Today’s Republican Party will say anything but the Truth

Perhaps one of the most overdone truisms you hear bandied about by people is “Actions speak louder than Words”.  This is perhaps the seminal lesson that Today’s Republican Party should learn.  They’re held captive by religious, white supremacist, and libertarian cults that operate in orbit around a corporatist elite and their cronies.  They don’t really have any more core values or principles. The only have the major goals of their cults and billionaire enablers.

You can see the hypocrisy, the lies, and the actual agendas in their actions.  In some ways, the worst of the cult priests are more honest than your establishment Republican which is why Karl Rove and others would prefer they stay silent while Republican Central fine tunes their messaging so they can fool more of the people most of the time.  They are no longer a party of serious governance.  Their goals are to further enrich and empower the wealthy, move as close to anarchy as possible with only the military left standing, and make as many states as possible adopt the bottom trawling quality of life one finds in Mississippi along with firmly entrenching one specific view of Christian morality into all institutions.

The party of “small government” is basically the party of huge military and international interventions and massive intrusions into people’s lives so that women, minorities, and children are forced into the appropriate biblical role of child bearing and slavery.  They are also supportive of police state tactics that include government spying, torture, and denial of due process.  Some of those folks are acceptable since they serve in the role of “House Eunuchs” where they proudly stand by or in for the master as long as they don’t get too vocal about their sexuality, their ambitions beyond child bearing, or the fact that their upward mobility is limited due to race, ethnicity, sex, or religion.

Let me source this rant to the naive ramblings of Josh Barro who wishes that Republican policies were more rooted in empirics and my now favorite Hillaryism “an evidence-based reality”.  Greg Sargent did a great job this morning at Maddow Blog talking about why Barro’s wishful thinking is unlikely to come true. It simply doesn’t fit into what Republican want.

Conservatives tend to prefer a different approach that decreases the role of government, not to achieve specific ends, but because decreasing the role of government is the specific end.

This, of course, affects nearly every debate in Washington. When it comes to job creation, for example, the task for Democrats is pretty straightforward: let’s do more of what’s been the most effective, and less of what’s been the least effective. Again, it’s about pragmatism and results based on evidence.

For Republicans, it doesn’t work quite that way — they have ideological ideals that outweigh evidence. GOP leaders could be shown incontrovertible proof that the most effective methods of creating jobs and improving the economy are aid to states, infrastructure investment, unemployment insurance, and food stamps, and they’d still refuse. Why? Because their ideology dictates the response.

The left starts with a policy goal (more people with access to medical care, more students with access to college, less pollution, more jobs, less financial market instability) and crafts proposals to try to complete the task. The right starts with an ideological goal (smaller government, more privatization, more deregulation) and works backwards.

For Barro, if Republicans “figured out” that their mistaken policy assumptions were, in fact, mistaken policy assumptions, they’d change direction. I wish that were true, but all available evidence points in the exact opposite direction.

Republicans that embarrass folks like Karl Rove and his donors are basically stating the goals of the party at the moment.  They don’t care how they arrive there.  There are no principles involved.  There is no evidence involved.  Each of the cults will violate all principles and all lessons of reality and science to arrive at these goals.  The religious right want their perverted version of Christianity as the rule of the land.  They want no birth control, no abortion, no visible or outward signs of homosexuality or anything other than how they define marriage, family, and morality.  The Republican Party says it is the party that dislikes government interference and regulation.  It wants ‘small government’.  To see this Republican principle violated perpetually, one only need look at the agendas pushed through by the Religious Cult wing of the Republican party where we get state mandated sermons, procedures, and tons of regulation.  Yes, we get Mississippi where the state regulates the one abortion clinic into illegality even though the right to an abortion is a constitutional right. These are the same folks that scream that any tiny bit of regulation of gun ownership is the end of the Bill of Rights and Constitutional rights as we know it.  See, the principle is only valid when it works for them.

Then, there’s the entire cult of Austrian Economics and Ayn Rand which is what the Barro piece was focused on.  Let me quote Paul Krugman on these folks:

Substance aside — not that substance isn’t important — Austrian economics very much has the psychology of a cult. Its devotees believe that they have access to a truth that generations of mainstream economists have somehow failed to discern; they go wild at any suggestion that maybe they’re the ones who have an intellectual blind spot. And as with all cults, the failure of prophecy — in this case, the prophecy of soaring inflation from deficits and monetary expansion — only strengthens the determination of the faithful to uphold the faith.

Barro even admits to the wrongness of the economic policies of this group. But again, Barro thinks that the principles are important rather than the outcomes.  This group wants the outcomes only.

Political parties should differ on normative questions. They ought to strive for agreement on positive questions — questions such as, what policies cause gross domestic product and median incomes to rise, how unemployment insurance affects the unemployment rate, or how global temperatures are changing. Currently, Republicans make a lot more errors on these kinds of questions than Democrats.

Correcting errors on positive questions should cause conservatives to revisit some of their top policies, as Bloomberg View columnist Ramesh Ponnuru laid out this weekend in the New York Times. Conservatives say tight money and lower top tax rates would enrich middle-class families. But that’s wrong, and if they figured that out, they might stop supporting tight money and lower top tax rates.

The deal is Josh, that the Republican Party does not want to honestly state that their goal is to make the upper class much wealthier and the rest of us are other in the category of pesky servants or moochers who aren’t worth wasting anything on.  Pesky servants should just work at their jobs and not be seen or heard and should just be thankful for the crumbs they receive.  Moochers need to just self-deport or join the military to learn civility and servility.   We got a glance of the true set-up here during the Romney 47% illumination because they though we weren’t listening in.   The silly donors thought the room  held only servants and house enuchs!!

You see, the Republican establishment really doesn’t care about the economy as long as the donor base and the corporate base do fine which is exactly what’s been going on for the last ten years or so. When they don’t do fine, they just dip into the public Treasury and replenish their gambling stakes. They don’t want to pay for anything that doesn’t directly benefit them.  They want to be worshiped as gods for holding their vaulted positions which they honestly believe has come to them because their special.  You can see this again in the places that Josh holds up as being great places because they’ve got Republican Governors.  Again, let’s think about this.  We’re talking the plantation mentality that thrives still in Mississippi and Louisiana.  Everything’s just fine as long as the economy works for the Koch brothers, the Oil and Gas Companies, Pete Peterson, and the House Eunuchs.  Let’s just use the Mississippi and Louisiana governor and state set up to illustrate their idea of Mississippi as the role model for the country.

Read the rest of this entry »