Five Republicans who are not democrats

Leave aside for a moment the favored policies of the ten Republican presidential candidates in the prime-time debate and the seven in the second-tier happy hour debate.  While there were very few actual policy differences, at least five candidates expressed startling contempt or disregard for the core structure of U.S. government, democratic constraints on the executive, international law, or the most basic standards of evidence for assertions made in public. 

Here's a quick look at five violations of the norms of democratic government as understood in the U.S. and internationally.

1. International law banning torture is not "brain surgery." Here's neurosurgeon Ben Carson responding to a question from Megyn Kelly: "As president,....would you bring back waterboarding?"

Alright. You know, what we do in order to get the information that we need is our business, and I wouldn't necessarily be broadcasting what we're going to do.(APPLAUSE)

We've gotten into this -- this mindset of fighting politically correct wars. There is no such thing as a politically correct war. (APPLAUSE)

The source of Huckabee's Holocaust porn

President Obama quite rightly read Mike Huckabee's disgusting, inflammatory assertion that the nuclear deal with Iran "will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven” as "an effort to push Mr. Trump out of the headlines. "  Most observers see it in that context: Trump is leading GOP contenders on a dive to a new bottom.

But where did the hysteria compressed in Huckabee's sound byte come from? Who writes the GOP's tune on dealings with Iran and middle east policy generally?

Netanyahu, natch.

To mark Holocaust Memorial Day back in April, "in a speech," The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard noted, "already winning attention in Washington," Netanyahu "compared Washington's deal with Iran to Europe's appeasement of Adolf Hitler which led to the Holocaust and world war."

Dissing the electorate III: Sullivan boosts Bacevich

Andrew Sullivan is endorsing a new diss-the-electorate meme: Andrew Bacevich's thesis in his new book, The Limits of Power:

The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.

My bullshit detector beeps when I read phrases like "the chief desire of the American people." I still believe that ultimately the electorate proves itself smarter than all of us - that 'the wisdom of crowds' yields its best dividends in the electoral setting.

"Ultimately" doesn't mean "in every election." I think Lincoln got it right: you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. When we're fooled, events eventually make the damage plain. And democracy, if corrupt rulers don't sabotage its machinery, allows for self-correction -- that's its saving grace.

Americans are no more corrupted by their material interests than they've ever been. I shouldn't dismiss Bacevich's ideas without reading the book, and I don't mean to. But I do disagree with the statement above.

Bush's two terms are a major challenge to my faith in the electorate. But here's how I see that tragic course. A series of unfortunate events from Monica Lewinsky through Gore's wretched campaign through an ill-timed periodic malfunction of our creaky electoral machinery allowed Bush to squeak through in 2000. Then 9/11 (and the swift apparent success in Afghanistan that followed) granted him a huge reservoir of trust, which was almost-but-not-quite drained by Nov. 2004.

The electoral eureka came in 2006, in the wake of Katrina, Bush's ill-conceived attempt to radically alter social security, and escalating violence in Iraq. It came later than many of us would have liked, but it came. That's how democracy works.

Now Americans are ready for more change. In response, the Democrats have taken a huge gamble by electing a black man -- who, like Lincoln, has captured a major-party nomination by sheer force of eloquence -- and, I believe, by sheer force of intellectual power underpinning that eloquence. It is an earth-shaking gamble: no one knows how deep racial prejudice still runs. It's compounded by Obama's relative lack of experience in elective office.

But to my mind, in this year there have been multiple hopeful signs that the electorate has developed new resistance to the bacteria of smear politics. Chief among them is Obama beating back a wave of Rovian attacks from Clinton; another is the success not only of McCain but of Huckabee against opponents running far more demagogic and asinine campaigns.

One of Obama's mantras is not this time. He has been saying for more than a year that Americans are too smart to fall for the familiar lies, the familiar smears, the familiar attacks on manliness and patriotism. And he's got very far with that message.

I'm admit I'm scared. McCain has revealed his intellectual bankruptcy over time He won't even bother to try to balance his proposed budget; he has no idea beyond asserting a vanished (and to a large degree always illusory) hegemony of how to advance American interests while fostering prosperity and incremental increase in freedom in the emerging autocracies; his idea of a health plan is more privatization, more control to the insurance companies, more limits to coverage and exclusionary mineshafts for individuals. "Bush's third term" is as good a tagline as any in our sound byte politics to describe what McCain offers -- and "will make Cheney look like Gandhi" may also be not far off. We can't afford that. And there is a real danger that we may get it.

But I think Obama understands the dynamics. He's as much a master of our political process as anyone alive. I think he's going to get there. Get us there.

Related Posts:
Dissing the Electorate II
Dissing the Electorate
Obama's metapolitics
Obama's metapolitics

Who let the dogs out?

If Obama were a really good Machiavellian -- and maybe he is, it's no insult -- I might think he released the Wright video into the wild himself. It had to out sometime - Obama had warned Wright a year ago that he might have to distance himself at some point. When it hit, Hillary had been taking a beating for going negative on other fronts, so her response was late and muted. It also came after McCain had taken a bit of heat for seeking/embracing the Magee endorsement--and any case, with the Dem nomination still up for grabs, it would seem to make sense for McCain to let others do the dirty work. More broadly, as Huckabee pointed out, the storm broke in March not October -- too late to derail the nomination, too early to do maximum damage in the general. (Okay, maybe not too late to derail the nomination. But if it proved potent enough for that, it would be fatal in the general. So the timing was optimal.)

If the release was planned, we might further assume that Obama had his great speech on race already in his pocket. I personally doubt this. I'm sure Obama wasn't lying about two days of sequestration getting the speech in shape. But given Obama's documented awareness that he wasn't done dealing with Wright, I'd also be surprised if the outlines and much of the guts of that speech hadn't been brewing in him for some time.