p m carpenter's commentary

A Bulworthy refinement

I agree with Chait's blunt assessment that "Bullshit works" but "Bulworth doesn’t," which may surprise, given that I've spent two posts this morning urging the president to "go Bulworth." But, as always, context matters. Chait explains:

Any political scientist will tell you that the scope for possible legislation in this term is very narrow: The median House member is a very conservative Republican who represents a district that voted for Mitt Romney, and whose biggest political risk is losing a primary to an even more conservative Republican.

But most political reporters and analysts don’t pay attention to the political science. They like narratives that revolve around the president as a protagonist. When you confront them with structural analysis that confounds their narratives, they just get upset with you.

In short, for Obama to go Bulworth with the intent of accomplishing much of anything in the 113th Congress is almost pure fantasy, as I earlier labeled the White House's mumbo-jumbo about "focusing" on job creation etc. etc. in the midst of a full-blown GOP hysteria attack that's quite unlikely to abate. The mumbo-jumbo sounds silly and looks silly mostly because it's so immensely, so conspicuously silly to anyone paying any attention.  

No, if a focused Bulworthing there be, it must be dedicated to excising the pseudoconservative tumor, in 2014. Otherwise we'll be doomed for another two years, as will the entirety of Obama's second term. The task of 2014 is herculean, but doable--if Obama and party start now.    

A less than gentle guide to drawing conclusions is what's needed

At this afternoon's joint press conference with the Turkish prime minister, President Obama, in a sadly characteristic response to a reporter's question about the current administration waxing Nixonian, said he would let the folks in the press "draw [their] own conclusions."

We might call that a "permission structure," while adding that it's a big part of the problem.

It was always a foregone conclusion that the Republican smear machine would attribute Obamian malice to every scandal--one real, two invented, and probably counting--but only in the absence of presidential counterpunching do such conclusions join the "foregone" category among the general press. The press will cover the noise, they don't much care if it's from only one source. It's easy, sensationalist copy; let the crackpots be their guide.

I gotta say, the current, scandalous! threesome is damn near a refreshing change, for we're in the fifth year of the GOP's monotonous imbecility and the press' stenography of it. Together, they've undermined the American political system's health and brought it to the point of a chronic disease. Hence the presidential time is now for a crushing, reorienting counterblow--for "going Bulworth" in exposing our potentially fatal attraction to all the present absurdities. (The proximate object, of course, is a reset, in 2014.)    

Now obviously now doesn't mean during a joint press conference with the Turkish prime minister. But I sure hope that Obama is quietly composing a whopper of an asap counterthrust. His homework is already overdue.  

A John Wayne investigation

Abstract of John Boehner's morning press conference:

We in the GOP demand two things: first, mass incarcerations, then, the facts. We're the party of liberty.

Constitutional conservatism indeed. 

When did you last hear of "constitutional liberalism"?

Sen. Rand Paul, speaking last week to a group of right-wing Iowa Christianists:

I’m not advocating everyone go out and run around with no clothes on and smoke pot. I’m not a libertarian. I’m a libertarian Republican. I’m a constitutional conservative.

Oh. So that's what he is.

He's also confused. Libertarians don't "advocate" nude pot-smoking, they merely defend every American's right to get stoned and naked. I've no problem with that.

I do, however, have a problem with Paul's further confusion: that semi-libertarianism amounts to "constitutional conservatism," which even further suggests the inadmissibility of constitutional centrism, or constitutional liberalism, or, for that matter, constitutional socialism. The fundamental purpose of our founding document was to enable the populace (narrowly regarded in electoral terms at the time, but permitted to expand) to shape the nation's (if you will) ideological future, which neither compels us to Social Security nor constrains us to free markets. The choice is up to us--either way, perfectly constitutional.    

Liberals have already conceded the flag, God, and even the word "liberal" to conservatives (who aren't conservatives, but that's another story). Now conservatives are deep into owning the constitution--which is tantamount to Christianists feeling free to commit any desired hypocrisy, because God's on their side.

Rand Paul is of course just one voice in this right-wing chorus. Regrettably, one hears virtually no pushback from the left--and one certainly never hears the phrase "constitutional liberalism." For the reason noted above, that phrase would be just as preposterous as constitutional conservatism, but might others please point this out?

"Going Bulworth"

The NYT's Peter Baker references President Obama's aborted fury:

In private, he has talked longingly of “going Bulworth,” a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought.

Counterbalancing that, though, is either the advice Obama receives, or a presidential predisposition that advisors loyally echo: 

“Probably every president says that from time to time,” said David Axelrod.... “It’s probably cathartic just to say it. But the reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you’re saying.”

At this point, Axelrod's adjectival distinctions escape me.

In a system in which being "truthful" about the opposition--in the sense of being harshly, openly critical--might well gum up the work of achieving the "practical" outcome of moving legislation forward, then prudence would dictate a measured approach.

But Obama doesn't operate in such a system; even the prospect of practical outcomes is a mirage. Instead, Obama operates, or rather is stymied, within a systemic structure which is practically nuts--all for the practical benefit of a uniformly venomous opposition to whom dysfunction and chaos are necessary default positions. Having been fed a pure diet of venom for years, the opposition's hardcore base can tolerate no other; and because the base determines who its representatives are, the latter are left only to cater.

Thus it's not merely a fiction but a practical disservice to the nation for the Obama administration to persist in prattling on about how the president "will continue to focus" on "growing the economy, helping it create jobs, strengthening the middle class, expanding opportunity, expanding security for middle-class families and seniors," as Jay Carney has been implausibly prattling all week.

There is no path, no political mechanism by which Obama could conceivably advance, let alone accomplish, any of these pressing items. For the president and his spokesmen to insist he's focusing on a fantasy is disturbing. By definition it feeds the impression that he's out of touch--untethered from the practical reality of Republican perfidy.

You "want to be practical," Mr. President? Then tell the nation the truth.

Housekeeping

Sorry but I had no choice. Since Typepad can't stop spam from flooding the comments section, and I haven't the time to police the area, I've had to opt for a "randomly generated verification code" for all commenters to enter before posting. I'll undo this action in a few days and see how things go. If no spam gets through, I'll leave it undone. Again, my apologies. But it's either this, or dozens of Cheap Meds! ads after every post. 

The trashiest Allen & VandeHei yet

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, Politico's dual foghorn of hysteria squared, are positively giddy over the Obama administration's scandal-plagued prospects. I could find only one incontrovertible sentence in their sadistic gushing: 

[T]he press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

Gushing and giddy, yes. Of course it is. But also a kind of notice. They're virtually declaring their partisan ground, or at least their anti-Obama ground. Not because aggressive reporting should always be the press' job, but because they spy a long-awaited opening to "get" Obama.  

Trashy. Really trashy.

***

update--and a relevant musing:

I guess I wasn't the only one who sighed. I didn't know when I read the Politico piece that it had already made the blogospheric rounds. Sargent addresses it at some length, as, I gather, others have. That's their style, and there's certainly nothing wrong with it, but I don't see the point in "fleshing out" the obvious. And isn't that what Allen and VandeHei's unprofessionalism is? Bloody obvious?

This by way of a kind of confession. I have struggled for some time with lengths of discussion in posts. I once wrote longer ones. Much longer. They largely went unread in their entirety. I've shortened them purposefully--there's no reason to write 850 words when 250 can cover the same territory. I'm not comparing myself to Philip Roth, but he once observed that most of his writing career had been devoted to "amplify, amplify, amplify"; then he saw Saul Bellow doing "compress, compress, compress." He was intrigued, and he followed suit. (I'm glad he didn't do so prior to Sabbath's Theatre.) Anyway, that seemed like a reasonable approach to me. So I've shortened discussions.

Whenever longer discussions seem necessary, I'm happy to oblige. But with trash like the Politico piece, I just don't see much to elaborate on--I see little to nothing that hasn't already occurred to most any reader, so I shoot for either brevity or silence.

I trust you're OK with this. It saves everybody a lot of time, all the way around. 

Pressure works

The Hill:

The White House on Wednesday asked Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to reintroduce a media shield law amid criticism of the Department of Justice’s subpoena of Associated Press phone records....

A spokesman for the New York lawmaker said Wednesday that Schumer would reintroduce the language that was approved in a 15-4 bipartisan committee vote [in 2009].

That would be the media shield law the White House opposed, which prompted Schumer to lament at the time that Obama's "opposition to the fundamental essence of this bill is an unexpected and significant setback." Notwithstanding Carneyesque gobbledygook intended to muddle the issue of WH inconsistency, that opposition has now evaporated. Finally, the First Amendment, a proud 1; Obama, a chastened o.  

But that's OK. It's in the primordial nature of the executive beast to gorge power. The Founders expected most presidents to be gluttons--to jealously retain whatever powers have been amassed as well as ramify more, hither and yon, anew. Hence the constitutional system's Chuck Schumers and the occasional Supreme Court to tell the likes of Dick Nixons to go shove it.  

But in this WH capitulation, there's no shame. It's smart politics--not to mention a necessary protection--even if the chief executive will have a hard time swallowing it.

***

Correction: The WH opposed the original shield bill, but not the compromise bill that Schumer's to reintroduce. 

Sober minds think alike

Speaking on MSNBC, David Axelrod revealed why no with a dram of political sense could have been involved in the IRS scandal: "[I]f anybody political was involved in this, they would say, 'Are you kidding me?' "

Speaking to Politico, an AP reporter revealed why no one with a dram of political sense could have been involved in the Justice Department scandal: "No one was yelling and screaming, but it was like, 'Are you kidding me!?' "

Repent!

Milbank on WH Press Secretary Carney, who said yesterday that

Obama’s love of press freedom “is backed up by his support for a media shield law.” This would be the shield law that died in Congress in 2010 because of Obama’s objections.

Read the link. I'd forgotten the issue. Jay Carney, meet Baghdad Bob.

The much larger point is that this, the AP story, is the killer story. Benghazi and the IRS' foolishness are insignificant compared to a scandal in which the press itself is the offended party, from which no administration would ever again get a fair shake on any other issue--not until the press is satisfied that that administration has duly, properly humbled itself.  

You can rage that that's grossly unfair and that the press is behaving like privileged frat boys. Rage away. But it won't alter the fundamental reality of the Fourth Estate's working relationship with the executive branch--and the latter needs the former to successfully engage and destroy the imminently apocalyptic GOP.

Obama must swallow his pride, bend his knee, and publicly pray for the press' forgiveness--and thereby convert the press from enemy to ally. He needs them, as many as he can get.

Holder and the complication of Obama's life

Eric Holder just complicated Barack Obama's life.

In the aftermath of the immensely stupid Bay of Pigs invasion, President Kennedy, in a brilliant public-relations move, took personal responsibility for the fiasco. This stroke of ingenuity swept his embarrassment from the forefront and added double digits to his approval rating. Nobody's perfect, and the American public likes to hear its imperfect leaders admit the obvious. 

A similar resolution awaits President Obama's handling of the brutish, clumsy A.P. story.

Much as Kennedy's Bay of Pigs was founded on the accumulated stupidity of the previous administration, Obama's indifference to the press' constitutional prerogatives as well as the Justice Department's own regulating guidelines was built on the amassed abuses of several preceding administrations. So goes executive power, whose growth the left intensely disdained under George W. Bush, but for which it has found a tempered understanding under Obama. So goes partisanship.

At any rate, admitting to such abuse seems Obama's smartest public relations option. I suspect he'll get around to it. But Eric Holder complicated matters yesterday when--commenting on an open investigation about which he had just pledged not to comment--he grieved that the A.P.'s story involved one of "the top two or three most serious leaks that I’ve ever seen. It put the American people at risk. And that is not hyperbole."

Which was rank hyperbole. The A.P. initially had held the story at the administration's request; it went forward with publication only hours before the administration was to release the story itself.

And all that, Obama will have to explain as he rolls out a public apology. He'll need to isolate the seriousness of the administration's leak, which may or may not have put the American people at risk, from the entirely distinct seriousness of the press' constitutional right to print the leak.

Somewhere in that messy mix Obama will have to untangle Holder's exaggerated, complicating conflation of the two. The attorney general would have better served his boss by simply reserving comment, as he had promised to do.   

Obama's lucky week

This may seem like an odd time to say this, yet there's probably no more appropriate time to say it: Barack Obama remains the luckiest politician alive.

If he were Jimmy Carter this week's triumvirate of scandals would have dripped out in successive months; just as one quieted down, another would have been waiting in the wings, ready to plague all the above-the-folds. Instead, Obama has had the good fortune to confront all the outrage collectively. The country's capacity for scandal and outrage is limited, so everything above that indefinable tolerable level is squandered--it's the excess of outrage that Republicans will never recapture for what could have been the maximum political advantage of drip, drip, drip.

This isn't to say that Obama is himself abbreviating his good fortune, however. This isn't the time for "cool." That routine may awe once again his most dedicated base, but the country would, I'm sure, appreciate a presidential press conference in which, with considerable animation and proper indignation, he took all comers--not merely a question or two while standing next to David Cameron. And Obama should open the presser by announcing the brutal unmoorings of ... whomever. That would place at least one necessary punctuation mark in this scandalous narrative, many more of which will necessarily follow. He should start putting them down now.

But, having said that, it still astonishes: Obama's luck seems endless. From landing Alan Keyes as a senatorial candidate to taking his second presidential term's lumps virtually all at once, well, it makes one think that somebody up there must really like him.  

The latest Drudging

Drudge is going to be fun to follow for a while. The top headliner, for the moment:

McCONNELL: 'We've Only Started to Scratch the Surface of This
Scandal'...

No need to click on which scandal. To the right, they're all fun-gible.  

Strike 'The Battle Hymn'

The pathologically sunny Greg Sargent:

Liberals who are dreading the scandal-mania that is taking hold should note that it contains a potential upside: It could make a Grand Bargain that includes cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits even less likely than it already is. That’s because when scandal grips Washington, a president actually needs his core supporters more than ever to ward it off, making it harder to do anything that will alienate them.

Oh Greg you silly thing. If there's a way to fuck this up, the American left will find it.

Run whatever sells

Is the right even capable of getting a story straight?

Townhall.com, minutes ago: "BREAKING: Eric Holder Recuses Himself From Leak Investigation." Yes you read that right, the A.G. is on the run. Then came the exciting, explosive lede:

Attorney General Eric Holder has recused himself from the Associated Press leak investigation. He will officially announce his recusal at a press conference Tuesday afternoon. Fox News is reporting his recusal comes partially because Holder has testified about potential national security leaks surrounding a May 7, 2012 Associated Press story.

All of that absolutely true--except Holder's recusal came last year.

Does this embarrass Townhall? No way. Shift to bottom of story:

UPDATE: During [THE] press conference Tuesday afternoon, Holder said he recused himself from the case "early on."

Townhall has left the "BREAKING" headline up, however. It sells better than reality.

The awful truth, per Kessler

One of the pleasures that WaPo subscribers will be paying for by this summer will be that of Glenn Kessler awarding, for instance, President Obama "Four Pinocchios" for such wretched nefariousness as claiming that the phrase "act of terror" is pretty much the same as "act of terrorism."

Well gee I don't know, Glenn. Is there a difference between "ass" and "assclown"?

Never assume

In a really perverse way, President Obama is proving that any assumptions of reasonableness will always be violently rejected as a foreign invader by the host of body politics.

Assume nothing, especially reason. Stay out in front, and stay there aggressively. And if you must assume something, then assume only that reasonable acts will be conspiratorially twisted beyond recognition--so, see Number Two, stay out in front of every conceivable twist.

And this, as Milbank notes, the Obama administration did not do with respect to those behind-the-scenes Benghazi emails:

They didn’t say anything publicly in March when they provided congressional investigators with e-mails showing that White House officials had been involved in an intense fight between the CIA and the State Department over the drafting of the points and that at least a dozen versions had been written.

The administration's silence--its assumption of reasonableness; that it had done its job and there the matter would innocently lie--rendered yesterday's presidential "outrage" moot. Said Obama: 

The e-mails ... were provided by us to congressional committees. They reviewed them several months ago, concluded that in fact there was nothing afoul in terms of the process that we had used. And suddenly, three days ago, this gets spun up as if there’s something new to the story. There’s no "there" there.

Of course there isn't. But it would have helped had the "nothing afoul" been advertised loudly by the administration in March--not yesterday. Instead, the administration assumed a certain amount of reasonableness by, I don't know, somebody. And you just can't do that. Not in Washington.

THIS impeachment: the deciding showdown

I must be totally out of the liberal loop. I thought that the GOP's routinization of madness was a political given, ergo, that talk of impeachment would come as naturally as this spring day, and, accordingly, that any folks who openly speculated on the odds of presidential impeachment proceedings weren't really speculating on the odds nor necessarily endorsing the proceedings--they were simply observing the objective reality of GOP horror.

Or so I thought. And it seems that's what the Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky thought; but now I see that he was out of the liberal loop, too.

He writes that he caught flack last week for noting the obvious: Brace for impeachment. He then goes on, at some length, defending himself for having made note of an enormously looming reality. "I was on the business end of a small number of angry tweets from liberal readers," he grimaces, "and I see that the UK Daily Mail trotted out my statement in a way that made it sound as if I thought it was legitimate." 

Well that's what you get, Dr. Tomasky, for telling a patient he has gall stones. Don't you see? It's the same as condoning his gall stones. It's not at all the same, of course, except that it's precisely the same--on Twitter, in the blogosphere, within the reckless misapprehensions of cable news.

At least Tomasky insists that liberal anger embodied a "small number," even if smaller is always louder. What won't remain small, however, is our resurrected confusion over What rises to the level of an impeachable offense. Remember that chestnut from the Clinton era, trotted out every 30 seconds every bloody night by every talking head on every deafening cable channel? 

Tomasky pre-adds to the confusion. He begins by observing that "yes, folks; under the Constitution, the President must do something" to be impeached, yet he later concedes that "A high crime or misdemeanor is whatever the House majority decides it is." The former is flawed; the concession is correct. It's that straightforward. But that doesn't mean we won't be subjected to inexhaustible debates on which is accurate.

What's singularly relevant, though, are those two little words, "House majority."

For the majority in place is mad, quite mad, as routinely mad as any political party's routinization of madness can get. The coming attempted coup won't be about President Obama--no more about him, anyway, than the GOP's previously attempted coup was about Bill Clinton. It will be about the GOP's incurable madness, and whether this republic, the world's oldest representative democracy, will tolerate it any longer. 

A perfectly legal outrage

When scandal is scandalously legal and in fact carried out by the nation's top law enforcement agency:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news....

The Obama administration has aggressively investigated disclosures of classified information to the media and has brought six cases against people suspected of providing classified information, more than under all previous presidents combined.

One can certainly understand the administration's purpose in aggressively investigating leaks; presidents and national security officials get nervous when highly sensitive, classified information becomes public currency.

But this president, of all presidents, what with his scholarly background in constitutional law and history, should himself understand and make clear to subordinates the notoriously deeper national harm performed by the "chilling effect" of spying on First Amendment sources--this time with the added, Nixonian touch of a broad and prolonged dragnet effect.

The irony. One real scandal finally comes to light, and it's perfectly legal.

How to whip up a scandal

On "Hardball" tonight we watched a media-gushing, Whitewater-like Washington scandal in the making. In the persons of HuffPost's Howard Fineman and Time's Joe Klein we witnessed speculation passing for reporting, guesswork substituting for legwork, and self-inflated splashing about at the vortex. There was however no news.

Fineman was proudest about the "pushback" he had already received from the White House on his "reporting." What reporting was that? From his column:

You don't have to be a Republican conservative or a tea party member or a hardened cynic to wonder who in the Obama campaign or the Obama White House might have known about inquiries into the tax status of Obama's foes.

And from crack-analyst Joe Klein we heard three times that this scandal will really explode--brace yourself--if it's connected to the White House. This would be big news. This would be, ahem, very harmful to the WH's political interests. Three separate times Klein felt compelled to enlighten us on this fine point of political acuity. I repeat, Joe Klein is a crack analyst.

I swear I was almost embarrassed for the two of them. Analysts, indeed.

Glenn Beck's unified theory of ultimate relativity

Sure it's confusing, but great minds think elaborately and spherically and thus can connect the seemingly scattered dots. Here's Glenn Beck's vast brain, at work today--with the dots helpfully highlighted:

America, if you don’t pay attention to what they did with the IRS and Benghazi, next year, your health care goes to the IRS.... So now you have to turn over all your medical records.... If you don’t think that they won’t use that to source and to sort people and to intimidate and to take away your guns, quite honestly....

What happened with the IRS was an Inquisition. It targeted Jews. If you were the wrong religion, if you were Jewish, if you were the wrong religion--submit!

When you have a government going in and putting a litmus test together for a religion, you are developing a very frightening state. If there aren’t impeachment hearings, if there aren’t massive firings and if there isn’t a change in the media, you are already operating under tyranny.

Go ahead, take your time. It's needed to sort all that out.

Republicans own the IRS scandal. Really.

Drudge's top blare is NEW 'ENEMIES LIST,' which links to a Fox News story on you-know-what.

Why, though, would anyone--especially anyone on the right--have ever expected competence from an agency headed up by a George W. Bush appointee? 

One well-known purpose of the Bush administration was to surround the president with a horde of breathtaking incompetence and thereby prove to the masses that government is every bit as useless as the right had for some time advertised it. Now it comes to light that the very highest level at the IRS possessed no clue as to what was occurring in its administrative outposts and provinces, and the right wingers are--shocked?

Hell they oughta be celebrating. This is a vindication of the W. Project--reducing government to its dumbest possible essence, then waiting for the thrill of blowback.

This is it, in all its incompetent splendor.         

You could put it to music

Kilgore:

Before long, I betcha, two strands of thought on the Right will converge: the notion that Romney lost because “discouraged” conservative white voters stayed home, and a revival of the same argument we heard after 2008 that the GOP candidate failed to exploit Obama’s vulnerabilities aggressively enough (you know, William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright in 2008, Benghazi! and now the IRS in 2012).

The bigger picture here is that we are hearing the death rattle of the brief and often insincere GOP “rebranding” project.  Who needs Latinos or better GOTV or a less savage image? All the Republican Party needs is more vetting of the opposition, and ruthless pols willing to take the fight to the enemy without inhibition. So much for the “fever” breaking.

That prognosis was clear during the run-up to the fiscal cliff. Remember that? Seems like years ago, but don't let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, 'tween election and cliff, that was known as Hopelot--that most fleeting of moments when we genuflected, clasped our hands, and prayed fervently that the crimson plague of GOP mania had lifted somewhat.    

No fucking way. In fact Republicans were crazier than ever. The fiscal cliff charade made that clear, and that's why I've held no hope or breath for any Republican reasonableness--on anything--since.

Two words say it all

President Obama's remark at this morning's press conference that the GOP's Benghazi Scandal!--that would be Scandal I, distinct from the IRS Scandal!, which is Scandal II, although Scandal II comes subsequent to what the GOP has cast as an unspeakable, five-year litany of Obamian horrors not seen since the likes of Watergate--but I digress, his remark this morning that it all "defies logic" is the perfect synopsis of the GOP position on ... everything.

The complete list might lessen "The Scandal (II)"

The Washington Post, on the IRS story:

Of the 298 groups selected for special scrutiny, according to the congressional aide, 72 had “tea party” in their title, 13 had “patriot” and 11 had “9/12.” Lerner, who apologized Friday for the targeting of such groups, described it as a misguided effort to deal with a flood of applications for tax-exempt status. She did not release the names of the groups.

Insufficiently noted is that these loosely named targeted groups number only 32 percent of the total. What are some possibly identifying connections among the much larger majority of the targeted groups? Another 68 percent received "special scrutiny." Why? 

The Treasury Department's audit, to be released this week, might diffuse the partisan emphasis on "tea party" etc., although it certainly won't put a halt to all the yapping.

One step short, one step closer

Although the NY Times editorial headline is one word too long--"Who Can Take Republicans Seriously?"--the editorial's concluding paragraph falls one step short:

Republican lawmakers have become reflexive in rejecting every extended hand from the administration.... Under the circumstances, Mr. Obama would be best advised to stop making peace offerings. Only when the Republican Party feels public pressure to become a serious partner can the real work of governing begin.

The paragraph follows a brief review of the GOP's comic hypocrisy and abysmal treachery on default-avoiding grand bargains, thus its urging of Obama to "stop making peace offerings" and cease efforts at fiscal governance would seem to be limited to that one issue.

The paragraph's language, however, is diplomatically, tantalizingly vague. It does and does not limit itself to the one issue. Indeed, if peace offerings and governing efforts are a waste of presidential time with respect to a grand bargain--the potential repository of all the GOP has pretended is most holy--is it not logically compelling that presidential time is being wasted as well on lesser issues before the Republican-poisoned 113th Congress?   

What's more, the final sentence is a throwaway line--an obligatory, civics-text tribute to the enduring hope of a domestic "Peace for our time," which everyone knows is hopeless. The Republican Party serves only an entrenched base, and therein lies the larger immovable obstacle to any "serious" partnership in "the real work of governing," which by definition means compromise.   

This loops us inexorably back to the paragraph's first sentence: Republicans "have become reflexive in rejecting every extended hand from the administration." This, as we know, applies to far more than a grand bargain. And when every compromise-seeking negotiation is doomed, the political result is as much a humiliating string of presidential and Democratic defeats as offensive displays of Republican intransigence. That, anyway, is the public's perception. Sure Republicans are asses; still, the Dems are failing.    

And that leads us just as inexorably to the only "long game" left to the president and his party. Quit trying. Move on to '14. Merely racking up more legislative failures betwixt now and then won't impel the public to take such extraordinary pity on Democrats that the electorate will flock to the polls in a sympathetic show of support. Dems will just look pathetic, and that doesn't inspire voter mobilization.

They could however politically and philosophically confront Republicans through avoidance; they could devote the next 17 months to the hope of the Obama administration's final two years by making exhaustively clear appeals to the public that only a congressional housecleaning can move the country forward. 

It's a risky strategy. Much of it would go into the electorate's ashcans of inattention and apathy. Yet whatever risk there is, it is negligible, for the alternative is defeat after defeat--and growing demoralization.

I suspect that's where the Times' conclusion was going--that it merely postponed taking the final step.

A hysterically lovely piece of anti-hysteria, from Ross Douthat

With immense confidence in the conservative superiority of empirical facts over the pathetic liberalism of vague humbuggery, Ross Douthat sets out to answer the question: "Where might an enterprising, public-spirited I.R.S. agent get the idea that a Tea Party group deserved more scrutiny from the government than the typical band of activists seeking tax-exempt status?"

As you might suspect, this poser proves a cinch for the ruthlessly analytical Douthat, and a real embarrassment for the sloppy left:

Oh, I don’t know: why, maybe from all the prominent voices who spent the first two years of the Obama era worrying that the Tea Party wasn’t just a typically messy expression of citizen activism, but something much darker--an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.

Yes exactly. All the prominent voices--that's the precisely traceable source of the I.R.S.' leftist paranoia. All of them. Every last one of them. Surely you know them; they're quite prominent.  

Having delivered this surgical strike upon the liberal forces of subterranean ambiguity, does Douthat withdraw from the field, content with his unparry-able thrust? No way, babe. He surges even more precise, more empirical, reminding us of the 1930s' "media-fed fear" (media, of course=liberal) of Bundists and Silvershirts, of the "many liberals" in the 1960s who saw right wingers on the grassy knoll, and the "many people"--by now, after this litany, one presumes on the left--who refashioned the Oklahoma City bombing into an expression of all domestic militia.

That darned left. If only it painted with a narrower brush; if it could only resist the temptations of generalization, thereby leaving the paranoid-prone mind of some feckless I.R.S. agent untormented. Alas, as the Tea Party formed, "liberals consistently echoed" an Obama administration D.H.S. report that warned of sweeping right-wing violence. Hence some agent's fecklessness materialized.

I don't know what, or whom, Douthat's been reading. He discloses nothing, reveals nothing, in effect, says nothing--nothing of any real empirical value. He merely stabs at liberalism's ecumenical paranoia with his own blunt, massively paranoid, ubergeneralizing knife. But if Douthat is at all genuine in his desire to get at some underlying truth, he might ponder the veritable mountains of center-left columns and blogospheric sites such as this one that have for years warned of this radicalized Republican Party--not so much the Tea Party, which is merely its dominant, guiding faction--which is institutionalizing a kind of bureaucratic, procedural terror to dismantle legitimate government.  

"Peeples"

Worst.

Movie.

Ever.

Made.

 

I do so like short film reviews.

Actually, you should go see it, just to memorialize it in the dark recesses of your tortured mind. Sure, you'll curse me for it, but you can look at it this way: As you leave the theatre you'll know that you'll never see another movie quite this bad. Not ever. Not ever again. From "Peeples," it's all uphill.

Liberal outrage already outrageous

I once had drinks with a historian of the American Army in the Second World War who held forth for hours (it was a lot of drinks) with tales of a Red, White and Blue that was, as he repeatedly framed it, second to none when it came to rape and plunder. The man knew his facts, he knew the incidents, he grasped the unilateral history of it all; he could rattle off the lurid chronology of the U.S. Army's war crimes with despairing ease.    

What he lacked was perspective. In the history of Allied war crimes the American Army committed its awful share, no doubt. The hellish inhumanity of war is inescapable, even for the guys in white hats. Yet compared to the immense, bureaucratically condoned, officially encouraged ravages of the Soviet Red Army, American transgressions fade into the fog of idiosyncratic, unauthorized brutality. When it came to rape and plunder in the Western theatre, the U.S. Army was indeed second--a distant second--to at least one.

It's an imperfect analogy. Nonetheless I'm already grimacing at liberals' rather extravagant storming of the IRS story. It seems like overkill--a demonstration in proving one's extraordinary virtue by exerting one's overly fastidious sense of splashy objectivity and anguished, ethical exhibitionism. The right has a big case here! This is outrageous! Shades of Watergate!  

Nonsense.

So far, at least, the IRS scandal is barely a scandal. Of course an investigation should ensue and heads should roll and all that. Yet at present there's no more evidence of any high-level participation in this seeming instance of political persecution than there is of any high-level corruption behind "The Benghazi Affair." 

Liberals have rightly scoffed at the latter, yet they're feeding the frenzy of the former.

Bad form. Really bad form. The IRS story is a distant second to real, scandalous skulduggery. And until there's some evidence to the contrary, liberals should treat it as such. One doesn't get points for overweening rectitude.

Free the House emails!

While watching Jay Carney fight off a press corps with nothing but a sensationalist ringing in their heads about internal deliberations which any other administration would never have released because of executive privilege I began praying for Carney to demand that John Boehner release all House conference emails and private memoranda relating to the majority's planned assault on the economy this summer. 

Maybe I'm just silly, but a premeditated, forthcoming, full-scale attack on the American people and world economy seems like a bigger story than post-incident email shufflings over one night's violent attack in a persistently violent region. 

***

Correction: My use of "release," above, was inaccurate. The WH originally made the emails available for review--not release:

Weekly Standard:

The White House provided the emails to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees for a limited time and with the stipulation that the documents were available for review only and would not be turned over to the committees.

ABC News:

White House documents reviewed by Congress suggest a different story.

ABC News has obtained 12 different versions of the talking points....

My apologies, as well as my thanks to reader BobB.