P.M. Carpenter

Not anarchy, just chaos

True anarchy contains more than a little utopianism. It is a systematically imposed, unsystematic system of non-governmental anti-civilization in which we, as a deliriously free people, all dance around fires and howl at the moonlight and grow our own arugula and delight ourselves hourly at having heaved the chains that bound us: a regulated food supply, trained air traffic controllers, licensed medical professionals -- those sorts of burdens.

The paradox of embryonic anarchy, though, is that it requires a lot of collective organization and keen planning and systematic execution to hatch it. Dismantling centuries of advancing civilization is no easy task or one-man job; reversing the materialized labors of the Greek demos and the Roman republics and the intellectual refinements of Locke, Montesquieu and Madison doesn't come from just passing out leaflets on streetcorners or holding a tea party. No, the dubious ingenuity of true anarchy first demands acute leadership and swarms of impeccably disciplined followers.

And that's why we're safe from Republican anarchists.

Now seven complete months into their rolling revolution, we get this from sidekick but wannabe Skipper Cantor: Yeah, "the debt limit vote sucks" but come on, guys, "stop grumbling and whining and ... come together as conservatives and rally behind the Speaker and call the president’s bluff."

Oh dear. Sounds like anarchy in the House. But it isn't, really. It's just chaos. 

One would think our Hay Market rioting friends could at least count to 1.2 trillion, or simply 217. At a barer minimum, inspirational eloquence -- "Damn the torpedoes," "Remember the Maine," "Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" -- generally surpasses the pubescent observation that the challenge ahead "sucks." Alas, such are the limits of a premature putsch.

Don't mistake: We may yet descend into the oxymoronic nightmare of conservative chaos, but true anarchy is beyond them.

Not since Lincoln

David Frum makes a curious argument:

Whether it was health care or the deficit or now the debt ceiling, direct encounters between Obama and his Republican opposite numbers have always ended badly for the president.

Why do I choose the modifier of "curious"? Because on the first issue -- health care -- Frum has tirelessly and rather courageously admonished his fellow conservatives for losing, by not playing. Now, suddenly, it has "ended badly for the president." And any verdict on the next two issues -- the deficit and debt ceiling -- is obviously premature.

So where does that leave Frum's argument? Contradictory, for starters; otherwise, presumptuous.

Even more interesting is Andrew Sullivan's assessment of Frum's:

I agree, I'm afraid. I know Obama wants to get things done and also believes that taking a strong stand in advance of legislation can prevent that. But without the clarity of rhetorical leadership, you end up in the miasma of legislative minutiae that leaves the impression that Washington has not changed at all. The result, of course, is that it hasn't.

Yet Sullivan's conclusion is, of course, demonstrably untrue. Washington has changed radically, in both general senses of the word.

Not since Abe Lincoln took office has a president's political opposition been so ruthlessly determined to oppose -- even to the point of national disloyalty, which is precisely what the GOP's treacherous machinations over the debt limit represent. It is futile to look back on Obama's first two years and speculate that he should have done this, or that he should have done that, and then this or that might have proceeded better; it is futile because whatever path Obama might have chosen, his opposition was acrobatically hellbent on obstructing it.

If Obama is to be properly faulted, then his fault lies in the rather incongruent criticism of excessive rationality. No one, least of all a chief executive of profound intellect and with a corresponding belief in the great and unifying power of Reason, could have predicted in January 2009 that the spiritually broken Grand Old Party would redouble its preceding madness, and then double that, and double even that again. No one could have predicted the right's absolutely surreal hypocrisy on debt and spending, its Obama-as-Hitler posters, its "death panel" frenzies and its birther lunacy and its Socialist Dictator! dementias. Neither could anyone have predicted the activist left's infantile behavior and ceaseless crankiness.

No one could have, and no one did.

Yet now we encounter the magnificent bounty of hindsight. And it's pointless. Because the right was always determined to sabotage Obama's presidency -- if "unusually extreme and intransigent" methods, as Frum grants, proved insufficient, then what the hell; economic treason might do the trick -- and with each passing day, it doubles down on its determination.

Again ... not since Lincoln.

George Will finds his inner Pegler

I'll say one thing for the debt-ceiling crisis. It has produced some of the best conservative ravings since Joe McCarthy and Westbrook Pegler.

Case in laughable point is George Will's column today, which reads like one of the borderline psychotic fulminations so commonly drooled onto the comments section of Michelle Malkin's Web site. A complete autopsy of Will's diatribe would be too tedious and gruesome, so let's zoom in on merely one of his gangrenous manifestations.

He praises the Constitutional separation of powers for having

rescued the nation from Obama’s preference for a "clean" debt-ceiling increase that would ignore the onrushing debt tsunami. There are 87 reasons for Obama’s temporary conversion of convenience to the cause of spending restraint — the 87 House Republican freshmen. Their inflexibility astonishes and scandalizes Washington because it reflects the rarity of serene fidelity to campaign promises.

How a clean vote would in any way stay or reverse the nation's fiscal encumbrances which Congress has racked up over the years is beyond anyone dwelling in the real world's spacetime continuum, but let us pass on that. Let us instead zoom in further on Will's praise for the Tea Party's "rarity of serene fidelity to campaign promises" -- yes, yes, praiseworthy indeed, even if it means utter national, and possibly global, destruction.

At the moment I am rather understandably imagining Mr. Will sitting at a typewriter, ca. 1939, giddily praising Herr Hitler for his impeccable fidelity shown to the promises made in Mein Kampf. Refreshing political behavior, was it not? Never mind its apocalyptic substance.

One just doesn't find fuehers leaders like that anymore, except ...

The Orwell-Snerd Party

Last night Chris Matthews delivered a splendid pounding of the tea-partying senator from Utah, Mike Lee, who began the interview by committing the regrettable error of noting the recent "bipartisan" support for the asinine Cut, Cap and Balance bill in the House -- bipartisan meaning 229 Republican votes and five Democrats.

This is TeaPartySpeak -- a rhetorical combination of George Orwell and Mortimer Snerd; a kind of insidious doublespeak united with guffaw-inducing, witless prattle; a sinister cognition coupled with homespun horsehit. And Matthews called him on it. Hard.

Where do you get this stuff? he demanded, not once, but repeatedly. Since when do five votes out of 234 signify bipartisanship? Matthews was at his exasperated finest, remorselessly pursuing an honest accounting from an ideological pol elected by unschooled ideologues to pursue everything but.

True, Matthews' fangs-in-ankle style wasn't exactly Cronkitean journalism, but it does at least serve the honorable purpose of trying to keep these clowns honest, and barring that, to humiliate them in the process. Unfortunately, its application has been, at best, sporadic, which has only encouraged the Mike Lees of our political nation to degrade straightforward language at will.

Matthews' tactics on display last night put me in mind of an exhortative piece I wrote a few years, just as GOPers had earnestly begun their verbal campaign to always, in interviews, refer to the Democratic Party as the Democrat Party. The giggling, snickering puerility underlying this tactic and reflecting Republicans' arrested emotional development was palpable, and the tactic -- enforced, I imagine, by the Orwellian-Snerdian Frank Luntz -- soon took a firm and universal hold, even among the party's more mature veterans. Yet very seldom did any cable-news host correct them or call them on it; which puzzled me, since there is no Democrat Party. How could a newsperson conduct an entire news interview in which a fictitious political organization is fancifully presumed to exist?

What I recommended to these hosts was that they begin practicing NYC's "broken window" theory of law enforcement -- a concise definition for which I'll lazily turn to Wikipedia: "that monitoring and maintaining urban environments in a well-ordered condition may prevent further vandalism as well as an escalation into more serious crime." You know, like before we know it, "Democrat Party" might metamorphose to "death taxes" and "death panels" and other such vandalisms of the English language, escalating into the now-serious and quite tangible crimes of Tea Partyism.

My recommendation: that every cable host (excluding those on Fox, naturally) stop the GOPer in his words and gently correct him. "Excuse me, Congressman, but you just said 'Democrat Party,' and there is no such thing. Did you mean to say 'Democratic Party'? All right, well, then please say so. And should you 'misspeak' again, I'll stop you again."

As you can tell from any cable interview today, my recommendation went unheeded. Republican pols now bray with abandon any distorted inventions that come to mind or that have been ordered from Orwell-Snerd HQ. Idiomatic conservatism is indeed "idiomatic," absent the "-ma-." Credit to Matthews for halting Mike Lee at his felonious mutilation of "bipartisan," but such linguistic law enforcement should have been applied consistently and relentlessly all along.

The dueling addresses

President Obama's address to the nation was flawed only by its theme of neoclassical economics that calls for reduced government spending in tough times. Eighty years of modern economic theory and indeed modern economics have soundly discredited pre-Keynesianism. Yet, having said that, it should also be noted that Obama has now twice (last Friday as well) directed the electorate's attention to -- itself. It voted for divided government last November, and we know who the divisive newcomers are, whom the electorate chose. I interpret Obama's dual references to the body politic's ultimate responsibility for this debt crisis as subtly, deliciously scathing.

Speaker Boehner's address, on the other hand, was riddled by deliberate lies, the only kind of pep talk his party's base can really love. John and his kind of simple, common folk of the rustic GOP don't hanker to the sinister, big-city ways of an unnecessarily expensive and complex Washington; no, they just sit around the old kitchen table, strumming guitars and reading the Bible and balancing their personal finances -- and gosh darnit if only these big-government boys could learn the same conservative virtues and values.

What Boehner left out of his address was mention of his party's sole and direct responsibility for this crisis. That's a given. But he also omitted that yesterday's conservative would never have brought us this close to destruction, and that today's conservative is in reality a kind of pseudoconservative, which historian Richard Hofstadter once defined as "a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their destruction."

Hofstadter's line pretty much encapsulates what the contemporary GOP is all about.

'Ever-increasing surpluses'

If you'd like yet another set of indisputable facts to torment your idiot brother-in-law with -- that is, prove for the umpteenth time that it was George W. Bush & Friends, and not Barack Obama & Kenyan Socialists, who got us into this seemingly bottomless deficit mess -- just take this along to your next regularly scheduled family blowout.

Assuming your dysgenic kin a) understands it, he will of course b) ignore it, but you can c) laugh a wickedly knowing laugh as he d) skulks off to Fox News or Rush Limbaugh for an ideological fix.

An extraordinary deceit

Yesterday, one could hear the unstrategic yelps of the activist left -- Obama is selling us out again; Harry Reid is his errand boy; all is lost; the Senate majority leader's sketchy, "unbalanced" proposal is just what they expected; and so on, and so on.

Lord, grant these morons a clue. I'm beggin' Ya.

In consultation with President Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, what Reid is formulating, based on reports so far, is but an extraordinary political deceit; i.e., he's calling the "no-taxes" coven's bluff. His $2.7 trillion in spending cuts are largely savings from two wars already winding down, and though no new revenue is proposed, Medicare is left untouched.

A triple and brilliant pretense: one that gives Republicans what they claim to demand -- unembellished cuts consistent with the debt ceiling's lifted height -- while ripping the message-war rug of 2012 right out from under them. 

And about this the left howls in disgust. Unbelievable (almost).

A free emetic, courtesy the Post

On rare occasions it is medically necessary to induce vomiting. This can come at quite a pharmaceutical cost, however. So here's a money-saving tip: print (but for heaven's sake don't read) Jennifer Rubin's, uh, column today, and retain for reading only in case of such an emergency.

Stay tuned

If you've ever read what is now fashionably referred to as a "tick-tock" of the Great Depression's onset -- the classic is still John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash -- you may recall the uncertain, befuddled, even erratic reporting of that era's journalism, from day to day, week to week, month to month. The market's down. Whoa, it's way down! Hold it, it's up. Uh-oh, it's back down, in fact, now it's nosediving. Never mind. It's up again. Crisis over. Oh no ...

From today's NY Times:

Wall Street equities fell about 1 percent at the start of trading on Monday on the lack of progress American political leaders were making on a deal to raise Washington’s debt limit and avoid a default.

As of this writing, the plunge has been cut in half. For now.

'Rigid ideologies over pragmatic policymaking'

If you're a regular reader you already know of my hammerings on the arresting similarity between our present political deterioration and the antebellum sectional crisis. UNC historian Lloyd Kramer writes a brilliant variation from a European perspective, in the Raleigh News and Observer.

This history may now seem remote, but the consequences of ideological rigidities in 18th century France are worth remembering whenever American politicians blithely suggest that a wealthy modern nation can default on its debts, return to a mythical national past and happily sustain a widening economic gap between its privileged elites and the vulnerable people who surround them.

You should read it all, here.

Is it medication time for Paul Krugman?

I now read Paul Krugman for the amusement. True, it's sad to watch a distinguished Princeton professor of economics decline into much the same pathology as that Princeton mathematics professor of a beautiful mind, but ...

Wait, I go too far? Such snark is unwarranted, you say? To even jokingly suggest that Krugman is seeing phantoms and debating invisible enemies and papering his garage with printouts from FireDogLake -- why, that's just gratuitous cattiness, you say.

Oh yeah? Then explain this concluding delusion from his column today:

[I]t’s possible that the reason the president is offering to undermine Medicare is that he genuinely believes that this would be a good idea. And that possibility, I have to say, is what really scares me.

First, note the accelerating paranoia; he's not just scared, he's now really scared. Second, observe the near-hysterical phrasing; "the president is offering..." -- what, like Alfred Jodl "offered" to surrender to Dwight Eisenhower? Third, behold the schizophrenic inventions; "It's possible," and "that possibility," the empirical foundations for which are ... ?

That said, you know as well as I that the mad professor hasn't actually gone mad. Krugman still sees political reality, but upon touching it he's repelled and thus flees to the intellectual caress of self-righteous purity.

Thereupon, finally, he hams it up for the cheap seats, to whom "nuance" doesn't sell.

David Gregory's trenchant "Mm-hmm"

On today's "Meet the Press," host David Gregory again showcased unchallenged demagoguery and revealed his own staggering indifference to any real analysis. His opportunity to journalistically debase the airwaves presented itself in the malign form of the GOP's Sen. Tom Coburn, a repugnant fraud who consistently receives Beltway applause for his mavericky independence, which in reality is scarcely more than customary Republican hysteria. To wit:

[The administration] said that they were going to oppose anything that would fundamentally change Medicare. Well, Medicare is belly-up. Anybody that's on Medicare today, I want to tell you, in five years, it's going to have to change.

What was Gregory's concurrent retort? "Mm-hmm."

It would be unrealistic to expect that Gregory retain in his nicely coiffed head all relevant facts and figures on all subjects, with which he could confront the Sunday morning demagogues. Yet Gregory often deploys not a shadow of pushback, or even a hint of preparation. He had to know that the odds this morning of Coburn repeating the above hysteria were rather good, so one might think he would have crammed on this specific subject before the program. A few actual facts are on occasion helpful.

There is, for instance, this report (pdf) -- "A Primer on Medicare Spending and Financing" -- available from the Kaiser Family Foundation, which Gregory let pass. Scattered throughout, the primer has this to say:

[O]n net, Medicare spending will be reduced by an estimated $424 billion for the 10-year period from fiscal year 2010 through fiscal year 2019, a 6 percent reduction from spending that had been projected for that period.

Trust Fund balances are expected to be exhausted in 2029.... The 2029 date is 12 years later than projected prior to enactment of the [Affordable Care Act].

Medicare actuaries calculate the 75-year "unfunded obligation" ... [at] $2.4 trillion, an amount dramatically lower than the $13.4 trillion estimated in 2009, a reduction which is due to the provisions of the ACA.

The long-run fate of Medicare depends on solving the larger problem of rising health care costs. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 takes initial steps to use Medicare’s leverage to carve a path that slows cost growth and improves quality [all italics mine].

All of which brings to mind a rather damning question, which Gregory, to his shame and our loss, failed to ask: How do you live with yourself, Senator, loutishly exaggerating Medicare's doom when you, along with your party's demagogic resistance, opposed President Obama's substantial mitigations contained in the Affordable Care Act?

Instead we got, "Mm-hmm." Riveting.

Is Bach-mania our sinful nature?

There's competing brooding on the NY Times editorial page today.

With a belatedness that borders on the prosecutably negligent, Nicholas Kristof informs us that "the biggest threat to America’s national security ... comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home" -- that these tea partying maniacs "are willing to drag [the economy] over the cliff of default."

Once you've picked yourself up from the resonating thud of your "Duh" reaction to that resplendent commonplace, you find yourself asking: Now, just who is it who leads the Tea Party in the House; you know, the "maniacs" about whom Kristof is finally alarmed? In a flash it comes: Why, Michele Bachmann, of course. Yes, yes, that's right, Michele Bachmann is the flamboyant caporegime of the very ideological gangsters who represent "the biggest threat to America’s national security."

Yet opposite Kristof is Frank Bruni, who contrarily informs us that "Bachmann’s profile at this point is wildly out of proportion to her probable fate in the election and the long-term impact on it that she’ll have."

I confess that the journalistic conflict I note here isn't a precise one: Bruni's disciplinary message is that we're all paying excessive attention to Bachmann's gaudy presidential run (not its larger manifestations), when we should be boring ourselves into High Seriousness by pondering, for example -- which, I scarcely need note, Bruni himself declines to do -- Mitt Romney's premature rigor mortis.

But is "Bach-mania," as Bruni chooses to belittle our morbidly giddy interest in Michele, not a legitimate subject of journalistic analysis -- indeed, the noblest of analyses -- if our "biggest threat," as Kristof chooses to alert us at last, comes from Bachmann-led, tea partying "maniacs at home"?

Sing to me, O Muse of the Commentariat, for your children of the Times have me torn and bewildered.

The Catch-22 of Tea Party madness

I'm not a psychiatrist, therefore I've no medical opinion on whether the Tea Party caucus -- which, says Dana Milbank, one GOP aide now refers to as the 'Default Caucus' -- is clinically imbecilic, just damn stupid, or actually mad.

In my politico-historical opinion, however, the Tea Party/Default Caucus practices political insanity in somewhat the way that a Whitey Bulger might plead himself criminally insane. That is, no fundamentally rational pol would interpret his demands as incontestably superior to all others' in political society, especially when his demands are reflected by such a tiny minority of likeminded extortionists, and no fundamentally rational pol would be willing to exact so much innocent blood, if his demands aren't met.

Unless, of course, such manifest irrationality is largely a show -- for a jury of carnivorous primary voters, for pseudoconservative talk-radio jocks, for some Sammy the Bull "pledge"-enforcer, and so on.

As Milbank further notes, the Tea Party's insanity plea has been crucial to their political tactics in the debt-ceiling furor:

According to negotiation "game theory," the Default Caucus has boosted Republicans' leverage. "Your hand is greatly strengthened if you can convince the other side that you’re crazy," said James Miller, an economist at Smith College. It has enabled House Speaker John Boehner to tell the president: The Tea Party has locked our steering wheel and we can’t swerve — so you have to.

Ah, but as novelist Joseph Heller has observed, there's always a catch. Which is to say, if your rationally plotted objective is to convince the other side that you're crazy, then you aren't really (really) irrational. You may be an irredeemable sociopath, you may be a carnival-barking swindler, or just a judicious coward -- you may be many unpleasant or untoward things, but at your tactical core you cannot by definition be hopelessly irrational, since your objective requires a remarkable element of the cunningly thoughtful.

It is here that the Tea Party/Default Caucus has overplayed -- Yossarian-like, without the humor -- its hand. Repeatedly it has appeared before the body politic and flight-surgeon Obama to plead its insanity: and though the flight surgeon spotted the self-cancelling ruse from the start, it has taken the body politic some time to realize that madmen don't declare themselves mad; nor in declaring themselves mad do they correspondingly declare the object of their violent madness to be profoundly sane -- and perfectly harmless.

It might help, but one needn't be clinically crazy to be a sociopathic-policy nitwit, or a paradoxic anarchist of authoritarian-personality disorder, or a retro-nihilist of socioeconomic 'Ozzie and Harriet' or even 'Gunsmoke' impossibilities. But that's what these clowns -- the Tea Party/Default Caucus -- are. And they stand ruthlessly exposed -- by President Obama, practicing flight surgeon.

Immensely dishonest consistency

"I do trust [Obama] as a negotiator," affirmed Boehner. Yet he also characterized the president's negotiating habits as incorrigibly gelatinous?

Such is the immensely dishonest consistency required of the Republican Speaker. It's tough to blame Boehner personally, even if he did encourage the enlistment of uncompromising lunatics into his House ranks. He's squeezed, he's but the nominal leader not of a party but of a treasonously radical gang of anarchists and nihilists, and he sees no way out.

Because, very likely, there isn't one -- just as his party has wanted it.