P.M. Carpenter

Putz polling

This, from the latest NY Times/CBS News poll, is the perfect sort of democratic imbecility that palsies the intellect of political strategists:

"Democrats ... are seen as having better ideas for solving the country’s problems," although "Voters are remarkably open to change, even if they are not sure where Republicans will lead them."

Want more? How about this from the historic archives of the "Self-Destruction Department"? "In September 1994 ... more than half of people said the condition of the national economy was good." So, naturally, We the people voted the Congressional majority out.

Six years later, We the people and five Supreme Court Justices rewarded a boffo economy with ...

Oh, never mind.

Rightward insurgents

Although Karl Rove's psychiatric skills contra Christine O'Donnell sparked this widely quoted seething from the inexhaustibly indignant Michelle Malkin -- "Rove came across as an effete sore loser instead of the supposedly brilliant and grounded GOP strategist that he's supposed to be," she wrote in one of her finer, frameable tautologies -- some genuine thinkers on the right, noted WaPo's Howard Kurtz yesterday, are teetering 'twixt the "distraught and distressed," smack in Rove's corner.

And they bear repetition. To wit, from the Daily Beast, "Former WSJer Tunku Varadarajan": " ... [The tea] party has succeeded in handing American democracy back to the floundering Democrats.... Confirming the truth that primaries are but a sweaty, vulgar contest in which ideological bully boys stomp to the forefront, Republican die-hards have voted for 'purity,' an elusive concept at the best of times, but in this context a vote for suicide."

Or, there was this from one of the conservative refugees camped at FrumForum: "American conservatives have suffered a crushing and lasting defeat. The center of gravity in American politics has shifted permanently and irreversibly to the left (and conservative ideology will eventually follow)."

Elsewhere, and apart from Kurtz's quotes, the NY Times' Ross Douthat scoldingly ventured that O'Donnell's "politics are too conservative for Delaware, and her past is far too checkered to overcome that disadvantage. Everyone who takes politics seriously understands this...."

Douthat wistfully added that "In the long run, though, O’Donnell’s victory -- and the defeat that will almost certainly follow in November -- might provide a salutary reality check for the party heading into 2012." Emphasis on the conditional, which I suspect Mr. Douthat would concede.

And then, yesterday, there was the aggressively sane Andrew Sullivan, who paused just long enough to astutely wound two birdbrains with one stone: "We know he will say anything, do anything, take any position to advance his own agenda" -- the infamous "he" being the bootlicking Mr. Romney. "He makes plastic look authentic. But it says something surely that he has sided with O'Donnell against Rove in this sudden outbreak of GOP civil war. He wants to win. He knows his only chance is to follow Palin, not challenge her. But she will eat him for breakfast."

For this social democrat, insurgent wit, piercing intelligence and ruthless self-examination are mighty pleasant things to witness on the right. Perhaps someday such qualities will recapture and thus intellectually uplift the conservative movement -- as that would also be a boon to the left, since arguing against the dullness of pseudoconservatism's present-day thinking only dulls our own.

The new new right

Are old-school conservatives in denial? Are they still standing athwart history, yelling Stop, but at the wrong crowd? Are they clinging to the prodigiously false hope that the radicalism of movement conservatism is but the right's latest ideological fad?

I ask because yesterday the NY Times' David Brooks, that lucid, Burkean voice of moderation and restraint, wrote in the future tense -- the future tense, mind you -- about the "intellectual tragedy" of modern conservatives believing that all of our national "challenges can be addressed by the spontaneous healing powers of the market."

Brooks then wandered farther and deeper into this, his metaphysical future: "Conservatism is supposed to be nonideological and context-driven. If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi socialist, then there is no need to think. A pall of dogmatism will settle over the right."

Dogmatism will settle in and over? If all government action is automatically dismissed?

Even absent last night's primary returns -- a GOP now glowing in the embers of its O'Donnells and Paladinos -- Brooks had little justification to project modern conservatism as anything but a thriving case study in intellectual tragedy.

Aside from its genuflections to the liberating miracles of free markets, movement conservatism -- which is to say, modern conservatism -- requires only the catechism of "Obamian socialism," Big Brother thuggery, and some imagined Elysium of past Constitutional purity. Oh, you may of course toss in some cultural mention of the evils of, say, onanism, but that's optional. The surer path forward is a profound hatred of all things Other and a zealous love of bad, shadowy history.

The tea party's contribution? Not much, really. It is, more or less, an extension of, an updated version of, the 1970s' ultraconservative New Right, which ideologically cleansed the GOP throughout the Reagan and Gingrich eras, bullied moderate Republicans into right-wing submission, and in general made an intellectual joke of itself, which naturally held American anti-intellectual populist appeal.

As the New Right/Tea Party/GOP's base is strangled by demographic evolution, its leadership is bound to devolve into louder and louder stridency, lunatic polemics, and electoral-salvage missions of utter desperation.

In short, old-school conservatism's David Brookses are seeing the future, and it is now -- no matter how ardently they wish to see movement conservatism as merely a menacing, fringe conservatism.

Isaiah Berlin to block

Last night I was reading the always magnificent Isaiah Berlin, from a 1951 essay, on Tolstoy's "despairing" historical approach to literature, or rather his literary approach to history, when Sir Isaiah suddenly seemed to speak to the 2010 midterm elections:

"[W]e never shall discover all the causal chains that operate [in history]: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small" -- a point to which I'll return momentarily.

Since at least 2006 Congressional Democrats have known what was coming: a massive, retaliatory attack by the GOP; an orchestrated assault infused with withering propagandistic lies delivered by withering propagandists, and yacht-loads of corporate and special-interest cash, all in the service of retaking power, for power's sake.

Four years. And throughout one of those years -- the last one -- the GOP has been mobilizing its ground troops, largely through a mercenary alliance with the tea party. "We would crawl through broken glass to vote," a reactionary English teacher from Texas told Politico. "We would stand in the pouring rain ... to make our point. We would do anything. We would contribute money we hardly have."

Now, here at the crescendo of those four years, where do Democrats stand?

"In the last six weeks," reported the NYT yesterday, "Republicans have outspent Democrats $20 million to $13 million in television advertising, according to an analysis by The New York Times of 56 of the nation’s most competitive House and Senate races."

And, picking up on yet another of yesterday's NYT pieces devoted to leftward and looming disaster: "For months, Democratic leaders have tried several ways to rally their voters in hopes of closing the enthusiasm gap with Republicans." But so far, not much luck; nothing much but GOP enthusiasm ruthlessly crushing that of Democrats' in virtually poll.

How to explain this? How to explain the lack of spirit, the shortage of funds, the evidently profound absence of long-term strategies on Democrats' part? How to explain Congressional Dems appearing to sleep throughout four, GOP-scheming years, and only at the eleventh hour comprehending that the GOP's bankably corrupt scheming would come showering down on them? And how could rank-and-file Democrats fail to self-motivate against such a vividly pernicious enemy?

Political commentators have been asking those questions for as long as the Democrats have sat stunned and dazed. No shortage of competing answers has resulted: party apathy, overconfidence, wrongheaded priorities, corporate and GOP villainy ... on and on. Yet still -- not that the electoral party is decidedly over, mind you; there's still time for the Dems to pull together on an emergency basis, out of sheer terror -- the multitude of answers remains intellectually unsatisfying. There must be something more.

We all, all of us, want to get at the pit of the problem and thus triumphantly emerge with some grand, explanatory and unified theory of Democratic doltishness. Yet that's a fool's treasure hunt, per Isaiah Berlin: "We shall never discover all the causal chains that operate [within classic Democratic ineffectiveness]: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small."

In fact, the causes number in the millions, each with a private and unknowable address. Tolstoy intuited this, nevertheless he insisted on dying in an agonized, futile pursuit of one underlying explanation, one just inches away from the reach of human striving. Isaiah Berlin suggested a philosophical relaxation about such things: we can't know, we'll never know, it's just too damned complicated for this supremely messy species of ours.

I'm with Isaiah here. There was a time when I wasn't. But the 21st century and, especially, 2010, with a rare intensity, are proving to be a real, recalibrating reset of an eye-opener.

Christine O'Donnell, insider sinologist

A Palin endorsement should be enough to persuade GOP undecideds in Delaware's Senate primary tomorrow that candidate Christine O'Donnell -- a homophobic, opportunistic nomad whose own state party discounts her as "bizarre and scandalous" -- is a choice whacko who naturally attracts the most exemplary voices of pseudoconservative Whackodom.

If for some of the undecideds, however, such a telling endorsement remains inconclusive, they might wish to ponder these passages (regarding O'Donnell's first Senate run) from the Associated Press, September 6, 2006, recently excavated in a LexisNexis archive:

During a primary debate broadcast on WDEL-AM radio, "O'Donnell ... asserted that China has a 'carefully thought out and strategic plan to take over America.'

"Fumbling for words when commenting further on China, O'Donnell said she wished she wasn't privy to some of the 'classified information' she had, prompting a skeptical [primary opponent] to ask whether she had a security clearance."

No word from the AP on the "security clearance" thing. But no matter.

I may have my itsy-bitsy doubts about O'Donnell's "classified" knowledge of sinister Sino-intent, but considering what her GOP has been doing to America lately, I have no doubt that China would have since cancelled its nefarious "takeover" scheme.

The latest polling I saw on the Delaware primary had whom the tea partiers disparage as the "liberal RINO" Mike Castle -- who voted against the health care bill, against the stimulus package, against financial reform, and for the continued nullification of the estate tax -- up by about 20 points.

As a liberal DINO, I confess my preference for an O'Donnell primary upset, thus guaranteeing one less anti-Obama vote in the U.S. Senate next January but one helluva frolicking good time till November. What baffles, though, is that an O'Donnell upset could even be seriously contemplated.

Obama's presser

With respect to his domestic policies, I found President Obama's press conference today to be a study in genuine frustration and growing bitterness. It was of course another prelim to the stump, so naturally the president would have been hellbent on conveying an atmosphere of GOP hostility -- one thwarting his every excellent intention -- but somewhere, not far from the surface, Obama also radiated a certain authenticity beyond politics: Folks, this place is broken.

In characterizing his approach to governance, the president used phrases such as "common sense"; in characterizing the opposition's, he cited "playing politics" and a "partisan minority" and a middle class being held "hostage," all of which "doesn't make sense." Except it does, if roughly half of Washington is determined to grind this country to a miserable and broken halt.

That was the next spoken step that Obama withheld: stripped of Washington's fragrant euphemisms, the plain fact is that the Republican opposition is ... disloyal. A harsh judgment, but the increasingly conspicuous truth transcends mere ideological differences today. The GOP is not only reveling in the nation's failure, it's doing its damnedest to bring it about. For the GOP it's all politics, all day, every day.

Bill after commonsensical bill has come up for a vote, many of which could advance the economy and many of which were once even co-authored by Republicans. The co-authors, noted Obama, then vote against the bills -- assuming they survive obligatory filibuster attempts -- time after time, instance after instance, disappointing jobs report after disappointing jobs report. Turn the screws one more notch.

And why not? think these fine, upstanding Republicans who bark their Beckian platitudes. What political price have they paid for disloyalty to the American worker? The latter may have his or her limits, but the GOP hasn't yet found them.

All of which, I think, has confounded, frustrated and embittered Mr. Obama. And it's finally showing.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that the president entered office in a state of profound naivete, believing that, sure, the opposition would oppose, as oppositions are meant to do, but for heaven's sake they'd never obstruct progress if potential progress indisputably could be shown. Obama understands that potential progress is often defined along ideological perspectives, and therein lie legitimate disputes and loyal opposition.

What, I think, has genuinely shocked man-of-reason Obama, however, are the unpardonable depths of utterly unprincipled opposition to which the GOP has plunged. Conservative ideology is no longer even at stake. Republicans' singular goal is merely to crush the president, no matter how many precarious Americans they take down in the process.

There's a word for that -- and typical, is it not, that it's being practiced by those who so methodically level it against others.

Our American Circus

Here in Circus America, this has been yet another week that was.

We've watched a lunatic "pastor" dominate the news against the virtuous media's protestations that such rubbish shouldn't be covered. And, related, for several days we heard the sounds of silence from Republican charlatans for whom nothing is too good for our troops, except when the latter's welfare might cost the former some rabid votes.

As the demonic pastor-cum-Wyatt Earp (Yosemite Sam?) graciously defrauded on live television whatever following he thought he had built (by announcing a nonexistent deal with a NY imam to whom he had never spoken), a 9/11 Truther paraded behind the theocratic guttersnipe, toting a poster which declared the monstrous nine-year-old tragedy to have been the demolition handiwork of our own government.

Meanwhile, inept Democrats have been coyly assaulting their Democratic president -- who, suggested an MSNBC commentator this afternoon, is "too smart" to be president -- just as national polling has convinced us all that Congressional Dems might have a really bad fall. Or they might not. Either way, it's been convincing and certainly the talk of towns, when, that is, we're not discussing loathsome men of the cloth who, with a book and a match, can dominate cable news 24/7.

All of this mindless chaos has had its upsides, of course. For example Glenn Beck has hardly even been mentioned by Palin's lamestream media this week, since that other depraved jackanapes has been doing God's work, on television, saving the nation if not the world from peaceful mosques.

What worries me about this, our American Circus, is that our silly seasons are now paralleling the madness of our earliest election years -- those of 1796 and 1800, as prime examples, were exceptional in their derangement syndromes mostly because the nation didn't yet comprehend what it was doing or how it was to behave as a constitutional republic -- rather than evolving with any collective, linear competence.

In short, we seem dumber than ever -- more amused and preoccupied than ever by the most frivolous nothings, impervious to rational policies, and beguiled by scoundrels, scapegraces and buffoons.

To the polls!

A greased precipice

From a two-tiered system of justice there can easily spring a three-tiered system or four. With the Ninth Circuit's dismissal yesterday of the rendition and torture case against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary, we stand ignobly at Phase Two.

The Court's reasoning was as tortured as the plaintiffs' bodies and minds: "This case requires us to address the difficult balance the state secrets doctrine strikes between fundamental principles of our liberty, including justice, transparency, accountability and national security. Although as judges we strive to honor all of these principles, there are times when exceptional circumstances create an irreconcilable conflict between them."

Whenever "justice" is temporarily removed as a fundamental principle of liberty and replaced with the state's unconcealed convenience of injustice, the entire intellectual structure of guaranteed human rights rots and collapses. There was no splitting the baby on this. The Ninth Circuit could aim for the oppressiveness of security or the risks of liberty, and it chose the former.

And because "transparency" and "accountability" were whisked away with the same pen that commanded injustice, any effort on your part or mine to comprehend any "exceptional circumstances" is rendered impossibly thwarted.

One is left with the government's word:

"The government is not invoking the privilege to avoid embarrassment or to escape scrutiny of its recent controversial transfer and interrogation policies," wrote the Court, "rather than to protect legitimate national security concerns."

That may or may not be true. But who among us would wish for the wretched paradox of guaranteed rights conditionally granted?

Olbermann flips

I just heard Keith Olbermann make the argument, for at least the second evening, that although the Florida "preacher" with fire in his eyes and hate in his heart has of course the Constitutional right to burn the Koran, restraint is urged. From the legal right, said Olbermann in so many word, there proceeds no moral necessity to exercise it.

I quite agree. But I didn't post this item just to announce my agreement.

Throughout the height of the NY mosque controversy, I also heard Keith Olbermann repeatedly mock and belittle those who opposed the site; those who argued that of course a Constitutional right to build the mosque and community center exists, but from the legal right there proceeded no moral necessity to build. Olbermann, with his customary sarcasm, found this argument worth only scorn.

Not that my opinion on the mosque issue is relevant here, but again, I agreed with Olbermann's position as originally stated. Now, however, Olbermann has chosen to use the very same line of criticism against the Florida preacher's proposed Koran-burning that he once pronounced, with respect to the mosque, as both politically insincere and Constitutionally absurd.

Just your garden-variety hypocrisy, you say? Naturally. But it's also a hypocrisy that bleeds from partisan politics, which is a sadder kind of hypocrisy to watch in a "news" program that purports to carry itself as honest journalism.

Full stop, again

Maybe it's time to start ignoring generic-ballot polling.

The latest from Gallup:

"Republicans and Democrats are tied at 46% among registered voters in Gallup's weekly tracking of congressional voting preferences, marking a shift after five consecutive weeks in which the Republicans held the advantage."

By the way, a dead heat is what Newsweek's poll showed a week ago, amid all the sexier flurry and frenzy of Gallup's stop-the-presses 10-point GOP lead!

Democratic Brutuses

From Politico:

It’s hard to talk to any House Democratic operative these days without getting an earful about how politically tone deaf this White House has been. The latest rant goes like this: Obama blew the entire summer for Democrats, starting with the First Lady’s fancy trip to Spain and Robert Gibbs’ public admission that Democrats could lose the House.... Then there was the mosque controversy, the Martha’s Vineyard trip and the lackluster Iraq speech. House Democrats estimate that they will have gone 10 straight weeks dealing with unhelpful storylines generated or exacerbated by the Obama White House.

Perhaps valid recriminations. But there's one in return that trumps them all: Congressional Democrats' months of squander over the public option.

By late summer, 2009, nothing was politically clearer than the singular reality that the public option was doomed. The White House gently dropped it from its list of demands for the healthcare bill, the House had had to weaken the option's provisions to secure passage, and in the Senate, the votes simply weren't there for a public option in any form.

Yet House and Senate progressives persisted in their publicly stated demands, which prolonged the dispute while changing nothing in the way of outcome. The progressives knew this; they knew, as well as the White House and Senate Republicans, that the public option would go nowhere, no matter what. But they couldn't resist playing to their base. In short, they were demagoguing on a dead issue.

Meanwhile, the economy was shedding jobs. As this transpired, the electorate watched Congressional Dems squabbling about one hopeless provision in a healthcare bill. More squabbling, more jobs shed, more public disgust.

Just pass the bloody thing in an acceptable form, advised the White House and an army of commentators, so that Congress can move on to jobs creation, the lack of which every poll singled out as the electorate's #1 worry. What passed instead were weeks more of more squabbling about healthcare.

By the time Congressional progressives publicly conceded the inevitable and passed the healthcare bill in its compromised form, the midterms were bearing down on Congress. The GOP had successfully and rather easily framed the bill -- given months to do so -- as a massive federal expenditure that would bankrupt generations to come, thus hope for any additional jobs bill and its concomitant spending was as doomed as the public option.

This was avoidable, yet it lies at the core of Congressional Democrats' midterm predicament. They've mostly themselves to blame.

WaPo's whopper

To me, the most disquieting aspect of the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll isn't that it shows the Dems are decidedly down or that it even aids in confirming the thesis that America is a center-right republic, notwithstanding center-left Obama's historic ascendancy or, amusingly, the left's indefatigable insistence that Americans are just wild about modern progressivism (but the wickedly mainstream media refuse to spread the word, you see).

No, Americans are center-right, and they've essentially been so for a couple hundred years, so no real news there, such as the pushback to Obama's moderate progressivism shown in the WaPo poll: 45 percent now regard the president as "too liberal." That is a perhaps shocking statistic to those who know what too liberal actually means, but, I suppose through America's rather ill-schooled center-right lenses, things might look that way.

What is disquieting, though, is to find that this nation's center-right majority no more comprehends what authentic conservatism looks and sounds like than it comprehends the face of Obama's progressivism.

It is appalling, utterly appalling that today's moderately conservative voters could see much of any genuine conservatism in the face of the modern GOP, rather than the crude face it so nakedly reflects: amorally moralistic demagoguery and a lust for pure power that would have shamed the Borgias.

To me, that's what's behind the WaPo poll's numbers. Forget all the jumbled stats of 49 percent to 47 percent about this, or 45 percent to 43 percent about that. Instead, the poll expressed, for sure, how a center-right nation might very well feel about a moderately progressive president after a couple years in office, but also fundamentally revealed -- and much more disquietingly -- that center-right Americans wouldn't know real conservatism if the latter rolled them without principle or mercy for, say, some 30 odd years.

Principles? Pshaw

From a Tea Party Express fundraising email of Sept. 4, in support of its "no-holds-barred constitutional conservative" candidate in Delaware, for the U.S. Senate:

[T]he GOP establishment here is pulling out all the stops to help elect Liberal RINO Mike Castle....

Mike Castle is so liberal, he not only opposes the repeal of ObamaCare, but he was one of the last U.S. Senators [last indeed, and in this case one of the least as well, contrary to the old saying, since Mr. Castle is a U.S. representative, not a senator] to announce how he'd vote on ObamaCare because he was thinking of voting FOR it.

Mike Castle has about $2.5 million he can still spend. The only way we here at the Tea Party Express can feel confident to win this race is if we expand our own campaign activities, and that means buying ads on Philadelphia TV stations....

So we need your help, and the help of conservatives and tea party activists across the nation!

Please - forward this to all your conservative friends.... We are up against the entire political establishment, who want to see us lose this race. But we CAN win - if we all stand united on the principles of constitutional conservatism.

Notice anything missing?

Evidently, one of the revolutionary principles of "constitutional conservatism" is to omit any reference, by name, to whatever human embarrassments the constitutional conservatives are supporting.

In this instance, the embarrassment is Christine O'Donnell, who, notes the NY Times' tea-party specialist, Kate Zernike, "is a perennial candidate with a history of financial problems, including unpaid taxes and a home in foreclosure." She's also a first-rate fibber and fabricator, having misrepresented to friendly audiences her "perennial" electoral flops as burgeoning successes. "Republicans," observes Zernike, "have attacked her for 'repeatedly lying to voters' and 'manipulating her own political history.' "

All of which is true enough; it's on the record, in print, on tape, on video. The charges against O'Donnell aren't just your garden-variety political mudballs. They're incontrovertible, impervious to happier interpretations. Delaware's tea party candidate is just a pretty face in need of a job, anyway she can get it, and she bamboozled her sponsors to get this far.

To be fair, I've received other Tea Party Express fundraising emails that do mention the wily O'Donnell by name. In the above-cited email, however, she's simply been airbrushed out, as an embarrassment, even as the unapologetic plea goes forward to donate against her more honorable opponent.

Object lesson: How quickly self-proclaimed revolutionaries, hellbent on changing disreputable politics, will adopt orthodox political ways, just to win. Principles? Pshaw.

Milbanks’ minority report

“Simpson apologized. He shouldn't have.”

Thus writes the Post’s Dana Milbank about former senator Alan Simpson’s rather impolitic remark, "We've reached a point now where [the federal government is] like a milk cow with 310 million tits." Simpson, demonstrating once again that only politicians unburdened by the groveling demands of reelection can freely outpour their minds, whether half full or half empty, then compounded his indiscretion by venturing, "The irony [is] that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess."

Milbank reduces his point of order at his column’s end: “Let's stop looking for reasons to take offense and start listening to what the man is saying.”

Putting aside the policymaking thrust of what Simpson is saying, which, like virtually all proposed solutions to contentious issues, has its upsides and downsides, I find myself eager to join Milbanks’ chorus. If, over the last 30 or so years, the media had devoted less time and space to the melodramatic outrage of ideological groups in hot pursuit of impolitic pols and more time and space on the impolitic pol’s precise bill of particulars, we might not be where we are today: trapped in a two-ring circus of colliding extremes.  

First, I couldn't care less about what Alan Simpson thinks is witty. (Besides, as Milbank notes, Simpson stole, with only slight modification, the “tits” line from H.L. Mencken. If I’m to work up any outrage, it’s only that over using Mencken without attribution.)

Second, endlessly quoting Simpson’s “wit” only encourages the man and others like him, those still in the electoral game.

Which logically enough is related to, Third: If you’re a politician in need of fast, emotional cash, just go out of your way to outrage the opposition. Forget trying to accomplish this with serious policy proposals, for they’ll go uncovered by the media. Boring. A little something outrageous, however? Bingo. Voices of opposition will see your outrage and return a torrent of outrage times ten, all of which will ensure intensely amusing media coverage, thereby loosening the wallets of your outrage-friendly crowd.

Mission accomplished, from which point #3 thematically loops to point #2, from which there is little escape, since #2 happily contributes to #3, and so on.

What, as the only countermeasure, is missing? You got it: more #1s.

Where was Joe?

"He's one of the major forces moving this country toward socialism. He's expanding the entitlement state. It is the wrong direction for America. This is a bipartisan problem, but he's at the front of it. I think our president has actually put our country down, not advanced it in the standing of the nations. I would suggest to you again [that] 'bad for America' is an apt description."

From an interview on CNN this week, those were the otherworldly observations of Alaska's GOP Senate candidate and tea party luminary, Joe Miller. From his lost battle to comprehend the genuine meaning of "socialism" to his abject misreading of current global perceptions of the U.S., what emerges is either a remarkably ill-informed pol or wholly unprincipled man.

What's even more striking about Miller's comments, though, is the same disassociate ailment that strikes one so oddly about other tea partiers: his political silence throughout the previous administration.

You want an expansion of the "entitlement state" coupled with phony bookkeeping and crushing debt? Try on for size the Medicare prescription program -- a perfectly fine concept legislatively corrupted in every imaginable way, courtesy George W. Bush and his "conservative" party.

You want a degradation of America's image "in the standing of the nations"? An unprovoked -- and for all you fiscal worrywarts out there, unfunded -- war would do it. And did it.

Where was Joe? Where was Joe then, as Bush and his Congressional allies marched innocent America straight into the devouring jaws of "socialism" and militarism?

Where was Joe as President Obama's predecessor unconstitutionally expanded "the executive state"? Where was Joe as the governing principle of fiscal responsibility intensified as but a hazy memory for the GOP? Where was Joe as the Bush administration was obliterating federal surpluses or bailing out big banks with abandon or laying the groundwork for mass unemployment?

Why your silence then, Joe? It wasn't as though the Bush administration merely stumbled now and then over genuine conservative principles. Indeed, what we all witnessed were two, uninterrupted terms of bigger and bullying government and international roguishness.

Just where in hell were you then, Joe?

Every time you insist that Obama is "bad for America," Mr. Miller, your potential constituents should ask in the way of retort, "Where was Joe?"