Congrats, Paul Krugman!!

Winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics.

Muddled Thinking About Negative Ads

The WaPo also gave Outlook front-page space to a Vandy poli-sci prof named John G. Geer to explain why negative ads are actually good. I can't question his main thesis:

First, negative ads are more likely than positive ads to be about the issues.

Second, negative ads are more likely to be specific when talking about those issues.

Third, negative ads are more likely to contain facts.

And finally, negative ads are more likely to be about the important issues of the day.

I can't help but note the distinction from "the issues" in the first two points, and "the important issues of the day" in the last one. McCain's ads about Obama's association with William Ayers are "about the issues," they're "specific when talking about those issues," and they "contain facts." The problem is, they're not "about the important issues of the day."

And this is where the problem is. Negativity in political ads and other political exchanges is absolutely essential, if by 'negativity' we mean criticism of one's opponent's stands on relevant issues, and pointing out the problems with those positions.

But when it involves the attempt to displace the genuinely serious issues with bullshit issues, or to create bullshit issues out of thin air, that's a whole 'nother thing.

Geer basically ignores this distinction, which is really at the heart of the question he raises.

To Geer: Dude, you're a poli-sci professor. This is your day job. Be better at it.

And I'd suggest that the WaPo Outlook editor learn to distinguish analysis that clarifies issues from analysis that further muddles them, but some things just ain't gonna happen.

Another WaPo "Shape of Earth: Views Differ" Moment

Ross Douthat blames the financial crisis on George Bailey, for providing mortgage lending to people who couldn't quite afford it. The WaPo puts this nonsense front-and-center on the Outlook front page. McClatchy provided a thorough debunking of this notion yesterday, and it's not like they were exactly the first ones to do so.

Shorter WaPo: "Shape of Earth: Views Differ."

Broder, the Official Pundit Rules, and Neo-Hooverism

Broder says that when Obama becomes President, his advisors will surely tell him that he must rein in his preferred programs on account of the huge deficits created by the bailout, and the Blue Dogs will fight for 'pay as you go' rules. Needless to say, Broder doesn't mention the Pentagon's upcoming proposal to increase defense spending by $450 billion over the next 5 years, but then, as others (I'd link if I could remember who) have reminded us lately, defense spending never counts as real spending with these clowns: health care for children has to be paid for, but wars and fighter jets don't.

Brian Beutler says, "Somewhere, buried deep in the stacks of the research library at NBC headquarters is a book of bylaws for American punditry, and one of those bylaws holds that a successful pundit must try--whenever possible, and for reasons unclear--to box politicians into the position of opposing desperately needed entitlement programs and other deficit spending." I'd add the words "non-military" before "deficit spending," and Dean Broder surely writes the bylaws, but other than that, he's nailed it.

And, in keeping with those bylaws, Broder doesn't even consider the prospect of Keynesian countercyclical spending to minimize the effects of the recession we're surely headed into. As Matt points out, this is no time for neo-Hooverism. The pundit class really has no grasp of economics. Lord knows I'm not an economist, but even I understand that much. Along those lines, Moody's has a nice chart rating the bang for the buck that different countercyclical measures would create, which Matt posts here.

Krauthammer Fiddles While Rome Burns

The Dow's plunged to 8,500 (wasn't it at 13,000 earlier this year?), the credit markets are freezing up, and Krauthammer wants to talk about Ayers and Rezko and Wright.

My basic take on Krauthammer has been that, unlike many of the WaPo op-ed writers, he's really a pretty smart guy; it's just that he's bought into a wildly different set of assumptions about reality. If you're writing from a world where the sky is green, the water orange, and the trees are purple, you're going to approach things in a different way than if you're a resident of this reality.

But it's hard to envision the alternate universe where Ayers and Rezko and Wright tell us a great deal about Obama, but Mccain's associations (e.g. the flock of lobbyists running his campaign) and Palin's (e.g. crazy anti-witch preacher) tells us nothing about them. Even in good times, this would be sheer political hackery.

But it's not good times. We're in the midst of a worldwide financial crisis unprecedented in my 50+ years. We can let Krauthammer decide, as the hurricane rages, that Obama would hang the pictures all wrong on the living room walls. Too bad the hurricane won't blow Chuckles right off of the nation's op-ed pages.

Gerson: Liberals Are Huge Tax Cutters

Gerson's column this morning is titled, "Health Insurance For All: How the GOP Can Frame the Issue."

Look, Mike: people don't give a flip if you can frame the issue, if McCain's health insurance plan doesn't actually work for the people who'd actually need health insurance the most. And Ezra's long since said all that needs to be said about that.

But Mike, you said something else that got me thinking: "Obama breathlessly reveals that the McCain credit "wouldn't go to you. It would go directly to your insurance company." Since the credit is intended for the purchase of health insurance, where else should it eventually go?"

Let's say I currently pay $12,000 in Federal taxes. Under McCain's plan, I get a $5,000 "tax credit." How much do I pay under his plan? $12,000. It just goes somewhere specific now - it goes to pay for my health insurance. (Which is what that money's already effectively doing, since I'm insured through my employer.) How's that a "tax credit," Mike?

By this standard, any government spending is a "tax credit." "Hey, we're giving you a $400 tax credit, and spending it on Interstate highways for you!" "We're giving you a 6.2% payroll tax cut, and putting it into Social Security for you!" "We're giving you a $2300 tax credit, and using it to buy you a piece of the Wall Street bailout!"

Yeah, Mike, I'm sure that's what most people mean by a "tax credit."

Ain't enough rolleyes for stuff like this.

The Scary Thing About Ruth Marcus...

...is that she's really one of the better regular columnists on the WaPo op-ed page. I'd put her on the borderline dividing the best one-third from the worst two-thirds.

That doesn't say much for the WaPo op-ed page.

Take this morning's column, "Whose Health Plan?.

The month before a presidential election isn't the best time for reasoned debate about complicated policy.

There's never a good time for the Post to cover policy in a serious way, is there? I remember asking at one of those WaPo online chats over the summer, just when they were going to get to the policy discussions. The gist of the answer was 'not yet - the voters aren't paying attention yet.' So now that the campaign's in full swing, that's a bad time too.

What'll probably happen - I say this because I've seen this happen in numerous previous election cycles - is that they'll have one Huge Policy Piece about each candidate, that will run for pages and pages. It'll be a big, indigestible lump that few people will have the time to read over their morning coffee, but they'll be able to say, 'see - we covered policy,' then rush back to the safety of the horse race.

But back to Marcus.

Overall, Barack Obama's health-care plan is preferable to John McCain's. Obama's approach -- which would require employers to provide insurance or pay into a fund, subsidize those unable to afford coverage on their own and set up new purchasing pools -- would cover more people and would help those who have the hardest time obtaining insurance.

At least she says that. Because the rest of the column is all about defending McCain's health plan. By the end, you'll barely remember that she thought Obama's was better.

But McCain's plan is not the ill-intentioned monstrosity of Obama's ominous portrayal. In important ways, it would be an improvement over current law, making a health insurance system that is now tilted in favor of the rich significantly more progressive.

The central aspect of McCain's approach is to eliminate the existing tax preference for employer-sponsored health care. Under the current system, employees don't pay tax on the value of the health insurance they receive from employers, even though most individuals buying insurance on their own don't get that break and have to purchase insurance with after-tax dollars.

That was yesterday. (Actually, the day before. Jeez, Ruth, can't you keep up?) Currently, the McCain campaign's going to cut Medicare and Medicaid by $130B/year to pay for the $5000-per-family tax credit. (They say they'll only cut waste, fraud, and abuse. Ain't no way - Medicare has a 1% overhead.)

Fortunately, Ezra wrote a post today demolishing Marcus' column. The economics of health care is his area of expertise, so and it damned sure isn't mine, so I'm happy to outsource this to him.

One thing Ezra points out at some length is Marcus' (and McCain's too, by the way) complete and total misrepresentation of Obama advisor Jason Furman's tax credit proposal. McCain and Marcus would both have you believe that Furman's plan and McCain plan are quite similar, but Ezra makes it clear that the only resemblance is that both involve a tax credit.

It's one thing for a typical politician (can we assume that McCain's 'straight-talking maverick' cred has already dissipated?) to misrepresent his own policy proposals to his advantage. But the only thing I can think of is that Marcus essentially took McCain's website at its word, and didn't bother with fact-checking.

Ruth, this is your day job. And it's really not a tough one. Could you at least try to do it right?

Flipping Richard Cohen (Why Bother?)

Richard Cohen actually has a half-decent column in today's WaPo:

In spite of it all, much of the media saw a credible performance. I could quote the hosannas of some of my colleagues, but I spare them the infamy that will surely follow them to their graves. (The debate's moderator, Gwen Ifill, used the occasion to catch up on some sleep.) Many of my colleagues judged Palin simply as a performer and inferred that her performance would go over well in homes with aboveground swimming pools.

A perfect example is the Wall Street Journal, whose (conservative) editorial page has been absolutely fixated on a strict (Scalian) reading of the Constitution. Did it wonder what in the world Palin meant by the authority she found in the Constitution to increase the role of "the vice president if that vice president so chose to exert it in working with the Senate"? What? Oh, never mind. The Journal chivalrously ignored the matter. Palin is excused from knowing the limits of the office she seeks.

In effect, columnists, bloggers, talk-show hosts and digital lamplighters have adopted the ethic of the political consultant: what works, works. It did not matter what Palin said. It only mattered how she said it -- all those doggones, references to her working-class status (net worth in excess of $2 million), promiscuous use of the word "maverick," repeated mentions of "greed and corruption on Wall Street" (Who? Be specific. Give examples. Didn't anyone here go to school?) and, of course, that manic good cheer.

Although he can't completely lay off the Kool-Aid:

I will end with its conservative columnist of years past -- the estimable William Safire. In 1996, he called Hillary Clinton "a congenital liar." It was a head-snapping characterization that, alas for Clinton, has defined her for the ages and that she stubbornly vindicates from time to time.

Yeah, we know about the sniper fire in Bosnia. But if Clinton's said as many whoppers in public since 1992 as Palin's said in her 15 minutes in the spotlight, I'd like to see the evidence. Yet even Cohen's not calling Palin a "congenital liar" - just an underachiever who's been graded on one hell of a curve.

The point I'd like to make is, if Cohen were suddenly to turn into the liberal he thinks he already is, this is as good as it gets. He's still a muddleheaded writer and thinker, as are so many of his colleagues on the WaPo op-ed page - Broder, Will, Samuelson, Applebaum, Gerson (who is also a partisan hack, plain and simple), and of course Hiatt. I'd be embarrassed, really, to have them on my side in a debate of any consequence.

Flipping any of these people to the side of the angels doesn't produce any real gain: it just turns muddleheaded conservatives and center-right people (whether they think of themselves that way or not) into muddleheaded left-of-center people.

They really all simply need to be gone. If they want to share their opinions with the world, they can start their own blogs, and see how long anybody bothers to read them. But their lack of intellectual clarity is frankly more embarrassing to their philosophical allies than it is an intellectual threat to their opponents.

Cry "Havoc" and Release the Brownshirts of American Politics

Damn.

Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
...
Palin, speaking to a sea of "Palin Power" and "Sarahcuda" T-shirts, tried to link Obama to the 1960s Weather Underground. "One of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers," she said. ("Boooo!" said the crowd.) "And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,' " she continued. ("Boooo!" the crowd repeated.)

"Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

Tribalism. Pure, unadulterated tribalism.

Can we stop talking about the "angry left" now?

Kudos to Dana Milbank for covering this side of Palin's support.

Anne Applebaum, Meet Sally Quinn, David Broder, and the Village

Occasionally, I forget how truly dumb Anne Applebaum is. Then she reminds me.

A specter is haunting this presidential election -- the specter of "Washington." Not Washington the city of museums and monuments, and not Washington the home of 588,000 mostly ordinary people, but "Washington" the metaphor: Washington, the bastion of elites who look down on the rest of America; Washington, the embodiment of the East Coast liberal establishment that scorns outsiders from the provinces. So frequently have we heard this idea invoked in recent days that I think it's time to dissect it a bit more closely. Increasingly, I am convinced that it alludes to something that doesn't exist at all.

Sally Quinn, November 1998:

Emanuel, unlike the president, had become part of the Washington Establishment. "This is one of those extraordinary moments," he said at the fund-raiser, "when we come together as a community here in Washington -- setting aside personal, political and professional differences."

Actually, it wasn't extraordinary. When Establishment Washingtonians of all persuasions gather to support their own, they are not unlike any other small community in the country.

...

But this particular community happens to be in the nation's capital. And the people in it are the so-called Beltway Insiders -- the high-level members of Congress, policymakers, lawyers, military brass, diplomats and journalists who have a proprietary interest in Washington and identify with it.

They call the capital city their "town."

And their town has been turned upside down.

With some exceptions, the Washington Establishment is outraged by the president's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The polls show that a majority of Americans do not share that outrage. Around the nation, people are disgusted but want to move on; in Washington, despite Clinton's gains with the budget and the Mideast peace talks, people want some formal acknowledgment that the president's behavior has been unacceptable. They want this, they say, not just for the sake of the community, but for the sake of the country and the presidency as well.

In addition to the polls and surveys, this disconnect between the Washington Establishment and the rest of the country is evident on TV and radio talk shows and in interviews and conversations with more than 100 Washingtonians for this article. The din about the scandal has subsided in the news as politicians and journalists fan out across the country before tomorrow's elections. But in Washington, interest remains high. The reasons are varied, and they intertwine.

1. THIS IS THEIR HOME. This is where they spend their lives, raise their families, participate in community activities, take pride in their surroundings. They feel Washington has been brought into disrepute by the actions of the president.

"It's much more personal here," says pollster Geoff Garin. "This is an affront to their world. It affects the dignity of the place where they live and work. . . . Clinton's behavior is unacceptable. If they did this at the local Elks Club hall in some other community it would be a big cause for concern."

"He came in here and he trashed the place," says Washington Post columnist David Broder, "and it's not his place."

"This is a company town," says retired senator Howard Baker, once Ronald Reagan's chief of staff. "We're up close and personal. The White House is the center around which our city revolves."

And the "Washington" in question was NOT the "the city of museums and monuments," and not "Washington the home of 588,000 mostly ordinary people," but "Washington" the "bastion of elites," the embodiment of the East Coast establishment.

It isn't a liberal establishment, and I have no idea whether it looks down on ordinary Americans, or whether it's just so removed from them that it doesn't have any idea what life is really like for them. But it's there. It's the place where David Broder dines on quail with Karl Rove and his wife. This is the "Village" that Atrios and others refer to.

Glad we got that settled. Now, back to Applebaum:

Washington, however stuffy it may once have been, is no longer in need of "a little bit of reality from Wasilla Main Street." ... Washington needs people who think like national politicians and not like spokesmen for the local business executives who fill their reelection coffers and the local party hacks who plan their campaigns. Let's be frank: The "bailout" bill was passed last week not because members of Congress decided it would work but because it was stuffed with the pork, perks and tax breaks without which no piece of legislation, however important to the nation as a whole, can now pass. Maybe it's unfair to call that "small-town" thinking, but it sure is small-minded. And small-mindedness, not snobbery, is the dominant mind-set of 21st-century Washington.

Don't get me wrong; populism can be a fine thing...

Did she just say that, or did I imagine it? Did she really confuse "populism" with stuffing a bill full of perks and tax breaks that business elites want, but do nothing for the average citizen?

Let's be clear: that bailout bill wasn't passed last week because it extended unemployment benefits, or because it promised any infrastructure spending that would have created new jobs as we head into a downturn, or because it would have eased the bankruptcy laws, or because it would have extended SCHIP health care benefits to more uninsured children, because it didn't do any of these things. Instead, its extraneous provisions comforted the already comfortable, and did nothing for the afflicted. 'Populism,' my ass.

If there are two defining aspects to the "Washington" mindset, they are (1) that elites should make the decisions for the good of America, which will routinely require them to have to ignore what the mass of Americans want and need; and (2) the vapors they get at the thought of 'class warfare' on behalf of ordinary people, even as they advocate a top-down class war against them.
Social Security and Medicare, which so many depend upon, must always be cut, because a little pain is needed to right the ship of state - but higher taxes on the rich? Sacre bleu! The pain must not be felt by the elites.

And in the recent bailout legislation, the Village disgust with the idea of limiting compensation of the Wall Street executives that had sailed our financial system onto the rocks was palpable. But the idea of using the bailout as a vehicle for assisting average Americans in these troubled times was hardly mentioned.

Yes, this "Washington" has completely lost touch with the lives of ordinary Americans. And Anne Applebaum has absorbed "Washington's" attitudes so completely that she cannot see that it even exists.

Outsourcing Mallaby On Financial Deregulation

Sebastian Mallaby:

The key financiers in this game were not the mortgage lenders, the ratings agencies or the investment banks that created those now infamous mortgage securities. In different ways, these players were all peddling financial snake oil, but as Columbia University's Charles Calomiris observes, there will always be snake-oil salesmen. Rather, the key financiers were the ones who bought the toxic mortgage products. If they hadn't been willing to buy snake oil, nobody would have been peddling it.

Who were the purchasers? They were by no means unregulated. U.S. investment banks, regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission, bought piles of toxic waste. U.S. commercial banks, regulated by several agencies, including the Fed, also devoured large quantities. European banks, which faced a different and supposedly more up-to-date supervisory scheme, turn out to have been just as rash. By contrast, lightly regulated hedge funds resisted buying toxic waste for the most part — though they are now vulnerable to the broader credit crunch because they operate with borrowed money.

Kevin Drum says pretty much what I would have:

First, Phil Gramm's 2000 Commodity Futures Modernization Act (supported, unfortunately, by the Clinton administration) was specifically designed to "protect financial institutions from overregulation" — primarily by leaving the market for credit default swaps completely unregulated. There may be several underlying causes for the credit crisis, but this is surely one of the very big ones.

Second, after the LTCM debacle of 1998, Alan Greenspan (and, sigh, Robert Rubin) produced a report suggesting that we should "encourage," "promote," and "consider" guidelines that might prod financial institutions into reducing their drunken sailor approach to leverage. But they declined to produce actual regulations to that effect. In fact, as I noted the other day, in 2004 the SEC issued a rule allowing big investment banks to increase their allowable leverage ratios. That turned out not to be such a good idea.

Third, there was a bipartisan failure to regulate the mortgage market into a semblance of rationality. Just the opposite, in fact, as lawmakers pressed Fannie Mae to insure ever dodgier loans and Alan Greenspan encouraged Americans to take advantage of ever cheaper mortgage rates.

Plus there was the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 (also Gramm's idea, and also, unfortunately, supported by the Clinton team).

While the Clinton team's fingerprints are definitely present here, there's a big difference between being too spineless or pro-business to stop bad stuff like this, and being the ones pushing it in the first place. Equating the two is like equating Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler.

When You Can't Tell Broder and Rich Lowry Apart...

Lowry's "Starburst" post:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

Broder today:

[Lindsey Graham and others] conceivably could have wound up on his ticket, had [McCain] not been captivated by the governor of Alaska.

"Captivated"? Jeez. And McCain had only met Palin, what, twice before he chose her? It must've been the starbursts.

Going into the debate, the fear among Republicans was that Palin would look as shaky as she did in some of her answers to Katie Couric and Charlie Gibson...[but she] appeared cool as a cucumber, comfortable with her talking points and unrattled by anything that was thrown at her.

Geez, Broder - even Saturday Night Live noticed what a difference it made that Ifill wasn't asking any followup questions, and Palin 'answered' the questions with whatever non sequitur talking points she damned well pleased. And I suspect that most of the country had the sense that Palin had nothing behind her talking points - that what you heard was the sum total of her knowledge on those topics.

But it created a mystery of its own. Why in the world has the McCain campaign kept Palin under wraps from her debut at the Republican National Convention until this debate? What were they afraid of?

I asked that question of Steve Schmidt, the McCain campaign manager, and he disputed the premise. Schmidt said that Palin has answered "hundreds" of questions -- which will come as news to the reporters who have been traipsing around the country with her. Going into the debate, she had done exactly three television interviews -- with ABC, CBS and Fox -- and not held a single news conference.

Graham, who has traveled the world with McCain and knows him as well as anyone, was more forthcoming when I put the question to him. "I think they thought she needed time for briefings on the issues that were new to her," he said. But then he added: "This campaign will go down in history as stupid if they don't unleash her now."

That is an understatement.

You'd think that even a senile geezer like Broder could see that anytime Palin speaks, unscripted, or has to answer questions by even a mildly persistent questioner, there's no telling what she'll say. She really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Please, please, unleash Sarah Palin!

By the way, this is my 100th post here at Everybody Laughs At Broder. (Big deal!)

Update: James Fallows' and Brad DeLong's Broder smackdowns are also worth reading.

Eve Fairbanks in the WaPo: the GOP Is Getting Crazier

I've got tons of stuff to do today, and a Redskins game to watch, so for now I'll outsource the well-deserved ridicule of Broder to BarbinMD and DemFromCT over at the Great Orange Satan.

But this Outlook piece by TNR's Eve Fairbanks about the GOP freshman class, amazingly enough, tells it like it is. (Ignore the positive spin of the "Audacity of Nope" headline.)

But McCain's triumph actually hid the fact that, at the lower levels of the party, the emerging center of gravity is more conservative, not less. In the House, such young members as Jeb Hensarling (Tex.), Mike Pence (Ind.) and their ideologically purist soulmates on the Republican Study Committee (which absorbed most of the GOP freshmen) began to influence the party's agenda from the right, clamoring to make pork-busting the GOP's focus, demanding legislation to lower taxes and even mounting a prank revolt on a war-funding bill in May, just to flex their muscles. "The American people thought Republicans weren't acting like Republicans," Hensarling explained.

Across the Capitol, Hensarling's ideological allies in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, hauled their own caucus rightward, forcing appropriations freezes, waylaying an intelligence authorization bill that required the administration to report on its secret CIA prisons and killing the moderate immigration reform bill backed by Bush and McCain. DeMint recently launched a political action committee that donates only to senators who have their right-wing bona fides in order. Over the last two years, these new-guard conservatives -- all of whom were awarded a perfect "100" rating from the American Conservative Union in 2007 -- have arguably fashioned themselves into the most listened-to Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The bailout bill was the new guard's biggest show of force yet. Hensarling's Republican Study Committee ("The Caucus of House Conservatives," proclaims its Web site) gave those GOP freshmen the political cover to buck their leadership. They made it clear that their revolt was more over principle than over details, a stand on behalf of what one GOP Hill staffer calls "true, rock-ribbed, hard-core conservatism." Hensarling derided the bailout as the "slippery slope to socialism," while his ally Tom Feeney (Fla.) insisted that the crisis was actually produced by a failure to adequately venerate deregulation. Another young Turk, Thaddeus McCotter (Mich.), even compared the bailout to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. (I suppose that makes George W. Bush a communist. I told you these guys were audacious.)

Not every Republican is happy about the rise of the new conservatives. Washington Post political reporter Dan Balz wrote last week of "a veteran of a past Republican administration" who "could barely spit out his contempt Monday for the actions of the House Republicans. 'They would rather be right in their views -- that ideology counts more, that ideology is crucial in any decision -- rather than making incremental progress.' "

But Republicans like that guy will have to get used to the growing influence of the conservatives. They have enthusiasm and demographics on their side. Moderate Republicans are getting offed all along the Eastern seaboard; eager grassroots activists are nominating right-wingers such as New Mexico's Steve Pearce and Virginia's Jim Gilmore in Senate primaries; and the American Conservative Union's congressional ratings dramatically show which way the wind is blowing. The Republicans who are retiring this year got an average ACU rating of 78 in 2007, placing them squarely between conservatism and centrism. But by my calculations, the Republican freshmen -- the vanguard of the generation that will be replacing these fleeing moderates -- got an average rating of 97.

If you're a true, rock-ribbed, hard-core conservative, you're probably happy about all this. As a card-carrying moderate weenie, I'm not, obviously. But it's not just the policies of the GOP's new guard that spell trouble; it's the attitude. What these young Turks do share with McCain is a taste for the grand gesture and the attention-getting stunt, the determination not to go gently into defeat and the psychological pleasure derived from creating a whole lot of political Sturm und Drang. After their May revolt on the war-funding bill, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) challenged Mike Pence about why on Earth his faction had bolted on what was supposed to be bipartisan legislation. "Never stop fighting," Pence replied.

But all this drama, fun as it is, doesn't make you look like you're ready to be at the governing wheel. (See McCain, John, and recent polling.) And it's this attitude -- the thrill of doubling down on ideology, of damning those torpedoes -- that helped get people such as Pearce and Gilmore nominated in states that obviously won't support their degree of conservatism. They'll probably lose in November, and Republicans will be two Senate seats closer to being ideological irritants rather than the Democrats' serious rivals.

We in the netroots have observed for some time that, as Dems pick up House and Senate seats in swing states and districts, we could be on the verge of (for the GOP) a vicious cycle where the attrition of the saner Republicans makes the GOP increasingly crazily right-wing, further alienating conservatives with even an ounce of sanity, and continuing the cycle.

But as far as I can tell, this is the first time the MSM has taken significant note that this is where the GOP may be headed.

And more important, Fairbanks' piece explodes the "we need bipartisanship, and both sides are equally to blame that we don't have it" meme. She portrays a GOP that can't be reasoned with. We've known that's true, but to see that in the Outlook section of the WaPo, written by a Joe Lieberman Weekly correspondent - well, dayum. Maybe the WaPo will someday catch up with reality after all.

Gerson: Bush Is the Hero of the Banking Crisis

"The Leader Who Stood The Tallest." Words fail me, so I'll let Gerson speak for himself.

One advantage of a crisis is the illumination it sheds on the main figures of American politics -- like a strobe light on a dark dance floor, catching all involved in characteristic, sometimes embarrassing poses.

True dat.

[T]he largest figure revealed in the light of the financial crisis has been President Bush. Americans may be tired of strategic boldness, but Bush clearly is not. When Paulson and Bernanke came to the president in mid-September, warning of an imminent financial meltdown, Bush's reaction was typical. He told Paulson not to worry about the politics and to propose whatever was economically necessary. It would have been easier for the administration to produce symbolic, easily passable legislation. Bush chose to go to the root of the problem -- toxic debt in the financial system. The plan was not perfect and was later improved. But charges that it is somehow timid or irrelevant are absurd. Seven hundred billion dollars amounts to about 5 percent of all mortgage debt in America -- about one-third of all subprime debt.

Three things:

1) Just because it's big, doesn't mean it will accomplish its intended purpose. Ever hear of "throwing money at a problem," Mike?
2) "Bush" didn't choose anything. Bush has no idea what's going on here. All he's doing is trusting that what Paulson and Bernanke tell him is true.
3) All Bush has left is the hope that someday, history will evaluate him more kindly than the vast majority of people would do now. If the credit markets freeze up on his watch, despite Congress having passed whatever legislation he sent them, that would be one disaster too many: his reputation would never recover. Bush has little choice here but to do what the grownups tell him to do.

Bush's ambition, bias toward action and indifference to political pressure are sometimes criticized. But his greatest failures -- such as the Katrina response and the initial strategy of the Iraq counterinsurgency campaign -- have come when he ignored those instincts. The troop surge resulted when he followed them. And Bush's economic ideology -- a belief in markets, combined with a recognition that intervention is sometimes necessary to make markets work -- seems well suited to the current crisis.

Please. Bush's economic ideology - regulation is bad - got us into this. It wasn't all his fault - Phil Gramm laid most of the groundwork before Bush was inaugurated - but Bush has been President for nearly eight years. His crew didn't see this coming, didn't do anything to make this moment less likely, and did their best to cut regulation of the financial markets beyond the extent that it had already been done.

With months remaining in his term, Bush's influence is not what it once was. But if his rescue plan eventually passes, there will be reason for thanks that Bush, rather than McCain or Obama, is president at this moment -- even if few offer that thanks.

The bill that Paulson proposed was probably the worst possible bill that had a decent chance of at least being a temporary Band-Aid for our credit crisis. (Which is all I expect it to be, even in its final form.) Obama's economic team could have come up with something better in about five minutes - and that's got nothing to do with Obama personally. The same would be true of any credible Democrat's economic team, had they been President at this moment - Gore, Kerry, Edwards, Biden, either Clinton, Richardson, Dodd, you name it.

Maybe they could have even kept a crisis from happening in the first place, if they'd been President for the past few years. How you perform in a crisis is really quite secondary, if you were in a position to keep things from getting to a crisis stage to begin with, but didn't.

McCain Loses Charles Krauthammer

My head just exploded.

Krauthammer's Hail Mary Rule: You get only two per game. John McCain, unfortunately, has already thrown three...In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely (for him) framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady and cool. In the primary campaign, Obama was cool as in hip. Now Obama is cool as in collected. He has the discipline to let slow and steady carry him to victory. He has not at all distinguished himself in this economic crisis -- nor, one might add, in any other during his national career -- but detachment has served him well...he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

He's not an Obama fan, repeating BS about Obama having "an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes?" when that's been clear for most of the past two years, and claiming that, in the primaries, Obama "rose above the crowd on pure special effects: dazzling rhetoric, natural charisma, and a magic carpet ride of transcendence and hope." And having been against the Iraq War from the beginning, Chuckles. That may seem trivial, but it was rather important to millions of Dem primary voters.

But still, McCain losing Krauthammer...who knew that was even possible?