P.M. Carpenter

The End of Defensiveness

What, the ying-yang of headline writing? On the Post's front online page we're told, "White House dismisses GOP criticism of spending request due Monday." Inside, however, the story is titled, "Jacob Lew defends Obama’s spending plan."

So which is it? Is the White House dismissive or defensive? Or, honing its skills of horrifying nuance, is it dismissively defensive or defensively dismissive? Or does the White House merely seek harmony in the beatific oneness of opposites, or perhaps the dialectical hum of Hegelian synthesis?

Well, there's always the reader's methodology of last and desperate resort: Read the story. Yes, sometimes it comes to that. And, turns out, it's sort of all the above: Mr. Lew both "dismissed Republican criticism" and "defended Obama’s approach" -- nonetheless while "to defend" suggests a certain cowering, "to dismiss" more than implies a deliberate insouciance; the latter alights rather unambiguously in the rhetorical land of, "We don't much care what those idiots think."

So this, too, has come to that, and with heavy justification. In a sane political world -- that is, one populated by roughly equal proportions of partisan lucidity -- a White House might make a show of dismissing the opposition. Yet the show would be staged, conspicuously, from a defensive position. Not here, not this time, no longer. Sure, a deficits-self-awareness must be demonstrated in pursuit of, and on behalf of, independent voters' delicate sensitivities, but otherwise this White House's attitudinal line can safely be: Those other guys, just plain meshuga; we've ceased brooding about, and defending against, their spasmodic fits and metronomic tantrums.

Because, as Paul Krugman put it with such economy this morning, "something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism." Or, to be even more economical: It's done gone crazy.

Santorum of Hippo

St. Santorum was again making the rounds this morning, essentially arguing that the State should be subordinate to the Church, which it would be in Rick's splendiferous City of Jerusalem, but of course never will be in the wicked Barack's City of Babylon. 

It is a downright eerie experience to listen to Santorum's fanatical contempt for America's secular constitutionalism -- the Founders' hallmark separation from the world's exceedingly troubled history of imposing competing versions of what are in reality the Unknown's unknowable desires on mankind's intimately knowable condition.

The greatest irony of the ecclesiastically orthodox Santorum Mind? His, he would tell you, is vast and breathtakingly starry by virtue of its association with God's vastness Itself; yet the small, secularly petty mind might ask what in God's name the Supreme Court was thinking when, for example, in Reynolds v. United States (1878), it outlawed polygamy. To the narrow-minded(?), State interference into assorted marital arrangements -- and this obviously goes for gays and lesbians, too; and perhaps less obviously for men and (i.e., on) dogs, if the two so freely choose -- is the very species of earthly interference for which God created civil libertarianism.

The irony, in short, is that the more expansively religious the mind, the smaller it usually is.

Going down?

Dan Balz reports:

The word "severely" did not appear in the prepared text of Romney’s speech that was distributed by his campaign. It was apparently ad-libbed by the former governor. No one could quite understand what severe conservatism really meant.

Piece of cake.

Romney was using "severe" in Webster's 6b sense: "inflicting pain or distress"; gobs of pain for us -- watching Romney's authentic attempts at simulation can be excruciating -- and oodles of distress for his party -- watching Romney's simulated attempts at authenticity must be excruciating.

As Balz also reports, last year at CPAC Romney "used the word 'conservative' once ... [and] the word 'conservatism' once"; this year he was liberal in their use to the point of profligacy.

Which indeed inflicts enormous distress. Here, for instance, is the voice of former senator John Danforth: "We have a cast of characters who are seeking the nomination, and none of them appears to most Republicans to be absolute standouts."

Oh, I forgot to mention, Danforth is a Romney-endorser.

Sour Krauthammer puckers up again

Charles Krauthammer didn't so much miss his calling -- he is after all a superb spinner of petty propaganda and a supremely obnoxious obscurantist -- as he did his ideal era, one perhaps Inquisition-related. Unlike the Grand Inquisitors, however, Charles is also quite flexible, meaning he could tolerate the pointed rot, the hazy corruption and the ideological wretchedness of the last Bush administration, while President Obama's almost boy-scout professionalism and unimpeachably pragmatic relief have Charles in the clinically depressed dumps.

This should not, however, be too surprising. It was Charles who coined "Bush Derangement Syndrome"; that is, it was Charles who cast the first boomerang, which in accord with psychic physics has turned on him like a buzzsaw, decapitating all of Charles's intellectual decorum. The poor man, he is the perhaps this nation's gravest sufferer of Obama Derangement Syndrome.

And poor President Obama! He can't even quote Scripture on behalf of the poor without Charles coming at him with a grim, wrathful scythe:

His [tax] policy, he testified "as a Christian" [at the National Prayer Breakfast], "coincides with Jesus’s teaching that 'for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.' "

Now, I’m no theologian, but I’m fairly certain that neither Jesus nor his rabbinic forebears, when speaking of giving, meant some obligation to the state. You tithe the priest, not the tax man.

Well, Charles, I don't know about his "rabinnic forebears," but I'm pretty sure that either Jesus himself -- or more likely his Church interpolators, centuries later, in search of temporal accommodations with State power -- had something to say about Caesar and rendering and all that fiscal jazz.   

But, not to worry, Charles. This isn't the place for a Biblical exegesis, which neither of us is qualified for anyway. No, what caught my secular eye was this dark epiphany of yours, regarding merely the most recent of greatly bugabooed hubbubs:

This all would be merely the story of contradictory theologies, except for this: Sebelius is Obama’s appointee. She works for him. These regulations were his call.

Now about that, Charles, I harbor deep, agnostic Doubt. Because, you see, I simply have a hard time Believing that President Obama sits in the Oval Office or in his private study, for hours on end, poring over HHS regulations. I'm not saying he wouldn't, but here's the thing, Charles: He can't.

Why? Because the principal object of "Bush Derangement Syndrome" bequeathed President Obama the godawfulest economy since FDR's in 1933; because Obama's predecessor stuck him with astronomic debts and deficits; because the vast indifference to working Americans paid by this particular president's "forebear" left millions of them unemployed; and because the current commander in chief, a studied and dedicated proponent of soft power, got saddled with two unforgivably hard conflicts by that forerunning warmonger, not to mention war criminal, of neoconservative fatuity.

You see, Charles, President Obama has been a trifle busy cleaning up the prodigiously clusterfucked headaches with which your idiot endowed this administration. And you know what, Charles? I do Believe Jesus would see it the same way; indeed, riffing on his celebrated Temple performance, he might, amen, even put it the same way.

Pre-live-blogging Newt Gingrich's CPAC address

4:10 Bam!

4:11 Swat!

4:12 Whack!

4:13 Bash!

4:14 Zinger!

4:15 Bop!

4:16 Slam!

4:17 Thump!

4:18 Wham!

4:19 Smash!

4:20 Whomp!

4:21 Pow!

4:22 Biff!

4:23 Socko!

4:24 Swack!

4:25 Zap!

Good day, and God bless America.

Why, Mitt? Why?

Poor Mitt Romney. He just cannot help himself. He was getting respectable applause from the CPAC patients on Fun Friday! release until he went and said he would offer future retirees a choice between private healthcare plans and "traditional Medicare."

Suddenly, one could have heard a feather alight on his Howdy-Doody hair.

The far right applauds Obama! (right?)

The Daily Caller headlines its reaction:

Obama contraception 'accommodation' still imposes state mandate on church, actually

Hot Air:

[S]o the administration response will be tell insurers for religious organizations to take on the costs themselves without passing it along to the religious organizations that pay for the policies?  I’m not sure that even Chris Matthews will buy that as a "compromise."

And Right-Wing News: 

Obama To Offer Non-compromise Compromise On Contraceptive

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin is still featuring her syndicated hysteria, this morning's pertaining to "a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats [who] defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of 'increased access' to 'reproductive services' for 'poor' women." Damn, I sure like all those air-quotes. To repeat, she's syndicated.

A critique of pure lunacy

In tracing the historical development of Rick Santorum's "dangerous cult of first principles," religion scholar Molly Worthen has written for the NY Times one of the finest journalistic essays I have read in some time.  

Santorum’s positions are perfectly logical if you accept his founding presuppositions — but, in his view, those presuppositions are not open to question. The genius of this emphasis on foundational assumptions is that if you can dismiss your opponent’s first principles, if you can accuse him of denying humanity’s "natural purpose," you can claim to win the debate without ever considering the content of his argument.

This tactic destroys the possibility for real political dialogue, since one need only engage with those who share one’s own presuppositions.

And Santorum, of course, is scarcely alone on the right in this comfortable conceit. For it is the above train of thought, or style of thinking, that has progressively radicalized the radical right to its present condition of chronic intolerance and, to its mind, of doctrinal infallibility.

Hence Sen. Jim DeMint, yesterday, at CPAC: "[C]ompromise works well in this world when you have shared goals. We don't have shared goals with the Democrats." Hence Mitch McConnell's reductionist politics of one transcendent, eliminationist objective and that one objective only. Hence eight GOP presidential candidates raising their hands in ideological affirmation of any compromise on taxes, no matter how favorable to their side, as unacceptably wicked. Hence a GOP House whose strategic "presuppositions" of Obamian diabolism are almost laughably presuppose-able.

The practical effect of all this, it seems to me, is that the radical right has willfully, even enthusiastically placed itself outside of America's pluralistic arena. It is now the right as the true Other, so to speak; it is the right as the fifth columnist, the fellow traveler, the podium-pounding dogmatist before an essentially pragmatic electorate, the awkward revolutionary among a decidedly unrevolutionary people, the hyper-uberconservative within a marginally, at best, center-right nation.

In sum and in short, by unveiling themselves as unserious players in a profoundly serious game, radical rightists should no longer be taken seriously; thus my suggestion yesterday that Sen. DeMint's wish be wholeheartedly granted -- that, in 2013, all centrist and center-left attempts at compromise with whatever remains of the radical right's congressional power structure be terminated.     

Students of Herbert Marcuse's political philosophy will perhaps recognize in this suggestion a variation on his mid-1960s "Critique of Pure Tolerance," which argued, to put it economically, that far too many lunatics were permitted by the modern media an outsized voice. To give you just a taste of Marcuse Unbound, he wrote, for example, of "The toleration of the systematic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda." Fox News, anyone? A GOP news conference? CNN's or MSNBC's hosting of, and serious engagement with, the lunatic ravings of, say, a Joe Walsh? (And Marcuse thought the lunatics of his era were off the wall. One can easily see what four or five additional decades of the media's "systematic moronization" of an already dumbed-down electorate have wrought.)

Oh my, I seem to going all New-Leftie here, and I don't mean to. Because my point, my argument, is essentially a mainstream one: Next year, any compromise with, and any tolerance of, the radical right should be mercifully euthanized.

Dear Sen. DeMint: Choke on it

Sen. Jim DeMint, speaking today at CPAC, was perhaps on to something big:

"[C]ompromise works well in this world when you have shared goals. We don't have shared goals with the Democrats."

I should hope not. Not only for principled Democrats' sake, but for the nation's.

It may be that DeMintian radicals' most favored metaphor is that of the 1938 Munich Pact, which thereafter enshrined appeasement in the pseudoconservative mind as that most foolhardy of all possible policies. The lesson that contemporary radicals of the DeMintian school took from that ugly slice of history was: always aggress, always advance, never retreat, and never, never appease, which is to say, loosely, compromise.

As a historical lesson this is of course as flawed as a lesson could be. For had England taken the DeMintian school's advice, in 1938, the Nazi war machine would have demolished her almost instantaneously; she would have lost the war before the Americans could have done much to avert her total disaster. Appeasement, at that time, cruel though it was to Czech Sudentenlanders, saved England's ass.

Yet to swing back to present and domestic affairs, I think, as already noted, that DeMint may now be on to something. That is, in keeping with our Munich metaphor, a mere year or two ago the (at least) partial appeasement of the radical right was an inescapable policy, for both President Obama and congressional Democrats. Someone had to give, if this nation was merely to function, let alone progress. But now? Well, it's an election year; no one expects anything to be accomplished anyway, short of the payroll tax-cut extension, which even the right will support, if only to save its own butt. But as for 2013, it is strikingly manifest that the radical right, given the slimmest chance, will shut this nation down in the aftermath of Obama's second inaugural.

By then, Obama & allies, like England by 1939-40, should however be far stronger. Appeasement, or compromise, could well become a policy of choice, not necessity. Thus it is then that the president and congressional Democrats might profitably recall DeMint's words and ballistically hurl them right back in his face. "Sorry, Senator, but we have no shared goals with you. Go have tea with Himmler or some such thing -- you and your godforsaken, uncompromising minority bloc. Oh, and while you're at it, choke on it."

'The doom guys'

E.J. Dionne:

Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton all understood that Americans prefer hope and optimism to gloomy declarations of impending doom. Why would Romney and so many in his party want to be the doom guys?

If I may, E.J. (And this is just a gentle reminder, since I know you already know this, and indeed you vaguely touched on it: "Romney’s problem is that he is caught in a cycle he can’t seem to escape ... [his] ongoing problems with the right wing of the Republican Party.")

"Why would Romney and so many in his party want to be the doom guys?" Because Romney et al must answer to the rank-and-file doom guys, the nihilistic GOP base, which, with alarming progression, is morphing collectively into an 'Authoritarian Personality,' as delineated in 1950 by Theodor Adorno et al.

Their study's key sociopolitical finding: Fear and destructiveness lie at the heart of the extreme right-wing personality -- a personality stubbornly impenetrable and perhaps immutable. That is, one cannot appeal to its rationality, for much of its fear stems from a hatred of ethnics and "others," a fear that is intrinsically irrational; and one cannot appeal to what Dionne exhorts -- attitudinal "hope and optimism" -- for the authoritarian's symptomatic exaltation of patriotism is in deeper, and paradoxical, reality a violent impulse to destroy positive government.

In short, right-wing extremists are essentially anarchistic -- yearners, we might say, for a primitive, lawless, Hobbesian state of nature.

A few seconds viewing any videotaped tea party rally is easy but profound confirmation of Adorno's insights.

Authoritarian personalities? The "right wing of the Republican Party"? -- i.e., the contemporary Republican Party? Yep, they're the "doom guys."

ObamaCare's tyrannical fairness

Filed under 'In Case You Missed It.'

Appearing on Lawrence O'Donnell's show last night, the unflappable David Boies, of Bush v. Gore fame, calmly and damn near indifferently explained to his host that there is no -- repeat, no -- Constitutional, First Amendment issue at stake in the most recent Inquisition into 'Obamacare's' purported tyranny, this time over the Catholic Church's holy conscience.

(To digress, or perhaps I should say clarify: Yes, holy "conscience," as divinely revealed, for example, in the ecclesiastical expediencies of shuffling pedophiles or accommodating fascist regimes. Just so we all understand the terminology.) 

What is at stake? Labor law; the same labor laws that the Church and every other U.S. employer is obligated to obey. The Catholic Church, as Boies explained dispassionately, could not evade out of some presumed religious conscience the minimum wage or workers' compensation or a 40-hour week or any other universally applied labor law of a reasonable standard. The Affordable Care Act's contraception provision, as a required condition of employer healthcare coverage, is no different. The Obama administration has already compromised, the ACA has already exempted the Church itself, just as a variety of preceding state laws have -- which have never, not once, been an "issue."

To put it idiomatically, this is a no-brainer. Which is also why, of course, culture-warring demagogues like Rick Santorum and suddenly Mitt Romney and virtually half the U.S. House will ride it to absolute exhaustion.

Still, that's what demagogues do. That's what they're expected to do. And who among us cares to fritter much time in blaming lizards for crawling or bats for flapping or black widow spiders for mariticide?

Should we not, however, expect something a bit more honorable from the Church? -- you know, the one worried about its integrity and conscience?

Eeny meeny miny moe

Yet we'll find most of the same clowns still there, in 2013:

Gallup said in new poll released Wednesday that a mere 10 percent of Americans approve of Congress’s job performance – a record low.

I've very little sympathy for such electoral whining; besides, the proper phrasing of the question should have been, Do you approve of the swinish, do-nothing malefactor you voted into office in 2010? After all, voters are relatively impotent when it comes to affecting political races next door. The uncharitableness of their choices begins at home -- and that's where the polling question should start, and stop.

Let's see a show of hands. How many believe the most irredeemable among the anti-government government-paycheck whores will be turned out of office in electoral disgrace? Joe Walsh, maybe. But the rest, the real barnburners and fire-eaters? They'll be back, because the selfsame whiners who now so vocally disapprove of the Congress that their elected representatives have given us will vote them right back in.

Of course we could see a huge swing in essentially conservative districts go to -- surprise! -- conservative Democrats, which occurred in something of a mammoth way in 2006 and 2008. But then we'd be forced to suffer the progressive cris de coeur about all those conservative Democrats voting like ... conservative Democrats.

I'd almost rather have the Joe Walshes.

Pigs in flight

Somewhere, a pig is flying, for I have found conceptual common ground with the Donald:

"I don't get Rick Santorum. I don't get that whole thing."
--Donald Trump, on CNN

The unmistakable trend

It is prudent to dismiss single swing-state polls, such as Quinnipiac's this morning, "showing Barack Obama with his first lead of the 2012 campaign over Mitt Romney in Virginia," just as it is prudent to dismiss single national polls, such as the Washington Post-ABC News's this week, which revealed that "President Obama for the first time holds a clear edge over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney."

It would be foolish, however, to dismiss what these polls are saying in the aggregate, especially given the additional, suggestive evidence of lower turnout in Republican primaries, an indication of a pronounced dispiritedness among the most piously cantankerous, get-off-my-lawn party faithful. And what this suggestive convergence is beginning to scream is: They're going down.

Earlier this morning I heard the National Journal's Major Garrett, speaking on MSNBC, say he couldn't really account for this primary season's overall diminished turnout. Well, I can't say with any epistemological precision that I in fact know, but I would say that hazarding the above guess is becoming less and less hazardous.

Miracles still occur. And by that I mean that in this presidential cycle I think the GOP base has been as keenly self-aware as assorted GOP luminaries; which is to say, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie and Haley Barbour, all of whom would have been far superior candidates to Mitt Romney, said, "No thanks." Shocking, I know, but they said "no thanks" not because of a deep and enduring love of their families, but because they did the math, they calculated the odds, and they concluded they couldn't win -- not, anyway, against a President Obama. The base, although not yet exhibiting symptoms of situational depression, was calculating roughly the same. We now see the symptoms vividly, in turnout.

One clarification, or maybe it's just a bit housekeeping. I have suggested here, from time to time, that I anticipate a "crushing" Obama victory. And by that I have meant, regrettably without being more specific, an imposing victory in the electoral -- not popular vote -- count. In 2008 Barack Obama won with less than 53 percent of the popular vote, but racked up a crushing 68 percent of the electoral count. And as he makes inroads (or re-inroads) in swing states like Virginia -- cautiously, prudently weighed, of course -- I'd say he's well on his way to an encore performance. 

Agent 'Mongo' Romney

Politico headlines it, "Rick Santorum roars back," and Bill Kristol is characteristically agog with vast strategic visions for neocon Rick and the latter's adviser John Brabender tells "NBC’s John Harwood that Missouri proved Romney can be beaten in a one-on-one fight" and the Washington Post declares that "Santorum proved three things:"

1) That Romney can lose
2) That he can beat Romney head-to-head under the right set of circumstances
3) That this race isn’t yet over

Horse manure. Rick Santorum merely failed to heed Gene Wilder's advice to Cleavon Little: "No, don't do that, don't do that, if you shoot him, you'll just make him mad."

Or think of Mitt Romney as the FBI's organized crime unit, or as some defense agency with a fleet of drone predators. Both detect emerging threats and rising stars -- second-tier hooligans out to make a name for themselves, to become a "Somebody"; they see their bad selves as tomorrow's newest and hippest crime boss, or as Osama's replacement; they commit the fatal error of making a splash, of being noticed. Radar sceeens light up with that singular blip and Agent Mongo moves in. Kaboom. The carpet bombing commences. Another decapitation.

Or, if you prefer, think of Romney himself as the crime boss. Because last night he spoke the scariest, Corleonelike words in the English language; he congratulated the religious right's caporegime, and "wish[ed] him the very best."