This is almost sorta kinda a book preview. I’ve been going through some books looking for bits to bolster my arguments for this and that, and I found a book called The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (HarperCollins, 2013). The author, Candida Moss, is a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame.

Most of the book is about early Church history. Moss says there is little actual historical evidence to show that early Christians were persecuted all that much, many legends to the contrary, and when they were persecuted it was usually more about politics than religion. Although it’s well written, if you aren’t really into early Church history this wouldn’t be a book to spend money on.

However, in her last chapter she makes a brilliant argument about how the myth of martyrdom is corroding religion and politics today. She writes, “Members of any Christian group can claim to be persecuted as long as they feel opposed.”

Yes, exactly. Opposition is no different from persecution. Having to buy health insurance is no different from slavery, or the Holocaust, or whatever.

I’m not 100 percent persuaded that the romance of martyrdom is just the residue of early Christian history, but the opposition equals persecution meme explains a lot. Further, the sense of persecution relieves them of any responsibility to reason with the opposition. If you are being persecuted, your only duty is to defend yourself by any means. You don’t have to make nice.

If you pay close attention to right-wing rhetoric, you realize that the Right believes persecution authenticates their message and proves their cause is just. Moss continues,

“Similarly, in her review of David Limbaugh’s book Persecution, Ann Coulter writes, ‘There is no surer proof of Christ’s divinity than that he is still so hated some 2,000 years after his death.’ Somehow, and quite perversely, hatred has become a witness not just to truth, but to Truth. No longer are reasoned argument, good judgment, or logic able to win the day, because failing to convince others of one’s opinions would be a better sign that one’s opinions were correct. Framed by the myth that we are persecuted dialogue is not only impossible, it is undesirable. We revel in the outrage and scandal that our words and opinions elicit. We don’t want to be understood by out opponent. We will fan the flames of hatred and bask in the knowledge that we are right and their criticism proves it.”

“There is no surer proof of Christ’s divinity than that he is still so hated some 2,000 years after his death.” Kinda takes one’s breath away, huh? And one might ponder, in what sort of bizarro alternative universe would that be true?

This is a hoot.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has chaired the Senate’s Intelligence Committee for five years. So when she suggested last month that investigators should make public a report on the U.S.’s interrogation techniques because it would “ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted,” one might have seen it as the strong words and fair assessment of a person who has deep experience on the issue.

But on Fox News Sunday this week, Bush-era National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden suggested that Feinstein actually encouraged the public release of the interrogation techniques report because of her emotions.

Citing specifically Feinstein’s line about not using such techniques again, Hayden told Fox News Sunday host Chis Wallace, “Now that sentence that, motivation for the report, Chris, may show deep emotional feeling on part of the Senator. But I don’t think it leads you to an objective report.”

I’m sure I speak for other female persons when I say that “You’re just being emotional” is what a man says to a woman when she has just told him something he doesn’t want to deal with or even think about. He can’t actually respond, so he dismisses her as “emotional.” Of course, he is being “logical.” Like men aren’t the ones who start bar fights.

See also Booman on why some people need to be in priso.

I’ve written in the past that a lot of righties seem to think the freedom of speech clause in the First Amendment includes a right to not be disagreed with. Josh Marshall about America’s whiny, paranoid mega-wealthy and notes that seems to be what they want, too.

Extremely wealthy people – enabled by a series of key Supreme Court decisions as recently as yesterday – want to be able to spend gargantuan amounts of money in the political process and remain essentially private persons who don’t get knocked around or criticized like everyone else in the political arena.

See also “If you criticize wealthy donors, you’re basically Hitler.”

Chris Hayes’s book Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy” makes the point that our institutions both public and private are being run by a class of people who got what they’ve got by circumstances largely not of their making; are sheltered from the realities most of us deal with; and who ultimately don’t know what they’re doing, but are so sheltered from the consequences of their own actions they don’t realize they don’t know what they’re doing. Donald Rumsfeld is a classic example. One suspects most of our captains of industry aren’t much sharper. But, y’know, they have lots of money, so we’re supposed to respect them.

We are so screwed. See also.

Have you ever considered that life itself is an April Fool’s joke? That would explain a lot.

Anyhoo — yesterday there was a big rush on the ACA insurance exchange websites, to the point that the system crashed for a while. A few righties couldn’t resist the urge to snark about that, overlooking the fact that, um, the system crashed because boatloads of people were trying to use it.

The signup surge has the Right in denial — it’s their fallback position on everything — and making claims that the Administration is lying about numbers, or else that the people getting insurance are either not paying for it or had insurance anyway. Jonathan Cohn takes apart their arguments. The bottom line is that there has been a huge backlog of people who wanted insurance but couldn’t get it, or who wanted insurance that wasn’t eating a disproportionate amount of their income and now those people are coming forward to use the ACA.

The ever-optimistic Brian Beutler thinks the ACA battle has been won. Maybe. I do think that the Right has way over-invested in Obamacare being a political winner for them, and if events continue on their current trajectory, it probably won’t be.

The question that won’t die — even on Fox News — is why can’t the Republicans come up with an alternative plan? And of course, they have. Every few months they announce with great fanfare that they have an alternative plan, and it gets a little flurry of attention, and rightie media triumphantly announces that the problem is solved, and then everybody forgets about that plan. And a few months later they announce a new new plan, which turns out to be a tweak of the last one, and then that one is forgotten.

And this happens because their plans aren’t serious. They’re just props. Because what they really want to do — eliminate or privatize the safety net and just let an unregulated private insurance industry gouge us any way it likes — is a political non-starter, and they know it. Their only hope of getting what they want is by doing it in increments — dismantling the ACA, then cutting safety net programs and insurance regulations by persuading us that it will make everything better, because free markets and capitalism and makers not takers.

So whatever “plans” they come up with have to serve that incremental purpose, which means they aren’t designed primarily to help people get health care.

Paul Krugman reminds us that the ACA was their plan, which has a lot to do with why it’s so messy.

Ross Douthat, in the course of realistically warning his fellow conservatives that Obamacare doesn’t seem to be collapsing, goes on to tell them that they’re going to have to come up with a serious alternative.

But Obamacare IS the conservative alternative, and not just because it was originally devised at the Heritage Foundation. It’s what a health-care system that does what even conservatives say they want, like making sure that people with preexisting conditions can get coverage, has to look like if it isn’t single-payer.

I don’t really think one more repetition of the logic will convince many people, but here we go again. Suppose you want preexisting conditions covered. Then you have to impose community rating — insurers must offer the same policies to people regardless of medical history. But just doing that causes a death spiral, because people wait until they’re sick to buy insurance. So you also have to have a mandate, requiring healthy people to join the risk pool. And to make buying insurance possible for people with lower incomes, you have to have subsidies.

The box they are in is that they can’t come up with a serious alternative. There is no possible serious alternative on the Right. Not one that will actually help people get health care, anyway. All they can do is obstruct and play legislative theater with their prop plans.

Erick Son of Erick and other righties have been having a grand time making fun of Matt Yglesias and calling him stupid because they think they caught him in a mistake. Except they didn’t.

Yglesias made a video titled “How Scary Is the Public Debt?” intended to explain that the public debt is not scary. Yglesias’s figure for the public debt is lower than what the Treasury says is the national debt, because Yglesias left out debt owned by one branch of government to another branch. But this point flew right over their muddled little heads, and they’ve been hooting about Yglesias making a mistake for the past several hours in complete oblivion of what Yglesias actually was talking about. John Aziz explains this.

Other than the number discrepancy that wasn’t actually a discrepancy, the righties’ basic issue with Yglesias is that they disagreed with him and don’t like him very much, but typically, they come up short explaining why. Mostly they just insulted Yglesias.

When Erickson eventually got around to trying to rebut Yglesias (after writing 263 words in a 394 word piece), the RedState editor pulled out arguments that were brief and devoid of both context and substance. . . . after that, Erickson was right back to bashing Vox’s “left-wing propaganda.”

It’s

Of course, the real issue is that on the Right it is apostasy to say that the public debt is not scary, so what Yglesias says must be propaganda. Yeah, that’s it.

So SCOTUS heard arguments on the Hobby Lobby case yesterday, and all we know for sure is that three women justices means at least three of them actually understand how contraceptives work. Unfortunately, there are only three.

There is a lot of speculation today about Antonin Scalia, but no one is speculating how he will vote. Obviously, he will side with Hobby Lobby. The speculation is about how he’s going to side with Hobby Lobby while ignoring his own past opinions on other religious liberty cases.

Dahlia Lithwick thinks the contraception mandate is doomed. If it is, this may be a “win” the Right will come to regret.

… is to inherit a large fortune. Old joke. However, these days it’s even easier to inherit a large fortune and make an even larger one. It’s practically idiot-proof, actually.

A new book by French economist Thomas Piketty is causing quite a stir because Piketty just plain comes out and says that the malefactors of great inherited wealth are eating the world economy. Krugman says,

Mr. Piketty, arguably the world’s leading expert on income and wealth inequality, does more than document the growing concentration of income in the hands of a small economic elite. He also makes a powerful case that we’re on the way back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are dominated not just by wealth, but also by inherited wealth, in which birth matters more than effort and talent. …

… It’s generally understood that George W. Bush did all he could to cut taxes on the very affluent, that the middle-class cuts he included were essentially political loss leaders. It’s less well understood that the biggest breaks went not to people paid high salaries but to coupon-clippers and heirs to large estates. True, the top tax bracket on earned income fell from 39.6 to 35 percent. But the top rate on dividends fell from 39.6 percent (because they were taxed as ordinary income) to 15 percent — and the estate tax was completely eliminated.

Some of these cuts were reversed under President Obama, but the point is that the great tax-cut push of the Bush years was mainly about reducing taxes on unearned income. And when Republicans retook one house of Congress, they promptly came up with a plan — Representative Paul Ryan’s “road map” — calling for the elimination of taxes on interest, dividends, capital gains and estates. Under this plan, someone living solely off inherited wealth would have owed no federal taxes at all. …

… Why is this happening? Well, bear in mind that both Koch brothers are numbered among the 10 wealthiest Americans, and so are four Walmart heirs. Great wealth buys great political influence — and not just through campaign contributions. Many conservatives live inside an intellectual bubble of think tanks and captive media that is ultimately financed by a handful of megadonors. Not surprisingly, those inside the bubble tend to assume, instinctively, that what is good for oligarchs is good for America.

Matt Bruenig writes,

A 2011 study by Edward Wolff and Maury Gittleman found that the wealthiest 1 percent of families had inherited an average of $2.7 million from their parents. This was 447 times more money than the least wealthy group of people — those with wealth less than $25K — had inherited. In between the wealthiest and least wealthy groups, inheritance levels ran in exactly the direction you would expect: the wealthier a group of people was, the more they had inherited.

As outrageously lopsided as these inheritance disparities seem, they only reflect half of the inheritance problem. The funny thing about piles of wealth is that they deliver to their owners passive, unearned streams of income variously called rents, dividends, profits, capital gains, interest and so on. Those who get big inheritances can park those inheritances in investment accounts that just get bigger and bigger without them having to lift a finger. As a result, the gaping inheritance disparity actually grows even more gaping each year after the inheritances have been received. …

…Children of the wealthy could wind up receiving increasingly larger shares of the national wealth bequeathed to them, wealth that will allow them to generate soaring incomes from capital income alone. If that happens, the meritocratic rhetoric that we use to justify America’s extraordinary levels of inequality will only become even more preposterous and delusional. Inheriting big piles of wealth and then using those piles to bring in even more unearned wealth is the exact opposite of meritocracy.

Sigh.