PMC Commentary

Missin’ the bloody point, as usual

Last Friday, Chris Matthews and his guests were frolicking in another of Hardball’s analysis-free zones. If you’re a regular viewer of MSNBC’s FOXy-R-Us fare, then perhaps you were as dismayed as I by that night’s “Tom DeLay segment.” The preceding is in quotation marks because what opened as a segment on DeLay instantly flipped into -- what else? -- a bash-the-Democrats segment.

Matthews aired a tape of Tom explaining his troubles as purely a concoction of idea-less Democrats who only attack, attack, attack. But rather than analyze DeLay’s defense strategy, Matthews’ panel -- a clueless Norah O’Donnell, the ever-balanced David Ignatius and the National Review’s “leftist-conspiracy” specialist Byron York -- instead latched onto the conservative consensus that DeLay is absolutely right: Democrats have no ideas, no plan, no self-defined future. They’re doomed to failure, chimed the panel, as long as they simply rely on attacks and forego the promulgation of a grand, ruling vision.

Now bear with me on this segue.

The next day the New York Times published an increasingly standard analysis of the Iraqi insurgency, which, as previously reported in Newsday, is being judged a “winning” insurgency despite an overwhelming occupational force. Keep Democrats in mind as you read these brief excerpts from the two publications:

“The insurgents in Iraq are showing little interest in … articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology or cause beyond expelling the Americans. They have put forward no single charismatic leader, developed no alternative government or political wing…. [One expert] said the insurgency could still be sorting itself out.”

Despite the insurgency’s apparent unintelligibility, another expert said, “Everything we thought we knew about the insurgency obviously is flawed.” In other words, there is indeed a winning, strategic method to its seeming madness of incoherence.

Replace the word “insurgency” with “Democrats” and you wind up with a fairly accurate description of today’s Democratic strategy. Then replace “we” with “network analysts.” Like the modern Iraqi situation -- where what “we thought we knew … obviously is flawed” -- what happened in the early 1990s in American politics became clear to analysts only after the fact. And the Republicans’ 1993-94 strategy was, peacefully speaking, the same as that of Iraqi insurgents -- attack, attack, attack.

Forget the old “Contract with America” as a grand and specific vision. When you reread it you rediscover it said little that was intelligible to the average voter except “We favor change.” It was an overall impression thing, that’s all: The Dems are a bunch of outdated, big-government losers and we’re not. Period.

In fact, the Contract’s essence merely comported with Karl Rove’s Edict Number Eight among his “12-Step Program to Dry-Drunk Power”: to wit, “Always position your opponent as an agent of the status quo, your guy as the candidate for change.”

That’s really all the Republicans did prior to the 1994 election. Again, forget the Contract. Rather, a Boston Globe article summed up Republican strategy in a March 21 headline of that year: “Conservatives Hitting Hard at Clinton Policies.” The article went on to say that the GOP was mostly chewing the electoral carpet over the Democratic president’s foreign policy, his “liberal judicial nominees” and his (Republican-ballyhooed) Whitewater sins.

In short, Republicans followed the modern Iraqi insurgency’s singular and quite effective strategy of attack, attack, attack -- which is all the Democrats are now doing as well.

If Chris Matthews & Guests had paused to apply some actual analysis and historical analogy to their discussion -- rather than just trot out the tired, bandwagon observation that Democrats have no grand scheme -- they might have seen at least a semblance of a forest through the trees.

But of course that’s not what cable-network analysts are there for. They’re only there to pile on.

Confession of a blogging newcomer

This is your government, at its highest level, in action.

The setting is the White House press room, the day after a Cessna aircraft over the nation’s capital caused the evacuation of more than 30,000 terrified people. The following is taken from the press-briefing transcript, wherein Press Secretary Scott McClellan clarifies unclear matters for an unclear nation.

REPORTER: Scott, yesterday the White House was on red alert, was evacuated…. And yet the president wasn’t told of yesterday’s events until after he finished his bike ride, about 36 minutes after the all-clear had been sent. Is he satisfied with the fact that he wasn’t notified about this?

McCLELLAN: Yes. I think you just brought up a very good point -- the protocols that were in place after Sept. 11 were followed….

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: The protocols that we put in place after Sept. 11 were being followed….

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: Actually, all the protocols were followed….

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: The president did lead, and the president did that after September the 11th when we put the protocols in place….

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: That’s not at all what occurred…. He was not in danger, a situation where protocols have been put in place to address the situation. The protocols were followed.

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: I think that he wants to make sure that the protocols that are in place are followed. The protocols that were in place were followed.

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: I think again … There are protocols….

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: To answer your question, I was just getting ready to address exactly what you’re bringing up. The protocols that were put in place after September 11 include protocols for that, as well. And there are protocols there.

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: Well, again, if you want to give me a chance to respond, I’ll be glad to. The protocols were followed….

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: Because of the protocols that are in place.

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME QUESTION.

McCLELLAN: The protocols that were put in place were followed, and I think they were followed well.

-- All that press patience, for nothing.

At first one wonders how reporters refrain from pitching their notepads and throttling forthwith such an officious little automaton like Scott McClellan. But then one remembers that it is no more McClellan’s job to enlighten than it is for reporters to report. These days, that is.

McClellan’s job is to obfuscate. A reporter’s job is to dutifully reprint press-release gibberish. That’s what the Dan Ratheresque-media-hating right wing has been after for 40 years and that’s what we now have.

Reporters and their corporate megamedia bosses would parry that if they told McClellan to shut up about “protocols” already and risk a walkout if he didn’t address the real question -- which comes down to either the president’s emotional and intellectual fragility or his irrelevance in a crisis -- the only thing they would accomplish is the loss of access, and then where would the public be?

And the obvious follow-up question is, Access to what? Scripted stonewalling? Puff press releases? Frank Luntzian doublespeak?

Allow me to confess a dark secret. For years I was mired in the superior-minded print-journalism mentality. I was leary of Internet news and opinion in the form of blogs. The temptation for bloggers to put up any unsubstantiated falderal they feel bolsters their argument is great indeed, as is the danger of a reading public swallowing anything on the Net as fact.

Yet, at least until the high print and broadcast media get their act together and start asking tough questions and demanding answers, blogs, however tendentious, are the only information-investigation alternative for a curious public. Even information chaos is preferable to official regurgitation.

Another up-or-down vote on black-and-white flakiness

Nothing could better define how the Bush administration thinks, how it operates, and how it treats reality than John R. Bolton’s written opinion to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “A policy official may state his own reading of the intelligence … as long as he does not purport to speak for the intelligence community.”

OK. Given that opinion, Mr. Bolton could openly speculate that -- pick a country, any country -- let’s say, Paraguay, is a looming threat. “That’s not -- how should I put this? -- exactly what the boys at intel think, but they don’t possess my mystical certitude. I’ve never trusted Paraguay, it’s full of suspicious Paraguayans and pushy cattle -- or so my friends in the North Dakotan cattle industry tell me -- and for all I know the menacing bastards are producing biological weapons. In fact, I’m pretty sure they are. That’s how I read the situation.”

No kidding. Any variation on that framework would perfectly comport with what Bolton posited to the Senate. And since the Bush administration vociferously backs Bolton, then that framework would also comport with the administration’s view of proper policy formulation and policy dissemination. What’s more, Bolton’s statement to the Foreign Relations Committee, as a pronounced administration perspective, belies all the administration’s disavowals of having ignored the intelligence community’s hesitance with respect to Iraq.

In other words, as if there weren’t proof enough already, Bolton made it resoundingly official that this administration doesn’t give a damn what intel experts have to say. It’ll proceed according to whatever it wants, whatever it believes, whenever it wants. To hell with intelligence. Literally.

So what was with all those post-9/11 investigative committees and commissions? What was their purpose? You guessed it -- for the administration and Congress to emulate some joke of a Stalinist fact-finding tour.

So it would seem. And as such, Bush’s Soviet upper parliamentary house, known colloquially as the Republican U.S. Senate, seems poised to rubber stamp the rabidly anti-United Nations apparatchik. Unimaginable but true, counterproductive but true, and stupid but true.

Here’s a man understatedly described by Senate Democrats as anxious “to stretch intelligence to fit his views,” as having a history of “abusive behavior and intolerance,” and as having delivered “disingenuous” statements to the Senate committee. The solidly partisan crust of this fiasco crumbled only a bit when one of Bush’s own, Senator George Voinovich, left the reservation out of sheer disgust and pegged Bolton as a “poster child of what someone in the diplomatic corps should not be,” as a man with “serious deficiencies,” and as an ass who would be “fired – fired – if he worked for a major corporation.” The United States, concluded Voinovich, “can do better.”

Well, Senator, it’s reality-check time. You forget we’re not talking about a competent corporation or the United States as we once knew it. We’re talking about the Bush administration. And Bolton is as good as it gets with this outfit.

The Senate committee chairman, Richard Lugar, pretty much yet unwittingly wrapped up the qualifications required for a top position with the Bushies. Let’s see, Lugar mused in so many words, Bolton is an overbearing ass, an opinionated ass, an abusive ass and an alienating ass -- but, “there is no evidence that he has broken laws or engaged in serious ethical misconduct.” In short, the senator suggested, Bolton is wholly unsuited for a high diplomatic position; but since he’s not a convicted criminal, well, he’s tops with the White House and therefore deserves one of the Senate’s famously stupid up-or-down votes and then, of course, the job.

I agree. In a sane democracy, Bolton would qualify as either an entry-level debt-collections manager or a replacement host for Bill O’Reilly. But in our BushThink democracy, Bolton can rise to the very top like the rankest of pond scum.

In fact, John Bolton should be a 2008 shoo-in as Tom DeLay’s vice president.

Arnold gets his butt kicked

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger accepts Visa, Mastercard and American Express.

But you need to charge at least $10,000 and funnel it through one of his “initiative committees” to gain the personal access you’re bound to tell the public you’re not seeking. And if you want to take three friends to sup with the Gov, that’ll cost your American Express card $100,000.

You can give more. You can give all you like. There’s no limit on giving to what’s amusingly called independent committees that also happen to support the governor’s agenda, so Arnold can skirt California’s campaign finance laws that otherwise limit him to a paltry $22,300 per donor.

The combined fundraising totals of Schwarzenegger’s administration have many Californians wondering why they held such a disdainful opinion of Gray Davis’s fundraising proclivities. In Arnold’s first year in office he raked in more than $26 million; since he first announced his candidacy he’s pulled in almost $50 million; and he has said he’s after another $50 million in 2005 alone to accomplish his factious goals, which had included such Bushian weirdness as privatizing the state employees pension plan.

Not exactly a “populist” record, as the governor is so fond of promoting his political tenure. Rather, it’s the same old bait-and-switch big-business scam that the GOP has shoved down the gullible little guy’s throat since at least the days of Ronald Reagan’s folksiness and Newt Gingrich’s Contract.

Notwithstanding all the dunning for all that cash, Arnold is taking his hits these days -- having plummeted from last year’s approval rating of 60 percent to 49 percent. He has not accomplished this remarkable feat on his own. He’s had plenty of help, and I’m delighted to say it has come from progressives -- that usually unraveled coalition of the hopelessly hapless whom many believe are as ancient history as Hiram Johnson.

Yep, I said progressives. Namely, organized progressives. Namely, organized-labor progressives. And namely, the self-styled progressive California Nurses Association -- a 60,000-member union that upended national unionization trends by tripling its numbers in a dozen years. It can be done.

The brief background on this is that Arnold, siding with hospitals and insurance companies, had tried overturning a state law limiting a hospital’s patient-nurse ratio -- something that anyone gasping for air while buzzing the nurses’ station would be rather displeased with. Anyway, the nurses let Arnold have it through organized protests, through airplane banners flying over his home-patio parties, and through newspaper and television information campaigns.

Needless to say, Arnold didn’t like any of this. And he only exacerbated his sorry predicament by blathering last December that the nurses “don’t like me in Sacramento because I am always kicking their butts.” Hence Mr. Public Relations emerged as a cross between a besieged barbarian and a bit of a girlie-man himself by sniffling about folks not liking him.

Thanks in huge part to the California Nurses Association, in league with other organized labor groups representing teachers, firefighters and police officers, Arnold’s popularity has experienced freefall ever since. This, despite all the image-polishing cash he’s raked in. “We take extreme credit for his poll numbers dropping like a rock,” said CNA’s executive director, Rose Ann DeMoro. Likewise, as the Sacramento Bee noted just a few days ago, gone are the days when “the national news media gushed that he was a born leader who might be destined for the White House.”

He pushed. The nurses pushed back. The nurses won. It’s really not as difficult as we make it seem.

Golden state progressives in hospital scrubs are brilliantly strutting their stuff. Let’s hope it’s a lesson to others that it can, after all, be done -- if we’ll just start doing it.

Oh, by the way. If you live in California and prefer fewer attending nurses when you’re hospitalized, Arnold accepts cash, too.

More Thunder on the Right: The Propaganda Ministry of Christian Broadcasting

Thanks to reader Steve Wolfson, who sent an expansive and riveting Columbia Journalism Review article on Christian evangelical broadcasting in America. Its reportage on the movement’s sheer numbers, cultivated by extraordinarily brash propagandists, is enough, however, to prompt one to update that passport straightaway.

You really should read the entire piece, but for those in a pinch I quickly offer the story’s twofold gist. The first is rather unsurprising: These people are nuts, and as incestuously connected to political power as old-style Chicago wiseguys.

The story’s other thrust, the one that tends to rock one’s world, is the massive and still-growing scope of right-wing Christian broadcasting. I hadn’t kept up with all its offerings and that’s why the article’s concise delineation hit me rather rudely. “Conservative evangelicals control at least six national television networks, each reaching tens of millions of homes,” writes CJR’s assistant editor, Mariah Blake, “and virtually all of the nation’s more than 2,000 religious radio stations. Thanks to Christian radio’s rapid growth, religious stations now outnumber every other format except country music and news-talk…. And this growth shows no sign of flagging.”

Blake points out that 96 percent of homegrown evangelicals partake of Christian broadcasting each month -- and with a whopping 25 percent of the United States’ population identified as evangelical (according to a piece in the Christian Science Monitor), we’re talking a huge number of folks methodically subjected to, and regularly brainwashed by, the most bizarre “reporting” imaginable, which we’ll get to momentarily.

Blake also keenly delves into the reasons for Christian broadcasting’s stellar numerical rise -- namely, fearful emotions aroused from 9/11 and the raging culture wars -- and reviews a host of evangelical-network chestnuts, such as the worldwide persecution of Christians and Israel’s almost singular importance in the news (since that nation “will trigger a cascade of apocalyptic events that will culminate in Christ’s second coming”).

But for my money, the most alarming -- not to mention amusing -- part of her story is how fanatically these broadcasters pound the drums of religious bellicosity and anti-liberalism. You might think with all the propaganda experts at their cash-heavy disposal they would march onward subtly, but you would be wrong. It’s much more of a crude, bludgeoning, DeLay-type hammer-over-the-head kind of thing.

For instance on the Christian Broadcasting Network, one 700 Club guest (billed as a “proven prophet”) clarified what has long perplexed most of the world -- Why in hell we invaded Iraq. “It has nothing to do with terrorism,” he told Gordon, son of Pat, Robertson. “It has everything to do with that there’s 1.2 million Muslims that have been deceived by the false God Allah, and that the God of heaven, Jehovah, is now in the process of doing war if you will against that spirit to … break the power of deception so those people can be exposed to the gospel.” I guess that does beat going door to door in Baghdad with pamphlets.

On the Trinity Broadcasting Network, armed with tax-exempt status since of course it doesn’t endorse political candidates, evangelical host Hal Lindsey warned voters just before the 2004 election that liberals wanted to “bring about our literal annihilation” and that “a vote for the conservative cause … is a vote to … reverse America’s decline and restore her to the path of morality, conscience, and strength of character.” And one radio network, USA, aired a “news” segment in which a former CIA analyst declared that if Bush won, Osama bin Laden’s “fate is sealed”; while if John Kerry won, bin Laden would “go back to business as usual” since a Democratic administration would “let them plan attacks on us.” The logic is perhaps less staggering than comical, yet the downside is that a lot of folks actually believe this garbage.

And while not aired, as far as I know, the president of the National Religious Broadcasters, Frank Wright, performed the choisest comedy routine after the 2004 election: “We” – the “we” being a bunch of religious lobbyists on a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. -- “got down on the floor of the Senate and prayed over Hillary Clinton’s desk.” If that ain’t psychosis then there’s no such thing.

I must get back into the habit of watching. I was into the habit once, before Jimmy Swaggart’s fall from grace. I spent many a Sunday morning observing the good reverend scare the hell out of old ladies with large-print bibles and installment-perfect pensions. But today’s wired evangelicals have moved up and on in a bigger way and for much bigger stakes. This requires yet more vigilance, even though one’s available time to monitor ever-growing right-wing whackoism was squeezed down to nothing long ago.

Blow-back revisited

An ABC News journalist once asked the president why, in the prewar stage, he portrayed Iraqi weapons as an imminent threat to U.S. security when intelligence reports, replete with cautionary tones and caveats, more often referred to potentialities. The president answered: “So what's the difference?”

Those were astonishing words, even for famously indifferent George W. Bush. Nevertheless we should repeat the question: What difference, indeed, did it make? And the answer is: A huge one.

First, the world simply doesn't trust us any longer. Mr. Bush can pretend it was only because of some passing difference of opinion over some inconsequential difference about what was real and what was not, and what was necessary and what was not in response, but the loss of global trust has been severe. (For those neocon apologists who continue to advance the curious defense that the always-wrong Clinton administration and the always-wrong world also believed in damning evidence, just remember this much: They weren’t the ones who slapped on six-shooters and went blasting their way into Baghdad.)

Perhaps if the president engaged the world by at least reading newspapers he would grasp the unpleasant diplomatic fallout from crying wolf. According to a front-page report in the Washington Post last year, foreign policy analysts who had sat squarely in the president's pro-invasion corner were thrown into anguish over sinking, or, rather, sunken, U.S. credibility abroad. Defense Advisory Board member and war hawk Kenneth Adelman, for example, complained “the foreign policy blow-back” from the administration's hyperbole “is pretty serious.” And -- as a second, and more severe, consequence -- he noted the damage done to exercising legitimate actions against imminent threats in the future.

In effect, the Bush doctrine had one shot at proving itself justifiable, but the postwar absence of damning evidence only served to tie our hands instead. Former assistant to State Secretary Colin Powell and good Republican Richard Haass joined Adelman's critical ranks. Not only have U.S. allegations about North Korea 's nuclear capability been thrown into question as a result of the Iraqi WMD fiasco, similar and quite valid allegations against other hostile nations, said Haass, could be dismissed by the international community as so much swashbuckling. The giant gap between Bush's rhetoric and proven reality has made it “more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack,” Haass concluded.

One can try piercing that argument, but it would seem impenetrable. Only the blind would argue the administration's overblown warnings about Iraq did not alter and further limit U.S. options against real foreign dangers.

And therein lies the irony behind the president's repeated schoolyard taunt during the presidential campaign that political opponents would seek an international “permission slip” before acting again. Ironic, because that is the one course of action that Mr. Bush, more than anyone else, has helped establish as the only feasible course.

In the hope of building a real coalition against a real threat, future presidents will feel constrained to present piles upon piles of evidence that would make the stuff against O.J. look thin. America 's depleted credibility will demand titantic efforts to meet almost impossible thresholds of intelligence findings. Such a prerequisite to unified international action, which Bush has imposed through unprecedented recklessness, could someday prove to retard a well-advised U.S. response in accord with international law.

In these perilous times – when we most need friends to help combat vicious global threats without first feeling compelled to vet our every word – the president has only complicated America 's security. And that, Mr. Bush, is “the difference.”

Is Dittodom Dying?

I’ve related the rise and fall of my hopes for a riveting weekend of locally produced, right-wing talk radio in the Ozarks. In a word, it was pretty much dead. No fire, no passion, no venom spewed. With their boys in power, who’s left to hate?

All they now have to keep the radio waters simmering is Rush: foaming, maniacal, drug-addled Rush. I listened to his show briefly on the drive down, and even he had been reduced to agitation over the comparatively mundane issue of No Child Left Behind and blaming all its failures, of course, on the liberally evil NEA -- hashed, rehashed and by now predictably rehearsed to the point of chronic boredom.

It reminded me of an earlier drive to the Ozarks while listening to Rush and how talk radio’s opportunities for pent-up rage over political goings on are withering away.

And in this there is great hope.

On the previous drive, George W. Bush had been elected to the presidency more than a year before, and on AM radio Rush and his ditto-callers were analyzing the question of -- what else? -- whether Bill Clinton had an evil political "center" (as in "moral center") or was merely a superficial opportunist. Either way, Clinton was doomed to damnation, and the fact that he no longer held public office concerned neither Rush nor Dittodom.

When I first tuned in, Rush was in the midst of a severe lecture on Clinton's commitment to full-fledged, ideological liberalism. A caller soon piled on with a challenging thought. Clinton, he said, was no ideologue. It was clear to all who are holy that every speech Clinton had ever given had been constituted only by "what you want to hear." The former president had no "center," no ideology, no convictions. Rush first stuck to his guns. Then, out of the blue he pronounced the caller correct. Bill was an opportunistic, politically center-less blackguard who speechified only on that which Americans wanted to hear and Clinton had always been that way. Rush then concluded before a commercial break … warning: whiplash ahead … that yes, Clinton was indeed a devout ideologue.

This muddleheaded, wholesale self-contradiction committed not once, but twice, and framed within the span of no less than two minutes, gave not one listener pause. The show proceeded on the premise of perfect consistency.

I hadn't heard Limbaugh's show for a couple years, so its snippets of logic were a real yawner. That Rush was devoting so much time to a powerless ex-enemy, however, was an eye-opening sign of ideological fatigue. And of course any time spent with Rush and his callers provides a valuable refresher course in populist conservatism.

It’s a brawling conservatism that fascinates. Thought, for instance, is the instrument of a street-fight, insularly bred and antagonistically tribal. The traditionally thoughtful path is that Reason leads to Truth, whereas populist conservatism first establishes Truth and then fights its way to reasoning.

The movement thus constantly self-justifies and lacks the potential of growth through internal dissension. Dissenting reason is suppressed so that Mother Ideology may achieve a one-dimensional supremacy. In short, it becomes fat, dumb and happy, reflecting the axiomatic reality of Herbert Marcuse's famous One-Dimensional Man. Filtered through the prism of populist conservatism, all complexities -- be they social, economic or political -- emerge in the singular and simplistic light of capitalism's holiness, the West's nobility and individualism's mythic sacrosanctity.

For talking-head conservatives in all media these days, reality is a frightful prospect, and the readily understandable their salvation. The human condition is enormously complex, of course, but they have promoted shallowness largely to gain electorally. That's politics, and so far as that goes, so good. But to remain vibrant a political movement requires an oppositional voice from within. In the long-term absence of opposition, the movement stagnates.

Hence populist conservatism has achieved a hopeful milestone for the thoughtful: the beginning of its self-tormented end -- or at least the death of heated talk radio in the Ozarks and Rush’s tired rehashing on national airwaves would seem to indicate that.

Purgatory

To update my high expectations, I’m sad to report that right-wing talk radio has died here. It appears to be a victim of its own success and its own distortions.

Without Bill Clinton’s eight years of peace and prosperity to kick around any more, and with their ideological hooligans firmly entrenched in state and national power, the revolutionary fire is gone, at least in these parts. But chiefly, a blind eye seems to reign, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor.

The debt is blowing up, Social Security is under siege, wages are stagnant, our health care system is more of a criminal negligence system, their party’s House majority leader is on the verge of indictment, Iraq is in flames, Iran is a basket case, North Korea is threatening nuclear aggression, one could go on and on – and local radio callers talk about everything but.

Bored to tears and disappointed that these revolutionaries had turned so tame, I finally called in to rattle off a few of the above points, desperately hoping to stir things up. The result was even deeper disappointment.

The host seemed stunned that anyone listening would even question the harmonious splendor in which we live. Only one caller followed up with any zeal, saying the “numbskull” caller must have been a “Democratic operative.” I confess those two go together all too often, but since I’m not on the party’s payroll, I won’t cop to a plea this time around.

Then he and the host exchanged several grossly misleading and unfounded facts just to bolster and reconfirm their ideological rectitude -- and that was that. End of story, except for the host summarizing the cause of any vestigial electoral disgruntlement this way: “They can’t get over the fact that they lost the election.” That dismissed it all.

I’m not sure how to read this turn of events. Maybe local talk radio is burning itself out; or maybe this is an isolated geographical phenomenon; or perhaps this is only the clinical stage of denial before anger re-erupts; or, the apparent transition could be altogether too young in formation to attempt precise diagnosis.

But something does seem to be in the air.

Entering the Divine Comedy of Talk Radio Hell

This morning I’m headed off for parts so redneck they make Capitol Hill’s Republican cloakroom look like a bi-sexual commie bastion. I speak, of course, of the Missouri-Arkansas Ozarks. I once lived there, still have family there, and in a few hours will be rejoining them in the 19th century.

For most Ozarkians the pope has nothing on infallibility compared to St. Limbaugh, whom they regard as one of the world’s most astute political philosophers. In fact, he’s regarded as the world’s only political philosopher, since they would be as stumped as George W. Bush to name a real one.

One of the area’s former U.S. congressmen provides the perfect window into the pedigreed brain. The particular blowhard I have in mind spent years puffing his reputation as a state-tax limiter and social welfare-basher, only to run for Congress and do … absolutely nothing. Nada for six years, except for immortalizing his congressional tenure by voting “No” on everything – including federal disaster relief for San Francisco after a devastating earthquake. (Needless to say, this was before Gingrich & Co.’s coup.)

On second thought, I believe he did introduce one bill. Something to do with homosexual public school teachers and their Liberal-Elite-backed plot to enslave our kids into thinking and doing sick, sick stuff. I recall his being on local talk radio once, delving into really detailed descriptions of what he insisted were quite customary male-homosexual practices. He got so carried away with the ins and outs of these blow-by-blow descriptions I could have sworn I detected heavy breathing. I was tempted to call in and say, “Down boy.” Talk about your textbook, latent-homosexual homophobia. It was priceless.

Not once did any hyper-drive-conservative caller ever ask him during one of these talk-radio appearances how he could be so damned anti-government but willing and eager to accept nearly $20 grand a year in congressional retirement pay for only six of years of, ah, public service. Not once. (I did, and he stuttered more than during one of his famous anal-sex tutorials.)

And talk radio is where it’s at there. After all, America’s supreme political philosopher dwells in Talk-Radioville, wherein Truth happily dwells. I could provide endless examples of just how sharp much of the discussion is on Ozarks talk radio, but a mere two must suffice for now, since I’m in a hurry.

Back in the late 1990s, when we toiled under Bill Clinton’s wicked empire, one weekend-morning radio host said he had it on excellent authority that Slick Willie had secret plans to use the coming Y2K crisis as cover for a martial-law decree canceling the 2000 elections. He was dead serious.

But my all-time favorite? A regular called in one morning, a few years before the above, complaining about Hillary Clinton’s insidious, socialist health care scheme. He summed up his complaint, I kid you not, this way: “How stupid does she think we is?”

Maybe (and I can always hope) during my Ozarks visit this weekend -- and all kidding aside, I love it there; wonderful country, wonderful family -- another gem like that awaits me. I’ll try to update you from the far right’s Right-Wing Ground Zero, so check back over the weekend. Cheers.

America’s Political History in Less Than 2 Minutes

Some visionaries of the left live in an imaginary America. They live in a nation where pleasant visions lead to socially revolutionary realities.

The remaining visionaries of the left live in a nation where exercising a robust imagination leads to profound disappointment -- because we’re a profoundly conservative people.

A brief history of America’s tenacious conservatism -- don’t panic; I promise to make this painless -- might be helpful in reassessing not so much liberalism’s goals as its prospects of achieving them, which are actually better than at first we might think. So here we go…

Even in its infancy, America made excuses for its decidedly “un”-conservative defections. Americans, certainly, were not the excitable type, like those mad Frenchmen across the seas destroying everything sacred. Our revolution was somehow more civilized, more thoughtful -- not even revolutionary, really, in the sense that irrational passions rule in such times. This revisionism started as historical myth, but swiftly morphed into living truth. As soon as we completed the dirty work of what was, of course, a violent revolution, we settled into industrious conservatism, religious revivalism and sober commerce.

The underlying cause was America’s roots in classical liberalism (not the modern variety). Seventeenth-century Lockean convictions of individualism, restrained government and the supremacy of private property were, and are, the rudiments of the American character. Even when presented with evidence that these principles often suffer from internal conflict, our national character resists radical change to preserve ideals. In short, we have often preferred the harsh consequences of inequality to basic fairness.

The sad history of the Reconstruction era was a prime example of American conservatism washing over progressivism. By the Civil War’s end, 620,000 men had perished in what had become the North’s struggle for political and social rights for all -- all men, at least. In fairly short order, however, a hunger for more economic, and less social, progress consumed the North. Reconstruction died a quick death, and we are still coping with the consequences.

If ever there was a time to brusquely reject classical liberalism, it was the Great Depression. The system was in disrepair, perhaps beyond repair. Yet, by and large, Americans stuck with it. Even leading and comparatively radical intellectuals of the era remained attached to classical liberalism’s principles, largely due to the absence of a revolutionary urge among distressed workers. Truly left-oriented thinkers had little of a base to build on, and they knew it.

The left was right, of course, when during the postwar era it decried American sins of poverty, racism and corporatism. Subsequently the left was right to be deeply disturbed by the phenomenon of Reaganism, and Al Gore and John Kerry’s inability to mop up the floor with a vacuous politician from Texas. That such men could be viewed by so many as reasonable prospects to attain, and then keep, the highest office only attests to yet another generation of conservative sympathies.

On the other hand, and it’s a big other hand -- the early 19th century was mixed with progressive causes like abolitionism and public education; what Reconstruction set in motion couldn’t be eradicated, and indeed reemerged in the “Second” Reconstruction of the 1960s; FDR’s New Dealers managed to shave capitalism’s rough edges and, incrementally, advance the cause of a civilized society; and though a drop in the bucket compared to many European social democracies, the Great Society further advanced the cause of social decency and some of it, such as Medicare, stuck.

So yes, Americans are a profoundly conservative people. But they’re conservative in the traditional sense of gradual change and incremental progress -- not in the reactionary impulses of a contemporary conservatism that is digging its own political grave through gross overreaching. It’s taken 20 years for many Americans to see that the conservatism they thought they supported has been wearing sheeps’ clothing.

For now, perhaps the most the left can hope for is an effective defense: slowing a government whose only activism promotes a ruthless plutocracy. Meanwhile, modern liberalism can continue offering a needed vision of America that rejects impersonal economic gain as the highest objective. Liberalism plays a much-needed role in extolling us to heed Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature.” And little by little, I am confident, it will re-gain as modern conservatism -- radicalism, really -- shows it true colors.

Ya gotta love it …

From the NYT, with discreet, though indiscrete, emphases added: “Two Republican members of the House ethics committee [who have now recused themselves from investigating Tom DeLay] … each provided $5,000 last year to a fund being used to underwrite Mr. DeLay's legal expenses.

“[They] were added to the committee this year.”

The Devil They Think They Know…

A few months ago I was sharing some cheap Chianti at a cheap bistro with a rather non-political -- borderline apolitical -- acquaintance. Nevertheless, for reasons forgotten he happened to wonder out loud why our political leaders were permitting a mushroom cloud of a deficit. He couldn’t understand why the powers that be weren’t tackling what must surely be a coming meltdown.

“It’s quite simple,” I said. “The powers that be aren’t fumbling the ball or merely tolerating this looming disaster. Quite the contrary. They’re doing everything they can to ensure it. It’s an ideological thing, a desire to undo the New Deal – anything at all related to FDR’s humanization of capitalism.” I was happy to explain this oddity.

“They want a deficit so grotesque that virtually all social programs will be a fiscal impossibility down the road, even if a socially conscientious governing team sweeps into power. The money simply won’t be there. Deficits and their accumulated debt-interest will be too huge to allow any wiggle room. We’ll be stuck with the far right’s agenda, no matter who’s in power.”

I noticed more than a glimmer of incredulity, so I plowed ahead.

“Oh, they were once coy about it. This thinking started during the Reagan years somewhat serendipitously when their supply-side rigmarole didn’t work out, but they denied it. Lately, however, thinking they have ‘the people’ on their side, well, now they’re brazenly open about it – in particular, Grover Norquist, the blabbermouthing right-wing ideologue in bed with Karl Rove, politically speaking.”

[“Norquist say[s] tax cuts eventually will starve the federal government of revenues and force Congress to accept reductions in government agencies and services” -- Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, February 6, 2004]

The way he looked at me, with that hang of suspicion toward someone questioning the sainted Gipper, you would have thought I had grown a horn.

“Nonsense,” he said. “Where did you dream that up? That’s rubbish. You’re just paranoid. I know your leanings. And no power in America would come out and say such a thing.”

[“I don't want to abolish government,” said Norquist. “I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub” – New York Times, September 14, 2003]

“No, it isn’t just paranoia on my part,” I said, “although I do admit to a creeping, severe neurosis since about, oh, January 21, 1981. But the fact is, they have said this. They admit it. They didn’t used to, but they do now.”

[Norquist: “I think [Democrats] have known for a long time they are in trouble -- and that we are going to dig out their whole structure of programs and power’ -- Washington Post, June 18, 2003]

“That’s pure hokum,” he insisted. “You need help. No American government would be that irresponsible or that evil or cruel. Besides, the other guys wouldn’t let them get away with it. One party can’t have everything its way. The two have to work together.”

“Not these boys,” I said. “It’s not that they just don’t like the other guys; they don’t want to work with them. That would entail compromise, a right-wing ideological no-no.”

[Norquist: “Bipartisanship is another name for date rape. We are trying [for] bitter nastiness and partisanship” -- Atlanta Journal-Constitution, December 28, 2003]

“Besides,” I continued, “they’re pretty sure they have power under control for quite some time and can abuse the other side with impunity.”

[Norquist: “The 2002 redistricting gave Republicans a lock on the House of Representatives until 2012 and the Founding Fathers gerrymandered the Senate for Republican control” -- Washington Post, June 9, 2003]

“Really,’ said I. “They’re pretty open about this stuff. It’s no secret. It’s been in the papers.”

I sensed that his irritation -- now coming as well, it seemed, from embarrassment over being so uninformed -- threatened a sputtering rage. Truth can be dismissed if one gets mad enough at its messenger. And, I further sensed, this messenger had by now grown that second horn and, to boot, a tail, snaking up and around the trident just behind me. Knowing that most people refuse to accept the Devil’s word on something, I lit a cigarette, poured two more bad Chiantis and changed the subject.

True story.

(If you have not done so already, also be sure to read this site's Bully Boy(s), below.)

Must see is right!

For those of you who missed STVWLF's comment on this site regarding word-meister Frank Luntz, I present it here and say, only, enjoy. It's classic. Many thanks to STVWLF (Steve Wolf?).

MUST SEE:
"ha ha ha" Daily Show interview with Frank Lutz and Samantha Bee reveals GOP tactics in action

http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/thedailyshowwithjonstewart/videos_corr.jhtml?p=bee

on that page, select "The Hall of Same"

Bully Boy(s)

A few more words about Bolton,

but first just let me say, John Bolton and Hermann Göring.

I have no particular reason to say those names in the same sentence, even though both are well-known bullies. They were just two names swimming around in my head. But don’t be confused. Don’t think I want you to think of them together, in the sense the two are somehow related in this piece. No, that’s what the White House was unfairly accused of when it happened to say “Saddam Hussein” and “9/11” together in the same sentences a couple thousand times. But that was coincidence.

So don’t think of Göring’s bullying personality when I reference Bolton’s personality. That thought would be a needless confluence on your part and I don’t want to be accused of comparing or mixing up a good, red-blooded American like John Bolton to a slithering, snarling, sadistic snake like Hermann Göring. It’s mere happenstance that I mention them in the same sentence -- Bolton … and Göring … that is.

Now that I’ve clarified that, a former Justice Department subordinate of John Bolton says fondly of his boss: "When you go in to brief [him], as I found out early, you better be prepared…. If you have holes in your argument, he won't work with you.”

Reality-based translation: Bolton is a self-satisfied ideologue who doesn’t tolerate shades of gray in what he insists on seeing as a black-and-white world. A “hole in an argument” is often just another way of legitimately saying out of legitimate concern for fairness and intellectual honesty, “On the other hand.”

And wouldn’t you know it? I didn’t till very recently, but I should have. As a Yale college student in the 1960s, Bolton aggressively supported American involvement in the Vietnamese civil war -- as long as it was some other American boy sent there armed to the teeth. “I confess that I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asia rice paddy,” he later wrote. Mr. Bolton enlisted in the National Guard instead.

(This is neither here nor there, but I have it on good authority that the Bush administration doesn’t want you to know that Hermann Göring never fought in a rice paddy, either.)

One would think even a man as brazen as Bolton would be too ashamed to admit, especially in writing, that he “had no desire to die in … Southeast Asia” while rooting on the less than voluntary venture by others. Let’s see … chickenhawk, Yale, National Guard, immovably opinionated. Somewhere, I’ve heard that before.

Which brings me back to a point I’ve been hammering away at throughout this overture to Bolton’s possible confirmation as ambassador to the U.N. Bolton and Bush were made for each other, and Bolton deserves any job he wants with Bush’s administration. That’s what Dick Cheney said in 2000 to an American Enterprise Institute crowd, right after John R. Bolton bullied his way into Florida’s democratic process and promptly stomped the stuffing out of it.

And now yet another of Bolton’s former colleagues, Avis T. Bohlen, a diplomat, has damned him with praise in the beholding eyes of the Bush administration: “He had a tendency to go after the little guys. I think Bolton is a bully.”

Well, Ms. Avis T. Bohlen, a lot of diplomats didn’t like Hermann Göring either, and he was pretty effective.

Not that I’m comparing the two.

Sticking to Muleheaded Policies like DeLay to Junkets

Last Friday E.J. Dionne wrote an excellent piece about George W. Bush being an “egghead.” No, it wasn’t a play on words; he wasn’t accusing Mr. Bush of having the inherent intelligence of a barnyard bird, but of possessing that politically toxic trait of intellectualism (toxic to the right, anyway).

His argument was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I gathered, but nevertheless a compelling twist on a partial truth of eggheadism. It’s true, as Mr. Dionne observed, that the Bush presidency has a “profound commitment to theoretical notions” -- the “What, me worry?” of Social Security privatization, the rose-pedaled path of Middle East democracy, and the Reaganomic fiscal nirvana that comes from more spending, fewer taxes.

Not to take Mr. Dionne’s rhetorical whimsy too seriously, but the rub came with his dependent clause: that Bush, in classic egghead style, embraces these “theoretical notions” while clutching a “relentless … commitment to pushing them regardless of the facts or the consequences.”

Oh yeah, no doubt he does that, but that isn’t eggheadism. It’s eggheadism’s opposite: muleheadism -- the blind stubbornness of simpleminded simplicity. It is, in fact, the curious phenomenon of anti-intellectual Goldwaterism of 1964.

Much like Bush, Barry Goldwater was inclined to advertise his limited intellectual achievements and even capacity. He was the common man’s politician with the common man’s disdain for lofty abstractions -- the demagogic candy of argumentum ad populum. Yet, thought Goldwater, in ignorance there was a certain profundity.

Speaking in 1964 at a campaign rally in Memphis, Tennessee, the presidential contender drew on the lifeblood of demagogic tradition when he said “a lot of my enemies call me simple. The big trouble with the so-called liberal today is that he doesn’t understand simplicity.” Problems are easily solved if only “we have the courage to face them. Those who don’t have that courage want complicated answers when they know in their hearts I’m right.” Sound familiar?

To kick-start a sputtering campaign, Goldwater grasped at the opportunistic politics of folksy, down-home cultural morality, an easy target in the turbulent midst of the 1960s. He was way ahead of Karl Rove and his boss. But unlike Rove’s boss, Goldwater was a reluctant moralist. He had spent his career as a quintessential Old Rightist bashing Bolsheviks and bureaucrats and believing fervently that piety was personal, not political. The 1964 holy grail of the White House changed all that -- though he loathed every minute of it.

He also came to regret every minute of it. Unwittingly he had ignited the morality-obsessed “New” Rightists of the following decade, and by 1981 Goldwater was lashing out, “If they disagree with you one bit, you’re a no-good S.O.B.” Looking back on his public career and assessing Washington’s climate of the mid-1990s, he lamented with characteristic brevity, “Perhaps I’m one of the reasons this place is so redneck.”

The comment was more than the stuff of extemporaneous quips that so typified Barry Goldwater. In his autobiography he complained with studied reflection that “the New Right stresses the politics of absolute moral right and wrong. And, of course, they are convinced of their absolute rightness.” His cause of complaint lay in the interests of both nation and party. “If either side insists on legislating morality in absolute terms, then the challenge to democratic society is too great. It’s simply unworkable.” And of partisan concern, “The great danger in the new conservative movement is that, instead of broadening its base, the movement may tear itself and the GOP apart.” He had awakened to consequences.

Further -- though without the slightest recognition that his contemporary thought might conflict with his famous oration on virtuous extremism a quarter-century before -- Goldwater condemned the “new” conservatism for preaching “little or no spirit of compromise.... Public business -- that’s all politics is -- is often making the best of a mixed bargain.... For a democracy to function, there has to be ... some room for compromise.” He had also awakened to complexity.

In short, Goldwater’s ’64 campaign was both anti-eggheadism at its finest and modern conservatism’s prototype, which is to say, muleheaded simplicity. But Goldwater grew out of it.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, shows no sign of developmental abilities. He’ll stick to simplicity like Tom DeLay to junkets -- “regardless,” as Mr. Dionne correctly observed, “of the facts or the consequences.”