There is something almost epically pathetic about Bruce Bartlett’s long column about how he slowly learned that the Republican Party is full of shit. It is basically an admission that he’s not very bright. How could he think that the GOP could go from attracting 10% percent of the black vote to 30% just because Republicans started telling black folks about the Democratic Party’s responsibility for Jim Crow laws. Ann Coulter says stupid stuff like that, but she does it to sell books, not because she thinks it will convince blacks.
It seems like what he really wants is for Republicans to forgive him for his apostasy, agree that he was right all along, and to start following his advice. But his advice varies from the ridiculous idea that the future of the GOP is in winning 30% of the black vote to the toxic idea that Paul Krugman is an economic genius.
He was genuinely shocked when he learned that he was being punished for criticizing the Bush administration from the right in the New York Times, but he was even more shocked when he learned that no one on the right bothered to read his column in the New York Times because they were all watching Fox News.
The recent election didn’t prove Bartlett right about anything. It may have confirmed for Bartlett that the right is suffering from “epistemic closure,” but the rest of us already knew that.
I did notice that Bartlett was writing some sane criticisms of the Republican Party in recent years and I appreciated his effort, but I still think he’s an idiot.
We had the same reaction to the column. Another thing I noticed is that it’s more of a self-pity party than actually trying to get the GOP to moderate.
Further, the article is all over the damn place. If he wrote this as a paper in college, I’d give him a C, tops, because it has no central thesis. Is Bartlett saying, “I was wrong back in the good ol’ days when I backed Ron Paul and now forgive me for my past sins,” or is he saying, “I was right before and I was right now…and those Republicans are just stupid and didn’t listen to me.”
It’s this nonsense obsession that both Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan seem to have that “Reagan was right for the time just as Obama is right for now.” It’s bullshit. Here we have plenty of evidence that both Bartlett and Sullivan admit they were wrong, but they can’t quite cross the Rubicon and flatly say, “The Hippies were right, Reagan was wrong.” They have to twist themselves into pretzels to justify their support for Reagan with their support of Obama, as if it’s not contradictory.
If he was wrong he hasn’t come out and said it, directly; in fact he says the opposite: the GOP left reality and therefore also left me. But you just said you were wrong!
I’ve seen it with health care, too. Andrew admits that maybe his homeland knows what they’re doing with regard to cost control on health care. But rather than fully admit it, he cowers back in the corner and says how awesome American health care still is and that if Obamacare doesn’t work then we need some form of premium support. NO, we don’t, you moron. Can you follow your own admissions to their logical end point? We need single payer. Admit it.
TL;DR: conservatives are, have been, and forever will be, what we thought they are.
Oh, this is my favorite:
Conservatism And Extreme Inequality
Here, Sullivan writes about how and why conservatives should be concerned with inequality.
Then, maybe even on the same damn fucking day, Sullivan will get on his knees and kiss Alan Simpson’s ass for telling the truth about “entitlements.” And then how we need to cut entitlements and reduce government spending. But we’re concerned about inequality! Really and honestly! Oh, public sector unions need to be squashed because…well, because!!! But I really do care about inequality! Pinky swear.
Here we have plenty of evidence that both Bartlett and Sullivan admit they were wrong, but they can’t quite cross the Rubicon and flatly say, “The Hippies were right, Reagan was wrong.”
Do you really think Sully is going to give up the love he has for the only other woman besides his mother?
And never get Sullivan to vote for or support Labour, even after he has post after post after post about why the Tories — the party and agenda he full-throatily supported when they were enacting their agenda — were WRONG about austerity, and him admitting as much. H can admit his sins, but never seem to work up the courage to do something about it.
Always comes back to the same dilemma, and it doesn’t matter which side of the pond you’re on: conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.
Bartlett is bright. He can write quite cogent articles when his blinders aren’t interfering. The problem is the ability of the “conservative” mindset to just ignore facts which don’t fit into their worldview. “Gullible” is a better description of their problem, but is milder than what they have. Somehow they deliberately fool themselves on a presumably subconscious level. The fact that Sullivan and Bartlett seem to still be prone to this even after realizing the problem of epistemic closure suggests some biological/psychological basis, and not just falling into the now rather cultish right wing.
Wishful thinking and clinging to cherished beliefs in the face of facts is not just a problem with conservatives, either. Something seems to make it much worse with conservatives, but it does affect other people too.
Read the following and tell me he is bright again.
Oh my! Bartlett’s obtuseness about what happened with those pre-1964 Southern Democrats is certainly mind boggling. Could he honestly think that they didn’t leave the Democratic party and go elsewhere? How old is he? His hair is white, as I recollect.
In general, I’ve long since learned to be wary of “come to their senses” Republicans. It never lasts, and it doesn’t alter the fundamental tilt of their world view.
Bartlett has missed a wee bit of history.
The famed GOper southern strategy has gotten those horrible pre 64 racist southern democrats to become post Reagan racist republicans,
same people,
same racist ideology,
different party behind their racist strategy.
These guys NEVER connect the dots in public.
Once you’re part of the tribe (or committed to trying to be part of the tribe), you have to disavow any and all knowledge of the Southern Strategy, or at least attempt to minimize its impact.
Deathbed confessions from Lee Atwater, post-discommendation admissions from former NeoConfederate players – hell, even blatant signals of their true intent DURING campaigns are summarily dismissed.
Willful blindness – it is strong with this bunch.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. He’s being delusional. He’s perfectly capable of analyzing whether black people care about which party the worst racists tended to be in 100 years or which party they’re in now. He just isn’t doing it. (For that matter, he’s perfectly able to learn the fact that black people are already generally much more informed about historical race relations. But, again, he isn’t.)
Actually, it’s pretty typical of Republican reasoning. They start with some conclusion they want (in this case that Republicans will win elections.) Add in some true facts (in this case that Republicans have a tough road to get significantly more support with Latinos or whites.) So in order for the desired conclusion to be true, Republicans have to be able to gain substantial support among black. Therefore he believes it. It’s not stupidity, it’s willful ignorance/self-delusion – something hard to describe with words because it makes no sense as logical reasoning.
“anti-immigrant attitude among Repub base…too severe…to reach out to…Latino[s]”
Ah, but the “attitude” of today’s noble Repub base (as willfully encouraged by Team Conservative over the past four years) isn’t “too severe” to reach out to black people, eh, Bruce? We must not be seeing the same racist placards and photoshops and “jokes” and emails or hearing the same dog whistles (“guttin’ welfare!/Prez Food Stamp!”) as Mr Bartlett.
Nope, all that’s needed is an easy little history lesson and voila, 30% of the black vote stampedes to the Repub camp. If only those people had known! A real can’t miss idea!
If Bartlett actually believes the brainless shit he’s peddling here, he’s a complete moran.
Paul Krugman is far more conciliatory. “Anyway, I have in the past been a bit hard on Bartlett, wondering why it took him so long to see the obvious. But never mind that: he has shown character, in a nation where that is hard to find.”
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/bruce-bartlett-is-a-mensch/
I agree with Paul. Bartlett is far from perfect, but he doesn’t deserve a wankerOTD.
I don’t get the hostility to Krugman. Explain.
Who is being hostile to Krugman?
2nd paragraph:
I don’t get the hostility.
You think that’s a view Republicans are now willing to concede?
I must have misunderstood. I thought the “toxic idea” was YOUR opinion. What you mean is that the idea is toxic to the GOP, yes?
My bad, sorry for the confusion. [reaches for the coffee]
Yeah that’s how I read it too. I couldn’t figure out how a man who is right 9/10 times is not actually an economic genius. Glad it was cleared up.
Here’s the thing…
When one speaks of groups that vote against their own interests…
One does not include Black people in that conversation.
Getting Black people to the polls is the problem…
once they get in the voting booth…
they know how to vote in their own interest.
We are not Blue-Collar White folks.
The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts – ended on the books – American Apartheid.
As a Black person, if you are a politician and the words come out of your mouth:
” I would never have voted for the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act.”
YOU BECOME MY ENEMY.
There is no followup.
I don’t need to know anything else about you.
Don’t want to know anything else about you.
You get thrown in the pile called MY ENEMY – and I know how to deal with you.
Jim Crow isn’t something in the history books for me.
It’s not ‘ theoretical’.
MY FAMILY LIVED IN THE POLICE STATE KNOWN AS JIM CROW AMERICA.
Black folk know how stood on their side at the end of American Apartheid.
And they know where the folks that didn’t went to- THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.
Ann Coulter sells books!!!!!! HaHaHaHaHa
No, she says those things so that you will recognize her face on the cover of the boom sitting in the New Books section at your local public library.
Either there is a huge conservative operation financing the placement of multiple copies of her and other folks’ screeds in every branch library in the land (threatening cries of “censorship” if a library doesn’t take them) or this country’s libraries have the stupidest purchasing agents in the world, wasting millions of taxpayer money on this drivel.
Same for Glenn Beck. They draw eyeballs, not dollars. The folks who want those eyeballs badly enough pay the freight, and they have very deep pockets.
Bruce Bartlett? Who’s he? Just some random GOP guy who knows how to get paid for a straddle.
I have a strategy to deal with those books at my local public library. It has 3 parts:
(1)hide the book behind others
(2)request contra books from the left
(3)check the book out and keep it out.
#3 I don’t do so much anymore and #2 is working very well these days, as the branch librarian is amenable to purchasing books with a more progressive tilt.
There is a parallel on the left to the dreck on the right?
I see no lefty books that are obvious hit jobs on rightwing politicians or lefty books that are in your face with one-word titles. All of the lefty books the branch library gets are pretty solid works from the center left.
But the books that are variations of calling the President a muslim socialist tyrant who is going to sell out America are a major stimulus program in parts of the US. This week, I saw five new ones, issued just before the election and crowding the New Releases shelf.
Doing #1, reshelving the offending title alphabetically by author in the fiction section we’ve done. Doing #3 is prohibitively expensive unless there are enough people who will check it out when you return it.
This is a really interesting situation because the county went 70%+ percent for Obama and the service area for the branch includes a huge part of some traditionally African-American communities, and a significant number of Asians and Hispanics.
Yeah, I read that article, and no, I don’t think Bruce Bartlett is any kind of idiot. I wouldn’t mistake him for anything more than a temporary ally, mind you, but I think he is conscious and self-aware. Thank you for the almost Driftglass-level rant though, Booman.
My take on that article specifically is that we are not its primary audience. He is talking to his fellow conservatives for the most part. He talks about his political evolution not to make a mea culpa but to establish his bona fides. His prattle about the pre-1964 Democrats is pretty hair-brained by my standards but again he’s talking to his fellows; people who Bartlett admits have rendered themselves addled with their closed information loop. Trying to reduce the Democratic party’s margins with minorities by wedging black people against latinos (or visa versa) is not an explicitly stupid strategy for the Repubs. They are just not capable of it right now. They are too invested in nativism and white privilege to make those kinds of gambits. The thrust of that article is Mr. Bartlett trying to illuminate the GoP’s wrongheadedness.
I do not blame you, as a political partisan, for scorning Bartlett, Booman. He pretty much lays right out there a map of his motives and they aren’t pretty. He clearly wants to go back to the political right and honestly feels that he criticizes them for their own good, but he can’t go back because he thinks their policies are disastrous and their tactics feckless. He hints that they can’t even credibly spout flimsy “Party of Lincoln”-rhetoric right now. This kind of article deserves analysis, especially from a Dem operative, not a Wanker of the Day post.
Personally, I give Bartlett a little credit. Perhaps he was naive not to see what kind of vengeful cargo cult the Republican party has become but at least he spoke up during the Bush disaster. How many of these apostate conservatives came to Jesus after all of the worst mistakes were made? After there was no longer a price to pay for crossing Bush? After their wingnut welfare was cut off? I give some Bartlett some credit for not waiting for an opportune time to speak his piece. Some. He’s better than a lot of them, Sullivan included.
Wanker of the day? No doubt. And for all the reasons already mentioned. But what really got my goat was this:
“…an expansion of Medicare to pay for prescription drugs for seniors was under discussion. I thought this was a dreadful idea…but I understood that it was very popular politically. I talked myself into believing that Karl Rove was so smart that he had concocted an extremely clever plan–Bush would endorse the new benefit but do nothing to bring competing House and Senate versions of the legislation together. That way he could get credit for supporting a popular new spending program, but it would never actually be enacted.
“I was shocked beyond belief when it turned out that Bush really wanted a massive, budget-busting new entitlement program after all…He put all the pressure the White House could muster on House Republicans to vote for Medicare Part D…After holding the vote open for an unprecedented three hours, with Bush himself awakened in the middle of the night to apply pressure, the House Republican leadership was successful in ramming the legislation through after a few cowardly conservatives switched their votes.”
In other words, when Bartlett THOUGHT that Bush backing a prescription drug program for seniors was just a sham, a Karl Rove fake out, he had no problem with it. He assumed that Bush was merely posturing, pretending to want such a program, but, after competing versions had been passed in the House and Senate, Bush would just let the proposal die, while still taking credit for “supporting” it, and he was totally OK with that. Misrepresentation, sleazy double dealing, bamboozling elderly folks who might not have been able to figure out that the President was playing them when he claimed, for political reasons, to be a supporter of a drug progam for them….all of that was fine and dandy.
But Bush actually meaning what he said, and really trying to get the thing passed? THAT “shocked” him “beyond belief.”
Now, maybe the program was a good idea and maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it should have been done a different way (I believe that is the liberal Democrat take on the Medicare drug program), but whether it was good or not, or done right or not, President Bush’s conduct, even if only in this one instance, of being forthright and actually getting a program passed after claiming to want just that, can hardly be seen, in and of itself, as a bad thing.
Except by a person such as Bartlett with no moral compass whatsover. Right, play politics with health care for old people. Try to fool them, and screw them while pretending to care. That would be a good thing. Whereas actually meaning what you say and doing what you said you would do “shocked” him “beyond belief.” What a sleaze!
OK, one cheer for Bartlett, I guess, for finally seeing at least part of the light. But the man doesn’t seem to have many good qualities. No wonder his fellow conservatives have no use for him. As a liberal Dem, neither do I.
Good catch, freemansfarm. I was preoccupied with the outrageousness of Bartlett’s wish to bury the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy, even as it is quite apparent that AS A POLICY it is alive to this day. This differentiates it from “The Democratic Pary’s Buried Past” of Jim Crow, which was buried by a Democratic Party President and the Congress he cajoled, bullied, etc. to bury it AS A POLICY. Big difference.
Bartlett’s proposal that the R’s could get 30% of the black vote if they were only willing to talk relentlessly about Jim Crow policies the Democratic Party turned its back on decades ago is insulting and completely impossible. His disappointment that his book failed because it came out at the same time Obama was gaining the nomination of the Party is quite sociopathic.