The Tyranny of the Minority and The Extremism of the Republican Party

Part One: The Tyranny of the Minority

Two government professors at Harvard have a new book out called The Tyranny of the Minority, which accurately warns that the Republican Party has been increasingly anti-democratic and right-wing, despite or because of losing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. The book, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, is a follow-up to their 2018 book, How Democracies Die. The PBS NewsHour broadcast a decent interview with the authors on 9/14/23. You can view or listen to the 7:25 video or audio at the link above, or read a full transcript, or play the YouTube version below:



Some key excerpts, starting with Ziblatt:

To be a party committed to democracy, you have to do three very simple things. Number one, you have to accept election losses, win or lose. Number two, you have to not use violence to gain or to hold onto power. And then, number three, most critically, in some sense, for mainstream political parties, is you have to distance yourself and be explicit and open about condemning anybody who's an ally of your party that commits any of those first two types of acts.

To be a party committed to democracy, in order for democracy to survive, the political parties in a political system have to ascribe to all three of those principles. This applies to parties of the right and of the left.

And I think what is so concerning, as Steve described, is that over the last four years, we have seen a process of decay within the Republican Party where all three of those principles are violated, but, in particular, most recently among mainstream members of the Senate.

Levitsky:

So, semi-loyal democrats are tricky, because they look like regular politicians. They look like mainstream politicians. They are, in fact, mainstream politicians.

They are in the halls of Congress. They are wearing suits. They look and talk and act like regular small-D democrats. But the key difference is their willingness to tolerate, to condone, to justify, sometimes to protect antidemocratic extremists.

And we have seen throughout history that when mainstream politicians of the left or the right tolerate, condone, protect extremists on the right or the left, democracies get into trouble. And so who are we talking about in the Republican Party today? Mainstream Republican Party leaders, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, leading senators, leading governors.

Both this book and their previous one offer some welcome international context on democracies in other countries and compare them to the United States – challenges, failures and better systems. Ziblatt touches on this briefly in the interview:

One big difference between the United States and a country like Hungary or other countries where democratic backsliding has really established single-party rule, we have constraints and there's a strong opposition to these forces.

That's certainly the case at the national level. What's so striking, though, because we have a federal system, that there are states in the United States where there are assaults on voting rights taking place, where there's extreme levels of gerrymandering, so that it makes it possible for a party that doesn't win the most votes to actually win control of state legislatures, where courts are then packed at the local — at the state level as well.

So what we see across the United States is increasingly a divide between states where you continue to have voting rights and democracy and states where democracy is really under assault.

Ziblatt closes by listing some concrete steps and perhaps some hopeful notes:

Some of the things that we discussed in the book and we propose, we have a 15-point set of suggestions in our last chapter, including things such as eliminating the Electoral College — we're the only democracy in the world with an Electoral College — introducing term limits and retirement ages for the Supreme Court.

We're the only democracy in the world that doesn't have retirement ages or term limits for national judges. We also propose some reforms that don't require constitutional reforms, such as eliminating or at least weakening the filibuster, the filibuster in the United States, since we're the only democracy in the world that has such a strong tool of obstruction in one of our chambers of Congress.

This tool of obstruction blocks very often majority-supported policies, gun control, efforts to address climate change, the minimum wage. Things get held up in the national Congress, which frustrates citizens. So we think there needs to be a kind of a sweeping reform agenda.

And one of the things we have discovered looking at other democracies, I should add, is that, when constitutional reforms come, they tend to cluster together. Momentum is gained. People get – regain faith in their political system. And we think this is very much part of the American tradition.

Where we are operating today without this is outside of the American tradition. And this is something we need to get back to.

This is all on point, and it's heartening to see more people considered mainstream and respectable sound the alarm about U.S. conservatism and the Republican Party. The phrase "tyranny of the minority" is nothing new; Rebecca Solnit and Michelle Goldberg both wrote good pieces with that title in 2017, and similar critiques go back further. Liberals and progressives have been accurately pointing out these dangers for over two decades now at least, but we're often not heeded, which remains a big problem, but nonetheless any truth that breaks through is welcome.

For more on the book, The Harvard Gazette did an interview, Steven Levitsky gave a lectue at Brown University, and the New York Journal of Books and Vox both have reviews.

Part Two: The Extremism of the Republican Party

Most mainstream media outlets remain reluctant to call out the extremism of U.S. conservatives and the Republican Party, and by their reticence help normalize that extremism, however inadvertently. Politeness takes precedence over accuracy. The Republican Party has become increasingly conservative and increasingly right-wing, and as a result, in mainstream media labeling, the actual political positions held by political figures called "centrists" or "moderates" have moved further to the right as well. (Classic Overton window dynamics.)

The PBS NewsHour is a good program overall, but its team seems to have made an editorial decision that any conservative or Republican who isn't far right should be called a "moderate." I've noticed it for several years, and PBS is hardly alone in this approach. Although PBS' Laura Barrón-López is a pretty good reporter and interviewer, she did exactly this early in the interview featured above:

Do you see Senator Romney's retirement as a sign that, rather than weed out the extremists in their party, Republicans are weeding out moderate Republicans like Romney and Liz Cheney?

I'd let this go if other reporters didn't use similar, misleading terminology so consistently. This approach is an ongoing problem in U.S. political coverage – normalizing conservative and Republican extremism, and not just by hacks, but even by people who presumably are trying to provide good reporting. It would be accurate to call Romney more moderate than other members of his party on at least some issues, and Liz Cheney did comport herself well during the January 6th committee hearings. It is fair to say they're being weeded out. But both Romney and Cheney are conservative, in many ways extremely so, with some horrible positions, which not incidentally are common in the Republican Party. As of a 2021 analysis by FiveThirtyEight, Romney voted with the Donald Trump agenda 75.0% of the time (which was less than many of his Republican colleagues) and Cheney voted with the Trump agenda 92.9% of the time.

Romney does deserve some credit for voting to convict Trump in both his impeachment trials (even if his vote "no" that Trump didn't obstruct Congress remains ridiculous), and Romney did put common sense and by his own account conscience above significant political and social pressure. It's technically true but a bit misleading, however, to say that Romney is "the first senator who has ever voted to remove a president of his own party"; Richard Nixon would have been both impeached and convicted by members of his party as well, but he resigned before it could happen. (The House impeaches, and the Senate convicts.) Liz Cheney, meanwhile, voted to impeach Trump in 2021 for the January 6th insurrection, but voted against impeaching him in 2020 for "withholding military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to extract dirt on rivals including Joe Biden," and said in 2022 she does not regret that vote. Her defense that the "evidence that was put on didn’t make the case" strains credulity, given the evidence presented. The Republican votes in favor of Trump in both cases were pure political loyalty and sheer political corruption.

It's worth considering Cheney and Romney's histories in a little more depth. It is nice that Liz Cheney respects election results, low bar though that may be, but she's always been pretty authoritarian herself. Liz Cheney has supported torture, opposed due process, and opposed investigating and holding accountable the Bush administration torture team, notably including her own father, Dick Cheney. This 2010 post covers some of that territory and includes a roundup of links on a disgusting attack ad run by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol's Orwellian-named group, "Keep America Safe." This 2009 post focuses more on Dick Cheney trying to whitewash his torture record, but also touches on Liz Cheney's efforts to cover for him and the corporate media enabling it. There's also Liz Cheney in 2009 echoing her father's attacks on then-President Barack Obama for proposing to shut down Guantanamo, and arguing for torture to Anderson Cooper, including brazenly lying to his face about the key findings of the Schlesinger report on torture, and shamelessly accusing Obama of covering up the truth of the torture program (she and her cohorts prefer the Orwellian term "enhanced interrogation techniques"). In no world are supporting torture and defending torturers "moderate" positions.

Liz Cheney also can be fairly called a plutocrat, like most of her Republican colleagues, having voted for the Trump tax cuts in 2017, which like the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, were (to quote a 2022 post):

. . . plutocratic, funneling even more money to the wealthiest Americans to please rich donors. Contrary to Republican claims, the corporate tax cuts did not trickle down and the tax plan did not pay for itself; they just gave rich people more money.

As the Council on Foreign Relations summarized in 2022, "income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country, and it is rising." That post, and the website Inequality.org, have some helpful charts. (My most in-depth post on income and wealth inequality was this 2010 one, with several other posts in the category.) Given how extreme income and wealth inequality already is in the United States, especially compared to other developed countries, and the increasing economic pressures on the majority of Americans, I consider it unconscionable (or just evil) to actively work to support more inequality, favoring the rich and powerful. That unconscionable mindset is unfortunately a common one among conservative politicians, but I don't think it can fairly be called "moderate." (I'll add that many political figures labeled "centrist" by the mainstream media are really conservatives in their actual positions, or at the very least establishmentarians.)

Romney was not in the Senate for the Trump tax cut vote, but states on his Senate website that he would have supported it – while simultaneously claiming he "fought against both tax cuts for the wealthy and tax hikes on the middle class"! Romney is counting on readers not knowing his record or details of the law, and not spotting the direct contradiction (or simply believes in his powers of bullshitting). Romney, like many conservatives, isn't merely plutocratic but downright neofeudalistic – when he ran for president in the 2012 election, he adopted his running mate Paul Ryan's extreme policies to give a massive tax cut to the rich but also to gut the social safety net, including ending Medicare as it existed. Romney didn't get the flack an honest assessment of his policies should have received, because voters "simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing." (Much more analysis and links in the stealthy extremist section of this 2012 post.) The same dynamics often play out for conservative political positions – mainstream media outlets seem reluctant to describe them accurately in terms of their likely effects or their extremism, which gives cover for their mostly Republican proponents.

As with almost every Republican presidential nominee since Nixon, Romney used racist dogwhistles. In August 2012, he boasted that "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate," feeding into the racist, bullshit "birther" conspiracies about Barack Obama. He also ran a number of ads with racist dogwhistles about welfare and Medicare, continuing, as Chauncey DeVega pointed out, "the Southern Strategy, and the politics of white racial resentment." Similar dynamics were at play with Romney's infamous remarks in 2012 that 47 percent of Americans would back Obama "no matter what" because they "believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them," and who "pay no income tax." Romney's claims were at best grossly misleading, and taken in larger context were outright false (as I covered in more depth in one section of a broader 2014 post, which did also cover Romney's multiple, contradictory revisions about his remarks).

Donald Trump lies almost constantly, and may be unbeatable in that category. But during his presidential campaign in 2011–2012, Mitt Romney told at least 917 falsehoods that Steve Benen diligently chronicled and fact-checked, and many were substantial lies at that. This wasn't a new trait, either; Romney was lying and bullshitting at least as far back as his 2007–2008 presidential run. (I have posts from 2007 on some Romney "hogwash" and the sophistry of his anti-JFK speech.)

Mitt Romney has often acted as other people are beneath him and lack the capacity to see through obvious bullshit, as when he argued opposite positions to different audiences in subsequent weeks. (The same trend comes up in Steve Benen's exhaustive series.) The most infamous example is probably from 2011, when at the Iowa State Fair Romney argued against increasing taxes on corporations by condescendingly telling a man that "Corporations are people, my friend." When the crowd responded by yelling out the obvious point, "No, they're not!" Romney replied with a straw man, "Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?" Besides these arguments being ridiculous on the merits, it's interesting that Romney believed they would be effective politically. Faced with a crowd who wanted to protect the social safety net, raise taxes on the rich and corporations, and presumably overturn the Citizens United decision – all for the benefit of the vast majority of Americans – Romney essentially argued that corporate profits benefit stockholders (who are, technically, "people") and thus critiques of economic inequality and unequal power were invalid. Romney did express (smugly) what and who he actually values in society, as he did with his 47 percent remarks, and also betrayed an entitled, privileged narcissism that seems extremely prone to bullshitting audiences he holds in slight to significant contempt. Although Trump remains much worse in this arena, Romney shares some of Trump's worst traits.

For much more on Romney, see Jon Perr's comprehensive 7/4/22 post, "Mitt Romney Is in Denial," which superbly shows how Romney is no elder statesman, and is in fact a raging hypocrite who shares much of the blame for the current problems in American politics, which Romney instead tries to blame on 'both sides.'

So it's fine to give Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney credit for their pro-democracy moments. And it's sadly probably accurate that Romney's replacement will be worse, and his departure means that congressional Republicans as a whole will become more extreme. But let's not ignore Romney and Cheney's records and other positions. Every time conservatives and Republicans get worse, there's a tendency to look back at some earlier time with rose-colored glasses and laud an earlier generation of conservatives and Republicans, who might have a bit better in some respects, but were honestly still pretty awful. It's both possible and necessary to acknowledge both realities.

And how awful are their fellow conservatives and Republicans? The vast majority of congressional Republicans voted to defend Trump's attempted coup on January 6th, 2021 and have fought against any accountability for Trump and his cohorts. Most of the Republican presidential candidates (or vice-presidential candidates) would support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were a convicted felon. Republican legislators in at least 11 states have been working to make it harder to vote. Conservatism has always had an antidemocratic strain, but the Republican Party has become increasingly, overtly anti-democratic and extreme.

Conservatives and Republicans are fighting hard against LGBT rights. They're also fighting against accurate discussions of racial issues and history, with a particularly egregious Florida teaching standard claiming that slavery benefited some black people (a view that Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has promoted several times). Republicans are still both trying to gut the social safety net and lying about it. And as has been observed before, the Republican Party is really the only major political party in a developed nation that both denies climate change and opposes universal health care. Unfortunately, conservatives and Republicans have chosen to be bad on almost every issue. (A 2018 post surveys their policies in the most depth.)

As of the writing of this post, Congress has narrowly averted yet another Republican-led attempt to shut down the government. As the BBC points out, this doesn't happen in other developed countries. And as many folks have pointed out, the shutdowns are Republican attempts to enforce agendas that they cannot achieve democratically. (Conservative and Republican policies tend to be both bad on the merits and unpopular.)

Media coverage has occasionally correctly blamed the Republican Party for this latest shutdown attempt, but as Dan Froomkin, Ian Milhiser and James Fallows via driftglass have pointed out, there's still a strong media tendency to blame 'both sides.' This is inaccurate, irresponsible and dangerous. (It's also nothing new. I haven't covered every shutdown attempt in depth, but covered the same dynamics in 2011's "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" and " 'Serious' Culpability on the Debt Ceiling Hostage Situation" and 2012's "Why We Can't Have Nice Things." See also the more general false equivalencies category.)

Defeating the tyranny of the minority depends on conscientious lawmakers, civil servants, activists and citizens. But it also depends on more accurate and honest reporting. Extremism should not be normalized, blame and credit should be justly and proportionally assigned, and anti-democratic rhetoric and actions must be called out.

Romney's "Anti-JFK" Speech

I'm going out of town for a few days, but wanted to dash off a quick post based on my comment to Buck's post today on Romney's speech. Buck rightly noted that Christian fundamentalists aren't liable to be won over by it. However, the AP story and video excerpts give the misleading impression that Romney is a champion of the separation of church and state, when he's anything but.

You can read the text of Romney's speech here, or if you prefer, read and listen to it at NPR here. Crooks and Liars has the video, and John Amato's post also features several superb links well worth checking out.

One of them, to People for the American Way, links the video and transcript of JFK's speech on his Catholicism. I'd also recommend Digby's post yesterday on JFK's speech.

TS at Instaputz notes Jonah Goldberg and Kathryn Jean Lopez' reaction to the speech, and certainly "It's a sad day indeed when Ramesh Ponnuru is the voice of reason." However, contrary to Goldberg and Ponnuru's take, the failure to mention agnostics and atheists was not an "oversight." This speech was extremely calculated, and agnostics and atheists were referred to, albeit obliquely. It's just that Romney was attacking them.

Romney had two aims here, allaying fears of the general public by invoking the separation of church and state (as the AP account runs with) and pandering to the religious right. But he overtly and implicitly attacks non-believers throughout the speech, as someone who was actually defending the separation of church and state would not do. As Steve Benen notes, it's "the anti-JFK speech." Check out Romney's speech and compare it to Kennedy's. Kennedy speaks about the separation of church and state as well as bigotry. In sharp contrast, Romney says (after his initial blather about the evils of Communism and how "Radical violent Islam seeks to destroy us") that:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

This is utter bullshit, and I highly doubt he doesn't know that. There's nothing wrong with being religious, but morality and freedom are anything but dependent on religion (which as practiced, has often assaulted both morality and freedom). Romney's assertion falls into a category of statements I hold that no sane, intelligent honest person could actually believe. A casual glance over history, philosophy and human nature shows it's just not so. There's nothing wrong with holding that religion makes you personally a better person, but how cloistered or zealous would you have to be to actually believe Romney's claim?

It's a pander. Joe Lieberman, Bush and other politicians have done the same, but it's telling religious people that they're better than people who aren't. National political leaders never pander to non-believers in the same way, but many feel safe and encouraged to spew this crap, because they think it plays, and the media rarely objects. This second but more important aim of Romney's speech is about pandering to the evangelical religious right, and pandering to religious folks in general. He "will need the prayers of the people of all faiths." Read the whole speech; if you're a non-believer, you're shit out of luck. The problem with Europe, he suggests, is that they're not religious enough. His speech also calls into question his words about "serving the law and answering to the Constitution" in Massachusetts. Perhaps Mass' state constitution is worded differently, but the United States Constitution, and certainly the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom devised by Jefferson and Madison that was later widely adopted elsewhere (JFK references it), are in opposition to what Romney's shilling. Romney also says:

It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong. The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square.

This is a tired false equivalency combined with a straw man argument. Secularism is not a religion, nor is atheism (nor are they the same). I've got much more on these issues in this older post, and Talk to Action remains one of the best sites on such subjects (they have one post up on Romney already, and I'm sure more will follow). Romney is directly invoking the same arguments and rhetoric as Christian Dominionists and other religious authoritarians, and that's no accident. He's invoking righty stereotypes about godless, European-loving liberals, and saying he'll fight them, dagummit. He's trying to stake out the right-wing position on what they view as a "culture war." A few lines about the "common cause of the people" don't erase that – even if you believe he's telling the truth about that.

Of course, this is also a man so dishonest, gutless and craven he won't say waterboarding is torture, won't say if he's a Biblical literalist, and literally tells different audiences diametrically opposed positions in subsequent weeks. He invokes the compassion of Jesus in this speech, but he's elsewhere bragged about not granting pardons (even to highly deserving war vets), and says we should "double Guantanamo." Giuliani is more of an authoritarian, but Romney is a snake oil salesman and may be the bigger scoundrel.

Romney's got a few lines suggesting he believes in the separation of church and state in this speech, and at least some of the press, eager to hail this as a new Kennedy speech, will likely run with that. One objective perhaps achieved, never mind that defending the separation of church and state is incompatible with bashing non-believers for their non-belief, no matter how slickly or obliquely. His other objective is to woo religious conservatives. As Buck notes, Romney isn't likely to win over the hardcore fundamentalists, but he must know that. He's trying to sell the larger righty crowd on the idea that, as a man of faith, regardless of the faith, he's their guy for the White House. We'll see how he does with that.

I wrote more about Romney earlier in "Hogwash." Harper's Scott Horton wrote a great post on him, "Mitt's Muslim Problem," and also recommended a good piece on the Romney campaign by his colleague Ken Silverstein, "Making Mitt Romney: Fabricating a Conservative."

I was happy to hear Barry Lynn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State raise the troubling nature of Romney's rhetoric on NPR show To the Point today. All Things Considered featured a good discussion with Notre Dame professor David Campbell, who picked up on the same issues and how markedly Romney differed from Kennedy. We'll see if other media outlets are as sharp as NPR, because as Questiongirl and others have noted, Romney is certainly no Jack Kennedy.

Lastly, I did want to recommend Steve Benen's posts, "Mitt Romney: The anti-JFK," "Romney, religion, and ‘the public square,’" and John Amato at Crooks and Liars once again both for his post and the splendid pieces he links. From Melissa at Shakesville, there's Blitzer discussing Romney's speech with Glenn Beck with slightly less than the usual obtuseness those two can muster (I had not known Beck converted to Mormonism, which makes this a rare incident where he's kinda-sorta qualified to speak, but check out Melissa's comment on the key element they skip). Oh, and also from Melissa, Huckabee implies God wants him to win. Our cup runneth over.

More on these issues is sure to come!

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

GOP Presidential Hopeful Can't Keep His Dystopias Straight

(Crossposted at News You Can Abuse)

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has just called stem cell research "Orwellian." (His specific language seems to apply to in-vitro fertility treatment as well.) Reuters reports:

"I believe it crosses a very bright moral line to take sperm and eggs in the laboratory and start creating human life," Romney told reporters. "It is Orwellian in its scope. In laboratories you could have trays of new embryos being created."

It's of course ironic for any Republican to invoke Orwell, since were Orwell alive today, he would be absolutely skewering them. Many a smug conservative over the years has tried to characterize Animal Farm and 1984 as solely critiques of the Soviet Union, but these are shallow readings that allow conservatives to pat themselves on the back while ignoring any reflection about themselves or about our own systems of governance and the media. Orwell, of course, was anti-bullshit above and beyond anything else, and the abuse of power has never been limited to only one nation or ideology. And while 1984 was intended as a cautionary tale, Karl Rove saw it as a how-to manual.

But it's unfair to lump Romney entirely in with all the Bush crew, since his views have never exactly coincided with theirs. However, for about a year now, he has attempted the interesting balancing act of trying to maintain his moderate credentials in liberal Massachusetts while simultaneously pandering increasingly to social conservatives in the national audience.

But I shall not oppose Romney's presidency due to his latest pandering. No, I shall oppose him because of his ignorance of classic science fiction. We must draw the line somewhere!

Romney talks about stem cells as "Orwellian," a term that most often refers to the future society depicted in 1984. However, 1984 deals primarily with the use and abuse of language, media and social structures, all to better control the perception and thought of the populace in a future totalitarian society. Romney really should have said "Huxleyian," referencing another famous dystopian novel, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. In Brave New World, society is stratified into a caste system according to genetic make-up, with "Alphas" ruling the roost over "Betas" and others of "inferior" genetic stock. The government, of course, regulates all human birth and grows everyone in labs, with quotas for how many Alphas versus Betas they make, and with normal sexual intercourse and reproduction an oddity.

How could Romney possibly have missed this? Did he really think that "Huxleyian" doesn't send the same dire chill down the spines of reactionary social conservatives, who Fox News tells us is one of the most literate and well-informed demographics in our large, diverse nation? Can such a man really be trusted with the future of our nation?

While I fully expect that the majority of Americans will be ignorant of science fiction, if Romney wishes to make it as a national candidate, it would behoove him to bone up on the subject. Nor should he regulate himself only to the classics. Pulpy science fiction, and flat out bad science fiction, both provide a wealth of ideas undreamt of by the comparatively unimaginative Orwell and Huxley. Reagan seemed to believe his missile defense project, "Star Wars," would create something akin to a science fiction force field. These days, it's instead a "bullet hitting a bullet," but missile defense continues to be the pointless mammoth pork project that will not die, regardless of how many failed tests and rigged demos the manufactures provide. That is a legacy, and true national leadership. Similarly, clearly someone in the White House is not afraid to read really bad science fiction. Who can forget Bush's call to send a man to Mars? Who can forget his dire warnings about the encroaching terror of human-animal hybrids? Who can forget how the nation rallied to him over both these initiatives, giving him a sizable boost in the polls, and cowing the Democrats? Democrats must only read Danielle Steel, or something equally useless, like Dickens, evidenced by their continual, tiresome whines about the plight of the poor and the need for a decent living wage. Who can be bothered with such matters when there are foreign lands to invade? What's the point of having the coolest military toys on the planet if we can't show them off? Why should we bother talking about universal health care, when we should outfitting sharks with laser beams on their frickin' foreheads?

Are you listening, Governor Romney? We must keep attentive to the crucial science fiction gap. When we stop reading science fiction, the terrorists win.

Reuters also reports that Romney has followed in the ranks of other Republicans by offering "an amendment that would have banned the creation of embryos for research purpose." This is, of course, a political pander offering a solution for a non-existent problem. No embryos need to be created for research, and no one has proposed this, not only because it would be unethical, but because there's a vast supply of embryos from fertility clinics that would otherwise be discarded (most reports put the number at about 400,000). Romney's move, consequently, is actually much more "Orwellian" than what he decries, since what he's really offering is the same old politician's bullshit.

Laser beams, Mitt. I'm tellin' ya.

(Literary and cultural ignorance seems to be a recurrent theme for conservative political pundits and politicians. When then-candidate for Chief Justice John Roberts said his favorite film was Doctor Zhivago (based on the celebrated novel by Boris Pasternak), Fox pundits expressed concern that "it was a little Commie." Of course, Zhivago, like Pasternak himself, was a victim of the Communists! But all things Russian must be bad, and all Soviet-era novels must praise the Soviet state, goes the thinking – why bother reading the book, watching the movie, or even reading a summary? Bush claims to have read Camus' The Stranger and "three Shakespeares" this summer, but he's not the only Republican who needs to brush up on his reading. However, in the meantime, terrorists can vie with Martians for who hates "our freedoms" the most, or who most direly needs our women.)

Update: D'oh! I may have spoken too soon on one item – Reuters recently reported, this very day, "U.S. Interceptor Downs Missile in Test Over Pacific." The test itself cost $85 million. I'll be interested to see more details, since some previous tests have been rigged demos. Missile defense is deserving of its own, serious, substantive post, but I'll mention a few items here: I'll be genuinely impressed if they can get a viable system to work. Even if it does work, the question is, is it cost-effective, and much more importantly, is it the best use of our resources? Isn't the best "missile defense" making sure we secure any loose nukes in Russia and other parts of the world, with good police work, good economic policy and good diplomacy? Realistically, how much of a threat is a missile attack, versus a "dirty bomb" or biological attack? Finally, if whether by accident or design, defense contractors have finally developed, or are close to, a viable system, bravo – but there's still the question of how much wasteful spending and mismanagement accompanied the project, and that remains an extremely serious, continuing concern. The Pentagon has consistently failed audits and throws good money after bad, some of that due to the usual bureaucratic dance of "spend it or lose it," but when your annual budget is roughly $400 billion, and $1 trillion in funds cannot be accounted for, you've got problems. Simply properly managing funds for the Defense Department would free up billions of dollars for other use. One would hope that the sincere proponents of missile defense – those who aren't working for defense contractors - would support that.