P.M. Carpenter

Worse than we thought

Good lord, these budget cuts really are severe. From The Hill:

The president recorded his [weekly] address from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh where he toured a high-tech factory and touted his newly announced Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a $500 investment initiative.

'We could be a menace'

It's not quite so much the totals as the timing.

The (Democratic) House Majority PAC -- a "super" PAC, meaning, thanks to our Nietzschean Supreme Court, that monstrous bribery is both peachy and perfectly legal -- has of late taken in a $75,000 contribution from billionaire George Soros, a $150,000 contribution from hedge-fund billionaire Donald Sussman, and media tycoon Fred Eychaner tossed in $100,000.

Meanwhile, on national cable and in 10 targeted states, Karl Rove's American Crossroads is on Monday "launching a two-month, $20 million campaign hammering President Obama on the economy."

Like it or not we live in the age of the perpetual campaign. Since I'm an incurable junkie contentedly in need of multiple fixes daily, I happen to like it. On the other hand I realize our political system's incessant convulsions of hyperpartisan hysteria aren't the healthiest civic routine; but, whatcha gonna do? It is what it is.

What's more, it has been what it is for more than 30 years -- and all along, decidedly lopsided. Since the 1970s' rise of the kinetic New Right, ultraconservatives have erected endless towers of doubleplusungood Orwellian think tanks to propagate the pseudoconservative Word, just as they've dug deep canals of right-wing cash to secure the preceding, as well as to finance their political friends and eradicate their enemies.

And they've never been shy or particularly secretive about any of it. In August, 1980 -- 1980, for heaven's sake -- John Terry Dolan, chairman of the National Conservative Political Action Committee (commonly dubbed "Nickpack"), giddily told the Washington Post:

Groups like ours are potentially very dangerous to the political process. We could be a menace, yes. Ten independent expenditure groups, for example, could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics. We could say whatever we want about an opponent of a Senator Smith and the senator wouldn’t have to say anything. A group like ours could lie through its teeth and the candidate it helps stays clean.

All refreshingly honest, except for the careful use of the conditional tense. Nickpack, and others like it, were a menace and they did lie through their teeth and what followed was America's yet-unended reign of ultraconservative hogwash and pseudoconservative humbug.

Thirty-one years later,

[The] House Majority PAC ... this week reported raising $800,000 in the two months leading up to [NY's special] election, which was won by Democrat Kathy Hochul.

To be sure, that pales in comparison to the $3.8 million raised in the first six months of the year by the leading Republican super PAC, American Crossroads.

And, again, perhaps more telling, American Crossroads is live and on-the-air across the country and emphatically in "Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Virginia."

Thirty ... one ... years ... later.

Boehner's Corleone 'compromise'

It will take some time to figure this one out:

Boehner listed three elements that he said are non-negotiable in any package to raise the $14.3 trillion borrowing limit. Any deal must include budget reforms, spending cuts that are larger than the debt-limit increase and must not include tax hikes, he said....

"If the president wants this done, he must lead," Boehner said.

Lead? Does Boehner not mean to say "follow," or "cave to extortion"? I am trying to wrap my brain around the speaker's rather peculiar concept of leadership, which entails the leader snapping to attention and barking "Yes, Sir!" to the man pointing a gun to his head.

Teatime for third partiers

Barack Obama may have his malcontented scatterings on the left, but Mitt Romney, should Mitt Romney it be, as the GOP's sacrificial purveyor of doom, is facing a most unpleasant cadre of right-wing opposition that actually knows how to organize. From Politico ... 

Mark Meckler, Tea Party Patriots' co-founder:

I don’t think anybody is looking for a third-party candidate, but anybody who would count out that possibility, I just think is ignorant.... I talk to – coordinators, activists, and the hundreds of thousands of people on our Facebook page – there is virtually no support for Romney.

Dustin Stockton, of Western Representation PAC (chairman, Joe Miller, yes, that Joe Miller), and Matt Kibbe, FreedomWorks' president:

[B]oth said that Romney is so unpalatable to tea party activists that the movement could consider backing a third party candidate instead of working for him in the general election.

"If the Republican Party nominates an establishment Republican who’s wrong on healthcare, who’s wrong on cap and trade and our core issues, tea partiers could stay home or they could go third party," said Kibbe.

And Tea Party Express' chairwoman, Amy Kremer

was sharply criticized [by fellow teasters] after a Fox News Channel interview this month in which she dismissed the possibility of tea partiers supporting a third party presidential candidate, and predicted "the entire tea party movement" would support the eventual GOP nominee, even if it’s Romney.

I almost feel sorry for Mitt. Like any second-rate pol of first-rate flexibility, he doesn't believe one word, one syllable, one solitary diphthong of the inanities he happily drools on the campaign trail for the de-edification of primary-voting ideologues. Yet even that isn't good enough for the party's most ideological activists. They demand a proven moron, a nominee so unfathomably dimwitted that he or she actually believes the delusional verities of the comically unbalanced Tea Party.

Poor, poor Mitt. Wrong candidate, wrong party, wrong century.

My -- and Obama's? -- Ur-moment of disaffection

"I think we are approaching a breaking point" with President Obama, said NY's Congressman Jerry Nadler to Dana Milbank, whose column this morning surveys "the feeling of betrayal" by Capitol Hill's assorted progressive Nadlers to the singularly pragmatic Obama.

Almost instantly we're thrust by Milbank into the smoldering fires of progressive discontent: They seethe over Obama's "Extending Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans" (which for the unemployed paid the rent and kept food on the table); over Obama's "Keeping the Guantanamo Bay prison open" (which Congress, not Obama, has done); over Obama's "Declining to support a larger economic stimulus, or a second one" (the first of which was never politically possible, the second of which is a political fantasy); over Obama's "Foot-dragging on climate change" (which in a weak economy is an unavoidable corollary); over Obama's "Resisting calls to support gay marriage" (from progs, perhaps the most insulting "Yeah, but what have you done for us lately" ever); over Obama's "Surging troops into Afghanistan and removing them too slowly" (the build-up of which was a campaign pledge and it has, after all, had its geopolitical successes, while the pace of any withdrawal is always "too slow" for war opponents); over Obama's "Offering up too many budget cuts in negotiations" (I assume they mean those reportedly enormous cuts that in reality turned out to be Boehner-humiliating peanuts?); and over Obama's "Hesitating to nominate Elizabeth Warren to head the new financial regulatory agency" (that would be the Elizabeth Warren who at Obama's request organized the agency and whose nomination can't survive a filibuster and whose recess appointment would ignite a political [and legal] explosion within the already raging debt-ceiling war).

From that list I omitted another of Milbank's itemized Obamian "transgressions," for it deserves a separate, special and honored mention; in addition, it was the issue whose moment represented my -- and for all I know Obama's -- "breaking point" with progressives: "Surrendering on the public option."

I won't bore you or myself into a catatonic seizure with a painfully extended revisit to, or delineated history of, that dreadful and needlessly protracted affair. Let's just recall that Obama's "surrender" was as roughly frivolous and carefree -- as progressives have labored to characterize it -- as Field Marshal Paulus' at Stalingrad. For days, weeks, months the self-destructive thing dragged out at demagogically progressive pols' insistence; but hey, they were from safe districts or states, pandering to their base, so what did they care that the public option simply, irrefutably did not have the votes to pass the Senate?

Meanwhile, about the jobs crisis -- the electorate's #1 worry -- those Democratic majorities sat idle, which radiated a public appearance of Democratic indifference, which in turn opened a massive breach into which Tea Party fanatics could charge. All the polling and every acute political instinct dictated that Congressional Dems should expeditiously conclude the best healthcare deal they could get (which, finally, they did) and then for Christ's sake move on to jobs creation -- or at least the bloody appearance thereof.

Obama understood almost from the get-go that there'd be no public option in the deal, and centrist Democrats and certainly the party's demagogic progressives knew there'd be no public option in the deal, and for damn sure the Republicans knew it; I knew it, the press knew it, insincere progressive bloggers knew it, mental patients and schoolchildren and my border collie Jack knew it. Still, the public-option platoon self-righteously fought on, widening John Boehner's path to the speakership and the quite possibly clinically sociopathic Eric Cantor's to the majority leadership.

That -- the public-option debacle -- was my Ur-moment of profound disaffection, the flashing genesis, the spark of a blinding epiphany and incontrovertible enlightenment: contemporary progressives, by and large, are imbeciles. I suspect that Obama, at about that time, also sensed some recalculating ground shifting beneath him.

I persist, as does Obama, in a philosophical fidelity to progressive goals. But, good God, those progressives themselves, what an embarrassing, counterproductive, pathologically hypervirtuous bunch of infantile nincompoops they can be.

There's a word for this

Eric Cantor, in his own oblivious way, has redefined the art of political compromise:

I believe that we have identified trillions in spending cuts, and to date, we have established a blueprint that could institute the fiscal reforms needed to start getting our fiscal house in order.

That said, each side came into these talks with certain orders, and as it stands the Democrats continue to insist that any deal must include tax increases.

And there you have it. Each side entered negotiations with "certain orders," yet those from the White House and its Democratic majority in the Senate are illegitimate, and thus obscene, while those from House Republicans are immutable, untouchable, and thus divine.

How can one earnestly negotiate with a political gangster like Cantor?

You know, Michele Bachman, once upon a time, may have had a good thought. She once openly mused to Chris Matthews that an investigation into "pro-American" and "anti-American" Members of Congress should be welcome. And what excellent timing, Michele; this debt-ceiling thing.

There's not a sober economist or conscious policy wonk who denies that a failure to raise the debt ceiling in a timely way portends anything but global catastrophe and, for our more immediate and self-centered concerns, a domestic economic collapse of unprecedented magnitude. Such an event, they say, would eclipse, even dwarf the Crash of '29 and its ensuing Great Depression, wreaking savagely unparalleled, immeasurable desolation on the republic.

Now, the lawmakers of the 1920s could be forgiven their sins, for mostly they knew not what they were doing. But what might one call the acts of contemporary lawmakers who, with full and pre-advised knowledge, understood precisely that their actions would devastate the nation and destroy its credit and severely cripple its economic future and throw millions more into unemployment and despair? What would one call the lawmakers' intentional betrayal of a national trust? There is a legal term for it.

Treason.

The best of all possible slanders

 The Washington Post's bio page invests 96 words in describing opinion-writer Jennifer Rubin, of "Right Turn," as a woman who "provides insight into the conservative movement and the Republican Party," which she previously did for such insightful publications as The Weekly Standard.

The Post would be well-advised, as a gracious service to its readers, to shorten its bio to only six: Jennifer Rubin is a witless hack.

Or, a fair argument could be made that the Post's editors believe such a revised description would be hugely superfluous, since within seconds of actually reading Rubin, the reader finds that her witless hackdom glistens like Cantor on a tax cut.

I quote, from her opening insight of last night:

President Obama gave a speech tonight that was aimed at re-election -- not victory in Afghanistan. In doing so, he made clear that he doesn’t much care whether we accomplish our mission (making certain Afghanistan is not a safe haven for terrorists); his mission is ending a war so we can spend more money domestically.

Obama made clear his indifference to terrorist threats, you see; he only wants to bathe, soak, and rinse in more of his sinisterly socialist schemes at home.  

Yet Rubin, as a conservative public intellectual, prefers that you not merely take her word for it. No, no, oh, no, Rubin substantiates her opinions, as she did last night, quoting from, and I quote, "a confidante of Tom Pawlenty" [sic]: "It was a speech designed to cater to and encourage rising isolationism in this country. The references to nation building in this country clearly indicate that. The president is playing with fire here." Got it?

But wait. Maybe I'm the one who has this all wrong. Maybe the Post's bio description is indeed the best of all possible Panglossian slanders: She "provides insight into the conservative movement and the Republican Party" -- no actual insight into affairs of the day, you will note, except that into the incestuous malignancy of the conservative movement.

My error. Well played, Washington Post.

We all miss the clarity

For any open society, it's hard to sustain a phantom conflict, since it's even harder for the nation's leaders to openly explain the damn thing. Because, again, it's a phantom, and its phantom angles require a certain obtuse approach, lest its comparatively desirable phantom-ness spill into a decidedly undesirable, acute and open conflict.

And never were those axiomatic tensions more on display than in MSNBC's pre- and post-presidential-speech coverage last night.

For about an hour before the address I listened to Chris Matthews brood about his own incomprehension. He didn't "get it," he just didn't get it: Afghanistan will be the same country in two years or ten as it is today, so why, or so it seems, are we so lethargically withdrawing?

But at least Matthews' bewilderment was genuine bewilderment. After the speech Lawrence O'Donnell, for tutorial reasons unknown, invited the international-relations "analysis" of ... Rachel Maddow, who, sustaining a broadcast tradition, framed her bewilderment as a kind of superior knowing. For the first time ever, said Maddow, the president failed to provide sufficient information for one to formulate a judgment; thus from this conclusion the audience, implicitly, was to further and rather darkly conclude that the president stood on shaky ground -- he offered little because he had so little to offer.

O'Donnell, as well as Matthews, might have served their audiences better had they offered up for analysis the cogency of the NY Times' David Sanger:

Though the president could not say so directly, one of the constraints on America’s retreat from a hard and bloody decade is the recognition that, more than ever, the United States will be relying on Afghanistan’s help to deal with the threats emerging from Pakistan.

As I noted all too briefly yesterday, Obama's Afghanistan policy as always been "more Af-Pak than Af," yet, as Sanger notes, he cannot "say so directly." As Fareed Zakaria adds over at the Washington Post, Pakistan is degenerating into a cauldron of paranoia and anti-American hysteria: "Islamist ideology is replacing strategy," the nation "is drifting into a strategic black hole," and "the evidence is now overwhelming that [Pakistan’s military] has been infiltrated at all levels by violent Islamists, including Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers."

But about a putative "ally," this, Obama cannot say.

Which loops us back to the whole "phantom" thing, which pinions Obama between his hopeful, public proclamations and his dire, secret worries.    

I (and I should think Obama, too) am with the marvelous John Houseman, who, as an aging superspook in an increasingly multipolar world, said in Three Days of the Condor: "I miss the clarity."

Ron Paul's peculiar 'isolationism'

Although one can always find something logical in the many philosophical roads that Ron Paul travels, there's also no doubt that he gets a bit goofier every day. Perhaps much of it is mere rhetorical carelessness, in that he tends to lose himself in streams of self-absorbed consciousness as he speaks. That, I don't know. But on the inexplicable goofiness scale, weigh this whopper from Paul, on the definition of "isolationism," after telling ABC's 'Top Line' that some folks are confused and indeed "don't know the definition of isolationism":

Isolationism is something that the protectionists want. They want to close borders for people coming in, and they want to close trade, and I have no desire to do that at all, because I'm a free trader and I want as much travel and communication with other countries as possible. This is what the Founders advised. We were never given the authority to be the policemen of the world.

Putting aside that Founder Alexander Hamilton's entire economic program was based on rank protectionism, and putting aside such "free-trade" legislation as Founder Tom Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807, and putting aside the definitional fact that commercial protectionism is a term employed with vivid distinction from anti-interventionism, and putting aside that xenophobia is also distinct from pretty much everything but, well, xenophobia, I'd say Rep. Paul has the definition of "isolationism" nailed, wouldn't you?

Newt's naturalism

I really do not understand all the shock and awe over Newt Gingrich's "implosions," the news of which "just keeps getting worse."

Newt's campaign management is merely the manner in which Republicans have been running the entire friggin' country, off and on, since Nixon, for everyone to plainly see. Yet Newt gets picked on as some sort of bizarre, GOP aberration?

These singular media assaults are grossly unfair and mean-spirited. I, for one, protest. We no longer use the "r" word for the developmentally disabled -- not since the real Rs popularized it as a governing technique. So now, to criticize Newt for a managerially congenital condition he can no more help than W. could his primitive, introductory English, well, I think it's just terrible.

'Anti-Keynesians' and their stultification of growth

In an absolute must-read piece, Ezra Klein points to the macroeconomic wisdom of PIMCO's bond-trading Bill Gross:

[I]n an unusual mid-month note to his investors, Gross hammered the "anti-Keynesians" in both parties who believe "that fiscal conservatism equates to job growth." The truth, he says, is just the opposite. "Fiscal balance alone will not likely produce 20 million jobs over the next decade. The move towards it, in fact, if implemented too quickly, could stultify economic growth"....

Gross’s credentials as a deficit hawk are unimpeachable, but he’s arguing here that, to be a deficit hawk over the long term, you need to be jobs-focused now, as no economy with 9 percent unemployment is going to achieve the growth necessary to get its deficit under control. And he’s right. The question is whether his call for the government to refocus on jobs and brush aside fantasies that deficit reduction is also job creation will get as much attention as his concerns about debt and deficits.

From a strictly political hardball point of view, which is the only view from which Republicans "govern," the deficit-obsessed GOP's strangling of the economic recovery is internally deemed the smart play (although I have my doubts that some of their prolonged wreckage won't rebound, in 2012, squarely in their face). So, in the perverse way of all is fair in politics and war, their sabotage is (almost) forgivable.

What is unforgivable in every way is that the electorate refuses to take a two-minute break from "Dancing with the Stars" to study and comprehend (a liberal estimate of the above article's reading time) just precisely what it is the GOP is so malevolently doing.

A political consensus, left, center, and right

From Greg Sargent:

Compared to the other GOP candidates, whose announcement speeches were packed with lurid and hallucinogenic falsehoods, [his was] a signal that Huntsman is not trying to win over the base with any outsized or crazy anti-Obama rhetoric. This guy is toast!

On Afghanistan, looking inward

Trying to clean up any venture begun by the aggressively hapless Bush administration is bound to be a job that ranges from the thankless to the hopeless. In 2009, among its ancient swindles was a medieval terrorist state deliberately undermanned and intentionally underfunded in the way of any remedies; eight years of neglect had only cemented the lost-ness of this cause, which was always immensely improbable anyway.

That venture, Afghanistan, was just one of the poisonous gifts that was to keep on giving to the Obama administration, along with another war of unthinkable origins and unspeakable mismanagement, a fiscal nightmare at home, a domestic taxbase suitable maybe for Madagascar, a pernicious healthcare system perpetually under- and uninsured, an unbabysat Wall Street, and massive unemployment.

Even FDR's inherited headaches consisted mostly of merely the domestic: not to be outdone by H.C. Hoover, George W. added the foreign.

All that, like an enormous stick of dynamite, got handed to President Obama. Well, he did ask for it, but still, I've always cut him some slack because of the unprecedented and mostly avoidable challenges that had him cornered from the get-go (also unlike FDR's first term, Obama was bequeathed an essentially conservative Congress, which repeatedly retorted "Maybe!" to "Yes, we can!").

So, although I never admired or much respected Obama's Afghanistan policy, I have tolerated it -- much the same as Obama, I suspect, tolerates it. More Af-Pak than Af, he was hemmed in by his own campaign pledge to prosecute Bush's one righteous war with adequate vigor, by international commitments, by his own military, by a reasonably determined body politic, and of course (see preceding variable) by the ever-looming potential of Republican demagoguery.

The sum total of national harm done by the latter to both human life and the public treasury has also been both incalculable and present since Korea. Truman's doggedness there was never enough to shake the Republican dogs of demagoguery, nor were Kennedy's warm-up in Vietnam and Johnson's outrageously muscular follow-up. Those same dogs cost Carter his job, they ridiculed Clinton and played, I think undeniably, an undismissible role in Obama's Afghanistan campaign pledge.

Happily, though, Republicans have of late found more inviting demogogic opportunities in the economy they wrecked than in the foreign policy they helped to pollute. Besides, since Obama has been for Afghanistan's prosecution, it was only a matter of time before Republicans discovered its wickedness; in addition, Obama managed to vaporize the principal villain they couldn't, so better to just forget the whole scene -- no need to remind the electorate of their own singularly enormous failure.

So, in the absence of the GOP's monolithically neoconservative fearmongering, Obama finally has an "out" which the body politic is warm to -- Pew Research Center's headline says it all: "Record Number Favors Removing U.S. Troops from Afghanistan." 

The domestic politics of needless death play a more important role in aggressive foreign policies than we as a "virtuous" people would ever care to acknowledge. This, Obama inherited too. He changes what he can, when he can. And if "the people" dislike the pace, they've only to look inward for its causes.

Might Hayes replace Uygur?

"Groomed" is not the word that springs to mind when I think of Cenk Uygur's intellectually unkempt, nails-on-blackboard performance on MSNBC, nevertheless that's how the NY Times describes the network's past cultivation and childrearing of the "progressive" host.

But there's hope that the primitive screeching and adolescent pouting of an on-air Uygur may soon be at an end, or at least that's the way I choose to read the Times' news that "Now MSNBC is developing a show for Mr. [Christopher] Hayes," of Nation magazine, who frequently guest-anchors for Lawrence O'Donnell and Rachel Maddow.

I've come to like and respect Hayes, even though he's trapped in as many doctrinaire bugaboos as Uygur. For example I vaguely recall an exchange on MSNBC between Hayes and then-Newsweek's Jonathan Alter a few months ago, in which Alter was explaining that FDR managed to achieve some now-renowned progressive jobs programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, only by defying the unions. Hayes sat and listened in visibly ashen horror to Alter's New Deal heresy; nonetheless he was polite, and he capped the conversation with a charitably brief denouncement of any such contemporary thought.

Is MSNBC "developing a show" for Hayes in the sense of a Uygur-replacement show? With eager eyes I scoured the Times piece for some hint of MSNBC's possible mercy unto its audience, but alas, there was none. On the other hand, the story didn't rule that development out.

So there's hope, blessed hope.

Huntsman launches his 2016 campaign

The Hill's opening description of Jon Huntsman's presidential candidacy announcement this morning inadvertently showcased his manifest unseriousness for 2012:

Former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman (R) launched his presidential campaign Tuesday with an emphasis on leadership, and a post-partisan message [the latter, my emphasis].

An unmistakable declaration for 2016. Huntsman himself almost comically disclosed his intentions:

[Obama] and I have a difference of opinion on how to help the country we both love. But the question each of us wants the voters to answer is who will be the better president; not who's the better American.

Jon, that may be the question you want to ask voters, but it sure as hell isn't the question most Republican primary voters want to be asked. They're uninterested in questions and answers. They want blood, they want to see it and they want to hear the rhetorical knife going in, over and over.

They're temperamentally indisposed to hearing any unfashionable nonsense about Obama's love of country: He is, after all, a conspicuously European-socialist hater of America, a biracial joker in America's deck of doom who must be discarded with vicious haste. 

But Huntsman knows that, just as he knows that Obama is unbeatable. For now, he'll just build some name ID and a comfort level with the GOP's vestigial sanity.