One of the things I love about the journalist Kurt Eichenwald is he is never afraid to just grab conservatives by the throat and rip out their windpipes. And boy, while so many journalists are spending their day navel-gazing, did Eichenwald do some ripping. It is the best series of arguments to use against your crazy uncle or even your sane next door neighbor.
In this piece over in Vanity Fair, Eichenwald starts off a brutal attack asking the simple question "Are conservatives ever right?"
Unsurprisingly, in an article loaded with facts and figures, the answer is no.
The basic point of the piece is that conservatives are more interested in being right then in listening to what experts tell them and the result of that is that decades of their ideas have proven to be disasters. After mentioning how the takeover of Congress means that Republicans can now try to put out their ideas, Eichenwald cautions this could mean more trouble.
Conservative know-nothings dismiss the professionals as know-nothings themselves, despite their training and expertise. And that could be the problem. Too often, it seems, conservatives have scorned experts as incompetent, biased, or otherwise worth ignoring because they came up with answers that didn’t fit their politically desired answer.
Before he begins the litany of examples, he writes "there is not a lot in the last three decades to give conservatives bragging rights, and with almost every fiasco, they blame someone else.''
What's wonderful is that then he tells what the Republicans what would happen because of a a particular policy, how it proved to be a complete failure or they were completely wrong, and then who they blamed for their idiocy. He goes all the way back to Reagan and through Obama.
Among the examples, tax cuts pay for themselves, deregulating the thrift industry will save it, deregulating the banks will bring economic success, tilting policy toward Iraq, sending arms to Iran, WMDs in Iraq, raising taxes would cause a recession, Bin Laden was a front for Iraq, Obamacare wouldn't work, and more.
I follow Eichenwald on twitter, where today he also keeps mentioning abstinence only education but I can't find it in the piece. I wish he had included that because that is something that really makes me mad.
Then near the end are words that just made me sit up and cheer.
What matters here, though, is not that conservatives have been reckless in the past. It is that ignoring expert opinion is a fatal flaw, one that has proven to do immense damage to this country—financial catastrophes, arming enemies, bloody wars, and the like....There is, a confidence that borders on arrogance that has repeatedly led to disaster. Add to that the constant refrain of “liberal bias,” which has proven to be a crutch conservatives use as a substitute for putting fingers in their ears and singing, “La-la-la.”
Seriously, if the midterms are getting you down, go read this
piece. It is a reminder of what we are fighting against, which is a group of people who couldn't get a thing right because they are so convinced they are infallible.