Now we're stuck with Elena Kagan

And I'd thought Sonia Sotomayor was too prosecutor-friendly for her refusal to hear evidence.

Kagan's nomination and certain confirmation are a disaster for liberty, for reasons Daniel Larison and Radley Balko explain.

Obama's overall record on civil liberties has been surprisingly terrible for a constitutional law professor. I don't have time right now to elucidate on all his slights, but I'm done making excuses. I expected this to be one of his stronger areas, and instead he's turned out to be worse than I would have expected from, say, Hillary Clinton.

I believe this is the turning point.  As Radley put it in 2008:

Here’s why I preferred Obama to McCain: The GOP gave up all pretense of any limited government principles. They’re no longer trustworthy on the issues where they’re supposed to agree with me. Obama, on the other hand, made some promises about government transparency, hinted at a less bellicose foreign policy, and I like what he said about Guantanamo, torture, and executive power. In other words, he was better on the issues where Democrats are supposed to agree with me. It’s really that simple.

Yet we no longer agree where we were supposed to agree.

I'm throwing in my towel and will not support Obama in 2012.

(A Republican candidate will have an even steeper hill to climb to earn my support, but as of now: a plague o' both their houses.)

Quote of the Day

"[Conservative and Republican critics of Obama] cannot point to any decrease in Obama’s actual support for Israel, because there has been no decrease of any kind, so they are reduced to talking about “subtle shifts in perception,” feelings, moods, and changes in style. These shifts are so subtle that they can only be seen by the trained eye of the ideologically-motivated pundit. As I have said before, Obama’s critics were once obsessed with his supposed superficiality, and now it is they who cannot stop talking about purely superficial things when criticizing him," —Daniel Larison

(via the Dish, bears repeating)

Quote of the day

"It is a measure of how badly Bush performed, how horribly McCain would have done, and how terrifyingly dangerous Biden is that Obama as President remains the least bad alternative available at the moment."

—Daniel Larison

"Terrible precedents"

Larison calls Obama's response an "incredible bungling". Leftists who'd developed a Strange New Respect for Larison's criticism of neocons and nationalists will probably re-plug their ears on this one.

American and Iranian nationalism

Via hilzoy, Larison:

"Americanists believe that any statement from the President that fails to build up and anoint Mousavi as the preferred candidate is discouraging to Mousavi and his supporters, because they apparently cannot grasp that being our preferred candidate is to be tainted with suspicion of disloyalty to the nation. It is strange how nationalists often have the least awareness of the importance of the nationalism of another people. Many of the same silly people who couldn’t say enough about Hamas' so-called "endorsement" of Obama as somehow indicative of his Israel policy views, as well as those who could not shut up about his warm reception in Europe, do not see how an American endorsement of a candidate in another country's election might be viewed with similiar and perhaps even greater distaste by the people in that country."

Somewhat tangentially, I'm reminded of an Orwell quote:

"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

Against Pat Buchanan

Buchanan mocks Sotomayor:

[Sotomayor] went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children’s books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you’re, frankly if you’re in college and you’re working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don’t think that’s college work.

Yglesias responds:

Learning a foreign language, if you’ve ever tried, is really hard. Meanwhile, it’s clearly also important for people living in the United States of America to do their best to learn to speak and read standard American English. But this takes hard work. Sonia Sotomayor, like many Americans, was born into a Spanish-dominant family. But she worked hard, learned English, went to Princeton, then Yale Law School, then had a successful career as a lawyer, as a District Court judge, as an Appeals Court judge, and now as a [nominee for] Justice of the Supreme Court. This is, as I’ve said before, a good inspirational story that parents are going to tell their kids to encourage them to work hard in school.

Unless, that is, you’re Pat Buchanan in which case you take a cute story about Sotomayor spending her summers re-reading classic children’s books she hadn’t had a chance to read as a kid and turn it into a pretext to mock her:

[..] normally Buchanan claims that Hispanics need to work harder to learn English. But faced with an actual example of someone working to learn English, he has nothing but scorn and spite.

I think the most unfortunate thing about The American Conservative (which Buchanan co-founded) as well as paleoconservatism in general is its association with Mr. Buchanan's classless racism (including antisemitism).

Ordinarily bad apples won't hurt the whole too much—you can find plenty of prominent rotten lefties and movement conservatives with similarly disturbing views or lack of class. See Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michele Bachmann, Michele Malkin, et. al.—they get called for it regularly.

But paleocon-ish numbers are few, so Pat Buchanan's prominence creates a disproportionate image problem for the related ideas of figures like Andrew Sullivan, Daniel Larison, and Ron Paul.

So I cringe whenever I see Buchanan's name mentioned—paleoconservatism would be much better off if he'd shut the hell up.

Republican incongruity

Daniel Larison hits the nail on the head:

The faction most responsible for the GOP’s political failure is national security conservatives. Yet within the party, they remain unscathed, their assumptions about the use of American power largely unquestioned, and their gross errors in judgment forgotten or readily forgiven. Among the mainstream right, the foreign policy of the Bush administration is barely a subject of debate. Rather than reorienting Republican foreign policy towards a political center defined by realism, humility and restraint, the GOP’s leadership and activists have redoubled their commitment to Bush and Cheney’s hawkish stances and to a lock-step defense of the Bush administration’s policies.

This situation creates a strange incongruity. In one breath, conservatives will invoke a baseless claim that Bush’s excessive spending lost them the country, and in the next they will defend to the last Bush’s decisions as Commander-in-Chief. Yet these were the decisions that, more than anything else, led to Democratic victories and the GOP’s now toxic reputation. What is more, everyone outside the conservative bubble knows the narrative that mainstream conservatives tell themselves is false, which makes conservative professions of fiscal austerity and continued hawkishness even less likely to win public support.

As much as I would like to see some real fiscal austerity and defense of personal liberty, I'm not so deluded as to think Republican deficiencies in these areas are why they've fallen so low.

National security conservatism is a largely unmitigated disaster, clearly (See: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz) but general incompetence and lowbrow anti-intellectualism bear their share of blame (See: Bush, Palin, Huckabee)

Non-intervention

Matt Steinglass asks:

Isn’t the Prime Directive’s doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of (particularly underdeveloped) alien civilizations a classically paleo-con non-interventionist position?

Larison's answer:

Indeed it is, which is why most Star Trek plotlines are so annoying. If the most important principle is non-interference, why is the moral of almost every Star Trek story that this or that Federation captain is right to violate the Prime Directive in order to “do something” whenever there is a crisis? Surely the stories should drive home why non-interference is the better, wiser course, but instead they routinely show the Prime Directive to be the invention of moral and political idiots. It is hard to think of another fictional world in which its heroes so regularly disrespect the core values that they are supposed to espouse. Anyone who watched very many of the original episodes with Kirk would come away with the impression that the Prime Directive was a rule mostly observed in the breach, and most TNG episodes and movies would tell you that non-interference is either misguided or actually morally corrupt. The entire ninth movie was one big celebration of so-called humanitarian intervention. The advocates of non-intervention–the people invoking the Prime Directive most often–were portrayed in that feature as corrupt collaborators with the worst of the worst.

A commenter retorts:

You’d have to be an extraordinarily doctrinaire non-interventionist to advocate anything like a Prime Directive approach to US foreign policy. Non-interference in other state’s domestic affairs is one thing. A policy of deeming other states too primitive to even be graced with the knowledge that the United States exists is a bit more extreme. Similarly, you can respect a state’s desire to protect its most important industries without going further and arguing that any economic or cultural exchange at all is too dangerous to the less-powerful culture. According to the Prime Directive it makes sense for an entire civilization, including all its people, to perish in a natural disaster, since saving anybody would halt that civilization’s natural progression towards extinction. I know paleo-conservatives aren’t known for their sentimentality, but I don’t think they’re quite that, uh, mean.

The Prime Directive is routinely disregarded on Star Trek because it’s so hard for a rational or moral person to take it seriously. A more flexible approach (like the way the crew on TNG actually makes decisions when the Prime Directive clashes violently with common sense, morality, ethics, etc.) seems more reasonable.

I'm decidedly against intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries (e.g. toppling Saddam Hussein) but I think the commenter is right about the Prime Directive becoming morally absurd when it means not being able help a civilization avoid extinction when it's of little cost to us.

There are multiple areas of intervention:  military (force), trade, and migration.

Larison, being a paleocon, is opposed to them all—which is why he likes the Prime Directive.  Some paleocons aren't quite so obtuse on trade. But they definitely oppose migration, because they despise multiculturalism.

Once, the American right agreed with Larison on avoiding military intervention, and it was the bleeding heart Left that would propose boneheaded freedom-spreading, nation-building exercises.  Times change, huh?  And it's all the neocons' fault.

Now the Left is better on military non-intervention, better on migration, and tolerable* on trade.  Which is why they have a superior foreign policy now.

*The talk last year of renegotiating NAFTA was fodder for stupid Democratic primary voters. The leadership is, thankfully, not so dumb as to follow through on that. All they'll do is stand in the way of new trade deals with e.g. Columbia. So basically we're just treading water on trade for the foreseeable future.

Link blag

Earlier I linked to Keith Hennessey's analysis of Obama's tax proposals, but Conor Clarke says taxing income earned and kept abroad is not being proposed. According to him, it only ends IRS deductions on investments abroad for which the income is kept abroad.  That plan makes sense to me.

Politico: Defense Budget Baloney; spending his higher than the topline figures that get quoted.

ThinkProgress notes that Obama's budget eliminated abstinence funding .

Megan: "there is probably a special place in hell reserved for politicians who betray our nation's most helpless children for the benefit of a sullen and recalcitrant teacher's union."

Larison contrasts neoliberalism with neoconservatism.

At last, a good argument against capitalism.

Awkward family photos.

Quote of the day

"Ross’ column was a thought exercise, which can be difficult for people who do not think." —Daniel Larison, via E.D. Kain

Karl Rove: "The President Has Become a Divisive Figure"

(meme) WSJ link

Ha ha, this from the master of wedge politics.  I'm sure he's reveling in the irony.

But his interpretation of the Pew poll polarization is widely off the mark.  Nate Silver explained a few days ago:

[..] measurements of the partisan split in support for the President, as Pew Research has done here (they found a record partisan split in Obama's approval ratings, with 88 percent of Democrats but just 27 percent of Republicans approving of Obama's performance) are not quite as straightforward as they might seem. This is because partisan identification is at least somewhat fluid. The Republicans, in particular, have lost quite a bit of support over the past several years; those persons who continue to identify as Republicans are a hardened -- and very conservative -- lot. Just 24 percent of voters identified as Republican when Pew conducted this survey in March, which is roughly as low as that total has ever gotten.

We see some evidence of these effects in the comparison of Obama's numbers to those of George W. Bush's at a comparable point in his presidency. Obama and Bush had roughly the same level of support among members of their own party (88 percent for Obama, 87 percent for Bush) and roughly the same level of support among unaffiliated voters (57 percent for Obama, 56 for Bush). Bush, however, had more support from the opposition party (36 percent of Democrats versus 27 percent of Republicans). And yet Obama, not Bush, had the higher overall approval rating, because Democrats are a significantly larger constituency than Republicans.

Larison points out more inanity

Modern kings

The West Wing aired from 1999 to 2006 on NBC. This award-winning drama (before Aaron Sorkin's departure in 2003) featured an idealized liberal presidency straight out of many a lefty's wet dream. Government solutions worked, and they worked well, catalyzing people's lives for the better and magically creating better conditions by efficiently picking winners and losers, with few unintended consequences but plenty of well-written and entertaining drama. The president even supported school vouchers, somehow getting Congress to overcome the awful lobby of public school teachers' unions. My roommates would watch the show as a therapy session whenever Bush's faith-based cowboy imperialism oscillated between failure and disaster.

But now that "the Decider" has departed and been replaced by a president with Bartlet-like tendencies, what will NBC give us to fill its side of the bargain? Why, Kings, a show set in a modern America-like nation ruled by an autocratic despot who starts and ends wars on a whim -- even the whim of a large military corporation backing him. Undesirable subjects may be killed quietly, the press is censored, and public morale cynically manipulated.  And as if that weren't enough, the whole thing is based on the mythology of Israel's first king.

Larison appraises:

When I discovered that the show was an attempt to make a modern adaptation of the story of Saul and David from the First Book of Samuel, I was even more intrigued and was determined to give it a chance. I did this even though I assumed that, being a network television series, it would downplay if not actually eliminate all references to God, prophecy and anointed kingship, and in this assumption I have been completely wrong from the first minutes of the pilot. The first three episodes have treated the original Biblical story respectfully, if not slavishly, and they have given the political theology of I Samuel and the role of “Rev. Samuels” as central a place in the story as one might expect to see. Obviously, the show is being marketed as a political drama/soap opera a la Rome with the religious component obscured almost entirely in the advertising (apparently because, as they say in the first scene, “it’s not popular to speak of God”), and additional plot twists added on occasion. Like Rome, it has impressive sets and casting, and a similarly large budget, and it has so far brought in high quality directorial talent. Naturally, pitted against The Simpsons and even more mindless reality TV fare, Kings has been doing very badly in the ratings. NBC is infamous for its mishandling of quality programming, so there is every reason to fear that the network will do its best to undermine the show until it is cancelled. However, this is a show that is intelligent, reasonably attentive to the Biblical narrative and serious when speaking of matters of faith and sacrifice, and if there is any show on network or cable that can claim anything similar I have yet to hear of it. It’s worth a look.

Well there you have it, approved by one of the smartest social conservatives I know of.  You can watch on Hulu.

The dangers of ideology

Daniel Larison:

one of the attractions of ideology is that it seems to offer “a schema for predicting the consequences of events.” I would emphasize that ideology only seems to do this, because one of the key features of any ideology is its horrific powers of oversimplification and its impressively narrow perspective on historical events. That is, ideology will not reliably predict consequences of events, but it will condition the mind to force every event into the mold provided by the ideology. If a person approaches the world with an ideological frame of mind, whatever events dominate the historical memory of his fellow ideologues are perceived as constantly recurring again and again as part of a progressive narrative of successive triumphs, each one more important than the last. The simple framing, the certainty of victory and the quick and easy interchangeability of extremely different groups as different faces of the same enemy are all very useful for purposes of propaganda and the acquisition and exercise of power.

This is one reason why so many ideologues express great confidence that History will judge their endeavors to have been worthwhile and why they always avoid accountability for the consequences of their own policies and actions: their grasp of historical contingency is poor, and their knowledge of history is usually limited to a narrow range of approved opinions about major events.

I think everyone is guilty of this to some degree, not just idealogues.  Grappling with opposing views and giving them a fair hearing takes a lot of discipline -- especially, in my view, when one is accustomed to reaching for the intellectual clarity of libertarian principles.

One reason I started this blag rather than just writing a private journal and bookmarking crap that amuses me was to hold my opinions and thinking up to some scrutiny.

If I can persuade you to agree with me about things that's great — but now that the number of people reading this appears to exceed a single digit I'm also itching for countervailing views.

So if you click a post title, you can use its comment box. It's free! =]

Not taking legalization seriously

Following up on Obama's pathetic answer, Radley is also galled:

reader Cory Spicer emailed this afternoon:

I am watching Obama’s “online town hall” speech and I am thoroughly disgusted.

A couple days ago he opened up a forum for users to submit and vote on questions. Several of the categories had questions relating to marijuana/drug law reform as their leading vote-getters, including the most popular overall question (in terms of both total votes and yes/no spread). So how did he react?

Well, first he answered four questions that received fewer votes. Then, before the fifth question was asked, he mentioned as a somewhat snarky aside that the marijuana question was “very popular”. The audience laughed a bit, and Obama joked about how he wasn’t “sure what that says about the online community” (this got a big laugh).

Then, he gave an unequivocal “no, I don’t believe that legalizing marijuana would help our economy”, offering no elaboration or supporting facts. The audience then gave him the heartiest round of applause for the day, and he then moved on to other, less popular questions.

I didn’t see the Town Hall, but if true, this is pretty galling. Politicians regularly dismiss legalization arguments out of hand, but can never offer a good explanation for their position. Obama’s “explanation” seems to be to laugh it off, and hope it goes away. It isn’t just stoners making the case for legalization anymore. It’s the Economist, it’s Foreign Policy, it’s a sizable cadre of respected economists, it’s the former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. If Obama’s going to continue the failed drug war, particularly the prohibition of marijuana, he ought to come up with a good reason why.

Steven Taylor:

I am struck by the unserious treatment of the issue by both the reporter and the President.

Given the cost of marijuana enforcement policies, the damage it does to civil liberties, the very real potential revenue from taxation, as well as legitimate questions about medical application, this is actually a very legitimate public policy question.

And to answer the Politico’s question, this isn’t about Cheech and Chong senses of humor, but is, if fact, about a real concern held by some in the US about this issue. Although, clearly, there was some self-selection bias going on here as well.

Freddie:

You know, there are actual policy consequences for the kind of “haha, the stoners came out!” attitude that President Obama, and the media, demonstrated towards the question about ending the prohibition of marijuana at the “digital town hall” event.

I was just watching MSNBC and they had some newsdouche on to talk about the event. Being members of the media, the host and the newsdouche mostly complained about how Obama was “leapfrogging” the media with the format. But the guy being interviewed took the time to snigger and laugh at the question about the reform of our marijuana laws, in much the same way Obama did. It’s not surprising. That’s the attitude of “serious” people everywhere, that advocating changing our destructive, futile, expensive and cruel marijuana laws has to demonstrate that the person so advocating is some burned-out, disaffected stoner who just wants to smoke up and tune out. You get that from the mainstream media and most of our national politicians all the time, the absolute refusal to take reforming our marijuana laws seriously. And that’s unfair, and corrosive to democracy, and has severe negative consequences for our policy.

First of all, even if everyone who supported the decriminalization of marijuana did so out of a simple desire to be able to smoke without fear of arrest, that would be a perfectly legitimate and principled stand. This is still a country where we are supposed to be allowed to live our lives in the manner that we want, provided that we don’t harm others or infringe on their own rights to self-determine. In democracy, you vote in part for politicians who support your interests, and you make political arguments for those policy positions that benefit your own self-interest. Hopefully, if everyone does that, the will of the people as a whole is done. So it’s not like there’s something disqualifying about people who just want to smoke marijuana and be left in peace by the government. And, of course, the use of the stoner meme plays on some deeply flawed assumptions and stereotypes, that everyone who smokes marijuana falls into the same (low class, trashy) groups. That’s one of the basic impediments to finding a little sanity in our drug laws, I’m afraid: the notion that anyone who uses marijuana is an unserious, unappealing person, and that anyone who advocates decriminalizing marijuana is similarly tainted.

And, of course, the basic libertarian impulse to leave people alone– still one of our greatest national features– is only a part of the reason to support reforming our marijuana laws. The other reasons are caught up in the utter failure of criminalization to prevent Americans from using marijuana, the massive financial costs of arresting and prosecuting marijuana offenders, the waste of valuable police resources on enforcing marijuana laws, the numbers of nonviolent marijuana offenders sitting in our jails and costing us public money, the increase in police corruption and misconduct that is an inevitable part of drug criminalization, and the occasional tragedy where an arrest on a marijuana possession results in the injury or death of the accused, a police officer, or both. The costs to this country from the continued criminalization of marijuana are truly massive, and the payoff is negligible. Completely independent of any acknowledgment of a right to use marijuana is the simple cost/benefit analysis which suggest that our current system is madness.

All of this rests on what is now a banal fact: that polling consistently shows broad majorities of Americans who favor serious reform of our marijuana laws. The American people are a slow moving beast, but they aren’t completely resistant to evidence and logic, and the great costs that the prohibition of marijuana inflicts on our society hasn’t gone unnoticed. So why, if reforming marijuana laws is broadly popular, is the issue still largerly relegated to the backburner politically? Why is neither party willing to make decriminalizing marijuana a major part of their policy platform? Because even smart, pragmatic politicians like Barack Obama can’t help but make jokes about a sensible question about a worthy initiative– worthy enough, at least, of discussion. We can’t get either party on board with ending a cruel and wasteful set of drug policies because supposedly neutral reporters can’t help but get a laugh out of positions that are sensible, adult, and supported by millions of Americans.

Our attitude towards issues have consequences. Every laugh and giggle at the expense of those who want our country to reexamine a disastrous set of policies makes it less likely that we will embark on a series of changes that would leave our country pragmatically improved and more free.

Daniel Larison:

Freddie’s frustration with Obama’s dismissive response to the large number of online questions about marijuana legalization is understandable, but it seems to me that legalization arguments will never gain much traction if advocates for it are constantly having to mention how they are not like the drug’s stereotypical users or regard the drug’s use as some grievous personal failing. Instead of coming across as a stronger argument, the standard “I’m in favor of legalization, and I’m the farthest thing in the world from a pot smoker!” argument ends up making the argument for legalization less compelling. This is because this kind of argument unintentionally reproduces the stigma against the drug and effectively endorses one of the key claims that supporters of criminalization make. While it is true that there are a great many practical and principled reasons why Americans of all stripes should oppose continued criminalization, for legalization to take hold as something more than a marginal issue that has the sympathies of more than relatively marginal political forces there would need to be a much larger constituency that regards criminalization as an intolerable imposition on one of their preferences.

I'm not sure Larison really has a point here. As he acknowledges it is Obama and his press secretary who marginalized the issue by laughing about it instead of providing real reasons to justify their stance. They played off the idea that only stoners care about this issue as a way to dismiss without taking it seriously, so that's why Freddie & others have to explain the untruth behind it.

Explaining foreign policy realism

I'm a realist, albeit quite an amateur and not particularly well-read one.  So I'll hand the Freeman controversy over to Cato:

Jon Chait makes a common mistake in an op-ed for Saturday’s Washington Post.* Joining various neoconservatives to attack Charles Freeman, just-appointed chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Chait writes that Freeman is a realist and therefore doesn’t care about morality in U.S. foreign policy. I don’t know enough about Freeman to know if the article is fair to his views (he seems like a great pick), but it shows a misunderstanding of realism.

Modifying a noun with “moral” does not make it so. Realists argue that idealism – ignoring realities that encourage tradeoffs among competing goods –  is foolish, and there is nothing moral about doing foolish things in the name of morality. Realists believe that our foreign policy should be governed by an ethic of responsibility, where you do things that actually lead to good consequences, starting at home. They see the promiscuous use of power as destructive of it and therefore of all the goods it serves, including the ideological sort.

Those with even passing familiarity with leading realists like E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr know that their goal was to create a moral foreign policy in an anarchic world. They saw idealists who thought they could escape realist concepts like the balance of power as a source of catastrophic wars. Given the nature of international relations, they saw idealism — seen in undo faith in international institutions and later military adventurism in service of ideological ends — as wasteful, dangerous, and therefore immoral.

Realists are partially to blame for this misconception. They have been too reluctant in recent decades to state their moral case. They too often allow people to get the impression that phony beltway realists like Henry Kissinger are the real deal – as if thrashing around Southeast Asia and South America in service of confused ideas about the balance of power was consistent with realist thought.

A realist U.S. defense policy would be moral for at least three reasons. It would stop squandering wealth on futile missions and allow it be used for worthier ends. It would not offend our values by embracing militarism and empire (in fact if not in intent) and restore the United States to its position as a model of liberalism, not its vindicator. It would keep us out of unnecessary wars, which are bad for liberty at home and only rarely conducive to moral ends abroad.

*It is typical of the Post to publish a column like this. Their op-ed page is home to about 10 advocates of militarized liberalism in foreign policy. The distinction between the neoconservatives and the liberal internationalists is largely academic.

Noted realist Stephen Walt, author of The Israel Lobby, also speaks up for Freeman.

Like Larison I'm mildly encouraged by his seeming to have all the right enemies.

More on Joe-the-Plumberization

Freddie thinks it may be unavoidable.

TMV comments on conservatism's path out of the wilderness.

And this four line play is golden.

Krugman had a good assessment earlier:

Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

And that's just the most common behavior. Some cheer at suggestions the president wasn't born in the U.S., or laugh at Chicago being nuked, in-between spouting gay bigotry and hoping babies get AIDS.

Update: Larison and Douthat chime

Religious identity and Republican politics

Do go read David Larison on this topic and also the radical menace of restraint and humility.