Karl Rove’s miraculous virginity

We were assured that only social conservatives in the Republican Party used the term “forcible rape” or had any respect for the idea that a rape victim’s state of mind had any influence on whether she became pregnant.

When it comes to fiscal policy, however, so-called market Republicans apparently think that they can become virgins all over again simply by losing an election.

Karl Rove’s righteous advice to Republicans as they prepare to respond to the President’s next $trillion request to raise the amount the treasury can borrow to pay the federal government’s obligations was penned in the Wall Street Journal this morning. He took particular offence at Obama’s proposition that Congress “should pay the bills they have already racked up.”

He asserted baldy that Obama signed the measures, “that racked up the bills, which Republicans opposed.” Please, he’s saying, just set aside an avalanche of evidence that Republican recklessness along with Democrat indulgence created the debt problem and the Great Recession's deficit. We didn’t vote for Obamacare.

Rove endorses massive, unspecified spending cuts to keep paying the interest on Obama’s profligate spending. Even his prescription for what to do now is qualified with virginal expressions of innocence:

“With control of just one chamber, Republicans won't be able to advance much-needed structural changes in entitlements. That's the cost of losing the 2012 election. A Republican wish list will have to await a GOP president and Congress.

“For now, Republicans must make Mr. Obama take ownership of his deficits and the debt (which has increased from $10.626 trillion the day he took office to $16.433 trillion on Wednesday). It's impossible to negotiate with an ideologue, but Republicans can systematically unmask him and constrain him as much as their limited power allows, if they are united and acting in concert.”

Some cost: you lose the Presidency and so you can insist that you had nothing to do with this mess and needn’t extend yourself to fix it.

Rove’s rebut to growing impatience with Republican policy intransigence is simply more extremism. He fleshes out the paranoid perspective: foul spirits surrounds me; I’m innocent.

It won’t matter what fantasy carries the Republicans into the next fight. Neither fiscal terrorists nor suicide boomers get a pass for being virgins. 

Mitt Romney’s “reasonable” debate performance?

Obama should be fired as a fact-checker. However, Mitt Romney’s performance in the first debate shouldn’t make it any easier to elect him president.

Campaign policy pronouncements, for political hustlers, used to be as cheap as paper to a typewriter. Today, they are what politicians say in the final debates of an election. Tailoring policy for a 90-minute audience with Americans, however, doesn’t change the underlying governing ambitions of today’s entire Republican leadership.

Romney’s inspired wordsmiths found the words, but misused them. “Trickle-down government” isn’t Obama’s alternative to “trickle-down economics." It’s the inescapable consequence of Republican determination to cut off Washington’s power to do any further good within American society. They’d reduce to a trickle any new money available for spending at home and would refer the supplicants to cash-starved states, churches, and engorged Chinese and American banks.

Obama’s apparent weak-debate performance will appear as nothing compared to the emasculated Washington macho that Republicans hope to leave as their legacy.

All Mitt Romney did Tuesday was give David Brooks and conservatives who can still talk to independents permission to call him a "Massachusetts moderate" for the duration of this election cycle.

Just short of being water-boarded, Romney blinked.

He shredded the craziest elements of his economic platform—the bits Bill Clinton could credibly destroy without using up any of his own fragile credibility. Most notable, he dropped his promise to cut income tax rates by 20% across the board and further cut the taxes of the rich. It had become impossible to talk in specifics about the nice stuff, while leaving all the nasty bits—the loopholes—up for negotiation with Congress.

Also, in a series of morning-after misstatements he’d carefully memorized, Romney appeared to shrug off the cruelest elements of his promise to repeal Obamacare.

First, Romney lied to multimillionaires about his lack of compassion for the other half of America. Then, on Tuesday, he lied to that other half as well.

(In the debate on October 16 on social policy, you can bet he’ll drop the most extreme Republican positions on immigration and other minority-group irritants.)

Nevertheless, just because Mitt Romney doesn’t appear to be trustworthy personally doesn’t mean the Republican Party he leads doesn’t offer a clear radical choice.

The fabulists in conservative think-tanks and Romney’s war room created a firewall of crazy stuff on tax cuts, religious freedom, welfare reform, socialized medicine, and America’s enfeebled place in the world, above all, to win the White House without having to compromise on their most important strategic concerns. Still intact, amazingly, is their determination to continue Bush’s tax cuts, across the board, and to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

These are the choices that make this election important.

Ingenious or not, if Romney wins in November, his utterances in Tuesday’s debate will give him absolutely no room as president to raise any new revenues. Democrat obstruction might save the Affordable Care Act—as a statute. However, they will not be able to properly fund it or growing pressures on Medicaid and other social and education programs for the other half.

Romney would carry on giving his 10% to the Mormon Church. However, he would oversee intolerable federal deficits and leave the vision of constructive government and the New Deal to New England and a few other affluent states mainly across the North.

Making a dangerous US election: One crazy side is enough

The foulest complaint of the week is: What a boring election; nobody is saying anything interesting. Sullen columns by David Brooks and condescending editorials in The Economist tell Americans they aren’t being offered a significant choice. This is dangerous and untrue.

Telling voters that it’s a dull election is as good as telling them not to bother to vote. And not voting in this election would be an outrage.

At the heart of the election’s image problem is the media’s distorted shorthand: both sides exaggerate, answer to millions, represent elites, and carry ideological baggage; so, covering the election is mostly about conflicting sound bites and the competence of two professional campaign teams—just two gray calculators, so relax.

In fact, Obama is graying and possibly is the most calculating president since Lincoln. A conservative, if you will. Romney, however, is not.

The Economist understates their differences by putting both equally off center:

“But the Republicans’ main problem is taxes. Successful deficit-reduction plans require at least some of the gap—perhaps around a quarter—to be closed by new revenue. If the Republicans got rid of loopholes, they could cut all the main tax rates and still raise more money.

“The Democrats’ challenge is more on the spending side. Productivity has been flat in the public sector at a time when it has doubled in the private sector. Mr Obama needs to decide whether he is on the side of taxpayers or public-sector workers (who, if they work for the federal government, earn more than their private-sector equivalents do in wages and benefits). He needs to get serious about cutting back regulation, rather than increasing it; and he needs to spend more time listening to successful business leaders rather than telling them all is fine.”

Click on: http://www.economist.com/node/21559630

Obama’s spending challenge is America’s challenge—it’s embedded in the country—and is acknowledged by the president and most of his party. Indeed, his spending performance during his first three years is actually better than that of his Republican predecessor.

Click on: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/05/big-government-obama.html

Romney’s tax problem is entirely self-inflicted and threatens America’s financial and social order. It is the child of a novice fanaticism; it excuses paranoia; it has made compromise impossible; and it tells Americans to give up on their own creation—government for the people.

Government isn’t your servant, stern young Republicans insist. If you want one of those, ask your daddy for one of his.

Obama offers more incremental management, a slow, united recovery. Whether sincere or utterly without conviction, Romney would lead a radical, coordinated Republican effort to transform Washington along the lines of a sugary illusion about daddy’s 1950’s America.

The Economist well represents the assumption that Romney is simply an expedient liar. That in office, he and Republican intellectuals would bend to the data that they’ve ignored for years and find a way to do “something sensible” on taxes, loopholes, and spending that would allow the budget to balance later in the decade—and all this while providing for a strong defense and presenting levels of support to an aging society.

Rational conservative voices like The Economist and David Brooks seem to believe that while Romney’s Republican platform is incredible, it’s reasonable to trust that he has a sensible plan of his own.

The idea that Romney has a hidden agenda to be a moderate president deserves no more respect than the fear that Obama, locked away in his hope chest, has a blueprint to turn America into a European socialist state.