Righties never betray their own principles, because they don’t have any principles. The closest thing they’ve got to a principle is the knee-jerk, Pavlovian opposition to anything that can be labeled “liberal,” “progressive” or “democratic,” either capitalized or not.

I bring this up because Paul Krugman writes,

The truth is that conservatives who predict economic doom if we try to fight climate change are betraying their own principles. They claim to believe that capitalism is infinitely adaptable, that the magic of the marketplace can deal with any problem. But for some reason they insist that cap and trade — a system specifically designed to bring the power of market incentives to bear on environmental problems — can’t work.

You know that the teabagbots who wave “down with cap and tax” signs at town hall meetings couldn’t explain what the “cap and trade” program is even if you gave them the Cliff’s notes and a half hour to study them. The truth is that the cap and trade model is probably the most conservative (in the dictionary sense of the word) and business-friendly means anyone has come up with to bring down carbon emissions. It challenges industries to come up with their own solutions and then rewards innovation and results.

As I see it, the alternatives are (1) doing nothing, or (2) what Paul Bledsoe of the National Commission on Energy Policy calls “command and control through the existing Clean Air Act,” which in the current political climate is about as likely to happen as Holsteins climbing trees. In fact, some on the Left are opposed to cap and trade because it is too business friendly. They charge that it will turn into another way for the financial sector to make a lot of money while screwing the rest of us.

But our captains of industry prefer Option 1, not doing anything. I suspect they plan to pull an Auto Industry — keep on as if there’s no problem and hope the crash doesn’t come until they’ve retired. And then government can bail out whatever poor sucker is running the company when that happens.

However, Juliet Eilperin writes for the Washington Post that the

Obama administration will formally declare Monday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public’s health and welfare, a move that lays the groundwork for an economy-wide carbon cap even if Congress fails to enact climate legislation, sources familiar with the process said. …

…It could trigger a series of federal regulations affecting polluters, from vehicles to coal-fired power plants.

My guess is that if they thought the Obama Administration might really hit them with stringent regulations, the captains of industry will suddenly decide cap and trade isn’t so bad.

Right wing propaganda to the contrary, cap and trade is proving to be a success in Europe. Krugman also says,

The acid rain controversy of the 1980s was in many respects a dress rehearsal for today’s fight over climate change. Then as now, right-wing ideologues denied the science. Then as now, industry groups claimed that any attempt to limit emissions would inflict grievous economic harm.

But in 1990 the United States went ahead anyway with a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide. And guess what. It worked, delivering a sharp reduction in pollution at lower-than-predicted cost.

Andrew J. Bacevich thinks President Obama’s troops escalation in Afghanistan is a really bad idea. Max Boot, on the other hand, mostly approves. This is way not reassuring.

On the other hand, the Glenn Beck Christmas show bombs, big time. Heh.

Big health insurer Aetna plans to pump up profits by dumping coverage for 600,000 clients.

Moosewoman, facing new ethics charges, thinks we should all rededicate ourselves to God.

Max Baucus has a girlfriend? Yuck.

There are times when messes are so messy I don’t even want to know about them. This is one of those times.

Paul Krugman: “Reform or Else.”

Karen Tumulty: “Where Did Health Care Reform Go?”

In a nutshell — health reform legislation is being gutted of the most critical cost control measures by “centrist” legislators who complain the cost control measures are too costly. So the aspects of the bill that make it fiscally responsible are being removed in the name of fiscal responsibility. At the same time, Republicans who for years have badmouthed Medicare and sworn to dismantle it are scaring seniors by telling them the health care bill would ruin Medicare.

One other peeve, sorta kinda related — as you know, most of the American public is perpetually soaked in right-wing propaganda, to the point that a factual and logical discussion of any issue in national media is just about impossible. Often polls come out with figures saying a majority of Americans believe X, “X” being a right-wing generated falsehood relentlessly promoted by corporate and special interests, rightie media and “think” tanks. Then this poll number is held up triumphantly by the Right as “proof” of the truth of X, when it really is nothing but a measure of the effectiveness of rightie propaganda campaigns. Recent examples:

Americans Skeptical of Science Behind Global Warming

Poll shows desire for tort reform in health care package

Joint us again tomorrow for another episode of “The Decline and Fall of America.”

Some problems cannot be solved, rectified, or un-SNAFUed. Some messes cannot be tidied up. That’s the plain truth of it. And I say that’s the case with Afghanistan. I think that whatever beneficial result might have been obtained there slipped away late in 2001 and was irretrievably lost in 2003.

In the early paragraphs of his speech yesterday, President Obama restated the reasons for the military action in Afghanistan in 2001. In 2001, I thought those were legitimate reasons. Eight years later, those reasons are moot. Bringing them up now as a reason for further military action in Iraq strikes me as a “gassing the Kurds” argument.

(For those who don’t get the reference — in the months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, righties screamed incessantly that Saddam Hussein must be deposed because he was “gassing his own people.” But the gassing to which they referred took place in 1988. It was a little late to ride to the rescue.)

At this point, there are these are the issues that need to be addressed:

1. Can anything of tangible benefit to the United States be accomplished by further investment of blood and treasure in Afghanistan? And is that benefit worth the cost? Put another way, is that benefit obtainable for the amount of blood and treasure we are willing to pay?
2. Would our abandonment of Afghanistan enable a genuine threat to the United States?
3. Would our remaining in Afghanistan enable a genuine threat to the United States?

I lack the expertise in Afghanistan to even pretend to know the answers to those questions. President Obama’s argument for escalation in Afghanistan is that it would serve a genuine national security objective. There remains a connection between the the Taliban, which operates in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and al Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan, he said. He administration’s purpose is “narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al-Qaeda and its extremist allies.”

Now, I don’t disagree with the objective. The Taliban are (is?) thoroughly malevolent. From what I know of them, they are less interested in striking the U.S. than in enforcing their toxic religious ideas in the Middle East. However, they are a destabilizing influence in the Middle East, and the stronger they are, the more support they can offer al Qaeda. So there is some benefit in “disrupting, dismantling, and defeating” them.

However, would the action the President outlined yesterday be effective enough to be worth the cost? I am skeptical. Juan Cole really, really doubts it. David Ignatius, on the other hand, is mostly supportive, although not without quibbles.

Another way to look at this issue is to consider the resources we have to spend on national security and how most effectively to use them. Thomas Friedman argues that our resources would be better put to use by “nation building” here at home and by developing energy sources that are not oil. Very basically, Friedman says oil money keeps repressive Middle East regimes in power, and the repressive regimes create a context that grows violent extremism.

Indeed, in the speech, the President said,

That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended: because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.

I hope he means that.

Reactions to the speech from Left and Right are mostly negative, although for different reasons. Negative reactions from the Left mostly boil down to “it’s too much like Bush,” or “it’s not a big enough departure from Bush.” Many lefties don’t agree that there is a substantial benefit to be purchased with additional blood and treasure. Either Obama will keep us bogged down and hemorrhaging in Afghanistan, or else whatever might be accomplished with this escalation will disappear as soon as we leave, so what’s the point? Lose/lose.

Possibly the most controversial part of the speech was the President’s announcement that we will begin to withdraw troops in July 2011. However, as Fred Kaplan points out, the pace of the withdrawal will depend on a lot of matters outside of our control. Thus, quagmire remains a real possibility.

Reactions from the Right are mostly that the speech wasn’t rah-rah enough. For example, Andrew Malcolm complained that in he speech President Obama didn’t once use the word victory. Bush was a better war president, see, because he used the word victory a lot.

Righties on the whole refuse to acknowledge that military victory is an outmoded concept. As somebody once said, when the enemy is a stateless movement, not a government, trying to achieve “victory” through military power is like playing whack-a-mole with mercury.

Righties also refuse to acknowledge the finite nature of America’s military and other resources. They don’t want to pay taxes, but they want the federal government to be infinitely resourceful; good luck with that.

Fred Barnes wrote,

I had hoped Obama would declare that nothing will deter him, as commander-in-chief, from prevailing in Afghanistan. But it turns out a lot of things might deter him. He listed a few of them: the cost of the war, its length (if more than 18 months from January 2010), the failure of Afghans to step up to the task sufficiently. He hedged.

It’s called “being honest,” Fred. We had eight years of George W. Bush mouthing meaningless words about “victory” and “resolve” that had little connection to anything happening in the real world. President Obama was acknowledging that there are limits to what we can do, and those limits are getting tighter all the time.