Smartest Republican of the Day: Scott Brown

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Politico:

Fighting for reelection in deep-blue Massachusetts, GOP Sen. Scott Brown ripped into House Republicans on Tuesday after Speaker John Boehner vowed that his caucus would reject the short-term payroll tax cut extension that nearly 90 percent of senators voted for over the weekend.

"The House Republicans' plan to scuttle the deal to help middle-class families is irresponsible and wrong," Brown said in a statement.

Well, he's right. And I'm sure political self-preservation has nothing to do with it.

A vulnerable freshman, Brown has been running to his left as he prepares for a tough challenge next year from Elizabeth Warren, the presumptive Democratic nominee. While Brown lauded House GOP efforts to secure a full-year extension of the payroll tax cut, he said the two-month Senate compromise would avoid tax hikes for millions of Americans at year's end, when the tax cut expires.


"The refusal to compromise now threatens to increase taxes on hard-working Americans and stop unemployment benefits for those out of work," Brown said. "During this time of divided government, both parties need to be reasonable and come to the negotiating table in good faith. We cannot allow rigid partisan ideology and unwillingness to compromise stand in the way of working together for the good of the American people."

Hey, give him some (but not much) credit, he's smart enough to know what works in Massachusetts -- and throughout much of the rest of the country. Which is to say, he's smart enough to know that being a Republican is toxic, with so many of his fellow Republicans looking completely insane, particularly when the Democrats stand firm on a popular issue and back the GOP into a corner.

(But will the White House cave once again?)

In praise of Tom Coburn, our Smartest Republican of the Day

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I can't quite believe it, given what a crazy right-wing nutcase he is, but, well, credit where credit is due and all that.

Here, via Think Progress, is what the extremely conservative Oklahoma senator said yesterday about liberals and the budget deficit:

All of us are going to give a little something if we're going to get out of the hole we're in. Everybody's going to see something different... I think it's better for us to take the pain that we're going to have to take and make sure it's meted out in the proper order than take much more severe pain. When I talk to my colleagues on the other side, and some of my closest colleagues are the most liberal, I find them more intellectually honest oftentimes, the very people they want to help, unless we change these [government programs] now are the very people who are going to get hurt if we don't fix it.

I still don't agree with the vast majority of the positions he takes, but here he acknowledges that there is a need for compromise (and that Republicans must compromise), praises his liberal colleagues (i.e., Democrats) for being more honest than his own kind, and actually makes a case for reforming entitlement programs so as to help those who need those programs the most. How very refreshing.

And this wasn't a first. As Think Progress notes:

Coburn is absolutely a staunch conservative with whom we disagree on most budgetary issues, but to his credit, he has consistently said that new revenue needs to be a part of any realistic deficit reduction package, acknowledging what the vast majority of his Republican colleagues won't. He has said it's "pretty stupid and naive" for Republicans and anti-tax zealots like Grover Norquist to think that a budget deal won't include new revenue, accurately pointing out the depths to which government revenue has plunged in recent years.

How very... not Republican of him. 

Smartest Republican of the Day: Chuck Hagel

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've always liked Chuck Hagel -- at least as much as I can like any Republican. Consider his typically sober assessments of the Iraq War, for example, and his disdain for ideological extremism, the currency of today's GOP.

Here's some of what I wrote about him back in September 2007 after he announced he wouldn't be running for president:

Of course, Hagel no doubt saw the writing on the wall. There is simply no future for him in Republican presidential politics -- not now, perhaps not in his lifetime. He could have held on to his safe Senate seat -- an alluring proposition, one imagines -- but for what, to what end? Just to be there, just to be a senator? And as a Republican, for a party that seems to have no room for someone like him in its increasingly narrow and fundamentalist tent? To be sure, Hagel is a solid conservative Republican on many issues that matter to Republicans -- on taxes, for example, but also on social conservative "values" issues that mean so much to the Republican base. But on Iraq, on the issue that has so divided Republicans, and the country, he want his own way, a realist, refusing to follow the president and the warmongers and the madmen in his party, so much of his party, further into what he knew, like so many others, to be a quagmire, a worsening one, one from which there would be no easy remove, one that was proving to be ever more catastrophic, both in and of itself and for his party and his country.

On Iraq, he proved to be a maverick, a critic, an independent-minded Republican -- and Republicans dislike such rebels, not to mention independent thought, particularly so now, in a time of war, of trumped-up war, endless war. You're either with them or against them, to rephrase Bush, and he was against them, forcefully so, and with integrity, credibility.

And where did that get him? He was basically excommunicated, dismissed by a party, his party, that was become ever more extreme.

Well, he's still not pulling any punches, and one of his targets continues to be the Republican Party:

Former GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel (NE) can't muster any praise for his Republican colleagues' behavior in Congress over the past few months. In an interview with the Financial Times, Hagel blasted GOP leadership for their "irresponsible actions" during the debt ceiling debacle, noting that "I think about some of the presidents we've had on my side of the aisle -- Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., go right through them, Eisenhower -- they would be stunned."

"Disgusted" with the debt ceiling negotiations, Hagel called it "an astounding lack of responsible leadership by many in the Republican party, and I say that as a Republican." "Does anyone not believe what's happened here the last couple weeks in the market was not a complete, direct result of the lack of confidence that came out of that folly, that embarrassment?" he asked...

Asked about Tea Party influence, Hagel said the Republican party is too captive to a movement that is "very ideological" and "very narrow." "I've never seen so much intolerance as I've seen today," he said. Later surveying the GOP 2012 field, Hagel said the party may need to rebuild, agreeing that Republicans are now "too far to the right."

So far, in fact, that even Reagan wouldn't be deemed conservative enough, extreme enough, and the White Bolsheviks who control the party would probably try to push him aside were it not for his reputation, just as they have tried to purge so many from their ranks, often successfully.

Maybe it's a good thing Hagel retired from the Senate. Otherwise he'd be viciously attacked for saying this, and for his various "incorrect," "heretical" positions generally. The attacks may still come, to the extent anyone on the right is still paying attention to him, but at least they can't take his seat from him.

Chuck Hagel may still call himself a Republican, but the Republican Party these days has no use for the likes of Chuck Hagel. He's just too sensible and thoughtful a man.

Kill the cuts!

By Capt. Fogg

There seems to be a difference between the ultra right as represented by Ayn Rand disciple and 'free markets cure all ills' cult leader Alan Greenspan, and the ultra right as personified by the rabble rousing opportunists who feed the vernacular conservatives of America. Dilatory though he may be in admitting that free markets are no more free or self steering than a car without a driver, he's none the less not as retarded as people who claim to see Russia over the horizon, staple tea bags to their hats and shriek about tax increases they didn't get. He does, albeit slowly, question the ad hoc axioms upon which he bases his theories and thus, through doubt, he thinks, he learns, he changes.

Amidst the tumult of irate e-mails calling President Obama a liar for personally having raised the cigarette tax ( a tax is a tax, after all ) and a communist for unleashing THE BIGGEST TAX INCREASE OF ALL TIME, which actually is nothing of the sort, it's refreshing to hear Greenspan utter:

"I am very much in favor of tax cuts but not with borrowed money."

What he's dismissing is the lifeblood of Republican economic policy and has been at least since the Reagan administration: tax cuts pay for themselves. It's policy that along with a huge increase in government agencies, military spending and a war now having cost more that World War 2 was supposed to be paid for by tax cuts, but failed. It was paid for by borrowing from foreign sources with our independence as collateral.

A rational person must have noticed by now that it doesn't work and never has worked and virtually always precipitates a recession. An irrational man, a Fox man, a Conservative man, even a Libertarian man, chants liberaliberaliberal, constructs straw stuffed scapegoats and tries to distract us with fairy tales about the President's religion and parentage.

"The problem that we've gotten into in recent years is that spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous."

said the Former Federal Reserve Chairman on NBC yesterday. It's axiomatic in our new propaganda soaked world that fixing a problem is far less effective and more expensive than hiding it under foamy lipped hysteria, and so the tax cuts that were designed to expire this year by the Republicans who wrote them into law, become a surprise betrayal by Obama. Those liberals are betraying us by following the law we wrote!

The tax cuts, that if renewed will cost us $2.2 trillion to $3.8 trillion over the next decade and put us that much further in debt, since no, they will not pay for themselves as has been demonstrated but will further impoverish the nation but to the benefit of a handful of people and corporations. But that debt must be thought of differently than any debt incurred in extending unemployment benefits and the glaring hypocrisy must never be acknowledged. For are we not conservative?

"You don't agree with Republican leaders who say tax cuts pay for themselves?"

asked David Gregory on Meet the Press.

"They do not."

was the emphatic reply.


(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Smartest Republican of the Day: Bob Bennett

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Utah Sen. Bob Bennett may have a bit of an axe to grind, and certainly has nothing to lose, given that his own party denied him a re-election bid by voting against him being its candidate this November -- yes, Utah Republicans are crazy enough to vote against an incumbent, a sitting senator, preferring someone even more conservative and even more of a partisan, but such is the way things are these teabagging days -- but give him credit for telling the truth about the GOP:

As I look out at the political landscape now, I find plenty of slogans on the Republican side, but not very many ideas.

He went on:

Indeed, if you raise specific ideas and solutions, as I've tried to do on health care with [Oregon Democratic Sen.] Ron Wyden, you are attacked with the same vigor as we've seen in American politics all the way back to slavery and polygamy; you are attacked as being a wimp, insufficiently pure, and unreliable.

Well, yes. That's exactly how it is.

Smartest Republican of the Day: Connie Mack

By Michael J.W. Stickings

We don't hand out an SRD all that often -- I mean, it's not like there are all that many candidates on any given day -- but let's give some credit today to Rep. Connie Mack of Florida:

Rep. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) ripped into the new Arizona immigration law today, comparing it to Nazi Germany.

"This law of 'frontier justice' – where law enforcement officials are required to stop anyone based on 'reasonable suspicion' that they may be in the country illegally – is reminiscent of a time during World War II when the Gestapo in Germany stopped people on the street and asked for their papers without probable cause," Mack said in a statement.

"This is not the America I grew up in and believe in, and it’s not the America I want my children to grow up in," he added.

Very well put. And so un-Republican of him (which makes him our SRD).

Yes, other Republicans have spoken out, if far more mildly, against the Arizona law. As I blogged the other day, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Karl Rove, three fairly high-profile Republicans, all have problems with it. But the overwhelming reaction among Republicans and conservatives, including Bill Kristol and George Will, is full and enthusiastic support for it.

Suffice it to say that Mack's statement is a breath of fresh air, a defence of freedom against fascism, and just the sort of responsible, intelligent comment one finds so rarely these days in the GOP.

(Of course, Mack may have had an ulterior motive. He needs the Hispanic vote if he wants to win state-wide office in Florida, and this is a good way to appeal to Hispanics. But I suspect that he is nonetheless sincere in his criticism of the Arizona law, as it generally fits in with his opposition to Latin American dictators like Hugo Chavez. Freedom is freedom, after all, here or there.)

Smartest Republican of the Day: Tom Coburn

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Wait... what? Tom Coburn? Is this bizarro reality? I despise Tom Coburn. He's one of the worst Republicans in the Senate, a partisan and ideological extremist.

But, well, credit where credit is due, I suppose. At a recent town hall meeting, the Oklahoma Republican a) defended Nancy Pelosi:

She is a nice lady... [boos and jeers]... Come on now. She is a nice... How many of y'all have met her? She's a nice person. She's a nice person... Let me give you a little lesson here. I hope you will listen to me. Just because somebody disagrees with you doesn't mean they're not a good person.

And b) criticized Fox News:

What we have to have is make sure we have a debate in this country so that you can see what's going on and make a determination yourself. [applause] So don't catch yourself being biased by Fox News that somebody is no good.

Wow. I mean, he's hardly a grammarian, and he's still way over on the right, but this was pretty caution-to-the-wind, and pretty darn admirable, for a Republican -- and especially for a hardened conservative like him.

Not that he'll be mistaken for a liberal anytime soon, nor even for a sensible human being, but still.

Smartest Republican of the Day: Mike Murphy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Sometimes, just sometimes, a Republican says something smart or otherwise does something that is worthy of positive comment, even here at this liberal blog.

So let's start a Smartest Republican of the Day series. There surely won't be as many entries as there are in our Craziest Republican of the Day series, but I think it's only fair to give credit where credit is due.

And, today, I am pleased to say, credit is due to GOP strategist and long-time McCainiac Mike Murphy, who wrote this for the New York Daily News:

Gov. Sarah Palin is the political train wreck that keeps on giving. First, she was an awful choice last year as John McCain's running mate. I came to this conclusion with regret -- I am one of McCain's biggest admirers.

But facts are facts. An inexperienced governor of a small state, she lacked the experience to be President and brought nothing to the ticket except a surefire knack for exciting voters who were already reliably Republican. It was a strategically awful choice, and I said so -- both on and off microphone -- at the time. Most pundits thought I was wrong. Look at the crowds she can draw, I was told. She "excites the base."

Phooey. Every presidential election year brings forth some new nugget of conventional wisdom from the media elite that totally misses the real picture. Last year, the big wrong idea was this notion that base voters have somehow become the new swing voters. We are now told the party base -- those voters who will vote for a bag of cement if it has an R or D attached to it -- must be carefully appealed to, romanced and appeased.

Under that funhouse reasoning, Palin was an inspired pick.

Unfortunately for McCain, the actual swing voters, the independents who do determine the winner of the election, didn't buy into this fantasy at all. After a three-week sniff, most couldn't run away from Palin fast enough.

*****

Other politicians are more reliable conservatives; Palin ran for governor on a set of populist issues usually linked to Alaska Democrats. She lacks any real accomplishment - no military or private-sector career of note, no academic achievement beyond a frenetic bounce between five colleges, including a sun 'n' surf-oriented outfit in Hawaii. She has served only two years as governor of a small and uniquely easy-to-govern state (other governors pine for Alaska's small population and billions of dollars in easy revenue from oil production), a job she has now abandoned.

And so on. The title of the op-ed says it all: "To go forward, GOP must snap out of its Sarah Palin spell."

That's good advice, from a Republican perspective.

As for me, though, I welcome as much Sarah Palin as the Republican Party can handle. The more the merrier. In fact, I encourage Republicans to hitch their "funhouse" wagon to this "train wreck."

Why? Because Murphy is right: "She'll lose, of course, almost certainly the Republican primaries and certainly the general election."

The Republican Party is indeed "demoralized." What could demoralize it more than the annihilation it would suffer with Palin at the helm?