‘Freakshow’
They lie. They cheat. They exaggerate. They bluster. They say one idiotic, ignorant, outrageous thing after another. They’ve shown such stark lack of knowledge — political, economic, geographic, historical — that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein and even cause their fellow Republicans to cringe.
“When did the GOP lose touch with reality?” wonders Bush’s former speechwriter David Frum in New York Magazine. In the New York Times, Kenneth Duberstein, Ronald Reagan’s former chief-of-staff, called this campaign season a “reality show,” while Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan confidante Peggy Noonan even spoke of a “freakshow.”
That may be the most appropriate description.
Tough times demand tough and smart minds. But all these dopes have to offer are ramblings that insult the intelligence of all Americans — no matter if they are Democrats, Republicans or neither of the above. Yet just like any freakshow, this one would be unthinkable without a stage (in this case, the media, strangling itself with all its misunderstood “political correctness” and “objectivity”) and an audience (the party base, which this year seems to have suffered a political lobotomy).

Factually Challenged
And so the farce continues. The more mind-boggling its incarnations, the happier the US media are to cheer first one clown and then the next, elevating and then eliminating “frontrunners” in reliable news cycles of about 45 days.
Take Herman Cain, “businessman.” He sat out the first wave of sexual harassment claims against him by offering a peculiar argument: Most ladies he had encountered in his life, he said, had not complained.
In the most recent twist, a woman accused Cain of having carried on a 13-year affair with her. That, too, he tried to casually wave off, but now, under pressure, he says he wants to “reassess” his campaign.
If Cain indeed drops out, the campaign would lose its biggest caricature: He has been the most factually challenged of all these jesters.
As CEO of the “Godfather’s” pizza chain, Cain killed jobs — but now poses as the job-creator-in-chief. Meanwhile, he seems to lack basic economic know-how, let alone a rudimentary grasp of politics or geography. Libya confounds him. He does not believe that China is a nuclear power. And all other, slightly more complicated questions get a stock answer: “Nine-nine-nine!” Remember? That’s Cain’s tax reduction plan that would actually raise taxes for 84 percent of Americans.
Has any of that disrupted Cain’s popularity in the media or with his fan base? Far from it. Since Oct. 1, he has collected more than $9 million in campaign donations. Enough to plow through another onslaught of denouements.

No Shortage of Chutzpah
Then there’s Newt Gingrich, the current favorite. He’s a political dinosaur, dishonored and discredited. Or so we thought. Yet just because he studied history and speaks in more complex sentences than his rivals, the US media now reflexively hails him as a “Man of Ideas” (The Washington Post) — even though most of these ideas are lousy if not downright offensive, such as firing unionized school janitors, so poor children could do their jobs.
Pompous and blustering, Gingrich gets away with this humdinger as well as with selling himself as a Washington outsider — despite having made millions of dollars as a lobbyist in Washington. At least the man’s got chutzpah.
The hypocrisy doesn’t end here. Gingrich claims moral authority on issues such as the “sanctity of marriage,” yet he’s been divorced twice. He sprang the divorce on his first wife while she was sick with cancer. (His supporters’ excuse: It’s been 31 years, and she’s still alive.) He cheated on his second wife just as he was pressing ahead with Bill Clinton’s impeachment during the Monica Lewinsky affair, unaware of the irony. The woman he cheated with, by the way, was one of his House aides and 23 years his junior — and is now his perpetually smiling third wife.
Americans have a short memory. They forget, too, that Gingrich was driven out of Congress in disgrace, the first speaker of the house to be disciplined for ethical wrongdoing. Or that he consistently flirts with racism when he speaks of Barack Obama. Or that he enjoyed a $500,000 credit line at Tiffany’s just as his campaign was financially in the toilet and he ranted about the national debt. Chutzpah, indeed.
Yet the US media rewards him with a daily kowtow. And the Republicans reward him too, by having put him on top in the latest polls. Mr. Hypocrisy, the bearer of his party’s hope.
“I think he’s doing well just because he’s thinking,” former President Clinton told the conservative online magazine NewsMax. “People are hungry for ideas that make some sense.” Sense? Apparently it’s not just the Republicans who have lost their minds here.

The Eternal Runner-Up
And what about the other candidates? Rick Perry’s blunders are legendary. His “oops” moment in suburban Detroit. His frequently slurred speech, as if he was drunk. His TV commercials putting words in Obama’s mouth that he didn’t say (such as, “Americans are ‘lazy’”). His preposterous claim that as governor of Texas he created 1 million jobs, when the total was really just about 100,000. But what’s one digit? Elsewhere, Perry would have long ago been disqualified. But not in the US.
Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann has fallen off the wagon, although she’s still tolerated as if she’s a serious contender. Ron Paul’s fan club gets the more excited, the more puzzling his comments get. Jon Huntsman, the only one who occasionally makes some sort of sense, has been relegated to the poll doldrums ever since he showed sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.
Which leaves Mitt Romney, the eternal flip-flopper and runner-up, who by now is almost guaranteed to clinch the nomination, even though no one in his party seems to like or want him. He stiffly delivers his talking points, which may or may not contradict his previous positions. After all, he’s been practicing this since 2008, when he failed to snag the nomination from John McCain. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
As an investor, Romney once raked in millions and, like Cain, killed jobs along the way. So now he says he’s the economy’s savior. To prove that, he has presented an economic plan that the usually quite conservative business magazine Forbes has labeled “dangerous,” asking incredulously, “About Mitt Romney, the Republicans can’t be serious.” Apparently they’re not, but he is, running TV spots against Obama already, teeming with falsehoods.

Good for Ratings
What a nice club that is. A club of liars, cheaters, adulterers, exaggerators, hypocrites and ignoramuses. “A starting point for a chronicle of American decline,” was how David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, described the current Republican race.
The Tea Party would take issue with that assessment. They cheer the loudest for the worst, only to see them fail, as expected, one by one. Which goes to show that this “movement,” sponsored by Fox News, has never been interested in the actual business of governing or in the intelligence and intellect that requires. They are only interested in marketing themselves, for ratings and dollars.
So the US elections are a reality show after all, a pseudo-political counterpart to the Paris Hiltons, Kim Kardashians and all the “American Idol” and “X Factor” contestants littering today’s TV. The cruder, the dumber, the more bizarre and outlandish — the more lucrative. Especially for Fox News, whose viewers were recently determined by Fairleigh Dickinson University to be far less informed than people who don’t watch TV news at all.
Maybe that’s the solution: Just ignore it all, until election day. Good luck with that — this docudrama with its soap-opera twists is way too enthralling. The latest rumor du jour involves a certain candidate who long ago seemed to have disappeared from the radar. Now she may be back, or so it is said, to bring order into this chaos. Never mind that her name is synonymous with chaos: Sarah Palin.

A Club of Losers
Indeed, the Kerry campaign did its best to distance their candidate from his French connection. A distant French cousin of Kerry’s was asked to avoid speaking with the press. And Kerry himself made a point of saying that he preferred American bottled water to Evian, the French brand.
This time around, though, with Europe deep in crisis, the Continent has become an even more prominent element of Republicans’ stump speeches. With high state debt, high unemployment in several countries and a sluggish euro-zone economy, the European Union is seen as a club of losers.
“You want to see America after the Obama administration is through,” arch-conservative candidate Rick Santorum said on the campaign trail last week, “just read up on Greece.” Santorum is fond of the sentence, and often replaces that country depending on the relative economic situation in Europe. Portugal likewise gets mentioned frequently, as do Italy and Ireland. Lately, France too has been making an appearance.
The US president, in other words, is merely a European in disguise. That is the message the Republicans would like to convey. Newt Gingrich, in particular, never tires of calling Obama a “socialist.” Obama has a “European social democratic vision” says Romney, and claimed recently that per capita income in the US was “50 percent more” than in Europe. And Ron Paul, perhaps the most extreme of the Republican field full of extremists, advocates pulling US troops out of Europe, in part so that America is no longer in the position of subsidizing “socialist Germany.”
Such attacks would, of course, be ridiculous were they not so effective at a time when the economic outlook in the US is far from rosy, particularly given the danger that the euro-zone debt crisis could put a quick stop to America’s fragile economic recovery.

A Convenient Scapegoat
Indeed, even Obama himself has become a fan of Europe-bashing. As long as the euro crisis remains unsolved, the president has taken to repeating, the global economy will continue to suffer. The Obama administration has also repeatedly demanded that European leaders — first and foremost German Chancellor Angela Merkel — take more decisive action. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has traveled to Europe several times in recent months to lend urgency to the message.
Why the focus on Europe? Obama’s re-election depends on at least some improvement in a moribund US economy and in a persistently high unemployment rate of 8 to 9 percent. Blaming the Europeans makes for a convenient scapegoat.
But for the Republicans, the focus on Europe has a different motivation. The war on Europe is not merely one guided by economic concerns. It is presented as a cultural confrontation. “American elites are guided by their desire to emulate the European elites,” says Gingrich. “As a result, anti-religious values and principles are coming to dominate the academic, news media and judicial class in America.” Secular Europe, in other words, has become a threat to Christian America.
Romney, too, sees it as a battle for the soul of America. The former Massachusetts governor, who has been dogged by accusations that he is a flip-flopper and not quite conservative enough to be the Republican presidential candidate, has begun emphasizing his love for patriotic songs during campaign appearances. Hardly a stump speech in New Hampshire goes by without him quoting a verse or two from “America the Beautiful.”

A Vote for Freedom
For there, it is often but a small step to expressing his disdain for Europe. “The president said he wants to fundamentally transform America,” Romney said during an appearance in Iowa at the end of December. “I kind of like America. I’m not looking for it to be fundamentally transformed into something else. I don’t want it to become like Europe.” He went on: “I want America to be more like America, if you will. I want the songs, that patriotism that we have.”
Santorum prefers to take a slightly more historical approach, comparing the European welfare state to the absolute rule of monarchies. The founders of America, he says, left Europe because they no longer wanted to be ruled by monarchs. I don’t believe, he says, that resources should be redistributed from the top to the bottom.
It is a statement that sounds absurd from a European point of view — even more so given the current state of the US economy. The American dream of being able to rise from being a dishwasher to millionaire hasn’t been reality for years, perhaps decades. And a recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found recently that social mobility between generations is now much lower in the US than it is in Canada and in several Western European countries.
Still, the key message the GOP field wants to convey is: A vote for the Republicans is a vote for freedom.
And not, as it happens, just any Republican. The field itself has taken to accusing each other of being too “European.” Recently, RC Hammond, the spokesman for Newt Gingrich’s campaign, commented on Mitt Romney’s alleged support for a value added tax. “The fact that he’s willing to look at European Socialism shows just how far out of the conservative mainstream he is,” Hammond said.

Initially, it was supposed to cost €110 billion ($130 billion). That’s how expensive the first EU bailout package for Greece was. Soon, it was expanded via a comprehensive rescue fund that helped out Portugal and Ireland. Then came a second bailout package for Greece, followed by an even more comprehensive rescue fund for the rest.
In late September 2011, representatives in Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag, had not yet voted on this expanded package — which would put Germany alone on the hook for €211 billion — but it was already clear to them that even that wouldn’t be enough. But nobody could say that out loud, and especially not Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, because they obviously didn’t want to endanger the government’s majority in parliament — and, thereby, its own ability to govern.
On top of that, the European Central Bank (ECB) is buying up sovereign bonds of debt-ridden euro-zone countries. At first, it was Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Then, beginning in the summer of 2011, it bought bonds from Italy and Spain. It now has a grand total of over €195 billion of bonds on its books. If things should go south, Germany will also ultimately be responsible for 27 percent of that figure, corresponding to Germany’s share of the ECB’s capital.

Winning Time
The argument is always that it’s all about winning time. Time that would allow the financial markets to settle down. Time that would let the debt-ridden PIIGS states (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain) implement stringent cost-cutting measures. Time that would make it possible for the euro zone to reform its institutions and rules — and perhaps even let Greece default without having the entire euro immediately implode.
But is all that money really well invested? And will the time it has bought also be put to sensible use?
Anyone who believes that the European currency union doesn’t have a future anyway will think that every euro devoted to the rescue effort is a euro too many. On the other hand, anyone who thinks that the European Union is no longer imaginable without the euro — as Chancellor Merkel does — will believe that no price is too high.
But whoever wants to save the euro must first be clear about the ultimate goal he or she wants to achieve. Do they want a currency union like the one constructed in the 1990s, with states that are solely responsible for their own finances, or a so-called transfer union with shared liabilities? Do they want a currency union in its current configuration or a smaller but stable euro zone of the core countries? And, whatever the answer, they also have to ask themselves which of these possibilities can realistically be implemented politically.

The Mistakes of the Past
In answering these questions, the very first thing one has to do is conduct an honest analysis of what went wrong with the ambitious project of giving the old continent a unified currency, and why it is stuck in such a deep crisis today. Indeed, if one is going to be able to draw the correct conclusions for the future, one can only do so by first identifying the mistakes and errors of the past.
But, already at this point, one runs into problems. Almost all of the major political figures in Europe — whether it’s Helmut Schmidt, Germany’s chancellor from 1974 to 1982, who sees himself as the grandfather of the common currency, current Chancellor Merkel, Jean-Claude Juncker, the head of the Euro Group, or Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the ECB until Oct. 31 — have been unanimous in stressing that there isn’t any euro crisis at all. Rather, in their eyes, what we have is simply a debt crisis in some euro-zone countries.
If it were only that simple. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Simply put, without a common currency, Greece’s problems wouldn’t have spilled over into Spain and Italy. And, without this risk of contagion, politicians and central bankers wouldn’t be staggering from one crisis summit to the next, ever driven by the fear that the currency union might break apart.
Without the euro, Greece could recover more easily. It could devalue its currency and thereby make its national economy competitive once again.
Indeed, without the euro, Greece wouldn’t have ever gotten into this calamitous situation in the first place. The fact that it was a member of the currency union was the only thing that allowed the country to borrow money at such favorable rates and get itself up to the neck in debt.

The Principle of Hope

Nevertheless, not one of the currency union’s founding fathers will admit that it was poorly designed. The currency union brought together countries that weren’t compatible economically simply because it was opportune politically. It replaced the currency exchange rate, the standard mechanism for balancing out differences between national economies, with the principle of hope. Now, the common currency was supposed to make the economies align themselves with each other, practically automatically.
In reality, however, the differences between the economies of the euro-zone countries became larger rather than smaller. The so-called “Club Med” countries benefited from the low common interest rate. They lived beyond their means and they consumed more than they could afford — to the detriment of their already weak ability to compete.
A country with a flagging economy normally devalues its currency. Doing so makes its goods cheaper on the global market, allowing it to increase exports and cut back on its deficit. But, in a currency union, there isn’t an exchange rate that can serve as a compensatory mechanism. If a country doesn’t have a sound economy, the tensions only increase.
For these reasons, it has always been clear that the currency union cannot function without shared economic and financial policies. Indeed, that’s exactly how politicians imagined things in the beginning. For example, in November 1991, then-German Chancellor Helmut Kohl told the Bundestag that a currency union without a political union would be absurd.

Political Delusions
At the time, Europe’s governments couldn’t agree on steps toward greater political integration — but they still kept pursuing the currency-union project anyway. The vague expectation was that the political union would follow the economic one of its own accord.
This hope was never fulfilled, and so the euro rushed headlong into crisis. Things started off slowly. But, once the criteria of the Stability and Growth Pact were no longer adhered to, they started picking up speed — until even the key promise that pro-euro politicians had made was broken. According to the so-called “no-bailout clause” of the Maastricht Treaty, no country was supposed to be liable for the debts of another.
As the former SPD Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück told SPIEGEL in an interview published in September, that was an “error that became evident during the crisis.” As he sees it, this “political delusion should have already been acknowledged and explained a year and a half ago.”
Instead, Germans were repeatedly told that saving the euro might not even cost them anything, that no money had changed hands yet, that only guarantees had been given. But nobody can believe that anymore.

A Bailout Based on an Illusion
Just as the euro’s introduction was based on a mistake, the effort to rescue the euro began with another instance of “political delusion,” to use Steinbrück’s phrase.
With debts amounting to 150 percent of GNP, Greece is de facto bankrupt. Over the course of 2011, even the leading representatives of the euro zone finally accepted this fact — after having claimed its opposite a year previously.
This explains why the first bailout package for Greece was, to put it mildly, based on an illusion. Possibly against their better judgment, countries putting money into the package assumed that Greece would be able to solve its debt problems by implementing a stringent belt-tightening regime.
The so-called troika, made up of representatives of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the ECB and the European Commission, was tasked with evaluating the success of these measures.
But they were not successful. Instead of getting better, things only got worse for the country. The austerity measures caused the economy to stall, hoped-for increases in state revenues never materialized, and the country started sinking deeper into debt rather than climbing out of it. But the financial assistance kept coming nevertheless.

Learning a Bitter Lesson
This year, the would-be euro saviors have had to learn a bitter lesson: If they assume that the collapse of a single euro-zone country would bring with it incalculable risks, comparable to the 2008 collapse of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers, then they have no credible power to exert pressure on deficit offenders. Instead, they just have to keep paying. And then the euro zone will have to subsidize countries like Greece for the long term — just like the rest of Germany has been supporting the chronically cash-strapped northern city-state of Bremen for decades under the country’s federal financial equalization system.
The only question is whether ordinary people will play along — both in the donor countries, who are meant to keep paying, as well as those in the recipient countries, who will have to suffer mightily under stringent austerity measures.
In September, the Bundestag voted to approve the expansion of the euro bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). But there is growing resistance to additional maneuvers of this sort — and not only in Germany.
The currency union has already started subtly transforming itself into a debt union. If the ECB — and soon the EFSF too — purchase sovereign bonds that might never be paid back, or at least not in full, the stronger countries will be liable for the weaker ones.
Of course, politicians don’t like to use phrases like liability union or transfer union. But what these phrases describe became reality long ago — which also numbers among the truths they prefer not to mention.

Bottomless Pit
Yet another inconvenient truth is that not all countries will be able to reduce their debt levels by themselves and boost their competitiveness. The currency union can only survive as a transfer union, and if it doesn’t want to become a bottomless pit, it also needs to become a fiscal union — one with strict rules and independent institutions capable of enforcing them.
For these reasons, the euro states have to cede a major part of their sovereignty to Brussels. Whether or not one wants to call the result the United States of Europe is a matter of taste.
Proponents of this kind of union fantasize that the crisis will give rise to an opportunity. They believe that now, in the hour of need, the pressure to act is big enough to push through the integration of Europe that has previously always failed because of national self-interest.
But they might be deceiving themselves once again. The parliaments of the EU member states would have to approve any far-reaching amendments to the union’s treaties. What’s more, in many cases, this would also involve changing national constitutions and holding referendums. Such a process is protracted, and its outcome is anyone’s guess.
The alternative would be returning to how things were originally, meaning at the birth of the currency union. As happened then, euro-zone members would pledge to maintain stability (which admittedly already failed once before, because the rules were overridden when push came to shove). In this case, there would be no permanent transfers and also no collectivization of debts.

Inevitable Shrinkage

In the end, the currency union will shrink. Greece and possibly even other countries will have to abandon the euro in order to be able to get back on their feet with the help of their own, significantly devalued, currency.
The euro saviors and their citizens must finally face the uncomfortable truth. Under current conditions, the euro will fail economically because the differences between euro-zone countries are too great.
But new conditions that would give the euro a firm economic foundation are almost impossible to implement due to political factors. In any case, they can definitely not be put in place quickly enough to combat the current crisis.
Indeed, the would-be euro saviors are suffering from yet another delusion: that they are able to buy all the time they need, without any limits.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Wealthy
There is no place for the politics of class resentment in the Republican party — except when it comes to Mitt Romney.

Today, at 10:11 A.M., bells rang all across Tucson in memory of the tragic shooting that took place one year ago.
Today is to remember the fallen — six beloved Americans whose passion and purpose enriched the lives of so many others. Today is to recount the heroic actions of ordinary Americans and first responders alike who jumped into the fray, saved lives and prevented even greater heartbreak.
Today is to give thanks for the 13 Americans who survived. One of those survivors, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, is a public servant whose dedication and determination is unsurpassed. I am honored to call her both colleague and friend.
Today is to embrace the lessons of the shooting’s aftermath — how the Tucson community, heartbroken but unbowed, came together as one and inspired an entire nation in the process.
Today is to promise that the best angels of our nature will always drive our actions. A promise to protect our family, to honor our friends and to empower our community. A promise to give thanks for the living and to honor John, Dorothy, Phyllis, Mavy, Gabe and Christina — six brave Americans who animate what is right and true in all of us.