There aren’t many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy.
A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being. “Has the G.O.P. gone insane?” they ask.
Why, yes, it has. But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades. Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye.
And may I say to those suddenly agonizing over the mental health of one of our two major parties: People like you bear some responsibility for that party’s current state.
And guess what? It isn’t just here in America people are starting to notice that these guys are bonkers. Here’s Das Bild:
“Playing poker is part of politics, as is theatrical posturing. That’s fair enough. But what America is currently exhibiting is the worst kind of absurd theatrics. And the whole world is being held hostage.
“Irrespective of what the correct fiscal and economic policy should be for the most powerful country on earth, it’s simply not possible to stop taking on new debt overnight. Most importantly, the Republicans have turned a dispute over a technicality into a religious war, which no longer has any relation to a reasonable dispute between the elected government and the opposition.”
“If it continues like this, the US will be bankrupt within a few days. It would cause a global shockwave like the one which followed the Lehman bankruptcy in 2008, which triggered the worst economic crisis since the war. Except it would be much worse than the Lehman bankruptcy. The political climate in the US has been poisoned to a degree that is hard for us (Germans) to imagine. But we should all fear the consequences.”
Way to go, wingnuts.
ciotog
I’ll bet the climate is a bit frosty in the Op-Ed wing of the Times today.
General Stuck
Good on Kthug for putting the onus where it belongs, on the republicans. And is precisely what Obama is trying to do, mud wresting with these mutts in the trenches, but of course drawing them out of their SS and medicare abolishing shell, by leaving everything on the table, is another Obama sellout. Never mind him telling us with a wink and nod, about every day, he intends no such sellout.
Violet
K-thug:
Bingo. It’s been going on for ages. What’s happening now is that the veneer of civility and responsibility has been pulled back and people can see who is really behind the green curtain.
c u n d gulag
About 15 years ago, there was this guy in our small city who was arrested for killing something like 8 hookers and storing them in the house where he lived with his mother and sister.
Some of the hookers had been dead for almost a decade, and he really didn’t do too much to prevent getting caught other than to try to hide them by burying them or stuffing them in the attic and cellar of the house, and occasionally throwing some bleach or lye around.
Neighbors complained about the stink for years, but police ignored it even when they came around – while still more hookers disappeared.
When he was finally caught, they asked his family how they could stand the stench. Their answer was that they got used to it.
The killer(s) in this story are the lunatics in the Republican Party, the family is the rest of the party, and the police are the MSM.
I think this is much better than the frog in hot water boiling to death analogy/parable.
Mudge
The aforementioned, fact free, conceptually challenged, crazies are already commenting on the Das Bild article. The first accuses the author of left-leaning, the usual meaningless code insult by the right, for presenting the facts. Even the Germans have noticed they are crazy, and they once again proudly flaunt their ignorance.
Baud
The only difference between the current GOP insanity and past GOP insanity as that this time the insanity is threatening those commentators’ personal finances rather than some invisible group of Americans. In their closed world, that isn’t supposed to happen.
El Cid
__
Yes, but it could lead to smaller government in terms of social programs, so it might all be worth it.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
This has been building since the Republicans invited the Dixiecrats to join them for electoral supremacy.
It worked… but the Dixiecrats live entirely on the stupid/evil axis, and well… here we are now.
We (black folks) have been tellin’ y’all for the last forty years what these fuckers are about, but noooooo, they were just “conservative.”
You know who else was conservative, right? NO, dammit, not him, but him.
Chris
Krugman has really been on a roll in the past couple weeks. They don’t call him Krugthulu for nothing.
Captain Haddock
So Krug and the Europeans realize the Republicans are insane? I’ll be more excited when that realization catches on in “real ‘murka”.
pixelpusher
It’s now becoming clear that the entire Republican strategy going forward is to rely on Stockholm Syndrome. Give the hostage takers some love, and maybe they won’t blow us all up to kingdom come.
4tehlulz
Europeans calling tehadists crazy? How does the GOP NOT take that as a sign to keep going?
Redshirt
What keeps me warm at night is the comforting thought that no matter what happens on this particular subject, it will all be forgotten in short order, and the attacks on America from the Confederate Party will continue unabated.
They, with their media mouthpieces, write the narrative, and we all follow in its fetid wake.
MBL
Our political climate has been poisoned to a degree where the GERMANS claim they can’t imagine it.
…
Wow.
jrg
Is there a poll on this? Everywhere I turn on the internet, there are hoards of morons blaming this on Obama and thuh libruls.
MattF
At work, one of my colleagues suddenly piped up– ‘Where did the progressive Republicans all go to?,’ he wanted to know… I, somehow, kept my mouth shut.
4tehlulz
@jrg: Quinnipiac or Gallup had some polls blaming the GOP more for this mess.
The internet trolls reek of same person.
Chris
But are regular people noticing?
Gallup polls that show the country more or less tied on whether or not to raise the debt ceiling, with a slight edge to the “no” crowd, suggest not.
jimmiraybob
What?
You mean that a party might seem to be crazy that is dominated by a witches* brew of Bircherthink, Ayn Rand libertarianism, some nebulously angry Tea non-Partiers, and the Christian right establishment, and that is exemplified by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck, and that has people vying for leadership positions while advocating second amendment rights and secession?
Man, I did not see that coming.
*yes, I am thinking of Christine O’Donnell
Chris
@ 4tehlulz,
That’s good news. Hope it keeps coming.
JustMe
And may I say to those suddenly agonizing over the mental health of one of our two major parties: People like you bear some responsibility for that party’s current state.
Wow. It’s rare that you see such a blatant shot across the bow of another NYT columnist.
Napoleon
I have been reading the NY Times daily feature on the Civil War which is basically what happened today 150 years ago and a week or so ago picked up Battle Cry of Freedom to read as well and time and time again in both its just amazing how the nuts in the south that set off the Civil War are like the nuts in the Republican Party today, most of them from the south.
jimmiraybob
First guess, Gitmo. Second guess, used for target practice in Alaskan outback. Third guess, a dungeon at W’s Texas faux ranch. Fourth guess, Democratic Party.
Culture of Truth
Darrell Isssa:
Republicans are “making sure that the President’s attempt to shut down the government Aug. 2 doesn’t happen because ultimately the president has an obligation to live within the funds”
Chris
@ Violet,
That, and what’s happening now is that the craziness is actually in danger of sinking the economy in a way that makes 2008 look like a hiccup, which might just screw over a ton of Very Serious Captains of Industry along with the rest of us.
gocart mozart
Actual footage of debt negotiations can be found here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upvZdVK913I
Frank
The saddest part is that most of the country will simply blame Obama if it all falls apart. Hello President Bachman!
Comrade Javamanphil
Meanwhile, the twitters inform me that Erick Erickovich is claiming his recent note to Republicans to blow up the economy, create a depression and get it labeled the Obama depression is popular reading in the majority caucus. Awesome.
Gordon, The Big Express Engine
“waking up and smelling the crazy” – That made me laugh. Krugman definitely reads blogs….
Ash Can
@MattF: The answer — “They abandoned the GOP and became independents and Democrats” — is truthful and non-inflammatory, so why keep it to yourself? People need to know the truth.
gnomedad
So some furriners think were nuts? You say that like it’s a bad thing. USA!
MattF
@Frank
I agree that the wingers will try to blame Obama (doh!), but I think they’ll only manage to convince one another. Bachmann, in particular, is so patently out of her gourd that even the relatively unobservant won’t miss it.
joeyess
Fixed your title.
It’s times like these I wish Germans could vote in our elections.
(being a child of a WWII veteren, I never thought I would say something like that.)
Chris
Yeah, same basic logic: “If we can’t rule this country by birthright, then we don’t want to play anymore.”
Christ. One of the consequences of representative government is that you share your government with people you don’t like, which means occasionally cooperating with them and occasionally losing to them. For all their finger-wagging about freedom and the constitution and the will of the people, conservatives still haven’t processed that basic lesson.
(IOW their real problem, even if they’ll never admit it, doesn’t go back to 1965 or 1932 or 1861, but 1776).
drkrick
@22 Napoleon – It’s striking, isn’t it? Substitute “liberal” for “Yankee” and an awful lot of the memes emerge intact: choosing policies based on how much it pisses off the liberals, claiming they’d like to change certain things but can’t because it would look like the liberals forced them into it, illegitimacy of liberal opinions or victories unless they’re acceptable to “us.” Given the utter failure of that worldview 150 years ago, its persistence is astonishing.
General Stuck
If that happens, I swear, I’m unplugging all my electronics and moving to the forest to hunt and gather . Might even build a tree house and swing from a grapevine or two.
chopper
politics is like the world series of dice in the marcy projects. obama is leonard washington, boehner is ashy larry and the GOP is rodney “quills” dinkins.
MikeJ
@Chris:
We should have never given in on slavery in 1776. Once they won one they insisted on getting everything their way.
Chris
The Germans moved on, and actually went through a process of national repentance that has no parallel in any other country, that I can think of. I wish we’d take a leaf out of their book someday.
MattF
@Ash Can
I’m fine with ex-Republicans, although I will disagree with them about this and that. But at this point– with people who are still holding their breath and shutting their eyes– I just get pissed off.
Dennis SGMM
For years “A number of commentators” aided and abetted the GOP in its pogroms against people of color, single parents, unions, welfare recipients, etc. They fucking encouraged the GOP in every pig-headed, malicious act and clapped their flippers with glee at the GOP’s adherence to boneheaded governance.
Now they’re feigning shock as if the GOP had just suddenly and inexplicably come down with Rabies. It’s like they never heard the words, “And then they came for me.”
Douglas
Just to clarify something – the Bild is pretty much the german version of the New York Post or the Sun.
Part of the rules every one working there has to sign is to “support solidarity with the USA”, and yeah, that doesn’t mean any of the DFHs here.
Left Coast Tom
@Comrade Javamanphil
Would this be the same Erick Son Of Erick who successfully gave a Coffee Mug to Governor Grifter?
TBogg quoting ErickErick
Napoleon
@ 35 drkrick
Yes it is and it even goes way beyond what you suggest.
Here the confedetes are trying to pay for a war and yet they had a hard time taxing the people in the south with the money to pay for it who were benefited by the war to run the war.
Last night I am reading about one of the pre-war independent armies launched (primarily) from the south in the (mostly) south’s attempt to take over and control other counties south of the boarder in order to spread slavery and in one case where the Spanish rounded up and shoot a bunch of armed American’s who landed in Cuba to topple the Spanish there was actually rioting in the South over Spains “provication” of “attacking” the Americans. Un-fucking real. Land in someone else’s country with guns to overthrow their government and then play the victim when you are caught (one thing that runs through the history of that time is the unremitting victimhood of the south – they have always been whiners). I guess blowing up the counties economy with economic terrorism then blaming the black guy in the WH is nothing next to that.
Lawnguylander
What a horrible state of affairs we’ve come to when the only hope for preventing a global financial catastrophe is Boehner and McConnell deciding to ruin their political careers by working out a deal with Pelosi and Reid. Because the most militant teahadis have to choose between the crazy and evil primary voters who want that catastrophe like I once wanted the Evel Knievel Snake River Rocket thing for my birthday, and mostly just evil financial backers who don’t want the catastrophe.
merrinc
Sorry, John – the Stoopid is stil strong in America. Here’s the latest Facebook meme:
Read that bit of brilliance was the morning status of one of my cousins from WV. I imagine my response will get me shunned by even more of my family members.
OzoneR
@merrinc
Maybe he should use the bully pulpit!
DZ
Don’t forget that the Germans have experience with the crazy destroying their country along with a big chunk of the Western world. It was a different kind of crazy but the crazy nonetheless.
WaterGirl
Saw this on Politico this just now:
President Obama makes decisions based on whether or not it will earn him brownie points with the press corp. Yeah, right.
P.S. Will someone please tell these idiots that it’s not all about them?
Culture of Truth
Hey if wingnuts wants to start funding “Seniors, Soldiers, & our Needy” first, that’s ok.
lou
That’s because the press isn’t doing its job of explaining why people should worry. My mother is as conservative as she can be, but when I explained why it was a big deal — interest rates sky rocket, the default will eventually just make the debt problem three times as bad, etc., she said in a puzzled tone — “why isn’t anyone explaining this tv?”
catclub
The preternatural calm of the stock markets, and low interest rates
in the bond markets, means that so far, investors are convinced it will not happen.
I am starting to worry that if it _does_ happen, the panic will be extremely compressed and extremely steep.
Also, given that the Germans ARE the inflation zombies that Atrios is always telling us about, the Germans have their own craziness issues.
dmsilev
@WaterGirl:
He should show up, ask them to balance beach balls on their noses, and throw them some fresh cod as a reward.
slag
@gocart mozart: Personally, I was hoping the battle of wits would end when they both finally drink and find out who is right and who is dead.
catclub
Culture o’Truth @ 49 “our Needy”
is either Boeing or prison guards for the people proposing it. It surely is not who you or I think it is.
murbella
Here you go Cole.
US recognizes Libyan rebel government.
walt
America isn’t voting for a ditz with a closeted gay husband. She might win the Iowa caucuses, but that’s as far as she’s going.
Viva BrisVegas
This is not the problem.
The problem is that people keep voting for an insane party.
In most democracies when a political party goes insane, people stop voting for it. That hasn’t happened yet.
General Stuck
Obama giving another presser this morning. He’s braning us all now with the Bully Pulpit on about a daily basis. I just hope he drops the motherfucker on top of that whiny punk Eric Cantor and make him squeal like a little greased piggy.
Dennis SGMM
There may be a silver lining here. I was concerned that the Citizens United decision would result in shitloads of corporate cash being used to aid GOP candidates. If the GOP fields enough candidates who believe that dynamiting the economy is a Good Thing then I trust that the corps will keep their money in their pockets.
stuckinred
Dennis SGMM
Eat the apple and fuck the corps!
Jim C.
Off-topic for a second, but damn Sully’s backups can be bad.
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/07/sympathy-for-the-devil-murdoch-vs-doj-edition.html
joes527
merrinc
Why not stop your own pay or all of Congress to save much more money for our country?
wow. just wow.
Someone has a problem with orders of magnitude.
This isn’t to say that stopping the pay of the millionaires club in DC would be a bad idea. But “save much more money?” Someone has been drinking too much tea.
slag
@Viva BrisVegas:
2nded. How many times during the Bush Administration did we all find ourselves asking, “Am I the crazy one here?”. And so the trend continues…
chopper
in moderation for quoting one of the cited stories. ugh.
jimmiraybob
Absolutely agree as a benchmark. But it might go back to the loss of the original Puritan colonies and the loss of theocracy/theonomy (God-based government). Almost all of the issues currently boiling over from the Republican party have a conservative Protestant/Biblical subtext (think Louis Gommert or Michelle Bachmann or Rick Perry’s upcoming prayer event or Darth The Hammer From Texas). Very similar to the original confederacy (see Confederate Constitution – a God-based constitution). Ultimately, too much freedom for heathens, pagans, heretics, liberals and especially women, gay-marrying gays, and persons of a certain hue. And by “too much freedom” I mean any. These have traditionally been the rallying points of the Protestant religious establishment (see David Sahat’s The Myth of American Religious Freedom).
To what appears to be a majority of Republicans now and many in leadership or vying for leadership (and certainly the social conservatives), the government has no legitimacy – it and its taxes are non-Biblical. People that I know that are now tied into the Tea Party ideology and that have never before been motivated by God or religion are using God/the Bible as justification for their arguments for limited government (government’s not in the business of helping people/citizens), ever lower taxes, unfettered it’s capitalism, anti-science, and gun rights (and, of course, their demonization of all things liberal).
So, if there’s a common thread explaining the apparent crazy, and if you ask me, it’s the clash of strict Protestant Biblical worldview with liberal secular democratic government – which brings us back to 1776. And, I don’t doubt that there are more than a couple of today’s Republicans, including leadership, that would see the crash of this government as a good thing and a chance to bring about a righteous Biblical government.
joes527
murbella
Oh that’s just great.
So much for the Libyans who support .. y’know … the existing government.
They don’t fit the narrative, so fuck them.
Freedom fries for everyone!
chopper
@Joes527:
i know. if obama had said ‘if this deal doesn’t go through, congress might not get a paycheck!’ regular folks would be pushing each other for a chance to pull the big ‘shut it down’ lever.
it’s like if the NYPD is facing furloughs over budget cuts, the cheif doesn’t argue in front of the cameras ‘but then we won’t be able to give out any more parking tickets!’
Dennis SGMM
@Viva BrisVegas
And it won’t happen. Without realizing it, the Republican base has realized one of its most cherished goals; that of infusing lots of religion into politics. They did it by making their politics into another religion that fits right in with their choice of Faith. Reason, logic, science, all are powerless against their version of revealed truths. And, just as some faithful feel that people suffer because they weren’t religious enough so the GOP faithful will attribute every calamity to a lack of rigor on the part of their pols.
Mr Stagger Lee
Let’s face it gang, teabaggers could hardly give a FLYING F$%k about whatn the world thinks of them. They think the Europeans are nothing more than a bunch a ballet dancing poofs who ought to be on their hands and knees that the GOOD OLE USA USA USA! Saved their behinds from those Godless Commies and needs to remember that BY GUM! They still think that they can go into any country and give those backward furriners a slap. USA USA USA USA!!!!
DZ
@ #59 efgoldman:
Oh, I can’t disagree with that completely, but the Nazis were a couple orders of magnitude beyond even the 27 percenters – at least as things stand today. Hitler took power in January, 1933 and put more than 150,000 people in concentration camps before the end of the year. We are not yet there. We might get there – truly scary thought – but not yet.
JPL
If the crisis isn’t resolved this weekend, after the market starts to fall, I am buying Miller’s and GlaxoSmithKline stock. BTW..I hate Miller’s. What pay for slightly favored water.
edit..glaxo is the maker of Tums
chopper
reposted from moderation hell.
politics is like the world series of d1ce in the marcy projects. obama is leonard washington, boehner is ashy larry and the GOP is rodney “quills” dinkins.
OzoneR
These idiots don’t realize Congress doesn’t get paid EITHER.
Mark S.
Conor Friedersdorf attended a midnight showing of Sarah Palin’s new movie. The result wasn’t terribly surprising.
Suffern ACE
@74 – However the unity of “the people” in believing that this alone will somehow solve the problems is astounding.
MikeJ
@Mark S.:
Sticky trousers?
Culture of Truth
Looks like the GOP has reached a decision, will hold a vote next week to extend the U.S. debt limit by $2.4 trillion, with unknown spending cuts and a balanced budget amendment.
slag
@MikeJ: Ew. Excellent word choice, however.
Chris
@ 43 Napoleon,
I’ve also heard that there were several times the “states’ rights” shtick seriously hurt the Southern cause – apparently, the Governor of Texas had a bunch of troops he never sent to help the main Confederate armies, preferring to send them to hunt Indians in his prairies. And that the Governor of North Carolina was sitting on a whole mess of uniforms, but also refused to send them out of the state, so Lee’s army had to go on in rags (“Lee’s Miserables,” they called themselves).
Makes it that much funnier when you listen to Lost Cause nostalgists wax poetic about “states’ rights.” Um, dude, states’ rights are one of the key reasons you lost. Being pro-Confederate because you’re pro-states’ rights is like being pro-Nazi and pro-invading-Russia-in-the-winter.
Dennis SGMM
@Mark S
Conor stands up after the movie and asks the person next to him, “Where’s my hat?” The person answers, “It’s hanging on your lap, Conor.”
Comrade Dread
I’d just like to note that if the Germans are saying, “You guys are f***ing nuts”, then it’s past time to go team up with chocolate and live the rest of your days as a tasty snack food.
JPL
Am I the only one who thinks this news conference is important. The President needs to be concise and lay out what could happen if…
And Luckovich was on target this morning..link
DZ
@ #72 JPL:
I do understand the sentiment, but buy Euros instead.
Judas Escargot
@DZ:
Narrow minded tribalism? Check. Inbred racism? Check. Total submission to private authority and “The State”, as long as they are run by those in-tribe? Check. Perversion of religious norms to fit the tribal narrative? Check. Glorification of violence to reach one’s aims? Check. Ultra-specialized, in-group vocabulary to make it easy to identify (and call out) who is “in” and who it “out”? Check. Pagan-level fetishization of romanticized history and tribal symbols? Check. A larger body of less insane people who just quietly let it all happen all around them, for the sake of the Tribe? Check.
We joke often about the “crazy 27%” here. Of that 27%, what portion do you think wouldn’t just love open warfare with the perceived Enemy? They’ve been buying all that ammo for a reason.
If there’s a difference, it’s one of degree, not one of class or type.
David in NY
@DZ —
Yes, whenever I reach for the “Godwin” analogy, or even the Soviet analogy, to something that’s going on today, I fact check and realize how incredibly awful 20th century totalitarianism really was, and how even our nutcase party isn’t back there … quite yet. (“2d Amendment remedies” might be there on a small scale, but that’s mostly a metaphor when used by politicians … so far.)
But Mussolini, Franco, various South and Central American dictators? I think perhaps our 27 percenters are closing in on their territory.
Stefan
Our political climate has been poisoned to a degree where the GERMANS claim they can’t imagine it…Wow.
Why “wow”? Germany has a very moderate political culture, with a great emphasis on cooperative decision-making and on civil discourse. Of course Germans can’t quite grasp what’s going on here.
…Ah, I see now. You’re referring to the Nazi period. I forgot that for Americans, all references to Germany immediately call up Adolf Hitler, and that they’re not really conversant with the last two generations of modern European history. In America, when it comes to Germany, somehow it’s always 1939.
Sarah Proud and Tall
Shorter Krugman:
OzoneR
the thing about the crazy 27% is that when you consider half the population doesn’t vote period, that crazy 27% quickly becomes the crazy 47%.
Omnes Omnibus
@ Judas Escargot:
@ David in NY:
Oh, there are plenty of budding little fascists within the 27%. They just haven’t fully embraced their inner Black Shirt yet.
Dennis SGMM
@Judas Escargot:
You neglected to mention their massive persecution complex which often ripens to full-blown paranoia.
Villago Delenda Est
That would be the parasite overclass that funds the teabaggers.
artem1s
De Nile is not just a river in Egypt. I think the German’s probably have a legitimate claim on recognizing both the crazy 27% and denial.
DZ
@ Judas Escargot:
@ David in NY:
It isfor now, a matter of degree not of type – that has already been established. But budding Hitlers and Stalins are not out there yet. Pinochet wannabes – almost certainly.
Linda Featheringill
Obama is still pushing for the “Big Deal”, although he would be willing to talk about something less dramatic. [from the morning presser]
Good for him!
catclub
Stefan @ 87 I was referring to the bond vigilantes of Germany NOW. They are just as deluded as teabaggers.
(They also have allies in the Tories in England who think austerity is the way to grow out of the recession and were elected to do it.)
I guess it is time to re-read “Great Popular delusions and the madness of crowds.”
No 1933-1945 reference necessary.
Comrade Dread
Stefan
Well, that, and almost every bizarre, f’ed up story I read in the newspaper usually comes from: Germany, Florida, or Japan.
Chris
@ Stefan,
This is nothing Naziish in scale, but I did detect a slight drop in the civility of discourse recently, in the form of Angela Merkel’s “multiculturalism has failed” dog whistle (loud as a bloody bullhorn).
I thought the nativist shtick had been more muted in Germany compared to, say, France or Austria; I haz a slight sad to see it gaining any ground there.
Martin
I guess we can’t tell the difference beween $90 million and $900,000 million, the approximate difference beween those two categories.
Greyjoy
Yeah, well, with the same people, when it comes to America, somehow it’s always 1944. Any time Europe criticizes America’s latest ridiculous move, some yahoo always has to say, “Oh yeah, and where would YOU be if we hadn’t saved your asses in dubya dubya two?” I agree that it’s annoying and we need to pay more attention to what has occurred in the intervening 67 years.
Culture of Truth
Obama: you can’t have your damm layer cake and eat it too! Now eat these peas!
JPL
A song for the occasion.. Was that a slam on Cantor or what
link
jl
Oh Lord, Tapper and Todd questions were…
Can’t think of a way to characterize them that is fit for Balloon Juice, which is saying something.
Edit: has Tapper been drunk for last week, Obama put a Medicare eligibility raise on the table. Which caused a little uproar among us libs. Did he not notice?
JPL
Tapper and Todd questions were… choots-pah
Culture of Truth
Q: Do you have any regrets from these negotiations?
Obama: Calling on you dipshit
murbella
good call.
I prefer the french word, menace, eg l’ourage menace the storm threatens.
The Wingularity menace.
MazeDancer
@jl:
The reaction of basic ick on the usually unreadable face of Mr. Obama as he was listening to Todd’s sleazy question was great. And replying with a dig about American’s are not interested in reality TV aspects of this serious issue was also great.
The President continually reinforcing how both sides want to prevent armageddon and agree the debt ceiling must be raised is so lovely to hear. Wonder if the fact that Mr. Obama is really, really smart makes the Repubs as crazy as his ethnicity.
catclub
104: Culture o’ truth
I larfed.
jl
No, Mr. President, it was another idiot ‘tone’ question, don’t poke, take a swing at them.
magurakurin
I’m ex-patriot American, but I don’t think can care any longer what happens as long as there is no default. Because then I will get fucked. Everyone in the world will get fucked. But if it happens that Medicare and SSI get replaced with free aspirin and S&H Greenstamps…I could give a shit anymore. Americans voted for and continue to vote for assholes like Cantor. I’m over it.
Just find a way to pay the goddamn money you’ve already borrowed and don’t tank everyone else’s markets.
Thanks in advance.
Martin
Certainly he is, it’s political win. GOP whines for a year that the deficit is the greatest threat to the nation, they go all in on this routine congressional event and tie it to deficit reduction and then can’t produce much in the way of deficit reduction (about $1.8T is the most the GOP has agreed to), Obama goes in and repeatedly demands $4T and can almost certainly deliver those votes, while the GOP keeps trying to weasel out of the whole thing.
If the GOP is going to demand something publicly, they better be willing to deliver if the other side trumps their move – which Omama has done here. He’s taken the GOP message (we need deficit reduction), made it a consistent Democratic message (actually we need a LOT of deficit reduction) with a plan, and can deliver and is now putting the GOP in the position of having to oppose deficit reduction because they don’t like his plan and they can’t agree among themselves what to do. He’s going to push this until the very last moment, and then after the debt ceiling is raised, when the next thing comes up, he’s going to go right back after it again and repeat that all the way through the 2012 elections. At least one leg of his campaign is now ‘we need to do deficit reduction, and the Dems can deliver on it’. He’s taking the GOPs messaging away from them.
(Note to those who are having trouble grasping this: the biggest component of Obama’s deficit reduction plan is tax increases. The 2nd biggest component is paying less debt service because of the deficit reduction. The 3rd biggest component is defense cuts. The 4th biggest component is drug price negotiating power for Medicare.)
catclub
Maze Dancer @ 106
Really, really, smart is mostly being able to keep his eye on the ball longer than those around him.
They told you in sunday school that “Patience is a virtue.”
He listened.
murbella
joes527
Chad mercs in t-62s and t72s don’t fit the narrative, sry.
catclub
Martin @ 110
It will be a first if the voters actually care more about ‘the democrats were the real fiscal conservatives’ than ‘the unemployment rate sucks, throw out the bums’.
jl
@110: hi martin,
Do you or do you not approve of the ‘tone’ of this blog and do you think we can get any constructive..
No, sorry, that wasn’t my question
I saw a column (thought it was by Salmon but don’t see it now) that basically agreed with your rundown of Social Security payment issue. Said that what this amounts to is selectively defaulting on bonds held by Social Security Administration. And that would not be a big deal in terms of whether SS bought them again, since they had to by law. But interesting question would be how (edit: the rest of) bond market looked at that.
Culture of Truth
Obama: the American people will remember who tried to get a deal done in the fall of 2012 when they go to vote
Q: dude the voters don’t even remember who won The Voice
Obama: Javier Colon
Q: braniac
murbella
catclub
Games theory 101
strategy beats tactics in the long game.
all the conservatives have is tactics.
geisha gurl
The US may be on the verge of making among the biggest and least- necessary financial mistakes in world history.
-Martin Wolf, FT.com
Thanks extremists of all stripes….
Chris
Game theory 102:
In the long run, we’re all dead.
Martin
I think what drives them crazy is that they can’t seem to rattle him. The GOP are bullies, that’s part of their tactic and part of what the base likes about them – they want a party who will push the Dems and unions and whoever around. That’s a feature.
But it doesn’t seem to work on Obama. He never acts bullied (exasperated, sure, but never bullied). He doesn’t lash out. He’s got this political zen thing that he does and I think that drives the right crazier than anything else. The GOP convinced themselves that Obama is weak and dumb and they need him to show that to the public for the rest of us to wake up, but not only does it not happen, he often ends up getting the better of them when they set the trap.
Culture of Truth
“Never!”
– Dick Cheney
Culture of Truth
Case in point, via CNN’s live blog of the press conference:
joes527
murbella
My point EXACTLY!
the very idea that there are Libyan civilians that support he current regime is so antithetical to out goals that WE MUST DENY THAT THEY EXIST.
Well played.
Linda Featheringill
martin #110
Nice discussion of the Big Deal. (And the stuff in parentheses is very clearly explained. This is much needed.)
Okay, so I’m a fan for the next 30 seconds or so. :-)
jl
The thing about the saying there is a need for long term deficit reduction, is that it is true. Even commie maniacs like DeLong, Krugman, Stiglitz and Galbraith agree.
Question is, how do you keep that goal from being hijacked by dishonest people who want to use it as an excuse to steal money from ordinary people?
I think that is Obama’s, and the Democrats’ challenge.
Martin
Well, these kinds of statements oversimplify things. I’m not saying that Obama is going to make fiscal discipline the centerpiece of 2012. I’m simply saying that Obama is taking the ability for the GOP to make it the centerpiece of theirs away to some degree. He’ll be happy to point out that the GOP hasn’t done fuck about sending him a jobs bill, that he asked for a payroll tax holiday and was turned down by the GOP, and whatever else will set the message he wants out there. But if in a debate the question of deficit reduction comes up, he’s got his 3 minute answer that the GOP won’t have a good response to.
Let’s also be honest about something here – the unemployment rate is the single most important issue to – the unemployed. That’s 9% of voters. What do the other 91% care about. I bet more than 9% of them would put deficit reduction at the top of the list, whether we think it should be there or not. Part of politics is having to deal with what the public cares about, even if the public is stupid to care about it.
MikeJ
@Martin:
I had a girlfriend that used to go crazy when I did this. Every time we had a fight I stayed calm. The calmer I was the more she flipped out.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@OzoneR #89:
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
Every country has its share of haters, nutbags, political paranoids and hard-core authoritarians as some non-neglible fraction of the population. But they can only get their hands on political power in a democracy when all the other folks sit on their asses and don’t do anything to stop them.
Here in the USA we have the strangest combination of people who are physically very hard working (look at our average # of hours worked per year per capita compared with other OECD countries) but mentally lazy and incurious. The latter is what is killing us.
Davis X. Machina
@Napoleon: @DZ:
My old moral-theology professor’s oft-repeated maxim ‘Gentlemen, ladies, let us not confuse virtue with lack of opportunity’ comes to mind.
There’s another bunch of folks — nothing like as large, but empirically non-zero — who would cheerfully liquidate the kulaks, and expropriate the expropriators, if The Day ever came. Sometimes they surface here.
People are like that.
RinaX
@#110 Martin
Nice Summary. Biggest takeaway that I had was his continued insistence on the fact that revenue raising had to be part of any cuts, and saying that 2.4 trillion in cuts without it would be extremely damaging to middle class people. He also didn’t seem to view McConnell’s current proposal as serious, and specifically said he expected to see several things voted on for political purposes that he wouldn’t take seriously.
So as always, my fear is what the conservadems would be willing to sign off on. I banged my head when Kent Conrad said the other day that he didn’t think taxes should be raised. That’s the type of shit to look out for.
Judas Escargot
@Culture of Truth:
Golly… wonder whatever wee Erick could possibly mean by a phrase like that?
Bobby Thomson
Holy crap.
Godwin wept.
General Stuck
And if you listen closely, all of his solutions that are related to entitlements, whether or not you think they are a good idea as a liberal person, spring from consistent progressive mindset. Such as means testing medicare at some point, payroll tax holidays, taxing the rich more etc…
He is taking the issue from the wingnuts, and making specific progressive suggestions, such as bargaining for lower drug prices for medicare. And ending up with a liberal/prog version of long term spending reduction, that is also Keynesian
It is a time honored winger tactic to divide a dem president from his vocal activist section of base, and Obama is turning that around on the wingers to divide them. It is a thing of beauty to watch unfold, though Obama sure looked tired in that presser. And the wingers can still destroy the world by design or accident.
jl
After listening to Obama today, and his interview on Cox TV (see yesterday’s TPM for link) I think Krugman is wrong that Obama agrees with the Very Serious People like Simpson Bowles. He is clearly a Keynesian, though probably a more economically conservative one that Krugman is (or, has become, to be more accurate).
I think he is trying to present the message in a way that can be successful in a very hostile political climate and through a superficial media.
Game theory 103 is that when your opponents payoff function is unknown, it may be impossible to formulate a successful strategy, even if one exists.
And at this point, what the GOP is thinking is surely unknown.
Davis X. Machina
It gets dodgy when the public is standing around like a bunch of stunned mullets, asking, and being perfectly happy to be told, what it ought to care about.
There are very wealthy people who are also very grateful for this.
Davis X. Machina
@RinaX: Conrad’s plan was half revenue. It was that useless human traffic bollard, Nelson (D-R-Who the Fuck Knows? -NE) who kneecapped Conrad’s plan.
...now I try to be amused
Here, we have l’orange menace.
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” — attributed to Sun Tzu
Bobby Thomson
@ gocart mozart 26:
Actually, it’s here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjRHI2O7SDg&
RinaX
@Davis X. Machina #135
That’s true. I just know one of them pissed me off the other day, and if I go back it was most likely Nelson who was being an ass.
Martin
Well, the bond traders are very, very, very far from stupid about these things. I live in bond trader central, and I know these guys. They’re stupid about almost everything else, but not this. They know selectively defaulting on SS spares them, but they also know that Treasury can probably only do that for a couple of weeks before the trick runs out. But more importantly, I think they would see that the GOPs willingness to let seniors not get their social security check as a very clear sign that they’re willing to blow the place up. IOW, by Aug 2, I don’t think they’ll care who actually gets defaulted on, they’re assume that Congress is okay with the next default being on them, and they’re going to drop the hammer.
Like this: “President Obama said the American people are sold on a balanced budget approach to the deficit. “Eighty percent of the American people support a balanced approach,” Obama said.”
We’ve moved from this discussion being about ‘spending cuts’ to ‘deficit reduction’ now to ‘balanced budget’. He’s de-emphasizing ‘cuts’ and re-emphasizing ‘balance’. Rather than talk about tax increases (which will backfire) he’s talking about ‘closing loopholes’ and such. Well, who doesn’t like that? But that’s a tax increase.
Linda Featheringill
davis #128
Right. Now for some serious Godwin: One of the major lessons I learned from my study of Nazi Germany is that loud and visible, public criticism is the most effective tactic unarmed people have against that kind of crazy.
We need to [continue to] fight against the 27%.
gex
@8 – what I don’t get is how top ranking members of the GOP can ADMIT the party is racist and yet no one is willing to accept that fact. Atwater, Weyrich, Melman, Steele. All of them have publicly stated that this current brand of the GOP was built on racism. Weyrich noted that the Falwells of the world didn’t care about abortion or feminism. But when Carter took away tax breaks for all white Christian academies, the fundies got involved whole-heartedly. Hatin’ on women and gays is just a bonus for them.
Davis X. Machina
@RinaX: It’s just sad when a.) Kent Conrad represents the left edge of the possible, and b.) he is wedgied within seconds by another Big Square State If-You-Squint-Right-He’s-a-Democrat.
DBrown
As an american I am lost to understand why so many americans still believe incorrectly that american won the war against Germany? That was Russia with their mass-murdering monster Stalin who won WWII against Germany almost single handily. Ignorance is one thing, delusion is another – far too many americans are delusional believing we won WWII. Lost why we recall a war that evil commie’s won for us by a monster that killed more russians than hitler did – strange recall.
Judas Escargot
@Martin:
In event of default (or, yes, an Obama veto), I’d expect the GOP House to start passing Bills trying to force spending priorities on the President to distance themselves from disaster, to drown out the voices of the sane; and to try to save their electoral chances in 2012.
The President then refuses– which, I think, as executive, he gets to do: Congress has already authorized and mandated the spending, as long as everything he does choose to pay is in that budget somewhere, he’s not breaking any law.
I don’t think they get to force any particular order of payment on him after the fact, unless there’s one already specified in the budget. And they can’t pass a new law unless they can get enough Dems to override his veto. (Given the number of craven Dems in the House, that is of course possible).
Then what? Impeachment? Does the GOP run to the courts? Does the SCOTUS get involved? (Joy).
I don’t know enough law to even guess what happens past that point.
gwangung
Yes, it is.
What do we do about it? (And let’s remember—conservative Dem politicians represent a LOT of conservative Dem people).
El Cid
It’s always good to remember that the epithet “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity” is just a humorous quote, and not some intelligent guide to analysis.
Via KThrugmann, yes, when rightists scream about FANNIEFREDDIEBARNEYFRANKACORN they know they’re lying.
jl
@144: I think desperate improvisation happens at that point.
Felix Salmon (see his column ‘damage already done’) mentioned yet another arcane fix to hitting up against the debt ceiling hard: re open closed bond issues.
One thing I think is clear, is that whether constitutional or not, with 14th amendmnt, and all the ambiguities about what constitutes ‘new debt’ the debt ceiling law may be practically unenforceable, even meaningless in an operational sense.
It is a dangerous, nonsensical thing, and we need to get rid of it. Congress would then have to worry about debt when it passes its spending legislation.
Villago Delenda Est
Actually, no. And even Stalin would concede this.
American logistical support made it possible for the Soviets to concentrate on tanks, artillery, and munitions in their industrial effort, and the US supplied the trucks that were used to keep the Red Army provisioned.
It’s absolutely true that the price in blood was paid by the Russians. But US logistical support made it possible for that price to be paid in a victorious effort.
Martin
Wait! That might be okay! I don’t know Conrads plan that well, but this could be part of the messaging that everyone keeps screaming the Dems don’t do.
‘Raising taxes’ will go nowhere. The GOP already won the fight over that term. The new approach is ‘closing loopholes’. That sounds like something only folks with their own tax attys would be affected by, but it’s really where all the money is, and that might be what Conrad is in favor of.
That’s one of the things that came out of Simpson-Bowles that’s worth latching onto. Stop demanding higher rates, and instead demand fewer deductions against those rates (this is part of the GOPs new ‘51% of American’s don’t pay taxes’ campaign). The thinking is that the GOP has poisoned the tax rate well, so nobody can go there, but at the same time they’re also shrieking about how unfair the tax system is. I think if deductions can be eliminated without raising the bracket rates that could be sold on both sides. It’d increase revenues and increase the % of people that pay income taxes, merely by concentrating on some classes of people that deduct their entire income. That’s not uncommon here where I live to have you finances structured so that you have a pile of investments in a trust over there that pays you, combined with your salary, just enough money that between other tricks and the mortgage deduction on your $2M house, you wind up with an AGI of $0. On paper, it looks like you have a house that you cannot possibly afford, but through a series of accounting tricks it all works fine.
One of the things the left should be screaming for is a cap on the mortgage interest deduction. Among other things, it’d serve as a moderate brake against real-estate bubbles, particularly here in CA. That’d be ‘loophole closing’.
So, be careful with what you wish for and what Dems are saying, because they might be delivering what you want, just not using the term you want. Seriously, Obama is characterizing $1T in bond interest savings of his deficit reduction plan as a spending cut. It’s true relative to what GAO is projecting, but that’s a serious spin on what people think of as a spending cut.
Redshirt
I wonder if this whole thing is a setup for Impeachment hearings. The Repugs hold the world hostage, forcing Obama to take a non-traditional approach to saving the world. The price of which will be immediate Impeachment proceedings and a 6 ring media circus from then till election.
JGabriel
@Martin:
Depends on what you mean by tax increase. Most people think of a tax increase as an increase in rates rather than revenue, whether it be an increase in the sales, property, or income tax rates.
Closing loopholes, reclassifying the income of hedge fund managers as salary rather than capital gains, etc., are tax increases to the extent they raise tax revenue, but most people don’t see it that way — or they think of it as a technicality — because tax rates were unchanged.
.
liberal
@143 DBrown wrote,
I once did a brief bit of research on the internet, and my conclusion was that the Russians put about 5/6 of the Germany military out of business; the Western allies, about 1/6.
So, yeah, you have a point. I reiterated it to my wife at the WWII Mem in DC and she nearly freaked out because of all the vets there.
signifyingmnky
+1
President Obama is basically making it plain that the Republican party are and have been grifting this country for years and aren’t serious about anything that comes out of their mouths.
IMO, what President Obama is doing now, what he’s been doing with the notion of bipartisanship since he entered office is making the case to the American people that Washington can solve serious problems if American voters send serious people to run it.
Unlike what’s suggested by some of his most vocal “progressive” critics, his vision isn’t by a need to be liked by Republicans, it isn’t part of some shadowy strategy to be some sort of Manchurian Republican President, and it isn’t about him being weak, politically naive, or incompetent. He’s neither of these.
It’s about making the point that things don’t get done in Washington because Americans elect people who aren’t serious about getting things done.
It’s a case third parties, including Nader have made for years only a Democrat is actually making it convincing, which is why they’re upset with him. It forces the far left and far right to put aside the idea of purity to for the sake of actual progress as opposed to “winning” never ending bouts of ideology for an ideology’s sake, which is why they’re upset with him. And, if Washington actually starts getting work done on behalf of the electorate, a lot of people who make money exploiting the divides that keep things from getting done, which begin to see diminishing returns. Hence, the man is beset on all sides by powerful people who would like to destroy his presidency.
President Obama isn’t despised by these people because he reneged on change, he’s despised by them because he is trying to change things, has been successful at doing so, and it scares the hell out of some people.
I say great. It’s why I voted for him.
Davis X. Machina
@gwangung: Damned if I know. Primarying Blanche Lincoln seems to have been such a swell idea….
celticdragonchick
@Dbrown
wtf???
I guess that bit where Stalin was screaming about opening up the second front and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of war materials (including P-63 King Cobra attack fighters, jeeps and just about anything else you can think of via the Murmansk run) didn’t really happen.
The Allies won the war together. Stalin was on the edge of capitulating early on, and our aid kept the Russians in the fight just as much as “General Winter” and the Russian infantyman’s famed tenacity.
OzoneR
Do you really think American educators were going to give credit for winning World War II to Russia in the midst of the Cold War?
liberal
@149 Martin wrote,
Look, it’s a great idea (meaning, in the sense of policy), but I thought the Rethugs—or at least the tea party faction—already said that any revenue raised by closing loopholes would have to go towards further tax cuts. I.e., any plan would not be allowed increase revenue.
Furthermore, while again I completely agree that it’s good policy, that that’s where the money is, etc, etc, the filthy rich parasites that benefit from the tax code being convoluted in the first place are wise to the situation and will instruct their Republican minions accordingly; I have no idea why you think it’d be otherwise.
gwangung
Yeah, but Republicans are out in front saying that these are increases.
Think Dems should get out in front in saying the rates are the same, we’re closing loopholes.
Georgia Pig
Obama doesn’t give a shit about whether he is a Keynesian, except to the extent that Keynesianism is equated with an attitude that a functioning democracy can determine it’s own fate, rather than simply being a victim of chance and human frailty. Irrespective of what the wingnuts think, Progress is and always has been the operative mythos in American politics. What Obama’s trying kind of rhymes with what Reagan did in the 80’s. There’s a reason the wingnuts love Reagan and, even though they’ve turned him into an empty totem, his impact is not just mythology. Reagan was a child of the Depression and an acknowledged fan of Roosevelt. Roosevelt, at least in the mythology, was characterized by a certain optimism, e.g, “Happy Days are Here Again” and government activism to address poverty and unemployment and build a public infrastructure to support economic development of rural America. Reagan adopted a Rooseveltian optimism about the American spirit with all that “Shining City on the Hill” stuff but, he inverted it by casting an oppressive government bureaucracy as being the source of economic and political stagnation that was stifling progress. Whether that worked to create progress is questionable at best, but a lot of wingnuts think it did because it at least made them feel better. What a lot of them didn’t get is that Bill Clinton (and GHWB, to his chagrin) really made the Reagan legacy more workable because he understood it had to have an underpinning of public capital. But subsequent generations of Republicans have driven off the road by focusing entirely on the selfish, individualistic aspects of the Reagan narrative, e.g., tax cuts, that, ironically, failed miserably and were undone during Reagan’s presidency and, subsequently, in Poppy Bush’s. Thus, we’ve seen the rise of special-interest warlords like Grover Norquist, the Koch Bros, fundamentalist preachers and ethically-challenged stateless corporate CEOs like Murdoch. What these people pimp is inherently destructive, because their goals ultimately marginalize huge chunks of the population as so much extra protoplasm. Obama is playing a strategy similar to Reagan’s with his focus on partisan division and, more generally, excessive special interest “fuck you, I got minism” that he wants to position as the force that is impeding American progress, rather than government.
Canuckistani Tom
@44 Napoleon
After the war, some folks tried the same thing up here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenian_raids
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@DBrown #143:
Yes but.
As a fairly hardcore WW2 history freak, I have to throw in an objection. The ability of the Red Army to defeat the Germans on the Eastern Front was substantially aided by our indirect aid, both in the direct form of military equipment and indirectly in the form of food.
First, re the food: Solzhenityzn’s books contain numerous references to the immense good-will created towards America amongst a Russian populace who remembered WW2 as a period when they would have starved to death by the millions (not that Stalin would have cared, but it would have severely impacted their industrial output) during the war without the food we supplied, and the problems these memories (nostalgically remembered cans of Spam, etc) posed for the Stalinist regime’s anti-US campaigns in the late 40s and early 50s.
More importantly, we supplied an immense number of trucks and other transport without which the Red Army would have been incapable of the rapid advances they pulled off from mid-1943 (after the failure of Operation Zitadelle) onwards. Russians died by the millions winning the war, but we supplied the trucks that got them from Kursk to Berlin in 2 years. The European war would have been different without those trucks.
catclub
Martin @ 125 “Let’s also be honest about something here – the unemployment rate is the single most important issue to – the unemployed. That’s 9% of voters. What do the other 91% care about. I bet more than 9% of them would put deficit reduction at the top of the list, whether we think it should be there or not. Part of politics is having to deal with what the public cares about, even if the public is stupid to care about it.”
NOPE, not based on this poll. Economy is top at 27%, jobs is second at 26%,
deficit is 7%
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/06/30/business/20110630poll-full-results.html
liberal
celticdragonchick wrote,
Yeah, he certainly screamed about it, but AFAICT D-Day happened pretty late in the war. And Africa and Italy were pretty much jokes as second fronts.
While the economic aid bit is true (though it would be good to see it quantified), the fact is the vast majority of German casualties were inflicted by the Soviets, not the Western Allies.
One interesting bit I came across when reading on this stuff years ago is that in terms of finally opening up that real second front (France), the Americans were more gung ho than the British. I don’t recall that the Americans had to drag Churchill kicking and screaming, but what I read made Churchill look lame.
gex
DBrownI think the problem is that Americans learn their history from movies and such. Wasn’t there a WWII film a while back that had the Americans cracking codes much to the chagrin of Brits?
We’re always the heroes and the bestest of the best.
Blerg
Chris
@ DBrown,
The immediate answer to that is that having been drowned in an avalanche of World War Two books, novels, comic books, movies, etc, all centered on the U.S. and continuing to this day (Captain America comes out next week), the American people have gotten used to seeing the entire war as an “America saves the day” story with no nuances. Popular memory and popular culture tell the story.
The answer to the question itself of whether America won the war –
Actually, World War Two seems to’ve been a team effort.
Without American supplies to keep them afloat, Britain and Russia would probably have caved much earlier (and without American reinforcements, Britain couldn’t have gone on the offensive and Russia would’ve had a harder time of it).
Without the Russian sacrifice on the front, Britain and America would’ve had to face the full force of the Wehrmacht (Russia inflicted something like three quarters of all German casualties, and tied up a similar percentage of German troops). That would’ve been difficult at best and quite possibly would’ve failed.
And without the British holding on all by themselves for an entire year, 1) the Russians would’ve had to face the full force of the German army in 1942, and 2) the Americans wouldn’t have had ready-made bases (Britain, the British Middle-East) from which to project power onto the European continent, which would’ve made it much more difficult to invade Europe.
I find it fair to conclude that without American involvement, the war probably wouldn’t have been won. Of course, it probably wouldn’t have been without Russian or British involvement either. But that’s different from saying “Russia won the war.”
Martin
That will fail. The truth is that the mandatory spending which comes due to non-budgetary legislation is now consuming about 95% of the revenue. We’re seriously down pretty to either modifying SS and Medicare payouts effective immediately, or not paying soldiers. Even if we did a full government shutdown that wouldn’t save us from this – that’s how bad the deficit problem is right now. Almost the entire discretionary budget (which includes military salary) is being borrowed. Those that are screaming that we don’t need deficit reduction are full of shit. We do, DESPERATELY. But raising taxes is deficit reduction, so that’s not some kind of progressive surrender.
Like I said, it wouldn’t matter. I do expect that Obama wouldn’t leave it all on SS, and he’s never suggested he would. He wasn’t even definitive on whether SS checks would go out. My guess is that next week, to counter the GOP symbolic votes, he’s going to announce which parts of the government are going to get shut down effective Aug. 2 and remain cagey on getting much needed checks to seniors. My guess is that it’ll be virtually all of it – including Congress’ budget and his own – basically implementing the plan that they use when there’s no budget to keep critical services running and furloughing everyone else. Unfortunately that’s not going to help a whole lot because payroll really isn’t even that big of a chunk of the discretionary budget.
celticdragonchick
Exactly. The Germans understood how vital the Murmansk convoys were, and they expended irreplacable surface combatants trying to stop them. US food relief and war supplies kept Russia in the fight.
murbella
@ joe
chad mercs are hardly libyan citizens.
Qaddafi is threatening to send suicide bombers to europe.
its just a matter of time.
recognizing the NTC means the billions of dollahs Qaddafi stole from his people, which are currently frozen in western banks, can be handed over to the NTC.
liberal
Martin wrote,
In addition to @164 Catclub’s completely valid point about current polling, this is just amazingly ignorant. The political science literature is pretty solid on the effect of the economy on elections, and I’ve never ever seen anyone present it as “mostly because of the direct impact on the voting of those who lost their jobs.”
The only way I can see Obama winning in 2012 without a dramatic improvement in the unemployment rate is that he faces a very weak Republican candidate. Which these days doesn’t seem like a remote possibility.
celticdragonchick
My typing skills today are FAIL.
I keep having to go back and correct my posts.
Chris
@ liberal,
I believe Churchill was more worried about Stalin than Roosevelt was. That might be part of it – Winnie wanting to let the Nazis and Soviets bludgeon each other to death for as long as possible without intervening, so that after the war was one, the Sovs would’ve been bled too dry to pose a major threat.
Martin
Voters aren’t buying it. Not at all.
Suffern ACE
@Judas Escargot-I think that was part of the plan all along whether the debt ceiling was reached, or just extended to be reached again next year. Look at their defense appropriation – the one in which they couldn’t cut a single marching band – and you realize that what they’ll do is pass a budget more unbalanced so that he’ll run up against that ceiling again and again so they can say “he can’t control his spending habits” or “you need to have us stop him from spending what we’ve told him to spend.” Same as it always was with them. Vote for programs, label everyone else’s “pork and waste” but vote for them anyway, then claim “I’m against the debt.”
celticdragonchick
The Russians were onto that. Their order of battle changed right after VE day in preparation for a possible war with the western Allies.
Citizen Alan
Davis X Machina @ 157
We will never know if Bill Halter could have beaten John Boozman. We will never know if Bill Halter would have vast improvement over Blanche Lincoln had he won. But I think two things are pretty clear: Bill Halter couldn’t have done a worse job against Boozman than Lincoln did, and he couldn’t possibly have been a shittier excuse for a Democrat than Lincoln was.
Martin
Careful, in just the previous poll it was 15% deficit, 18% economy. The problem the GOP has with a poll like that is that their two messages are contradictory – tax cuts to boost the economy and deficit reduction. Obama’s are not, so he can more easily adjust his proposals to fit the concerns of the voters than the GOP can.
boss bitch
I want to hear what people on the street are thinking NOT what people who read the NYT and whoever that other guy is are thinking.
Catsy
@jl:
Objection: assumes facts not in evidence.
catclub
redshirt @ 153
Well, if it is then it is the stupidest tactic yet.
“You are putting him on trial for saving the world from the calamity that YOU caused?”
A blowjob is one thing, saving SS checks for millions of seniors is a different one.
Davis X. Machina
@boss bitch:
“Damn, it’s hot. Do I have beer still in the fridge, or do I need to buy some on the way in?”
(It’s mid-summer, in a non-election year…)
Draylon Hogg
It’s come to summat when ze Germans are aghast and agog at your “poisonous political culture”
Martin
Well, I think most people here don’t believe you know what the fuck you’re talking about on a vast range of issues, so what you see is probably only applicable to you.
jl
@181 catclub,
thanks I think you’ve helped us identify the likely GOP strategy of impeachment of Obama for his desperate improvisations to stave of disaster without a debt limit increase.
At least, if the recent behavior of the GOP is any guide to their smarts.
stuckinred
celticdragonchick
9 US flush deck destroyers were also given to the Soviets.
Nom de Plume
@MBL #14: Our political climate has been poisoned to a degree where the GERMANS claim they can’t imagine it.
I had the same thought. Of course, the Germans are a couple of generations removed from their own descent into fascism, so they can get away with a statement like that. What worries me is the implication that we must go through a similar process in order to become as sane as them.
MikeJ
@stuckinred: And don’t forget the two
TU-4sB-29s.catclub
Liberal @ 165 “but what I read made Churchill look lame.”
Well, to think Churchill would be more willing to let the Germans and Soviets knock each other out than Roosevelt
is not much of stretch.
Churchill was sort of the original cold warrior, iron curtain and all.
FlipYrWhig
@ Davis X., @ Citizen Alan:
Primarying Lincoln _was_ a good idea. The fact that Lincoln received support from the institutional Democratic party and Obama himself was, also, to be expected; if you’re trying to be an insurgent candidate, it should only _help_ your case to see the powers that be trying to shut you down. “Look at how threatened they are! Join the cause and shake up the rotten system!” Etc. But Arkansas Dems preferred Lincoln anyway. Them’s the breaks.
joes527
murbella
Again, we deny the existence of people that don’t fit the narrative. You want to argue that _more_ folks support the rebels than support the government, well that’s possible. But it would take a plebiscite to know whether or not it is the case. Yeah I know … not gonna happen. Because it is so much easier to select the folks that WE want o be the government, (and pretend no one else exists) than to let them work it out themselves.
Europe is bombing Libya. I know that it sucks, but sometimes folks bomb back. Anyone who doesn’t want a bloody nose should keep that nose out of other people’s fights.
How does any of this make the Rebels that we have selected the legitimate government?
gogol's wife
#158 Celtic Dragon Chick has it right — the allies did it together. I would also protest against identifying the Russian people with one man, Stalin.
catclub
Martin @ 179 “Careful, in just the previous poll it was 15% deficit, 18% economy.”
And you did not mention 21% jobs. The actual largest of the three.
Careful indeed.
Villago Delenda Est
He coined the term “iron curtain”.
He also didn’t care much for the Soviets, but he knew that the Nazis were a bigger threat. Once the Nazis were out of the way, time to change gears.
fasteddie9318
Case study in not jumping into threads in the middle: I read this and my immediate reaction was “WTF? Somebody primaried Abraham Lincoln?” Which, OK, the Radical Republicans did split and did run Fremont until he withdrew, and some War Democrats did support Lincoln, but I don’t think Obama was involved.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@celticdragonchick #170:
Since we seem to have formed a flashmob of WW2 history freaks in this thread, I’ll throw out one of my favorite pieces of trivia from Gerhard Weinberg’s book A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. There was crucial period during the turning of the tide phase on the Eastern Front (IIRC in late 1942/early 1943) when the majority of Allied deliveries of war material flowed not thru Murmansk but thru Iran. The Germans were very aware of this and during 1942 had on a number of occasions discussed with the Japanese the possibility of joint operations in the Indian Ocean theater to choke off the ability of the Western Allies to supply Russia via that route. One of the major reasons why they were never able to attempt that operation was the diversion of Japanese resources away from the Indian Ocean necessitated by the Guadalcanal Campaign. Weinberg’s take was that in a way unnoticed by the combatants then (and by few historians since) Americans fighting and dying on Guadalcanal helped contribute to winning the battle of Stalingrad.
OzoneR
Economy is a vague term. If you ask people, a lot of them will blame the deficit/debt for the bad economy
stuckinred
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
nice
Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E)
@ liberal 166
Ordovician Bighorn Dolomite (formerly rarely seen poster Fe E)
@ liberal 166
ETA to add the damn post!
Well, North Africa did prevent the Germans from getting to the OIl that they so desperately needed, so while pretty samll in terms of numbers of men and equipment, it was pretty important. Plus our various efforts tied up a large chunk of the luftwaffe which they REALLY would have liked available against the Soviets.
WWII was a team effort.
Redshirt
catclub @ 183: Didn’t say it was wise. Logic need not factor into the tactics. But you can guarantee it would dominate the media, and isn’t that most important? To control the spin/narrative, and thus fashion reality as you see fit?
PIGL
celtic
what’s your point here: that the American in fact deserves 100% credit for winning World War 2 because of a bunch of trucks?
Books have been written about this war, you know, by actual military historians. The ones I have read do not support your position. Your virulent WTF responses have the more the air of defending the roseate hollywood myths then a reverence for the truth.
The statement that “Russia won the war” is correct insofar as it is a fact that German air and ground superiority were crushed, by the Russians, at the battles of Kurst and Stalingrad. They never recovered. This is what made the other invasions possible. But the war was already lost at that point, and the Russians would almost certainly have it to Berlin on their own.
Yes, America provided important logistical support. That does not equate to decisive victory in the biggest land battles that have ever taken place, or that probably ever will take place.
Lawnguylander
@Chris
It’s not just like that in the US. As a child I spent my summers in Ireland and the UK and begged to be deluged by my parents, aunts and uncles with WWII themed comic books. As I recall, those kinds of comic books and graphic novels took up half the shelf space at newsstands, chemists, etc. As much as I loved reading them I was always frustrated that you’d think that Britain won the war all by itself if this kind of stuff was all you read. When Americans were depicted it was often as arrogant blowhards who’d have been lost without British savvy and pluck. I don’t really remember anything about the Soviets, though. But I wouldn’t have wanted to hear anything about that, being a scared eight year old* at the height of the Cold War. (Hitches up pants) The telling of WWII history was agreed upon in the West during the Cold War and has only changed slowly since it ended.
*Which is to say that all scared children think like wingnuts and all wingnuts think like scared children.
Villago Delenda Est
PIGL: You are another dilletant who knows NOTHING about how modern war is fought. Dismissing the impact of logistics is the tell here.
WWII was a team effort. The Russians did the heavy lifting with levers provided by the US.
shano
Drayton @186……… the Germans improved their economy with 60% spending cuts and 40% tax increases. They are doing well with this formula. Wish we could have the same ratio.
FlipYrWhig
Sorry for the confusion, fasteddie!
Catsy
@VDE:
Logistics, logistics, logistics.
It has always been thus, ever since the first tribe marched overland to attack another tribe. If your army has no food, munitions or fuel, you don’t have an army–you have a problem.
Tony J
Liberal @166
Oh yeah, the US was very eager to get a second front going, but most of the hypotheticals I’ve read conclude that an invasion of France in 1943 (which is what the US wanted) would have been a bloodbath. The Germans were a – lot – stronger than they would be a year later, and the US Army was, to put it mildly, not quite ready to face the Wehrmacht in a head-to-head clash. No one at the time was thinking of anything sneaky like D-Day, it would have been Dieppe all over again but on a massive scale, probably.
The Western Allies might not have been able to repeat the operation next year, and there’s a fairly good chance that Germany would have been forced to pull so many troops from the Eastern Front in the process that they would have avoided the huge losses they took in 1943/44 trying to fight for every inch of ground. A failed 1943 invasion could have left Germany – stronger – in 1944 than it otherwise was.
As for Churchill, he was gung-ho for an invasion of southern Europe, which would have been a lot easier to pull off, and would have given the Allied armies the seasoning they needed while putting markers down all over regions he thought the Soviet Union would otherwise claim after Germany fell. Pushing up through Italy and the Balkans would have forced Hitler to spend money and resources he couldn’t spare to defend southern France, Austria and the vital Rumanian oilfields. It wasn’t actually that bad of a plan, but the US didn’t want to do it. So they compromised.
Italy was invaded, but the vast majority of effort was spent on building up for a cross-Channel invasion in 1944.
YMMV.
And yes, the whole Allied war-effort succeeded because they were ALLIES. America provided the logistics, Russia the manpower, Britain the geographical advantage. Take any one of the three out of the equation and Germany probably wins.
End of Nerdish Interlude. Back to your regular programming.
burnspbesq
@magurakurin:
Freudian slip? Or fuck you spell check?
burnspbesq
@jl:
Exactamente. Krugman and DeLong have the benefit of being able to be ultra-Orthodox Keynesians, because they don’t have to try and get a program through a Congress that would be firmly Austrian if it was smart enough to know what that means. Which is not to denigrate their contribution to the discussion; it’s good that somebody is there to show the full range of possibilities.
Chris Andersen
It would be much worse than Lehman because at least after that failure, the United States was there to provide a safety net for the world financial system. Whose going to hold the net when it the U.S. that falls?
luc
It is perhaps worth noting that “Bild” (or die Bild Zeitung) is the closest German equivalent of a Murdoch-style tabloid. Certainly not a left-leaning newspaper.
Paul in KY
DBrown, I was certainly taught in college that the USSR was the main reason we won WW II. 75% of the nazi armies were on the Russian Front.
I think ‘American Exceptionalism’ ™ mandates that this unfortunate truth be downplayed.
Edit: Village Delenda Est, it wasn’t all those free trucks we gave them, it was the masses of T-34 tanks & Sturmovik attack planes from factories byond the Urals that won it for the USSR (plus the great fighting tenacity of their very pissed off troops).
Paul in KY
liberal, Churchill knew an invasion would kill alot of British troops. He remembered WW I & all their losses there & was reluctant to have those same kind of casualties again (in a worst case scenario).
He came around, though.
Tonal Crow
Somewhat OT, but if Krugman had written today’s Bobo column, Republicans would be screeching OMG! DEATH PANELS!
liberal
Martin wrote,
Fuck you, too, O Wise One.
Stefan
Here in the USA we have the strangest combination of people who are physically very hard working (look at our average # of hours worked per year per capita compared with other OECD countries)
Yeah, but while we work longer hours, we don’t work harder. Americans goof off at work a lot, so while they’re at work a long time, they don’t get as much done per hour as others do. Contrast our productivity numbers with other OECD countries and it doesn’t look as good. In Germany, by contrast, they work shorter hours, but when they’re at the office, they actually work. And then they leave. It’s a system I prefer.
liberal
…adding, in terms of not knwoing what the fuck you’re talking about on a vast range of issues, this one is pretty high up there:
Methinks your problem is that you don’t like it when there are other people out there who understand that you’re a legend in your own mind, O Wise One.
Stefan
It’s come to summat when ze Germans are aghast and agog at your “poisonous political culture”
Didn’t I already address this stupid attitude up above? Oh yes, here it was @89:
Why “wow”? Germany has a very moderate political culture, with a great emphasis on cooperative decision-making and on civil discourse. Of course Germans can’t quite grasp what’s going on here.
…Ah, I see now. You’re referring to the Nazi period. I forgot that for Americans, all references to Germany immediately call up Adolf Hitler, and that they’re not really conversant with the last two generations of modern European history. In America, when it comes to Germany, somehow it’s always 1939.
liberal
@215 wrote,
Sure. My point is that it would also kill a lot of American troops. Not to mention all the Soviets that were already being killed.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Paul in KY #214:
I don’t think any of the history buffs here are downplaying the fighting role of the Red Army, but rather that they would have had a different and much longer and harder sort of fight on their hands without massive logistical support from the US. By 1944 the Red Army was on average more mechanized than the German Army which invaded in June 1941 with 600,000 horses to pull their guns with, and it showed in the results. Operation Bagration in 1944 is a spectacular example, but it is also worth remembering that their advance across the Ukraine in late 1943 involving jumping numerous river barriers which would have made excellent defensive lines, but they were consistenly able to throw advanced elements across a bridgehead and then rapidly expand it before the Germans could do much of anything to stop them. Their ability to move mechanized infantry and artillery long distances in short amounts of time were key in making that possible, and even those Soviet military memoirs which go out of their way to deny credit to the US can’t conceal that it was a vast truck fleet which made this possible, while remaining diplomatically silent on the subject of where all those trucks came from. Those trucks mere made in Detroit, not Sverdlovsk. If it hadn’t been for all those trucks and the food and gas and ammo to go with them, the Red Army still fights it way all the way to Berlin, but in 1946 or perhaps even ’47, not ’45. This is not a pleasant thought when you consider how many of the German superweapon programs went fizzle in 1945 and had no effect on the war (especially the newer model submarines) or what the Germans would have been able to do if they had kept the death factory camps in Poland and Western Russia open for another year or two.
Paul in KY
liberal, we didn’t lose 1,500,000 people in WW I. Great Britain (and its colonies) did.
That coloured his thinking a bit, IMO.
Paul in KY
ThatLeftTurnInABQ, all I know is what I was taught in Military Science & Political Science classes. It was stated very clearly that the USSR was the prime reason Nazism was defeated.
I agree with that statement.
liberal
@209 Tony J wrote,
I’ve only read a little about this stuff, but my recollection is that the US didn’t want to do it precisely bcause they didn’t think it was a very good plan.
El Cid
I’m not sure which I believe more as a prediction (not some stupid “law” or rule) of what’s most likely to appear in extended political blog comments, the arising of Hitler/NAZI accusations, or debates about the role of US versus the USSR in WWII.
...now I try to be amused
As I understand it, fighter cover was an absolute prerequisite for any amphibious invasion of Europe. That eliminated a lot of potential landing sites, or required intermediate invasions to take air bases. (Operation Husky in Sicily was one.)
bob h
And special thanks to the Chamber of Commerce and Wall St firms who bankrolled the Republican 2010 takeover of the House which now threatens to trash their business models and profits. Heckuva job.
Tony J
Liberal @ 225
They didn’t so much think it was a ‘bad plan’ as they thought (rightly) that Churchill was thinking about “What does Europe look like – after – we win?” and trying to get the best possible result for Britain without worrying how it would play in Peoria. A lot of US planners were – very – suspicious of Britain, and it showed.
Put it this way. The US wanted a quick knockout that it didn’t really have the ability to deliver in 1943. Invading France in 1943 would have probably been as disastrous to the Western Allied war-effort as Stalingrad was to the Germans. You don’t put your best army with the most seasoned troops into a meat grinder unless you absolutely have too. That’s what France in 1943 would have been.
My bottom line here is that Churchill was probably right. A Western effort in southern Europe would have weakened Germany more, for less cost, and given the US and UK a much better position come 1945 than they actually got. France would still have fallen, there still would have been a D-Day to spread the effort and drive for the Rhine, but a lot of countries that ended up under Soviet control would have had US and UK occupiers instead.
Original Lee
I am slowly starting to take heart that the low-information voters are paying attention. My fairly conservative neighbor (ex-Marine originally from Oklahoma) asked me today, flat out, “Is Michelle Bachmann really that crazy stupid?” and I was pleased to be able to answer, without undue gloating or smugness, “Yes. Yes she is.”
Then I was treated to a 5-minute exasperated rant about the f**king Tea Party nuts in Congress and that he’d never seen anything like it in his life and he had a whole bunch of buddies in the area who were ready to hit the streets outside the Capitol if anything happened to their retirement benefits.
He even swore he would never watch Faux News again, although I don’t think he’ll keep that oath.
Cain
@Violet:
The three stooges? Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk, Nyuk.. doh!
celticdragonchick
@PIGL
Your strawman-fu is weak, young Jedi. I claimed that we won as ALLIES. Go back and read what I wrote. Also, as has been pointed out by others, Russian armies would have faired rather worse without the considerable fuel, food, ammunition and weapons we gave them. Now, history may be my minor instead of my major (which is geology), but I know how to read and evaluate primary and secondary sources and then defend my conclusions. This thread is not really the forum for that, but I would be willing to send you other work I have written if you like.
celticdragonchick
@PIGL
Your strawman-fu is weak, young Jedi. I claimed that we won as ALLIES. Go back and read what I wrote. Also, as has been pointed out by others, Russian armies would have faired rather worse without the considerable fuel, food, ammunition and weapons we gave them. Now, history may be my minor instead of my major (which is geology), but I know how to read and evaluate primary and secondary sources and then defend my conclusions. This thread is not really the forum for that, but I would be willing to send you other work I have written if you like.
celticdragonchick
@stuckinred
The only ones I can think of that we built in sufficient numbers to just give away and that are flush deck are the Fletcher Class. Is that right?
The Sumner and the Gearing class (also called long hulled Sumners) were also flush decked, but I cannot see us giving those away, especially since the Gearings were needed for radar picket duty. Let me know which it was.
murbella
@joe
cuz Obama said so, lol.
you do understand that was why OBL junk punched america in the economic nads, dontcha? A RESPONSE to American interventionism.
This time we are on the side of the islamists. the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
We just might be on the winning side.
/smart-aleck smirk
Original Lee
@Martin 169: Apropos, I believe at the end of June the head of the Social Security Administration was interviewed on the radio and basically said that the August SS checks would go out but September’s would not unless the debt ceiling was raised on time.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@MikeJ:
I do the same thing. The angrier they get, the calmer I get. It’s surprising how many people lose their shit when you do that…lol! If that happens, it makes it clear that they are the ones who are losing their shit, which only makes them angrier. It’s a great technique to use with assholes.
I taught my wife and kids the same thing; be calm in the face of a shitstorm of idiocy, let it blow on by and then calmly and politely respond. If possible, make sure to include a circuitous verbal slap upside the head of the idiot on occasion, something that they won’t get until they are stewing over the ‘incident’ later. My wife got one asshole fired by doing just that…lol. The asshole was her boss and he had dealt her endless shit for almost a year when her zen attitude caused him to lose on her it in front of the owner. Unknown to the boss, the owner had walked into the shop (pizza shop) while he was berating my wife, pissed that he couldn’t ‘get’ to her. The owner asked my wife if this happened often and she said “daily”. The owner fired the asshole and promoted my wife, saying that anyone who could take that amount of yelling and screaming had to be a good manager.
She didn’t disappoint him, at least until the day we moved away from the area.
Obama has this shit down good and he knows how to use it to his advantage. Give them enough rope and …
Just Some Fuckhead
@Martin:
This is just retarded. The actual unemployment/underemployment rate is over 15%. These aren’t just random individuals existing in a solitary unemployed and underemployed existence. They have families, spouses, dependent parents, etc. They have other people depending on them for healthcare access, etc.
There is something wrong with you.
General Stuck
That is hilarious coming from a whackjob like you fuckhead.