One of the themes I’ve been talking about since November 6 is the frantic search of Republicans in Washington for something, anything to change other than its ideology in order to improve its political standing. There’s endless talk of technology, tactics, outreach efforts, and minor tweaks in selected policy positions involving non-core issues like immigration (where the “change” Republicans are timidly considering actually just involves a partial return to policies championed by the George W. Bush). But none of the real stuff on taxes, entitlements, education, the environment, labor policy, anti-discrimination laws, abortion, foreign policy—or for that matter, the belief that “socialists” are taking the country straight to hell.

Well, maybe they think Democratic errors and a much more congenial midterm electorate in 2014 will save their bacon. But that’s a less compelling excuse in states where the GOP is not only losing ground but has become virtually irrelevant—most notably the largest state, Ronald Reagan’s state, California.

With that in mind I was interested to read an assessment from the veteran reporters at Calbuzz of the most promising and ambitious of candidates to become the new California GOP chairman, a former legislator named Jim Brulte. It’s generally a very positive account of his tripartite strategy for party renewal that includes rebuilding its fundraising infrastructure, focusing on grassroots organization in parts of the state where Republicans are under-performing, and recruiting candidates for local offices now going to Democrats by default. But then there’s this:

[T]he California GOP’s problem isn’t just a failure to communicate - it’s the underlying message that’s being communicated that’s a problem. The GOP brand is poison - among most white voters but especially among Latinos, Asians and black voters. Oh, and women. This is because as long as the Republican federal and state officeholders and candidates espouse misogynistic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, no-tax-ever ideology, no amount of lipstick will gussie up that pig.

It will be endlessly entertaining to watch Chairman Brulte handle the screwball California Republican Assembly members who want to introduce resolutions for the CRP to adopt at its conventions, declaring that any candidate who votes for any tax increase or any candidate who supports choice or a pathway to citizenship cannot have GOP backing.

Brulte can fix the operational flaws in the California GOP — and his election as chairman would mark a huge leap forward for the state party. But until the Republicans in California — especially those seeking to represent legislative districts at all levels — moderate their politics to more closely align with the mainstream of political thought in the state, The California Republican Party will remain a pariah. No matter who’s chairman.

In other words, if the steak is tough and unappetizing to the taste, all the sizzle in the world won’t make people buy it. If Republicans haven’t figured that out in California, where they are on life support, I’m not sure if they’ll figure it out anywhere absent a few more electoral beatings.

* Daniel Drezner makes the abundantly good point that if holding the debt limit hostage is a bad idea now, it will be a bad idea a few months down the road.

* Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith reports that the insane theory the administration engineered the Newtown massacre to build support for gun regulation is going viral in the wingnutosphere.

* Gallup finds 61% of self-identified Republicans favor abolition of the Electoral College. This should be reported to GOP pols trying to keep the College and then rig it.

* Paul Krugman argues federal deficits won’t be a serious problem for decades—unless we fail to take actions to spur economic recovery.

* Mickey Kaus shows signs of getting obsessive about bashing Ezra Klein. Methinks this will turn out about as well for Mickey as his Senate campaign.

* Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin indicted on 21 corruption charges.

And in non-political news:

* Chinese e-commerce billionaire steps down from CEO position because he’s “too old” to run internet-focused business at 48. This makes me laugh bitterly.

Back to blogging after my bitter laughter subsides.

I was just about to perform, as a public service, another deconstruction of another David Brooks column. But Jonathan Chait beat me to the punch by a country mile, and left little to be said in the ruins of Brooks’ argument.

You should savor Chait’s joyfully vicious logic at your leisure, but he does make one point worth underlining as a general indictment of the “reasonable Republicans” who admit the extremism of their party’s dominate elements but lash out at the opposition in their agony:

The prevalent expression of this psychological pain is the belief that President Obama is largely or entirely responsible for Republican extremism. It’s a bizarre but understandable way to reconcile conflicting emotions — somewhat akin to blaming your husband’s infidelity entirely on his mistress. In this case, moderate Republicans believe that Obama’s tactic of taking sensible positions that moderate Republicans agree with is cruel and unfair, because it exposes the extremism that dominates the party, not to mention the powerlessness of the moderates within it.

Just as conservatives want Obama to provide cover for their unpopular “entitlement reform” proposals, Republican “moderates” want Obama to give them the power they so completely lack by offering deals to the GOP that don’t offend the Right and give the “moderates” a position as brokers.

What I don’t understand is the extraordinarily blind conviction that the only reason these “moderates” have no power is the absence of deals on the table, which, because they can only be supplied by Democrats must be supplied by Democrats. This ignores the half-century story of the rise of the conservative movement and its eventual conquest of the GOP, which has nothing to do with “deal-making” and everything to do with repealing most of the policy legacy of the twenty-first century, as created by both parties. Perhaps some fine day, after the 100th “RINO Purge” primary or the millionth op-ed denouncing Republican “surrender” to socialism and secularism, David Brooks will wake up and figure out that movement-conservative types view people like him as dinosaurs who belongs on the ash heap of history. In the mean-time, Chait is right: progressives may sympathize with Brooks’ agony, but we have no responsibility to sabotage our own aspirations for the country to salvage his.

A new study has been published by the U.S. Military Academy’s Combatting Terrorism Center analyzing the potential threat of far-right groups espousing violence to achieve their goals.

Like a DHS-authorized study in 2009 on the same topic, this paper is drawing predictable outrage in right-wing circles (though it’s not clear yet whether the pressure will produce denials and apologies from the administration, as happened in 2009).

Here’s the lurid description of the West Point study by Rowan Scaraborough of the Washington Times:

The West Point center typically focuses reports on al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists attempting to gain power in Asia, the Middle East and Africa through violence. But its latest study turns inward and paints a broad brush of people it considers “far right.”

It says anti-federalists “espouse strong convictions regarding the federal government, believing it to be corrupt and tyrannical, with a natural tendency to intrude on individuals’ civil and constitutional rights. Finally, they support civil activism, individual freedoms, and self government. Extremists in the anti-federalist movement direct most their violence against the federal government and its proxies in law enforcement.”

The report also draws a link between the mainstream conservative movement and the violent “far right,” and describes liberals as “future oriented” and conservatives as living in the past.

And here’s the pivot from carping to freaking-out, courtesy of some anonymous GOP congressional staffer:

A Republican congressional staffer who served in the military told The Washington Times: “If [the Defense Department] is looking for places to cut spending, this junk study is ground zero.

“Shouldn’t the Combating Terrorism Center be combating radical Islam around the globe instead of perpetuating the left’s myth that right-wingers are terrorists?” the staffer said. “The $64,000 dollar question is when will the Combating Terrorism Center publish their study on real left-wing terrorists like the Animal Liberation Front, Earth Liberation Front, and the Weather Underground?”

As a matter of fact, most government-backed analyses of domestic terrorism threats cover left-wing and right-wing extremists together, and the FBI did a particular study on “eco-terrorism” quite recently. This is aside from classified materials, and the rather robust interest of federal law enforcement authorities in left-oriented anarchist groups.

But putting aside the question of “balance” in studying different kinds of terrorism threats, is there a reason experts should be particularly concerned about right-wing activity right now? Gee, think it could have something to do with the constant assertions, even in respectable conservative periodicals, that “patriots” need to stockpile military weapons in order to undertake (if so dictated by their perceptions of endangered essential “liberties,” which may include freedom from Obamacare or from progressive taxes) the violent overthrow of the United States government?

The conservative movement really does need to distance itself from “right to revolution” talk, particularly when connected to absolutist notions of “legitimate” or “American” governing models for the nation. If that’s too much to ask, then conservatives need to stop carping every time the rest of us get a little worried about armed-to-the-teeth wingnuts shrieking hatred at the duly elected U.S. government.

In drawing up the agenda for the House Republican retreat underway in Williamsburg, I am very confident in asserting that organizers did not for a moment consider America’s preeminent number-cruncher, Nate Silver, as a potential presenter. He is, after all, still being punished for correctly predicting the outcomes of the last two presidential elections.

That’s too bad, because the solons might have learned something—and not just about public opinion. Earlier this week Nate put up a post at FiveThirtyEight that analyzed government spending over time and as a percentage of gross domestic product. You can and should read the whole thing, but I want to draw attention to four particular findings by Nate that are very important as we enter the annual season of national agonizing over federal spending.

The first, and best-known, data point, is that the growth of “entitlement spending” in recent years has very much been the product of a health care cost spiral that has equally affected public and private spending. That’s significant because progressives tend to favor more government intervention to stabilize health care costs (while expanding coverage), while conservatives tend to favor privatization (while abandoning or paying little attention to a goal of universal coverage that used to be a bipartisan totem). Both sides claim their policy prescriptions will break the cost spiral, but in case that doesn’t happen right away, progressives favor socializing the costs through mandatory cost-sharing in private markets and progressive taxes in the public sector, while conservatives favor shifting costs to consumers (or in the case of public programs, beneficiaries) on the theory that Americans should take greater “personal responsibility” for health care.

These are diametrically opposed approaches based on different philosophies, policy goals, and readings of empirical reality. Compromising between them could produce outcomes perverse to both points of view.

The second data point I’d like to highlight is that of all the contributors to “runaway federal spending,” the item that can’t be blamed at the moment is interest on the national debt, which as Nate points out represent less than half the level of 1991 as a percentage of GDP. So for all the endless talk of an unsustainable debt burden that will blight the lives and crush the souls of our children and grandchildren, persistently low interest rates (themselves a refutation of the claim that financial markets are panicked about debt) have made federal borrowing a bargain.

The third often-forgotten fact is that although defense spending is much lower as a percentage of GDP than it was at the height of the Cold War, it’s still a lot of money for a nation in relatively peaceful times, and currently represents 24% of federal spending, up from 20% just a decade ago.

And finally, Nate’s analysis illustrates the remarkably little-understood fact that much of what we think of as “government spending”—the vast array of non-entitlement federal programs that deal with everything from roads and bridges to schools and prisons and environmental protection efforts—represent a very small (2.5% of the budget in 2011) and generally stable (less as a percentage of GDP than it was in the early 1970s) share of the federal budget and of GDP.

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As House Republicans sit through presentations and discussions about their immediate and long-term fate in Williamsburg this weekend, the buzzkill background includes not only the 2012 election results and the strategic and tactical traps they seem to keep entering in negotiating with the White House on fiscal issues—but also current polling, which is not friendly.

The latest big poll from NBC/WSJ confirms the bad news. One of those mood-ring polls that mainly test how Americans are feeling about this and that, its approval rating numbers are an extended reality check for House GOPers. Interestingly enough, the president’s job approval ratio (52/44) is now very similar to his personal favorability ratio (52/37). This wasn’t the case during much of his first term, when the job approval numbers were often significantly lower. The “how do you feel about” numbers for the GOP are simply dreadful: the party as a whole is at 26/49; John Boehner is at 18/37; and the Tea Party Movement that has a mortgage on the GOP’s soul is at 23/47. The one major political figure with higher public standing than Obama right now is the woman most likely to be his successor as the Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton (56/25, with a job approval rating of 69/25).

You never know, but it’s doubtful the GOP numbers are going to improve in the short term, as reflected in the reality that the retreating House Members are debating whether to sullenly accept the president’s position on the debt limit, or to threaten to destroy the U.S. economy unless wildly popular retirement and health care programs are cut. And the main help on the way (unless it’s in the “looming Dem divide” that Politico is ritualistically trumpeting today) is a midterm election in which Republican fortunes improve because fewer people vote.

But at least they’ll leave Williamsburg with the benefit of some sage political advice, and will mutter to themselves as they return to Washington: “Don’t talk about rape. Don’t talk about rape.”

The big topic of the morning seems to be the reports beginning to leak out of Williamsburg, Virginia from the House GOP’s three-day “retreat.” With the exception of a few availabilities offered to a strictly sequestered press corps, this is very much a closed event, but obviously various participants want to make sure whatever happens is either well-known or thoroughly misunderstood.

I don’t know if any of you have been to one of these these high-level-elected-official meetings, but they are all about the same, depending on how substantive the particular sponsors want things to feel and look (apparently the poor weather at this Williamsburg event is keeping the Members indoors and away from the golf links and tennis courts and tourist attractions). I used to staff governors’ conferences at least twice a year, and it was always a game to see how boring we could make it all sound so that no one would get the impression the workaholic chief executives were having fun. So in Williamsburg as in other such events, the pols will sit around in their unused golf clothes, alternatively enjoying the “frank,” unreported conversation and being reminded every word said will eventually be repeated by someone next week over lunch.

For the non-elected presenters at such events, the game is to simultaneously convey a sense of solidarity with the solons—you know, they’re all on the same team, even though some of them are there because hundreds of thousands of people voted for them while others are just relatively high on the greasy pole of Beltway gabbing—and flatter them, courtier-like, with the awe-inspiring nature of the challenges they face and the examples of such “peers” as Lincoln, Jesus Christ and Gandhi.

The mood of the Williamsburg retreat is probably best indicated by the fact the Members have already had sessions where Kellyanne Conway told them to stop talking about rape, and Domino’s Pizza CEO Patrick Doyle talked about “selling a damaged brand to a modern audience.”

Unless the retreat produces some sort of real consensus for a strategy on dealing with the debt limit, or someone gets drunk and falls into the James River, those could wind up being the highlights when the whole deal is over. I am genuinely glad I’m not one of those “real journalists” being watched by security guards at this event, and trying to coax a compelling story line from disinformation and pablum.

Feeling solidarity with all the folks who have to get up in the dark to go to work. Here’s DC’s own Nighthawks performing “Sixteen Tons” at the Brass Monkey Blues Festival in 1984.

There actually wasn’t a lot of political news today, but it was fun to deal with some hardy perennial subjects. Here’s what I’ve got for remainders:

* Fox renews Karl Rove’s contract as “analyst” through 2016. He did such a bang-up job on election night, after all.

* Seems questioning Pakistan’s blasphemy laws can get you accused of blasphemy, as Pakistan’s ambassador to U.S. is discovering.

* At TAP, Paul Starr extensively reviews Obama’s second-term policy options in immigration, health care and climate change.

* At Ten Miles Square, Do Hyun Kim explores the many mansions of U.S. wealth inequality.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer discusses reasons journalists were suckered into the Manti T’eo “fake girlfriend” story.

And in non-political news:

* “Dear Abby” dies at 94.

Continuing my recent practice of ending the day with a musical group or theme deployed at the beginning, here’s more Allman Brothers, performing “Trouble No More” at JazzFest in 2010.

Selah.

If pro-choice Americans—or whatever it is we’re supposed to call ourselves—are a bit hung up on the word “choice,” their opponents have a problem with a very different word: rape. Seems lately that every time you turn around some conservative pol is tying himself into knots or nuking his approval ratings by highly nuanced arguments either denying the “legitimacy” of rapes that produce pregnancies, or treating rape-generated pregnancies as the rape victim’s mandatory gift to the world.

So unsurprisingly, as Politico’s Jake Sherman and Bresnahan report, the GOP’s highly paid consultants are advising Republicans to STFU about rape already:

It’s way past time: House Republicans need to stop talking about rape.

That’s the message GOP lawmakers got here Wednesday evening from Kellyanne Conway, a top GOP pollster.

Conway dispensed the stern advice as part of a polling presentation she made alongside fellow GOP pollsters David Winston — an adviser to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — and Dave Sackett. The comment was described by several sources in the room.

Conway said rape is a “four-letter word,” and Republicans simply need to stop talking about it in their races for office.

This is why Kellyanne pulls down the big bucks.

But she probably understands that there’s a reason for the right-wing obsession over abortion-and-rape, aside from porcine indifference to women’s sensitivities.

Once you decide that women’s bodies instantly become nothing more than incubators for Sovereign Citizens at the moment an ovum is fertilized, then the only logical position is to oppose abortion in all cases other than one where the incubator’s life is so endangered that she can plead self-defense. Pregnancies caused by rape or incest may be horrifying to a lot of people—most notably the victims of rape or incest—but that’s how the metaphysical cookie crumbles, if not a sign that God is a Dude with a rather instrumental view of women.

For many of the same people who believe regulating military weapons is the first step down the slippery slope to Auschwitz, making exceptions to the abortion-is-murder-unless-it’s-self-defense is morally and intellectually intolerable. And so they fret about the possibility that women will escape the necessity of doing their reproductive duty by getting themselves raped or preyed upon by a family member.

This issue is, of course, only the tip of a crazy jagged iceberg. The same folk that oppose interfering with pregnancies caused by rape have a strong tendency to believe tens of millions of Sovereign Citizens of this country are murdered every year via methods of “contraception” that in theory or practice interfere with the growth and the opportunity for eternal salvation of fertilized ova. They don’t tend to talk about that a lot in public (even without Kellyanne Conway’s advice), since the number of “murderers” involved would make a Mafia summit look like an evening at Chuckie Cheese. But that’s the ideology (which so many treat as religious, frequently by way of confusing patriarchal traditions with the Will of God) we are dealing with here.

There’s been some buzz the last week or so about the announcement by Planned Parenthood that it’s dropping use of the term “pro-choice” to describe its position on abortion and related issues. I don’t know at this point if the leadership of that brave and besieged group shares the long-standing concerns of some advocates of reproductive rights that the term sounds like one better confined to consumer discretion or conservative education proposals—or is simply less powerful than the “pro-life” brand deployed by the anti-reproductive rights coalition. The Anna North Buzzfeed article reporting the change (via interviews with Planned Parenthood leaders) seems to indicate the main problem was that “pro-choice” doesn’t poll very well:

Polling conducted on Planned Parenthood’s behalf appears to show some dissatisfaction with the labels. In one 2012 poll, 35% of voters who identified as pro-life also believed Roe v. Wade should not be overturned (7% of pro-choice voters, meanwhile, thought it should be). And in an online survey of recent voters, 12% said they were both pro-life and pro-choice, and another 12% said they wouldn’t use those terms. When asked for their moral opinions on abortion, 40% of those voters said “it depends on the situation” — far more than called the procedure either acceptable or unacceptable.

At Slate Amanda Marcotte argues that however it polls, “pro-choice” is the most accurate term for the issues dividing supporters and opponents of reproductive rights. Besides, it’s an emblem worth fighting for:

The only real choice you have is to label yourself or let others do it for you, and of those two options, smart folks will pick the former every time.

Also at Slate, Katie Roiphe cheers Planned Parenthood decision to abandon a “bourgeois” term that over-simplifies attitudes towards abortion policy (she prefers “pro-freedom,” though it’s even less precise, and there would be a mighty big fight with the Tea Folk over that one). But even she acknowledges that abandoning “anti-choice” for the opposition would be a shame.

A big part of the problem with Planned Parenthood’s poll-driven approach to this subject is that the group may be missing a big opportunity for educating people about what “choice” means. The “depends on the circumstances” answer that keeps showing up in polls on abortion should be very troubling to reproductive rights advocates, since it implies there are subjective motives (i.e., reasons for abortions that are and aren’t “acceptable”) that if properly identified should govern actual policies backed by state compulsion. Marcotte nails it:

The correct term for people who want abortion to be decided on a case-by-case basis is pro-choice, unless, of course, these focus-group participants imagine a panel to which each woman has to make her case in order to determine if she’s a good enough girl to avoid punishment by forced childbirth.

Yes, public opinion on abortion is often “nuanced.” But the question of who decides really isn’t.

So who wants to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016? It’s been rumored for a while that the junior United States Senator from Kentucky is very interested.

But if so, Rand Paul has some fences to mend. And he’s been working on one via a trip to Israel last week, where he sought to offset his long-standing demands for reduced U.S. aid to Israel (and everybody else) with all sorts of sympathetic noises about Israel’s own policies, as explained by the New York Sun’s Seth Lipsky:

In Jerusalem last week, the senator met a broad range of leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres, as well as Naftali Bennett, a rising right-wing leader aligned with the settler movement.

The Jerusalem Post quoted Paul addressing questions about what Israel should do about the settlements and Gaza. “Well,” he replied, “America should and does have an opinion about these things, but ultimately these are decisions you have to make.”

There hasn’t been such a supportive comment on Israel’s settlements in the West Bank and in Jerusalem since Sarah Palin last spoke on the subject. Her comments drove the left up the wall.

Paul also voiced support on Gaza: “I don’t think you need to call me on the phone and get permission to stop missiles raining down from Gaza.” He seems to want Israel to have a free hand in its own affairs, which dovetails with his wariness on foreign aid.

Indeed. It’s one thing to say you have no issues with Israel going to war with Iran, and another altogether to promise to join right in. But I guess Paul’s doing what he can do to perform the maneuver famously described in the Nixon White House Tapes as a “modified limited hangout” by going as far as he can go, even if he’ll never earn the trust of neocon foreign policy types.

And that may not matter a lot for someone more interested in the good opinion of the people at Pizza Ranches in Iowa than in the offices of The Weekly Standard. The Iowa Republican reports that Paul’s entourage in the trip to Israel—itself sponsored by the famously homophobic social conservative group the American Family Association—was chock-a-block with Iowa Christian Right stalwarts:

The trip was arranged by the American Family Association and included 53 prominent evangelicals and conservative activists. Among them: RPI Chairman A.J. Spiker, Iowa National Committeewoman Tamara Scott and Pastor Brad Sherman, who played a key role in Mike Huckabee’s 2008 Iowa campaign … South Carolina’s GOP Chairman Chad Connelly was also on the trip.

Who cares if William Kristol or Jennifer Rubin considers you an Enemy of Israel if the real “Israel Lobby” in the GOP, the Christian Right, disagrees? Not Rand Paul.

Got several longer posts out of the way, w/ more to come, I fear. Here are some mid-day news treats:

* At TAP, Jamelle Bouie looks at promising new BLS data on jobless claims.

* ThinkProgress has rundown of conservative pols calling for Obama’s impeachment over gun issue.

* Voteview’s analysis of votes in 112th Congress shows continuation of “asymmetric polarization.”

* Dep. National Security Advisor Denis McDonough reportedly slated to become White House Chief of Staff.

* On Times’ op-ed page, former conservative Australian prime minister John Howard offers advice to Obama on how to enact new gun laws. But—but—American exceptionalism!

And in non-political news:

* Second-day Manti T’eo/imaginary girlfriend story just as confused as ever, though a lot of people aren’t buying the “victim of a hoax” line.

Back after dealing with some household repairs.

The desire to label people and phenomena is an inherent aspect of political analysis. And I don’t question Noam Scheiber’s effort at TNR to make distinctions between different varieties of House Republicans when it comes to things like their willingness to send the U.S. economy into a tailspin via a debt default.

But the labels themselves really do matter. And I would object to the neat characterization of House GOPers as falling into three equivalent baskets of “moderates, pragmatic conservatives, and hard-core conservatives.”

The moderates have to run in closely divided districts and prefer to hew to the center when possible. The pragmatic conservatives tend to be in somewhat safer seats. But because they’re in a stronger position politically when their party is more popular, they have an interest in boosting the party’s overall image with voters. Finally, the hard-core conservatives are either jihadi extremists who value ideological purity above all, or pols who worry more about potential primary challengers than their general election opponents. They have no problem if the party is scorned nationally so long as they preserve their conservative bona fides.

Calling any House Republican in a competitive district a “moderate” is both dangerous and wrong. Allen West was in a competitive district. Michele Bachmann is in a competitive district. Even Steve King of Iowa had to run a serious campaign this last cycle, and was by no means guaranteed victory. These were arguably the three most extreme Members of the House Caucus. Thanks to both partisan polarization and gerrymandering, the two parties rely far less than they used to on winning elections in “enemy territory” where triangulation against the extremists in one’s own party might be politically useful.

As for the “pragmatic conservatives” (presumably led by John Boehner), exactly how much pragmatism can be attributed to the decision not to blow up the economy? Before we start assigning degrees of reasonableness to these people, let’s remember the history of the last few years and what might have happened if the 2012 elections had turned out just a bit differently. A grand total of one House Republican voted for Obamacare, which was based on a classic “pragmatic conservative” health care model first developed by the Heritage Foundation. That was Joseph Cao, who won an overwhelmingly Democratic district in Louisiana after the incumbent got caught hiding big piles of cash in his freezer. He’s not around any more. No Senate Republicans voted for the legislation. Yes, they may have differed on this or that issue, but how can you call anyone a “moderate” who rejected Obamacare?

Now you can claim that this vote was dictated by partisanship rather than ideology, and thus didn’t represent the actual views of “moderates.” But that sends us down the rabbit hole of trying to deduce the “actual views” of pols who when push comes to shove tend to vote with the “extremists.”

Consider an even more fundamental issue than Obamacare: the Ryan Budget, an “extremist” blueprint for the entire federal government if ever there was one. Four House Republicans voted against it in April of 2011, at least three of them because it didn’t go far enough in immediately slashing domestic spending: i.e., it was not extreme enough. A revised version of the Ryan Budget lost ten Republican votes in March of 2012. Again, a majority of “no” votes came from hard-core conservatives who thought it was namby-pamby.

Had Mitt Romney won the presidency and his party the Senate, it is a lead-pipe cinch that GOPers would have enacted the Ryan Budget via budget reconciliation rules (Romney explicitly said he’d sign it, as part of the ideological vetting process that led to his nomination, whatever his constant tinkering with positions on Medicare during the campaign implied. He also, as you probably noticed, put Ryan on the ticket). Moreoever, Romney, the very ideal of a “pragmatic conservative” (if not a moderate) signed the “Cut, Cap and Balance” Pledge that promised opposition to any debt limit increase unless a radically lower permanent cap on spending were enacted, reinforced by passage of a constitutional amendment. This latter commitment—reflecting support for the very foundation of the “extremist” position on the debt limit we’re dealing with right now—happened long after Romney had won the nomination; it was necessary, it can be assumed, to keep conservatives—and not the “pragmatic” kind—happy.

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