Those Crazy Repuglicans: Colleague on Fire Editions

Why are repugs saying Obama is cutting defense?


Benen on what happened AFTER THE SEGMENT....

It was a very special episode of Glenn Beck's Fox News show, when he pretended to douse a colleague in gasoline while talking about setting himself on fire, but what I found especially interesting is what happened immediately afterwards.

You may have seen this clip already. After learning that President Obama might eventually embrace an immigration-reform legislation along the lines of the proposal touted by George W. Bush and John McCain (in at least one of McCain's various personas), Beck said, "President Obama, why don't you just set us on fire?"

From there, Beck had a fairly predictable tantrum -- he's apparently upset about France, bowing, Guantanamo, Cuba, etc. -- before concluding that we might "lose the Republic." To drive his point home, Beck took a gasoline container, and pretended to pour gas over Fox News' Bill Schulz.

This was so completely insane, it was probably the first time I genuinely started to wonder if Beck's derangement is an elaborate act. A guy this crazy, in real life, might try to eat his shoes while arguing with mailboxes. Getting dressed and making it to a television studio every day would be difficult.

But that's not really the interesting part. Alex Koppelman added, "Unfortunately, not captured in the video is what happened next, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry came on and Beck asked, 'Governor, you're regretting being on this program at this point, are you not, sir?' Perry responded, 'Not at all, Glenn Beck. I'm proud to be with you.'"

And that, in a nutshell, helps explain what's gone terribly wrong with conservative Republicans of late. Beck appears to be in desperate need of medication, and the chief executive of one of the nation's largest states is "proud" to appear on the show, just moments after Beck pretended to set a colleague on fire.

Credible, serious public officials would ordinarily want to avoid making eye contact with a deranged figure, but Gov. Perry was delighted to chat with the Fox News lunatic. Maybe it's because Perry actually finds Beck's madness compelling; maybe it's because Perry has a big Republican primary coming up and wants to curry favor with Beck's followers.

Either way, it's a problem for the party and the conservative movement. Conservative blogger Rick Moran said yesterday, "Beck worries me. Conservatives worry me. I worry about myself. I feel trapped in a huge ball of cotton, trying gamely to make my way out but don't know which direction to start pushing. I am losing contact with those conservatives who find Beck anything more than a clown -- and an irrational one at that."

If the GOP wants to pick itself up off the mat, this would be a good place to start.

McCarthyism revisited April 9: GOP in Exile: Rachel Maddow talks about how a GOP Congressman says he has a secret list of socialists he works with in Congress. Huh?

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

JedLewinson is on a video tear:


And, in case you missed that priceless cultural reference, here is Miss Teen USA 2007 from South Carolina (over 34,000,000 YouTube views):


Benen on Rethugs: REDISCOVERING THEIR LOVE OF STIMULUS....

Over the last couple of months, we've learned a few tenets of Republican thinking that are, to the GOP, fundamental truths. Government spending, for example, does not create jobs and cannot stimulate the economy. What's more, the only thing worse than government spending is government spending on unnecessary programs. It has always been thus; it will always be so.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a conservative Georgia Republican, has been pretty consistent on these points. His approach to the economy is strikingly incoherent, but at least everyone knew exactly where Chambliss stood -- we can't stimulate the economy with government spending, and wasteful spending is manifestly repulsive.

That is, until this week, when Chambliss suddenly changed his mind. Brian Beutler reports that the Georgian called into NPR yesterday and "argued that there's no better way to create jobs (read: stimulate the economy) than...with government spending." Chambliss said:

"Well listen, the jobs are important any time, whether you're in a fiscal crisis or not. But now, when we're in these very difficult times, certainly it's even more important.

"I've been an advocate not just of spending more money on the F-22 but on -- when it comes to stimulating the economy, there's no better way to do it than to spend it in the defense community."

Let's all welcome Sen. Chambliss to the Big Government Club. It's a delight to see such a far-right lawmaker embrace the notion that government spending stimulates the economy, and I can only assume that Americans can count on his support -- from now on -- on economic recovery efforts.

I should, of course, acknowledge the inverse of this, which the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb touched on yesterday: if liberals like government spending so much, why would they support the Gates restructuring plan that scraps spending on a variety of military programs?

The answer, of course, is that those who approve of Gates' plan are endorsing sensible government spending. The administration wants to spend an additional $21 billion on the military over Bush's last budget, focusing those investments to address modern national security challenges. Gates' blueprint identifies spending we don't need, and redirects the money to better uses.

In other words, it reduces waste, which is part of the conservative mantra, isn't it?

Or not discovering their love of stimulus. Aravosis: GOP chair Steele questions whether we're really in an economic crisis

The far-right extremists running the Republican party today do not believe that we are in any kind of economic crisis. That is why Steele said this today. That is why the Republicans all voted against the stimulus (why vote to save the country from falling into a depression if you think the economy is fine?). That is why GOP governors are turning away stimulus money, and risking their own local economies and the national economy. Because the far-right extremists who have taken over the Republican party do not believe that the economy is in any trouble. Talk to anyone. Ask them how their sales are going. Ask them how many customers they have this years as compared to last. Ask them if they still have a job, if they're still working a full week. This goes beyond out of touch. It's basically insane. The media really needs to come down hard on this - the Republicans need to be grilled on why they continue to believe that the fundamentals of the economy are strong.

Benen: IT DOESN'T MEAN WHAT HE THINKS IT MEANS....

Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, has a reputation for knowing what he's talking about. Keep that in mind when reading this exchange between Ryan and Sean Hannity last night:

HANNITY: You talk about the demonizing: This has become a mantra, tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans don't care about the poor. They've been very effective in their bumper stickers and slogans and propaganda. How do you convince people that this benefits everybody ... when the Democrats are out there saying you don't care about the poor, which I know is a lie. But what's the answer?

RYAN: Well, look, what we're proposing is we're going to give taxpayers a choice. You can have the current tax code with all of its loopholes and bells and whistles, or if you want a simplified system that fits on a postcard, two rates, 10 percent and 25 percent. It's progressive.

Now, we've joked over the years about the Republican drive to "create their own reality," but let's be clear: they're not allowed to create their own dictionaries.

A "progressive" tax system has a certain meaning -- to over-simplify a bit, those who have more, pay more. What Ryan has recommended isn't "progressive" in the slightest, because it gives enormous breaks to the wealthy, while increasing the tax burden on everyone else. That's the opposite of a "progressive" structure.

Maybe this is why the White House hasn't had more productive policy discussions with congressional Republicans. They think a $21 billion increase in defense spending is a "cut"; they think a five-year spending freeze is stimulative; and their top budget guy thinks a regressive tax system is "progressive."

It's pretty tough to find common ground between sensible and nutty. When GOP officials wonder why they haven't played a more substantive policy-making role, this should be a pretty big hint.

Joe Klein: Krauthammer Desperately Seeking Nail

Charles Krauthammer, the ultimate bleating-heart neoconservative, is all atwitter over Barack Obama's foreign trip. Where most rational observers saw a significant U.S. triumph, the beginning of our reconciliation with the rest of the world after eight years of stupid bellicosity, destructive threats and empty bluster, Krauthammer sees decline and weakness. Obama admitted past U.S. misbehavior! That is surely a sign of weakness...or maybe, perhaps, a sign of renewed strength? Or maybe, it's just being honest, a quality the Bush Administration eschewed. The Euros chose not to play on Afghanistan? Perhaps that had something to do with the Bush Administration's myopic avoidance of that theater of battle for the past seven years--the Euros, not the heartiest of allies when it comes to warmaking, were left to fend for themselves without any U.S. leadership or much U.S. support and they are aching to leave now. Over the next year, we'll see what effect a renewed US good-faith effort in Afghanistan has when it comes to stiffening the spines of our allies. The Euros didn't buy Obama's plea for a stimulus plan? Perhaps that has something to do with the rampant corruption that has marked US-style capitalism during the Reagan-Bush era. Oh--and uh-oh--another sign of Obama's embrace of weakness: he actually admitted that the US finance-thieves had been part of the problem.

And there was--oh. my. God.--the failed North Korean rocket launch. The Gates Defense budget is cutting anti-missile defense systems in Alaska. More Obama wimposity! Except that Gates has decided not to spend tens of billions on an anti-missile system (that doesn't work) to counter a North Korean rockets (that don't work) carrying North Korean atomic bombs (that have, so far, fizzled when tested). The real North Korean threat, created by George W. Bush's first-term ineptness, is the nuclear fuel that was produced in the past six years--fuel that the wildly impoverished North Koreans could sell to terrorists or rogue states (as they sold their nuclear plant design to the Syrians). That is a threat that doesn't yield easily to the empty bluster of neocons--indeed, it was accelerated by US bluster.

The point is that Krauthammer's nonsense--the whole neoconservative project--proved an utter failure during the Bush years and now exists well outside a vast, stable, liberal-moderate consensus on foreign policy that includes most Democrats, the Bush 41 realists and the leading strategists of the U.S. military. Rectifying the Bush 43 embarrassment will not be easy and it will not come quickly. There are no Krauthammers and nails when it comes to diplomacy. But Obama's effort to show the rest of the world that the US can be trusted to lead once more is precisely what is needed right now.

Sully on The Tea Tantrum Movement

I spent the better part of an hour earlier today scanning the various sites and blogs to try and understand what specifically the Fox-Pajamas tea parties are about. Having absorbed about as much of the literature as I can, I have to say I'm still befuddled.

Option 1: It's a protest of the bank bailouts orchestrated by Bush and now Obama. But surely these tea-partiers understand what would happen if we didn't bail the banks out. Are they advocating letting major banks fail? Or are they advocating a Krugman-style government take-over? No idea.

Option 2: It's a protest against tax hikes. But there have barely been any! Are they arguing that the planned return to Clinton era marginal rates is an outrage worthy of the colonists ... only months after an election in which the winning candidate ran on exactly that platform? Is that postponed future increase so radical that it demands a protest modeled on one in which people were taxed with no representation at all? Truly bizarre. And when you consider that we have gone through a very long period of relatively low taxation for the very successful, and a very long period in which their wealth has soared, and after an election where a majority of such people voted for Obama, the extremism seems unrelated to anything substantive underneath it.

Option 3: It's a protest against illegal immigration. Ok, so why the tea? Weren't all the original tea-partiers illegal immigrants?

Option 4: It's a protest against government debt. Yay! I will leave aside the somewhat awkward fact that Fox News and Pajamas Media barely covered the massive debt racked up by the Republicans during a period of economic growth. Instead, I'll proffer a simple point: If the tea-partiers are concerned about debt and concerned about taxes, one presumes they favor drastic spending cuts. But what are the tea-partiers proposing to do to Medicare, Medicaid, and social security?

I'd love to see a proposal that they support on any of these entitlement programs, but particularly Medicare which is the culprit for much of the debt burden. Where is it? Or are we really going to hear more diversions about "pork"?

As a fiscal conservative who actually believed in those principles when the Republicans were in power, I guess I should be happy at this phenomenon. And I would be if it had any intellectual honesty, any positive proposals, and any recognizable point. What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.

These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.