It May Be Early to Call It a Pattern, but …

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Three apparently unrelated news stories are tied together by one factor. The news stories are:

  1. Rachel Dolezal and her attempt at race reassignment;
  2. Ariel Bradley, the “ISIS bride” from Tennessee who has gone all-in for jihad; and
  3. This week’s murder of five family members in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, allegedly by the oldest son.

The common factor is that the principles of these stories were all  home-schooled by parents who were tightly controlling and kept their children isolated from mainstream culture.

A few days ago Amanda Marcotte wrote an article that tied together the similarities between Dolezal and Bradley. They both were raised in such isolation, by rabidly controlling parents, that when they approached adulthood they either were compelled to invent new identities for themselves or create identities out of whole cloth that separated them from their upbringing. Marcotte writes,

BuzzFeed pieced together the 29-year-old Bradley’s story through conversations with her friends and a brief interview with her mother. Her friend Robert Parker says that Bradley was raised by a fundamentalist mother who was intent on keeping “her away from materials that would make her question Christianity.” Not only was Bradley homeschooled; she didn’t even learn to read until she was a preteen.

Bradley started rebelling against her parents in adolescence and spent her teens and early adulthood drifting from one identity to another, according to her friends. “It was like, when I first met her she was a Christian, and then she was a socialist, and then she was an atheist, and then a Muslim,” one friend explained. “As far as I could tell it was always in relation to whatever guy she was interested in, so if she meets a guy that’s an atheist then she’s an atheist, falls into that for a year.”’

Having not been allowed to become herself as she was growing up, she had to take a persona where she could find one.

I found Dolezal a bit baffling until I read about her upbringing by hyper-conservative Christian home schoolers who were also white supremacists. And who also adopted black children while being white supremacists. What little information has come to light makes the Dolezal family sound like a house of horrors. My guess is that adopting a black persona was a highly elaborate coping strategy for Dolezal. She wasn’t trying to perpetrate a hoax as much as she was deceiving herself as a way to distance herself from her upbringing. Or somehow work through her upbringing. Or both.

We don’t yet know if the Bever family of Broken Arrow were religious fundamentalists, but the neighbors are saying that the parents barely let the children out of the house.

While the community was left shocked by the brutal violence, the neighbor tells PEOPLE that something hasn’t seemed right with that family for a long time.

“They’re very reclusive,” the neighbor says. “The kids don’t come out of the house.”

She adds: “It’s a very big house, but I’ve only ever seen a boy once and they’ve been here for many, many years. We only really knew they had kids because they have a pool and there are toys outside. But they don’t come out.”

The neighbor says the kids were homeschooled by a married couple who kept the children “on a very short leash.”

“It’s weird because they’re old enough to drive,” she says of the detained brothers, “but I’ve never seen them. And I’ve never seen a friend come to the house at all.”

She continues: “They never open the blinds. The windows are never open.

“It’s very scary.”

We don’t know for certain that the oldest son Robert Bever and possibly another son, both now in custody, really did stab and axe their parents, two younger brothers and a sister. I will try to keep track as more information comes out. But it’s past time we needed to pay attention to the “home schooling” movement and take care it’s not fostering and perpetrating physical and psychological abuse.

There Is No Invisible Hand

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This cartoon sums a lot up for me. I remember back in the 1980s when I was living in New Jersey and looking for a decent, affordable apartment for me and two little kids. Nobody was building affordable apartments. There was much building of McMansions, yes, but there there was a shortage of decent lower-rent apartments. And every day I passed a huge, newly built industrial/office complex that was completely empty. Months went past; it remained empty. There just wasn’t that much demand for office space, I guess, or else the builders miscalculated what people would be willing to pay in rent. And I understand there’s a glut of McMansions in the New Jersey real estate market these days.

See also “The Old Suburban Office Park Is the New American Ghost Town.”

Now, proponents of Free Market capitalism will probably argue that the Free Market was not at fault; it was bankers, or the Federal Reserve, or something else that caused investment in the wrong thing. But this assumes that the Free Market is a thing that exists out in the ether somewhere entirely separate from banks and financial policy, separate from land and labor, separate from money and infrastructure.

This was published about a year ago, and I’m sorry I didn’t notice it before.

Polanyi’s core thesis is that there is no such thing as a free market; there never has been, nor can there ever be. Indeed he calls the very idea of an economy independent of government and political institutions a “stark utopia”—utopian because it is unrealizable, and the effort to bring it into being is doomed to fail and will inevitably produce dystopian consequences. While markets are necessary for any functioning economy, Polanyi argues that the attempt to create a market society is fundamentally threatening to human society and the common good.  In the first instance the market is simply one of many different social institutions; the second represents the effort to subject not just real commodities (computers and widgets) to market principles but virtually all of what makes social life possible, including clean air and water, education, health care, personal, legal, and social security, and the right to earn a livelihood. When these public goods and social necessities (what Polanyi calls “fictitious commodities”) are treated as if they are commodities produced for sale on the market, rather than protected rights, our social world is endangered and major crises will ensue.

Free market doctrine aims to liberate the economy from government “interference”, but Polanyi challenges the very idea that markets and governments are separate and autonomous entities. Government action is not some kind of “interference” in the autonomous sphere of economic activity; there simply is no economy without government rules and institutions. It is not just that society depends on roads, schools, a justice system, and other public goods that only government can provide. It is that all of the key inputs into the economy—land, labor, and money—are only created and sustained through continuous government action. The employment system, the arrangements for buying and selling real estate, and the supplies of money and credit are organized and maintained through the exercise of government’s rules, regulations, and powers.

The article goes on to argue that what we all call “deregulation” is really “re-regulation.” “Government continues to regulate, but instead of acting to protect workers, consumers, and citizens, it devised new policies aimed to help giant corporate and financial institutions maximize their returns through revised anti-trust laws, seemingly bottomless bank bailouts, and increased impediments to unionization.”

Our “socialist” mayor, Bill de Blasio, has made the creation of decent low-income housing in NYC a priority, bless him. The city needs this desperately. The “free market” doesn’t provide low income housing here. NYC is a place in which, if you build it, rich people will come and pay ridiculous amounts of money for it. But that means the “free market” only caters to them. There are new high-rise apartment buildings going up all over the place in Brooklyn; rent for a basic one-bedroom unit averages about $2,800 a month, I understand.

The people who have made free market capitalism their religion are certain that as long as government doesn’t interfere, the Holy Free Market (blessed be It) will naturally provide whatever anyone needs. But in truth the Free Market doesn’t give a hoo-haw about what people need. The Free Market will dedicate infinite resources to filling even the frivolous desires of the wealthy; everyone else is just out of luck, sometimes even for life’s necessities.

The Free Market also is wasteful and destructive, depleting resources for short-term profit without thought to the future; using up materials and resources for buildings that sit empty and consumer products that end up in landfills after only two or three years of use. The Free Market refuses to maintain infrastructure, will not safely dispose of hazardous waste unless forced to, and will not clean up the ecosystems it destroys. The Free Market would rather kill coal miners than invest in safety precautions.

Because, you see, there is no “Free Market”; there is no benevolent “invisible hand” that turns individual self-interest into common good. There are just people scrambling to make as much money as they can, and as long as a portion of those people don’t care who they hurt in the process, the results often will not be benevolent at all.

Henry Ferrell — the same guy who wrote the article quoted above — today has a post at Washington Monthly about Very Serious People. He’s talking here about foreign policy, but it applies to economic policy as well.

  1. Everyone has a mix of beliefs, some of which are right, and some wrong.
  2. Everyone co-exists in a social system that tends to value, heavily reinforce and widely disseminate some people’s beliefs while disparaging, heavily discounting, and tending to limit the circulation of certain other people’s beliefs. This bias is not random, but instead reflects and reinforces existing power structures and asymmetries.
  3. People whose beliefs are reinforced and widely circulated so that they are socially and politically influential, even when they are manifestly wrong, are Very Serious People. The system provides them with no incentives to admit error or perhaps to understand that they have erred, even when their mistakes have devastating consequences.

We’ve been fed this fantasy about “free markets” lo these many years, and the fantasy won’t die because the VSPs believe it. But from where I sit that fantasy is not just destroying lives; it’s destroying the planet.

Reverse Wedging

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When the nuclear deal with Iran was first announced, a number of right-wing media sources gleefully speculated that it would hurt Hillary Clinton — for example —

Republicans want to yoke Mrs. Clinton to the Iran deal, betting that voters—particularly those in the normally Democratic Jewish community—will see the accord as a capitulation that in the end will lead to Iran getting nuclear weapons. Exit polls show that Mr. Obama won 69% of the Jewish vote in 2012, which was 10 percentage points less than Al Gore’s share in 2000, according to the Pew Research Center.

WSJ has been seeing “cracks” in the Jewish-Democratic alliance for months. Whether there are any cracks other than in WSJ’s head I cannot say. But even before the agreement was announced, polls showed that American Jews were more likely than other Americans to want an agreement with Iran. I suspect American Jews on the whole are better informed about Iran than other Americans and have a few clues about what’s at stake.

I haven’t seen any post-agreement polls that call out Jewish opinion specifically. Jewish-American organizations are lining up on both sides of the issue, along expected lines, but whether that will change the minds of Jewish-American voters remains to be seen.

An ABC News / Washington Post poll taken last week shows the American public supporting the agreement, 56 percent to 37 percent. A large part of the people supporting the agreement are skeptical it will work, but want to give it a try, anyway. For the record, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley have all expressed support for the deal.

However, I wrote a few days ago, Republican politicians are stumbling all over themselves competing for Biggest Trash Talker of the Iran Deal. This week’s award for Most Reckless Trash Talker possibly goes to Scott Walker, who not only has promised to end the deal on his first day in office, but said that he may have to take military action on his first day in office. Greg Sargent writes,

A dispute has erupted between Scott Walker and Jeb Bush over how to handle the task of undoing Obama’s Iran deal as president, with Bush hinting that Walker is approaching the issue with a lack of maturity, and Walker suggesting that Bush is not zealous enough about confronting the enemy.

Walker is also saying that it’s “very possible” the next president will have to take military action on Day One of his presidency — though it’s unclear whether he means against Iran in particular, or more generally.

The argument says a lot about the two candidates’ differing calculations with regard to the level of nuance GOP primary voters are prepared to entertain about the Iran deal, and more broadly, about foreign policy in general.

Foreign policy experts (the non-Zionist ones anyway) are fairly unanimous that the deal could prevent war and a nuclear-armed Iran, whereas no deal would likely either lead to war or a nuclear-armed Iran. And I really don’t think the American people on the whole are in the mood for starting more wars or electing some guy who thinks he may have to declare war as soon as he takes his hand off the Bible on inauguration day.

Barring unforeseeable developments, I don’t see the deal hurting Dems, including HRC. It could easily hurt Republicans, though.

The Twilight of the Elites

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It strikes me that the “elite” of both of our political parties are showing signs of being out of touch with their bases.

Democratic Party insiders have cruised along these past several years assuming that 2016 will be a Hillary Clinton coronation; no other candidates need apply. Odds are still high that HRC will get the nomination, but Bernie Sanders is making her work for it.

But the Dems long have been out of touch with the base; I’ve said for years that the Dem establishment acts as if it doesn’t want to be seen with actual progressive activists in public. The vast chasm between the Republican establishment and the schmos who vote for Republican candidates is a relatively new thing.

Right now I’m seeing all kinds of headlines from right-wing sources and mainstream media saying that the Trump campaign is toast. As I wrote yesterday, and as Josh Marshall writes today, the elites may be in for a shock.

Let’s not forget: these are supporters who have cheered Trump as he’s called Mexicans rapists and criminals and all the rest. They don’t have delicate sensibilities. Let’s also not forget that these kinds of attacks on McCain (actually considerably uglier ones) have a long history among hard-core base Republicans, just the folks Trump is spiking with. They claim he had a lackluster career before his capture (some real truth in that) and they hint he may have been turned in some way by captors or betrayed his fellow POWs during his captivity (zero evidence for this). But even beyond the hard-core fringe that believes those things, McCain is just really not popular with base Republicans, especially not those who define themselves around the immigration issue. He’s the ultimate RINO. All of which is to say, if you’re someone who’s cheered to Trump’s clown car of aggression and derp over recent weeks, I see little here that will make you reconsider your enthusiasm. In fact, I see a lot that will make you see this as more of a brash truth-teller who won’t take any crap from the Republican establishment, the media or its favored leaders.

At the risk of stating the obvious, resurrecting Mitt Romney to denounce Trump or having Jeb or the increasingly hapless Reince Priebus do so is unlikely to shift this perception of what’s going on.

This might shock Reince Priebus, but I doubt many of the hard-core rightie base know who he is. See also Steve M’s roundup of rightie reaction to Trump’s McCain bashing.

Ten and more years ago, the people directing Republican politics could play their voters like a fiddle. About ten years ago I thought I saw the beginning of some fissures regarding the issue of immigration, but that was about it.  Now, nobody seems to be in charge. The Wall Street Journal and National Review are denouncing Trump in no uncertain terms. But who the bleep reads the Wall Street Journal and National Review? Not the GOP base, I don’t think.

See, the base likes its assholery pure and undiluted. The elites are more sensitive, at least when one of their own are being slimed. Other people, not so much. But with the elites, selective hate speech is a means to an end. With the base, the hate speech is the end.

Can the GOP Bring Down Trump?

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In another bravura performance of Peak Assholery, Donald Trump slammed John McCain for getting himself captured in Vietnam. The Republican establishment and most of the other candidates — Ted Cruz being the exception — ran to the microphones to condemn him.

Nate Cohn writes,

Mr. Trump’s candidacy probably reached an inflection point on Saturday after he essentially criticized John McCain for being captured during the Vietnam War. Republican campaigns and elites quickly moved to condemn his comments — a shift that will probably mark the moment when Trump’s candidacy went from boom to bust.

His support will erode as the tone of coverage shifts from publicizing his anti-establishment and anti-immigration views, which have some resonance in the party, to reflecting the chorus of Republican criticism of his most outrageous comments and the more liberal elements of his record.

Yes, that’s probably what will happen. But I’m not certain that’s what will happen. Because the section of the Republican base supporting Trump wrote off McCain as a RINO a long time ago and probably don’t care what Trump says about him. To verify this I went to Jim Hoft’s site Gateway Pundit, and sure enough, the mouth breathers were cheering Trump for insulting McCain. Representative comments:

It seems lately the more Trump opens his mouth, the more truth emerges. Refreshing in the stale crypt of RINO pablum.

Trump is right, McCain is a do nothing Progressive yes man. He works for the money men.

Trump is right – all of McCain’s actions have been actions of Treason and Rebellion and of Dishonorable Conduct, it is a deep Wrong to our nation that he was not tired when he returned from Vietnam. It is a Deep, Incredible Wrong that he was ever elected to the office of a Public Servant.He committed strings of Treason while in Office and only ONE of them is the Treason of his co-authoring and promoting SHAMNESTY, both in America AGAINST OUR CONSTITUTION and in Mexico, Central and South America, and for all practical purposes, WORLD WIDE…. FLOODING OUR NATION TO DEATH. There is no longer an Punishment for McCain’s Felonies that is too severe so that anyone has GROUNDS to say, “That is too harsh.” Anyone who does say it has REFUSED to look at what McCain has done to others, the MILLIONS dead due to his DIRECT ACTIONS with willful knowledge aforethought. …

That last one goes on and on and was written by a woman. Be afraid.

Of course, it’s also not clear exactly who the Trump Supporter is. Cohn continues,

His support does not follow ideological lines, as Harry Enten of FiveThirtyEight has observed. It is not even clear that he has more support among immigration hard-liners than other Republicans. A Politico article titled “The Mystery of the Trump Coalition” struggled to identify which issues or demographics drove support for Mr. Trump. There might not be any.

Or, it might be that the assholery is what’s driving the support. He is the asshole’s candidate.

The Republican establishment has the vapors today over Trump’s comments about McCain. They didn’t mind so much when he was spewing demented hate speech against entire population demographics, but insulting another Republican will not stand. However, I suspect Trump is riding a wave that Republicans created but which got away from them some time back.

The GOP establishment ought to be grateful to The Donald, I say. He’s making the rest of their candidates seem almost human.

The Growing Anti-Capitalist Movement

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Maybe it’s just me, but I’m seeing more open grumbling about capitalism than I used to. There was a time one could not say that, maybe, capitalism really doesn’t work in the long run without being shouted down. But now I see people grumbling about capitalism almost every day. Even the Pope is running around saying that the unfettered pursuit of money is the “dung of the devil.”

The problem, of course, is that capitalism doesn’t work for the masses unless you regulate the hell out of it, which the high priests of capitalism will not accept. Ironically, the past 30 years of deregulation (while celebrating the triumph of capitalism over communism) have done a bang-up job demonstrating that Karl Marx was right about one thing, at least — capitalism carries the seeds of its own destruction.

I don’t have to persuade you “regulars” why this is true, but those of you who wandered in late can read A Wealthy Capitalist on Why Money Doesn’t Trickle Down,  Capitalism Simply Isn’t Working and Here Are the Reasons Why, and More Compelling Evidence That Free Market Capitalism Doesn’t Work Without Government Regulation.

If the true believers of capitalism had the sense God gave cucumbers they’d be at least considering re-instating some of the old safeguards, such as the Glass-Steagall Act, to save capitalism from complete collapse someday. But they won’t. It’s against their religion. See this commentary from a blogger whom I doubt it all that wealthy —

[Sen. Bernie] Sanders moronically said to John Harwood on CNBC, “What I think is obscene [is] when you have the top one tenth of one percent owning almost as much as the bottom 90.”

That’s capitalism.  That’s our history. That’s why  we are not Vietnam or Cambodia.  We are not the old USSR or Tiananmen Square in China.  We are successful because success is not legislated, but achieved.

And I’m sure this guy genuinely and fervently believes that allowing the nation’s wealth and resources to be hoarded by people who really don’t work for it, whom we did not elect, cannot control, and possibly wouldn’t even like much if we met them makes America strong, and he will continue to believe that as long as he is able to cling to a middle-class lifestyle. But if the nursing home dumps him on the street some day because Medicaid has been scrapped to pay for more tax cuts for the rich, he may be in for a shock.

As the current system works for fewer and fewer of us, I’m seeing more people, younger people especially, say out loud that capitalism doesn’t work. It’s not really a movement yet, but if current trends continue I think it will be in three to five years or so.

I’m seeing suggestions that government should encourage profit sharing and more stock ownership among employees. I see the Birkenstock crowd is big on something called the “sharing economy,” which I take it means you can rent out your stuff when you’re not using it. But it seems to me these are band-aids, not cures.

On the other hand, economic adviser Jeremy Rifkin says that capitalism is about to experience  “the most exquisite of deaths.”

“We are seeing the final triumph of capitalism followed by its exit off the world stage and the entrance of the collaborative commons,” Rifkin predicts.

This is not socialism but an entirely new economic model. That sounds exciting, but what the hell is it? I’ve read the piece and cannot make sense of it. But maybe some of you will.

Stop David Brooks Before He Expresses Himself Again

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It was bad enough that The Cabbage was caught on video opining that Bernie Sanders “doesn’t get the working class.” As I wrote on my Facebook page, “Next we’ll hear Donald Trump complain that Joaquín Castro doesn’t get Latinos. Or Richard Dawkins will lecture us that the Pope doesn’t get Catholicism.”

But today Brooks has outdone himself. His column lectures Ta-Nehisi Coates on racism. Someday, when somebody builds the Museum of Clueless White Privilege, this column should be the first exhibit.

Responding to Coates’s new book Between the World and Me about the experience of being a black man in America, Brooks actually whitesplains to Coates that racism in America just isn’t as bad as he thinks it is. At one point he assumes that Coates doesn’t always mean what he wrote literally and accuses Coates (whose main strength as a columnist, IMO, is his masterful and well-researched presentation of American history) of distorting American history. It’s embarrassing. Someone at the New York Times would have done Brooks a favor by killing this column before anyone else saw it.

A big part of Coates’s problem, Brooks thinks, is that he doesn’t appreciate the American dream.

In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.

Oh, let’s not be patronizing or anything, Mr. Brooks.

This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.

I like the “acid of excessive realism.” Does that mean “what people experience in the real world,” by any chance?

Brooks concludes,

Maybe you will find my reactions irksome. Maybe the right white response is just silence for a change.

Ya think?

In any case, you’ve filled my ears unforgettably.

But not head head, apparently. But cabbages aren’t known for their mental acuity.

See also Helmut Monotreme at Sadly, No and Scott Eric Kaufman at Salon.

A Global Disaster

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Paul Krugman is calling the European summit agreement on Greece “the sacking of Athens.” He said, gloomily, “So we have learned that the euro is a Roach Motel — once you go in, you can never get out. And once inside you are at the mercy of those who can pull your financing and crash your banking system unless you toe the line.”

See also Krugman’s blog posts “Faithocrats,” “The Pause of 2014,” “An Unsustainable Position,” and “History Lessons for Euro Debtors,” which together make about as good a primer on the Greek situation that there is. See also Ivan Krastev, “A Greek Farce.”

The immediate impact of the Greek agreement is calmer markets, defeated Greeks and skeptical Germans. So should Europe celebrate? Do European leaders expect Greece to be transformed by the accord as Central Europe was transformed in the 1990s? Is it possible that the whole referendum episode — a resounding public “no” followed by Mr. Tsipras’s climb-down with the creditors — could serve not to humiliate Greek voters but instead to re-educate them?

While many in Brussels are hoping that the Greeks have learned, it is more than likely that the new reform package agreed to on Monday will result in further radicalization of certain segments of the European left and the spread of apathy in Greece.

Mr. Tsipras’s leftist populism failed to win Greece a better deal. Instead, the real political winner is most likely to be not the moderate center but the anti-European right. And while European leaders can congratulate themselves on keeping the Union going, the price that Europe will pay for saving Greece economically and losing it politically is the transformation of the Union from a project sustained by hopes and aspirations into one surviving on shared fears and confusion.

Krugman says in “Faithocrats,”

But let me note, as I have before, that what Europe calls technocrats aren’t people who know how the world works; they’re people who subscribe to the approved fantasies, and never change their minds no matter how badly wrong things go. Despite the overwhelming evidence that austerity has exactly the dire effects basic textbook macro says it will, they cling to belief in the confidence fairy. Despite a striking lack of evidence that “structural reform” delivers much of a growth boost, especially in an economy suffering from a huge output gap, they continue to present structural reform — mainly in the form of disempowering workers — as a sovereign remedy for all ills. Despite a clear record of past failure, they continue to push for asset sales as a supposed answer to debt overhang.

In short, what Europe usually means by a “technocrat” is a Very Serious Person, someone distinguished by his faith in received orthodoxy no matter the evidence.

Structural reform in the form of disempowering workers sounds pretty much like what the Republicans want to impose on us, here.  Faith-ocratism will be our doom.

The Deal

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First, what are the conditions of the nuclear deal with Iran? Charles Pierce explains:

This is the biggest gamble yet for an administration that appears to be reacting to its lame-duck status by ignoring it entirely. An administration that, as we have pointed out previously, has upturned its big bag of fks and discovered that it has no more there to give. The Republicans — especially those running for president — are going to go indiscriminately up the wall, and Benjamin Netanyahu nearly beat New Horizons to Pluto after having given it a nine-year head start. …

… (Strumming the same tune on this side of the world is Senator Huckleberry J. Butchmeup, who has hit the fainting couch with the impact of an anvil dropped from an airplane: “You’ve ensured that the Arabs will go nuclear. You’ve put Israel in the worst possible box. This will be a death over time sentence to Israel if they don’t push back…You put our nation at risk.” And the alternative is another war, somewhere down the line. You first, senator.)

Central to the knee-jerk dismissal of any agreement with Iran regarding nuclear weapons is the belief that the Iranian regime is fundamentally suicidal, that its leaders actually would commit themselves to a course of action that would result in the complete annihilation of their country. In 2012, at a campaign event, Rick Santorum said this flat-out, that the Iranians would launch a nuclear exchange, which they surely would lose, because they don’t fear such cataclysm based on their belief that it would bring about the arrival of the 12th Imam. Santorum — and have I mentioned recently what a colossal dick Rick Santorum is? — was not laughed off the stage. This is exactly the same kind of nonsense we heard during the Cold War when the nuns assured us that the Russians didn’t fear nuclear war because they were atheists anyway.

OK, that doesn’t exactly explain what’s in the deal, but it’s damn funny.

You know that the Right would denounce any deal made between President Obama and Iran, because it’s President Obama and Iran.  It’s hard to say whom they hate and fear more — an Islamic republic or their own President.  In any event, Republicans wasted no time rushing to microphones to denounce the deal they hadn’t had time to study.

Andrew Rosenthal:

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who reportedly has been getting briefings on foreign affairs because he’s the governor of a Midwestern state with no actual experience in the area, announced: “The deal allows Tehran to dismantle U.S. and international sanctions without dismantling its illicit nuclear infrastructure — giving Iran’s nuclear weapons capability an American stamp of approval.”

Actually, no. It requires Iran to dismantle a great deal of its “illicit nuclear infrastructure” before sanctions start to be lifted, would restore them and impose more if Iran cheats, and keeps in place many sanctions based on Iran’s human rights record and its support for terrorist organizations.

“Shame on the Obama administration for agreeing to a deal that empowers an evil Iranian regime to carry out its threat to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ and bring ‘death to America,’” said Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor.

Mr. Huckabee, like the rest of the G.O.P. field, offers not a clue as to how he would prevent Iran from doing those things, which don’t actually require a nuclear weapon, which the United States and Israel have, by the way.

Just go read all of Rosenthal’s piece; it’s one of the snarkier things I’ve yet to read in the New York Times, outside of Krugman’s blog.

Miss … I mean, Senator Lindsey Graham — may have won the competition by declaring the deal was “akin to declaring war on Israel and the Sunni Arabs.” It’s still about a year before the nominations, and LG alone has just about depleted the global supply of hysterical hyperbole.  Where can they go from here?

The runner up is Scott the Power Tool, who is not running for President. And why the hell not? He called the deal “Munich for our time,” which by itself is depraved enough to win him a place in the GOP debates, candidate or no.

Ian Black of the Guardian says the winners of the deal are Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani; President Obama; Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin. The losers are Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS; King Whoozitz of Saudi Arabia (I wish they’d all go back to being all named Abdullah) and Binyamin Netanyahu. Mostly a win, I’d say.

Here’s a roundup of reactions from all GOP candidates. Oh, and here’s a fairly clear walk-through of the agreement.