But what of it? She will not be president. The White House can only dream of her as the Republican Party nominee and the party knows this. Hence, they dispatched one of their most loyal soldiers, a former National Review stalwart, to just illustrate one of the seventy-five million reasons she cannot win a national election. If it is all that important to you to know just how lost in the rhetoric of the pathetic know nothingism that has plagued our country since its founding, then try to read Ryan Lizza in the New Yorker without screaming into space. Can't be done.

 

The more serious issue is whether she is all that far from mainstream Republican "thought" these days. The word "thought" is put in quotation marks because thinking has little to do with it. And, yes, we need to make another reference to the Bush White House "adviser" who in 2004 told Ron Suskind that the "reality based community" just doesn't get it lest we think any of this is a passing fad.

 

As our economy and, perhaps more, just collapses under the weight of the two terms we allowed that administration to control the presidency, preceded by a Congress the same party led to impeach the prior president while leaving more important issues to be ignored or decided by a fealty to ignorance, the mainstream press just begins to notice what has been so for at least the 15 years since the "contract with America" was endorsed by an electorate addicted to stupidity.

 

So, finally, with money being lost and credit ratings downgraded, somebody---even Martin Feldstein for crying out loud---notices that maybe the focus of the deficit is a bit misguided but that the government should be trying to stimulate the economy by spending a few bucks. Yet every single Republican candidate for president appearing at the Iowa debate broadcast on their television network the other night, agreed that more cuts are necessary: even cuts ten times the amount that could be recovered from raising taxes on the most affluent among us, are not enough. They remain angry at Franklin Delano Roosevelt sixty-six years after his death for finding ways to protect Americans from the "pure market capitalism" that threatened our country when he took office, and is doing so again.

 

These "wise heads" suddenly noticing just how crazy these people are when they threaten to prevent the country from paying its debts---and, sadly, this includes our president (a smart man, who grew up not in Kenya, but in Hawaii, going to high school in sandals and thinking the best in people who mean nothing but...) have nothing but themselves to blame. It was only two weeks after the new President was inaugurated, for instance, that Steven Pearlstein (then a sane person) had to explain to his readers that spending is stimulus and vice versa, and to warn about

 

supposedly intelligent people [who] are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.

That was 2009. The same year that even before his inauguration, the President was warned that this was a time to be bold, not tepid and that with an economy then falling at least $1 trillion under its capacity 

Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion [stimulus] plan. And that’s not enough.

and a few weeks later, still 2009---and on the same day as the Pearlstein column explained the English language to people obsessed with Laffer curves or something equally discredited---Paul Krugman observed that 

most economic forecasts warn that in the absence of government action we’re headed for a deep, prolonged slump....Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive. 

So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh

So cut the comedy, folks. Maybe it took Standard & Poor's two years (much less 15) to notice that 

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as 
America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, 
and less predictable than what we previously believed

but, their track record of noticing problems only after every other person in the world sees them is legendary (and, of course, none of this has much to do with the liklihood of the country defaulting on, say, T-bills). 

What's everyone else's excuse? The brief rant that appeared here last week, noting that in the face of evidence that the source of the nations' growing debt (putting aside the more obvious source from the loss of revenues during in a massively declining economy) was not the FDR-inspired "entitlement programs" but unfunded wars and prescription drug programs to help drug company campaign contributors, the Chief Bloviator of what passes for "Washington Wisdom" questioned his guests, by announcing as if it were fact, that 

what really drives the debt, that's entitlement spending, it's been going on this way and was a ticking time bomb since the '60s [and] we're going to solve a political problem but not the underlying fiscal problem, which is what creates our debt

Keep talking, folks. You are doing a great job. Stupid is just plain stupid and treating the stupid as if they are "the other side" of a reasoned argument is not only foolish, it is destructive. See?