Right

I've been quiet for a few weeks. Sometimes it takes me a while to get a thought all the way together, or at least together enough to write something. The recent talk about civility in politics finally pulled together a thought I've had pieces of for a while now. It starts and ends with Congressman Steve Cohen.

In case you missed it, Congressman Cohen compared the tactics of the Republican party with regard to the health care debate to the tactics of nazi propaganda ace Joseph Goebbels (apparently pronounced Gerbels, because the nazis also hated spelling, and R's I guess). Lovely work by the Congressman, way to be a grown up. We'll get back to him later.

While listening to the post-Tuscon shooting media bonanza,(liberals blaming conservatives, conservatives scrambling to defend themselves, everyone talking about being nicer to each other) I was reminded of something that's been concerning me for a while now. At this point in history, the Republican party, and really, most of the conservative side of our political debate, is intellectually bankrupt.

In the wake of the recent shooting, I heard no less than three conservatives on Fox tell me "guns don't kill people, people kill people". OK, but can we at least agree that people with guns are better at it? It's unbelievable to me that one of our political parties is still arguing against gun control. Guns have become a religion on the political right in this country. No compromise, no common sense, no rationality.

Where are the conservative solutions to gun violence? Thousands of people are killed by firearms every year in this country, you can't just point to the Constitution and say "it won't let us do anything, sorry". How about a 28th amendment repealing the 2nd amendment? Nice and constitutional. Or, how about we just stop ignoring the first part of the 2nd amendment? Or, how about a tax cut for not owning a gun? Republicans love tax cuts (I was joking about that when I wrote it, but then I thought about it for a few minutes and it might be our best shot).

I'm not saying just take everyone's guns away right now and that's the answer. I don't know what the long term answer is. I'm saying, if you're not a cop, you don't need a gun, but we've got two political parties, and the one on the right basically thinks gun ownership is an American birthright. That's my point. But hey, maybe if you just keep talking about the second amendment, people will just stop getting shot one day.

(Sidenote: Don't get me started on needing guns for hunting. Tricking a wild animal out into the open so you can shoot it in the face for shits and giggles isn't any less barbaric just because it's a family tradition and your great-grandpappy used to do it.)

A few years ago now, I watched one of the earliest debates for the Republican nomination in 2008, back when there were something like 39 people still in the race. The moderator asked them who believed in evolution. I think three of them raised their hands. People on the right do the same thing with climate change science, responding to facts and verifiable data by simply claiming not to believe in it. Science isn't Tinkerbell, we don't all have to clap to make it real. Reality doesn't require you to believe in it, it's just there.

I'd like to have two parties working together to see if they can come up with smart solutions on energy and climate change. Instead, we've got one party coming up with stupid ideas like cap and trade and the other party pretending the problems aren't real. I'm not sure that's going to get us anywhere, but if you just keep saying it's not real, maybe it'll go away.

The story on economics is similar. Every time we start arguing about the economy, Democrats start quoting economists while Republicans go back to Reagan's made-up bullshit economic theory, which has somehow become the economic theory of the entire party. Reaganomics only works to destroy the middle class, and Reagan already took care of that, so it's pretty much useless now. We keep cutting taxes, the economy keeps getting crappier, but maybe if you just keep saying tax cuts create jobs it'll start to happen.

Then there's health care, and we start circling back to Congressman Cohen and the nexus of right-wing stupidity and political civility. I think we all agree that nobody is Hitler except Hitler, and nobody is a nazi except nazis. The media got so worked up about how mean Steve Cohen was being that they mostly forgot to point out that, nazi references aside, the Congressman's point was 100% valid.

The whole Republican strategy on health care has been to come up with lies and keep saying them on TV until they become true. "Death panels", the "government take over of health care", the whole thing about how people in Canada can't ever see a doctor (which is double ridiculous because even if it were true, the bill the Democrats passed doesn't resemble the Canadian health care system at all). Does any of this unbelievable bullshit sound familiar? Has the Republican party even floated a credible counter-proposal? You want a free market solution to health care? So do I. You got one? Me neither.

Why does this bother me so much? Why I am so tough on Republicans? It bothers so much because the two party system only works if both parties are making good faith efforts to do what's best for the country. Right now, I don't know if either party is. For every Republican who's basically just a lackey for an oil company or a bank, there's a Democrat who just does the bidding of a union (or an oil company, or a bank. Seriously, the two parties are barely bought and paid for by different interests at this point).

So, why so tough on Republicans? Because I think they can be better. I think I'd vote for the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt if it was still the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. I want to vote for candidates who believe in limited government, but who also know that government has a role beyond blowing stuff up in other countries. I want to vote for candidates who believe in personal liberty and responsibility, but who also understand that personal liberty isn't absolute when 300 million people are all trying to have a society (Sidenote number 2: I'd also like to vote for an atheist for President, but I doubt I'll live that long). I'm tough on Republicans because I want to be a Republican, but I can't, because Republican leaders are morons who spend their days trying to come up with the best right-wing sound bite.

Why am I so frustrated? I'm frustrated because factual accuracy has become optional in political arguments. I'm frustrated because politicians are worrying about civility, and that's fine, but nobody cares who's correct. I want a government in which being correct wins you the argument, and I want a Republican party in which being correct is more important than being right.

Reconciliation

Some things are hard to reconcile...

I'm big on individual liberties. As a necessary caveat to that, I believe in limited government. When government expands with unnecessary laws and by doing unnecessary things, it leaves a little less liberty for the rest of us. My favorite example is the trans fat war waged by my former home city, and a number of other cities as well. I don't know exactly what trans fats are, but I know they're delicious. I don't have a problem with the government forcing foods to be honest about how bad they are for us, but once they've done that, if people still want to eat crap, get fat and die young, that's their right (it's honestly hard for me to believe anyone would disagree with me on this, but I know people do).

The difficult thing for me is, I've got a bit of dictator in me too. Specifically, if I were the President, I would feel strongly that my administration and I should be allowed to do whatever we want and everyone should shut up and let us. I wouldn't actually act that way if I was the President (well probably not, maybe not) but that's what I'd be thinking. Usually, these two somewhat conflicting impulses are easy to reconcile, because I'm not going to be the President, so limited government it is. But it gets harder when we have a President like Barack Obama, who I like and who I think is a smart guy and who I think probably knows what he's doing. Luckily, I don't actually agree with the President and his party on a lot of things, so even though I like him, I'm still pretty firmly in favor of limiting his power.

I'm thinking about reconciliation now because there's suddenly a lot of talk about Senate Democrats using the reconciliation process to pass health care reform. The President is meeting with Republicans again Thursday, this time Senate Republicans and this time specifically to talk about health care. I expect it to be mildly entertaining, but not as great as the smackdown the President laid on House Republicans last month. I also expect it to get us nowhere in terms of getting closer to passing a bill.

Sidenote: I wish the President would do this kind of thing on the really stupid Republican talking points, like how lots of Republicans say they don't believe in evolution (I'm sure lots of Democrats say this too, but I'm picking on Republicans for now). Recently, Olbermann threw out a statistic that said 38% of people in Texas think that humans were created in our present form about 10,000 years ago. 51% of people in Texas (and yes, I'm accepting Texas as a reasonable proxy for "Republicans") don't believe in evolution (what do the 13% of people who don't believe in evolution but also don't think people were created 10,000 years ago believe?). 30% of people in Texas believe humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time. That last one always gets me. 3 out of 10 people think the Flintstones was a documentary (I may have stolen that joke from Bill Maher, I don't care, it's funny) Do you think if I stop believing in Texas I can just make it go away?

Anyway, health care is something I'm a little conflicted about too. I'm so tired of hearing about it, but it's just as important as it was six months ago and we're not really any closer to a solution than we were six months ago, or six decades ago for that matter.

On one hand, I know we need a change. It's ridiculous that so many people in this country don't have health insurance. And I'm not so quick to call health care reform an unnecessary expansion of government because, as I've argued before, the private sector sucks at providing health insurance. I think that's an argument the Democrats are missing out on. We don't really need health care reform. Health care in this country is awesome. Hospitals are great, we have the best doctors, we have great technology. We need health insurance reform. It's not the care that needs fixing, it's the access. I think people (some people anyway) who already have good access would be more reasonable about this issue if they understood that this isn't really about them. No wait, that's a terrible strategy, it's damn near impossible to get most people to care about anything that isn't about them. I retract that suggestion.

On the other hand, everything I know about the current Senate health care bill tells me we're getting a crappy bill at the end of this process. I don't want to get into a whole thing here about everything that might appear in a hypothetical health care bill, so just one example. I hate the individual mandate, I really do. The idea that the government can force people to by a product is insane. And don't come back at me with auto insurance, the government can only force you to by auto insurance if you make the free choice to own a car. I know it's hard to make insurance affordable if healthy people don't have to buy it, and I don't necessarily have an answer for that, but I still don't like it. If I were a Senator, I'd probably vote against the next health care bill that comes up if it's as compromised as I think it will be. Why? Because individual mandate+no public option=big fat multi-billion dollar gift to insurance companies and I don't care what else is in the bill, I wouldn't put my name on that.

Having said that, as someone who probably won't like the final bill, do I think Senate Democrats should use reconciliation to pass a bill? Of course they should. Why? Because I want the people in charge to either believe in what they're doing or go away. This is where the dictator in me comes out again. Democrats, if you think you've got an idea that's best for the country, than just do it and live with the consequences. All this nonsense of looking for compromise and political cover, that just tells me Democrats really have no confidence in their own ideas and they'd very much like to not be held accountable if something doesn't work out. If that's how you approach decisions, get a job which doesn't require you to make any.

People ask me why I don't change my party affiliation considering how often I disagree with and mock Republicans. This is why. Everything Democrats do strikes me as cowardly. When Republicans get power, they tend to do things (and sure, starting with Reagan, a lot of those things have been pretty stupid, but they still did them, and most of those guys would do those same things again if we let them). When Democrats get power, they spend a year searching for political cover and nothing gets done. You could have the best idea in the world, it doesn't help anyone if you're not willing to act. Democrats don't act, they cower and beg us not to vote against them.

Is Barack Obama a political coward? We're about to find out. I hope not. He's a smart guy, but that doesn't help us if he spends the next three years not doing anything because he's terrified of not getting re-elected. One of the best things about George W. Bush was his constant sense of certainty. He wasn't always right (OK, he was hardly ever right, that's not my point right now), but HE was always sure HE was right. If we could only get that sense of certainty into a guy like Barack Obama, who might actually be right sometimes, we might just get somewhere.

And yes, I understand that Barack Obama and the Democrats just doing whatever the hell they wanted to do would also stick me with a government doing a lot of things I wouldn't really like. Yes, that happens sometimes. I don't know where people got the idea that we're entitled to a government that only does things we like. The government doesn't work for us, they work on our behalf, there's a big difference. They don't always have to do what we say and we don't always have to like what they're doing.

But here's the problem, Barack Obama's willingness to listen to other ideas and compromise is, at least tangentially, related to his high level of intelligence and, simultaneously, one of the main reasons people are so frustrated with him. In contrast, George W. Bush's ability to block out dissenting opinions and inconvenient facts and do whatever he wanted allowed him to get a lot done, but was also a key part of his, um...unremarkability(I just made up a word, I do that quite often, I could be the next Republican President). I feel like I want a President who can do both. Because then, even if I wouldn't like what was happening, at least something would be happening, and that's often better than nothing. See? Some things really are hard to reconcile.