p m carpenter's commentary

Where Obama went wrong

Every time I read a Dowdian screed grounded in the argument that President Obama "has never felt the need to explain or sell his signature pieces of legislation ... or stanch the flow of false information from the other side," I am compelled by the essential truth of the argument, and thus of the screed, yet I'm also reminded of the argument's far deeper but obscured indictment of the American electorate.

It's true. For about three years President Obama governed. Before he was elected president, he campaigned. But when he was elected, he governed; doubtless an old-fashioned idea of the presidency, but, reckless radical Kenyan socialist that he is, as president he governed nevertheless. He thought the electorate would notice.

Obama also thought the electorate was bound to notice that his chief opposition (from the right--not left--just to clarify) was a politically dishonorable syndicate of ill-tempered nincompoops who lusted not for a better America, but for raw power.

As we now know, both thoughts, or beliefs, were misplaced. The electorate--not all of it, obviously, but an unhealthy enough of it--regarded Obama's concentration on competent governance over a Bush-like concentration on perpetual propaganda as a presidential manifestation of aloofness and arrogance. This particularly influential electorate also managed to miss the beastly conspicuousness of congressional tea partiers' anarchic, nihilistic bloodlust and power-thirst.

In short, President Obama gave this electorate too much credit. He believed they could distinguish centralities from peripherals, the essentials from the frivolous, and the way forward from the path backward. He was outstandingly wrong, although such a misreading is a common defect of intellectual presidents.

At any rate, now that he's back to the emotional fireworks of campaigning, rather than indulging all that dull governing, perhaps the screed-prone children will love him again.

The impossibility of honest debate

Dionne asks, "Can we at least reach consensus on the sort of debate between now and November that could help us solve some of our problems?"

He answers, "I’ll let you in on the outcome in advance: Ideology quickly gets in the way of even this modest effort."

In other words, "No." But the economy of a simple "no" might preclude a manifold exploration of how GOP ideology "gets in the way"--or, again in other words, "obstructs." And disingenuously, at that.

Dionne insists on reaching out, on publicly tempering what almost certainly is his absolute certainty about the absolute fraud that is the modern Republican Party. For instance he poses this: "[A] challenge to conservatives: If cutting taxes is really more important to you than fiscal balance, why not just say so? Why pretend that balance matters when your real goal is a sharp reduction in the size of government?"

The fundamental difficulty with that challenge is that it assumes that an honest question put to conservatives might someday be met with an honest answer. (Has Dionne seen a Mitt Romney or Reince Priebus or John Boehner or Eric Cantor or Mitch McConnell interview lately?)

But the challenge's insurmountable difficulty is that it also implies--purely for argument's sake, I gather--that "fiscal balance" is in some way "important" to conservatives, even though fiscal imbalance is conservatives' deadliest weapon in their nihilistic assault on civilized government. Indeed, fiscal balance is neither "more important" than tax cuts nor even modestly "important," and we've roughly 40 years of empirical evidence of such ruthless, pitiless pseudoconservatism.

Can we ever get the pseudoconservatives to admit it? See "fundamental difficulty," above.

But Dionne knows this. I know it; you know it; Romney, Priebus, Boehner, Cantor and McConnell know it; the GOP base knows it; the Beltway press knows it (shhh, quiet please, fairness and balance in progress); and for damn sure the entirety of the center-left knows it.

Still, urges Dionne, "let’s have it out ... [for] if we don’t use this campaign at least to define the problems we face, we will end up wasting the $2 billion or so this campaign will cost, and a lot of time."

And that's where he loses me. "Have it out" with slick sophists who won't even concede their professed conservatism isn't genuinely conservative?

I just don't see how any level of authentic debate can occur with those who are so pathologically disingenuous.

Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz's love poem to Mitt Romney

Just reading Bertrand Russell on Leibniz's theodicy (the theological proposition that the world's evil reveals God's goodness), the "proof" of which Leibniz provided to Prussia's Queen Charlotte. Observes Russell:

This argument apparently satisfied the queen of Prussia. Her serfs continued to suffer the evil, while she continued to enjoy the good, and it was comforting to be assured by a great philosopher that this was just and right.

Gotta love it.

Oh, and one may apply the selfsame comfort to oblivious Wall Streeters, $174,000-a-year Republican congressmen who belch that food stamps and Medicaid are the scourge of the poor, and a certain presidential candidate.

I'm having a pleasant evening, and I won't ruin it by describing the latter.

The Donald Trump we all know

Donald Trump, Friday night, speaking at the North Carolina GOP Convention:

[T]he biggest thing Mitt Romney has to fear is the press. They don't tell the truth.

Donald Trump, Friday night, speaking to reporters after his convention speech:

I think he got the headline on a day where I did get a lot of press, and interestingly, since then, his polls numbers have gone up very substantially. So I really think, and he really thinks, that the press has helped and it's been good.

Sorry, Mr. Will, but when it comes to Trump, "bloviating ignoramus" borders on the gently euphemistic.

In the first place, bloviation is so common, so lacking in individuation. Trump bloviates, for sure, but I bloviate, too, and you bloviate, Mr. Will, indeed nearly all God's children bloviate. As a species we eat, sleep, and bloviate. It's what we do; it's what separates us from lower-animal humility and contentment.

And then there's ignoramusness, a most unfortunate condition, especially of the bloviation-carrying ignoramus--a lawyer-deriding term originating in an early 17th-century play but vastly popularized by Mencken in the 20th--which of course means, rather innocently, just plain ignorance; that is, simply a remedial absence of knowledge. But here, again, Trump is far from sui generis. It is axiomatic that in a universe of infinite knowability, even we higher(?) animals (particularly those of who squander a great deal of time bloviating) are condemned to egregiously finite smarts. 

So Mr. Will, when you attempted to belittle Trump with that "bloviating ignoramus" crack, you were in reality embracing him as one of our own. Yet he isn't. One of us, that is. Clearly, "bloviating ignoramus" may apply to Trump as an unremarkable entry in his medical chart, but as a statement of what truly makes Trump Trump, it is grossly inadequate.

Bellowing moron? No, that won't do; it has too much of a touch of the politically incorrect. Unrehabilitated racist? Absolutely not, since Trump himself put that issue to rest on Friday night: "Somebody said, 'Oh, because I brought up the birth certificate, I'm a racist. I said, 'How can I be a racist, I just picked Arsenio Hall' [as my reality-show winner]." (No shit. Trump really said that.) Clownish opportunist? Close, but still, in this sprawling republic of political P.T. Barnums, a bit too on the nose.

How about this? Donald Trump is a symptom. He's just a symptom, merely a sad, sorry symptom. A symptom of what, we already know; and you, Mr. Will, you already know as well, even if you refuse to concede the ingloriously conspicuous point.

Badass Jonah Goldberg

The National Review’s badass social scientist, Jonah Goldberg:

[I]t is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth.

Well, let's see. He forgot voting Republican ... watching Fox News ... buying a Sarah Palin book ... opening a Sarah Palin book ... believing that Mitt Romney has a plan to save the economy ... believing that House Republicans have a plan to save the economy ... seeing Paul Ryan as an intellectual ... swallowing the theory that tax cuts always increase government revenue ... repeating the theory that tax cuts always increase government revenue ... accepting that Donald Trump really does have a bevy of researchers in Hawaii ... keeping one's subscription to National Review up-to-date ...

Oh my, one could go on, couldn't one?

Next Tuesday's hunting party

The Daily Beast's Sally Kohn:

The desire for power too often feels foreign to the marginalized and self-marginalizing left, which has seemed comfortable in Wisconsin with being angry without channeling that emotion into influence. Progressives have had a far harder time yoking grassroots activism to electoral politics than conservatives, who quickly managed to translate Tea Party rabble rousing into political power.

Yep.

The other day I saw the civil-rights icon and U.S. congressman John Lewis on "Hardball," vehemently reminding viewers that the single most powerful weapon every American citizen possesses is the vote. Yep.

Marching, protesting, sloganeering, chanting, yelling, fist-raising and becoming cosmically one with Bob La Follette--all are unimpeachable exercises in participatory democracy. But there's a final step in effecting positive change to which more than a few progressives always seem indifferent: the actual voting part.

It's incomprehensible.

Think of a hunter, eagerly out to bag some big game. He's pumped, so to speak; he's bought a dandy new rifle and it's polished and primed and loaded. He's spent $3,000 in venturing to his big-game destination. He's wearing the latest in wild-animal-slaughter garb. He's spent another $2,000 on an expert guide, to locate his powerful, elusive prey. Finally, he has the sort-of-stupid-looking, eyelid-drooping quadruped in his sights; he raises his rifle, he squints and he aims and ... he doesn't pull the trigger. Rather unshockingly, his prey slips away.

What is it about having to actually pull the trigger lever that so many progressives don't get? In mapping a path to change--any positive change, even if constrained for the moment--Rep. Lewis could not have uttered a more magnificent simplicity of truth: The single most powerful weapon every American citizen possesses is the vote. Because mine, and yours, is of the very same caliber and lethal impact as David Koch's or Karl Rove's.

In the end, nothing else counts. And nothing could be simpler.

Philosophical journalism

This morning Politico's Robin Bravender spits up an astounding morsel of, uh, philosophical journalism? Here's the thrust, which, until the piece's very end, runs unmolested by any logical strafing or reportorial counteroffensive:

Barrett has leaned hard into the idea that Walker sparked a civil war in [Wisconsin] for purely partisan purposes. He has accused the governor of fudging job growth numbers to make himself look better, of hiding emails in a criminal probe and doing the bidding of out-of-state billionaires. He also sunk his teeth in during the two televised debates and is running ads hammering Walker on the criminal investigation surrounding his former aides....

But the smash-mouth attacks make it hard to imagine Barrett as a unifying figure, a point Republicans have seized on.

Let's imagine a piece from the vigorously analytical Ms. Bravender writing for Stars and Stripes, circa 1944:

"The Nazi's military slaughtering machine is contemptible. The Allies are a military slaughtering machine. Ergo, the Allies are contemptible."

I rather like the idea of a philosophical journalism, particularly since the art of political journalism has become so squalid. But, Ms. Bravender, please be advised of advances made in the syllogism since the ancient age of Aristotelian logic.

Again, the destructive politics of distraction

This is the sort of unholy, godawful crap that keeps good, intelligent people out of electoral politics:

It started as a one-day story, a chuckle on conservative talk radio in Boston....

But already, [Elizabeth Warren's] epic fumble of a simple question threaten[s] to change the dynamic of the Senate race in Massachusetts.

Have you ever "epically fumbled"? Right. The proper answer: Who hasn't?

Granted, you may be temperamentally, intellectually, ideally and perhaps incomparably suited to serve as a city mayor, or state senator, or U.S. representative, or even president of the United States; but to serve, potentially, you must either be a masochistic fool or possess the hide of an M2 Bradley tank--because most of your campaign will be consumed not by exchanging ideas, but by battling relentless assaults on your one or more epic fumbles ... which in no conceivable way would ever affect your public service.

So you pass. I know I did. Hell, having been permanently expelled from high school (where I spent a breathtaking, five-day whirlwind of a career), after which I entered an epically comic career as my city's most inadequate juvenile delinquent, followed by a few truly grim years of severe alcohol and drug abuse, self-destroyed relationships and raging clinical depression, I long ago accepted that any professional life of mine in the electorate's hands would be, let's say, rather Hobbesian. 

I digress, I suppose. But you get my point. And geez, how I feel for Elizabeth Warren, who didn't--as perhaps I did--deserve this crap.

A coming shift

I think the Obama campaign will be compelled to shift its strategy.

No more Bain, no more Governor Mittfit--just a jackhammering, Trumanesque, 1948, ferociously heartfelt 'Do-Nothing-Republicans' message, which has been vividly and brilliantly outlined by Mann-Ornstein and straightforwardly entitled: Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

That's bumper-sticker length. It's also endowed by the considerable merit of absolute truth.

p.s.: Implicit is a revival of Obama's last jobs plan--destined, obviously, to go nowhere in this barbaric, Republican-infested Congress, but the proposal could be used as a pronounced counterpoint to the GOP's malicious do-nothingness.

America and the Teacup Party

Krugman the austerity hunter is exploring Teacup Party country:

[T]he austerity drive in Britain isn’t really about debt and deficits at all; it’s about using deficit panic as an excuse to dismantle social programs....

[T]hey aren’t quite as crude as their American counterparts.... Still, the direction of policy is the same — and so is the fundamental insincerity of the calls for austerity.

American conservatives once observed Toryism with a certain awe and respect, as well as a touch of sympathy. The transatlantic version of governmental prudence and restraint had retained a Burkean interpretation which many on the American right had never read (or perhaps even heard of), and it all sounded so smart and sophisticated and in general reflected well on the very "idea" of conservatism. Plus, the Brits had Sir Winston, and later Iron Lady Margaret. Still, the poor things were incurably plagued by national health care--humanity's greatest crime against stiff upper lips. So, pity the conservative Brits.

In David Cameron, though, they have a younger Mitt Romney, who himself is an artificial creation, a frightful amalgamation of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Sarah Palin and Herman Cain. If Herr Doktor Frankenstein had wished to fabricate a walking political abomination, Mitt Romney would have resulted.

Yet one larger point to be observed, and profoundly lamented, is that the British, across the political spectrum, have seemed increasingly and horribly willing to imitate their American cousins. You recall that Labour's Tony Blair was cultivated as little more than a little Bill Clinton, and now of course the Brits have a tea-cupping pseudoconservative as head of government (I'm unshakably convinced that Burke would have been appalled by such disruptive, draconian austerity). My own, deeply personal pity-the-Brits moment came upon watching a documentary on Liberal Democrat (and now Deputy P.M.) Nick Clegg's exuberant mimicry of modern American campaign techniques.

Of course the Brits have suffered from a crushed complex ever since Franklin D. make it clear to Winston that the latter's empire was no longer in charge--or for that matter, the empire was no longer, period. The jig was up. We'd bake the century's remainder in our own way, thank you very much, and the Brits could just jolly well pick up the crumbs. Thus began their rather pathetic, fawning sidekickism.

But if I may, gentle cousins. Please stop. Go back. Return to the independence of spirit that once made England great, and made minds such as that of John Maynard Keynes's. And when you conservative Brits, especially, look to America as some sort of political-philosophical pacesetter (so far kept at bay by St. George Obama), you should pause and ponder the tocsins of one of your local scribes: Something wicked this way comes, and that way madness lies.

Bill Clinton is off to Wisconsin

It could make a difference.

I've written very little on the Wisconsin rebellions and subsequent recall battle, the reason having to do almost entirely with my immeasurable disgust with average Wisconsites. What the hell were they thinking when they voted in Republican Scott Walker to begin with? "Why, we didn't know he was a monstrous perfidy and wholly owned instrument of sinister special interests when we did that," they answer--although by 2010 it wasn't exactly a state secret that virtually every Republican pol was a monstrous perfidy and wholly owned instrument of sinister special interests.

That Walker entered office and thereupon instantly demonstrated what a sniveling worm he in fact was, was hardly surprising. Wisconsites quite literally got what they asked for. Shocking.

But their shocking opacity hasn't ended there. Not by a long shot. No, despite blockbuster revelation after blockbuster revelation, splattered all over their local and our national news, of Walker's exceptionally disgraceful unsuitability for the state's highest office, he's done no worse than run about even with Tom Barrett, and generally ahead. This is not only incomprehensible; it's inexcusable.

Perhaps they'll redeem themselves next week. If not, they'll forever stand--or rather crawl--as politics' poster boy for that swinish admixture of both democratic gullibility and unpardonable apathy.

And down ... goes ... DOMA

Breaking Duh! news:

[T]he 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston said the [Defense of Marriage Act] discriminates against gay couples by not giving them the same rights and privileges as heterosexual couples and is unconstitutional.

My intro was not meant to make light of this ruling. It was meant only as an indication of how utterly unintelligible and mindlessly prejudiced I find opposition to its kind. Why the precise sexual orientation of any loving couple, married or not, should grab the U.S. Congress's attention is--I'm sorry--simply beyond me.

For that matter, why Mitt Romney's religion's originalist position on marriage should be of any jurisprudential concern is beyond me, too. (True, even farther beyond me is why any sane woman would want to marry one of us insensitive brutes, let alone three or four of them wanting to marry and share the very same insensitive brute.)

What the hell. What business is it of ours?

I guess I'm possessed by the unalarmed demons of damn-the-torpedoes libertarianism, which, when it comes to its expression in civil liberties and human rights, is still struggling to find rationally unacceptable limits.

George Will in 'The Clouds'

As the saying goes, The more things change, the more they stay the same. Accordingly we can see George Will as one of Aristophanes's "bloviating ignoramuses"--a hair-splitting, eristic, lawyerly Sophist of the first rank; an unscrupulous Machiavelli devoted to the political alchemy of converting raw arguments into pure crap.

Will's inductive powers are really quite stunning. Did you know, for instance, that "Reasons for the Supreme Court to reconsider Citizens United are nonexistent"? I bet you didn't. (Not to be as fastidiously cranky as Will, but I think he means to argue that "good reasons" are nonexistent, since even bad reasons indisputably "exist.")

But we must further ask, How does George Will know this, and better yet, how does he choose to enlighten you about it? Why, through the happy abuse of argumentum ad verecundiam, of course. That is, Will actually cites as an authority the Citizens United-hugging Sen. Mitch McConnell--"Congress’s staunchest defender of the First Amendment"--who has "noted," in Will's words, that "Through March 31, the eight leading super PACs supporting Republican presidential candidates received contributions totaling $96,410,614. Of this, $83,220,167 (86.32 percent) came from individuals, only $13,190,447 (13.68 percent) from corporations."

Ergo, "These facts refute"--we're back to Will now--"such prophesied nightmares as The Post’s fear that corporate money 'may now overwhelm' individuals’ contributions." Does the "fact" that many of these generous chaps are corporate individuals who are using their amassed, corporate-derived income to bribe pols (and bamboozle the electorate) bother you? It shouldn't, says Will. Just "Disregard the unsupported smear that candidates are bought." And that's that.

But we haven't yet arrived at Will's principal thrust of sophistic snarkiness. That he saves for last: "The collapse of liberals’ confidence in their ability to persuade is apparent in their concentration on rigging the rules of political persuasion." 

You will notice in that passage a subtle omission--"ability to persuade," as in, ability to raise money with which comes the ability to honestly persuade. That, anyway, is how those of intellectual integrity would naturally interpret "persuasion," which is not by nature a rhetorical art in which success is measured by the most effectively outrageous, unfounded and unverifiable claims.

That, it is almost needless to add, is mere demagoguery; which, left unbridled, soon creates a demagoguery gap, and before long we're in a galloping demagoguery race. And what did the framers fear above all other republican fears? Ultimately a gross imbalance of powerful factions, who could through sheer volume and repetition and accumulated might--super PACs, anyone?--befuddle and mislead the susceptible masses.

One would think that given George Will's aggressively self-advertised fidelity to intellectual honesty, he would find "honesty" in others' political debate and persuasion indispensible, too. But he can't be bothered to even mention it--because intellectually, he's either as blind or corrupt as Citizens United.

On being Mittwitted

Earlier today on MSNBC I heard the ineffably banal Michael Steele, former chairman of the ineffably hysterical RNC, remark that Mitt Romney's latest absurdity--Trumpism--would soon pass and then Romney could get on to more important things.

But that's the point, or rather Steele's typically missed point.

With Romney, these absurdities never end. Whether it is uttering a peculiar affection for firing people (and during a recession!), or characterizing $374,000 of income as chicken feed (and during a recession!), or casually mentioning his wife's dual Cadillacs (and during a recession!), or dismissing the poor as afterthoughts or humanizing ruthless corporations or attempting $10,000 bets on national television, Romney's dark absurdities just don't stop.

And they're not only mistakes--blunders that inevitably result from the relentless pressures of a six-year campaign. When Romney isn't committing serial gaffes he's executing some studied stupidity. To wit, the Trump affair, or the Grenell debacle, both of them premeditated, unforced errors that when taken alone are relatively harmless. Accumulated, however, and on top of the gaffes, they're lethal.

All of which is to say, the Trump absurdity won't stop here, today. Tomorrow it will be something else. It won't be the Trump thing, but it will be something--something just as lethal, just as absurd, just as Mittwitted.

Killing us fondly with her song

Is this a parody?

Mitt Romney's cosmic ineptitude

As I was saying, which was only what many others have said, and the NY Times says again this morning:

It was supposed to be a day of triumph for Mitt Romney [and so on, and so on]....

Instead, Tuesday was hijacked by Donald J. Trump. Inexplicably to many in his party, Mr. Romney had scheduled an appearance at a fund-raiser in Las Vegas on Tuesday night with Mr. Trump.

It's not really so inexplicable, though, to either the "many in his party" or to the far many others who so gratefully reside outside of it, when one simply accepts Mitt's singular oneness with cosmic ineptitude. Somewhere in the Tao Te Ching, I think it is, there is expressed the ancient wisdom of intensely pursued objects possessing the nasty habit of receding faster than one's eager grasp. Twenty-five hundred years ago the sages advised, "Chill"; 500 years later, Jesus advised, "Chill"; another fifteen-hundred years after that, Montaigne advised, "Chill"; and now, fresh on the philosophical heels of yet another 500 years, this nugget of enlightenment is ubiquitous--it leaps at us from the back of cereal boxes and fast-food fortune cookies and from shelves upon shelves of undigested self-help books: "Chill, you idiot."

But Mitt can't "chill." Mitt is a micromanager; his pockets are stuffed with unearned cash because his head is crammed with lifeless statistics. It makes no difference to Mitt that he's in organic politics now, as opposed to the necrotic business of what even the brain-dead Rick Perry had the wits to call "vulture capitalism." To Mitt, it's all the same-- this people and profits stuff--data, numbers, shifting numbers, calculated gambles, acceptable debits, huge rewards, balance sheets and delicately balanced negotiations.

His latest negotiations are, however, unwinnable. He seems to think that if he slithers around with the clownishly malevolent racism of Trump, he'll make big and permanent gains with the reptilian base. And independents won't mind. Later, when he's playing nice with independents, and vaguely disavowing all things Trump, then the base won't mind.

But this is a base whose rugged ignorance is surpassed only by its deep-seated contemptuousness and bedouin vengeance. In other words, they don't forgive. And thinking independents won't forget.     

There is, of course, nothing universal or comprehensive about these observations. Much of the base will turn out for Romney on Election Day, as will many independents. But Romney's cosmic ineptitude and unsightly staggering from hither to yon should, from my empirical point of view, shave just enough Romney votes in essential swing states to swing the election to President Obama, and rather decisively.

Separating confidence from triumphalism

Andrew Sullivan:

It's clear enough by now that this election will be a nail-bitingly close one; and that any early triumphalism among the Obamaites is preposterous. Of course he can lose.

Of course "of course he can lose." The Kansas City Chiefs could play professional football next year. Vladimir Putin could join the Tiny Tim Fan Club. Newt Gingrich could shave some ego and Sarah Palin could read a book and Mitt Romney could force a personal acquisition of some human DNA. A bit more realistically, I could stop giving a rat's ass about the commentariat's admonitory prediction, en masse, that "of course he could lose."

For me, anyway, "Obamaitism" and "blind optimism" are not synonymous. For some they are, and from those folks I keep a safe and intellectually healthy distance. Such rabidly pro-Obama derangement is too spookily reminiscent of the wretched W. years. Yes, I'm pro-Obama, but I can also read an electoral map and I can read (positive) polling data from the critical half-dozen or so battleground states on that map and I can appreciate increasing demographic advantages for Obama as well. And most of all, I can recognize an epic loser--hello, Mitt--from a parsec away.

Could things change throughout the next five months?

Let's give that some deep thought ...

... I'm thinking ...

OK, I'm back. Of course they could. But for the moment, at least, to possess a vast confidence in Obama's reelection isn't "triumphalist" in a preposterously pollyannish, delusional, or quixotic sense. It's perfectly logical.

For Mitt and the Donald, it's 20 bucks, same as downtown

Unshakable idealists among both the left and right often question pragmatism's devotion to principle. Pragmatism, to the politically pure and philosophically pious, seems such a lady-of-the-evening kind of thing; the concerned parties may get some or even much of what they want, but damn it's tacky, tainted, and ultimately unrewarding. Because of these defects, "principle" is marooned. 

I'd argue that the more proper way to assess pragmatism is to instead acknowledge its chief virtue, which is that, merely, of incrementalism--little victories, one at a time, until the sum of your little victories in pursuit of a magnificently principled victory is large itself (think Social Security in the late 1930s, think Social Security today). On the other hand if you admire idealists' rigid piety and their stern devaluation of Pragmatism as the woefully Unprincipled, then Mitt Romney was there, yesterday, to help make your case:

I need to get 50.1% or more and I'm appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.

By that he meant Donald "The Birther" Trump--from whom the taking of cash might technically be regarded as pragmatic, but from whom, as well, the cheaply perfumed stench of whoring opportunism smothers any principled motive by Mitt.

Republicans remain the problem

Everybody has a beef with one or another section of, or amendment to, the U.S. Constitution. And law professor Sanford Levinson, in his NY Times op-ed this morning, "Our Imbecilic Constitution," has a lot of them, from the Senate's disproportional representation to assorted gridlocks of institutional design to the Constitution's aggressive hurdles to amend itself.

My own snarling pet peeve of a beef is the 22nd Amendment, which, had it been in place in 1940, might have compelled embarrassed American histories of how President Willkie lost the Second World War. It's hard to imagine a more undemocratic Amendment to the U.S. Constitution than Republicans' anti-FDR temper tantrum embodied in the 1951 version. But give them time.

I'm sympathetic to Levinson's sweeping complaints; after all, for years I've harbored a rather subversive hankering for a parliamentary system, which would seem to offer a systemic compromise between anarchic direct democracy and the suffocating representational gridlock we now have. But of course American parliamentarianism won't happen, because 1) as Levinson notes, the Constitution is damn near impossible to amend, and 2) such an amendment to the Constitution would be its death-warranted last.

Still, I think Levinson misses the fundamental problem, which in his argument is structural, and to my mind, is temperamental.

What was truly admirable about the framers was their willingness to critique, indeed junk, the Articles of Confederation [writes Levinson]. One need not believe that the Constitution of 1787 should be discarded in quite the same way to accept that we are long overdue for a serious discussion about its own role in creating the depressed (and depressing) state of American politics.

Again, that may be true, and reasonable people will sensibly debate which structural changes should be made. Yet reasonable people today stand in near universal agreement--and I believe the framers would have concurred in profound abhorrence--that our fundamental problem is not, for instance, the institutional scandal of Mike Crapo's equal voice to Barbara Boxer's; rather, as Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein recently said it, Republicans are the problem.

The fundamental problem begins there; and for now, it ends there. There is no way around this sticking point. No matter which intelligent reform one attempts, Republicans will kill it. No matter what progress one suggests, Republicans will block it. No matter what compromise one extends, Republicans will, in return, Fed Ex a dead fish. If you were to try to think of a party that Tony Soprano, Ted Kaczynski, Ayn Rand and Mortimer Snerd could all enthusiastically support, you'd soon be thinking, "Republican."

Mann-Ornstein realistically concede that "in the short run," Republicans won't change, although "If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change" [my emphasis]. Their short-term recommendation, though? It's doable. Very doable. We must demand of the political press that it do its damn job: that it mustn't "seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views."

And to do this, there's not a section, not a paragraph, not a word, not even a comma of the U.S. Constitution that would require a change.