p m carpenter's commentary

Of toasted mojo

If the ghostly Founding Fathers were to rematerialize today, I have it on good authority -- mine -- that they would likely lament not having stamped a 200-year expiration date on their famed document, as a thoughtful safeguard against the vissicitudes of enough time allowing a reasonably good thing to go so terribly bad. In lieu of this, they might very well have rethought their entire experiment in quasidemocratic and divided government, sparing only the appended Bill of Rights.

This imagined "What if?" history -- known as "contingency theory" to dusty practioners of the dark and empty art -- bubbles up from this morning's NYT piece on how leaderless our government is today, and how leaderless it shall remain for at least the next year and a half, following, alas, six-and-a-half years of the even worse, which is to say, six-and-a-half years of George W. Bush as a fully empowered leader. We were damned when we did and now damned when we don't.

The NYT analysis centers on the lame-duck/dead-duck phenomenon of a president's final years of a term-limited do-over (which of course the Founding Fathers didn't prescribe, but let's not quibble), and the phenomenon this time around appears especially lame, and, in the midst of an intractable war, especially deadly.

"President Bush enters the final 18 months of his presidency in danger of losing control," observes the analysis with profound understatement, "over a party that once marched in lockstep with him." In view of just who this particular president is, that's naturally a good thing; problem is, there's nothing -- certainly no other party of any organizational skill or unified agenda -- to fill the powerless, directionless vacuum.

But my question revolves around something deeper, and I imagine it's the 800-pound-gorilla question that would dawn immediately on the rematerialzed Founding Fathers: "How in God's name did this country ever put an idiot like George W. Bush in the White House in the first place, and what's more, how has he managed to hold on so dreadfully long?"

I have little doubt, nay, no doubt, that the Founding Fathers' first act, given a shot at their own do-over, would have been to trash the arcane electoral college system. The antidemocratic potholes of that little gem may have been passable when it cost, say, Sam Tilden a presidential easy chair in 1876, but when it permitted a certified imbecile to trump the democratic majority in 2000 -- well, enough is enough, and much better to block such potential catastrophes from the get-go.

Still, going even deeper, I also imagine the Founding Fathers would have rethought the whole notion of separated government. This leader thinks and does one thing, that leader thinks and does something else, and yet other leaders think and do something entirely different. It's more than a formula for lame-duckdom and mere gildlock till the next election; it's a formula for sustained, recidivist and even absurd stagnation. The people want or demand one thing or another, while the "system" sits and chokes, doing absolutely nothing.

Indeed, I imagine the Founding Fathers would conclude, after reading a newspaper or two from 2007, that a parliamentary system -- of the species that evolved post-George III -- wasn't such a bad idea after all. Should the majority congressional party happen to be so moronic as to elevate an even bigger moron to the White House, a no-confidence curtain would fall soon enough and the nation would be spared the gasping, directionless, preposterous holding pattern that we now find ourselves in, with all its attendant and needless evils.

The NYT piece quotes a political scientist as saying "the president's mojo is completely gone." Yesterday, as an immense herd of other writers was doing the same, I justifiably denounced the president for trampling on the Constitution. But perhaps that document's mojo has played itself out as well. We gave it a good go, but our mountainous problems now seem, in large part, to come about because of it, not in spite of it. Just perhaps.

Trampling the Constitution with great merriment

In a move as unexpected as another pornographic display of Ann Coulter's ugly mind, yesterday the White House again declared war on accountability. I was delighted, truth be told. For this administration to start behaving with any show of decency or legality at this late stage would merely be an unsettling, apocalyptic sign of a suddenly disordered universe.

Writing dual letters on behalf of the regal gangster whose unfettered, unimpeached tenure has the entire world baffled, the White House's chief pettifogger, Fred Fielding, "advised and informed" the insanely powerless chairmen of the House and Senate judiciary committees that "the White House will not be making any production in response to these subpoenas for documents" regarding the U.S. Attorneys' firings, which would only prove, he failed to add, the stinking corruption and criminality of the Bush administration.

Five will get you ten that Fred wrote that very, final line to Karl in an RNC email in a moment of White House levity, just before shoving the unobliging letters in envelopes -- signing off, "Karl, I never knew trampling on the Constitution could be such fun! What are those Congressional schmucks gonna do about it? What have they ever done about it?"

But Mr. Fielding actually did write something to Messrs. Pat Leahy and John Conyers almost as facetious: "With respect, it is with much regret that we are forced down this unfortunate path which we sought to avoid by finding grounds for mutual accommodation."

I defy any thinking, fair-minded person to locate as much as one syllable of honesty, one vowel of integrity, one single dotted "i" of straight shooting in that entire, miserable sentence.

This White House has no "respect" for anyone or anything except its own grotesquely obese power; it "regrets" absolutely nothing it ever does; it is scarcely being "forced down" any undesired path; the "unfortunate" part is wholly of its own choosing; it seeks to "avoid" nothing but scandalously delayed accountability; and any act of "mutual accommodation" is as foreign to these bullying blackguards as sweaty fornication is to Pope Benedict XVI.

And there has ensued yet more black comedy. "The White House has said it would allow current or former White House officials to speak to the committee only under strict limitations. Specifically, Bush has insisted that the officials not be compelled to testify under oath, that their testimony not be recorded or transcribed and they speak to a limited number of lawmakers in private."

To that, Leahy and Conyers should reply to Mr. Bush with this brief, slightly modified but pointedly relevant line from "Arthur," in which the exasperated John Gielgud instructs the incorrigible Dudley Moore: "Perhaps you would like us to wash your dick for you, too ... you little shit."

But they won't, of course. Instead, they'll pound their mighty chests and bellow platitudinous nothings, which Mr. Leahy has already previewed: "Increasingly, the president and vice president feel they are above the law. In America no one is above law."

Quaint, indeed, but the president has some news for you, Senator. And in the nick of time, the right-wing courts will confirm it.

So should you give it up, Senator? Just concede your impotence and defeat? Plant a crown on Arthur's illiterate head and a scepter in his bratty hands and declare the game over? Here's a helpful hint. You'll never beat this clown as long as your party keeps impeachment off the table. You've nothing to threaten him with.

Cut the crap, Senator

I've tried tea leaves and a crystal ball and assorted voodoo incantations, but I still can't precisely divine what in hell the Foreign Relations Committee's ranking apologist, Senator Dick Lugar, was saying this week. At least two other senators seemed to suggest they knew what he was saying, but their comments on Lugar's comments only further confounded the obscurity.

Speaking for nearly an hour on the Senate floor, Lugar said, "In my judgment, the costs and risks of continuing down the current path outweigh the potential benefits that might be achieved. Persisting indefinitely with the surge strategy will delay policy adjustments that have a better chance of protecting our vital interests over the long term."

OK, in his first line -- among his prepared, carefully scripted lines -- his concern is expressed in the present tense: the downsides of staying, as is, now outweigh whatever might otherwise be accomplished. This emphasis sets up the future: failure to alter course now will delay inevitable adjustments -- I like that: "adjustments" -- that, good or bad, nevertheless have a better chance of working than the lunacy in place.

Lugar added that our Mad King Ludwig should begin "a downsizing and redeployment of U.S. military forces" in Iraq.

In its literal interpretation, that sounds like an exit strategy, does it not? Yet the following day he extemporaneously remarked to reporters that "he thought it was too late to begin devising" -- wait for it, here it comes -- "an exit strategy." What in God's name, in the Queen's English, does "redeployment" mean? A reverse surge? When one redeploys, Dick, one exits. Calling it anything else is just strategic b.s.

Further muddying any clarity was Lugar's comment -- again, later, and to reporters -- that "he had no intention of suddenly voting with Democrats, particularly in their efforts to limit war financing or set a timetable for withdrawal." So it seems the "costs and risks of continuing down the current path" aren't costly or risky enough to warrant a rationally scheduled withdrawal -- yet we should downsize and redeploy?

Then, of course, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell "and his top aides" splattered even more mud on any transparency by saying "it was still not clear whether [Lugar] would vote with the Democrats on procedural motions related to cutting or limiting war funding." So Lugar says point-blank he won't, while his party leader says he might. My, my, it seems the usually well-oiled Republican machine could use a couple more squirts.

But the most puzzling of comments on comments? The prize goes to Senator Carl Levin, who announced: "I am encouraged by what [Lugar] said and it just adds to the momentum for change. Hopefully he’ll take some very specific steps to implement what his words mean. They are powerful words."

Not only were Lugar's words more teasing than powerful, why is a leading member of the majority suggesting that a member of the minority do something "to implement" policy? Isn't the "something" some something-or-other the majority is supposed to do?

But let's bottom-line this thing. Sure, Lugar was playing a bit of a game, doing a dance, dangling a red cape just to get the White House's attention, and to let it know that all is far from peachy in Minorityville. But coming from one of the most respected, most somber senators, on such a somber issue, isn't it time for unmistakable forthrightness, not coyness?

Crumbling Rocks of Incredulity

Not long ago, sometime before the 2006 elections I think, I witnessed former presidential adviser David Gergen experience what amounted to -- for him -- an emotional breakdown on a political talk show. It was a sight to see. Here was this normally mild-mannered and intrepid courtier practically breaking out in a sweat, fidgeting and trembling, rambling and dissolving, right on camera.

What prompted the poor man's meltdown? In the most general terms: The System. That is to say, the political system, the campaign system, the trivializing media system; our system, specifically, in which politicians fudge, evade and promise the heavens without ever engaging the nuts and bolts of structurally mountainous problems or ever suggesting even the meagerest of popular sacrifice.

And that day, whatever day it was, on whatever talk show it was, there sat Mr. Gergen, reeling off a litany of these problems, from the deficit to Iraq, and decrying with each utterance how the pols of both major parties are blowing right past them with idiotic, simplistic pabulum and ignoring the colossal "train wreck" -- those are the words I recall him using -- we're headed for.

As he inched to the end of his fuse, I was sure he would blow. It was, I guess, his Mike Gravel moment. Then, a cut to commercial, a new panel, fresh troops from the catastrophic front -- intrepidity reinstated, more familiar talk of inconsequence.

Mr. Gergen may have lost his famous composure that day, but that he was onto something big, there is no doubt. Rome is indeed burning all around us, while The System fiddles and obsesses over what's on top of John Edwards' head rather than, let's say, the vacuum in Fred Thompson's.

So it was with a profound sense of déjà vu that I read yesterday of former Gov. Mario Cuomo's similarly frantic bell-ringing, in which "every week or so [he] prepares a private political memo, called the Update, and e-mails it to friends and allies in hopes of provoking thought and debate. The Update’s central thesis is that there are Great Issues at stake in the 2008 presidential election -- [Iraq, health care, Medicare and Medicaid, the Middle East, global warming, immigration, trade and budget deficits] -- and that the candidates should be judged on their ability to discuss them in detail, 'in a way,'" as the governor put it, 'that measures more than glibness, memory and theatricality.'"

Take taxes, for instance, as did Gov. Cuomo in an interview with the New York Times' Patrick Healy. Other than promising to roll back the egregiously insane Bush tax cuts for the filthiest of the richest, the leading Democratic presidential candidates, said the governor, "don’t want to talk about other taxes they might raise, or what the definition of middle class is for the purposes of tax cuts or tax increases. They don’t want to get into that because they say, 'People will misunderstand if the Republicans attack us or lie about our plans,' and they will get hurt as a result.'"

The gaping flaw in their rationalization, of course, is that Republicans will attack them no matter what they mumble about taxes. So why not be direct, clear and honest? But the hell of it is, even should one of these candidates make it to the White House by saying nothing of real consequence, he or she will then do nothing of real consequence either, because -- you got it -- people will misunderstand if the Republicans attack him or her or lie about his or her plans, and he or she will get hurt as a result.

So the inertia of superabundant pusillanimity will persist, as the oncoming trains keep barreling down the national tracks.

Mr. Gergen, meet Mr. Cuomo. Mr. Cuomo, meet Mr. Gergen. Perhaps the two of you can room together in the Home for the Politically Pixilated when you both mentally collapse out of frustration with all the reigning nonsense.

Flirting with democracy

I don't insist on labeling news items I read as "must-read" news items for you as well, but this one demands an exception. Upon reading it, those who cling to the desperate hope that an informed, enlightened democracy will ultimately save the day will be deflated; those who have long since given up on such magnificent obsessions will be smugly vindicated.

I refer to a published Newsweek poll of 1,001 imbeciles, adults all, conducted June 18-19 in the year of our indifferent Lord, 2007, testing general knowledge and especially that of current events. Well, they aren't all imbeciles -- only 81 percent of them, for instance, failed to name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, that hardly anonymous honcho of one of the merely three branches (not counting the vice-president's office) of the federal government.

OK, so John Roberts isn't a household name, I hear you cry. That scarcely subtracts from the electorate's overall ability to weigh weighty issues, gauge America's place in the world, evaluate its performance at home, and intelligently chime in on election day with a broad knowledge shaped by constant exposure to newspapers, radio, network news, 24-hour cable news, innumerable public affairs programs and the ubiquitous Internet.

You think? Then what about what "they" think when posed this question: "Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?"

Brace yourself, because a full half -- probably the half that still believes voting is their solemn civic duty -- responded either "yes" or "don't know."

But ah, I hear you cry again. Of that half, at least most fell into the cautious "don't know" category, right? Wrong. Eighty-two percent of those who have yet to get the word that Saddam Hussein was wholly unconnected to the 9/11 attacks responded "yes" -- that's 41 percent of all polled -- proving there's no ignorance like administration-sponsored ignorance, served daily to millions of willing ignoramuses.

What's worse, that 41-percent figure of certified morons is actually up from 2004.

As the poll's findings go on, the reader's confidence in democracy, if confidence it be, goes down, and down ... and down. For example, 15 percent of those responsible enough to own and even answer a telephone said yep, as far as they knew, Osama bin Laden had indeed "been tracked down and captured by the United States" -- either that, or they just weren't sure about this vague and underreported matter.

Another 41 percent couldn't name the speaker of the House, although a quarter of that percentage really, really thought they could. Unfortunately, they thought she was either Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay.

A staggering sixty-three percent didn't know Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and four percent more than one would think -- that being, well, four percent, or roughly one in every 20 American adults -- thought the one thing Andrew Jackson and Al Gore had in common was ... "both opposed global warming." I kid you not.

Enough of this. I'm going back to bed, with the covers pulled far over my head.

Out of town for a few days. I shall return.

They work in mysterious ways

He is risen. He is spreading The Word. Our salvation is at hand.

Maybe.

Actually, we have precious meager ways of knowing what The Word is, or if salvation could follow, for virtually all the coverage of celestial Mike Bloomberg's bombshell divorce from the Republican Party and consequent possibility of His presidential availability centered, almost exclusively, on the politics of it all.

Keen interest in salvation only abounds, of course, because things have gotten so bitterly demonic. We're mired in two buffoonish wars, have spent and continue to spend ourselves into a fiscal apocalypse, harbor tens of millions without health care and the planet is in a toaster, to name just four of a couple hundred seemingly impregnable problems.

Hence nothing among the Fourth Estaters could be more important -- could it not? -- than extensive analysis of those problems in relation to He Who holds the promise of fixing them.

He Himself preaches the dark abyss, with the New York Times, as the dominant gorilla of its Estate, in excitable tow. The paper of record's front-page story on the Mayor's probable candidacy-cum-salvation positively roared the menacing bleakness:

"The intense reaction in other campaigns to Mr. Bloomberg’s announcement ... reflected the ferment that has characterized the race for president this year, with no obvious heir apparent on either side, an unpopular incumbent president, and a country facing serious problems at home and abroad."

Bloomberg "told [one] audience ... that the country is 'really in trouble.'

"He used pointed language to attack the ways of Washington, while promoting his own centrist approach. 'We continue to struggle from big problem to big problem with Band-Aids and the bleeding continues and nobody is really ready to stand up and make the tough decisions,'" said He.

Bloomberg uses "increasingly sharp language to criticize both parties in Washington as too timid to take on big problems and too locked into petty squabbling to work together."

And so the article went, for more than 1300 words: We're "really in trouble" -- but, aside from Him, we've nothing but bombastic political shamans to lead our Exodus.

Yet among these 1300 words of trouble and travail, all of 10 were devoted to His policy positions:

"He is for abortion rights, gay rights and gun control."

That was it, in toto.

The news consumer of national ills and dreamer of dreamy resolutions is indeed left with abundant confirmation of just how far up Poop Creek we are, but delivered unto him or her is nary a smattering of just how we'll ever paddle our way back -- for the merchants of news are themselves consumed by the political atmospherics alone.

If He is risen, wouldn't it be nice to know how He plans to introduce the secular Rapture, rather than, simply, how His coming reflects the squalid abyss, or affects Hillary and Rudy?

On journalistic blogging: To pussyfoot or let rip?

Those "missing" White House emails are a source of meticulous but ambivalent caution for The Politico's blog, "The Crypt." Its front-page headline was, "RNC lost thousands of White House e-mails"; its inside headline was, "Deleted?"

The story itself contained this lead: "Flying in the face of the Presidential Records Act, the Republican National Committee lost or destroyed thousands of e-mails from current and former White House officials, according to a congressional report released Monday" [emphases added, obviously].

Yes, this is indeed a puzzler.

Could there possibly, just possibly, have been some skulduggery afoot? Well, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform "found that among the White House users were top political strategist Karl Rove ... and former political director Ken Mehlman, who formerly was chairman of the RNC."

Best be careful. Toss "lost" into the speculative reporting as often as "deleted" and "destroyed." After all, when discussing monuments to political chastity like Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, one can't be too fair and balanced.

Besides, "the committee [also] found that [it was] Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel, [who] failed to take any action to preserve the e-mails despite testimony that he knew about their widespread use."

You've gotta love it. "Failed to take any action to preserve" -- as in Al Capone "failed to take any action to preserve" his accountings of gambling, whorehouses, graft and bootlegging just before going on trial for income tax evasion.

And the puzzle kept growing: "Many revelations in the report itself stem from an earlier investigation into the contact between administration officials and incarcerated former Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff."

Damn, more infernally incomprehensible dots to connect. But once again, could it possibly be, just possibly, that something felonious was taking place between White House officials and a soon-to-be convicted felon?

What's my point? I'm not sure myself, except for this: The Politico's "Crypt" needs to decide, as does every blog, if it's a blog or a straight-news column.

As we all know and have come to expect, blogs are for frolicking through the news with extreme prejudice and prodigious bias, two bents that often produce the extremely and prodigiously correct. In short, blogs are a way of bellowing what the news will merely whisper months from now.

So let the news pussyfoot; let the blogs rip.

Shafting US with a smile

It's hard to imagine the nearly anonymous, presidential unhopeful Chris Dodd having raised more than twice the amount in campaign contributions from any given industry over a better-known and first-tier candidate, but this he has done.

To wit, from yesterday's NYT: John "McCain’s campaign filings show just $61,000 from the military industry in the first quarter -- less than half as much as the long-shot campaign of Democratic Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics."

Now why in the world, one might reasonably ask, would the military-industrial complex cold-shoulder a candidate who seems to want to fight everyone and for years to come? The answer, generally, lies in those evidentiary notches in the fetid system of bribery that we charitably call campaign finance, and, specifically, because Mr. McCain has been tooling around the country saying enormously obvious things like this:

"Defense contractors are more concerned with winning the next contract than performing on the current one."

As any consumer who has recently compared any corporation's sales and service departments knows all too well, McCain could have generically and quite properly substituted "American business" for "defense contractors." Nevertheless he fingered defense; and defense is pouting, taking its revenge, unleashing a passive-aggressive tantrum that makes others in the bribe-begging department stand up, take note and keep their mouths shut about the vast array of corporate ghouls who do profound harm to this nation.

So much for the commonplace. What made this particular article so interesting, however, was its evolutionary component of flagrant debasement: that is, even the grafters are going public -- going quotable -- about their charming racket.

Historically lobbyists and other major campaign contributors have limited themselves to public confessions of wanting "access." That's all, just access -- the opportunity to plead their case before government decision makers. It's unmitigated b.s., of course, but that's all they'd allow the public or press. Yet in this piece, on the record with the New York Times, a telecommunications lobbyist rather startlingly permitted her name -- Kim Bayliss -- to be attached to this matter-of-fact but customarily muted observation:

"[McCain] wants to be independent, to make decisions free from the influence of special interests -- God bless him. But those are the people with money, and they are only going to give their money because you have been with them or you are going to be with them."

As noted, the observation itself is scarcely shocking. What does startle, however, is that at least some bribers -- and many more to follow, no doubt -- are no longer taking the wimpy, good-citizen and goo-goo public relations approach to graft. They are going public, identifying themselves and telling voters point-blank that their job is that of buying politicians, lock, stock and congressional seat or Oval Office.

Like everything else in this increasingly vulgar culture, even in politics the phony veil of propriety is being lifted. It's anything goes and everything to the highest bidder and the grafters now feel free to be open about it. You'll take it and like it, they are saying, in effect, because you have no choice. Because they also own the means of change.

High-handed hocus-pocus

The president will soon brandish his right of executive privilege to ward off congressional inquisitors who wish to grill, under oath, corrupt former White House officials who conspired with corrupt Justice Department officials to tweak the nation's time-honored system of impartial, nonpartisan jurisprudence -- the latter being, it is rumored, that which has always separated this great nation from the brutal banana republics of men, not laws.

As one news analysis put it, "Democrats want to know if the White House allowed politics to interfere with the Justice Department," which is like asking if the mob ever "allowed" criminal activity in the operation of unions under its malignant umbrella. But ask they must, as a formality.

Personally, I'd love it if Democrats came up empty handed; if they managed, that is, to isolate one solitary department or agency or lonely bureaucrat somewhere, anywhere, in the last seven years that has not been subjected to White House politics. It would prove the proverbial exception to the rule, which is presumed a universal exception, but still eludes, to the best of everyone's knowledge, the Bush administration's rule.

At any rate, with high indignation the president will whoop and wail about preserving his right of executive privilege, which, he and his legal guns will imply, if not directly assert, the Founding Fathers embalmed in the U.S. Constitution. Even tin-horn dictators like Bush have, they will plead in effect, a constitutional right to hatch lunatic conspiracies in the Oval Office, free from prying eyes and prying ears. It's his constitutional sandbox, and he has every right to play in it however he wants. After all, how can he, as a mere, inept layman, be expected to slickly subvert the constitution in the absence of protected, free-ranging, expert felonious counsel?

Some of this reasoning will surely proceed from their sense of "strict constructionism," that legal curiosity around which Bush & Friends have built splendid political careers. And they are very strict about it. As just one example, they have campaigned for decades against a woman's right to choose based on the "right of privacy," because there's no such phrasing in the constitution. Hence Roe v. Wade -- that twisting of literal language and thus original intent -- is intolerable.

But there's a trifle hitch in what the president will claim as his own strict, constitutional right. And the hitch is, the constitution says no more about "executive privilege" than it does the "right to privacy." Nowhere in that document did the Founding Fathers enumerate this as a reigning doctrine of the land. Had they intended it, why in Jim Madison's name did they not nail it down in writing?

But ah, Bush & Friends will say, the de facto supremacy of executive privilege began with George Washington and, more important, has been constitutionally enshrined ever since by the Supreme Court through judicial review.

But there's another but, which likely strikes you before I can write it: Nowhere in the constitution do the words "judicial review" appear, either. It's merely an unAmerican construct concocted out of whole legal cloth by "activist judges" whose only intent has been to enslave us all through unelected, undemocratic, non-strict-constructionist arrogance and humbuggery. Right? Or have I misread these paragons of strict constructionism in their railings against runaway activist judges?

We seem to be left with only one certainty. Bush & Friends' legal and political hypocrisy will prevail, of course. The inquisitors will be denied. The conspiracy's remnants will linger in camera. And the unitary executive will, once again, kick the stuffing out of accountability.