The Armey At CPAC

Understandably, this year's Conservative Political Action Conference produced some truly outrageous statements.

Young America's Foundation spokesman Jason Mattera compared the gathering to Woodstock, quipping "except that unlike the last gathering, our women are beautiful, we speak in complete sentences and our notion of freedom doesn’t consist of snorting cocaine, which is certainly one thing that separates us from Barack Obama.”

Speaking of Tiger Woods' wife, Tim Pawlenty joked "I've had enough. We should take a page out of her playbook and take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government."

Introducing fanatically pro-corporate and anti-income tax crusader Grover Norquist, Human Events editor Jed Babbit stated "I'm just really, really glad it wasn't him identified as flying that plane into the I.R.S. building."

Dick Armey did not disappoint the attendees, declaring (first video below) of President Obama "You're intellectually shallow. You're a romantic. You're self-indulgent. You have no ability.... There's nothing so arrogant as a self-righteous income-redistributor."

It was the most offensive remark made by the former Texas congressman and current chairman of Freedom Works, of whom Chris Matthews said (remark at end of video, the second below) on Thursday "I like Dick Armey a lot." It rivaled in bad taste Armey's comment when he appeared (third video below) with Salon's Joan Walsh on Hardball, twice condescendingly telling her "give it a rest" and then blurting "I am so damned glad that you could never be my wife because I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you- every day."

But neither of those was as ridiculous as another comment (fourth video below) made by Armey at CPAC, wherein he referred to the U.S.A. as having "the greatest health care in the world," with, among other things, the "greatest accessibility.... and that which is in fact copied by the rest of the world."

No need, here, to go into the statistics demonstrating that our nation on health care spends more than twice as much per capita as any other developed nation with outcomes no better than most. Or that over 30 million individuals residing here legally lack health insurance. Or that no other nation is rushing around to mimic our heath care system. It has been explained and described by so many others.

The New York Times noted in an editorial printed yesterday that a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan in Michigan "settled" with regulators for a 22% rate increase after seeking a 56% increase. In California, Anthem Blue Cross, a subsidiary of Well point, has announced an average increase of 25% for persons in the individual market. Paul Krugman noted in his New York Times column yesterday

what WellPoint claims is that it has been forced to raise premiums because of “challenging economic times”: cash-strapped Californians have been dropping their policies or shifting into less-comprehensive plans. Those retaining coverage tend to be people with high current medical expenses. And the result, says the company, is a drastically worsening risk pool: in effect, a death spiral.

Krugman points out that "California's individual insurance market is already notable for its lack of regulation, certainly as compared with states like New York — yet the market is collapsing anyway." This makes a farce out of Armey's claim "the solution is not more government control, the solution is less government control."

Few Republicans these days are so bold, and absurd, as to claim there is not a serious health care problem in this nation. Still, no Republican, and few members of the mainstream media, will stand up to denounce Armey's ridicule of a "crisis in health care" as "a notion you're (Obama) getting away with peddling."

Democrats should be assigned some responsibility, after a year of health care debate, for not having so demolished the self-interested complacency of individuals who spread such myths. Nonetheless, the primary blame needs to be assigned to Dick Armey and others acting out of self-interest who refuse to address, and only obsure, our health care crisis.

No Redeeming Social Value

It's not really that Rush Limbaugh, in his speech to CPAC, defined bipartisanship as good vs. evil, Jesus Christ vs. the liberals:

To us, bipartisanship is them being forced to agree with us after we politically have cleaned their clocks and beaten them. And that has to be what we're focused on. [Applause].... Where is the compromise between good and evil? Should Jesus have cut a different deal? Serious.

No. It's more like Rush gets to pontificate endlessly without making any suggesting improvement to policy to aid the country he pretends to love. Here he is saying policy doesn't matter:

Well, the one thing, and there are many, but one thing that we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas right now. I don't want to name any names. It's not the point. But I talk to people about the Obama budget or the Obama Porkulous bill or whatever else TARP 2 whatever it's going to be, and they start talking to me in the terms of process and policy. I say stop it. What do you mean? Who is setting the process or policy? They are. You want to tweak it? No. This is philosophy, folks.

Representative David Vitter (insert cheap shot here) of Louisiana had spilled the beans when he spoke to the District of Columbia chapter of the conservative legal group The Federalist Society on February 12. Writing in Mother Jones that day (before the votes on the jobs bill), Stephanie Mencimer explained

According to Vitter, the GOP is basically betting the farm that the stimulus package is going to fail, and the party wants Democrats to go down with it. "Our next goal is to make President Obama and liberal Democrats in Congress own it completely," he said. Instead of coming up with serious measures to save the economy, the party intends to devote its time to an "we told you so" agenda that will include GOP-only hearings on the bill's impact in the coming months to highlight the bill's purportedly wasteful elements and shortcomings.

Still, Rush Limbaugh is a more powerful figure in the party than David Vitter, and his hyperpartisanship more clearly unmasks the Republican allegiance to the twin gods of party and polarization. Here he lays down the gauntlet, effectively challenging his opponents to a fight:

I have learned how to tweak liberals everywhere. I do it instinctively now. Tweak them in the media. And no reason to be afraid of these people. Why in the world would you be afraid of the deranged?

This is not someone who sees those who disagree with him as having an honest difference of opinion- or even a dishonest difference of opinion. Instead he labels them as "deranged," liberals for whom "it's not about revenue generation; it's about control;" people ("they") who are "stealing it from you." There is no interest in debating such individuals; only in demonizing them. And in making tens of millions of dollars misinforming and enraging his supporters.

Playing It Straight

After the record-setting deficits the nation endured during the presidency of George W. Bush, Republicans are furiously trying to sell the American people the notion that it is Barack Obama who is oblivious to the danger of big budgets. Typical were the remarks of the biggest Repub of them all, Rush Limbaugh, at the Conservative Political Action Conference. He claimed

In fact, the money he's spending is not ours. He's spending wealth that has yet to be created. And that is not sustainable. It will not work..... President Obama, your agenda is not new. It's not change, and it's not hope. [Applause] Spending a nation into generational debt is not an act of compassion.

Though Rush was completely on board with the huge tax cuts for the wealthy that played a major role in Republican red-ink of the 1990s, painting President Obama as a reckless spender was not as bizarre as the conspiracy Rush has uncovered in the Executive Branch:

And it's gotten so out of hand now that what worries me is that this administration, the Barack Obama administration is actively seeking to expand the welfare state in this country because he wants to control it.

Limbaugh, characteristically, provided no evidence, facts or details. President Obama has pledged to eliminate budgetary flim-flam, pledging to include the cost of wars and of national emergencies in the budget, rather than hiding them as his predecessor did. Newsday, in an editorial today, noted:

Obama explicitly rejected some of the more egregious budgeting practices of his immediate predecessor. President George W. Bush never included the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in his budgets, for instance, opting instead to treat those military campaigns as emergencies and fund them off the books. He took a similar approach with the entirely predictable $60 billion it cost the Treasury for each year that Congress spared 20 million taxpayers the expensive bite of the alternative minimum tax. Bush also budgeted nothing for federal disaster response, though natural disasters invariably occur. Obama included all three things in his 10-year budget.

Next, he made it clear that laying the groundwork for a strong economy down the road won't be free. Want to kick fossil fuels for a green future? How about reforming how we pay for health care, so we can get more for our dollars and reduce the ranks of the uninsured? Want to keep Medicare solvent? Get a bigger federal contribution for our schools? Repair and maintain roads, bridges, airports and mass transit? Build a modern energy grid?

It will all cost money, a fact Obama didn't sugarcoat. He budgeted funds as a down payment for those priorities. And he proposed taxes and identified savings to help cover the tab.

The message to taxpayers and Capitol Hill? Quit the magical thinking. These things won't pay for themselves. And we can't just continue to borrow and spend and pass the bill to our kids.

You can treat your audience as children, going for the cheap laughs, as in Limbaugh quipping "Besides, as far as John Kerry is concerned, if it wasn't for his varicose veins, he would be totally colorless. [Laughter]" Or try the route of candor and courage, "treat(ing) the public like grown-ups," as Newsday put it of Obama. Unfortunately, Rush's posse, proud to identify itself as "dittoheads" and fresh off supporting George W. Bush, has little interest in hearing it straight from a President.

McCain And The Rule Of Law

Really, one should have some sympathy for John McCain. In speaking to the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 7, 2008, the Arizona senator knew he would have to address the issue of illegal immigration, one of the issues which has put him at odds with the Repub base and majority of registered Republicans.

So he finessed the issue, successfully putting off till later his day of reckoning on the matter. This is what he said in relevant part:


I have pledged that it would be among my highest priorities to secure our borders first -- (cheers, applause) -- to secure our borders first. And only after we have achieved widespread consensus that our borders are secure would we address other aspects of the problem in a way that defends the rule of law and does not encourage another wave of illegal immigration. (Applause.)


If you don't know what McCain was saying, you've read carefully. Of course, he was trying to say "I'll close the border first." Except that he didn't say that, but instead "it would be among (his) highest priorities"- whether that means one of his two or one of his eight-six highest priorities is anyone's guess. And he didn't say that he would- or wouldn't- build a wall, which opponents of the McCain-Kennedy "Comprehensive Immigration Act" want above all.

Understandably, then, McCain did not define a solution which would "defend the rule of law and does not encourage another wave of illegal immigration." For that matter, McCain might argue that the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 did not "encourage another wave of illegal immigration"- though it did legalize millions of illegal immigrants. And lest the applauding conservatives did not notice, McCain did not pledge to propose legislation consistent with that objection and the rule of law- only that he would "address" the problem- and not necessarily "comprehensively" (a term dear to the Senator) but only "other aspects." I do, though, admire McCain's speechwriters for their sleight of hand.

Liberal supporters of comprehensive immigration reform need not panic at the possiblity of election of McCain (except for other reasons). He may want to cut taxes for the hyper-rich; allow mentally ill individuals to buy weapons (pledging opposition to waiting periods); cut Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor (propagating the myth of "entitlement programs that are bankrupting us"); promote federal control over citizens (curtailing the right to an abortion); and turn a blind eye to our urgent need for health care- but he'll wait awhile to "defend the rule of law." And given McCain's attack on Democrats for blocking "an extension of surveillance powers," it's clear that the rule of law, like the protection of privacy, would not be one of those "highest priorities" of his administration.