The Carpentariat

House of clowns

A spectre is haunting America--the spectre of a clownish demagoguery.

The polished ghosts of the profession's yesteryears--the Joe McCarthys, the James Michael Curleys, the Huey Longs and the 'Pitchfork' Ben Tillmans--are surely convening somewhere in Hell to mourn what Dana Milbank calls this "charmingly futile" turn of amateurish vents. I pray God they might rematerialize for at least an hour or two, with Hell's special dispensation, to conduct for these charmlessly living GOPers an advanced seminar in the delicate art of rabble-rousing. 

McCarthy possessed a Luciferian amiability that was mesmerizing; Curley a swashbuckling, picaresque sense of humor; Long a wicked intelligence; and Tillman a truly frightening sincerity. Alas, and quite sadly, House Republicans harbor neither amiability nor humor nor smarts nor sincerity. Matched against the pros, they're batting .000 in the sporting American pastime of Appealing Demagoguery.

In fact they're so disagreeable, so humorless, so bloody insincere and so unspeakably dumb they don't seem to understand that demagoguery is supposed to be appealing.

What they--those they, anyway, on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform--are actually practicing is less demagoguery and more of the "show trial" techniques of the nakedly brutal Joe Stalin. Brutality needs no finesse; indeed it is often resorted to only when finesse just isn't a capable option. Yet because we as a people have to date managed to fundamentally preserve ourselves as a nation of laws--notwithstanding the fundamental lawlessness of the George W. Bush administration--these brutal House clowns can go only so far; blindfolds, stakes, fetters and last cigarettes are but happy elements of their goofy imaginations.

Hence we get down to the real choice of 2012. No, not that of the class, grace, supreme intelligence, extraordinary abilities and remarkable accomplishments of Barack Obama versus the plain oafishness of Mitt Romney. That choice was decided when non-politician Romney began his awkward, overwrought political career nearly twenty years ago. The towering choice facing the American electorate, rather, is whether they really want to keep such an able president in office while saddling him with such a House full of clowns.

Fatuous and Furious

Michael Steel, spokesman for John Boehner:

The White House decision to invoke executive privilege implies that White House officials were either involved in the 'Fast and Furious' operation or the cover-up that followed. The Administration has always insisted that wasn’t the case. Were they lying, or are they now bending the law to hide the truth?

Adds Politico:

Some House Republicans also tried to invoke the famous Watergate-era mantra, "Who knew what and when did they know it?" That was meant to suggest a more extensive scandal, though the lawmakers offered no new evidence to back up such a claim.

My italics.

In a sane world, italics wouldn't be needed, because no such histrionic rot would be available to report. In a political season--by definition, insane--we expect bad, overwrought theatre from both parties; however until 14 years ago we never expected one of those parties to attempt a nullification of the last presidential election by congressional fiat--a coup, really. And until now, we certainly never expected the same party to so consistently reveal itself as ruthlessly hostile to the nation's best interests and better angels.

It seems there is no goodness, no virtue, no honor so historically engrained in the American character that it's to be left unmolested by the GOP. The party is fully deployed in the broadest of broadside assaults on all legitimate political opposition, on republican integrity, on any sense of fair play, on public civility, even on plain human decency.

There is, as they say, nothing sacred to these contemporary pseudoconservatives, except power--theirs.

Lately my memory banks have experienced some serious flashbacks to something Bertrand Russell once wrote on the pitfalls of a liberal democracy in which executive and legislative powers are separated:

Where such a doctrine is embodied in the Constitution, the only way to avoid occasional civil war is to practice compromise and common sense. But compromise and common sense are habits of mind, and cannot be embodied in a written constitution.

There, in a mere two sentences, is the heart of the Mann-Ornstein diagnosis, "The Republicans are the problem"--for among them, there is no corresponding compromising or commonsensical habit of mind. They are instead the embodiment of a mindless rage in full pursuit of total power regained. Should the country go down as collateral damage, so be it.

Prior to virtually every national election we are tutored by excitable pundits and sonorous politicians that this election could very well be America's most crucial one. We generally dismiss their alarm as self-serving hype. But this time, they'll be right.

Let Mitt be Mitt

In his political love life, Ross Douthat yearns for a little excitement, a few fireworks--a bit of real passion, something perhaps less than Byronic but more than the phonebook. Douthat's trying, he's really trying, to love the one he's with, I'll give him credit for that, but his man keeps dozing on the sofa by dusk:

[L]ately the Romney campaign seems to have decided that they can win this election without taking any substantial risks at all...; his general-election campaign seems carefully constructed to be as cautious and boring and even attention-repelling as possible...; the riskiest move the presumptive Republican nominee has made in the last two months was his decision to attend a fund-raiser with Donald Trump.

Douthat seems surprised, and for the life of me I can't understand why. In Romney's robotic ways he represents the McDonaldization of American politics: you can have that tasteless, artery-clogging gob of processed animal flesh and perfect(ly) white bread with mustard or without, with onions or without, with pickles or without; but however you have it, it'll be bland, because it's meant to be tasteless, because some tastes offend.

Douthat urges behavior modification:

[S]ometimes the best way to win a bloc of voters is to actually try to win them. In this case, that would probably mean offering a policy agenda more attuned to the ways in which recent Republican economic policy hasn’t always delivered for middle-income voters – a health care agenda that promises more to the uninsured, say, or a tax agenda that’s more family-friendly than the current Romney proposals.

In other words, Douthat suggests that at the eleventh hour the Republican presidential candidate woo him and others with wholly non-Republican policies. Douthat's gentle, euphemistic counseling and attempt at "meaningful" communication is hilarious: Dear Mitt, please scuttle, if you wouldn't mind, "recent Republican economic policy [which] hasn’t always delivered for middle-income voters"--yes, a gut-wrenching, retirement-demolishing, home-foreclosing, job-obliterating great depression is generally deemed short in the middle-class, happiness-delivery department--and "a health care agenda that promises more to the uninsured" is love's way of saying either an individual mandate or single-payer.

But I'm going to defend Mitt here. He should, with no little manly justification, just tell Ross: "You knew who I was, you knew what I was, before we got engaged. So don't try to change me now."

'Take Allen West. Seriously, take him'

In Bill Maher's savaging of modern American politics there is a certain continuity of intense discontent that is strangely comforting. Which is to say, before Maher there was Mort Sahl, equally discontented, and before him Will Rogers, equally discontented, and before him Mark Twain, again, equally discontented.

Maher's latest:

[I]f I were a Washington pundit, I’d launch into some boring speech about how both sides are equally to blame, and then I’d call it a day and we’d all meet at Katherine Graham’s house for cocktails. Which is weird because Katherine Graham is dead. But this is why you never see us booking George Will and Peggy Noonan on my show (besides the fact that they wouldn’t do it): Because the same old Washington pundits haven’t said anything interesting since disco. Also because the idea that the blame for our government’s dysfunction is equally shared by the parties just is a giant, steaming mound of horseshit and anyone who has paid attention to politics over the last 20 years knows it.

It's that "anyone who has [been paying] attention" part that's most disturbing and least reminiscent of the Sahl-through-Twain eras, though. Then, politics was also a sport, much like today; but more folks (on average) had their head in the game, since there was less competition for their attention.

Partisan news isn't

Notwithstanding Napoleon's elementary advice that when one's enemies are destroying themselves, then for God's sake leave them be, MSNBC seems intent on going all Fox News on us and letting Mitt slip away.

I just don't understand it. Was Romney not already serving himself heaps of self-humiliation? Had not Fox nailed itself down as the world's leading and undisputed distorter? Rhetorical questions. Then why would MSNBC hand them both more ammunition to fire more of that "false equivalence" crap?

Such is the natural putrefaction of "partisan news" organizations--a term which is at war with itself, and organically leads to the kind of overzealous news-juvenilization that Fox propagandists and preceding others made infamous.

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The discombobulated American left

I don't write much about the American left, mostly because there isn't much of an American left to write about. It is a mouse that on occasion heroically tries but simply cannot roar.

In descending statistical order--ending in obscurity--roughly 40 percent of the American electorate self-identifies as conservative, about 35 percent as moderate, 20 percent as liberal, and among the latter cluster about 1 out of 4 identifies as "very liberal." This few, this unhappy few, this 5-percent band of brothers and sisters constitutes, I think we would all agree, the modern American left. Some compensate and console themselves with the historical analogy that, well hell, during the antebellum period abolitionists represented only about 5 percent of the electorate, too. And look at what they accomplished. History might answer, however, that the Civil War wasn't launched by abolitionists, wasn't fought by abolitionists, and ultimately derailed into the prolonged Southernization of American politics.

But let's not go there, if for no other reason than that one of the chief distinctions between fiery abolitionists and wet-blanket progressives is that the former never bellowed they were 'The 99 Percent.' They were a besieged, molested, peculiar and extreme minority, and they knew it. They also seemed to instinctively understand that bellowing self-delusional, self-inflating slogans should be left to the 21st century.

To which we'll return, now, and direct our attention to this pathetic contemporaneity: the Campaign for America's Future's annual 'Take Back the American Dream Conference' opened in Washington D.C. yesterday, where, notes Dana Milbank this morning, "half of the 500 seats were filled."

TBADC's Web site purports a populist, progressive, grassroots aggressiveness: "We are the 99%. If we organize, if we force the debate, we can win not only the election but the argument"--even though "we" cannot fill a mere 500 seats.

I beg your indulgence. I'm not trying to be snide. But in return please indulge me for a moment by at least acknowledging that the above's gratuitous bluster is counterproductive, in that it's needlessly strained, which destroys credibility.

By that I mean activist progressives' claims are rhetorically strained in view of their lacking a material, socioeconomic transformation, which should by definition inhere in authentic progressive movements. Yet here, from TBADC's Web site, is a bit of elaboration: The organization promises primarily to preserve the status quo in protecting Social Security and Medicare, as well as protecting federal obligations ranging from "food stamps to food safety" and reducing unemployment.

That's all fine, it's quite admirable--and profoundly conservative. One might think "the American left" would instead advocate socialized healthcare, urge a nationalization of the banking system, or propose, unabashedly, a comprehensive works-projects program. And the American left indeed believes in some or all of these things. But it broadly asserts one thing in the name of progressivism, and then timidly retreats and particularly says others.

Which, perhaps, it should--I'm not arguing otherwise--since we are a moderately conservative nation, and defying that reality also defies political common sense.

Nonetheless where does that leave--how shall we call it--the formal American left? As a political asterisk.

If it really wanted to dissemble and thereby advance itself politically, it would start by telling the truth: We are, pragmatically speaking, today's true conservatives.

Revisiting my breaking point

Kevin Drum:

When the court overturned the NRA in 1935, it was a shock — but it was also a unanimous decision and, despite FDR's pique, not really a surprising ruling given existing precedent. Overturning ACA would be a whole different kind of game changer. It would mean that the Supreme Court had officially entered an era where they were frankly willing to overturn liberal legislation just because they don't like it. Pile that on top of Bush v. Gore and Citizens United and you have a Supreme Court that's pretty explicitly chosen up sides in American electoral politics. This would be, in no uncertain terms, no longer business as usual.

Me, from a year ago:

[E.J. Dionne asks] "At what point do we decide that a political system has become decadent?"

My personal breaking point? ... I heard my first unmistakable crack a bit more than 10 years ago, when a colossally corrupt U.S. Supreme Court not only single-handedly determined that the ineffably dimwitted George W. Bush should be president of these United States, but that its reasoning process in arriving at that staggering electoral insult should be forever regarded by future courts as sui generis, since the reasoning process was, like George W. Bush, so ineffably dimwitted. I consoled myself at the time with historical coddling: from county clerkships to the U.S. presidency, the American art of stealing elections has been a long and noble one; and besides, quite often the racketeering thiefs turned out to be not half bad as respectable officeholders.

So even though I had heard a crack -- even though I had, in fact, suffered an undeniable breaking point -- I further consoled myself with the Twainian thought that, like Wagner, perhaps Bush would be better than he sounded. Oh, what a misjudgment, or rather, what a false hope. He was worse, far worse, as in galactically far worse, and behind him he harbored a Congress-full of either likeminded ideological nincompoops or spinelessly loyal oppositionists willing to grant their imprimatur to virtually every imbecilic Bushian impulse.

I reiterate my contention of the Bush v. Gore decision as our seminal decadence. Reagan's deficit-launching, supply-sided ruination was one thing, Goldwater's incubation of an intoxicated New Right another, and before any of that nonsense, McCarthyism and Bircherism--ideological and temperamental precursors of tea partyism--were quite another.

But in Bush v. Gore we suffered an unmitigated theft of democratic expression. Although we concealed our humiliation well, we never--or so I would further contend--overcame our quiet pain of having sat and watched a panel of intellectually fraudulent despots steal our national self-determination right out from under us. We were bullied, and we took it like cowering children. From this, the despots took the same lesson that all bullies take from quivering capitulation: They came back. In Citizens United they came back, and now it appears--words I hope to soon eat--they'll return in overturning the Affordable Care Act.

But it's worse than that, much worse. Bush v. Gore set the United States on course of a political degradation like we've never seen--the embrace of torture as national policy, chiefly, but also unprovoked war, warrantless domestic surveillance and the brazen pillaging of the public treasury.

We can and should blame the Bush administration for these new and permanent lows, but we've the Supreme Court to thank.

Romney's quantum politics

Greg Sargent says "There’s a great deal to chew on in Mitt Romney’s interview with Bob Schieffer." For the exceptionally hopeful few, that may be.

Yet Romney has planted his flag in the undiscovered country of limitless unknowing; he has braved fifth and sixth and possibly greater dimensions of bizarre unreality and, from time to time, he reemerges from the quantum fog to reassure us that it all makes sense, not for us to worry, we needn't bother our recession-addled brains, he has everything under control.

He really can snap his fingers and be in two places at once, while giving three answers simultaneously to four disparate audiences.

In short, Mitt Romney has the uncertainty principle down pat, mixed with a bit of Eastern mysticism: Those who know as Mitt knows don't say, and those who say as Mitt doesn't say don't know. He comes by this sort of golden-tablet con artistry naturally.

In response, the exceptionally hopeful, such as Sargent, whip out their elegant microscopes and set to analysis--the efforts of which yield sentences of vast disappointment, such as this: "Romney seemed to confirm that he will not be detailing how he would pay for his proposed tax cuts."

He seemed to confirm he won't confirm what he seems to be saying while not saying it.

My regrets, Mr. Sargent, but I don't find this to be "a great deal to chew on." It is intellectually undigestible. It is a fraud, a hustle, a phantom, a changeable unobservability which, unlike "real" quantum mechanics, can and should be dismissed as the insult to human inquiry and civic endeavor it is.

I realize that such a journalistic dismissal would make for exceedingly short columns and thus maroon cybercolumnists to the idle black hole of Romney's immeasurable vapidness. But journalists should give it a try; they should just note that some slick buffoon who calls himself the Republican presidential candidate gave another interview or another speech yesterday, which made no more sense than his preceding interviews and speeches, and no more sense than the next ones will, either.

Then they could chew on something else--something real, something fathomable, something less tedious than the hither-and-yon Romney Shuffle.

The debacles roll on

I'm reluctant to comment on Greece's latest demetamorphosis since Greek politics isn't my speciality. But that's OK, since it doesn't seem to be much of a speciality for Greeks, either. As Krugman wraps today's events: "The debacle rolls on."

Debacle-manufacturing isn't unique to Greece, though. Earlier I was listening to Harvard's Kenneth Rogoff--hardly a Share Our Wealth, Huey Long economist--urging the central banks of both Europe and the United States to "flood the markets with liquidity," and here at home for the U.S. government to begin rebuilding our decayed and decaying infrastructure: roads, bridges, water systems, ports, all the material components of a modern civilization without which we cannot sustain ourselves, let alone grow economically.

And yet what are we doing? What is roughly half of Washington advocating? The Greek solution.

The debacles roll on. 

Romney's 'leadership,' linguini style

From CBS News, June 8:

Romney touts "strong leadership" in new ad

From Politico, this morning:

In an interview with Bob Schieffer aired Sunday on CBS’s "Face the Nation," the presumptive Republican presidential nominee five different times declined to answer whether he would conduct the same policy President Barack Obama on Friday announced his Department of Homeland Security will now pursue.

The American right's 'butheads'

From what I can gather from Politico's canvassing of 'RightOnline' bloggers in Las Vegas yesterday, majority opinion about the idiot from the Daily Caller lay somewhere betwixt the following polar opposites: since "our president is not transparent ... etiquette for previous administrations don’t [sic] apply," and "I found it embarrassing."

Those last four words, from one Jon Fleischman, of California's FlashReport, would in any sane and authentic conservative gathering be broadly embraced as a familiar sentiment. In other words, it--that sentiment--would not leap from the pack as a polite, proper, well-mannered, thoughtful, concise and rational orphan. Yet, with the additional exception of Trent Seibert's (of TexasWatchdog.org) reaction--"I found it offensive"--it does.

Most expressed opinions (and again, I derive my characterization only from Politico's survey) came from your typical "Buthead"--the weasely, ill-mannered, irrational noggin implanted with a weasely, unctuous tongue. To wit ...

"I don’t believe in being rude, but ..."

"The fact that he would interrupt the president, I don’t agree with that. But ..."

"Maybe it was a little rude, but ..."

There are indeed legitimate opportunities for the epic "but": e.g., yes the Allies committed atrocious acts during the Second World War, but ...; or, yes Dick Nixon and George W. Bush were common criminals better left committed to Leavenworth than pardoned history, but ...; or, yes Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' rated an unconscionably obscene price at Sotheby's, but ...

But, this was not one of those opportunities, and it was epic only in that it marked yet another, major degeneration of the American right.

One wonders if there is a bottom.

'There will be scandals'

It's a fascinating juxtaposition--a mental mediocrity who increasingly slips into an irascible incoherence but nonetheless consistently gets one thing right, versus a self-imagined mental giant who prides himself on an imperturbable lucidity but nonetheless gets most everything wrong.

John McCain:

I'm afraid we're in for a very bleak period in American politics. To somehow view money as not having a corrupting effect on elections flies in the face of reality.... [Citizens United is] the most misguided, naïve, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 21st Century.

George Will:

Romney promises to appoint "restrained" judges. If, however, the protection of liberty is the court’s principal purpose, it must not understand restraint as a dominant inclination to (in the language of Romney’s Web site) "leave the governance of the nation to elected representatives."

Such as those elected representatives who imposed Obamacare’s individual mandate? Or those representatives who limited (with the McCain-Feingold law) the freedom of political speech of persons acting as individuals? Or those who limited (with the law that Citizens United overturned) the speech rights of people associated in corporations?

The accuracy of McCain's prediction is, to quote a famous document, self-evident, and it is self-evident on both a priori and empirical grounds. Only a fool would argue that mountains of supremely self-interested, oligarchic cash would benefit broad democracy; or that one dollar, one billion dollars lies within the acceptably equivalent boundary of one person, one vote; or that the intrinsic corruption of big money in everyday politics was no scourge of the Gilded Age or primal enemy of Progressive reform or steady ally of Nixonian machinations.

"There will be scandals," McCain added. But why the future tense? The scandal is Citizens United itself, from which (speaking of the Nixon administration) the rotting cancer on the American political process has already metastasized.

Typically despicable

What can I say but that today was yet another manifestation of pseudoconservatism.

In the past three-and-a-half years we've witnessed, among other outrages, a gubernatorial finger poked in the president's chest, an idiotic "You lie!" hurled from a congressional Republican seat, charges of Obama's unAmerican birth leveled by a prospective GOP presidential candidate, Obama's "Kenyan" worldview assaulted by one of the party's actual presidential candidates--and now a despicable member of the right-wing press repeatedly interrupts the president during a brief news, no-questions conference.

These people are thugs. They are not politicians, they are not honest advocates, they are not journalists, and in general they most certainly are not conservatives in any traditional sense of the word. They are at best pseudoconservatives of the chronically pestilential variety.

When will authentic conservatives wake up and realize who is acting, and how they are acting, on their behalf?

For the right, it's S.O.P.

Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants and he's loved, more than ever, by the right. Obama gives a reprieve to 1 million illegal immigrants and in this the right finds additional, as well as quite pointed, reason to detest him.

S.O.P.

The political press corps: as amateurish as the tea party

If one's expectations are fulfilled, is it then proper for one to claim disappointment? I cite my expectations, from NY Observer's "Politiker":

Despite the hype, [Obama's] speech was mainly a rehash of themes and ideas from the president’s recent stump speeches and his remarks were widely panned as overly long by the political press corps.

And such has been widely remarked and widely penned. Why am I unsurprised? Perhaps because the political press corps has for years been reducing itself to a squalid, sensationalist-driven pack of clueless jackals. Or maybe the Oberver's encompassing observation is intended to account for balance: Let's see, Mitt Romney is a feckless cipher, and if we're tempted to report said fact of fecklessness, we perforce must portray his opponent, Obama, in a similar fashion.

Or, it could be that the political press corps is simply ignorant of the fundamentals of its reported prey: politics. Which is to say, the political press seems to have altogether missed Obama's twofold objective yesterday, which, on both counts, he nicely achieved: emphatically presenting this election as a choice--not a referendum--and nationalizing the contest in its congressional colorations. The second objective was sought in his phrase, "This election is your chance to break that stalemate"--the stalemate which has obstructed the socioeconomic progress that's been possible all along.

In other words, Obama's reelection comes with a hitch. Voters must give him sane congressional allies. This thrust in Obama's speech was just as poignant as his "choice" maneuver. So naturally, the press corps missed it. Instead they brooded over the "rehash[ing] of themes and ideas from the president’s recent stump speeches," or, again in other words, the president's deployment of repetition, which the press corps itself repeatedly insists is vital to Obama's campaign. Go figure.

The political press corps is much like the tea party. The latter believes it can competently run the government without knowing anything about government. Likewise, the political press corps believes it can competently report on politics without knowing anything about politics.

We are trapped in an age of bumbling amateurism.