P.M. Carpenter

Anti-intellectual methadone

It seems it has come to this.

The bottoming out -- please, we're begging, somebody please assure us that this is indeed the bottom, the deepest and icyist circle of Hell, that farthest from the warm, celestial orb of secular enlightenment -- of the Republican base's monstrous anti-intellectualism is compelling a fresh look at the writhing, rotted, utterly corrupt "intellect" of Newt Gingrich.

That, gentle readers, is just how alienated from the maddening crowd the GOP's literate demimonde has become. Alienated, and desperate. Desperately alienated. And despairing. In fact so despairing of "the Palinization of the GOP" is the Post's Kathleen Parker, she writes approvingly that

there are signs that the GOP is recognizing its [anti-intellectual] weaknesses and is ready to play smarter. To wit: The sudden surge of Gingrich, who, whatever his flaws and despite the weight of his considerable baggage, is no intellectual slouch. Whether he can pull off a victory in Iowa remains to be seen, but a populist professor — a bombastic smarty-pants Republicans can call their own — may be just the ticket.

Yes, I know. It takes a while to recover from a passage like that. So take a moment. A moment of ...

Back? Jaw off your chest and eyes realigned? Good.

In the Commentariat Field Manual, there are itemized, of course, worse transgressions than that of confusing glibness with intellect. If a prodigious verbal ease of sleaze genuinely corresponded with depth of thought, than Rush Limbaugh would be an honored pillar of the Ivy League. This should go without saying, though perhaps the Field Manual hits it not hard enough. Are we clear?

Still, I am not wholly without compassion, and thus a little slack-cutting, for Ms. Parker and her fellow conservative desperados. It's true, they could have done more, way back when, to stem the GOP's torrent of anti-intellectual piss. That they failed to do so betrayed only their partisan eagerness, however, much like those disingenuous liberals who have failed to disown the bottomed-out despicability of an Alan Grayson. We are all, at one time or another, soaked in the stench of hypocrisy.

But, come on, Ms. Parker. Elevating the wretchedly fluid malevolence of Newt Gingrich as "just the ticket" to punch down GOP anti-intellectualism? Has it really come to that, Ms. Parker?

Don't panic

The NY Times, observing the symptomatic Ron Paul phenomenon:

His campaign, which has won a number of straw polls and is picking up momentum, has demonstrated its ability to organize and mobilize supporters, which is particularly relevant in Iowa.

A state which is particularly irrelevant. And growing more irrelevant to the nation each election cycle. Because it is unrepresentative of the American body politic. So unrepresentative, its caucus habitually hands victories to losers and losses to victors. See, most recently, Huckabee, McCain.

For the GOP, Iowa is the clearinghouse of insurgents, radicals, and the ideologically incurable. It is the asylum that gives hope to the doomed -- the Michele Bachmanns -- and a sigh to the preordained -- the Mitt Romneys.

For serious Republican presidential aspirants, Iowa is both essentially irrelevant in the selection process and, conceivably, the GOP's future. Which is to say, death. It is a microcosm of fracturing sensibilities, a pressure cooker of petty prejudices, a busy nest of blithe ignorance, an unresurrecting graveyard of spooky fundamentalists, a loony bin of economic libertarians. Iowa is the JOHN HANCOCK of the GOP's plucky declaration of rampaging dementia.

For now, Iowa's freakshow of Pauls, Cains, Bachmanns and Gingriches seems containable; that is, it has yet to hammer immovable stakes in the still-relevant primary and caucus tents of the continental U.S. So a Romney can bypass the spectacle and still star in the show. Yet with each cycle the Iowan diaspora becomes, paradoxically, while more and more irrelevant, more pronounced; the Cains become more competitive in the New Hampshires, and the guiding consumers of once-hopeless insurgencies, of pestilential radicalism and ideological incurabilities become ... the base. The only base.

Hence there is, in the sublime mathematics of electoral politics, likely no way the Republican Party can stay on this course and remain a national player; one within the two-party system. I suspect 2012 will be the GOP's 21st-century watershed -- the causation of 2013's revanchism, authentic conservatives retaking authentic conservatism. A formal Tea Party, the scattered precursor of which has already captured the delusional imagination of pseudoconservatism's third-party species, will erupt and in shorter order flame out, a victim of incoherent infighting.   

Or I'm wrong, and we're all in much bigger trouble than we ever imagined. But, that I doubt. If America's political history were one of ideological instability and revolutionary ruptures, I wouldn't, but it isn't, so I do.

The death of American Exceptionalism, at the hands of ...

This news item -- "Despite popularity among GOP candidates, American Exceptionalism on the decline" -- in today's Washington Post registered with me as actual news; that is, it far surpassed in authentic newsworthiness the boneheaded plays made by GOP presidential candidates, the absurd ill workings of Congress, and all the routinely reported, misguided worries about America's intolerable debt, versus America's intolerable unemployment.

From the story:

A new poll from the Pew Research Center shows that fewer than half of Americans now believe that American culture is superior to the rest of the world.

Just 49 percent of Americans agree with the statement that, while Americans themselves "aren’t perfect, our culture is superior."

That’s down from 60 percent in 2002 and 55 percent in 2007, and it’s only slightly higher than in Germany (47 percent) and Spain (44 percent).

In other words, just about the only thing that is exceptional about us today is that we so abruptly stopped believing ourselves to be exceptional.

The rather brief chronological span, noted above, within which our self-faith declined is remarkable -- it was that of the Age of Exceptionalists: unexceptional boors who tortured detainees, much like the rest of the boorish world; unexceptional warmongers who converted belligerence into a national religion, much like some of our past foes; unexceptional profligates who squandered our resources, much like the profligates of (other) banana republics ...

One could go on, yet the irony would not deepen. Nor would its sadness.

Defense cuts -- really?

Although congressional Republicans concede that "they are more fractured than they were in July and early August" -- those dreariest dog days of the debt-ceiling debacle -- it is impossibly optimistic of congressional Democrats to think "the GOP [will] have to choose between tax increases or cuts to the military," which, according to The Hill, Democrats are indeed thinking, because of the supercommittee's decay.

Perhaps I'm too conceptually trapped in the contemporary gloom that is modern American politics, but it seems to me that the liklihood of Republicans capitulating to automatic defense cuts is about on a par with that of Sean Hannity endorsing Bernie Sanders. 

[I]n sharp contrast to this summer, Democrats say they are in the driver’s seat. They note that Republicans are already vowing to torpedo the sequestration cuts to the Defense Department, something Democrats say they will not go along with.

As The Hill underscores it, "Republicans opted" for national security cuts over tax increases. But when one combines the frightful spectres of Democratic giddiness with Republican disregard of all professional integrity, one is left only with the assurance that the latter will find a way to throw a dishonorable wrench into the things-are-looking-up works.

It is inconceivable to me that GOP congresspersons will simply march home next year to face their local ochlocracies, in the form of Republican primaries, grasping fistfuls of defense cuts. I just cannot see that happening. More frightening: many congressional Democrats do. 

The talk-radio clowns are about to get even funnier

Even talk-radio frother Laura Ingraham just cain't take it no more, saying on her show Wednesday:

What happens when Godfather’s Pizza doesn’t deliver? You get Newt Gingrich in 30 minutes or less!

Which, reportedly, is the equivalent of intellectual audacity in the profane annals of right-wing radio. Audacious, and unique:

[T]he danger for Cain, GOP strategists say, isn’t that Limbaugh and other talkers will turn on Cain publicly. It’s that they will simply stop talking about him - triggering a silent run on his political stock.

They -- "Limbaugh and [most, it should be inserted] other talkers" -- have no slicker alternative to a quiet, Stalinesque air-brushing. To turn on Cain publicly would be to admit their error in judgment, and that of course is out of bounds to the all-knowing Mouths. So they'll neglect and abandon Cain into obscurity.

Yet, as entertaining as this marooning process will be, and indeed probably already is, it's a mere trifle of cowardice compared to the fun that awaits us when the GOP presidential field has finally been narrowed to one. Yeah, that one.

How will the Limbaughs and Levins negotiate neglect then? Sure, the vaster portions of their broadcasts will be devoted to garden-variety Obama-bashing. But their every ferocious assault against the sitting president will in turn represent an unspoken endorsement of the mandating, yep-it's-man-made-global-warming, pro-choicing challenger -- the very last man they wish to ever see in the White House; not to mention that unseating Obama would be bad -- exceptionally bad -- for the paranoid, right-wing bullshit business.

To finesse this dilemma would violate talk radio's absolutism. Limbaugh et al can no more be a little bit pro-Romney than, as the cliche goes, they can be a little bit pregnant. Nevertheless, in their inescapability of factitious anti-Obamaism, they'll be stuck with a stammering brand of implied pro-Romneyism (unless, that is, a third, tea party erupts) which will be a hilarious phenomenon to witness.

Lazy Republicans

Walter Dellinger, a former acting U.S. Solicitor General, penned the lead reaction to Politico's "Arena" questions today: "Will the president's comment come back to haunt him in campaign 2012? Have his words been misconstrued?" Wrote Dellinger, with a perfect balance of ire and curtness:

I am ashamed to be part of this conversation. The moderator's question refers as if it were a fact to "President Barack Obama's recent characterization of the American people as 'a little bit lazy.' " He said no such thing.

Contributors to this exchange who are responding with criticism of the president for calling the American people lazy must know full well that they are perpetuating a falsehood.

But this is American politics, in which, for Republicans, falsehoods are king; regicide is noble, as long as it's a Democratic president in power; and, as long as he's a GOPer, a Mad Lugwig on the throne is just fine.

So right on cue, a former Republican congressman strutted his party's severe dissociative disorder:

Yes, it will haunt him and it should. It will go down as one of many inappropriate, derisive comments aimed at the people and nation he was elected to lead, not mock, much like Jimmy Carter's "malaise, crisis of confidence" speech.

Speaking of lazy...who's the guy that has been playing all that golf?

What an idiot. The "Carter-malaise" invention just never gets old with these boys. And oh, yes, speaking of lazy, the guy's name was George W. Bush.

Sydney Greenstreet's parallel universe

I was beginning to think the Beltway commentariat was granting, not atypically, this Republican linguistic curiosity a pass: that a "covert" operation can be overtly proposed, while maintaining its covert integrity. 

Thus, in "The Maltese Falcon," still the classiest tale ever of skulduggery, deceit and intrigue, Sydney Greenstreet announced to Humphrey Bogart that he was slipping him a mickey. 

Well, Greenstreet would have, had he been scheming as a modern GOP presidential wannabe. And I wish he were around to do so. For the party could use a little cloak-and-dagger class.

Last Saturday night -- you've probably blocked it from your recall center; it was that Night at the Comic Opera, another GOP debate -- Mitt Romney, as I noted at the time, 

opened by asserting that President Obama should have provided "covert assistance" to the Iranian resistance movement. Perhaps Obama did. How would we know, if the assistance was indeed covert, just as Romney demanded?

Naturally I assumed that similar and quite voluble howls of perplexity would soon erupt from both pundits and press. That such howls were muted or mum, however, was understandable, given the other and abundant piles of perplexity that all the wannabes coughed up that night.

Yet David Ignatius gets around to it today, and his complete column is required reading:

What is it about "covert" that the Republicans don’t understand?... Activities that are so glibly discussed lose some of their credibility, in addition to their deniability.

All of which, though, poses a much broader question. In their shabby pursuits of the lowest and commonest denominators, is there anything these Republican wannabes won't say, anyone to whom they won't pander, any line they won't cross, any logic they won't butcher, any tradition they won't upend, any propriety they won't violate?

Appears not.

What, Newt worry?

"Isn't he in jail?"

That was a Gingrich spokesman's comprehensive reply to Politico's Maggie Haberman, who had asked for -- and one assumes expected -- a somewhat more comprehensive reply to Jack Abramoff's recent appraisal of Newt Gingrich's "corruption."

Dismissive, insolent, superior -- the hallmarks of both candidate and staff.

Should one include "concerned," "worried," or "damage-controlling"? Not really. To be concerned, The Gingrich would require a genetic constitution of something other than the sociopathic; to be worried, he would have to actually be running for president; and any pursuit of control would suggest a possession of some concern or worry about the damage he wreaks, which of course he, as a ffffundamental sociopath, possesses not.

The Gingrich just doesn't care, never cared, couldn't care less, indeed hasn't a care in the world -- because he's amassing yet more mountains of cash, while glittering as the center of national attention.

Mission accomplished. What's to worry?

The more intriguing rumble, yet to come

Ross Douthat accurately frames the exciting new challenger:

[Newt Gingrich] suddenly has a clear path to the great prize of this Republican presidential campaign: The chance to finish a respectable second to Mitt Romney.

That Romney has all along been the inevitable nominee is beginning to soak into some pretty thick skulls on the far right (among whom Douthat is certainly not included). What alarms is that the profoundly squirrelly "resistance" has held so firm for so long, has maintained the majority, and has demonstrated an almost kamikaze eagerness to polish off what's left of the traditional GOP.  

From here on out, the only real suspense will come in which faction -- the conservative or pseudoconservative -- opens a clear path to winning the party after it is, or so I suspect, crushed in 2012.

Occupational bullshit

Progressive inspirationalist Katrina vanden Heuvel outdoes herself today in a Rooney-Garland "Strike Up the Band" fever. Then again, she's always in hyperdrive, bubbling with irrepressible enthusiasm for the Progressive Cause, which, I suppose, helps to bolster the often sagging spirits of the truly believing and magazine-subscribing. After all, if the New Testament ended in, Who the hell knows?, there wouldn't be many church-attending Christians.

Yet I come not to bury Katrina, but to parse her -- which is one of those more effortless exercises to properly start one's day. She pronounces:

Occupy is a protest movement — one that has transformed the landscape of politics, by forcing the country to face the reality of entrenched inequality and power and address what should be done about it.

Among the movement's protagonists, this has been the principal response to the question hurled by befuddled agnostics, if not antagonists: But what is the movement all about? Why -- comes the answer -- it is about enlightening America's Everyman about America's "entrenched inequality and power." One must then ask, however: Among the population that is acutely aware of the Occupy movement's message, what percentage wasn't already aware of America's entrenched inequality and power?

Right.

It is indeed a rhetorical question, which no honest movementeer would trouble him- or herself to treat otherwise, since the uncomfortable answer -- see R.Q. -- is so strikingly self-evident. Virtually everyone who has bothered to follow the protests has done so with a preexisting, corresponding knowledge of vast socioeconomic inequality and brute, systemic power. The degree to which this knowledge is intimate may vary, but broadly, it is a constant of current-events awareness.

Ah, the movementeer may protest, but we've honed and heightened that awareness. Really? The tea partiers who turned out in 2010 would have concurred essentially with vanden Heuvel's diagnosis, for partisan definitions -- what constitutes the entrenchment of the multitudes' inequality and elitist power -- are quite fluid. And the progressives whom vanden Heuval now rallies then demonstrated, in turn, their heightened awareness of the disaffecting powers-that-be by poignantly staying home.

Now, true enough, progressives and tea partiers may significantly alter their electoral behavior in 2012; but that isn't to note that their awareness will have been altered or heightened appreciably. Same armies, same battle, same situational awareness -- nonetheless a possibly different outcome, given the vicissitudes of political war.

Beware of "consciousness raising" pronouncements. They're very rarely authentic.

Good Old Perfection

This Cain, uh, explanation is virtually Gingrichian in its flawless admission of personal flawlessness:

I have never not taken responsibility for what some people perceive as mishaps, missteps or whatever the case may be. In that particular case [the already legendary Libya lapse], I paused to gather my thoughts. And in any other instance where I may have said something that had been misinterpreted I have always corrected myself.

By "Gingrichian" I mean, of course, that which radiates as infallibility -- the ethereal, Platonic ideal of human perfection on Earth. And who would have thought (certainly, Plato never did) that in one hapless generation we'd witness two glowing manifestations of such indescribable splendor.

For both Newt and Herman, their glory must suffer our misperceptions and misinterpretations. This is their cross, their burden, their crucible. Born unto us was a destiny guided by God, and it's name is Gingrich ... or Cain; take your pick, it's bargain-basement day in the GOP's offering of untouchable grandeur.

But wait, you misperceive, you grossly misinterpret if you think I suggest only a twofer. Because if you order today, or by next November, the Grand Old Party will include, at no additional cost, the foreseeable permanence among the body politic of other impeccable messiahs, from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann.  

For each is without mishap or misstep, having never not taken responsibility for our errant misapprehensions. And all they need to remain on their glittering paths of national notoriety and political distinction is for us to never not take them seriously.

Two -- actually three -- entirely different worlds

The Post's Jennifer Rubin, in one of her more hilarious fits of high indignation, fuming overtime about "the upswing in violence, mayhem and public filth stemming from those about whom the left was cooing only a couple weeks ago":

In their frenzy to find a grassroots movement on the left and in their insistence that the public really did support these people, the left-leaning elites tried mightily to ignore the instances of anti-Semitism, violence and fouling of public places. When that became impossible, they simply chose to ignore the whole disgusting mess. Had they been candid from the start about what the Occupy protesters looked like, sounded like and believed, the liberal punditocracy might not be embarrassed (is that possible?), or, at the very least, anxious that someone might call its members out for their immensely dishonest portrayal of the Occupy phenomenon.

And then, there's the Post's James Downie:

Never mind that Occupy Wall Street has continually cleaned the park itself, or that health experts who have visited the park have pronounced it sanitary, or that even Bloomberg could cite only one incident that threatened public safety in his statement about the eviction.... All this while, as Matt Taibbi put it last week, "in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes." Nobody arrested the bankers for pushing fraudulent loans and subprime mortgage investments, or the ratings agencies and government regulators that neglected their duties and helped Wall Street crash the global economy. But putting tents in a public park? Time to bring out the batons and pepper spray.

I'm neutral on this. Against Rubin's charges, I've yet to coo, although to paraphrase Claude Rains, I'm but a poor, corrupt (and minor) official of the "liberal punditocracy." On the other hand, in response to Downie/Taibbi, I still can't understand how a volcanic meltdown of finance capitalism could be an outrageous surprise to ... anyone. It's what it does, regularly, systemically, inherently -- especially when "We the People" put Gingrich Revolutionaries and Bushie boneheads in majority power, to oversee it.

What's more, the virtuous electorate put them back in effective power a mere two years later.

One tries to grasp, or reconcile, the preceding complacency and the present outrage. The latter, to me, seems somewhat theatrically melodramatic, whereas the former seems genuine.

"I can only pick on an ignoramus so many times before it feels sadistic"

Foreign Policy's Daniel Drezner states a perilous view, which he'll come to regret, since GOP "ignorance" is about all there is to relate:

I don't care if this man is leading the polls in Iowa, or is still running a strong second (or a weak third) in the national polls.... I just can't pay any more attention to Herman Cain's foreign policy views.... 

There's a mercy rule in Little League, and I'm applying it here -- unless and until Herman Cain surges back in the polls again, or manages to muster something approaching cogency in his foreign policy statements, there's no point in blogging about him anymore. I can only pick on an ignoramus so many times before it feels sadistic. 

I have, many times, taken this same, gentle vow of silence, whether applied to a Cain or a Bachmann or a Palin -- a heartfelt, humane conviction that usually lasts about as long as a CERN particle experiment. After all, it'd be nothing short of the downright angelic to somehow escape, without some comment, these clowns' raining bombardments of imbecility.

But there's another rule in Drezner's referenced sportsmanship: Never underestimate your opponent. Jimmy Carter failed to appreciate the American electorate's often irresistible tug toward ignoramus-ness in 1980, as did Al Gore in 2000, as did, though to a lesser extent, John Kerry in 2004.

Said another way, one simply cannot expose the seemingly self-evidently absurd too much.

Like Wagner, is Gingrich better than he sounds?

Priceless.

Making the case against bi-lingual education at a [2007] National Federation of Republican Women event, Gingrich said children should be taught "the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto."

A bit later, Gingrich taped a characteristically insincere video in Spanish -- or, to you Texan graduates of Yale, in "Mexican" -- saying "The words I chose to express myself were not the best."

Yet that's hardly the most delightful part of this classic tale of Gingrich's m.o. Which was, instead, this: It was a rival campaign operative who "shared" the video with Politico, observing "with some awe that the former speaker himself had last month blamed 'Republican incompetence' for losing Latino votes."

We'll only have The Gingrich for a short while. Let's enjoy him (it?) while we can.

The Gingrich Gambit

It won't happen, but a Gingrich nomination would at least possess the merit of having broken free of the once-inescapable importance of early and often primitive primary states, and having elevated the potential of comprehensive national campaigns for the presidency.

Much of Gingrich's strategy, if you will, is but vintage Gingrich, meaning it's merely the happenstance product of an undisciplined personality and a hyperinflated ego and inexhaustible greed. Like Trump, like Bachmann, like Cain, Newt Gingrich never dreamed he'd make it this far; he just wanted to peddle more books and huckster more videos and heap another pile of cash on his heaping piles of cash -- the sign of a true, Lincolnesque civic spirit.

But of course restricting his marketing efforts to the rather minor exploitations of Iowa, New Hamphire and South Carolina would crimp his profitability. He needed to go Big, so The Gingrich had yet another of his Big Ideas: he would announce that he's jettisoning the old politics of first campaigning in those states that vote first; he would instead travel this vast republic -- with the occasional detour to Greece -- and live off the land and hold deeply, deeply intellectual forums wherever the opportunity prevailed.     

The Gingrich would not be circumscribed. No sir. No way. The good people of New York and Chicago and Los Angeles were in as desperate need of his very reasonably priced books and videos as Ottumwans were -- and only personal tragedies of unfulfilled enlightenment would ensue if The Gingrich failed to team his wagon and head west -- and north and south and east -- to shake his tambourine and vend his discount Gingrichisms.

So, we admit his serendipitous strategy. He confected a national campaign over primary-state pettiness because his wallet demanded such. Like most historians and all ideologues, Gingrich worked backward, from concluding thesis to researched substantiation. He would have his inexorable national campaign (i.e., marketing tour), but only because -- presto -- the people deserved one.

Still, regardless of The Gingrich's motives -- always crooked or circular -- the underlying concept appeals. For the land's highest office, only national campaigns -- from the get-go. No more camping out in Iowa only, for two or three years, catering to and conning the fundamentalist Christians, whom the GOP candidate will promptly betray in New Hampshire.

As noted, there will, sadly, be no Gingrich nomination however, no Gingrich triumph, no Gingrich refashioning of the political status quo. He will ride and exploit this momentary tide like all the other anti-Mitts, and then, poof, he'll be gone. But that's rather a shame, and for reasons beyond the awesome splendor of an actual Gingrich nomination. It's a shame that the concept of a true national campaign for the nomination, studded with roving and real debates, will probably never take off. We'll be stuck with the coarsening of Iowa.