Romney on Rush: it's the thought that counts?

Asked to comment on Rush Limbaugh's slut-slur of law student Sandra Fluke after she testified about her classmates' need for contraceptive coverage, Mitt Romney took a prudish swat:

“I'll just say this which is it’s not the language I would have used," Romney said. "I’m focusing on the issues I think are significant in the country today and that’s why I’m here talking about jobs and Ohio.”

My immediate reaction on reading this was to wonder: is there some underlying idea in Limbaugh's bilge that Romney approves of? That women who want their health care coverage to pay for birth control are prostitutes, perhaps?

Kevin Drum has cleared up the point for me:

Cheney's still spinning..

No wonder Dick Cheney considers Rush Limbaugh a friend. Cheney twists political reality as relentlessly as he once twisted intelligence, relentlessly as Limbaugh.  If he gets a new heart, he should get his own show. 

Via Slate, here's his latest spin on Obama's counterterror policy, from an interview to be aired tomorrow on NBC:

He obviously has been through the fires of becoming President and having to make decisions and live with the consequences. And it's different than being a candidate. When he was candidate he was all for closing Gitmo. He was very critical of what we'd done on the counterterrorism area to protect America from further attack and so forth.

I think he's learned that he's not going to be able to close Guantanamo. That it's-- if you didn't have it you'd have to create one like that. You've got to have some place to put terrorists who are combatants who are bound and determined to try to kill Americans.

I think he's-- in terms of a lot of the terrorism policies-- the early talk, for example, about prosecuting people in the CIA who've been carrying out our policies-- all of that's fallen by the wayside. I think he's learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate. So I think he's learned from experience. And part of that experience was the Democrats having a terrible showing last election.

And here he is on counterterrorism and drones:

As I say, I think he's found it necessary to be more sympathetic to the kinds of things we did. They've gotten active, for example, with the drone program, using Predator and the Reaper to launch strikes against identified terrorist targets in the various places in the world.

Okay, one point at a time:

Owens' win in NY 23: bad for Democrats, good for the country?

After basking a bit in the tea partiers' election-night shock when their insurgent darling Doug Hoffman went down in NY District 23, Frank Rich cautions:

The Democrats’ celebration was also premature: Hoffman’s defeat is potentially more harmful to them than to the Republicans....it increases the odds that the Republicans will not do Democrats the great favor of committing suicide between now and the next Election Day.

Quite so. But what may be bad for Democrats in the short term is good for the country.

The country needs the Republican party to step back from the brink. Other mature democracies have fringe parties that play primarily to voters' fears and fantasies, but those parties exist within multiparty systems. In times of stress their vote may approach or crack 20% of the total, and everyone draws a breath and notes the electorate's anger.

We have only two national parties. If one of them shrinks to attract the affiliation of less than 30% of the electorate and retreats entirely into fringe party thinking and tactics, that's dangerous. The tea partiers' lies and paranoid fantasies; their demonization of a reform effort as incremental, cautious, and indeed historically Republican in its genesis as the pending health care bills; their glorification of the willful ignorance of Palin and Bachmann and their rapt attention to transparent demagogues like Beck and Limbaugh, is all fringe party behavior. Those who equate health insurance mandates or voluntary end of life counseling with fascism are themselves potential fascists -- demonizers of opposition, rabid advocates of torture, paranoid fantasists.

If that fringe entirely captures one of our two parties, the next big shock -- a world market collapse like that predicted by Roubini, a major terrorist attack -- could push such people into power. If, meanwhile, new Republican governors in purple states go to work with even a modicum of pragmatism -as Christie at least will have to do -- that could have a powerful demonstration effect for Republican decision-makers.

David Brooks lambastes Democrats for agreeing with him

Never one for logical rigor, David Brooks ignores himself to a breathtaking degree in today's column.

He begins with an intriguing hypothesis: our latter day Father Coughlins -- Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity & co. -- command plenty of attention but virtually no votes. His evidence is probably selective, but it's an intriguing hypothesis. They are puffed up by enablers. True enough. But...

They are enabled by cynical Democrats, who love to claim that Rush Limbaugh controls the G.O.P.

Just another politically expedient lie, right? Oh, wait --

And the saddest thing is that even Republican politicians come to believe it [that the shock jocks have real power]. They mistake media for reality. They pre-emptively surrender to armies that don’t exist.

They pay more attention to Rush’s imaginary millions than to the real voters down the street. The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people. The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity. The party is losing because it has adopted a radio entertainer’s niche-building strategy, while abandoning the politician’s coalition-building strategy.

The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.

To anyone who believes that democracy can't function without viable choices, it was a sad and shocking spectacle to witness a parade of Republican leaders first calling out and then kow-towing to Rush Limbaugh earlier this year. Democrats would rather have an opposition they can work with; as Paul Starr demonstrated recently, their health care bills are comprised almost entirely of Republican ideas past, but there's no one on the other side negotiating in good faith.

But in David Brooks' still partisan mind, Democrats who agree with him that the Republican party is entirely in the grip of media demagogues are "cynical." And what is Brooks? Pure-minded?

Paul Krugman is overinvested

Paul Krugman genuinely thinks he knows how to clean up the bank mess. Maybe he does. He knows that Geithner is wrong to try to find ways to improve the banks' balance sheets without taking them over. Maybe he's right. But frustration is hardening his hypotheses into certainty:

Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.

Krugman is starting to sound a little like Rush Limbaugh. It's not fair to put in his mouth, "I hope he fails." But if Geithner's plan doesn't fail, then what happens to Krugman's credibility? Would he enjoy a stint on The Daily Show?

Update 3/24: Time's Justin Fox, responding to criticism of a post venturing that Geithner's plan could "provide a path to intelligent nationalization (cf. Andrew Leonard, below, and xpostfactoid, 2/21) voices a similar sentiment about Krugman:

it's entirely possible that Hempton and I are guilty of wishful thinking about Treasury's intentions. But it's also possible that Krugman is guilty of whatever the opposite of wishful thinking is.

Even if Krugman is right about the futility of Geithner's attempts to bolster banks, he may well have the political calculus wrong. Compare Andrew Leonard in Salon:

But all the sturm-und-drang expressed hither and yon about how the Obama administration is damning us all to a decade or more of economic doldrums by not pursuing immediate bank nationalization today, is just a bit overwrought. The U.S. economy is not going to stop shedding a half million jobs a month if we nationalize Citigroup today, instead of two months from now. We are deep in a recession and it will be quite awhile before we crawl out of it. Two months of caution do not mandate a "lost decade." Indeed, we will know in a matter of months whether the Obama administration's current efforts are gaining any traction, and if they aren't, then there will be no other alternatives. Perhaps the smartest thing that Geithner's critics could do is to just step aside and let him fail.

Never mind Geithner's critics. If it's true that megabanks must be nationalized, it may be smart politics for Obama to exhaust all other options before presenting that one to the country.

Two cheers for Nineveh

At this moment, when the stock market has fallen faster than in the early thirties and we've learned in new detail that for eight years we lived under a President who authorized himself to abrogate the First and Fourth Amendments and unilaterally violate any law or treaty he chose, what's to feel good about?

This: our political system is working again. Has worked. Over two elections, we threw the bums out. The political safety nets held -- for the present. Collectively we lost a quarter of our worldly wealth. But we have our (political) health.

Thinking about the resilient if slow-moving wisdom of the electorate, I find Jonathan Chait's unsentimental view of how democracy works oddly reassuring:

Rush Limbaugh is drawing some ridicule for saying, "One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat [the Democrats] is with better policy ideas." But I think he's basically right. Good ideas are meritorious. But being meritorious isn't what wins elections. Most voters have only the faintest idea what policy ideas candidates advocate when running or implement when in office. External conditions (such as the economy, but war and scandal matter also) have much more influence over which party wins...

I think it's pretty clear that the Democratic comeback since then has had next-to-nothing to with developing "new ideas" and almost everything to do with Republican failure, the state of the economy, and a really effective presidential nominee. yes, Democratic ideas proved more popular, but they really were the same basic ideas the party had advocated for years.

Democracies are not immune from extended periods of misgovernment. They are resilient, and adaptive, because unless misgovernment erodes (or crushes in one fell swoop) the basic machinery of choice, they retain the ability to self-correct. And that ability swings not on the ideologies that juice the agents of power but on the cold, hard facts to which those ideologies are answerable.

Sometimes events do mow down the wrong guy, or even the right guy for the wrong reasons -- a recession falls unluckily, a helicopter crashes in the desert. And I think Chait's wrong to the extent that bad ideas, gussied up with slick Rovian sophistry and smears, can sway the swing voters at times. You can fool all of the people some of the time, and a bare majority for a bit longer. Electorates make mistakes. But eventually, the facts break through.

If America is a shining city on a hill, it's not Jerusalem (thank God!). It's Ninevah. We know how to repent, and change course.