P.M. Carpenter

A keeper

Oh that was great, a real keeper. Regulars readers know my affection for the official understatement, and the vice admiral conducting the Pentagon briefing on our Libya operations just delivered a classic one. Yes, he said in response to a journalist's question, we do have communications-jamming capabilities, but we don't have to use them at the moment. "That's one of the benefits of Tomahawk missiles," he added, deadpan.

Can the understatement get any better that that?

Incredible squared

From the Tea Party Express, via email:

Hello friends - it's Lloyd Marcus here, Vice Chairman of The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama. Many of you know me from my repertoire of conservative songs, most famously, The American Tea Party Anthem [I'm sorry, I don't].

During my work fighting for conservative ideals across America I've had the great pleasure of meeting three incredible conservative icons who have done their part to make America a better place: Sheriff Joe Arpaio, "Joe The Plumber", and Republican Senate nominee, Joe Miller.

Don't you love it? There was perhaps something subconscious at work in Marcus' description of Arpaio, Plumber Joe and Alaska Joe as "incredible" -- that being Merriam-Webster's only definition of the word: "too extraordinary and improbable to be believed; also: hard to believe."

Then, in support of Marcus' "iconic" blunder came this email, from the Express' Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama's president, no less:

Big news! Sharron Angle ... has confirmed that she will be joining us for the political event of the year - and you're invited to join this historic event!

Mark your calendars for Thursday, March 24, 2001 for "An Evening With the Joe's" and join Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Joe the Plumber, and The Honorable Joe Miller for a fundraiser to benefit the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama.

So mark that 2001 calendar, folks, if you can still find it.

What incredible amateurism. And this is the political force to take and keep America by storm?

A stubborn world

Andrew Sullivan's objections to President Obama's Libya speech are, it seems to me, flawed from the get-go, and then the flaw never lets loose. In his post, "The Imperial President," Sullivan opens with, "There are, it appears, only two reasons the US is going to war...." Later, "why should the US go to war over this?" Later still, "I can think of no worse basis for committing a country to war than...." Finally, "To launch a war on these grounds is to...."

A three-letter error committed four times in a mere eight paragraphs.

This is no war. I know what a war looks like and this isn't it, not for the U.S., anyway. The Bush administration and those who enabled that swindling mob of cutthroats knew not what a war looks like, and got precisely that. Are the enablers doomed to forever misread presidential motives and decisions?

For eight years it's been a fantasy of mine that those who earnestly encouraged and agitated for Bush's War could somehow be banned by Congressional statute from ever commenting again on a president's foreign policy decisions. Let the enablers dabble in matters of health care and muse about federal budgets and the like, but when it comes to all things foreign and military, one singular public comment, in print or on tape, could find them dangling from the nearest gibbet.

I detested Bush and Bush's War that much -- but, OK, I'm not really supportive of censorship -- and at the time, I equally detested their enablers. Any fool could have seen that the Bush administration was playing a shell game, and every fool should have seen it. But our stable of fools was overpopulated; many slipped through the cracks.  

Now I sense a truly insulting even if minuscule sense of self-vindication on their part. Writes Sullivan: "At least Bush argued that Saddam posed a threat to the US. No one can seriously argue that Qaddafi poses such a threat." Yes that's the point, is it not? -- Sullivan's moral outrage is backward. Bush deliberately argued a passel of despicable lies, while no member of the Obama administration has even brushed against its predecessor's earth-shattering magnitudes of manufactured hysteria.

And once again a kind of vindication through catharsis peeps through. Sullivan continues, "A congressional vote is also important to rein in the imperial presidency that Obama has now taken to a greater height then even Bush." This time, you see, he is catching the rat in his corner and dutifully exposing him. It is however unfortunate for Sullivan that hyperbole doesn't help. What Obama is doing in Libya is authentically multilateral and internationally sanctioned. What Bush intended to do and ultimately did in Iraq was, let's be serious here, unilateral and he never gave an authentic damn about international approval. As for "reining in the imperial presidency," did Bush's Congressional vote really contribute to that goal? Or did it mock it?

Sullivan nonetheless makes a profoundly important point about presidential war (which this isn't) and its Congressional approval. The intervening problem is reality. For starters, Bush proved that most any president -- even Olympian bunglers like himself -- can rather easily obtain Congressional approval for hostile actions, if he so desires them. Second, when Sullivan writes that Obama's actions are a "presidential power-grab," by that I assume he means what is now a presidential tradition. Third -- and here I'm on shaky ground, because I can't read his mind -- if by Congressional approval Sullivan means the formality of a declaration of war, such a document isn't always a smart idea: prototypically imperial Truman, for example, wisely circumvented that Constitutional "option," since a formal declaration of war against North Korea could have triggered a series of Korean-Sino-Soviet treaty obligations, and presto, World War III. Finally, Sullivan provides his own counterargument: "[Obama] needs some Congressional support in an open-ended military commitment to ensure the protection of civilians in Libya." He sure does. He'll need money. And Congress can vote it or not.

Ezra Klein, being Ezra Klein, is more measured, which was of late a Sullivan characteristic (and in other arenas still is): "This post shouldn’t be read as a statement of opposition to military intervention in Libya. I don’t know enough to confidently make that call. But that’s precisely the problem: There’s very little information about what we are expecting to do or how much it will cost, but I suspect our commitment, once made, will actually be quite difficult to reverse." I tend to agree, with this addendum: I do not suspect that Obama will linger in Libya as he's lingering in Afghanistan. From the latter he desperately wants out but can't find an exit; from the former an early one is the answer -- which some close "friend" of Qaddafi's is likely to provide in the form of a .38 slug in Qaddafi's brain. 

Here, though, to somewhat repeat myself, is the overarching point: I don't know how to change the real world, and neither does Obama. There are domestic politics in play, like it or not. There are diplomatic politics in play, like it or not. There are regional transformations to be pondered and weighed together and separately, like them or not. There are some bad friends to be protected and many good allies to be assuaged, like it or not. And there is the stupidity of ideology and uniform answers and the nimble flexibility of pragmatism and nuance, the first of which Obama rejects, the second of which he embraces.

Does that guarantee a splendid outcome? Of course not. But that's the real if regrettable world in which Obama operates, and most blogospheric commentators do not.

Pony up

In this, one can see not merely a legal, but preeminently an electoral, strategy:

Not satisfied by the 2010 Supreme Court ruling that opened the floodgates to corporate-sponsored election ads, conservative opponents of campaign finance regulations have opened up a series of new legal fronts in their effort to eliminate the remaining laws restricting the flow of money into politics.

They have taken to Congress, state legislatures and the lower courts to target almost every type of regulation on the books: disclosure requirements, bans on foreign and corporate contributions and ... party spending limits and public financing of campaigns.

Such is the right's only hope in the face of its vanishing demographics. Conservative strategists understand that within the next few decades their natural base of white Christian soldiers will dwindle to electoral insignificance, in national terms. An artificial strength must meanwhile be found -- and they believe they've found it: the outright purchase of public opinion and representative democracy.

Not so fast

I initially subscribed to this conventionalism, as reiterated yesterday by Ezra Klein:

Because elections are ultimately decided on the state of the economy and these spending cuts are going to suck jobs out of an already weak labor market, Republicans are probably making their jobs easier in 2012.

But, not so fast. It's true that a weak economy will be a (bearable) drag on President Obama's reelection, as it will (maybe not so bearably) on 20-odd Senate Democrats. Their commonality is, of course, their incumbency, which was the principal target of dissatisfied voters in 2010.

Should the economy remain weak, there is little reason to think that the House will uniquely escape what other incumbents might well suffer in 2012 and what itself thumpingly suffered in 2010 -- an anti-incumbent onslaught, of nonpartisan hostility. And it just so happens that most 2012 House incumbents will be Republican, not Democratic.

Perhaps my speculation is too logical to use in relation to the idiosyncratically gullible American electorate, but then again, the Klein & Co. argument is based on linear logic -- that Events A will influence and affect Event B -- as well.

Notwithstanding, there looms one impeccable point of political logic that likely will be discarded by Democrats in 2012, just as they foolishly discarded it in 2010: The Congressional elections beg for a nationalized theme -- the Obamian "Don't give them the keys again" theme; that theme should be pounded with ruthless repetition; and that theme should be required speechification by every Congressional candidate asking for party funds. 

Krugman's happy little world

Paul Krugman reaffirms -- again -- the intellectual dangers of mixing straight economic analysis with uncomprehending observations of political streetfighting:

I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner ... was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly.

Catch that? The same metaphor. Not the same policy, not the same spending, not the same philosophy -- merely the same political metaphor, which even the most fiery-eyed progressive should wisely deploy in hard economic times, since "belt-tightening" can also mean a reallocation of resources; that is, cuts in some places to make possible an expansion of others.

Yet to read Krugman is to fume about Obama. The cad, that unprincipled, opportunistic cad, he who shares John Boehner's ludicrous Hooverism, which unquestionably is why he "was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas."

There it is again: "defeat in the war of ideas." No acknowledgement of Obama's sensible co-optation of the right's popular rhetoric; just a Krugmanian sigh of the vapors. Oh dear, oh my, we're despairing, tsk-tsk, do get us some water, quick, and pull up the fainting couch.

But I myself fibbed and manipulated in my opening sentence. Krugman is of course not uncomprehending of political gamesmanship. He's as clued in to what the White House is doing -- bowing to the electoral realities of deficit politics, especially among independents -- as William Daley. He simply chooses to ignore it, and instead blithely bang the drum of the perfect political world.

Which renders useless his critical observations on the pitiable state of Democratic politics:

Jobs do get mentioned now and then — and a few political figures, notably Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, are still trying to get some kind of action. But no jobs bills have been introduced in Congress, no job-creation plans have been advanced by the White House....

Could it be that Nancy Pelosi is "trying to get some kind of action" only because she safely hails from a Congressional district so blue as to blind? As for job-creation bills' lack of "introduction" or "advancement," this may have something to do with the House's territorial occupation by a ferocious brigade of economic imbeciles and sociopolitical barbarians. And things aren't much better in the Democrat-controlled Senate, where so many of the controllers are about to run the electoral gauntlet of really cranky independent voters, whether or not their crankiness is valid. 

Yet those immovable forces are no obstacle for Krugman. No, the White House should advance and unspecified Congressional suicides should introduce massive job bills that are inescapably hell-bound. Because for progressive commentators, political reality just isn't a factor.

My Beck orientation

I watched about 10 minutes of Glenn Beck this afternoon -- the only time I've ever tuned in, to my memory -- and it was, let's just say, something else.

In a mere 600 seconds the unctuous little charlatan managed to deliver a blizzard of conspiratorial elements pointing to, by Beck's own admission, only God knows what. He rattled off -- I repeat, all with no apparent connections, which he freely admitted -- the suspicious entities of the White House, George Soros, Qaddafi, the Lockerbie bomber, Obama's close circle of anti-Semites, England, BP, the New World Order, and again the White House, this time with reference to its mysterious reluctance to militarily intervene in Libya.

Yet Beck possessed a vague conclusion: "Something ... isn't ... right!" he said. He didn't know what, he couldn't quite put his finger on it, he and his staff were still poring over massive heaps of telling information. I've no doubt he'll get back to us when his "research" is over, although, clearly, dispositive conclusions for Beck are wholly unnecessary.

I confess, the experience really was quite mesmerizing. Not enough to make me want to stay tuned, or tune in again soon, maybe, but there was something about watching such an accomplished flimflammer ply his craft that I found irresistible; much like the hours I once spent watching Jimmy Swaggart in his prime, watching him imitate with uncanny timing the physical and emotional lows and crescendos of Hitler's oratorical artwork.

I've also no doubt that Fox News(!) will cut Mr. Beck loose within the near but indeterminate future. As I understand it, although I added by one to his quarter-hour viewers today, his overall ratings are in freefall, and then of course there's this whole embarrassment-by-association thing for Fox, which we all once thought impossible. At any rate, I'm glad I watched him at least once, live and in near-full conspiratorial flower. I sure will miss him.

A lost opportunity

Just now I was browsing the Washington Post and came upon an internal link entitled, "The benefits of budget cuts?" Interesting, I thought.

So I right-clicked to open it in a new tab, which accommodated only this much wording of the article's actual title: "Ohio Governor Kasich tries to sell his bu..."

Well you can imagine my delight. Finally some hard-hitting, no-punches-pulled, pleasingly accurate political journalism, though I confess the headline writer seemed hardly to fit the Post's more formalistic style.

But then the page downloaded in full, with, of course, the complete title, which finished with, "...dget cuts to a skeptical public."

Damn.

But it was nice while it lasted.

 

Global dumbing

As a practice I frown on simply posting others' writing, without comment. But this post, by Ezra Klein, begs nothing more:

On Monday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee marked up Republican-backed legislation to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases. Democrats proposed a series of amendments that simply admitted the reality of global warming -- they didn’t require regulation or a carbon tax. Just an admission of the state of the science. Rep. Diana DeGette’s amendment was particularly careful in its language: “’The scientific evidence is compelling’ that elevated concentrations of greenhouse gases resulting from anthropogenic emissions ‘are the root cause of recently observed climate change,’” it read. Not one of the 31 Republicans on the committee voted for it, or any of the amendments. Not one. Confronted by one of the most significant threats our planet faces, the 31 House Republicans charged with coordinating America’s response refused to even admit the underlying facts.

'Horse Feathers'

Only Haley Barbour has navigated the tiny pacific pond of Republican primary voters, unveiling an anti-interventionist worldview in just a few words: "I don’t think it’s our mission to make Libya look like Luxembourg."

Whether or not he actually believes that or even much cares about it are questions of fair game, since there's the marketing matter of his open positioning niche to be considered: Pawlenty, Santorum, Romney, Gingrich, Huckabee and the already has-been from the North are, to a man and a has-been, thrashing the turbulent, neocon waters for no-fly zones or airstrikes -- in general, more militarily aggressive leadership. They know the base, but of course Barbour does too, just as he knows that grabbing a small slice of the base's majority thinking is perhaps less beneficial than hogging the entire minority chunk.

But, again, that's just Barbour. Otherwise, the GOP's stable of presidential wannabes remains unanimous in its Billy Kristol Fife and Drum Corps membership. Because when it comes to assessing President Obama and his positions, on Libya or any other issue, they are the Groucho Marxes of American politics: "I don't care what you have to say / It makes no difference anyway / Whatever it is, I'm against it!"

To me, the most fascinating angle of Republican primary politics, though, is its diametric entrenchment from popular opinion. In their race to capture the presidential nomination, the cynicism among hopefuls is bottomless; they'll appeal to any contemptibly crackpotted idea that comes along -- like Libya interventionism -- if it means another Iowa caucus ballot cast in their favor. But that's merely their bottomless cynicism. In the general election, there's the infinite cynicism of the nominee, who runs around the country in altogether different imperial clothing, usually denying but also just sort of forgetting that he was an altogether different primary candidate. This he must do. Because whatever positions got him nominated would crush his general election hopes.

Again, Libya is an excellent model of Republican -- I'll be charitable -- idiosyncrisy, since a Pew Research Center domestic poll reveals that "Sixty-three percent said the U.S. does not have a responsibility to act in Libya while only 27 percent support intervention."

The NY Times reports that "It is unclear how much the [Obama] administration is willing to put on the line in Libya, given its deep aversion to being entangled in another war and its clear calculation that Libya does not constitute as vital a security interest to the United States." To me, though, add "deep aversion" to a "clear calculation" and the sum is far from any lack of clarity.

But as for Republican hopefuls, they, too, are clear. They'll cravenly take the pro-intervention, anti-Obama position now, and later, when it's just as clear that Obama was right to be cautious, the nominee will either assume the meretricious air of having known and advocated that all along, or take cheap but small shots at Obama's proven strategic intelligence.

That, of course, is just politics. But among today's principled Republicans, their opportunism is so bloody conspicuous it leaves one and only one principle in the forefront.

The simple truth will do

Harold Meyerson's conclusion is sound enough; indeed, it's a torrential truth that ...

What the systemic failures on Wall Street, in the Gulf of Mexico and in Japan should teach us is that the need for active, disinterested governmental regulation is rooted not in any radical impulse, as the American right continually contends, but in a sober, conservative assessment of the human capacity for mistake and self-delusion, not to mention avarice and chicanery.

But his premise -- is it not? -- is either severely strained or just downright hallucinatory. For all of the above, he writes,

should weaken at least one of our own deeply rooted faiths — in our own infallibility.

Who's this "we" he writes of? And what "infallibility"?

Meyerson might answer, "The experts," but they're certainly not we, and whatever faith most folks do have in the experts, I'd wager it's far from "deeply rooted."

Is Meyerson perhaps writing of his own kind? By that I mean, it's true that the single most impeachable attribute of traditional progressivism (of which Meyerson is a member) is its sustained belief in the perfectibility of man, but even that belief should be differentiated from one in an infallibility of systems. Thus, that can't be it. Yet other than that, I haven't a clue as to whom he could be so worrisomely addressing.

So please, Harold, by all means sell the conclusion, but don't oversell it.

A changing tune, again

Just a few days ago the media were trumpeting John Boehner's superior hand, to President Obama's, in budget negotiations. The White House, we were told, was adrift in passivity if not indifference and with no game plan, while the mighty Speaker was having his diabolical way.

That was then. Now,

Tuesday’s breakdown in Republican discipline weakens Speaker John Boehner’s hand in White House budget talks and raises the chances of a government shutdown next month unless he and President Barack Obama greatly step up their game.

So the media are beginning to "get it," but still they're not quite there. This is Obama's game -- that of first conceiving, then anticipating, and now watching Boehner's magnificent squirm.

As I noted nine days ago:

Having proven itself as the reasonable, compromising arm of government, the Obama administration can sit electorally pretty across the negotiating table, also pointing out to Boehner that any negative economic consequences of a government shutdown will become its and the DCCC's top campaign argument for clearing the House of its tipping majority -- that is, its irrational, incorrigible, tea-partying children. And that argument just might be enough to convince Boehner to persuade Republican "moderates" -- who happen to like being in the majority, just as Boehner likes being Speaker -- to be grownups.

Good grief, I didn't "divine" this prediction or use a secret decoder ring or gaze on some luckless chicken's entrails. I just watched what Obama's been doing for more than two years now -- with remarkable success -- and applied it to the present. Pretty basic stuff. 

As long as the media insist on rushing a judgment of Obama's every long game, they'll misjudge it every time.

A circular puzzle

Theorizes the Post's Chris Cillizza:

While ... nominal independent voters tend to swing from party to party in midterm contests where the stakes seem smaller and the media coverage is considerably less, they tend to revert to their natural partisan tendencies in the high-profile, big stakes world of presidential elections.

If that theory is right — and it makes good sense to us — that means that the true independent voters in a presidential election are not the 29 percent (or so) of people who identify themselves as such in recent exit polls, but in fact a far smaller contingent that rates in the high-single or low-double digits.

It could be, as Cillizza speculates, that most self-identified independents are in fact closet partisans, and it is this partisanship which materializes with such regularity and even a reliable magnitude of predictability in presidential elections.

Yet if that is the case, why, then, do those same "closet partisans" swing so radically in midterm elections? If they are genuinely partisan, would their partisanship not reveal itself with greater consistency?

Now it may also be that partisanship is subject to the vicissitudes of midterm elections' "smaller stakes" and scanter media coverage, as Cillizza allows. But that only opens another "but." For if true, then the penetrability of partisanship in presidential elections is much greater than Cillizza disallows.

The mislabeling scam

Welcome to anarchy of a profoundly anti-intellectual strain. The addition of "anti-intellectual" may seem redundant or superfluous, since only a determined fool would do what House Republicans are doing, but remember, anarchists of the 19th- and early 20th-century mold (one thinks of Emma Goldman or Albert Jay Nock) were some of the intellectual world's leading lights -- minds that could theorize for hours upon hours with a certain logical even if violent flow.

No longer. Today's revolution is conducted by mere demagogues and unschooled agitators whose "theory" begins and ends with "We must cut spending, because we're broke." Ask them -- assuming you can find one in any media venue besides Fox -- to go beyond the slogans and platitudes and all you'll get are more slogans and platitudes. These clowns know macroeconomics and fiscal theory and comparative governmental systems even less than I know botany (as I recall there's lots of green in it, but my understanding stops there).

Their anarchic "ideas" are so shallow and scatter-brained as to border on nihilism -- destruction for destruction's sake; destruction for the sheer joy of destruction; destruction of a Rumsfeldian known unknown sort, leading into an uncertain fog of, perhaps, nothingness, but what the hell, it sure is fun.

All of which they call government, and governance. Just as astounding -- in what is perhaps the greatest marketing scam of 20th- and 21st-century American politics -- they persist, successfully, in calling this bundle of anarchic nihilism ... "conservatism."

They've been so successful they've got everyone doing it. I, too, have been at fault from time to time, though I try to resist. Most media, however, casually accept the use of "conservative" in its wildest Orwellian contortion of the English language. This, from today's Politico, is representative:

[T]he idea that it’s not enough to slash $10 billion is ludicrous to some lawmakers — especially longer-serving Republicans. In private conversations around the Capitol, they are growing increasingly frustrated with the cavalcade of outside groups, talking heads and conservative lawmakers who seem to be driving the debate (emphasis mine).

The Hofstadterian deployment of "pseudoconservative" would of course be far more accurate, and if one wished to be precisely accurate in one's descriptive aim, just plain "anarchistic" or "nihilistic" it should be. But on we march, we unvaliant many, mislabeling this wreck of "conservative lawmakers" with doubleplusungood abandon.

The harm? Language is important. The roughly four-fifths of the American electorate that see themselves as moderate to conservative in (vaguely) ideological outlook too often believe they're voting for authentic conservatives, since the latter simply call themselves such (and, as noted, the media are happily complicit). Too often, a simple label will earn a pol a vote.

There may be buyer's remorse later, but by then -- for at least two years -- it's too damn late.

Now they worry?

Sometimes the smug characterization of "understatement" cannot even hope to adequately capture an observation's transcendent irony. Some other, some yet unknown description cries out for recognition -- maybe "bottombloviation"? I don't know. But you'll at least know what I'm talking about when you read this, from Politico's Jonathan Martin and John Harris:

[T]he conservative intelligentsia ... fear that [Sarah Palin's] rise would represent the triumph of an intellectually empty brand of populism and the death of ideas as an engine of the right.

One reads that passage and sits a trifle stunned, because its intended central topic -- Ms. Palin -- is so utterly irrelevant to the conservative fears expressed, which, by the way, are just as irrelevant, since the realization of those fears crested and crashed long ago.

I recommend the piece for its entertainment value only. It's chock full of delicious slices of redundancy, but what the hell, when it comes to Palin we just can't get enough of this stuff. Said, for instance, the Weekly Standard's Matt Labash:

[I]f you close your eyes and listen to Palin and her most irate supporters constantly squawk or bellyache or tweet about how unfair a ride she gets from evil mustache-twirling elites and RINO saboteurs, she sounds like a professional victimologist, the flip side of any lefty grievance group leader. She’s becoming Al Sharpton, Alaska edition. The only difference being, she wears naughty-librarian glasses instead of a James Brown 'do.' "

Gotta love it. But back to the initial passage that so flummoxes.

First, the "conservative intelligentsia"? One needs to be reminded that there is such a herd, its numbers are so small. One scratches about the pseudoconservative rubble in search of these relics but finds only a vestigial breed, the truly prominent of which are countable on the fingers of one hand (Brooks, Sullivan, Frum, Larison, Fukuyama [whose mind but not theories I respected], and maybe, as a mutation, Will). But let's be fair to conservatism's intended intelligence: This, by definition, isn't an "ism" that's meant to go around boasting about its new and creative ideas; it's conservatism for heaven's sake, a calculated preservation of the worthy past, wherever that can be found -- not a rash experiment in utopian anxiety.

That the Politico article would even reference soi-disant conservatives' worry -- some tundra-bound demagogue might "represent ... the death of ideas as an engine of the right" -- reveals the philosophical distance that modern conservatives have traveled; it shows how untethered from their Burkean roots they've become; how unattuned they are to their engine's idle-speed of tradition.

(Don't misread. I'm not presenting contemporary conservatism as a pitiable foil to modern progressivism's brilliance and ingenuity. The latter camp has by and large grown just as intellectually dessicated, sloganeering about "People Power" and the singular need to fight, fight, fight the Establishment, all the while neglecting its profoundly nimble and pragmatic roots in FDR's New Dealism.)

But the topper, the real whopper of Politico's passage was that the above-referenced demagogue could alone "represent the triumph of an intellectually empty brand of populism," in the name of conservatism. One staggers, one reels, one wonders: Where in God's name have the "conservative intelligentsia" been?

What has it been? Thirty years of the emptiest populism? Thirty years of stirring the bigoted rabble? Even longer. There were the scarcely silent Nixon years of a majoritarian cultural divide, and before that, Goldwaterism's wholly indecent appeal to the basest of American instincts, and before that, of course, the sickening populist decadence of Republican McCarthyism.

Now they worry.