Republi-CONs In Their Delusion-land

UPDATE III: There is a "surprising amount of criticism being directed at Bush by the GOP candidates 'reflects how much more conservative the Republican Party has become.'

Indeed, nowhere is this truer than in the case of the auto-bailout. The perceived imperatives of the GOP primary require that this obvious success story — this clear-cut example of government intervention staving off a massive economic disaster and saving thousands of American jobs — must be explained away by any means necessary.

The last Republican president — one who was in office less than four years ago — says that if government had failed to bail out the auto-makers, it would have led to '21 percent unemployment' and a 'depression.' But today’s GOP candidates just don’t want to hear it."

Read the Washington Post, George Bush, crony capitalist.


UPDATE II: The title says it all. Read the Washington Post, Gingrich pledges moon colony during presidency, which notes he "proclaimed that the 'weirdest thing' he ever did in Congress was to introduce a 'Northwest Ordinance for space' that would allow a moon colony to become a state once 13,000 lived there."


UPDATE: "It’s not at all clear why we should care if our presidents are idea-obsessed. Just as having a lot of pens doesn’t make you a great writer, having a lot of ideas doesn’t make you a great thinker. And getting distracted by every new idea you hear can distract from the focus and discipline the presidency requires. The idea that cancer is triggered, at least in part, by common viruses is very interesting, but I wouldn’t want the leader of the free world to spend too much time worrying about it. Same with the idea that William Shakespeare was a pen name for Sir Francis Bacon. It is the quality, not quantity, of Gingrich’s ideas that should concern us. And the quality of Gingrich’s ideas is often concerning."

Read the Washington Post, Newt Gingrich’s big, bad ideas, which notes that his ideas "led to one of the more amusing Web sites of the campaign — “Supervillain or Newt?” — which asks you to guess whether a given idea came from Gingrich or a fictional supervillain."

[See Supervillain or Newt, "where you have to decide whether an idea comes from an indestructible megalomaniac hell-bent on ruling the world, or from a fictional supervillain."]

If you think about it, The Great Lecherer, aka Newtenstein, is really just a symptom of the delusion gripping the Republi-CON party.

From the 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics:

"Reading the transcript of Tuesday’s Republican debate on the economy is, for anyone who has actually been following economic events these past few years, like falling down a rabbit hole. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantasy world where nothing looks or behaves the way it does in real life.

And since economic policy has to deal with the world we live in, not the fantasy world of the G.O.P.’s imagination, the prospect that one of these people may well be our next president is, frankly, terrifying.

In the real world, recent events were a devastating refutation of the free-market orthodoxy that has ruled American politics these past three decades. Above all, the long crusade against financial regulation, the successful effort to unravel the prudential rules established after the Great Depression on the grounds that they were unnecessary, ended up demonstrating — at immense cost to the nation — that those rules were necessary, after all.

But down the rabbit hole, none of that happened. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because of runaway private lenders like Countrywide Financial. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because Wall Street pretended that slicing, dicing and rearranging bad loans could somehow create AAA assets — and private rating agencies played along. We didn’t find ourselves in a crisis because “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers exploited gaps in financial regulation to create bank-type threats to the financial system without being subject to bank-type limits on risk-taking.

No, in the universe of the Republican Party we found ourselves in a crisis because Representative Barney Frank forced helpless bankers to lend money to the undeserving poor."

Read The New York Times, Rabbit-Hole Economics. He noted that:

"But that’s history. What do the Republicans want to do now? In particular, what do they want to do about unemployment?

Well, they want to fire Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve — not for doing too little, which is a case one can make, but for doing too much. So they’re obviously not proposing any job-creation action via monetary policy.

Incidentally, during Tuesday’s debate, Mitt Romney named Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw as one of his advisers. How many Republicans know that Mr. Mankiw at least used to advocate — correctly, in my view — deliberate inflation by the Fed to solve our economic woes?

So, no monetary relief. What else? Well, the Cheshire Cat-like Rick Perry — he seems to be fading out, bit by bit, until only the hair remains — claimed, implausibly, that he could create 1.2 million jobs in the energy sector. Mr. Romney, meanwhile, called for permanent tax cuts — basically, let’s replay the Bush years! And Herman Cain? Oh, never mind.

By the way, has anyone else noticed the disappearance of budget deficits as a major concern for Republicans once they start talking about tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy?

It’s all pretty funny. But it’s also, as I said, terrifying.

The Great Recession should have been a huge wake-up call. Nothing like this was supposed to be possible in the modern world. Everyone, and I mean everyone, should be engaged in serious soul-searching, asking how much of what he or she thought was true actually isn’t.

But the G.O.P. has responded to the crisis not by rethinking its dogma but by adopting an even cruder version of that dogma, becoming a caricature of itself. During the debate, the hosts played a clip of Ronald Reagan calling for increased revenue; today, no politician hoping to get anywhere in Reagan’s party would dare say such a thing.

It’s a terrible thing when an individual loses his or her grip on reality. But it’s much worse when the same thing happens to a whole political party, one that already has the power to block anything the president proposes — and which may soon control the whole government."