He's moving his lips, goes the old joke.
A number of people, in the comments and elsewhere, have demanded to know incredulously whether I really believe that the Republicans are no worse than the Democrats. They have challenged me to take a side. Here goes.
For starters, I voted for Bush in 2004, but Democratic in the last election, and though I haven't dug too far into their policy prescriptions yet, but I find it hard to imagine a circumstance under which I would vote for Romney, McCain, or Giuliani. (I know nothing about Thompson except that he plays a damn fine district attorney.) It depends on who the Democratic nominee is, but I'll probably either pull the lever for Obama or an independent. So I am not defending Republicans, to the extent that I am defending them, because I am one.
But that doesn't mean that I think the Republicans are evil. I think they are tarred with scandal right now because that's what happens to the party in power--by which I mean, the party in power is the one with the big opportunities for corruption. Bill Clinton got caught renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to donors because he had the Lincoln Bedroom to rent out. I did not admire the Republican machine's depradations on K Street, and think that they were a disgusting innovation in American political culture. But now that that machinery is in place, I will be very surprised if the Democrats don't use it. I will be very pleased, of course, to be proven wrong; but if Democrats control Congress for ten years, I expect that the end result will be a rash of corruption scandals with Republicans crying that the Party of Tammany Hall is just doing what it has always done, while conveniently forgetting their own more recent history.
I think most politicians, like most people, are basically well meaning folks who act out of some combination of idealism, a fervent desire to be liked, greed, power hunger, and trenchant ability for self-deception. I do not think that these qualities are notably unequally distributed between the parties, which is why I don't identify with either of them. Moreover, I think that the electoral calculus of a bipartisan system means that those qualities will always be roughly evenly distributed between the parties.
I think that laws get passed through a combination of idealism, pragmatic horse-trading in order to deliver goodies to local districts, and electoral positioning with key interest groups. I think that fundraising consumes a great deal of time, but is not a particularly important explanatory variable in high-profile policy making. Lobbyists do a great deal of damage by securing small tax breaks and subsidies for themselves, locking out competition, and otherwise distorting the economy. But they do not get to buck the will of the people on anything that the public genuinely cares about. Major policy initiatives are stymied at the behest of big interest groups, not big donors; CAFE standards fail in Congress not because GM gives a lot of money to congressional campaigns, but because the UAW has a lot of members, and those members will vote against anyone who passes a law that hurts sales of American cars; and also because Americans do not like to drive more expensive, less powerful, and smaller cars. Campaign money buys a congressman's ear, but what buys his vote is your ability to convince him that your idea will be good for the country, his constituents, or his electoral prospects.
I therefore do not think that, for example, rich donors snapping their fingers are a good explanation of the Republican position on tax cuts, or much else besides trivial provisions in bills you've never heard of. It is not that I excuse these things--they are repulsive. It's just that I don't expect the Democrats to be any different--witness Nancy Pelosi's special exemption from the minimum wage for a territory in which a canner in her district happens to have a major plant, or Charles Schumer's otherwise frankly bizarre position on carried interest. I don't think that Republicans have some special brand of evil; I think that they behave as I expect people given lots of government power to behave, which is to say fairly badly. Nor do I expect that I'd behave any better in their place, which is one of the many reasons you will not catch me running for office.
I think that their ideology does differ, and many progressives think that that ideology is evil. Obviously, I differ there too. I diverge in many places from the core ideology of the Republican Party, and in many other places from the core ideology of the Democratic Party; in some places I respect honest differences in value judgements, and in other places I think that both parties engage in willful ignorance of reality in order to foster a more self-satisfying world view.
I think that there are better and worse people in politics, but I also think that it is hard to know decisively who those people are; I've found out that politicians I hated were lovely, honorable chaps in person; and conversely, that people I respected were widely known for being venal, lying, power-hungry jerks.
So when I decide who to vote for, I try not to decide who the better person is; I try to guess which one of them is likely to come closest to my preferred policy basket--for whatever reason, good, bad, or indifferent. Obviously, I occasionally guess wrong. But that's my general approach to politics--which is why discussions about who is stupider, or meaner, or less honest, or whatever, generally leave me pretty cold.
"and in other places I think that both parties engage in willful ignorance of reality in order to foster a more self-satisfying world view."
Now, do you think libertarians do this, don't do this, do this more, or do this equally?
The widespread use of emotive language (evil, hate, nazi, commie, etc.) may be evidence in favor of the hypothesis that politics engages more the emotional part of the brain than the rational part. It seems very much akin to the behavior of rabid sports fans.
As someone who has read your work for years, the only issues I can think of where your position is closer to B. Hussein Obama's than the republicans is that he is pro-abortion and less supportive of electronic surveillance of terrorists. What issues of his do you like?
"I haven't dug too far into their policy prescriptions yet"
Doesn't that mean you aren't doing your job? How can I get paid to talk about politics without having to do research?
"I think most politicians, like most people, are basically well meaning folks who act out of some combination of idealism, a fervent desire to be liked, greed, power hunger, and trenchant ability for self-deception. I do not think that these qualities are notably unequally distributed between the parties, which is why I don't identify with either of them. Moreover, I think that the electoral calculus of a bipartisan system means that those qualities will always be roughly evenly distributed between the parties."
I'm willing to agree that this is _generally_ true. But I think the evidence at hand is pretty clear that the last approximately 15 years and especially the last 7 years of the GOP has been a glaring and terrible exception. Parties usually do strike some sort of working balance between (in no particular order) a general pragmatism; serving the basic desires of their key constituencies; low-grade corruption; and heartfelt ideology. But the pragmatism has gone completely out the window in the GOP, and the scale of the corruption has been unusually high, and their ideologies have been unusually virulent and, frankly, inimical to the nation's interests. I hope that the next electoral cycle or two flushes all of that out of the GOP's system, and they go back to being a normal, boringly-not-entirely-competent-and-only-somewhat-corrupt party like the Democrats are. But until that time, they just can't be considered a real option at the national level.
I think the better question is why anyone would identify with a party. After all, a party's only goal is to get elected (not push any specific policy agenda, unless it furthers the party's chances of getting re-elected). As such, parties have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Doesn't anyone who affiliates with one party therefore self-identify as the lowest common denominator?
Activists affiliate with parties as a way to promote their causes. But it is hard to see why people who are only voters would bother to do so. Their affiliation cannot rationally be expected to have any impact on anything.
In most cases, I suspect that people first develop an emotional attachment to a party and then join. Their affiliation gives them good feelings in the same manner as wearing a replica jersey of their favorite football team.
What strikes me these days about the two parties is how hysterical the Democrats are. Even if you take two people relatively close the center, like Glenn Reynolds and Kevin Drum, you'll note that the former is generally bemused and the latter is generally annoyed. Megan in this regard seems to me much more like the Republicans.
I know that there are two sets of people--both subsets of the set of Democrats--out there: those who will respond that Glenn Reynolds is a far-right nut, and those who will respond that any rational person would be angry at the destruction of our country and its Constitution. That kind of proves my point.
My simplistic take on politicians is that democracy is messy, and in a country of 300m people, with untold diversity of wants, needs, and opinions, it is very messy.
Politics is the art of compromise. In the scrum of debate, nearly everyone has to give a little. Those unable or unwilling to compromise are unable to get anything done, which is why true ideologues are both scary and impotent.
I fear that we hold our leaders up to an unrealistic standard of "no surrender," or "no compromise," because compromise has taken on the image of "selling out."
Some do indeed sell their souls, but this is not the same as being flexible, being reasonable, being accommodating when needed, and understanding where and when to give a little.
We are far too hard on the candidates, far too "self-referentially right," and too unwilling to overlook some warts, in the search for the perfect candidate.
There aint any. Pick the best you can and go vote.
Great post.
I think Megan could end up in real danger of plunging web ratings.
I've noticed that well-reasoned, reasonable, non-inflammatory and insightful postings in the political arena generally get few comments. Blogs that consist mostly of such postings often wither away for lack of readers. (Actually, even a comment of such nature can often kill a turbulent high bandwidth topic dead.)
Most people read political blogs for excitement and interest, and political blogs generate passion by either having the reader passionately hate what the poster has to say, or having the reader passionately hate what the blogger is pointing out as hateful. (Ever see a political blog that talks mostly about it's own side?)
Lately, I've felt that the ratio of well-thought out postings that don't classify half the world as evil, stupid, or evil AND stupid has risen sharply, especially in this new home. (Okay, to be fair, postings that allow *other people* to latch on to them and comment how the other half of the world evil, stupid or evil AND stupid, Megan's postings are lamentably deficient in this regard.)
Now I'm worried that if she keeps this ratio up, she could be in danger of getting cancelled, which would give us *no* such posts.
So, in the interests of continuing to read articles like those of the last few weeks, if she could make ill-considered and inflammatory posts more often, I'd worry a lot less for this blog's future.
Megan,
This is, I think, typical of the myopia you sometimes display. It's not that most of what you say above is unreasonable - in fact I agree with most of it (albeit from a slightly different place in the political spectrum, and with more cynicism about the pernicious influence of monied interests). But I think you miss several ways in which the present republican establishment - not all republicans, or even all republican politicians - is in some respects uniquely pernicious.
I'm stonkered by some of the comments. Stating as unassailable fact that the current crop of Republicans (or the current administration) is uniquely corrupt, venal, incompetent, etc. displays a Grand Canyon-sized gap in historical perspective:
* Has the Bush administration engaged in warrantless wiretaps? Yes. Was this an abuse of our civil liberties? (For the sake of this discussion, only) Let's answer that question in the affirmative. How does this abuse rank on a historical scale with the Clinton administration's perusal of 100's of it's political opponent's FBI files? In scoring these two "abuses of civil rights", keep in mind the Bush administration informed key members of Congress of it's program, had the program monitored by career members of the Justice Department, made changes to the program when objections were raised by those career attorneys, etc. The Clinton administration "FBI file review program" provided no such safeguards.
* Still on the topic of wiretaps, how does what Bush has done compare with the wiretaps conducted by JFK, LBJ, and Nixon?
* Abuse of executive power over the military? Bush got Congress' permission -- in advance -- to go to war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Clinton did not get permission before taking action in Kosovo. You might approve of one action and not the other, but that does not make Iraq an abuse of power if Kosovo was not.
* On the topic of corruption, isn't there a currently serving Democrat member of Congress who was caught with close to $100,000 of cash in his freezer? To say that Republicans are the only ones with their hands in the cookie jar requires overlooking these frozen assets.
* Sexcapades? The difference between Republican and Democrat sex scandals is that, in general, the Republican scandals don't involve, you know, sex. Craig wasn't caught having sex, he was caught inviting a sexual encounter. Other recent Republican scandals involved a phone number on a madam's phone list and sending emails to Congressional pages. The worst Clarence Thomas was accused of was asking about a pubic hair on a coke can. On a historical basis, how do these scandals rank against Clinton and Barney Frank? (In case you don't remember, Barney Frank is a Democrat member of Congress from MA. His lover ran a brothel out of the Frank's home. Frank claimed to be unaware of his lover's business activities. On another occasion, Frank used his connections to "fix" his lover's parking tickets.)
My point is not to excuse Republican lapses by pointing to Democrats' similar indiscretions. I am trying to illustrate that saying the current set of GOP politicians represent some new ethical low is just plain silly.
For all of the folks commenting that the current crop of Republican leaders are somehow beyond the pale - please try to remember back to what you thought of all the crackpot Republican grievances with the Clinton administration and then take a look in the mirror.
I'm not excusing recent Republican failings (and as a Republican I can list many) but taking exception to the moonbat craziness that feeds on itself in a remarkably reality-free zone of the internet.
Just look at the shock of so many of Megan's new commenters that seemed to be offended that Megan just doesn't accept it as axiomatic that Republicans are evil.
Republicans over-reacted to the abuses of the Clintons, but that doesn't excuse those abuses either.
And I realize many of you are probably too young to remember it - but for real abuses of power you should check out the Democratic House leadership of the 1980's and early 90's. If you need a starting point, look up queen of the hill and king of the hill voting.
I'm Paraphrasing from memory, but P.J. O'Rourke once said something to the effect that one of the problems with government is that it's boring. Congress passes a huge volume of legislation every year, and the executive branch makes a whole pile of regulations, and chances are that you don't really care about 95% or more of it, including some things that you probably should care about. If you actually did pay close attention to everything the government does, your eyes would glaze over, you would enter a comatose state, and you wouldn't have room in your brain for the things that normal people find important, like family, friends, work, and baseball.
The fact that the government does such a huge amount of stuff that very few people pay any real attention to provides opportunities for corruption and other mischief that only a saint could resist. Unfortunately, we don't have a Saints Party. The party that's less evil is whichever party has less power. And yet, surprisingly few people seem to get this. We insist that government provide for every need and solve every problem, without giving much thought to what all of this power does to those who exercise it. If you want an honest government, stop asking it to do so much.
Jim Nelson
Amen.
David,
The "abuses" of the Clintons were almsot entirely oversold to the media. There's just no "there" there. Your very first example of Democratic misadministration is one that has been shown by the independent counsel's investigation to be have no substance to it!
"Sexcapades" are exactly the sort of thing that are going to happen at all times in all parties. I haven't seen anyone putting any particular argumentative weight on them, other than perhaps making a bit of a hypocrisy argument. It's just not anything like the source of most people's strong discontent with the current GOP.
Every other item on your list is rife with confusion. E.g., you write, "On the topic of corruption, isn't there a currently serving Democrat member of Congress who was caught with close to $100,000 of cash in his freezer? To say that Republicans are the only ones with their hands in the cookie jar requires overlooking these frozen assets." But the issue isn't -- rather completely, by the way this conversation has been set up, just plain isn't -- "is one party totally without sin?" The question is, "is the current GOP leadership much worse than either current or previous Dem leadership, and for that matter, much worse than previous GOP leaders?" Pointing at the one or two Democratic members of Congress who have engaged in some minor corruption just doesn't begin to speak to the point. Nothing that any Dem is even accused of right now is anywhere near the scale of what DeLay was involved in, or with the Abramoff scandal; maybe it's in the same general league as the Alaska congressional delegation's corruption, say, but the problem for the GOP is that that just tickles the surface these days!
Here's another confusion: "Abuse of executive power over the military? Bush got Congress' permission -- in advance -- to go to war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Clinton did not get permission before taking action in Kosovo. You might approve of one action and not the other, but that does not make Iraq an abuse of power if Kosovo was not." I don't know of anyone accusing Bush of abusing executive power of the military in this regard. Rather, the relevant issues about Iraq are things like (i) allowing the timing of the war to be structured for maximal partisan advantage, even at the cost of hurting our efforts in Afghanistan and damaging our ultimate prospects in Iraq; (ii) lying the country into the war in the first place; (iii) the Plame fiasco; (iv) the Congressional GOP's total unwillingness to exert even the slightest bit of oversight over the war; (v) spectacular profiteering by Haliburton, to the detriment of the conditions for our troops. You'll be hard-pressed to find something even remotely comparable that the Dems have done.
In general, if anyone wants to accuse Dems of being "hysterical" or overwrought about the current GOP leadership, they should take to heart this quote from Ed Kilgore:
"Think about it. Since 1998, we've witnessed the first presidential impeachment since the 1860s, the first presidential election to go into "overtime" since the 1870s; the first attack on the continental United States since 1812; the first major preemptive "war of choice" in U.S. history; and the first televised destruction of an American city. I don't mean to equate any of these non-9/11 occurances with what we witnessed that day, but it has been an extraordinary span of time.
If you want to truly understand why Democrats (especially those whose entire formative political experience has been the last decade) are so often "angry," remember the behavior of the leadership of the Republican Party in all of the non-9/11 events I've mentioned. And then remember what the president and vice president have done to destroy the national unity and worldwide symphathy this country enjoyed just after 9/11, typically viewing domestic unity and global approval with ill-disguised contempt."
The GOP in recent years is awful in a rare vintage, to which one can only hope to compare it to, say, the GOP of the Gilded Age and the antebellum Democratic party.
For all of the folks commenting that the current crop of Republican leaders are somehow beyond the pale - please try to remember back to what you thought of all the crackpot Republican grievances with the Clinton administration and then take a look in the mirror.
Here's the thing Rob - I think even you would agree that there are times in the political life of a nation when events really do justify a high level of anger. Now we can agree (now anyway) that such anger wasn't justified during the Clinton administration. But we can agree that it is sometimes justified. Many of us, including a number of Republicans (see, e.g., John Cole) believe that the deeds of the current administration fall into that category. Others disagree. But my point is this: yet one more invocation of Republican hysteria during the Clinton administration is not a persuasive argument to those who honestly believe that we are now in a situation were extreme anger is justified.
To maybe bring the point home a little more bluntly: telling the angry family member of a murder victim to calm down, using as an argument something along the lines of the following is not likely to be effective or persuasive: "please try to remember back to what you thought of the hysterical anger of your neighbor whose car was dented in a minor accident and then take a look in the mirror." In fact, it would be considered offensive.
Just look at the shock of so many of Megan's new commenter that seemed to be offended that Megan just doesn't accept it as axiomatic that Republicans are evil.
No one is arguing that all Republicans are evil. But to fail to recognize the unique medicity of the current Republican establishment, coming from someone like Megan who professes to be, and probably is, relatively non-partisan, is mystifying.
And I realize many of you are probably too young to remember it - but for real abuses of power you should check out the Democratic House leadership of the 1980's and early 90's. If you need a starting point, look up queen of the hill and king of the hill voting.
As your last shred of credibility disappears. I am old enough, I do remember it, and garden variety political corruption, even as extensive as it was then, is not what is getting people mad today. A personal reaction: I'm the opposite of mad when I hear about the garden variety Republican scandals. That stuff isn't THAT bad in the greater scheme of things, and it's helpful politically for the Dems. What gets me mad are the BIG issues, the stuff that doesn't get prosecuted, either because its bad acts committed by the administration (which is, you know, the branch tasked with enforcing the law), or isn't technically illegal, albeit horrible in one way or another (K-Street, for example, though that's small potatoes compared to the horrors of the war on Terra, much is which has been violative of the law, but most of which is not illegal, at least under U.S. law).
I saw Ed Kilgore too and he's quite right. Frankly, when I come accross people who don't see a difference between the two parties and don't understand why the republicans are off the table of responsible choices I scratch my head thinking, what is wrong with you? Now some people are hoplessly committed to an ideology and the GOP represent that choice so they can't move, some are just stubborn in their habits and only want to see the GOP of the 1970s in their mind, but for the most intelligent people all I can think of is that there is unconscious denail that keeps screening out alarming facts. And really it is not surprising, I mean people do not like to change their worldviews, it's unsetteling, and if you grew up with a worldview that there are two political parties that more or less do the same thing and that they won't rock your world too much, well then you are going to resist the idea that one party has gone off the rails and has become a harmful force to you and your community. Because if one of the two parties has become toxic to the nation, then in a sense you can no longer sit back and just enjoy your private life, you are being called on to do something, even if that something is as small as making a new choice, and in my experience people hate re-evaluating reality so that they have to work harder and do more. A body at rest stays at rest, so to speak.
LarryM -
Can't we agree that what has you really mad are the policies not the bad acts, which just don't amount to much.
You mention the K-Street Project and I appreciate that you refer to it as small potatoes -- but the only new or interesting thing about the K Street project was that DeLay was dumb enough to give a name to it and brag about it.
I assume you are not naive enough to believe that Pelosi and Hoyer are not now leaning on associations and interest groups to hire Democratic-leaning lobbyists.
I won't speak for Megan but I think the larger point she has been making for a while now is that political discourse would be a whole lot more productive if we could have policy debates rather than name-calling debates. I know that's too much to hope for in a larger context, but it seems an achievable goal for a wonkish economics blog.
As for the last shred of my credibility - I defy anyone to compare the 12 years of Republican House control to the last 12 years of the prior Democratic majority and to honestly believe that anything the House Republicans did wasn't 'small potatoes' in comparison.
Not that I excuse those small potatoes - though I had hoped that Pelosi and Hoyer would copy the Republicans in largely following through on their campaign promises to rectify the bad practices of their predecessors rather than emulate and at times exceed them.
One of the reasons BDS is so widespread is that the more evil your opposition is the more heroic you become. If Bush is just a misguided idealist opposing him is less fun than it is if he is the bastard son of Darth Vader and Cruella De Ville.
Also many on the internet are too young to know much about the history of politics. Therefore every thing seems unique and unprecedented. The things liberals say about Bush are almost exactly the same things they said about Reagan. The things the right will say about Hillary will be the same as they said about Bill.
You see this all the time in sports, young people who say that whoever is on top at the moment is the greatest ever. Such as those who claim LeBron James is better than Jordan was. The present always seem bigger and more extreme than the past. If Fred or Rudy get elected liberals will look back at now as being the good old days.
All too true.
Although I think people should watch Yes, Minister more, if they want to understand the world.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080306/
It's funny, I'm old enough to have lived through a fair amount of that history as an adult, starting with Reagan, and am a bit of a history buff, and it's always been my opinion that Bush's defenders are the ones lacking historical prospective.
But in fairness, plenty of people on both sides of the debate aren't real familiar with their history. Reagan ... well, setting aside for a moment that Reagan hatred, while real enough, never approached the level of Bush hatred, I happen to think that a fair amount of the liberal critique of Reagan was justified. And defenders of Bush will cry "see, we survived Reagan, and now he is regarded as a great president." My response to that would be fourfold. First, Reagan benefited from a good deal of luck. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, Reagan had characteristics lacking in Bush which made a huge difference in terms of outcomes. I'm referring, inter alia, to his flexibility on taxes after the first two years, and his attitude towards the Soviet Union during his second term (an attitude that was fought by many of his advisers). Thirdly, I would dispute some of history's judgments. Finally, and this to some extent distills the above, Reagan never go the country involved in a fiasco like Iraq.
More generally, I'd make two points. Firstly, references to prior instances where people exhibited extreme anger towards presidents is always unpersuasive for the reason set forth by me up thread.
Secondly, while you can find precedents to many of the worst misdeeds of the Bush generation in past presidencies, (a) some of the worst stuff is unique to the Bush administration, (b) we've never had an administration which had it all, so to speak - there may be precedents for much of it, but from different administrations - not the same concentrated level of awfulness, (c) the worst prior administrations occurred during periods when the power of the Federal government was lesser, so the potential harm was lower, and finally, (4) we have had some pretty horrible prior presidents, so saying Bush is not the worse isn't saying much. I'm thinking particularly about some of the immediate pre-civil war presidents.
But I'll agree with one thing (from another comment) - if Guiliani is elected, many of us will pine for the (relatively) good old days of Bush. But that's an indictment of Guiliani, not a defense of Bush.
Actually it was the same comment.
In any event, let me elaborate a bit. I'll limit myself to the interrelated constellation of civil rights/prisoner treatment/executive power issues. I'll avoid the well trodden ground of the "justification" for administration positions on these issues, and the level of harm. I want to focus very specifically on the response that "Lincoln/Wilson/FDR did the same or worse." Now there certainly IS some truth to that - but that response misses the point for a number of reasons. Even setting aside the fact that some specific Bush policies don't have a precedent in those (or any) administrations (e.g., the extreme breadth of administration claims of the extent of executive power, "coercive interrogation," and the level of explicit disdain for international law), the REAL difference is that the vast majority of the policies which invite comparison were war time policies limited explicitly to the course of the war in question.
Now I realize that most of Bush's policies share a "war time" rationale. The problem is that, aside from the fact that the relevant statutes and executive opinions don't limit themselves to the course of the war, the very nature of the "war" we are fighting doesn't have a definable end. The war on terror? Does anyone think that we are going to eliminate terror as a method for acheieving policial goals? hardly.
My point isn't to challenge that particular formulation of the "war." My point is that NONE of the relevant formulations describe a conflict that has a definable end. Again, set aside the question of what implications this has as to whether we should adopt such an open ended definition of the contest. We have done so. In doing so, and, at the same times, adopting a number of laws/policies restricting civil liberties/prisoner's right and expanding executive power. Unlike prior conflicts, there is no reason to believe that we will ever give up these expanded powers/repeal these diminished liberties.
Again, set aside the merits for a moment. Whatever you think about the merits, I think we can all agree that all of this has at least a potential for abuse. And that potential is far, far greater when the laws are permanent, as opposed to a LIMITED war time exigency.
And THAT'S the biggest reason why the Lincoln/Wilson/FDR analogies are of little value, and why the policies of the Bush administration in those areas are so potentially dangerous.
Note the comparisons also ignore a couple of other facts - the existential nature of two of the conflicts in question, and the fact that, in Lincoln's case, we were dealing with a domestic insurrection, a horse of a very particular color. And yes, I realize that some people pretend to think that the current "war" is an existential conflict, but adults clearly don't REALLY believe this, and I'll do Megan's readers the courtesy of assuming that they are adults. But that's small potatoes vs the real difference set forth above.
Finally, astute readers will point out that the "limited war time measure" argument doesn't apply to the Clinton policies that were in many respects a precursor to what Bush is doing. True enough. But I never really even understood what the import of that argument was supposed to be, except as a kind of "gotcha" to people who somehow try to defend the Clinton record on these issues while attacking the Bush record. Evaluated fairly, on these issues at least, I think the obvious response is along the lines of this: Clinton's record on these issues, while not as bad as Bush's, was indeed pretty horrible. But that just lends strength to slippery slope arguments regarding such policies.
i love the craziness of claiming that the current republicans are objectively beyond the pale in ways different from other parties/politicians at other times. by definition, if the votes split roughly 50/50, the republicans cannot be objectively beyond the pale (cause you'd be able to prove it). and you can't just blame it on ignorance. no way the roughly 50% of voters who disagree that the repubs are beyond the pale are all just ignorant or acting in bad faith. but please, keep trying to prove it.
ad - Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are excellent primers on government and politics. I wondered if anyone else in the US had ever heard of them.
I saw Ed Kilgore too and he's quite right.
He is? 9/11 was the first attack on the continental U.S. since the War of 1812? Putting aside any other possible example, nobody attacked the World Trade Center in 1993?
In response to LarryM: FDR's court-packing plan was far more of a power grab than anything Bush ever did; can you imagine the (justified) hysteria today if Bush proposed that he be allowed to eliminate Justice Stevens' vote on the Court (which is the effect of appointing someone to "balance" a judge's vote) because Stevens wouldn't endorse his policies towards Guantanamo?
As for having a "definable end," FDR's New Deal has been far more permanent than Bush's war-on-terror; it didn't end when the depression did. (Yes, I know that people who think Bush is the worst president in the history of the universe generally think that the New Deal was a great thing, and that economic freedom doesn't really compare to the freedom to make international phone calls without the possibility that they may be eavesdropped upon. Suffice it to say that I disagree with your views.)
And further as to Bush's civil liberties issues -- I think that trying to keep Padilla from getting a trial was wrong, to be sure. But to say that locking up one person, accused of an actual crime, without trial, is worse than what FDR did -- locking up more than 100,000 people who weren't accused of any crimes -- shows lack of perspective.
Bush's wiretapping? You don't agree with it, fine. But to pretend that it's worse than what several successive presidents let J. Edgar Hoover do is ridiculous, and is what demonstrates lack of historical knowledge. And you may say that the war on terror is without a clear end -- but Bush will be out of office (except to the truly loony who think he's going to cancel the elections) in 2008; Hoover's reign went unchecked by anybody through term after term.
"if the votes split roughly 50/50, the republicans cannot be objectively beyond the pale (cause you'd be able to prove it). and you can't just blame it on ignorance." Ah, but it's nowhere near 50/50 right now, is it? Let's be generous and say that 40% of Americans are not utterly disgusted by the current GOP. Of that group, it's entirely plausible that at least 2/3 of them really are ignorant in various ways (if, e.g., they mostly get their news from Fox or (worse) Rush). Not stupid -- just very poorly informed & manipulated. And the rest really are nuts.
One key difference between the left and right today is that the nutjob left -- and there definitely is a nutjob left, too! -- has mostly left the Democratic party for the Greens, etc., and those that haven't left are pretty significantly marginalized. But the nutjob right is still in the GOP fold, and some of them still close to the party's centers of power.
Regarding the Lincoln/FDR thing, surely a key difference is that those presidents conceived of their actions as deeply morally problematic. One has no sense from this administration that they lose any sleep about their policies.
Btw, I'm not especially claiming that conservatives are generally more ill-informed than liberals.* Polls of Democratic primary voters reveals a lot of cluelessness about the actual positions of the leading Dem candidates. We, as a nation, just do not choose to be very well-informed about politics.
*(Though this may be _somewhat_ true in recent years;but I think that's more the fault of Fox news than of their audience.)
"Hoover's reign went unchecked by anybody through term after term." We've crossed over into silly & rather desperate territory here, if you've sunken to trying to pin Hoover's deeds onto the various Democratic presidents who hated him & continually fought with him.
In 1968, with the memory of Goldwater's '64 wipeout vivid in their memories, and needing an issue more appealing than opposition to the New Deal, Nixon and his aids ran a campaign at least partly inspired by Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority (written before the election but held for publication until after), in which, running to the right of George Wallace, Nixon appealed to white voters in the south, and ethnic whites elsewhere in the country, who were opposed to the civil rights movement. That is to say, Nixon pandered to racists, and it gave him the victory. And thus, a party that had been less segregationist than the Democrats, turned 180 degrees and became, as far as all future national elections were concerned, a racist party. In 1980 Reagan announced his candidacy, at Trent Lott's suggestion, in Philadelphia, Miss, the town where the three civil rights workers were murdered, and made clear in that speech his support for states' rights, which in 1980, as in 1860, was universally understood to mean "keep the black man down." In 1988 Bush had his minions run the Willie Horton ads, and in 2000 his son's Florida campaign chair, Katherine Harris, struck thousands of black names from the voting rolls on the spurious grounds that they were felons. Racism worked for Republicans every time, and is a significant part of the reason why they won those elections.
Add to this Reagan's embrace of a vulgar version of the Laffer Curve (lower taxes and the increased revenues will magically make the deficits disappear), properly denounced at the time as voodoo economics by Bush Sr, which became so popular electorally that the Republicans abandoned once and apparently for all their long-held committment to fiscal responsibility. Just as he'd tripled the size of the California budget when he was governor (and it wasn't an accident, he worked hard to transfer a host of municipal responsibilities to the state level), he helped triple the size of the federal debt as President. And no Republican president has come close to submitting a balanced budget ever since.
After nearly forty years of direct appeals to racism, and after more than a generation of voodoo economics, the Republican party is no longer the part of Eisenhower or Lincoln, but rather of Delay and Gingrich and Lott and Abramoff. The Democratic Party, for all its disorganization and petty corruption and weakness, has nothing to compare to this wretched history.
There are many wonderful people who are Republicans, and I have no reason to believe there is more personal virtue in one party or another. Many of the people I love most in the world are Republicans, and I admit that many of them are my moral superiors. But parties matter, and there are differences between the parties that matter very much.