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There’s flip-flopping, and then there’s this. Pheeew.

But in all fairness to John McCain, the disconnect runs deeper in the GOP. How do you premise your entire economic platform on keeping government’s dirty mitts off our sacred financial institutions, then insist the government bail them out when they inevitably succumb to the too-predictable consequences of unchecked, boneheaded, myopic greed? How to reconcile the yawning discrepancy between these two postures? Let me give it a shot…

Everybody knows that free markets are identical with freedom and state planned economies are evil. Taking over an entire industry is about the most evil thing a government can do, but only when that industry is successful. See, when a foreign government dares to nationalize a critical economic resource — let’s say oil — because its private owners — who, just for fun, let’s postulate have their home offices on Wall Street — have failed to handle that national resource in a way that sustains that nation’s economy or benefits its people… well, that’s bad. Real bad. We go to war over stuff like that when other people do it.

But when our own financial institutions get into trouble, the government has to take control in order to right the ship. Otherwise, the economy would suffer! It may seem unfair to expect taxpayers to bail out companies that do stupid, evil things that ultimately lead to their own undoing. But things will be even worse if we don’t. It’s all about the public good!

And so you see, it’s not that Republicans are against government oversight of private enterprise. On the contrary, when the shit happens they advocate the same policies as guys like Hugo Chavez. It’s just that they draw a key distinction between assets and liabilities: when a business is successful, hands off! As long as somebody somewhere can theoretically be making money off it, any form of government intervention would be oppressive. BUT, the moment that moneymaking enterprise ceases to make money and instead creates problems, it’s on the rest of us to dig the moneymakers out of the hole they have dug for us all.

I hope that clears up any confusion. You may now resume voting Republican on the principle that they’re good with money.

OK, so conservatives keep proving their impressive talent for fiction, so how come their attempts at self-expression are always so pathetic?  How come they can’t come up with a single novel, film, or TV show that isn’t just completely worthless?  I’m really stumped.

two likely long-term political outcomes of the 2008 flood occurred to me while in the midst of sandbagging last week:

one, a lot more people are going to be open to the idea of global climate change after this summer. two 500-year floods fifteen years apart should be enough to convince even the most willfully ignorant skeptics that, at a minimum, something is up.

two, there’s vast political capital to be reaped by whoever is smart enough to grasp the magnitude of the disaster and respond accordingly. unlike louisiana, a state where democrats lost influence with the post-katrina exodus of african americans, there will be no diaspora here. instead, as is often the case in situations where normal life has been turned upside-down, the potential for change — and people’s appetite for it — are at a peak. the conventional strategies and demographic calculations that used to keep populations divided and neatly contained within predictable voting blocs are falling apart faster than a poorly constructed levee.

in the last week i’ve seen iowa city hippies working side-by-side with mormon and baptist missionaries, farmers holding bags for college professors to fill, black folks showing up to stack sandbags in exclusively white neighborhoods. it’s funny how little it resembles the red/blue america we’ve been told we were living in. the more people get outside, meet their neighbors, engage with them in common cause, the less interested they become in the old ideological wedges and abstractions: those who pitch in to help are friends, those who obstruct and drag their feet are not.

as george bush arrives in eastern iowa today, more than a week after the need for help was greatest, nobody is particularly pleased to see him. nobody that i talked to was much impressed by michael chertoff’s mealymouthed, empty platitudes after last week’s tornadoes either. but barack obama filling sandbags across the river in quincy makes an impression:

even if it is a staged photo-op, it’s clear from his remarks that obama has at least spent enough time in the affected areas to have some idea what its like for people there, and more importantly, to understand the feeling in the air and the fluidity (no pun intended) of the political situation. that’s one reason why stories like this one are happening all over the region.

and where’s john mccain? who the hell knows, or cares? people here have been too busy to watch or read anything but local news. nobody’s paying attention to mccain or his 20th-century-style campaign. until he actually shows his face here, he’s a nonentity.

meanwhile, bleeding heartland reports on some iowa GOP bloggers who are objecting to state & federal flood relief on the grounds that it’s politically beneficial to democrats. i’ll give them this much: it’s true that actually, y’know, doing the work of government likely redounds to the benefit of those politicians who are doing it. but convening a special legislative session to address the worst natural disaster in our state’s history, they complain, constitutes pandering to special interests — in this case, the people of iowa. this, ladies and gentlemen, is the legacy of the bush presidency, in which nobody ever lifted a finger to help anyone but GOP cronies. from a post-bush republican mindset, any meaningful action whatsoever is only comprehensible as political payoff — why else would you bother?

so, my fondest hope for 2008 is that iowa republicans campaign hard on this theme, that democrats are only pushing the relief effort because they want your vote — as if rewarding effective leadership and punishing incompetence and venality weren’t the whole reason we vote in the first place.

From the C-SPAN homepage:

Pres. Bush’s request for Iraq war supplemental funds was defeated 141-149, with 132 Republican members voting “Present.” 

Those special-election losses that keep adding up for the GOP must have them really scared if they don’t even have the balls to endorse their President’s budget. But voting against it would just be too strong a statement, apparently.