P.M. Carpenter

"There's really no excuse for this"

Donald Trump's toxicity, splattered all over Fox and Friend's:

They give you a certificate of live birth which anybody can get. Just walk into the hospital. This guy either has a birth certificate or he doesn't. I didn't think it was such a big deal, but I will tell you, it is turning out to be a very big deal. People are calling me from all over saying please don't give up on this issue. If you weren't born in this country, you cannot be President. You have no doctors that remember, you have no nurses -- this is the President of the United States -- that remember. Why can't he produce a birth certificate? I brought it up just routinely, and all of a sudden, a lot of facts are emerging and I'm starting to wonder myself whether he was born in this country?

That gibberish elicited this pointed response from Politico's Ben Smith: "There's really no excuse for this."

But of course there is. Though diseased, Trump is a symptom -- a symptom of a mass media culture that can keep even a Sarah Palin afloat; a culture that conflates celebrity with wisdom, notoriety with insight, name-recognition with gravitas. In a way, Trump would be a fool to deny his toxic inner-self.

Yet he is also, to my mind, a walking billboard for a 100 percent -- or damn close to it -- inheritance tax. Like George W., without pop's money this clown would have been managing a McDonald's franchise somewhere.

God save us from America's ever-narrowing "aristocracy" of so little merit and no conscience.

Go get 'em, tigers

The GOP needs more solid advice from its deep strategists, such as Sen. Jim DeMint.

Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and possibly Sarah Palin and Donald Trump not enough for you? DeMint recommends Republican governors for presidential candidacies, those

leaders who have the boldness and courage we see from a lot of the voters. They expect people to fight and not back down, to do what they say during a campaign. I think that’s what you see across the country, the governors who are inspiring now. Scott in Florida, Walker in Wisconsin, Chris Christie in New Jersey. Just tell it like it is and taking on the special interests, particularly government unions. It inspires people.

It sure does -- against. Let's see. From today's Politico:

In Ohio, Republican Gov. John Kasich’s approval rating stood at just 30 percent last week, according to a Quinnipiac University poll.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker ... [is] in negative approval territory.

Christie’s favorability rating is still in barely positive territory, but a Rutgers-Eagleton poll found it dropped by a net of 10 percentage points in the wake of Christie’s February budget address.

And from last month, and still diving, we had the headlining popularity of Gov. Rick Scott: "Approval Rating Is Low At 36%."

Ideology truly does have a rude way of blowing off reality.

A high-speed railroading

I saw this headline yesterday -- "Conservatives home in on 'ObamaRail'" -- but I passed up the story's content, in part because of its smothering predictability but also because I swear they're wearing me down: if it's smart, if it's infrastructural, if it's economically sound and if it's anything to do with Obama, then they're agin it. This adolescent anti-ism is exhausting.

Every rational step forward is either another instance of intolerable federal bullying or it's European socialist skulduggery devised to enslave our children. It's foreign, it's suspect, it's unAmerican, it's alien -- it's just too damn intelligent for the right.

Things have got so bad, it's also spooking some of their own: "The vehemence of Republican critics has surprised even some Republicans, who say transportation issues used to find more bipartisan support."

We all heard the president propose high-speed rail in his State of the Union address, a recommendation that in saner times would have triggered a booming chorus of House and Senate Democratic endorsements of a Democratic president's economic leadership. Instead -- and this troubles as much as right-wing reflexiveness -- in The Hill story we find the most urgent voice of rail advocacy in one Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union.

You know, Dems, when you beg someone to lead, you're supposed to have his back.

Is Newt slipping?

Fear-jockey Newt Gingrich is compiling so many mortal bugaboos that have America teetering on the edge of destruction, he no longer even makes an attempt to sort them, rationalize them, or sloganeer them.

I see this as his greatest political liability. Which is to say, we survived the mid-20th-century perils of "Korea, Communism and Corruption," as well as the late-19th-century precipices of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion" mostly because we could keep them all straight. They came packaged in elegant, catchy alliterations that just sort of screamed a Boo! that one could never forget. We could pass them along effortlessly across the backyard fence, we could brood over them at the office watercooler with our fellow victims, one could frighten small children and the witless bourgeoisie with the spectres of simple and memorable threesomes.

But ponder this line from Mr. Gingrich, delivered last night in San Antonio at John Hagee's Cornerstone Church:

I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

Sure, in one sense Mr. Gingrich held in his hand the names of three deadly threats to America, the last of which was the classic of patriotic amnesia, but none of which rang alliteratively unforgettable with the other two.

Even worse, however, was that while we could once imagine Communism raging in a cesspool of Corruption, or Romanism working its popishly wily ways in concert with Rum or abetting Rebellion, Gingrich somehow pushed us under the caravan of "radical Islamists" hellbent on securing a "secular atheist" America.

This rather ffffundamental (to use Newt's favorite and always dramatically delivered adjective) contradiction is too staggering to ignore, for long, even by Newt's famously obtuse base. Someday, somewhere, even a John Hagee is bound to stop and say: Wait a minute, radical Islamists are hustling a secular atheist agenda? I thought they were imposing Sharia law from the sand up, in godless Michigan. What gives?

No doubt that when asked, Gingrich will reply that he wasn't being inconsistent; that he was only responding to the unctuous inconsistencies of those radical Islamists, every one of whose birth certificates he'd sure like to have a little look-see. That could work.

Still, though, he's left with all that untidiness. In addition to atheistic Islamists murdering our patriotic memory, Gingrich also hauled into our perilous mix the mainstream media's wickedness and unChristian eggheads and San Francisco's, ahem, atmospherically suspect Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Newtster, I think, is slipping. He is cruelly taxing the intellectual capacities of the Republican primary base, piling a fourth, a fifth, even a sixth cause of our imminent desolation onto three already differentiated causes.

And he hasn't even bothered with a punchy trinity of causation, like maybe "Atheists, Assholes and Assassins."

Come on, Newt. You can do better.

Thank you, Charles and David

In keeping with my working theory that Barack Obama will go down in presidential history as a kind of Franklin D. Roosevelt II, I find these lines of plutocratic incoherence and phony bitterness, in the Weekly Standard, from the Koch brothers:

Charles: "He’s a dedicated egalitarian. I’m not saying he’s a Marxist, but he’s internalized some Marxist models...."

David: "He’s the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation and has done more damage to the free enterprise system and long-term prosperity than any president we’ve ever had."

FDR was savaged from the far right as a Marxist slayer of capitalist virtues, as a destroyer of free enterprise, as a radical, unAmerican bogeyman opposed to long-term prosperity, while being simultaneously savaged by the far left as a traitor to egalitarian virtues, as the unforgivable savior of free enterprise, as a conventional American pol opposed to real and long-term prosperity.

In brief, when as president you've alienated the extremes to the point that both are floundering in opposite and parallel and emphatically unhinged universes, you've probably done something of truly historic merit.

An 'extraneous right-wing outpost'

It's really quite remarkable, how Michele Bachmann can manage to score a direct miss on virtually every historical concept or event. It's as though she actually comprehends this stuff inside and out -- that is, she knows precisely how to miss the mark, like the jazz singer of perfect pitch, Jo Stafford, who would expertly hit a sour note for amusement -- otherwise she would, out of dumb luck if nothing else, occasionally say something correct.

Her latest, from Iowa's Conservative Principles Conference: "The idea of liberty is so great and yet so precious ... the founders recognized it could only be entrusted to the brain trust [of voters]."

One gathers that the founders were entrusting liberty to voters whenever they weren't preoccupied with eradicating slavery from the former colonies. But of course Iowa's Conservative Principles Conference unveiled what the founders feared most: herds of ill-schooled, ill-bred, emotional buffoons who would convert the power of enfranchisement into the power of a government incited and led by equally witless demagogues such as Michele Bachmann. 

There is no educating some people and the founders knew it; they envisioned whole covens of little Bachmanns who would scream in ignorant delight at every enticing imbecility bellowed by those who would grossly mislead them. Thus the founders erected massive barricades between government and democracy mobocracy, separating as best they could higher "elected" officials (senators and presidents) from the electors, and hoping that the People's House, overloaded with big Bachmanns, did not in short order bring the entire structure down.

Of course not all demagogues are witless, a la Ms. Bachmann. Some are simply dishonorable. Yesterday, for example, I extinguished a few irretrievable minutes of my life by watching on C-Span the Most Right Dishonorable Newt Gingrich, also appearing at Iowa's CPC, who uttered without even a tinge of shame that on Libya he had been entirely consistent: if inconsistencies there seemed, it was only because he was trying to keep up with Obama's. Captain Queeg was more believable -- and a thousand times more honorable.

This I observed after also watching a minute of Bachmann's history tutor on White Citizens Councils, Haley Barbour, who informed CPC's audience that our sitting president, whose reelection depends on lower unemployment, is trying -- deliberately -- to kill jobs. The audience found Mr. Barbour's insight to be of impeccable logic.

But then, as noted, came Mr. Gingrich. And a man can only take so much. So I flipped the political atrocity of CPC off and reached for Albert Camus' The Rebel, who drearily crawls his way out of nihilism, absurdity and despair. Hey, when you find spiritual uplift in mid-20th-century French philosophy, you know you've hit bottom.

I sense digression. Back to Iowa, and CPC, and Bachmann & Co.'s imbeciles, all of which I'll leave in the capably terrified hands of Doug Gross, "a Republican activist and former nominee for governor," who told the NY Times: "If Iowa becomes some extraneous right-wing outpost, you have to question whether it is going to be a good place to vet your presidential candidates."

Rhodes to perdition

All he had to say was, "Humanitarian mission," a softer but every bit as sweeping a term as "War."

For instance the United States, in league with allies, was eventually incited to the magnificent humanitarian missions of 1939-1945, which very much resembled a very big war, but that was merely a brutal mission in which by unavoidably brutal means we literally saved humanity.

A stretch? You bet. Yet stretched it could be by accomplished semanticists.

The preceding and direct cause of that mid-century mission was labeled "The Great War," mostly because it was everything but. That 1914-1918 global bloodbath was an awful exercise in diplomatic rigidity and military stupidity and colonial-territorialist squabbling and some of the poorest international leadership the world has ever witnessed, and for those reasons it was rightly called a "war," even if greatness had nothing to do with it. Indeed, the war was so stupid and so wasteful it required heaps of propagandistic humanitarian humbug to save it: the Kaiser, sans our noble intervention, would soon impale every last Anglo-Saxon babe in arms and rape every worthy white woman; To arms, To arms, for Heaven's sake, To arms! 

For that matter, he could have gussied it up in Studs Terkel terms and labeled our mission a "Good War," which, when compared to its global predecessor or, say, the wanton and mindless slaughter of the 30 Years War or the 100 Years War or the serial Crusades or the legendary Trojan War, was about as "good" as a war gets.

He could have even gone ecclesiastical on us by clasping his hands and bending his head upwards and pronouncing solemnly that we are in a "Just War." You don't like that, fellow? Then you can take it up with God's press agents, Tom Aquinas and Augie.

All of these options were available. But when your paycheck comes from a humdinger of a title like "Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications," then Lordy Lord you had best communicate strategically and with a bureaucratic flourish that awes.

And that's just what Ben Rhodes, the aforementioned DNSASC, did, when asked what this thing is.

Our good, just, humanitarian but thankfully Ungreat mission is in fact "a military operation," said Ben, but it's a "limited" one that soon will slide to that only of "a support role." Furthermore, we're there merely to "protect" innocent lives and "[avert] a humanitarian crisis." 

Well done, Ben. Now stop. Stop. STOP! But no, that dagnabbit DNSASC thing got the better of him; he felt compelled to earn that paycheck and glorify in that title. So off he went: "Obviously that involves kinetic military action.... So it’s not a war; it’s a kinetic military action that is time-limited and contribution-limited on the front end."

Since everyone else in the blogosphere and on cable TV and in radio is already making fun of poor Ben, I raise this issue here only to publicly confirm one of my narrow but incontrovertible theories of human psychology: There are some people on whom a fancy title should never be bestowed.

Of Orwell, Krugman, and Cameron et al

I resist as best I can George Orwell's 1940 essayistic observation, offered as totalitarianism was engulfing the globe. To wit, from "Inside the Whale": 

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism — robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale — or rather, admit you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it.

Record I do, and though I endure rather well, too, I've yet to accept the ludicrous swindles of modern politics, whether those of utopian progress or elysian reaction. Both, in my opinion, are harbored by the smallest of narrow minds, which can feel at home and thrive only in like-minded atmospheres.

To accomplish this, propaganda is, for their proponents, of indispensable value and unqualified need. And this singular element -- that of propaganda -- is what must be taken into consideration before ever expressing a contrary thought about what it is that the proponents are proposing; for the proponents may, in reality, not believe a bloody word of what they're saying, although they say it with absolute self-assurance.

Such is the case with Paul Krugman's pushers of the "confidence fairy" -- those right-winging pols and ideological economists who have loudly sputtered for at least two years that austerity is the way to go for debt-ridden, highly unemployed nations; that "spending cuts," as Krugman defines this brazen fantasy, "would bring quick dividends in the form of rising confidence, and that there would be few, if any, adverse effects on growth and jobs."

True enough, that's what they've said. But do they actually believe it?

To read Krugman, indeed they do. This morning, for instance, he wrote that "[T]he government of Prime Minister David Cameron chose ... to move to immediate, unforced austerity, in the belief that private spending would more than make up for the government’s pullback" (my emphasis). The result to date, as anyone of modern economic sensibilities would expect, has been an unmitigated reversal of England's fortunes: "growth has stalled, and the government has marked up its deficit projections." No surprise.

Nor is it a surprise, it seems to me, to Prime Minister Cameron and all of Mr. Cameron's political minions. An extremely bright chimpanzee in possession of only a cursory knowledge of Keynesianism could have and most certainly would have predicted this very outcome. And no one can tell me that Mr. Cameron is not far smarter than a bright chimpanzee. 

So we're back to propaganda, the chosen instrument of Cameron (and Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan), all in the service of an ideology which they do believe will, in the longer run, be better for us. First, however, we must be conned; we must be forced into unnecessary suffering so that we change our wicked ways and adapt to the New Reality, their reality.

In short, they're dishonest with voters. They no more believe their short-term economic propaganda than I do. And once, just once at least, Mr. Krugman should spell that out before writing about their "belief" -- because that belief, at its foundation, is political in nature and not economic.

I'm not asking that Mr. Krugman accept in any way or endure to any extreme the legitimacy of the ideological right's belief -- I ask only that he record it. Absent that, his analyses of it make less sense.

The Fed caves

This dismays:

The Federal Reserve took another step toward transparency on Thursday, announcing that Chairman Ben Bernanke will begin holding quarterly press briefings to discuss policy decisions.

I've nothing against transparency, but this seems too transparently that of a move away from sober, unpoliticized economic analysis and monetary planning, and toward the populist rabble. It resembles, in short, a victory for ignorant tea partiers and Paulites.

The press coverage of the Fed's publicity shift concedes as much: "[T]he Fed has been repeatedly criticized by several top Republicans, including House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and Rep. Mike Pence.... Furthermore, the big Tea Party push that helped win the GOP control of the House has also boosted the profile of Rep. Ron Paul, the longtime and fierce Fed critic"  -- against whom the Fed "has had to fend off criticisms."

What is the next and even easier step after fending, when the aggressors fail to cease their assault? Why, bowing, of course.

Said, in defense of the Fed's move, University of Maryland economics professor Phillip Swagel, "If I were at the Fed, I would be thinking, 'Look, I've got a good story.' An opportunity to get out that story is a good thing for them." Here, clearly, we hear an econ prof and not a student of American politics.

Prof. Swagel's belief that Ben Bernanke could ever hope to compete with the GOP's simplistic "Printing press!" charges by carefully delineating, for example, the elaborate whys and wherefores of "quantitative easing" -- "QE2," no less -- lies far beyond my faith in the slogan-consuming American electorate.

One Ryan-Pence-Paul volley can level mountains of Bernanke's wisdom, and it appears we should already write off one Alp.

The GOP triage

There's something a trifle uninspiring about a presidential campaign that promises us a "slog," but that's just what Mitt Romney & Co. is doing.

Casting himself as more guerilla fighter than Zig Ziglar motivator in the impending torment of yet another GOP psychiatric triage, also known as a Republican primary season, Romney hopes to slither through Iowa and South Carolina virtually unnoticed. This, for Mormon Romney, will not be difficult. In thus avoiding those particular guns of January and early February, he'll simultaneously wow them in New Hampshire -- a state populated by stoic multitudes not known for their wowability -- and then really get rolling in Florida. Such is his plan.

If all this sounds eerily Giulianiesque to you, you're not alone. "Mindful of Rudy Giuliani’s wait-until-Florida strategic disaster," reports Politico, "Team Mitt knows they must do well or at least meet expectations in the initial races to stay in the conversation."

Ay, and there's the rub. I, personally, have a better chance of landing on Jim DeMint's Christmas card list than Mitt Romney has of doing well in Iowa and South Carolina; indeed, should Romney actually "meet expectations" there, no matter how flat he attempted to stomp them, his next authentic run could be not in '12, but '16.

We know Romney has the money to sustain himself (one is tempted to insert "artificially" before sustain), but what about, uh, Republican primary voters? GOP and former McCain strategist Mike Murphy acknowledges that "It’s a long march," but then spins the tale that "eventually [Romney] is the candidate who resonates with the bulk of regular Republicans as the lesser candidates fall away."

Back to the rub: Other than as a mob of birthers and theocrats and tea partiers, how should one define "regular Republicans" -- that is, those who clutch primary ballots or attend caucus covens these days? There remain those spiritual Wilkie and Eisenhower Republicans, of course, yet many have drifted in horror at the recent GOP to independent territory (which in some states bars them from casting primary ballots). And whoever is left of conservative normality that the party itself hasn't run off, the GOP's presidential candidates do so in their near exclusive pandering to the birthers and theocrats and tea partiers -- which drives the quite unfashionable and older-school regular Republicans both crazy and out of the process.   

What's more, it appears Michele Bachmann will be on hand throughout this go-around to herd the entire psychiatric enterprise into the outer far-right ditch. Every time poor Tim Pawlenty thinks he's gone sufficiently nuts to vastly appeal to the very basest of the primary base, someone like Bachmann comes along and lowers the damn bar again.

But I've faith in Mr. Pawlenty. He seems to possess even fewer principles worth defending than Mitt Romney. Soon, I'm certain, he'll hunker in a serious way -- perhaps salute South Carolina for having taken the lead in ridding this nation of slavery, as well as praise Iowa for its steadfast and pioneering abhorrence of Mau Mauism.

I remain equally convinced, however, that someday some GOP presidential field will lead an insurrection against its own madness; that the candidates will collectively announce that enough is enough; that they simply cannot get any cateringly crazier or sink any panderingly lower and it's time to rebuild; that it's time to cashier the fundamentalists and utopians and nihilists and psychiatric ideologues; that it's time to re-alight in reality.

I am immensely thankful, however, that they have chosen to merely triage again in 2012.

Say again, Governor?

Gov. Mitch Daniels, in a speech at CPAC: "[O]ur opponents are better at nastiness than we will ever be."

Andrew Breitbart, in an interview with the Daily Caller: "[Former White House adviser] Van Jones is a commie punk ... a human toxin ... a cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak. And a commie. And an eco-fraudster."

Serendipity

Serendipity and a sudden flashback to recent reality. Which is to say, I just now happened to click on Congress.org's site and rather than the current page I was treated to this article -- "Will U.S. intervene in Libya?" -- from last Friday, March 18:

A group of lawmakers pushing for intervention in Libya praised the Obama administration Thursday for what they said was its new readiness to back military options against Muammar el-Qaddafi’s autocratic regime.

Lawmakers and senior Senate sources ... were informed [in "a classified briefing with administration officials"] that the administration was considering creating a no-fly zone and a no-drive zone in an attempt to create safe zones where government forces would not be permitted to go....

The calls for more forceful intervention have grown increasingly urgent since pro-Qaddafi forces began striking back at the less-organized rebels....

All italics are mine, but by rights they should be from "lawmakers" -- all those, that is, who are now squawking about having been sidelined and left uninformed; those who prattle today as though all of Obama's actions in concert with multilateral forces then were but a bolt from the blue, which they, all along, held deep reservations about.

Furthermore, in Congress.org's sidebar there's a listing of "Recent Headlines." There was no reference, on that Friday of March 18, to John Boehner's concerns, whether deep or characteristically shallow.

More 'Big Ideas'

First Read smartly captures the insufferable yet somehow thoroughly enjoyable obscenity that is Newt Gingrich, so I'll just repost it:  

In the past two days, Newt Gingrich has been clear that he thinks the Libya no-fly zone was a mistake. Yet, on March 7 he seemed to express support for a no-fly zone in Libya. The New York Times’ Shear: "President Obama should establish a no-fly zone over Libya 'this evening,' [Gingrich] said on Fox News. "All we have to do is suppress his air force, which we could do in minutes," he said. Yet on TODAY yesterday, Gingrich said, "I would not have intervened. I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Qaddafi. I think there are a lot of other allies in the region we could have worked with. I would not have used American and European forces".... Then, he attempted to deflect in a "clarification" on his Facebook page with a post titled, "My Position on Libya." His opening doesn’t address his own apparent inconsistency, but the president’s: "It is deeply troubling that there is so much confusion, lack of foresight, and little resolve coming from the President and his administration about what our mission and goals must be in the Libya engagement."

Another croak of wisdom

Politico headline: "Donald Rumsfeld: White House lacks goals, vision for Libya"

See below.

The Incredible Mr. Boehner

God grant John Boehner the continued physical strength and intellectual weakness of his operatic farce. A wiser Speaker would have stopped before now, would have reblended into the murmuring mob of House anonymity, would have cornered the known derangements of Michele Bachmann or Steven King into doing the dirtiest of his hypocritical work for him. But not our Johnny, God bless him.

No, our Johnny instead screamed his bad and phony faith to the world, though he nevertheless bothered addressing it yesterday specifically to Mr. Obama. Of the following 19 words in Mr. Boehner's letter to the president, see if you can guess which one would have never appeared in a letter to Mr. Predecessor:

"I respect your authority as Commander-in-Chief and support our troops as they carry out their mission. But ..." (<-- ding, ding, neon flashing, ding! ding! ding!)

It gets even worse. Boehner trails off into a comprehensive befuddlement about our strategy and goals in Libya -- virtually all of which Obama has already answered, repeatedly -- which when compared to Boehner's comprehensive lucidity about Bush's vastly greater sinkholes of Iraq and Afghanistan leads me to think that Mr. Boehner is either an idiot savant or ... it could be that he's just, ahem, explosively disingenuous.

My purpose here in even bothering with the rather peculiar Mr. Boehner is, however, less that of noting his partisan hypocrisy -- a real political yawner, for both sides -- than to reemphasize the much larger issue of the right's lost credibility: indeed more than lost, more than marooned, it's an abused thing of the desolate past, or rather should be a thing of the desolate past. None should be granted today.

Listening to the right about Obama's Libya after its Iraq is like listening to Nathan Bedford Forrest about better race relations. So there, I've reemphasized the point, with a tediousness I openly acknowledge.

Mine is not, though, an altogether unwarranted tediousness, because so many in the mainstream media persist in treating the likes of the wholly incredible Mr. Boehner with utter undue reverence and intellectual respect, such as HuffPost's Howard Fineman on Lawrence O'Donnell's program last night, or the Post's Jonathan Capehart this morning: "Boehner’s good questions for Obama on Libya."

By all means, gentlemen, you should question and probe and doubt. But for heaven's sake and ours, don't cite any unrehabilitated member of the neocon right as a credible source for your questions, probings and doubts. It's unseemly, and it not only weakens but shatters your case, to the limited extent you have one.