The Three Stooges meet healthcare reform

The collapse of the Trump/Ryan attempt to destroy Obamacare was one of Washington's more fascinating train crashes. What's wondrous is not that some things went wrong, but that pretty much everything went wrong in completely predictable ways, and that multiple parties, all Republican, were involved in the takedown. If you could have planned the destruction of the replacement legislation, the ACHA, you would have planned for things to play out exactly as they did.

They played out like a Three Stooges movie, with the Stooges played by Paul Ryan, Donald Trump, and, collectively, the Freedom Caucus. And the process is such a mess that it's not even clear whether Ryan or Trump is Moe in this scenario.

Let's look at the destructive power of the Republican Stooges:

Paul Ryan

Ryan was the key architect of the ACHA, and my god, what a mess. For years, the Republicans have insisted Obamacare was a disaster but have refused to present an alternative, and now we see why. ACHA had no real philosophy of healthcare, instead focussing entirely on giving billionaires tax cuts and cutting services for the poor.

At the same time, the bill kept a lot of the most popular parts of the ACA, because Republicans were terrified that taking all the benefits of Obamacare away at once would lead to election losses.

The result was strange, because after 7 years of  Republicans saying they would get rid of Obamacare, Ryan's bill really didn't. Instead, it kept many of the key ingredients but made them all worse. Ryan's bill was set to take insurance away from every single person who had gained it under ACA while only having a minor effect on the deficit.

The bill had been created in secret and Ryan attempted to rush it through before people could figure out what was in it. He failed. He seems to have written the bill with little input from anyone - not healthcare experts, not other factions of his own party, and certainly not Democrats - and he wound up with a bill that even he probably didn't like that much.

When the criticisms started to rush in, Ryan decided to make the bill even worse in hopes of pulling in recalcitrant conservatives even at the risk of losing recalcitrant moderates. He piled failure on top of failure like a master Jenga player.

It turned out that the only quiver in Ryan's arrow is the one that lessens the taxes of billionaires. That was the only part of his bill that looked like it would work the way it was supposed to. While Ryan has managed to cultivate a reputation as a smart policy wonk, the ACHA is wildly supportive of Paul Krugman's portrayal of Ryan as a fake and a habitual liar.

The Freedom Caucus

For Obama's entire time in office, the GOP was the "party of no." The Tea Party wing represented by the Freedom Caucus functioned as party of no within a party of no. Essentially anti-government anarchists, the Caucus simply doesn't want government to work, and believes that compromise is the ultimate evil.

For them, Ryan's bill, as awful as it was, wasn't nearly awful enough. While many Republicans just cynically used Obamacare hatred to fuel voter disenchantment, the FC contains the true believers whose passionate hatred for all government programs is unfeigned and wildly destructive.

For many in the FC the only acceptable option was to roll back Obamacare in its entirety. Crippling it or even fatally wounding it was not enough; it had to be a clean head shot or nothing.

Basically,  the party of no's inner party of no proved incapable of saying yes.

To some extent, this could be politics. The FC is full of people from hardcore conservative districts where there is a constant threat of challenges from the right funded by rich extremists. So making stupid decisions that play to the base make electoral sense. And after 7 years of saying Obamacare was the Hitler of American politics, they had painted themselves into a bit of a corner.

Still, insisting on everything or nothing in politics is the best possible way to get nothing. And the FC got nothing of what they wanted, with little chance to get it any time in the near future.

But from what I've read, the FC sees this not as a disaster but as proof of their power. Which means they are likely to stick to their path of purity politics during every subsequent legislative fight. And that could mean that the Republicans basically get nothing done for their entire time in power (fingers crossed).

Donald Trump

Everything his opponents predicted about Trump was on display during the ACHA clusterfuck. After promising an amazing healthcare bill with better coverage and lower premiums for all, he simply turned over the creation of a new healthcare system to Paul Ryan, who had no interest in any of those promises. Trump didn't understand the bill, and in lobbying for it he apparently didn't even try to make a case for any of its policies (because, of course, he didn't understand them). All Trump could do was try to charm and threaten Republicans (he didn't even bother reaching out to Democrats, which didn't stop him from complaining that none of them was willing to vote for ACHA). It turned out that he was not charming or threatening enough to get a majority to vote for a turd.

When support for the bill proved hard to come by, Trump was completely flummoxed, finally tossing out an ultimatum that failed dismally.

It's unlikely that Trump even really cared about the ACA. For him, Obamacare hatred was a campaign weapon, and he no more wanted to end a working healthcare system than he wanted to jail Hillary Clinton. All he really wanted to do was cater to the base and rack up a win. It didn't happen.

Of course, Trump being Trump, he is now playing off this disastrous defeat as no big deal. Trump's inability to admit mistakes means he can never learn from them, so expect him to continue to ignore experts and allow hacks like Ryan to create legislation he doesn't understand or care about.

Why It Happened

For eight years Republicans have been dreaming of what they would achieve when they finally were back in power. So how did their first major push to reshape government end so disastrously?

One big issue was that Obamacare was based on the Republican plan known as Romneycare, forcing Republicans to run against what was basically the Republican healthcare solution. It wasn't the bill they hated but Barack Obama himself. This left them with no place to go; they would have been better off had Obama created a single-payer system that could have been countered with Romneycare.

With the only sensible Republican plan co-opted by Democrats, Ryan created pure nonsense and hoped hatred of Obamacare was so strong that no one would care what disaster they replaced it with.

Part of Ryan's own explanation is that Republicans don't know how to govern. He explained that for ten years all Republicans had to do was be against things, and they've only had three months to learn how to be a governing party.

This sums up everything that's wrong with the modern Republican approach to government; they believe you only govern when you are in charge. In reality, governing is something you can do from either side of the aisle. You can introduce legislation, you can engage in bipartisan dealmaking, you can win people over to your side and let them win you over to theirs. The GOP's decision to forgo governing  in favor of continuously attacking  Obama has allowed their government skills to atrophy. Many of them don't even seem to understand how government works.

If Trump really wants to govern, his best shot would be to move a little to the left, ignoring the Freedom Caucus in favor of winning over moderate Democrats in pursuit of actually fulfilling campaign promises like improving healthcare and increasing employment opportunities. If the Freedom Caucus wants to further their agenda, then they would need to stop insisting on all or nothing when they simply don't have the power to get that all. If Ryan wants to be effective, he needs to stop pretending to take policy matters seriously and actually take them seriously.

I don't see much indication that any of that is going to happen. The Three Stooges of the GOP will continue to poke eyes and slap faces and create nothing but mayhem. And just like the real Three Stooges, it's only funny sometimes.

Trump voters are idiots and jerks who blithely voted a racist fearmonger into office - here's why we shouldn't demonize them

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States is one of the most horrific moments in U.S. history. A blatant racist whose election has the KKK dancing in the streets, Trump is a crude, corrupt, unqualified moron who will cause damage to this country - through his Supreme Court appointments, through his destruction of progressive programs, through his encouragment of bigotry and xenophobia - that will continue on for decades.

The people who voted for Trump should be ashamed. They have unleashed a great horror on the country, and it is little comfort that Trump's policies will wind up ruining the lives of many of his most fervent supporters.

So yeah, it is outrageous to suggest that we need to understand these people, as some are suggesting. What's to understand? These are white people whining about their lives even though many of those voters aren't suffering, demanding that the little we've given our country's minorities be taken back, that our halting attempts at equality for women be smashed. They were dumb enough to believe Trump's promises and uncaring enough to not care who got hurt. The majority of them are so racist that they think Obama is a Muslim foreigner. They are monsters.

On the other hand...

There is a problem with painting Trump voters with too broad a brush. Certainly, the worst people in America - Nazis, Klansmen, sexual assaulters - embraced him enthusiastically. But that doesn't mean everyone who voted for Trump loved everything about him.

John Scalzi posited in the Cinemax Theory of Racism that even if everyone who voted for Trump isn't actively racist, they all basically accept racism as a part of the Trump package that they can live with. And that's true. But they are not the first voters to accept the bad with the good. In 2012 I read an article by a progressive who refused to vote for Obama because he had sent out drones in the pursuit of terrorists that had killed many innocent people. For him, to vote for Obama was to say he could live with a president who would kill innocent foreigners.

I voted for Obama anyway - it wasn't like Romney was a peacenik who would end all the killing - but in doing so, I have to accept that I made a statement - to keep the Supreme Court from becoming even more conservative, to keep making progress against racism and sexism, to further a (somewhat) progressive agenda in the United States - I could live with drone strikes that killed civilians in the Middle East. I feel bad about it, but I did it, and I did it knowing I was doing it.

So if you're a conservative afraid of a liberal Supreme Court, if you believe liberal economic policies will make the country poorer, then you might say, "I really hate that Trump is calling Mexicans racists and Muslims terrorists, but I have to protect this country from a greater threat."

I might disagree with that analysis and those priorities, but I can't say I have never compromised on the perfect in favor of what I perceived as the least bad option.

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I've read a fair amount about those Trump voters. My main takeaway is that they feel like government cares about everyone but them, and they're very resentful. They feel that there is affirmative action for black people, new rights for gays, and nothing for them. That they are taken for granted and undervalued and their struggles are ignored.

And if you're like a lot of my friends, your reply to that is, "Damn right I'm ignoring your so-called 'pain.' You problems are nothing compared to those of people of color. There are people getting pulled over and shot by the police while you're whining that your kid didn't get into their first-choice college. Fuck you with your slightly-lower-than-your-parents standard of living and your undeserving lazy-poor-people tropes. You white straight people are at the top of the heap, and if you're suffering, then how do you think the people without your privileges are doing right now?"

Or, to put it another way, "yes, white America, you really don't matter at all. Just shut up and vote for the Democrats."

I understand this attitude. I have had advantages in life and I feel people with less advantages deserve a boost up; that their need is greater than mine. But at the same time, I can appreciate that if you feel you are getting less so that others - no more deserving than you - can have more, then you might be annoyed.

Look at it this way. Let's say you're a kid, and every day your parents give you one cookie. Now, you have friends who get three cookies a day, so you're already a little resentful about your lot in life, but at least you get that one cookie.

Then one day your parents say, that kid next door gets no cookies, so from now on every Wednesday and Sunday we'll take your cookie and give it to him.

If you're a really noble, self-sacrificing kid, you'll be okay with that. You'll say, give him my Monday cookie as well. But if you're like most kids, you will be consumed with the unfairness of getting less cookies not because you have done anything wrong, but because someone you don't even know is just being given the cookies that have always been a part of your life.

There is a difference between not being noble and self-sacrificing and being a monster. But people who drift to the self-sacrificing side of life can forget that.

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There's a big problem with the "fuck all you whiny-ass Trump voters, you're all racist monsters" attitude. By lumping everyone together like that, you make everyone in that lump unreachable. If someone came up to me and said, "you are a monster and every death caused by Obama is blood on your hands; people like you should just die, because you care about no one but yourselves," I would not listen to much that person had to say.

And we may really need those non-KKK Trump voters soon. Because there are people who were horrified by aspects of Trump but ultimately thought that voting for him would not destroy the country. They thought Trump was all talk and wouldn't really have jackbooted thugs going from house to house arresting Muslims and Mexicans.

But if they are prooved wrong, they might cool on Trump. They might say, "wow, I did not realize this would happen." And they could join the opposition to Trump.

Unless, of course, you've told them they are all privileged assholes whose concerns are stupid. In which case, why exactly would they want to join with you?

The fact is, white people do have problems, because everyone has problems. If you're white, you are less likely to be shot by a cop, but it can still happen. Innocent white people get shot by cops. White people get sick and go bankrupt paying medical bills. White people lose their jobs. And you can't insist that people shouldn't complain about their problems because others are suffering more. If you lose a child, you don't want to hear, "that's nothing, I lost my whole family, quit whining."

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I don't excuse people for voting for Trump. They did a terrible thing, for terrible reasons, and will cause irreparable harm to this country. But I still believe we need to understand their views and listen to their complaints. Because the fact is, as they just proved, they can vote in big enough numbers to put a fascist in the White House. And if Democrats don't try and understand and communicate with them, then in four years they will give him a second term.

Clinton’s Suicide of a Thousand Cuts versus Trump’s Big Lies

Hillary Clinton has once again got herself in trouble for holding back information, in this case not letting the press know that she had pneumonia until she almost collapsed. It’s ultimately a pretty small lie, but it feeds perfectly into the narrative of Clinton as shifty.

At her most dishonest, Clinton doesn’t come close to the dishonesty of her rival, Donald Trump, who tells huge whoppers on a daily basis. Clinton more often paints things in the best light based on the public record, and then continually makes small changes in her story as new information comes to light. Overall, her stories don’t really change all that much, but the constant drip-drip-drip of modifications makes it seem like she never actually tells the truth.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, tells huge, ridiculous, easily disproved lies, and when he is shown the evidence, he simply insists the evidence is wrong. The irony for Clinton is that her attempts to adjust her story to conform to the available facts creates a perception of shiftiness, while Trump’s bold, unapologetic dishonesty just makes people think that he’s a man who sticks to his guns.

Imagine Hillary Clinton were accused of shooting someone. The police would take her into the interrogation room, and she would say, “I didn’t know that person, we never met, I wasn’t there that night, and I don’t even own a gun.”

When the cops would show her a photo of her with the victim, she would say, “well, we may have met once, but I don’t remember them, and anyway, I was out of town and don’t own a gun.” And when they bring in the gun, registered in her name, with her fingerprints on it, she would say “come to think of it, I do have a gun, but I certainly never shot someone I barely knew with it.”

Now imagine Donald Trump was accused of shooting someone. He too would say, “I didn’t know that person, we never met, I wasn’t there that night, and I don’t even own a gun.” Faced with a picture of himself with the victim, he would say, “I never met him, that’s not even me in the photo.” When they brought in the gun, he would say, “I never owned a gun, those aren’t my fingerprints.” When they showed security video of him pointing the gun at the victim and pulling the trigger, he would say, “no, that’s not me. Absolutely not.”

Trump’s ability to stick to his lies makes it difficult for the press to even report on them. Every time Clinton makes a small change in her story, the press can write, “faced with new information, Clinton changes story.” But how many times can the press report that Donald Trump has repeated the exact same lie in the exact same way? It’s not really news; it’s like reporting that the sun rose this morning.

It must be frustrating for Clinton to see her every lawyerly prevarication become a damning headline while her opponent tells so many lies that journalists consider them nothing but “dog bites man” stories. But she keeps reinforcing the negative perceptions by refusing to get ahead of a story; she always waits for events to catch up with her. If on Friday she’d simply announced she had a touch of pneumonia but was going to try and keep going, she would have seemed forthright for admitting to illness and tough for pushing through, and video of her staggering into a car would have been nothing but proof that you shouldn’t run around when you have pneumonia. By waiting until she had no choice but to say something, she encourages people to think she has something worse than pneumonia. If in a couple of days she announces she actually has double pneumonia, no one will be surprised, because that’s what she does.

And if in a couple of days Donald Trump announces that he is incapable of getting sick and in fact hasn’t even aged since he was thirty, people will shrug. Because that’s just Donald being Donald.

Donald Trump's Best Path to the Presidency Involves a Russian Invasion

Donald Trump loves conspiracy theories. Obama was born in Kenya. Ted Cruz's father was in on the Kennedy Assassination. The Clintons killed Vince Foster. 

So Trump should love my theory on why he's running such a terrible campaign.

Right now, pollsters are giving Trump about a 15% chance of winning in November, seemingly because he keeps saying crazy things about how Obama founded Isis or Second Amendment people could do "something" about Clinton. Trump became the Republican nominee because his outrageous statements kept him on the front page, but while that worked great among disaffected, angry Republicans, it's failing with everyone else.

But if I were a conspiracy theorist like Trump, I would think he was blowing the election on purpose, because his goal is not to be elected but to be appointed.

Right now, Trump is claiming that the only way he can lose is if Clinton steals the election through fraud. Among hardcore Trumpites, who believe all the polls are heavily skewed, this is a persuasive argument. 

So, Trump has established that his loss will be from Clinton's skulldugery, the government will be illegitimate, and people with guns will have to do something about it.

For all the crazy shit he says, 40% of the voters are still planning to vote for him right now, so there are a lot of people on his bandwagon. And a lot of them have guns.

So here's the theory. Trump throws the election. His followers, who believe it was all voter fraud, rise up and start shooting Democrats. The country descends into chaos. Tea Party radicals claim the government has collapsed and request help from Russia, because Republicans have a hard on for Putin (apparently, he's what they consider a "strong leader"). Russia invades and appoints their buddy Trump - who has praised Putin and has financial connections with Russia - as the country's new dictator.

Is that an insane theory? Sure. Do I expect anyone to believe it? Of course not. But in a crazy election against a seemingly inept businessman who has already used his bizarre behavior to become the Republican nominee, you've got to consider all the possibilities.

At the least, it's more likely than the Clintons having murdered Vince Foster.

David Cameron is Paul Ryan's Ghost of Christmas Future

The lesson many pundits are taking from Britain's vote to leave the European Union is that the appeal to bigotry, hatred, and fear can lead people to vote against their best interests and royally fuck themselves up out of pure spite. If that can happen there, they say, then a Trump presidency can happen here.

That may be true, and we should certainly all be scared. But Brexit should also scare one particular American, Paul Ryan, who just had a chance to see what happens when politicians make a short-term political calculus that destroys their career.

Brexit happened because Prime Minister David Cameron wanted to get reelected. A chunk of anti-immigration conservatives wanted Britain out of the European Union and to keep the Conservative Party together and win an election, Cameron agreed to a referendum on leaving the EU.

Cameron didn't want Britain to leave the EU, he just wanted to pacify those on the right and counter the popularity of the anti-immigration U.K. Nationalist Party. He figured he could easily persuade voters to vote REMAIN.

He couldn't, and having created a disastrous situation with disastrous results, he had no choice but to resign.

Now, Cameron will go down in history as the guy who screwed Britain and the EU. That is his legacy. Nothing he has ever done in his life will matter; he's the Brexit guy.

Like Cameron, Paul Ryan decided to do something dangerous to the country for political expediency: support Donald Trump as the Republican presidential candidate. Trump, a racist, xenophobic no-nothing conman (or, as the Scottish would say, a weaselheaded, Cheeto-faced, jizztrumpet/fucknugget/shitgibbon) who spews hatred against minorities like a shit-throwing sprinkler system, gained the nomination through big lies and absurd promises. It's clear to everyone with half a brain, including Ryan, that he is a toxic bomb set to blow up this country.

But Ryan also believes, probably correctly, that Trump is somewhat more likely to support his help-the-rich, screw-the-poor agenda than Hillary Clinton, and for that reason, he has chosen to endorse the monster.

Ryan's endorsement looks worse and worse every time Trump claims his right to be judged only by those with European ancestry or congratulates himself when horrible tragedies befall the country, but while Ryan will mildly criticize Trump's remarks, he is still determined to make him president.  Ultimately, whether he succeeds or not, he is probably destroying his career.

In November, one of two things will happen. Either Trump, in spite of a phenomenally incompetent campaign, will win, or Clinton will. If it's Trump, well then, an authoritarian lunatic will helm this country, most likely sending the world into economic collapse, and Ryan will intimately tied to that disaster (and probably won't even get much from his shopping list out of the short-fingered megalomaniac). If it's Clinton, then Ryan sold his soul and got nothing for it except a GOP in flames.

The U.S. does not have Britain's parliamentarian system, so Ryan won't have to resign anything. He'll still be a congressman. He might even get reelected; in this country an incumbent can get reelected even if he's in prison for fraud. But his career as the golden boy of the GOP will be over. Like Cameron, he will forever after be known for one thing; tying himself to a bucket of shit, throwing the bucket down a well, and trying not to fall in after it.

Watch out Ryan; it's a very heavy bucket.