PMC Commentary

Romney stumbles on a pretty good point

Mitt Romney, speaking to Fox News, just before fleeing Poland:

I realize that there will be some in the Fourth Estate, or whichever estate, who are far more interested in finding something to write about that is unrelated to the economy, to geopolitics, to the threat of war, to the reality of conflict in Afghanistan today, to a nuclearization of Iran. They’ll instead try and find anything else to divert from the fact that these last four years have been tough years for our country.

In a way I agree with Romney. It seems to me that political journalists should be investing a greater percentage of their everyday coverage to pounding reminders of just how shockingly awful the Bush administration was; those eight, horrifying years that reversed a surplus, detonated the debt, catered to the affluent, introduced stagnated middle-class incomes, created virtually no new jobs, diplomatically alienated the world, launched an insanely fatuous invasion of the wrong country ... and ... whew ... almost done ... the Bush administration was so dizzyingly busy with all this it couldn't be bothered to notice that our entire financial structure was about to collapse in a devastating pile of rubble, which would then be dropped in President Obama's lap, leading to the painfully undeniable "fact that these last four years have been tough years for our country."

Which rather makes sense, don't you think? It's all part of the same story; one cannot intelligently ponder these "four years" without pondering the totality and inescapable continuity of the twelve. Barack Obama didn't waltz into the Oval Office in 2009 and slash 7,000 points from the Dow and throw several million poeople out of work. No, that was done for him--by the very kind of economic urinating and neoconservative crapping on us that Mitt Romney wishes to reintroduce.

And he's right. We should ponder the history of it all, and far more often.

Mitt's got it bad, and that ain't good

Steve Kornacki issues a once-legitimate but now-receding caveat:

[F]or all of the attention Romney’s trip has attracted, most voters still aren’t paying attention – and for those who are, the story will be overtaken by something else next week, and something else the week after, and so on, until it’s a distant (at best) memory.

By "something else" Kornacki means something non-gaffish. A new jobs report, a fresh GDP, a euro meltdown, an Iranian crisis, "something" like that, something that will overwhelm Mitt Romney's impressively accumulated record of jawdropping blunders.

Early on, I feared that as the case. He's just warming up, I thought, it's been four years, he's rusty, he'll get better. But at some indefinite, indistinct, vague and shadowy point during the GOP primary season it became thunderingly clear that Mitt Romney is a man of boundless, inevitable oafishness: he stumbled from his wife's "couple of Cadillacs" to right-heighted trees to human corporations to $10,000 bets to not hiring illegals (when politically inconvenient) to being "[un]sure about these cookies."

My guess? We'll actually witness an exponential pickup in the pace of Romney's gaffes, for the simple reason that the more self-conscious he becomes in tapping them down, the more aggressively they'll pop up. I don't know why. It's just human nature for the most intense self-intentions to go preposterously awry. And Mitt Romney's got 'em bad.

The Kristol con

Bill Kristol is awestruck by Romney's "eloquent and powerful" Warsaw speech:

It's striking that in these remarks, Romney chooses to speak not as a "citizen of the world" but as a citizen of the free world. He suggests that American exceptionalism isn't a basis for some sort of arrogant disdain for the rest of the world, but rather provides the grounds for a duty to stand with others around the world fighting for freedom. 

I defy anyone to locate any powerfully eloquent significance reflected in Kristol's platitudinous muddle.

Mitt Romney boldly refuses to speak as a citizen of Kazakhstan, but with free peoples he hangs his hat. Goosebumps, huh? What's more, only the ruthlessly tortured concept of "American exceptionalism" allows Romney to heroically "stand with others around the world fighting for freedom."

And here we get to Kristol's real objective: the labored protection of neoconservatism's exclusive appropriation of human freedom in American foreign policy. Forget Franklin Roosevelt's historic internationalism on behalf of human freedom, as well as Harry Truman's and John Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson's (as twisted as it was) and Jimmy Carter's and Bill Clinton's and now Barack Obama's.

The only internationalism that counts as humanly splendid and truly freedom-seeking, contends Kristol, is that beheld by Republican neoconservatives, even if the neocons did vapidly botch freedom-loving internationalism through unprovoked slaughter and trillions in fiscal waste.

Now that's some powerful material. Mighty powerful.

'Sit down you pig, I love you'

Only the colossally inept Romney campaign could so effortlessly couple these two sentences:

"Kiss my ass. This is a Holy site."

I once managed to learn a little--very little--Chinese and upon dining with some Chinese friends at a Chinese Restaurant I somehow uttered to one, "Sit down you pig, I love you." Roars of easily deciphered Chinese laughter ensued.  

My excuse? I was trying to speak Chinese. Romney's crew, to its detriment, is sticking with English.

The fault, dear David?

David Brooks has assembled a nine-point lament, a weary been there, a worn done that, a dirge to political tediousness that is both reasonably insightful and strikingly unaware. More on his self-unawareness later.

He takes the measure of our presidential politics and concludes that "This race is the latest iteration of the same debate we’ve been having since 1964," which is, for Brooks, essentially the whole ballgame. "Intellectual stagnation." From there, Brooks indulges in some differentiated sameness; point two is a "lack of ... intellectual innovation," which defies much distance from "intellectual stagnation."

Moving right along, Brooks' third, fourth, and sixth through eighth points can be bundled efficiently: campaigns "focus on the uninformed," they "lack ... serious policy proposals," their polarizing nastiness "make[s] it impossible to succeed after one of them wins," they equate more money with more votes, and increasingly sophisticated communications mires them in mind-numbing "tit-for-tat minutiae." In all this, I think we can agree, there is nothing remarkably objectionable. 

In Brooks' fifth and final points, however--and especially in reference to point one: "This race is the latest iteration of the same debate we’ve been having since 1964"--we begin to see either some clinical dissociation or Brooks' deliberate deployment of Tactic Three: "focus[ing] on the uninformed." Says he: "Neither side is propelled by much positive enthusiasm for their own side," and "Finally, dishonesty numbs ... As John Dickerson of Slate has said, the campaigns want the Pinocchios. They want to show how tough they are. But the result is a credibility vacuum."

OK, now that our itemized housekeeping is done, we can sit back and marvel at Brooks' own "intellectual innovation," which is to blithely ignore the strongest currents of Republican politics since 1964, which, along with all the usual debris, have flooded the national arena with a numbing dishonesty clung to and "propelled by" a far-right "positive enthusiasm."

Broadly speaking, little has changed in our national political debate since the Goldwater years because that was the era in which Republicans decided to go populist: to bamboozle the hayseeds who eagerly interpreted civil rights as unearned privileges; to enlist religious fundamentalists in the GOP's trumped-up war against the godless secularists; to divide the electorate into the pro-American and the anti-American (between McCarthy and Bachmann there is no daylight); to crush the memorable foreign policy triumphs of FDR and HST with the malevolence of More Defense Today, More Defense Tomorrow, More and More Defense Forever; to enthrall the greedy with little regulation and even fewer taxes; and to blend in the uninformed, inattentive, impeccably ignorant mind the foreign evils of totalitarian socialism with the modest goals and real progress of New Deal and Great Society liberalism.

And it was Brooks' one-time boss, Bill Buckley, who spearheaded the above, populist "synthesis." It was ingeniously crafted to appeal to the electorate's least analytical and most visceral--QED, it has ever since burdened the rationality of sensible policy sensibly pursued with the fiery, unthinking passions of the pseudoconservative mob. 

Brooks, uh, forgot to put that on his list.

The world's tiniest (but most uninformed!) electorate

Jonathan Chait:

Newsweek would surely love to cause another huge stir and to enrage the Romneys [with "The Wimp Factor" cover story], but it’s doubtful they would even notice any more.

Well, Jonathan, there's no reason to be unkind.

What you're pointedly saying is that the newsweekly has become irrelevant, which of course it has. But then again so have the daily papers, as well as cable news and the Internet's blogosphere.

On one side of the partisan divide a bit less than half of us already know, and have known all along, how we're going to vote this fall. On the other side a bit less than half already know how they're going to vote. Most states are already decided, with their electoral votes roughly split R vs. D, meaning most states in the presidential election are as irrelevant as Newsweek. That leaves about 5 percent of the electorate in a handful of states who are undecided--a profoundly puzzling and astoundingly high percentage when you stop to think about it, given, that is, that the GOP's candidate is an absolute idiot.

Still, information from the newsweekly or the daily paper or cable news or this or that Web site won't mean much to these uncommitted folks. It never has.

The plaintive conservative wail

By God I feel sorry for them. Andrew Sullivan:

The eyes roll, I know, when I cling to the word "conservative" like others cling to their, er, Second Amendment rights. But I'd be dissembling if I did not argue that on a whole array of issues, Obama is simply and unequivocally the more conservative candidate.

Of course he is. But those I feel sorry for are those conservatives who still seem to associate, or wish to associate, "conservatism" in any intelligible fashion with the Republican Party. That conservatism is gone, boys, probably forever, just as liberalism for a century has been disconnected from its ideological roots of free-market economics. Liberalism today means almost the precise opposite of 19th-century liberalism. Yet no one cares. Its meaning today is its meaning today, which has been its meaning since roughly the 1930s--as distinguished from modern progressivism, which is sort of the rowdy children's version of adult liberalism, which itself is a hybrid of sober New Dealism and a pragmatic, internationalist foreign policy.  

What's more, in the face of the GOP's anarchic reactionaryism modern liberalism has morphed into the only true conservatism to be had: it stands to preserve and protect those American institutions which have become our traditional means of greater social stability: namely, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, public education, the earned income tax credit and the like. The Republican Party is actively hostile to governmental means to the ends of social stability; in short, the Republican Party has kissed conservatism goodbye.

And it would seem the party really means it. Who is the base already pimping for the 2016 contest? Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, two religious fanatics who wouldn't know Edmund Burke from Moe, Larry or Curly.

But back to this conservatism and Republican Party business, which is but symptomatic of old ways of thinking dying hard. It goes without saying that authentic conservatives will have nothing to do with today's manic GOP, but their prejudices are to be found as well in their indefatigable resistance to formally allying with the Democratic Party. Give it up, conservatives. You might as well be miserable with the rest of us under the Dems' big tent. There's simply no place else, which isn't all wet, to camp.

By the way, in the wake of the formal treaty of political entente you are still welcome to call yourselves "conservatives"--even if you're actually today's liberals.

Point, right

Dispatch from Dave Weigel:

According to information from Nielsen BookScan, The Amateur has sold 137,000 copies, while Barack Obama: The Story has sold only 19,000.

The Amateur is eponymously titled. Ed Klein, the author, is a right-winging scandalmonger of pretentious seriousness and muckraking amateurishness. Barack Obama is another deeply researched, quality work by professional journalist and biographer David Maraniss.

Observes Weigel: "[T]he number of people who want their bitter views of Obama reinforced vastly outpaces the number who like Obama and want to understand him better." Which is another way of saying that works in intellectual crayon will beat the commercial pants off the responsible stuff every time. Roughly the same goes for campaigning and political advertising. The right, though, is naturally adapted to this primitive, knuckle-dragging environment, while the left mostly tsk-tsks the wretched injustice of it all.

Point, right.

Mitt Romney, burdened white man

Boss Romney, with mint julep in  hand, reclining in his white rocker on the spacious veranda of "the luxurious King David Hotel," just can't get over how inadequate them colored folk is to those vastly clever, culturally superior Jews:

As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality.... I recognize the power of at least culture and a few other things.

The AP corrects Boss Romney, who always happens to be eminently correctable:

The economic disparity between the Israelis and the Palestinians is actually much greater than Romney stated. Israel had a per capita gross domestic product of about $31,000 in 2011, while the West Bank and Gaza had a per capita GDP of just over $1,500, according to the World Bank.

But so what? Boss Romney was merely pointing out how intrinsically shiftless it is of them segregated colored folk to allow ruthless hegemony and endless oppression and forced ghettoization by a well-armed, ever-vigilant police state of immensely greater resources and "a few other things" to keep themselves down. But, you know, well, you know how they are.

Of Churchill and Zapata: an exceptional possibility

Classic Krauthammer, typical right. Never concede, never apologize. Turn the tables, demand apology from the wronged.

Sure, it was Krauthammer who first contributed to the right's "bust"-gate hysteria by implying that one and only one sculpture of Winston Churchill had once graced the White House, but alas no longer--not, that is, since the advent of the exotically anti-American, very un-Tory, suspiciously foreign, probably Marxist Barack Obama was handed the presidency by a momentarily delusional, suddenly panicked, woefully unaware, now profoundly regretful American electorate.

In the "single-bust" theory, Krauthammer was mistaken. "At which point, [we] would expect [Krauthammer] to say: Sorry, I made a mistake. End of story." This, he does not do; he instead doubles down and pretends the White House has descended yet deeper into the superduper deviousness of its own murky slime.

Nonetheless I don't really care. Do you care? I thought not.

I do wish to note, however, my care of this irony. It's the Krauthammer crowd that is forever bemoaning what they claim is President Obama's inadequate-to-absent belief in American exceptionalism, yet it's the Krauthammer crowd that believes a foreigner should still grace the Oval Office spot now graced by no less than that exceptional American, Abraham Lincoln. Churchill was of course half-American, but it was my understanding that exceptionalists like their heroes all-American.

To wriggle out of this exceptionally contradictory fix the right says that Winnie is symbolic of our historically special Anglo-American relationship, featuring warm moments such as a bloody revolution, the violent persecution of English loyalists, the Anglo-Saxon burning down of our nation's capital city, Great Britain's diplomatic dalliance with the traitorous South, and assorted decades of rabidly anti-English American sentiment against the former sucking the latter into European bloodbaths. I issue no value judgments here, I take no sides. Just saying.   

At any rate, given the tumultuous contours of America's special historical relationship with Great Britain, as properly symbolized, say Krauthammer and the right, by a quasi-Englishman's bust in the Oval Office, I can only assume that when a U.S. president of Hispanic heritage is elected--as he or she surely will be, someday--the right will have no problem with that president featuring a bust of, say, Emiliano Zapata in the Oval Office. After all, Mexico is at least on the same continent as the United States, we once recurrently battled Mexico as we did England (and then there was Mexico's conspiratorial involvement in the "Zimmermann" affair, which is German--Kraut[hammer]!--for "Carpenter"; the plot thickens), and God bless it, it has many of our jobs and it buys our guns and it ships us our drugs. And if all that ain't special, I just don't know what is.

With luck, though, whenever an exotically anti-American, very un-Tory, suspiciously foreign, probably Marxist Latino or quasi-Latino president storms the White House, we'll still have Charles Krauthammer to guide us.

Wastin' time with Westen

Dr. Drew Westen is back, bubbling with indignation and fluttering with the old familiar vapors and again slaying the Enlightenment with his Rousseau-like Romanticism. Oh dear, if only President Obama were endowed with Westen's boundless courage and penetrating intuition and almost total ignorance of politics, we'd be well on the road to utopia--Hope/Crosby-style, that is.

You no doubt remember Westen, an insufferable progressive ideologue who a year ago caused such a liberating stir in the deflated groins of lesser progressive ideologues; a psychology professor who, in addition to political ignorance, piled historical and literary pretensions--"the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise"--into his "controversial" NY Times piece, "What Happened to Obama?"

That singular effort by Westen earned him what others had labored entire careers to achieve: a slot in the New Republic's annual list of "Over-Rated Thinkers":

Westen bungled a number of important facts, ignored others, elided crucial parts of history, and displayed a generally poor knowledge of how power is distributed and exercised in national politics.... He appears to be giving a deeper, more inward analysis, when in fact his knowledge of politics is amateurish. But at least he tells an enticing story, and that, apparently, is what it’s all about.

Ditto, in "If Obama loses the election, here’s why," now showing in the Washington Post. The above is just about all you need to know.

To be a trifle more informative, though, it seems that in Westen's professionally unconnected-dots-of-an-opinion Barack Obama is afflicted by the coextensive character flaws of both titanic timidity and extraordinary arrogance. This immense inner conflict I find rather extraordinary in itself, and it's indeed unfortunate that, as noted, Westen doesn't seem to notice it. Nonetheless the conflict is revealed in the president's "three crucial errors":

Obama’s first mistake was inviting the Republicans to the table. The GOP had just decimated the economy and had been repudiated by voters to such an extent that few Americans wanted to admit that they were registered Republicans. Yet Obama, with his penchant for unilateral bipartisanship, refused to speak ill of what they had done.

And ...

[I]nstead of designing a stimulus that reflected the thinking of the country’s best economic minds, he cut their recommended numbers by a third and turned another third into inert tax cuts designed to appease Republican legislators whose primary aim was to defeat him.

And ...

[He] let a popular idea — a family doctor for every family — be recast as a losing ideological battle between intrusive government and freedom.... In keeping with the most baffling habit of one of our most rhetorically gifted presidents, Obama and his team just didn’t bother explaining what they were doing and why.

In short, President Obama as chillingly poltroonish and fiercely hubristic. This "narrative" is achieved by Westen's near abject neglect of accompanying facts on the ground and reality in play and events in progress. To read Westen's interpretation is to imagine an ideologically unified and powerfully insuperable Democratic majority in both chambers--a majority both squandered and exploited by executive-branch ineptitude, a presidency both hopelessly adrift and blindly anchored. Unreliable, conservative Democrats begone; an influential, lockstep and constitutionally empowered minority begone; factions begone; lobbying begone; politics begone.

Enter self-righteousness.

Which seems to be the principle plank in the indignant platform of (some) activist progressivism. Well, that and an egotistical idealism forever unsullied by the inextinguishable grime of pragmatic politics--you know, the kind that modern progressivism's founder, FDR, practiced.

Grinning Greer

From the 'News That Isn't Really News' department, Florida's former GOP chairman, Jim Greer, now says in a deposition (more on that momentarily) that in December 2009 he "was upset because [Republican] political consultants and staff were talking about voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting."

The right will respond that Jim Greer is a lying, disreputable scoundrel who's up on assorted felony charges.

But hey, he's your felon.

The Krauthammer syndrome

So there on one op-ed page of the Washington Post we've got Charles Krauthammer assailing President Obama for having "started his presidency by returning to the British Embassy the bust of Winston Churchill that had graced the Oval Office." Elsewhere, on the White House Blog, Dan Pfeiffer corrects Krauthammer: "normally we wouldn’t address a rumor that’s so patently false.... [B]ust still in the White House. In the Residence. Outside the Treaty Room."

Parenthetically, there are actually two busts. One was indeed returned; the other indeed remains. This, too, is addressed by Pfeiffer, in an "update."

Anyway, that resolves that.

Or does it? Bear with me.

On another op-ed page of the Washington Post we've got the Post's associate editor, David Maraniss, author of Barack Obama: The Story, writing that

In the introduction to my book, I took note of a sick political culture where "facts are so easily twisted for political purposes and where strange armies of ideological pseudo-historians roam the biographical fields in search of stray ammunition." That sentence is now cited on right-wing Web sites as evidence that I hold them in contempt.... I do hold some of them in contempt.... I hold them in contempt for the way they disregard facts and common sense and undermine the role of serious history as they concoct conspiracy theories that portray the president as dangerous, alien and less than American.

So here's a WaPo associate editor decrying "a sick political culture" in which "facts are so easily twisted" by "ideological pseudo-historians" to "portray the president as dangerous, alien and less than American" and then we click back to WaPo's Krauthammer page and find no correction or clarification whatsoever of his misleading rot after the White House debunks the sick, twisted, ideological bust "controversy." 

I appreciate that Maraniss, though a Post editor, is not the Post's op-ed editor. Maraniss' intellectual chastity remains intact. Yet one would think that a paper worthy of Maraniss' fair intelligence would itself be fairly smart enough to hire an op-ed editor to correct or clarify the reams of malicious boneheadedness that emanate from malicious boneheads like Krauthammer.

I appreciate that Krauthammer is quite intelligent, too; I claim no other. But his rabid malice toward Barack Obama calcified long ago into a solid mass of sick, twisted bone between his ears. A vestige of Krauthammer's intelligence is still detectable in his stylistic eloquence, however his hatred--a pure, venomous bile that hemorrhages weekly in a vertiginous freedom from any responsible editorial cauterization--mitigates all respect.

I'll take Stalin to block

Today's GDP report has Hot Air positively hissing in ecstasy:

[H]aving an average growth rate of 2.2% after a recovery is supposed to cheer us up?  The economy clearly isn’t "moving in the right direction" the last two quarters — and in fact, it’s been going in the wrong direction, declining in each quarter.... American consumers aren’t pursing their lips and whistling; they’re conserving their money as the storm approaches.

Approaches from which direction? That would be, ahem, from the right--over there, way far to the right. But of course the GOP's storm isn't really appoaching; it's been pounding the economy in every conceivable anti-American way for at least two years.

And that, as they say, is the party of God and flag.

You know, not even Joe Stalin was so fucking insulting as to tell postwar Eastern Europeans that it was their elected leaders' fault that the Red Army was rolling over their lands and grinding their dreams and crushing their hopes. He just did it. He possessed the power to do it, and he did it. He played no mind games, deployed no verbal gymnastics, engaged in no political obscurantism. He simply and brutally did what he damn well wanted to do, and left it at that.

Wouldn't it be nice if the GOP could be as honestly straightforward as Stalin?

Shakespeare on Olympic Extravagance

What manner of human toil is this?--
Will would have asked, in the morn,
as he sat glued to the tube,
too overboobed to move,
by all that Olympic porn.

Haven't we amateurs' confessionals,
of Dream Team professionals,
which make folly of this shopkeepers delight?
Oh well, says Will, 'tis a brave new globe,
which zounds! seems wicked disrobed,
and to that he says, good night.