Is the GOP really divided?

The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza says the GOP primary shows a Republican party divided.  Really?“

The GOP is united on replacing President Obama and divided on the best way to do it,” said Matt McDonald, a Republican strategist who is unaffiliated in the 2012 race. “On the one hand, you have people who see motivating the base as the path to victory, and on the other hand, you have people who see reaching out to independents as the path to victory.”

Others express that sentiment slightly differently — “Our party is trying to choose between its head and its heart,” said Eric Ueland, a longtime Senate strategist — but what’s clear is that in a political world in which Republican voters want “both/and,” they are faced with “either/or.”

All the GOP candidates are claiming to be conservatives (it's not clear what Ron Paul is, but I don't consider him a serious candidate). Gingrich and Santorum are conservative, and while it's not even clear if Romney is even a Republican (or an adherent of any political philosophy at all), the policies he's espousing for this particular campaign are in fact conservative.

The problem is that GOP voters are divided between voting for real conservatives who don't have a chance in hell of beating President Obama in November, or a faux conservative who has a better chance of beating Obama.  Note what's missing: Liberal Republicans, moderate Republicans, and middle of the road Republicans.

No one can put up a serious run for the GOP nomination who doesn't align themselves with the far right of the party. On the Democratic side, all of our serious candidates have tended to be in the middle of the Democratic party, espousing some conservative views (Hillary was for the Iraq war) and some liberal (Obama was for a health care public option during the campaign but decided to move to the middle/conservative end of the Democratic party, and even further to the right, to govern).

Republicans don't move to the middle when they run for the primary and they don't move to the middle when they govern. There is diversity in the Democratic primary and Democratic governance - and if anything, Democrats are afraid to be seen as liberal, while there is no diversity at all among serious GOP presidential candidates and GOP governance.  You can't be a moderate (aka liberal) and get the GOP nomination, you can be a moderate (aka conservative) and get the Democratic.  Our party leans to the middle of the Democratic-Republican continuum, there's leans farther and farther to the far right.

What's telling about what Cillizza wrote is that the GOP divide isn't between moderate and conservative Republicans, it's between conservatives who want a real conservative and conservatives who want someone who can win, even if he's a phony. The moderates simply don't exist anymore in the GOP. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Turning the metro steps into a living piano

This is totally cool.  From a metro station in Stockholm.

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Big Oil execs barred from leaving Brazil following spill

Oil executives being held responsible for spilling oil and creating a natural disaster? What a novel idea.

A federal judge in Rio de Janeiro state granted a request from prosecutors who are pressing for charges against both firms, a spokesman for prosecutor Eduardo Oliveira said in a phone interview. George Buck, who heads Chevron's Brazil unit, and the other 16 executives must turn in their passports to the police within 24 hours, the spokesman said. Charges are expected to be filed on Tuesday or Wednesday, according to the prosecutors' press office. The court decision came a day after the Brazilian navy spotted a thin stain of oil extending for about 0.6 mile (1 km) in offshore field Frade, which was also the site of last year's spill. U.S.-based Chevron said in a statement it halted production at Frade on Saturday after winning permission from Brazilian oil industry regulator ANP.

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Police make arrests in Occupy protest

Here we go again. Is it possible for the NYPD to show any restraint or is being a bunch of hooligans simply what they do?

Police arrested dozens of Occupy Wall Street protesters on Saturday night during a protest marking the movement's six-month anniversary at its birthplace in New York's Zuccotti Park. The sweep of the park by police just before midnight capped a day of demonstrations and marching in lower Manhattan. There was no official word on the number of arrests but dozens of people were handcuffed and led out of the park. Earlier in the day, 15 people were arrested and three officers suffered injuries, police said.

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Rick Perlstein: Conservatives have always been this crazy

Rick Perlstein, having emerged from self-imposed radio silence onto the pages of Rolling Stone (yes, I know; mixed metaphor), is doing a weekly bang-up job — just in time for Clown Season.

His message this week: "Yes, Virginia; these really are your daddy's crazy conservatives."

It's a good-sized good article; here's a taste. After listing the old and the new (stunning parallels between 50s conservatives and our own lovable bunch), he notes (my emphasis and paragraphing):

Dr. Noebel's latest project is to republish a volume he apparently finds freshly relevant, Dr. Fred Schwarz's You Can Trust the Communists: To be Communists. Schwarz, an Australian physician who died three years ago, had his heyday in the early 1960s, when he would fill municipal auditoriums preaching his favorite gospel: that the Kremlin dominated its subjects by deploying "the techniques of animal husbandry," and harbored "plans for a flag of the USSR flying over every American city by 1973."

The new version, updated by Noebel – it comes with raves from grateful Amazon.com reviews, like this: "Just as important as it was 50 years ago"; and this: "Should be required reading for every American," and "This book made me a conservative" – is titled You Can Still Trust the Communists: To be Communists, Socialists, Statists, and Progressives Too.

Why does this matter? Because the notion that conservatism has taken a new, and nuttier, turn has influential adherents whose distortions derail our ability to understand and contain it.

In a recent New York Review of Books review of Corey Robin's ground-breaking book The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, which traces continuities in right-wing thought all the back to the seventeenth century, the distinguished political theorist Mark Lilla pronounced that "most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley."

So what did a "reality-based conservative" like Buckley make of Fred Schwarz? Reader, he blurbed him, praising the good doctor for "instructing the people in what their leaders so clearly don’t know." So, in fact, did Ronald Reagan, who in 1990 praised the quack's "tireless dedication in trying to ensure the protection of freedom and human rights."

And here's the late GOP heavyweight Jack Kemp, who wrote in praise of Schwarz's 1996 memoir (Reagan is pictured with Schwarz on the flap): "How much I appreciate the fact that as much as anybody, including President Reagan, President Bush, and Pope John Paul … [Dr. Schwarz] has had the opportunity to educate literally thousands of young men and women all over the world in the struggle for democracy and freedom and the struggle against the tyranny of Communism."

The "establishment conservatives," Reagan and Kemp, and the "nut," Dr. Fred Schwarz, were never so far apart after all.

You hear a lot about Ronald Reagan from the conservatives-are-nuttier-than-ever-before crowd: They praise him as a compromiser and point out, correctly, that he raised taxes seven of his eight years as president, in stark contrast to today's Republicans, who refuse to raise them at all.

Here's the thing, as I wrote amid the hosannas after he died in 2004, during the awful reign of Bush:

"It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater."

And so it goes: Reagan is now deemed one of those reality-based conservatives whose disappearance we now lament. Wrong.

Another excellent read; do check it out.

And Paul Krugman reminds us of this:



As always with Reagan, words aren't the point; bail on the audio if and when you like. But hey — shoulders you could land an airplane on. Look, rubes; manly.

GP

(To follow on Twitter or to send links: @Gaius_Publius)
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The Pogues - Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six

A classic song by The Pogues about the failed system of justice in the UK during The Troubles. My visit to Austin is over following a fun St. Patrick's Day where I had the opportunity to meet up with some old friends from many years ago. Texas may not be my ideal state, but Austin is a fabulous town with so much going for it. I can't wait to come back. Read the rest of this post...