p m carpenter's commentary

They're over there, Paul

The leading presidential candidate among Iowa's imbecile bloc has, in a kind of perverted Krugmanesque way, nothing to offer but real-world solutions to real-world crises.

Michele Bachmann is, naturally, opposed to raising that silly old debt ceiling, since the government, as we all know, can easily pay its bills with only a fraction of its usual income. But wait. There is an exception to Bachmann's peculiar, individual mandate. She would vote for raising the ceiling, but ...  

they would have to defund Obamacare.

Observed The Hill: "Of course, that's an incredibly unlikely proposition, and Bachmann acknowledged as much" in a Fox News interview.

But at least she's out there, fighting the witless fight, proposing the preposterously unachievable, casting her piercing light on the utterly pointless and further lobotomizing the electorate.

American democracy, the contemporary GOP, the morons: Paul Krugman's they.

Mr. Krugman, your diagnosis is ready

I have made a great study of Paul Krugman's vast politico-economic distress, I have grieved his frustrations these short summer nights, I have labored to unlock the source of his woes and have endeavored to offer succor. Now, finally, my toil pays off, for I am prepared to diagnose. And wouldn't you know it? The vastest difficulties so often lie rooted in the simplest of imperfections: Paul Krugman hasn't yet learned his pronouns.

Listening to what supposedly serious people say about the economy, you’d think the problem was "no, we can't." But the reality is "no, we won't."

My dear Mr. Krugman, my dear, concise Mr. Krugman: We can't, you see, because they won't. We have nothing to do with it. They're the problem. And their problematic badass selves are intentional and determined and attitudinally fixed like Gibraltar, therefore we cannot indeed.

To suggest a collective "we" in control of us is as uselessly simplistic as railing against the collective we who voted for Bush-Cheney, since it was they who committed that foul and unforgivable wickedness, the consequences of which we merely suffer.

However your mind, Mr. Krugman, does roll in and out of practical lucidity, as evidenced by this passage:

The truth is that creating jobs in a depressed economy is something government could and should be doing. Yes, there are huge political obstacles to action — notably, the fact that the House is controlled by a party that benefits from the economy’s weakness.

While your modifier of "political obstacles" is "huge," it would have held real-world value only in the form of "hugely immovable." Because that's what they -- they in the House, and all the little moronic theys who put them there -- are: immovable. At least until next year.

You then write that "political gridlock should not be conflated with economic reality." For whom is that intended? Us? Them? We in the real world quite properly conflate gridlock with reality, because the reality of our situation is that we're gridlocked. Those others -- those mired in the squalid fantasies of neoclassical economics -- are only too happy to force "should" into "must."

I have confidence that you, Mr. Krugman, can master your pronouns. After that we'll tackle in greater detail the intricacies of conditional verbs. For now, let's just work on who the hell we are.

Eric Can't-whore

The difference between a bellyaching, pandering House pol and presidential leadership:

Speaking less than an hour after President Obama concluded his press conference, [Eric] Cantor referenced the House GOP’s campaign Pledge to America, holding it aloft to demonstrate the repeated promises Republicans have made not to raise taxes.

"As part of any deal, we’re not asking the president to violate his promises to the people of this country, and we wish he wouldn’t ask us to do the same," Cantor told reporters at the Capitol.

Franklin Roosevelt, in late 1940:

I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into foreign wars.

Circumstances change, necessity intervenes, and responsible leaders change with necessity.

From here on out: 'horsehead negotiating'

The Post's Fred Hiatt observes "three potential strategies" for Obama:

One is to join Nancy Pelosi and go for broke on "Mediscare": Accuse the Republicans of getting ready to wheel every granny out of every nursing home and otherwise threaten civilization as we know it.

A second would be to end up with Mediscare but first appear open to compromise, to appeal to independents, while assuming there can be no grand bargain with Republicans.

The third is to go for something real: a long-term debt reduction plan that would increase revenue, begin to control entitlements without threatening granny and reassure financial markets that the American political system can get its act together when push comes to shove.

Obama, at first, previewed the first, but fleetingly. The second, many of us presume, is his working strategy, principally because the inescapable reality of Hiatt's concluding phrase in the second strategy precludes the third: "there can be no grand bargain with Republicans."

To Beltway journalists, a "grand bargain" allures by mere virtue of its grandness. The terminology is lofty, its aspiration noble, the general idea appeals to one's higher appreciation of accommodating universalities. Oh, if only we could have Grand Bargains today as we did in the glossier days of yore: you know, like the Grand Bargains of 1820 or 1850 -- utter calamities in the long haul.

I shall continue to protest that any grand bargain with the contemporary GOP would hatch with a deadly ulceration: they are corrupt brokers, they've no honor, and they're hellbent on total war. Permitting them any lebensraum now with a rescue oxygen tank will only guarantee that they'll return stronger and even more destructively determined.     

In this debt crisis the political gods have graced Obama with the opportunity for a final showdown. He's already brilliantly displayed his willingness to compromise; hence independents should be happy. Now he should go for the kill, the horse's head in the bed -- the president should not ask twice for a favor.

Slash Medicare, Shield Millionaires

Sniveled a Mitch McConnell spokesman:

[I]t's baffling that the president and his party continue to insist on massive tax hikes in the middle of a jobs crisis while refusing to take significant action on spending reductions at a time of record deficits.

I ran this through the Snivelo-Reconciler 2000 and out popped: It's baffling only to the enormously befuddled that the president and his party continue to insist on massive tax hikes, which are neither massive nor even hikes, in the middle of a jobs crisis that we created while refusing to take significant action on spending reductions, assuming we ignore those couple of trillions here and there, at a time of record deficits, which we created just as cretinously as we did the jobs crisis.

After reading that this morning I next encountered Ross Douthat, who less snivels than smirks:

Obama’s political team wants to use the leverage provided by those cra-a-a-zy Tea Partiers to make Democrats live with bigger spending cuts than they normally would support. Why? Because the more conservative-seeming the final deal, the better for the president’s re-election effort.

Douthat's declaration squares broadly with conventional political theory -- it is generally advisable to run center to center-right in a national election -- yet the details of the current predicament defy the conventional. "T]he more conservative-seeming the final deal, the better for the president’s re-election effort" -- ?

Taking Douthat at his word, the above passage would mean that Obama should for instance caress the Ryan plan, which would go one comparative better and represent the most conservative-seeming of a final deal. According to the Douthat theory Obama should, as well, eschew even whispers of eliminating certain tax spending or the eventual repeal of Bush's upper-end tax cuts.

The lethal weakness of Douthat's conventionality is that it slams into the superior conventional theory of running in alignment with contemporary public opinion -- which happens to overwhelmingly detest the conservative-seeming Medicare "fix," while overwhelmingly supporting the repeal of Bush's upper-end tax cuts. What's more, poll after poll shows minuscule concern with deficits, in relation to job creation.  

For now, the status quo of negotiations-deadlock is the best political (not to mention policy) deal for Democrats and the nation. As Douthat's paper reports:

Democrats say that because of Mr. Boehner’s retreat, they will now be able to portray Republicans as refusing major Democratic concessions on spending in order to protect tax breaks for big businesses and rich Americans.

Should Democrats hold firm, the looming advent of a debt crisis could force a clean vote on the ceiling; a debt crisis itself would force one. Without ever having to disclose any specific "concessions on spending" -- since no specifics were ever nailed down -- Democrats would be free to campaign on Republicans' catastrophic brinkmanship and a slogan of, "The Republican Plan: Slash Medicare, Shield Millionaires."

Intellect vs. Ideology

You are free to take all of this for what it's worth, which is to say, what comforts you.

Prior to the first A-bomb test, physicists calculated a small but very real risk that such a nuclear chain-explosion might ignite a global, atmospheric conflagration. Given the perceived necessity of the Bomb, they took that mathematical chance. They won, so to speak. When Gen. MacArthur proposed a near-impossible landing at Inchon, the Joint Chiefs were pretty sure that he had lost his mind. In longer order they were right, but as far as Inchon went, they were dead wrong. MacArthur "lucked out." With John Kennedy's quarantine of Cuba, he risked a thermonuclear confrontation with the Soviets. The Soviets blinked; Kennedy's bet paid off.

On the other hand Hitler waged that he could knock out Stalin's Russia with a repeat performance of the blitzkrieg, leaving Britain with no option but to sue for peace. He lost. Ronald Reagan understood the macroeconomic imbecility of Laffer's curve, but he gambled that things would work out in reality, as they did so nicely on paper. He lost. And George W. Bush bet on the ludicrous prediction of happy Iraqis welcoming American invaders -- all with little to no fallout. He lost.

It's too soon to say, but someday the GOP's "blink" of 9 July 2011 may rank among the greatest of historic turning points. For Obama there inhered an immense element of calculated risk -- effectively the end of his presidency had Republicans taken advantage of what meager IQ they have left -- they declined, so Obama won; for Republicans there loomed the party-determining fork of Reason or Ideology -- and in choosing the latter, they lost.

I invite you to take another look at the first two sets of scenarios and decide for yourself those in which intellect vs. wishfulness played the larger role. Then look again at the third. There is at times a certain blurring, but most anyone would agree that studied intellect in general has trumped wishful thinking; and I'd further argue that, throughout history, a devotion to ideology -- a system of thought saturated by wishfulness -- has virtually dictated the losing side.  

And just how will Republicans play out the debt-ceiling denouement? Again ideologically, or so it now seems clear, which again tips their hand, which means the intellectual Obama retains even better odds of total victory in this total war.

Addendum

I trust the professional left, progressive activists, online doomsayers and cable thunderers will now graciously retract their riveting denunciations of Obama's negotiating skills.

It's true that Obama's larger compromise gamble was riddled with peril -- there was always the slim, and grim, chance that House Republicans would smile and bellow a big "Thanks!" -- but he weighed the odds and bet that the GOP would resist the internal sin of ideological impiety.

He bet right. And that's all that counts.

The cosmically stupid

Speaking of the galactically stupid ...

House Republicans -- nominally under the pinball leadership of John Boehner but spiritually infused into the demonic void of Eric Cantor's soullessness -- just achieved a magnitude of stupidity that is downright cosmic.

Had they called President Obama's bluff -- i.e., had they exchanged a few modest tax hikes (the mother lode of which is already slated) for what they could have poundingly demagogued, in a 2010 redux, as Obama's entitlements-slashing -- they could have neutralized Democrats' D-Day assault on the Ryan plan, fortified their House majority prospects for 2013, added to their counterparts' numbers in the Senate, and even severely undermined the president's reelection odds.

But the heretical bugaboo of fiscal sophistication sent them scattering like roaches for what they mistakenly believe is political safety. They returned Obama's gift unopened, which, as I and others have speculated, was likely what Obama anticipated:

The White House has to know that any such deal along any such outlines is not only a long-term political loser, but a strong, short-term political improbability.... [T]hough few compromises have ever been grander in scope than this reported proposal, even fewer have been as politically weak. Hence Obama could get electoral credit for merely proposing, while all along deeply suspecting -- indeed praying -- that it's going nowhere.

To the Washington Post, a White House official unleashed the opening salvo:

Message-wise, we can go to town on them. We weren’t for raising any taxes that weren’t on well-off people and special interests. So it’s going to be very clear that they walked away from a larger deal over their sacred cow of tax relief for the rich.

Like Reagan, Obama has always been fortunate in his enemies -- from Alan Keyes to Hillary Clinton to John McCain & Lunacy Inc. -- and in Cantor, Tea Party & Friends, the president has stumbled across a propitious coven of assclowns so outrageously ideological, so struggling-economy-offsetting, as to suspect a magnificent deus ex machina presence.

The entertaining Rick Perry

I enjoyed this item, from April 28, 2009, from the Dallas Morning News:

[Gov. Rick] Perry said Monday that he's never been for big government or excessive spending, something that he says has marked the start of Obama's presidency ... "They pour your tax dollars into every problem imaginable," Perry said ...

[although]

Last year, when the economy was headed toward disaster, Perry, as head of the Republican Governors Association, asked Congress to pass an economic recovery package.

But by that I'm sure he meant one of those cost-free economic recovery packages.

Even more enjoyable, however, was the courage displayed by this Texas governor in stating so bluntly that he opposed excessive spending. Most politicians, year after year, election after election, when asked "Do you support excessive spending?" heave an "Absolutely" or simple "Yes" in peremptory response. But not Rick Perry. No, he opposes it. He opposed it then, and he opposes it now.  

So if you're one of those GOP voters yet dissatisfied with your party's 2012 presidential offerings -- although that remains a predicament that baffles us more than you, what with Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and other illustrious Stone Agers in the running -- please entertain the thought of the entertaining Mr. Perry. He's creatively consistent, miraculously frugal and boldly straightforward. 

Krauthammer's rage: Obama is playing his game

Charles Krauthammer is never more fatuously self-contented than when his party practices its traditional politics-to-policy ratio of 95:5, and the other party practices its customary ratio of 5:95.

For Charles, this peachy imbalance could not be sweeter. While the common herd can comprehend the pseudoconservative politics of soundbites and 30-second television ads (always grainy, always slo-mo, always B&W, always some 'unAmerican' angle), it generally reserves the effort required to understand actual policy disputes, and so lazily writes them off as "just politics."

By Election Day, the GOP's ghost stories told around the national campfire have sufficiently frightened the herd, which couldn't begin to tell you what their fright is really all about, but it does know that things are pretty scary out there -- and those policy pinheads have a lot to do with it.

It is, then, a transcendent delight to watch Charles shake with rage and drool with envy whenever the opposition turns the tables. Which is what Charles suspects -- and I pray -- that President Obama has done with the all-consuming issue of debt; which is to say, Charles believes that the filthy intrigue of some seriously unserious presidential politics has lain before us all along.

I quote the raging, drooling Krauthammer:

A clever strategy it is: Do nothing...; invite the Republicans to propose real debt reduction first; and when they do — voting for the Ryan budget and its now infamous and courageous Medicare reform — demagogue them to death.

And then up the ante by demanding Republican agreement to tax increases. So: First you get the GOP to seize the left’s third rail by daring to lay a finger on entitlements. Then you demand the GOP seize the right’s third rail by violating its no-tax pledge. A full-spectrum electrocution. Brilliant.

The probable outcome? Charles says, "We shall see" -- a stunningly courageous formulation; only a professional Post columnist would possess the full-flowered masculinity to risk such a dicey prediction.

As for my own, I cannot see the GOP seizing that second third rail, and I would further speculate -- indeed, I've already done so -- that Barack Obama can't either.

Empirically disprovable

I caught only a few seconds of President Obama's unRosy Garden update on the economy this morning, and in the few seconds I heard, he mentioned deficit reduction as critical to business "certainty," and thus job growth.

How did this profoundly mistaken, empirically disprovable notion ever become so mainstream?

Never mind. I know.

Nevertheless, let's remember that the progressive Franklin Roosevelt, in 1932, campaigned conservatively on the promise of balanced budgets. Much advisory effort was required to convince President Roosevelt to give Keynesian economics a try. He did. The economy improved. Yet once improved, Roosevelt reverted in his second term to conservative caution and he cut federal spending -- he never could shake the tidy allure of balanced budgets -- thereby producing the unpleasant effect of a recession within the depression.

A remedied deficit, "certainty" and job growth: profoundly mistaken, empirically disprovable. 

The debt crisis is no legal problem

Last night I listened to law professor Jeffrey Rosen on "Hardball" interpret President Obama's 14th Amendment option as "uninterpretable." There's just no question that the president has the Constitutional right to invoke the Amendent's Section 4 to avert a debt crisis, testified the George Washington University legal scholar.

And there's the twist: legal scholar -- which means that Rosen's scholarly uninterpretability is about as genuinely uninterpretable as an economic theory is to a roomful of economists. In other words, what Rosen meant by "uninterpretable" is that that is his interpretation.

It was only to be expected that right-wing "legal scholars" would instantly hurl themselves into frenzied denunciations of the Constitutional option -- perhaps it was they whom the Dickensian Mr. Bumble had in mind when he observed that "the law is a ass" -- but now comes Obama's former Harvard law professor, Laurence Tribe, to delight the right and inconvenience Rosen with the Constitution's Article I, Section 8: Only "The Congress shall have Power ... To borrow money on the credit of the United States."

Which lies in indirect conflict with the 14th Amendment's now singularly faddish Section 4: that Obama can exercise final presidential authority in averting a debt crisis, since "the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law ... shall not be questioned." Why a conflict? Explains Tribe:

Nothing in the 14th Amendment or in any other constitutional provision suggests that the president may usurp legislative power to prevent a violation of the Constitution.

Tribe then expands on his Constitutional objection with a practical consideration:

[E]ven if [the 14th Amendment arguments] were persuasive, they would not resolve the crisis. Once the debt ceiling is breached, a legal cloud would hang over any newly issued bonds, because of the risk that the government might refuse to honor those debts as legitimate. This risk, in turn, would result in a steep increase in interest rates because investors would lose confidence.

In the end, Tribe transcends his own profession by reminding us that the debt issue's resolution lies fundamentally not in a Supreme Court ruling (God help us), but in political pragmatism (and here, strikingly, one sees Tribe's intellectual influence on Obama): Forget the legalisms, advises Tribe, for this is a matter that properly lies on "the political drawing board."

The manner in which Tribe elaborated on this concept is virtually identical to the way Obama described it at his "Twitter conference." Tribe:

Only political courage and compromise, coupled with adherence to traditions that call upon Congress to fulfill its unique constitutional duty, can avert an impending crisis.

Of course none of this compels the conclusion that Obama would reject the 14th Amendment option; after all, he's had his Treasury secretary floating the idea since May. It does, however, seem to darken the prospects of Obama's ever deploying it. And I'm with Tribe, and likely Obama: This is a political, not a legal, question -- and in the political arena it must be resolved.

GOP breakthrough: 4:0

If you can discern any consistency in all this gibberish, I'm sure White House negotiators would love to hear from you:

"Everything is on the table except raising taxes on the American people," Boehner told reporters at the Capitol.

And:

"[The Speaker's] communicating that there is a possibility that something big could happen soon," a high-ranking GOP official told The Hill.

And:

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Wednesday Republicans would discuss closing tax loopholes but that any deal on taxes must be revenue-neutral.

And, if revenue-neutral, then the spending-cuts to revenue-increases ratio would self-perfect to precisely 4:0, which is precisely 100 percent removed from any remotely reasonable ratio. So naturally it follows that "something big could happen soon."

The White House scenario?

We have only the proposal's outlines from last night's Washington Post report, so it remains premature to pronounce judgment on a deficit-reduction deal that includes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid spending cuts largely in exchange, perhaps, for upper-bracket tax hikes, already scheduled to expire. Such a deal might contain some policy prescriptions deemed wonkishly necessary over time, but the politics of it would stink like an ill-managed slaughterhouse: it would open a path for the serpentine GOP to slither its way out of a minefield, and render congressional Democrats' otherwise planned offensive essentially impotent.   

And thereupon hang my optimistic hopes. The White House has to know that any such deal along any such outlines is not only a long-term political loser, but a strong, short-term political improbability. The uppermost image it has most commonly wished to project is that of President Obama not as a Great Communicator, but as the Grand Compromiser. And though few compromises have ever been grander in scope than this reported proposal, even fewer have been as politically weak. Hence Obama could get electoral credit for merely proposing, while all along deeply suspecting -- indeed praying -- that it's going nowhere.

For if somehow legislatively successful, this compromise would prove as roughly valuable as another Grand Compromise: that of 1850, whose principal achievement was merely to postpone an inexorable civil war by a decade. A politically bloody, virtually apocalyptic showdown is coming between today's Democrats and Republicans, just as the North -- sooner or later, no way around it -- was destined to clash with the South. In my prodigiously uninfluential opinion, now is preferable to later; the White House and congressional Dems have eye-popping public opinion behind them on protecting Social Security etc. and going instead for the upper-income gold, while the GOP lies wounded and popularly besieged. 

As noted, somewhat needlessly, the White House knows this. The Senate is likely a surmountable obstacle in the way of this compromise, but the president would need vast numbers of House Democrats to align with rather significant numbers of moderate(!) Republicans -- and aye, there's the beautiful rub. Maybe, just maybe the White House is relying on the GOP to do precisely again what it does so well: take any White House suggestion and heave it with outraged protests over unAmerican Obama's malevolently socialistic and irreconcilable ways.

Therefore comes the debt crisis, and with it goes the GOP. In a matter of days. If the body politic still requires a tutorial in just how vigorously the contemporary GOP of goons, gangsters, demagogues and Bible-hoisting racketeers should be crushed, pulverized and blown away, it need only wait until the White House begins announcing just which obligations the U.S. government will honor, and which it will not, cannot. That should do it.

Again, some such showdown is coming, this year or next or within a very few. And a more favorable Democratic environment is unimaginable. The above scenario may seem too obvious, too conspicuously Machiavellian (excuse the contradiction), but it just might be, or so I can hope, the White House scenario.

The galactically stupid

From Politico:

A [deficit] deal now that includes substantial Medicare savings — and thereby diffuses that political issue in 2012 — could be a real asset for Boehner. Democrats have put options on the table representing close to $500 billion in 10-year savings from Medicare and Medicaid.

Any deal that even smacks of Medicare cuts would go down in political annals as perhaps the dumbest concession ever made. Republican media consultants would gleefully launch into demagogic hyperdrive, Boehner would be cork-popping to California and back, and the Dems could kiss their return to a House majority good-bye.

There is in politics the colossally stupid and then there's the "Few Good Men" galactically stupid, and it doesn't take a genius to know into which category Medicare cuts would fall.

postscript: I see from the comments that my point is being misinterpreted. Medicare cuts -- from a policy point of view, good or bad, wise or unwise, small or large -- weren't the point, which was brutally political, and only political. You recall, I'm sure, what magnificent distortions the GOP rolled out in 2010 regarding the previous $500 billion in Medicare cuts (which were not, in fact, benefit cuts, but no matter, not to the GOP). Additional "cuts," in 2011, would only neutralize the vast Democratic advantage gained from the Ryan plan; in short, they could easily protect the House Republican majority. Again, from a strictly political point of view, such a move would be "galactically stupid." 

That's some small ball

Say, how would you like your head to spin like something straight out of a B horror film? Yeah? Then read on.

Politico:

Obama is looking a little more like Clinton in the second half of his first term, pushing modest jobs proposals and a diet of bite-size policy talkers.... The slimmed-down agenda is the consequence of a resistant Congress and no money to spend, but it also aims to address a political problem for the president headed into a tough reelection fight....

Obama did the opposite of shoot small in the first two years of his term, realigning the American auto industry and passing a major economic stimulus package, health care overhaul and Wall Street reform bill. And now, he is attempting to negotiate a $4 trillion deficit-reduction package, which would be another massive feat.

That's from a top-headline story titled "Obama plays small ball on policy," oh, the weenie, but then internally re-titled "Obama's policy issues more modest," ah, we see, there's merely been some manner of policy-scope diminution -- both of which then thematically reemerge as: In his first two years Obama accomplished massive feats, another of which he's attempting in this, his third year.

So, in sum? Small ball.

And by the way, if some of the things Obama is now doing seem small, the reasons might be a) he has a Congress that's overstuffed with neoclassical economic pinheads and Elmer Gantry throwbacks and sociopathic Machiavellians, and b) we're broke.

Just as ridiculous

This is far from the most egregious of Beltway journalism's boffo banality, but it does add a certain battiness that I found irresistible. Eugene Robinson:

My view, for what it’s worth, is that now is the wrong time for spending cuts or tax increases — that it’s ridiculous to do anything that might slow the lumbering economic recovery, even marginally. But if there have to be cuts, then Republicans must be forced to move off the no-new-revenue line they have drawn in the sand.

So Robinson's view is that rectifying the tax-code abomination of billionaire hedge-fund managers' 15 percent rate is, for the moment, "ridiculous," because such an adjustment "might slow the lumbering economic recovery." The same view would apply, I gather, to expunging the depreciation jollies of their corporate jets.

As absurd as that may sound -- correction, is -- let's nevertheless grant Robinson the perfect right to an imbecilic opinion. But wait, it stops there not. For although taking the above revenue actions might ridiculously slow the recovery, well, that's only proper and fair, if spending cuts must also come.

Hence Robinson's studied opinion is that double the harm is preferable to half the harm -- in, I guess, some sort of schoolyard, two-wrongs logic of right?

There are of course many eminently reasonable arguments that justify the immediate elimination of the inherently unjustifiable in the tax code, but Robinson's isn't one of them. What worries, though, is that his temporary anti-tax fever may indicate more than an isolated and singular slip; indeed, it may be but the first symptom of that dreaded Beltway disease: balance-itis -- that hideous malady, as you know, that compels its victim to ponderously appreciate both sides of every debate, no matter how imbecilic one side may be.

Not Munich, the Rhineland

I have only one bit of historical judgment to pass along to President Obama before Thursday's renewed negotiations with the GOP nitwittery.

On March 7, 1936, Hitler order troops into the industrial, demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. Military historian Andrew Roberts, in his recently released (and wonderful, by the way) The Storm of War, is merely the last of a long line of historians to note:

Had the German Army been opposed by the French and British forces stationed near by, it had orders to retire back to base and such a reverse would almost certainly have cost Hitler the chancellorship.

I would with the same tidbit advise John Boehner, also, but you get the metaphor: Boehner most likely has issued similar orders, just as he already suspects he'll lose his chancellorship speakership over the humiliation.

Taking the plunge

David Brooks foreshadows my anxiety over a debt-ceiling deal as either presently conceived or speculated. He notes that Republicans so far have extorted Democrats into agreeing not only to the hitherto disagreeable, but to the virtually unthinkable: namely, they have cornered Dems into agreeing "not to raise tax rates," and in negotiations have limited any talk of revenue increases to the mere elimination of loopholes.

Naturally, that's not enough for the GOP. Because when we contemplate the Republican Party these days, we may contemplate many things, but its "normality" cannot be one of them; nor its "logic," nor intellectualism, nor "moral decency," nor anything even remotely resembling coherent economic theory. Anyway, all of that is what Brooks fears and suspects, and the rest of us know.

Brooks' advice to the GOP: For the love of Pete, you morons, take the deal, you've already won. "[T]rillions of dollars in spending cuts in exchange for a few hundred million dollars of revenue increases" = "No-brainer."

Unquestionably that's the "deal of the century," as Brooks calls it, for Republicans. They would not only impose their medieval vision on contemporary society, but philosophically they might lock it in for years to come. The debt ceiling crisis would blow over, and we'd be left with the fiscal wreckage.

On the other hand, writes Brooks, quite correctly, I think:

If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

Which leaves one wondering about the wisdom of avoiding a debt crisis.

Knowing desperation

In reading E.J. Dionne's holiday testament to the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution I found the bittersweet, the almost pathetic, and the undeniably desperate. For, you see, Dionne was only attempting to educate the grotesquely ineducable: the Tea Partiers.

Whether they intend it or not, their name suggests they believe that the current elected government in Washington is as illegitimate as was a distant, unelected monarchy. It implies something fundamentally wrong with taxes themselves or, at the least, that current levels of taxation (the lowest in decades) are dangerously oppressive. And it hints that methods outside the normal political channels are justified in confronting such oppression.

We need to recognize the deep flaws in this vision of our present and our past.

In his next 490 words, Dionne proceeded to recognize just that: the assorted misconceptions and wild misinterpretations that Tea Partiers hold in their torpid heads about our founding documents. So therein came the bittersweet and nearly pathetic, in that Dionne, an honest, sensitive scholar of moderate sensibilities, was acting Reason's Chamberlain to the Tea Party's unappeasability.

To the latter, the actual historical record is but a concept to be played with, or shredded at will; to the former, intellectual integrity remains an honorable notion.

As for Dionne's desperation? His fear of the "if" becomes more justified every day:

[I]f we pretend we are living in Boston in 1773, we will draw all the wrong conclusions and make some remarkably foolish choices.

So Dionne hustles the erudite and reasonable; but given that the House and effectively the Senate are mutant re-creations of the Tea Party's determined ignorance and "remarkable foolishness," one reads Dionne's hustling as a kind of knowing desperation.

Liberal conservatives

Although the Washington Post's Robert Samuelson misses the mark a bit, I am delighted to see yet another among the commentariat advance in general my long-standing argument that liberalism is the new conservatism, and in that sense conservatism -- by conservatives -- is no more.

Samuelson:

The struggle nominally pits liberals against conservatives, but this is misleading. The real debate involves reactionaries vs. radicals. Many liberals are reactionaries and many conservatives are radicals.

To "reactionaryism" Samuelson assigns a curiously circumscribed, twofold definition: from Webster's, "a return to an earlier system or order"; and from Michael Barone, a "[pining for] the golden years of the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s [when] . . . Americans had far more confidence in big government." Yet, as my Webster's says, "reactionaryism" is especially "ultraconservative," the antithesis of the "golden years."

On the other hand Samuelson is exquisitely accurate in writing about erstwhile conservatives as contemporary radicals, since they do indeed "[seek] drastic political, economic or social reform." What, however, is the true meaning of "conservatism"? Explains Samuelson: A "respect [for] existing institutions and traditions that anchor the social order."

Well, well. Today, such a respect would embrace the socially anchoring institutions of, say, Social Security and Medicare, both of which evolved from mere Rooseveltian-Johnsonian innovations into universally embraced traditions of American community. Liberalism itself may have devolved into little more than a holding action against the genuinely reactionary radicals, but it is holding most tightly onto the very "anchors" by which Samuelson defines conservatism.

Douthat's ideological palsy

I have now read Ross Douthat's sweeping pronunciamento of conservative puritanism several times --

Institutions tend to be strongest when they make significant moral demands, and weaker when they pre-emptively accommodate themselves to human nature

-- and I swear I can make neither logical heads nor empirical tails of the damn thing, other than that Mr. Douthat is ideologically palsied by the grim thought that licensed but dissolute gays are coming to wreck the recently re-perfected institution of straight marriage.

Douthat's opening word -- "institutions" -- rather loses the reader in an imprecise haze of disorienting fog, suggesting more and even deeper ambiguities to come. What exactly does he mean by "institutions"? I scurried for help. And, according to my first source, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The term, 'social institution' is somewhat unclear." Just as I feared.

For reasons unknown, the good people at Stanford Encyclopedia thought this "theoretical" definition might help: "An institution [is] defined as an interlocking double-structure of persons-as-role-holders or office-bearers and the like, and of social practices involving both expressive and practical aims and outcomes." However if that academic pomposity fails to clarify, then you might try the "somewhat" more comprehensible rollout: institutions are "complex social forms that reproduce themselves such as governments, the family, human languages, universities, hospitals, business corporations, and legal systems." (Where churches went, I've no idea.)

Now remember, "Institutions" is but the first, "somewhat unclear" word of the Douthat Declaration, and we've an entire sentence to go; one further saturated by the hopeless obscurities and debatable relativities of "strongest," "significant," "weaker," and -- just a couple of other words we might all agree on in coming millennia -- "moral" and "human nature."  

What I think Douthat is driving at, if I may address his universal loftiness from the profanely interpretive, is that he and other likeminded, heterosexual boys once had this exclusive club called "marriage," see, from which they could quite naturally ostracize Others. And now it's being democratized -- and that means the im-moral rabble of more "animal" than "human" nature is at the gates.

Classic, theoretically non-ideological Burkean conservatism, trying  to keep up, but not liking it -- adding a knowing "tsk-tsk" here and a disapproving "Oh dear" there.

A Sunday sermon

This morning on CNN's "State of the Union," Sen. John McCain stumbled around in the biblical.

McCain:

[T]he principle of not raising taxes is something that we campaigned on last November and the results of the election was that the American people don't want their taxes raised and they want to cut spending.

1 Corinthians 13:11:

When I was a child, I talked like a child ...

Again, McCain:

[Americans] don't want compromise. They want us to balance the budget. They want us to stop mortgaging our children and our grandchildren's futures and they don't think that they need their taxes raised.

Again, 1 Corinthians 13:11:

... I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.

We await John McCain's and his party's completion of the Corinthians passage.

Meanwhile, sugarplum fancies of Hell freezing over dance in our heads.

Finally, the Answer to Everything(?)

In Politico's "Minnesota nice turns nasty," the thematic explanation offered for the state's intensely unpleasant turn to disagreeable deadlock is sublimely appealing in its simplicity.

Says former governor Al Quie, an atavistic moderate Republican: "What’s changed is that the two political parties are driven by their extremes more than they should be." Adds political scientist Steven Schier: "We are consumed with matters of abstraction.... Elites are rigid about their principles, and they’re very far apart."

Sounds about right, doesn't it? As middle Americans yearn for governmental movement through middle solutions, government's ideological "elite" are roadblocking all paths forward with base-pleasing insurmountabilities. Yesterday, I myself contributed to this thematic simplicity in a playful brooding about progressive pols having "fought, fought, fought" for a public option -- a soon-realized unrealistic component of any final healthcare bill -- "at the cost of far more urgent matters"; just as, presently, the GOP leadership is internally burdened by a debt-ceiling demand for the "Dopiest Constitutional Amendment of All Time," that of the extraordinarily stupid and fantastically unworkable balanced budget amendment.

So there you have it, another of the media's much-sought, ultimate Explanations, one of those Uber-themes one can carry in one's pocket for easy deployment at the office watercooler: "Well, you see, Frank, or at least as I see it, our current difficulties are encased in needless battles over frivolous abstractions embraced by a deadlocking equilibrium of ideological elites." Frank will be awed.

There's just one problem: That concise analysis, that "Let's get to the heart of this thing," that cutting of all crap, so impressively framed, is itself full of it.

Don't get me wrong. The protracted battle over a public option and the current skirmish over a balanced budget amendment are both ideal examples of party rigidity going nowhere, a destination repeatedly confirmed by party elites -- and in that narrowest of definitions, both proposals can be fairly described as equally extreme. But are their intellectual merits, their public-policy merits, the merits of their practicability in addressing practical problems of equal weight and value?

Stack any random team of 20 academics, policy wonks and technocrats to deliberate on the above merits of a public option against another stack of a random team of 20 academics, policy wonks and technocrats to deliberate on the merits of the balanced budget amendment. From the first team you'll receive a mix of differing but somber opinions. From the second team you'll get nothing but contemptuous laughter.

All of which is to say, there exists an immense qualitative distinction between the two parties' "extremes." And on issue after issue -- be it the debt-ceiling's urgency, or fiscal policy, or environmental policy, or women's rights, or, well, one can go on, almost ad infinitum -- virtually any academic, policy-wonkish or technocratic jury of judges would rule the pragmatically "liberal" position essentially meritorious and the ideologically "conservative" position essentially asinine.

If one ignores this qualitative distinction and reduces our political conflicts to little more than an antagonistic "equilibrium of ideological elites," then one explains, essentially, nothing.

The summer of McConnell's exasperation

Sweet karma.

We can only imagine how the Senate minority leader snickered with Kentuckian Schadenfreude throughout President Obama's exasperated labors to nail down a healthcare bill sans a public option, since, after all, Obama possessed in the Senate the votes for the former yet lacked the votes for the latter.

Among Democrats' activist base and throughout the ranks of progressive demagogues, the public option had somehow metamorphosed into the legislative equivalent of Holy Writ; without it, they sermonized, we as a nation would merely exhibit the hideously kakistocratic soul of an Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, or Florida.

So on they fought, fought, fought, which is to say, they postponed the inevitable, at the cost of far more urgent matters, like jobs.

Again, it wasn't that Obama opposed a public option. Quite the opposite. Nonetheless some minds are able to comprehend simple arithmetic and thus accept its senatorial tyranny; other minds, while no doubt capable of comprehending what literally counts as success, are simply indifferent to the unfortunate savagery of anything less than 60. For there's nothing more exhilarating than the infantile righteousness of a lost cause. 

Back to karma. At once we see Mitch & Aides, in his Senate office, sitting around the crackerbarrel and passing the Jack Daniels and laughing uproariously at Obama's public-option kindergarten troubles, and now the scene blurs, it shifts, the image flips, the Schadenfreude is reversed. From The Hill:

Tea Party-backed lawmakers are pushing McConnell to insist on passage of a balanced budget amendment in exchange for allowing an increase in the debt limit.

McConnell has resisted ... argu[ing] that a balanced budget amendment, which requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers, simply doesn’t have enough votes to pass the upper chamber.

Somewhere in the calculating recesses of his scheming reptilian brain, McConnell comprehends that not only is the proposed amendment what former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett has suggested is the "dopiest ... of all time" -- in addition to "especially dimwitted," "mind-boggling in its insanity," and a "slapdash POS that was designed solely for the purpose of appealing to ignorant Tea Party types" -- but, that, dopey or not, or for that matter even virtuous or not, the bloody thing hasn't the votes.

Do the senatorial "Tea Party types" care? Nah. Because there's that activist base, you see -- and it's summertime and the demagogic livin' is easy.

At McConnell's expense. Gotta love it.

Prima-facie treason

A reader quotes, and asks:

"...in the GOP's infinitely contemptible debt-ceiling rebellion we're witnessing the greatest threat to this republic since the sectional crisis of the late 1850s and early 1860s." This is an extremely powerful statement. Can you provide historical context to validate and elaborate on this? I am asking this only because I think this matter deserves much more than the single paragraph you have given it.

To which I would quote myself, from June 23:

[T]he lawmakers of the 1920s could be forgiven their sins, for mostly they knew not what they were doing. But what might one call the acts of contemporary lawmakers who, with full and pre-advised knowledge, understood precisely that their actions would devastate the nation and destroy its credit and severely cripple its economic future and throw millions more into unemployment and despair? What would one call the lawmakers' intentional betrayal of a national trust? There is a legal term for it.

Treason.

I believe one can legitimately make that case; indeed, I think it stands as staggeringly prima facie.

Not since the sectional crisis has an American political party -- a minority party no less -- assumed dictatorial powers that so arrogantly defy the U.S. presidency and all attempts at reasonable, pluralistic compromise. House Republicans, in addition to their minority counterparts in the Senate, have unilaterally declared who shall rule absolutely supreme, and how. That, perhaps, is just politics. Yet in this instance the material consequences of their actions spell a devastation to this nation that is, economically speaking, tantamount to the bloodshed of the Civil War -- the minority South's treasonous response to Constitutional compromise and republican governance.

In brief, the Republican Party would rather instigate and rule over a hellish America on Earth than serve in a constitutional republic of inescapable compromises. That, too -- again, given its horrific consequences -- is treason.

But don't mistake. We as a country made it through the Civil War, a couple of global wars, the Great Depression and the cultural maelstroms of the 1960s, so we'll certainly make it through the attempted dictatorialism of the GOP's petty tyrants. 

I'll now climb off this particular soapbox.

An inexorable showdown

I agree with Tim Pawlenty on the potentially transcendent virtue of his state's collapse, and extend the logic nationally. Pawlenty:

There’s going to be a variety of near-term impacts, but the longer-term goal is what is most important here.

As I have opined before, in the GOP's infinitely contemptible debt-ceiling rebellion we're witnessing the greatest threat to this republic since the sectional crisis of the late 1850s and early 1860s. The party means to remake the nation in its own, unrehabilitated and minority image; if it cannot, then the nation be damned, says the GOP to President Obama, much as the South dismissed President Lincoln's attempts at political reasonableness. (Lincoln's 1861 position on slavery may seem deeply un-reasonable to us today, but remember the historical context.)

Now -- as then -- at hand is an inexorable showdown, and we might as well have it out this August. Skirting the showdown through a one-way compromise or resorting to a presidential override of statutory law might by definition postpone the showdown, yet there no longer seems to be a persuasive reason for any such a postponement. Obama has already proven his reasonableness to the electorate. That was a large part of his December, 2010 compromise. Now that, as the kids say, is so last year.

A debt-ceiling showdown would indeed have severe "near-term impacts," yet the concessionary alternative is the permanency of long-term governance by Republican racketeering. There is, however, another alternative: expose these ideological thugs for what they are, and exchange the near-term pain of an immense fiscal crisis for the much longer-term gain of electoral House- and Senate-cleaning.

Be assured I take none of this lightly. I'm not of a political temperament that would casually recommend a virtual civil war. However the radicalization, the extremism, the utterly sociopathic gangsterism of the GOP accelerates almost daily, and at exponential speed, and with a seeming endlessness. Unless Obama stops them, now.

My (and Krugman's) plea to Obama: Play it straight

Paul Krugman:

[T]he reason Republicans are doing this [i.e., playing debt-brinkmanship] is because they must believe that it will work: Mr. Obama caved in over tax cuts, and they expect him to cave again.

One would think that a Princeton professor and NY Times columnist would comprehend the difference between caving and compromising. Alas, one would be wrong. But that's history, and Krugman's an economist, and rarely do the two disciplines shine in one.

So let us, or rather let Mr. Krugman, proceed:

They believe that they have the upper hand, because the public will blame the president for the economic crisis they’re threatening to create.

Well, Republicans may believe that, but believing it doesn't make it so. At this point they can no more read the Tea Partying leaves of this execrable thing than Krugman can. In my opinion, though, which, admittedly, is worth no more than Krugman's, nationally televised presidential addresses and thundering, three-times-a-day denunciations of GOP extremism from the bully pulpit would outweigh McConnell and Cantor's pathetic little news conferences from Capitol Hill.  

Yet Krugman and I do find a point of agreement:

[F]ailure to reach a debt deal would have very bad consequences. But here’s the thing: Mr. Obama must be prepared to face those consequences if he wants his presidency to survive.

I take this as incontrovertible. Last December's compromise contained elements of bipartisan extortion, as every compromise does. But in a debt-ceiling deal as Republicans have heretofore framed it, compromise from their side should be disallowed, which would leave nothing but extortion. And that, Obama cannot permit.

See earlier paragraph: I believe Obama would "win," a rather sorry semantic usage in place of what should be regarded as everyday governance -- that is, that Reason would prevail.

There is, however, a way for Obama to both win and lose here. All this recent talk of the president exercising some notional Fourteenth-Amendment right to unilaterally blow by Congress' debt ceiling and instruct Mr. Geithner to pay the government's bills notwithstanding -- well, it worries. The bills might get paid, but the volume of Imperial President! and Despotic Executive! bellowed by Congressional Republicans would render their present hysteria comparatively low-keyed. And with the bills being paid, an electorate receiving its Social Security checks etc., etc. might then be likely to contendedly sympathize with the fiscal barbarians.

In short, the better way for Obama to win this thing is to play it straight, however crooked Republicans may be.

And down ... goes ... Minnesota: Stay tuned

It's a model state that once brimmed with crisp progressivism and button-downed goo-goos and a one-for-all civic ethic and it gave us Humphrey, Mondale, and Wellstone. Now it's effectively closed, a shambles of pseudoconservative ideology and uncompromising nihilism.

Welcome to Minnesota. In the opening line I used the present tense -- it still is a model state -- although the model no longer fits its history. Now it's a model, as political scientist Lawrence Jacobs warns, of "ungovernability."

The causation is simple: "There’s a new ethic here," adds Jacobs, "that compromise is weakness." And of course sticking to one's guns ultimately (and I scarcely need add, paradoxically) translates into a corruption of principled leadership, since the inevitable wreckage of deadlock translates only into the singular principle of desolate rudderlessness.

At stake is a choice of deficit-resolution that virtually anyone, let's say, ideologically born after the era of Horace Mann would find a no-brainer. The Democratic governor has suggested "rais[ing] income taxes only on those earning more than $1 million a year -- an estimated 7,700 Minnesotans, or 0.3 percent of all taxpayers." The Republican-controlled legislature's proposal? "[D]elaying another $700 million in payments owed to schools."

The malevolence of contemporary Republicans' assorted Plutocrat-Protection and Nineteenth-Century-Restoration Acts requires little discussion, if any. Their diseased ideology of Bachmannesque indifference to the public -- or what they would call egads! the collective -- good is simply too manifest to beg any further diagnosis. Only the cure remains: for exasperated, exhausted voters to send these predatory bumpkins packing back to their suburban mansions or rustic log cabins, where in privacy they can polish their blue steel and caress their Bibles and with luck find someone to reread to them the classics of anarchy theory.

That's the American Way -- a polite, thanks-but-no-thanks, we've-had-enough, essentially conservative, peaceful change of leadership and governance, the nonrevolutionary limits of which, as I speculated yesterday, the GOP is rather ill-advisedly testing.