Auditioning for the Clown Show

The Republicans had a hard time settling on John McCain as their candidate in 2008 – he’d been all over the map, ideologically, all for immigration reform, on humanitarian grounds, and his name was on the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act that froze out the big donors, the important people, from the political process, until the Supreme Court ended that nonsense with their Citizens United decision, ruling that money was actually free speech. You see, keeping rich donors from pouring in ten million a week into this election and that, when you think about it, was denying rich folks their free speech rights. McCain came around on both issues, suddenly disgusted with brown people and sorry he had once treated the absurdly wealthy so shabbily. It wasn’t enough. He had wanted Joe Lieberman, who had been Al Gore’s 2004 running mate, to be the guy to run with him this time, to offer a unity government where both sides would work together, but the base would have none of it. McCain had the best chance of all the available Republicans to win in November – he was a war hero and all – but he was too amiable and pleasant. They wanted McCain’s affability to be balanced by someone who was angry and nasty trailer-park trash, proudly ignorant of all that fancy-pants stuff about the stupid and boring so-called real world, and who’d never compromise on anything, no matter what the facts turned out to be. The best McCain could come up with was Sarah Palin, not exactly trailer-park trash but at least a hockey mom – close enough – and the rest is history. Obama won that one rather easily.

Now McCain, just a senator from Arizona still, is toast, given the latest PPP poll from that state:

John McCain is unpopular with Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike and has now become the least popular Senator in the country. Only 30% of Arizonans approve of the job McCain is doing to 54% who disapprove. There isn’t much variability in his numbers by party – he’s at 35/55 with Republicans, 29/53 with Democrats, and 25/55 with independents, suggesting he could be vulnerable to challenges in both the primary and general elections the next time he’s up.

As Sartre would say, les jeux sont faits, and Andrew Sullivan lets it rip:

The buffoon from Arizona is one of the most frequent guests on cable news and on the Sunday morning talk shows. He was dead wrong about Iraq, Afghanistan and has never copped to it, clinging to his fantasy that his beloved “surge” made it all worthwhile. It didn’t, as the resilient sectarian warfare in that benighted country demonstrates day after day. He caved to Karl Rove on the torture question in 2006, leaving the CIA program in place. He picked a delusional maniac to be a vice-presidential candidate after close to no vetting whatsoever. He was jumping up and down trying to foment a war with Russia over Georgia in 2008. This week, he was dyspeptically assaulting the president of the United States at a time when one might imagine, wise souls in Washington might see the benefit in a temporary united front vis-a-vis Putin. He is determined to sabotage any deal with Iran, which would necessitate another war in the Middle East, a war for which there is close to no public support, and which could have incalculable consequences in the region and the world.

A simple question: why does anyone still take him even faintly seriously?

Why did anyone take him even faintly seriously in the first place? He really wasn’t going to win in 2008 – he satisfied no one on the right and no one on the left and no one in the middle. He wasn’t even a nice guy any longer, or could only be one in private, among friends, and now he’s not much of anything. It’s just that he was the best the Republicans could do that year.

The same thing happened with Mitt Romney, although Romney chose Paul Ryan to run with him. Romney chose a policy wonk, but a young and handsome one, who was also one of those Ayn Rand deep thinkers, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Ryan wasn’t angry nor was he proud that his mind hadn’t been dirtied by too much basic knowledge about that stupid and boring so-called real world. He loved facts and figures, the more obscure the better. He was the anti-Palin and that should have done the trick, but it didn’t. Ryan was cold and boring where Palin had been anything but, and as much as Mitt Romney had said, as often as he could, that he himself had always been “severely conservative” – don’t think about Romneycare in Massachusetts – no one believed it for a minute. It’s just that Mitt Romney was the least-worse option for the Republicans. They had auditioned Michele “Wild-Eyed” Bachmann and the ever-odd Donald Trump, and Rick “Oops” Perry, and Herman Cain the Pizza Man, and the otherworldly (but not in a good sense) Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum, perpetually obsessed with how dirty sex actually is – and those were just the headliners. At least Romney and Ryan were tethered to this planet. People would rather vote for members of their species, but the problem was becoming clear. The party had no way to choose a candidate that might win in the general election. The primary process, with all the debates, might weed out the clowns, but it also weeded out the severely conservative.

They didn’t see the real problem. Outside their own circle, where folks don’t limit their knowledge of what’s going on in the big bad world by watching only Fox News and only listening to Rush Limbaugh, most everyone finds the severely conservative to be actual clowns. Americans seem to be a moderate people, always a bit put off by those who boast that they are pure of mind and pure of heart. Those are the kind of people you cross the street to avoid. At best they’re tiresome, and most of the time they’re dangerous. They’re outraged and you should be outraged too, and everyone should be outraged? Give it a rest, buddy. Get a life.

Republicans have wrestled with this since 1964, when Barry Goldwater roused them by saying that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue – a notion that the nation rejected rather dramatically when Lyndon Johnson beat Goldwater in one of the biggest landslides in American history. That landslide still must puzzle many of them. Goldwater was pure of heart after all. Their buttons and bumper stickers that year said “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right” – to drive home the point. That was cool, but the quip that year was “In Your Mind You Know He’s Nuts” – which seemed to be the general opinion.

It’s been that way ever since. The base of the party hated running John McCain and then Mitt Romney. There would never be another as pure of heart as Barry Goldwater. Only Ronald Reagan came close, but then he raised taxes now and then and made nice with the Soviets, signing arms treaties rather than punching them in the nose, and the Bush guys were hopeless. The father, basically a careful technocrat who only made severely conservative sounds when he had to, couldn’t win a second term, and the hapless son screwed up big time on everything, leaving a trail of geopolitical and economic ruin we’re still dealing with. Things haven’t gone well.

And now it’s once again time to figure all this out, and that always starts with the American Conservative Union hosting its annual Conservative Political Action Conference, where those considering the 2016 Republican presidential race take the stage to demonstrate that they really are severely conservative, to their core, but they’re no clowns either. They want to hit that sweet spot, so this year it was at the Gaylord National Resort just south of Washington, where they came to strut their stuff, made even more interesting this year because they had to strut their stuff in front of the now even more powerful tea party wing of the party. They did invite Chris Christie this year – he wasn’t invited last year after getting all buddy-buddy with Obama after the Sandy disaster – but he’s forgiven because the hopelessly liberal press had been picking on him for either being a thug or being too incompetent to know what his own people were doing. MSNBC put him back in their good graces, and the stage was set. They’d kicked out the atheists and the Log Cabin Republicans (they’re gay you know, but quite conservative) refused to show up – so all was well. They had a panel on minority outreach in a big auditorium and no one showed up to listen in – as one might expect, because the oppressed minorities in America are the very rich and the vastly outnumbered Christians in this utterly godless nation, as everyone knows. So it was time for the auditions. Send in the clowns.

The Los Angeles Times’ Robin Abcarian covered the first day, with notes on who said what, like Bobby Jindal:

I want to start my remarks with a heartfelt and sincere apology, and I mean this. You know, I spent a lot of 2012 going around the country saying that President Obama was the most liberal and most incompetent president in my lifetime, ever since Jimmy Carter.

Now, having witnessed the events abroad these last several days, as we see the president of Russia invade a neighboring country while our president wants to downsize our military, while our president brags about the increased spending on food stamps – seeing a president … who doesn’t seem to understand that our allies and our enemies alike need and want a strong America.

You know, we have long thought and said this president is a smart man. It may be time to revisit that assumption, or at least to make a distinction between being book-smart and being truly wise. And so today, let it be heard – and I hope he’s watching – to President Carter, I want to issue a sincere apology. It is no longer fair to say he was the worst president of this great country in my lifetime. President Obama has proven me wrong.

The crowd cheered. Everyone else has forgiven Jimmy Carter, or forgotten him. They haven’t, and then there was Donald Trump:

You know, I just left Trump National Doral in Miami. Great place! I just spent $250 million rebuilding it, making it the best resort in the country. I saw Tiger Woods this morning, Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson. And I was dressed like this and they said, ‘Where are you going?’ And I said, “I’m going to CPAC.” Now, I don’t know if they knew what I was talking about. They acted like they did. So that was very impressive.

Yep, he spent a quarter billion on a golf course, not on charity crap for pathetic losers, and he knows all the big golf stars, and they were all in awe that he was invited to CPAC – so maybe, if asked, he will run for president again, or at least bless whoever they choose. The Donald will descend from on high to make everything come out right. It was an interesting pitch, and Slate’s John Dickerson reports on how careful Chris Christie’s pitch was:

On Thursday, the political task before Christie was to get a good reception from a skeptical crowd without saying anything that might be used against him in a 2016 presidential bid. He achieved that modest goal. The Democratic Party, in its instant analysis of Christie’s CPAC speech, couldn’t actually find anything noteworthy in the speech. It criticized him for what he “didn’t talk about.”

The first notable elision was Christie’s defense of the Koch brothers, the wealthy backers of Americans for Prosperity, the pro-free-markets activist group. You wouldn’t know that’s who he was defending, because Christie never mentioned their names. Instead he attacked Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has been going after the Koch brothers by name and at length on the Senate floor. This attack on “two American entrepreneurs” was a sign of how pointless Washington had become, according to the governor. Reid should “get back to work and stop picking on great Americans who are creating jobs.” No ad can be run in which Christie can be found praising the Koch brothers, whom liberals are working hard to make household names of horror.

The man is careful:

When Christie stood up for his pro-life abortion views that was recognizable enough, but he didn’t make a moral point about the sanctity of life. He turned the issue into a weapon to use against Democrats. When had they invited pro-life Democrats to speak at their conventions? Never, he pointed out. It was Republicans who have invited Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Tom Ridge to speak, all of whom support abortion rights. It was a sturdy partisan attack, but not one that would turn off a single pro-choice voter who might someday consider Christie.

As the younger George Bush would say, mission accomplished, maybe:

A recent Washington Post poll found that 30 percent of Republicans say they definitely would not vote for Christie, the highest percentage for any Republican tested. Among those who identified themselves as conservatives, 35 percent said they would not vote for him. Christie might have changed a few minds by not overtly offending anyone, but in a conference where so many speakers referred to the divisions within the party – especially the rift between the establishment and grassroots wings – there will be thousands of chances for Christie’s fortunes to rise and fall among conservatives before he becomes the party’s nominee or even before next year’s CPAC.

He still has work to do, but this is a start, and that leaves Paul Ryan, who gave only a brief speech that was mostly pleasantries, but for this:

What the Left is offering people is a full stomach – and an empty soul. The American people want more than that. People don’t just want a life of comfort. They want a life of dignity. They want a life of self-determination.

This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my friend Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. But he told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch – one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids’. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.

That’s touching, but Jonathan Chait isn’t impressed:

Okay, fine. Some kid would rather have his parents pack him a lunch than get it for free at school. Most kids would also rather have their parents drive them to school and drop them off than ride the bus. But just as not ever child has a parent who can drive them to school, not every kid has parents who can afford to give them lunches every day. That’s why “the left” supports things like school buses and free and reduced-price school lunches. Because a free bus ride and a free lunch may not be the best possible way to transport and feed children, but it’s better than nothing.

Ryan’s plan is to reduce funding for the school lunch program. So more kids will have empty stomachs, but their souls will be full.

Ed Kilgore adds this:

Totally aside from whether it is the role of government to fill the souls of children, the idea that the first step towards soul food is to eliminate the food is a mite cruel. The very basic fact that safety net programs do in fact reduce hunger and homelessness and disease does not register into the equation – which is why Ryan’s own measures of poverty exclude the tangible value of government benefits.

The old saying about minimal income from whatever source that it is just enough “to keep body and soul together” is actually pretty profound. Poverty may improve the spiritual condition of mystics, but it’s really bad for kids and sick people and people who have to work long hours in difficult physical jobs to make ends meet. And if you look at and listen to Paul Ryan, the notion that this is a man of great moral and spiritual depth entitled to lecture the poor on their slavery to government is a bigger outrage than all the actual “welfare fraud” that has ever existed.

As for a life of dignity, Paul Krugman offers this:

Um, yes, but how dignified can you be on an empty stomach? How much self-determination do you have? And who is supposed to value dignity over having enough to eat? Children… And if the child’s mother can’t provide that lunch in a brown paper bag… then what?

The total failure to accept that the poor face real physical hardship, that affluent politicians have no business lecturing people having trouble buying food or having trouble paying for health care about dignity, is just stunning.

Of course it is, but these are only the auditions, for the job, two years from now, of winning the presidency by being severely conservative but not a clown at all. It’s a tough gig. Only Ronald Reagan pulled that off, but he was a highly-trained actor. With those acting skills he actually managed to make his severe conservatism sound almost kind of sunny, but then once in office he turned out to be not all that severely conservative when things needed to get done. That was the performance of his life and we won’t see his like again. Everyone else since Reagan has been an amateur, auditioning for a nearly impossible role, and the CPAC convention will end with a grand finale – a major speech from Sarah Palin – to prove it.

Our Own War

Forget the current Crimean crisis. It’s Wednesday evening, March 5, 2014, here on the West Coast, ten or so time zones away from Kiev, five days into this, and Russian tanks are not rolling into the Ukraine to take back the place for Mother Russia, or for whatever empire Vladimir Putin has thought up to replicate the old Soviet Union that went the way of the Great Auk. Heck, none of those six thousand or more Russian troops now in the Crimea have even put their insignias back on, so really, there really are no Russian troops there, sort of. Putin maintains they’re just concerned citizens or something, and the talks continue, now in Paris, next in Rome, but no one wants war. And while we want sanctions, to punish Putin for being a bad boy – after all, the Crimea, even if it had been a part of Russia forever, has been part of the Ukraine for many decades now – the Europeans are wary. They need the Russian natural gas that is fed to them through the Ukraine, their main source of energy now that everyone’s backing away from nuclear power, and there’s too much interlocking trade in other goods and services now anyway – crippling the Russian economy, to get Putin to back down, would cripple their own economies.

That means no one is going to do anything at the moment. Putin may or may not realize he’s overreached, but it’s hard for him to back down now, now that he’s fully committed to being seen as a total jerk in the eyes of the world. He has to prove that invading and occupying the Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, even if he’s set up a bit of plausible deniability, wasn’t a dumb-ass thing to do, really. That’s not going to be easy, as everyone in the West seems to be in the right here, but even that’s not all that useful. What’s the good in being right if you can’t do anything about it? It’s a standoff – the blustering guy who made the foolish move, who really needs a way to back down gracefully, without looking like an even bigger jerk, staring face-to-face with those who really can’t do anything to make him pay for that foolish move, or even offer him some face-saving concessions, because he was wrong, damn it.

Nothing can happen now, which is probably for the best. A few days of things as they are now, and then a few weeks, and then a few months, and then a few years, and everyone will go about their business. Russia will have troops in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, as they always have had – their Black Sea fleet is based in Sevastopol – and the rest of the Ukraine will continue to integrate itself with Europe, not Russia, just like before. One way to see this is as a crisis about what some see as the awful status quo, a status quo that actually works well enough as is. Everyone will get over it.

But it is all Obama’s fault, or something. The current meme is that Benghazi caused the Russians to invade the Ukraine – because when you kill Americans and nobody pays a price, you invite this type of aggression, and way back then we should have killed some people right back, right away, or something. That would have made Putin think twice? Those two particular dots are hard to connect, and some on the right are a bit embarrassed by those who are out and about screaming this to the rooftops. Sure, it’s an election year, at least a midterm election year, but most voters don’t remember what happened three years ago in Benghazi, or even know where the place is. As for Kiev, well, there’s Chicken Kiev, right? Rachel Ray once made that on television, if memory serves, but bring up Sevastopol and you’ll get a blank stare. Huh? If you’re going to attack Obama, use Obamacare and those Death Panels and the outrage that the wrong sort of people getting a chance to buy health insurance, or those food stamps no one really deserves, or unemployment benefits, which no good people ever deserve, or raising the minimum wage, which will ruin American businesses and make everyone’s daily Big Mac cost a few pennies more. Just don’t pull out a whiteboard and draw a direct line from Benghazi to Sevastopol. People will walk. All politics is local.

The current Crimean crisis distorted all that. The Ukrainians are no doubt fine people, but those right here who work hard and pay taxes want to know what they’re getting for their money, quite personally – roads and bridges and schools and a military that keeps them safe, and eventually Medicare and Social Security – and they want to know the big bucks they pay in taxes aren’t being used for stupid stuff, or being spent on people who don’t deserve a dime of it. That last part is a very personal thing. America runs on envy and resentment – that’s what fuels economic growth, as one does have to have the latest whatever, and thus what makes capitalism work, and also what drives public policy. Voters have their grudges. Sevastopol isn’t on their minds.

That’s why what should have interested voters, had they not been distracted by Putin’s gambit, was direct talk about what the government was supposed to do – Obama released his budget proposal, and Paul Ryan released his. Obama’s budget will never pass the Republican House, and Ryan’s budget will die in the Democratic Senate, but each threw down the gauntlet. Each said “this” is what America should be doing, and that’s what the midterm election will be about, and the next presidential election.

Obama did go all-in with his budget:

President Obama sent Congress a $3.9 trillion budget request on Tuesday that stands as a platform for Democrats to run on in this election year, full of policies intended to invite contrasts with Republicans rather than offer compromises as he did last year, without success.

Mr. Obama’s budget for the 2015 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, reflects his aspirations in his waning presidency, regardless of the political reality he confronts. The document, his sixth budget, seeks to energize Democratic voters with populist proposals like a more generous tax credit for the working poor, paid for with higher taxes on the rich.

The president, as before, seeks to balance calls for spending and tax-cut policies to help the economy against measures to reduce already declining deficits. But this year his emphasis is on the investment side to address the rise in economic inequality, broaden opportunities for upward mobility and spur technological innovation.

He lost the Republicans at “higher taxes on the rich” of course, but that was a conscious choice:

“Our budget is about choices, it’s about our values,” Mr. Obama said as he visited an elementary school in Washington. “As a country, we’ve got to make a decision if we’re going to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans or if we’re going to make smart investments necessary to create jobs and grow our economy, and expand opportunity for every American.” …

“We’ve got to decide if we’re going to keep squeezing the middle class, or if we’re going to continue to reduce the deficits responsibly while taking steps to grow and strengthen the middle class,” Mr. Obama said at the school. “The American people have made clear time and again which approach they prefer – that’s the approach my budget offers.”

And he’s through with expecting to be able to work with the Republicans:

Gone from his budget is the concession Mr. Obama proposed to Republicans last year, as his second term began, to reduce future Social Security cost-of-living increases. The president had hoped that gesture, made over Democrats’ objections, would entice Republicans to compromise on a “grand bargain” of long-term deficit reductions and federal investments. But Republicans refused to consider raising tax revenues from the wealthy and some businesses, as Mr. Obama sought.

He’ll stick it to them on that. Just as the Ukrainians are no doubt fine people, maybe the poor and middle class are fine people and really do need a bit of help, but not at the expense of the rich – as the rich need to be nurtured and protected just as much? Obama is forcing the Republicans to make that sort of argument. That’s why, if the minimum wage goes up, your Big Mac will cost a few pennies more. No CEO should earn a penny less, or corporate profits can’t drop even one hundredth of a percent. Priorities, folks! Obama is betting no everyone agrees with their priorities.

Obama is betting the other way, particularly in details like this:

Buried in the $3.9 trillion budget request that President Obama sent to Congress on Tuesday is a clause that has Wall Street tax advisers on edge.

The proposal would essentially forbid so-called inversions, an increasingly popular maneuver that allows United States companies to legally reincorporate in a new country when they buy a smaller foreign corporation, thereby avoiding paying the Treasury Department millions or even billions of dollars in taxes.

Outlined in an appendix to the budget known as the Green Book, which describes the administration’s revenue proposals, the new language would make inversions all but impossible to pull off.

“This will essentially eliminate inversions as we know them,” said Robert Willens, a corporate tax adviser who has helped companies accomplish such transactions.

If an American company, by incorporating in Tortuga under the name of its little subsidiary with three employees there, can no longer do that, and thus can’t avoid paying millions or even billions of dollars in taxes, what’s the point of being a proud American at all? There are a lot of such details, each designed to make Republicans howl, or finally admit they don’t give a shit about the poor and the middle class.

They won’t admit that, so we get this:

As a direct counter to President Obama’s recent emphasis on the gap between rich and poor, the upcoming House Republican budget will focus on welfare reform and recommend a sweeping overhaul of social programs, including Head Start and Medicaid.

The push, led by Rep. Paul Ryan, returns the GOP’s attention to a policy front that animated the party in the 1990s and signals Republicans’ desire to expand their pitch to voters ahead of this year’s midterm elections. This new effort comes after the party spent months fixated on combating the federal health-care law and engaged in intraparty squabbles over fiscal strategy.

On Monday, Ryan (R-Wis.), the House Budget Committee chairman, published an often stinging 204-page critique of the federal government’s anti-poverty policies, questioning the efficacy of dozens of initiatives and underscoring where Republicans say consolidation or spending reductions are needed.

“There are nearly 100 programs at the federal level that are meant to help, but they have actually created a poverty trap,” Ryan said in an interview. “There is no coordination with these programs, and new ones are frequently being added without much consideration to how they affect other programs. We’ve got to fix the situation, and this report is a first step toward significant reform.”

Ryan wants massive cuts to all that stuff. Tear it all down and slowly but surely make it more efficient. That will help the poor and middle class eventually, and no rich people were harmed in the making of this movie, because the massive cuts are everything:

Food stamps, low-income housing, and a flurry of other social service programs and tax credits are also targeted in the report. Ryan said Republicans will soon offer specific prescriptions to the problems he outlines. Putting a comprehensive anti-poverty agenda alongside efforts to devise an alternative to the federal healthcare law is a GOP priority, he said. …

Ryan said the crux of the report is the conclusion that federal programs need to be entirely reimagined, with more than tweaks or axed appropriations, and that legislation this year should move toward broader solutions that solve what he thinks are structural weaknesses in how the government supports the poor.

In short, something new may take forever, but we need to stop doing what we’re doing, right now. Only that will help the poor, but Jonathan Chait is rightly skeptical:

The bigger dilemma is that Ryan’s budget goals leave him no room to maneuver. He’s committed to balancing the budget within the next decade. But he wants to prop up defense spending, refuses to increase tax revenue, and has promised to maintain Social Security and Medicare benefits for all current retirees. He recently cut a deal with Democrats to ease cuts in the main domestic spending programs. Having taken everything else off the table, the only place left for his cuts is programs that benefit the poor.

And Ryan’s budget absolutely slays the budget for anti-poverty programs – the vast majority of his spending cuts come from the minority of federal programs aimed at the poor. That fact has led to his current predicament: Democrats have painted him as a cruel social Darwinist, causing him to become concerned about his image as an “Ayn Rand miser,” causing him to re-brand himself as a poverty wonk, causing him to dive into scholarly literature. But scholarly literature is never going to show that his plans to impose massive cuts to the anti-poverty budget will help poor people.

Chait reviews how every scholar Ryan cited said that Ryan completely misunderstood what they had said, or misquoted them, and adds this:

And yet, without the massive cuts to the anti-poverty budget, Ryan has no plausible way forward. Reconciling the ideological goals of the House Republican caucus with the best findings of social science is fundamentally impossible. That’s why Republican leaders usually dismiss those findings as biased tripe from liberal eggheads.

Brian Beutler adds this:

Actually the evidence is right there on the first page of his new report. “Despite trillions of dollars in spending, poverty is widespread,” it reads. “In 1965, the poverty rate was 17.3 percent. In 2012, it was 15 percent.” Sounds like a huge bust, right?

Except, there’s a footnote at the end of that sentence, and it reads, “The Official Poverty Rate does not include government transfers to low-income households.”

I’m surprised Ryan included this caveat, even though it’s more honest to include it than to leave it out. Because it also reveals that his critique of federal anti-poverty programs is premised on a metric designed to create a false impression that tons of money has been wasted, when really it’s done exactly what it was supposed to.

The war on poverty has indeed been a bust if you treat the poor people it’s lifted above the federal poverty line as if they remain impoverished. But that’s like saying “The earned income tax credit has failed you because, if you don’t count the value of the tax credit, you’re still in poverty,” and then applying the same logic to millions of beneficiaries.

Salon’s Joan Walsh is even less kind:

Seriously, how many times are we going to be told that there’s a “new” Paul Ryan who really, really, really cares about the poor – and whose budget proposals consistently slash programs designed to help them. All that’s different about Ryan’s approach now is he’s telling the poor that cutting their programs is good for them, because it will free them from “the poverty trap.”

She’s not buying it:

He complains, correctly, that too many anti-poverty programs are “means-tested – meaning that benefits decline as recipients make more money – [so] poor families face very high implicit marginal tax rates. The federal government effectively discourages them from making more money.”

Of course, the alternative to means-tested programs in other industrialized nations is universal programs that essentially set a floor for income, nutrition and health below which families can’t drop. Social Security and Medicare are rare American examples of universal program – ones that Ryan has repeatedly tried to gut (while most Republicans and even some conservative Democrats endorse “means testing” them). A guaranteed family income and a genuine national health insurance program could eliminate means-tested programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid – but Ryan and his GOP allies (and lots of Republicans) would never consider those notions.

Nor will they consider the other guaranteed anti-poverty program: a hike in the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would lift almost a million Americans out of poverty immediately – but Ryan’s party is opposed to it. Indeed, more Republicans are coming out every day saying there should be no minimum wage at all.

There is, indeed, a poverty trap in the U.S., and the media fall into it again and again: taking seriously the warmed over Reaganism of conservatives like Paul Ryan, and pretending there’s something in it that will help the poor.

And there’s Kevin Drum:

Even conservatives – the more honest variety, anyway – will concede that liberals have plenty of reasons to be skeptical of Ryan’s goals. His annual budget roadmaps have consistently relied on slashing spending for the poor, and Republicans in general have been consumed with cutting safety net spending for decades. It’s perfectly natural to view a report that lambastes federal poverty programs as merely the first step in an effort to build support for cutting spending on those programs.

Drum would like to see some of Ryan’s proposals, when Ryan actually proposes something, anything, rather than saying that something should one day be proposed:

Liberals should certainly be open to making safety net programs more efficient, and if that’s Ryan’s goal he’ll find plenty of Democrats willing to work with him. But that all depends on knowing that this isn’t just a Trojan Horse for deep cuts to spending on the poor.

So how about if we hear this from Ryan? How about if he says, plainly and clearly, that he wants to improve the efficiency of safety net programs, but wants to use the savings to help more people – or to help people in smarter ways – not as an excuse to slash spending or to fund more tax cuts for the wealthy? Really, that’s the bare minimum necessary for liberals to suspend their skepticism, given Ryan’s long history of trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

This would require a genuine turnabout from Ryan, and it would require him to genuinely confront his Tea Party base with things they don’t want to hear. And it would demonstrate that helping the poor really is his goal. But if he’s not willing to do that, why should anyone on the left believe this report is anything other than the same old attack on the poor as moochers and idlers that’s become practically a Republican mantra over the past few years?

And right there is the battle that has been being waged when all eyes were on the Ukraine. Each side has said “this” is what America should be doing, decisively and emphatically, and are playing on Americans’ endless supply of envy and resentment, pulling out all the stops. Ask your church organist about that. Pull out all the organ stops and things get really loud, as this will. Forget the current Crimean crisis. That will sort itself out. This won’t.

Geopolitical Market Forces

New Jersey isn’t all Chris Christie and Snooki and Bruce Springsteen, and it’s not one long episode of The Sopranos there, everywhere, every single day, in spite of the gleeful thuggery of Christie’s crew in Trenton, which he says he didn’t really notice until it was too late, if you believe that – and you’d better believe that or he’ll punch you in the face. That, and nasty Newark, are only nine tenths of what New Jersey is all about. There’s the other one tenth – Paul Fussell and the Elizabeth Warren teaching at Rutgers, and Albert Einstein deciding the place to settle down and think big thoughts really ought to be leafy and serene Princeton University, in the absurdly perfect college town of Princeton, New Jersey. The place even looks like a movie set – and he loved it there. The university also loved having him there, for obvious reasons – there was only one Einstein. Take THAT, Harvard! They did not, however, anticipate him getting playful. Einstein soon developed a habit of dropping sly aphorisms into weighty conversations, and since few really understand what he was getting at with his talk of space and time and special relativity, everyone else remembers the quips, like his quick dictum that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. That was probably said to quiet some rather dense person who just didn’t get the relationship of mass to light and time and wanted a simple explanation even a four-year-old could understand. Yeah, well, it doesn’t work that way. Some things just aren’t simple.

Forget that man’s Special Theory of Relativity, superseding his General Theory of Relativity – someone had to say that yes, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler, unless you want meaningless nonsense. Republicans need to be reminded of that, often, because their insistence on small government, or virtually no government, and laissez-faire capitalism, where the market determines what’s worth doing and what’s not, takes what Adam Smith said long ago, about the Invisible Hand of Competition fixing everything, to places Adam Smith wasn’t willing to go. Smith thought competition was pretty cool, and governments could get in the way of economic progress, but he never went so far as to say it would be best to get rid of government entirely because an unregulated free market would create paradise here on earth. Along with discussing the wondrous efficiency of competition, that Invisible Hand that magically makes everything better for everyone, he offered a rather extensive list of what governments ought to do – collect taxes to build infrastructure, and to run public schools, for everyone, and to provide a police force to keep the peace, and to regulate corporations and curb monopolies, and to do things to assure that the people are healthy, as the prevention of “leprosy or any other loathsome and offensive disease” from spreading among the population might be a good idea. In Smith’s view, none of this should be privatized, but somehow our current crop of Republicans have decided that Smith should be made as simple as possible – privatize it all – if it makes money for someone, it should be done, and if it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be done. That’s real freedom, and a totally free market fixes everything, always – but that makes things simpler than possible, as Adam Smith carefully explained. Of course any four-year-old can understand the simple concept being stated – government bad and personal freedom good – but that’s meaningless nonsense.

That’s fairly obvious. Americans will fight tooth and claw to keep their Social Security and Medicare, and think public roads and bridges are rather useful, and some still somehow think public schools are a good thing, and no one is making big bucks there. Attempts to privatize those have failed again and again, but to be fair, sometimes the market speaks clearly, ridding us of crap we were told was wonderful. The Ford Edsel comes to mind, and in 1985, the “New Coke” lasted all of six months or so. The markets spoke. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand did what he said it would do – make things better for everyone. That’s not to say the immensely successful Justin Bieber is a wonderful talent and a wonderful person, but the market works most of the time.

They may even work geopolitically, and they actually may take care of our problems with Vladimir Putin. At least that’s what Jason Karaian argued on Monday at Quartz:

Strongly worded statements, threats of travel restrictions, and summit no-shows… So far, these are the relatively mild diplomatic implications for Russia of its incursion into Ukraine, as few in the West can stomach an open military confrontation with Moscow over its apparent occupation of Crimea.

But the markets are punishing Russia much more swiftly than the diplomats. A wide range of Russian assets – stocks, bonds, and the ruble – plunged in value today. To shore up the ruble, which is plumbing record depths, Russia’s central bank unexpectedly hiked interest rates today. It ratcheted up the benchmark one-week rate from 5.5% to 7%, and traders report that the central bank has also been spending billions of dollars in currency markets to stem the fall in the value of the ruble….

Karaian explains that Russia finally reined in their double-digit inflation, but an extended fall in the value of the ruble could bring that back, fast, and they’d be in a world of hurt again. Who needs diplomacy, or war, when market forces are what really matters here? The Invisible Hand strikes again:

And so, perhaps for the first time since unrest broke out in Ukraine, Putin may be finding that his actions have costs – not the costs that world leaders threaten to impose in vague communiques, but the pain that results from thousands of nameless, faceless transactions in stock, bond, and currency markets as investors flee the uncertainty and instability sown by Moscow’s unpredictable intentions in Ukraine. These are attacks that cannot be repelled by troops and tanks, but the damage they cause is every bit as real.

The markets spoke, but they also spoke here:

The escalating crisis in Ukraine created turmoil in global markets on Monday, hitting stocks from Wall Street to Ukraine and causing a spike in oil and natural gas prices that could reach into consumers’ wallets.

But despite fears that the conflict between Russia and the West over Ukraine could shift into a military confrontation, analysts said there was little risk of global financial contagion or of major blowback to Western economies.

“If this turns into an outright war, it will be a different story,” said Holger Schmieding, chief economist at the private bank Berenberg in London. “More likely it will remain a Cold War-style standoff, and if that’s the case the economic damage for the West and the global economy will be limited.”

Still, the growing crisis in Ukraine is unsettling investors, who have already been nervous about shaky emerging-market economies.

Yeah, there was a massive sell-off on Wall Street – everything is interconnected these days – but then there was an even bigger rebound:

U.S. stocks rallied on Tuesday, with the S&P 500 closing at a record as concerns about a confrontation between Russia and Ukraine eased, and the market recovered more than all of the previous session’s hefty losses.

President Vladimir Putin delivered a robust defense of Russia’s actions in Crimea on Tuesday, saying he would use force in Ukraine only as a last resort. His comments relieved investors’ fears that East-West tension over the former Soviet republic could lead to war.

The day’s gains followed Wall Street’s worst day in a month, when investors sold stocks and other risky assets as tensions escalated between Ukraine and Russia. Global stocks rebounded on Tuesday while gold, the Japanese yen, and Treasuries prices fell. Crude oil prices, up more than 2 percent on Monday, reversed some of that session’s gain in trading on Tuesday.

It was a little more detailed than that:

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday denied sending members of his military into Crimea or that any of the up to 25,000 Russian troops already stationed in the country had any role in the standoff, according to the state-run RIA Novosti news agency. He insisted his military isn’t planning to seize the Crimean peninsula – but didn’t close the door on action “to protect local people.”

Should Russian troops intervene, Putin said, “It will be legitimate and correspond to international law because we have a direct request from a legitimate president and it corresponds to our interests in protecting people who are close to us.”

He was backing down, as best he could. After all, Ford did keep insisting the Edsel was a wonderful car, and everyone wanted one. This was the same sort of thing, modified bluster, in response to the judgment of market forces telling him he was selling what folks saw as pure crap. It’s just that modified bluster is hard to pull off. Angela Merkel had already told Barack Obama that Putin had kind of lost it – he was on a different planet, and Julia Ioffe confirms that in her summary of Putin’s televised press conference that somehow calmed the markets:

Slouching in a fancy chair in front of a dozen reporters, Putin squirmed and rambled. And rambled and rambled. He was a rainbow of emotion: Serious! Angry! Bemused! Flustered! Confused! So confused! Victor Yanukovych is still the acting president of Ukraine, but he can’t talk to Ukraine because Ukraine has no president. Ukraine needs elections, but you can’t have elections because there is already a president. And no elections will be valid given that there is terrorism in the streets of Ukraine. And how are you going to let just anyone run for president? What if some nationalist punk just pops out like a jack-in-the-box? An anti-Semite? …

The American political technologists they did their work well. And this isn’t the first time they’ve done this in Ukraine, no. Sometimes, I get the feeling that these people… these people in America. They are sitting there, in their laboratory, and doing experiments, like on rats. You’re not listening to me. I’ve already said, that yesterday, I met with three colleagues. Colleagues, you’re not listening. It’s not that Yanukovych said he’s not going to sign the agreement with Europe. What he said was that, based on the content of the agreement, having examined it, he did not like it. We have problems. We have a lot of problems in Russia. But they’re not as bad as in Ukraine. The Secretary of State. Well. The Secretary of State is not the ultimate authority, is he?

And so on, for about an hour. And much of that, by the way, is direct quotes.

Ioffe isn’t alone – The Guardian described Putin’s remarks as “impromptu and occasionally rambling” and The New York Times said he was “clearly furious” and Adam Taylor at the Washington Post called it “a series of half-truths, circular reasoning, and bravado.” But how do you defend an Edsel? And it got even more interesting:

Secretary of State John Kerry held a press conference in Kiev on Tuesday after he had toured the areas where anti-government protesters were killed in recent weeks and meeting with members of the provisional Ukrainian government. While taking a question from NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell, Kerry appeared shocked when she informed him that Russian President Vladimir Putin had insisted earlier that no Russian troops were present in Crimea outside Russia’s bases.

“U.S. officials have been saying that Vladimir Putin will be isolated by his actions, yet today he seemed defiant,” Mitchell began. “He denied that there were any Russian troops in Crimea – occupying Crimea.”

“He really denied there were troops in Crimea?” Kerry interjected.

“Yes he did,” she replied. “He also blamed the crisis on the United States.” She said that Putin shows no signs of withdrawing from Crimea and asked how U.S. pressure is working.

Kerry responded to this question by identifying the political figures he has met with in Ukraine and by praising the provisional government’s restraint.

In short, he had no idea how to deal with this, but the markets had already spoken. The product was being withdrawn. It was defective, and Ioffe explains why:

For the last few years, it has become something like conventional knowledge in Moscow journalistic circles that Putin was no longer getting good information, that he was surrounded by yes-men who created for him a parallel informational universe. “They’re beginning to believe their own propaganda,” Gleb Pavlovsky told me when I was in Moscow in December. Pavlovsky had been a close advisor to the early Putin, helping him win his first presidential election in 2000. (When, in 2011, Putin decided to return for a third term as president, Pavlovsky declared the old Putin dead.) And still, it wasn’t fully vetted information. “We were like astronomers, studying refractions of light that reached us from great distances, and used them to draw our conclusions.”

That’s a bit dangerous, and Vladimir Putin did say this – “Our major concern is the orgy of nationalists, and extremists and anti-Semites on the streets of Kiev” – and at Fox News, here, there’s endless talk of the current epidemic of gangs of young black men randomly beating white men to death, everywhere, almost every day. Yeah, it’s that Knockout Game – which isn’t happening anywhere at all, except in a parallel informational universe. Vladimir Putin seems to have his own personal Roger Ailes.

Not that what we’ve been saying makes much sense, as James Mann discusses here:

The administration loves to brand actions it doesn’t like as relics of the past. “It’s really nineteenth century behavior in the twenty-first century,” Kerry said of Putin’s Crimean gambit. A senior administration official who sounded like either National Security Advisor Susan Rice or Ben Rhodes told reporters on background, “What we see here are distinctly nineteenth- and twenty-first century decisions made by President Putin to address problems.”

Well, to start with, by definition Putin’s decisions are taking place in the twenty-first century. The administration here seems to be using the centuries like a teacher handing out a grade: twenty-first century is an A, twentieth century is a C, nineteenth century is an F. More importantly, talking this way raises an uncomfortable question: Does the reality of the twenty-first century conform to what Obama administration officials think it is?

Dmitri K. Simes is even more exasperated:

We are speaking very loudly. We are carrying a small stick. We are not really disciplining the Russians. We are not clearly defining what is important to us. We are acting like King Lear. We are issuing pathetic declarations which nobody is taking seriously.

When I saw Secretary Kerry on television yesterday, I think it was a very sad performance. He was visibly angry. He was visibly defensive. He was accusing Russians using very harsh language of violations of international law. His description of the political process in Ukraine which led to this situation was incomplete and disingenuous at best. And then, after he said all of these things, he did not say, “Well, because of the Russians violating international law, threatening international security, that because of that the President of the United States is moving our naval assets in the Black Sea!” With the language he was using, that’s what you would expect him to do. But he was carrying a small stick.

Rhetoric is not policy and sounding tough doesn’t roll back Russia’s advances. The administration will have to do something that does not come naturally to it: think strategically. This means taking steps, preferably quietly, to demonstrate our commitment to the security of the Baltic States. It means considering strengthening the Ukrainian military if the conflict escalates. But it also means avoiding empty public threats, respecting Russia’s dignity and avoiding creating an impression that it’s our way or the highway.

Well, we’re selling a product too, and Slate’s Fred Kaplan speaks to that:

Here are the real lessons of the crisis in Ukraine: Russia is not a great power, and Vladimir Putin is hardly the master grand strategist that many American Cold Warriors have been weirdly eager to believe.

Or these should be the lessons that Western leaders take away and broadcast to the world. I’ve been disturbed by the Obama administration’s rhetorical response these past few days – the drumbeat that Putin is on “the wrong side of history” and that his actions will bear “costs” and “consequences” – because it’s the sort of rhetoric that can’t be meaningfully translated into action. History is not some Hegelian juggernaut arcing toward destiny, and to believe otherwise is to overestimate the force of righteous words and a little nudging. (Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was said to be on the wrong side of history, yet somehow he’s still around.) As for that nudging, there are no consequences – none that Obama or European leaders could credibly threaten that would keep Putin (or any other Russian leader) from doing whatever it took to hang on to Ukraine.

It’s time for modesty:

The primary goal is, or should be, to make things right in Ukraine: to stabilize its economy, assure its territorial integrity, and ensure free and fair elections in May. A subset of this goal is to do all this, if possible, with Russia’s cooperation.

And it’s also time for realism:

Two things have to be kept in mind. First, for any Russian leader in history, Ukraine is vital: as a leading market, supplier, and buffer to Western encroachment. Second, Putin really views the protests in Ukraine as the product of a Western plot to wrest the country away from Russia’s orbit. He’s wrong, but everything in his background leads him to see conspiracies, and he would have found it “no coincidence, comrades,” that the initial demonstrators in Kiev were protesting then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s retreat from a closer relationship with the European Union.

That’s a bother, but there is a way out of this mess:

The answer – maybe the only answer, the only way out of this crisis- lies in the upcoming elections. Let the Ukrainian people decide which way they want to go. Russia-leaning candidates will run – maybe one of them will even win. Certainly there’s no guarantee that the winner – or a majority of the Ukrainian people – will want to embrace the West exclusively.

A case can be made that Putin committed a huge strategic blunder in this crisis. Had he simply stood by and waited for the elections – had he used Ukrainian proxies to clamp down on the more militant protesters rather than send black-masked storm troopers to occupy the Crimean peninsula (which is under de facto Russian control and populated largely by Russian loyalists) – he probably would have won in the end. The Western nations, assured of the allegiances to democratic forms, would have backed away. Ukraine would still need Russian aid and trade to survive. Even with some movement by Ukraine toward the EU, Moscow would retain its dominance.

But that’s not what he did so we are where we are, until the elections – unless we simply let the markets speak. Forget sanctions – the Europeans will never agrees to those, because they’d hurt Europe just as much as they’d hurt Russia – and forget what Putin is saying. Markel was right. The man is not on this planet. As for what we’ve been saying, some of it sanctimonious, some of it belligerent, some of it conciliatory, that only confuses matters, and this is one of those few times that Invisible Hand might actually be useful. Putin has a new product. Let’s see if anyone is buying it. It’s simple, really, but not that simple.

Hammering Away

They say that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail – which is a clever way to say some people are just stuck on stupid, or they can’t think outside the box, whatever that means, or, as the French would put it, they have that idée fixe madness – but they really didn’t see it as madness, or some sort of pathological mania, just a sad and often dangerous narrowness. Eighteenth century British writers put it differently – they mocked the fool riding his hobbyhorse. Lawrence Sterne built his brilliant novel entirely on that sort of madness, a comic masterpiece with twists and turns that would make John Locke’s head spin, which was kind of the idea. It was great fun, but in real life such narrowness is no fun at all. What is one to do with someone who says we should do this thing, because even if it had never worked before, and even if it is beyond counterintuitive, and even if anyone else who had tried it found it didn’t work at all, it really ought to work, in theory?

What is one to do? Just say no – although such people won’t take no for an answer. They’ll say cut taxes on the rich and hammer everyone else, and stop as much government spending as possible, and when unemployment surges, make sure the unemployed receive no benefits, and kick the lazy bums off welfare, even if no one will have any money to buy much of anything – because austerity causes prosperity, and vast income inequality will make everyone left with nothing, and no hope, strive for excellence, in some sort of heroic hope against hope that they too can join the rarest of the rare, that amazing One Percent, who have reached that blissful state paying no taxes and sneering at those below. It’s an aspirational thing. Tell them this makes no sense, and that every reputable economist has laughed at such foolishness, and that such notions just ruined a good number of European economies and the European Central Bank finally gave up on this austerity thing and apologized for even trying it, and they’ll tell you it really ought to work, in theory. And they won’t discuss it further. They have their theory, their idée fixe, their hobbyhorse – they have their hammer, and they’ll use it, even if no one else sees any nails around anywhere. At least none of them said that the proper response to 9/11 was to eliminate capital-gains taxes and the estate tax, although George Bush did tell everyone to go shopping – hit the malls or the terrorists will have won. That was a bit puzzling, but that was American’s hammer, as he saw it. Osama bin Laden, in his cave somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time, must have wondered what he did wrong – but he got his holy war anyway, soon enough. Americans are an odd lot.

At least some Americans are reliable:

Sen. John McCain sharply condemned President Obama on Monday, blasting the administration’s foreign policy as “feckless” and partially responsible for the mounting crisis over the advance of Russian forces into Ukraine.

In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, McCain (R-Ariz.) said the “blatant act” by Russian President Vladi­mir Putin “cannot stand,” even as he acknowledged that the United States does not have a realistic military option to force Russian troops to withdrawal. Instead, McCain called on the administration to enact sweeping economic sanctions against the country, including a freeze on financial assets of its prominent business leaders and preventing them from entering the United States.

The White House is already working on that, but that didn’t matter to McCain, because that effort was late and halfhearted, and without passion, which folks like him have in spades:

“Why do we care? Because this is the ultimate result of a feckless foreign policy in which nobody believes in America’s strength anymore,” McCain said to the annual gathering of Jewish leaders in Washington.

His point is that he CARES and Obama doesn’t:

“The president of the United States believes the Cold War is over; fine – it’s over. But Putin doesn’t believe it’s over,” McCain said, citing Russian interference in Moldova and Georgia, as well as its support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime.

“It’s an outrage,” McCain said. He blasted Obama for failing to take military action against Syria last fall, when the president said he would support airstrikes against the Assad regime for crossing a “red line” over the use of chemical weapons, then deferred to Congress, which opposed military action. …

“My argument to you is: Do you believe, in light of the events of the last five years, that the Iranian mullahs think we’re serious?” McCain said. “I don’t think so.”

Michael Tomasky takes it from there:

McCain floated three notions: tougher sanctions against Russia and its higher-ranking officials; NATO membership for Georgia; expanded and sped-up missile defense systems in Europe. The first is unobjectionable. The world has to do something here, and sanctions are that something. If we can’t prevent Putin from engaging in this kind of aggression – and face it, we can’t – we can at least do what we can to harm his economy and limit the foreign travel of his high government officials.

But Georgia in NATO and missile defense? McCain and other hawkish types (including, very distressingly, Joe Biden back in 2008) have been banging that gong for years now. Calls for Georgian entry into NATO go back to the mid-2000s, when “Rose Revolution” president Mikheil Saakashvili made it a top priority. It was a horrible idea then – expanding a military alliance right up to the doorstep of a certain country, all but surrounding it, is bound to be seen in that country, and not unreasonably, as a provocative act. It’s even worse when that country happens to have 8,500 nuclear weapons.

Sure, show you CARE, but don’t do something stupid:

NATO’s famous Article 5: an attack on any NATO country will be taken as an attack on all. What would the implications of that commitment have been in 2008, during the Russo-Georgian war in Ossetia? It’s true that Georgia moved first in that conflict, but pretexts for such action are absurdly easy to establish. Would the United States and the other NATO countries have been forced into war against Russia in 2008 if Georgia had been a NATO member then? It’s not at all an idle question, and it is one well worth keeping in mind now.

As for missile defense, the United States is already scheduled to install missile interceptors in Poland in 2018, which is mistake enough. But at least Obama has drawn back here from stronger commitments to Poland (a charter member of the coalition of the willing, remember?) made by the Bush administration. The Bush commitment was for interceptors of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Obama scaled that back to interceptors of intermediate-range missiles. There will now be pressure from McCain and others to go back to Bush’s plan, and to get them there faster than 2018, which is the Obama timetable.

I’m hardly an expert on the different types of missile interceptors, so if the question is which one to deploy, I readily confess I’m not your man. But I have a better question: What in blazes does Poland have to do with this anyway? Is Putin set to invade Poland – a member of the European Union and of NATO? Is this 1939? The hawks do love those Hitler-era talking points. Yes, certain parallels can be drawn between what Putin is doing here and what Hitler did in the Sudetenland. But do we really think he wants to drag all of Europe into a war, wipe Germany off the map, and put Russia’s and Europe’s gay population in concentration camps? Putin is a hideous person, but a latter-day Hitler he is probably not, and even if he did want to do those things, trillions of dollars in trade are at stake for him in his relations with Europe in a way that wasn’t at all true in the 1930s.

In fact, yesterday Putin accepted Angela Merkel’s mediation offer for a contact group to discuss the crisis, suggesting perhaps that his aims here, however repugnant, may fall short of world domination.

Ah, but when all you have is a hammer… There’s no point in going further, but Tomasky has a larger point:

And as for McCain and his Cold War caucus: McCain wants the United States to do the things he wants it to do so that the United States remains the world’s only true hegemonic power. For almost all of John McCain’s sentient life, we had a bipolar world, and then, after 1991, a unipolar world. The McCain’s of America think the bipolar world was a freak accident of history and the unipolar world is the default way things ought to be.

But the unipolar era of U.S. dominance is – increasingly, was – itself a product of particular historical forces, and those forces are changing rapidly. We’re returning to a multipolar world in which there will be other powers that can operate more or less on the United States’ level. Far from resisting this we should welcome it.

Let others share the burden, no matter how much that hurt’s McCain’s pride, because his idée fixe is just sad and pointless now:

Recreating a bipolar world of U.S.-Russia conflict is at the very bottom of our global “to do” list. We don’t have to like Putin or what he’s doing here, but let’s not pretend that who controls the Crimea is a question of first-rank global importance, and let’s not play into Putin’s grubby hands. Demagogues only gain power when they can whip their people into a frenzy about an outside enemy. Obama must not help him, and mustn’t let himself get cowed by a hectoring neocon right into saying things he shouldn’t say.

Daniel Larison points out here that it’s Marco Rubio too:

Over the weekend, Rubio offered eight proposals for “punishing” Russia. Some are old stand-bys of symbolic retribution (e.g., condemnation at the U.N., boycotting the next G-8 summit, expelling Russia from the G-8) that are more or less easy enough to do and will have no effect, while others are much more reckless and foolish, such as pushing harder for Georgian membership in NATO, that will certainly make Russia more intransigent. Speeding up the process of bringing Georgia into NATO is just the sort of useless, ill-considered goading that will make it even more difficult to avoid further escalation in Ukraine. It is the sort of proposal one would make if one wanted U.S.-Russian relations and the situation in Ukraine to keep getting worse.

No, they don’t want that, but all they have is a hammer, and Andrew Sullivan reacts to McCain’s AIPAC speech:

It really was a beaut: full of the usual bluster and bravado and bad but winning jokes – and, of course, no strategic sense whatever except bromides about “strength” and “weakness”. Believe it or not, he declared Obama “weak” and all but invited Iran and China and Russia to take advantage of it. This, I surmised, was an act of indirection: he was really goading AIPAC to help secure a war against Iran and permanent annexation of the West Bank. To what end? As I said, you don’t listen to a John McCain speech for strategy, or an exploration of costs and benefits in a dynamic and tense situation. What’s important is strength! As if “strength” without strategy helped us in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Sullivan, however, sensed something else:

What’s fascinating to me is a kind of Putin-envy. For all the loathing McCain has for the desperate autocrat, he also clearly gets a thrill up his leg when talking about him. If only the US president could see that this is still emphatically a zero-sum world, that moving your military around is the first thing you do when confronted with a foreign policy challenge. If only we could be as tough as Vladimir! You sense in McCain’s worldview – and that of countless others still stuck in 1978 – that we need to out-Putin Putin.

That’s fine, let him fanaticize, but Sullivan then cites this odd item on how Russians, in Russia, feel about going to war to win back the Ukraine:

The Kremlin’s own pollster released a survey on Monday that showed 73% of Russians reject it. In phrasing its question posed in early February to 1600 respondents across the country, the state-funded sociologists at WCIOM were clearly trying to get as much support for the intervention as possible: “Should Russia react to the overthrow of the legally elected authorities in Ukraine?” they asked. Only 15% said yes – hardly a national consensus.

Hell, George Bush did a better job at bamboozling Americans, and Sullivan adds this:

From Simferopol, Simon Shuster counts the costs already incurred: $60 billion was wiped off the Russian stock exchange today, and the ruble went into free-fall. Gazprom lost $15 billion in value in one day. Of Putin’s neighbors, almost all have come out against Russian aggression: Kazakhstan wants an end to hostilities right away; China opposes any intervention; Poland would have a strong case, along with the Baltics, for even stronger ties to the West, as do all of Russia’s neighbors with Russian-speaking minorities. And that leaves aside the possibility of cutting off the Western bank accounts of Russian oligarchs and of revoking Russian inclusion in the G-8.

None of this has occurred to John McCain of course – which is one reason – after his similar “We are all Georgians now!” hissy-fit in 2008 – that Americans elected Obama instead of him. That decision looks wiser and saner by the day, doesn’t it?

Yep, Obama had a whole toolbox, not just a hammer, but these guys just don’t see it:

Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said Monday that while he doesn’t support Russia taking military action in Ukraine, “that doesn’t mean Putin and pro-Russia forces in Ukraine are in the wrong,” in an interview with BuzzFeed. …

In the interview with BuzzFeed, Rohrabacher described Putin as trying to protect Russian interests in the region, saying Putin “has a right to be upset” with the ousting of the democratically elected government under President Viktor Yanukovych, who was pro-Russian.

In short, at least Putin has the balls to do something, not just sit and think, unlike Obama, except Tikhon Dzyadko wonders what good Putin is doing for himself:

Questions about the legitimacy of the new government in Kiev will fall away; the IMF and the West will be tripping over themselves to help Ukraine financially; this, in turn, will prop up the government in Kiev, which is currently broke; and, finally, the Ukrainian people will be united in their fight against an occupier – and isn’t this exactly the kind of unity you need after a revolution? Russia, on the other hand, will be left with international isolation and yet another neighboring territory recognized by no one. In 2008, it was Abkhazia and South Ossetia; now, it is the Crimea. But in acquiring the Crimea, Russia will lose Ukraine, its biggest partner for transporting gas to Europe.

Alexander Motyl sees the same thing:

If Putin knew his history, he’d know that nothing consolidates post-revolutionary regimes like invasions. Some counter-revolutionaries join the invaders, but most people put aside their differences and rally around the flag. The threat of existential annihilation strengthens post-revolutionary states, invigorates national identities, and encourages leaders to adopt radical change. The ongoing Ukrainian response to Putin’s invasion fits this bill to a tee: even the country’s top oligarchs, all Russian speakers, have condemned the invasion and rejected partition. When the crisis ends, Ukraine will be stronger and its diverse population may finally possess all the features of a modern nation. Ironically, Putin might accomplish what Ukraine’s elites have thus far failed to achieve: effective state building and genuine nation building. And that Ukrainian state and that Ukrainian nation are as unlikely to regard him with affection as they are certain to want good relations with a democratic Russia rather than Putin’s.

Oops. Sullivan adds this:

Putin has all the strategic sense of Dick Cheney, doesn’t he?

Yeah, well, that’s why everyone on the right kind of admires him, and wishes Obama were more like him, but in the Guardian, Michael Cohen responds to that:

You don’t have to listen to the “do-something” crowd. These are the same people who brought you the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other greatest hits. These are armchair “experts” convinced that every international problem is a vital interest of the US; that the maintenance of “credibility” and “strength” is essential, and that any demonstration of “weakness” is a slippery slope to global anarchy and American obsolescence; and that being wrong and/or needlessly alarmist never loses one a seat at the table.

The funny thing is, these are often the same people who bemoan the lack of public support for a more muscular American foreign policy. Gee, I wonder why.

And now the detail:

As in practically every international crisis, the pundit class seems able to view events solely through the prism of US actions, which best explains Edward Luce in the Financial Times writing that Obama needs to convince Putin “he will not be outfoxed”, or Scott Wilson at the Washington Post intimating that this is all a result of America pulling back from military adventurism. Shocking as it may seem, sometimes countries take actions based on how they view their interests, irrespective of who the US did or did not bomb.

Missing from this “analysis” about how Obama should respond is why Obama should respond. After all, the US has few strategic interests in the former Soviet Union and little ability to affect Russian decision-making.

Our interests lie in a stable Europe, and that’s why the US and its European allies created a containment structure that will ensure Russia’s territorial ambitions will remain quite limited. (It’s called NATO.) Even if the Russian military wasn’t a hollow shell of the once formidable Red Army, it’s not about to mess with a NATO country.

The US concerns vis-a-vis Russia are the concerns that affect actual US interests. Concerns like nuclear non-proliferation, or containing the Syrian civil war, or stopping Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Those are all areas where Moscow has played an occasionally useful role.

The idea here is that the territorial integrity of Ukraine “is hardly in the top tier” of US policy concerns. And it’s odd to treat this as a zero-sum game:

Putin has initiated a conflict that will, quite obviously, result in greater diplomatic and political isolation as well as the potential for economic sanction. He’s compounded his loss of a key ally in Kiev by further enflaming Ukrainian nationalism, and his provocations could have a cascading effect in Europe by pushing countries that rely on Russia’s natural gas exports to look elsewhere for their energy needs. Putin is the leader of a country with a weak military, an under-performing economy and a host of social, environmental and health-related challenges. Seizing the Crimea will only make the problems facing Russia that much greater.

For Obama and the US, sure, there might be less Russian help on Syria going forward – not that there was much to begin with – and it could perhaps affect negotiations on Iran. But those issues are manageable. Meanwhile, Twitter and the opinion pages and the Sunday shows and too many blog posts that could be informative have been filled with an over-the-top notion: that failure to respond to Russia’s action will weaken America’s credibility with its key allies. To which I would ask: where are they gonna go? If anything, America’s key European allies are likely to fold the quickest, because, you know, gas. And why would any US ally in the Far East want Obama wasting his time on the Crimea anyway?

Ed Kilgore adds this:

I’m no foreign policy expert, but there’s clearly something wrong when the supposed experts seem to borrow most of their analysis from adolescent psychology, where it’s all about who’s tougher and who is sending signals of weakness.

Well, adolescent psychology explains a great deal here. Adolescents are necessarily narrow – it comes with the territory. Early on they find a hammer of some kind, and it’s pretty cool, and they then go looking for nails to pound, which for a time seems to impress people – but sooner or later they’re just another kid pounding random nails, looking for approval. And obviously John McCain and his cohorts found their hammer long ago – simple brutality will keep you safe in this world and that’s all you need to know about the world. They still think that’s an impressive hammer, and they’re still pounding whatever nails they can find, to prove it – but everyone else grew up and moved on. And guess what? This latest Crimean crisis doesn’t involve nails.

In the Absence of Alternatives

“The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.” ~ Henry Kissinger

“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.” ~ Abba Eban

Clever quotes are cool, but these two guys may have got it wrong. Kissinger was the master of Realpolitik – the amoral assessment of national interests and nothing else – and thus didn’t think much of humanitarian concerns and doing the right thing and all that idealistic nonsense about spreading freedom and democracy. We could support brutal dictators, or those who overthrew brutal dictators – it didn’t matter. What mattered was what was in it for us, and that always left only one geopolitical alternative. In spite of all the noble talk about this and that, that does tend to clear the mind. It’s just that this ignores an array of values that almost everyone has – and that meant Kissinger was laughing at anyone who had a sense of right and wrong. He obviously got no points for being warm and fuzzy, and, in fact, he was a bit of a moral monster. The late Christopher Hitchens wrote a long thundering book about that – but then Abba Eban would be considered a dangerous fool in Netanyahu’s new Israel, which grabs all the land it can by building permanent settlements in disputed areas, will negotiate nothing, and spends most of its time trying to shame the United States into wiping out Iran, because they’d rather not. All other regional alternatives were exhausted long ago. No one came to their senses. Certainly no one over there is behaving wisely now – neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians – because there is no longer any incentive to behave wisely. Eban obviously misunderstood the result of the exhaustion of all possible alternatives. It’s not resigned acceptance of sensible compromise. It’s endless seething resentment, punctuated by belligerence – you know, like our own Republicans these days.

The absence of alternatives is dangerous, but that’s where the United States finds itself at the moment. The Ukrainians had their odd revolution of sorts, throwing out the president they had actually elected, who turned out to be a crook, grabbing all the goodies for himself and his friends, and jailing anyone who complained – and who had decided to turn down all cooperation with Europe and deal only with Russia, enraging the Ukrainian-speaking majority, who don’t think of themselves as Russian in any way, but pleasing the Russian-speaking minority in the industrial east of the country, and down in the Crimea. The Ukraine used to be part of the Soviet Union. Some don’t miss those days at all. Some really do miss those good old days, and Vladimir Putin, the former KGB guy, seems to want to reassemble the old Soviet Union. What any of this has to do with the United States is a mystery, but we support the concept of self-determination, and this matter had been settled – the people spoke. We also support democracy, the idea that people get to vote on how things are run, and who should run them, and this odd revolution was about tossing out the guy who had been elected freely and fairly, which is a bit troubling – but no matter. The Russians can’t just go in and take over, but they did. This was the weekend they pretty much took over all of the Crimean peninsula, with the Russian parliament granting Putin’s request that he be authorized to use military force in all of the Ukraine, not just Crimea, in any way he saw fit. And what are we going to do about it? What are our alternatives? Tell him to stop, or we’ll tell him to stop even louder?

We seem to have no leverage, and Kissinger isn’t the only master of Realpolitik. Russia’s only warm-water port is in the Crimea, Sevastopol, where they park most of their navy, and the new and unelected Ukrainian government might decide to toss them out. Talk about the will of the people and international law, about the sanctity of international borders, is pleasant enough, and perhaps righteous, but Russia cannot lose that port. Like Kissinger, Putin seems to be willing to be the utterly amoral bad guy here. And what are we going to do about it anyway? We’re not going to go to war again. Vietnam was bad enough. Iraq and Afghanistan sealed the deal, and Russia has nukes. War with Russia would be the real thing. All we can do is huff and puff, but we’re not blowing anyone’s house down.

So it was huffing and puffing:

Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday blasted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “stunning, willful” choice to invade Ukrainian territory and warned of possible sanctions.

“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country,” Kerry said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” one of several appearances on network interview shows.

“It’s serious in terms of the modern manner in which countries resolve problems,” Kerry said.

In short, these things just aren’t done, so it must be that Putin is acting out of “weakness” and “desperation” – he’s really a pathetic ninety-seven-pound weakling or something. It was name-calling, but his was a “brazen act of aggression” and maybe, just maybe, everyone will move to kick Russia out of the Group of 8 in addition to boycotting the G8 summit in Sochi this summer. That’ll show Putin a thing or two, as if he cares. Kerry also called on Congress to put together an economic aid package for Ukraine, to help out the good guys, and said we’d be “prepared” to impose economic sanctions on Russia, if we must, as if Putin cares, but our alternatives are limited:

When Putin sent Russian troops into Georgia in 2008, then-President George W. Bush dispatched warships to the region and distributed humanitarian aid on military aircraft. Asked if Obama was prepared to take similar actions, Kerry replied: “The hope of the United States and everyone in the world is not to see this escalate into military confrontation. That does not serve the world well, and I think everybody understands that. The president has all options on the table.”

Kerry said if Putin rolled back the military intervention, the U.S. would work with Russia to protect ethnic Russians in Ukraine and “stand up to any hooligans, any thuggery” there.

That’s it? Well, there was the phone call:

When asked on CBS if a ninety-minute call between President Obama and Putin on Saturday had any impact, Kerry said “we’re going to have to wait and see.”

Obama made it clear during the call that Russia’s military intervention is “absolutely unacceptable,” Kerry said. “President Obama wants to emphasize to the Russians that there are a right set of choices that can still be made to address any concerns they have about Crimea, about their citizens, but you don’t choose to invade a country in order to do that,” Kerry added.

One assumes that Putin listened politely, while feeding the dogs and tidying up the office. It was all noise, and Heather Parton (Digby) explains why:

It’s very hard as an American to righteously defend the precepts on International Law with respect to national sovereignty after what we did just eleven years ago in Iraq. I feel like an idiot saying it out loud to anyone and am embarrassed to see John Kerry shaking his fist and proclaiming the illegality and illegitimacy of Russia’s actions when he personally voted for that illegitimate and illegal invasion. From what I gather, this is not a problem for most people so perhaps I’m in a minority, but to me, that misbegotten war has completely shattered any claims we have as a nation to lecture others in this way. It sounds hollow and phony and completely without what the neocons used to call “moral authority.”

I think that this matters, particularly for a democratic military superpower that has pretensions to benevolent hegemony. You do something like Iraq and you invite others to do the same. Indeed, one could make a better case for the Russians doing what they’re doing today than what we did just a few short years ago – there is a long, long history among these people and common borders that have been drawn recently (by historical standards) are always in flux. Compared to our patently phony rationale for invading Iraq, the violation of international law here is far less egregious.

Putin could have said one word – Iraq – and made his point. We have to pay a price for that war of choice, not that this makes any difference to those here who are angry with Obama:

I have no hope for the bellicose wingnuts who are doing the usual flag-waving and warmongering. If they had their way we’d be “liberating” Ukraine this week – and onward to Moscow. And I certainly agree with the liberals and realists who want to prevent Russia from pushing further into Ukraine and provoking a bloody war. Nobody wins when that happens. … Mostly I’d just like to see a little less sanctimony from our leadership as they try to work their way through this. It’s not helping anyone.

To be honest, this is a moment I’m glad we have President Obama in office right now. He’s shown admirable restraint in these matters in recent months and I’m hopeful he will prove to be a cooler head than most of Washington seems to be this weekend. At least he doesn’t sound like an amnesiac when he wrings his hands over national sovereignty being violated. His hands are clean on that one.

Yes, but the anger is there:

President Obama has only limited options to punish Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin over military action in Ukraine, but some Republicans say that is partly the result of Obama’s own foreign policy.

“Putin is playing chess – I think we’re playing marbles,” said Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, speaking on Fox News Sunday. Rogers said the Russians have been “running circles around us” in negotiations on such items as Syria and missile defense.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, said “we have a weak and indecisive president,” and that “invites aggression.”

At Mother Jones, Kevin Drum counters that:

This kind of knee-jerk reaction is unsurprising, but it’s also nuts. Has Rogers even been following events in Ukraine lately? The reason Putin has sent troops into Crimea is because everything he’s done over the past year has blown up in his face. This was a last-ditch effort to avoid a fool’s mate, not some deeply-calculated bit of geopolitical strategery. [Yes, Drum is mocking George Bush there.]

Make no mistake. All the sanctions and NATO meetings and condemnations from foreign offices in the West won’t have much material effect on Putin’s immediate conduct. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about this stuff: he does, and he’s been bullying and blustering for a long time in a frantic effort to avoid it. Now, however, having failed utterly thanks to ham-handed tactics on his part, he’s finally decided on one last desperation move. Not because the West is helpless to retaliate, but because he’s simply decided he’s willing to bear the cost. This is a sign of weakness, not a show of strength. It’s the price he’s paying for his inability to control events.

He couldn’t keep his friend in power in the Ukraine, he’s having a hell of a time convincing the world that his guy in Syria, Assad, is a fine fellow, and now he could lose the one naval base that matters, so it comes down to this:

Having decided that he’s willing to pay the price for his action, Putin now has to be sent the bill. It will pay dividends down the road.

That’s our alternative, and as for now, Putin is doing what he must, as Slate’s Fred Kaplan explains here:

Putin may face a bad month or so in the world media – perhaps face some sanctions and other troubles – for moving tanks, planes, and Russia’s own brutal brigade of riot police to quash protesters, overthrow parliament, and restore some version of the old regime. But in his mind, that’s nothing compared with the prospect of losing Ukraine.

Putin, after all, has lamented the breakup of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. He considers Ukraine to be a Russian “territory,” not an independent nation (and said so to President George W. Bush in 2008). And the Crimean peninsula, which Nikita Khrushchev ceded to Ukraine in 1954, is Ukrainian in name only – and even then just barely. (Khrushchev didn’t quite surrender the land but declared it an autonomous enclave.) …

Yes, Russia signed an accord guaranteeing Ukraine’s borders, and Secretary of State John Kerry scored debater’s points by noting that Putin couldn’t very well insist on Syria’s sovereignty while violating Ukraine’s. None of this matters to Putin, nor would it have to any other Russian leader in memory. Putin could cite the Crimean people’s pleas to restore order in their streets (not that they’d been teeming with disorder). If the crisis persists, he could easily find someone in the eastern part of the Ukrainian mainland – which is largely pro-Russia – to issue similar pleas. “I’m not invading Ukraine,” he could say, “I’m only answering the calls for fraternal assistance from citizens endangered by hooligans and terrorists.” (Indeed, in his phone call with President Obama today, Putin reserved the right to protect Russian interests in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.)

Of course, these are rationalizations, not real reasons. Putin’s principal motive, now in the Crimea and possibly later in eastern Ukraine, is to reassert Russian hegemony.

Kaplan is just not sure that Russia can sustain an occupation given that most of the Ukraine has an “ancestral hatred” of Russia, and we should all calm down:

Is this horrendous? Yes. Is it a big surprise? No. What can we do in response? Not a whole lot – again, unless we want to go to war, which would be stupid. There are good reasons why even George W. Bush backed off (or at least stopped short of pursuing) a pledge to consider Ukraine for NATO membership. First, calmer minds weighed the level of Western interests in Ukrainian independence against the cost of defending it in a pinch, and found the former coming up short. (A military alliance like NATO, in which an attack on one is seen as an attack against all, should mean something.) Second, polls suggested that only a minority of Ukraine’s citizens wanted to join this alliance; about 40 percent saw NATO as a threat.

Still, we’re in a pickle:

Why did Obama publicly state that aggression in Ukraine would trigger “consequences”? Clearly he was telling Putin to recalculate the potential costs and benefits of an invasion. But Obama was ignoring a simple fact: Putin would incur almost any risk to avoid losing Ukraine. To put it another way: There are no consequences – none that the United States could credibly threaten – that would keep Putin from doing whatever it takes to hang on to Ukraine.

Perhaps Obama is the one who has to learn Realpolitik, but Mary Mycio adds interesting detail:

Most of the Crimea is basically a desert, with less annual rainfall than Los Angeles. It is impossible to sustain its 2 million people – including agriculture and the substantial tourist industry – without Ukrainian water. Current supplies aren’t even enough. In Sevastopol, home of the Black Sea Fleet, households get water only on certain days. In fact, on Feb. 19, when snipers were shooting protesters on the streets of Kiev, Sevastopol applied for $34 million in Western aid (note the irony) to improve its water and sewer systems.

The Crimea’s dependence on Ukraine for nearly all of it electricity makes it equally vulnerable to nonviolent retaliation. One suggestion making the rounds of the Ukrainian Internet is that the mainland, with warning, shut off the power for 15 minutes. It may not normalize the situation, but it could give Moscow pause. …

So, while Vladimir Putin rattles his sabers, the authorities in Kiev might decide to just hold tight, for now. If Yanukovych destroyed his own power, he may very well destroy Putin’s as well. The fugitive ex-president, whose greed extended deep into the peninsula, isn’t a popular figure there either and any efforts to install him…

And so on. We may not have alternatives, but the Ukrainians might. Cut off the power now and then, randomly, so they can’t plan for any particular outage, and do the same with the water. Shrug and say it was routine maintenance. Then keep doing it. They’ll get the message – or they’ll roll the tanks into Kiev and let the rest of the world cut them off from everything. It’s a plan.

Andrew Sullivan adds this:

Putin has panicked. To initiate a full-scale war with Ukraine, after effectively losing it because of the over-reach and corruption of Yanukovych, opens up scenario after scenario that no prudent Russian statesman would want to even consider, let alone embrace. That doesn’t mean he won’t continue to over-reach or that we should be irresolute in confronting this aggression; just that we should be clear that the consequences of further escalation will be deeply damaging for his regime – and certainly far graver for him than for the West.

As for Obama’s long chat with Putin, Sullivan notes what Leon Aron had to say about that:

Ideally, the conversation would have been one in which the American president was speaking not only for the US, but also for NATO and the EU. The president is likely to have pointed out that the risks would involve Russia’s membership in the G8, the safety of financial and other assets of the Russian elite which are located outside of Russia, as well as the ability of the members of this elite and their families to visit, live or study in the U.S. and the EU. In addition, Moscow’s behavior could trigger new export controls, which given its dependence on Western technology, particularly in the oil and gas sector as well as in the food industry, could have a very negative impact on the Russian economy.​

Alongside these measures, the U.S. and its allies might also provide – publicly and in private – a few face-saving devices for Russia, such as guarantees that the Russian-speaking Ukrainians will be free from harassment or discrimination of any kind; an introduction of UN peacemaking forces in Crimea to protect the political rights of all Crimeans, and the reaffirmation of the pre-existing “special status” of Crimea within Ukraine, as well as the continuation of the pre-existing Russian sovereignty of the leased naval base in Sevastopol.

Aron thinks we do have leverage, both sticks and carrots, so there are alternatives of all sorts here, at least alternatives to war, and the New Republic’s Timothy Snyder explores those:

Russian propaganda about depraved Europe conceals an intimate relationship. Tourism in the European Union is a safety valve for a large Russian middle class that takes its cues in fashion and pretty much everything else from European culture. Much of the Russian elite have sent its children to private schools in the European Union or Switzerland. Beyond that, since no Russian of any serious means trusts the Russian financial system wealthy Russians park their wealth in European banks. In other words, the Russian social order depends upon the Europe that Russian propaganda mocks. And beneath hypocrisy, as usual, lies vulnerability.

Soft power can hurt. General restrictions on tourist visas, a few thousand travel bans, and a few dozen frozen accounts might make a real difference. If millions of urban Russians understood that invading Ukraine meant no summer vacation, they might have second thoughts.

Damn! Ditch pure communism and allow a bourgeois middle class to develop, and a top layer of ultra-rich thugs owning the oil companies and such, who are quite useful to keep you in power, and your options are suddenly limited. Crushing Ukraine starts to seem like a real bad idea.

Sullivan sums it up this way:

We have many cards to play. Putin has one: military force. But if he uses it, he will be in a full-scale war within his own region of influence. Whatever else that is, it is not a demonstration of strength. It’s a sign of profound weakness.

If so, what should we do? Remind him of the costs of playing that one card he has to play, in detail, often, and hope for the best. Maybe Abba Eban was right. Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Or they don’t. All we can do is wait and see what happens – that’s it. But then absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. Now we wait.

Too Much Tennyson

The trick is to make whatever you’ve done, however foolish, seem heroic, especially if it involves the Crimea. On October 25, 1854, it was the charge of British light cavalry, led by Lord Cardigan, against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War, and that was a royal screw-up. The idea was that the British forces would send that famous Light Brigade to pursue and harry a retreating Russian artillery battery – the sort of thing a light cavalry is designed to do – but someone up the chain of command changed the orders and had the light cavalry mount a frontal assault against an entirely different artillery battery, one that wasn’t retreating at all, one that was dug in and had established overlapping fields of defensive fire. Oops – but the Light Brigade charged anyway, and reached that fixed battery, or those few who were left alive reached that objective. Then they retreated, defeated.

It had been a suicide mission, but orders are orders, and these were honorable and faithful soldiers. Theirs was not to reason why. Theirs was but to do or die, so into the valley of death rode the six hundred. That’s how Alfred, Lord Tennyson put it in The Charge of the Light Brigade – a bit of jingoistic piffle about the wonders of the disciplined and selfless heroes of the British Empire, that glosses over the blundering stupidity of those at the top, getting everything wrong. Tennyson’s poem is, then, about the nobility of the fight, not the stupidity of the war, the sort of poem that little boys and John McCain love. Do or die! Only cowards ask questions – everyone knows that – and that made sense when Tennyson published that poem, two months after the Light Brigade was wiped out. Tennyson was poet laureate for most of Queen Victoria’s reign after all, and hiding the folly of those at the top, while lauding the good and noble British, generically, is what that job was about. His job was to be the apologist for the Empire, and the message then was the same as the message now – Support the Troops! We just slap yellow ribbons on the back of our SUV’s these days – the days of heroic poems are over and Tennyson’s best lines sound quaint now. My strength is as the strength of ten, because my heart is pure? No one other than Rick Santorum says such things these days, and no one remembers the Crimean War.

That might be a mistake, as heavily armed military forces are now roaming Ukraine’s Crimea, and are believed to be Russian, but they are without uniform insignia of any kind, and refuse to say whose orders they are following, so something is up, and we may end up playing the part of the British in 1854:

Tension dramatically mounted in Ukraine’s Crimea region Friday as its ambassador to the United Nations warned Russia against any further violation of its territorial borders, a warning that came as the United States urged Russia to pull back from the region or face possible consequences.

“We are now deeply concerned by reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside Ukraine,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in televised comments from the White House. “It would be a clear violation of Russia’s commitment to respect the independence and sovereignty and borders of Ukraine and of international laws.”

Obama said any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would be “deeply destabilizing” and he warned “the United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.”

Obama didn’t say what those costs would be, but he probably won’t be sending in the Light Brigade. We don’t use guys on horses these days. Still, it’s the Crimea, and it’s a mess:

The remarks were the latest in a series of fast-moving developments that saw Ukrainian officials grappling with rising secessionist passions in the Russian-majority region, where the airspace has been closed and communications have been disrupted.

Ukraine accused Russian Black Sea forces of trying to seize two airports in Crimea but said Ukrainian security forces prevented them from taking control.

Ukraine Interior Minister Arsen Avakov earlier characterized the presence at the airport of unidentified armed men, who wore uniforms without insignia, as an “armed invasion.”

The crisis echoed throughout the world, with the U.N. Security Council president holding a private meeting about the crisis enveloping Ukraine and world leaders calling armed groups not to attempt to challenge Ukrainian sovereignty.

They had their odd revolution of sorts, throwing out the president they had actually elected, who turned out to be a crook, grabbing all the goodies for himself and his friends, and jailing anyone who complained – and who had decided to turn down all cooperation with Europe and deal only with Russia, enraging the Ukrainian-speaking majority, who don’t think of themselves as Russian in any way, but pleasing the Russian-speaking minority in the industrial east of the country, and down in the Crimea. The Ukraine used to be part of the Soviet Union. Some don’t miss those days at all. Some really do miss those good old days, and Vladimir Putin, the former KGB guy, seems to want to reassemble the old Soviet Union. What any of this has to do with the United States is a mystery, but we support the concept of self-determination, and this matter had been settled the previous weekend – the people spoke. We also support democracy, the idea that people get to vote on how things are run, and who should run them, and this odd revolution was about tossing out the guy who had been elected freely and fairly, which is a bit troubling – but no matter. The Russians can’t just go in and take over.

Russia may not want to do that. Just as Hitler argued that the Sudetenland, where most of the folks spoke German, not Czech, was really part of Germany, and just as Saddam Hussein argued that Kuwait had really always been part if Iraq, the worry now is that Putin is implying the same thing about the Crimea:

At a press conference outside the U.N. Security Council, Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.N., Yuriy Sergeyev said the country was prepared to defend itself and urged the U.N.’s moral and political support for the Kiev government, particularly in Crimea. …

Ukraine suspects Russia of fomenting tension in the autonomous region that might escalate into a bid for separation by its Russian majority. “We still have a chance to stop the negative developments and separatism,” Sergeyev said.

Sergeyev accused Russia of violating its military agreement by blocking Ukrainian security forces, including its border guards and police, in the region.

“This group is making a serious mistake challenging our territorial integrity,” he said.

But Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaliy Churkin, compared the reports of Russian troops taking charge of positions on the ground to rumors that “are always not true.”

Yes, but sometimes they are true, and the situation is unstable:

Crimea was handed to Ukraine by the Soviet Union in 1954. Just over half its population is ethnic Russian, while about a quarter are Ukrainians and a little more than 10% are Crimean Tatars, a predominantly Muslim group oppressed under former Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Meanwhile, Russian lawmakers introduced two bills Friday to simplify annexing new territories into the Russian Federation and simplify access to Russian citizenship for Ukrainians, the state news agency Itar Tass said.

One bill also stipulates that the accession of a part of a foreign state to Russia should be taken through a referendum, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

Maybe Russia won’t invade and grab the Crimea. They’ll just make half of the population official Russian citizens, which would make the Crimea a de facto part of Russia anyway – no muss, no fuss – but their troops are there:

Back in Kiev, Andrii Parubii, chief of national security and defense, said Ukrainian military and police forces had stopped Russian military forces from seizing two airports in the Crimean region.

The Russian military is on the outside of both airports, Parubii said in a televised news conference from the Ukrainian parliament.

Weapons were not used during the operation, according to Avakov, the interior minister.

Russian armored vehicles were moving toward Simferopol, the regional capital, on Friday, the Ukrainian news outlet TSN reported.

Men in military uniforms had been seen patrolling the airport in Simferopol, as well as a military and civilian airbase in nearby Sevastopol since early Friday.

Avakov said the armed men at the Sevastopol air base were troops from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, stationed in the port city. They were in camouflage uniforms without military insignia, he said.

And this isn’t good:

Moscow alarmed some observers by announcing the surprise military exercises Wednesday in its western and central areas, near the Ukraine border.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s largest telecom firm was unable to provide data and voice connectivity between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine because unknown people had seized telecommunications nodes and destroyed cables, it said Friday. There is almost no phone connectivity or Internet service across Crimea, said Ukrtelecom, which is the only landline provider.

Things aren’t looking good, and maybe we ought to do something, but that was that first Crimean War:

The immediate issue involved the rights of Christians in the Holy Land, which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. The French promoted the rights of Catholics, while Russia promoted those of the Orthodox. The longer-term causes involved the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the unwillingness of Britain and France to allow Russia to gain territory and power at Ottoman expense.

Maybe we’re still fighting that same war, without the overlay of religion. Another empire fell, the Soviet Union, and we don’t want Russia to grab and hold key suddenly-autonomous territories. That’s why the Light Brigade was charging. That’s why Obama is making ominous and purposely ambiguous vague threats. The odd thing is that the Ukraine, as a distinct entity, was created as a result of the Crimean War – new borders were drawn where none had existed before. We may have to fight over those again.

Do we want to do that? Is that reasonable? Don’t we have better things to do?

That depends on who you ask. Tennyson may be dead and gone, but we still have John McCain:

In response to reports of a Russian takeover in parts of Crimea, Arizona Senator John McCain said on Friday, “We are all Ukrainians,” before calling for swift U.S. economic aid to Ukraine, condemnation of Russia at the United Nations, sanctions against Russian officials and the installation of U.S. missiles in the nearby Czech Republic.

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes “this is a chess match reminiscent of the Cold War and we need to realize that and act accordingly,” McCain said, in an exclusive interview with TIME. “That does not mean I envision a conflict with Russia, but we need to take certain measures that would convince Putin that there is a very high cost to actions that he is taking now.”

Yeah, he’s at it again:

McCain made his declaration in response to a question from TIME about his famous 2008 statement, “We are all Georgians,” issued when he was a Republican presidential candidate after Russia invaded Georgia. Asked whether he feels the same way about the plight of Ukraine six years later, he agreed. “We are all Ukrainians in the respect that we have a sovereign nation that is again with international boundaries… that is again being taken in as part of Russia,” he said in an interview in his Senate office. “That is not acceptable to an America that stands up for the rights of human beings. We are Georgians. And we are Ukrainians.”

Yeah, and his strength is as the strength of ten, because his heart is pure, or at least that’s the general idea:

In the interview Friday, McCain said President Obama has “been incredibly naïve” about Putin’s goals. “Putin wants to restore the Russian empire, that’s his ambition; he’s stated it many times. Therefore no one should be surprised,” McCain said. “I predicted it and I’m not a genius. But I know Putin.”

In short, don’t think, charge, heroically, although McCain isn’t calling for war:

McCain says he wants to see the Obama Administration move a short-term economic aid package for Ukraine as quickly as possible. Kiev is “on the verge of an economic collapse. That would give credibility to the new government,” he says. The U.S. should also be working on a long-term International Monetary Fund bailout for the Ukraine, McCain says.

On the military front, McCain believes Putin needs to face a show of U.S. strength. Putin is “convinced that the United States is weak and there’ll be no significant retaliation of his occupation of the Crimea and possibly eastern Ukraine,” he says. He wants to see Obama revive the Bush era missile defense plan, which would have placed U.S. missiles in the Czech Republic.

Right – setting up lots of our missiles in the Czech Republic will stabilize things in the Crimea, snazzy but wholly defensive missiles designed to shoot down other missiles aimed at western targets. What? How does that threaten Russia? Maybe it’s a head-fake. Look! Missiles! Maybe the word “missiles” is magic. The rest of the item comes down to McCain saying that Obama should be “braver” – but one thinks of the superbly brave men of the Light Brigade charging on, to their deaths, because someone wasn’t thinking. Tennyson made that sound heroic. It was, and it was also stupid and pointless, and tragic.

That doesn’t matter. McCain is old-school. Unthinking bravery is all, even if everyone dies, which is what Tennyson and all the other propagandists for the British Empire were peddling. They were peddling that because that sort of thinking is what maintains an empire, because if you start to realize what is actually happening at the top, you can get a bit angry:

President Obama was interrupted during a speech to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Friday by a protester who accused him having a plan for a “nuclear war with Russia.”

The president’s remarks came less than an hour after Obama warned Russia about military intervention in Ukraine in a statement from the White House briefing room.

“I’m sorry, who is that back there? What the heck are you talking about?” Obama said to the shouting. “I don’t know anything about that plan. I don’t know what you’ve been reading.”

The protester had been reading Tennyson, or watching Fox News, but at Bloomberg News, Leon Mangasarian talks to regional experts who see no war coming:

[Eastern European analyst Anna Maria] Dyner said economic concerns are an even bigger reason discouraging Russia from overt intervention in Ukraine. The Kremlin doesn’t have “a huge amount of money to spend on such a big operation,” she said. More fundamentally, she added, Russia’s slowing economy is a factor.

“Ukraine is an important gas transit country to Europe and a conflict would probably damage pipelines, further harming ties with the West,” Dyner said. “This would damage the Russian economy, which is the last thing Putin wants right now, just as they’re thinking about reforms amid weak growth.”

Perhaps economic constrains will keep a lid on things, but Luke Harding argues here that “Moscow’s military moves so far resemble a classically executed coup” in Crimea:

Seize control of strategic infrastructure, seal the borders between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, invoke the need to protect the peninsula’s ethnic Russian majority. The Kremlin’s favorite news website, Lifenews.ru, was on hand to record the historic moment. Its journalists were allowed to video Russian forces patrolling ostentatiously outside Simferopol airport. …

From Putin’s perspective, a coup would be payback for what he regards as the western-backed takeover of Kiev by opposition forces – or fascists, as the Kremlin media calls them. The Kremlin argument runs something like this: if armed gangs can seize power in the Ukrainian capital, storming government buildings, why can’t pro-Russian forces do the same thing in Crimea?

Add to that Joshua Keating arguing here that nobody now would be able to stop Russia from having its way with Crimea:

The fragile new Ukrainian government, which has other problems, not the least of which is keeping other parts of the country from splitting off, doesn’t really seem like it’s in a position to retake Crimea by force, risking a full armed intervention by the Black Sea Fleet. These moves likely violate the 1994 agreement between the U.S. and Russia under which Moscow agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its current borders in return for Kiev giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. Beyond verbal warnings, the United States certainly seems extremely unlikely to intervene.

On the other hand, Keating warns that those who think that Obama isn’t brave, and that Obama is naïve, and that he’s a wimp who’s always getting slapped around by Putin, who looks like the real leader here, always winning these things and making Obama look bad, needs to think again. Grabbing Crimea would hardly be a big win for Putin:

Gaining de facto control over yet another dysfunctional pseudostate, essentially ensuring long-term tension with Kiev in the process, certainly doesn’t seem as good an outcome as what Russia thought it was getting a month ago: a government of the whole of Ukraine tied economically and politically to Russia rather than Europe. This isn’t really a great outcome for anyone.

Another way to put that is that there’s no point in fighting over a tiny part of the spoils of the former Soviet empire, when you’ve already lost the far larger part. Winning there only makes things worse. It’s not do-or-die. There’s no need for any heroic charge. It’s just that too many remember the stirring words:

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

And a third of them survived:

The futility of the action and its reckless bravery prompted the French Marshal Pierre Bosquet to state “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.” (“It is magnificent, but it is not war.”) He continued, in a rarely quoted phrase: “C’est de la folie” – “it is madness.” The Russian commanders are said to have initially believed that the British soldiers must have been drunk.

That’s a natural assumption, but the trick is to make whatever you’ve done, however foolish, seem heroic. For that you need poetry, or guys like John McCain. But every empire has lots of those.

Celebrating Disruption

After twenty years one becomes jaded. Hollywood just doesn’t seem that exciting, and the Sunset Strip is just irritating, at least at night. It’s the traffic, and the places people have decided they really must go. The Laugh Factory is down on the corner here, in the same complex with the tiny original Hyde Lounge, which is invitation-only hip, for the right people, and by ten at night surrounded by would-be paparazzi – but it’s been about a decade since Paris Hilton got into fistfight with Lindsey Lohan in the parking lot out back. There’s nothing there, and Schwab’s Drug Store, where Harold Arlen pulled over one night in 1938 and scribbled down “Over the Rainbow” in the light from the neon sign, and where Lana Turner was not discovered, is no longer across the street – just a multiplex and a giant trendy gym and a Trader Joe’s, and a Starbucks of course. As for the Laugh Factory, it’s minor league – the Comedy Store, four blocks west on the same side of the street, is where all the big-name comics got their start. The Laugh Factory is for has-been and never-will-be desperate comics, but the wide-eyed tourists from Iowa don’t know the difference. Hey, it’s Hollywood!

No one who actually lives here in Hollywood shows up there, or shows up anywhere else on the Strip for that matter. They stay home and go about the everyday business of living – paying the bills, feeding the cat, watching a little television. One night at the Laugh Factory, twenty years ago, was enough. The scruffy comics laughed long and hard at their own jokes, to bewildered silence, and that night Rodney Dangerfield slipped in the back of the room, to be noticed – he was promoting a new film – and muttered how “he don’t get no respect” a few times and slipped out again.

That said it all. Everyone is Hollywood is a lost soul, trying to parlay their nothingness into fame and fortune, and there are better things to do than to pay a lot of money to help them along. The Laugh Factory in Manhattan is directly across the street from that new Renzo Piano glass-and-steel New York Times skyscraper, and it’s probably the same there too, on both sides of the street. The oddest people want your attention, and your respect, and if possible, a good chunk of your money. There’s really no reason to participate in that.

Okay, forget the Laugh Factory. Think of the basement ballroom at the Hyatt hotel in Washington, just down the hill from the Capitol, where the Tea Party Patriots just held their Fifth Anniversary bash, five years after Rick Santelli come up with the idea of the Tea Party. Back in early 2009 he was the one who may have started it all with his rant on CNBC about the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan and how the losers who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford shouldn’t get any help at all from the government. The government shouldn’t use taxpayer money to bail out such pathetic fools. It was fairly standard libertarian stuff, but it was condensed nicely into the basics, as he saw them – get rich, keep all your stuff, and sneer at those who aren’t rich, because everyone’s scorn was what they deserved. Even if it helps the economy, bail out no one, ever. The banks and the financial services industry had done nothing wrong at all, really. Let the total losers in life curl up and die.

The good people will do just fine, and that classic One Percent rant grew into a movement to end all taxes, if possible, and stop Obamacare from robbing the good people to give healthcare to the lazy losers, and to elect all sorts of people who will fight hard to keep the government from doing much of anything at all, because government is evil, and taxes are theft, and so on and so forth. Now these people, after five years of this stuff, want your attention, and your respect, and if possible, a bit of your money, just like at the Laugh Factory – without the dead-on-arrival bad jokes.

The New York Times reports on how this is still minor league:

The list of marquee names on hand was testament to the growing clout of the Tea Party: Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee – all three elected to the Senate thanks to its activist support.

But inside the Tea Party Patriots anniversary event on Capitol Hill on Thursday, timed to commemorate five years from the day Rick Santelli, a CNBC journalist, delivered an on-air tirade that helped spark the political movement, there was a sense of dejection and restlessness along with the congratulations and cheer.

“I think after the 2012 election the Tea Party is really finding its own identity,” said Judd Saul, a filmmaker from Cedar Falls, Iowa, who was there to promote his new film about the Internal Revenue Service, “Unfair.”

“The Tea Party will be coming back with a vengeance,” he added. “But we’re still in the rebuilding phase.”

As with the fourth-string comics down the street here at the Laugh Factory, we’re talking about a work in progress, because they don’t know which material to use, the crude stuff or the genteel stuff:

“The way to defeat establishment inertia is not by finding and discarding heretics as much as it is about winning a civil debate,” said Senator Lee, of Utah, “A civil debate, not a civil war.”

The contrasting approaches of Mr. Lee’s two colleagues in the Senate, Mr. Paul of Kentucky and Mr. Cruz of Texas, who are both considering seeking the presidency in 2016, captured the tension.

Mr. Paul has been pushing a more ecumenical path for Republicans.

“In order for us to be a bigger party though, we have to reach out to more people, more than just those of us here,” he told the crowd.

“I disagree with the president all the time; I don’t call him names,” he added. “There are people out in the public who are taking away from our message. And let’s try not to be a part of that.”

Mr. Cruz seemed less interested in the “big tent” philosophy that Mr. Paul espoused. And he did not seem particularly concerned that coarseness in the political debate was a problem.

It’s the get-nasty or stay-nice dilemma that every comic faces – to be Lenny Bruce or Jay Leno – but since these folks pride themselves on being a grassroots movement, and hate the idea of a leader of any sort deciding which it should be, they can’t solve that dilemma:

There were anti-tax and antigovernment activists like Mr. Saul. There were fiscal hawks like Gary Anderson from Worcester, Mass., who was part of a group called Tea Party in Space that says it wants to shed light on wasteful spending at NASA.

There were libertarians like Steve Hoodjer from Parkersburg, Iowa, who said he traced the birth of the Tea Party movement not to 2009 but to 2007, when supporters of former Representative Ron Paul, the senator’s father, invoked the original Boston Tea Party for inspiration. He was unimpressed with Rand Paul and said, “The apple’s fallen a little far from the tree.”

Conservatives were already facing tensions over one of their biggest annual speaking events, the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. It starts next week. The conference, which has in previous years faced boycotts over controversies like its exclusion of gay Republicans, is facing criticism for inviting a group of atheists. CPAC has reportedly rescinded the invitation.

A rival conference, organized by conservative activists like Stephen K. Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News, is being set up at a hotel across the street. They are calling it the Uninvited, and it will feature speakers like Phyllis Schlafly and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, who are popular with the grass roots but not on the CPAC agenda.

In short, it was another night at the Laugh Factory, amateur night at the local comedy club, with John Boehner, Speaker of the House representing the hated establishment and thus not attending, adding this:

I have made it clear that I have great respect for the Tea Party and the energy that they have brought to the electoral process. My gripe is not with the Tea Party. My gripe is with some Washington organizations who feel like they’ve got to go raise money by beating up on me and others.

Well, yeah, the audience in the basement ballroom at the Hyatt cheered loudly when any speaker called for his removal, but an ABC News item suggests the problem is with folks hating the establishment, even their own:

Several tea party candidates have suffered embarrassing revelations in recent weeks, from Kansas doctor Milton Wolf, a challenger to longtime Republican Sen. Pat Roberts, who acknowledged posting gruesome X-ray images of patients on Facebook to Kentucky businessman Matt Bevin, challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has struggled to explain his apparent past support for the Wall Street bailout program that he now campaigns against.

Establishment Republicans – in defending their incumbents against challengers within their own party – have been aggressive in pointing to these missteps as evidence that some elements of the tea party movement, particularly outside groups who are offering these candidates financial support, are pursuing a nihilistic agenda.

“It’s clear these outside groups spent very little time actually vetting their endorsed candidates,” said Brian Walsh, a former communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “And that information is coming to the surface earlier than it did in previous cycles.”

In essence, some tea party candidates may fail to net victories in their most coveted races this year because despite the trappings of a mature political operation, they are still far behind in some key but basic areas of the modern campaign: candidate vetting and opposition research.

In Hollywood, that’s known as not being ready for prime time. That’s Laugh Factory stuff, but then the establishment of the party isn’t much better, as Jonathan Chait explains here:

Lots of people treat the Republican Party’s inability to unify around an alternative health-care plan, four years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, as some kind of homework assignment they keep procrastinating on. But the problem isn’t that Cantor and Boehner and Ryan would rather lie around on the sofa drinking beer and playing video games than write their health-care plan already.

It’s that there’s no plan out there that is both ideologically acceptable to conservatives and politically defensible. Carping from the sidelines is a great strategy for Republicans because status quo bias is extremely powerful. It lets them highlight the downside of every trade-off without owning any downside of their own. They can vaguely promise to solve any problem with the status quo ante without exposing themselves to the risk any real reform entails. Republicans can exploit the disruption of the transition to Obamacare unencumbered by the reality that their own plans are even more disruptive.

A comic has to do more than stand on stage, point, and say look, that’s funny. There does have to be some there, there, although they’ve been faking this rather well:

Now, for this method to work, you need to pretend to have a plan of your own somewhere. Cathy McMorris-Rogers’s response to the State of the Union address heavily emphasized the message that Republicans were definitely, positively going to unveil their own health-care plan. “We have solutions to help you take home more of your pay, through lower taxes, cheaper energy costs and affordable health care,” she promised. “No, we shouldn’t go back to the things — the way things were, but this law is not working. Republicans believe health-care choices should be yours, not the government’s, and that whether you’re a boy with Down syndrome or a woman with breast cancer, you can find coverage and a doctor who will treat you.” Time noted that “the repeal and replace message is already working.”

The amazing thing here is that House Republicans have managed to sustain this any-day-now stance since the outset of a health-care debate that began five years ago.

Yeah, five years is a long time to wait for the punch-line, and Andrew Sullivan is depressed:

I know we’re all supposed to be used to this by now, and regard it as the way politics works, but seriously: is there a more glaring example of the subordination of the public good to opportunistic factionalism? The GOP acts as if its only goal is to get power, even if it has nothing much to offer about how it would tackle such tough problems as climate change or immigration reform or healthcare when it gets it. They are in this for the electoral game, as Mitch McConnell once famously explained.

Jonathan Bernstein adds this:

Chait mentions that this has been going on for years, but he doesn’t refer to the granddaddy of all “repeal and replace” claims: the op-ed written in early 2010 by House Republican committee chairmen promising not just a bill, but a whole process. They were going to hold hearings, draft a bill and bring it to the House floor. I haven’t checked recently, but last I looked the story was that they hadn’t even bothered with the hearings part. As Chait says, there’s just nothing there.

All comics need at least some material, but Bernstein may be being a bit unfair here. There have been some ideas; it’s just that Peter Weber explains here that their tentative ideas tend to be quite bad ideas:

The CBO analysis for Rep. Young’s bill to raise full-time employment to 40 hours, for example, found that the bill would raise the federal deficit by $74 billion while reducing the number of people getting employer-sponsored health insurance by about a million; about half of those people would go on Medicaid or other public programs, the other half would be uninsured.

It’s not clear the other Republican proposals would be popular in practice, either. Some of them, as the Washington Post’s editorial board notes, would be better than ObamaCare at holding down healthcare costs and incentivizing people to buy private health insurance. But they are more disruptive to the status quo – especially post-ObamaCare – and almost all of them would be ripe for articles about sick people losing coverage or watching their health insurance costs skyrocket.

And at that point they can do that Rodney Dangerfield thing and mutter about how they “get no respect” – but it won’t be funny. Dangerfield’s shtick – to use the vaudeville term – was funny because he didn’t deserve respect. He knew it. You knew it. That was the joke, and the Republicans famously can’t tell a joke. Comedy requires self-awareness.

There is a paucity of self-awareness in the Tea Party too, as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent notes here:

The chatter continues today about Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s outburst at the National Governors meeting, with observers again decrying the “partisan wars” that have infected our “polarized” politics. Surely polarization is a real phenomenon on the elite level. Government is divided on the federal level and one-party control of state governments has increased. But the Jindal episode also illustrates the other side of this story: while the two parties are obviously locked in partisan stalemate, there is far less evidence that the voters are polarized on the issues themselves.

It’s like that comic laughing long and hard at his own jokes, to bewildered silence:

In Jindal’s diatribe, he claimed that Obama is “waving the white flag” on the economy by focusing on executive actions in the face of Congressional gridlock, and took a shot at Obama’s push to raise the minimum wage by decrying his “minimum wage economy.”

The evocation of the minimum wage sheds light on the real cause of “polarization.” Here is a policy that is supported by broad majorities, one that Republican officials have voted for in the past. Large chunks of Republican voters support it. But as two recent polls showed, Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly oppose the hike – while non-Tea Party Republicans support it. The GOP position is dictated by the Tea Party.

They are running the show:

This applies to economic issues in general. While many Republicans see a need to develop a GOP poverty agenda, Republicans have shied away from policies that involve government spending money to combat poverty and increase mobility. On specific policies such as the extension of unemployment benefits, and more generally on the question of whether the federal government should act to reduce inequality, GOP stances are largely dictated by the preoccupations of Tea Party Republicans, whose economic worldview is largely isolated from the broader public, rather than non-Tea Party ones, which are much more in line with the rest of the country.

That explains bewildered silence, as what is being said doesn’t make any sense, even comic sense:

Jindal also used his diatribe to attack Obamacare. This is also instructive. Jindal has blocked the Medicaid expansion in Louisiana. Yet GOP governors blocking the expansion are playing mainly to conservative activists; GOP governors who have bucked that pressure and embraced the expansion are actually faring better politically than are those refusing to accommodate any part of Obamacare.

There is probably majority consensus even in Congress behind a host of proposals that would help alleviate poverty and spur the recovery: a minimum wage hike; a UI [unemployment insurance] extension; infrastructure investments to create jobs. Dem lawmakers are advocating for these proposals. Republican lawmakers oppose them.

This is followed by dead silence:

Pundits lament Congressional gridlock and dysfunction. But if we define “gridlock and dysfunction” to mean Congress is paralyzed from acting on policies that have majority support from the public and even in Congress, then the leading cause of the problem these observers themselves are identifying is that the Congressional GOP remains in thrall to the Tea Party agenda. If the Tea Party didn’t have that influence, all these proposals might have a better chance of moving forward; so might a broad budget deal combining tax hikes and spending cuts. It’s just that simple. That’s the main cause of the stalemate, and it’s why Obama is resorting to the executive actions Jindal laments.

We’ve had five years of this, and Obama is trying to yank the act that’s bombing from the stage. It’s called getting the hook – in vaudeville they actually used a big hook to yank the pathetic act off the stage. Obama will use executive directives, but it’s the same sort of thing.

Meanwhile, in the basement ballroom at the Hyatt hotel in Washington, now playing, enjoy the comic stylings of the Tea Party Patriots, and remember to tip your waiter! On the other hand, you could avoid low-end comedy clubs. They’re some of the most depressing places on earth.