P.M. Carpenter

Mitt's bamboozlement

Ezra Klein on Mitt Romney's "revenue neutral" tax plan:

If Romney cut Medicaid entirely — took it from the $407 billion it is projected to cost in 2016 and moved it to zero — his math wouldn’t work. If he then excised all spending on food stamps — taking them from a projected $80 billion in 2016 to nothing — he still wouldn’t be there.

All of which blows a huge hole in Romney's "cut, cap and balance" triad.

I wonder, if one of Romney's Bain executives had brought him a similarly structured business proposal, would he have fired him? You bet your capital-gains tax advantage he would have. Fortunately for Romney, however, the GOP base takes pleasure in being bamboozled.

George Will: It's over

After reviewing all the insurmountable flaws, faults, failings, foibles, deficiencies, demerits and defects of the GOP's double-helix frontrunners, George Will concludes that "Neither ... looks like a formidable candidate for November." Thus the grieving Will exhibits the emotional economy of true conservatism: He's jumped straight from denial to acceptance, skipping, in the process, all the anger, bargaining and depression. 

It's already over. You know it, I know it, Obama knows it, Will knows it, every thinking Republican knows it. The great challenge remaining is that of enduring the coming months of GOP lies, distortions, fabrications, falsehoods, slanders and hysterics; and truth be told, this challenge will prove more grueling than any rational contest between competing ideas ever could be.

The race will test our patience, dignity and equanimity; it will try humanity's soul -- not its intellect. Such is always the greater challenge: deploying smarts against a witless opponent is easy, while maintaining calm in the face of ruthless depravity is an exhausting, potentially dehumanizing trial.

Am I personally up for it? To borrow from Politico's keen insight, that remains to be seen. 

The GOP debate con't

Here, from last night, is a quick study in the difference between dignified, post-game analysis and vulgar, in vitro boosterism.

E.J. Dionne: "Romney won this debate ... Yet [he] was not a particularly attractive figure in the process."

Jennifer Rubin:

Mitt Romney brought the heat and ... [Romney] flattened Rick Santorum ... [and] Romney hit Santorum ... [and] Romney went after Santorum ... [and] Romney bludgeoned Santorum ... [and] Romney won on temperament.

Rubin's vulgarity could also be interpreted as desperate hysteria, of course. After all, who wouldn't be frenzied to the snapping point if one's chosen candidate has been found trailing Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and now Rick Santorum?

What Rubin and all the other rank-amateur Rubins in the "resolute" pro-Romney camp have consistently failed to appreciate, though, is that they're not supposed to let everyone see them sweat. Rubin & Co. doesn't stop at evincing mere signs of weakness; they positively gush the stuff. They're soaked in self-evident torment and saturated in (understandable) neurotic terror: their bumbling Awkwardness of a yoyo-ing frontrunner might at any inopportune moment open his mouth -- egads! -- without a script.

It's woe to any ally of the extemporaneously perilous Mitt Romney, who's eight months of self-inflicted horrors to go. I almost feel sorry for his three or four genuine supporters.

The GOP debate

Ron Paul is so full of self-righteously reactionary b.s. it's sickening, until one watches him gut and fillet one of his opponents with it, which he just did to the even more self-righteous Rick Santorum.

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In the GOP it has come to this: Santorum defending his earmarks, the state-interested distribution of which is a senator's job.

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Santorum says he opposed the Wall Street bailout "on principle" because he preferred the markets to work. The markets were working -- we were in near-complete financial meltdown. Without the bailout we would have melted to irreversible doom. The entire point of the bailout was to stop the markets from doing the prodigious harm they were doing to every working-class American. Is that so hard to understand and accept?

***

It's easy for us Americans to feel our cultural superiority over, say, the primitive barbarity of Afghans, who riot and murder over "insults" to inanimate iconography. Yet that feeling becomes a bit elusive when we watch the likes of presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who not only believes in the real and physical presence of a Hellish bogeyman, but because of that is by God the front-runner in one of our two major parties.   

What happened? Did the entire world climb into a rickety time machine and set course for the 13th century? And if so, why do I still get cable? How is it that I just watched Santorum, who is miles and miles away at the Arizona State Monastery, defend a belief system in a Scholastically evasive and Sophistic way that makes Augustine of Hippo look like Timothy Leary?

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Oh dear, they've been reduced to a violent spat over ... Arlen Specter.

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You know, Newt just might slip through all this bickering and come out ahead in Michigan. Not out front, just farther ahead than expected. Because Mitt and Rick are coming across as petty squabblers, and the GOP base likes monstrously cyclopean squabblers.

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There goes Mitt again: promising to slash taxes, vastly increase defense spending, and cap and balance the budget. The old scams just never get too old for this tiresome bunch.

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Romney asserts point blank that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, "it will be used." What epistemological foundation does he have for that assertion? None. Absolutely none. Yet he calls Obama irresponsible. It's really quite breathtaking.

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If any of these three -- i.e., excluding Paul -- were to be elected president, we'd be looking at WWIII. What epistemological foundation do I have for that assertion? I'm looking at it, I'm listening to it. These clowns are horrifying.

***

And that's a wrap.

This is dangerous work. It's pushing the limits of my assorted, recovering chemical dependencies.

Linguistic road kill

According to a new Suffolk University/WHDH News poll, Massachusetts' Sen. Scott Brown holds a 9-point lead over Elizabeth Warren. The cause of Brown's surge? Independents, among whom 60 percent support Brown -- a 32-point advantage over Warren. And this was the killer:

When asked what word first came to mind when respondents heard the name Elizabeth Warren, "liberal" was a top reply. On the other hand when asked what came to mind when they heard the name Scott Brown, "independent" and "fair/fair person" were among the top responses.

The embarrassment is far too much of a fait accompli for any dignified hand-wringing over liberals having ceded their own moniker to the dustbin of derision. Although the right began assaulting "liberalism" when liberalism was still king -- one in possession of the resources necessary for lightning retribution -- liberals failed to appreciate that tactical belittlement was politically more lethal than sticks and stones. While liberals fussed over policy, all the good little Luntzian right wingers were reading their Orwell and securing financing for bogus think tanks to disseminate the anti-liberal Word.

Well, whatever. The point now is, "conservatism" has for years been overripe for a bit of proper redefinition, since contemporary conservatism fails to even remotely resemble actual conservatism. Today's conservatives are radicals, pure and simple -- the precise antithesis of authentic conservatism. Every now and then one hears a liberal progressive Democrat mumble some such observation on some cable show; but by and large "conservatives" are afforded by Democrats the presumption of a kind of self-respect, in that these radicals are free to call themselves whatever they like.

The result? Slap "liberal" on Elizabeth Warren and watch her favorables among independents plummet; slap "conservative" on Scott Brown and watch swing voters accept him as an "independent," "fair person."

For the former, and all like her, this political reality is doubleplusungood. Fortunately, the radicals haven't yet managed to make unlawful the equal deployment of Newspeak, but liberals progressives the Elizabeth Warrens of this nation had better hurry in equalizing the linguistic carnage, before it's too late.

The Devil from West Palm Beach's Pravda

We now know how Satan responds to being outted.

Rick Santorum, in 2008:

[T]he Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country — the United States of America.

Rush Limbaugh, yesterday:

[Santorum] did say these things and he’ll have to have an answer for these things when queried.... It’s just not the kind of stuff you hear a presidential candidate talk about. It’s not ordinary in that sense.

Oh, he's a sly one, that Satan, that Father of Lies -- with a cough button.

You mean we have to watch?

This kind of analysis, from Politico, is the kind I most admire, because this is the kind of thing that isn't likely to occur to us Beltway outsiders:

How Santorum handles his moment under intense fire [tonight] remains to be seen.

As long as he first rolls up his sleeves and throws no one under a bus, other than infidels of course, he'll be fine. But that, too, remains to be seen.

The Temptation of Bob McDonnell

We harbor no doubts that God wants Bob to sign the Virginia General Assembly's anti-woman, pro-paternalism bill, or bills, as the holy case may be, since we harbor no doubts that Bob knows God, that Bob listens to God, that Bob understands God and all God's wishes. This, anyway, is what Bob has told us. And since we're godly, we believe Bob. Go Bob.

And good for you, God, for keeping Bob righteous amid so much secular wickedness (not to mention keeping Bob's hair even more perfect than Mitt's; Dante's gradations of Hell 'tweren't nothing compared to the Orders of Tonsorial Perfection revealed atop godly males' pates).

Thus it is with profound consternation that we learn Bob "is backing off his unconditional support for [the] bill." As the sainted president of the ineffably virtuous Family Foundation put it, "It is a change as far as I can tell."

What gives? God doesn't change His mind. God doesn't compromise. And God doesn't suffer pluralism, which is precisely why the Founders kept God the hell out of the U.S. Constitution. God has been correcting for that sinful human error since at least the 1970s; He has delivered unto us chosen pols, the Elect, so to speak, to set things Right, through His Righteousness. And you, Bob, are one of them.

So just what in God's name do you think you're doing, Bob? What's this backing off shit? The Virginia General Assembly's anti-woman, pro-paternalism bill once had your "unconditional support" -- "unconditional" being a trifle superfluous when it comes to describing the self-righteous politics of the truly righteous. Those would be yours, Bob.

Hang in there, Bob. The Devil is tempting you with a Veep slot. Don't listen. Avert your eyes. Fight for that bill, just as it is. And you sign that bill, Bob. Because God is no democrat, or republican, and Righteousness never compromises.

Jennifer Rubin, under a streetlamp

I just read Jennifer Rubin's latest, and I did so with a certain awe. I had no idea that such blind ignorance from a major, mainstream publication could stumble its way into print. Some might object that Rubin's musings are instead mere, knowing hypocrisy, which of course blankets all commentators. But I would object to that objection. When plunging into manifest hypocrisy, we always commit the necessary mitigations to print as well -- bluntly, "This isn't hypocrisy," or, "This may seem hypocritical but it really isn't," or, "This is hypocrisy for good reason" -- yet one will find no such weaseling in Rubin's piece. Hence it is, as noted, just awesomely blind ignorance.

Of what, in particular, do I speak? This: "Santorum on social issues is not a conservative but a reactionary," whereupon Rubin proceeds to condemn reactionaryism in toto:

A reactionary is one who seeks to return to a previous state of affairs. It is not a conservative outlook, which in the Burkean sense looks to people as they are, prefers modest over the radical solutions and builds on the existing morals and habits of the society.

As well as existing institutions and traditions -- like, say, Medicare in its existent, traditional and institutional form, whose obliteration by Paul Ryan through voucherization Rubin supported in April of last year as a "very serious budget document ... [that] is remarkably nonradical" [emphasis original].

Is that in fact hypocrisy? Sure it is. But is Rubin even aware of it? It doesn't appear so. It seems to reflect more of a profound cognitive dissonance. She's simply oblivious, utterly oblivious, as she thrashes about in her shallow assaults on all but her partisan love, Mitt Romney.

There's a word for her kind, which I won't use, but it ain't "commentator." And its essence is to be found, daily, in the once-respectable Washington Post.

The 'X' Factor; a battle of pure polarization

Newt Gingrich's s-pac manservant Rick Tyler broods that in the expansive wasteland of Mitt Romney's total war and scorched-earth campaigns, "there will be no one left to vote against Barack Obama." And Newt Gingrich's manservant may not be far from the truth.

Look at it this way: X.

Which is to say, political psychologists have long agreed that negative advertising's collateral damage, in any general election season, lies in the alienation of independent voters, while in primary seasons its chief aim is to drive all but friendly partisans within the broader partisan camp of party into despair, indifference, and dormancy. This, the GOP's presidential candidates have accomplished admirably: out of Maine's more than 1.3 million residents, for example, scarcely 6,000, or 0.4 percent, bothered with civic duty.

Republican genocide is taking a prodigious toll, and one must ponder its lasting effect. For about a quarter-year now we've witnessed massive air campaigns of charges and countercharges of malfeasance, fiscal recklessness, "serial hypocrisy" and "corporate raiding" and "blood money" -- the war portends no delimitation, only escalation. When, however, this civil war officially concludes, and two-party belligerency commences, one easily envisions Republican enthusiasm as the top-left-to-bottom-right line in an 'X' graph. That is, there will be casualties and durable animosities lingering within the GOP base, which should materialize in lower turnout.

Meanwhile, though, Barack Obama will possess an unmolested, essentially unified and motivated base, translating into the 'X's' bottom-left-to-upper-right line. In other words, the scourge of polarization could actually work to Obama's advantage; or, put another way, the independent vote may prove to be of lesser importance in 2012 than in preceding elections.

With Obama and Mr. X (but probably Romney) blasting away at each other with martial abandon, independents will doubtless experience the selfsame despair the GOP base is now experiencing. In brief, independents could likely stay at home, which would cut into Obama's numbers. Yet while Obama has a unified and (given Obama's stump skills) energized base to work with, the disaffected, demoralized and despairing GOP base -- see Tyler, above: "there will be no one left to vote against Barack Obama" -- could likely stay home as well.

Thus the rough and enduring equilibrium of this nation's left and right camps could be thrown into a vast disequilibrium on the only day that will matter: November 6.

The absurdity of polling

How absurd is much of the polling now being conducted on Obama head-to-head match-ups? This absurd, from the Des Moines Register:

Ron Paul ... would defeat Obama [in Iowa] by 7 percentage points, 49 percent to 42 percent.

Not even Ron Paul believes that.

This far out from Election Day, gut instincts are at least as accurate as "scientific" polling (the above result came from all of 611 Iowans), and mine are screaming a rather lopsided Obama victory. The economy appears to be in ascent, while the GOP lies unmistakably in unprecedented chaos, and there's little reason to anticipate any major shifts in either. The scariest variable is gas prices -- a function of supply, demand, wild speculation and market manipulation over which U.S. presidents have virtually no control, but all the responsibility. Upon such whimsies does democracy rule.

At any rate, for the moment Obama's opposition -- which, I think we're all agreed, seems to be in the pay of the DNC -- is adding more and more to his electoral count each day. And that's the general upshot, notwithstanding the tedious outpouring of absurd polls.

I'm with Dick and Rick

It's not often the entire political cosmos, from the extreme right to the outer left, can find harmony and oneness with space-cadet Richard Viguerie, but ...

The best thing that could happen would of course be that conservatives coalesce behind one conservative candidate, such as Rick Santorum, and provide him with a convincing majority going into the Republican National Convention.

Absolutely.

Yep, now Santorum does the Hitler thing

I just performed a Google News search of "Santorum" and "Obama" and "Hitler" and I got only one direct match to the most despicable comparison yet made by this most despicable of GOP pols. Only WGRZ.com, of Western New York, states it with some forthrightness, although even WGRZ is not altogether unambiguous: "Last night, Rick Santorum seemed to compare President Obama to Hitler."

Here's what this little man of immense contemptibility had to say, which the Washington Post's "Election 2012" blog cravenly labels as merely "an extended World War II analogy":

[R]emember, the Greatest Generation, for a year and a half, sat on the sidelines while Europe was under darkness.... America sat from 1940, when France fell, to December of ’41, and did almost nothing.

Why? Because we’re a hopeful people. We think, 'Well, you know, he’ll get better. You know, he’s a nice guy. I mean, it won’t be near as bad as what we think. This’ll be okay.' Oh yeah, maybe he’s not the best guy, and after a while, you found out things about this guy over in Europe, and he’s not so good of a guy after all. But you know what? Why do we need to be involved? We’ll just take care of our own problems ... and we’ll be okay....

[S]ometimes it’s not okay. It’s going to be harder for this generation to figure this out.... You understand it — you’re here. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t get it. But what about the rest of America, do they understand what’s happening? Is anybody telling them what’s happening?

How could any sober journalist fail to interpret that hateful drivel as anything but a direct Obama-Hitler comparison?

'Pugnaciously drunk'

"Newt Gingrich was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk."

Well, that's how the Washington Post's fresh expose of the former Speaker should have opened -- poetically, if a trifle plagiaristically. A real time-saver, though, that suggested lede; 12 defining words of towering vocational hypocrisy, sparing the busy reader either 465 novelistic pages or four journalistic ones.

[A] largely unexplored cache of documents compiled by a former Gingrich aide ... show Gingrich was viewed by his staff primarily as a tactician — the "tent evangelist" of the conservative movement, one staffer said — with little ideological core.

I'll leave the Post article to speak for itself, although here I would add a touch of irony.

Perhaps the story's most damning passage -- most damning, that is, to any contemporary conservative -- is the one that virtually any conservative of conservatism's more lucid, Burkean yesteryears would have proudly advertised:   

Gingrich had described himself as a "progressive" in his 1970 application to teach at what was then West Georgia College. That self-description changed to a "common-sense conservative" by his 1974 race.

"Changed to a," in the aforementioned lucid age, might well have been written, "included." For there is no organic conflict between progressivism and common-sense conservatism; indeed, the founder of modern progressivism, Franklin Roosevelt, was unshakably conservative in many of his cautionary ventures and tales, just as Edmund Burke seldom disdained the mantle of progress.

Today's sharp contrast between the two schools of thought may be a political reality, but it's also a philosophical fiction -- if, that is, we embrace the authentic meanings of "progressivism" and "common-sense conservatism." But that's damn hard to do these days, which is to say, ever since conservatives went and got themselves pugnaciously drunk on pseudoconservative evangelicalism.

The GOP Manifesto

This morning, on CNN's "State of the Union," Michele Bachmann candidly and accurately summarized her party's collective transcendence of Ronald Reagan's sunny, can-do optimism:

There is no future, there is no hope with President Obama having a second term.

Where does one go from there? When apocalyptic finality becomes your party's core message, nothing else matters -- everything hinges on that singular potential.

What should we do about taxes, entitlements, energy independence, as well as nuclear proliferation and the South Pacific and Afghanistan? Such questions are insignificant, in fact they're immaterial. Because, remember? With a two-term Obama -- which there will be -- there is no hope, no future. It's all over. It's all over; there's no point in discriminating between the little all-overs and the big all-overs. It is all, all of it, over. There's to be no hope. And no future.

And it can't get any uniformly bleaker than that.

When the doom fails to materialize, as it will, the uninebriated, majority portion of the 2016 electorate will pause to watch Joe Biden's presidential campaign ads. He'll need only one: that one clip, from 2012, when Michele Bachmann appeared on CNN's "State of the Union" to summarize her party's self-dooming transcendence of Ronald Reagan's optimism -- that under a reelected Obama, there will be no future.