Martin Sheen dismantles religious fundamentalism in two minutes...
I don't own an Omega watch and I don't plan on buying one, but it's still a most cool commercial...
A great quote that I first spotted on Andrew Sullivan's blog this morning...
"...The president genuinely views this remote, landlocked, primitive Central Asian country as a vital U.S. national security interest."
"What is it about Afghanistan, possessing nothing that the United States requires, that justifies such lavish attention. In Washington, this question goes not only unanswered, but unasked. Among Democrats and Republicans alike, with few exceptions, Afghanistan's importance is simply assumed---much the same way fifty years ago otherwise intelligent people simply assumed that the United States had a vital interest in ensuring the survival of South Vietnam. as then, so today, the assumption does not stand up to even casual scrutiny."
-Andrew Bacevich, Commonweal
It is deeply depressing to watch conservatives and Republicans try to bring down Obama's health care initiatives. Not because the whole utopian Rube Goldberg contraption shouldn't go up in flames, mind you. No, my dismay with the current assault on Obamacare has to do with the quality of the arguments against it, and what those arguments say about the condition of conservatism in particular, and the American electorate in general.
Conservatives and Republicans are trying to bring down the various Democratic congressional proposals by invoking spurious straw men such as mandatory euthanasia, abortion, and bankrolling illegal immigrants. The Right is laying siege to congressional town hall meetings, where mobs of the Tea Party and pitchfork ilk repeat these lame and shrill morsels of fearmongering.
There's a much, much simpler argument to be made against this mess Obama calls health care reform, or universal health care, or universal health insurance, or whatever...
THERE IS NO MONEY FOR THIS!!!...NONE!!!...WE CANNOT AFFORD THIS!!!...
The federal budget deficit for 2009 will be more than 2 trillion dollars. Let that sink in for a minute. On top of that 2 trillion, Obama wants to create a brand-new entitlement program in the middle of an especially nasty recession that is estimated to cost a trillion dollars over ten years (take that estimate and multiply it by a number between five and ten, and you'll be in the ballpark of actual cost). Every sale of U.S. Treasury securities is already a cliffhanger! Do we really think the bond market won't buckle under the weight of all this additional long-term debt?
But why isn't that argument being made instead of all the other silly nonsense that makes conservatives and the GOP look like X-Files rejects?
Because it wouldn't work. Nobody cares about the cost of things. Nobody really cares about the national debt, or a sudden, steep spike in long-term interest rates that would make the stagflation of the 1970s look like a trip to Six Flags.
Until they do...Until something makes them care...
Over three decades ago, the enlightened, thoughtful, and selfless masses who comprised the California electorate, etched in constitutional stone a requirement that there could be no future tax increases in the state without the approval of two-thirds of the California legislature. Rightfully enraged about legislative inertia in the face of escalating property taxes, the people of the Golden State rose up to pass Proposition 13 with 67% of the vote. Thus, a paroxysm of voter wrath was the mother of profound political and historical irony; a super-majority of Californians transferred the ultimate veto power to a minority, utilizing the uber-democratic mechanism of the ballot initiative to render California politics intrinsically undemocratic for all eternity. When it comes to the all-important question of financing California state government, the minority rules.
Which would be fine by me, or at least, operationally and philosophically consistent, had the California electorate also amputated their appetites for great heaping platters of government services along with the means to pay for them. However, preferring to subscribe to Emerson's nonsensical contention that "consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds," the voters of California have spent the last thirty years demonstrated their powers of disavowal and cognitive dissonance, noisily demanding low-to-no taxes and social services on par with Scandinavia. Approximately every six months we descend into the trenches of budget battle with Democrats flatly rejecting anything resembling a cut in government programs, and Republicans just as intently eschewing anything resembling a tax increase. Having achieved impasse, the two parties then join hands to engage in accounting mythology and call it a budget, perpetuating $15 billion dollar structural deficits and the state's abysmal credit rating on into the future.
What is striking is how content Californians are with this utterly dysfunctional arrangement. Voters largely tune out from budget dramas in Sacramento, and why shouldn't they? From a practical point of view, their day-to-day lives are largely unscathed by any tangible consequences of their credit-card conservatism and low-tax liberal largesse. Infantilism has been the dominant ideology of Californians since the late 70s, which distilled to its essence, is as intellectually reflective and morally conscious as a teenager set loose in a shopping mall with the parental Visa.
Thus, there is a properly conservative argument to be made for eliminating the No Taxation Without Two-Thirds Approval feature from the state constitution. It is this; California voters need to truly SEE AND FEEL the cost of state government. A gleeful Democratic majority in the Legislature, having slipped the surly bonds of Proposition 13, would undoubtedly enact the level of taxation appropriate for financing their elephantine welfare state, at which point the consequences and costs of the welfare state would become starkly clear to California voters. The practical pain of such intellectual honesty would be too much for California voters to bear. The Republicans would subsequently control the Legislature for at least a generation.
Proposition 13 insulated the great inchoate mass of Californians from having to pay forall the government that they wanted...and they want A LOT. That condition is as immoral as it is unsustainable. JFK said that to govern is to choose, and Californians need to pay for their choices. Conservatives should support such a day of reckoning. Nothing would do more to endorse the cause of limited government as the voters being made intimately aware of the costs of big government.
Shrinking into the comfort and general irrelevance of cultism and self-willed permanent minority status, the G.O.P. has embraced an especially pathetic conspiracy theory, now infamous as Birtherism.
Birthers feverishly subscribe to the notion that the president was actually born in Africa, and that his birth certificates from Hawaii are forgeries, thus depriving him of constitutional legitimacy as Chief Executive.
It's difficult to overstate my annoyance with the Birthers. At this crucial hour of policymaking, with powerful arguments needing to be made against virtually all of the Administration's major domestic and foreign policy initiatives, conservatives and Republicans are reducing themselves to contemptible punch lines, bereft of any intellectual credibility.
Wallowing in birtherism may be more fun than contesting the feasibility and desirability of Obama's proposals on health care reform, energy policy, and education overhaul, but ultimately it's just a degrading path to nowhere. More than a path to nowhere, it's a short route to the drainpipe of political obsolescence.
