DEFUND VOTER ID!

If they can't fix the technical problems of voter ID, shouldn't it be defunded? Shouldn't the legislature shut down the government, if necessary, to make sure that happens? At the very least, shouldn't implementation be suspended and all mandates and penalties be delayed?

A Texas district judge who has been voting for the past five decades was almost barred from the polls Tuesday, thanks to the state's newly implemented, stricter voter ID law. The law kicked in on Tuesday as early voting in Texas' November 5 election began.

As she told local channel Kiii News, 117th District Court Judge Sandra Watts was flagged for possible voter fraud because her driver's license lists her maiden name as her middle name, while her voter registration form has her real middle name. This was the first time she has ever had a problem voting in 49 years. "What I have used for voter registration and for identification for the last 52 years was not sufficient yesterday when I went to vote," she said.

Watts worried that women who use maiden names or hyphenated names may be surprised at the polls. "I don't think most women know that this is going to create a problem," the judge said. "That their maiden name is on their driver's license, which was mandated in 1964 when I got married, and this. And so why would I want to use a provisional ballot when I've been voting regular ballot for the last 49 years?" ...

Where's the "tech surge" to fix this problem?

Why isn't anyone being fired for not being aware of it?

What didn't Governor Rick Perry know and when didn't he know it?

THE RIGHT'S ALINSKYITE CAMPAIGN AGAINST KATHLEEN SIBELIUS

The right knows that it's not enough to attack Obamacare, or complain about the problems with Healthcare.gov -- you have to give people a villain, in this case, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. This is a specifically Alinskyite approach -- which makes sense because the only people in modern political life who obsess over Ol' Saul's Rules for Radicals are right-wingers.

I wanted to find the text of Alinsky's 12th and final Rule, and where did I find it? At a site called "Best of Beck: Glenn Beck Quotes, Research, References, Transcripts, Audio, Videos."

RULE 12: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Secretary Sebelius, for now, this is your life.

The right-wing corollary to Alinsky Rule #12 is "Whenever possible, pick a target who's non-white, a woman, or both." Think about it: Van Jones. Shirley Sherrod. Lois Lerner. Eric Holder. Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton (on Benghazi). Valerie Jarrett (on everything). There are scapegoats who don't fall into these categories, inside and outside the administration -- George Soros, Cass Sunstein, Mike Bloomberg on guns, Chuck Schumer -- all Jews -- as well as Harry Reid (though he takes a backseat to the truly despised Nancy Pelosi on the right-wing hate-o-meter). But the ideal target is still someone who's not a white Christian male. So Sebelius is pretty close to ideal.

YOU KNOW WHO'S AN IGNORAMUS? BRIAN WILLIAMS

Here's Brian Williams on last night's NBC Nightly News talking about the death of Tom Foley:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Transcript (emphasis added)

Beneath the Capitol Dome, present day, in the House chamber today, a rare honor afforded to very few in our history, specifically those who serve as Speaker of the House. In memory of former Speaker Tom Foley, who died last week, today the Speaker's chair and desk were draped in black, the gavel resting upon it. His portrait was also draped in black. Foley was a Democrat from Washington State, proud of his work as a conciliator. Let's just say he served in a different era.

Yeah, that was such a different era:

A few days before he became speaker, a scandal erupted over a Republican National Committee memo entitled "Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet" and comparing the Spokane Congressman to openly gay Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank. An aide to Newt Gingrich, then the House Republican whip, encouraged reporters to look into the sexuality of Foley, who had been married since 1968. President George H.W. Bush eventually condemned the memo -- though he stood by RNC Chairman Lee Atwater, a longtime aide.

More:

Karen Van Brocklin, one of Gingrich's top staffers, spread false rumors that Speaker Tom Foley was gay in an unsuccessful attempt to get the media to cover the story. Larry Sabato, author of Feeding Frenzy, observed that Van Brocklin was "particularly aggressive" in spreading the rumors. Van Brocklin told a New York Daily News reporter, "We hear it's little boys." ...

Gingrich refused to fire Van Brocklin.... He claimed that she was merely asked by a reporter if there were stories around about Foley's personal life, "and she stupidly said yes." But the Los Angeles Times discovered that Gingrich was lying: several reporters said that Van Brocklin "had brought up the subject of Foley's alleged behavior with at least three news organizations and had tried to get them to publish stories on the subject by claiming other newspapers were about to do so."

Foley lost his speakership when an unknown named George Nethercutt beat him for his House seat in the Gingrich/Contract with America Republican wave election of 1994, which was not exactly a campaign full of sweetness and light.

Yes, every obituary of Tom Foley says that he worked extremely well across the aisle. But he did not "serve in a different era." He served at the dawn of the godawful era we're living in now.

Brian Williams might have mentioned that. But he'd rather have you believe that what's troubling politics today is a temporary fever, and not the GOP's standard operating procedure for at least a quarter of a century.

IS RASMUSSEN REVERSE-SKEWING POLLS NOW?

The latest poll in the Virginia governor's race is extraordinarily good news for Terry McAuliffe -- he's up by 17 over Ken Cuccinelli. And this poll is from ... Rasmussen? Really? A pollster long known for a significant Republican lean? Rasmussen has McAuliffe up by 17 when every other poll of the race conducted this month has shown McAuliffe up by 7 to 9 points?

Maybe this race really is turning into a blowout -- but I have to wonder whether Rasmussen, seeing that McAuliffe is solidly but not overwhelmingly ahead, is exaggerating the Democrat's lead in the hope that a single-digit McAuliffe victory will now be interpreted as McAuliffe falling short of expectations.

I don't have to remind you that Republicans sneeringly discounted the 2012 polls that showed President Obama leading, claimed that these polls were skewed, then cooked up a lot of excuses for the Obama victory -- Dick Morris said it was because of Sandy, Karl Rove said it was an act of voter suppression for Obama to say negative things about his opponent. In any case, Republicans didn't accept that Obama really won.

The creative interpretation of electoral results by Republicans continues -- Cory Booker, we're told, kinda-sorta lost his Senate race in New Jersey because his victory margin over Steve Lonegan was in the low double digits, and now Lonegan says the government shutdown, which he supported, cost him the election.

Republicans are desperate to send the message that America loves them, and you should pay no attention to actual vote totals that say otherwise. If, as I suspect, Rasmussen is pumping up McAuliffe's numbers, this could be a different form of GOP skewing.

HEALTHCARE.GOV: MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT THE BOTCH

I'm of two minds about the failures of Healthcare.gov. On the one hand, the rollout is obviously a botch, and that's a threat to the reputation of anyone who believes that government can do good things for people -- a notion that's been challenged so relentlessly over the past few decades that it has to be strenuously rebutted at every possible opportunity. On the other hand, there's this:

@lapared @truthrose1 @allanbrauer @samsteinhp I use my non-news junkie sister as a bellwether. She thinks website uproar by msm is stupid.

— itgurl (@itgurl_29) October 22, 2013

The technology of a customer-service interface is difficult to navigate? You think this is unheard of? Try getting through a telecom's phone tree if you have a service problem. Try disputing a claim rejection with a private health insurer right now.

Right-wingers have made Obama and Obamacare seem so evil and menacing and totalitarian -- death panels and all that -- that technological incompetence might actually be defusing the fear. See? We're not all being shipped off to extermination camps. We're just getting 404 errors for hours. Bumbling has to seem less scary than the Big Brother tactics Republicans prepared us to expect.

****

That said, this from Ezra Klein (via Andrew Sullivan) is a problem if it's true:

The problem here isn't just technological. It's managerial. The White House's senior staff -- up to and including the president -- was blindsided. Staffers deep in the process knew that HealthCare.gov wasn't ready for primetime. But those frustrations were hidden from top-level managers. Somewhere along the chain the information was spun, softened, or just plain buried.

The result was that the White House didn't know the truth about its own top initiative -- and so they were unprepared for the disastrous launch. They didn't even know they needed to be lowering expectations. In any normal corporation, heads would roll over a managerial failure of such magnitude and consequence.

Any top government official who's liberal or even semi-liberal, and who has or shares the responsibility for rolling out a new government program, needs to be deeply, deeply invested in getting it done right. The right attacks government at every opportunity, and the mainstream press absolutely loves stories about government waste and inefficiency and incompetence. Heartlanders are bombarded with this narrative; they're inclined to believe that government is no damn good at anything, even though there are a lot of services they want from government. Officeholders and aides in Democratic administrations don't put enough emphasis on proving the naysayers wrong by getting programs to work right. That needs to change.

****

Sullivan goes on to quote W. James Antle III of The American Conservative, who worries about precisely the outcome I'd prefer:

Nothing would better vindicate [conservatives'] case against Obamacare than the "death spiral" that would follow young people fleeing exchanges that are being flooded with the old and sick.

Yet if Obamacare undermines the entire individual health insurance market, it will make it even more difficult -- and perhaps impossible -- to ever implement any free-market health care reforms. In fact, single payer may loom ever larger as the only viable remaining option to an employer-based system that both conservatives and liberals would like to substantially remodel.

Sully adds:

[Republicans] will continue a policy of sabotage -- and the possibility that we could all end up in single-payer as a result is not the kind of empirical thing they can compute.

Hey, I'd be delighted if the end result of all this were single-payer. But anyone who thinks that an irreversible Obamacare failure would lead to single-payer is smoking crack.

First of all, right-wingers will never acknowledge the failures of the marketplace, including the marketplace that would be left after an Obamacare failure. More important, right-wingers don't give a goddamn whether anyone except the 1% has heath insurance, as long as the uninsured don't take it out on them at the polls, and as long as corporations are fat and happy. Right-wingers would be perfectly happy to replace Obamacare with whatever washes up in its aftermath, if voters put up with that. Alternately, they would be happy to create a system in which insurance sales across state lines put all health insurance in one state with incredibly pro-business laws, the way so many credit cards originate in South Dakota, where the sky's the limit on interest rates charged. They would be happy to put such great restraints on malpractice suits that the deserving just gave up on seeking redress. They would be happy to watch the numbers of the insured steadily climb. They would, in short, be perfectly happy to turn America into one big Texas as far as health insurance goes.

All they'd need to do is persuade the voters that it's their fault if they're insured, or it's the fault of the poor sucking up all the Medicaid, or, well, it's because Obamacare screwed everything up permanently. Alas, I think voters , who've been abused by the economic and politic and health-care systems for years, would just sigh and go along with that.

So I suppose that's one good reason for the administration to get this right -- not because the alternative will be socialized medicine, but because it will probably be PerryCare.

HINDROCKET: DEMOCRATS CAUSE MASS SHOOTINGS

That's literally what Power Line's John Hinderaker is saying here:

HAVE BARACK OBAMA AND ERIC HOLDER CAUSED AN INCREASE IN MASS MURDER?

... Still, one wonders: why has the Obama/Holder administration seen a tripling in attempted mass murders, even as the overall homicide rate has continued to decline? It might be coincidence. But it also may be that the hysterical publicity given to each such incident has encouraged others. During the last few years, the Democratic Party news media have enthusiastically promoted stories about "shooters," hoping to aid the Obama administration in its gun control initiatives.

Oh, right -- and civil rights activists throughout the first half of the twentieth century "enthusiastically promoted stories" about lynchings out of a sinister desire to score political victories by passing civil rights laws, not out of a sense of outrage at brutality. Yup, got it. Oh, and I love the way Hindrocket puts "shooters" in scare quotes, because, y'know, shooting firearms is a sacrament, and it's sacrilege to refer to people who commit mass murder with guns as "shooters," even if calling them that is a simple and non-controversial statement of fact.

That effort has been unsuccessful, but it may have had the unintended effect of encouraging other unstable individuals to seek the same sort of immortality that the Democratic media have conferred on, for example, Adam Lanza -- a murderer who himself was clearly inspired by the fame that had been accorded his predecessors and idols. Perhaps next time Eric Holder gives a speech about the anomalous increase in incidents of attempted mass murder, he should look in the mirror.

If anyone is "encouraging ... unstable individuals" to pick up guns, it's the gun lobby, which relentlessly tells the gun community and the rest of America that firearm use is the source of the rarest bliss in the human experience, is deeply nourishing to the soul and moral character, and is critically necessary for the proper functioning of society. If I were a clinical paranoid, I'm pretty sure that message would persuade me that my decision to shoot up a middle school made me one of the people whose firearm use was going to put the world back on its proper course, and that any enjoyment I had throughout the course of my massacre was good clean fun. I'd think that the "bad person with a gun" was the other guy. I'd think I was the good person with a gun.

It's absurdly easy for a crazy or otherwise deranged person to get a gun in this country -- but it's also absurdly easy for a crazed person with a gun to get the message that being angry and armed is a wonderful thing. You look in the mirror, Hindrocket.

HOWARD BEALE VOTERS VS. ALRED E. NEUMAN VOTERS

Over at The New Republic, Tod Lindberg argues that the shutdown narrative we've developed is actually good for the GOP. I know this sounds like a willfully counterintuitive #slatepitch, but I think Lindberg has a point:

... Now, let us stipulate that the government shutdown, however long-lived its repercussions turn out to be, was a Republican political failure on a truly grand scale. Moreover, the agents provocateurs were indeed the Tea Party darlings of the House and Senate....

The Tea Party faction is telling its own version of the same story, namely, that it fought the good fight and lost. But that's another way of saying that the Tea Party does not have the political power within the GOP to prevail. Yes, it can create circumstances in which the government shuts down. But it cannot prevent the government from reopening, let alone an increase in the debt limit when the alternative is default or massive spending cuts, in an effort to get its way....

If the GOP House leadership were truly under the thumb of its most radical members, there would have been no House vote on the Senate compromise bill, the government shutdown would have continued, and the Treasury would today be coping with the worst financial crisis in the history of the Republic. Of course, Democrats and progressives were issuing warnings about precisely that outcome. But it didn't happen. And the reason it didn't is that the GOP, though it includes a radical wing, is not a radical monolith, and its non-radical leadership has the power to defeat the radical wing when push comes to shove. To the extent the GOP’s internal struggle is understood as a contest between conservatives and radicals, in which the conservatives prevail, it will likely help the party regain some of the ground it has been losing at the center.

If that really is what people take away from this crisis, then they'll think -- perhaps even more than they did before -- "Well, the Republicans are a reasonable and responsible bunch, and they'll be just fine as soon as they deal with that pesky lunatic minority." That really might be a good message for the GOP.

Lindberg goes on to say this, however:

If the Tea Party faction managed to pull off in 2016 what it failed to pull off in 2012, namely nominate one of its own for president, we would quickly and rightly be back to the story about the party's capture by its extreme elements. Likewise, if the GOP keeps its House majority in 2014 and elects a speaker actually willing and able to deploy such radical means as forcing a default crisis.

And now we get to the real problem. What has to happen before voters decide the GOP can't be trusted at all? Does the party actually have to push us into default and start a global depression before the "What, me worry?" Alfred E. Neuman voters of the American center say, "Gee, you know, these fellows really have the potential to do some harm"?

And that's the difference between the majority of the U.S. electorate and the voters of Wingnuttia. You edge a millimeter toward a slope that's a hundred miles away, and isn't the slightest bit slippery, and wingnut voters immediately foresee a cataclysmic slide. Propose firearm background checks that aren't even truly universal, and wingnut voters think mass gun confiscation is imminent within weeks. Pass a market-based, Heritage Foundation-developed health care plan, and they think we're living under the Khmer Rouge. Everything Democrats do puts wingnut voters on immediate full alert, mad as hell and refusing to take it anymore, even if it's a baby step toward what they fear, with no further steps desired or planned.

But if Republicans take us nearly to the brink of disaster, a disaster from which we're rescued at the last second, centrist voters still don't develop a sense of alarm about the party.

What, them worry? Well, they should. But they don't.

MAYBE "THE 27%" SHOULD BE CALLED "THE 31%"

I'm happy to see this CNN poll. The changes it's measuring may not endure, but those changes are significant and broad-based, at least for now:

Just over half the public says that it's bad for the country that the GOP controls the House of Representatives, according to a new national poll conducted after the end of the partial government shutdown.

And the CNN/ORC International survey also indicates that more than six in 10 Americans say that Speaker of the House John Boehner should be replaced....

This is the first time since the Republicans won back control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections that a majority say their control of the chamber is bad for the country....

When I saw this, I suspected that the approval drop for the GOP and Boehner would be mostly because of dissatisfaction among right-wingers (who presumably would want even more right-wing extremism and intransigence from the party and the Speaker, and who'll vote accordingly in 2014). Right-wing dissatisfaction is a factor -- according to the numbers (PDF), 32% of conservatives think it's bad that the GOP controls the House (I guess they'd prefer control by an actual Tea Party party), and 55% of conservatives want Boehner replaced as Speaker. However, moderates are also disillusioned -- back in December 2012 (PDF) they favored GOP control of the House 50%-43%, whereas now they oppose it 59%-32%; moderates approved of John Boeher's job performance 51%-35% in December, whereas now 65% want him replaced as Speaker.

But there is a floor for the GOP. We used to talk about "the 27%" -- the percentage of people who would vote right-wing under any and all circumstances. Well, maybe that number should have been 31%:





Nothing shakes these people's faith. And as long as there are more than 218 House districts in which the 31-percenters are a majority, Republicans will hold the House indefinitely.


(Poll via Memeorandum.)

TED CRUZ IS JUST MAKING CHRIS CHRISTIE LOOK GOOD TO THE VILLAGE

In the background as I started typing this, an NPR reporter was droning on with the nine thousandth iteration of the mainstream media's boilerplate Ted Cruz story (you know: concerned Republican says alienating GOP colleagues isn't a good career move if Cruz wants to have a long Senate career, reporter notes that what makes the establishment despise Cruz makes the tea party love him, blah blah blah). Liberal politics mavens are listening to this and counting the days until the GOP crack-up is complete and the progressive utopia follows.

Meanwhile, I was seeing this at Memeorandum, citing editorial pages from New Jersey and Virginia::





I'm assuming Terry McAuliffe is going to win in Virginia. But he's an unloved political hack and he's probably not going to crack 50% in a three-way race against a teabagger and a Libertarian. The mainstream press is quite ready to tell us that that's not much of a victory -- hell, Cory Booker won the New Jersey Senate special election by double digits last week and the New York Times write-up dripped with contempt for Booker, while right-wingers acted as if his teabag opponent effectively won. (Let me point out that Booker's race was close as close as it was in part because he nearly made Martha Coakley's mistake -- until the end of the race he seemed to think he could coast. His overall TV ad spending was only a quarter of what Bob Menendez spent on TV last year in his Jersey Senate race.)

While McAuliffe is winning ugly, and Booker is entering the Senate after a victory that fell short of initial expectations, Chris Christie is about to win in a blowout, adored by the "liberal media" and embraced by the voters of a supposedly deep-blue state (and barely opposed by a Democratic Party that's simply decided to allow him to run up the score). Even gay marriage is working out ideally for him: it's come to New Jersey via the courts, which means that gay-tolerant swing voters won't see Christie-as-meanie blocking it, but he's still trying to get it overturned, which means he isn't failing a GOP presidential litmus test.

The press is very, very ready to write the story that the way out for Republicans is to follow the Christie model. No, let me rephrase that: The press is very, very ready to write the story that the way out for American politics is to follow the Christie model. Or the Susana Martinez model and the Scott Walker model -- and hey, Walker has a book coming out next month! The meme is that while everyone's feudin' and fussin' in D.C., Republican governors are getting the job done. Here's GOP operative Ed Gillespie, in The Washington Post, reminding everyone in the Beltway how that song goes.

I'm not sure what the exact date of Christie's second inaugural is going to be, but his first one was on January 19, which means the second one will fall sometime between the next federal government shutdown deadline and the next debt deadline. I assume we're going to have more ugly brinkmanship then -- which is only going to cast Christie in a rosier glow, by contrast.

I know, I know -- Christie's going to have to tack to the right to win the presidential nomination. But McCain and Romney pulled it off. I know -- the embrace of Obama burdens Christie. But McCain was burdened by support for immigration reform, and Romney by Romneycare. And if Christie can nab the nomination, he's much, much better than McCain or Romney at dishing out the red meat his base craves -- he'd be his own Palin -- and he does it without alienating centrist pundits.

So, yeah, there's some fun to be had in watching Republicans in Washington attack one another. But I think it all just makes Christie or some other GOP governor more likely to win the media primary in 2016.

****

UPDATE: Christie just withdrew New Jersey's appeal of gay marriage. I'm surprised. That's going to help him on Election Day and hurt him in 2016.

GUY WHO ROUTINELY PUBLISHES SCURRILOUS LIES ABOUT DEMOCRATS IS BEING TAKEN SERIOUSLY AGAIN

Edward Klein has made a career of attacking Democrats in scurrilous, credulity-straining books and articles -- but every time he publishes something new, people take him seriously. Today, in the New York Post, he has a gossipy new "revelation" -- anonymously sourced, of course, like nearly everything he writes:

As the White House was gearing up to sell ObamaCare to the American people last summer, Valerie Jarrett, the president's pointwoman on a host of issues, phoned Oprah Winfrey.

She invited the Queen of All Media to join celebrities, including Amy Poehler, Jennifer Hudson and Alicia Keys, to meet with President Obama and discuss how they could generate publicity for his health-care law.

Oprah refused....

Instead, Oprah sent a low-level rep from one of her talent agencies, which was regarded as a insult....

Oprah's friends publicly dismiss the idea that she had a falling out with Obama. They note that she phoned Michelle Obama right after the 2012 election to congratulate her. They say Michelle invited her to have dinner with the first family. But the dinner never took place, and Oprah continues to be frozen out....

Oh, yes -- Oprah is so "frozen out" by the White House that last August, a couple of weeks after this meeting, it was announced that she's receiving a Presidential Medal of Freedom this year. And if sending a representative to the Obamacare meeting rather than personally attending is such an insult, then I guess Alicia Keys and Jon Bon Jovi, who also sent representatives, also intended to insult the White House.

The meeting took place on Monday, July 22. Hey, maybe Oprah didn't want to go to the meeting jet-lagged -- after all, she'd attended Tina Turner's wedding in Switzerland the day before.

And if Oprah did snub the Obamas, so freaking what? She's Oprah. She's not some head of state.

Let me remind you that this is the same Edward Klein whose 2005 biography of Hillary Clinton claimed that Chelsea Clinton was conceived during a rape of Hillary Clinton by her husband. Even right-wingers despised it. John Podhoretz:

This is one of the most sordid volumes I've ever waded through. Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated. And 200 pages into it, I wanted someone to drive stakes through my eyes so I wouldn't have to suffer through another word.

Joe Queenan:

... it is a very bad book ... it relies too much on nasty personal comments about Senator Clinton provided by anonymous sources ... it sleazily intimates that Hillary Clinton is a lying, scheming, smelly, left-leaning lesbian and a non-maternal parent who consorts with lawyers who defend mobbed-up unions and bears a striking character resemblance to both Richard Nixon and Madonna, and who tacitly approved of her husband's rape of a young woman at a time when Mrs. Clinton may or may not have been bathing, washing her hair or shaving her underarms, while hanging out with short-haired women from the sapphic charnel house Wellesley College.

Klein coauthored a 2010 book called The Obama Identity: A Novel (Or Is It?), in which a CIA agent named Theodore J. "Higgy" Higginbothem III goes in search of the truth about Barack Obama.

Higgy and his crack operatives discover startling secrets about the 44th president of the United States-a man some call "The Chosen One" and others refer to as "an Obamanation." Among the many startling revelations in THE OBAMA IDENTITY: * What Obama's Kenyan grandmother says about his birthplace * How a Muslim imam taught young Obama to apologize for America and bow to foreigners * How the Reverend Jeremiah Wright taught Obama to use the TelePromTer * What happened to the videotapes showing Obama high-fiving the Reverend Wright after one of his anti-American sermons * How financier George Soros brought about the collapse of the American economy to help elect Obama * Why Obama blames everything on George W. Bush except Katie Couric's dismal ratings * How the Russians blackmailed Obama into canceling America's anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe * Who came up with the idea of carving Obama's face on Mount Rushmore right next to Abe Lincoln's?

Klein claimed Bill Clinton denounced Obama as an "amateur" and wanted Hillary to run against Obama in 2012, then wanted Hillary to accept the VP slot from Obama if offered (allegedly the White House was planning to ask Hillary and Joe Biden to switch jobs). All this, of course, based on anonymous sources.

Forgive me if I assume that every word Klein writes about a Democrat is a lie, including "and" and "the."

*****

And while we're on the subject of the New York Post, get a load of today's front page, if you haven't seen it already:





Seriously? The folks at the Post are so deeply embedded in their own bubble that they think readers will see the government fining JPMorgan Chase $13 billion for its role in the financial meltdown and feel sorry for JPMorgan Chase?

THINGS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES THAT MAKE ME WANT TO GUZZLE ANTIFREEZE, ZOMBIE LIES EDITION

From an otherwise reasonably good New York Times story about the squabbling within the GOP:

Though the election and re-election of Mr. Obama may have radicalized many conservatives, the base's fury has its roots in the two terms of his predecessor, Mr. Bush, whose expansion of Medicare, proposed immigration overhaul and 2008 bank bailout left many conservatives distraught.

"People just saw a party that had wandered away from its soul," said Michael A. Needham, the chief executive of Heritage Action, an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation and perhaps now the most influential lobby group among Congressional Republicans.

This is the king of all zombie lies.

The base developed a sense of "fury" against establishment Republicanism during the Bush years? Really? Then why did establishmentarian John McCain and establishmentarian Mitt Romney each get 93% of the Republican vote in their election years? And if Bush profoundly alienated the GOP base, why did he leave office with a 75% approval rating among Republicans (as opposed to a 34% approval rating in the country as a whole)? If years of Tea Party/Ted Cruz/Sarah Palin/Heritage Foundation rhetoric have made the scales fall from Republican base voters' eyes about the big-government sins of Bush, why is his approval rating among Republicans even higher now than it was in January 2009 -- 84%, according to an ABC/Washington Post poll conducted this past April?

As I've said many times on this blog, the notion that voters rejected the GOP for big-spending policies was a lie Republicans started telling us -- and themselves -- shortly after they were blown out in the 2006 midterms, because they refused to admit that Bush's blunders -- Iraq, Katrina, Terri Schiavo, the attempted privatization of Social Security -- were the real reason Democratic voters turned out. Yes, since then Republicans have started to believe their own BS, telling themselves that they reject establishment-style Republicanism because it allows them to imagine that they had nothing to do with Bush's policy failures or -- and this is probably more important to them -- Republicans' losses at the polls in 2006 and 2008 (as well as 2012). But just watch them in 2014 if Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Thad Cochran and Lamar Alexander survive their primaries. They'll turn out to vote for these supposedly hated RINOs in November, because God knows that allowing Democrats to win would be like signing the country over to Satan.

IF WE'D HAD JUNGLE PRIMARIES IN 2010 AND 2012: LESS-CRAZY REPUBLICAN SENATORS BUT MORE OF THEM?

A number of journalists -- Reid Wilson at The Washington Post, Adam Nagourney at The New York Times -- have concluded that we could reduce government dysfunction if the U.S. and the states adopted California's system of non-partisan or "jungle" primaries, in which all candidates run against one another regardless of party, and the top two candidates advance to a runoff, even if they're in the same party. Political scientists -- John Sides, Seth Masket -- don't buy this. Masket has written:

Allow me to link here to the paper I did with Nolan McCarty, Eric McGhee, Steve Rogers, and Boris Shor ... showing that variations in the openness of primaries seem to have no relationship to the moderation or extremism of a state's elected officials.... The people that show up in primaries still tend to be very partisan voters, and parties are pretty skilled at advantaging the candidates they like even in difficult circumstances....

In theory, the openness of the top-two system encourages the entry of moderate candidates. But ideologically extreme ones can end up doing quite well, for the simple fact that voters have a very hard time distinguishing between ideologically extreme and moderate candidates....

All of this has produced a situation in which California's legislators are no more moderate, relative to their districts, under the top-two regime than they were before. Indeed, they may even be a bit more polarized.

I'm no expert, so I'll limit myself to a bit of speculation about recent Senate elections.

Yes, I think it's possible that we might have been spared Ted Cruz in the 2012 Texas Senate race if Texas had had a jungle primary -- but it's not at all certain. Both Cruz and David Dewhurst received more votes (in both their primary and the subsequent GOP runoff) than Democratic primary winner Paul Sadler received in his party's primary -- so it seems possible that Dewhurst and Cruz would have advanced to the general election if there'd been a jungle primary. Cruz beat Dewhurst handily (57%-43%) in the GOP runoff. Would Dewhurst have picked up enough Democratic and independent votes to beat Cruz if they'd faced each other in a general election? Hard to say. And when I see that Dewhurst is now running for reelection as lieutenant governor by calling for President Obama's impeachment, I think there'd have been a high level of crazy no matter which of these guys won.

It's possible that Charlie Crist, who lost a three-way race to Marco Rubio in 2010 while running as an independent, could have beaten Rubio in a two-man race -- if there'd been a jungle primary, the two of them certainly would have advanced to the general election, beating Democrat Kendrick Meek. I'm amusing that Crist could have beaten Rubio one on one because if you add the vote totals of Meek and Crist, they exceed Rubio's by a tiny amount. But in a jungle primary system, Crist wouldn't have had to leave the GOP to run against Rubio; if he'd won, he'd have won as a member of the GOP, and he'd be serving as a Republican today.

Harry Reid won reelection in 2010 because he faced crazy Sharron Angle. Maybe, if she'd had to run in a primary that involved all the candidates, she'd have lost and the top two would have been Reid and less-crazy Republican Sue Lowden. Polls suggest that Lowden might have won that contest.

The same goes for Claire McCaskill in Missouri in 2012 -- if there'd been a jungle primary, the moderating influence of Republican and independent voters might have put her in a general election fight with John Brunner rather than the now-notorious Todd Akin. Polls suggest that he would have lost that contest.

And we can pretty much assume that a jungle primary in Delaware in 2010 would have picked moderate Republican Mike Castle for one of the final slots, rather than crazy Christine O'Donnell. If Democrat Chris Coons had been running against Castle, polls show that the Republican would have won handily.

So my guess is that jungle primaries would give us somewhat fewer crazy Republican senators -- but possibly more Republican senators.

OBAMACARE ISN'T GOING TO BE LIKE MEDICARE -- IT'S GOING TO BE LIKE LEGAL ABORTION

The sunny view of Obamacare is that once it's an established, familiar part of our lives, Americans will enthusiastically embrace it and find it impossible to imagine going back to a time before we had it. (That's also, for right-wingers, the gloomy view of Obamacare.) Repealing it will be as unthinkable as repealing Social Security or Medicare.

But I don't believe that. I think Obamacare is going to be like legal abortion: it's going to be something right-wingers never stop picking away at, and always regard as a long-term grievance.

The New York Times reports:

... in Virginia's capital, conservative activists are pursuing a hardball campaign as they chart an alternative path to undoing "Obamacare" -- through the states.

One leading target is Emmett W. Hanger Jr., a Republican state senator from the deeply conservative Shenandoah Valley, who prides himself on "going against the grain." As chairman of a commission weighing one of the thorniest issues in Virginia politics, whether to expand Medicaid under Mr. Obama's Affordable Care Act, he is feeling heat from the Republican right.

His openness to expansion has aroused the ire of Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group backed by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Dressed in emerald green T-shirts bearing the slogan "Economic Freedom in Action!" its members are waging what the senator calls "an attempt to intimidate me" in Richmond and at home.

They have phoned his constituents, distributed leaflets and knocked on 2,000 doors in his rural district. When the Republican town committee met Monday night in Mr. Hanger's home county, Augusta, Americans for Prosperity was there....

"This has been one of those trench warfare kind of efforts for a year now, and I think it is one of those hidden stories of the whole fight against Obamacare," said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. "It's not flashy; it's just in a whole bunch of state capitals and in the districts of a whole lot of state legislators, but it's such a crucial aspect of the overall long-term effort to roll back Obamacare."

The state-by-state strategy represents a split from the course pursued by Heritage Action for America and its sister organization, Heritage Foundation....

It "represents a split" only in the sense that the state-by-state fight for fetal heartbeat laws and mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds "represents a split" from the fight for a national Human Life Amendment -- yes, one is incremental and the other isn't, one is state-based and the other is national, but they're part of the same struggle.

The Supreme Court's ruling that states can opt out of Medicaid expansion has become a fundamental weakness of Obamacare; another weakness is the optional nature of state-run health health exchanges. Both give governors and state legislators too much power over implementation -- and we know from the gun control and gay marriage fights that it's relatively easy to punish state legislators and elected state judges who deviate from conservative correctness on hot-button issues.

But a bigger weakness is the fact that everyone isn't an Obamacare beneficiary, which means it's easy for the right to say that Obamacare is a liberal plot to tax "us" to give a benefit to "them." (Yes, obviously any one of "us" could lose employer-based health coverage at any time and become one of "them," but right-wingers never think that way.)

I know, I know -- we're not getting single payer anytime soon. That's why I support Obamacare. But I'm not under the illusion that the right will ever accept it or stop fighting it, any more than the right ever stops fighting abortion rights or gun control or the teaching of evolution in public schools. I really believe we'll battle over Obamacare forever. If the haters can't kill it, they'll never stop trying of chip pieces off it.

JEWISH DEFENSE LEAGUE SUCCESSOR ORGANIZATION ENDORSES TED CRUZ

I see via the Twitter feed of a right-wing blogger known as the Mad Jewess that Ted Cruz has been endorsed for president by a group known as the Jewish Task Force, which was founded by a former member of the Jewish Defense League who's a convicted terrorist:





The JTF is a bit of a joke, but its founder has a rather colorful history:

Victor Vancier (born December 25, 1956), commonly referred to by his Hebrew name, Chaim Ben Pesach ... is an American political activist and the founder and director ... of the United States-based Kahanist organization, Jewish Task Force (JTF) ... and the former National Chairman of the Jewish Defense League (JDL) in the United States.... In 1987, he was convicted on charges related to a series of terrorist bombings conducted during his time with the JDL to protest Soviet treatment of Jews.... He served over five years in federal prison for his involvement in 18 bombings in New York and Washington....

Vancier is the current head of the Jewish Task Force, a Kahanist organization in the United States.... Vancier created JTF in 1991, since Irv Rubin started to dissociate the JDL from Vancier because his terrorist activities had harmed their reputation.... The Jewish Task Force raises money for the claimed purpose of funding Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria, ... puts on television programs through Public-access television cable TV and runs a website with the stated goal of saving Israel, America, and the West.... Vancier is banned from entering Israel because of his terrorist acts....

Years ago I occasionally watched the JTF public access show, which was usually just Vancier/Ben Pesach delivering a nonstop Michael Savage-revved-to-11 rant describing every Jew to his left (including, frequently, Elie Wiesel) as a traitor to the Jewish people, and referring to every non-white as a "cock-a-roach," or far worse. YouTube has a number of videos of the show, including this one from 2004, in which Vancier/Ben Pesach talks about then-Senate candidate Barack Obama in his typically gutter-racist way (of Obama's father: "The black African Muslim did what most black men do, according to all statistics: he abandoned his child").





I'm not blaming Cruz for this -- presidential aspirants sometimes get embarrassing unsolicited endorsements. On the other hand, I'm not ruling out the possibility that Cruz would be stupid enough to welcome endorsements from groups of this kind.

WE CAN INSTANTLY GET ALL OF WINGNUTTIA TO DEMAND THE REPLACEMENT OF THE TEAM NAME "REDSKINS," BUT WE'LL HAVE TO MAKE A CONSIDERABLE SACRIFICE

Yes, Charles Krauthammer agrees on the appropriateness of changing the D.C. pro football team's name from "Redskins," if reluctantly. (He endorses a name change in a column that essentially accuses anyone else who objects to the name of being a politically correct totalitarian, and his proposed alternative -- shortening the name to "Skins" -- is quite ridiculous, not to mention unoriginal.) Krauthammer may have come around, sort of, but most right-leaners agree with team owner Dan Snyder that the name should never be changed, precisely because they unswervingly oppose anything that's "politically correct."

But we could get all right-wingers to support a name change -- no, demand one -- if we went about it the right way. And when I say "the right way," I really mean "the right way:" we need to rally around a new name that will make conservatives so happy they won't care if they're being "PC."

Sounds good? Well, I warn you: you won't like what I'm about to propose.

Right-wingers will flock to the anti-"Redskins" movement if the proposed new name is ...

... the Washington Reagans.

Or the Washington Gippers.

Or, alternately, the Washington Wolverines.

Right? Wouldn't we have Fox and Limbaugh and Ted Cruz all on our side if we settled on one of those names?

WHY ARE WE EVEN HAVING THIS DISCUSSION?

At The Washington Post, Ryan Cooper says he has a "grand bargain" idea that Republicans and Democrats might actually agree on, because it doesn't involve tax increases, which Republicans have made clear are unacceptable to them:

... it might be possible to move past this point. The way to do it would be for Dems to ask for a different concession from Republicans, such as a huge boost in infrastructure spending to get the economy going again, and give them tax cuts in exchange for it....

Such an offer would throw the incoherence of the Republican budget position into sharp relief.... I'd wager that if the offered tax cuts were big and juicy enough, Republicans would conveniently forget all about their balanced budget mania (just like they did in the Bush years) and might be ready for some good old logrolling.

This deal would be quite a long shot. But it's got a better chance that anything that hinges on tax increases.... In fact, probably the biggest roadblock to such a deal would be President Obama, who seems to actually value his deficit reduction quite highly.

Atrios picks up on that last point:

I'll Take That Deal!

But, of course, Obama wouldn't, because as Ryan says, he seems to love his deficit reduction. I always joke that nobody cares about the deficit, but the truth is Obama is probably the exception to that. I have no idea why.

In fact, the president made an offer very similar to Cooper's earlier this year, in an appearance at an Amazon distribution center in Tennessee (remember?), and -- imagine my amazement -- he was smacked down by Republicans:

Obama offers 'grand bargain' on corporate tax rate, infrastructure

President Barack Obama proposed a "grand bargain for middle-class jobs" on Tuesday that would cut the U.S. corporate tax rate and use billions of dollars in revenues generated by a business tax overhaul to fund projects aimed at creating jobs....

The president's plan combined a proposed corporate tax rate cut - desired by Republicans - with new spending on infrastructure projects like roads and bridges as well as education investment - desired by his fellow Democrats....

Despite the olive branch, Obama's proposal immediately drew fire from the top Republicans in Congress. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, "It's just a further-left version of a widely panned plan he already proposed two years ago - this time, with extra goodies for tax-and-spend liberals."

Boehner shot it down, too:

While the president presented the proposal as a concession, Republicans dismissed it more acidly than usual. "It's the opposite of a concession," said Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio.

In the Republicans’ view, Mr. Obama's offer was less of a "grand bargain" than an effort to extract a new fiscal stimulus program with money from a corporate tax cut that would end up, for accounting reasons, initially generating billions of dollars of revenue for the government.

Obama's infrastructure proposals always go nowhere with the GOP -- for instance, in 2011:

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair John Mica (R-Fla.) tossed cold water on Obama's call for a national infrastructure bank Thursday night, just minutes after the president told Congress to put partisanship aside and pass his plan quickly.

"We've already had experience with some of these federal grant programs that requires Washington bureaucrats, Washington red tape, Washington approvals and then bowing and scraping to Washington. I'm strongly opposed to any type of a new federal infrastructure bank," Mica said in an interview following the speech.

Asked and answered. If you want to see a complete list of the Obama tax or spending proposals Republicans would accept, pull out a blank sheet of paper and stare at it. That's the complete list.

TWO FACTIONS ENTER, ONE FACTION LEAVES

Following up on the previous post, I'd like to add that I'm detecting a common thread among soft-on-teabaggery establishmentarians: while they fret about the 'baggers, they fret about their tactics only; they lament these tactics because they think the 'baggers are just what our politics needs, if only they could learn how to behave.

Ross Douthat, for instance, thinks the budget crisis was dangerous lunacy, but he still says this:

One of the themes running through my various government shutdown posts has been the importance of seeing the current wave of right-wing populism clearly and weighing its merits and demerits judiciously. That requires understanding the strategic thinking that led to the shutdown in the first place ... acknowledging the legitimate sense of political disappointment that underlies the right's inclination toward intransigence ... and most importantly, recognizing that relative to the G.O.P. establishment (such as it is), today’s right-wing populists often have better political instincts and better policy ideas.

And then there's the Peggy Noonan column I quoted in my last post, in which Noonan pretends to read the thoughts of the late senator Robert Taft. Noonan tells us that she -- er, Taft -- thinks the teabaggers are just swell, if a bit rowdy and undisciplined:

The tea party ... seems to him to be "trying to stand for a free citizenry in the age of Lois Lerner. They're against this professional class in government that thinks we're a nation of donkeys pulling their wingèd chariot.

"Their impatience with the status quo is right. Their sense of urgency is right. Their insight that the party in power has gone to the left of where America really is -- right on that, too."

But the tea party has a lot to learn, and quickly....

"The tea party should stop the insults -- 'RINO,' 'sellout,' 'surrender caucus.' It's undignified, and it's not worthy of a serious movement. When you claim to be the policy adults you also have to be the characterological adults. Resentment alienates. An inability to work well with others does not inspire voters." ...

But isn't the whole point of teabaggery, as Andrew Sullivan has been arguing, that it's a fundamentalist religion that accepts no compromise and tolerates no heretics? Sullivan quotes Rod Dreher, who may be an idiot much of the time, but is pretty close to the truth here:

Can the Tea Partiers' beliefs be falsified? I don't think they can be. I mean, is there any evidence that could convince them that the fault here lies with themselves, in the way they conceive politics, and in the way they behaved? It sure doesn't look like it. In that sense, they think of politics as a kind of religion. It's not for nothing that the hardcore House members stood together and sang "Amazing Grace" as the impossibility of their position became ever clearer. They really do bring a religious zealotry to politics.

Let me hasten to say that I'm not endorsing the "Christianist" meme, which I find far too reductive, among other things. Besides, many of the Tea Partiers and fellow travelers are not motivated by religious faith, but by a religious-like zeal for their political ideology. It was like this on the Right before the advent of the Tea Party. There has long been a sense on the Right that the movement must be vigilant against the backsliders and compromisers, who will Betray True Conservatism if you give them the chance. Again, the religious mindset: politics as a purity test. In this worldview, a politician who compromises sells out the True Faith -- and faith, by definition, does not depend on empirical observation to justify itself.

By contrast, Peggy Noonan's Taft seance produces this bit of dialogue:

What should the establishment do?

"Wake up and smell the Sanka! Listen, reason, talk. Advise in friendship. Be open to debate and get broader, ask yourself questions...."

How will a big merge happen?

"Day by day, policy by policy, vote by vote, race by race. On both sides they'll have to keep two things in mind. A little grace goes a long way, and 'A kind word turneth away wrath.'"

I'm with Sullivan and Dreher on this. This is religion to the 'baggers, or if not, it's the title game in a sport -- or maybe a blood sport. It's a contest in which there can be only one winner: two factions enter, one faction leaves.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S RADICAL CHIC

I keep hearing that the business establishment in America is furious at Crazy Caucus Republicans -- and I've always understood that The Wall Street Journal is the voice of that business establishment. The Journal's editorial page has long been a somewhat separate entity, traditionally further to the right than the rest of the Journal, but its wingnuttery has been a corporatist wingnuttery.

So what do I see today in the Journal's opinion section? Jim DeMint of the Heritage Foundation making no apologies for nearly inducing a global economic depression, and asserting that if the normal levers of government don't permit him to get what he wants, he'll just pick up any weapon at hand and threaten to destroy the whole machinery of the government all over again if he sees fit:

Jim DeMint: We Won't Back Down on ObamaCare

Now that the government shutdown has ended and the president has preserved ObamaCare for the time being, it's worth explaining why my organization, the Heritage Foundation, and other conservatives chose this moment to fight -- and why we will continue to fight. The reason is simple: to protect the American people from the harmful effects of this law....

Yes, I can hear many conservative friends saying to me right around this point: "Jim, we agree with you that ObamaCare is going to wreck the country, but elections have consequences."

... the lives of most Americans are not dominated by the electoral cycle. They shouldn't have to wait three more years for Congress to give them relief from this law.... Full legislative repeal may not be possible while President Obama remains in office, but delaying implementation by withholding funds from a law that is proven to be unfair, unworkable and unaffordable is a reasonable and necessary fight....

Yes -- "a reasonable and necessary fight" even if it's unwinnable except via extortion. Hope you're happy to read that, Chamber of Commerce members.

Wander over to Peggy's Noonan's column and you'll find her offering support for the crazies as well, even if she thinks their tactics are a bit much. Noonan's column is one of her bizarre acts of ventriloquism. In this case she claims to be channeling the voice of Senator Robert Taft from beyond the grave. He tells her that, although they need to learn to play nice and compromise, he kind of likes the teabaggers:

... He feels more sympathy toward the tea party than the establishment. "Their policy aims, while somewhat inchoate, seem on the right track. They need to be clearer about what they're for -- intellectually more ordered. They can't lead with their hearts."

The establishment? "My goodness -- lobbyists, consultants. I gather there's now something called hedge-fund billionaires." The establishment has a lot to answer for. "What they gave the people the past 10 years was two wars and a depression. That loosened faith in institutions and left people feeling had. They think, 'What will you give us next, cholera?'"

The tea party, in contrast, seems to him to be "trying to stand for a free citizenry in the age of Lois Lerner. They're against this professional class in government that thinks we're a nation of donkeys pulling their wingèd chariot.

"Their impatience with the status quo is right. Their sense of urgency is right. Their insight that the party in power has gone to the left of where America really is -- right on that, too."

Teabaggers are the solution and hedge-fund billionaires are the problem! Got that, Journal readers?

Add this to the William Galston's Journal op-ed from a couple of days ago, which admiringly described the teabaggers as Jacksonians "whose key tenets include self-reliance, individualism, loyalty and courage," and you have to wonder what the Fortune 500 CEO at the breakfast table is thinking. To me it's starting to feel like the right-wing equivalent of some mythical moment in the late 1960s when the local suburban paper suddenly decides to run an op-ed from Eldridge Cleaver in exile, while declaring on the editorial page that, gee, the kids who blew up the ROTC building a week ago might have chosen an inappropriate way to get their message across, but really, aren't they sort of like a modern-day equivalent of our Founding Fathers? The war comes home....

WELL, THERE'S ALWAYS IMPEACHMENT

What are crazy people going to do when Mitch McConnell is saying there'll be no more GOP-led government shutdowns?

"One of my favorite old Kentucky sayings is there's no education in the second kick of a mule. The first kick of a mule was when we shut the government down in the mid 1990s and the second kick was over the last 16 days," [McConnell] said. "There is no education in the second kick of a mule. There will not be a government shutdown.

"I think we have fully now acquainted our new members with what a losing strategy that is," he added.

Well, there's always impeachment:

Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) recently arranged for the delivery of an anti-Obama impeachment book to all 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The book, Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office, by Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott, is published by the conspiracy web site World Net Daily, which also reported on Rep. Stockman's helping hand....

Impeachable Offenses claims that President Obama has committed many violations of the U.S. Constitution that could qualify him for impeachment, such as delaying the implementation of Obamacare and granting waivers to some companies and Congressional staffs....

Here's the book trailer for Impeachable Offenses, which is like a video supercut of every right-wing email forward of the past five years (Benghazi! Fast and Furious! Gun control! Mexicans!:





And if you somehow have the idea that World Net Daily is much further to the right than Fox, please note that I found this book trailer at Fox Nation, where there's also a handy summary of the book's contents.

But they wouldn't try to impeach Obama with Democrats controlling the Senate (and thus preventing conviction), would they? Well, Democratic control of the Senate didn't stop them from shutting down the government in order to defund Obamacare, did it? And a futile impeachment attempt wouldn't rattle global financial markets! (It didn't in 1998, right?) So it's a genius plan!

Yes, I think the history of the shutdown, and the fact that the Crazy Caucus would clearly do it all over again despite the fact that it was an utter failure, strongly suggests that the crazies might go for impeachment next. And John Boehner probably will do nothing to stand in their way. And there'll be primary challenges for any doubters.

THE ROUTINE DEMONIZATION OF DEMOCRATS

I spotted this in a New York Times front-page story about the budget crisis:

"If you look back in time and evaluate the last couple of weeks, it should be titled 'The Time of Great Lost Opportunity,'" said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, among the many Republicans who argued that support for the health care law would collapse once the public saw how disastrous it really was.

"It has been the best two weeks for the Democratic Party in recent times because they were out of the spotlight and didn't have to showcase their ideas," Mr. Graham added.

This is Lindsey Graham, not Ted Cruz. This is a Republican admitting to a reporter that his party was hurt by the events of the last couple of weeks. This is a Republican who seems to be somewhat abashed.

And yet his statement ends with that swipe at the Democrats. And though the story tells us that it's a reference specifically to the health care law, the wording suggests that the real message is: everybody knows that all Democratic ideas are stupid and dangerous.

Prominent Republicans say this sort of thing all the time. Now, I'd have no problem with this if prominent Democrats routinely did the same thing. But they don't. They don't routinely say that all Republican ideas are stupid and dangerous. They don't imply that America would be a better place if its citizens turned on the Republican Party and gave the GOP the series of electoral thrashings it deserves. That sometimes gets said during presidential campaigns, and it's said in some campaigns for other offices in deep-blue localities (see, e.g., Bill De Blasio in the first New York mayoral debate). But it's not a routine part of Democratic rhetoric, the way blanket dismissals of Democrats are a routine part of Republican rhetoric.

Yes, Democrats in the course of this crisis have said plenty of nasty things about the Tea Party and the Crazy Caucus. But that just suggests that there are non-crazy Republicans who have good ideas and who are willing to work in good faith to reach sound compromise solutions for America's sake. (That turned out to be true in this one instance, at a minute to midnight, with the fate of the global economy on the line. But "non-crazy" Republicans such as Mitch McConnell will now go back to trying to dismantle every Democratic legislative accomplishment of the past century, while endeavoring to enact a Kochite agenda that would be ruinous to ordinary Americans.)

When we talk about why American politics doesn't work anymore, a a simple message is rarely uttered: It's the Republican Party, stupid. That has to change.