Ezra Klein takes an interesting column from Paul Krugman on Demoracts and the Deficit and jumps to an entirely inccorrect conclusion about deficits, arguing like Kemp and Cheney, that deficits do not matter. that is simply wrong.

First, Krugman's point:

Now that the Democrats have regained some power, they have to decide what to do. One of the biggest questions is whether the party should return to Rubinomics — the doctrine, associated with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that placed a very high priority on reducing the budget deficit.

The answer, I believe, is no. Mr. Rubin was one of the ablest Treasury secretaries in American history. But it’s now clear that while Rubinomics made sense in terms of pure economics, it failed to take account of the ugly realities of contemporary American politics.

And the lesson of the last six years is that the Democrats shouldn’t spend political capital trying to bring the deficit down. They should refrain from actions that make the deficit worse. But given a choice between cutting the deficit and spending more on good things like health care reform, they should choose the spending.

In a saner political environment, the economic logic behind Rubinomics would have been compelling. Basic fiscal principles tell us that the government should run budget deficits only when it faces unusually high expenses, mainly during wartime. In other periods it should try to run a surplus, paying down its debt.

I get Krugman's point. To wit, when Democrats bring down the deficit and create surpluses the Republicans take all that hard work and then give away tax breaks to the extremely wealthy. And that is obviously what happened in the last 6 years.

But that does not mean deficits do not matter. More.

The continuing faux-negotiations of our Lefty wonks with Libertarians is an interesting exercise but it does suffer from a fatal flaw in my view - our Lefty wonks are attributing ideological rigidity to liberal policy prescriptions that simply does not and has never existed. To be a liberal DOES NOT mean being for big government programs, state intervention and single payer healthcare as a matter of ideology. Rather to be a liberal is to to have a set of values and objectives for which good policies to achieve those values and objectives are sought. The policies need not involve state intervention - they need only work. Here is an example of what I believe is this flawed thinking. Ezra writes:

Ryan Sager writes:

Democrats gained with libertarian voters in 2006, without alienating other major voting blocs. This at least puts a dent in the idea that no one can offer anything to libertarians without sending the rest of the electorate screaming from the room like a call girl from Milton Berle.

This seems...wrong. Did Democrats actually offer anything in 2006? I mean, sure, a minimum wage increase and governmental power to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, but is that really the sort of concessions Sager is hoping for? Or did 2006 prove that offering an end, or at least a check, to a buffoonish war attracts voters of all stripes?

Actually Democrats DID offer a different set of values and priorities to the country. They did contrast what values and objectives are important to them as compared to the values and objectives of the Republicans. Some called it Populism. Some called it the Common Good. But it was an important message sent and really, while wonks and the Beltway Elite like to act as if specific policy proposals are the basis of voter choices (this is especially true during Presidential primaries, when the Media and wonks pore over in great detail competing tax plans and the like as if these can ever mean more than a statement of a candidate's values and priorities). Indeed, it is a flaw seen in much Democratic political thinking.

Our Lefty wonks have turned an interesting political exercise into yet another battle of the plans. To me the politics, not the policies, remains the more interesting part of this discussion. More on the flip.

Dick Cheney denies he shot and killed the deer, but what is it doing on his lawn? Wonkette explains.

The NY Daily News has more.

[Hat tip reader Scribe.]

Last week, Karl Rove gave a speech on foreign policy at the annual Churchill Dinner sponsored by Hillsdale College at the Mayflower Hotel.

Via Lexis.com (subscription only), which has a copy of his speech, in answer to a question about redistricting, which he criticized, he said:

....I say this as a former political consultant who liked competitive races when I was in the business. I won't be returning to the business.

The Evans and Novak Report says this means Rove is retiring from politics when Bush's term ends.

A followup to this discussion. In realtime, Bob Somerby and I had similar reactions to Rahm Emanuel appearance with George Stephanapoulos:

Meanwhile, we chuckled a bit when we stopped by The Lake and read this post about Rahm Emanuel. In the following exchange on Sunday’s This Week, Rahm gave a classic non-denial denial when asked if he had known about Foley’s misconduct:

STEPHANOPOULOS (10/8/06): All week long, there have been suggestions by—on talk radio and by Republicans and their allies that this was perhaps a Democratic dirty trick. And I just want to ask you plainly, did you or your staff know anything about these e-mails or instant messages before they came out?

EMANUEL: George, never saw them. And I'm going to say one thing, let's go through the facts right here.

PUTNAM: But were you aware of them? Didn't have to see them.

Glenn Greenwald, a very fine blogger, is over the top and I think wrong when he accuses Rahm Emanuel of lying about FoleyGate. Glenn's argument goes as follows:

Did Rahm Emanuel explicitly and clearly lie during his October appearance on ABC?

Emanuel would likely say that he did not "lie," because each time he was asked whether he was "aware" of the e-mails -- which he plainly was -- he never denied being "aware" of them. Instead -- he would likely argue -- he changed the subject by denying that he ever "saw" the e-mails, a fact which appears (based on what we know) to be true (or at least not demonstrably false). Therefore, in the narrowest and most technical way, an argument could be constructed that Emanuel did not actually "lie" in his responses.

But that argument, ultimately, is nonsense. If you listen to the video, there is little doubt that Emanuel was lying in every meaningful sense of that word. He not only denied having "seen" the e-mails, but also interrupted Stephanapolous's first question about whether he was "aware" of the e-mails with an emphatic "no," and at least on one other occasion, denied not only having seen the e-mails, but also having been aware of them. Those denials were just outright false (i.e., "lies").

Absolutely not. In every meaningful sense of the word, Emanuel ducked the question in order to not lie. Ducking the question is not lying Glenn. It is really surprising to me to read a lawyer write those words. Witnesses duck and avoid questions all the time. UNDER OATH. In any meaningful sense, Glenn has misstated the meaning of lying. Emanuel expressly said he had not SEEN the e-mails. An obvious signal to anyone thinking here. What would a good questioner have asked as a followup? To me it is obvious - did you ever HEAR of the POSSIBILITY of the existence of such e-mails? From whom? What were you told? But Glenn plays the ingenue here for some reason. It is poorly done by him.

More.

By a vote of 95 to 2, Robert Gates was confirmed Wednesday as our new Defense Secretary.

Senate Democrats and Republicans lauded Gates's frankness after a day of testimony Tuesday in which he acknowledged that the United States is not winning in Iraq, and said that historians would have to judge whether the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 was correct. He also pledged to take a fresh approach to Iraq in which "all options are on the table."

Who voted against him? Two Republicans, Jim Bunning (Ky.) and Rick Santorum (Pa.)

VP Dick Cheney's daughter Mary is pregnant. The co-parent is her long-time partner, Heather Poe.

I'm sure Dick and Lynn will say they are delighted and looking forward to grand-parenting their sixth grandchild.

Good for Mary and Heather. Since they now live in Virginia which has banned both gay marriage and civil unions, I hope they make time to lobby for equal rights. It sounds, however, like they are embracing a more traditional lifestyle where one parent works for the bucks while the other attends to the home.

Cheney, 37, was a key aide to her father during the 2004 reelection campaign and now is vice president for consumer advocacy at AOL. Poe, 45, a former park ranger, is renovating their Great Falls home.

Chris Bowers has an important post up about the need for Democrats to understand the power of words, especially their own:

Left-wing strawmen . . . developed and perpetuated by the conservative movement over the last thirty years as a means of tarnishing the entire left with those stereotypes. The stereotypes were used not to depict fringe left-wing positions, but rather to try and identify anyone who identified as a liberal, a progressive, or even as a Democrat with those positions. Bill Clinton is a good example of this. He governed absolutely as a centrist, but was still identified by the right with every single one of those stereotypes. The right-wing does not use these stereotypes to help the vast majority of Democrats seem reasonable compared to a fringe left, but to make the entire left the equivalent of the fringe left, no matter how much any individual Democrat, liberal or progressive sought to distance himself or herself from those stereotypes. Bill Clinton will be hit just as badly, if not worse, than use crazy, military-hating, religion-hating, extremist, vulgar, anti-American, overly partisan bloggers. When wielded by someone outside the left, these stereotypes serve no other purpose than to tarnish the entire left, and to give the right power over the left. Whenever anyone on the right or in the established media brings up those stereotypes, then that is the exact purpose that person is serving. Whenever anyone who is implicated in those stereotypes--Democrats, progressives and liberals--wields them in public and is not joking, I fail to see how that person is not doing exactly the same thing. . . . It . . . helps make those brutally unfair stereotypes and strawmen real, because conservatives can point to yet another Democrat, liberal to progressive who has validated whatever ridiculous invective that was being used.

Democratic stars like Barack Obama especially must avoid doing this in my view. For two reasons. One, it harms the Democratic Party and its objectives. Two, it does not work to the benefit of the Democrat trying to curry favor. More on the flip.

This is a pleasant surprise from Tom Edsall, a column that has some good insights on both Democrats and Republicans. First on the Democrats and something very smart that Rahm Emanuel said:

Representative Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic Caucus chairman, pointed out that 16 of the seats the party won in November were suburban or exurban. He contended that the election marked the emergence of a new “metropolitan” populism, “a revolt of the center against the Rovian model of polarization politics.” In Emanuel’s view, “Prescription drugs, gas prices and economic populism are no longer associated with blue-collar downscale voters. Office park workers can be just as populist as industrial workers — they are struggling under rising college and health care costs too. They resent giveaways to H.M.O.s; they don’t want subsidies to oil companies when oil is 68 bucks a barrel. We are going to deal with the oil royalty issue, and we can cut the interest rates for student loans.”

This is a critical insight - populism now extends beyond the lower working class. To Broder, this would mean independent centrism when in fact it is broadbased populism and rejection of Republicanism. More.

John Bolton has resigned. Even he knew the votes weren't there.

NOTE: I published this piece last year.

There is a passage in Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum that has always had a great resonance for me, as a companion piece to Richard Hofstader's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." I think, as edited, it can be understood without intimate knowledge of the plot:

To invent a Plan. The Plan justifies you to such a degree that you can no longer be held accountable, not even for the Plan itself. Just throw the stone and hide your hand. If there really were a Plan, there would be no failure. You never had Cecilia because the Archons made Annibale Canta-lamessa and Pio Bo unskilled even with the friendliest of the brass instruments. You fled the Canal gang because the Decans wanted to spare you for another holocaust. And the man with the scar has a talisman more powerful than yours.

A Plan, a guilty party. The dream of our species. An Deus sit. If He exists, it's His fault. The thing whose address I lost is not the End, it's the Beginning. Not the object to be possessed but the subject that possesses me. Misery loves company. Misery, company, too many dactyls. Nothing can dispel from my mind the most reassuring thought that this world is the creation of a shadowy god whose shadow I prolong. Faith leads to Absolute Optimism.