p m carpenter's commentary

The GOP leadership, off the wagon -- again

Ezra Klein:

The bottom line is that this isn’t just a good jobs report. It’s a recovery jobs report. It’s showing the sort of numbers that win elections. As my colleague Neil Irwin tweeted, "That sound you hear is champagne corks in the West Wing."

I'm not so sure. Pop! fizzzz ... there it went again. Sounds to me like extravagantly priced bottles of Merlot and cans of cheap beer, brewed from the tepid waters of east-central Virginia, being opened by the GOP's severely depressed leadership.

This can't be happening, they're quietly slurring to each other, just before they launch into another gloomy pronunciamento to the press. "[T]he American people were promised by the president that unemployment would not exceed 8 percent," says a wobbly John Boehner, once again forgetting to mention that forecast's outdated and since-revised data.

Then slithering up to the mic comes every recovering alcoholic's worst I-can't-take-this-idiot nightmare of re-indulgent temptation, Eric Cantor, belching, "we could do a lot better."

Damn right we could. Just get the hell out of Obama's way.

One key, less time, no problem

In the late 1960s, real newspaperman Jack Germond joked that presidential candidate George Romney backpedaled from his rhetorical contortions so often, he was tempted to add a time-saving key to his typewriter: "Romney later explained ..."

In keeping with Germond's profoundly useful idea, I suggest to the makers of computer keyboards this time-saving key for contemporary journalists, when it comes to reporting on the regularly improving economy: "But Republicans, noting that unemployment remains above eight percent, charged the Obama administration with ..."

'Nothing new under the sun'

For quicker reference, one should file Brooks's latest column under Ecclesiastes 1:9. I found his meditations brilliant (which is the conservative in me), if woefully ignored by today's inept scatterings of protest, which is Brooks's woe, too.

One minor difference of opinion, though, David. Nietzsche wasn't all that fresh, either; he being but a syphilitic bastardization of Schopenhauer and Plato's Callicles.

"Komen Git It": A farce in one act

So the Susan G. Komen Foundation's original cover story for its politicization of women's healthcare turns out to have been a mischaracterization, hence the foundation has recharacterized its cover story, such recharacterization including a sound thrashing of those who originally "mischaracterized" its revamped policy of politicization, among whom was, most notably, the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

I have heard this bumbling burlesque variously described by pro-choice commentators as bewildering, baffling and inexplicable, which themselves are bewildering characterizations, since the cast of characters for this little farce includes: a right-wing congressman, Americans United for Life, and a self-described anti-Planned Parenthood, "pro-life Christian" ex-pol, as Komen's new senior vice president.

Oh, and a boatload of stupidity -- not really a character on stage, but a backdrop embodiment. And it appears this ship of fools, being, as it were, foolishly stupid, possesses no keen interest in publicly appearing any brighter, anytime soon; to wit, "Komen executives said donations were up '100 percent,' but executives declined to provide specifics." Planned Parenthood, by strikingly intelligent contrast, "also reported an outpouring of support, with $650,000 in contributions in 24 hours after the announcement. Of those, $400,000 came from more than 6,000 online donors."

Some who believe deeply in women's rights and women's health and constitutional rights and the healthly rule of law have been distressed by Komen's bizarre lurch to right-wing skulduggery. Yet I find it rather uplifting and a cause for newfound hope.

There was a time, as they say, when this breed of subterranean chicanery and pseudoconservative scorcery would have been executed with an internally dazzling but untraceable professionalism. Its victim would have been dead or dying before anyone realized who knifed it -- yea, those days of not so distant yore, when the "vast right-wing conspiracy" was less vast, less conspicuous, more competent, and far more lethal. The right's very success, however, has led it to taking on new troupes of inadequate amateurs and bumbling beginners who just can't help but botch even the simplest of hits, while leaving their bloody prints all over the stage-prop knife.

In brief, movement conservatism has added too many roadshows and touring companies; too many expansion teams, so to speak, invariably absent sufficiently manned talent; it has transmogrified into a collection of buffoons and bumblers -- all perfectly unprepared to strut their imperiously unclothed stuff on the American stage of political farce. And folks are noticing.

***

Update: One-and-a-half acts.

A Larkin chestnut

Was just reading Larkin; I'd forgotten this beaut, from 1971:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don't have any kids yourself.

Just thought you'd enjoy it. It's a chestnut, but if you're like me, you don't retain poetry.

We're in serious trouble

Donald Trump's Romney-endorsing news conference opened with the Donald saying that "our country is in serious, serious trouble," which seemed glaringly self-evident, given that all the cable networks carried Donald Trump's Romney-endorsing news conference live, and that Donald Trump's Romney-endorsing news conference has been, and shall remain, virtually the only political story in this 24-hour news cycle.

Mitt Romney's oyster

Just as Fareed Zakaria ends his public letter to Mitt Romney, "you can call this new century whatever you like, but it won’t change reality," we should note that though Zakaria's preceding logic does indeed devastate Romney's, that won't change his advertised, neoconservative irreality.

By and large, you have ridiculed [President Obama's] approach to foreign policy, arguing that you would instead expand the military, act unilaterally and talk unapologetically [writes Zakaria]. That might appeal to Republican primary voters, but chest-thumping triumphalism won’t help you secure America’s interests or ideals in a world populated by powerful new players.

This, more likely than not, Romney already knows. I'd bet dollars to dingbats that he no more believes in the hormonal Kristolesque vision of tentacled American power than does Dennis Kucinich. Yet, there's the bloodthirsty base with which Romney must reckon. Let them eat raw meat. What does Mitt care? I mean, it's not like the man has any actual principles worth defending, and certainly none worth losing a Republican primary over.

To wit, as Peter Beinart observed in early January:

At the New Hampshire debate ... Mitt Romney denounc[ed] Barack Obama’s efforts to cut the defense budget (without, of course, suggesting how he’d reduce the deficit without touching defense and homeland security, which together constitute more than half of all discretionary spending).

Yeah? Your point, Peter, being? Romney and his triumphalist base positively revel in this sort of irreality. In fact, the farther removed from elementary logic, the more powerful is Romney's appeal. This gelatinous panderer could promise to double, triple, quadruple defense spending, cut taxes, balance the budget, and increase Medicare benefits for card-carrying tea partiers only -- and scarcely one of the latter would pause to protest that perhaps it doesn't add up.

For you see, Messrs. Zakaria and Beinart, the world is but Mitt Romney's oyster, whose shell is but right wingers' own little insane asylum.

Where there's a Will, there's a distortion

Every election cycle, each of which is more wretchedly awash in special-interest bribery than the last, the astringent mind of George Will invokes some laughably loose comparison between political spending and cultural fun money. In the current go-around, as the Republic drowns in the free-flowing toxins of what he calls the Supreme Court's "splendid" Citizens United ruling, Mr. Will's comparison is: 

This year, the presidential campaigns combined may spend almost $2 billion, which is almost as much as Americans will, in a few weeks, spend on Easter candy.

OK. At least that rots only our teeth. But why stop at that little frivolity? I mean, how much will we spend on SpongeBob SquarePants underwear? Does anyone care, except, indubitably, the makers of SpongeBob underwear? Does that spending in any way frame, fix, or place in perspective what we should spend on presidential campaigns?

And who are "we"? I'll take Will's word for it that we as a nation will debit ourselves to the tune of $2 billion on Easter candy, but the collective "we" will scarcely spend $2 billion on the presidential campaigns -- and that incomparability, Will prefers to neglect. If I spend $5 on Easter candy, who cares? Indeed, if my neighbor spends $5,000 on Easter candy, this, too, neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, as Jefferson said of another context. Yet if I contribute -- i.e., can only afford to contribute -- $5 apiece to my city council candidates of choice, whereas my neighbor can afford $5,000 contributions to my candidates' hyperlibertarian opponents, well, after the election I might awake one morning to the sight of that 50-foot SpongeBob monument on my neighbor's front lawn, the one he has yearned to erect for years, but couldn't because of those dad-blamed government-zoning ordinances.

What's more, if the two major presidential campaigns were publicly financed at $1 billion each, would Will object that this is a mere trifle? Somehow I suspect that Mr. Will would suddenly discover that $2 billion of that sort of political financing is a Gingrichian grotesquery.

Mitt Romney, class warrior

Isn't it odd that a party that rails against Obama's and the Democrats' "class warfare" yet also promotes the existence of a "classless" America to voters would have a frontrunner who goes out of his way to dismiss the lower and upper classes and concentrate explicitly on the middle class? -- all being classes that don't actually exist in any sense of socioeconomic or cultural separateness?

I am so confused. We are a classless society, within which the Democrats, especially President Obama, foments warfare amongst the nonexistent classes, only one which nonexistence Mr. Romney wishes to help.

Help!

'Oops' writ large

Dr. Frankenstein, meet Monster.

Starting in South Carolina, it started getting feisty both in the air wars and in the debates, and in Florida over the last week it has deteriorated from feisty to primal.... We’ve seen enough, let’s turn back to the issues.

Thus spoke the head of the American Conservative Union. Added Florida's GOP chairman:

The idea that we would attack each other like this is frustrating and painful. My face was red with anger when I watched one of these discussions on television because this is not what Republicans are about.

Perhaps these gentlemen have been too close to their party's laboratory experiments, conducted since the late 1970s, in the manufacture of mass rage to objectively comprehend the final, diseased abomination that they -- as well as all of us -- are now witnessing. Their immediate predecessors thundered disingenuously about school prayer and busing and women's rights so as to stir the irrational fears and bigoted passions and therefore the votes of unsettled millions; while the New Right's descendant leadership has, with equal disingenuity, resurrected race hatreds and fanned acute sexual prejudice and stoked resentments against the poor and blathered endlessly about a utopian anarchy of government-less, untaxed perfection.

They fired all these white-populist vulgarities to a boil, and now they're "red with anger" over a Promethean party unbound by any restraints, any decorum, any simple dignity. They ask to gently "turn back to the issues"; to proceed as though it -- all of it, excepting the vote-loyalty -- never happened.

Well, boys, I and anyone else who's bothered to study the uncontainable self-destruction of hate-inspired, race-based political movements have got news for you. It's going to get a helluva lot worse for you and yours, before a smile ever comes to that red face.

'Political gaffe,' definition reconfirmed

Mitt Romney's emotional IQ continues its frightful plunge:

I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there.... We will hear from the Democrat party, the plight of the poor.... You can focus on the very poor, that's not my focus.

This prattling embarrassment to privileged upbringings really should commit to memory Mark Twain's admonition about silence, foolishness and doubt-removal. Six years he's been running hopping for the land's highest office -- thus handicapped, because of one foot getting stuck in his mouth nearly every day.

They confessed what?

Again from Dionne, another exit-poll gem -- this one perhaps the most glittering, and unquestionably the most astonishing, of them all:

[V]oters who said campaign advertising was important to their decision voted for Romney by better than 2 to 1.

This reference lacks mention of what percentage of voters actually confessed to interviewers that "campaign advertising was important to their decision." So, notwithstanding the imbalanced 2 to 1 statistic, the overall number of confessing and apparently unembarrassed voters may have been rather small. Still, that a quantifiable number could have been so unaware of the two more prominent campaigns' utter butchery of truth in their advertising offensives says something about this electorate's raw obliviousness to political news in print and public affairs programming on the tube.

These people are the propagandist's dream, and the small-r republican's nightmare.

Romney's Barbarossa

Conservative scribes for the GOP establishment read more and more like bunkered propagandists promising the party faithful an early, decisive conclusion to the wintry Gingrich Front -- their only path, they well understand, to the later, greater victory.

[Newt] might go on, as he promised. But, really, how many Republicans will follow him? Fewer and fewer, I suspect.

Or fewer and fewer, Jennifer Rubin hopes. One can never be sure, since Miss Jennifer habitually conflates her wishfulness with analysis.

Over at the Times, Ross Douthat is more confident this morning in the establishment's sweeping obliteration of Gingrichgrad:

If he keeps going now – and there’s every reason to think he will – he’ll be pinning his hopes on a deus ex machina. Every realistic path leads only to defeat.

To which the giddy nonbelligerent can only remark, Of course it does. But that's not really the issue, is it? The issue, rather, is how Pyrhhic Romney's victory will be; or, put alternatively, how delightfully successful Gingrich's defeat will be.

Douthat asserts with a near wave of dismissiveness that "The anti-Romney vote isn’t as big as Gingrich likes to think it is" -- which is probably true. But it's also not as small as Douthat would like to think it is -- which is incontrovertibly true. E.J. Dionne assists:

Republicans who call themselves very conservative voted by better than 4 to 3 for Gingrich. Gingrich won by a similar margin over Romney among strong tea party supporters. The staunchest opponents of abortion ... went to Gingrich by an even bigger margin.... Romney was far weaker among white evangelical Christians than with other voters. This constituency appears to have split narrowly for Gingrich over Romney.

And who are the most unforgiving and least compromising folks on Earth? White evangelical Christians, the very conservative, the tea partying, and the single-issuers -- the GOP's essential base, without whom the nominee's "realistic path leads only to defeat."

The Who Cares? primary

From exit polling, this riveting indicator from that cliffhanger in Florida, which might, just might explain the overall outcome:

Romney beat Gingrich among women -- and men.

Uhhhh ...

My levity doesn't imply a lack of caring about the Florida primary, although it should. This is small ball, a mere trifle, a negligible nothing compared to that which actually matters in the much longer run; which is, simply, the extent of damage and division that Newt Gingrich is willing to inflict on his own party. That's the only story here.

The primaries are over, just as they were over a month ago. They're only formalities. Romney's the nominee, he's always been the nominee, he shall be the nominee. Romney isn't the story. Gingrich and his accompanying carnage are.

Finally!

Finally.

A bill that GOP leaders are bringing to the House floor Wednesday would require states to prevent welfare recipients from accessing or spending their benefits at strip clubs, casinos and liquor stores.

This, however, is bittersweet indeed. For subsequent to this measure passing, can there be any national challenges left to meet?

Time to retire the 'narrative' narrative

Prevailing liberal sentiment, conventional commentariat wisdom, cable-news' chronic diagnosis, the blogosphere's ruthlessly jackhammered cliche -- you may call it whatever you will, you may run from it, you are even free to dread its alarming (and alarmed) repetition, but by God you can never entirely escape it: 

The president and his advisers have at times done a mediocre job of telling the administration’s story. They need to better explain how individual decisions, such as delaying the controversial Keystone pipeline, fit into a coherent Big Picture of where the country needs to go.

That's from Eugene Robinson's latest column, although it could have come from most anyone who sits center-left of a keyboard with an Internet connection. Such musings have become a de rigueur paragraph of the modern major generalist. He no longer screams Get me rewrite! Now, it's Where's the Big Picture?

I can sympathize with this sentiment, but my sympathy rests on an increasingly steep and downward trajectory. I, too, back in 2009 and 2010, roughly, was of the wistful choir: the Obama administration could do a better job of Big Picture-painting and Grand Narrative-telling, especially on the shell-shocked battlefield of healthcare. It might be observed that the rather more important point to be made was that the Obama administration accomplished healthcare; but, then again, I'm a hopelessly incurable pragmatist. At any rate, the commentariat's narrative on Obama's lack of one soon became the chic, alternative observation. My tolerance for it began to diminish, however, when Congressional Democrats -- many of whom had also been pushing the "no narrative" narrative -- themselves refused to nationalize the 2010 elections within a coherent narrative, contrary to the Obama administration's urgings.

What's more, the 2012 election soon loomed, which, reasonably enough, meant Obama's 2012 campaign loomed. And what's a campaign? It's a Grand Narrative. But kick-starting it in 2011 -- that annus horribilis awash in GOP apoplexies, in which the cable networks were investing the mother lode of their voyeuristic airtime -- would have eclipsed any emphatic narrative of 2012.

Better to bide one's time; better to wait for a better journalistic reception -- one not quite so saturated in the coverage of a Republican Party unhinged.   

In sum, Obama's been playing the long game. Which has worked, to the best of my recollection, most every time. One would think that prevailing liberal sentiment and conventional commentariat wisdom, etc., etc., would have caught on to this staggeringly manifest and strikingly successful presidential strategy by now. But, I guess that's not how they play their game.

Correction

A few days back I speculated that Newt Gingrich's historical model of politics was Georgia's notoriously racist demagogue, Tom Watson. I was so wrong. According to the Washington Post, Gingrich's historical model of politics was Georgia's notoriously racist demagogue, Eugene Talmadge.

There must be blood

I love the smell of internecine napalm in the winter:

Even as they breathe a sigh of relief about Romney’s apparent Florida turnaround, some party establishment types are nonetheless bracing for a protracted and ugly fight between factions that the GOP hasn’t seen for decades.

Thus writes Politico, whose last several words leave one groping for clarity. Which decade would that be? When has the GOP ever experienced such an internal brawl? The H.W. Bush-Buchanan spat was a Sunday garden party compared to the current blowout, and Goldwater was but a desperate shot in the dark against an altogether unbeatable incumbent.

No, this time, for the GOP, these are, potentially, the End Times.

Although some tea partiers will no doubt scandalously support Mitt the Inevitable out of partisan reflex, an appreciable number will not. And if we've learned anything about the vintage Tea Party Personality, it is this: it is absolutist, it is nihilistic, it is motivated and it is hideously outsized. Roll those first two destructive features into the last two of insurgent mobilization, and you get quite the bloody purge -- or at least a fanatical, even suicidal attempt at a bloody purge. The tea party is the atavistic, "Better Dead than Red" faction that will never bow to the pragmatic, nor will it ever -- that most detestable of words -- moderate, nor will it ever settle for anything less than how it sees itself now: as the GOP's Final Solution to Ideological Purity.

Deprive the tea partiers of their way, and there will be blood. Which means there must be blood, soon, and lots of it, since "some party establishment types" comprehend that they will never survive these lunatics as one of the two major parties.

Real ideology or fivolous demagoguery?

Krugman commits an intrinsic contradiction; and if that's too strong of an interpretation, then we should at least call it an unresolved tension. There's Exhibit A:

[I]nfluential people on both sides of the Atlantic heaped praise on the prophets of austerity ... because the doctrine of expansionary austerity dovetailed with their ideological agendas.

Versus Exhibit B:

[P]olicy makers, pundits and, I’m sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to forget what they used to know.

Krugman is not alone in blurring these vitally distinct propositions: Conservative (I would say "pseudoconservative"), anti-Keynesian Western pols are genuinely entrenched in "their ideological agendas," yet they simultaneously, and with aforethought, have deployed these agendas "largely for political reasons"? Either the former negates the latter, or the latter -- as the term "for political reasons" is generally understood -- obliterates the former. Which is to say, either these pols sincerely believe in their agendas, or they are merely opportunistic, pandering windbags.   

I mentioned that Krugman isn't alone in this blurring, since I've committed the selfsame ambiguity countless times. So this isn't a criticism of Krugman, but an honest puzzlement. Are these anti-Keynesian pols of "expansionary austerity" really that ideologically dimwitted? -- as Krugman notes, "any economist ... or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook 'Economics' ... could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea" -- or are they just playing to the dimwitted crowd, understanding, as they do, that the simplicity of Cut spending! is, compared to perhaps complicated macroeconomics, a stirring comprehensibility.

I don't know. It's unanswerable -- or at least with any real and final authority, it's unanswerable. My native cynicism, however, compels the suspicion that, say, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, or Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, aren't really so dumb as to believe that slashing federal spending while in the powerful gusts of economic headwinds is a smart idea. Even the most rudimentary of empirical economics belies such an opinion. Still, such an opinion can be a humdinger of a crowd-pleaser, assuming the crowd itself has for years meticulously evaded all enlightenment while languishing in its Platonic cave -- e.g., has been boobtube-glued to nothing but Fox News' glittering disinformation.

Such a suspicion suggests nothing less than the politically sociopathic on the part of Messrs. Boehner et al. My apologies if that's rhetorically strident -- but maybe, just maybe, profoundly true.

Please don't fib to Newt

For a politician who claims to possess a cosmic superiority in debating skills, with which he would crush the diabolically devious Kenyan imposter in the presidential square-offs, Newt Gingrich has offered the most peculiar excuse for his poor debate performances last week.

Asked, simply, "What happened?" by ABC's Jake Tapper, the former speaker threw up this defensive, explanatory barrier: "I was amazed."

Amazed, that is, in the sense of being stunned, stupefied, staggered. Amazed in the sense of a speechlessness rendered. Amazed in the sense of being stopped, shut down, swept savagely into a crippling silence.

The Great(est) Debater amplified his sense of helplessness:  

I'm standing next to a guy who is [giving] the most blatantly dishonest answers I can remember in any presidential race in -- in my lifetime.... And, you know, he would say things that were just plain not true.

Well, that left me stupefied. Isn't exposing an opponent's blatantly dishonest answers -- utterances that are "just plain not true" -- a rather elementary, or, as Newt would put it, fundamental part of live, on-stage debating? The world's great(est) debater actually confessed that his Achilles' heel consists of ... being fibbed to? Just lie to Newt and watch his rhetorical offensive crumble?

So it would seem. And that's according not to me, but to Newt.

Oh, the world's great(est) debater also mentioned this little tidbit of political insight: "You cannot be president of the United States if you can't be honest and candid with the American people."

Ergo, Barack Obama would have never become president of the United States had he not all along been honest and candid with the American people. Ergo II, Barack Obama could not possibly be the diabolically devious Kenyan imposter that the world's great(est) debater says he is.

Or so it would seem. And that's according not to me, but to Newt.

OWS: A squandered opportunity

When a conservative scholar leads his think piece with a gentle ridicule of, rather than an uneasy defensiveness against, liberalism's principal propaganda campaign, you know the latter has probably squandered an excellent political opportunity -- again. 

Such is the frame of political scientist James Q. Wilson's op-ed, "Angry about inequality? Don’t blame the rich," which opens with this mild mock of a yawning ho-hum:

There is no doubt that incomes are unequal in the United States — far more so than in most European nations. This fact is part of the impulse behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose members claim to represent the 99 percent of us against the wealthiest 1 percent [italics mine, ridicule his].

From there we enter an argumentation minefield of obscure statistical bloodshed -- did you know the Swedes' "Gini index" is much lower than America’s; or that Greece's "went from 0.413 in the 1970s to 0.307 in the late 2000s"? -- chiefly because OWS was foolish enough to slap a specific (not to mention far too narrow) percentage on the target of its justified anger (much as Mitt Romney was foolish enough to conjure a specific numerical creation of jobs). That is, by limiting its valid indignation to the huge incomes of the 1 percent, OWS necessarily disregarded the grossly inequitable structural advantages among the 99th percentile, the 98th percentile, the 97th, and so on.

In other words, in favoring the "income inequality" argument over exposing the much deeper injustice of wealth's far broader maldistribution, OWS let the intellectual quarry slip away. The movement also allowed this sort of easy counterpoint to be made, as Prof. Wilson easily does: 

The "rich" in America are not a monolithic, unchanging class. A study by Thomas A. Garrett, economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, found that less than half of people in the top 1 percent in 1996 were still there in 2005.

In yet other words, much of the physical quarry -- not merely the intellectual -- slips away. Again, had OWS not restricted its volleys to the 1 percent, the above point would have been rendered utterly pointless.

Of course we can always ask, But what have the practical results of OWS's propaganda been? (Note: I am not using "propaganda" pejoratively here.) Wilson gleefully answers:

[A] December Gallup poll showed that 52 percent of Americans say inequality is "an acceptable part" of the nation’s economic system, compared with 45 percent who deemed it a "problem that needs to be fixed."

Shortly after that poll's release, a rather stunned and definitely disconcerted Charles Blow, of the NY Times, noted the results with an infinite dreariness:

A Gallup poll released on Thursday found that, after rising rather steadily for the past two decades, the percentage of Americans who said that the country is divided into "haves" and "have-nots" took the largest drop since the question was asked.

A squandered opportunity. No one of any thoughtfulness is questioning the sentimental nobility behind OWS's efforts; Wilson, certainly, does not, nor do I. It's just that the organized left, disorganized as it is, always seems to hit its target with so little strategic effectiveness.

Dear athiests: Mitt has your back

Irresistibly -- Gawker, via Political Wire:

"Two readers have sent us confirmation that Edward Davies, Mitt Romney's militantly atheist father-in-law, was indeed posthumously converted to Mormonism by his family, despite the fact that when he was alive he regarded all religions as 'hogwash.' "

Getting one's ticket punched after the heretical fact would, I should think, present an insoluble problem for the heavenly Gate Keepers.

It's this sort of superstitious mumbo-jumbo that has always deterred me from any spiritual alliance with the officially Saved. And, while not allying myself with the thumpers, even a little, I should also think the fundamentalist Christian right would be extraordinarily distressed in imagining a pagan-rescuer in the Oval Office, reversing the heavenly decreed fate of the properly doomed.

I just double checked. Yep, this is the 21st century.

The High Noon II I'd love to see

Professor of government John Pitney Jr. imagines the unlikelier of coming presidential debates -- those between the incumbent and Newt Gingrich -- and predicts that while "Obama might botch a name here or a fact there," the former Speaker would make "radioactive comments" alienating to all but the most ardent right winger:

The more time he gets to talk, the more likely he is to say something outrageous. Throughout his career, his speeches and extended interviews have been spawning grounds for odd or even grotesque Gingrichisms.

It's a pity these Obama-Gingrich showdowns of a high-noon farce -- one can, as well, imagine the numerous holes that Gingrich would blast in his foot -- will never materialize. If the faking Dudley-Do-Righting Mitt Romney doesn't put the Black Bart of Georgia away in Florida next week, then the dry gulch of February will; its intervening drought of non-debating dullness will bequeath Gingrich only the useless and arid wind.

But here's the unlikeliest of presidential debates that I'd like to see: an Obama-Gingrich-Romney showdown. Now that's the ticket.

Throughout the GOP's gang warfare of a primary season, Obama, whenever asked which of these dueling hooligans he expects to take on, has answered quite sensibly that it makes no difference. A Gingrich is indistinguishable from a Romney, and a Romney is as extremist as a Gingrich, (Santorum, I think we can all agree, is merely gunning for the VP selection). Obama's plan of counterattack awaits only for the name of the last man standing to be filled in -- for there is absolutely no guessing about the bloodied survivor's sick, reality-twisting, diabolically underhanded bushwhackings to come.

And there ain't no doubt in my Western-justice, Hollywood-nostalgic mind that the cool, white-hatted, imperturbably righteous Will Kane could plug two Frank Millers as thoroughly as one. Why, one of the Millers might even plug the other on stage in a desperate, double-crossing struggle to out-fanaticize his equally ornery hombre.

I am of course just daydreaming. Such things aren't done; presidents don't fight down or invite gang-tackles like that, and the divided opposition never unites until it has drunk-punched itself into a staggering, bloodied stupor. But the farce of both Romney and Gingrich trying to out-right-wing each other -- revealing, in the horrifying process, that there really is no de facto difference between them -- in the face of Obama's center-left Reason would decisively hammer an early nail in the formers' inevitable coffins.

Over the rainbow

With increasing frequency I find myself distressed whenever I ponder the time, however limited, that I've just invested in reading the political press.

"I think it’s the most blatantly dishonest performance by a presidential candidate I’ve ever seen," says Newt Gingrich about Mitt Romney to the Washington Post in one story just perused; and "It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product ... He would proof it," says a former secretary for Ron Paul's newsletters, in another story scoured.

Reading both pieces in full, I don't know ... maybe two or three minutes of my life transpired? And in what way was my knowledge of current events enriched? How was the world about me thrown into a more enlightened relief? Simply put, what did I learn?

I "learned" that Newt Gingrich is a wretched liar, and that a publisher of political newsletters read his own newsletters.

Right. Nothing. Two, three minutes -- poof, gone, irretrievable. It rather makes one want to crawl off to a closet -- equipped with only a flashlight and an armful of Shakespeare -- and then forget the whole, monotonous, repetitious scene.