By Michael J.W. StickingsSee, this is why Chief Justice Roberts’s recent little hissy fit over being challenged by President Obama was so ridiculous. (Well, it’s one of the reasons why. Basically, Roberts should grow a spine.)According to Roberts, Obam…

By J. Thomas DuffyPerhaps, Texas Governor Rick Perry, when he threatened secession last year, meant, only, intellectually.Texas Textbook MASSACRE: ‘Ultraconservatives’ Approve Radical Changes To State Education CurriculumThe Board removed Thomas Jeffer…

By Michael J.W. StickingsIf there’s one part of Canada that’s right for Sarah Palin, it’s Alberta, our embarrassing bastion of right-wing insanity and one-party Conservative rule. It’s hardly a surprise that she was welcomed so enthusiastically in Calg…

By Michael J.W. StickingsAccording to Tom DeLay, an indicted felon, “[p]eople are unemployed because they want to be.” That was the question asked by CNN’s Candy Crowley yesterday, and DeLay unleashed the view that is common on the right and among Repu…

By Carl One of the more idiotic things about conservatives is this crying need to privatize everything, as if somehow private companies could do a far better job than the government in everything. Case in point: The U.S. Postal Service. T…

No, really!

This initial post (plus this correction) reveal a fascinating pattern that emerges from asking self-identified conservatives about the spending cuts they’d want to see.

Longtime conservative bugaboos like “foreign aid” and “welfare” score high marks. But other than that, no single proposal reaches even so much as 25% support for cuts among conservatives. And the next highest-scoring answer was something of a surprise: “war on terrorism.” Well, I’ll be!

After that, the answers show extraordinarily low, and extremely disparate support for cutting anything else in particular, with no other sector or program even rising to 20% support for cuts. And remember, these are self-identified conservatives.

Foreign aid, of course, comprises only about 1% of the annual federal budget. Defining “welfare programs” for the purposes of assessing how much of the budget is spent on them, presents some problems. Are they all “entitlement programs?” That’d be a sizable budget chunk. But how to reconcile even that with the fact that while something like 35% of conservatives say they want to cut “welfare programs,” less than 10% say they’d cut “aid to the poor?” And if “welfare programs” is to include all entitlements, you’re gonna have a problem with the extremely poor support among conservatives for cutting Social Security.

The bottom line is that conservatives — probably like most Americans — say they want at least some spending cut, but can’t cobble together any serious majorities in favor of cutting anything in particular. Even foreign aid comes in below 50%, not that slashing it would help save much money, anyway. And yet, whenever there have to be cuts, the bulk of them by necessity must be those which would be extremely unpopular even among conservatives.

The only answer to that is probably the only thing even less popular with conservatives than cutting these programs, and that’s taxes. And again, taxes are unpopular with pretty much anyone who has to pay them, though it’s also generally said to be the case that the more liberal end of the spectrum is more open to their necessity than the other side. (We’ll have to see if any data is ever produced that will one day call that assumption into question.)

But in lieu of actual answers, what you get from the discordant mewling of loudmouth teabaggers and other conservative screechers is: a collection of complaints about which they cannot even come to a consensus regarding the measure of their suckitude. “Cut… stuff!” is what you’d get if you had to synthesize a message from this mess. Which is not unlike what you’re you actually seeing saw from them today on Thursday, now that they’ve been invited to a summit meeting to share their ideas for health care reform.

Is this truly a party with a coherent philosophy, supposedly poised to wrest back control of the government? It’s often said that Republicans are far better at stating their basic beliefs than Democrats, and they usually do it by making reference to smaller government, lower spending and lower taxes. But the only consensus they’re able to produce for that even among themselves is for lower taxes. Which is kind of how we got where we are with the budget in the first place. And which leaves Republicans in truth as the party that stands for the explosion of the budget, which comes as no surprise to anyone who’s capable of remembering that Bill Clinton left office with a budget surplus, wrung out of slaying the Reagan deficits.

Again, not unlike what’s what was on display at the summit today the other day. The Republican position on health care, like the Republican position on everything but taxes, is designed only to hold their base together on the fact that they’re angry about something, and want to beat Democrats at the polls in order to prove how angry they really are. What happens after that? Well, who gives a crap? Just cut my taxes.

Why do Republicans believe the government “do comprehensive well?” Because as long as they comprise some part of it, there’s only one thing they care about, and that’s withholding the means by which anything the government does can be paid for. And “bipartisan compromise” with them means finding the “middle ground” between doing something and preventing anything from being done.

It’s a fool’s errand, and all you need to do to quantify the foolishness is to ask them the simple question, “What do you want?”

We’ll see if anybody gets that down at Blair House today.

By Michael J.W. StickingsHow hilarious is it that Ron Paul — yes, Ron “anti-Iraq War, thorn on the GOP side” Paul — won the straw poll at CPAC yesterday? It’s no wonder there were boos, but he ended up with almost a third of the vote, well ahead of R…

Change.

By Michael J.W. StickingsWell, the CPAC Insanitarium is in full swing in Washington, as it is this time every year, and the star of the first day, yesterday, was none other than Marco Rubio, the upstart right-wing darling who, now well out in front of …

By Carl I seriously doubt the father of our country would cotton to the whining underpants crowd:[O]n the eve of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference in Washington, more than 80 conservative leaders gathered on the grounds…

Hmmmm.

By Capt. FoggSo let me get this straight, President Obama, or if you’re a Republican, just plain Obama, is a dangerous leader because when someone tried to blow up a plane he took hours before mentioning the magic word “War.” That was bad. Never ev…