P.M. Carpenter

Uh-ho

It's beginning to look a lot like the Mayan New Year:

The U.S. government will hit the $16.4 trillion federal debt limit on Monday and turn to "extraordinary measures" to continue borrowing, the Treasury Department said Wednesday, beginning a countdown until Congress either passes legislation to allow for more borrowing or the government defaults on its debt.

So once again, and sooner than thought, we encounter those five most terrifying words in the English language: "Beginning a countdown until Congress ..."

The degree to which the debt ceiling's somewhat premature collapse complicates the government's already deeply destructive, gratuitous gridlock is immeasurable. For years, contemporary Republicans have distinguished themselves as America's most destabilizing force since the 1850s' Southern Democrats--and now the horrible power of the GOP's threatened nihilism is effectively doubled.

As are the prospects of total war, which, like most wars, is being provoked by a bottomless fatuity. The post-apocalypse upside, assuming Democrats entrench? (And I do mean unwaveringly.) We won't have this Republican Party to kick around anymore, for it will have made history of itself.

Mephisto and me

I enjoyed this observation from Barney Frank, speaking to Politico in a stage-left-exit interview:

I know reporters [and we assume commentators] who are the most hypersensitive people in the world. It really does strike me that people who make a living by writing rude things about other people get so upset if you suggest any criticism of them.

I strive to avoid such craven behavior. If you've criticism, bring it on. I'm no masochist, but I can cheerfully withstand intelligent slams; to me, the least pardonable intellectual sin is to hold one's tongue for fear of offending any of the many, mindless Booster Clubs out there--among which, this site is not one.

As for Frank's quip about folks who thrive on "writing rude things about other people"--in my folksy case, "other people" generally being right-wing nincompoops, but I repeat myself--I'm reminded of Goethe's Faust, which opens with this brief exchange:

The Lord:

Can you not speak but to abuse?
Do you come only to accuse?
Does nothing on earth seem right to you?

Mephistopheles:

No, Lord. I find it still a rather sorry sight.
Man moves me to compassion, so wretched is his plight.
I have no wish to cause him further woe.

I'm with Mr. M. on this one--although, Lord help me, I do so cherish all heaps of woe on the radical right.

They've finally done it; they've driven Norm Ornstein mad

Go ahead, read it. But you'll likely feel compelled to read it again, and yet again, for Norman Ornstein's "Huntsman for speaker!" op-ed not only resists comprehension, it batters and bloodies it.

They've driven poor Ornstein mad, these dastardly Republicans--so mad, he's reduced to proposing a remedial "action" that is "out-of-the-box," as he puts it, which means he's surrendered all hope and originality to conventionally styled desperation.

The action? "The Constitution does not say that the speaker of the House has to be a member of the House," observes Ornstein, thus the House should "find someone from outside ... to transcend the differences and alter the dysfunctional dynamic we are all enduring."

Dysfunctional dynamic to AEI congressional scholars, perhaps. It's FUBAR to others.

But that's the thing. The speaker isn't the problem. The problem is a prodigiously dysfunctional House majority, from whose internal rot another squalid speakership shall arise.

I can just barely envision one possible but improbable escape: Boehner is reelected; he somehow scraps the Hastert Rule (which requires GOP unity on floor votes); and then he cobbles together a functional coalition of the House's two minorities--Democrats and that surviving breed of despairingly sane Republicans, before they vanish altogether. 

Merry Christmas to all

Here's wishing you the happiest of holidays, the very merriest of Christmases, and the most festive of annual feasts.

Yes, I can suppress my inner humbug, at least for a day.

Have a truly great one.

--PM

My Christmas offering to the White House

Now comes this, from the sigh-heaving National Journal:

Just as occurred with Rice, the U.N. ambassador whose prospective nomination as secretary of State ... flamed out in the face of widespread criticism of her, President Obama appears to be rethinking his choice for Defense secretary.

Generals, it is commonly observed, always fight, or prepare to fight, the last war--a martial failing that is seemingly, regrettably underway in the White House. Doubtless Obama's political generals are tired. They've been through a long and bloody campaign--grueling hours and dozens of crucial decisions each day, all with decency's future hanging in the balance. It's an exhausting, brain-numbing burden; indeed it's enough to make a political strategist survey the next war's pressing enormities and think: How about we just do what we successfully did last time?

Because "last time" was brilliant. Last time worked. Last time entailed a daring, pragmatic long-game that though irritating as hell to the left's anxious idealists was in reality the best possible strategy to achieve incremental victories, demonstrate patient leadership and a compromising spirit to swing voters, and thus win reelection. But that was then, and then is not now. Unlike early 2009, now means another four presidential years whose presiding influence and power will endure for only about two.

The White House can no longer afford to play the long game, because the game is now politically and Constitutionally shortened--the evisceration of lame duckism looms and reelection is removed from the governing equation. Hence any WH notion that political capital preserved today on, say, cabinet nominations, won't suffer immense devaluation tomorrow on, say, the debt-ceiling issue, is catastrophically, anachronistically misguided.

I've never made any secret of my deep admiration for the Obama administration; in fact I have frequently compared it to Lincoln's and declared it the progressive-conservative successor to FDR's. And if I didn't admire it and wish it every possible success, I'd keep my critical mouth shut and thereby do it the greatest possible disservice.

If one sees a valued friend going down the wrong road, one intervenes bearing the truest gift of friendship: corrective advice.

Therefore my Christmas gift to the Obama administration: Stop this. Stop this right now.

Breaking badass

From a NY Times 'news analysis':

Even some of the president’s closest advisers said they were surprised by the ferocity of the Republican opposition.

"It’s kind of a stunning thing to watch the way this has unfolded, at least to date," said David Axelrod, one of Mr. Obama’s longtime advisers. "The question is, how do you break free from these strident voices?"

It's kind of a stunning thing to read, especially from one of the president's closest advisers. The answer is, you break free. You break free.

You don't negotiate with blackmailers and kidnappers; you don't retreat from a nomination fight in a fog of intimidation; you don't abandon another potential nominee to a gathering storm of neoconservative malice; you don't appoint a cool-headed task force to ponder a red-hot problem; and you don't bewilder the populace just before a holiday respite by insisting you've every intention of meeting the lunatics and their ever-ballooning lunatic demands "halfway."  

You break free by not budging.

You break free by backchanneled communications if necessary with loyalist sympathizers--otherwise known as genuine conservatives--inside the radicals' congressional camp.

You break free by flooding the airwaves with spokespersons and surrogates carrying the manifold message that you'll by-God fight for a second-term cabinet of your own free choice; that without a day lost you'll fight for the safety of America's children--no matter the political expense; and that you'll fight to reestablish fiscal sanity--not a half-sane policy, not a mostly sane policy, but an entirely and expertly sane policy, because 1) it's what you campaigned on and 2) well, it's the sane thing to do.

You break free by explaining and re-explaining and then explaining again to the American electorate precisely what former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle explained to the Times: "I worry that it’s going to take [a true crisis] to bring people to the reality that they can’t mess around here anymore."

And then you explain that you're fucking through messing around.

If it's war they want ...

In one of the more infelicitous analogies I've ever read, Republican Congressman Steve LaTourette defended an enduring Boehnerian speakership of mayhem, mutiny, and arithmetical illiteracy, because otherwise "It's like saying the superintendent of an insane asylum should be discharged because he couldn’t control the crazy people. That's nuts."

I admit I like the analogy, since if nothing else it suggests a practical way forward: Thorazine in the lower chamber's water supply. Nonetheless, competent superintendence of insane asylums generally does entail a certain amount of "crazy control" so that the inmates can harm neither themselves, each other, or, most important, the surrounding community.

What genuinely worries in The Hill piece, though, from which the LaTourette quote is lifted, are these concluding passages:

One conservative House Republican ... said the only way Boehner’s position is likely to be in serious jeopardy is if he agrees to raise the debt ceiling in a fiscal-cliff deal with Obama without significant concessions on spending cuts and entitlement reform from the president.

"If he gives away the debt ceiling, he’s in trouble," the member said.

Which is to say that in the tormented minds of the crazies the fiscal cliff is to the debt ceiling what a firecracker is to a hydrogen bomb--which, it would seem, the crazies fully intend to detonate. They can't wait. It's so close, so tempting, so nihilistically orgasmic, they themselves are about to pop.

The member's comment also suggests that any fiscal-cliff deal would be both secondary and insignificant to his and his fellow radicals' anticipated, debt-ceiling extortion of monumental dimensions; hence the president's trading of anything--whether marginal rates, taxable levels, or a chained CPI--for an interim deal would in short order amount to an utterly useless appeasement.

Further, and paradoxically, any fiscal-cliff deal that's endowed with a one- or two-year postponement of a debt-ceiling war would be far more reckless than the war itself. Republicans' legislative "right" to cryptofascistic terrorizing of the nation's economy and credit must be forever and unconditionally surrendered. This government, as well as future governments, simply cannot endure with an apocalyptic debt-ceiling knife held perpetually at its throat.

If war must come, let it come now--and have it done with.

A 'for show' news conference?

Maybe that was just for show. One can hope. But if not for show, there were two disturbing lines from President Obama in his late afternoon news conference.

In any negotiation the parties must meet halfway, he said, yet he added that he had met Republicans "halfway on taxes and more than halfway on spending." Why the latter offer? Why would the chief victor of a national election ever concede more than 50 percent of anything in any negotiation? And for heaven's sake why would the losers receive, in toto, 51 percent?

Second, as the president indirectly lectured his base that no party ever gets 100 percent of what it wants, he was speaking over the heads of a party that indeed insists on 100 percent of whatever it wants--even subsequent to an electoral thrashing--or the country gets it, so to speak.

But, as noted, perhaps this was all just for show. One can hope. The quite possible alternative is too frightening.

Simply oblivious

This is fascinating.

The GOP has now unleashed its own PPP--a statistical creature called Harper Polling, "with the goal," reports Politico, "of putting the party on parity with Democrats in the field of IVR polling — a term that stands for interactive voice response polling, commonly known as 'robo-polling'"--and idiomatically known as a relative piece of shit.

Anyway, assuming you're interested in such results, Harper is out with its first collection, part of which asks about the GOP 2016 presidential primary (no hissing, please). And the winner--by a plurality of roughly 100 percent--is ... senator and theo-geologist Marco Rubio.

Do you still care? Put any stock in Harper and IVR polling? OK then, if so, let's proceed.

"[T]he TEA party ... is the foundation of Rubio’s support," writes Harper's founder, Brock McCleary. "Approaching half of all TEA supporters (43%) are voting for him"--that stat from a GOP sampled universe in which 58 percent "support the goals of the TEA party movement" (and 80 percent watch Fox News).

So, let's reframe this. If Harper is correct--anywhere close to correct--then the GOP as a national party is already dead, given that the Tea Party is essentially dead and that the GOP is essentially the Tea Party. Yet this seems not to trouble Mr. McCleary, whose only observation is that "If I’m one of the other guys [say, Chris Christie or Condi Rice or Rand Paul or Allen West], it can’t stay that way. Somebody has to eat away at that [Tea Party] base for Rubio." The future GOP standard-bearer should not, you will observe, jettison the Tea Party; he or she should, rather, seek simply to balance the insanity.

This poll--again, if anywhere close to correct--is the GOP's obituary.

Meaningless horseshit

Wayne LaPierre's "meaningful contributions" are to arm the bejesus out of school administrators and convert our schools into armed fortresses and shove every American into one of the NRA's gun safety programs.

I know I'm hearing this slop--right now, the idiot is still speaking--but I can't quite believe it.

***

LaPierre's smartest moment was when he shut up. Good Lord, he finally finished, but only after doing his organization inestimable damage--more inestimable damage. This was not the time to double down, yet that's precisely what he did.

But, that's an extremist for you.

'This is no time for a Grand Bargain'--or anything like one

I'm with Krugman:

This is no time for a Grand Bargain, because the Republican Party, as now constituted, is just not an entity with which the president can make a serious deal. If we’re going to get a grip on our nation’s problems — of which the budget deficit is a minor part — the power of the G.O.P.’s extremists, and their willingness to hold the economy hostage if they don’t get their way, needs to be broken.

And I'd go even farther. This is no time for a bargain--period--whether grand or petite. GOP extremism has become tantamount to political gangsterism, and one should never bargain with gangsters. There's no honor among them, they'll double-cross you at the smallest drop of self-advantage, and, in sum, only an unspeakable fool would place any trust in them. At all.

If we don't break their strangling power, then we can kiss this potential city on a hill goodbye, and one of the globe's still-leading hopes will descend into permanent dysfunction and chronic impuissance.

The GOP is dead, long live the Conservative Party

Ezra Klein writes that "it’s clear now what Plan C is going to have to be: Boehner is going to need to accept the simple reality that if he’s to be a successful speaker, he’s going to need to begin passing legislation with Democratic votes." That, however, portends a vanishing post-Jan. 3 scenario for the speaker-cum-speaker, for "a conservative spoiler ... could very possibly deny Boehner the 218 votes he needs to become speaker, clearing the way for a more moderate candidate like Eric Cantor to unite the party."

After choking down the deployment of both "moderate" and "Eric Cantor" in the same sentence, let's entertain another, longer-range and fundamentally deeper possibility--that of a Plan D. 

For starters, whoever the next speaker is--Boehner, Cantor, Kevin McCarthy or any other compromise candidate--his reign will come pre-packaged as a political catastrophe. If on any piece of House legislation he's able to rally the radicals to vote with the moderates, the legislation must by inexorable definition be unacceptably radical to the Democratic Senate and president--for otherwise the radicals would have been un-rallyable. Hence any "successful" Republican speakership of the 113th Congress is almost certainly doomed: no sober, sane legislation will ever make it out of the House, while all the wacko tea-party stuff will never make it through the Senate or to the president's desk for veto.

Here's a Plan D, however, which I concede that at the present has as much chance of lift-off as Louie Gohmert receiving an honorary doctorate from Harvard, but, perhaps, somewhere down the road ...

Whatever the true number of House Republican moderates is--authentic conservatives, that is, in the mold of Ohio's Steve LaTourette--that number could caucus in the 113th Congress as the Conservative Party, just as the tea partiers have their own narrowly partisan label. Further, these moderates (dutifully organized for the advancement of the nation's welfare, rather than nihilistic intransigence) could openly cooperate with the Democratic minority and thus promise passage of any obstructed sanity--if only they, in a kind of temporary fusion with House Democrats, were allowed to vote on responsible legislation. They'd be denied by the Republican leadership which remained beholden to tea partiers, but Conservatives would have made their move, have issued their bid.

Politically, House moderates--the Conservatives--have more to lose than anyone. It is they, many coming from purpled swing districts, who, as a result of an increasingly despairing electorate, are the more likely ones to find themselves unemployed in 2015. But should they begin caucusing now in the embryonic form of a conscientious, separatist Conservative party, they'd do both themselves and the nation some immeasurable good.

Let them go

How embarrassing for Mr. Boehner.

So now we're hearing an array of Democratic pols urge the speaker to rejoin the negotiating process with President Obama. That may be the only path left for the House leader, although it appears that Boehner is a de facto leader of few--far too few to sustain his speakership as leadership. The same path for Obama, however, besides a display of mere showmanship, would be ill advised.

The Republican Party is teetering, and it is quite possibly terminal. A responsible, good-faith opposition party would have grievously pondered the election's results and then positively rushed its House members to the floor to pass the Senate tax bill, which awaits only House action. Such an act would have signaled a refreshing Republican willingness to once again play adult roles in the nation's governance. Yet that, the party did not do. Instead it pouted and threatened and has regressed even farther.

In short the Republican Party has slapped a DNR label on its anti-intellectually corrupt and soullessly ailing ass. President Obama would be wise to honor that label. He should no longer dignify the GOP by permitting it further chances at respectability. They'll only turn on him anyway. It's going to be a long two years, and Obama should spend that time profitably by pulling the GOP's plug. Then, in its memory, perhaps a genuine, earnest and newborn conservative party can gather some wits, duly ensoul, and arise. 

Rubin psych-check #1,463

Jennifer Rubin's 'Plan B'? To go absolutely, unambiguously, stark-fucking-raving nuts. God I love this woman.

Today she attempts some spirit-lifting of the palsied right by reporting that an "apoplectic" White House is being "openly mock[ed]" by Republicans--well now that's a whole new tactic; that Grover Norquist "can play a tough game of chess," too--Jennifer meant to say "hopscotch"; and that the Boehner-mocking Heritage Action Network is only humiliating its bad-ass self by issuing--and this I really do like--"piffle."

Then, while wiping the foaming saliva from her quivering lips, Ms. Rubin goes out in a gotcha flurry of procedural malcomprehension which only reignites our utter puzzlement at the Washington Post's employ of such an incurable idiot: "[T]he House will pass its bills and send them to the Senate. Poor Senate Dems will actually have to vote on something."

Or, as Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put it today, "We are not taking up anything they are working on over there."

Maybe in 2014?

Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen predicted yesterday on Current TV that because of a shortage of GOP votes, a House assault weapons bill is likely to fail next year, and at any rate, to paraphrase Cohen, "the Republican leadership ... wouldn’t schedule the bill to be voted on."

The timing of such Republican indifference and even hostility to the nation's social welfare should roughly coincide with Republicans' indifference and hostility to the nation's economic welfare--i.e., either an extended denial of a debt-ceiling hike or the prolonged, needlessly teasing torture of one.  

These two immensely irresponsible acts alone should be enough for Democrats to effectively use--as the bluntest of propagandistic instruments--in 2014 against the GOP House majority. True, many districts are hopeless; yet others--especially those undergoing similar demographic trends to the country's at large--are, almost by the hour, becoming increasingly horrified by the political obscenity they hath wrought.  

Hence 2014 could, quite realistically, represent the final throe of this particularly monstrous amalgamation of Puritans, Randians, corporatists, nihilists, anarchists, Borks, racists, gun freaks, conspiracy theorists, misogynists, xenophobes and homophobes. Then a conservative-party rebuilding could begin, which is just as essential to a healthy Democratic Party as it is to any authentic conservatism. But first, the monster must be destroyed.