Good news for conservatives tonight

Conservatives don't realize it for the most part, but they lucked out with President Obama's re-election.

I'm not alone in this estimation. Lifelong Republican General Colin Powell (U.S.Army, Ret.) and The Economist, the world's most prestigious conservative publication, agree with me and me with them.

Winning isn't everything. If Romney had won he'd have won with a campaign that was deceitful and lie-ful even by Washington's low standards. He'd have won as the willing tool of the radicals who have gained control of the GOP through its influence in closed primaries.

For the Republican Party to become a conservative party again it has to lose, like an alcoholic has to hit rock bottom before he'll change his ways.

Until then, true American conservatives need a Democratic President to moderate the radical Republican House. President Re-Elect Obama won't be able to carry out any domestic policy that requires money or legislation or both--and that's 90% of domestic policy. So whatever conservatives think of President Obama's policies, they hardly matter. What matters is how President Obama can force the House to act more in keeping with the average American conservative as opposed to the minority of Republicans who live in Cloud-Cuckoo Land where all taxes are wrong, the President is a Kenyan Muslim Terrorist Socialist who isn't legitimately President, where all abortions should be felony even in cases of rape and incest, and which spends wildly on unnecessary war and "war on drugs" expenditures, return to the pre-Obamacare status quo on healthcare, more deregulation of Wall Street (contrary to what Adam Smith prescribed), and more tax cuts for the highest-incomed 1% of Americans.

None of those things are suited to moderate, Eisenhower-style conservatism. They add up to a harsh, doctrinaire, all-Daddy State no-Mommy State, America Tarzan the rest of the world Jane stance that would be incredibly bad for us. A CEO-in-chief might be palatable if the guy were the former CEO of a manufacturer or services provider. But a CEO who's really just one of those Wall Street financiers, and who stood to profit personally and enormously from his proposed tax policies, fails to fit the Mormon principle of avoiding both sin and the appearance of sin.

I could imagine Governor Romney being a successful President if Congress were Democratic, as was the case in Massachusetts. But that was so not the situation here and now.

Read the Economist's sour endorsement of Obama. It details the conservative argument for voting for Obama and for an Obama win being better for American conservatives than a Romne win would have been, in more detail than I gave here, with plenty of criticism of Obama included.

One last reason for Obama to win re-election is that it enhances our standing abroad with our political and economic partners, and somewhat reduces the poison of Anti-Americanism abroad (except in Pakistan and Israel, the only two countries that would have voted for Romney).

Conservatives in American need to pry themselves loose from the grip of tribalism, and from the grip of being and being seen as the Party of White People. It does the conservative cause no good to have the albatross of Southern White racism wrapped around its neck, just as it did the Democratic Party no good when it had that dead bird on it for the previous century.

Right now Republican radicals will inevitably say this proves Romney wasn't radical enough. The job of real American conservatives is now to try to take back their party.

The path to doing so is to work for stuctural reforms like those California has adopted: nonpartisan redistricting, open primaries, fall elections with the top two vote-getters in each district regardless of party, elimination of winner-take-all electoral college delegate selection--things like that.

As long as the parties are calling the shots instead of the people, this push towards extremism on both sides will go on. The parties need to be less central, less inserted between the voters and their representatives, for conservatives to produce a Republican Party that gains adherents through attractive policies rather than gerrymandering and Rovian propagandizing.

The Economist reluctantly endorses President Obama

The Economist endorsed Barack Obama for President as the lesser of two evils. You can read it here. Thousands of comments followed, many from people frothing at the mouth over The Economist's temerity (not that many of them know words like that).

Then someone mentioned that many of the comments were so unhinged that they didn't seem to come from actual Economist readers.

I said:

re: comments coming from right wing trolls who are obviously not readers of this publication
I've seen the same thing around the Internet. Scientific American, America's most prestigious scientific publication for general readers, regularly has its comment threads filled with rants by people who deny evolution, global warming, scientific method, the ethics of the scientific community, identifying the Democratic Party as a Com-yew-nist front organization--you name it.

Same thing on Amazon.com's Science forums.

Same thing on the NY Times and washington Post.

In all cases there are blizzards of entries, always impassioned, always logically impaired, often grammatically impaired as well. Often in such volume they threaten to overwhelm the comment threads, making the threads useless for the purpose intended (exchange of ideas).

Rather like what happened at the Town Hall hearings over ObamaCare that Congressmen gave the summer before it was passed. Remember them? They'd pull tricks like spacing themselves throughout the hall, then jumping up, shouting a slogan, then sitting down; right after another would jump up, shout something, sit down. They'd repeat this so no one member of their group could be ejected--and so the town hall meeting couldn't be conducted successfully.

So how'd they show up at these meetings, organized like that? How do they show up on the comment threads of magazines and sites they obviously don't read?

This is the essence of AstroTurfing. These people aren't being paid to do this, but the folks that organize them and send them out on these, well, missions--ARE paid operatives, running right wing websites, often pretending to be just patriotic, Consitution-luvvin' citizens.

Not paid by the Republican National Committee, of course. Paid by their patrons.

I can't prove this but it fits the facts. It's sure obvious that these ranters aren't Economist readers.
What's ironic is that these commentors exemplify EXACTLY why the Economist ever so reluctantly has endorsed President Obama: because America's Republican Party has become too extreme, too unhinged, too obsessed with removing America's first black president (purely a coincidence, that, right?), to be entrusted with the White House.

Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and even their ostensible deity Ronald Reagan would be dismayed by what the GOP has morphed into.

The Economist endorses Mitt Romney

The last issue of The Economist endorsed Mitt Romney for President. The Economist tends to be economically quite conservative / pro-business without all the Social Conservative baggage of the American conservative movement.

This was my comment:


The Economist's encomium for Mitt Romney seems to reveal a basic ignorance about the difference between parliamentary politics and the American system.

In parliamentary systems the prime minister is the CEO of the party that controls the legislature. So the PM speaks with the one voice of the government.

In the American system Congress can be and often is controlled by the opposing political party. And the American Congress can thwart most of what the President proposes--and vice versa. Hence all the talk about governmental gridlock.

Enter Mitt Romney. Currently Congress is controlled by his party: the House by an unstoppable majority, the Senate by a minority that can stop anything the majority does.

There is very little chance that this control of Congress by the Republicans will change this November--in fact they stand to gain a majority in the Senate.

Any consideration of the American presidency MUST take place in the context of Congress. He doesn't get to run the country by himself.

And if we get a Republican president coupled with a Republican Congress, Romney's unlikely to oppose his own Congress--no more than Bush was--especially considering the ideological fervor that currently controls the GOP. So even if Romney as Governor of a state with a Democratic legislature worked as a "let's all work together" smart moderate, that's not what we'll get from a President Romney riding the tiger of a Tea Party Congress.

Not to mention the fact that despite Romney's obvious intelligence, the things he's said during this campaign--both from a teleprompter and spontaneously--represent the most beetle-browed, knuckle-dragging, factually challenged reductionism and misrepresentation of facts. I'm not talking about political differences. I'm talking about him saying things are factually false--over and over and over.

And if we take him at his word...well, it's hard to believe a conservative European publication such as the Economist would back him, since he condemns Obama for taking ideas from--gasp--Europe. As if that's the worst thing you could say of an American president.

Is a blatant jingoist Europhobe really what you want for us? Or do you think he's just lying about that? In which case do you want a blatantly opportunistic, demagoguic liar--who accurately reflects what the Tea Party Congress believes--as our president?

Seems like the most small-c conservative thing you could wish for is a pragmatic moderate like Obama for 2012.

The Economist's advice for Arizona: surrender.

The Economist wrote a particularly fatuous editorial against Arizona's immigration law.

Here's my response:

The London & Los Angeles metro areas both have about 13 million residents. Over the past 70 years London has gotten a lot more multicultural, with the white English-descended majority progressively leavened by people of many nationalities, races & ethnicities. Surely British foodies rejoice at this.

Now imagine if, over the past 70 years, so many people had come from just one demographic slice of one foreign country that today, half of London was, say, Spanish.

But not doctors/lawyers/art history professors/engineers. Just unskilled laborers with less than a secondary education.

And say that this group speaks little or no English, & now doesn’t need to, because with half the city Spanish-speaking, with store signs in Spanish & shopkeepers who also speak Spanish, with many TV & radio stations broadcasting only in Spanish—including the most popular one in London; with ballots in Spanish & official signs in Spanish, & a city government that rushes to accommodate Spanish-speakers in every way imaginable.

Add that in this scenario the Spanish government has told these Spaniards that the UK is historically a part of Spain, so those who are here in London illegally…aren’t.

So they parade through town in vast numbers—hundreds of thousands on occasion—waving Spanish flags & demanding their rights; even telling fellow Londoners that on every October 12 (Spain’s National Day), only the Spanish flag is to be shown—displaying the Union Jack in London on that day would be “disrespecting” Londonia’s Spaniards [something like this just happened here in California].

Moreover, suppose these Spaniards reproduce at four times the rate of other Brits, & demographers project that Spaniards will become a majority of voters in southern England in a few decades.

Now suppose the Economist’s editors then chime in & demand that Brits accept all this with a smile—that the movement of all these Spaniards into London metro is as inevitable as plate tectonics; that the displacement of modern multicultural Britain by large monolithic Spain barrios is also inevitable, & virtuous, really. To object would be racist, & so one may safely ignore the complaints of anyone so churlish as to prefer their own varied culture to the monolithic one that’s displacing it.

Would the Economist make such cavalier assumptions and recommendations to we who live in the Southwest if this scenario were playing out in England?

In 1940, 0.5% of Americans could claim Latino heritage. Now it’s 14% & growing rapidly. But this underestimates the situation greatly, because that migration is concentrated across the American Southwest. Here in California, it’s growing so fast that by 2050 a majority of voters will people who describe themselves as Mexicans.

I challenge any Brit who claims to love his country to say he’d be happy with England becoming transformed like this—particularly when that domination is in the hands of another country’s least educated, least skilled, & least cultured cohort.

Nor do they love the country they’ve invaded. They say we’re the illegals here in the Southwest, so if we don’t like illegals we should go.

This Economist editorial treats Americans’ complaints about all this with equal contempt, as if our distress & our arguments aren’t even worth discussing—only what is to be done with such knuckle-dragging yobs as us.

Does anyone at the Economist know what’s been going on in Mexico over the last century? Its population has exploded--from 13.1 million in 1900 to 20 million in 1940 to 111 million today, plus perhaps 12 million more illegals here.

This is America’s fault how? They did this themselves, and no we don’t need their unskilled labor. Today one out of five American unskilled laborers (many of them Black or Latino) is unemployed. What kind of job magnet is that? We need skilled immigrants.

And as for the 12 million illegals—the Economist believes we’re morally & practically obligated to give them legal residence. As if “we” lured there here. We assuredly did not. Union-busting corporatists did, with government collusion, against the will of the American people.

Ronald Reagan tried amnesty in 1986. It triggered a tidal wave of new illegal immigration.

What we do need is a universal biometric ID database, enabling us to actually know who’s here, & to make it impossible for trespassers to make a living here or access social services here. Then many will self-deport.

And Arizona's law--which simply applies federal immigration law at the state level--is a start.

More on the Economist's endorsement of the healthcare bill

The Economist reluctantly endorsed voting for the healthcare reform bill. This garnered dozens of comments from Tea Party types. I said this in response to both (which you also see at the Economist's website):

For readers of the Economist who aren't fluent in American, maybe I can help with some of the terminology used in many of these comments:

Socialism: any regulation of any business in any way.

You see, as a child Ayn Rand was traumatized by the Soviets confiscating her parents' estate. This made her unable to distinguish between regulation and confiscation, and she passed this philosophical virus on to generations of American right wingers.

Liberal/Conservative: in America we use these terms somewhat differently. Basically, conservatives long to restore an America that never was, while liberals long to transform it into a nation that never will be. So they're dueling dreamers.

Conservatives are happy to destroy the environment as long as they can keep driving their three ton SUVs. Liberals are happy to destroy American unskilled laborers' livelihoods in order to make America the safety valve for Mexico's overpopulation crisis (from 20 million people in 1940 to over 100 million in 2000). So neither is either.

And since Conservatism (capital C) has become a religion, they'll regard the Economist's apply of reason to the messy healthcare bill as heresy. Because in a religion, study is not analytical but rather worshipful. And, as you've experienced with Europe's radicalized Muslims, you are not allowed to disagree, with or without reasons--only to obey.

And when you read nutcases here declaring that the Democratic legislators in Congress should be tried for treason by a military tribunal--you'll see that they've left the basic tenets of constitutional democracy far, far behind.

But since our schools teach children facts but not what to do with them, they aren't aware that they've abandoned our nation's basic values--because they didn't understand those values in the first place.

For my part, as a centrist American who's reasonably educated, I think the Economist has assessed our healthcare bill spot on.

Now I'm waiting to see whether our Supreme Court--whose hard-right near-majority lied about their objectivity during their Senate approval hearings--will summarily overturn the universal health insurance mandate in the bill, thus kneecapping it.