Rick Perry is now the undisputed front runner in the GOP field. Some pundits think he will be hard to stop. We’ll see; it’s early yet.

I keep reading that Perry is not Bush. And I keep thinking, how are they different? They both are big time crony capitalists whose big issues are tax cuts and tort reform. But here Steve Kornacki spells it out. The difference, really, is a matter of perception on the Right.

After 8 years of being unable to take down Bill Clinton, the GOP establishment decided that it needed a new marketing strategy. Bush was “elected” in 2000 with the solid support of the establishment and empty rhetoric about “compassionate conservatism.”

And for the first half of Bush’s presidency, Perry and most other Republicans stayed on board even as Bush implemented big government conservatism — a massively expanded federal role in public education (courtesy of a deal with Ted Kennedy and George Miller), a giant new prescription drug entitlement program, the creation of a brand new Cabinet department and so on.

I should add that the real impetus behind most of this was to find new ways to funnel taxpayer money to the education, pharmaceutical, and other industries, but let’s go on …

Every now and then, there’d be some grumbling on the right about Bush’s spending binge, but it didn’t amount to anything. Bush’s approval rating with Republicans remained astronomically high and he was reelected in 2004 thanks in large part to the party base’s devotion to him.

And let’s not forget … September 11 September 11 September 11 September 11 September 11 September 11 September 11 September 11 September 11 September 11 September 11 September 11, etc.

It was in his second term that everything changed. For the first time in his presidency, due mainly to news from Iraq that seemed to get grimmer each month and to his administration’s feeble response to Hurricane Katrina, Bush’s poll numbers began to plummet, first under 50 percent, then into the low 40s, and then into the 30s. His formula had stopped working, and when Republicans were blown out in the 2006 midterms (losing the House for the first time since 1994 and the Senate for the first time since 2001), the leaders and activists who had once acquiesced to the supposed necessity of compassionate conservatism began jumping ship. It was because Republicans had betrayed their own ideological principles, they decided, that the Bush presidency had failed and the GOP’s image was in disrepair. Or, as Limbaugh put it a few days after the ‘06 election:

The way I feel is this: I feel liberated, and I’m going to tell you as plainly as I can why. I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried.

It was in this climate that the Republican Party as we know it today and Rick Perry as we know him today were both born.

Basically, the base has persuaded itself that Bush “failed” because he strayed too far from conservative orthodoxy. He wasn’t pure enough, in other words. Especially after their midterm victory, the GOP is all about ideological purity. And Rick Perry is giving it to them.

This explains a lot of the insanity, including the House vote to privatize Medicare and the call to raise taxes on working people. They’re in self-destruct mode.

Eric Cantor wants to pay for Irene disaster relief with massive cuts to funding for disaster first responders.

If this were to happen, and some disaster required more responders than we had on hand, would Cantor then decide to fund first responders by cutting funds for disaster relief?

The New York Times editorializes about the Right’s resentment of the poor.

These Republican leaders, who think nothing of widening tax loopholes for corporations and multimillion-dollar estates, are offended by the idea that people making less than $40,000 might benefit from the progressive tax code. They are infuriated by the earned income tax credit (the pride of Ronald Reagan), which has become the biggest and most effective antipoverty program by giving working families thousands of dollars a year in tax refunds. They scoff at continuing President Obama’s payroll tax cut, which is tilted toward low- and middle-income workers and expires in December. …

…The moral argument would have been obvious before this polarized year. … The real problem is that so many Americans are struggling on such a small income, not whether they pay taxes.

Silly New York Times. Don’t they know that in the topsy-turvy world of right-wing morality, the moral argument is that wealth must flow to the wealthy, who “deserve” it, and that the poor must be punished for their poverty? It’s a good editorial, though.

Along those lines, see “Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging.”

Also along those lines, wingnuts are outraged because the President is calling for a national day of service to commemorate 9/11. Pam Geller actually called a day of service “sacrilegious.” One wonders in what religion that would be true. Jim Hoft apparently thinks that the president’s suggestion for voluntary charity work is socialism.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Chait explains what jobs are, and how they work, to a right-wing think tank.

Everybody is talking about Dick the Dick’s exploding head book. I take it it’s mostly a work of fiction, since Dick’s recollection of events doesn’t seem to match anyone else’s. All kinds of people with firsthand knowledge of events are coming forward to say Dick is just making stuff up.

But IMO the single most interesting semi-revelation from the book is the degree to which Dick was the acting head of the Bush Administration during Bush’s first term — which we knew — but not the second term.

Jefferson Morley, analyzing Cheney’s self-aggrandizing account, says Cheney portrays himself making foreign policy and cabinet decisions without even consulting the President. He seems to have assumed Bush would approve of his decisions without having to ask.

But the reign of Cheney ended in 2006. Morley writes,

In November 2006, Bush fired Rumsfeld without asking for the vice president’s opinion. For the first time in five years, Bush started making key decisions on his own.

Cheney’s account turns petulant at this point. After 2006, no one in the Bush administration (besides Cheney) can do much good. The new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates mistreated two top generals. Secretary of State Condi Rice was so eager to reach an agreement with North Korea she issued a public statement that was “utterly misleading.” And President Bush had failed by acting on her recommendations, not his.

Get this –

“The process and the decision that followed seemed so out of keeping with the clearheaded ways I had seen him make decisions in the past,” he writes with surprise.

What had changed was that Cheney no longer dominated the process of presidential decision-making on foreign policy. He was merely the vice president.

Very sick.

This is from ABC News –

He reserves much of his ire for former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and now Powell and his longtime aide and chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, are attempting to set the record straight. In no uncertain terms. Cheney, Wilkerson told ABC News, “was president for all practical purposes for the first term of the Bush administration” and “fears being tried as a war criminal.”

Again, Dick was president during the first term, but not the second one. In foreign policy, Condi took his place. Not that she was much of an improvement.

BTW, you might remember that Bush asked for Rummy’s resignation not because of some failure in Iraq, but because Republicans had just been slaughtered in the 2006 midterms. Karl Rove would resign the following August. The Bush White House was in some kind of meltdown by then, it seems, and Bush appears to have changed his mind about who to trust. It’s water under the bridge now, but someday the real history of the Bush Administration will be written, and I suspect the last three years were especially surreal.

See also “Remembering Why Americans Loathe Dick Cheney.”

Michael Lind makes connections between some of the icons of libertarianism — i.e., Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, the Cato Institute — and fascism. Not a total surprise, of course, but there were details I did not know, such as the ties between Hayak and Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Also, when Chile began transitioning to democracy, Milton Friedman mourned the loss of a “free society” that was being dismantled by “the emergence of the welfare state.” The thousands who “disappeared” while Pinochet was in charge didn’t count for much to Friedman.

Alex Pareene, “GOP Demands More FEMA Funding and Less Infrastructure Investment.”

Alex Seitz-Wald, “No Disaster Relief Funding for Hurricane Irene Without Budget Cuts“

Howard Kurtz is critical of Irene coverage:

It was raining in Manhattan on Sunday morning, and the dogged correspondents in their brightly colored windbreakers were getting wet.

But the apocalypse that cable television had been trumpeting had failed to materialize. And at 9 a.m., you could almost hear the air come out of the media’s hot-air balloon of constant coverage when Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm.

I don’t know how bad it was outside of the greater New York media market, but if I never again see some reporter in a rain slicker pointing out to sea and saying, look at those waves, I’ll be happy.

It wasn’t so much that there was inane coverage of nothing for hour after hour. It was that there was inane coverage of nothing on nearly every channel for hour after hour. Except for the premium channels, nearly every channel had suspended regular programming and was covering the storm that wasn’t happening.

I don’t blame authorities for warning the public to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. But by Saturday morning all the news stories said the storm would be no more than category 1, if that, when it got to New York. The news managers should have known there wouldn’t be enough happening to justify round-the-clock live reporting.

It would have made sense to have some news crews standing by in high-risk areas in case something happened. Then while nothing much was happening they could have stuck to the usual August weekend programing of crime show re-runs and used a news crawl at the bottom of the screen to keep viewers apprised of new developments. But no, they had to do round the clock live reporting, even when there was nothing to report.

So by this morning the CBS affiliate was reduced to repeatedly showing us some sand and small debris that had washed up on the Asbury Park boardwalk. It was bad enough to see this once. But the studio anchors kept going back to the reporter at Asbury Park, who once again would show us the sand on the boardwalk with as much excitement as if she had found signs of a space alien landing.

On the other hand, if you had wanted to know the likelihood of flooding in your neighborhood — good luck.

Update: Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog makes the point that Irene really was a significant storm that caused significant destruction in some places. But if anything this underscores the inanity of the hurricane news coverage. By giving so much time to their live, brain-numbing, “on the spot” coverage of relatively insignificant storm activity, television news missed real stories.

For example, this morning I learned that there was some nasty flooding in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan, which is on the west side, near the Hudson River, around 13th Street. Yesterday the live news teams were all several blocks south, anxiously covering the damp sidewalks in Battery Park.

Of course, the real problem is that anything happening outside of New York City was being ignored by the A-list news teams. Perhaps local and national news was covering it, but New York City television was oblivious to yesterday’s record floods in Pennsylvania and Vermont.

A few years ago — probably 2004 — at some progressive political conference, I spotted a young man wearing a “Ron Paul for President” T-shirt. I asked the guy if he was serious, and he said yes, and went on and on about how Ron Paul was against the war in Iraq.

Do you know anything else about Ron Paul’s ideas? I asked. No, he said, but he figured he would be all right on other issues if he was against the war.

By now, the kid is a few years older and may have noticed there are other issues in the world beside war. And Matt Yglesias has written some posts focusing on Paul’s cockamamie ideas, and frankly, the man is even crazier than I realized. Here is the executive summary, from the first post –

After looking at his positions and statements, the most remarkable thing is that if it weren’t for his loud fanbase of self-proclaimed libertarians you wouldn’t really think this is the platform of a libertarian. He’s loudly trumpeting his plan to impose criminal penalties on women who terminate their pregnancies and he makes it clear that his interest in freedomdoesn’t extend to the freedom of anyone unfortunate enough to have been born in a foreign country. His campaign slogan of “RESTORE AMERICA NOW” is strongly suggestive of conservative impulses and nostalgia for the much-less-free America John Boehner grew up in. The mainstay of his economic thinking is the ridiculous proposition that “[t]here is no greater threat to the security and prosperity of the United States today than the out-of-control, secretive Federal Reserve.” Not only is Paul’s goldbuggery nutty on the merits, like his affection for forced pregnancy and severe restrictions on human freedom of movement it’s difficult to see what it has to do with freedom. The freedom of the government to set a fixed dollar price of gold? America’s current monetary policy—a fiat currency that’s freely exchangeable for other currencies and commodities— is the free market position.

I knew Paul was anti-choice, but I hadn’t realized he has said that abortion is “the most important issue of our age.” In a nod to states’ rights views he says he will “remove the abortion issue from federal court jurisdiction.” but he also supports a feeral law defining “life” as beginning at conception and wants to stop all federal funds from going to “Planned Parenthood, or any other so-called ‘family planning’ program.”

As Matt correctly says, Ron’s views are libertarian only if you don’t think women count as people.

Paul’s “thing” for ending the Federal Reserve and bringing back the gold standard is just weird. I’m not even sure a gold standard is possible in a 21st century economy. But in particular if his objection is that a Federal Reserve represents too much federal control, going to a gold standard would require at least as much federal control, because a gold standard only works if the government regulates the price of gold.

I know Ron Paul has a medical degree, so I hesitate to say he is stupid, but there has to be something wrong with him. The elevator is not going all the way up. Considering his flaming idiot son, maybe the family suffers some kind of early-onset dementia.

Just as Paul only seems reasonable if you don’t actually know what he thinks, the gold standard argument is one that could make sense only to someone who knows absolutely nothing about about it. For some background on goldbuggery, see Barry Eichengreen, “A Critique of Pure Gold” and “Gold Faithful” by Thomas Frank.

Now Paul wants FEMA to be demolished. Lord knows FEMA does not always wrap itself in glory, but Paul is utterly oblivious to the nature of disasters –

“FEMA is not a good friend of most people in Texas,” Paul said. “All they do is come in and tell you what to do and can’t do. You can’t get in your houses. And they hinder the local people, and they hinder volunteers from going in.”

After Hurricane Ike demolished parts of the Texas coast in 2008, Paul voted against a bill that would funnel billions in aid to the area, which covers his congressional district.

FEMA has since pumped more than $3 billion in federal funds into the state.

Some progressives still think of Paul as their friend because he wants to do away with the “war on drugs.” And he’s anti-war. But Paul seems to be more of an isolationist than a pacifist. He appears to think that whatever goes on in those other countries is irrelevant to us. But his ideas about domestic policy are demented.

You can see, however, that his views on domestic economic policy are almost laughable. He suggests that we abolish all regulation of air pollution because “[p]olluters should answer directly to property owners in court for the damages they create – not to Washington” with zero indication of how he wants this to work in practice (my guess, a massive settlement resulting in the creation of a regulatory bureaucracy) while also arguing that we should “[l]ift government roadblocks to the use of coal and nuclear power.”

As with the gold standard, his idea for dismantling government bureaucracy requires constructing other government bureaucracy. And he is clueless about this. Like I said, there’s something wrong with him.

Where I am, which is north of the Bronx near Yonkers, ain’t nothin’. Run of the mill storm. I was expecting sheets of rain and howling wind, and it just isn’t happening. I still have power, so far.

I understand there is considerable flooding near the shores. The ocean is flooding streets and probably filling some basements. Some people are probably going to be sorry they didn’t move their cars to higher ground yesterday.

The worst of this is supposed to be over by noon, and the storm should be completely gone by early evening.

So far, no rain or wind near chez Maha. They are telling us the storm will be at its worse here from early Sunday morning to about 2 pm tomorrow afternoon. Tonight I plan to fill a couple of thermoses with coffee in case there is no power when I wake up in the morning. Obviously if there is no power I will have to budget laptop time carefully, but I think my batteries are good for at least four hours.

Again, I am no where near water, so I’m not too concerned.

This is one of the dumbest arguments I have ever read against evolution. It’s so stupid I wonder if it is meant to be a joke, but I don’t think it is. Sample:

Before we even start, we ought to notice that, if evolution is true, there would be no way to know it. Because evolution teaches that everything that exists is the product of the random collision of atoms, this logically includes the thoughts I am thinking about evolution. But if my thoughts are the product of the random collision of atoms, there is no reason to think that any of them are true — they just are.

There’s kind of a perverse, almost psychotic, genius in that. However, it violates what I might call Maha’s First Laws of an Argument, which is that you can’t very well refute something if you don’t know what the bleep it is.

“Evolution teaches that everything that exists is the product of the random collision of atoms”? Where do they get this stuff?

For more refutation of the refutation, see PZ Myers and Charles Johnson.