p m carpenter's commentary

They get dumber every day

One aggravating attribute of liberals today is that they dismiss, as too fussy and old-fashioned, conservatives' traditional interpretations of American history, our nation's exquisite exceptionalism, and, when you get right down to it, the wholesome value of the 'three Rs.'

For instance, who but pompous liberals in striped pants would argue with Herman Cain's reading of the U.S. Constitution -- something once nobly taught to eagerly patriotic schoolchildren, yet, these days, honored only by old-school conservatives?

I quote Herman:

We don’t need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America, we need to reread the Constitution and enforce the Constitution.... [F]or the benefit of those who are not going to read it because they don’t want us to go by the Constitution, there’s a little section in there that talks about "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believed in, they instilled in you.... [D]on’t stop there, keep reading. Cause that’s when it says "when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals [or, "of these ends"], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." We’ve got some altering and some abolishing to do!

OK, OK, you're way ahead of me. Both hallowed phrases are from the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. Still, we really should listen to what conservative morons like Herman Cain have to say, since, unlike liberals, they're so splendidly -- nay, spiritually -- informed about true Americanism.

The Biggest Lie

What will the GOP's Biggest Lie of 2012 be?

Tim Pawlenty previews it:

We've tried President Obama's way ... and his way has failed.

If the effort of having "tried President Obama's way" encompasses the Senate minority's relentless obstructionism and mechanical filibustering, the House's reckless negligence of any sort of jobs bill, and the right's hyperaggressive media machine of attack, attack, and attack again -- and if necessary, just make stuff up -- then, yes, I suppose we have tried Obama's way.

'I [can't] believe these idiots'

The only word of his I'd change is "couldn't" to "still can't." Former governor Ed Rendell:

I couldn’t believe these idiots — I don’t know what else to call them — they’re idiots.... They actually made their members vote on it. It was completely stunning to me.

Rendell was speaking, of course, of Paul Ryan's indescribably idiotic Medicare plan, and all but four House Republicans' vote for it, at the leadership's request. Even if one subscribed to its unnecessary carnage in terms of policy, there remained the insurmountable hurdle of the plan having no place to go, no means of advancement, since the Senate wouldn't pass it and the president would never sign it; hence politically it was as dunderheaded as it was a policy disaster.

So why did the House do it? That's the focus of a fascinating Politico story, which, try as it might, still can't explain the inexplicable -- beyond, that is, the unsatisfactory explanation of a charging herd mentality stemming from immense tea-party pressure.

"The tea party itch has definitely not been scratched, so the voices who were saying, 'Let’s do this in a way that’s politically survivable' got drowned out by a kind of panic," a top GOP consultant involved in the debate said, on condition of anonymity. "The feeling among leadership was, we have to be true to the people who put us here. We don’t know what to do, but it has to be bold."

Gives one a feeling of confidence, does it not? ... Hey, we here in the House leadership haven't the vaguest notion of how to placate a ferociously ideological caucus that represents maybe 30 percent of the American electorate -- tops -- so how about we destroy Medicare? Think that would perk 'em up some?

"Idiotic" doesn't come close. Hence my modifier: indescribably idiotic.

Observes Politico's Glenn Thrush and Jake Sherman:

Time will tell whether the Medicare vote, the most politically significant legislative act of the 112th Congress thus far, will be viewed by 2012 voters as a courageous act of fiscal responsibility — or as an unforced error that puts dozens of marginal GOP seats and the party’s presidential candidates at serious risk. That question might be answered, in part, this week during a special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District, in which Republican Jane Corwin appears to be losing ground to Democrat Kathy Hochul.

Listen up, Messrs. Thrush and Sherman. Time has already told. Even if Corwin wins, the GOP has lost. New York's 26th should never have been competitive: even the presence of Tea Party candidate Jack Davis, who is draining votes from Corwin, would never have drained sufficient votes to convert a Democrat into plausibility had it not been for Corwin's support of Ryan's Medicare plan.

Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of the GOP's life, which will seem like a living hell for the next 18 months, until it's effectively over, in November, 2012.

All this assumes, naturally, that the Dems will know how to exploit the GOP's monumental misstep in swing districts across the country. But that's another story.

The right, from hysteria to incoherence

Saturday, in relation to President Obama's State Department speech, Andrew Sullivan eloquently reflected a broad sentiment in his pointed reaction to "the rank hysteria that immediately sprang from Jerusalem and quickly enveloped the far-right-wing-media-industrial-complex." Yet the far-right-wing-media-industrial-complex is going one even better: In its hysteria over Obama's rather modest approach to Israel-Palestine, the right is outdoing itself, to a heretofore unimagined magnitude, in utter incoherence.

Take, for instance, the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin's post-AIPAC-speech musings yesterday. I frankly can't make heads or tails of her ramblings -- it's that incomprehensible -- other than that she really, really detests Barack Obama and loves to lavish recriminations upon him, even if that means the intervening necessity of aforementioned incoherence.

A sample or two will suffice.  

"Missing was his explanation for his Thursday statement," wrote Rubin, "that it was now U.S. policy to base a peace deal based on 1967 lines with land swaps."

From Obama's AIPAC speech:

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps -- (applause) -- so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states....

[I]t was my reference to the 1967 lines -- with mutually agreed swaps -- that received the lion’s share of the attention, including just now. And since my position has been misrepresented several times, let me reaffirm what "1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps" means. By definition, it means that the parties themselves -– Israelis and Palestinians -– will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967. (Applause.) That’s what mutually agreed-upon swaps means.

I'm at a loss. That's U.S. policy. It has been for years. Obama just explained it. Again. So what's "missing"?

Rubin proceeds:

But the lowlight was his reiteration of his Thursday remarks on the 1967 lines. Oh, yes, he did. [M]ixed in were blame-the-media and woe-is-me sentiments that were shameful displays by a U.S. president.

So, wait, but, uh, he did explain it. Only now his explanation is labeled "woe-is-me."

Are you following any of this? I'm sure as hell not.

One more sampling, just in case you'd like another good laugh at some of the worst, most tangled polemics I've ever read:

Obama must be very certain that liberal Jews will enthusiastically support him no matter what. And there is evidence he is right. Josh Block, senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former AIPAC spokesman, e-mailed: "It [the speech] was a strong reaffirmation of the US-Israel relationship, and was an important and positive change from his remarks on Thursday. It reflected an important continuity of US policy going back to President Johnson."

This is the sort of spin [!] that pro-Israel Democrats use to justify voting for Obama. But there is a reality that can’t be avoided. This president once again has proved an apt negotiator on behalf of the Palestinians and a thorn in Israel’s side.... [I]f Obama should be reelected in 2012 one can only imagine how hostile he will become toward the Jewish state.

Finally, finally, Ms. Rubin finally got something right: "one can only imagine how hostile he will become toward the Jewish state."

Or, should you choose not to engage in mere imaginings, that's OK. Because the likes of Jennifer Rubin are here, there, everywhere on the right to do the imagining for you.

Advantage: Pawlenty

Tim Pawlenty must be the happiest Republican alive. As widely reported over the Daniels-fleeing weekend, there's this today, from the NY Times:

Mr. Pawlenty and Mr. Huntsman now have clearer opportunities to establish themselves as the main alternatives to Mr. Romney.

I can't see how Pawlenty fails to gain the advantage here. He's been on the hoodwinking campaign trail for months, polishing his evasions to reporters' questions, while Huntsman is so politically rusty, he actually answers them.

Compare.

When asked last month if he supported Paul Ryan's Medicare plan, Pawlenty answered playfully but shrewdly: "Anybody else have a question besides this guy?" By mid-May, all that could be said was that "Pawlenty has handled the matter much more delicately than Gingrich."

Now Huntsman, from last week. Does he support the Ryan plan? "I would've voted for it ... Including the Medicare provisions."

That's a haunting quote. As the Republican primaries approach and Republican voters begin to think (maybe) that it might be a trifle smarter to nominate a candidate who can perhaps win in the general, rather than just bewitch the hardcore right in the primaries, Pawlenty's team will be hanging Huntsman's unambiguous statement around his panicked neck.

Meanwhile, Romney will be stumbling through his fifth or sixth or thousandth re-invention of his Massachusetts plan. And again, Pawlenty will be there to help.

Advantage, Pawlenty, it seems to me. All the way around.

The principle of pragmatic policy

The NY Times' David Sanger alludes to the seemingly omnipresent demand for omnipotent "principle" in President Obama's foreign policy:

"Pragmatism is a great thing," a senior aide to Mr. Obama said over lunch in April. "But somewhere in all this we have to lay out some principles."

A perhaps shocking question: Why?

I quote from one of American pragmatism's founding fathers, William James:

[T]he universe has always appeared to the natural mind as a kind of enigma, of which the key must be sought in the shape of some illuminating or power-bringing word or name. That word names the universe's principle, and to possess it is after a fashion to possess the universe itself....

But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such word as closing your quest. You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing realities may be changed [emphases original].

So, back to another of Sanger's quotes:

"After decades of accepting the world as it is in the region," [Obama] told an invited audience of Middle Eastern ambassadors and bloggers at the State Department, "we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be."

To pursue the world as it should be, not -- as recent manifestations of so-called "principled," and by that they meant inflexible, policy would have it -- to recreate it. For no such recreation is possible, no such "closing [of a] quest" can ever be achieved; we can only pursue a better world, through a program of "more work" and step by logically practical step "within the stream of [our] experience."

It's not perfect. But then again, to cling to unknowable universal truths and enigmatic absolutes is, as we have seen, an even more dangerous business.

Dick Armey's surprisingly bright idea

Said the reliably befuddled Dick Armey on CNN's "State of the Union" about Mitch Daniels' narrow escape:

Now, obviously, we have to start looking, and I was just saying this morning, maybe it's time to start drafting Paul Ryan.

Yes, Dick, that's the ticket. The shortest distance between two points -- in this case, between crippling disadvantage and abject devastation -- is a straight line, and Rep. Ryan is unquestionably your straightest archery shot to near political oblivion.

H.L. Mencken, as I recall, once observed that democracy may be a "self-limiting disease." By that he meant its proclivity to the popularly absurd, sold by the bellowingly demagogic, would someday bring us to ruin and thus some other, saner form of governance. About that, who knows, but without question Mencken's "self-limits" formulation applies to political extremists.

Those such as Dick Armey love to huddle in ideological exclusivity and dream their extremist dreams and plot their extremist triumphs, and in record delusional time they convince themselves not only of their infinite virtue, but, because they've been dreaming and plotting in relative isolation, of their vast popularity.

Their base is flawlessly suited for the above brand of procedural politics: they listen only to Rush Limbaugh and watch only Fox News and read next to nothing; they live in the smallest of ignorant worlds and thrive on the bulkiest of pander; they imagine themselves plucky warriors amidst a sprawling and growing army of the self-agreeably virtuous. They feed on fantasy, and the frenzy is symbiotic: it travels from top-down to bottom-up, and from bottom-up back to top-down, and before long it's but a monolithic, homogeneous mush.

It's all rather amusing, in its own depraved little way, but even more amusing is that before electoral reality re-intrudes we start hearing crackpot extremists like Dick Armey earnestly suggesting crackpot extremists like Paul Ryan for the top of the ticket. 

Which I happen to think is a marvelous, even perversely forward-looking, idea. For what American conservatism most needs is an electoral thumping so vast, so crushing, so utterly rejectionist, it'll rehuddle and restrategize and return to actual conservatism -- and never return to the delusional extremism of Armey-Ryan.

A Daniels deflection

In the manner of a pol who courageously called for a "truce on so-called social issues" and then cravenly opened a new front by hindering women's rights and starving Planned Parenthood, and in the manner of a pol who broods about fiscal responsibility but who helped to detonate a handsome federal surplus and then blow a massive hole in the nation's fiscal health, comes Gov. Mitch Daniels with another political swindle:

His wife made him do it. Rather, not do it. "In the end, I was able to resolve every competing consideration but one ... the interests and wishes of my family."

Someday, in other loaded election seasons such as 2012's, we'll witness whole bevies of presidential wannabes with the genuine courage and simple honesty of a Sen. John Thune, who earlier this year bluntly confessed he had decided against running against Barack Obama because Obama would clean his clock and he knew it and everyone else knew it and there was no point in pondering his pain any longer. None of this "the little lady needs me" crap or the "home fires are a burnin'" nonsense, which always, unexceptionally is nonsensical, since these chivalrous family men already gleefully labor at 18-hour-a-day jobs.    

Haley Barbour came close to the Thune challenge, but "in the end" he swerved and failed to pre-concede a disastrous humiliation at the polls by citing not the blazing home fires, but the lack of one in his belly. It took political friends and associates to surreptitiously confess to the press the real reason for Barbour's non-participatory wisdom: He couldn't see a path to victory.

As for man-of-the-Lord Mike Huckabee, his colossal hypocrisy was altogether expected, so there's no sense in even revisiting his non-announcement.

To me, what additionally exposed Daniels' towering non-authenticity, though, was the addendum in his emailed bow: "If you feel that this was a non-courageous or unpatriotic decision, I understand and will not attempt to persuade you otherwise." Bingo. A rather conventional Republican tactic: find the weakest, most vulnerable point in one's argument -- in this case, Daniels' rude rebuff of GOPers convinced he could save the republic from Obama's socialist claws -- and then dump the shame of that conspicuous weakness on the dissenters themselves.  

Having dispatched the tedious "little lady" swindle, we can profess without any fear of logical inconsistency that Daniels' decision was indeed non-courageous and even unpatriotic, assuming he was always straightforward in his gloomy assessments of Obama's presidential wrack and ruin. A courageous patriot of Daniels' stature would have regarded as incontestable his absolute duty to at least try to stop the wastrel Obama and his reckless, republic-dooming ways. Daniels understood bloody well the inescapable logic of this, hence his "I ... will not attempt to persuade you otherwise." Put simply, he didn't attempt to argue the absurd.

Finally, there's the matter of Daniels' saccharine humility -- a rolled-out, formulaic humbleness that is by now diabetes-inducing. "Please stay in touch," he wrote, "if you see ways in which an obscure Midwestern governor might make a constructive contribution to the rebuilding of our economy and our Republic."

Obscure? You want obscure? From the annals of demonstrable political courage, I'll give you "obscure," Governor.

Barack Obama was essentially minutes away from having been an invisible state senator when de decided to challenge the most formidable political machine known to modern American politics: the Clinton organization. He had behind him and in his pocket a singular speech at a national convention and a few months as U.S. senator and nothing else -- nothing, that is, but guts, vision, determination, a touch of genius and an abundance of pragmatic smarts.

In short, President Obama had -- has -- what you don't, Governor Daniels, which is why he would have crushed you in 2012, which is why you chose not to run, which you were audaciously dishonest about.

Camping's raw deal

Harold Camping is getting a raw deal.

It's no more absurd for him to predict that today is the world's last than it is for John Boehner or Mitch McConnell to proclaim that in the grip of recession we should slash spending. Most earthbound economists of all ideological stripes listen to the latter and scratch their secular heads and wonder how on God's green planet these right-wing pols could be so ludicrous; but they can be, of course, because the media always find a handful of fiscally deranged ideologues with Ph.D.s in economics to present the supply-sided side of things and balance the story and thus hoodwink the public.

Yet the media don't exegetically balance and dignify Camping's conspicuous lunacy with solemn, scholarly theological treatises on eschatology, of which there are many. No, although they're no less deranged than the House Budget Committee, Camping and his acolytes are merely ridiculed and tolerated with amusement and humored light-heartedly. No one, no one in the mainstream media treats them seriously.

Why not? They're no crazier than Boehner.

The tragedy, and hope, of Jon Huntsman

"I happen to think the volunteer approach works, but I’m going to think about what you’re saying."

That was Jon Hunstman's diplomatic answer yesterday to a New Hampshirite's question about restoring the draft, and it exemplifies splendidly why I could never be president, or senator, or rep, or state rep or county clerk. To field mind-numbing question after mind-numbing question about tertiary issues while -- were I Huntsman -- my party and its base proceeded catastrophically on primary concerns would simply be too much for my customary tranquility and high gifts as a "uniter."

"Are you nuts?" would have been, along with a bemused chuckle, my comeback. It would have been out there before I knew it knew, racing across the room to the ears of my faux-profound auditor and the mics of the horrified press, before retrievability was ever an option. "At the rate our party's going, we'll be lucky if we can pay park rangers in another year, let alone a couple of million servicemen and women -- and you want to add more?"

Yet Huntsman, he of recent ambassadorial training and traditional political ooze, instead both flattered the guy's deep and searching intelligence -- "I’m going to think about what you’re saying," which of course Huntsman won't -- while artfully telling the guy he's out to lunch -- "I happen to think the volunteer approach works."

Now that's the way to do it. I wouldn't be able, but Huntsman is clearly capable of entertaining two competing, irreconcilable positions; fondling the one through superficial ingratiation while never letting loose of the other. Such is the way the swooning multitudes have been bamboozled for centuries.

But there are limits. There are irrepressible limits to this political choreography of pretend probing and pretend accommodation. And even before the official starting shot, Jon Huntsman has reached his.  

Sure, he can backtrack on, say, cap and trade out of economic worries. He can say that because the "economy collapsed, we can no longer focus on that debate [cap and trade] as aggressively as we did in years past." The economy is subject to shifting demands and rolling strategies; what's true today may not be true tomorrow, and what was true yesterday may be hogwash today. That, on the economy, anyway, Huntsman can deceptively argue with innovative plausibility.

His insurmountable hurdle, though? Human rights. Huntsman has been for them. He, as a courageous Republican, has acknowledged and championed them in the past -- and they aren't subject to shifting demands and rolling strategies.

For instance he recently told George Stephanopoulos that civil unions -- which are way out there for the GOP -- are a matter of "equality and fairness." Equality is not inherently mutable, and fairness cannot intrinsically regress. In short, there's no GOP escape route for Huntsman here; he cannot declare that sure he believed in "equality and fairness" last year, but this year requires an acceptance of inequality and injustice.

The same holds true for Stephanopoulos' question and Huntsman's answer about "children of illegal immigrants be[ing] able to pay in-state tuition." Huntsman framed his response in the humanistic box in which he's admirably trapped: "I don't believe in penalizing the younger generation coming across our borders who have no say whatsoever over their journey and destiny."

Human rights cannot be circumstantially finessed or rolled back as one's political position. Not any longer. Only the most vile Southern demagogues of, say, Alabama's George Wallace or, much earlier, Georgia's Tom Watson could at one time preach some semblance of biracial brotherhood and then turn on a viciously bigoted dime for political benefit. Today that's not possible, not only because cable and Internet coverage would expose them as frauds, but even more so because human rights are on an unyielding march forward -- thus their political subtraction is a loser, as the GOP, with excruciating resistance, is finding out.

No, Huntsman is burdened with his human decency. But he's a young man. By 2016 or 2020 perhaps his party will catch up, and then he'll become that most magical of all political labels: "a viable presidential candidate." 

Gerson: It's the Dems' fault

The Post's Michael Gerson attempts a stupendous feat of political obfuscation in attributing the debt negotiation's difficulties to

The conflict between social Democrats and pro-business Democrats.... Again and again, Democratic leaders have failed to produce budget approaches that unite 90 percent of their caucus. This is not entirely their fault. The ideological distance between social Democrats and pro-business Democrats is wider than any ideological gap on the Republican side.

What Gerson shrewdly elides is that all Democrats know that any budget deal that includes what virtually everyone outside Republicans' narrow ideological gap knows is ultimately needed -- tax increases -- would be ruthlessly demagogued. Democrats would have it strapped around their necks in the upcoming campaign in RyanCare-offsetting twists and distortions.

For honest fiscal debates in Washington have been essentially outlawed by the GOP since the tax-cutting, deficit-ballooning era of the Great Communicator, notwithstanding his own occasional violations of supply-side Scripture.

Gerson is correct in observing the two extant schools of Congressional Democratic politics: social democrats and pro-business (or neo-liberal) Democrats. But were it not for insanely devout Republicans' catechism on taxes -- which has surpassed mere econo-political belief and morphed monstrously into nothing less than a declaration of what is and what's not acceptable Americanism -- Democrats by now would have worked in passable harmony on a grand and sensible bargain.  

I can't prove that, of course, since no one can prove a negative. There's also that little problem of the agenda-driving, Radical Republican House, which renders any Democratic unity, on most any subject, politically academic. But I suppose actual proof isn't actually needed. Because on the face of it, for Gerson to attribute debt-negotiation difficulties to any significant degree to Democratic divisions rather than inviolable Republican doctrine is both intellectually offensive and laughably partisan.

Oh, those rascals

Tea Party Express is holding a "Defeat Obama RadioThon" today, and I thought you might like to know, straight from Email HQ, the partial "lineup of guests for this exciting, historic event":

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, GOP Presidential Candidate Herman Cain, Former Senator Rick Santorum [inexplicably demoted from "Presidential Candidate"], Former Congressman JD Hayworth, Conservative Activist Phyllis Schlafly, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Conservative King of New Media & Author Andrew Breitbart, Republican Presidential Candidate Gary Johnson, Right Wing News' John Hawkins, Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard and Comedian Jackie Mason.

What struck me about the list is that it bothers to identify only one as a "comedian."

So much for Huntsman

Want to know what a self-aborting GOP presidential candidacy looks like? I direct your attention to the transcript of George Stephanopoulos' interview with Jon Huntsman. It's eye-popping.

For example ...

I worked for the President of the United States. The President asked me, the President of all the people. And during a time of war, during a time of economic difficulty for our country, if I'm asked by my President to serve, I'll stand up and do it.

Bad enough, right? I mean, for that crowd? But no, we're not quite there yet. Pursued Stephanopoulos, "So you'd do it again?" And Hunstman said, he actually said, "I'd do it again. Of course."

Huntsman would, that is, willingly work for what Mitch McConnell described last night (and every one of Huntsman's competitors giddily will describe) as "a Chicago-style thuggish administration."

Let us continue. "I'm asking what you think about him now," as Stephanopoulos continued. "Do you [still] believe he's a remarkable leader...?" Huntsman's response: "History will show how effective he is."

Oh for God's sake, Jon, he's a Chicago-style thug. Keep your answers delirious, please.

Which evidently soon occurred to Mr. Huntsman. For he then careened to the right of Newt Gingrich.

"If you were in Congress, would you have voted for [Paul Ryan's remarkably idiotic budget plan]?" asked Stephanopoulos. Replied Huntsman: "I would've voted for it." Asked Stephanopoulos: "Including the Medicare provisions?" Replied Huntsman: "Including the Medicare provisions."

Well, that didn't take long. Have a nice year doing whatever it is that former China ambassadors do, Mr. Huntsman. Because you sure as hell won't be at the top or bottom of any GOP presidential ticket next year.

Through inexcusable rationality who've already alienated the GOP base, and now through a kind of unforgivable post-pandering you're horrifying the general electorate. 

She's allowed, I guess

Pardon me for asking, but isn't this ... "dithering"?

In an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren on Thursday night, the former Alaska governor said she has the inner drive to run, though she hasn’t decided whether to launch a campaign.

Palin has, of course, decided not to launch a campaign. But how she can sit and publicly advertise doubt and indecision after excoriating so many others for those transgressions is just another example of Sarah Palin's truly grotesque goofiness.

The 'Begin Times'

About that stunning event tomorrow ...

In 1992 Mr. Camping said the rapture would probably be in 1994, but he now says newer evidence makes the prophesy for this year certain.

Along similar lines, since at least the early 1990s the commentariat has regularly predicted the return of GOP sanity, but every year the 'Begin Times' get delayed.

My own prophecy holds steady for 2013. By then, I have divined, the Palin-Bachmann or Bachmann-Gingrich or Santorum-Cain presidential ticket -- or even better, with a spot of luck and Providential guidance we'll witness Donald Trump's Second Coming; his running mate, Orly Taitz -- will have, in addition to the apocalyptic imbecility of the Ryan Medicare plan, so thoroughly disgraced and so extraordinarily thinned the official ranks of the Republican Party, they'll have nowhere to go but up, from the grave.

In early 2009 I issued less a prophecy than a prayer. The GOP had been humiliated just months before; it was scattered, disoriented and in spiritual search of a new political mission. My entreaty was that it return to the kind of Eisenhower-Rockefeller Republicanism that had served it so well and had kept it afloat for so long. It was not to be.

The Boehner boneheads and Cantor cretins and McConnell mystics and assorted Gingrich gurus descended into a rolling series of resurrectional covens and -- presto -- they emerged with the insufferable gobbledygook we see and hear today. They had help, of course. The sorcerers' apprentices of the tea partying crowd convinced their masters that their nihilistic "vision" of a Phoenix-like America would work wonders with the electorate: the masters converted, to their eventual regret.

But that gets ahead of the contemporaneous story (prayer); the point being, in 2009 the GOP had a real, organic shot at remaking itself through genuinely conservative appeals of lasting merit.

Back to the present. The party has opted for radical bedazzlement and short-term gratification. And now, to no one's surprise, it's doomed. Oh, the party may yet wreak a living hell on the rest of us by compelling, say, a financial default -- something of a swan song of catastrophically chaotic futility -- but it's vividly bloody obvious that in its current incarnation, the GOP is slated for permanent retirement.

Much of that will come involuntarily in 2012. Then, in 2013, the party should possess just enough of one last chance that it can jettison its fiscal morons and tea-partying revolutionaries and return ... to Earth.

That, anyway, is my Camping-variation prophecy. The 'Begin Times' are scheduled for late 2012, early 2013 -- I'm a trifle fuzzy on the precise date, but the severity of November 2012's Armageddon will narrow that down for us. Nevertheless, love offerings are now accepted.

The 'unthinkable' II

Ezra Klein previews the Hope-Crosby 'Road to Banana Republic':

This country has a proud and bipartisan tradition of risk aversion when it comes to the country’s credit rating. Democratic administrations don’t default on our debt. Republican administrations don’t default on our debt. We don’t default on our debt. We don’t default strategically, as a way of detonating a fiscal bomb in the hope that the ensuing chaos will create an opening for policy measures that wouldn’t pass in normal times, and we don’t default temporarily, for a day or two or three or four. We simply don’t default.... But it’s a position the Republican Party is coming dangerously close to abandoning.

And that’s what will scare the markets. The real danger of the debt ceiling is not that a temporary default will make our bondholders poor. It’s that by doing something that the American political system has previously regarded as unthinkable, the market will cease to believe the stories it tells itself about the safety, security and predictability of the American political system.

In brief, there is no such thing as a short-term default crisis. Any default, by definition, would cripple international confidence in the American political system, hence American stability, hence American finance.

What we can't know beyond any doubt is whether most of the GOP's Paul Ryans -- the singular version of which, notes Klein, recently "assured CNBC that the market would accept a default 'for a day or two or three or four' " -- are merely absolute dunderheads who fathom not in the least the devastating harm they portend, or are wickedly ingenious strategists who believe not a word of their own propaganda, but revel in its long-term, crippling consequences to America's social safety nets.

What we do know is, we don't want to find out.

'Pragmatic persistence'

I find only one morsel in Andrew Sullivan's live-blogging of Obama's speech, well, untasty:

It is this pragmatic persistence that is the hallmark of a president who was once an inspirational candidate. And such persistence requires a long view and two terms. But given the alternative - a US foreign policy devoted to exacerbating the religious divide globally, enabling Israel's suicide, making no distinctions within the Islamic world - we already know it must be our primary hope.

No, not the italicized words, which are part of the orginal, but the sentence's ending: "once an inspirational candidate."

To me, Obama's persistent pragmatism has always been the inspiration. While others have swooned and gurgled over his blockbuster speeches, I have nodded off. Rip-roaring rodomontades and loud pronunciamentoes have never been my dish; I prefer the steady, borderline silence of presidential competence, which Obama demonstrates every commonplace day.

Under Obama, shit ... gets ... done -- as opposed, say, to the shitty flamboyance of an abjectly incompetent Bush administration.

One marvels at the near-utopian circumstances of one pragmatic Obama times 535, presently among the latter of whom there are many an inspirational pol, without an ounce of pragmatic sense. Which has got us where we are.

Deceptive gibberish

I don't know the man personally so the options I present are, while speculative, incontestably limited: Tom Coburn is either the most ignorant demagogue in the U.S. Senate or he's the Senate's most demagoguing ignoramus (allowing abundant room, of course, for his Oklahoma colleague, James Inhofe). 

I need not provide proof of this assertion, since Sen. Coburn thoughtfully provided it himself, in yesterday's Washington Post. Egads. I tremble to think that it's not a mere possibility but jawdropping reality that such thundering hysteria, born of feeble-mindedness -- or, as alternatively conjectured, feeble-mindedness born of hysteria -- manifests itself in "esteemed," senatorial form.

His screed opens in notorious darkness:     

Our country is facing the greatest threat to our freedom and future since 1941. Any honest view of our debt, deficits, size of government and demographic challenges shows we must make major changes if we are going to pass on the American way of life to our children.

It closes in imposing doom:

History has not been kind to republics that pretend they can borrow and spend beyond their means indefinitely. We can cheat history, but only if we act quickly.

Everything between is deceptive gibberish, which is the only logical consistency in Coburn's entire op-ed.

Simply put, there would be no "debt crisis" if Tom Coburn & Co. weren't insisting on staging one. Our country faces many challenges, some of which do in fact threaten our freedom and future: appalling wealth inequality, a political system awash in corporate bribery, electoral obliviousness, educational debilities in an increasingly educated world, graveyard-whistling energy dependence -- reasonable people can lengthen the list reasonably. But no person of reason would itemize "our debt, deficits, size of government and demographic challenges" as an existential threat, let alone as our "greatest threat" -- unless of course that person is speaking not of the threat itself, but of the sociopathic threateners, a.k.a. Tom Coburn & Co.

True, the GOP since the Reagan era has stealthily heaped this nation in debt so as to forever bury the modern welfare state; not just the Gingrich parody of food-stamped Cadillac welfarism, but the people's general welfare obtainable only -- as history has conclusively shown -- through genuine equal opportunity and collective safety nets, themselves obtainable largely through the impartiality of positive government. To be sure, there is a delicate balance to be found between civilized help and centralized control, but contemporary conservatism is no longer interested in finding that balance. Today's conservatism is instead profoundly, radically authoritarian in both ideology and execution; thus this pseudoconservatism seeks to destroy, not build on or sustain, entire foundations of the general welfare state.

What better, more efficient way than a manufactured "debt crisis" which thrusts at us all "the greatest threat to our freedom and future"? Delicate balances be damned. Just blow it up. Blow it all up. Vaporize the village to save it -- and portray patriotic motivation, certainly not ideological malice, as one's arsenal.

But for the GOP's creation, there is no debt crisis. Economic growth, increased taxes and prudent spending cuts will (could) all conspire in time to tame the debt. Taming the debt, however, is not the GOP's goal. Blowing up the welfare state is.

No longer 'unthinkable'

EJ Dionne has more confidence in the Beverly Hillbillies-Corleone Party than I:

Republicans holding the debt-ceiling increase hostage to their efforts to eviscerate programs know perfectly well that Congress will not risk a financial crisis.

Dionne retains the "That's unthinkable" position since refusing to raise the debt ceiling is -- to anyone familiar with the economic laws of cause and effect -- unthinkable. Dionne believes that eleventh-hour swerving is still everyone's tactic of choice in potentially fire-balling games of chicken. And Dionne knows that no national politician is so disagreeably reckless as to temper-tantrum us right over the cliff and into the Great Depression II.

All these beliefs reflect a sustained faith in the fundamental decency of the GOP. It may be that Dionne's confidence is justified, that "risk[ing] a financial crisis" is only a spike in Republicans' political amusement and base-pandering, that the party's lunatics are yet in total control of their asylum. Doubtless, that's the historical view: the present deadlock is just the latest in a long, political litany of brinkmanship, virtually always predictable in its whimpering demise (excluding that little dustup in 1860-61).

Doubtless as well is that the amassing doubters of this long and once reasonable view hope that Dionne is correct. But I'm sorry, EJ -- my faith has checked out. The "unthinkable" has become the GOP's standard negotiating position, and one of these days whatever nuclear option they're pushing is going to go boom. We're no longer contemplating mere political laws of compromise and obstinance; instead, our immutable threat is the mathematical law of averages.

Two days ago there appeared a piece in Politico, by Carrie Budoff Brown, that read more like a Gothic horror story than political journalism:

[T]he negotiating position of a growing number of Republicans appears to be this: If they need to hold out for a better deficit-cutting deal and blow the August deadline, so be it.

[S]aid Arizona Rep. David Schweikert: "It’s absolutely silly. We have plenty of cash flow to pay debt, which means I’m trying to figure out how credibly the administration can keep using that language."

Sen. Pat Toomey: "[I]t’s not a financial crisis. It’s not a default on our debt. It’s not a catastrophe. It’s a disruption."

Today, Politico's Jonathan Allen and Jake Sherman add to the horror:

What is increasingly clear — even to leading Republican lawmakers — is that Republicans are further than ever from approving a debt-limit increase.

[T]here are indications that rank-and-file Republicans are rejecting warnings from the administration, many economists and even some GOP leaders that default would result in an abrupt international economic collapse.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.): "By defaulting on the debt, in the short and long term, it could benefit us to go through a period of crisis that forces politicians to make decisions."

Unthinkable. All of it, unthinkable -- to the stubbornly reasonable -- yet each passing day only swells the hayseed-gangster head of the modern GOP. It may be that the last thing they want is to avert a crisis of Great Depression II proportions. Indeed, it may be that a government-gutting economic depression is the singular object of their debt-ceiling exercise, a gutting which they of course can never achieve through earnest negotiations.

A Ribbiting Dick

I confess again a fascination with Dick Morris, only in part because he looks and sounds like an adenoidal bullfrog with an East-coast accent. The other part is because he thinks every bit as brilliantly as one.

Dick's latest: "[T]he country would accept [a government shutdown] for a short period of time in a battle to cut government spending." Dick knows this. How? I haven't a clue, and neither does Dick. Nonetheless, he feels confident in his confidence.

It gets better.

Socialist Obama's Treasury Department, in sinister cahoots, you see, with I guess leftist banks and radical "global financial institutions," have been engaged in a "media war" (dog-whistle time: think "liberal" media) over the debt-ceiling crisis, so of course Treasury "has and will succeed in spreading the impression — however false — that Republican obstinacy is imperiling the nation’s credit." In one sense, Dick is correct here. For as we all know, it was Republican profligacy that has imperiled the nation's credit; their obstinacy that threatens to topple the nation's struggling recovery is merely the icing on their contemptible ways.

But let us not quibble. Dick, like Newt, is a Big Idea Man, and his latest in Big Ideas, disseminated inexplicably by The Hill, he thus repeats: "If Republicans trigger a government shutdown — even if it involves a temporary halt to Social Security payments and troop salaries — Americans will accept it."

And Dick wants you to know that. That you'll accept it, that is.

Ribbit.

 

Emergency correction

Earlier today I wrote:

Jon Huntsman has potential, but so far, unlike Pawlenty, he's shown a resistance to degrading his former respectable self.

Check that. From Politico, just minutes ago:

Jon Huntsman will meet with former New Hampshire Senate candidate Ovide Lamontagne this weekend, a sign the former ambassador will try to court the state's conservative grassroots and tea party voters.

The Bennett-Gingrich Morality Hour

Conservative bloviater Bill Bennett, that avatar of self-righteous falderal such as The Book of Virtues and The Moral Compass, delivered this (the audio segment is linked) characteristically fraudulent advice to Newt Gingrich on his radio talk show yesterday:

My advice to you to salvage your candidacy is to say, "I blew it. People misunderstood me because I misspoke. I said the wrong words and I’m sorry" ... I think that’s your only shot or I think you are done, Newt. I honestly do. You have got to deal with this because it’s not working. What you are doing is not working.

Mr. Bennett, you noticed, along with a few million others, that Gingrich did not "misspeak." He used precise, intentional language. But, according to your "virtues" and "morality," Bill, it's advisable for Gingrich to just invent any horseshit -- whenever the first horseshit is "not working."

By the way, Gingrich's reply to Bennett? "I think that's honest advice."

Yet the segment lacked. What Bennett needed -- just to further clarify his old-fashioned, conservative versions of morality and virtue -- was a personal visit from John Ensign, or perhaps David Vitter, or maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger (...) to expatiate on marital fidelity and family values. Newt was too tied up with other urgent matters to re-enlighten us on such issues -- and without contemporary conservatism's constant guidance on all things virtuous, I just don't know what this country would do.

An exhausted demagogue

I, for one, would hate to see Newt Gingrich withdraw from the presidential scramble so early. There's still so much damage left to do -- notwithstanding the titantic self-destruction his party has already wrought -- and Newt was, I thought, the man to do an outsized share of it. Circus clown Trump is gone, revivalist Huckabee is out, Palin is confined to her panic room, and virtually everyone else on the mere edge of temptation, such as Mitch Daniels, is too smart to engage what promises to be an apocalyptic election year for the GOP.

I persist in the decidedly minority opinion that the eventual loser to Barack Obama will be Tim Pawlenty, assuming Pawlenty doesn't doze off or put the Republican base to sleep before the nominating convention. I've been saying this since at least August, 2009, and I've yet to see any formidably countervailing forces arise. Jon Huntsman has potential, but so far, unlike Pawlenty, he's shown a resistance to degrading his former respectable self; which leaves Mitt Romney, who, despite $10 million days, has a functioning ticker called RomneyCare in the bomb-case of his campaign.

So, except for the occasionally molested history lesson from Michele Bachmann, the GOP's field of exotic entertainment is rapidly, even prematurely, diminishing.

We deserve better than this. The party brims with whackjobs, ideologues and imbeciles, and we have a right to their maximum exposure. So Newt, don't go. Not yet.

That prospect, though, ain't lookin' good. 

True to GOP form, when Newt is muscled out it will chiefly be a consequence of his having got something right: that the Ryan Medicare plan was an epically idiotic gambit. Virtually every House Republican now perceives that monstrous reality, but they're stuck with its epic idiocy through 2012. Sure, if polls darken much more they can unpass the plan, so to speak, but they cannot ever unring the bell. Their best defense is, for a change, simply a good defense. Close formation and tight ranks might at least keep much of the the base content; hence, as Politico reports, "not a single prominent Republican has rallied to Gingrich’s defense." He is persona non grata by necessity.

Newt's best defense, however, was an offensive charge against his fair-weather friends. As uniquely bizarre as Newt Gingrich is, when it came to capturing, say, the critically important social conservative vote, Newt was just one more hypocrite among the pack. He needed to position himself somehow, to market himself differently -- and blasting his own party on Ryan-unCare could have represented a brilliant, Inchon maneuver.

It would not have saved him -- there was never a chance he'd be the party's nominee -- but it could have made for lots of political fireworks and kept Newt above the fold for weeks and months to come. Which is what, or so I thought, Newt loves most.

And that is why I was so distressed to read this:

The candidate himself sounded a defiant note on Fox Tuesday night, largely blaming the media for his woes and vowing not to participate in any more "gotcha games."

"If it doesn’t relate to solving our problems, from now on my answer’s going to be, 'I’m not commenting on it,' " Gingrich said. "I’m not playing Trivial Pursuit."

That, I am almost inexpressibly sorry to observe, is but a Palinite maneuver of defeat, surrender, effective withdrawal. It screams "weariness" in the opening game, it advertises just a tired old man, it manifests an unwillingness or inability to fight back with yet more self-destructive verve. It shrieks, "For me, it's all over."

And all so soon. Far too soon.

Paul Ryan? A 'wonky guy'?

Earlier today I heard an MSNBC correspondent describe Paul Ryan as a "wonky guy." The occasion for this media resume-inflation was Ryan's abjuring of a Senate run -- the implication being that he's actually much happier dipping into the House's murky policy bowels rather than replacing his lowly status of "Rep." with the more distinguished title of "Sen." 

Nonsense. Ryan is an ideologue -- the furthest thing from a genuine wonk. He knows advisable policy before ever applying one shred of phony research -- cooked up by some Norquistian imbecile at the Heritage Foundation -- to his preconceived ideas. His budget proposal, as just one horrifying example, was a symphony to plutocracy and an insult to human decency. But by God it expunged at least one socialist evil. And that's all Ryan cared about.

He could have saved reams of government paper -- not to mention his own party -- had he merely been in mental custody of what the NY Times' eloquent Timothy Egan wrote today:

There is a very simple way to make Medicare whole through the end of this century, far less complicated, and more of a bargain in the long run than the bizarre Ryan plan. Raise taxes.

Well, that's what a "wonky guy" would conclude. A right-wing ideologue, though, would travel to hell and back to see that such immensely reasonable advice is never entertained.

Oh, one other thing. Perhaps Ryan declined the Senate race simply because he's about as popular as the price of gas?

Going viral

There's news that former W. apparatchik Tommy Thompson is pondering a U.S. Senate run, which, as Politico puts it, "would give Republicans a popular former two-term governor to seriously challenge for this toss-up seat."

In Wisconsin. A Republican. A "serious challenge."

It is beyond my comprehension that the elevation of any Republican for any Wisconsin office above notary public could, after Scott Walker & Co., loom as a realistic possibility. Yet it does. And it shall remain, whether the threat comes from Tommy Thompson or Paul Ryan or any other contemporary manifestation of Stone Age Republicanism.

Then, once the GOP's candidate is successful, once he's in office, once he schemingly and inevitably votes in cahoots with his fellow Pretenders against the known wishes of working Americans, the voters will scream: We didn't know! He never campaigned on that! We've been betrayed!

Bluntly, it has come to this: The modern GOP is like a burrowing infectious agent against which the body politic, in 2012, must complete its full dosage of powerful antibiotics. It's that, or the GOP will come roaring back in even more virulent form, much as it did in 2010, after its humiliation of 2008.

Next time, the party must be greeted at the polls with something more than mere humiliation. It must be crushed to near extinction. Only then will its vestigial handful of wise men say: No more, it's time we re-start by going back to good-government basics. You tea partiers? Good riddance. Have fun with your third, useless party.

Said crushing, though, must be unmistakable.

Misreading Trump

It was with Kierkegaardian fear and trembling that I peeked at Chris Cillizza's piece, "What Trump can teach the GOP field." It is here, in "The Fix," where Beltway banality is so often born -- the spawn of Washington's insider trading and warmed-over conventional wisdom -- and I quaked at another delivery so soon, right on the heels, that is, of The Huck's.

Instantly I was staring into the black, come-hither eyes of the Prince of Banality himself: Cillizza informed me that although Trump's media playtime was but a footnote in politics, "that doesn’t mean the Trump saga — and, it was a saga — is without lessons to be learned by the Republican candidates who will run for president in 2012."

So what, Chris, was "The most important lesson?" Was it, perhaps, that racism still tragically works in American politics? That anti-intellectualism persists as a real keeper? That it's now impossible to distinguish betwixt "carnival barkers" and right-wing politicians? That the right wing itself has flown from all semblance of rationality and seriousness?

Alas, no. For from the miasmic muck arose this, Cillizza's Answer to Cillizza's Question: "Confrontation is good. Confrontation works."

Ah, I sense you're underwhelmed. Appallingly so. But hey, at least my piece came with an up-front disclosure.

At any rate, by and by we learn from Cillizza that by "confrontation" he intended a somewhat unshockingly unrevolutionary theory of political campaigning, for which Cillizza conscripted political veterans to endorse.

Such as Rob Stutzman, GOP strategist: "[Trump] had the appeal of a candidate who would brawl with Obama on behalf of the rank and file and create contrast" (whoa, now there's an understatement). Added Stutzman, "The birther issue was stupid and contrived but it should demonstrate to legitimate candidates that you can stand out by being the candidate who engages Obama on substance like taxes, homeland security and spending."

All of which Cillizza promptly re-disfigured through boneheaded synthesis: "Put another way: Trump’s willingness to fight mattered more than the substance of what triggered the fight."

Precisely, absolutely, altogether and extraordinarily wrong.

From the beginning, Trump appreciated that he could appeal to the right-wing base only by exploiting their diseased willingness to believe anything wickedly mysterious about Barack Obama. It wasn't Trump's mere "willingness to fight" that stimulated them to ecstatic heights of drooling hysteria; it was the substance of idiotic non-substance that the reactionary army of whackodom was able to comprehend, and so exuberantly sign on to.

Aggressive accusations about Obama's "China policy" or superfluous drivel on taxes? Come on. What the far right wanted, what it needed, and what it got from Trump was a boatload of stupidity. And they ate it up. Because ...

My Huckabee story

Regarding Mike Huckabee's political conversation with God ...

My wife and I once had a daycare lady watch our daughter. She was a very "Christian woman," something she made no secret of, which I confess troubled me mildly. We paid her the $100 deposit she required. She performed her duties for a few weeks, ultimately to our dissatisfaction (tale of our daughter's split lip, while in the lady's care, omitted here). We changed daycare centers. We met all the contractual requirements for the return of our $100 deposit. I asked for the money and, rather bizarrely, she answered that she had spoken with God and He agreed she should return it. That's nice, I said. Days passed, no check. I called again. Seems God had changed His mind. Yes, she had spoken with God again and He no longer felt the return of our $100 was the right thing to do.

Fuck it, we finally said, after trying to negotiate rationally with a savage Christian in possession of God's "full blessing."

And that's my Mike Huckabee story.

Leftist radical

"The full consequences of a default — or even the serious prospect of default — by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The Nation can ill afford to allow such a result." --President Ronald Reagan's writing, 1983, my emphasis

Newt's Big Obvious Idea

The right has been horror-struck -- as just one example, I caught the first 5 minutes of Rush's show today; the poor man was apoplectic -- over Newt Gingrich's apostasy yesterday, on "Meet the Press," regarding Paul Ryan's Medicare plan:

I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.

What the right seems v-e-r-y slow to comprehend is that Newt not only lacks in the Big Ideas department, he's utterly bankrupt when it comes to ideals or principles or loyalty or honor or virtually any positive human attribute. The man can read polls, though, and because of this scarcely unique talent he knows that Ryan's plan will only submerge the GOP vote in 2012 another 10 points from the losing deficit it already owns.

The other presidential candidates had already distanced themselves from the House proposal in so many words; Newt simply decided to use precise ones. It was a smart positioning move, for the general election, which Newt knows he'll never see anyway -- but what the hell, he's on nearly as much of a lark as Trump was.

No kidding?

For reasons unknown, this made the NY Times, today, at 1:19 p.m.:

Mr. Trump, the real estate mogul and reality television host, is not going to run for president.

Hasn't that been understood all along?

Now if only Trump would announce: Gotcha -- can't believe I got so many right-wing whackos to catch my act.