Back in 2008, I used to argue that Sarah Palin didn’t really exist — that she was actually an incredibly elaborate Tina Fey performance art project, an Andy-Kaufman style hoax. Because, seriously — Palin was so staggeringly vapid that it stretched credibility that she could be for real. It almost seemed more likely that she might be an over-the-top parody of a certain kind of blissfully idiotic, all-American wingnut, than that she was an actual person.

I often have similar thoughts about Mitt Romney. A surpassingly perfect villain for our times, he appears to come straight from central casting as the slick, shifty-eyed C.E.O. who’s fixing to downsize your ass — and implement his evil scheme for world domination while he’s at it. The G.O.P could not have run a more astonishing incarnation of the self-parodying cluelessness of the 1 percenters if they tried. For all practical purposes, it’s as if the the top-hat-and-tails-wearing Monopoly guy was their candidate.

Think I’m exaggerating? The Mittster’s latest Richie Rich moment from the campaign trail has him regaling an audience of economically anxious college students with some swell advice on how to succeed in business: just be like his “friend” sandwich shop entrepreneur Jimmy John, and get your parents to bankroll the costs of a start-up! Hey, that sounds easy — why didn’t I think of that?! Here’s Mittens:

This kind of divisiveness, this attack of success, is very different than what we’ve seen in our country’s history. We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.

Among other things, I love the way Romney frequently drops the names of his fellow plutocrat friends, in what appears to be a disastrously misconceived attempt to impress his audience with his (nonexistent) street cred. The man seems to lack the most rudimentary empathy gene — it’s that pathological. I eagerly wait the scene in the movie he rips off his human mask and reveals the terrifying cyborg alien that dwells underneath.

This story is from earlier in the week, but somehow I missed it. Noted fraudster and gun policy researcher John Lott has apparently been admitted back into polite society again. As Media Matters reports, on April 25, Lott published a garbage, error-riddled op ed in the New York Daily News about Florida’s infamous “Stand Your Ground” laws. Just a day earlier, he was cited respectfully in a vomitorious New York Times “trend piece on concealed carry clothing for the ‘fashion aware gun owner’.”

As we say in my ancestral homeland of New Jersey, I gottaproblemwiththat.

Lott is problematic on a number of levels. First of all, his famous research that purports to show that more guns lead to less crime is incredibly shoddy from the standpoint of social science methodology. So much so, in fact, that back in grad school an econometrics professor of mine taught a class based on Lott’s dataset, which basically amounted to an entire course in how not to do quantitative social science research.

Worse than the crap social science, though, are the persuasive allegations that Lott committed outright fraud, by basically making up survey data.

And as if that’s not enough, there’s the ludicrous Mary Rosh affair, in which Lott was caught red-handed writing pro-Lott comments and reviews in various internet forums, under the name “Mary Rosh.” It was, as I recall, one of the first well-known internet sock puppeting scandals.

And also … in addition to being a fraud and a hack, Lott has demonstrated himself to be, well, pretty much a jerk. For example, he unsuccessfully sued Freakonomics author Steven Levitt for defamation for Levitt’s criticism of Lott’s work — a dick move if ever there was one, and an act that seriously violates the norms governing scholarly debates.

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that all the most virulently homophobic wingnuts must eventually be discovered trolling for male escorts on rentboy.com.

Or so it often seems. And from this Sunday’s New York Times comes the news that social science seems to confirm this impression.

Researchers Richard M. Ryan and William S. Ryan write about a series of studies they conducted that were designed to measure an individual’s “implicit sexual orientation.” Their experiments uncovered “a subgroup of participants who, despite self-identifying as highly straight, indicated some level of same-sex attraction […] Over 20 percent of self-described highly straight individuals showed this discrepancy.”

The fact that a significant number of gay people are in denial about their sexuality is not exactly news. But what’s intriguing, and extremely relevant politically, is what the researchers discovered about the underlying ideology of these closeted types:

Notably, these “discrepant” individuals were also significantly more likely than other participants to favor anti-gay policies; to be willing to assign significantly harsher punishments to perpetrators of petty crimes if they were presumed to be homosexual; and to express greater implicit hostility toward gay subjects (also measured with the help of subliminal priming). Thus our research suggests that some who oppose homosexuality do tacitly harbor same-sex attraction.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I never fail to be astonished by the depth and intensity of some conservatives’ obsession with LGBTQ folks. Why in the world would someone take such a passionate, all-consuming interest in the private sexual behavior of such a small minority of the population? I know that many of the wingnuts use religious arguments as a justification for their hate, but those arguments tend to be unpersuasive in the extreme. IIRC, Jesus didn’t have a whole lot (or actually, anything) to say about teh butt sex — though interestingly, he did teach that “[i]t is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” (Fyi, if you’re interested in what the Bible does actually say about homosexuality, I highly recommend that you take a look at this wonderful little pamphlet).

Unsurprisingly, the authors of the Times piece report that the self-hatred of these closet cases is associated with being raised in unsupportive, homophobic families:

What leads to this repression? We found that participants who reported having supportive and accepting parents were more in touch with their implicit sexual orientation and less susceptible to homophobia. Individuals whose sexual identity was at odds with their implicit sexual attraction were much more frequently raised by parents perceived to be controlling, less accepting and more prejudiced against homosexuals.

The authors take pains to emphasize that “[n]ot all those who campaign against gay men and lesbians secretly feel same-sex attractions.” Still, the implications of the research are fascinating. I can’t resist speculating: does Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum struggle with his inner Liza Minnelli fan? If that were indeed the case, I seriously would not be at all surprised.

Glad to have survived another week, and hope to greet the next with no further need to mention Newt Gingrich, unless Mitt goes crazy and offers him a Cabinet post to get him to go home. But here are a few other items:

* Romney tells college students to consider borrowing money from parents to start a business. He really just can’t help himself, can he?

* Rasmussen poll shows Bill Nelson of FL with big leads over all his GOP opponents. Numbers are very similar to recent PPP poll.

* MO Republican gubernatorial candidate tells African-Amerian newspaper ed board interviewers he “doesn’t know” whether the president is a Muslim. Well, can’t accuse him of pandering.

* Bryan Fischer’s got company: Matthew Franck pens long post at National Review’s The Corner blasting Romney spokesman Ric Grenell for “unhinged devotion” to marriage equality.

* Dave Weigel publishes media coverage word clouds on all the “mentioned” candidates for Veep. Bad news for Bob McDonnell: “Ultrasound” dominates his cloud.

And in non-political news:

* Google devises search term that eats up search results. Go figure.

This weekend I’m happy to welcome back Kathleen Geier for guest blogging duty. Please treat her kindly and attentively.

Since it’s now Friday night (in the East at least), you know what that means, right? FISH & CHIPS! Enjoy the Eddie & the Hot Rods video below.

Selah.

Less than two weeks before the Indiana primary, the best bet conservatives have this year for purging an Establishment RINO from the Senate, Sarah Palin has endorsed Dick Lugar’s opponent, Richard Mourdock, via Facebook, her preferred medium for communicating with the world when she’s not on TV:

Indiana deserves a conservative in the Senate who will fight for the Hoosier State, uphold our Constitution, and not just go along to get along with the vested interests of the permanent political class in D.C.

Richard Mourdock is the conservative choice for Indiana. Senator Lugar’s 36 years of service as a Senator are appreciated, but it’s time for the torch to pass to conservative leadership in Washington that promises to rein in government spending now.

It was a reminder that for all her peripatetic activity in 2010—she eventually endorsed 48 candidates for governor or Congress, just over half of whom eventually took office—this is her first real endorsement this cycle, if you don’t count her semi-endorsement of Newt Gingrich for president.

It’s hard to simply describe her endorsement strategy in 2010. Sometimes she took a flyer on a long shot, like Clint Didier in Washington; sometimes she weighed in relatively late on a sure thing, like Marco Rubio in Florida. Sometimes she campaigned avidly for candidates, like Nikki Haley in South Carolina; quite a few other times she just provided the Facebook Seal of Approval.

All in all, she was relatively shrewd in her choices, though mostly via endorsing viable conservative women to boost her Mama Grizzly brand. So it’s not clear whether she’s giving the nod to Mourdock because she thinks he’s going to win, or because she needs to keep up her wingnut street cred, and this is the first big primary battle of the year. We’ll know more if Mourdock wins, and/or if Palin weighs in on behalf of other promising “insurgents” like Ted Cruz in Texas or Don Stenberg in Nebraska.

It must seem to some readers like I’m writing far too much about religion-and-politics. I can only reply that I devoutly wish I could write about it less, but then every time I look at the news aggregators, there is a new militant statement from some religious authority on how “religious liberty” requires a fresh spurt of political activism.

One of the most remarkable things about the newly aggressive political posture of conservative clerics is how thoroughly they are willing to overlook centuries-old differences in doctrine, worship, ecclesiology, and (using a broad definition) ethics in order to create coalitions on cultural issues. Because the Catholic Bishops are in a panic over abortion, contraception and same-sex relationships, they are willing to walk-arm-in-arm with evangelicals who until the day before yesterday were describing the Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon—even as they wage war on their own “liberal” co-religionists, not to mention mainline Protestants who have far more in common with them on what used to be considered more fundamental matters. And in doing so, conservatives across every confessional line are putting aside profound differences on non-cultural political and ethical issues, such as the public social safety net for the poor. To cite one jarring example: Does it really matter if the Bishops harshly criticize Paul Ryan’s budget proposals if they are going to wind up encouraging the faithful to vote for the party and the presidential candidate championing them on grounds that Obama and Democrats threaten religious liberty itself by insufficiently deferring to the Church on insurance regulations? Probably not.

The latest chapter in this political realignment of clerics comes from the United Kingdom, per the Telegraph’s religion editor John Bingham:

Archbishop Antonio Mennini, the Apostolic Nuncio, called for closer co-operation with other faiths as well as Christian denominations to put pressure on the Government over its plans to allow same-sex couples to marry.

In an address to Catholic bishops from England and Wales, he echoed the recent comments of Pope Benedict who said the Church faced “powerful political and cultural currents” in favour of redefining marriage….

His comments come after a series of high-level interventions by some Muslim and Jewish leaders last month after the Equalities Minister, Lynne Featherstone, launched a national consultation on how same-sex marriage might be introduced.

Last month the Muslim Council of Britain voiced opposition to the plans, describing it as “unnecessary and unhelpful”.But, as the Islamic faith in Britain does not have the same hierarchical structures as Christian Churches, much of the Muslim opposition has been voiced through local alliances.

In Scotland, the Council of Glasgow Imams recently agreed a joint resolution describing same-sex marriage as an “attack” on their faith and fundamental beliefs.

Opinion in the Jewish community has been more sharply divided. The Liberal and Reform synagogues have given their support to same-sex marriage but rabbis within the main United Synagogues have expressed opposition.

It appears the Catholic hierarchy in Britain, with the support of the Vatican, is offering itself as an interfaith coordinator for resistence to same-sex marriage under the theory that it’s an “attack” on their common liberties.

I’m all for interfaith cooperation, and for extra-faith cooperation that includes people without faith. But is the desire of people to be treated equally like other people really the right occasion for it? Are ancient walls to be torn down strictly in order to build new ones?

So it would seem.

The ever-insightful Paul Starr has a fine meditation on the nature of compromise up at TNR, in the context of reviewing one book by political philospher Avishai Margalit and another by political scientists Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson. He discusses subjects ranging from the the slavery compromises of the late eighteenth century to the Yalta Treaty of 1945, but eventually arrives at the contemporary quandries over gridlock and compromise in American politics, which Gutmann and Thompson are especially anxious to resolve. You should read the whole review, but I wanted to draw attention to a stunning passage involving the consequences of earlier compromises over taxes and health care that still greatly affect our policy debates:

Consider two areas of policy, taxation and health care, that Gutmann and Thompson bring up repeatedly. Their example of a great compromise on tax policy is the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which cut the top marginal tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent. The law was supposed to simplify the tax code, but the complexity has since crept back, while effective tax rates on the upper brackets remain low. In retrospect, the 1986 legislation was one of the key steps in national policy contributing to increased income inequality….

When viewed broadly, the history of health policy does not provide much of a case for the virtues of compromise. Step by step, the United States has created the most complicated and expensive system in the world. In 1954, Congress codified a special tax benefit for people with employer-provided insurance. The great compromise of 1965 produced Medicare’s hospital insurance plan on one basis, Medicare physician coverage on another, and the Medicaid program—Representative Wilbur Mills’s famous “three-layered” cake, with all too much frosting on the top for the healthcare industry. Later compromises gave us a Children’s Health Insurance Program and a prescription drug program for seniors. Add in a myriad of private plans, and it is no wonder that administrative overhead runs so much higher in health care in the United States than in countries with a more coherent framework of national policy. In both health policy and the tax code, then, compromise has been the mother of complexity and unfairness.

Starr doesn’t specifically point this out, but it’s striking that in current Republican demands for a “deal” on taxes, the offer is to make rates even lower in exchange for getting rid of some of the loopholes that have steadily crept back into the code since 1986. When you add in the rate-lowering exercise Bush got through Congress using reconciliation during his first term, you have two rounds of rate-lowering accompanied by more and more “loopholes” mostly benefitting high earners, coupon-clippers and corporations. So the cumulative effect is that people favoring a progressive tax system are expected to compromise a third time on rates in order to restore key features of the earlier compromise which didn’t stick. It’s a very asymmetrical situation, to use the term that Starr and others have so often applied to the more general issues of partisan and ideological polarization.

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Sorry for the delay in posting, but just got into a bit of a Twitter spat with Jonathan Martin of Politico after tweeting that I was unafraid of Jeb Bush as Mitt’s running-mate.

In any event, whilst this was going on I stumbled on an awe-inspiringly vicious and thorough takedown of Tucker Carlson by Alex Pareene at Salon. As one of those Journo-Listers whose off-the-record quotes got taken wildly out of context in the Daily Caller’s signature exposure of the Vast Left-Wing Medica conspiracy, I can’t say that I shed any tears over Pareene’s evisceration of ol’ Tucker. But then I came across this line (warning: non-family-friendly content ahead!):

Like every other raging asshole who goes into journalism, Carlson idolized Hunter Thompson.

Now I was never much one to admire, much less emulate, Thompson’s—er, ah—“lifestyle choices,” and stopped reading him altogether way back in the 1980s when he pretty much became a parody of himself. But sorry, Alex, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 remains one of the best political books ever written, and made a positive difference if only because it blew up the Teddy White genre of “insider” campaign journalism once and for all (at least until Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes briefly and partially rehabilitated it, and then Game Change brought it right back).

In any event, I’ll assume Alex would agree that while all “raging assholes” may idolize Hunter Thompson, not everyone who idolizes Hunter Thompson is a “RA” his or her own self, and leave it at that.

And for those of you who are puzzled by this post because you haven’t read Thompson, or just know him as the inspiration for Garry Trudeau’s Uncle Duke (a development that Thompson himself blamed for ruining his career by making him a bigger celebrity than the politicians he was trying to write about), then go read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 and get back to me.

Even if the day is racing by, don’t forget your nutritional needs. A few appetizers:

* Conservatives are pointing to a 2003 news report that Mitt Romney and his family saved a Scottish Terrier—not to mention six human beings—from possible death after a boating accident in 2003. Allahpundit calls the story a “gamechanger” in the campaign. Seriously.

* Nate Silver argues that polls showing close race in Arizona are indicator that Obama’s ahead nationally, not that the state itself is suddenly a “swing state.”

* Wisconsin courts make it clear that state’s new voter ID law will not be in effect for recall election.

* Turns out ALEC’s friends in SC legislature quietly passed law exempting the group from lobbyist ethics requirements.

* House passes GOP version of CISPA despite White House veto threat.

And in non-political news:

* You can read an actual debate at HuffPost about whether Kanye really likes Kim.

I’ll be back soon, but for those watching the clock and anticipating the weekend, here’s a vintage video from The Vapors, better known as the New Wave band that was “Turning Japanese.”

Yesterday I noted Greg Sargent’s prediction that the maneuverings of House Republicans on the student loan interest rate issue might come to resemble their notably unsuccessful meanuverings on the payroll tax, with hard-core conservatives refusing to support the party line even as Democrats remained united.

It looks like Greg may have had a very good point, based on this report from The Hill’s Cameron Joseph:

The well-funded, fiscally conservative Club for Growth has urged House Republicans to vote against legislation that would extend lower interest rates on federal student loans, a move that could complicate Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) plan to pass the legislation on Friday.

“The federal government should not be in the business of distorting the market for student loans,” said Club for Growth President Chris Chocola. “Decades of government intervention have driven tuition costs to record highs, and continuing these subsidies is simply bad policy. We urge members of Congress to oppose them.”

The group said it would include the vote in its legislative scorecard, which it uses to decide which Republicans it should challenge in primaries.

I’m sure Boehner and his team are frantically reminding House conservatives that the vote is not necessarily designed to actually affect student loan interest rates, but rather to share the blame with Democrats, because it’s nestled in the poison pill of a provision offsetting the cost by raiding a health prevention fund created by ObamaCare. As Joseph notes, that’s why Democrats are expected to vote as a bloc against the House bill. If, however, conservatives begin to bail on Boehner and the bill goes down, the expected Senate bill without the poison pill will become the only vehicle for avoiding the interest rate hike, and then Republicans really do have a big problem.

I’m sure Boehner would prefer to accelerate the weekend and get out on the links for a smoke and some rays.

Well, I suppose I should be excited by the long parade of Jeb Bush friends and associates who’ve told Politico’s Jonathan Martin that he emphatically does not want to be Mitt Romney’s running-mate. After all, according to Martin, Jebbie is “the GOP vice presidential pick that Democrats fear most — a brassy choice who would likely deliver his crucial home state, boost the ticket with Hispanics and Catholics and appeal to both conservatives and independents.” Even “Obama’s high command” knows “Bush would effectively take Florida off the map,” so who am I to suggest otherwise?

There is this little problem that the only empirical data we have on Jebbie’s immense power to deliver his home state, a recent PPP poll, suggests he’d only move the needle from a 45-50 deficit to a 46-49 deficit. And beyond Florida, there is a pretty widespread perception that a GOP nominee who (a) wants to keep voters from thinking even for a moment about George W. Bush and the mess he left the economy in, and (b) is part of a party that now considers the 43d president a big-spending, immigrant-coddling heretic who betrayed conservative principles, would probably like JB a lot better if he campaigned like Madonna, with no last name.

Interestingly, the only time that perception comes up in Martin’s piece is via the concern that dynastic issues might create pressure on Jebbie to pledge he’d never run for president. “But Bush’s loyalists dismiss such a ploy as a nonstarter.” Why do that when you and half the party wishes that you, not Mitt, was at the top of the ticket to begin with?

In any event, Jeb hasn’t issued a Sherman Statement just yet, so maybe we should all remain very afraid.

NOTE: My references to “Jebbie” may seem to violate my earlier foreswearance of mocking diminutives for conservative politicians, notably Rick (formerly “Ricky”) Santorum. I deploy this term for the former governor of Florida only because it is reportedly how he is addressed by his mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush, who also reportedly was grooming him, not his older brother, to become president. It’s worth remembering that we have the late Lawton Chiles—who defeated Jeb Bush in his first gubernatorial bid in 1994, and thus took him off the table for a 2000 presidential run—to thank for the eight years of W.’s administration.

Having made my point, I’ll henceforth end the “Jebbie” references unless he publicly adopts the diminutive himself in an effort to make himself even cuddlier and more lovable than he is right now.

I didn’t comment initially on the death of Chuck Colson because I didn’t quite have the time to write an assessment commensurate with this man’s significance. Fortunately, Sarah Posner has done it for us in a solid profile at Salon, making it clear that Colson’s greatest impact was at the very end of his long life—and God help us, well beyond it.

Colson was one of the drafters of the 2009 manifesto, the Manhattan Declaration, which, in hindsight, forecast how the religious right would react to the HHS mandate. Assembled by what was billed as an ecumenical group of evangelicals, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, it was released at the height of the legislative showdown over the Stupak Amendment, offered at the behest of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to eliminate nonexistent federal funding of abortions. The signatories — today they number over half a million — pledged unspecified civil disobedience in response to laws they assert violate religious liberty, the “sanctity of life” and “the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.”

In the Manhattan Declaration, victims are not women who can’t access healthcare or a gay couple that can’t get married. The victims are Christians, and their freedom from laws not crafted from a biblical worldview.

Colson was also co-founder, along with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (another recently deceased religious figure whose vast influence just keeps increasing) of Catholics and Evangelicals Together, a group that has taken the beachhead of cooperation on the abortion issue and widened it into an alliance encompassing its founders’ unusually aggressive approach to the meaning of “religious liberty.” Some may recall that Neuhaus caused a very big stir in 1996 by suggesting that a “regime” that legalized abortion and same-sex relationships might well forfeit any obligation of obedience from godly citizens. It’s no accident that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ recent “statement on religious liberty” approvingly cites a similar manifesto from CET.

Indeed, the agitation surrounding the contraception coverage mandate clearly reflects the bizarre analogy, indirectly suggested by Neuhaus and directly argued by Colson, that this new conservative religious coalition is like the German Confessing Church, simply declaring its allegience to Christ in the face of totalitarian persecution. Notes Posner:

Colson had the audacity to compare America to Nazi Germany, and to urge his listeners to read Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” which he called “prophetic in its application to today … The destruction of civil society has always been prelude to a totalitarian government.”

To people unfamiliar with or uninterested in Colson’s enormous influence in recent years, he’ll always be remembered as the ugly face of Watergate, the proud thug who went to prison for his misdeeds and there found faith, subsequently establishing a prison ministry. But that was simply the prologue to Colson’s true calling as a self-proclaimed martyr leading others to demand theocracy in the name of liberty.

I didn’t write yesterday about the reports that Newt Gingrich was going to shut down his campaign, since it hadn’t really happened yet, and I figured Newt would milk the final moment for all it was worth.

Sure enough, as Mark Leibovich of the New York Times reports, Gingrich is still roaming around North Carolina, pretending to be a presidential candidate just like he’s pretended to be president-in-waiting all these years since he was forced from the speakership:

One of the quirky indulgences of modern campaigns is that candidates announce their intent to run for president on multiple occasions — essentially, stunts to milk media attention. They announce the formation of exploratory committees, announce that they intend to run, announce that they are actually running, etc.

Ever the innovator, Mr. Gingrich has applied that ritual to quitting. While he has had no realistic chance of overtaking Mr. Romney for several weeks, he maintained until recently that he would stay in the race all the way to the Republican National Convention.

But at some point, Mr. Gingrich started referring to the race in the past tense. He shed nearly all of his staff. He pinned his hopes on Tuesday’s primary in tiny Delaware, saying that he would reassess if he lost — which he did, by almost 30 points.

On Wednesday, Mr. Gingrich indicated that he would suspend the campaign next week with a speech. He will offer some form of official endorsement of Mr. Romney.

A familiar analogy is to the Japanese soldiers who turned up in remote areas long after August 1945 and had no idea that World War II had ended. But Mr. Gingrich knows his war is over, and while not exactly fighting, he is not surrendering yet, either. His wife, Callista, was appearing at events nearby.

It must be weird for regular folks to run into Newt or Callista right now. What do you say to them? “Thanks for the memories?” “Have you had to hock the jewelry yet?” “Please go away?” “Can I call your care-giver for you?” “Is that a Secret Service agent with you, and am I paying for that?”

Leibovich offered a vignette from a custom racing car factory that Gingrich was visiting for no obvious reason:

“This is absolutely astonishing,” he said, transfixed while caressing a gray engine block in a prototyping lab. He walked slowly across a factory floor that resembled one of those blinding white rooms in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. The place was largely vacant, as many employees had decamped to Brazil for a big race this weekend.

Mr. Gingrich gave a thumbs-up to a guy driving by on a maintenance cart and popped his head into an office. “Hi, I’m Newt,” he said to the startled occupant, Felicia Thomas. “I know who you are,” she said.

He lingered, in no rush at all.

Leibovich probably used the stranded-Japanese-soldier-fighting-on analogy because zombie metaphors are just too obvious as he watches Newt shamble along with no particular place to go. At some point, even if Gingrich doesn’t get around to officially announcing the end of his campaign, the Secret Service protection will be pulled, and we’ll all forget about him until he figures out a new way to give us one more chance to regard him as our Churchill.

As somewhat lower-than-expected first quarter GDP figures begin to sink in today, we’re going to hear another chorus of cries from conservatives that Obama’s economic policies have failed, and that what this economy needs is a good dose of—austerity!

No, that’s not the word they will use, of course, but claims that the “debt crisis” is America’s number one problem, or that “business confidence” needs a boost via assurances that the “debt crisis” will be addressed, or that government is soaking up resources that the private sector requires for long-term growth, etc. etc: that all adds up to the “A word.” And as Paul Krugman points out, we’ve already had a strong taste of it thanks to retrenchment of state and local governments over the last three years:

For the past two years most policy makers in Europe and many politicians and pundits in America have been in thrall to a destructive economic doctrine. According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should — by spending more to offset falling private demand — but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.

The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.

It’s a point that needs to be raised and repeated so long as neo-Hooverism persists: austerity is its own punishment; it hasn’t boosted growth in Europe, and it won’t boost growth here. If you want smaller government as an end in itself, fine, just say so. But don’t call it an economic growth strategy, because it’s not one.

UPDATE: This Atrios quote about sums it up the campaign for austerity: “I might actually prefer evil. This is mostly just stupid.”