
        
        with or without carrying a coconut?
      - jdw on September 30, 2012 at 10:54 am
        
        Two swallows could carry a coconut between them.
      - Richard Bachman on September 30, 2012 at 11:13 am
        
        No, they’d have have it on a line!
      - Richard Bachman on September 30, 2012 at 11:11 am
        
        African or European swallow?
      - jdw on September 30, 2012 at 11:15 am
        
        African swallows are non-migratory
      - Richard Bachman on September 30, 2012 at 11:26 am
        
        Ah, yeah….So they couldn’t bring one back anyway.
stupidicus on September 30, 2012 at 10:40 am

He was a bit behind the curve.

It’s been clear since the Pee Party rise (and who funded it) and the effort to hijack the repub party for its use as a “last hurrah”, that the monied interests that pull their strings are fully aware that between the health care, jobs, etc problems, and the biggie, AGW that is inextricably intertwined with them (just look up the additional deaths and health problems being tied to it for example), are inevitably gonna require socialistic solutions that the modern republican party has had an aversion to for longer than the rise of the Pee People, and therefore cannot provide any solutions for them. It’s all about starting high and settling lower, before the avalanche is triggered by events they’ve long known were imminent. Settling lower is the adaptation they’ll be forced to undergo if they wanna remain viable as a national party.

Between all that and the looming brown demographic tsunami (the socialist hordes at the gate) they’ve known their days were numbered, and that their golden mountains of wealth were due for a serious erosion as a result. Their efforts have been motivated/dictated by, a desire to minimize the amount of erosion to their wealth and the political power it buys. It’s long been all about delaying the inevitable, and their “rat in the corner” attitudes and behavior are a reflection of this.

That’s how I’ve seen and argued it for 2-3 years now, and why I’ve long been confident that the fear of rightwingnuttery it has fostered, will be their undoing in Nov. While the class warfare it represents may have its origins in the efforts of Saint Raygun, events in the interim have made it abundantly and increasingly clear their days were numbered, and that those events represented the sharpening of the knives and pitchforks soon to be wielded against their bloated wallets. Avoiding that is what all their opposition to any raising of taxes is all about — avoiding the tax bleeding they must inevitably suffer.

Their hope is to stall the inevitable, and given the current size of the income/wealth inequality that has accumulated over the decades, it’s hard to imagine that their mountains won’t remain large, making them the winners of the decades long game, and who will be laughing all the way to the banks they own — just less than before.
- Errol on September 30, 2012 at 11:46 am
  
  They just won’t be able to loot the treasury and pillage via crony capitalism. winning this election was about getting their hands on soc sec funds as well as reversing consumer protection and health care restraints on their looting. also for the Kochs, polluters par excellence, destroying the EPA. I’m sure all their loot is overseas and inaccessible to taxation – apart a concerted effort on the part of many nations, all of which are losing major tax revenue, – (there’s some talk of a concerted effort to recoup tax revenue, but it’s way in the future).
  hoping we get a look at Romney’s tax filings, however. would be nice to see how they have it rigged.
  - stupidicus on October 1, 2012 at 10:52 am
    
    The last I looked they collectively worldwide have something like http://www.slate.com/blogs/trending/2012/07/23/super_rich_offshore_accounds_hiding_32_trillion_preve
    nting_280_billion_in_tax_revenue.html squirreled away.
    
    Govs in the role of Robinhood can do a lot of good with a fraction of that.
    - Errol on October 1, 2012 at 7:00 pm
      
      wow. and the govs know they need it so maybe eventually …
- RandyH on September 30, 2012 at 1:37 pm
  
  The Owner Class are desperate to repeal, and not just change, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) immediately before it goes into full effect. So much so that they have spent enormous amounts of money on propaganda to convince the crazy 27% (and any other morons they could round up) to fight for it.
  
  There must be some financial motive on their part to justify such an expense, right? Something that they couldn’t be completely honest about, for fear that regular people wouldn’t sympathize with them. It had me stumped until I learned recently that starting in 2013, people who make over $250K per year will have to start paying 3.8% Medicare Tax on all income over $250K. This isn’t just on earned (wage) income, either, like everyone else pays. It’s on everything (including interest, dividends, capital gains and “carried interest.”) And since this is Medicare Tax, not regular Federal Income Tax, there are no loopholes, deductions, credits or anything – and little chance of ever getting any passed – because, as they’ve been trying to pound into our heads forever, Medicare is “broke” and “not sustainable without major benefit reductions.”
  
  So, that hidden financial motive is pretty huge for them. And just one of those boring policy details that were too complicated for the press to report on fully during the healthcare debate. They did talk about some of this but I never noticed how far-reaching the tax was and I thought I was following the issue closely. But the tax lawyers of the uber-wealthy no doubt noticed this little detail in the legislation. And the panic ensued.
  
  I learned this from this article (via Digby) about the Romney’s having to pay $500K extra in this Medicare Tax next year. And they’re not even really rich when compared to the Kochs, Waltons, etc.
  - Errol on September 30, 2012 at 2:44 pm
    
    fascinating – and wow! rMoney actually paying some taxes. the mind reels
  - stupidicus on October 1, 2012 at 10:49 am
    
    Well, I’ve always thought the “one term pres” thing would have been and will be applied to any dem pres, because obstructionism is analogous to the little dutch boy and his fingers in the dike.
    
    They know (much like they did back in the depression days) that inevitably too much greed emperils their hold on power http://consortiumnews.com/2012/08/20/forgetting-the-why-of-the-new-deal/ from the social disorder it introduces, when the number of bodies begins to outweigh their bank account numbers in the political world.
    
    In terms of the sympathy you raised, just imagine how quickly that is gonna evaporate once AGW starts ravaging the world, and more food/water shortages arise, insurance companies can’t keep up http://www.insurancenetworking.com/news/insurance-climate-change-risk-ceres-30007-1.html, population migrations are required, etc. The “people” aren’t gonna care whether this rich guy/gal/corp or that one had their finger in the making of the increasingly baked pie or not.
    
    You betcha the financial motives are high, even if some of the threats to them are not immediate, but readily observable on the horizon. While those curently sympathetic to them because of the “taxes are theft” BS — the only successful “trickle down” scheme rightwingers have produced, given the abundant stupidity it represents — I’ve long thought and argued that AGW is gonna be what inevitably breaks down the wall of rightwingnut credulity, replacing sympathy with those knives and pitchforks.
mino on September 30, 2012 at 12:56 pm

Perhaps irony is not dead and Romney is totally fulfilling the White Horse Prophecy in taking the party down with him by giving voters a good look at our plutocrats. Only a debacle will produce the Senate and House.
obsessed on September 30, 2012 at 5:13 pm

>That’s not to say that there won’t be a deal that the Democratic base doesn’t like, but it won’t ever be half as generous as what Boehner walked away from last year.

I’d like to believe you, but I don’t. Now that the fear of Romney actually winning has almost completely receded, I’m getting furious at Obama all over again, thinking about all the recent stories of a lame duck grand bargain after the election and remembering all the times he ignored Krugman and followed idiots like Summers and Emanuel. Frankly, I think the whole thing is rigged. The Republicans are taking a dive to make Obama look reasonable when he guts Soc. Sec. and Medicare.

It’s great fun to watch red states turn blue, but we’re still screwed.
- Errol on September 30, 2012 at 6:07 pm
  
  Recent stories of a lame duck grand bargain probably have something to do with depressing dem voter turnout and generating anti-Obama conversations on the internets
  - MNPundit on October 1, 2012 at 12:16 am
    
    Eh, you mean Obama mentioning Simpson-Bowles in the Convention speech was an attempt to depress Dem Voter turnout?
    
    Anyhow, I’ve long since committed to voting third party, but this is a pretty good piece.
    
    http://www.tomdispatch.com/dialogs/print/?id=175598
rifek on October 1, 2012 at 12:56 am

The Rethuglicans have doubled down on Lee Atwater’s Southern Strategy (better characterized as the Inbred Redneck Asshole Strategy) for 40 years. Accountants accept that sunk costs are sunk. Regular people, not so much.

The Last Stand of the Modern GOP

About The Author

BooMan

38 Comments

Recent Posts

Recent Comments