We’re in such a mess these days, one can either bemoan that mess, or wonder how we got here. I feel a little helpless to be just bemoaning, and, as the situation changes from day to day, one is compelled to constantly update one’s bemoans, which in retrospect can begin to sound both repetitive and ridiculous. To avoid simply stringing together a near-random sequence of short-term moans, I have decided to save my breath for a longer exhalation. I have already expended some breath on the source and status of our 21st century blues, global edition, “Are we having fun yet? Why living at the end of history has become the living end”, written a full three months ago, it what seems like the age of innocence, pre-riots and pre-COVID-19. Today I’d like to pursue a strand of our current agony unique to the U.S.—the utter moral collapse of the Republican Party. So, to coin a phrase, WTF happened to that party?
It is “remarkable”—though not of much comfort—that in the larger frame of things what has happened to both the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S. has happened to the Left and Right in Europe as well—the gradual abandonment of the “old” working class by the Left in favor of other marginal groups—nonwhites and homosexuals, for example—along with an “obsession” with the environment—while the Right has taken up the cause of the working class, advocating both protectionism and, more importantly, greater restrictions on immigration. The downsides of globalism—the loss of the Euro-American dominance in manufacturing and the global economy in general, the rise of a “rootless” global super-capitalism, vastly increased immigration, and terrorism—have significantly destabilized what apparently seems to have been in retrospect a “golden age”. And, according to Robert Frost, “nothing gold can stay.”
Long ago—long, long ago—an astute political observer named Richard Nixon concluded that a political campaign fought by the Republican Party on domestic issues would lead inevitably to defeat. Republicans were the party of the virtuous few; Democrats the party of the vulgar many. Democrats would always win, and Republicans would always lose, because the Democrats could always outpromise the Republicans, promising to take money from the virtuous few and give it to the virtueless many, a brand of “thinking” that formed the core conviction of one Mitt Romney as recently as 2012, which I ridiculed in a post titled Mitt: “Yeah, I am an arrogant, out-of-touch, multi-millionaire! What’s your point?”. According to Dick, any Republican politician with national pretensions who wasn’t named Dwight David Eisenhower had to approach the American electorate as a matador approaches a bull, with both cape and sword poised at the ready, the cape emblazoned with the name “COMMUNISM!” in the largest possible letters.1
The crushing of Barry Goldwater in 1964 seemed the ultimate validation of Nixon’s analysis. And yet, only four years later, what a falling off there was! The stunning rise of black crime following the disastrous urban riots in both 1967 and 1968, coupled with the near-simultaneous Tet Offensive in Vietnam, extinguishing all hope of a quick exit from the deeply unpopular war in Vietnam, led to Nixon’s “third time’s the charm” victory in November.2 In a few short years, the Democrats’ “natural majority” melted and resolved itself into a dew. Yes, there were more than few bumps and jolts along the way, but by 1984 it seemed clear that it was the Republicans, and not the Democrats, who were the “sun party”,3 the party that set the nation’s agenda and won easy majorities in any “normal” election year. Yet the Republicans had only one more presidential election, in 1988, to enjoy the sun. Again, WTF happened?
The Democrats lost control of the nation in 1964 when they dared to undo the primal wrong of American history, the suppression of black Americans. Throughout the “glory days” of the New Deal, which many liberals today look back on with unconscious misunderstanding, supposedly “liberal” programs like Social Security, minimum wage, etc. covertly yet effectively discriminated against blacks, conferring their benefits almost exclusively on whites,4 and further social legislation under both Harry Truman and Eisenhower “honored” this tradition of “white socialism,” which I’ve discussed in some detail in a number of posts. But by the 1960s, with the pressure to end covert segregation in the north, as well as explicit segregation in the south—to integrate housing and schools (using “forced” busing to do so), as well as the skilled blue-collar trades like plumbing and brick-laying—the white working class became convinced that government was not taxing the rich to give to “us” but rather taxing “us” to give to the blacks, and they expressed their resentment by voting in droves for George Wallace in the 1968 Democratic Primaries held in northern states like Michigan. The anti-big government rhetoric of Barry Goldwater that proved so disastrous in 1964 suddenly had resonance.
The riots and the war in Vietnam split the Democratic Party in two. The riots destroyed liberals’ optimistic belief that eliminating legal segregation would automatically resolve all the social ills that blacks suffered from—disproportionately high rates of poverty, crime, alcoholism, illegitimacy, etc.5— an innocent certainty reflecting their unwise belief in human perfectibility, which was really no more than the groundless assumption that everyone is “naturally” a middle-class liberal at heart. Instead of decreasing, many of these ills increased dramatically.
Liberals never had an answer for the failure of their ideals, none that worked, anyway, and to a great extent they engaged in the self-defeating tactic of refusing to admit that they had failed. The liberal social scientists of the time largely ignored the devastating impact of the riots and the consequent upsurge in violent street crime among blacks on the economic and social health of America’s great cities. It didn’t fit in their equations, so they refused to acknowledge its existence.
This led to the “first wave” of neoconservatism. “A neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged,” chuckled neocon godfather Irving Kristol, though what he “meant”, in my skeptical opinion, was “A neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by a Negro.”6 For so many middle-class intellectuals, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, American big cities—and New York most of all, of course—were scarcely less than paradise. Overnight, these demi-paradises were suddenly rendered almost unlivable.7 Neocons, again in my skeptical opinion, carefully concealed what was really a deep and personal bitterness, which could, and frequently did, shade into racism, hiding behind “objective” social analysis to obtain the answers they wanted. Yet if their own analysis was faulty, so was that of their opponents. Though unrepentant liberals talked incessantly of finding, and destroying, the “causes” of crime, they never did so.
The intellectual crisis provoked by the disastrous war in Vietnam was equally acute and shattered what seems in retrospect the cozy Cold War liberal consensus: when once it seemed that liberals had all the answers, both at home and abroad, now they were failing everywhere. In any event, many “liberals” were really leftists at heart, and were tired of being “responsible”. They hated Lyndon Johnson from the first because he talked like a hick, and now they could hate him for substance as well. I remember being bewildered by the reception given to “MacBird!”, a cheesy piece of agitprop written in 1967 by leftist playwright Barbara Garson, which received a rapturous review from aging leftist Dwight MacDonald.8 MacDonald acknowledged that all the “charges” against Johnson in the play, portraying him as Kennedy’s murderer, for example, were nonsense, that Johnson had done more for integration than Kennedy even talked about doing, and yet! It was so much fun to be unfair! So much fun to release all the hatred you felt for all the big shots, who didn’t think you were as important as you knew yourself to be! The self-righteous, antagonistic left was reborn, and quickly established its control of the massive new higher educational system that the postwar prosperity was creating, a control that, of course, has only tightened over time.
For conservatives, this explicit rejection of the moral superiority of the West was horrifying enough, but what was really the ultimate nightmare was Richard Nixon’s “betrayal” of the anti-communist cause, symbolized by his visit to China in 1971, and his clear goal of ending the Cold War by accepting the status quo rather than the “victory” that “true” anti-communists always demanded . The foreign policy neoconservatives emerged, the first generation largely anti-communist Democrats like Sen. Henry Jackson and Paul Nitze, though the second generation naturally found its place in the Republican Party.
By 1984 conservatives were dominant in foreign policy. They had a reasonably coherent judicial philosophy that allowed them to reverse many, though not all, of the previous liberal Supreme Court decisions of the Warren and Burger courts. They had achieved perhaps their most dramatic intellectual success in the field of economics, overthrowing almost entirely the neo-Keynesian liberal dream of a semi-socialist planned economy and replacing it with the very comfortable notion that government wasn’t needed at all! Sans government, it seems, the economy ran itself, at peak efficiency, all the time, and so everything was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, thanks to infinite power of free markets to always make the “right” decision—for if it wasn’t right, the market wouldn’t have made it! The neo-Panglossian overtones of free market theory escaped the notoriously tough-minded neocons, who, being mostly literary folk, more comfortable with 19th century novels than numbers, were happy to be relieved of the responsibility of thinking about such trivial matters.9
Yet the neocons made little headway in the humanities and the arts. They made some progress in history, though, like their work in the social sciences, all of their efforts, no matter how learned, invariably bore the scent of apologetics. There was always a moral lurking somewhere in the background, often having something or other to do, somehow, with the necessity of U.S. support for Israel. There were few “conservative” novelists or poets.10 Many of the neocons, or just plain “new conservatives,” were effectively atheists, though of course they could not admit this. Most of them had a “post-sixties” sexual morality that no longer took virginity seriously. Some felt that abortion was murder, but many did not. Most probably disapproved of homosexuality, on various grounds, but even this deeply rooted prejudice was beginning to dissolve.11 They had many political reasons for disliking feminism, but were increasingly walking the walk if not talking the talk. Many were quite “sympathetic” to liberal positions on environmental issues, but were unable/unwilling to resist pressure from “Big Oil” and “Big Coal” and their political allies within the Republican Party to endorse effectively “know nothing” positions on the environment, which alienated them from many “hard” scientists, with whom they otherwise might have formed some political alliances, particularly in academic circles. They had no natural sympathy at all for the evangelicals, whom they perforce had to embrace without stint. And they had almost no penetration in popular culture, where sixties “rebellion” seemed to never stop mutating into ever new and ever wilder forms.
They seemed to rule on Wall Street, but the moral split between Wall Street and Main was never wider. The Street was about three things, money, coke, and whores, and the latter two naturally had to be hushed up. And so the cliché of the right-wing, black-tie bad boy was born, elegant in his tux, enjoying all the finer things that the moralizing left hated: thick steaks, fine cigars, fine brandy, indulgent in all things except sex and drugs. In fact, conservatives were as “metropolitan” in their lifestyles as liberals, but could not admit this. Their disconnect with their own generation, plus the necessity of linking politically with low-income rural whites, whose lifestyle they found ludicrous, encouraged a cynical obsession with process as an end in itself. They enjoyed sneering at the fatuous idealism of the Left in the first place, and found it convenient in the extreme to double down on its opposite in compensation.
Perhaps most fraudulent of all was the conservative hatred of “big government” and the endlessly proclaimed devotion to a balanced budget, though when in power Republicans invariably increased government spending, while cutting taxes, thus pushing the budget deficit further out of control. When George H. W. Bush actually tried to reduce the budget, via the “insane” method of increasing taxes (employed successfully, of course, by his successor, Bill Clinton), the “new right”, led by Newt Gingrich, screamed. For decades, the Republicans pushed endlessly for balanced budgets, and every word of the thousands of speeches they gave on the subject was a lie, lies which they themselves believed.12
The hatred of “big government” was largely code for the biggest skeleton of all in the Republicans’ closet, racism, for the Party of Lincoln had become the Party of Reagan, a man who regarded the American civil rights movement with utter hatred and contempt. The leading figures in conservative jurisprudence, Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Antonine Scalia, repeatedly went out of their way to demonstrate their scorn for Brown v. Board of Education. According to these “legal titans” (George Will’s term for Scalia), racially segregated government services were perfectly constitutional. Republican dogma about “balanced budgets” and an “originalist” understanding of the Constitution largely reflected an “agenda” that would undo Democratic efforts to eliminate the effects of centuries of racist oppression—an agenda that was never enunciated explicitly, for the best of reasons, because it was disgraceful.
Yet conservatives can be as comfortable as anyone else with their hypocrisies, one assumes, and, with the most glorious victory imaginable, the utter defeat of communism, coupled with the splendid little war in the Persian Gulf initiated by the first President Bush in 1990, it seemed that, as the presidential election year of 1992 approached, it must have seemed at first that nothing could go wrong. And, yet, all at once, everything did.
I have never read, anywhere, a serious discussion by a conservative of ‘what went wrong” in 1992. It appears that the “conventional wisdom” as that Clinton’s victory was entirely due to Ross Perot, judging from comments made by classic Republican insiders Mary Matalin and William Kristol in a video I discussed here. But as I said then and repeat now, why did so many supposed “conservatives” vote for someone as off the wall as Ross Perot, who quit the presidential race five months before the election, making bizarre charges against the Bush campaign, only to jump back in a few months later?
I suspect that many “conservatives” in 1992, like liberals in the late sixties, were tired of being responsible, tired of being “good”. The overwhelming threat of communism allowed them to ignore such things as balancing the budget, which could come later. They never realized, until it was too late, that they never wanted the threat to end.13 The defeat of communism left them without a unifying goal, and it was simply too much work to come up with meaningful policies that would address the country’s continuing problems. It was so much easier to hate Bill Clinton, a walking compendium of all that they hated in the first place!
And they did hate him. This is something else that I’ve never seen in any of the Republican post-mortems. They hated him at the top (the neocons) and at the bottom, Rush Limbaugh’s burgeoning army of dittoheads. The Republicans had babbled so constantly of their “mortal lock” on the presidency, they apparently took it for granted that it was true. Only a fiend in human form could deny them of their prize. I am struck, in the many “what happened” books and articles by Republicans that I’ve read since the emergence of Trump,14 how rarely Republicans blame their defeats in 1992, 1996, 2008, and 2012 on themselves. It’s always “the media”, and the ruthless, cold-blooded Democrats, unscrupulous, deceitful monsters that they are, who do in the innocent, doe-eyed Republicans, who always deserve to win, but somehow never do.
The horror of Clinton’s victory prompted the Republican policy of “absolute opposition” that has prevailed in the party ever since. Every Democratic proposal is rejected, not as flawed or incomplete, but outright damnable. Newt Gingrich’s “policy” of destruction for destruction’s sake became the party’s byword from that day to this, the party of principle (so they always thought) already on the road to becoming the party of nihilism.
It is “interesting” that Clinton’s election first set in motion the political forces that would ultimately crystalize the Democrats as the urban, coastal party, and the Republicans as the rural one, because Clinton, who, after all, had been getting himself elected as governor of Arkansas for more than a decade, ran an explicitly “southern” campaign, and did very well in the south in both 1992 and 1996. But the congressional election of 1994 proved the true harbinger of things to come, as the moderate Democratic Party in the south largely collapsed, replaced by rabidly right-wing Republicans, put in office by voters who had been effectively voiceless since the demise of the explicitly racist Democratic Party back in the seventies.
In the north, racism was gaining ground as well, due to friction between urban blacks and rural and suburban whites in states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.15 Although race is scarcely a topic neglected by the media, the racial tensions at the state level is underreported. The mainstream media doesn’t like to call attention to the level of dysfunction in cities where black residents often regard the first function of government as the provision of “good jobs”, the more the better, along with generous welfare benefits to the poor. The provision of services—like good schools— has a lower priority, and, in any event, no one should ever be fired. Whites who feel that they’re being taxed to provide comfortable salaries for worthless state and local employees, not to mention welfare, see the Democratic Party as the party of blacks (and immigrants) and vote for politicians like Paul Ryan, who promise balanced budgets that will eliminate welfare for bad people yet somehow leave Social Security and Medicare, the great middle-class welfare programs, untouched.
The Clinton era saw the full emergence of the conservative “counter culture,” largely talk radio and Fox News, with the late addition of the Drudge Report as the first flowering of right-wing paranoia on the newly born Internet. Liberals kept searching for “their” Rush Limbaugh or “their” Fox News, blind to the fact that the entire East Coast/West Coast media universe saw the world from a liberal perspective, even though the conservatives loudly complained about “liberal bias” every minute of the day. Because there is nothing so invisible as a completely accepted “truth”.
Clinton proved a maddening figure to Republicans throughout his eight years in office, seemingly always on the verge of defeat—indeed, of self-destruction—and yet always emerging somehow victorious in the end. Republicans lost all sense of shame in pursuing Clinton’s destruction. If one must become a monster to destroy a monster, well, so be it. Anyhow, it’s kind of fun being a monster, being ruthless and cunning, and all that! And, anyway, we’re doing it for good!
The Republican “victory” in the 2000 presidential election was deeply flawed—the Supreme Court’s “fraudulent five” stomping all over the Constitution in their haste to drive a stake through goddamned Bill Clinton’s goddamned heart—and furthermore it left a bitter taste—the third election in a row in which the Republican presidential candidate had come in second to a worthless Democratic foe. The Republican fear that they would have to somehow finesse a permanent Democratic majority by a judicious—judicious and well disguised—downsizing of the electorate began to grow, encouraged every step of the way by the Supreme Court, who relentlessly decided every case affecting the political process in the “Republican” manner, almost invariably by 5-4 decisions. Hey, we’re the Constitutional party! That’s why we always win!
This deliberate commitment to an all but explicitly racist approach the most basic feature of a democracy—free elections—goes almost unmentioned by even the bravest of Republican “reformicons” and even those who have left the party. It’s just too ugly. The one serious treatment by a Republican/conservative is by Thomas Patterson, a “staunchly Republican” Harvard professor, in his recent book, Is the Republican Party Destroying Itself?, a generally excellent book whose greatest flaw probably lies in the tense chosen for the title, for surely the Republican Party has destroyed itself several times over by now.
Yet it did not look that way in 2001. Despite its “flawed” victory, the new Bush administration, with a black man as secretary of state, and a black woman as national security advisor, was a far cry from the lily white ranks of St. Ronnie’s divisions. And George, Jr., like his father, really, pursued a “moderate” domestic policy, designed to steal the Democrats’ thunder with regard to both education and health care for seniors. Foreign affairs, however, were a different matter, though the dangers remained hidden until 9/11, a catastrophic event whose consequences—thoroughly unnecessary though they were—proved infinitely more cataclysmic.
Throughout the Clinton years, Republicans had become more and more convinced that they simply had to find themselves a second Cold War if they were ever going to defeat the Democrats, a lesson driven home by Bush’s failure to register a plurality in what surely ought to have been, by Republican lights, a Republican year. Saddam Hussein, pummeled and toothless, made a pathetic bogyman, but, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the bogyman you’ve got rather than the bogyman you want.
Despite George Bush’s call, during the 2000 presidential campaign, for a “humbler” foreign policy, in fact Republicans were planning to jettison the Democratic “fetish”, as they saw it, for international cooperation and agreements. Instead, Uncle Sam would use his unique economic and military superiority to simply lay down the law for other nations, who would either heed our words or feel our wrath.
Republicans seized on Bin Laden’s attack precisely as the Austrian-Hungarian Empire seized on the assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand: as an excuse to execute a pre-conceived agenda. The difference was, the Austrians acted to preserve an antiquated and expiring empire; the Republicans acted to preserve an antiquated and expiring party.
The Republicans initiated the Second Gulf War with supreme deceit and conducted it with equal incompetence, something I have moaned about almost endlessly. What is most indicative of the continued moral failings of the Republican Party is that the only Republican to denounce the second Bush Administration’s record as one of deliberate deceit rather than unfortunate intel is—wait for it—Donald Trump. Professor Patterson, whom I praised so strenuously only a few paragraphs ago, is utterly silent on the issue, and, indeed, on foreign affairs in general. Reading his book, one would not know that countries other than the U.S. exist.
“Thoughtful” conservatives greeted Obama’s massive victory in 2008 with perhaps even greater miscomprehension than Clinton’s narrow win in 1992. That gosh darn media! They just went gaga over some black kid from Harvard who pushed all their liberal buttons! Bush a bad president? McClain a feisty fighter pilot unfit for a desk job? Sarah Palin a self-promoting airhead? What are you even saying?
While conservative “thinkers” fumed over Obama’s election, his “flawed” but largely sensible efforts to reverse the global economic meltdown—a great deal of it simply counter-cyclical spending on an appropriately massive scale—drove the Republican masses bonkers. Democrats were almost guaranteed to lose seats in 2010, and probably control of the House, but Obama’s overreaching on health care turned defeat into disaster, creating the Tea Party monster, which was Trumpism without Trump, destruction for the sake of destruction.
“Moderate” Republicans like John Boehner should either have formed a small, separate “Moderate” party or else resigned to allow their districts to find new representation, but they lacked the nerve to recognize the fruits of their past hypocrisies. “If we can just get past this rough patch, we’ll be okay.” And so they became willing members of the party of destruction. They sold out their ideals, easily, because they never really believed in them in the first place. The same thing happened, on a much larger scale, when Trump was elected. Bastions of free market orthodoxy, like the Wall Street Journal and the Club for Growth, suddenly discovered that free markets, free trade, unrestricted immigration, balanced budget, reduced government spending—all that stuff—well, it wasn’t really all that important after all! Winning is the thing! Winning is everything!
Donald Trump, monster that is, did no more than strip the mask from a party that had become one of ignorance and destruction, with no positive purpose whatsoever, and no real goal other than to wreck the Democratic Party out of spite. The Democratic Party, for all its faults, resembles a political party; the Republican Party, as I have said before, is simply a gang, a gang that is destroying the rule of law in these United States.
1. Nixon believed, or said he did, that a president wasn’t needed for domestic affairs, so that, actually, presidential elections should turn entirely on international issues. Of course, that was what he simply wished were the case.
2. Nixon not only lost the presidency in 1960, but the California governorship in 1962, prompting his once-famous “last press conference”, at which he sourly told reporters “You won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more.”
3. Largely, but not entirely, forgotten political journalist Samuel Lubell pointed out that, prior to the New Deal, the Republicans were the sun party. From 1896 through 1928, the Democrats won the presidency only once, and only thanks to Teddy Roosevelt’s ego.
4. In terms of absolute numbers, probably more whites than blacks were excluded from the New Deal’s welfare state than blacks, because the country was over 80% white at the time. The poorest whites—sharecroppers, migrant farm workers (known as “hired men” back then), servants, and others—were almost as politically impotent and invisible as blacks.
5. A “tangle of pathologies”, as Daniel Moynihan so tastelessly put it in his infamous report. Moynihan could have used far more circumspect language, particularly in light of his own Irish forebears, who were similarly condemned within his own lifetime.
6. Unfortunately for the Democratic Party, many white working class voters had the same experience. Lily Tomlin gave a touching description (video unfortunately not available on YouTube) of how her blissful Detroit childhood was destroyed by the riots. I lived in Chicago in 1967, when the Loop swarmed with crowds every night until after midnight. A few years later, it was almost deserted, as was Times Square in New York.
7. Kristol’s disillusionment with “the Left” began far earlier than the sixties riots. In his autobiography, he describes his days in the army during World War II, saying that his unit was largely composed of members of the Mafia. In fact, they were not. They were simply working-class Italians, men who amused themselves by drinking, fighting, gambling, and whoring. They were, in a word, goys, though Kristol, who learned quite quickly to be politic, chose a politer term. Kristol had no doubt that of such crooked timber nothing straight could ever be made.
8. MacDonald was once a committed Trotskyite, aka modern-day Jansenist. Since they were more Catholic than the Pope (Pope Stalin), they didn’t have to obey him. Yet in many ways he was more of a small-town atheist, against whatever everyone else was thinking. The assassination of John F. Kennedy naturally released an orgy of “analysis” on the Left. Throughout the furor, MacDonald was virtually alone in insisting that Oswald really was a “Marxist” if not a communist, and that he acted alone, upholding in all its squareness the infamous “Warren Report” that all of his hip friends loathed.
9. I remember seeing the late Charles Krauthammer, now being turned into a sort of neocon saint, reacting to praise for Bill Clinton’s role in “restoring” U.S. prosperity on some talk show. “Clinton got out of the way,” sneered Krauthammer, with infinite contempt. Free markets work! That was all ye know, and all ye need to know. And that was all Krauthammer did know.
10. My contemptuous words may make both paleocons and theocons snicker and/or snort. Well, let them.
11. In one of Norman Podhoretz’s many books—probably Breaking Ranks (1979), but maybe Ex-Friends (1999), Podhoretz in his preface and postscript sneers heavily at “men who will not be men and women who will not be women”, yet in the meat of the book writes proudly of his great successes as editor of Commentary, in particular his achievement of publicizing the work of Norman O. Brown, the author of Life Against Death and Love’s Body, the latter in particular strongly suggesting that Freud’s theory of the necessity of sexual repression was all wrong, and that, “naturally”, all possible avenues of sexual gratification should be pursued, a very sixties notion. The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Bostock v. Clayton County demonstrates that perhaps 90% of the Republican establishment is homo friendly and probably has been for decades. The ”Defense of Marriage Act” et al. was simply boob bait for the bubbas, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan sneeringly (and inaccurately) described Bill Clinton’s welfare reform proposals.
12. The “king” of Republican hypocrisy on the subject of balanced budgets was of course Lyin’ Paulie Ryan, whom I have excoriated on a near infinite number of occasions for his near infinite number of sins. I still find it astounding that it took the election of Donald Trump, and indeed the passage of the outrageous tax bill that Ryan put together on his behalf, for many Republicans to realize that their beloved party had never, ever meant a word of the millions they had uttered in praise of balanced budgets. I denounced them, pretty loudly, here.
13. I chuckled about this here.
14. I’ve moaned about this, almost incessantly, but perhaps most pointedly here and here.
15. In the past several years I have read several articles about the economic struggles suffered by the state of Connecticut. None of these articles contains a word about the cause of the problems: the split between wealthy, white suburbs and poor cities with large black and Hispanic populations.
