p m carpenter's commentary

Today, the Booker game-changer; tomorrow ...

As Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz's heads exploded at MSNBC, there prevailed considerable calm from Politico's Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman. Last night, Matthews was so worked up over the Cory Booker kerfuffle that he came within inches of declaring the Obama campaign irreversibly toasted; meanwhile, reported Thrush and Haberman, Democratic advisers "consider the Booker ... comments to be a sideshow that elevates the cable news chatter level but doesn’t hurt their overall message where they care about it, which is in the Midwest."

Schultz we should excuse. He means well; he's a good-hearted populist who seems to genuinely believe in the purely propagandistic concept of the "99 percent." It's that very passion, however, that corrupts his understanding of practical politics--and it shows. Matthews, though, should know better. He worked in the political rackets before starring in the cable rackets. The latter have evidently swamped his sense of perspective. Last night the poor man was so exercised over Booker's self-important sabotage of Obama's principal campaign message, he wrung his hands on-air for an additional live hour--only to watch Booker, on Maddow, about an hour later, offer a serviceable rebuttal of Republicans' typically instant overreach.

My point is a common, and perhaps even a superfluous, one: We no longer just follow political campaigns, we careen through them--we zig, zag, bounce off the walls and do Daffy Duck backflips and handsprings upon every news-cycle story: this is the one, the one game-changer, the explosive mutation that alters everything.

Until tomorrow, or later that day, or the next "tweet."

Meanwhile, the cable-news gurus who are forever bemoaning the loss of real debate about substantive, deep and deep-rooted issues in political campaigns remain forever fixated on each hour's supreme game-changer.

I'd wager if I were to stop the next hundred folks I met on the street and ask them who Cory Booker is, maybe, maybe one could tell me. This is what Barack Obama understands about American politics, and the gurus do not.

The Booker-Ford morph

As I was saying ...

Ford is like clockwork.

As this rather regrettable instance demonstrates, there's something else I should have added to my earlier "Gestalt Gutter" list, which, if one thought about it long enough, would stretch and fade into infinity. Anyway, at least one missing item: Republicans possess an almost hypnotic ability to stick together when it counts.

A 'Gestalt Gutter'

Michael Tomasky:

The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection--at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done.

Tomasky's cited example is Mitt Romney's coming, attempted assassination of Barack Obama's character:" [Romney's] trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts."

I don't disagree with Tomasky on his character-assassination thesis; I only raise the issue because I quibble with his introductory and singular pronunciamento: that "The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is ... their skill at projection."

In part, Tomasky is incontrovertibly correct, in that Republicans' projection skills are one secret of their success. To me, though, "the secret of Republican political success" is, first of all, no secret at all, and second, much more of what we might call a "Gestalt Gutter" thing; that is, Republicans, since roughly the late 1970s, simply have been willing to do whatever it takes to succeed.

At root there lay a vigorous (if brutal) ideology--one essentially wrapped in unsentimental atomism; vernacularly, a dog-eat-doggism, blessed by a self-justifying corruption of Christianity. With that end in mind, Republicans proceeded, Machiavellian-like, to the delicate question of means. And with their end being "good," there could be in their minds no bad means to accomplish it. All was laid on the tactical table as impeccably legitimate.

Projection; character assassination; dirty-money think tanks and propaganda mills; electronic contract killers on radio, television, and soon the Internet; unspeakably massive bundles of cash from the slimmest of demographics; unabashed hypocrisies; mad-dog candidates; twisted and insidious (or most often utterly absent) logic; the reinvention of, or studied ignorance of, American and world history; the expropriated accoutrements of God and flag; and perhaps the crowning jewel of their overall success--their acute and quite useful appreciation of how immensely gullible many voters can be.  

Like I said, a kind of political "Gestalt Gutter" thing, in which one cannot profitably isolate any particular toxicity from its thoroughgoing, wholly filthy summation.

The need for nausea

Newark Mayor Cory Booker, on why "I get very upset when I see such a level of dialogue that calls us to our lowest common denominators and ... the kind of campaigning which I think is becoming too much of the norm in our nation."

Because "This kind of stuff is nauseating to me on both sides."

That may be true, all too true, Mayor, even if every time I listen to you I am reminded of former congressman Harold Ford, Jr., whose similarly overwrought centrism and "even-handed" assaults on both political parties vividly advertise an opportunistic man on the higher-office make.

But back to the other truth of that other nausea. This sort of advertising is indeed "very upsetting," as you say. Yet even more upsetting is the unavoidable need for being momentarily upset. And by that, I mean this: The swing-voting American electorate is so weak-minded and ill informed and easily led astray by the fancy baubles and shiny beads of any shameless, Romney-like campaign, only a brick-bat counter-offensive can be up to the challenge of cutting it down to proper size.

[Romney's] whole candidacy is based on the claim that his experience at extracting money from troubled businesses means that he’ll know how to run the economy — yet whenever he talks about economic policy, he comes across as completely clueless.

To Paul Krugman, he does. To you and me, he does. To virtually anyone who is even the least bit familiar with responsible fiscal policy, he does. But somehow, more than a few swing-voting independents--left to their own, independent devices--miss the inescapable reality that Mitt Romney is uttering absolute gibberish.

The banality of mean

In today's NY Times' top story, " 'Super PACs' Let Strategists Off the Leash," we peek into the dazzling brilliance and breathtaking originality of the GOP's best political minds. Here we learn from the consummate pros, the Brooks-Brothered Machiavellis, the too-late-for-Nixon crowd. In this story, we see what it takes to be in such specialized demand--why these boys are at the top of this strategic game, and why most of us mere amateurs could never succeed in this high-powered field of such sublime insights and cleverness.

You don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to get on a small prop plane to New Hampshire. You don’t have to stay at the Holiday Inn Express. You can stay home and manage everything during normal office hours.
--Fred Davis, "a prominent Republican advertising strategist," indeed, he of Ricketts-Wright ignominy

I think at the end of the day it has to do with money.
--Matt Mackowiak, "a Republican consultant who works with Let Freedom Ring, a group set to spend $20 million on political advertising this year"

You don’t have kitchen cabinets made up of well-intentioned friends and neighbors who don’t know what they’re doing but eat up a lot of your time.
--Bob Schuman, "who ran a super PAC called Americans for Rick Perry," and who obviously knows real genius when he sees it, you know, like Fred Davis and Matt Mackowiak

Diabolical. Absolutely diabolical, each and every one. And a bit chilling, they are--these minds that can so easily cut through the clutter and bullshit and see, for instance, and in a flash, that "it has to do with money."

From the Renaissance to Obama; or, Obama's renaissance

Maureen Dowd, fuming over the Catholic hierarchy's ill treatment of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius at Georgetown University on Friday, quotes Mario Cuomo:

If the church were my religion, I would have given it up a long time ago. All the mad and crazy popes we’ve had through history, decapitating the husbands of women they’d taken. All the terrible things the church has done. Christ is my religion, the church is not.

Which reminded me of Bertrand Russell's quotation of a Church historian, from 1529:

My position at the Court of several popes forced me to desire their greatness for the sake of my own interest. But, had it not been for this, I should have loved Martin Luther as myself, not in order to free myself from the laws which Christianity, as generally understood and explained, lays upon us, but in order to see this swarm of scoundrels put back into their proper place, so that they may be forced to live either without vices or without power.

And both quotes brought to mind Reinhold Niebuhr's early 1930s thesis (in Moral Man and Immoral Society) of virtuous men and women somehow surviving, even thriving, within a universe filled by what Niebuhr saw as inevitable institutional corruption. Loosely, it is possible for the "moral man" to remain good and moral, but once he begins consorting, with a view to governing, with others--some of whom may not share his natural enthusiasm for goodness--then heaven help him, and us.

In the spheres of religion and politics, we have for centuries watched in frustration the madness of institutional thought, the overreaching acts of fallen men, the bounding leaps from stifling orthodoxy to anarchic heterodoxy, and the human descents of harsh collectivisms and even harsher fascisms.

In our revolutions and reactions, we don't seem to "get it"; we seem, rather, to be doomed to some sort of mad, Nietzschean loop.

Which is why, just to bring us up to the present and to lasso some of the above vastness into a tidier and more useable form, I admire Barack Obama. Unlike so many of the witless, ill-schooled demagogues who oppose him, he's actually given real thought to this stuff. And the "truth" he's discovered, I think, is the same as noted by the public intellectual Will Durant nearly a century ago:

The truth of conservatism and radicalism is liberalism--an open mind and a cautious hand, an open hand and a cautious mind; the formation of our opinions on large issues is a decreasing oscillation between extremes.

Durant, of course, wasn't talking about the Barbara Boxer kind of liberalism: he meant the philosophical kind, the small-c catholic kind; the kind that Obama heroically persists in reintroducing to the secular sphere; and the kind whose denominational resistance Maureen Dowd laments.

A steal at $17,000

Whenever I wish to teach my young daughter a thing or two about human integrity, my eyes, my thoughts and my heart turn to Washington, D.C., for there--where Madisonian wisdom melds with a Can-Do spirit and tea party thrift--virtue reigns.

And drips. Into pans. Black Hawk helicopter drip pans, to be precise. And at $17,000 a pop (there have been 374 pops so far), they're an absolute steal, since the non-Blue Tag price is a ghastly $19,000. ("[An Army spokesman says] the Army might get more pans if financing is approved." And I kid you not.)

But mostly I point my innocent daughter to Washington in her search for human integrity because there, there on Capitol Hill, our conservative congressfolk generally wish to keep their virtuous deeds quiet, unless asked about them, at which point of course they simply cannot tell a lie. "It’s important that Congress do what it can to provide our military with the best resources to ensure their safety and advance our missions abroad, while also saving taxpayer dollars wherever possible. These dripping pans help accomplish both of these goals," says Ky. Republican Congressman Harold Rogers, who to date has siphoned from taxpayers "more than $17 million in work orders for Phoenix Products," which makes the pans, and which happens to be in Rogers' district, and which happens to contribute to Rogers' campaigns.

[Phoenix Products' owner] said he did not think that his company’s relationship with Mr. Rogers or its Washington connections were a major factor in the Army’s decision to buy his pan. His company got the work, he said, because its drip pan was "just simply a better product."

Now it's true that another company in, ahem, another district, manufactures a similar pan for about $2,500. "It’s not a supercomplex part," said that company's engineer. Yet any company so unimaginative that it fails to connect its Can-Do spirit to the very special kind of tea party thrift which now prevails in Jimmy Madison-hip Washington, well, that's just not the kind of Romneyesque entrepreneurialism mixed with Rogers' kind of public-private virtue that I can hold up for my daughter's proper instruction.

Yesterday I caught a couple of hideous minutes on MSNBC of one Heidi Harris, a raving right-wing talk-radio shrew, excoriating all those "lazy" folks on food stamps, who, I gathered, are exclusively draining America's fiscal resources into the drip pans of national bankruptcy ...

... oh hell, wait, strike that. That sounds a trifle critical of Heidi. And I sure don't mean for it to. Because Heidi is just the type of Madisonian, thrifty Can-Doer whom I trust my daughter will emulate if she hopes to succeed in this virtuous tea-party nation of real human integrity.

An urgent addition to Mann-Ornstein

Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein are back, this time with a fistful of goo-goo prescriptions that both "won’t work" and "will." The list is there to read, so here there is no need to review the five unworkable solutions to the nation's ungodly gridlock and sociopolitical decline as well as their four-point list of "a more sensible and promising reform agenda."

It is worth noting, however, that Mann and Ornstein's final item of unworkability is what we might call the Panglossian approach: the rather ho-hum attitude--prevalent especially among students of history--that American politics has always been a wretched snake pit crawling with personal aggrandizement, institutional cowardice, "acrimony and gridlock," "intense stress and polarization"--yet in frequency and intensity these things peak, and these things dip, and our present evils are merely one chapter of this endless and generally rosy cycle. I confess, as a student of history myself, that I possess perhaps an excessive sympathy for this interpretation.

On the other hand, I and many other observers of America's political scene have for some time compared its present circumstances to those, very loosely, of the sectional crisis; and as Mann-Ornstein dryly note, "it is not exactly comforting to compare what’s going on now to the years leading up to the Civil War."

In short, we cannot prudently dismiss our troubles as inherently, inexorably dismissable, since on at least one occasion the American political system broke down utterly and catastrophically.

Today, the GOP is as sclerotic, as ignorant, as demagogic, as hysterical and as hellbent on apocalyptic destruction in the service of a wholly doomed, virtually deceased ideology as was the Southern Democracy of the 1850s. The latter would have its way, no matter what; it would molest and distort the new Republican Party's countless attempts at compromise and peaceable coexistence; it would simply "make stuff up" about candidate, president-elect and President Lincoln; it would bully and bluster, because it had no legitimate argument; it would, if not forever appeased and coddled and effectively handed control of all separated powers, turn violent.

I'm not suggesting we'll again hear the boom of insurrectionist cannons. But after the above historical review and possibly too lengthy digression, I would suggest that the most straightforward path--unmentioned by Mann-Ornstein--to averting anything close to an 1850s-redux is simply to vote the neolithic nihilists out of power (after all, Mann-Ornstein also concede that Republicans are the problem). Way, way out of power; so humiliatingly, so crushingly that they won't forget it, at least not for another 152 years.

This is not an outright impossibility, some dreamy "what if," some absurdly delusional, democratic success-wish. The anti-GOP sentiment and pro-civilization votes are there, just as they were in 1932, also. But it would require actual engagement by Everyman, which means a professional ground game like we've never seen. 

The 'belief' in paranoia

In relation to Joe Ricketts and Fred Davis's seeming psychotic break, Steve Kornacki writes that

[t]here’s a persistent belief on the right that President Obama snuck into office in 2008 because an awestruck media refused to look into his background and personal associations, preventing voters from learning about all sorts of radical, anti-American connections that would have turned them against the Democratic nominee.

This "belief" is consistent with the paranoid right's threefold dementia, which, as Richard Hofstadter diagnosed it the mid-1960s, boils with conviction that "there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy ... to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism"; that "top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists [radicals] that American policy ... has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests"; and that "the country is infused with a network of Communist [again, radical] agents ... so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans."

To undermine capitalism. Check. To pave the way for socialism. Check. To sell out American national interests. Check. And, at the hands of a left-wing conspiracy so vast and diabolically unscrupulous, to paralyze loyal Americans--i.e., right-wing Republicans. Check. President Obama and his devious crew have had all the boxes checked by the Ricketts and Bachmanns and Palins. But a question remains: Just how many Palins and others are there, really?

This, about his own lifetime's Palinesque species, Hofstadter could not have known in 1964, although his apparent guess essentially narrowed to John Birchers--a decided minority, even if it unquestionably influenced the thinking and beliefs of many mainstream conservatives of that era who were looking for any additional reasons to vote against the hated Lyndon Johnson, and later, his even more hated Great Society.

Neither have we any way of knowing in 2012. My suspicion, however, is that the actual numbers per capita are no larger than they were in '64, and quite possibly smaller. For not merely the paranoid right, but for the far right at large, though, its cynicism has swelled exponentially. In 1964, it took some doing for the average voter to actually find and thus be able to debate a wingnut of authentic Bircher qualities. Today? They're everywhere, thick as thieves, as they say, and possessing about the same sense of personal honor. They'll cynically swear they believe everything Kornacki delineates above; and "they" are virtually the entire, primary-voting Republican Party. So much of what they believe is self-evidently absurd, surely even to them--but it's their story, and they're sticking to it. I suppose their intense cynicism arises from the simple fact that they cannot argue the facts or beat the opposition with facts.

Within mere "beliefs," though--be they political or religious--facts just don't matter.

It's painful

Greg Sargent woefully finds the Romney campaign lathered in teflon. Jonathan Chait finds it "an amalgamation of free-floating conservative rage and anxiety." Steve Benen finds it dishonest, immature, and "silly."

All true, even impeccably true. But the more I watch of the Romney campaign, the more I find it just plain painful.

It's not so much that Mitt Romney is slippery and slick; it is, rather, that he's so goddamn, manifestly amateurish at it.

The man is an embarrassment to political cynicism, he's a screaming insult to cheap opportunism, and Plato's Ideal of demagoguery ought, by rights, to sue him for defamation. But most of all, he is painfully inept.

Is it any wonder that he hides from the press? Now remember, we're talking about the modern press--the press that doesn't know how, or refuses, to actually ask any pertinent questions of politicos. But even this press is too perilous for Mitt Romney; not because some journalist might accidentally stumble on a pertinent question, but because Mitt Romney might tragically think of something unscripted to say.

Whoa. Too dangerous. It's too dangerous for the man who wants to be the leader of the free world to speak, for even a minute or two, extemporaneously. That's not my judgment. It's the singularly sound judgment of Mitt Romney himself, in consultation with his singularly ill-at-ease campaign staff.

And it's painful--painful to watch, painful to ponder, painful to anticipate even one more day.

Asymmetric pontification

Now here's a hard-hitting piece of political journalism.

Dylan Byers, Politico's media critic, opens by quoting Ryan Lizza's description of "asymmetric polarization"--that the Democratic Party has inched leftward, while the GOP has skyrocketed to the right--and then moves to a general discussion and rather unmistakable condemnation of the Sunday talk shows' refusal to book Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein's book-length expansion of this theme. Byers wags his finger:

[T]here's a fair chance the thesis is being overlooked because none of these shows want to appear partisan. Which is exactly how -- and why -- asymmetric polarization works.

But get this. How does Byers open his piece, in his own words?

Whether you agree with the thesis or not, 'asymmetric polarization' is at the very least a compelling topic for debate -- and a pertinent one, as it underlies many progressives' frustration with the deadlock in Washington.

Whether you agree with the thesis or not--which is like opening a discussion of Earth's geology with the line, "Whether you agree that the Earth is spherical or not, it sure is a compelling topic." In other words, Byers does almost precisely that which he bemoans the Sunday shows for doing.

The distinguished (and, by the way, best) literary critic Harold Bloom has famously lamented the death of irony. But Harold, you're just looking in the wrong places.

Bring it on

One could give a lot of deep thought for a very long time to creating the absolute dumbest ad campaign against President Obama this fall, but one could never outdo in rank imbecility what some strategic boyz from the GOP hood, in cahoots with Joe Ricketts, TD Ameritrade's founder and a Chicago Cubs owner, have come up with.

It's so dumb, it reminds me of those goofy CIA anti-Castro plots from the early 1960s, or perhaps some really inventive sort of an Ollie North credit default swap between Middle East and Latin American terrorists. It's so dumb, only the rancid bile that bubbles from diseased minds suffering horribly from Obama Derangement Syndrome could conceive of such a thing.

And it's so extraordinarily dumb, they'll probably do it.

What's "it"? To "jolt" the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. in four months, by doing "exactly what John McCain would not let us do,"say these Mad Men--by running $10 million in TV ads "linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr."; by buying "full-page newspaper advertisements featuring a comment Mr. Wright made"; by renting "outdoor advertisements"; and, get this, by flying "huge aerial banners ... over the convention site for four hours one afternoon."

Wait. Not really Ollie North stuff. More like Jack Lemmon's character of Professor Fate, in "The Great Race," right?

Romney, stuck?

Where has Andrew Sullivan been?

I'd be fine with 3-1 on the spending cuts-revenue increase question. I'd prefer the revenue increases were achieved through tax reform, rather than increasing tax rates. But Romney is stuck with the position that he would even turn down a 10-1 ratio....

Romney is stuck with no such thing. He's forever unburdened by anything so uncontrollably weighty as principles, commitments, or his word. Were he by some miracle to awake tomorrow to a focus-grouped change of right-wing opinion, which overnight had begun to appreciate the immeasurable splendor of a 1-10 ratio of spending cuts and revenue increases, then, well, by God, that would be Romney's position.

It would not be a new position for Romney, mind you. No, no, it would be the position he has always held. This he would let us know, even if it meant correcting a certain Fox News interviewer with the prickly comeback, "Well, Bret, your question is just not accurate. So we're going to have to be better informed about my views on issues."

Man up, Ezra

Ezra Klein is by far one of the better politico-economic analysts in Washington. He is almost painfully fair and objective, which is why he's also nearly always more critical of Republicans--plainly, easily the most criticizable bunch of insidious hooligans in modern political history. They have taken us to unprovoked warfare, to mass unemployment, to intense polarization, to plutocratic heights, to bankrupt lows. They are a scourge. And everyone knows it, even Republicans, who happen to fancy being America's scolding scourge.

So why in God's name would Klein then scribble this titanically unanalytical unbelievability?

I'm not one who thinks Republicans intentionally tank the economy to undermine Obama.

Right. Rhetorical question. Klein wishes not to come across as "polemical." And since accusing Republicans of nakedly unpatriotic behavior--no matter how thunderingly self-evident that behavior is--would be countered by accusations of Klein having committed the egregiousness of inexorable thinking and conclusive writing, Klein passes. Some would say, "Klein wimps out," but let's not be polemical.

Yet peculiar, is it not, that later in the same column he writes:

If I were the market, I'd take the fact that the leader of one of the two parties [John Boehner] has publicly said that he "welcomes" debt-ceiling showdowns as evidence that the United States is almost certain to default on its debt -- if only temporarily -- within the next decade or so.

In brief, what Boehner desires, as Klein implies (correctly), is a near lethal knifing of the U.S. economy. The Speaker's recently iterated threat--"I will again insist on my simple principle of cuts and reforms greater than the debt limit increase"--was reckless, extortionist, needlessly market-spooking and economy-tanking and ... intentional.

All around the edges, Klein points this out; but dead square in the middle, he's "not one who thinks" it's true.

Come on, Ezra. Get real.

The GOP menschen

Ross Douthat, on Americans Elect's unepic failure:

It’s possible to imagine a gifted political figure emerging to fuse elements from the Tea Party and O.W.S. critiques into a plausible third party challenge to politics as usual.... Such a candidacy (Pat Buchanan meets Ralph Nader) wouldn’t have to actually govern the country; instead, its purpose would be to jolt the two parties out of their usual habits and arguments and to persuade one or both of them to adopt some of its ideas.

Embedded in this critique--which helps to impel desperate, ill-advised, ill-considered third-party movements--is the right's fashionable bugaboo of late: that both major parties bear roughly equivalent blame for the wretched condition in which we find ourselves. The national debt and annual deficits? Republicans and Democrats, equally--or thereabouts--responsible. The Iraq war? A Republican and Democratic war. The housing crisis? You have, in equal measure, asses and pachyderms at fault. Wall Street's shenanigans? Republicans and Democrats alike joined with about equal fervor in dismantling the New Deal's financial protections ...

You get the point: Any conservative willing to blame Republicans is a confessor only to the extent of an offsetting, nullifying, symmetrical blame. In numbers, there is safety. In bipartisan guilt, there is anonymity. In 'So's your mama,' there is absolution. When everyone is to blame, no one is to blame--especially those to blame.

What's exceptionally perverse about this conservative tactic is its saintly subtlety. "OK, look everybody, we're willing to accept some of the blame for this contemptible state of affairs, which proves what genuine, above-board, capital fellows we are. And that, by definition, proves that we're not all bad."

What's omitted from that false humility is the final confession that conservatives (pseudoconservatives, actually) are reaping precisely what they wanted, all along. They're willing to take some of the "blame," because the present outcome of their actions is the long-sought, far-right Ideal. "Conservative" pols labored for decades to ratchet up the debt--through the slashing of revenue and the explosion of defense--to unendurable levels, at which point any new revenue would be vigorously anathematized as unacceptably destructive to a wounded, debt-laden economy. The only option: dynamite the New Deal, the Great Society, and any of their corollaries.

Take some blame? You bet they'll take some blame. They're delighted to do so. After all, they're very gracious winners, don't you think? So gracious, they're even willing to share some of the public's condemnation.

What menschen they are.

To Michelle Goldberg, I tip my hat

Applause for the Daily Beast's Michelle Goldberg, whose recent non-offense committed against the woebegone "martyr" of Ann Romney earned the latter this thoughtful non-apology:

I’m truly sorry to have given the right a pretext for another tedious spasm of feigned outrage. I’m sorry to have stirred one of the teapot tempests that now dominate the increasingly dispiriting world of political journalism.

As a student of American political history, I am sensitive to the perspective that every era has come complete with a Glenn Beck, a Westbrook Pegler, or a James Callender. In that, every era has been "dispiriting" in its political journalism and commentary. But Goldberg is right to add "increasingly." When I unloaded on the Post's Jennifer Rubin this morning, it was as much a culmination of my swelling, amplifying fury at the right's generalized chronic madness--its Becks, its Krauthammers, its Limbaughs, its virtually Rubinesque everything--as it was any isolated fury at any particular Rubinism.

The right's singularly intelligent strategy is, I guess, to drive all of us as mad as the right is--to embroil us all in the right's juvenile distractions, its adolescent food fights, its infantile diversions from whatever is truly important. In time, or so the strategy goes, the civilized intelligentsia will walk away in resigned disgust, as will barely interested independent and moderate voters, leaving the political arena almost entirely to the right.

The trick to defeating such a diabolically ingenious strategy, I suppose, is to remain as calm as is psychiatrically possible and to just hang on a bit longer--within each and every day. For every day the right weakens a bit more, as its increasingly frantic volume would suggest. Because the right knows it's doomed--demographically, if in no other way. What we're presently suffering are its last, vile exhalations.

In future eras, perhaps we can get back to merely one or two Becks or Rubins at a time.

Pop goes another poll

"Mitt Romney has a slight edge over President Obama in the race for the White House in the latest CBS News/New York Times poll."

Thus does CBS moan in another of its statistical orgasms. It then whispers softly, though, that "Romney's slight advantage remains within the poll's margin of error"--which of course promptly erases any presumption of a Romney "edge."

Just as promptly comes CBS' flooding memory of those other, empty, meaningless, one-night statistical stands: Ah yes, there was Obama on top, in February and March; there was Romney in the saddle, in January; and also in January the two were melded, from time to time, in an equal, horizontal embrace.

All of which is titillating indeed; but, as mentioned, is utterly meaningless, unless one of them opens roughly an 8-10 point advantage and stays there--which is vastly unlikely to happen now that the whorrifying W. Years are slipping from the nation's memory and the electorate, consequently, has resettled into its roughly 45-45 partisan divide.

Oh, did I mention that presidential elections aren't decided by national popular vote? One can flush just about 44 upcoming, predetermined state returns and concentrate only on the remaining, decisive few. And there "the path" for Romney is, as the Washington Post reported earlier this month, rather "narrow."

(I noticed this morning that David Brooks is calling Obama the "ESPN Man." As silly as that sounds, in its socially scientifically-hipster-Brooksian way, it is also perhaps true in the sense that Obama, in view of last week's developments, has clearly decided to at least give Romney a sporting chance in some of those "bi-," swinging-states, like North Carolina.)

So the next time you experience another of these neck-and-neck national polls, just lie back and have a cigarette handy and try to keep in mind that even the worst of these things is about as good as it gets.

Newsweek cover is an expose of Rubin (et al)

I always knew that Jennifer Rubin was little more than a first-rate, red-lamp hack for the diseased orthodoxy of the contemporary right, but I never realized, until today, that beneath her exterior of grifter opportunism there beat the black heart of a truly malevolent harpy.

That seems over-the-top, you say? Then you haven't yet read her latest bile--"Newsweek cover is a gift to Romney"--in which she "humorously" assaults the magazine's Andrew Sullivan and Tina Brown for having honored Barack Obama for his presidential, human, and philosophical decency in the matter of same-sex marriage. As a mouthpiece for Mitt Romney, Ms. Rubin is altogether unfamiliar with manly integrity; hence she resorts to schoolyard ridicule when she encounters it among the opposition.

The result? Something so unworthy of the Washington Post, it further makes one realize that mainstream journalism, as infected by the predatory right, hasn't hit bottom yet. Here's a retch-worthy sample, whose entirety she has framed as a letter, from Mitt and Ann, to "Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Brown":

I’m not about to go stoking the flames of anti-gay fervor in my base. That’s not my style, and as I always say to Ann, a moment not talking about Obama’s economic bellyflop is a moment wasted. But you’ve done it for me!...

[T]o define the president by a rhetorical, meaningless gesture is really above and beyond anything we expected. The "recovery" president or the "jobs" president would, well, be silly, I guess. But so long as he’s carving an identity on an issue that ranks somewhere below "high speed trains" among voters’ priorities I’m just tickled to death.

To refute, in any itemized way, the "critiques" of Ms. Rubin's petty sarcasm would be but the proverbial exercise in absolute futility: those who understand what Obama has been up against these last three years don't require an itemized refutation; and those who ideologically revel in the GOP's vicious obstructionism are closed to all reason and empirical data, anyway. But for Rubin to mobocratically ridicule President Obama's attention (as well as Sullivan's and Brown's) to a piercing social issue that has caused immense and indescribable personal pain to millions of victimized Americans is, well, I guess one can say it is nothing but the unfurling of Rubin's truest colors.

When will I learn? When will I learn? For the contemporary right and its hired hacks, harpies, and harridans, there likely is no bottom.

Ron Paul's last, last hurrah

"We will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted."

Or, "I quit."

"Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have."

Or, "I'm broke."

There, now wasn't that easier?

I suppose Ron Paul's mealy-mouthedness was in keeping with his followers' refusal to ever concede defeat, to ever bow to reality, to ever say die. But for a straight-talkin' good old boy who claims to always tell things like they are, what an officious, bureaucratic lump of plusungood double-talk he spewed in his last hurrah. 

Romney chooses self as vp mate

Politico revealed today from insider sources that, in a surprise and shocking move, the Romney campaign has decided that Mitt Romney will choose himself as a running mate:

One Republican official familiar with the campaign’s thinking said [the vice-presidential selection process] will be designed to produce a pick who is safe and, by design, unexciting.... The prized pick, said this official: an "incredibly boring white guy."

When asked to comment, Romney said the Romney choice was a brilliant one. "I cannot imagine a more unexciting, incredibly boring white guy to run with than myself," said an obviously self-satisfied Romney. "Our thinking is this: perhaps two privileged, really rich and stunningly dull white dudes," added Romney, "can in some way match the one highly intelligent black politician who is our great misfortune to oppose."

Mrs. Romney, Ann, who happens to have the same first name as Mrs. Romney, agreed. "Mitt made up his own rules in business, too," she said. "Why not give it a go in politics?" 

Hot Air's vapors

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey is giddily stirring the propaganda pot. About the NY Times' story on Obama's "charm offensive" toward the African-American faithful, he writes,

The churches now wonder whether Obama will back efforts to force churches to perform same-sex marriages...:

"Absolutely not," Mr. Obama insisted. "That’s not where we’re going, and that’s not what I want."

Really? The Obama administration’s track record on religious freedom singularly argues otherwise.

Morrissey then misrepresents the ObamaCare-Catholic Bishops donnybrook, and ends by saying that "The only time this President is solicitous of religious freedom and principles is when he’s trying to cover his own rear end."

Yes, yes, of course, the only time....

And there you have it--the language usage of a fanatic.

All this screeching about "religious freedom and principles" from a political faction that would undergo the hysterical vapors should a Muslim, for instance, or a Buddhist, for instance, or an atheist, for instance, ever run for the presidency--in this Constitutional land that guarantees no religious tests for public office.

It's O.K., E.J.

E.J. Dionne gets himself into an uncharacteristic huff:

Secularists, who never liked Catholicism in the first place, want us to leave the church, but so do Catholic conservatives who want the church all to themselves.

I’m sorry to inform the [secularist community] that I am declining its invitation to quit.

It's O.K., E.J. Really, it's O.K. You are your own man. Yet I'm sorry to inform you that organized religion in the civilized world is going the way of the Didus ineptus. Its extinction won't come today, or tomorrow, and for all I know its effective extinction may always be less than total. But it's coming, totally or nearly totally, as the impersonal god of science disseminates its increasing, naturalistic understanding of the universe--and there's no way to prevent it.

I hasten to add that I also have no way of knowing if organized religion's extinction will be, overall, a good development for humankind. Although I belong to no organized religion myself, and indeed I find its elaborate pretensions to universal truths insufferable, I've too much in me of the conservative wariness of unintended consequences to issue a (characteristically) rash, premature opinion. It may very well be that humankind's assorted beliefs in an invisible High Judge of individual humans' eternity have, after all, been a force for good, rather than mere excuses to justify evil against others deemed less good. I just don't know. Unlike Christopher Hitchens, I can't know. And the judgment of history shall remain out on that, probably for several millennia.

But in the meantime, E.J., I do believe I'm safe in my assumption that organized religion--which, I also hasten to add, has absolutely nothing to do with the actual existence or possibility or varying probabilities or non-probabilities of a cosmic Supreme Being--is approaching its expiration date.

Trimming the truth

By what diabolical stretch of which wildest imagination could any ecclesiastical mind genuinely possess this sentiment, as related to the NY Times by a megachurch pastor about President Obama's public shift on same-sex marriage:

"Some of the faith communities are going to be afraid that this is an attack against religious liberty."

Is there really no Biblical prohibition against melodramatic leaders of gullible flocks demagoguing the bejesus out of a non-existent issue?

If there isn't, there should be, because the melodramatic have been spooking the gullible with the above sort of counterfeit hype for a couple of thousand years now. Lordy lord, it's all over, this it it, a real eschatological bobbydazzler, because some king wants a divorce or some president pushes some secular Reason.

Said another pastor about his fellow obscurantists:

"They [are] wrestling with their ability to get over [Obama's] theological position."

Nonsense. Obama's "position" is appropriately temporal, not theological, and they know it.

All of which makes me think that on this matter, at least, they've been reading the wrong source; that they should promptly stop and instead go right to the top, to that ultimate authority on the human condition, Bill Shakespeare, who observed: "To thine own self be true."

Say what?

In a Tea Party Express email, literacy, punctuation and geography continue their incoherent march:

Gov. Palins endorsement carries a lot of weight with conservatives and Tea Party groups. It was just this last week that she put her stamp of approval on Tea Party Express endorsed Nebraska U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mpourdock and is, in our opinion, the one that put him over the top in defeating Sen. Dick Lugar. 

You know, if these tea-party types were to at least take themselves seriously enough to double-check which senate race in which state they're ballyhooing, others might take them a bit more seriously, too. As things are, they're just a joke--and a very bad one at that.

Are Christianity and capitalism incompatible?

In his indispensable NY Times essay, "Capitalists and Other Psychopaths," William Deresiewicz poses a contradiction that is antecedent to the subject:

Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.)

I would quibble with Deresiewicz's parenthetical conclusion--that the "loudest" Christians' insufferable hypocrisy is somehow a matter only for their own demons--but his opening shot is incontrovertible. As I understand Christianity, its essential currents of selflessness and love and community stand in stark opposition to capitalism's selfishness and indifference and atomism. (Indeed, it is this very contrast, this clash, this conflict, that once divided traditional conservatives of the Burkean bent from economic libertarians of Hayekian inclinations; both of whom, in time, discovered Bill Buckley & Friends, whose artificial synthesis of the late 1950s and early 1960s is finally decaying).

But Christianity merely picked up where the theologico-philosophy of antiquity left off. For instance, Plato, whose assorted treatises dealt with the overarching questions of The Good and Justice--as ethereally descended on us earthly ragamuffins--and how in this world we could ever reconcile them with the pettiness of self-glory and self-interest. (Plato's answer, ultimately: a rather brutal communism.) Antiquity never figured it out, either.

Christianity, however, along with the world's other major religions, did divine the Golden Rule, which was something of an improvement on Plato's totalitarianism and Aristotle's often rather weird ethics. Just treat others as you would like to be treated. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward, pretty easy to remember, even if a helluva lot harder to always deploy, especially if one is in business.

One problem, though, is that Christians in business are forever rampaging through their theological memory banks to justify ... pretty much anything, but ordinarily some godawful, unjustified profit. The Bible is full of loopholes, escape clauses, clever ins and outs--and for all its indictments of this or that, one can, with little effort, usually find equally powerful and opposing justifications.

On the other hand, the stand-alone Golden Rule is a tough ethical nut to crack. For Christ's sake just be considerate; and before we act (in business, or everyday life) like the asses we are, we should stop and think, Is this what I'd want, coming in my direction?

This (to return to my customary territory of politics) is, it seems, how Christians such as President Obama comprehend Christianity, and how European-socialist-progressive-conservatives such as President Obama comprehend a more humanized capitalism. What's more, their actions tend to match their rhetoric. And that's more than one can say about most Christians, and virtually all Christian capitalists.

Mitt, Jamie, and Barack

As an epistemological pop quiz, it's hard to know if God is still producing intercessionist miracles--coupling, for instance, in just one week, another stunningly incoherent Mitt Romney with a stunningly incompetent Wall Street bank--or if our evolutionary species has merely turned the regressionary corner and is now becoming miraculously dumb. Is Romney really presidential material? And is our banks learning?

But, whatever, what a miraculous week it was.

Whether it's Fate, Providence, or just happenstance, something is screaming "Look out, you idiots!" I mean, come on. Within hours of one another, Romney again vividly demonstrated that he hasn't an honest thought or a redemptive clue in his perfectly coiffed head, while JPMorgan, which Romney would parole even further and release to the care of the Gilded and Jazz Ages, demonstrated, as the NY Times put it this morning, that "luck is the only thing preventing another meltdown."

True, on the upside, and in evidentiary favor of either His better angels or our evolutionary smarts, there was President Obama's embrace of human rights writ larger. This of course cannot be discounted, even in the wretched week that was. Yet Obama's embrace could, politically speaking, soon resemble Cleopatra's caress of the asp.

I doubt it, though. There are too many factors--too many antidotes--in Obama's favor. But still, when it comes to knowing, really knowing, what America is inclined to do--given that one of its major-party presidential prospects is a hopelessly recidivist nincompoop, and that we're still allowing destruction-slinging Wall Streeters to sling destruction--all one can do is scratch one's befuddled head, and take a wild guess. 

Where do little bullies go? Some, to Breitbart.

Why of course. It's all the sniveling media's fault.

That's the conclusion reached by Breitbart.com about the unconscionable Post story, "which implied without evidence that Mitt Romney was a homophobic bully" [emphasis added].

How did Breitbart reach this conclusion? Mostly through the Post having changed eight words in its orginal 5,500-word piece to a clarifying 14, none of which changed the thrust of the piece's importance.

Which is?

Certainly not that Mitt Romney did stupid things as a teenage schoolboy. The now-manifest fact that Mitt Romney could not, as a candidate for the U.S. presidency, simply confess to what everyone already knows and understands and accepts--that teenage schoolboys do stupid things--is, however, rather disturbing.

Yet by this, Breitbart is unbothered--as are all the other little bullies who grow up to be big bullies of the pseudoconservative persuasion.

Well, that didn't take long

Those marvelously unfettered markets.

Bloomberg:

"There are many errors, sloppiness and bad judgment," [CEO Jamie Dimon] said, as JPMorgan’s stock sank in after-hours trading. "These were egregious mistakes. They were self-inflicted." He called himself and his colleagues "stupid."

Ezra Klein:

[T]he point of the Volcker rule -- and of financial regulation more generally -- isn't to punish banks for being evil. It's to protect the rest of us from banks being stupid.

Heidi Moore, at Marketplace.org:

The Volcker Rule [against banks "putting money in hedge funds, investing in companies, or taking big, stupid bets in the market"] is something that's been talked about a lot but - this may surprise you - it hasn't actually even been written yet. It's currently a legislative whale, at 300 pages, and banks like JP Morgan are still fighting it.

With a lot of help, from Congress' you-know-whos.

A bully's memory

Mitt Romney seems to delight in proving what an incredibly incompetent liar he is, telling Fox News:

I don’t recall the [Lauber] incident myself ...

... and immediately preceding that,

I had no idea what that individual’s sexual orientation might be.

That's a pretty good trick--to not be able to recall an "assault and battery" incident but be able to recall that he wasn't aware at that time of some specific element of that incident.

It's a bit like Romney's denial to Newt Gingrich, during one of the many GOP-debate fiascoes, that he possessed any knowledge of some nasty, "assault and battery" super PAC ad he was running, yet he went on to provide an unprompted, blow-by-blow confirmation of its specifics.

For the remarkably incompetent Romney to have made so much money in the corporate world of buyouts and takeovers, his victims clients must have been as helpless and vulnerable and desperate as John Lauber was.

The Brooks-Krugman Phoney War

Today is Krugman's turn to chase Brooks with scissors:

[O]nce again, authoritative-sounding figures insist that our problems are "structural," that they can’t be fixed quickly. We must focus on the long run, such people say, believing that they are being responsible. But the reality is that they’re being deeply irresponsible.

Earlier this week, Brooks was chasing Krugman:

[We, the authoritative-sounding figures] believe the core problems are structural, not cyclical.

Now that Krugman has counterthrusted, Brooks has the weekend to ponder his next offensive--which will read astonishingly similar to his last offensive--which will propel another Krugman counterthrust ... and so our long national nightmare will proceed.

These two should stop their public squabbling. It's not that Brooks looks a bit silly arguing economics with a Nobel Prize-winning economist. After all, Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize in economics, which means we can all hold out hope for one. It is, rather, that both columnists are forever lambasting grubby politicians for their failure to communicate and compromise and find a way forward, and yet there they sit, truce-less, whacking away at each other with essentially the same argumentative weapons each week -- even though they're not that far apart.

Do we have short-term ills? Of course we do; and this, Brooks would not deny. Do we have long-term ills? Again, yep--and Krugman, yep. Both understand that globalization is at least a factor in domestic economic change, that educational needs alter in format from era to era, that some sort of fundamental tax reform looms unavoidably, and so on. And both understand stimulus, even though one is a tireless, whooping  evangelist for it, while the other is, you might say, a High Episcopalian.

The point is, Brooks wouldn't shut down the government over the attempted passage of Obama's latest jobs bill, and Krugman wouldn't shut down the government, period. In that, there is harmony, and the sort of accord we once had in national politics. So boys, why don't you show them--that is, remind them--how it's done.