<span class="Apple-style-span">"Keep in mind that these poor policy outcomes aren't really mistakes or the much-cited 'incompetence.' It's malice."</span&gt<span class="Apple-style-span">
</span&gt<span class="Apple-style-span">Well, if it's malice, then shouldn't the title of your post be "Domestic Policy by Evildoers"? I mean, nobody would accuse Karl Rove or Dick Cheney of being an idiot. They're bad people, nasty people of ill intent. Morally bankrupt. Whatever. </span&gt<span class="Apple-style-span">
</span&gt<span class="Apple-style-span">I mean, really Matt: it's as though you're some liberal in thrall to moral relativism with this reluctance to call evil what it is. </span&gt<span class="Apple-style-span">
</span&gt<span class="Apple-style-span">(Tongue in cheek here!)</span&gt

New programs must be poorly designed in order to "prove" that such things don't work.

The converse is just as true:

Existing programs must be managed poorly in order to prove that they no longer work.  

Exhibit A: Amtrak

The new prescription drug plans, though heavily subsidized by Medicare, are marketed and administered by private insurers like Aetna, Humana, PacifiCare and UnitedHealth Group.

Is the benefit intended for the insurance companies or for the retirees?

My husband is in our state retiree system, and they are our secondary insurer after Medicare.  We have a drug plan with the state, and they have told us not to sign up with the Medicare drug plan, since theirs is better.  That's the only reason I know what decision to make.

This drug plan was passed a reward to pharmaceutical (sp?) companies as reward for their large contributions to the Republican party. it has nothing to do with the welfare of seniors. If it's a disaster for seniors, while being a bonanza for big companies, the Reublicans see that as a double good. It's another reason to starve the beast of big government(which doesn't work), while lining the pockets of big donors. Meanwhile the public is screwed. These peoplke are doing some despicable immoral stuff. When will the populace wake up and throw these bums out? Oh wait - why do that when there's gay marriage and abortion to worry about. What a fiasco.

I believe the Medicre insanity was either 100% a republican production or very close to it.

Keep in mind that these poor policy outcomes aren't really mistakes or the much-cited "incompetence." It's malice. As during the post-Katrina recovery, the fear is that if you design a program well, people will like it, and support for the dread "big government" will grow. New programs must be poorly designed in order to "prove" that such things don't work.

I don't see any proof of this, and it is a little conspiratorial for my tastes.  Are you really suggesting that conservatives are implementing policies they disagree with, and implementing them badly, so that people will associate those bad policies with liberals?  

Doesn't Occam's Razor tell us that the best answer is that they are simply incompetent?

When you're faced with manifest failure, failure that was absolutely predictable from the outset--over and over again--you do have to start grasping at straws.

They haven't done anything right.  They haven't shrunk the government. They haven't introduced fiscal sanity.  They haven't implemented RMA at DoD; they've kept every stupid pissant money-wasting program They haven't ended welfare as we knew it. They haven't reformed social security. They haven't introduced business-like practices in government.  They haven't improved education. Pork expenditures are up by an order of magnitude.  Abortions are up. There are more poor people. Inflation is up.  Interest rates are up.  The war in Iraq is a disaster, and in creating that disaster they've undermined the America is invincible story.  Relations with Europe are in the toilet. They're torturing people in Soviet prisons.  They've dramatically increased the size of entitlements without improving benefits, and they've made it more complicated. They've made the tax code more complicated, and penalized wage earners. Health care has gotten more expensive and more of PITA to deal with for the middle three quintiles (looking at enrollment forms today took a couple of hours).  They've both made the country more protectionist and lost industiral capacity to overseas competitors. The median take home wage is down. The pension system is near collapse. The airlines are near collapse.  China holds a marker on about half the annual GDP.

They've thrown away at least 50 and more like 100 years of American good will  as a leader in promoting freedom, human rights, and not torturing people.  Do you think striking students in China would lead the way, today, with the stature of liberty.

Aside from conducting the war in Afghanistan, they've fucked every single thing up.  There is no upside.  And they've not even cheerful about it, like Reagan. They're mean.  And their central strategy is to lie about everything, undermining the news media as a means of covering up their manifest failure in every endeavor.

There were upsides with Reagan, upsides even with Nixon. Bush I is looking like a freakin' statesman, and Clinton is taking on godlike qualities next to these guys.

You have to start wondering what in heavens name they're thinking.  It's no wonder Matt's reaching. 

People are leaving the meetings crying, because they don't know what to do.  It's shameful.  I hope it backfires "big time".

To be fair, there is literature on the right (mostly from Grover Norquist and his followers) that does, indeed, advocate starving the government of resources so that it will perform badly and people will lose faith in it.

Beyond that, the idea that people who control government won't exactly work in the best interests of the programs they don't like is a pretty old one.

Republicans, and some Democrats, have lambasted "entitlements," even sticking that innacurate term to them and Medicaire/Medicaid have always been considered "entitlements."  Given our history, and the terms used to describe such programs like Medicaire and Social Security, it's not out of bounds to question the motives of the people making decisions about these programs. 

Is it possible that it's less direct than that, though?  Perhaps they have implemented policies that they either find disagreeable for political reasons or that they can live with out of deference to public will and they haven't exactly designed them to fail but didn't put the thought or effort into them that was needed.  There are softer scenarios, after all, than ones in which people laugh "muahahaha," and set out on a conspiracy.

   JayAckroyd: I disagree about Afghanistan -they failed at that also by not providing follow-through and allowing the country to fall largely back into the hands of warlords and remnants of the Taliban. They have failed at every major foreign and domestic policy effort. Period.
     No one should let themselves be chumpified by the high minded goo-goo and false fairmindedness of helpme and dontthinktwice. There is evidence that the rightwing wants public programs to fail purely because of ideology and they will be very unscrupulous in pursuing that end. Sabotage is part of their toolkit. Look at the some the incoherent and destructive proposals pumped out by rightwing think tanks and legislators during the late great social security debate. Many of them would have resulted in an earlier date for cash-flow problems (assuming that the Bush fiscal policy remains in place). There is a post either here or at the New Republic relating a conversation with Bill Bennett during the Reagan years where he flatly said he wanted policies set to that public schools would fail. What would you call the effort to bad mouth ridicule, and reduce public faith in the treasury bonds invested in the SS trust fund? (Any suave trolls who want to argue that these are not really really really real treasury bonds: don't bother -there are no marks at this blog). Was that anything other than an attempt to reduce public confidence in social security out of thin air?
    Sometimes Occam’s razor does lead one to suspect motives. There is a quote from James Madison: “A foolish reason given by a wise man is seldom the true one.” In the case of many rightwing pundits, one might change “wise man’ to “self-professed wise man” or “very clever fraud” but the point remains the same.
    There is plenty of evidence of bad motives. There is also evidence of great incompetence. There is certainly evidence of immense incoherence whenever ideological, financial, and political motives clash, but a bill must be produced no matter what, as in the case of the Medicare drug benefit. I am not sure we can pick out which one of  sabotage or incompetence or incoherent desperation to produce something that looks OK is the reason for each miserable stupid provision in a many of the bills, but I don’t think that is necessary.

I kind of agree. I don't think that The Administration has any kind of shared organizational self-awareness. But certainly individuals within the administation, and those who influence the administration have individual self awareness, and know what they are doing when the advocate certain types of proposals. I think some influential individuals do have sabotage in mind (Rove, Norquist, Bennett, many individual Republicans in Congress and right wing think tanks)

"China holds a marker on about half the annual GDP"

Nice rant, and I agree with you.  But I believe the debt held by China is "only" about $700B, against US GDP of about $11T, so you're off by almost a factor of 10.  Big problem, and getting bigger every day, but not that big.

But do you think any of them knows, or talks with any who knows and understands the details of the legislation and the likely consequences? I agree with what you say regarding major decisions, I am not so sure regarding what actually goes into the legislation and the conference negotiations, adminstrative regs. Bush's attitude is probably "whatever..."

Even if half the stuff in your statement were true...how can you keep losing to these guys?

That's the most insidious part of the program. Did you see the recaps of the Sunday shows?  They stand up and just flat lie. They say that black is white, and there's no such thing as truth anyway--every statement is political.  They've completely destroyed the ability for media oversight with this strategy; the media doesn't have in its collection of tools one that says "The president continued to insist today that black is white, in a stunning and unprecedented display of lying to the American people."  Hell, they don't even have it their toollkit to write a story that says "A large number of Americans believe in things that are manifestly false--like astrology."

The willingness to say, with a straight face, over and over again, things that are false--to the point where people who don't follow this stuff closely shrug and say "There must be something to it, or they wouldn't say it. And all those politicians lie anyway." That's why.

We'll see if they can keep this going. They're tanking, and going back to these strategies in stronger terms with weaker foundations. I'm a traitor again this week, and San Francisco is, according to Bill O'Reilly (who has how much air time?  20 hours?) fair game for terrorists because they're traitors too.

How long did this work for McCarthy? 5 years?  But these guys have been very effective at staying away from any setting where they are confronted by facts.   

I disagree about Afghanistan -they failed at that also by not providing follow-through and allowing the country to fall largely back into the hands of warlords and remnants of the Taliban.

I did say "conduct of the war." And the Taliban is gone. Bin Laden no longer has the resources of a state at hand, and has to do whatever his is doing from hiding, which is a significant accomplishment.  If the policy goal was making Afghanistan a better place, then, yes, they've mostly failed. If the goal was to drive out the Taliban and send bin Laden to the caves, then it was successful. Of course, it was a failure in their idiotic terms:  "dead or alive".

There is a post either here or at the New Republic relating a conversation with Bill Bennett during the Reagan years where he flatly said he wanted policies set to that public schools would fail. 

Yes, and there are clear cases where you can say that has happened, the most recent being the resistance to using housing vouchers to deal with people  made homeless by Katrina.

But if you made me choose, I'd say it's this:

There is certainly evidence of immense incoherence whenever ideological, financial, and political motives clash, but a bill must be produced no matter what, as in the case of the Medicare drug benefit.

Diulillo said that he engaged in a number of policy discussions while he was in the administration, and that he was upset that they all turned not on policy considerations, but on political considerations. I honestly thinkit's not been an issue of active neglect.  I think it's been a case of complete cronyism, throwing political sops as needed to allow the administration to say that they've done something.

That's the central point. They didn't care to fix the schools, help seniors hamstrung by drug costs, stop the threat of terrorism. They simply wanted  "reached a bipartisan program to improve education" "worked with democrats to come up with an effective drug benefit" "embarked on the war on terror with Congressional support" bullet points.

They won their election. Now we have three more years of rank incompetence to deal with, and  no way out that I can see.  Harding's gonna look like a statesman when these guys are done.

I think there needs to be a distinction between two kinds of administration blundering. The first is simple incompetence and the second is malicious incompetence. In the hurricane Katrina fiasco, you saw both. The immediate government response was sluggish and uncoordinated because you had a leader who not only was out of touch, but also fundamentally unable to manage his way out of a paper bag. MBA or no MBA, the idea that Bush was a no-nonsense take-charge CEO was always risible. As an MBA myself, I think I can say with assurance that that degree is no guarantee of anything.




But there can be no doubt that in certain cases there is malice aforethought when Republicans get involved in policy. The anti-poverty and housing relief efforts post-Katrina are a perfect example. As many have pointed out before, in the LA earthquake ten years ago, homeless people were given housing vouchers so that they could find something quickly through local markets. It worked well. But despite that, a similar scheme was blocked this time around in part because Republicans were afraid it would be "too successful" and people might wonder why we need to wait for an emergency to put such a scheme in place.

Philosophy 101 taught you that motives are irrelevant. When you're a sophomore next year, take 201.

Dude, get a grip. Dem's have been saying fo a year George Bush lied to America. Bush gave a speech and said "no I didn't." The reason Bill Orielly said that the people of SF are wrong is that they voted to ban recruiters from high school and college campuses. Oh and he's only on 4 hours a day (3 radio, and 1 tv... even less if you add in the commercials).