The Republicans Have All The Ideas!

From Reagan's Mourning in America to Gingrich's Contract on America to the Cult of Bush and his Killer Clowns, through the whole of my adult life I have endlessly heard Movement Republicanism extolled by the Gatekeepers of corporate broadcast media and elite print and the punditocracy as the "Party of Ideas."

In almost every case these "Ideas" consisted of the application of neoliberal "free market" pieties -- backed by guns -- to literally every imaginable problem. The Clinton White House -- traumatizied, I guess, by the triumph of these stunning Ideas, or maybe just taking them for granted, too -- scarcely strayed from the same market fundamentalist script.

Just to be clear, these "Ideas" almost always amounted to variations of:

ONE: "Looting government at home + miracle = ENDLESS PROFIT!" and

TWO: "Bombing governments abroad + miracle = DEMOCRACY EVERYWHERE!"

It's really hard sometimes to shake the impression that those who say these things and mean them are almost unfathomably stupid, and those who know better and say them anyway are almost unfathomably evil.