Torontoist made its endorsement of a party in the federal election today. I wrote it.

So after Obama releasing his birth certificate yesterday the birthers made appearances on all the MSNBC shows and the MSNBCers just lost it. I mean, Chris Matthews and Lawrence O’Donnell aren’t calm little bunnies, generally speaking, but there’s their usual level of shoutiness and then there was this: Matthews was plainly and visibly furious with the birthers who showed up on his show, and O’Donnell actually cut off Orly Taitz when she started spewing the birthers’ new line of crap (which, for those not in the know, is that Obama supposedly forged his Social Security number at some point and… therefore he’s not President, or something).

You kind of get the feeling that these guys really felt that, if the question of Obama’s birth was finally answered, that finally the birthers would shut up because they wouldn’t have any real ground to stand on. It’s not that they didn’t think the birthers weren’t racist: they knew that. But they thought that the birthers would play by some sort of rules. “Here is the proof you have demanded; you can demand it no more.” But of course this was never about proof; this was about hating and fearing B-Rock the Islamic Supashock, and there aren’t any rules for that.

We’re in postmodern politics now, and the tribalism can only get rawer from here.

If you’re not Canadian, you might not appreciate how unbelievable the last of this set of best-case scenarios is:

For the sake of comparison: you see that 43 in the Liberals’ Conservatives’ best-case scenario for the New Democrats? 43 seats is the most the New Democrats have held in any Parliament ever.

(via Threehundredeight)

I don’t know if you’ve heard or not lately, but dad-made billionaire Donald Trump has been capturing the attention of the nation by suggesting he might possibly run for President of the United States. This is actually one of those things that happens every decade or so; some massively rich person like Trump (or Perot or Forbes) announces that they’re going to run for President because they’re successful businessmen, and “they can run this country like a business.” For some reason, this quote is never greeted with the guffaws of hilarity that it deserves; somehow, we never hear about famous directors announcing that they’re going to run America like a production of “Guys and Dolls”, or successful ranchers announcing that they’re going to run America like a cattle farm. When businessmen announce that they’re going to run America like they ran IBM, though, we can’t get enough.

Probably it’s just that we’re easily impressed by businessmen in America. We might not know much about governing, but pretty much everyone has tried to make money, and we all know how hard it is. So when someone who makes a lot of money talks, we tend to say, “Wow. He must be smart, if he can make that much money.” (We tend to forget options like, “He must be incredibly unethical,” or “He must have a rich daddy whose money he squandered to the point where he had to declare bankruptcy multiple times.”) But maybe, just maybe, these businessmen have a point. Let’s look at some of the ways Obama could run America like a business.

1) Cut out the middleman. Right now, the United States has a military budget that dwarfs its discretionary spending. A large part of that comes from the research, development and purchase of military equipment. Back in the days when peacetime meant considerably less spending on weapons technology, it made sense to contract this work out, but this is the 21st century. We’re a military superpower now, and it’s time to accept that we’re constantly equipping our troops. So Obama should use eminent domain to confiscate the assets of companies like Honeywell, General Dynamics and Pratt & Whitney and nationalize them, passing the savings along to the American taxpayer.

2) Cut our losses on unprofitable projects. At this point, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost us trillions of dollars without achieving any of the goals we set or generating any kind of return on our investment. Any good businessman would take the hit, write off the losses, and proceed to something that makes a profit.

3) Explore alternative revenue streams. The federal government makes money by taxation. (It spends money by providing services to its customers, a vital difference that makes it impossible to apply traditional business models to government, but we’re pretending that’s not true right now.) So if you want to make extra money without tax hikes, you need to find something else to tax. The currently-illegal drug trade is a multi-billion dollar industry that currently goes completely untaxed, due to our insistence on throwing both producer and consumer in jail. Legalizing drugs would not only save us billions of dollars a year in enforcement costs, it would generate billions more in tax revenue. Sure, some might complain about the morality, but we’re running America like a business now, and it’s the bottom line that counts!

4) Expand your revenue base through mergers and acquisitions. Right now, one of the most contentious issues in American politics is immigration. People want to defend the borders, people want to make sure that Mexicans have a path to citizenship, people want to make sure that Mexicans can continue to provide a labor base to the agricultural industry. In addition, people want to make sure that the Mexican drug trade doesn’t cause problems for America. The obvious solution? Annex Mexico. You have a much smaller southern border to defend, the Mexicans become citizens and don’t have to worry about hostile borders, and the drug trade becomes legal (see point number 3.)

5) Ensure a consistent long-term vision from the top. Elections every four years? A new CEO every eight years, one that could wind up with a diametrically-opposed viewpoint to the current head of the company? No sane business would even dream of operating this way. No, it’s time for Obama to abolish the electoral process and declare himself CEO For Life. It’s the only way to make sure that the long-term goals of America get recognized.

6) Get rid of unnecessary middle management. What does Congress even do, other than get in the President’s way and neuter his bold plans for America’s future? Fire ’em all, and deal directly with the governors. (Who are, of course, free to fire their state legislatures as well, so long as they understand that they can be replaced if they don’t do what the boss says.) The savings in Congressional salaries alone would be worth millions.

7) Outsource unprofitable divisions. Look, there’s really no nice way to say this, but…there are some states that just aren’t pulling their weight. They’re always near the bottom in education, employment, and a host of other standard-of-living categories, and they constantly demand federal money while decrying federal interference. It’s time to just go ahead and “downsize” the populations of these states (humanely, of course) and replace them with cheaper citizens from China or India. Just bring them over here, put them to work, and let them help make America great again!

These are just a few of the great strategies I have, and I’m not even smart enough to have a rich dad like Trump! I’m sure that a CEO as President would usher in a new Gilded Golden Age for this country, and I don’t see why we should wait for 2012 to start implementing it.

Most of my readership are, unsurprisingly, Americans, so this column should be read – and widely dispersed – by them.

Seriously: polling indicates that four-fifths of the United States opposes raising the debt ceiling. In economic terms, this is like four-fifths of the United States wanting, say, New York City to be blown up with a nuclear bomb; even technical default (e.g. allowing debt to hit the debt ceiling but not defaulting), and the USA’s position as possessor of the world’s reserve community currency1 ends the same day.

Which for me would be pretty awesome because the US dollar would plummet against the loonie and I would be able to buy lots of stuff from Amazon with Canadian pennies, which would suddenly be of incredible value to Americans. Until I lost my job in the inevitable recession that would hit me and everybody else in the world thanks to the USA collapsing, but rest assured that my Amazon shipments would include everything I would need to become the Gyro Captain from The Road Warrior.

1. D’oh! [↩]

I’m liveblogging the Canadian federal election debate over at Torontoist.

Toby S.: What do you think the odds are that the shenanigans unfolding in Wisconsin will have any lasting effect on US internal politics?

About even, I think. It’s still too soon to tell whether the uprising that’s begun in the midwest over anti-union shenanigans is going to have staying power. If it does, you’ll see lasting effect. If it doesn’t, you’ve seen the last gasp of the labour movement until they need to start really rioting again, which should probably come when corporations reintroduce company towns or similar abusive practices – give it twenty or thirty years and it’ll happen.

Menamebephil: What do you think of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’? Do you see it as a workable scheme?

No, not really. I see it as a clever marketing attempt to sell social service cuts. Now, elements of the Big Society idea are workable in certain areas: youth centres, for example, could probably be run primarily on a volunteer basis (if they weren’t already, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that that was the case). You’d need some paid staff, but volunteers could pad out the ranks and make the centers more cost-efficient. But the fact that occasionally there are areas where volunteerism can make for more efficient operation of social services doesn’t make it a universal plan.

Moreover, the fact that a lot of this volunteerism will almost certainly be church- and religious charity-driven makes little economic sense if you think about it, because rather than giving churches a tax break and then asking them to organize social services, you could instead just tax them and pay for it yourself, which would almost certainly be more efficient, but I doubt the Tories are interested in that sort of efficiency.

anthony: a) what will it take to have the green party to elect a member
b) how do you think the regional loggerhead will solve itself
c) how do we prioritize cities in the current canadian political context
d) what will it take to get ignatieff into the pmo

A) The other parties spontaneously dissolving.
B) Massive malfeasance on the part of a given political party that inspires populist outrage nationwide.
C) I have no idea. If anybody else does, let me know.
D) This assumes we want Ignatieff as Prime Minister, you realize. Honestly, I’d almost rather see Gilles Duceppe in there.

Silent g: What are your thoughts on Mayor Flounder 100+ days in?

In a shocking twist, he has turned out to be a stupid joke of a man whose smarter brother is really running the show and everybody knows it. I know: you’re totally surprised!

Magic Love Hose: If you had to recommend one single book on how Canada first implemented its single-payer health care system, which would you recommend?

There isn’t really a definitive history book on the topic, to be honest, mostly because it’s pretty straightforward. The Wikipedia entry gives you most of the basics you need to know.

I was going to do another answering-questions post last night but then some news happened and Torontoist asked me to write about it so I did.

The first thing to look at, before getting down to the strengths and weaknesses of any specific candidates, is just how terrible the 2012 field is for the Republicans overall. When it comes to the Presidency, successful candidates generally come out of sitting government officials (current governors, senators (but only first-term; the longer you spend in the Senate, the more your voting record gets diluted with compromises until your opponents can always find something to attack you with) vice-presidents, or military officials)…since McKinley, only two Presidents have gotten elected without being current office-holders when they started campaigning.

All the sitting Republican governors? They’re staying out of this. (Or at least, they are for now. There is quite a while between now and the election.) My strong suspicion is that they’re not particularly eager to tackle Obama; despite Republican claims that he’s a demonic entity from beyond our universe here to put our grandmothers to death and dragoon our children to study in madrassas, they’re actually lucid enough to realize he’s a popular, savvy campaigner with a good ground game and strong fundraising skills. So the Republican establishment, while they’d take a win if they got it, is not going to put up someone like Chris Christie up against Obama and wind up getting him tarred with the “loser” brush. They’ll save their big guns for 2016, and put a sacrificial candidate up in 2012.

Which means that there are exactly two kinds of people running; people who are too dumb to realize/don’t care that they are a sacrificial candidate, or people whose only chance at any kind of relevance is to run now. I don’t see any of them as having much luck against Obama (although again, there is a while between now and the elections.) But who will take the nomination? Well, let’s look at them one by one!

Mike Huckabee

Strengths: Background as an ordained minister puts him as the front-runner among the religious right; Deputy Dawg-esque appearance and folksy, homespun demeanor lulls people into not noticing what an asshole he is

Weaknesses: Gave clemency to a man who went on to kill four cops, which is a little bit out of step with the “Law and Order” party; looks like he’s about one pair of bib overalls away from a recurring role on “Hee-Haw”; nobody named “Huckabee” ever has a chance of being President ever

Chances: From the sound of things, Huckabee’s smart enough to realize he’s better off sitting this one out; he’s not making much of a move towards campaigning, and he certainly doesn’t need to run to stay in the public spotlight. But he might make a run at it, just to see if he can pick up momentum in Iowa, a state that likes him, and translate it into a strong showing elsewhere.

Mitt Romney

Strengths: Strong fundraising skills; desperately wants to be President; good hair

Weaknesses: Has to explain how his RomneyCare is completely and totally different from ObamaCare while explaining how Obama stole all his ideas; desperately wants to be President; religious affiliation with a group that has, on occasion, talked about how they will “dance on the ashes of our enemies” when they get a Mormon to the Presidency has made some people slightly leery; has difficulty door-knocking due to people pretending not to be home when he shows up, forcing him to just leave his literature for them to read later

Chances: Very good, actually. He’s not particularly well-liked by the Republican establishment, but he’s also not particularly disliked, and he has an aura of respectability to him that a lot of strategic-thinking primary voters will mistake for electability. He won’t win against Obama because he’s got the same problem Hilary Clinton had–his naked hunger for the office turns off voters, who at least like their potential President to pretend like they don’t ache for it.

Sarah Palin

Strengths: There are still a few Republicans dumb/sexist enough to believe that if they vote for her, there’s a chance she might sleep with them

Weaknesses: Most people are beginning to catch on to what a vapid, corrupt, petty, spiteful, intellectually incurious, vindictive, greedy, dimwitted, dishonest, crazy asshole she actually is

Chances: Zero. She’s going to make a token run, because she’s an utter fame-whore and she only has two ways to get on the media’s radar now that she’s no longer an actual politician, and criticizing Obama for everything he says or does is starting to get stale. Running for President extends the timer on her fifteen minutes of fame, but she doesn’t have the organizational skills, establishment connections, or real desire for a sustained run. Expect her to drop out the first time she loses a primary, citing negative remarks about her and a need to protect her children from the harshness of a political campaign.

Newt Gingrich

Strengths: Is as close to an intellectual as a Republican gets; has a Nixonian ability to go for the jugular; believes that like Nixon, he’s been out of politics long enough that people have forgotten why he wound up out of politics

Weaknesses: Has never stood for national office before; has spent so long exclusively in the company of people who agree with him that he doesn’t actually realize that most Americans wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire; is named “Newt” (see “Huckabee”, above)

Chances: Not great. He is popular among Republicans, and he does have a lot of favors he can cash in from the Republican establishment, but his habit of impulsive speech will get him into trouble at least once and remind primary voters of his downsides. Expect him to hang around for a while if he does go for it, though; Newt isn’t one to admit defeat easily.

Ron Paul

Strengths: Actually has strong convictions and an intellectually-coherent position, albeit one that supports child labor, the return of the gold standard and the right of Texas to secede from the United States

Weaknesses: Anti-war candidate in a party that might well beat him to death with a blunt instrument for it before realizing he’s on their side; among people that think of Rush Limbaugh as the Voice of Mainstream America, is kind of viewed as “a little bit out there”

Chances: None and then some. Among the people who love him, he’s very well loved; unfortunately, that’s a very vocal five percent of the Republican party. He tanked in 2008, and I really can’t see him doing better with four more years under his belt. It might not stop him, though; he’s the perfect definition of a sacrificial candidate, someone who runs just for the bigger soapbox and nothing more.

Tim Pawlenty

Strengths: Lack of charisma makes him seem deceptively reasonable; can claim he balanced the budget in Minnesota for eight years without raising taxes, knowing nobody cares enough about Minnesota to find out how he did it

Weaknesses: Couldn’t deliver Minnesota to McCain…in the Republican primary; best known to most Americans as “that guy who let the bridge collapse, right?”

Chances: Low, but not impossible. His habit of tacking hard-right to show his Tea Party credentials makes him seem more “craven and desperate” than “strongly conservative”, but he’s got enough legitimate conservative street cred to avoid seeming like an opportunist like Romney. Which, in a tie between the two “staid white guys with no charisma”, might be enough to pull him ahead.

Donald Trump

Strengths: …hahahahahahahahaha! Oh, you’re serious? Um, he’s rich enough to pay for his own attack ads instead of having to ask big corporations to do it

Weaknesses: The hair; the personality; has no political experience; has no campaigning experience; the hair; has donated as much money to Democrats as to Republicans; like most self-funded candidates, has a platform primarily geared towards restructuring the tax laws in a way that benefits him personally; Americans can’t shake the lingering suspicion that he’s only running so that he can rename the White House “The Trump House”; the hair

Chances: Less than none. I don’t actually expect him to run, to be honest; this is another publicity stunt, like “The Apprentice” or his appearance on WWF Raw or his naming everything after himself. Expect him to drop it after about six weeks.

The CRTC did something bad, but not quite as bad as the other bad things they’ve done recently, so a lot of people didn’t hear about it. I have attempted to correct that at Torontoist.

(re: this.)

Multiple readers have asked that I show support for a democratically elected government in Egypt, and to say that the alternative is not between Hosni Mubarak and Iran II: Radical Islamic Boogaloo. Which is obbviously the case. So here is a pretty decent Youtube making the rounds that sums up a lot of imagery from the Egyptian revolution (does it have a color-coded name yet? Get on that, Egyptians).

Personally, I tend to think that “new Egypt” will probably end up politically resembling Turkey more than anything else, and that would be entirely okay.

Also, the recent CRTC decision to meter internet usage in Canada is bullshit, moneygrubbing of the worst kind. Here is a second Youtube. Featuring George Strombopoulos, who, and I say this as someone who has poked fun at Strombo on a regular basis in the past, is really becoming a national media treasure. The petition of which he speaks is here; if you’re Canadian you should go sign it right now if you have not already.

And if you sat through all that, here is a reward.

(Well, it made me laugh.)

Nobody should realistically blame Sarah Palin for directly causing the incident. Sarah Palin did not pull the trigger; Sarah Palin did not tell the nutbag to pull the trigger; Sarah Palin did not buy the gun.

However, there’s a difference between cause and context, and that’s what those of us trying to talk about Palin’s comments want to discuss. Saying “he was just a nutbag” isn’t sufficient. There are lots of nutbags who do violent things, but Jared Loughner didn’t decide to kill people because he was in a crazy cult (like Squeaky Fromme was) or because he was obsessed with a Hollywood star (like John Hinckley was). Jared Loughner, like most of the major violent newsmaking incidents of the past few years, decided to go kill people because he felt, like most paranoids do (and he’s pretty obviously paranoid) that Somebody Was Out To Get Him.

But most paranoids don’t go out killing people; the tinfoil hats and hoarding is usually enough to get them by. So what happened with Jared Loughner? The same thing that happened with Andrew Stack when he flew his plane into an IRS building, or Byron Williams when he decided he had to go shoot up the Tides Federation and the ACLU, or James von Brunn when he shot up the Holocaust Museum, or Jim Adkisson when he decided to shoot up a Unitarian Church, or Richard Poplawski when he shot up a bunch of cops, or Nidal Hasan when he shot up Fort Hood.

I threw that last one in there in purpose, because back when Nidal Hasan – somebody who was obviously mentally disturbed – committed his crime, there were no shortage of people who were willing to say that radical Islam influenced his actions even if he was a nutbag. Now, this is not to say that Sarah Palin is equivalent to Osama Bin Laden; of course she isn’t. Bin Laden is a terrorist; Palin is just a generally terrible human being.

But she, and more importantly the modern conservative movement, uses the violent rhetoric of uprise and uses it routinely. This cannot be denied because it is plainly obvious on its face. “Don’t retreat, reload” did not become her catchphrase for nothing. Sharron Angle talking about how if conservatives lose at the polls they should consider resorting to “Second Amendment remedies.” Carrying signs that say things like “we came unarmed – this time,” or alternately just bringing a gun right to a political event period1. Glenn Beck talking for hours at a time about how the government is being put to evil, tyrannical ends, and how it’s important for Americans to “rise up” or “not take it any more” or “[insert intentionally nonspecific assertion of brave action here]”.

This is not to say that Jared Loughner is conservative; most likely he is just too crazy and fringe to really be anything, much like Stack or or even Williams.2 But he, like the others, was receiving a steady diet of rhetoric that was violent, at times even slightly eliminationist.

As for Poplawski and van Brunn, they were white supremacists, which – historical connotations aside – doesn’t really have that much to do with modern conservatism, ideologically speaking.3 But over the last few years, movement conservatism has been visibly borrowing rhetoric from the paranoid camp of white supremacism. Not racist stuff, let’s be clear; paranoid stuff.

Government as inherent tyranny; liberal institutions as ground for secret conspiracies; the almost certainly incipient charge of the black helicopters. And, of course, the desperate labeling of a health care bill so blandly middle-of-the-road and centrist it was probably drafted with mayonnaise rather than ink as “a government takeover of healthcare” and “death panels” and etc. etc. etc. If you’re a paranoid, you already think that THEY are out to GET YOU. If you’re told, over and over again, that THEY is “this specific bunch of people,” sometimes it starts to sink in. That paranoid rhetoric has been chanted, like a mantra, by the modern conservative movement. It’s not the cause for Jared Loughner’s actions; it’s the context.

I get that conservatives don’t want to talk about context right now. After all, it’s rather uncomfortable when this sort of thing is so obvious on its face – just as it was obvious that when Nidal Hasan shot up Fort Hood that, although he was a nutbag and that was most of the reason he went on a rampage, being exposed to the worst kind of violent Islamic rhetoric didn’t help.

And Palin knows it, which is the sad thing: she knows exactly what she did and why. I mean for crissake Sarah Palin’s staff is reduced to pretending that the gun sights on that map were surveyor’s symbols, that’s how desperate they are to try and find any excuse at all for their tone now that it’s possibly gone south on them and people are saying “hey, maybe this isn’t appropriate,” and incidentally when Team Palin says things like that I don’t know why their supporters don’t realize that they’re really saying “you are idiots for giving us money and moral support, you really are, that’s what we think of you,” but that is neither here nor there.

But context matters. Why things like this happened, and have happened before, and will continue to happen in the future – these things matter, because now there is a respected federal judge and a man who shoved his wife down and took her bullet and a nine-year-old girl who are dead. Dismissing this as the act of one nutbag, as random chance, equivalent to a strike of lightning? Moral cowardice, plain and simple.

1. In a show of maturity that’s on par with walking around with your cock hanging out of your pants. [↩]
2. Adkisson, I think, can safely be described as conservative. [↩]
3. This is not to say that there is not overlap. There is. Pretending otherwise is just bullshit. But conservatism, in and of itself, does not have anything really tangibly in common with white supremacism. [↩]

The “room” in the title is a metaphor for American politics. I don’t intend to try to trick anyone into believing that there’s actually a large African mammal trampling my DVDs, or anything. And sure, that sounds like it’s obvious, but I still feel the need to clarify the point because the metaphorical elephant (which is very real, as opposed to the real elephant, which is actually imaginary) of American politics is that one of the two political parties controlling our nation is, well…crazy. Batshit crazy. Pants-crapping crazy. Crazy enough to believe that there’s a literal elephant in my room, and that it was put there by the Federal government crazy. Not even “crazy” in the usual, everyday sense, but in the clinical diagnosis sense. The Republicans have gone insane, and we can’t possibly fix our country until we start talking, on a national level, about the elephant in the room.

Now there are some who might not believe me. We should start with the evidence. And believe me, there are any number of juicy pieces of evidence to choose from, but I think we can start with the simplest one–the Republicans in Congress are currently claiming that we can’t possibly devote $12 billion to extending unemployment benefits, because we don’t have the money in the budget to pay for it and we have to balance the budget, while simultaneously claiming that we can’t possibly let the Bush tax cuts expire, because it’s worth going deeper into debt to give millionaires and billionaires a $700 billion tax break. These are not positions that can be held at the same time by any kind of rational human being.

And the more the Republicans try to insist that they are, the clearer the evidence of their insanity gets, because the rationales they cite are wrong. Demonstrably, provably wrong–tax breaks to millionaires don’t promote job growth (if they did, would we have lost 8 million jobs since the tax breaks were enacted?) and they don’t stimulate the economy (unemployment benefits do, actually, because the poor have to spend every dime they get and can’t save anything, while the rich can just toss that money on the pile.) These people are trying to argue a policy that’s incoherent by citing rationales that are incoherent. They refuse to acknowledge reality when reality conflicts with their belief system, and if that isn’t a textbook definition of insanity, it’s close enough for everyday life.

When did it happen? I’d like to say it was with Reagan. He’s certainly the patron saint of the current Republican party, but on looking back, Reagan tempered his policies with some actual common sense. Yes, he did lower taxes, raise spending, and try to deficit-finance America to greatness…but he did seem to have some understanding of the fact that it couldn’t be sustained indefinitely, and he was even willing to raise taxes when he had no other alternatives. Under the current Republican ideology, this makes him a RINO. (Eisenhower, who had a top tax rate of 90%, who pulled us out of Korea and refused to get us into Vietnam, and who created the Federal Interstate Highway System, would be considered a Communist.) As much as I’d like to believe that it began with the man who said, “The government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,” it really began with the people who divorced that quote from all context and turned it into a mantra.

No, I’d date the Republican Party’s descent into insanity to 1992, and the election of Clinton. First, losing a national election had some pretty bad effects on the Republican psyche to begin with; they’d been looking forward to an unbroken run of Republican hegemony stretching out into the 21st century, and to be beaten by some lecherous hillbilly from Arkansas and a crazy billionaire from Texas (remember, this was 1992, before all the crazy billionaires became Republican role models) was a lot to take. At the same time, this election made them the minority party, and there’s some truth to the notion that you can be a lot crazier in politics if you don’t actually have the responsibility to implement your ideas.

Then, of course, they did, as 1994 swept the Republicans into power in Congress. And that’s where the real crazy started. Because the Republicans had had, at that point, two years to come up with their plans to save the nation. Two bitter, angry years where their discussions fermented in the toxic atmosphere of talk radio and frustration over the ’92 losses, and came out as a mix of “government is the problem” and “whatever they’re for, we’re against” and “we just have too many not-True Americans in this country these days!” And then they had to go to Congress and try to implement those ill-considered schemes. And of course, they didn’t work. Because they were, well…a little bit crazy.

But there’s this curious phenomenon to human behavior called “cognitive dissonance”. We don’t like to be wrong. We hate it, in fact. The more deeply held a belief, the more we’ll cling to it in spite of the evidence, simply because we’ve tied our whole ego to the idea and we’re terrified of what it says about us that we were suckered that thoroughly. And nobody ties their ego to an ideology like a politician. The more obvious it became that the Republican philosophy of “less government, more free-market solutions” was a recipe for disaster, the harder they pushed it and the less dissent they allowed from it within their own party. Bush Jr’s eight years of power, where he had the Oval Office, the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, and the goodwill of the American people on his side, and wound up losing 8 million jobs, transforming a budget surplus into the largest deficit in the history of the human race, and allowing the first attack on US soil since the War of 1812, should really have been the stake in the heart of the old Republican philosophy–a transformative event. Instead, they’ve doubled down on doing everything just like Bush did it. The flying saucers didn’t come this year, but they’ll certainly show up next year.

At this point, it’s impossible to govern in tandem with the Republicans, because it’s impossible to have a rational discussion when only one side is rational. If I say that we need to rebuild our nation’s highway system, and you say that we need to tax the Tooth Fairy to do that because the bitch is obviously loaded if she can afford to give away all those quarters, we’re clearly not going to get anywhere. Bipartisan compromise is impossible, because it’s not like we can agree to only get half our funding from the Tooth Fairy’s stash. What is needed, in essence, is to vote the Republicans out of power, and let them consume themselves in the way all cult movements eventually do: Bickering, in-fighting, perpetual purity purges, and a slow, sad awakening to the failure of a philosophy they’ve tied themselves to. (There are sometimes mass suicides involved, but let’s hope that doesn’t happen.) Only when we see the Republicans admitting that they’ve been completely wrong about everything they’ve said in the last three decades can we hope to get politics on a saner track in America. Until then, the Republican party just can’t be trusted to govern. In fact, I wouldn’t trust them with anything more complicated than a pet taxi and a piece of string.

My money is on Julian Assange, but I can also see a case for it being Barack Obama, Glenn Beck, or Jerzy Buzek. But Time likes to throw dorky curveballs with Person of the Year too, so you get things like “You” (god, that was such a lame presentation of what was accurate identification of an important trend) or “The Whistleblowers” or “the Good Samaritans.”

So – thoughts?