p m carpenter's commentary

The "debate," in 10 seconds flat

My hat is off to the Post's Chris Cillizza, Fox's viewer of last night's Republican presidential debate. Yes, Chris stuck it out, the courageous fellow, and here's the totality what he learned after 90 grueling minutes:

Tim Pawlenty is "aggressive," mawkish, and a piss-poor comedian. Rick Santorum is formulaic to the point of being canned. Ron Paul is formulaic to the point of being ... Ron Paul. Herman Cain has a good memory, and he's glib. Gary Johnson is Calvin Coolidge's understudy.

There. Now you can tell your friends at that cocktail party tonight that you watched the debate out of a sense of civic responsibility, and sound like an authority on it.

Integrity

From The Hill:

The economy added 268,000 private-sector jobs in March, giving an unexpected boost to a White House already enjoying a good week ... The gains were much greater than the 180,000 expected by analysts ... Stocks surged on the news that the private sector had gained the most jobs in a month in five years.

From Mitt Romney:

Today's disheartening unemployment increase is another reminder of the failure of President Obama's economic policies. The cost of the President's inexperience and failed liberal policies is borne by families across the country.

Integrity, always integrity.

Republican virtues in a democratic age

There's something almost bittersweet in David Brooks' reflections this morning on small-"r" republicanism:

The breakthrough [on a budget agreement], if there is one, will come from the least directly democratic parts of the government, from the Senate or some commission of Establishment bigwigs. It will be enacted when voters realize we need to build arrangements to protect ourselves from our own weaknesses. It will all depend on reviving the republican virtues upon which the country was founded.

One reads such phrases -- "republican virtues" -- mostly in unread history texts these days, since the good-citizenship concept of republican virtue was long ago eclipsed by the presumed superiority of Jacksonian democracy; the latter of which Brooks, as a Burkean conservative, is of course distrustful.

But that's OK. I'm sympathetic to Brooks' lament -- in one of those full-circle ways. I too am distrustful of Jacksonian democracy and tend to look toward "the least democratic parts of the government" for long-term national salvation, though not from a conservative point of view. Mine, rather, is from another and now dated concept, nearly as dated as Burkean conservatism: that of a Fabian-socialistic thrust.

I suspect I repeatedly find myself endorsing Barack Obama's executive approach because I also suspect that in his political heart of hearts, he, too, sympathizes with Fabianism's essence: that of an intellectual elite steeped in republican virtue, working in undemocratic concert for the nation's common good, and launching in each policy case from a rather coldly technocratic and exquisitely pragmatic point.

Philosophically speaking to the end points, this brand of what you might call intellectually aristocratic socialism is light years away from Burkean conservatism: the first shoots for a kind of functional, material egalitarianism, while the other assumes a certain and natural rigidity of class. Yet their working methodologies are essentially the same: they both distrust ... well, let's be blunt ... the uninformed rabble; both elevate to near deification the governing value of an educated elite; and both, reflecting perhaps their greatest similarity, comprehend the strong advisability of gradual, incremental change over sudden bursts of the earthshaking.

If I'm correct in my suspicion that President Obama does indeed sympathize with my and Brooks' preference for political elitism, if goes without saying that he couldn't be waterboarded into confessing it publicly. For we operate in a Jacksonian democracy, where Every Man and Woman is Unenlightened King and Queen, of the Huey Long sort -- hence we must suffer from popular and thus governing ignorance such as, cutting the deficit in a recession is a bright idea.

At any rate, it's good see phrases like "republican virtues" in popular print, notwithstanding the distance we've traveled from them.

Those madcap Republicans

From The Hill, April 30: "House Republicans have stayed united behind a budget proposal imposing major changes to Medicare after a two-week recess highlighted by attacks on the plan."

From the Post, yesterday: "Heading into key debt talks with the White House, congressional Republicans publicly split Thursday over the prospects for their ambitious proposal to transform Medicare."

While Medicare's original assassin, Paul Ryan, was conceding that his party is "under no illusion" that they just committed anything but the most asinine, suicidal political stunt in this nation's history, and would now work overtime to act as though it never happened, the quivering upper lip of John Boehner was insisting that "nothing is off the table except for raising taxes."

So here's the deal. Until Election Day, Democrats' position on the Republicans' position will be that of the Republican speaker's, while Republicans' position will be that not of the Republican speaker but of a disgraced wonk and apostate committee chairman.

An evening of thrills

If you missed Fox News' Republican presidential debate last night -- geez, now there's a clause that screams for air quotes -- don't bother asking the nation's most powerful Republican how it went, because "as the debate began," according to the NY Times, "the House speaker, John A. Boehner, took a seat at a steakhouse in Washington."

In another official endorsement of apathy, Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee's chairman, said of the sparse and unknown participants, and I kid you not: "As we all know, there are numerous other candidates that are looking at it — and thank God."

Go ahead, look it up, that's what he said.

Then, just to sanction our apathy, the Times reported post-debate what we all expected pre-debate: "For much of the time, the evening unfolded like a typical night of political programming on the Fox News Channel."

Politico provided even more in-depth reporting on this enlightening evening of vigorous Socratic dialogue: "The GOP hopefuls who were on stage for the 90-minute debate barely engaged with each other."

Zzzzzz.

It gets old

David Weigel notes the latest term for the newest madness -- Proofers -- and adds that the "discussion is a real signal of how much conspiracy thinking has permeated the culture."

Anecdotal evidence of the madness: Weigel writes that while "Walking around Greenville [SC] this morning, I did not find anyone who wanted the photo released because they doubted OBL's death." One gentleman told him, "That's the last thing I want. I mean, think about those pictures you've seen of soldiers' bodies dragged behind a helicopter. When I see that, I want to get out there and fight somebody, and I'm not even a fighter. It's not like they're ever going to approve of us, but to show those pictures, that'd be the worst thing you can do." Yet the same gentleman had spent the previous evening surfing the Internet for 9/11 videos. "I saw ones with firefighters saying there was a bomb in the second [World Trade Center] tower," he told Weigel. "You can hear the explosions going off."

Weigel concludes, "He didn't buy into this, but there was video of it; it was compelling. And photos of bin Laden, surely, could become the grist for brand new conspiracy theories. There's really no way out of this."

By "this," I assume Weigel means both the Proofer silliness specifically and the cultural madness in general. And it's the latter whose cumulative effect has, for so many, grown so bloody wearisome.

To a sizable minority of madmen, nothing and nobody are what they seem: the president isn't really the president, a birth certificate isn't really a birth certificate, a terrorist attack wasn't really a foreign terrorist attack, the irrefutable killing of the #1 terrorist is actually a political swindle, the absence of an Easter commemoration is a sign of Muslims having taken the White House, rather modest healthcare reform is a sign of a socialist takeover ... you can fill in the rest, or not, since it's ad infinitum.

There is, to be sure, nothing new about political paranoia and downright goofy suspicions of encroaching, conspiratorial monsters. From fears of the Illuminati and popism to fears of Masons and domestic communists, we've never lacked for utterly unfounded worries. Still, we've also never had them force-fed to us, 24/7. It gets old.

When, for instance, was the last time you read a straight, mainstream news piece about the deficit; one that analyzed only the merits of cutting the deficit now or leaving it till later -- one, that is, that didn't soon trail off into the screwball, tea-partying politics of macroeconomic ignorance and its paranoid fears of Obama's stealth-socialist designs?

Most likely you haven't read such a piece, not lately anyway, thus the screwball has become mainstream. And it gets old.

To save the system: Sarah Palin (or some such creature)

Way back in January of this year, I marveled at the coy overconfidence of SarahPAC Treasurer Tim Crawford, who offered up to Politico this rhythmic response to reports that Sarah Palin's tentacles were wrapping their way around several influential Iowans:

"Have there been informal conversations between supporters on the ground in Iowa and with the PAC? Of course there have.

"Do we have supporters all across the nation? Yes.

"Do we have supporters in Iowa? Yes.

"Do those supporters want Sarah Palin to run for higher office? Yes, of course they do."

But oh how the unmighty have flatlined. She's now reduced to merely tweeting about world events: "Show photo as warning to others seeking America's destruction. No pussy-footing around, no politicking, no drama; it's part of the mission."

This fall from buffoonery's grace is, I write in all seriousness, a tragic episode in this nation's two-party course of events.

There thrives in the GOP a certain recycling of the lunatic elite -- if not Palin, then Santorum or Trump or Bachmann or Gingrich or ... -- which has accelerated and exacerbated in recent years, and which, further, will come to a full and decisive stop only upon a wholesale meltdown: that is, the nomination of a Palin for president, or a Trump for president ... you get my drift. And at this point it's evident that the singular withdrawal or diminution of a Palin, etc., from national GOP notoriety means nothing; there's always another unschooled guttersnipe ready and willing to take his or her infamous place -- simply because the equally guttersniping base is so ready and willing to embrace him or her.

The danger now, so to speak, in 2012, is the same as it was in 2008, only more intense. And that danger is that the party will nominate a reasonable, McCainlike presidential candidate such as Tim Pawlenty or Mitt Romney, and not a certified, lunatic guttersnipe such as Sarah Palin. The compromise candidate will then go down in competitive flames, yet competitive nonetheless -- the lesson of which will, characteristically, be misconstrued by the GOP base: If only we had nominated a real conservative. You know, an abject crackpot.

It would seem that what the GOP needs most -- and thus the health of the two-party system -- is a near-lethal dose of its own medicine. Allow the GOP base precisely what it wants, let it heap more lunacy on lunacies, let it choke down a 50-0 state loss, let it approach its nihilistic deathwish, let it glory momentarily in an ideological mushroom cloud before concluding that a return to Reason and its ejection of lunatics just might work a trifle better.

A Romney, Pawlenty, Daniels or Huntsman nomination will only postpone the inevitable and necessary. What the GOP needs, what will reboot the integrity of the two-party system, what will reclarify voters' fundamental choice between genuine conservatism and genuine liberalism, is nothing less than a thunderingly cathartic, pseudoconservative blowout: a Palin-or-some-such presidential nomination.

Photographic uselessness

Although Eugene Robinson concedes that his secondary argument for releasing the bin Laden photos is the exponentially weaker one, he also commits a rookie mistake in its defense: "photographic evidence would silence most, but not all, of the conspiracy theorists."

The only truth of all conspiracy theories is that any contrary evidence proffered -- photographic, documentary, eyewitness, circumstantial, logical -- is not only insufficient in disproving the conspiracy, it's actually greater proof of the conspiracy itself and further confirmation of the sinister cover-up. Conspiracy theories are like the Borg: they assimilate every assault and grow stronger with every blow; the more one untangles, the more there is to obfuscate and retangle.

As just one recent but glaring example, this subliterate email, from TeaParty.org, arrived in my plucky inbox yesterday:

It is becoming apparent the Birth Certificate which Mr. Obama presented to the public as a "true and accurate copy of the original" is neither. As a matter of fact, many are claiming it is a fraud! Forensic specialists have examined the publicly displayed Obama Birth Certificate and are claiming it is a poorly created dummy document, a fake!

It goes on. Oh, does it ever go on. Hawaii's governor, Neil Abercrombie, is of course now implicated, but that ain't the half of it.  

The document in question could possibly represent hundreds, or even thousands, of fraudulent birth certificates used to commit a plethora of crimes. Crimes such as credit fraud, passport fraud and possibly has created a hidden pathway, which illegal aliens have trod for years, as they nefariously enter into the United States and pose as citizens.

Nuts, you say? Well of course it is. Yet the Birther lunacy is no nuttier than the imbecilic notion held by hordes of unhinged Truthers that Dick and George wired and detonated the Twin Towers, or any laughably lunatic variation thereof. Have both theoretical schools of "thought" been dismantled decisively and conclusively? Yep. Has that "silenced" them, as Robinson predicts photographs would the bin Laden conspiracists?

Robinson's principal argument for the photos' release, however -- and by the way, I don't mean to pick on Eugene; it's just that he neatly compresses the prosecution's case for release -- is just as weak: "The reason to display the photos is to show bin Laden for what he really was: not a holy warrior, not a holy anything, but a deluded mass murderer who met the end he so richly deserved." This pictorial end, argues Robinson, "would have disillusioned and deflated ... some jihadists and wannabes."

This reasoning I find even more mystifying than the belief that conspiracy theorists can, in part or in whole, ever be satisfied. If the photographic evidence of the insanely vast destruction of innocent human life wrought by bin Laden 10 years ago failed to disillusion "jihadists and wannabes" as to the perpetrator's "holiness," then I doubt that a glossy, 8X10 postmortem epitaph signed by President Obama would.

A Costanza moment

In an interview with Martin Bashir, Douglas Feith, George W. Bush's undersecretary of colossal befuddlement, just erased any doubts that anyone might have possessed about the wisdom of secreting the bloody photo: He was for releasing it.

The anti-war 'wing'

I suppose there's some depth in this gross generalization within news analysis by Sam Youngman, The Hill's White House correspondent, but if so, the generalization does double duty in expressing modern progressivism's simplistically shallow view of the world as well; views which are, unfortunately, every bit as simplistic as those scoffed at on the right:  

The anti-war group MoveOn.org no longer strikes fear in the hearts of would-be Democratic candidates who claim national security as a strength, and the anti-war wing of the party has turned on a president it once viewed as an ally.

It is the independent clause that concerns especially. Virtually everyone to the left of Newt Gingrich is "anti-war," yet a small wing of -- let's face it -- small progressivism fancies itself more virtuous than others in its love of peace and opposition to slaughter; further, it is counterproductively loud; and what's more, it is profoundly confused, since this president in 2008 campaigned with unmistakable clarity on the need to intensify the struggle for an independent, if not friendly, Afghanistan. 

I can't say that I endorse the president's Afghanistan policy, although like Donald Trump's breathtaking decision to fire Gary Busey, I doubt my reservations keep Obama up at night. Yet I was certainly aware of his intentions during the campaign, and I've tolerated his announced persistence ever since.

In other words, there is nothing there to "turn on." Obama, being Obama, is merely and methodically going about this business as best he believes he should. And since he's demonstrated no incompetence whatsoever throughout the process (unlike you-know-who), I'm content to tolerate a policy with which I disagree a bit longer. Put in yet another and perhaps unfashionably old-fashioned way, I believe he's earned our trust.

For progressivism's "anti-war wing" to now distrust Obama is, to me, as much of a Betraeus to genuine presidential leadership as American Firsters were to Roosevelt, who also understood that in a complex world, peace isn't always an option.

Man-on-fog genius

Forget methamphetamine and all manner of white bliss. For a truly mind-altering experience, try Rick Santorum.

In Iowa, on Monday -- just hours after President Obama's Bush-postponed killing of the globe's #1 terrorist -- Santorum hallucinated before a reality-deprived crowd that Obama had made America "less safe." He added that America's foes, having pondered the present administration's weakness, are now "less fearful and less respectful of us."

Later, on Tuesday, the former United States senator(!) told Politico that, sure, Obama "made a good call on a military mission." Yet, but, however, nonetheless, "Going after Osama bin Laden is something that has been the policy of America for 10 years."

In brief -- snort, sniff -- it doesn't count.

Brushing a few fugitive snowflakes from his lapel, Santorum then observed through igneous eyes: "[Obama's] two great foreign policy successes have been this tactical decision on a policy of the previous administration which he continued, and his decision to continue the policies of the last administration with respect to Iraq. His other strategic decisions have been, in a word, horrible."

Rick, let me put it this way, as gently as I can. You know your presidential prospects are rather dim when all the opposition need do is to quote you.

The nuance of dumb

So Mitt Romney doesn't do nuance. Well, that's a pity.

More pitiful, though, is that some progressives don't either.

To explain, I sat in what you might call amused horror yesterday afternoon, exercising my human toleration of MSNBC's Cenk Uygur, which I can now sustain for up to three full minutes. Pretty impressive, really, considering that, initially, I was a 98-second weakling. No longer. No, now I laugh when he kicks his sands of progressive fatuity in my face; I've learned there's an "off" button on my remote, and just knowing that has vastly improved my endurance.

But back to the horror angle, amusing as it was. And it was this: Cenk's guest was Slate's law correspondent, Dahlia Lithwick, and together they were mapping out anti-terrorism strategy for President Obama, who by now, as we all know, has demonstrated vividly that he understands nothing about battling terrorists. And any rate, somehow, somewhere in the warrooms of their overactivist progressive minds, Cenk and Dahlia concluded that, at the very least, Obama should reconsider his "broken campaign promises" to close Guantanamo and end military tribunals.

This I found amusing, since of course Obama in no way "broke" his promises on these issues. He did encounter an institutional obstacle called the United States Congress as he attempted to fulfill those promises, but progressive memory commonly treats such inconveniences as historical trivia and mere political nuisances. Any imperial progressive president -- for which progressives yearn, as a Constitutional splendor; as opposed to imperial regressive presidents, which progressives detest, as a Constitutional abomination -- need only fight, fight, fight Congress, and he'll have his righteous way.

The accompanying horror, though, came in the realization that some of the Cenk-Dahlia Show's progressive viewers might actually believe some of this ahistorical, self-righteous, contradictory progressive humbug.

Ah, but my amusement quickly returned. For just as my horror and tolerance were striking three minutes, I also remembered that I was just about Cenk's only viewer.

Up

All the customary disclaimers, still ...

A Pew Research Center poll, taken yesterday, shows Obama's job approval jumping to 56 percent (from 47 percent, in April), and his net disapproval plunging from 50 to 38 percent.

Most dispiriting to Republicans, I would think, was the aggregate response to the question: "Do you approve or disapprove of the way Obama is handling the threat of terrorism?" A whopping 69 percent approved.

Should the economy continue its upward trajectory and, along with it, gas prices level out, you won't be able to find a bookie with enough offsetting bets at even astronomical odds to take yours on Obama.

Political drunk driving

From Politico:

The hope among establishment Republicans is that the succession of [recent] events will trigger an end to what they see as the silly season — that party activists will sober up and end their flirtation with the fringe.

Three enormous problems with that.

One, so many of the party activists are the fringe; two, roughly half of the states have closed primaries or caucuses; and three, one of them is Iowa, whose caucus is both pace-setting and driven not only by the fringe right, but the fringe religious right -- a double-lunatic whammy.

Though enormous, the GOP's problems aren't insurmountable, though. For instance a borderline annihilation in 2012 could weed the party of some its influential fringe, which would drift into separate, third-(tea)-party status.

Till then, however, one thing seems certain: the party's silliness will get a lot sillier before the party wises up. At least this year and next, the lunatics have the wheel.

Self-parodies

"Wow! Let me stop you there. I did not know that and I’m sure most of my audience didn’t know that.... That is absolutely fascinating. You’re not going to hear that on other networks," gushed Fox's Bill O'Reilly to Rep. Peter King, about the latter's partisan hallucination that the waterboarding of Khaled Sheik Mohammed yielded the necessary clues that led to Osama bin Laden's death.

I'd like to add that that's merely one among thousands of the right's misguided fantasies that we're not going to hear on other networks, but of course I can't add that, because we'll hear it thundered here, there, everywhere, for yet more months and more years to come. It's just part of the right's he-man shtick, never to be muted or denied.

The important thing, though, is that while President Obama can't put an end to the right's stupidity, he could at least put an end to waterboarding. Which he did.

Bin Laden's keen perception

Ezra Klein essentially frames the victory of Osama bin Laden, bankrupter of superpowers, over George W. Bush, overreactive chickenhawk: 

We didn’t need to respond to 9/11 by trying to reshape the entire Middle East [as bin Laden suckered us into doing], but we’re a superpower, and we think on that scale.

I would protest the "we." Certainly the Bushies thought, which is to say, grossly miscalculated, on that scale, but their marketing of neoconservative fatuity was based on similarly gross misrepresentations to the body politic, which only followed.

Now, one can argue, as I have many times, that the public should have been less gullible. On the other hand, in this, the world's longest-running representative democracy, there has existed a mutual socio-political understanding that "we" would permit our government the greatest benefits of doubt, so long as our government did not abuse its immense powers to wrongly persuade. Bush wasn't the first to abuse those powers -- the presidencies of Polk, McKinley, L.B. Johnson and Nixon were, notably, serial abusers of the truth -- but he was enough of a criminal anomaly to (partially) excuse a credulous population.

Hence to my mind, there is more "he" -- indeed "they" -- than "we" in the assignment of national culpability. To their discredit, the American people are rather easy to rile. Yet we are not, primordially, a warlike people; we soon find warfare both tedious and wasteful, and prefer to exit from it sooner than later. What is indispensably required and commonly expected in this contradictory mix, however, are national leaders of decency, dignity, honor and honesty.

In George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld et al, we had none of those qualities. And sure enough, the world's most perceptive criminal knew just how to exploit their corrupt failings. He snookered them "big time," as Junior's keeper liked to say, and with unremarkable ease -- for it is exceptionally hard to exploit honorable men.

Conspiracy theories, Osama bin Laden, and moonbeams

ABC News reports that the White House is divided on releasing ghastly photos of the human malevolence finally gunned down.

Which, parenthetically, reminds me: I've read a few Christian political commentators who, notwithstanding their hatred of Osama bin Laden, confess they are dutifully praying for his soul. I'm not. Of course I'm not a Christian, or for that matter a member of any organized belief, but if I were a Christian I'd be all the more convinced that God is perfectly capable of sorting out the garbage, sans my human intervention.

At any rate, the internal White House debate harbors one side's belief that the photos are perhaps too "grisly and graphic, displaying a gaping hole above his left eye where brains and blood can be seen." On the other side of the debate is the contention -- and this is what caught my eye -- that they'd release the photos so as to "squash conspiracy theories that the terrorist is not dead."

This second squad can't be serious. "Squash conspiracy theories"? About Osama bin Laden? Or anything to do with 9/11? Or anything to do with anything official since the pharaohs? It can't be done. Evidence and proof and rationality and logic mean nothing to the conspiratorially minded. In fact the more evidence and proof and rationality and logic one dumps on them, the more they hunker and quiver in insider superiority. They "debate" like Daffy Duck ambulated; babbling and backflipping and handspringing across the terrain, never to be pinned down on one issue before soaring to the next.

Besides, does the White House not know, which one prominent conspiracy theory Web site re-announced yesterday, that "Bin Laden actually died in December of 2001 of natural causes"?

You bet the White House knows that. There's not a spot of doubt otherwise. For this White House, you see, is in cahoots with the former administration, which was in cahoots with the FBI, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and civil engineering faculties from Maine to Hawaii. And now, according to another of the Web site's stories, it's "Lying about bin Laden's death" because "They've lied about everything to do with 911."

Everything. They. Lies, lies, they're all lies and liars, so naturally any proof offered by the liars will be greeted as lies. A pretty nifty argumentation scheme.

One simply cannot penetrate the tin foil. What's more, attempting to block its moonbeams is met with even more huddling self-satisfaction. The aforementioned Web site, for example, carried a story whose lede read: "After comment-threading at Huffpost this afternoon about the range of inconsistencies between the White House account of the anti-Bin Laden operation and what appear to be the facts, this little message greeted me when I went to leave a link to tonight’s piece there an hour ago: Sorry, but you have been banned from commenting."

Ah hah! You see? The naked truth will not out; no, no, not to the benighted multitudes, because the conspiracy morphs and amplifies and tangles ever deeper.

Hence, dear White House, there is no debate. Release or don't release, it makes no difference as far as conspiracy theorists are concerned, since they already possess the inside scoop.

I'll get emails. I always do. And lots of them. They always read the same: Gee, you know, I don't usually endorse this conspiracy stuff, but on this topic, the contrary evidence is actually quite spooky and hey I'm an educated guy and I've studied this nefarious affair now for o so long etc. etc. -- so please don't casually dismiss my lunacy.

Years ago, I made the mistake of responding to a couple of these meshuga-grams, noting certain flaws in their logic. Both immediately fired back unrelated as well as additional arguments. I learned my lesson. I trust the White House doesn't really expect anything different.

Frum here to eternity

David Frum:

Here’s hoping that we have at last seen the end of this ugly insinuation that there is something less than fully American about the black president with the exotic name....

The success of the bin Laden operation is a great moment for the United States – and not only for the United States.

But it is also a deservedly bad moment for some of the destructive forces in American public life: for those who have substituted for ordinary politics a sustained campaign to brand President Obama as an outsider, as un-American, as non-American.

Genuinely incomprehensible to me is why more conservatives cannot see what Frum sees: that the GOP's scandalous drumbeat of the president as "Other" is, in both the short term and long, the single most self-destructive strategy available to it.

I suppose from a purely cynical, altogether ruthless and even coldly pragmatic point of view, had the right's unsubtle campaign of Obama-qua-Kenyan or terrorist-friendly Mau Mau shown itself to be effective in the pursuit of electoral alienation among any group other than its numerically shrinking and squalid base, then a legitimate case could be made for it. Politics is, after all, war, and disinformation campaigns are part and parcel of its accepted ordnance. Yet there's no evidence that its strategy was accomplishing anything other than making the right look remarkably foolish: a still-dragging economy and higher gas prices were taking a toll on Obama's approval ratings; the right's unsubtleness was not.

The objection will be raised that the GOP's 2012 presidential candidate must first win the nomination by running the diseased gauntlet of Republican primaries: that he or she will win the nomination only by feeding the ravenous base, thus he or she has no route but the scandalous one. Again, myopia. Whoever wins the nomination in 2012 is already a historical footnote. The real winner will (could) be whatever Republican candidate comes along, this year or next, who denounces such scurrility in GOP politics and thereby primes himself for the 2016 nomination; by which time, it is to be hoped, anyway, the conservative base will have learned its unforgettable lesson of 2012 and will have re-expanded to conservative normality. Such an Eisenhower-Rockefeller re-expansion would permit this visionary Republican to then campaign on a platform of sanity-- and perhaps, even, to have a shot at victory. 

For now, though, the GOP seems to be hopelessly mired in the suicidal muck, grabbing at every sick, opportunistic plaything that appears shiny. It has lost its soul, its every reason for being. It has become merely a plague on both the nation and itself. Yet what is most astounding is that not one of its "luminaries" is willing to see the irrevocable darkness ahead -- as David Frum so clearly has -- and make some attempt to change course.

Dr. Rushlove

I just caught a moment of a very fevered Rush Limbaugh, who seemed to be suggesting with newfound desperation that President Obama, in killing bin Laden, has ruthlessly dismissed the world's welfare.

How's that? you ask. Well, you see, according to Rush's information, in "secret files" it has been noted that al Qaeda promised to instantly detonate a nuclear bomb -- in Europe, I believe Rush said -- in the event of Osama bin Laden's assassination or capture.

But did President Obama care? Pshaw. Thus, Rush was beside himself, what with Obama's breathtaking inhumanity and all.

My dear Mr. Limbaugh: As even the Hollywood satire "Dr. Strangelove" had the smarts to point out, Doomsday Machines are pointless unless the machinist makes his device known to the world beforehand. You got that, Rush? Do you understand that al Qaeda would not have been content to let its threat sit silently in a "secret file"?

More worrisome, are your listeners actually as stupid as you think they are? Even they had seen and absorbed the lessons of "Strangelove" -- until you came along, outselling even Sellers.

I've also managed to choke down a minute or two, here and there, of Fox News. Its theme -- again, gathered from mere specks of random switching over -- also seems to be the potential of al Qaeda's rage and how now we're all doomed because we've gone and pissed off the terrorists.

Where, in the sainted name of George W. Bush, is the right's characteristic machismo? The bravado? The "Bring 'em on," indomitable American spirit? Now that Obama has accomplished what the right only yapped about, its mouthpieces sit cowering in their studios, shivering in fear.

Or ... could it be? ... no, no, they couldn't be that cynical ... yet ... maybe, could it be? -- that they're not only faking, but marketing the fear? 

Ring-a-ding-dingbats

Media Matters coughs up a good recap of right-wing hysteria from August, 2007, when candidate Obama said "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets [in Pakistan] and President [Pervez] Musharraf won't act, we will."

Rush Limbaugh: "Well, we've got another tape from -- I get these guys confused -- Usama bin Laden. Another tape says he's going to invade Pakistan and declare war on Pakistan and Musharraf, which, ladies and gentlemen, puts him on the same page with a Democrat presidential candidate -- that would be Barack 'Uss-Obama.' "

Sean Hannity: "called Obama's statement 'frightening.' "

Karl Rove: "indicative of 'the inexperience that he has.' "

Fox News analyst Ralph Peters: "Obama's Pakistan position 'loonier than anything he's said about Iraq' ... 'This is crazy.' "

Fox News' John Gibson: "Obama suggested we invade Pakistan, this week. He's a loser."

John Podhoretz, in the New York Post: "This country is never going to insert military forces to conduct a major campaign against al Qaeda inside Pakistan without the permission of that country's government."

Bill Kristol: "Barack Obama, losing ground to Hillary Clinton because he seemed naive about real world threats, frantically suggest[ed] that he would invade Pakistan."

The difference

Nate Silver speculates:

[T]he 2012 election was probably not going to revolve around national security. Instead, the Republican nominee was probably going to attempt to make the campaign about the size of government and the future of the welfare state: how to deal with entitlement programs in the face of an increasing national debt.

Had the situation been identical, except for that the current president were a Republican rather than a Democrat, the 2012 campaign would go precisely like this:

National security, 24/7. All campaign ads and all presidential interviews would reduce to a matter of commander in chiefdom -- his being the greatest ever.

Billboards would spring up throughout this immense republic, depicting our flight-suited leader holding the bloody head of history's most nefarious criminal and America's most prodigious peril.

Our alert level would now be at bright crimson, at which color it would remain until November 7, 2012.

The attorney general would appear daily to announce the arrest of yet another post-bin Laden plotter.

Homeland Security would be appropriated a gazillion dollars. We would invade Belize. 

The deficit and national debt would be declared a massive distraction by unpatriotic Democrats. Tea Partiers would start loving America again. Entitlements would be expanded, so as to placate any fiscal reservations about piling trillions more on the Pentagon.

Calls for yet more high-end tax cuts would go out, so as to increase government revenue, with which we could finish the dreaded Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Mount Rushmore would be in immediate danger of defacement-via-addition.

Somewhere

Somewhere, Gov. Mitch Daniels just withdrew his evolving 2012 playbook from a desk drawer. He looked at it. He opened it thoughtfully. And then he methodically ripped out its pages, chewed them up and spit them out and stomped on the wretched things.

Somewhere, Mitt Romney is wondering why his Christian god is so cruel.

Somewhere, Michele Bachmann is reconstructing the Founders' defeat of jihadism at New Hampshire's Lexington and Concord.

Somewhere, Newt Gingrich is having another Big Idea about all this, which once again we'll be told was Big indeed, although we'll never quite learn what the Big part was.

Somewhere, Mike Huckabee is renewing his Fox News contract.

Somewhere, Tim Pawlenty is playing hockey on thin ice.

Somewhere, Sarah Palin is ... oh, who gives a shit.

Somewhere, Donald Trump is ... oh, who gives a shit.

Somewhere, Haley Barbour is saying, Damn I'm smart.

More Kenyans, please

From the NY Times:

Beginning in March, Mr. Obama presided over five national security meetings at the White House to go over plans for the operation and on Friday morning, just before leaving Washington to tour tornado damage in Alabama, gave the final order for special forces and C.I.A. operatives to strike.

You know what? If this is the type of calm, measured, intensely focused and impeccably executed leadership that we can expect from a Kenyan-born, unqualified Harvard Law-schooling socialist, then by all means let's stack the federal government with thousands just like him.

Their unfinest moment yet

Mitch McConnell seemed to think this triumph was faceless:

On September 11, 2001, America came together and vowed that we would never forget the memory of those whose lives were lost on that terrible day. Tonight’s announcement shows that we have made good on that pledge.

Palin tweeted:

Thank you, American men and women in uniform. You are America's finest and we are all so proud. Thank you for fighting against terrorism.

Seriously, that's all. No mention of the president.

The idiot Bachmann did the same:

A time to express our deepest gratitude to the U.S. military for taking out Osama bin Laden.

Mitt Romney carefully ranked his thanks:

Congratulations to our intelligence community, our military and the president.

At least John Boehner had the courtesy to recall the president's name, albeit both of them. After thanking the troops, he added:

I also want to commend President Obama and his team, as well as President Bush, for all of their efforts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice.

The Republican National Committee went passive-voice on us:

Justice was delivered to a ruthless terrorist courtesy of men and women of the United States military.

And then the "real" story, the one posted on "What Really Happened," a leading conspiracy-theory Web site:

Yes, we were hacked. Starting just moments before President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, our website was hit with what the hosting company described as a massive distributed denial of service attack, no doubt to prevent the public from accessing the documentation showing Bin Laden actually died in December of 2001 of natural causes.

The point of presenting these varied reactions is that a half-cracked, delusional conspiracy-theory site emerges as the least dishonorable among them. At least it's consistent, however psychotic its consistency may be. As for the others? They simply cannot bring themselves to honor the presidency even in the most incontrovertibly honorable moment -- if, that is, a political opponent happens to be occupying the office.

For eight years they made excuses for the great and determined leadership of President Bush, who in reality dishonored the memory of the victims of 9/11 by diverting U.S. resources into an insane, unprovoked war of his choosing, letting bin Laden slip away.

Only about halfway into his first term, President Obama accomplishes what the "great" Bush not only failed to accomplish, but obviously -- and shamefully beyond words -- was rather indifferent about. About Obama's leadership, the GOP says little or nothing.

While President Obama has quietly gone about the essential business of the American people, the GOP has instead most notably labored to exclude the former from the latter's ranks. So yes, there's a striking imbalance between the two in competence and governing ability and vision and seriousness and the depths to which they'll take their partisanship. But in the end, those differences aren't what will alienate the American people from the GOP. What will make the populace heave in disgust at the GOP is, rather, its utter lack of simple decency.

Post-innocence

Recall for a moment all of the Republican pols who today claim they were ardently opposed to their party's earlier big spending -- those unpaid-for wars, that unfunded entitlement, those fantastically irresponsible un-offset tax cuts -- which of course all passed through their Congressional majorities like Patton's crap through a goose.

Don't ask them to defend their party's erstwhile irrational exuberance and unforgivable extravagance. No, no, they, to a GOP man and Republican woman, were courageously protesting those things all along, instead talking fiscal responsibility and small government and encouraging their fellow GOPers to do the same yada yada ...

You'll find none with an accurate memory or honest tongue.

This morning on "Meet the Press," Virginia's Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, said he dismissed all that "birtherism" talk long ago and encouraged his fellow GOPers to do the same.

Don't look to him to defend the madness, for he was innocent; he courageously stood against his party's dementia; he tried his best to thwart its fatuous distractions.

Good grief, they simply never tire of jumping the check-out lanes at Walmart.

Now, maybe Gov. McDonnell did in fact discourage the madness. I don't know. My point, though, is that soon we'll find that not one Republican pol ever stoked its fires. Not one.

Bloody-nose politics

Have you ever wondered what schoolyard bullies grow up to be?

Republicans, of course. More precisely, though, Republican operatives, whose inner bully-ness aides them in consummating near comical displays of characteristic protest-under-pushback, like those shocked and horrified looks they once flashed on the pecking-ordered schoolyard whenever one of their victims, having had enough, finally retaliated. 

True crime, real life example, from Jonathan Collegio, Karl Rove's American Crossroads' spokesman, on the White House's formation of Priorities USA, which will seek to counterpunch tens of millions in GOP secret-donor financing:

Obama’s brazen hypocrisy, in encouraging his own operatives to start groups exactly like the ones he demagogued last year, shows how cynical this president can be when it comes to perpetuating his own power.

Does the apt phrase, "Hey, you started this," mean anything to these people?

'Washington's excesses'

It's an irony of our age that the one Beltway journalist taken least seriously as a journalist because of his rehearsed cynicism and penchant for punchlines is also the one journalist to report -- from afar -- the Correspondents' Dinner for what it is: a journalistic embarrassment of insider debauchery.

With the proliferation of A-list parties and the infusion of corporate and lobbyist cash, Washington journalists give Americans the impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like the celebrities and power players we cover....

As I began to do the RSVPs for a few of this year’s parties, I thought about what our hard-bitten journalistic forebears would make of Cee Lo and SamRo and the Donald. Then I made other plans for the weekend.

Good for you, Dana Milbank.