Political Irony

© Jen Sorensen

This has become a very political issue, with some people on the right calling them patriots, and some people on the left calling them terrorists. As usual, the reality is somewhere in the middle. There is a good, balanced article in the New Yorker discussing this called “The Bundys and the Irony of American Vigilantism”.

Meanwhile, the Twittersphere is going nuts calling the occupiers hilarious names. And they deserve it. After all, these people who are threatening to kill (or die) to defend their right to abuse public land are the same people who want to deport Muslims who are living in the US legally, close their mosques, and do other horrible things to their rights.

But regardless of your politics, can you help but laugh when people mock this so-called militia by calling them “Y’all Qaeda”, “Yokel Haram”, or “Al-Shabubba”? Or – because they are pretty much all white – the “Vanilla ISIS”? And instead of Jihad, they are waging “YeeHawd”. Even their choice of target is a joke, as pointed out by Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station in a tweet:

To nobody’s surprise, the very first act of Congress in 2016 is a bill that (once again) attempts to repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood. Speaker Paul Ryan seems proud of this action, and even admits that he knows the bill won’t become law, telling a conservative talk host: “You’re going to see us put a bill on the president’s desk going after Obamacare and Planned Parenthood so we’ll finally get a bill on his desk to veto.” Pure politics.

Also on the docket, the House Benghazi committee will continue its partisan investigation of Hillary Clinton.

The only new thing is legislation clamping down on Obama’s Syrian refugee program, which continues the GOP’s long record of being the “Party of No”.

Is this the bold new agenda that Republicans promised us? It suspiciously looks exactly like the old agenda.

One of my favorite things is checking up on people’s predictions of the future. Even better is when someone else does the checking up for me.

Which brings us to this interesting article in ThinkProgress, containing four predictions made before the 2012 election of the dire things that would happen if Obama was reelected.

The price of gas. Mike Lee (R-UT), on the Senate floor no less, predicted that (if Obama was reelected) gas would hit $6.05 per gallon by the start of 2015, and keep rising after that. Likewise, Newt Gingrich predicted that if Obama was reelected he would push gas to $10 a gallon. Even funnier, Gingrich claimed that he could hold the price of gas to $2.50 (and printed that price on his presidential campaign signs). That would be 50 cents higher than the current average price of gas in the US.

You can almost laugh that one off, because in reality the president doesn’t have much control over the price of gas. But what about unemployment? Mitt Romney predicted that if Obama was reelected, we would see “chromic high unemployment” for the next four years. At the time, unemployment was at 8.1%. Romney pledged he could bring it down to 6% by the start of 2017. And now, a year earlier, unemployment stands at 5%.

Rush Limbaugh predicted loudly that “the country’s economy is going to collapse if Obama is re-elected. There’s no if about this. And it’s gonna be ugly. It’s gonna be gut wrenching, but it will happen.” He even went into detail, saying that first California would declare bankruptcy and Obama would force red states like Texas to “bail them out”. Of course, California now has a $4 billion budget surplus and it is the reddest states that are the most in the red (financially speaking). And as for the US, other than a problem with wage stagnation caused by the GOP, the economy is doing fine.

Finally, after the election was over and Obama won, many people predicted that the stock market would crash. Including this guy:

He wasn’t alone. Forbes magazine’s “Intelligent Investing” column claimed the “market selloff after Obama’s re-election [was] no accident” and “stocks are dropping with no bottom in sight” because of policies the Obama administration would persue in his second term. Likewise, Bloomberg TV claimed that the stock market would drop at least 20% because of Obama’s reelection, and joked that investors seeking to protect their assets should “buy themselves a machine gun.” Meanwhile, back in the world of reality, the stock market is up 27% since Obama was reelected.

Go read Matt Taibbi’s latest column in Rolling Stone, “In the Year of Trump, the Joke Was On Us.

Yes, even if you are sick and tired of reading about Trump. This isn’t about Trump, it is about us.

UPDATE: If you need something lighter to read on this fine New Year’s day, I suggest you peruse the article in Salon about Ronald Reagan. It turns out that the GOP saint was not only grossly ill informed, he just didn’t care, and spent the majority of his presidency either on vacation or napping. Oh, and his schedule was controlled by an astrologer.

Obama believes that not only was 2015 a good year, but 2016 will be even better:

And it looks like Obama has reason to be happy. According to Real Clear Politics, Obama has broken the “second term curse”.

What’s the “second term curse”? When a president is reelected, they often have problems midway through their second term. Nixon was forced out of office. Reagan had the Iran-contra scandal. Clinton was impeached. And Dubya had a double: Hurricane Katrina and a quagmire in Iraq.

But Obama has so far avoided any scandal like his two-term predicessors, and with one year left to go has already racked up a number of wins. Most recently a budget deal with the Republicans, but before that leading the push for climate change accords, the nuclear deal with Iran, normalizing relations with Cuba, huge wins for gay rights, stopping federal raids on medical marijuana users, and rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline (which especially didn’t make sense with the current low oil prices).

There is also good news that (despite the best efforts of the GOP to sabotage the economy, like with government shutdowns and tax cuts for the wealthy) the economy has finally recovered from the Great Recession. The median annual household income has just surpassed levels it was at before the recession started in December 2007.

I can’t wait to see what he accomplishes in the new year.

UPDATE: Yet another win, at least according to Jeb Bush. Bush is attempting a twofer, blaming the rise of Donald Trump on Obama, saying on NPR:

He would not exist were it not for Barack Obama. He is the [antidote] in some people’s minds to the politically correct, divisive policies of Barack Obama.

I guess he has a point. If Obama weren’t president, the GOP would not have had anyone to blame everything on, spewing hatred and lies for so long that their base doesn’t seem to be able to recognize the truth anymore. Which opened the door for Trump. Thanks Obama!

Eugene Robinson has an interesting opinion piece in WaPo titled “How Donald Trump destroyed the Republican Party in 2015”, as if it is a fait accompli. He does soften that, saying “An entity called the GOP will survive — but can never be the same.”

His point is that Trump has exploited the resentments and fears that have been so carefully cultivated and used by the Republican establishment to keep the base in line. However, the GOP action has never matched their rhetoric. Not on immigration, on abortion, on gay marriage, on terrorism, even on whether Obama was born on American soil. As Robinson puts it “Trump has given voice to the ugliness and anger that the party spent years encouraging and exploiting. He let the cat out of the bag, and it’s hungry.”

Bottom line? One of two things will happen:

The party might nominate Trump, in which case the establishment will have lost all control. Or party leaders might somehow find a way to defeat him, in which case they will have lost the allegiance of much of the base. In either event, the GOP we once knew is irredeemably a thing of the past.

Republicans keep trying to create a conservative utopia, with predictable results. First there was Kansas, where Sam Brownback showed us how to cut taxes and destroy the social safety net, and when that failed, they doubled down with even more tax cuts (for the rich) and spending cuts, with disastrous results.

But did they learn? No, then presidential hopefuls Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal just had to try the same thing in their states of Wisconsin, and Louisiana.

Wisconsin famously destroyed their public unions, but they also refused to expand Medicare and Medicaid, turned down money to build a high-speed rail system, and tried to recruit new businesses. But the result was that Wisconsin now ranks dead last in new business start-up activity.

Louisiana also tried severe austerity, but when their state university fell into the equivalent of bankruptcy and the economy got worse, Jindal became so unpopular even his own state didn’t support him for president.

What’s really embarrassing about these examples is that we have plenty of example of the opposite strategy working just fine. After the Democrats took over California from the Republicans, the economy boomed. While Wisconsin’s economy was sinking, next door in Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton raised taxes, raised the state minimum wage, passed a law guaranteeing equal pay for women, and made education a priority by pumping one third of the budget surplus into public schools. You know, all the things that Republicans say will kill jobs. But instead Minnesota’s economic growth is one of the highest in the US, and Forbes ranked Minnesota the 9th best state for business.

Note that we don’t have to compare one state to another for examples. In Minnesota itself, the previous governor was another (forgotten) presidential hopeful, Tim Pawlenty. Pawlenty called himself Minnesota’s first true fiscal conservative in modern history and prided himself on never raising taxes. But he left the state with a $6.2 billion deficit and only created 6,200 jobs in his eight years as governor (compared to 172,000 jobs created by Dayton in four years.)

Strike two. But apparently the GOP never learns. This just in, the state of Kentucky recently elected Matt Bevin as governor, and he immediately stripped voting rights from 140,000 people and lowered the minimum wage for government workers.

You may remember that Kentucky is the home state of Kim Davis, who refused to do her job and grant marriage licenses to gay couples. Well, Bevin used his new executive power to give Davis an out. As a side note, Bevin also said that he believes making same-sex marriage legal could lead to parents marrying their children.

I’ll be watching Kentucky, to see how it does. But it appears that the GOP is still testing the definition of insanity.