P.M. Carpenter

We're not asking, Ms. Palin, we're now begging

Chris Matthews erred. Last night, responding to Sarah Palin's characteristically defiant "I’m not going to shut up" folderal on Monday night's Sean Hannity show, Matthews uncharacteristically paused and then proceeded, "No one's told her to shut up."

Oh but they have, although "they" -- Palin's preferred, collective pronoun for all who oppose her preposterous eminence -- contrary to what Palin would want her base to know, tend to come from the right side of the room: "they" are that rarest of endangered species, thoughtful conservatives, such as David Brooks or Andrew Sullivan. These voices employ perhaps more graceful rhetoric than the blunt, straightforward "shut up," but even their more eloquent declaratives are unmistakable.

This, it appears, explains a good deal as to Palin's habitual and seemingly mysterious references to "they." They are everywhere and they're lurking sinisterly, according to Palin in speeches and on Fox, plotting at every turn to "shut" her up; which, naturally, she won't do, since in her commercial mind she is America's Jeanne d'Arc², wrapped in the unamended Constitution and rolled in mom's apple pie crust. Yet if she ever named the names of the actual "they" who have asked that she shut the hell up, the mystery and ambiguity of her real opposition would go the way of Michael Corleone's (Part II), and she'd be left with fighting only the right.

A few others outside the conservative camp, of course, have asked, too, that she shut up, such as my indirect and rather inelegant request of late. But I wish to make clear that that request was filed through no predilection whatsoever for political censorship. It was filed instead from under the oppressive weight of that proverbial final straw. Ms. Palin, we just can't take you anymore; not after Tucson's aftermath, which was your last chance to strike at some semblance, at least, of honest, intelligent, and civil discourse.

You insist, Ms. Palin, that you're "not going to shut up." Well, OK, rather than asking you to, let's pose a question instead: Just what is it that you have to cluck that we really need to hear?

Have you some level of macroeconomic expertise that could shine some recovery light on our present situation? Have you any hard-learned, long-examined insights into international affairs? Tales, perhaps, of your self-truncated executive brilliance and dedication that would be transferable to Washington? Even some general enlightenment about the national Zeitgeist? Anything? Anything at all? Anything to add, other than more endless chapters about how you've been slandered and wronged?

Good grief, Ms. Palin, even when you venture to clean up your image you slander yourself. You posted "crosshairs" one day and later, through an opportunistic aide, they became "surveyors' symbols," only for you to blithely reconvert them to crosshairs (properly posted, of course). You also once displayed an elementary ignorance of the common word "repudiate," which you thought was "refudiate," which you first claimed was a clever Shakespearean neologism, which you then later claimed was only the result of accidently typing "f" rather than the "d" next to it, which meant you thought "repudiate" was spelled "redudiate." A tangled web, Ms. Palin.

By itself, a minor issue. George Washington couldn't spell, either. But for heaven's sake he didn't lie about it, he didn't contort reality, he didn't jump to inject the very highest dosages of unadulterated venom into every debate, he didn't wallow in victimization, he didn't seize every national event as a showcase for George-centricity -- and did know something about teamwork and executive management. 

In short, Ms. Palin, he and most of his successors didn't pollute the national stage, they enhanced it. Yet one is hard-pressed to think of even one example of enhancement -- of anything -- on your part.

I once cheered you on, Ms. Palin, I was once in your corner, rooting all the way for your GOP nomination, since you'd be effortlessly defeatable. But the growing enormity of your blight has finally outweighed even that prodigiously happy prospect. You just aren't worth it, Ms. Palin; your continued presence on the political stage only further diminishes our already dubious democratic process.

Nutjobs for all

In rapid response to Michelle Malkin's paranoid whimsy about Kenyan-Stalinist Barack Obama having dictated the Tucson memorial's "Together We Thrive" T-shirt distribution -- "Can't the Democrat political stage managers give it a break just once?" wrote the giddily despondent Malkin -- PolitiFact reports that "officials at the University of Arizona say it was all their idea."

And God bless her, "Malkin later ran an update to her column, noting the university's claims" -- but, yet, however, nevertheless she persisted in "maintain[ing] that the odds of White House involvement were high."

Imagine that. Malkin reasserted opinion and speculation over known or discoverable fact. Astonishing, no?

Such are the unctuous gears of the far right's noise machine, which has yet to meet a diseased speculation it didn't like -- indeed, the more diseased the better -- especially since it courts and embraces such an exploitable, gullible base.

Yet those on the responsible left should not snicker or gloat too long or too far, for they've their precious loonies as well. Yesterday, for example, I visited a major progressive Web site and there, in the comments section to a critical piece on Obama, was an appalling litany of "progressive" hysterics: Obama is a fascist, said one; Obama is Bush II all over again, said another; Obama is a corporate shill secretly abetting the vile Republicans, said a third ... etc., etc. -- a tidy collection of some of the most wretchedly paranoid, hideously contemptible slop I've ever encountered on the Web. And I've visited Malkin's site, so that's saying a lot.

It seems we've a long way to go before the political Web grows up.

The (tea) party is about over

How much of an enduring threat to rational, responsible politics are those loosely affiliated tea parties?

A post-election November story in Politico, by Ken Vogel, which I came across only yesterday, might provide some reliable clue. In it, Vogel interviewed "tea party organizers in Washington and across the country," and, as the piece's title happily suggests -- "Tea partiers turn on each other" -- there seems to be trouble in revolutionary paradise.

Big trouble, even, as is revealed by the story's immense negativity -- an uplifting tale of internal squabbling, bickering and brawling which appears to have no end but a dark one for tea partiers.

What follows are selected passages, both reported and quoted, reflecting the tea parties' travails:

... embroiled in internal feuding over
       philosophy, strategy and money
... at risk of losing its momentum
... increasingly divided
... disagreements and [a] sense of frustration
... "fractured at the organization level"
... "intoxicated with [the limelight]"
... organizational chaos
... widening apathy at the edges of
       the movement
... deep disagreement about what any national
       organization would look like and who
       would lead it
... turmoil within the movement
... internal clashes
... "rivalries and turf battles"
... mundane rivalries and personal feuds
... "There’s a lot of fighting, and
       everyone wants to be in charge"
... extremist rhetoric
... "malicious"
... compromised by extremism
... "kind of out there and radical"
... "beginning to become a little bit
       de-energized"
... "starting to feel like they’re
       fighting a losing battle"

All that, I remind you, followed a successful midterm election for the tea parties; a brief drama whose inexorable denouement, it seems, entails corporate-flack Dick Armey as a right-wing Robespierre.

And what of Capitol Hill events since? what of the noble budget-slashers the tea parties helped elect? what of that vanguard of libertarian, teeny-weeny-government exuberance, the new House majority?

I quote, straight from The Hill: "This week, the House is expected to vote on the Stop the Overprinting Act, which ... could save as much as $35 million over 10 years.... It follows a bill introducing a 5 percent cut to House office budgets, which passed the House overwhelmingly on Jan. 6."

Whoa, now there's revolutionary fervor for you -- dynamiting $3.5 million a year from a multitrillion-dollar budget and slashing a ghastly 5 percent from already bloated congressional fiefdoms. One is tempted to ask in seriousness: Is that some sort of sick joke?

For tea partiers, adding incendiary insult to these notional wounds was Eric Cantor's massive recalibration this week: "We ... understand that we as Republicans do not control this federal government — the other party does."

Once, as late as last October, tea partiers saw a GOP revolutionary cadre willing to shut 'er down, if necessary; now they see the same old party of big tax cuts, bigger spending, and the biggest deficits ever.

The tea parties' future? Here's what's likely. This loosely organized fringe movement will not, cannot sustain the ratcheting levels of disaffection, disappointment and ideological betrayal that its tightly organized keepers, the GOP, are dispensing. More likely than not, in relatively short order -- two years or three? maybe less? -- the movement will trail off into third-party territory, seldom to be heard from again.

The little engine that won't

I enjoyed this email from Tea Party Express's "Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama":

Conservatives and Constitutionalists are rallying together today for a major push on Facebook and Twitter.

We're on the verge of surpassing 10,000 active members for the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama. If you haven't already joined, then today's the day to do so. It's absolutely FREE, and you can help make this Sunday evening a fun time for conservatives to come together with shared principles.

10,000? Only 9,512,083 to go.

A commentary tutorial

Conservatives just can't bring themselves to do it.

I don't mean real conservatives of the actual school of genuine conservatism, such as Andrew Sullivan or David Frum, but the play-acting, budget-mangling, quackery-spewing, bugaboo-creating pseudoconservative conservatives of the modern school of right-wing chaos, radicalism and boundless obscurantism.

And every now and then one even finds a conscientious objector among the authentic conservative crowd, such as the NY Times' Ross Douthat, who also just can't quite bring himself to do it: to write, that is, in unambiguous language, that the tea-partying GOP's Sarah Palin is demonstrably unfit for any high public office other than that of ex-part-time governor; that this pronouncement goes for 2016 and beyond as well as 2012; and that her grotesque, self-absorbed, ill-tempered response to the tragic Tucson events is what encased this long-overdue partisan judgment in everlasting Ready-Mix.

Instead, Douthat merely observes that Palin is not, despite all the media hype, the 2012 GOP frontrunner and that she has no "plausible path" to the White House in 2012; that she unwisely made "a speech [last week] complaining about her own victimization"; and that she's "becoming the kind of caricature that [her] enemies have always tried to make of [her]" (italics mine).

And then this, the kind of kid-glove, promiscuous-pol-rearing, Montessori-style political commentary that only encourages the permanent scourge of a Sarah Palin Forever: Governor, "you might ... win a few more admirers if you cultivated a lighter touch and a more above-the-fray persona."

Now what, I ask you, is the point of offering admirer-cultivating tips to a remarkably malevolent pol who has publicly affirmed time and again her unmistakable unfitness for higher office? And what is the point of intoning that this prodigiously hate-filled harpy is only becoming a caricature of hate-filled harpiness?

That "caricature" -- which by now is but an undeniable fact of unshakable personality -- was not, Mr. Douthat, a creation of her "enemies," who, by the way, didn't exist until the obscure, vice-presidential candidate created them. It was Palin -- not her enemies, in some sort of devious, make-believe propaganda campaign -- who directly bellowed and brayed about "unAmerican" blue portions of the country she proposed to help lead, and wildly denounced the future president as a "pal" of "terrorists."

Those, ah, comments should have earned her a one-way ticket home to Wasilla during the campaign -- one imagines what Ike would have done had Dick, rather than caressing a mere slush fund, bluntly accused Adlai of unconcealed treason -- yet all they did was buy her the continuing notoriety of "death panels" and "blood libel."

And that's because some conservatives -- even some among respectable conservatism -- continue to dangle the rotted carrot of a Sarah Palin as a legitimate force in American politics.

I almost regret engaging here what some would insist are the kind of searing polemics that civility would properly eschew. But that's the hell of it: in the service of eradicating a political plague such as Ms. Palin, there are no assertive judgments, no blanket denunciations too harsh. Her very presence on the political stage -- deemed only disturbingly idiosyncratic by too many otherwise honest conservatives, who thereby contribute to her continuing presence -- compels the absolute need for all thoughtful commentators to write plainly that Sarah Palin should just go home and shut the fuck up.

Blow-ing with the winds

The NY Times' Charles Blow begins with the prevailing double-barreled fallacy ...

Within hours of the shooting, there was a full-fledged witch hunt to link the shooter to the right.... The only problem is that there was no evidence then, and even now, that overheated rhetoric from the right had anything to do with the shooting.

What I recall was an instant and perfectly reasonable but still guarded assumption of collective guilt; after all, the principal target was a Democratic congresswoman who had been figuratively "targeted" and whose office had been physically vandalized by radical forces of the right.

If it was unreasonable to immediately suspect those who had already perpetrated harm, then law enforcement acts unreasonably when it suspects the reporting spouse in a "missing" spouse case, which itself follows repeated charges of domestic abuse.

And "anything" -- that the toxic atmosphere had anything to do with the shooting.

Here, Mr. Blow dismisses mountains of data and decades of research (Google search: "toxic social environment effects on individual psychosis") into the sociopsychological phenomena of mob violence or partisan hysteria or, in general, extreme social pressures and their branching effects. Indeed, even the 17th century's Thomas Hobbes suggested that the invention of the firearm had introduced a "democratic" and tragically leveling effect into politics: given the contribution of a disaffected, roiling environment against a "rightful" king, any infected madman could now competently commit regicide.

Blow's head then explodes in a trumpet-blaring, concluding crescendo of self-righteous fallacy:

Now we’ve settled into the by-any-means-necessary argument: anything that gets us to focus on the rhetoric and tamp it down is a good thing. But a wrong in the service of righteousness is no less wrong, no less corrosive, no less a menace to the very righteousness it’s meant to support.

In short, two wrongs don't make a right -- perhaps the most superficial, idiotic aphorism ever confected by the Dudley Do-Right mind of man.  

By Blow's moral calculation I presume it would have been "wrong" of some 1934 German Jew to send Herr Hitler to the Devil? And it was "wrong" of Abraham Lincoln to withhold emancipation until he knew it would serve the war cause? And it was "wrong" of American patriots to heave legally authorized but monopolistic tea into a harbor?

Blow didn't think his piece out. What he did, instead (and perhaps this is wrong of me to muse so presumptuously), what he did was to rise up in a sanctimonious phantasmagoria of journalistic balance -- no reflexive leftie or right-basher, he.

No, he's a man of bold calculation, partisanship be damned; he's just that kind of guy.

Next, maybe Mr. Blow can remind us that there are many decent, hardworking people who believe the earth is flat, so let us snicker not.

A Thoreauvian moment

As I recall it was Henry David Thoreau who once revealed that he didn't read newspapers, since each page, indeed each story, he opined, would require weeks for him to satisfactorily comprehend all of its ramifying depths of historical background and contemporary implications. So he didn't bother. That's probably a poor paraphrase, but it nonetheless strikes, I think, at Thoreau's intended essence.

What sparked this recollection was a Hill piece this morning, which quoted from Rep. Jeff Flake's Saturday GOP address in which he noted the continuing need for town hall-like events:

"The people are sovereign. The freedom and wisdom of the people determine our future, not the whims of dictators and certainly not the bullets of fanatics."

That passage alone contains a dizzying set of dubious assumptions, beginning with the one about representative pols representing only the people's will, as though the former are but vote-casting automatons, sitting there in Washington to express the democratic voice of the virtuous majority.

If so, what of the GOP's rigid stance on, say, health care reform, on which most every poll finds "the people" precisely split? Or did Flake mean he himself properly represents only the majority opinion of his district? And if so, what of Kennedy/Sorensen's thoughtful analysis, in Profiles in Courage, of a politician's responsibility to personal conscience? And how much weight should the Flakes of Washington give the broader "United States" portion of their district-representing title?

Even murkier -- in addition to borderline demagogic -- was Flake's matter-of-fact assertion of the people's "sovereignty" and "wisdom."

In for example the run-up to W.'s Iraq war, they were decidedly neither: the president was going to war -- period, case closed, there was no way around it. Bush's public support at the time was, for him, good but superfluous; so much for democratic "sovereignty." And because "the people" by and large were equally jingoistic, they were as unwise as the government. Later, when the war went tragically south and the people wisely wanted out, their sovereignty again counted for nothing. 

Today, Rep. Flake underscored the sovereignty, freedom and wisdom of the people at large, who won't be intimidated by violent "fanatics." But does any thoughtful student of modern politics disbelieve that the GOP is at the primary, whimsical mercy of, at best, bulletless fanatics?

One passage, two sentences -- "The people are sovereign. The freedom and wisdom of the people determine our future, not the whims of dictators and certainly not the bullets of fanatics" -- that would have extended Thoreau's rustic sojourn by weeks, perhaps years. We're bombarded by such platitudes a thousand times a day, and we think nothing of them.

Not for innocent eyes

From Tea Party Express's political action committee, Our Country Deserves Better:

Politico is reporting today that Democrat political aides are putting together a fundraising effort to secure more than $1 BILLION to ensure Barack Obama can win re-election in the upcoming presidential campaign.

At the same time, the Republican National Committee (RNC) is $20 MILLION in DEBT, and plans to still be $10 MILLION in DEBT at the end of this year.

Friends, this is one of the primary reasons why groups like ours, the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama are so important:  because we are committed to Constitutionalist Conservative principles - and not just political partisanship.

If Barack Obama is going to try to raise more than $1 BILLION, then We The People need to find a way to raise $1 BILLION or more ourselves.  We simply cannot fail - we must defeat Obama and limit his tenure in office to just one-term.

I confess I'm a fan of political pornography. As such, it was my extreme pleasure to view the hardcore above, packed as it is with misdirection, con-artistry, unflinching contradiction, forbidding hysteria, indulgent ambiguity, and the most delightful sense of frustrated urgency and latent virility.

But shouldn't this sort of political XXX material come cyberwrapped in some sort of plain, electronic brown paper?

"Old dichotomies"

From Eugene Robinson, yesterday:

While [President Obama] never stopped preaching his message of getting past the old dichotomies -- progressive-conservative, left-right, Democrat-Republican -- he also never devised a new template for political discourse. 

I disagree. To me, the new template was unmistakable: problems addressed and progress achieved through relentless pragmatism -- which in itself suggests an elegant incrementalism (should one wish to pile up the comfortable old "isms") -- within an adult environment of political civility.

Indeed, Obama wasn't so much "getting past" or junking the "old dichotomies" as he was playing the Hegelian, meshing the this and that of some thesis with the either/or of its antithesis and then arriving at resplendent middle ground; from where, in time, through the selfsame process again, a yet higher plateau could be reached.

The guarded incrementalism of the pragmatic approach would, theoretically, encourage a greater degree of political civility throughout. David Brooks, also yesterday, noted the self-cancelling reality of civility projects as stand-alone projects (of the sort, that is, that E. Robinson seemed to desire):

Speeches about civility will be taken to heart most by those people whose good character renders them unnecessary. Meanwhile, those who are inclined to intellectual thuggery and partisan one-sidedness will temporarily resolve to do better but then slip back to old habits the next time their pride feels threatened.

That was a not-so-blunted barb fixed pointedly in Palin's lower lip, however it was aimed as well at bombastic House and Senate herds of GOP brand.

In theory, Obama's strategy was sound. And for a while -- in November and December of 2008, even January of 2009 -- it seemed that Republicans might re-metamorph into reincarnations of (not quite but close to) Eisenhower Republicans. No one could have known, however, that their "intellectual thuggery" would resurrect so dreadfully.

Krugman sees the light(?)

Without acknowledging that this is precisely why President Obama has always approached political issues from a pragmatic posture as opposed to a profoundly idealistic, "morally superior" stance of progressive wont, Paul Krugman, an inveterate apostle of the latter, endorses the former this morning, while Obama, an apostle of the former, lately exalted the latter.

Say what? OK, in the way of explanation, let us let Krugman debate himself:

"[T]he great divide in our politics isn’t really about pragmatic issues, about which policies work best; it’s about differences in those very moral imaginations Mr. Obama urges us to expand, about divergent beliefs over what constitutes justice."

And there of course is the rub: those "moral imaginations," an oratorical flourish that Obama deployed at an acutely appropriate moment of national grief, but as a political program those "imaginations" are, as this pragmatic president well knows, a slippery road to muddlement, divisiveness and disaster.

Progressives often confront issues from a platform of morality; they philosophize endlessly about our "better angels," about humanity's inexorable improvement, if not perfection, about, simply, what's morally "right." In the process they only set themselves up for a pseudoconservative counteroffensive, because they, too, claim to know what's morally "right."

Somehow both sides can read the mind of God, although pseudoconservatives appear to be more celestially literate than progressives. If, say, Sarah Palin were unable to invoke Providential authority for her every political whim, she'd have no political program at all.

And just imagine, if you will, the resulting horrors of some United States president affirming his personal politics by Godly edict, which only his limited mental capacity but nonetheless limitless spirituality can decode. Oh, wait ...

In short, the political chant of "morality" is often no more than a shill -- a political pea pod designed to cover and move about our secular, policy desiderata. Esteemed religio-politico-philosopher Stephen Colbert has encapsulated what he posits as a right-wing dilemma, which for wingers, however, is a piece of cake: "If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition ... and then admit that we just don't want to do it."

Pretend? There's no pretense. They revel in Ayn Randian selfishness and extol Calvinistic proofs of their Godly election. Or, they prattle about love and caring and then "moralistically" argue that both are achieved only through cutting the poor loose on some sort of Jesus-approved, Horatio Algerian journey. And either way, Biblical footnotes abound; it's the "moral" thing we are all urged to do (and since the footnotes are indeed Jesus-approved, why, even violence in their enforcement must remain on the table of deliberation). 

Yet both sides possess a pod. The Social Gospel is, by definition, steeped in what God so vividly wants us to do, which is precisely what the pseudoconservatives and tea partiers' God asks us to reject. Still, the much larger progressive framework of utopian visions of material equity is saturated in a voluble, evangelical language of an intense social "morality" -- of which there is no objective ideal, nevertheless progressives' highly indignant hustling of one reduces them to risible catcalls of feeling "morally superior."   

All of which swings us back to what I believe is President Obama's vastly superior and traditional political posture (that of modern progressivism's founder, FDR, too): Subdue, in general, public talk of indefinable morality and stick to practical politics -- i.e., pragmatism; adhere to a kind of technocratic course of "This works, that doesn't"; acquaint oneself only with what contributes to our general welfare, and, no matter its ideological or moralistic hues, go from there.

Retain this piece as a natural emetic

The healing begins, per R. Limbaugh:

I honestly thought about opening the program today, go out and find a medicine man to open the program, much as they opened the pep rally last night, and it was a pep rally. I think even Obama was a little bit put off by the behavior of that crowd last night.... They had two members of the regime quoting the Bible. They didn't have preachers, priests, rabbis.  They had Big Sis and Eric Holder quoting from the Bible, and I'm thinking this is not gonna play well with the Democrat base. And, of course, the Muslim brothers might be scratching their heads over that....

Now, Fox loved it. The Fox All Stars when this was over were slobbering over the speech. It was predictable. And they were slobbering over it for the predictable reasons. It was smart; it was articulate; it was oratorical; it was all the things the educated ruling class wants their members to be and sound like....

It was everything we knew it would be. It became everything we knew it would be, and that is attacking talk radio, attacking Sarah Palin. We knew. It was utterly predictable....

Yesterday was Wednesday. [Giffords] opened her eyes on Sunday. We have the doctor saying so, because they were keeping her in an induced coma and she would come in and out of the coma, I guess. Now, the doctor made it a point to say today that she voluntarily opened her eyes for the first time yesterday. Now, clearly, folks, the impression sought here is that the president and Mrs. Obama arrive on Chariot One, they head to the hospital, they go into the room of Gabrielle Giffords, they do whatever they do, they lay on hands, what have you.

I must stop here. This is all I can get through without saturating my laptop with my lunch.

It should be immeasurable

A Quinnipiac University poll [shows] that voters think Obama's time in the White House has been better than Bush's by a 46-30 percent margin.

About 10 years ago I wrote a piece for TomPaine.com that argued, not entirely in jest, that about one-third of the American people can always be counted on -- literally -- to represent the abject basest of mammalian intelligence. The theory hasn't been proved wrong yet.

They just needed more time

The Hill's Michael O'Brien is evidently among Fox Business Network's three regular viewers, for he has taken note of guest-Senator Rand Paul's otherwise unnoticed drivel last night: 

"Well, these are the kind of things that I think some on the left decided to manufacture even before the events occur," said Paul of Tucson's "events" and many Democrats' reasonable assumption that they were made more likely to explode because of the far right's pressure-cooking rhetoric.

"I mean, this is part of the playbook of Rahm Emanuel where they say any crisis should be used to their advantage to further their agenda," added Paul.

This approaches conspiratorial, truly lunatic Limbaugh territory: The "events" occurred, but, eerily, it was "decided" by Dems beforehand to "manufacture" their controversy.

Idiotic comments like that, or comments like that which even minimally allude to such idiocy, remind me of comedian Steven Wright's remark that he treats his body not like a temple, but like, at least, a reasonably well-run Presbyterian daycare center. That's Democratic strategery for you: more like a daycare center than a splendiferous temple, utterly and amateurishly incapable of the kind of diabolical evil and wicked "playbook" that Republican pols so often conjure, or want their base to imagine.

At any rate, so much for that universal praise of all Republican pols -- as opposed to their propagandistic mouthpieces on cable, radio and the Internets -- having taken the high road throughout this excruciating time. They merely needed a little more time.

Strategic isolation

More graceful or appropriate comments were inconceivable. President Obama's memorial remarks were spiritual, touching, thoughtful, hopeful and manifestly heartfelt. Toward their conclusion my wife turned to me and said, rhetorically, "He's hitting a home run, isn't he." In unnecessary reply: He sure did.

My wife's admiration turned to shock, though, when out of 10th-inning curiosity I turned to Fox -- a truly sui generis act in our house -- for a voyeuristic, and I presumed re-educational, recap.

And sure enough, there above an insistent crawl -- "Friend says that Loughner didn't listen to radio ... Loughner did not watch TV ... Loughner was not political" -- was the post-memorial analysis of Brit Hume, Chris Wallace and Charles Krauthammer that converged on, according to the panel, Obama's central refutation of the irresponsible left's claim that right-wing incivility caused this tragedy.

Did the left make such a claim, and was there any direct causality? Both had already been conclusively answered, or so I thought, in the negative; we can and do, however, legitimately speculate that one man's insanity may have been infected by the poisonous, vocal barbarity of the right.

Nevertheless, what I heard Obama pointedly posit in his Tucson remarks wasn't a recalibration or retirement of that withered debate, but that our future could see more Tucsons if we don't learn to learn tolerance and mutual respect.

"[L]et's remember that it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy," said the president, "but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation."

The discerning reader will note Obama's strategically brilliant insertion of the word "simple": this tragedy was of enormously complex causation, the president was saying, while in no way ruling out the organized right's element of gun-packing, cable-disorienting, talk-radio-depressing, unmodulated madness.

Yet I'm sorry, Mr. President, that I must freely confess that I'll fail your inspirational call to "use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations" and "to sharpen our instincts for empathy" and respect -- because mine are worn out; have been worn out. They're exhausted, turned incurably hopeless by years of the far right's unremitting, profoundly irremediable vitriol and hate. 

Today, I will join millions of other Americans who, like myself, were inspired last night and yet now will observe the right's wretched, retching denunciations of all that you pondered in Tucson, Arizona. The usual, reactionary suspects of cable television and talk radio and cyberviciousness will merely use your Come, let us reason together speech as a whetstone for their claws, daggers and fangs.

They've no honor; they never will. And with people like that, one cannot reason.

But you keep trying, Mr. President -- and in so doing, isolating.

Our Foundering Ms. Palin

"[O]ur Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women.... Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways"--Sarah Palin, 2011

What our Founders knew most ingeniously and feared the most as well, Ms. Palin, was that any democratic system in which the franchise is extended to the little-informed, passionate rabble would be ruthlessly exploited by contemptible demagogues.

They detested even the concept of a broad and relatively direct democracy, Ms. Palin; you are a living example of why.

They also feared the inevitable development of political parties, since, again, they knew that your venomous ilk would always be with us -- those, with personal benefit in mind and no conscience, who would strive to divide the body politic into squabbling, antagonistic camps, and to hell with the nation's superior interests.

The Founders, Ms. Palin, were men -- and women -- of deep learning, deeper reflection and unshakable commitment. They valued the ages' wisdom, they applied lessons learned, and they resolved to stay put in their publicly honored positions of high office, especially when times and conditions got rough.

They weren't weak, they didn't quit, and they seldom reduced themselves to the squawking antics of victimhood.

In addition, Ms. Palin, the Founders understood, when writing that ageless document, that these United States should be permitted by legal covenant to grow and mature according to the times -- that in 1865, or 1913, or 2011 we could no more abide a strictly 1787 Constitution than in 1787 they should have looked to 1563 as an immutable Ideal. Ms. Palin, the Founders were the first -- and last, by their own design -- "orginalists."

Ms. Palin, the Founders indeed saw "imperfect passions" as American democracy's greatest threat. And in view of the capitalizing Southern firebrands and at least one Northern ice queen we've suffered, one can easily say, They sure were were prophetic, those Founders.