Vertigo

EJ Dionne never really understood the American people enough to know how to find the political center. The result, as you can see below, is political vertigo.

The right’s stealthy coup

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: April 1

Right before our eyes, American conservatism is becoming something very different from what it once was.

Assertive?

Yet this transformation is happening by stealth because moderates are too afraid to acknowledge what all their senses tell them.

Stealth, like a ninja elephant flying a Stealth bomber through a goddamn electrical storm. But you foxed that shit out because your radar is un-fucking-stealthable.

Last week’s Supreme Court oral arguments on health care were the most dramatic example of how radical tea partyism

E.J. Dionne: crotch-kicking the English language since 1976. (Or something; I can’t be bothered to actually look up his embarrassing first foray into professional journalism.)

has displaced mainstream conservative thinking.

Conservative Justices in the Supreme Court and the years of their appointments:

Antonin Scalia: 1986

Anthony Kennedy: 1988

Clarence Thomas: 1991

John Roberts: 2005

Samuel Alito: 2006

Tea Party founding: 2009.

Even if Dionne hadn’t taken the 7.2 seconds to Google this factoid, anyone paying even passing attention to news in 2009 knows that the Tea Party existed as a reaction to Obama’s executive power-grab, which couldn’t have happened before 2009. Moreover, a Republican court appointee, by necessity of the nominating process, could not have happened after 2008. Either Dionne is a fool (likely), or he is arguing that the Supreme Court is both populist and reactionary (which is undeniably foolish, as Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life for precisely the purpose of combating populist and reactionary trends).

It’s not just that the law’s individual mandate was, until very recently, a conservative idea.

Yes, it was proposed by the Heritage Foundation and a handful prominent Republicans in the ‘90s. No, it was never a conservative idea.

Even conservative legal analysts were insisting it was impossible to imagine the court declaring the health-care mandate unconstitutional, given its past decisions.

This wasn’t fucking Pearl Harbor or 9/11. These hypothetical doofuses are still probably buzzing about the shocking twist ending to the latest Katherine Heigl flick. Surprise, assholes, the guy and the girl end up together.

So imagine the shock

She took him back? After he was lying to her the entire time about the bet he had with Paul Walker? Oh Rachel Leigh Cook, no matter how many times I re-watch She’s All That, your characters never cease to challenge my preconceptions and supplant my expectations! You are a cinematic treasure! (Is that fruit too low? It’s been like fifteen years.)

when conservative justices repeatedly spouted views closely resembling the tweets

Supreme Court oral arguments are, by law and custom, restricted to 140 characters.

and talking points issued by organizations of the sort funded by the Koch brothers.

<nefarious> Dun Dun Duuuuunnnnnnn </nefarious>

The Koch brothers own the Supreme Court! I’m not sure if this is supposed to be damning for the Supreme Court or redemptive for conservative opinioneers. Opiners? Opinion-givers? Fuck it, I like opinioneers.

Don’t take it from me.

I have more trust in people that have mugged me.

Charles Fried, solicitor general for Ronald Reagan, told The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein that it was absurd for conservatives to pretend that the mandate created a market in health care.

Well no shit, Corporal Paraphrase. No one argues that the individual mandate spontaneously created the health care market. It does, however, create commerce deemed unnecessary by the marketplace. That’s why it’s a mandate. As Scalia pointed out during oral arguments, however, the market being regulated was not health care; it was health care insurance. Yes, the distinction is germane to the argument. While everyone might need health care, not everyone needs health care insurance. Obviously there are issues looking at the health care insurance market as a whole as well, as everything from prenatal care to obesity care will only apply to select, and easily-identifiable groups in society. Lumping in coverage for gout medication with birth control, insulin shots, and gender reassignment surgery makes about as much sense as forcing retailers to sell a baby-grand piano with every case of beer.

“The whole thing is just a canard that’s been invented by the tea party . . .,” Fried said, “and I was astonished to hear it coming out of the mouths of the people on that bench.”

This man has also claimed, without irony, sarcasm, or pants-shitting horror, that the federal government is absolutely within its rights to compel, by force, the purchase of any good or service. Broccoli. Straight leg jeans. Excess inventory of the discontinued Microsoft Zune. Anything! Again, legal opinions aren’t about populism, but citizens are comfortable with and few judges profess Fried’s judicial philosophy.

Staunchly conservative circuit judges Jeffrey Sutton

Who called the plaintiff’s claims against the individual mandate “a theory of constitutional validity the Court has never considered before.” Far from a ringing endorsement, this was merely an acknowledgment that nothing short of a Supreme Court opinion on the matter would settle the issue.

and Laurence Silberman

Silberman was even more overt about the need for review from the Supreme Court.

must have been equally astonished, since both argued that overturning the law would amount to judicial overreach.

Clearly, anyone who has done even a modicum of research (which I barely did, because I pride myself on doing the bare minimum) would immediately find that neither Sutton nor Silberman would bat an eye at the prospect of the individual mandate being overturned.

Yet moderate opinion bends over backward to act as if this is an intellectually close question.

The crux of the opinions for both appellate court rulings could easily be boiled down to: “I don’t know. There is contradictory case history and this is an intellectually close question. You should probably ask those guys.”

Similarly, House passage of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget,

Jesus Christ, man, slow your roll. This is not how your eighth grade English teacher taught you to write transitions.

with its steep cuts in the tax rates on the wealthy and sweeping reductions in programs for the poor,

This is a grossly inadequte simplification, but both Mrs. Dionne and I agree that grossly inadequate is pretty much the only fitting description for you.

is an enormous step rightward from the budget policies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Faced with growing deficits, Reagan and Bush both supported substantial tax increases.

I didn’t even live through most of the 80’s and I have a clearer understanding of what happened than Dionne. Both Bush and Reagan were pushed into tax cuts that they didn’t want in return for budget cuts that never actually happened. It weakened Reagan and cost Bush the presidency.

It’s one thing to believe that compromise carries a positive net effect. It’s quite another to revise history to paint a concession as Reagan’s or Bush’s policy position.

A small hint of how this push to the right moves moderates away from moderation came in an effort last week to use an amendment on the House floor to force a vote on the deficit-reduction proposals offered by the commission headed by former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton.

Oh, you mean the debt commission that Obama set up, propped up, milked, and then ignored when their findings weren’t politically convenient? That commission?

You learned only in paragraphs buried deep in the news stories

The Washington Post Opinions Page is now criticizing “the news stories.” Maybe conservatives really are having success pushing opinions to the right.

that the House was not even asked to consider the actual commission plan.

WaPo: “House could vote this week on budget plan modeled on Simpson-Bowles ideas.” [emphasis added] It’s right in the headline, you fucking moron.

To cobble together bipartisan support,

Ah, this makes more sense. He’s not angry because moderate Republicans are siding with Ryan. He’s angry because Democrats are. HERETICS!

sponsors of the ersatz Simpson-Bowles amendment kept all of the commission’s spending cuts but slashed the amount it prescribed for tax increases in half.

So, Republicans are asking Democrats to compromise. They do, after all, control the House and we are so often told that compromise is the ultimate legislative virtue.

See how relentless pressure from the right turns self-styled moderates into conservatives?

Not even a little bit. This was Obama’s commission!

If there’s a cave-in, it’s always to starboard.

[citation oh-so-desperately needed]

Note how many deficit hawks regularly trash President Obama for not endorsing Simpson-Bowles

Actually, it’s because his budgets are fucking clown shoes. His last foray into dark humor was unanimously defeated by a congress incredulously asking each other “Is he fucking serious?” To which others responded confidently “No. He can’t be. No one’s this tone-deaf.”

while they continue to praise Ryan — even though Ryan voted to kill the initiative when he was a member of the commission.

I envision E.J. writing this sentence, a wry smile creeping across his face. He’s so proud of his scathing indictment of Paul Ryan that he is completely oblivious that these facts directly contradict his central thesis that conservatives are intractable and unyielding.

Here again is the double standard that benefits conservatives, proving that, contrary to establishment opinion,

You write for the Washington Post Opinions Page. You are establishment opinion.

Obama was absolutely right not to embrace the Simpson-Bowles framework.

Right. It’s not like the deficit has skyrocketed since he took office.

If he had, a moderately conservative proposal

[citation needed]

would suddenly have defined the “left wing” of the debate, just because Obama endorsed it.

That’s how compromise works, Jack. You’ll notice the presumptive position of Obama, “Simpson Bowles but with more tax increases” is roughly the compliment to “Simpson Bowles but with less tax increases.” You’re the buffoon who suggested that compromise the end-all be-all for legislation during the debt ceiling debate. Now that you’re being called on to actually compromise, you whelp like a little girl with a skinned knee.

This is nuts.

Parity can be hilarious.

Yet mainstream journalism and mainstream moderates play right along.

An assault on mainstream journalistic moderation from the journalistic mainstream might just make my head explode. Have some damn self-respect, Washington Post.

A brief look at history suggests how far to the right both the Republican Party and contemporary conservatism have moved.

The last seven Republican Presidential nominees have been: Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, and George H.W. Bush, and George H.W. Bush. That’s twenty eight years of moderation.

Indeed, the only of these nominees that you could even consider arguing was truly conservative was George W. Bush, who gained that reputation almost entirely as a result of his hawkish foreign policy. He famously branded himself as a “compassionate conservative,” as though conservatism had to be qualified. His signature domestic achievement was the woeful No Child Left Behind Act. Sure, he passed a couple of tax cuts. (What president in a deep recession wouldn’t? Oh… Right.)

Today’s conservatives almost never invoke one of our most successful Republican presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower,

Define success.

who gave us, among other things, federally guaranteed student loans and championed the interstate highway system.

Oh. Passing liberal ideas under the Republican banner is not success.

Even more revealing is what Robert A. Taft, the leader of the conservative forces who opposed Eisenhower’s nomination in 1952, had to say about government’s role in American life. “If the free enterprise system

Note: “the free enterprise system” does not equate to “the federal government”

 does not do its best

Note: “do its best” does not equate to “guarantee”

to prevent hardship and poverty,” the Ohio Republican senator said in a 1945 speech, “it will find itself superseded by a less progressive system which does.”

By which, of course, he means Communism, which would hardly be surprising during the run-up to the second Red Scare. I don’t think Dionne really read this before copying the quote from some leftist blog.

He urged Congress to “undertake to put a floor under essential things, to give all a minimum standard of decent living, and to all children a fair opportunity to get a start in life.”

Please explain how this is inconsistent with current Republican/conservative platforms?

Who can doubt that today’s right would declare his day’s Mr. Republican and Mr. Conservative a socialist redistributionist?

Yo! This guy! Right here.

The only issues modern conservatives would have with Taft is that he didn’t specify which tasks that were federal and those that were state and local, probably because Taft understood so intrinsically that they would best be local. Not a single conservative in elected office opposes universal access to education, food, or health care for those in adject poverty that are unable to assist themselves.  Not a one.

Such a gross misunderstanding of conservative legislative philosophies indicates that  Dionne is actually arguing against some archetypal “other,” his own concept of evil projected against the monolithic right. He did, after all, claim that this was all some super-secret CIA ninja Sue Storm flying a stealth bomber rightwards. (Sort of.)

If our nation’s voters want to move government policy far to the right, they are entirely free to do so.

Awful generous of you to say.

But those who regard themselves as centrist

You’re welcome to regard yourself as centrist all you want, E.J. You aren’t, though.

have a moral obligation to make clear what the stakes are in the current debate.

Past experience tells me that moderates oppose moral obligations, making things clear, and debates.

If supposed moderates refuse to call out the new conservatism for the radical creed it has become, their timidity

Past experience tells me that either timidity or apathy is the defining characteristic of a moderate.

will make them complicit in an intellectual coup they could have prevented.

You might as well call them criminal co-conspirators. Moderates really respond to criminalizing their political decisions.