Category: Rants

Grab some popcorn, kids! It's time for one of my favorite windows into America's soul: a celebrity pro athlete rape case! There's no circus like a media circus, and two time Super Bowl champion quarterback Ben Roethlisberger of the Pittsburgh Steelers is in the center ring juggling flaming bowling pins in front of a dancing bear. Such excitement. Such suspense.

Will there be victim-blaming? Will the prosecutor puss out and refuse to file charges? Will irrelevant details of the accuser's private life be open for public debate? Will we get an explanation for why the media are so obsessed with the consensual sex life of Tiger Woods (hint: BLAAAAAAAAAAAACK!) but comparatively disinterested in the Big Ben case?

If you missed it – and there's an excellent chance that you have, unlike the tale of Mr. Woods – Big Ben is accused of sexual assault on a 20 year old college student in a bar in Milledgeville, GA. Some facts we know. The QB's bodyguards were asked to scan the bar to invite women back into the "VIP" section. I assume this meant scanning for intelligent-looking people so they could discuss Proust. One female (not the accuser) reported that the accused made a crude sexual advance when she asked for an autograph. Sounds fair; I also charge oral sex for my autograph! Witnesses, and perhaps also the unreleased security camera footage, claim that bodyguards blocked the door to the bathroom in which the assault allegedly occurred. Good to know that those bodyguards understand how to look after their client's interests. Lastly, according to Ben's version of events, they engaged in some sexual contact short of intercourse (perhaps "heavy petting") and the accuser "fell and hit her head." Note that neither he nor anyone in his party offered any assistance to the woman after her potential closed head trauma.

He has hired a battalion-sized team of lawyers and private investigators who are investigating the matter more vigorously than the police at this point. They have yet to question him and dropped a request for a DNA sample. Fullest extent of the law indeed. Since I'm sure the attorneys, investigators, and police will have plenty of questions about the accuser, I think in the interest of fairness we should treat both parties in this dispute equally. I have a pair of questions for Big Ben. You know, standard American rape case questions, albeit not ones commonly directed at the accused.

First, this is the second rape allegation against the QB in less than a year. Doesn't this suggest a pattern of questionable conduct on his part? Let's start digging through his personal history.

Second, wasn't he kinda asking for it? I mean, he's a 28 year old man hanging out and getting wasted with college girls. Then takes one of them into a bathroom with no witnesses. All of this while he is under a pending civil suit for rape in another state. Let's suspend logic for a minute and accept the standard American male sports guy's explanation for these incidents: the girl is some gold-digging slut looking to falsely accuse rich men and get paid off. If that was the case, why in God's name would he allow himself to be "victimized" by getting drunk with immature college kids and then being alone with one of them? Talk about asking for it. He was begging. This is not how you should dress if you don't want to be accused of rape:

Not pictured: class, judgment

(note: This is an photograph from an unrelated incident, but doesn't it speak to his character deficiencies? Doesn't it?)

Seriously, someone who subscribes to the idea that wealthy male celebrities walk around wearing a bullseye should not be partying with the girls from the local Delta Zeta. That is, unless he wants to be victimized.

Maybe I am being more cynical than necessary. He may be investigated thoroughly and perhaps even prosecuted. Not all of the news has been good for Ben so far – just listen to teammate and fellow bar attendee Willie Colón stand behind his friend (His attorney said Mr. Colón has "no knowledge of the incident and his name should not be brought up about this incident again.") Or maybe he really is innocent and the victim of malicious accusations. Which of those we think is most likely says a lot about us as individuals and as a society.

I've had the privilege of learning about politics from some pretty amazing people throughout my academic career, including a Nobel Prize winner, a man who redefined the way we understand ideology and public opinion, and an intellectual successor to Murray Edelman. Despite all that I think I have learned more about politics from my dad.

The HCR legislation passed this weekend is, in any reasonable analysis, watered down. Weak. A shadow of a real reform bill. For this reason I was staunchly opposed to it for months. I argued that passing no bill would be a better outcome than passing reform in name only. What we got is marginally better than that.

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But it is a good thing that it passed. It took me a while to understand why. More accurately, I needed to have it explained to me.

This bill is a beachhead – a way for the idea of universal health care to establish a foothold in this country.
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It packaged a number of the most lukewarm, least controversial ideas in health care reform and was enacted over strenuous opposition, opposition based mostly on ignorance (or misinformation). It is not a good bill, but it is the first step in a long process. And no matter what the wingnuts say this week, it isn't going anywhere. As one of the dumbest up-and-coming conservative superstars said:

I never thought I would say this, but Patrick Ruffini is exactly right. "They" are well and truly fucked. This thing is not going anywhere.

First of all, it would require a Republican president.

That won't happen for at least 3 years, possibly 7. By that time the changes will be well entrenched both bureaucratically and politically. The wheels of government move slowly but they are difficult to stop once they start rolling.

Second and more importantly, David Frum is right. (What is wrong with me today?) A campaign to repeal these reforms would amount to the longest suicide note in the history of American politics. Here are just a few examples of changes made that future Congresses will not touch with ten-foot poles.

What kind of delusional sociopath is going to base a campaign around repealing that? Don't get me wrong, the GOP's commitment to nihilism is strong enough that they'll make the argument anyway. But politically that will go over about as well as the flat tax, flag burning, or mandatory HIV infection for children under six. If they want to campaign to kick Junior off your insurance, jack up the price of Granny's pills, and give insurers the right to drop people for pre-existing conditions, I am happy to see them do it. "We demand to pay copays!" is a mighty strange campaign slogan to say the least.

So is Frum right? Is this Waterloo for the GOP? If they were smart it wouldn't be. There's plenty for which they can claim credit. They kept many things they disliked out of the legislation. But the fact remains that they failed to stop it. This is the first real victory for Obama and it's hard to avoid the fact that he looks like a more competent President today than he has at any point in the last six months. Most people understand politics like a football game – who won, who lost, and the final score. And the bottom line is that after six months of histrionics, threats, and blood-curdling rage from the Teabag crowd and talk radio, in the end they couldn't go a goddamn thing to stop it. They altered the final product but could do little more than throw tantrums like children on Sunday as the final vote was tallied.

I'd love to say I figured that out on my own, but sometimes we all need a good talking-to from someone older and wiser.

Visiting the U.S. for the first time has to be weird for foreigners. This has been the case for as long as America has been a nation, and in fact a French guy made quite a name for himself writing about our peculiarities for a Continental audience over two centuries ago. We've always been a bit "different" and like most countries we're rather proud of (some of) our unique attributes. But I think we are starting to overdo it with the cognitive dissonance. We're far and away the wealthiest nation on Earth but we sure as hell don't look like it. We've built a magnificent castle of wealth on top of crumbling, centuries-old infrastructure in which no one seems willing or able to invest. The effect is not unlike seeing a decrepit trailer park with a 2010 Bugatti Veyron parked out front.

Two anecdotes are relevant before we move on.

First, I have a friend who was raised in Berlin Wall-era Eastern Europe. I once asked her to recount her impression, having been raised in a much different society and subject to considerable anti-American propaganda, of seeing America for the first time. She responded that she was amazed at how shabby it was (being in the South at the time didn't help). Potholed, filthy streets lined with boarded up buildings. Trash everywhere. Public transportation systems that would embarrass any other nation on Earth. Say what you will about the failings of the Communist system, she concluded, but at least it was clean and looked like someone gave a shit about it.

Second, the company at which I worked in Chicago for several years briefly took in a Kenyan exchange student studying law at a university in the city. He accompanied me on a field visit to a hospital in the decrepit Austin neighborhood on the far west side. He surveyed the neighborhood and said "This looks exactly like Nairobi." That made me incredibly sad. It didn't help 30 seconds later when he added "Actually, most of Nairobi is nicer than this."

I don't think many Americans understand this. We raise our children to believe that everyone else in the world wants to come live in America. Most of us, I think, believe that America looks terribly impressive to foreign visitors. I seriously doubt that Los Angeles is impressive to a traveler. Other countries have shitholes too, so I assume most visitors have seen one before.

Pictured: St. Louis. Or maybe Mogadishu. I don't know.

The NYT has recently emphasized the fact that most major cities' sewage networks are crumbling. Many date back to the 19th Century and are literally leaking shit into our water. Our roads and bridges are disintegrating (and occasionally fails at considerable economic and human cost). Our society and economy rest upon a "third world power grid" that occasionally fails spectacularly. The average African country has better, newer, cheaper cell phone infrastructure. We lose (waste) seven billion gallons of clean, treated water every day through the leaks in our water system. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it would take a five year investment of over two trillion dollars to bring the nation's road, levee, and utility infrastructure up to a passing grade. Not even an A. Just a C. And this doesn't even include general urban blight – the collapsing tenements, abandoned businesses, and wagon-rut roads.

Our theory, aided considerably by how continuously broke state and local governments are, seems to be of the patch-and-pray variety: do just enough to prevent total collapse and hope it holds up. We did precious little to address this with the Federal stimulus package, most likely because the right would have gone into hysterics over infrastructure projects as a Trojan Horse for funneling kickbacks to organized labor. Not that we could use blue collar jobs these days.

It makes perfect sense that Americans, like many people, adopt the ego-defensive position that we live in a great place. While we certainly don't need anything else to be sad about these days, I can't help but wonder why more people do not look around and think, "Wow. Was this place always such a dump?" Instead we tell ourselves that billions of people around the globe secretly long to live in Spartanburg or Waco or Merced. Sure they do, Billy. Sure they do.

You have to hand it to Dick Armey. He gets a phenomenal amount of attention from the mainstream media considering that he died in 2002. Or so many of us thought. Nay, wished. But after several lucrative years of consummate Beltway insider status as the top dawg at lobbying titans DLA Piper, Armey has emerged as the unofficial spokesman of the anti-Washington Teabagging movement as the head of the so-totally-grassroots "FreedomWorks" group. That's right, eight term Congressman and multimillionaire lobbyist Dick Armey, leading a populist movement.

Frighteningly, it now appears that he is more convincing as a salt-of-the-earth populist than as a historian. Bear in mind that this guy used to be a professor of economics. He has a Ph.D. and taught at a not-bad university for several years. Keep that in mind. Remember that.

On Monday, Dr. Dick gave a speech at the National Press Club in DC, which is just the sort of thing a regular Joe does. The topic of his ramblings was, as best I can tell, a re-telling of 400 years of American history through the eyes of a Teabagger. As an aperitif he began in 1600 with Jamestown ("Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow.
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") Yes, it was the typical 16th Century socialism. If it didn't work then, why would it work now? Let us also remember the lesson of the earlier Roanoke Colony, which failed in 1587 because of the capital gains tax.

The eminent historian continued by reprimanding non-Teabaggers (i.e., not "real" Americans) for failing to understand our founding period. At this point you might want to make sure that you are sitting on something that resists stains, because this is about to get pants-shittingly awesome.

"The small-government conservative movement, which includes people who call themselves the tea party patriots and so forth, is about the principles of liberty as embodied in the Constitution, the understanding of which is fleshed out if you read things like the Federalist Papers." The problem with Democrats and other "people here who do not cherish America the way we do is they did not read the Federalist Papers.

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Who the heck do these people think they are to try to sit in this town with their audacity and second-guess the greatest genius, most creative genius, in the history of the world?"

The most creative genius in the history of the world? More creative than Beethoven, DaVinci, or Falco? Oh my. But here comes the best part. Apparently one of the Teabaggers submitted a question about how Alexander Hamilton – you know, author of the goddamn Federalist Papers and the Federalist – could be an inspiration for the movement given that he was "widely recognized then and now as an advocate of a strong central government." Good question, albeit a considerable understatement. The man devoted his entire life to a powerful, supreme Federal government.

"Widely regarded by whom? Today's modern ill-informed political science professors? . . . I just doubt that was the case in fact about Hamilton."

OK. Before I go on, I have to disclose my status as a modern, ill-informed political science professor.

Having read the Federalist Papers in their entirety at least a half-dozen times and a few specific papers many times more, it is painfully obvious that Dick Armey has never read the Federalist Papers.

He may in fact have no idea who Alexander Hamilton is.

Another possibility is that he is stupid like a fox. Totally unprepared for a real question – how did this guy get past the screeners anyway? – he quickly read the situation and gave the best answer for the audience at hand. Dick Armey probably knows who Alexander Hamilton is and what the man stood for, but he also knows damn well that not a single person in that audience has read the Federalist Papers or knows anything about Hamilton. So he dismissively recasts Hamilton as a states' rights advocate whose record is distorted by liberal elites. Sounds pretty plausible to the average Teabagger, no?

It's that kind of rapid-fire reaction that makes Dick Armey, Ph.D., in such high demand among the K Street oligarchs who pay handsomely to have him lead their populist revolt. Who said there are no second acts in American life.

Sometimes – OK, most of the time – I think it would be pretty cool to be a Big Name Blogger; carried by major media outlets, rubbing shoulders with media celebrities, and raking in 50,000 hits per day. Then I remember that popularity of that kind draws one into the Beltway world and, given enough time and exposure to the media Villagers, turns you into another milquetoasty cog in the machine that churns out the bland, "moderate" product that passes for journalism these days. Fortunately I'll never have to figure this out firsthand but I think that no matter how progressive you are, every day immersed in that world makes you sound just a little bit more like David Brooks. Before anyone realizes what happened you're on TV telling the President to run to the center.
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You start talking about being "mature" and "realistic" with alarming regularity. Policy advocacy goes out the window in favor of satisficing (Herbert Simon's wonderful portmanteau of satisfy and suffice) and accept catering to the mushy center. Maybe something in cocktail wieners – or whatever gets served at exclusive Beltway circle jerks – makes settling for mediocrity seem appealing.

Ezra Klein is a pretty good read.
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He has widely been considered one of the bright lights in a dim field of political commentators. This makes it all the more shocking to see him grab his ankles for Evan Bayh in this puzzling, rambling, open-ended interview. Bayh makes some valid points and of course his premise – that the Senate is fundamentally flawed – is reasonable.
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At the same time he is using Klein to go on the traditional Retiring Senator Jeremiad about how irrevocably broken the institution is, how valiantly he tried to make it right, and how in the end the forces of Evil were just too powerful. The fact is that Evan Bayh is exactly what is wrong with the Senate and I find it irresponsible at best that Klein not only failed to call him on it but served as a one-man cheering section throughout Bayh's sanctimonious, pedantic, Lieberman-esque lecture.
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He complains about the "six year campaign." What meaningful campaign finance reforms did he propose or vote for during his tenure?

He whines about the influence of moneyed interests. No doubt his principled opposition to health care reform was not influenced by the millions and millions of dollars that Indiana insurance giant WellPoint channeled through Mrs. Bayh as a poorly disguised bribe.

He complains about self-interest a few paragraphs after complaining about how he'd never get a chairmanship because of the Democratic rules.

His grand example of the failure to protect the common good is the members of his own party who refused to cater to GOP talking points about "deficit reduction" and the discredited economics that underlie them.

He says "Ezra, is we're on the path of political least resistance. Make no hard decisions…" after he quit.

He talks about real statesmanship being defined as making tough choices and doing something for the good of the whole even if it isn't your preference. Why did he repeatedly hold up his own party's legislation until it looked more like Evan Bayh wanted it to look? (i.e. like something the Republicans wrote)

He calls himself a "progressive" repeatedly and Klein is too busy sucking to call him out on it.

He talks repeatedly about being a deficit hawk and Klein never asks him why he voted to repeal the Estate Tax and for the massive Bush-era tax cuts.

Bayh's grand message is that good people are caught up in a bad system. That sounds more than a bit like the Nuremburg Defense. The system is made up of people, and Evan Bayh is one of them. Maybe the problem is more complex than Senate rules and the need for constant fundraising. Maybe the real problem is that retiring Senators suddenly start talking about very big ideas that were strangely absent during their time in office. Now that he has had this spiritual epiphany he's quitting a position of tremendous power because attempting to fix the problem would be too hard. Thanks for playing. I have fifty bucks that says he takes a lobbying job six months after his term ends.

I hope Ezra Klein re-reads this a few times and does to his own work what he failed to do in his talk with Bayh; that is, to ask a few critical, tough questions about his performance.

Black conservatives amaze me. Seeing black commentators parroting Trent Lott's talking points causes the same reaction I had the first time I attended a live Rocky Horror screening. I stare in slack-jawed wonder and ask myself, "Who in the hell are these people, and what could have gone so wrong in their lives to make them like this?
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" Staring at a freakshow is usually entertaining, but this is…this is too many standard deviations away from normal. A student writing a doctoral dissertation on personality disorders could have a field day with Larry Elder, Armstrong "On the White House Payroll to Pimp NCLB" Williams, Star "Abortion should be illegal now that I've had four of them" Parker, Thomas Sowell, Fox News pinup girl Angela McGlowan, or La Shawn Barber. That could fill several hundred pages before we even got to Alan Keyes.
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When I read something like Walter Williams' latest – and I'm convinced that Intellectual Chernobyl syndicates WW for the sole purpose of making Star Parker look smart in comparison – I end up conflicted over the motives and mindset of the average black conservative pundit/politico. Try crawling inside the head of a black person who would write the following:

Most politicians, and probably most Americans, see health care as a right. Thus, whether a person has the means to pay for medical services or not, he is nonetheless entitled to them. Let's ask ourselves a few questions about this vision.
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Say a person, let's call him Harry, suffers from diabetes and he has no means to pay a laboratory for blood work, a doctor for treatment and a pharmacy for medication. Does Harry have a right to XYZ lab's and Dr. Jones' services and a prescription from a pharmacist? And, if those services are not provided without charge, should Harry be able to call for criminal sanctions against those persons for violating his rights to health care?

You say, "Williams, that would come very close to slavery if one person had the right to force someone to serve him without pay." You're right.

There can be but a small number of explanations for such fatuousness.

1. An African-American version of the "self-hating Jew" phenomenon. Society scapegoats and marginalizes them to the point that they snap and turn on not only their own people but themselves. Their self-flagellation happens to be a valuable commodity in the marketplace of ideas.
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2. They are extremely savvy businesspeople who don't really believe what they say but realize that one can make a handsome living as The Black Guy^tm in a monochromatic conservative movement desperate for diversity. Race provides them a competitive advantage in the marketplace because they can say all kinds of phenomenally racist shit, including comparing lots of things to slavery, but it can't be racist if a Black Guy^tm says it! Can it? Sure can't!

3. This is some sort of Dadaist performance art, a minstrel show for the 21st Century. Bill Kristol pounds out ragtime tunes on an old piano while Larry Elder and the rest of the crew shuffle around on stage for our sick amusement.

4. They are either not smart enough or not reflective enough to realize that, you know, it's a little weird for a black columnist to be so ideologically aligned with people who are closet, or in Limbaugh's case explicit, racists. I'm sure there are lots of black people who believe in things like smaller government or outlawing abortion, but it's hard to imagine anyone believing them strongly enough to overlook the entire southern wing of the party and the attitudes of its white media figureheads.

Is it bad that I often consider #3 the most plausible?

It's no secret that 95%-plus of African Americans run from the GOP like it is an incontinent, fire-spewing dragon with a thousand heads. The party grasps at non-stories like the Kenneth Gladney thing "like a rope ladder over a stream of crocodiles" simply because they know the movement has absolutely nothing to offer black voters except a bunch of white people with pre-1960 attitudes toward them. Those who don't run leave us to ask the same question that comes to mind every time Michael Steele steps in front of a camera – is he a dupe, a self-loathing basketcase, or a particularly shrewd and amoral person who sleeps well at night as long as he's raking in the cash?

Someone should do a study on what percentage of men in the industries colloquially lumped under "Wall Street" – banking, finance, etc. – are former fratboys. I deal with a lot of fratboys, obviously, and I must say in fairness that they are a highly polarized group.

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They are a not-quite-even mix of dedicated, conscientious students of above-average intelligence and some of the laziest, meanest, most entitled borderline sociopaths (inability to feel remorse or accept responsibility for one's actions being particularly rampant) you'd ever hope to avoid meeting. The former invariably go to law school or the public sector, as many of them have connected friends who can land them desirable Capitol Hill type employment. The latter, realizing that law school is, you know, hard and stuff, get MBAs or have Dad land them some vague position in "business." It is essentially impossible for me to listen to some lazy kid in a backward baseball cap whining about his grade without silently wondering which mutual fund he is going to end up managing straight into the ground in ten years.

Admittedly I am flying by the pant seat here, lacking empirical evidence to support the anecdotal. But I'll be damned if I can read the transcripts of AIG employees alternately spitting venom at the public and whining like children at the mere prospect of not getting a second round of bonuses on the taxpayer's dime without noting, "These guys sound exactly like fratboys." The poor logic, the self-righteous appeals to fairness, the victimhood, the sense of entitlement, and the naked disgust for people they consider inferior (i.e. everyone) are all there in spades.

"To be honest with you, I really hope it blows up. I think the U.S. taxpayer deserves to lose a trillion dollars over this thing for the way they have behaved."

That is just one quote and may or may not be representative of all the people involved. Regardless, it has to be a bit shocking coming from an employee of a company that would not exist today without taxpayer intervention. Whether or not the people working for the company today were involved in the Credit Default Swap trading that brought the company to the brink of ruin, the fact remains that AIG would already be moldering on the dustbin of history next to Lehman Brothers, Enron, and the Edsel.

Apparently the majority of the aggrieved employees received their second round of bonuses anyway. Irrespective of that, I have a suggestion for any of them who feel mistreated by AIG, the taxpayer, or Washington: look for another job. Surely one of the big banks, investing houses, or insurance companies will be looking for sharp new employees with that magic AIG touch.

In fact I just saw this ad posted on Monster.com:

BIG EGOS WANTED. Seeking analysts and traders for growing Financial Products division. Experience with insolvent companies a plus. Inflated sense of self-worth desirable but not required. Must be prepared to take on challenges and work to bankrupt the division with minimal supervision. Provide list of three references who can speak to your staggering ineptitude and child-like ignorance of financial markets. No blacks.

The reality is that "AIG Financial Products division" looks about as good on a resume as "Producer – The Chevy Chase Show", "Giuliani 2008 Campaign Manager" or "One time my roommate blacked out and I raped him." It takes a special kind of person to maintain a sense of entitlement after being generously bailed out and thus saved from unemployment.
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Fortunately our universities are chock full of the next generation of young minds who fit the bill.

Jonathan Raban's "At the Tea Party" in the New York Review of Books (courtesy Matthew L.) is generally excellent but especially relevant to me. Anyone who has undergone an ideological conversion at some point in life – particularly the right-to-left kind – will empathize with the author's discomfort and inner conflict throughout the piece. I am familiar with the lonely feeling of being in a crowded room and realizing that everyone around you is absolutely out of their goddamn mind. And I strongly suspect that a lot of conservatives look at the carnival freakshow that is the Tea Party and know exactly what that feels like.

The conservative movement has always had an image problem.
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Previously (pre-Gingrich and "Contract with America" era) the problem was that "conservative" conjured up images of old, well-heeled white men in a country club sipping 40 year scotch in cashmere sweaters. The ideological faces of the movement were people like Safire and Buckley, pretentious stuffed shirts who fancied themselves intellectuals. True, there was a lunatic fringe – Father Coughlin, the Birchers, McCarthy – but mainstream conservatism tried to keep it at arm's length. Now the driving intellectual force of the movement is a gaggle of AM radio nutbars; Father Coughlin is back but this time the elected officials are groveling at his feet. And the new image of the average conservative has less to do with country clubs than with trailer parks, NASCAR infields, and barely literate adults in histrionics and stupid hats.

Raban does fail to note that the Tea Party Convention, with its $600 registration fee and multi-weekday format, does not provide an accurate cross-section of the movement. Of course the attendees will be retirees with money to throw around.

Who else would have the time or money to blow on such a circus?

But even in this overwhelmingly homogeneous group he notes a clear dividing line between, for lack of a better term, the sane and the batshit crazy.
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There are people in the audience who exchange silent grimaces with their spouse or friends when Tom Tancredo goes on his anti-immigration tirade and proposes a "civics literacy test" for voting or when Joseph Farah of World Nut Daily gives his boilerplate "God is American, and where's the birth certificate?" sermon. Half the room cheers like mad, getting the bile-fueled entertainment for which they came, and the other half wonders "Who are these people and what the hell am I doing here?"

Educated conservatives realize, for example, that 25% of the electorate is going to be Latino in a couple of decades and Tancredoism will guarantee indefinite minority status for the GOP. They realize that the insane birth certificate crap is just the update version of, as Lee Atwater (Reagan's version of Karl Rove) said:

You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger"

Conservative or not, any reasonably intelligent person knows exactly what the "birther" crap is – and more importantly, how damaging it is to the cause. Raban highlights the serious schism between people who do and do not get that. I don't know where conservatism goes from here, but I know where a lot of individual conservatives are going if the Glenn Beck legions manage to consume the GOP entirely.