p m carpenter's commentary

The Moron-Count: More than 4 out of 10

My Internet was out for most of this morning, so for my current-events edification I was forced to resort to cable, whereupon I landed in "Morning Joe"'s little coffee klatch, and thereupon strongly regretted it.

The cause of my remorse was an MSNBC graphic, derived from the headcounters at Gallup, showing two figures; one of no surprise, but the other a real jaw-dropper:

Would you consider -- I'm paraphrasing here, with only memory to serve -- voting for Sarah Palin in 2012? headlined the graphic. Among Republicans, unsurprisingly (although, it seemed to me, perhaps a trifle inflated), the yea-count was 71 percent.

But across the electorate at large? Forty-three percent responded in the affirmative -- and the poll was taken post-rambling-resignation speech.

Furthermore, as Gallup enumerated this most curious state of affairs, 53 percent of everyone polled agreed with the proffered statement that the media's treatment of the soon-to-be ex-governor has been "unfairly negative."

Now, the 53 percent figure I came close to understanding, since the electorate detests the media about as much as it does pols. But to see that more than four out of 10 would voice an unprompted willingness to cast a vote for such an indisputable blob of scatterbrains on stilts was nothing short of appalling.

There is, however, one possible mitigation, although it's purely notional. And it is this: If Gallup were to call me today to ask about my willingness to vote for Sarah Palin in 2012, my eager, immediate, even unthinking response would be, "You betcha!" And maybe I'm not alone.

Anything to lighten the political atmosphere and to urge her forward. Run, Sarah, run. We -- especially those of us in desperate need of cheap entertainment -- are beggin' ya.

Funnyman Franken needs your prayer-offerings

If, as a yeomanly United States senator, Al Franken manages to retain his famous sense of humorous sanity, it will be nothing short of a minor miracle.

Honest to God, I feel sorry for the guy. He seems to want to legislate, in earnest, for the benefit of Minnesotans as well as the nation -- but, to quote King Lear, O, that way madness lies.

That's not to suggest that Franken is naive. He's been around the political block and he knows -- in large but still academic part -- what's in store. So, in best junior-senatorial fashion, he has chosen to start off by fitting in.

"Sen.-elect Al Franken’s first day on Capitol Hill was Not A Circus, and the soon-to-be junior senator from Minnesota was Not Funny At All," riffed the Politico. "Those were the messages Team Franken toiled to convey to the press and the public Monday, tamping down anything that resembled a spectacle surrounding Franken’s arrival and stressing the former comedian’s sober side."

Which he may wish, soon, to nevertheless intoxicate with some sanity-saving levity. For it's further reported, with a few realistic modifications added here, that yesterday he met with "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to discuss the agenda" -- legislative delays, nomination holds, filibuster threats, bribery negotiations, counterproductive amendments, private airings of petty grievances, and in general the wholesale sell-out of the democratic will -- "for the week ahead."

Said peppy Franken-adviser Eric Schultz: "I think you’re going to find, as Minnesotans found, that he’s a serious, thoughtful person who wants to come to Washington to work" -- and try not to leave drooling, babbling, sedated, and straitjacketed.

But perhaps Franken is just playing it "solemn and staid," as he was additionally described yesterday, while he quietly goes about collecting plentiful comedy material for "Saturday Night Live" or a blockbuster Michael Moorelike film, "Dude, Where's My Democratic Senate?"

Whatever the case I wish him all the best, and I pray for his sanity.

Sarah Palin could always join the Democrats

In this morning's column I referenced two passages from Vanity Fair's "It Came from Wasilla" as most exemplary of the Alaska governor -- Sarah Palin's "extravagant self-regard," which finds itself comfortably housed within "a political party that ... often demands qualities other than knowledge" -- but upon further reflection, I believe I was remiss.

There was a third -- today a rather pedestrian, ho-hum quality which invited oversight, but whose implications are politically transcendent: "Palin has always been a party of one."

With respect to Palin alone, VF's Todd Purdum noted she possesses "no political principle or personal relationship [that] is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is 'conservative,' whatever that means, but ... in a June interview with Sean Hannity, she sounded like a New Dealer when she proudly proclaimed that 'a share of our oil-resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources—imagine that.' In the next breath, sounding like a 'starve the beast' conservative, she said she hoped the price of oil, the principal variable of state revenue, would not rise too much."

Confused, contradictory, and, as Purdum put it, "all over the lot in the articulation of her platform." Yet Palin is hardly alone, and that's where, logically, the "transcendent" part comes in -- and it's something that Democrats, in general, and on a macro level, are far more guilty of than Republicans.

As a party they're confused, contradictory, and all over the lot. Now it's true that ever since Democrats broke from their nineteenth-century and Southern states rights' mold they've tried their best to square with Will Rogers' observation about political incoherence, yet for a few decades running they at least -- roughly -- stood for civil rights, equal opportunity, progressive taxation, and (post-Vietnam) a vaguely intelligent and humbler foreign policy.

Today? Take any Democratic pol and you're also taking your pick, philosophically speaking. He or she might be neoconservative in foreign-policy approach, might not; might be for more equitable taxation, might not; might wish to legislatively overcome historical traditions of inequality, might not; or, in the most current debate, might demand health care for all, or, might not.

Each is, Palinlike, merely "a party of one." And since overcoming many of society's inbred problems first requires a factual, non-subjective, pragmatic, one-size-does-indeed-fit-all approach, the Democratic Party's collectivity of individual deviations means that it, too, is fast becoming "a political party that ... often demands qualities other than knowledge."

Al Franken, Daily Kos, CQ, Health Care, and NO EXCUSES

As CQ Politics alone has just pointed out, again, for the gazillionth but hardly final time, Al Franken's ascension (or descent, if you prefer) into the now-60-Democratic-member U.S. Senate means less than elementary math might tell us.

It's more like a job for theoretical physics, perhaps even metaphysics, for "In a caucus that now spans the ideological spectrum from Franken on one end to Arlen Specter on the other, the Democrats" -- our nation's fuzziest, most insubstantial word -- "can’t actually do whatever they feel like doing."

CQ emphasized its didacticism with a specific senatorial example -- that being the Democratic-caucusing Joe Lieberman, who, having received in the past four years $423,644 from insurance companies, $359,870 from health professionals, and $297,090 from "pharmaceuticals/health products," according to OpenSecrets.org, is now selflessly "skeptical" of a public option in any health-care reform bill.

So, bingo, right there, on just this one issue, you see, the Dems are down to 59.

The online publication then moved on to educating Markos Moulitsas, of the Daily Kos, who, on MSNBC yesterday, said "Let’s do what the American people have asked Democrats to do, and let’s not use any excuses like this 60-vote nonsense, which is now obviously no longer an issue."

That "statement proves," wrote CQ's David Nather, that "Moulitsas doesn’t really understand the Senate. But there are lots of people who will agree with him."

David, count me among the willfully ignorant. Because you know what, David? When it comes to the paramount, three-score-old issue of comprehensive health care, Mr. Moulitsas and I, as well as millions of other Americans, do not, to be really blunt about it, much give a sympathetic shit about the theoretical physics and higher mathematics of Democratic seat-counting.

No, we hired these clowns to do a job -- one which, by the way, they, as a party, had already promised to do.

When they hire staffers, do they accept excuse after excuse when pressing tasks are left undone? Of course not. They can them. Results -- that's what the good senators demand, and no excuses are allowed.

Well guess what, senators. It's your turn. We don't care how you do it, we don't care how many corrupt bargains you must cut, we don't care whom among you has to be blackmailed into doing the right thing on health care. Just do your damn jobs, as you promised you would. And no excuses.

Dick Cheney's unrelenting self-destruction

As American troops initiated their pullback from Iraq's urban centers earlier this week, in the ultimate pursuit of a near-total withdrawal by 2011, former Vice-President Dick Cheney told The Washington Times' "America's Morning News" radio program that "he is a strong believer in Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and that the general is doing what needs to be done," according to the Times.

OK, so you know what's coming. BUT ...

"What [Odierno] says concerns me," said Cheney. "That there is still a continuing problem. One might speculate that insurgents are waiting as soon as they get an opportunity to launch more attacks. I hope the Iraqis can deal with it. At some point they have to stand on their own, but I would not want to see the U.S. waste all the tremendous sacrifice that has gotten us to this point."

I no longer see any plausible alternative explanation for Cheney's unendingly irresponsible, reprehensible, "I'm saying this now for an 'I told you so' moment" comments than that's precisely what he wants to see. And that in itself marks a major and profound degradation of American politics.

As much as I, in addition to roughly 80 percent of all Americans, despise Dick Cheney, I resisted that belief; it was, until lately, unimaginable that this nation's once-second-highest official could actually yearn for the slaughter of U.S. troops, just so that he could be proven correct in his vilifications of his successors' broader policies.

The inconvenient details behind Cheney's slithering malignancy -- for example, that the pullback's timing was his own administration's doing in its status-of-forces agreement with Iraq; or, of course, that it was chiefly his lies which sucked us into this unnecessary, wasteful war to begin with -- are insignificant. Reason, facts, and reality have never afflicted the former vice president's thinking. He operates on fear, and the greatest fear today is his own: he knows, as does the world, that Iraq's impending explosion and reentry into unbridled sectarian atrocities will expose his and George Bush's "successful" surge as the politico-military disaster it is.

But, Dick being Dick, he is casting pre-blame for what was always predictable, and predicted.

Most dishonorable men have at least a few redeeming qualities, and along those lines I hereby make this further prediction: America's future and favorite parlor game will consist of trying to name just one in Richard B. Cheney.

Why is Al Franken bothering; or for that matter, Republicans?

I hope Al Franken possesses no illusions about grasping some impending rein of power; that as a high-profile Democratic senator, and a majority member, no less, he'll find himself neatly positioned to effect some of that social good of which he's always dreamed.

For the unblinkered know better ... and better, and better, with each passing day. They're learning that when it comes to slatternly party discipline, excepting that revolving around the most exquisitely refined campaign-finance techniques, the United States Senate in Democratic hands is a wholly individualized institution that simply cannot be beat.

In the absence, that is, of an iron-fisted majority leader such as Lyndon Johnson, Senate Democrats are but captives of a cat-herding corral, with predictable results: this one is owned by big pharma, that one by hospital associations, the other by profit-mongering physicians, and that other guy by HMOs.

Their constituents, or so they believe (and one must confess, with good reason), are the least of their worries. They need only one, indispensable thing: ready cash, to flood the airwaves every six years and to hire expert consultants to convince the poor, gullible, and otherwise disaffected boobs that it's time to pony up another pointless vote in support of their man, or woman, who's neatly positioned to effect some of that social good of which the boobs have always dreamed.

Franken, coming, as he does, from a swing state, is guaranteed a tough reelection fight. So he'll have to join in on the game -- the outcomes of which will almost invariably come down on the decisive side of the specially interested, well-heeled status quo.

All of which causes me to marvel not so much at Al Franken and the Democratic Party, but at the financial wastefulness of the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and a bevy of individual GOP senators. As the Politico reported yesterday, they have, combined, "over the past three months," pumped a mountain of cash into Sen. Norm Coleman's hopelessly quixotic survivalism, just to avert an immediate Frankenesque 60.

Why bother? I mean, it's not like Franken is off to join some deliberative chamber that threatens political mediocrity of the mind. You're safe, guys. Don't sweat it. Save your money, protect that cash.

The Michael Jackson media circus: My thoughts and yours

Yesterday morning the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," the Washington Post's media correspondent Howard Kurtz, asked his panel of CNN-anointed journalism experts if the media's carpet-bombing coverage of pop-star Michael Jackson's death was (is) professionally justified.

The brief exchange, which, exasperatingly, came at the segment's end rather than as a lead-in, unfolded as follows:

Kurtz: I only have half a minute here. [One panelist] mentioned the network newscasts, which led Thursday night, Friday night, of course, with Michael Jackson. Back in 1977, CBS led with another story, the Panama Canal instead of Elvis' death. And it just seems like everybody is on this Jackson bandwagon.

[Second panelist]: It's because people are talking about it. I mean, you know ...

Kurtz: Is that the standard? Is that the media standard, whatever people talk about becomes the most important story?

[Second panelist]: Yes. It is now. I mean, I'm not a 40-year veteran of TV journalism, but I can tell you that you cater to what everyone is talking about. That seems to be the new standard.

There is, of course, no "seeming" to it. That is the new standard -- the entertainment-driven, ratings-obsessed, profit-chasing standard that would make Howard Beale blush.

Yet it's not that cable-news networks have either forgotten or never understood the difference between hard, important news and pure, sensationalistic distraction; it's just that cable-news executives now report to corporate boards of directors and shareholders who are less than fussy about how profits are turned. If some executive fails to grasp that, the board, assuredly, will find someone who doesn't.

In this respect I tend to find philosophical harmony with Marx -- no, not Groucho -- in his (not very well-known) sympathy for the capitalist, who, wrote Karl, is as much a victim of impersonal market forces as the next guy; he does what he does, in general, not out of inhumanity or malice, but through the ruthlessly competitive need to survive.

In short, said Marx, blame the system, not the capitalist -- and I imagine that would have been his decree with respect to the Jackson media circus as well; there is no personal blame to be had here.

But what do you thing? In your opinion are network executives perpetrators of distracting madness, or merely helpless victims?

For Limbaugh, it's the net

I vaguely recall watching, as a kid, an old black-and-white movie in which this investigative journalist -- played, I think, by Stuart Whitman -- suspected sinister goings on inside the local insane asylum, so he managed to get himself committed to its "care" so that he could do some snooping around.

Well, you probably won't be surprised to learn the film's ending: He spent so long playing crazy, he actually went crazy, a tragic victim of too-clever-by-half, self-induced psychosis. So in the sinister asylum he remained, for the rest of his unnatural life.

Now, compare those fictive musings with the real-life ravings of Rush Limbaugh, who, by his own admission, has been playing it prodigiously over-the-top, for quite a number of years, in the pursuit, we are told, of a higher objective: to snake out and expose the evils of liberalism.

And here, from this week, is an example of how Rush is faring. In sorting out the why's and wherefore's of "this [Gov. Mark] Sanford business," Limbaugh said, he actually said:

This is almost like: I don't give a damn! Country's going to hell in a handbasket. I just want out of here! He had just tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina. He didn't want any part of it. He lost the battle and said, "What the hell? The Federal government is taking over! I want to enjoy life!"

Yes, it's one for the psychiatric record-books, folks: In Rush Limbaugh's increasingly dark, desperate and distorted mind, a $787 billion economic stimulus package is believable-enough stimulation to send a perfectly proper, right-thinking Southern governor into a follow-up exploration of Argentina's forbidden bush country.

So I put this to you: That's beyond strategic broadcasting; that's just plain nuts. And it just may be that Rush has been acting the lunatic for so long -- stridently bashing the left and absolving the right for ever-greater fun and profit -- he has finally become a genuine, certifiable one.

Now showing in the Democratic Senate: "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers"

The other day I was watching cable news between severe bouts of politico-clinical depression when on the screen up popped the melancholic Sen. Chuck Grassley in an interview, not exactly what the doctor ordered.

He was, naturally, first randy to do something more than what Obama is doing about Iran -- precisely what, remained a mystery -- and that part of the interview was harmless enough.

But soon there rolled around the issue of health care.

Grassley, as we all know, sits on Max Baucus' powerful, health-care-unreforming finance committee, and as such has risen to the top of what Baucus selectively, disingenuously calls his "Coalition of the Willing" -- a tidy, ideologically close-knit little band of arch-do-nothings, excluding, obviously, senators such as health subcommittee (of the finance committee) chairman Jay Rockefeller, who "has clashed with Baucus" for "advocating liberal proposals, such as a strong public-insurance option, that Baucus does not believe can pass the Senate."

And just why does Baucus believe so fervently that a "strong public-insurance option" can't pass? Because Baucus, in holding hands with the Chuck Grassleys of the so-called opposition, fervently works to see that it can't.

He wants, he says, bipartisanship.

So back to the Grassley interview, in which the network host finally comprehended the staggeringly manifest: Senator, are you saying that a bipartisan health-care bill must necessarily exclude even the consideration of a public plan?

"Absolutely," said Chuck, thereby reducing the bi-partisan to a singular GOP formulation, and thereby making a mockery of Baucus' "bipartisanship."

Which, in effect, makes Republican Senator Chuck Grassley not only the co-chairman of the Democratic-majority finance committee, but co-majority leader of the Democratic Senate, given the overarching importance of health-care reform -- all of which, as I discussed in this morning's column, will rightly cost the Democrats, big time, in 2010.

They just don't "get it."

Gov. Mark Sanford -- What else?

What else, or who else, indeed, would occupy this space this morning? -- although the "What else" question about Gov. Sanford is soon to enter the broader investigative realm of state finances.

But who, really, cares about that? Mostly this is a story that provides us yet another titillating, voyeuristic peek into the private mind and shadowy actions of yet another colossal hypocrite -- a genuine "Tartuffe," as Molière stylized these wretched creatures of furtive intent.

I won't deny my own rather embarrassing indulgence in schadenfreude; nevertheless last night I sat and watched two virtually uninterrupted hours of Sanfordology, on "Hardball" and "The Ed Show," with a discernable degree of sorrow, of uneasy participation, of loss.

Why loss? Because there they were, prominent political network hosts engaged in breathless analysis of a ruined Suuthrun governor -- was, for instance, Sanford's press-conference stage-management of first order?; is it better to have the jilted, humiliated little lady accompanying the scalawag pol?; has his anonymous staff distanced itself enough from this clown? -- just as sinister manipulations of the most historic domestic legislation since Medicare were taking place in the cloakrooms of Congress.

Sinister, and, for at least two hours (which stretched well into the night, I'm sure), silent.

Yes, we get it. Mark Sanford is a hypocrite, as is John Ensign, Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley ...

And, yep, these jerks are family-values hypocrites, no less. Oh, the disgusting irony of it all -- which I, too, from time to time have invested stale space in discussing, as though that thought hadn't already dawned on every conscious, vein-pulsating American.

As for Sanford's once-upon-a-time criticality as a 2012 presidential candidate: does that not justify all the coverage? Hey, we've three more years for yet other hypocritical GOP kingpins to fall, and if we endlessly convulse over each one of them, we'll lose track of what the 2012 race is even about.

The only upside to this psychologically predictable story is that we, as a political society resting on often questionable platforms, are yet one step closer to removing personal morality as an unsteady plank.