Matthew Yglesias: Coming to Terms With the Welfare State: The argument here is that Republican conservatives should admit what the UK Conservative Party freely concedes: that they support at least some parts of the modern welfare state and won't do anything to dismantle them. Yglesias mentions FDIC as one example, which is about as non-controversial as he can get. Doing that much would take the Grover Norquist shrink-and-drown-the-government principle off the table.

[O]ne key difference is that you almost never see anyone on the American right actively affirm belief in even a bare-bones welfare state or basic regulation. Conservative governance doesn't evince an actual desire to fully dismantle this stuff. But when conservatives get abstract, or out of power, you get a lot of stuff from Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg and some of the Cato people and so forth all about The Road to Serfdom or the totalitarian implications of the school lunch program.

Yglesias cites a book review by David Frum, who established his conservative bona fides in his "axis of evil" speech where he tried to will World War III into being, but he's been back-pedalling since then, trying to find some terra firma to launch his fantasies from. Problem is, most conservatives are happier living in an imaginary world where simple principles rule and inconvenient facts can be ignored. Conservative politicians may privately concede that there are government programs -- even welfare programs -- that they can't kill outright, but the party ideological apparatus isn't constrained by such practicalities. Moreover, the politicians don't insist that they do. Even when they recognize that a pet cause is politically hopeless, they're happy to to disguise it as something else, like casting accelerated logging as the Healthy Forests initiative. They may understand that politically they can't kill Social Security, yet they still try to palm off destructive programs by claiming that they are needed to "save" Social Security.

Sticking to their hardcore anti-government principles makes even more sense when they're out of power. When Bush was in the White House, Republicans had to be schizophrenic over government power and spending, even to the point of supporting deficits to pay for political plunder. Now they're free to be as anti-deficit as possible, at least without breaking their no-tax-increase pledges. But attitude runs deeper than that. Virtually every success the Republicans have enjoyed going back at least as far as Nixon was based on fear and loathing, which they refined to the point where it consumed them. Their ability to focus all that rage on the Democrats is what built them the base they have, and it's all the base they're going to have for a long time now. So why should they be reasonable and make Obama look good? Their only hope is to get Obama to fail, then to get a majority of Americans to blame Obama for that failure. They've pulled tougher con jobs in the past, so why not this one? It's not like they have any other options, or any other ideas. In appealing to the dumbest and meanest America has to offer, that's what they've settled into.

Matthew Yglesias: Blaming the Victim for Health Reform Difficulties: For example, what are the Republicans doing with health care reform?

What we have here is a Democratic president advocating for some tough reforms that will reduce public expenditures over the long run. Those reforms will be hard to implement. And one reason they'll be hard to implement is that, as Ezra Klein notes, conservative politicians who ought to be the core constituency for endeavors to slow the growth of Medicare costs seem more interested in drawing blood from Obama than in slowing the growth of government.

Another example, from another Yglesias post:

There is, for example, simply no way to dispute the fact that other developed countries with national health care systems also have more efficient health care systems. There's maybe a credible argument to be made that the United States couldn't realize those efficiencies, but no serious person can maintain that they don't exist. And yet here's John McCain saying "the idea that somehow the government can administer health care in a more efficient fashion than the private sector I think flies in the face of examples of other countries that have done so."

He went unchallenged on this assertion because in America "everyone knows" that government is inefficient and "everyone knows" that foreign countries are bad.

Actually, McCain's assertion can be disproved by what the US has already done in the areas where the government actually runs health care: compare Medicare vs. private insurance, or the VA vs. private for-profit providers.

Of course, McCain doesn't have to do that, because he's sticking to the anti-government, anti-Obama, anti-everything script. It's a bluff, but who's calling him on it? It's the sort of bluff that Bush ran for eight increasingly disastrous years. Even after the results came in and his popularity went down the toilet, who called him on it? That is why the Republicans think they can get away with what they're doing.

The single most important thing that Obama has to do as president is to push significant health care reform through. It's much more important than saving the banks from mass hara-kiri by fraud, saving the planet from global warming, or dialing back the ridiculous global American empire. It's more immediately necessary than turning back the tide of jingoistic stupidity that dominates the political media these days -- although doing something on health care will start to do double duty there. I recall -- not sure when but early 1990s are a good guess -- when it was scandalous that health care chewed up 12% of US GDP. That figure is up to 17% now. It's a cancer whereby a few greedy private interests are devouring the economy, filling our lives with uncertainty and fear. That this is an issue in doubt testifies to the overwhelming power of money in politics: that 17% is a huge vested interest (double the size of the military-industrial complex, roughly the size of the banks, just to give you two points for political influence comparison).

One thing I expected the Democrats to move more proactively on is to start taking the big money out of politics. They may figure that as the top dogs now this is no time to get out of the game, but the game itself is what corrupts American politics so utterly.