Spoilsports

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This Wall Street Journal editorial is hysterical — starting with the title —

Iran Curveball
This latest intelligence fiasco is Mr. Bush’s fault.

President Bush has been scrambling to rescue his Iran policy after this week’s intelligence switcheroo, but the fact that the White House has had to spin so furiously is a sign of how badly it has bungled this episode.

At this point I was wondering if I were really reading the Wall Street Journal. Since when had the WSJ editorial page actually owned up to reality? But the next sentence put my mind at ease.

In sum, Mr. Bush and his staff have allowed the intelligence bureaucracy to frame a new judgment in a way that has undermined four years of U.S. effort to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Yep; this is the WSJ editorial page we know and love to snark at.

This kind of national security mismanagement has bedeviled the Bush Presidency. Recall the internal disputes over post-invasion Iraq, the smearing of Ahmad Chalabi by the State Department and CIA, hanging Scooter Libby out to dry after bungling the response to Joseph Wilson’s bogus accusations, and so on. Mr. Bush has too often failed to settle internal disputes and enforce the results.

It’s sad, really. The Warmongering Right really did get away with creating its own reality, for a while. With the help of compulsive pleasers like George Tenet they created a world in which no one told them anything they didn’t want to hear. Now they want to believe the intelligence agencies deceived the Bush Administration with false intelligence on Iraq, but the truth is that the Bush Administration made it clear that the only products they would accept from Intelligence were those that confirmed their beliefs. Intelligence complied, and gave the Bushies what they wanted, and then took the blame when it all turned out wrong.

Oddly, after this some of them decided the Bushies’ games were no fun, and they would not play them any more.

Today the righties are taking comfort in a Rasmussen Poll that says only 18 percent of American voters believe Iran has stopped its nuclear weapons programs. The Dream (of bombing “the daylights out of Iran’s nuclear facilities and terrorism-supporting infrastructure“) is not dead! The American People are still with them!

Maybe not. A USA Today/Gallup Poll taken November 2-4 says that only 18 percent of Americans support military action against Iran. I assume we’re not looking at the same 18 percent.

The Wall Street Journal remains gloomy:

We reported earlier this week that the authors of this Iran NIE include former State Department officials who have a history of hostility to Mr. Bush’s foreign policy. But the ultimate responsibility for this fiasco lies with Mr. Bush. Too often he has appointed, or tolerated, officials who oppose his agenda, and failed to discipline them even when they have worked against his policies. Instead of being candid this week about the problems with the NIE, Mr. Bush and his National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, tried to spin it as a victory for their policy. They simply weren’t believable.

It’s a sign of the Bush Administration’s flagging authority that even many of its natural allies wondered this week if the NIE was really an attempt to back down from its own Iran policy. We only wish it were that competent.

Clearly, the Washington bureaucracy is running short of toadies willing to sell out their country for the sake of an unpopular Administration that will be gone in 13 months. How odd.

See also Ewen MacAskill, “Intelligence expert who rewrote book on Iran” in today’s Guardian.

Faithiness

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David Brooks has a column in today’s New York Times titled “Faith vs. the Faithless,” about Mitt Romney’s religion speech. I plunged into it with the same enthusiasm I have for dumpster diving in really bad neighborhoods. But I was pleasantly surprised that Brooks actually had a glimmer of insight.

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but
speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious.

I’ve read the speech. It not only disses the nonreligious (about which the Rude Pundit gets really rude); it also leaves out anyone who isn’t a monotheist. I guess Mitt isn’t worried about losing the Buddhist vote.

As for the alleged war on religion, Joe Conason rightly points out that it’s mostly been the religious fighting it:

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals — including agnostics and atheists — have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader — which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid’s religion.

And an editorial in today’s New York Times gets to the bottom of why Romney had to make the speech in the first place:

Even by the low standards of this campaign, it was a distressing moment and just what the nation’s founders wanted to head off with the immortal words of the First Amendment: A presidential candidate cowed into defending his way of worshiping God by a powerful minority determined to impose its religious tenets as a test for holding public office. …

…Mr. Romney was not there to defend freedom of religion, or to champion the indisputable notion that belief in God and religious observance are longstanding parts of American life. He was trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party, who do want to impose their faith on the Oval Office, that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.

And to do that, Romney evoked the common enemy of all God Nazis — secularists. As Steve M. says —

His basic message was “Well, yeah, I’m a Mormon, but LOOK — OVER THERE! IT’S A DIRTY FILTHY ATHEIST!”

But let’s go on to David Brooks’s next paragraph, which is astonishing, coming from David Brooks:

The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

The difference between a tribe and a mere interest group is that tribes are something people incorporate into their identities. The group becomes an extension of the self under the guardianship of ego. But the trick with religion-as-tribe is that one can be a fierce and devoted member of the tribe without being particularly religious, and vice versa. If we could travel through religious history we could dredge up busloads of great theologians and spiritual teachers who would tell us that ego attachment is death to sincere religious devotion.

Another aspect of religion-as-tribe in America is that, increasingly, sectarian distinctions are sluicing together into one vague and amorphous All-American Christianity. Understanding of doctrine becomes less important than loyalty to doctrine and identification with the tribe. Pastor Dan speaks of “faithiness” —

Romney’s appeal was thus not to faith but to “faithiness,” to steal from Stephen Colbert. He didn’t want to appeal to the specifics of belief, because those would have worked against him, but to the quality of being perceived as a person of faith. Brooks got that much right. It is a pernicious tactic, and one that is bound to be tried over and over again as candidate after candidate tries to proclaim themselves the leader of faith and the free world without alienating too many swing voters.

It is a pernicious tactic because, even as Romney paid homage to religious tolerance, the point of his speech was to ingratiate himself with the intolerant and thereby reinforce their intolerance.

There’s no question that there’s a huge block of voters who think they are entitled to demand religious tests for public office. We must never forget that separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible. The same wall that separates church from state also separates us from sectarian tyranny.

There’s something else that struck me about the Romney speech. It’s becoming apparent that Mitt is the candidate Old Line GOP party insiders want to nominate. John Dickerson writes,

When Mitt Romney gave his speech on religion in American life Thursday in College Station, Texas, he brought everything but the presidential seal. Introduced by George Herbert Walker Bush, the last popular Republican president, he stood in front of a row of American flags and faced a bank of cameras worthy of a celebrity murder trial. Leading up to the address, his campaign had released pictures of his arduous speechwriting process, exactly as the White House does before the real president gives the State of the Union address.

Various tools like Peggy Noonan and Hugh Hewitt praised Romney’s speech as second only to the Sermon on the Mount. This is the GOP establishment speaking. They don’t like McCain; I suspect they’ve come to realize what a loose cannon Rudy Giuliani is; and Huckabee is bad for business. Mitt’s their guy. He’s starting to look like the GOP nominee to me.

(Holy) Oil and Water

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At the Corner, Rich Lowry is feeling estranged.

Remember how evangelicals had “matured”? Remember how the war on terror had replaced social issues? It shouldn’t be hard, since all those things were being said a couple of weeks ago (heck, still being said maybe even a few days ago). Part of what seems to be going on with the Huckabee surge is evangelicals sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the chattering class—we’re still here, we still matter, and we still care about our signature issues.

I don’t remember hearing that evangelicals had “matured.” Nor have I noticed that Rich Lowry had “matured.” I infer that “matured” means evangelicals were expected to put aside their social and religious views in favor of other issues.

Remember the lack of excitement in the Republican race, especially among dispirited social conservatives? Well, now there is some excitement, and it isn’t over free market economics or the war on terror, but a candidate who doesn’t speak compellingly about either of those things but instead about social issues. As a friend I was talking to a little earlier points out, the most important moment of the campaign so far came when a social conservative excited a social conservative audience—Huckabee with his “I come from you” speech at the “values summit.” This friend argues that the Huck surge makes it harder, not easier, for Rudy to win the nomination. Now that many evangelicals have a horse in this race, it would be very hard to tell them that not only will their guy not get the nomination, but they’ll have to settle for a pro-choicer. I don’t know about that, but Huck has certainly trashed about nine months-worth of conventional wisdom on the changing nature of social conservative voters.

Excuse me, but … whose conventional wisdom on the changing nature of social conservative voters? Especially if that “wisdom” is they will drop conservative Christian values in favor of the Republican Party’s interests? I recall no such “conventional wisdom.” Perhaps Lowry mistakes his own wishful thinking for “conventional wisdom.”

For years members of the right-wing “chattering class” believed they owned the copyright on Christianity. They’ve smugly lectured us lefties that we have a religion problem. The Narrative — never forget the Narrative — is that conservatives honor religion and liberals don’t. It says that conservatives march in the bright light of moral clarity to fight Evil wherever it exists, while liberals stumble about in a fog of relativism and play on Evil’s bowling team.

Of course, there’s the Narrative, and there’s the Reality. But let’s put that aside for now.

Evangelicals are not a monolith. Not all are fundamentalists, and even among fundamentalists there is a contingent more eager to kick-start Armageddon in the Middle East than to overturn Roe v. Wade. In America, nationalism, jingoism, and fundamentalism have been fused together for generations. But the Republican Party was not part of this fusion until relatively recent times. Fifty years ago a nationalistic fundamentalist whackjob was as likely to be a Democrat as anything else. Nor, do I believe, did viable contenders for a major party presidential nomination explicitly court the fundamentalist vote until the past quarter century or so.

This is not to say that religion hasn’t played a role in presidential politics; of course, it has. Before John Kennedy, both parties catered to anti-Catholic prejudice, for example. But I know of no other time in our history when one party claimed Christianity as its own exclusive property and used it to club the other party.

Since Reagan, and especially since Rove, the GOP has brandished the white evangelical vote to swing elections in its favor. As Thomas Frank explained so well in What’s the Matter With Kansas, the GOP manipulated white evangelical voters into undermining their own lives, jobs, futures, civil liberties, access to health care, pensions, education, etc., in order to strengthen a financial/corporate/political aristocracy headed by King George W. Bush.

This system worked just dandy as long as candidates could cater effectively to the Christian right while serving the interests of the corporate and military-industrial establishments. Unfortunately for the GOP, none of the current presidential candidates seems able to do that. Instead, the top three candidates appeal to separate slices of the Reagan Coalition pie. You’ve got Rudy Giuliani, who has become the great white hope of the neocons. You’ve got Mitt Romney, who has some support among moneyed interests. And you’ve got Mike Huckabee as the Christian candidate. Pat Robertson’s endorsement notwithstanding, Giuliani is simply not going to get the so-called “values” voters. Romney faces hot anti-Mormon prejudice. And apparently Huckabee doesn’t know “The Islamofascist Enemy” from spinach.

Lowry is perplexed that “values” voters care more about their hot-button sex-and-death issues more than they care about the Republican Party or the corporate status quo. His problem is not that white evangelicals have changed, but that they haven’t. However, by giving Christian conservatives so much clout, the Bush Administration has spooked the moneyed interests that have been its foundation since at least the 1920s.

Poor babies.

Today Romney is preparing to deliver a speech intended to defuse his Mormonism as an issue. Judging by the parts he has released, the speech is going to be a weightless rhetorical froth drizzled with lines like “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom” and “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” Millennia of human history in which religion did just fine without freedom are cheerfully ignored.

Romney’s problem is that he has to simultaneously ask for religious tolerance while appealing to religious intolerance. Jeremy Lott compares the task ahead of Romney to the way John Kennedy defused the Catholic issue in 1960:

[Kennedy’s] speech has been remembered as a cry for religious toleration and an excoriation of religious bigotry. It contained those elements – “[I]f this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser…” – but the thrust of it was Kennedy’s promise that he wouldn’t be a particularly Catholic president. …

… If Romney were to give even a watered-down version of that speech today, he would not be the nominee of the Republican party. Evangelical primary voters may distrust Mormonism, but they have a greater fear of secularism. In that, they’re not too different from the country as a whole – many Americans would rather have a Muslim as president than an atheist.

Lott suggests that Romney “drop the consultant-speak for a few moments to tell voters exactly what it is that he likes about his faith, and where they can go if they’re unwilling to accept that.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for that. Mitt Romney is to authenticity what oil is to water. (See also Andrew O’Hehir and Walter Shapiro.)

Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, has packaged himself as Jesus’ candidate. But Huckabee is being spun by the war-and-profits Right as bad for business and soft on Islamic terrorism. Righties are comparing him to Jimmy Carter — which, in Rightie World, is lower than pond scum.

Now Republican voters are plagued by epic indecision. And Rich Lowry is perplexed that Christian conservatives are less interested in his favored issues than in their own. He sees this as a sign of evangelical “immaturity.” One might infer that, all along, he thought abortion, school prayer, gay marriage, and other issues dear to Christian conservatives were kid’s issues, and that evangelicals were to be humored, not taken seriously. Who’s got a problem with religion, Rich?

Al Gore, Bali, and You

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bali logo

 

Al Gore is going to the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali next week, and wants your help.

 

"…In front of representatives from the world’s countries, I will speak about the need for a visionary treaty to be completed, ratified and brought into effect everywhere in the world by 2010. I need you, your friends and family to sign this petition calling for a new, positive leadership role by our elected leaders. I will bring your signatures on stage with me as a clear demonstration of our resolve.

"This petition shows our commitment to solutions to the climate crisis. Please add your voice today and urge your friends to add theirs. The time for action is now. Only together can we make the change."

A Patriot Acts

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Air Force veteran and former: social studies teacher, college professor, and organizational consultant John Nirenberg patiently explains why he’s walking 480+ miles from Boston’s Faneuil Hall to Speaker Pelosi’s office to encourage her to put impeachment “back on the table.”

Scott Ritter, explains below why there is so little overt opposition to an attack on Iran. His words might also explain why Nirenberg decided to hit the road to get an audience with Pelosi (in December, no less):

…very few Americans actually function as citizens anymore. What I mean by that are people who invest themselves in this country, people who care, who give a damn. Americans are primarily consumers today, and so long as they continue to wrap themselves in the cocoon of comfort, and the system keeps them walking down a road to the perceived path of prosperity, they don’t want to rock the boat. If it doesn’t have a direct impact on their day-to-day existence, they simply don’t care.

There’s a minority of people who do, but the majority of Americans don’t. And if the people don’t care — and remember, the people are the constituents — if the constituents don’t care, then those they elect to higher office won’t feel the pressure to change.

The Democrats, one would hope, would live up to their rhetoric, that is, challenging the Bush administration’s imperial aspirations. Once it became clear Iraq was an unmitigated disaster, one would have thought that when the Democrats took control of Congress they would have sought to reimpose a system of checks and balances, as the Constitution mandates. But instead the Democrats have put their focus solely on recapturing the White House, and, in doing so, will not do anything that creates a political window of opportunity for their Republican opponents.

The Democrats don’t want to be explaining to an apathetic constituency, an ignorant constituency whose ignorance is prone to be exploited because it produces fear, fear of the unknown, and the global war on terror is the ultimate fear button. The Democrats, rather than challenging the Bush administration’s position on the global war on terror, challenging the notion of these imminent threats, continues to play them up because that is the safest route toward the White House. At least that is their perception.

…They don’t have the courage of conviction to enter into that debate and stare at whoever makes that statement and say they’re a bald-faced liar. They’re not going to go that route…

I don’t know what the last straw was for Nirenberg. Meanwhile, H.R. 1955, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act recently and quietly passed the House by 404 to 6, and is under consideration by the Senate. John Nichols of the Capital Times:

…H.R. 1955 would establish the framework for an Orwellian network charged with policing not the actions but the thoughts and statements of Americans. It would establish a commission with broad investigative powers and an official charge to propose legislation and regulatory moves to bar whatever thoughts or words the commission identifies as “homegrown terrorism.”

With its authority to call hearings and compel testimony, the commission would invite a return of the days of inquests into “thought crimes” by the likes of Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy and California Sen. Richard Nixon….

Under H.R. 1955, investigators would be authorized to examine Web sites and online communications with an eye toward controlling the free flow of ideas and information that is the lifeblood of the digital age. Indeed, the National Lawyers Guild and the Society of American Law Teachers warn: This legislation “will likely lead to the criminalization of beliefs, dissent and protest, and invite more draconian surveillance of Internet communications.”

…Backers of the bill claim they only want to address what they describe as “threatened” force. But what they identify as a “threat” might be nothing more than an expression of the deep frustration Americans feel with politicians…who show so little respect for freedom of speech.

This legislation suggests that a danger that must be officially addressed — “violent radicalization” — is characterized by the embrace of an “extremist belief system.” But who defines extremism? Didn’t the British label Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine extremists? Didn’t the supporters of World War I attack anti-war campaigners such as Robert M. La Follette and Eugene Victor Debs as extremists? Weren’t supporters of women’s suffrage dismissed as extremists? Weren’t the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin attacked because powerful figures considered their advocacy on behalf of civil rights to be extremist?…

I don’t need to remind you, that the on-air “talent” of Fox News, as well as many voices on the AM dial routinely label many of us reading and writing blogs like this one as “extremists”. Jeff Dinelli at the Left Coaster:

…The cleverly worded law would allow the government to arrest and imprison anyone who speaks out against the Bush administration, the Iraq occupation, the Department of Homeland Security or any other government agency, including the FDA….It is the latest in a long line of fear-mongering legislation that stretches back to the birth of our nation, as pointed out in a fine post by Phillip Giraldi at HuffPo.

Forget that this is going to be specifically aimed at Muslim organizations. This is the beginning of the end to Free Speech in America. If this law passes, every information source you know and trust could be shut down and its authors arrested…

Would you have believed thirty years ago that there would be Free Speech Zones in America? H.R. 1955 was co-authored by not by some far right nutcase, but by Jane Harman, a California Democrat, chair of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence. The fact that she’s considered mainstream, and that the bill passed while the news was occupied with massive fires in her home state, helped the bill dodge public attention. Harman’s district contains a number of defense contractors and borders the district that’s home to the RAND Corporation, which IMO would be a beneficiary of this legislation

You can feel what’s left of our democracy, “ossifying up”, as the bill’s thought police will likely chill what’s left of Free Speech in America. Its intent and vague language is a step toward putting web sites like this one out of business.

Join John Nirenberg, either in person on US Route 1, or via his website March in My Name.

Republicans and the “T” Word

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Michael Kinsley says that Fred Thompson may not have what it takes to be the Republican nominee:

The real strategy of Thompson’s plan is a familiar one from past Republican tax plans: Give large breaks to businesses and the wealthy (by, say, abolishing the estate tax), bribe the middle class to go along by offering smaller breaks to them, and don’t worry about paying for it all.

But maintaining your indifference to the size of the bill you are running up requires nerves of steel. You must never waver, never, never express the slightest concern that lost revenue may be a problem, and never, never, never even hint at where you might go to find the money. Thompson followed the script, putting out word that the explosion of economic activity after his tax reform would bring in too much money to even count, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then, unfortunately, he blinked. He revealed that he is a political amateur by making ominous noises about finding some savings through changes in Social Security benefits, which has to mean cuts in Social Security benefits or no money will be saved.

Raise your hand if you would be happy to accept lower Social Security payments in exchange for a simpler tax code.

I thought so.

Kinsley also discusses Mike Huckabee’s “fair tax” proposal:

He has endorsed something called the “fair tax,” which involves repealing all federal revenue sources—the income tax, Social Security tax, estate tax, everything—and replacing them with a 23 percent sales tax on everything except education. The fair tax propaganda says, frankly, that it is intended to be “revenue-neutral.” That is, it would bring in just as much money as the taxes it replaces. No monkey business about explosions of new revenue.

This makes it easy to figure out who would win and who would lose in Huckabee’s so-called “fair” tax. It’s a zero-sum game: Every dollar someone’s taxes go down is a dollar someone else’s go up. What you spend every year is the amount you earn minus the amount you save. On average, Americans save practically nothing, but wealthier people save more. Very poor people actually spend more than they earn, while Bill Gates and Warren Buffett couldn’t spend more than a small fraction of their income if they tried. So, wealthy people are going to see their taxes go down, which means that poor and middle-class people are going to see their taxes go up.

In spite of his soak-the-poor tax plan, the right-wing Club for Growth has gone to the mattresses to defeat Huckabee. Leslie Wayne writes in tomorrow’s New York Times:

As Mike Huckabee rises in the Republican presidential polls, fiscal conservatives have been raising alarms about a series of tax increases he oversaw while governor of Arkansas — new taxes on gasoline, nursing home beds and even pet groomers.

The Club for Growth, a politically influential antitax group, has dubbed Mr. Huckabee Tax Hike Mike and poured money into anti-Huckabee advertisements that were broadcast in early nominating states, with more on the way. Mr. Huckabee “spends money like a drunken sailor,” according to the group’s news releases, and it has sprinkled YouTube and the airways with videos that mock him and his policies.

Frankly, your average drunken sailor is a miser compared to most Republicans.

But the record offers a more complex and nuanced picture. While taxes did rise in the 10 years that Mr. Huckabee was governor, the portrayal of him as a wild-eyed spendthrift is hardly apt. For the most part, Mr. Huckabee’s tax initiatives had wide bipartisan support, with the small number of Republicans in the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature voting for the tax increases and many maintaining that the state was better for them.

David Lightman writes for McClatchy Newspapers:

In the late 1990s, as the nation’s and Arkansas’ economies boomed, that wasn’t difficult, and Huckabee presided over substantial tax cuts. In 1997 and 1998, state lawmakers approved $97.9 million in income-tax relief, and another $14.1 million in smaller tax breaks.

About 65 of Huckabee’s 90 tax reductions were enacted from 1997 to 1999. The centerpiece was $90.6 million annually in individual income-tax breaks, but most of the cuts were small and highly specialized.

Among them: exempting residential lawn care from the gross receipts tax, a Salvation Army sales-and-use-tax exemption and an exemption for sales of biomass to produce electricity.

Huckabee came to Washington in 1999 and boasted about his record. “The big battle was no longer, ‘Which taxes will we raise and by how much?’ but ‘Which taxes will we cut and by how much?’ ” he told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center.

Bill Clinton’s economy made being a tax cutter easy and fun.

But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.

But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.

The State Supreme Court handed him another problem when it ruled that Arkansas’ education-funding system wasn’t meeting student’s needs and had to be revamped.

So in 2003, Huckabee had a very different message. In his State of the State speech that year, he warned lawmakers that, “If you deem that all new revenue sources, your proposals or mine, are indeed dead on arrival, then you’ll be saying that teacher pay increases are dead, scholarships are dead, medicine for the elderly is dead, that long sentences are dead and that we’ll have a massive early release of thousands of inmates from the (prison) system.”

Unlike the bleepheads of the Club for Growth, Gov. Huckabee actually had to govern a state. But in GOP Land, facing reality is heresy, and as a candidate Huckabee has to prove he can still be oblivious. Back to Kinsley:

Neither Thompson nor Huckabee has anything useful to say about the real problem, which is the huge gap between revenues and spending that George W. Bush, having inherited a surplus, is leaving behind. Thompson’s willingness to take on Social Security would earn him some points for courage if he were planning to use the money to reduce the deficit or address the entitlements problem. But he wants to pour the money into new tax cuts for business, which is not just a bad idea but an incredibly lazy one. There’s more to running for president than buying a round of drinks at the country club and asking what’s on people’s minds.

At least Huckabee’s revenue neutrality would not make the problem worse. For this, the business wing of the Republican Party is hysterically labeling him a “fiscal liberal.”

A what? For Republicans, the epithet liberal used to mean someone who wanted the government to spend a lot of money that it didn’t have. Then it meant someone who wanted the government to spend what it had, but no more. Now, apparently, you are a “liberal” if you only want the government to spend a few hundred billion dollars a year more than it has.

Actually, the spending debate is now over, or should be. The GOP bluff has been called. Republicans had six years in which they controlled the White House and (for most of that time) both houses of Congress. They could have cut any spending they wanted. They did the opposite. None of the realistic Republican presidential possibilities is discussing spending cuts except in the vaguest terms.

But if you peer into the abyss of debt and say that what this country needs is another tax cut, that makes you a good conservative.

What really makes you a good conservative is to believe you can have something for nothing. All their elaborate theories about supply-side economics and “fair” taxes are fiscal alchemy. If we can just find the right formula, they think, government revenue will appear magically, and fairies will provide the government services we want without our having to pay for them.