Monday Open Thread [12.22.14]

The bailouts made significant profits for the Federal Government. We learned last week in the President’s press conference that the auto bailout loans were all paid back and the U.S. government made a profit of $15 billion. Now we learn that the government ultimately made a $22.7 billion profit on baling out A.I.G. too. The bailout loans (I am not calling them bailouts alone because that implies handouts were given and not paid back) were mighty unpopular, but they were the correct policy.

“He’s going down a checklist of thorny, longstanding problems, and he’s doing whatever he can to tackle them. These are things that have been tearing at us for decades and generations. My sense is his feeling is, I’m not going to leave office without doing everything I can to stop them.” — David Axelrod, quoted by the New York Times, on President Obama’s recent actions.

Jonathan Chait examines the pro-torture mindset. He contends that “admiration for the methods used by totalitarian states is … embedded in the torture program created by the Bush administration.” It explains their evilness, and also their admiration for Vladimir Putin.

Three decades ago, right-wing French intellectual Jean-François Revel published a call to arms entitled How Democracies Perish, which quickly became a key text of the neoconservative movement and an ideological blueprint for the Reagan administration. Revel argued that the Soviet Union’s brutality and immunity from internal criticism gave it an inherent advantage over the democratic West — the United States and Europe were too liberal, too open, too humane, too soft to defeat the resolute men of the Iron Curtain.

“Unlike the Western leadership, which is tormented by remorse and a sense of guilt,” wrote Revel, “Soviet leaders’ consciences are perfectly clear, which allows them to use brute force with utter serenity both to preserve their power at home and to extend it abroad.” Even though Revel’s prediction that the Soviet Union would outlast the West was falsified within a few years, conservatives continue to tout its wisdom. And even as Revel’s name has faded further into the backdrop, recent events have revealed the continuing influence of his ideas.

So these fascists (and that is what they are) looked at the Soviet Union, which they supposedly hated so much because they were communist, as compared to Western Democratic Civilization, and they admired the Soviet Union. Because they admired the fascism. They admired the police state. They admired the lack of dissent. The lack of chaos always present in a free society.

Kevin Drum takes a look at what the President’s recent moves mean for next year:

All of these things are worthwhile in their own right, of course, but there’s a political angle to all of them as well: they seriously mess with Republican heads. GOP leaders had plans for January, but now they may or may not be able to do much about them. Instead, they’re going to have to deal with enraged tea partiers insisting that they spend time trying to repeal Obama’s actions. They can’t, of course, but they have to show that they’re trying. So there’s a good chance that they’ll spend their first few months in semi-chaos, responding to Obama’s provocations instead of working on their own agenda.

Case in point: Congressional Republicans are now going to have to spend significant time and energy in a Cold War battle with Obama over Cuba policy–one that is likely to end in failure, and that appeals only to a sliver of the U.S. population.

After all the interminable stuff we heard in 2014 about the Great Big Adult Republicans getting control over the unruly Tea Folk, I think we’ll find that Boehner and McConnell aren’t going to easily restrain conservatives with so much chum in the water. The provocation to a feeding frenzy is just becoming way too overpowering.

Greg Sargent also makes the case that Obama’s actions are laying the groundwork for a 2016 campaign that places the Democratic candidate (Hillary Clinton) on the right side of history and looking toward the future, and the Republican candidates on the wrong side and stuck in the past.