The federal budget is $3.8 trillion.

The Republicans have just come up with their plan to cut the federal budget. They've found $32 billion of cuts.

Their fiery campaign rhetoric, fierce determination, righteous indignation, and bloviated anger have summoned forth a hairball.

What happened to John Boehner's $100 billion budget-cutting commitment? What became of Paul Ryan's big ideas? Where did all the roaring and raging on the right during the 2010 election go?

This is embarrassing.

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I was primed to issue a rant but you would all profit much more by reading this interview with Noam Chomsky.

My only thought is that the events in Egypt ought to induce the sickening feeling that the regime whose face is being exposed has been a U.S. client for decades and is only one of many such clients. Moreover, the behavior on exhibit is not a new experience for the people of Egypt, nor for those oppressed by other U.S. stooges around the world.

That the U.S. is not truly hated around the world is a testament to the understanding and restraint of the suffering, benighted peoples of the world. And if anything can put to rest the fantasy that the "West" is in the business of upholding freedom and human rights internationally, it should be the events of the past week.

Much more good stuff at the Democracy Now! website.

When I lampooned here yesterday the enthusiasms, "wisdom," and real motives of neo-conservatives who are pontificating about democratic upheavals in Egypt and other Arab states, I presented them as false prophets and knew better than to offer myself as a true one. Hannah Arendt filled that bill, somewhat, at the end of the post.

But Arendt is long gone (she died in 1975), and the writer who best explains now what's truly at stake in the present crisis has just posted a terrifically clear, concise, compelling assessment. It's a prophecy in the best sense -- not a "prediction" -- and it takes more into account, in Egypt and in the West, than anything else I've read.

We need to discuss this piece's implications for American policy and politics. But I'll do no more here now than give the floor to the man who has written what my subjects of yesterday couldn't have given us even had they tried. If anything, yesterday's post just tried to clear away a mess of brambles and underbrush to get us to this.

In the Washington Post this morning, George Soros describes very well America's equities in Egypt's current political struggle. America is not all powerful and does not have a magic wand to turn totalitarian regimes into well-functioning democracies, but there are times when the balance in America's strategic relationships must shift toward the vital importance of popular self-determination and will.

Soros opens:

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President Mubarak announced yesterday that he would not be seeking reelection, telling the world what it already knew. What was more interesting about the announcement was the way it was foreshadowed by the actions of the American administration. Obama has decided that he wants to be part of what's next, clearly, but siding with the crowds against Mubarak right now is not exactly going bold.

If he really intends to capture the imaginations of the young people in the crowds, from Tunis to Amman, he will have to signal powerfully that he is intent on building a new Middle East with them and live up to the promise of his Cairo speech. This means making clear that he will not be toyed with by the Netanyahu government. Many will jump to the conclusion that the fall of Mubarak is proof that Netanyahu was right all along, that his neighborhood is tough and unstable. But the wisdom of the crowd is that the occupation of Palestine has been the toughest and most destabilizing reality in the neighborhood for the last 40 years.

It would be folly for Obama to move on the Palestinian issue if a peace deal were not capable of being envisioned. Obama should not dare to present a plan that is implausible just to pander to Egyptian protesters, and he will certainly not sacrifice Israel's essential security interests. But what if a deal is not only possible but more or less worked out?

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Every century seems to have its revolutions and their progenitors. Often, the gap between the idea and its political effect can be 50 years or more. The first volume of Marx's Das Capital was published in 1867, but it wasn't until 1917 that a Marxist Revolution in Russia occurred. When we look back on the revolutions taking place across the Arab world in the winter of 2011, we may find that the ideas of one man may have unintentionally brought down governments across the Mid East. His name was Alan Greenspan, and he began changing our world in 1987, when President Reagan made him Chairman of the Fed, the most powerful banking institution in the world.

Grouping Marx and Greenspan will certainly displease the Ayn Rand crowd, but stick with me for a minute. What was the initial spark that set off the bonfires consuming the Arab world? In a word--Inflation. The revolt in Tunisia was called "The Hunger Revolution", because it was sparked by the dramatically rising cost of grains across the country. A Chinese economist, Andy Xie, has just published a remarkable article outlining the long term effect of the low interest, easy money policies the Greenspan fostered (and Bernanke followed). While I don't agree with all of Xie's thesis, he makes many important points. Cheap money only helps people with assets. It does not help the Egyptian bread seller. It inflates asset prices (stocks and real estate), and causes radical income inequality. It inflates the casino economy of Wall Street, but does nothing to help foster a real productive economy. Here is Xie.

Moreover, as global GDP doubled in dollar terms, far outstripping the output growth of grain or energy, their prices have surged. The FAO global food-price index rose by 138% in the decade, and the Brent crude price rose to about $100 per barrel now from an average of $20 in the 1990s. Even if the average income rose by 90% in dollar terms as the economic data suggest, the outsized price increase in food and energy could have offset that for a big chunk of the global population. A sizable portion of the global population may be worse off today than 10 years ago.

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David Brooks and Leon Wieseltier, whom I'll politely call "historically neo-conservative" commentators, are singing Kumbaya and shouting whatever is Arabic for "Right on!" to Egyptians who are pressing bravely for democracy and Hosni Mubarak's departure.

At least one might think so, reading Brooks in the New York Times and Wieseltier in The New Republic. They aren't actually there in Cairo with the demonstrators, of course. But they do sound amazingly like liberal Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is in Egypt praising the movement for democracy. All agree that Obama hasn't done enough to oust Mubarak and hearten the people.

Huh? This from Brooks and Wieseltier, who've long countenanced Mubarak and his regime without a murmur? If it was just them, it wouldn't matter. But they're exemplars of a mindset that endangers Egypt, Israel, and the United States, especially when it's opportunistically on the side of what's best in all three.

Egyptians, Brooks informs us piously, are no different than Russians, Ukrainians, and South Africans in their quest for dignity. True. Yet Brooks seems bizarrely out of character, as if he were channeling The Young Rascals: "All the world over, it's so easy to see, people everywhere just wanna be free!"

Wieseltier, less rapturous, decides that Obama is hesitating because he's still recovering from Liberal Iraq-War Syndrome and We Unjustly-Overthrew-Mossadegh Syndrome and is taking the wrong lessons from history. Although "the rebellion [in Egypt] is still maddeningly obscure, and [Obama] must be careful," that only makes his "support for the democratizers of Egypt more urgent," Wieseltier advises us.

He even quotes Kristof quoting demonstrators craving American support. Tahrir Square is Tienanmen; all it needs is a visit from the real Statue of Liberty, instead of a Chinese demonstrator's poignantly hoisting a model. But I am not making light of the upheavals in the Arab world. I am observing the upheavals in neo-conservatives' minds.

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I'd like to thank Charles Johnson for his excellent essay, The New Tribalism. In my book, Blowing Smoke, I found myself searching for a word to describe the vague web of race, religion, culture, and politics that the right wing has used to construct and exploit a new collective identity. I called it a new class-consciousness, but I think that Johnson's term tribalism more aptly captures the jumble of racial and social bonds that the right has used to mobilize white, Christian conservatives as a political bloc.

If you read below the fold of Johnson's article, you'll notice a number of vitriolic comments from readers. These commenters are not TPM regulars. They have been stalking Johnson around the Internet for years, literally. The one called diaryofdaedalus has tried to register at Johnson's blog under at least a dozen different aliases. He has his own blog that alternates between bashing Johnson and exposing the "myth of Serbian genocide." Apparently, he even chose the name Daedalus because Johnson used Icarus as a stage name in his former musical career.

Why such obsession? It's a bitter example of what happens when conservatives like Johnson challenge the bigoted rhetoric of the right wing. The explanation requires some back story.

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Daniel Levy of the New America Foundation, one of the sharpest thinkers on all matters Middle Eastern, does not buy the idea that President Hosni Mubarak ever was a force for "stability" in the region.

On the contrary, according to Levy's latest piece in Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel "Mubarak's heavy-handed security and intelligence apparatus probably created more terrorists than it intercepted."

Nor does Levy believe that Mubarak helped advance peace. All he did was advance Israel's short-term interests in preserving the status quo.

The regional utility that Mubarak's Egypt maintained became more narrowly focused on the short-term interests of the Government of Israel. Some have described Mubarak as a cornerstone of U.S. efforts to resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict, but that is inaccurate. Mubarak's Egypt became the cornerstone of something far-less worthy: an effort to maintain a farcical peace process that sustained Israel's occupation and settlement expansion, that sustained an image of Egypt's usefulness as the indispensible peace-builder, and that allowed the US to avoid making hard choices.

Levy believes that it is critical to both countries that the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty be maintained. But, he says, that does not give the U.S. or Israel the right to "demand that Egypt continue to be the loyal servant of a thoroughly discredited peace process. The US should be careful not to view transition in Egypt too much through the prism of Israeli demands."

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First, I want to thank Michael for inviting me to participate in this book club, and for the kind words about me in Blowing Smoke.

"Persecution politics" is an excellent way to frame what's happening in the GOP and the right wing these days, and I'd like to bring up another important factor that helps make persecution politics such an effective defense mechanism: tribalism. Not just the atavistic racist tribalism of a small section of the far right base, but a new kind of widespread mainstream tribalism enabled by modern technologies.

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The two other Michaels participating in this book club have offered two reasons for the growth of right-wing paranoia. Michael Maiello argued that economic frustration has led people to conclude that someone is stacking the decks against them, while Michael Orion Powell proposed that the decline of American international hegemony is to blame.

Maeillo is in good company. Journalists, political scientists, and even President Obama have made similar arguments. But while economic challenges may have exacerbated the paranoia, I do not believe that economics lies at the root of it. I spent a chapter in Blowing Smoke addressing the matter, which I'll briefly summarize here.

After World War II, social psychologists sought to explain the popular success of the Nazi regime by proposing that impoverished Germans had channeled their economic frustrations into anti-Semitism. The theory became known as the frustration-aggression hypothesis.

The hypothesis seemed plausible, since the Nazis arose from the ashes of economic depression, but subsequent sociological studies failed to confirm it, and the theory eventually fell out of favor. One recent statistical study found a correlation between political extremism and economic decline, but the effect was modest, and the authors concluded, "The empirical results in this paper instead show that it is unlikely that even strong recessions can change political outcomes."

Moreover while some paranoid movements in American history have coincided with economic recessions, there are also counterexamples that challenge the hypothesis that such movements are primarily driven by economic decline. For instance, the worst period of mass paranoia in recent U.S. history was the Red Scare, which took place amid the tremendous postwar economic boom of the 1940s and 1950s.

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Al Jazeera's video of Egypt President Hosni Mubarak swearing in intelligence chief Omar Suleiman as the first vice president of Egypt in nearly three decades has many clamoring to learn whatever they can about this person who may actually succeed Mubarak.

Suleiman, one of the long-serving national security technocrats in Egypt, has been a key manager of Egypt's lucrative, military-aid lubed relationship with the United States and has been one of the key interlocutors with Israel.

One of the most disappointing encounters I had with Suleiman was during the time he led efforts to patch together a revived "unity government" in Palestine, tying back together Fatah and Hamas that had split in a bloody and violent civil war which resulted in each party governing different parts of Palestine.

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Joe Nocera gets most of the story right in his discussion of the Financial Crisis Inquiry's Commission's (FCIC) report today. There was gross negligence, greed, and outright fraud, but none of this would have lead to catastrophic consequences if we didn't have a housing bubble. (For that matter, having a housing bubble driven economy virtually guaranteed catastrophic consequences, even without the financial abuses. Spain, which had a well-regulated banking system and no financial crisis, keeps reminding us of this fact, with its 20.6 percent unemployment. The commission was off on the wrong foot from the outset in looking at the "financial crisis." The real crisis is an economic crisis caused by the collapse of an asset bubble which had been the engine of growth in the economy.)

Nocera blames the mass delusion that house prices could rise endlessly with no foundation in the fundamentals of the housing market. This is absolutely right, but there is a key point missing. We have regulators, most importantly central bankers like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, who are not supposed to succumb to mass delusions. They are supposed to make their assessments of the economy based on a measured analysis not the hysterical rantings of the deluded masses.

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If one needs additional proof that the "pro-Israel" lobby and the policies it dictates to US policymakers are bad for both the U.S. and Israel, look no further than what is happening in Egypt.

The regime that the Israeli government and its U.S. lobby have depended upon to enforce the status quo is going down. It is not clear when, but it's going to be soon, much sooner than anyone ever anticipated. And you can be sure that any democratic government that takes Mubarak's place is not going to play the role of America's (let alone Israel's) enforcer in the Middle East.

Hopefully, the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty will survive -- thousands of lives on both sides have been saved by President Carter's Camp David Treaty -- but there are no guarantees. Far from it.

Of course, no one would even be worried about the peace treaty if the Israelis had agreed to implement the critical second part of the Camp David Accords.

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To find out more about Michael Orion Powell and his work, check out his blog, Deschamps.

I like Michael's description of Beck as "rationalizing" bigotry.

There's a video of Beck discussing the infamous Father Charles Coughlin and dismissing comparisons between him and the two. In the video, he notes that Coughlin viewed poverty and inequality as a chief issue, which differentiates him from the Ayn Rand touting Beck. The lack of self-awareness shows as he continues to describe Coughlin, saying that Coughlin believed the Great Depression was caused by a "cabal of international bankers" who worked in tandem to usurp "American sovereignty." That that was the basic argument of his George Soros obsession seems to be lost in the midst of Beck's self-awareness deficit. Beck's alleged cabal of bankers is likewise overwhelmingly Jewish and his frequent use of Nazi imagery, and his use of screenshots of the Sinai peninsula (Go back and watch the video for yourself. It's right there in the open.) while talking about Soros is an act of blowing the fascist dog whistle louder than it's been blown in a long, long time. We'd have to be able to catch Beck in private to know if he uses derogatory terms for Jews, but from the outside it seems to rationalizes old, indeed ancient, anti-Semitic arguments by substituting "progressive" for "Jew." As his fans at the white nationalist website Stormfront have put it, Beck goes "as close as you can get to naming the Jew without actually naming the Jew."

There's so many more examples of his rationalization of bigotry, as Michael has put it, and Charles Johnson and I have documented them pretty well. The rationalization threatens to cascade into the avenues that may even surprise, however. Even with significant disillusion with the right wing, stories such as the effort of House Republicans to legally redefine "rape" to "forcible rape" continue to astonish. As a female friend said, this is apparently justified because "in the whole 'I'm a poor defenseless man,' world, rape is a tool used by nubile young women to trap defenseless older men."

As Michael put it, it's no longer about proving that Beck and the Tea Party brigadiers carry bigoted resentment but explaining it. It seems as if, at least on an unconscious level, significant levels of the population have bought into the paradigm that racism and bigotry is okay now that WASPs are no longer in total control in society. This could possibly explain the adoption of terms like "ruling class" by Rush Limbaugh just as he makes crude imitations of Chinese accents.

The decline of America as a superpower plays into all of this. Americans have not felt a strong need to think about the rest of the world for a long time, and the country's untouchable hegemony seemed to vindicate that. Now Americans are losing jobs to people halfway across the world who actually speak more than one language, have a stronger work ethic and are willing to work for less. The irrationality of racism and stereotypes provides a comfort that at least you're still superior to the people you're losing out to. You can see this in clips where Glenn Beck proclaims that there are no working toilets in India.