NR Takes on the Radicals (A Little)

Sometimes, the twitter machine just spits out perfect material for items to write. So this morning I wound up opening tabs on Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry's epic (five-screen) condemnation of radical Republicans, along side a nice takedown of Russell Brand's recent political babbling from Alex Massie. One of them was about "an adolescent extremist whose hatred of politics is matched by his ignorance" -- want to guess which one?

OK, it's the one calling all politicians frauds...from the Left, where liberal democracy, including the "left" parties, looks like a conspiracy against the True Revolution. But one could pretty easily write exactly the same critique of Tail Gunner Ted and his radical allies. Of course, the key point is that in the US, the radicals have a powerful hold on one of the major political parties. Which is a bit of a problem.

Massie is far more direct and effective. Does he have the easier target? Not really, but he does have the harder argument, perhaps. After all, Massie doesn't care at all that those sympathetic to Brand will consider him Not Left Enough, but National Review certainly cares a lot about being considered a True Conservative publication.

Indeed, Ponnuru and Lowry's five-screen attack on the radicals is packed full of "on the other hand" and "to be sure" qualifications, so much so that at times it's hard to tell whether the point is convincing convincable conservatives or if it's to do just enough to be able to claim credit for being on the side of sanity. Is that unfair? Perhaps. But there sure are a lot of caveats here. "The tendency arises from legitimate frustrations." "The Republican consultant class has often seemed to suffer from an almost clinical deficit of imagination." "It’s not as if the Republican leadership handled this episode especially well." And they endorse the silly Fox-ready spin during the shutdown, the minibills and the Battles of the World War II Memorials, as "smart tactical moves," while calling the Tea Party "one of the wonders of American politics" which they claim, implausibly, would be impossible anywhere else in the world.

Nevertheless, it's good to see a flat-out attack on the radicals from NR.

Even as qualified and caveated as this one is.

I do think the problem is a bit deeper than Ponnuru and Lowry want to pretend it is. They really only attack the obviously suicidal: the awful Senate candidates, the shutdown strategy that had no chance of victory. Their solution is that the party should work hard to win elections in order to implement their agenda, which is all very well and good. However, it also masks something real going on here. The "True Conservative" agenda that the radicals and most mainstream conservatives claim to want, at this point, has become so radical that it probably is at least a modest electoral problem -- and even more so, it would be a massive governing problem, both in practical and electoral consequences. I'm thinking here about the Ryan Budget, with its complete elimination (if you take the budget math literally, which is what we're supposed to do with budgets) of all non-defense discretionary spending. I'm thinking, too, about the "47%" rhetoric, and about Medicare (and presumably Social Security) "reform." Or about the farm bill, where Ponnuru and Lowry are on the side of the "reformers" and ignore that the main reform in the bill is slashing food stamps.

In other words, really detaching themselves from the radicals and healing the GOP might require some rather more difficult choices for mainstream conservatives than just jettisoning Christine O'Donnell. No matter how enthusiastically and (I suspect) repeatedly they're willing to do that.

Still, it's a start, I guess.

Catch of the Day

Matt Yglesias demolishes a conservative talking point about Singapore and health care reform. Bottom line, after he reviews what Singapore actually does:

None of this sounds to me like anything American conservatives favor. As in, there is no legislation that's been championed by major Republican leaders that would do any of these things and, in general, none of these measures comports with conservative aversion to government spending and regulation.

Here's where I think we are. There are several conservative policy wonks who are basically sincere, as far as I can tell, in their views on health care reform. Fragments of their claims and arguments are used, sometimes, by Republican politicians. The latter are basically uninterested in the substance of the issue at all. To some extent that's not unusual; lots of politicians talk about issues about which they have no real substantive interest! Some of it, however, is our old friend the post-policy GOP -- they really just aren't interested in policy at all, and therefore aren't constrained in their choice of talking points by anything policy-related.

In other words, the real-life Republican alternative to the ACA remains "nothing." But that's considered politically inappropriate, and so real-life Republicans get to hand-wave around the issue by identifying various things they theoretically would build a replacement around. However, for Republican politicians and many of the non-wonk other party actors (and perhaps some of the wonks, too), it really is just hand-waving. There's nothing substantive about it for them.

Again: that's not true for many conservative wonks. But politicians aren't using their work to build an alternative; they're using it for an easy way of having something to say that sounds sufficiently serious. And, again, while that's not unusual in any party on any issue at any time, it's unusually try for this particular party, on a very wide range of policy areas, at this particular time.

Also: nice catch!


(Hat tip to longwalkdownlyndale)

Counting Hard

Some foolish liberals, back in 2009-2010, used to blame Barack Obama for things when the actual problem (from their perspective) was that they just didn't have the votes in the Senate. But, to be fair, that was somewhat complicated: Democrats had a large majority, and I can definitely understand the frustration when that large party majority didn't actually work out to a policy majority (in some cases a supermajority, but often just any regular majority) for some specific liberal policies. 

So if I called them out on it then, I should probably make note of this utter nonsense from shutdown advocate Erick Erickson:

Throughout this fight, Harry Reid has outsmarted Mitch McConnell. Repeatedly, Reid used the Senate’s rules to toss aside numerous proposals from the House while McConnell looked on not knowing how to fight back.

Reid knows how to beat McConnell. If Reid fights hard, McConnell backs down and tries to blame others. McConnell’s lieutenants attack Ted Cruz so “the Leader” can deflect from his own legislative impotence. And he continually is one step behind Reid in his knowledge of how to use the Senate’s complicated rules to win a fight.

Senate rules are in fact complicated. In this particular case, however, the obscure rule Harry Reid relied upon was...take a vote, and the side with the most votes wins.

If you want to get into technicalities, I suppose you can, but none of them mattered. I mean, the Senate was able to pass a clean CR thanks to complicated manipulation of the rules while the Senate failed to pass a clean debt limit increase because Republicans mounted a successful filibuster, but it didn't matter at all -- not at all -- whether those things passed or not. All that mattered was that...well, I was going to say that all that mattered was that McConnell didn't have the votes to pass a "defund" CR, but that's not even true; what mattered was that neither the House nor the Senate had the votes to override a veto on a "defund' CR.

Yes, yes, everyone who understands anything about Congress knows all of that. But Erickson either doesn't know it, or is pretending he doesn't. After all, his remedy is to declare war not on Democratic Senators in marginal seats who voted with their party in this fight, but on McConnell and the other squishes.

The real question is whether sane Republicans are going to fight back against this malarkey. I doubt it; I don't think a couple of weeks of lousy polling is going to be anywhere near enough to overcome what's broken about the GOP.

The perverse incentives for folks like Erickson are still there -- I'm sure he's done quite well from the shutdown. And it's still the case that Republicans see Tea Partiers as a positive force in their 2010 win, just as they saw Newt as responsible for 1994, so even the electoral effects appear far murkier than they actually are.

But at least there's a chance -- no certainty, but a chance -- that we won't go through one of these again for a while.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Oh, I give up: anyone have any ideas for how to fix the Republican Party -- or, more broadly, to rescue conservatives from the radicals, hucksters, and crazies?

(Yeah, feel free to argue with the premise of the question if you think that Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin are the True Conservatives, but good luck with that).

Catch of the Day

An excellent one from Philip Klein, who argues that conservatives are now overcompensating for being too easy on Bush-era Republicans by being unrealistically harsh towards Obama-era Republicans:

Republicans can prevent the passage of gun control, as they have. But when it comes to the current debate, many conservatives have been arguing that if Republicans cannot get Obama to wipe out or seriously undermine the signature legislative accomplishment of his presidency, the only reason is that Republicans lack sufficient courage. And that's a completely absurd expectation.

Read, as they say, the whole thing. Note, of course, that what we're seeing here is exactly parallel to the magical thinking about the presidency that many liberals have fallen for throughout Obama's presidency. That's not to say (and Klein certainly doesn't say) that all the criticisms of either Republican Congressional leaders or the president are wrong; it's just that pretty much all of the criticisms based on the premise that if only they (he) had the guts and the dedication...if only they they really wanted whatever it is...then they could get it.*

What Klein doesn't add, but could, is that this belief in magic makes conservatives easy marks for demagogues who promise that Republicans could have everything if they just fight hard enough. Thus Ted Cruz, who really (as Ross Douthat has been pointing out lately) had nothing substantive to offer conservatives, winds up the conservative hero while those who have been working on real policy proposals lose the spotlight, at least for now.

Nice catch!




*Which is interesting: it suggests that the problem isn't so much about the presidency per se as it is about a general reluctance to accept, and perhaps a failure to understand, Madisonian democracy.

A Good Measure of Where We Are? Judd Gregg's "To-Be-Sure"

Want a good measure of how far Republicans are from being a healthy paragraph? Check out Judd Gregg's "to-be-sure" paragraph.

Gregg has a column over at The Hill today slapping down Ted Cruz and other Republican Crazy Caucusers. It's legitimately brutal, and written to get attention, beginning with: "Most Americans these days are simply ignoring Republicans. And they should."

Well, yes. But then we get to the to-be-sure -- placed not close to the end, as the classic structure dictates, but smack-dab in the middle, and continuing far beyond one paragraph. This is the part in which Gregg, essentially, performs a Ritual of Conservative Obedience to establish his credentials so that the column is taken as "sane, loyal Republican criticizes suicidal strategy" and not "RINO establishment turncoat criticizes real conservatives" (and, yes, I know that RINO establishment turncoat isn't exactly the most rational formulation, but it's a thing, nonetheless. Well, it isn't, but...oh, you know). Where was I...oh, yeah, Gregg:

None of this is to deny that ObamaCare is a disaster, especially for small businesses, most states and many healthcare providers. It should be replaced with something that will actually improve the quality and reduce the costs of healthcare. There are many good ideas in this area but they will not be achieved via an inherently self-defeating strategy...

Beginning next year, there will be a real outcry regarding the arbitrariness of the sequester cuts. At that point, the fight should be joined in earnest over the issue of changing ObamaCare to initiatives that improve and expand healthcare coverage rather than march toward a dysfunctional, single-payer system. 

So not only is this substantively nonsense -- ACA may or may not be a good policy, but it certainly isn't a "march toward a dysfunctional, single-payer system" -- but it's also tactical nonsense. After all, the message shifts here from a sensible one about the impossibility of the Cruzites getting their way by holding their breath until they turn blue into one about that being nuts this year...but perhaps appropriate once sequestration hits harder. Or something like that; it's hard to tell exactly what he's holding out as Plan B here.

At any rate, the point here isn't whether Gregg makes sense; it's what he feels he needs to do to get listened to by his target audience of non-crazy Republicans (how do we know that's his target audience? Different audience gets different "to-be-sure" paragraph!). And, to tell the truth, it shows how hopeless the task is right now. Tea Party Republicans have spent four years now convincing themselves that the enemy within (the GOP) is in some ways an even bigger problem than the enemy in the Oval Office. And you know what? Advice they're not apt to take from someone grovelling to their myths really isn't going to push them in a better direction. Good for Gregg that he's trying, and he's of course correct about the defunding strategy right now, but my advice for anyone trying to push Tea Partiers back on the path to healthy governing is that they aren't going to get there unless they give up their mythology, so you might as well be blunt.

Elsewhere: The CR, Ted Cruz, more

Let's see...haven't done this for a while, so there are a few.

Today at Plum Line I got into the question of whether Democrats have already surrendered on the budget by accepting a sequestration level CR (the answer? No, probably not, but I'm not impressed with their strategy).

And I got on Ted Cruz's case for his "new paradigm" of grassroots activism.

What else?

Cruz's rhetoric is self-defeating.

The Republicans could use a Pope -- or maybe Gowron.

Five reasons we might get a budget calamity.

Summers and the proper use of trial balloons.

Those Obamacare Rape Ads Are a Scam on Conservatives, and That's Not the Worst Part

I suppose I have to talk about the creepy anti-Obamacare ads that everyone, or at least all the liberal bloggers, are talking about today.

Look, folks: this is a very obvious scam.

This is not about stopping the ACA.

This is about money.

Oh, for the donors, it's presumably about stopping Obamacare.

But for the people putting together the ads, unless they are incredibly stupid and naive, it's almost certainly about raising money from those donors. And, perhaps, making a name for themselves (or a bigger name -- I'm not looking to see who is responsible) within the conservative movement.

These ads could not be better designed to do one thing: to get condemned by liberals. Thus impressing easily scammed conservative marks, who tend to really believe that if liberals hate something, it must be terrific and effective.

This campaign is not designed to convince young people to "opt out" of Obamacare. It's part of a "campus tour" supposedly designed to convince those young people to go without insurance, but that's transparently a fraud; traditional-aged college students, the ones who are supposedly being targeted, aren't really the customers that matter (it's their older brothers and sisters...yes, some traditional-age college students may purchase their own insurance under ACA, more than was the case before, but it must be a fairly small group).

No, there are real efforts to undermine the law -- harassing the "navigators," pressuring the NFL and others not to publicize it, and more -- but this campaign isn't one of them.

Will it have any effect on actual consumer behavior? I doubt it. But it is worth noting that if it does "work" at all, it's going to work on the people who respond best to the affect evoked by the ads: in other words, people already primed and ready to hate Obama(care), people already primed and ready to hate the government of the United States, people primed and ready to suspect the very worst of the program. And do note: the way it "works" is by convincing them to go without health insurance.

So basically: if you're a rich conservative who isn't very smart about how you give your money, this ad is designed to pick your pocket. If you're a non-rich conservative, you might get duped into some foolish behavior, but that's just acceptable collateral damage. For everyone else, it's an occasion for (to be fair, entirely justified) outrage, I suppose, but basically it'll come and go without any real effects.

Hey, I know: we're not supposed to question motives. I believe that. So I'll say again: it's possible that these ads are not a scam, but a real political campaign undertaken by seriously naive and stupid operatives. Just as it's possible that the people doing the "defund" campaign sincerely believe that a government shutdown threat would achieve that, as opposed (as Jamelle Bouie and others pointed out) just finding it an effective money-raising tool). I have to admit, however: that's not what I think is going on.

"Break the Fever" Is Futile -- Especially For Boehner

I said this over at Greg's place yesterday (and just now another version of it on twitter), but I sort of buried it in the post, and so I want to highlight it properly:

[T]he key thing to know about a shutdown is that it will end. Maybe after a day; maybe after a month. It will end, and it will end with something that both Boehner (and mainstream conservatives) and Obama (and mainstream liberals) can live with. And at that point, there is nothing more certain in this world than that radical “conservatives” will believe that if only Boehner  and Congressional Republicans had held out a little while longer, Obama would have surrendered and Republicans would have won a total victory.

So a shutdown (or a debt limit breach) has to end with Boehner (supposedly) selling out conservatives, and doing it with far more press coverage and attention than he would get from (again, supposedly) selling them out before a shutdown by cutting a deal. That’s a disaster for him — and, on the other side of the Capitol, for Mitch McConnell — and one he’ll work hard to avoid.

This is in response to Noam Scheiber, who thinks that it makes sense for Boehner to accept a shutdown because it will force Republicans to come to their senses (see also Brian Beutler today).

What I think is that the bulk of the Republican conference already knows that a shutdown won't achieve the goal of rolling back health care reform; that's the sense, for example, from reporting within the conservative press about hostility to Ted Cruz. In fact, they believe it will be a disaster, but they feel pressured to go along anyway.

The problem is that nothing about actually going through with it is likely to help.

"Break the fever" was a bad idea when Barack Obama believed in it (or perhaps he just claimed to believe in it); it's a bad idea now. The isn't some easily-shattered illusion. It's a very successful enterprise. It's not something that a clever strategy can solve; it's just part of what politicians have to work around and muddle through.

The only good news is that I'm pretty sure Boehner knows all that. It might not be enough to prevent a debacle, but it's something.

Forced To Be A Jerk Over Impeachment

Yeah, only a jerk would point out that "impeachment" is what happens in the House, while trail and conviction, or acquittal, or "Not Proven," is what happens in the Senate. Well, I'm afraid today I'm just going to be that jerk.

In response to a Kay Steiger inforgraphic over at TPM, which asks:

Republicans are talking a big game about impeaching the president...Could they actually pull it off? 

And concludes that, no, they couldn't, because the Senate.

But of course 218 Republicans in the House certainly could impeach Barack Obama.

(As long as I'm at it...no, technically, it doesn't have to go through the Judiciary Committee, either.)

Why does anyone care? Because it surely is worth noting that Republicans can, if they want, impeach the president. Hell, they can do it once a day, and have a special session on Sundays to do it twice. And they can force the Senate to dispose of it, which would certainly tie up the Senate floor for quite some time, even if the whole thing is a joke.

And, as with shutdown and a default, I'm pretty confident that John Boehner wants no part of it, having learned that lesson very well when Tom P. Baxter was Speaker. And yet, as with shutdown and default, there sure is plenty of demand for it within the conservative marketplace (see this key point from Paul Waldman), and therefore, as Joaquin Andujar always said, youneverknow.

Catch of the Day

A very nice one from Brian Beutler, who takes note of the current campaign against the IRS role in the Affordable Care Act...and the GOP enthusiasm for Health Savings Accounts:

For the uninitiated, HSAs are tax-preferred vehicles that provide people with bare bones insurance an incentive to put away money in the event they develop chronic illness, require long term care, or experience a costly accident. Modeled after IRAs, they allow qualified people to put pre-tax dollars into an account that can only be drawn from without penalty to pay for certain medical costs.

There’s plenty to dislike about HSAs, but that’s an old debate for another time. Instead, I’m here to ask: What mysterious, benevolent government agency do Republicans think enforces this critical aspect of their supposedly grand plan to reform the health care system? Hint: It’s three letters long.

Cute.

There's certainly a tension between the GOP grovel to libertarians and real small government types, typified by John Boehner's insistence that the House shouldn't be judged by how many laws it has passed because only big government socialists pass laws...and the GOP attempt, at times, to actually propose 1980s and 1990s style conservative ideas. Of course, that's most obvious in the GOP hatred of "Obamacare," which after all is a 1990s style conservative idea.

The trick is that mainstream conservatives are willing to use the rhetoric of "no government at all" libertarians (or, even more so, simply nihilists) without really wanting to commit to following the actual anti-government implications of that rhetoric. So they want the credit for proposing solutions to real-life problems, pretending not to notice that the rhetoric they use against "liberal" solutions is equally valid (or not) against their own solutions. It's not just Obamacare; the same thing shows up in Republican-backed tax treatments in the current tax code such as the child tax credit (and, I suppose, the EITC). As with HSAs, you need an IRS

I'm not sure how much any of that really does constrain them, but it's certainly possible that part of the "post-policy" turn they've taken -- for example, their long-time failure to come up with the "replace" part of "repeal-and-replace" -- is a result of many conservatives taking the rhetoric too seriously.

I should add, by the way, that I don't want to say that the political/policy model implied by the more extreme anti-government rhetoric that virtually all mainstream Republicans use is per se "wrong." I would say, however, that an actual party that lived by those principles would be very, very, unpopular in the US.

And: nice catch!

Shocker! (Least Revealing Revelation Ever)

Oh, c'mon, Mother Jones:

As Mother Jones revealed last week, Groundswell, the hush-hush right-wing strategy group partly led by Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wanted to hype the Benghazi tragedy into a full-fledged scandal for the Obama administration, as part of its "30 front war" on the president and progressives. A secret audio tape of one of Groundswell's weekly meetings shows that prominent members of the group pressed House Speaker John Boehner and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the chair of the House oversight committee, to expand the Benghazi investigation and make this supposed scandal a top-priority for congressional Republicans. This recording indicates Groundswell's mission extends beyond message coordination to scandal-stoking.

Really? You're telling me that the same right-wing kooks who were publicly hyping Benghazi! and publicly urging Boehner and Issa to "make this supposed scandal a top-priority" were...also doing the same thing when the TV cameras weren't on!

And furthermore: they threatened that House Republicans "go hard on Benghazi or risk losing financial and grassroots support."

Never mind that Boehner and Issa haven't actually gone along with the specific demand (a select committee on Benghazi!). Never mind that Issa and House Republicans have been perfectly happy to hype Benghazi, with our without this supposed pressure. Never mind that there's nothing here about "Groundswell" control of the resources they supposedly were threatening to withhold.

This is about as big a non-revelation, and non-story, as I've ever seen. Check that...actually, I do think there's something of a story here. But it's not a scandal story; it's a story about, as far as I can see, perfectly legitimate activity by a portion, and hardly from the evidence a central portion, of the Republican party network. That's interesting! At least a little. But there's nothing nefarious going on here, and more to the point, nothing particularly secret about any of this.

Rise of a Reality-Based Conservative Media?

Kevin Drum writes:

Conservative desperation to revive the IRS "scandal," which basically imploded in their laps weeks ago, continues apace. Steve Benen reports today that the latest is a scoop by the Daily Caller about a White House meeting with IRS chief counsel William Wilkins in 2012. The fact that this was trumpeted in the Caller is pretty much all you need to know about this supposedly nefarious meeting, 

Which is absolutely true; indeed, two or three years ago, one could say the same about virtually any story that originated in the GOP-aligned press.

What's fascinating is that it's changing. Or at least, there are now decent-size islands of reality within the mainstream conservative press. National Review has really stepped up its game, with Robert Costa leading a decent-sized group of people doing real reporting. There are also I think a somewhat larger number of reality-based columnists who are willing to take shots at conservative nonsense while staying firmly within the conservative mainstream. See, for example, columns on the futility of shutting down the government over ACA by Ramesh Ponnuru and Byron York (over at the Washington Examiner, which also runs Philip Klein's informed health care discussions). Not that there's anything wrong with exiles such as David Frum -- everyone should obviously wind up whether they feel comfortable -- but if the GOP is to get itself out from the damage that a closed information feedback loop can cause, they need people within that loop to do something about it.

The question, to me, is what comes next. Will both this relatively new reality-based conservative media coexist peacefully with Rush and Fox and the rest of the nonsense? Will war break out? Who would win?

At any rate, it all seems to me like a pretty significant development.

I Doubt Republicans Have a Divine Doctrine Problem

Ed Kilgore:

In all my writings on this subject, I’ve stressed the fact that the contemporary conservative movement—and particularly its increasingly dominant “constitutional conservative” wing—is unusually resistant to changes in its ideology, policies and messaging, for the rather obvious reason that they believe in a fixed, timeless government model located somewhere in the 1920s that reflects not only the Founders’ design but a divine imperative communicated through the Declaration of Independence, natural law, and scripture. So of course they will look high and low for evidence that they don’t have to “change to win,” and even if that pursuit fails, they’ll argue for holding out for a perfect electoral storm to avoid any compromise in their “conservative principles.”

That's one theory. I think, with all due respect to Kilgore, who is a long-time smart political observer, that it's wrong.

I'm not convinced, to tell the truth, that Republicans are unusually resistant to change. I think they are unusually resistant to moderation -- that is a particular type of change.

And my explanations for it are structural and institutional, rather than based on something inherent in conservative ideology. Specifically, I think that what matters are (1) the conservative marketplace, which is driven more by resentment than by ideology; and (2) a series of examples/historical accidents/mythology that have allowed people to convince themselves that purity is a better general election strategy.

What I believe about the "fixed, timeless government model located somewhere in the 1920s that reflects not only the Founders’ design but a divine imperative" is that the fixed model is constantly undergoing revisions, and that most of the adherents to that model are extremely open to even very large revisions, as long as they are always presented as part of a fixed, timeless, government model.

Now, what I don't have is any way to show that I'm right and Kilgore is wrong. Or maybe we're both correct, or both partially correct. But I'm fairly convinced of it -- Republicans will move on policy when they think it's in their interest to move on policy, and at that point the divine origins of their former policies won't stop them.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

The flip side of last week's question: what politician are you most embarrassed at having supported?

As with last week, I'm not looking for big changes you've made (in other words, not looking for those who supported McGovern or Clinton or Obama when they were young and liberal) -- I'm interested in either politicians who disappointed you by being something other than what you thought at the time, or (equally interesting to me) politicians you didn't like at the time but thought were the best choice for strategic reasons.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Here's one for the week leading up to July 4th. Long-time readers will recall that I'm an advocate of particularly celebrating politics and politicians on the 4th; I also have a new column at Salon this week on the importance of elections (warning, conservatives: you won't like my examples, but the piece should work with examples of your own).

At any rate, this gets to the question: what politician are you proudest to have supported?

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Russ Ortiz, 39. Not a bad pitcher in his prime, although his Wins/quality seems fairly high. And then two years after the Giants gave him a way for two guys who never worked out, he went from Atlanta to Arizona...and fell off a cliff. And yet he managed to hang around for at least parts of five more seasons, and more than 50 more starts, despite never again doing better than an 82 ERA+.  Anyway, he was fun to root for.

Oh, the good stuff:

1. Ross Douthat takes on conservative libertarians. Interesting.

2. While Conor Friedersdorf really doesn't like elite-bashing by elite conservatives.

3. And Philip Klein understands the context of the situation.

4.  Michelle Dean on Arendt and (Mary) McCarthy.

5. And I'm not a big fan of "derp," but Noah Smith almost convinces me.

The Return of Lazy Mendacity

Oliver Willis yesterday asked:

what is it with cons[ervatives] who provide links to stories that disprove their accusations?

Hey, I know that one! It's lazy mendacity.

On a totally different substantive topic, Conor Friedersdorf had a great example of lazy mendacity, also yesterday -- conservatives linking to a NYT story about Boston and quoting something from mid-story to support a claim that the press was ignoring the bombers' religion, when in fact the headline and the lead (yeah, I spell it that way usually) were about "Islamic Extremist Beliefs As Motive." In other words, while Friedersdorf goes to great pains to show that the claim is wrong, all anyone really needed to do was to look at the story that was supplied as evidence.

The point is that there's something about the conservative marketplace which encourages quite a bit of laziness on the part of those selling to it. You don't need to be clever; you don't need to show your work. All you need is to read the audience well and supply the kinds of outrage they're looking for. And, as conservatives should know, if you provide incentives for something, you'll get it.

Of course, there certainly are very good pundits among conservatives, and solid, substantive politicians...it's just that the market rewards appear, for the most part, to be elsewhere. And so: lazy mendacity.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

The conservative push in GOP Senate primaries over the last several cycles: a net plus or net minus for conservative policy outcomes?

Sunday Question for Conservatives

Is CPAC a good representation of conservatives? If not, what should conservatives do about it?