Count me as one who never knew, until this past weekend’s Niall Ferguson dust-up, that conservatives have long held John Maynard Keynes’s sexuality against him. I know, silly me; of course they did. And the nature of the protest is so typical of the conservative mind. The insistence on highlighting (usually inaccurately) one element of a person’s biography, and then arguing that this element represents the person’s full “character,” and then making the claim that said character is destiny; that’s how conservatives tend to see and explain the world, whether in limning their heroes (how Ronald Reagan “won” the Cold War) or in making sense of villains like Keynes.

Many commentators have by now risen to Keynes’s defense on a personal level and argued that his childlessness does not prove that he didn’t care about future generations. But surprisingly to me—especially as we concurrently debate the abysmal failures of austerity—no one that I’ve seen has defended Keynes against the larger historical charge and said the obvious: that in fact, Keynes-inspired policies as implemented in the United States and elsewhere have done immeasurable good for future generations, one hell of a lot more good than supply-side economics could ever even pretend to.

Let’s review the allegation, which Jonah Goldberg summarized over the weekend with the kind of bemused indifference that did not characterize his earlier iteration of the bill of particulars supporting his claim that John Kennedy was a fascist. Goldberg pronounced himself surprised that what Ferguson said was news to anyone. He then carries us on a brisk journey from Joseph Schumpeter (whose 1946 quote about Keynes has been oft-mentioned these last few days) to Gertrude Himmelfarb to William Rees-Mogg (see, even the Brits said it!) to Bill Greider (see, even a lefty said it!) to show that people have been saying this about Keynes for years, so what’s the big deal?

In the dark arts of political campaigns known as oppo research, the most basic tools of the trade include campaign finance reports, arrest records, lawsuits, old newspaper clips.

In Virginia, though, it seems as if all it takes to embarrass the opposing campaign is a working library card.

Over the past week, Republican operatives have been barely able to contain their glee as they email out select passages from What a Party!: My Life Among Democrats, Presidents, Candidates, Donors, Activists, Alligators, And Other Wild Animals, the memoir by Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, top fundraiser and ally of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and now the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia.

I've spent a lot of time with politicians, so it would be fair to assume that my proximity would increase my cynicism about the process, the people, or both. As the saying goes, no man is a hero to his valet – and political consultants are the valets of the modern American political system.

But I've gone the other way. The more time I've spent with men and women in office and running for office, the more I've come to respect the extraordinary pressures they are under and the very personal pain inevitable in a public life where there often seems to be no public space. Unless you have been through it or seen it up close, it's difficult to imagine.

U.S. special operations teams were told to stand down the night of the attack on the U.S. intelligence and diplomatic facility in Benghazi on the eleventh anniversary of 9-11, according to a new whistleblower who will testify this week before Congress.

Gregory Hicks, who was the top deputy to the slain U.S. ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, will say his in written testimony that a second team of special operations officers were told not to fly to Benghazi on the evening of the attack. That team was scheduled to depart on a C-130 airplane to Benghazi that eventually took flight at 6:00 am on the morning of September 12. Less than one hour earlier, a round of mortar fire killed two CIA contractors—Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods — standing guard at a CIA annex in Benghazi.

While a team of CIA contractors from Tripoli did arrive in Benghazi late in the evening of the attack, Hicks' testimony sheds new light on the military's response to the attack as it was taking place. The testimony from Hicks, who served as chief of mission for the U.S. embassy at Tripoli after Stevens was killed in the initial attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, contradicts what senior Obama administration officials told Congress in briefings last year.

Not long after Elvin Daniel joined the National Rifle Association, his sister, Zina, was shot to death by her husband. She was 42 years old and in the process of a divorce on the fall day last year when her husband, Radcliffe Haughton Jr., an ex-Marine, showed up at the Azana Salon and Spa in Brookfield, Wisconsin, with a loaded .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

Nothing could have prepared Daniel and the two daughters Zina left behind for the loss. But her violent death wasn’t a complete surprise. Earlier that month, Haughton drove to the suburban-Milwaukee beauty parlor where his wife worked and slashed her tires. He was arrested, and Zina filed for a restraining order. At the court hearing that followed, she told the judge: “I love my daughter. I loved my husband. I never wanted her to see him taken away.” To her husband, she said: “But things have gotten so bad, Rad. I just, we need to separate. We need a course before you hurt me. I don’t want to die. I just don’t want to die.”

Days later, Houghton killed his wife and shot six other women in the spa, killing two of them with shots to the head and neck, before finally shooting himself dead. The couple’s older daughter, Yasmeen, was in the spa and witnessed the events. The day the restraining order was issued, Houghton wrote a plea on his Facebook page. “Need to get out of Wisconsin, HELP…,” he wrote. The Internet did not help him escape the nightmare of his broken marriage, but it did provide, for $500 cash and no questions asked, the tool of his destruction.

If Dick Harpootlian were a Republican, liberals would be jumping over one another to call him a bigot. In 2002 Harpootlian called Lindsey Graham, then running for a South Carolina Senate seat, “light in the loafers,” thus fueling a nasty whispering campaign about Graham’s sexual orientation. Last Friday he struck again, telling activists to “send Nikki Haley”—South Carolina’s Indian-American governor—“back to wherever the hell she came from.”

But Harpootlian isn’t a Republican. Until he retired last Saturday, he was chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. He made his comments about Haley at the party’s annual dinner, just before Joe Biden took the stage. And as a result, the liberal response has been muted. So far, neither Biden nor Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, whose candidacy for a South Carolina congressional seat has gained national attention, has repudiated Harpootlian’s comments. And for now, at least, conservatives are just about the only ones asking them to.

That’s a problem, because unless offenses like Harpootlian’s are slapped down hard, Democratic Party bigotry is likely to get worse. The reason is simple: the Republican Party is getting more diverse. Stung by its disastrous electoral showings among Americans who are neither white, Anglo, straight, nor male, the GOP has finally begun to broaden its candidate base. The party now boasts an African-American senator from South Carolina, Cuban-American senators from Florida and Texas, Indian-American governors in South Carolina and Louisiana, and Mexican-American governors in Nevada and New Mexico. In all likelihood, 2016 will witness the first-ever serious minority candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination. And it’s a good bet that either a minority or a woman will find a place on the Republican ticket. Prominent openly gay Republican politicians are only a matter of time.

What should we learn from the Kermit Gosnell trial?

Abortion rights advocates have argued that there is nothing to see here. Move along. This is what illegal abortion looks like, they say.

But Gosnell’s clinic was not illegal. It was a licensed medical facility. The state of his clinic was well known: there were repeated complaints to government officials and even the local Planned Parenthood. He wasn’t operating under the radar but in plain sight, and he received referrals from abortion clinics up and down the East Coast. Gosnell performed plenty of abortions within the 24-week limit in Pennsylvania and worked part time for a National Abortion Federation–accredited clinic in Delaware.

BACK WHEN I was President Clinton’s political adviser, I cited poll numbers to try to talk him out of even a tiny tax increase on the middle class, in the form of a four-cent hike in the gas tax. But the final word went to Lloyd Bentsen, Clinton’s Treasury secretary. “Mr. President,” he said, “I’m sure Paul’s polls are correct. But I never saw a fella lose his seat for voting for a four-penny gas tax.”

Bentsen was right. The modest tax increase went through. Yes, the 1994 midterms were a disaster for my Democrats. But not because of the gas tax.

Bentsen’s political observation comes to mind in the current discussion of gun control. Sure, the polls say 90 percent of Americans support expanded background checks. But have you ever seen anyone lose his or her seat for voting against gun control? I’ve seen more than I care to recall lose their seat for supporting it.

TWENTY YEARS ago the leaders of Europe agreed on a bold step: a new currency called the euro. They promised that the euro would improve life for everybody—and denounced all opposition as ignorant, xenophobic, and backward. Their words gained extra plausibility because many of the opponents of the euro really were ignorant, xenophobic, and backward.

Yet the backward critics were right, and the enlightened proponents were wrong. And so it is with the immigration debate in the United States.

Nothing unifies the American elite like immigration. From Barack Obama to Paul Ryan, from the editorial board of The New York Times to that of The Wall Street Journal, from the offices of Facebook to those of Goldman Sachs, everybody who counts more or less agrees.

How many Middle East quagmires does America want? How many can it afford? After our so-called triumphs in Iraq and Libya – and our not-so-triumphant 12-year experience in Afghanistan – the siren song of Syria now beckons. Mr. President, resist that call. We are not wanted there; America has no need to go there. Think Viet Nam, without a Cold War to offer as rationale for our presence. Indeed, those who urge you to go there never voted for you, and that should tell you something about your future base of support when things head south. Yes, we are actually in the curious situation where the American and Arab publics are united on a key issue: Don’t go to Damascus.

Both American opinion and the Arab Street are unified in their opposition to U.S. involvement.

So what was President Obama thinking when he declared last summer, in a moment of rhetorical folly, that the use of chemical weapons would violate an imagined “red line?” As Leslie Gelb made clear, the region has more than 30 years experience with chemical weapons, which the Reagan Administration treated as business as usual. Ruthless realpolitik? Sure. But effective. 

The facts on the ground are anything but auspicious for America injecting itself into an intra-Arab morass. Sunni leaders are divided between those sympathetic to the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Qatar and NATO ally Turkey, and Middle East monarchies such as Saudi Arabia. All oppose Assad, yet each backs a different camp in Syria. As a senior American official put it, “there is no coherent Arab coalition.”

Every time I write a column on guns, the howl arises that I am talking about a right that is enshrined in the Constitution, buddy, and I better watch myself. The howl then transmutes into an extended harangue that this right is absolute, and no libtard fascist, whether me or the Satanesque Dianne Feinstein, is going to limit the right in any way. The first soldier to charge across this rhetorical veld is followed by hundreds harrumphing their assent. The only problem is that it’s an ahistorical, afactual, and barbaric argument. No right is absolute. In fact, the Second Amendment arguably has fewer restrictions on it these days than many of the other first 10, and there is and should be no guarantee that things are going to stay that way. In fact, if we’re ever going to be serious about trying to stop this mass butchery that we endure every few months, they cannot.

Let’s begin by going down the list and reviewing various limits placed on nearly all the amendments of the Bill of Rights (I thank Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center for helping me out here). The First Amendment, of course, guarantees the right to free speech and assembly, and to worship as one pleases. There haven’t been that many restrictions placed on the freedom to worship in the United States, although there is a steady stream of cases involving some local government or school board preventing someone from wearing religious clothing or facial hair or what have you. Sometimes a Christian school or church is denied a zoning permit; but more often it’s the freedom to worship of a minority (Muslim, Sikh, etc.) that is threatened.

As for free speech, of course it is restricted. Over the past 50 or so years in a series of cases, courts have placed a number of “time, place, and manner” restrictions on free speech. To restrict speech in general, the government must meet four tests. But this is always being revised and negotiated. Here’s one restriction on the Bill of Rights that I’d wager most conservatives would happily approve of. In 1988, the HHS under Reagan promulgated rules prohibiting a family-planning professional at a clinic that received federal dollars from “promoting” (i.e. telling a woman about) abortion. This was challenged partially on free-speech grounds. In Rust v. Sullivan (1991), the Supreme Court held that these rules did not violate the clinicians’ free-speech rights. So far as I can see, this is still law. It’s just one example from many free-speech restrictions that have been imposed over the years, as you can see here.

New Hampshire: A posse you can trust

It seems Stella Tremblay, a Republican state representative from New Hampshire, is determined to get to what she thinks is the bottom of the Boston bombings. Earlier this week Tremblay went on a Boston radio station and suggested that the man whose legs were pictured blown off in the bombing was faking it, and said she wanted a full investigation into the attack. Not from the FBI, but from somebody “unbiased.” Her suggestion? Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a steadfast believer that President Obama’s birth certificate is a fake and who’s been accused of fabricating evidence to support his birther beliefs.

South Carolina: More guns, please

South Carolina lawmakers have been among the most vocal opponents to the pro-gun control push following the tragedy at Newtown, Connecticut. Already this year state politicians have introduced bills that would allow teachers to carry firearms and students to enroll in a high school gun class, but now they’re pushing a new strategy: with representatives this week signing a resolution “inviting and welcoming gun manufacturers into our state.” The resolution, which 55 South Carolina House members signed, discusses possible incentives for gun and ammo manufacturers looking to open and expand in the state, citing, among other things, a political climate  that is more “hospitable” that other states’ less “accommodating” stances.

With polls showing Hillary Clinton holding a formidable lead over all other potential candidates for president in 2016, a press conference to promote the idea of a woman president seems a little behind the news, a treasured dream catching up with a new reality, or perhaps a stalking horse for Clinton.

Stephanie Schriock, president of Emily’s List, which raises money and works to elect pro-choice Democratic women, said she has no inside knowledge of what Clinton is likely to do, but there is widespread acceptance of a woman as president, and 72 percent of voters surveyed think it’s likely to happen in 2016.   While Clinton gets mentioned most, there’s no guarantee she will run, which is why Emily’s List wants to “ignite the conversation” around an idea whose time has come, and build a movement that Clinton or another in the sisterhood can inherit.  

Ellen Malcolm, who founded Emily’s List in her basement 28 years ago, looked on like a proud parent as pollsters unveiled the latest numbers showing overwhelming support among voters across gender and party lines for a “generally well-qualified woman.” Those numbers were always strong, says Malcolm, but when voters were asked about their friends and neighbors supporting a woman, they weren’t so sure. These days, there’s no hesitation, the country is ready. “What a waltz!” Malcolm exclaims. Twenty years ago, no pollster would have predicted the dramatic shift in attitudes toward a woman president, or marriage equality, or even immigration, that we see today among the general public, says pollster Lisa Grove, who adds one caveat: voters still think it’s harder for a woman than a man to get elected president.

The National Rifle Association is not known as a home for academics, but on the opening day of the NRA’s 142nd Annual Meetings and Exhibitions, the day’s brightest political star walked the stage like a constitutional law professor. Before he was elected as the junior senator from Texas last November, Ted Cruz was, in fact, a law professor at the University of Texas from 2004 to 2009. Cruz received a hometown hero’s welcome in Houston on Friday from a crowd of several thousand at the political event hosted each year by the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action (ILA), the organization’s political lobby.

There is nothing nonpolitical about the NRA-ILA, and the Leadership Forum functions as much as a rally for NRA members as a beauty pageant for politicians looking to curry favor with one of Washington’s most feared, loathed, and powerful political organizations. Within minutes of the hushed harmony of roughly 5,000 patriotic Americans pledging allegiance to their flag, NRA President David Keene said he knew the crowd had followed “everything that happened in the Senate last month.” Keene then introduced the ILA’s executive director, Chris Cox, as the man instrumental in defeating the background-check bill that failed to pass the Senate on April 17.

As the rally emcee, Cox articulated a series of arguments that speakers including NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, and Sarah Palin repeated throughout the day. Namely, that the NRA is an organization that is funded by and in the service of law-abiding gun owners, and that they are an innocent bystander in the fight over gun control.

While a high school student at Honolulu’s elite Punahou School, Barack Obama was a high-flying member of a pot-smoking, party-hearty crew that called itself “the Choom Gang.” As biographer David Maraniss revealed in last year’s Barack Obama: The Story the future president “had a knack for interceptions. When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted ‘Intercepted!,’ and took an extra hit.”

In his current trip to meet with Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto, Obama will once again be talking about illegal drugs and interceptions—and he will almost certainly continue his long habit of bogarting other people’s joints. As CNN summarizes it, one of the “key issues” of the trip is to strengthen efforts to stop the flow of pot, cocaine, methamphetamines, and other drugs from Mexico into the United States.

Despite thinly sourced stories by Obama boosters that the president in his second term “will pivot to the drug war” that he privately considers a “failure,” there’s every reason to believe any new initiatives coming out of this Mexico trip will disappoint the liberals, libertarians, and smattering of conservatives who took Barack Obama seriously when he questioned longstanding drug policies.