PMC Commentary

Another pointless Cruz defense

Rich Lowry's indignation over the left's Ted Cruz-bashing reaches a representative pitch in this passage:

In a Washington Post column a year ago, Dana Milbank noted Cruz’s [Ivy League] schooling and concluded almost entirely on that basis that his tea party politics must be a put-on, that he is, underneath it all, an "intellectually curious, liberal-arts conservative." Note the insulting assumption that an interest in books and ideas automatically immunizes someone from a certain kind of conservative politics.

Or you could note that Lowry wimps out in using the amorphous phrase, "a certain kind" of conservatism, which Lowry never really characterizes beyond "constitutional" conservatism, as though Cruz's tortured bromides and twisted, ahistorical platitudes are somehow new revelatory heights in political philosophy.

No, Lowry meticulously avoids specifics when it comes to defining "Cruzism"--except, interestingly, in the Cruzist cause of Defunding Obamacare, which Lowry belittles as an incoherent, delusional, "grass roots-pleasing slogan in search of a realistic path to legislative fruition."

Well good for you, Rich. And I mean it. But the opposition's point is that that is the very kind of the "certain kind" of conservatism which Cruz espouses. Get it? Do you now see where we're coming from, Rich? Cruz's kind of conservatism is merely a self-inflating scam, known commonly as demagoguery--which qualifies not as a governing philosophy.

Now it's true that an interest in books and ideas doesn't automatically immunize someone from conservatism, however it generally goes far in reducing one's primitive urges to politically play to humanity's worst instincts. But here, on Ted Cruz, at Princeton and Harvard, all those books and ideas seem to have had no salubrious effect.

Brace for Bolton (assuming anyone notices)

Alrighty then. The horde grows.

The super-hawkish, former Spiro Agnew-interning, Billy Kristol-backed, "pomp-eschewing," pro-gay-marriage John Bolton is throwing his helmet into the ring!

Has Bolton retained at least some sliver of rationality to carry him down the presidential campaign trail? I vote yes. Because even he concedes that his candidacy will be "a little unorthodox."

Well, if not rationality, a talent for understatement anyway.

The scope of our scientific trials, politically speaking

In a NY Times op-ed, "Welcome to the Age of Denial," astrophysicist Adam Frank contrasts the popularly embraced scientism of his postwar, mentoring generation with our present era, in which "it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact":

Narrowly defined, "creationism" was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as "creation science" and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels.       

Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.  

And yet it's worse than that. Right-wing efforts to degrade the value of unmolested science have bled into the humanities and social sciences as well.

While for instance the theoretical triumph of Keynesianism is complete, a kind of Hayekian denialism reigns in practice. History and political science are reduced to incoherence as fundamental concepts of American governance, long accepted and honored, are destructively refashioned as a kind of lost originalism. Even the essential art of critical thinking is under relentless assault--although I shouldn't say "even," for attacks on logic, rationalism and empiricism lie at the heart of any successful obscurantism.  

All of which demonstrates the extraordinary power of propaganda--the far right's ingenious use of which has paralleled the upward trajectory of our national ignorance. In recent decades the right's unremitting deployment of ideological think tanks, specializing publishers and "academic" papers and, in general, its brilliant manipulation of electronic media have steadily subtracted from American enlightenment.

Meanwhile the moderate left's counter-deployments have been scattered and half-hearted. Don't be aggressive in gainsaying the right's claims: such has been the strategic approach, out of fear of alienating the wafflers and centrists and racking up electoral losses. In some regions this is but political prudence, but as a national strategy it would seem to be failing.       

Perhaps it's time for a heavy dose of U.S. Grant's general philosophy of war: Don't worry about the casualties. (I stress general philosophy, for Grant, contrary to some interpretations, was an eminently humane and gentle man.) "The art of war is simple enough," he observed. "Get at [your enemy] as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can and as often as you can and keep moving on." 

Lincoln agreed.   

 

Again, the impeachment movement

This is just weird, and getting rapidly weirder. 

Conservatives' immaculately conceived Impeach-Obama movement seems to be jumping around and spreading like plagueish fleas from a medieval rat. Just days ago it was nowhere--nowhere to be seen, heard, or felt--and suddenly some idiot Texas tea-partying congressman takes the issue seriously and then some congressional clown from Michigan has a wet dream about it and now (thanks to Chait) I discover this rambling essay by Examiner columnist Noemie Emory in the Weekly Standard, which concludes rather dramatically with this suspense:   

Nixon died before Clinton hit his own spot of [impeachment] trouble, so nobody knows what Nixon would have told him, what Nixon would have said to Obama, or what Clinton now says to Obama, if he says anything. Or if Obama would listen. Or if Obama will find himself one of their number, in any way, or at any time soon.

This is like a Seinfeld episode: It's about nothing. There's nothing there, absolutely nothing but the immovable fact that lots of conservatives detest the man who's sitting in the White House. Emory's essay (and I hesitate calling it that; it's more roaming dissociation than essay) doesn't really deny that, it simply revisits the evil of Nixon and shadiness of Clinton and thereby leads ineluctably to the ominous conclusion of Obama's doom.

The only thing that makes this otherwise ignorable development significant is that Impeach Obama is catching on so fast it's likely to become a litmus test in GOP midterm primaries. The old birtherism goblin is perforce gone (what with the rabble's near coronation of foreign-born Ted) so the party's most devout crackpots must upgrade. How 'bout impeachment? Sounds good.

In fact, to me it sounds terrific. Keep hustling the crazy, boys. It's the least you can do for your party, and the absolute best thing you can do for our country.  

Hideously untouchable

The Washington Post, reporting on the Syrian government's latest atrocity:

The United States and Britain separately expressed deep concern [about the chemical attack], demanded an urgent and unfettered investigation by a United Nations team already in Syria and called for emergency consultations in the U.N. Security Council. They strongly condemned any use of chemical weapons and said anyone responsible must be held accountable.

Mere condemnations of sovereign brutality have become so de rigueur as to be almost unnoticeable, thus modifiers have become as imperative as the condemnations. We condemn the Syrian war criminals? Go blow, they'll say. Oh, we strongly condemn them? Well in that case that's literally one for the history books--but it still makes not one bloody bit of difference.

For the much larger and practical problem, of course, is this rhetorical business of "anyone responsible must be held accountable." How? By whom? In what fashion? The answers are as elusive as the rhetoric is essentially empty.

For all we know President Obama meant it when he drew a "red line," but it's for damn sure that he soon regretted drawing it, and he harbored no serious intentions of enforcing it. And now, subsequent to the send-some-spokesman-out-to-announce-small-arms-to-Syria-interventionism donnybrook, even his minor, unserious intentions have been swallowed by the cat.  

It's not that we're a paper tiger; it's just that we're played out and rather too busy re-ratcheting our customary indifference to the world. After Iraq and Afghanistan, we've had enough--and to the neocons who want more, they can thank themselves for having put the sword to all the "fun." In addition, the notion of coming to the militarized aid of radical Sunni Islamists hellbent on next slaughtering Americans seems to lack a good deal of domestic appeal.    

So we're left with "We strongly condemn this shit"--and then a Shakespearean aside, "But what else can we do?" 

Expand that consciousness!

The Note introduces a new contestant:

[A]fter his appearance today at a labor event in Iowa, [Howard Dean will] pop up in New Hampshire next month.... Whether Dean becomes the [progressives'] vehicle or not, there’s room to President Obama’s--and Hillary Clinton’s--left at the moment, on topics both foreign and domestic.

That is undeniably true. Yet the electoral "room" measures only about 4.5 percent squared (OK, I'll make it easy: about 20 percent), which for Dean should be a daunting, ahem, disadvantage.

Overkill

Thirty-five seems unreasonably harsh. Twenty would have both punished and sent the government's message, if punishment and message-sending--rather than vindictiveness--were in fact the purpose. Plus, for Private Manning to spend the next 32 years (given time served) in lockup will only deepen and perpetuate the pro-Manning, anti-surveillance forces--hence 35 seems strangely counterproductive as well. 

Manning "also will be credited with 112 days for the treatment he endured at a military jail," reports the NYT, "that the judge ruled was unlawful." Let's see, how many years did his criminal jailers receive?

And what can't be shaken--no matter the heaps of sentencing technicalities piled on--is what lies at the root of Manning's "crimes":

The materials that Private Manning gave to WikiLeaks include ... a video taken during an American helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 in which civilians were killed, including two journalists ... [and] documents exposing the abuse of detainees by Iraqi officers under the watch of American forces and reports showing that civilian deaths during the Iraq war were most likely significantly higher than official estimates.

Meanwhile, many of the actual perps of all this horror are enjoying pleasant retirements on government pensions. Go figure. And when you're done, you probably won't get "35."

Impeachment, the new birtherism

Now that foreign-born presidential-wannabe Ted Cruz has laid prostrate the maniacal Republican drivel of birtherism, it is--was--inevitable that some fresh maniacal drivel replace it. The fever requires feeding. Now lesser neurotic minds probably pondered the amping up of the old Obama-as-socialist-tyrant routine as a suitable whackjob replacement for birtherism, but in an inexpressibly charming stroke of pseudoconservative fate, Impeachment, instead, seems to have won the day.    

Enter, for instance, GOP congressman Kerry Bentivolio, who recently gathered up some "lawyers, Ph.Ds in history, and ... said, 'Tell me how I can impeach the president of the United States.'" Ah, to have been there, and taken note of the gentle, lawyerly euphemisms of: "Kerry, you are fucking nuts." Not to be deterred by the political inconvenience of impeachment generally requiring some evidence of an impeachable offense, however, Congressman Bentivolio still clings to his "dream."

But,   

Until we have evidence, you’re going to become a laughing stock if you’ve submitted the bill to impeach the president because, No. 1, you’ve got to convince the press. There are some people out there no matter what Obama does he’s still the greatest president they’ve ever had. That’s what you’re fighting.

Bonus points to Bentivolio. He not only debuted the new birtherism, but managed to work in the old bugaboo of the liberal media. The paranoid style is a wily one.

Al Jazeera America: Banned in Boston for all I know and damn near everywhere

As an American cable subscriber (Mediacom) I can watch, listen and learn from the Home Shopping Network's "Shaping Fashion by Tummie with Heather Thompson" as well as from infinite streams of something called "Bridezillas" on some network called "We."

But from Al Jazeera America I can see nothing, even though "it seemed to deliver" yesterday, in the NY Times' opinion, "on what it promised--serious, straightforward news."

I had already gotten hooked on Al Jazeera English's online coverage of the Egypt crisis, which, unfortunately, cut into my many hours of Tummie-pleasing enlightenment with Heather. But what the hell, cruel tradeoffs are an inescapable part of life. Yet now, not only is a local blackout of AJA inescapable too, even AJE's live-streaming is gone.

Still, there's cause for hope: 

A spokesman for Al Jazeera did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, but the head of social media for the new channel, Riyaad Minty, hinted about a possible solution. To those "who have lost the live streams," he wrote on Twitter, "We hear you. We’re working on it."

As for access to AJA anytime soon, on cable?

Well, there's always "Bridezillas."   

Now Lamar Alexander's under fire

Another GOP Senate establishmentarian looks down the barrel of a Tea Party threat. The Hill reports that "Tennessee state Rep. Joe Carr (R) announced Tuesday that he will challenge Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.) in the Republican primary."

To Alexander's immense credit, he's not cowering in the face of local Tea Party outage over his (execrable?) history of "compromise and bipartisanship." In a reelection op-ed, the senator is downright dismissive of their quackery:

I know that if you only have 45 votes and you need 60 senators to get something important done like balancing the budget and fixing the debt, then you have to work with other people--that is, IF you really care about solving the problem, IF you really want to get a result, instead of just making a speech.

This one's going to be entertaining.

Bill Kristol, he's trying, sort of

Bill Kristol, still thinking inside the nuthatch:

This is useful to think outside the box, not just accept the conventional wisdom.... If [Sarah Palin] wants to have a serious future in American politics, as opposed to giving speeches occasionally, causing a ruckus with Facebook posts, she should run for office.

God bless you, Bill, but that might necessitate her reading a briefing book or merely a newspaper, which means the "office" itself isn't the bridge that's too far, but just basic preparation.

Oh, and Bill, if you would after all like to read some conventional wisdom of the authentically wise variety, I've got some for you: Never combine "serious future" with any reference to Palin in the same sentence. Violation of this rule is what keeps you inside the nuthatch. 

The NSA and 2014

Chait:

[T]he House map will allow the Republican majority to survive with almost all white voters for a long time..... So the danger for Republicans isn’t that they’ll lose the House.... It’s that they’ll create an intra-party orthodoxy so strong it will prevent them from nominating a candidate who can distance himself from Steve King’s racial ideology and Paul Ryan’s economic ideology. In the meantime, they can inflict an awful lot of damage to the country at very little cost to themselves.

I'm not quite as pessimistic as Chait regarding the House map; a major meltdown of the debt-ceiling core might well engender just enough voter condemnation to doom just enough GOP Housers. There is no doubt, however, about the slimness of these odds or the narrowness of that path.

Even granted optimal electoral conditions, the midterm is going to be tight for Obama & Dems. Yet the prospect of "optimal" is slipping away--especially among younger voters, whose approval of the president is dropping, quite possibly because of the sustained NSA controversy. Now while it's true that younger voters can be notoriously unreliable as voters, it's also true that they're a vital element in any effective Democratic coalition.   

In other words, the political need for a civil-libertarian-leaning resolution of the continuing NSA squabble is virtually self-evident. And if you cringe at the notion of the NSA having to pull in its horns a bit, just look at it this way: Can you imagine any greater threat to the welfare and security of the United States than another two years of controlling Republican nihilism?  

Go south, young demagogue

This just gets better:

Cruz said his mother told him that he could claim his [Canadian] citizenship if he ever wanted to, but that he never pursued it and thought the matter would never come up would remain hidden would go away was settled.

Eh?

Already tight as a Drum

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum finally snaps, as I have been snapping for the last several months:

If you express anything short of absolute condemnation of everything the NSA has done, your Twitter feed quickly fills up with hysterical proclamations from the emo-progs that you're a right-wing shill, a government lackey, a useful idiot for the slave state, and an obvious fool. Conversely, if you criticize the NSA's surveillance programs, your Twitter feed quickly fills up with equally hysterical proclamations from the O-Bots that you hate Obama, you've always hated Obama, and you're probably a racist swine who's been waiting ever since 2009 for a chance to take down the nation's first black president....

I'll confess that although the leftier-than-thou types have always been around, I've long been skeptical of the idea that Obama has a core group of supporters from 2008 who really do consider him The One, a shining beacon of light who can do no wrong. But I'm the one who was wrong.

National Review's Charles Cooke posts an hilariously sympathetic note: "Welcome to my world, Kevin.... I have been called a 'racist' for so long now that I’m almost looking forward to a Hillary presidency so that I can be called a 'sexist' instead."

Yet it's even worse than Drum and Cooke observe. The charge of racism as affixed to Obama's occasional critics who have largely and enthusiastically supported him since 2007 is so conspicuously vapid, even the "O-Bots," or so my experience suggests, are reluctant to throw it around, at least in my direction. Instead, they essentially argue that any criticism of Obama--and their argument is always made on a piece-by-piece basis, thus providing maximum defensive flexibility--is just hopelessly ignorant. My, his, her, their criticism--anybody's criticism, from left, right, or middle, on any given topic--simply fails to grasp the radiant but on occasion obscured brilliance of the wickedly strategic Obama administration's position.  

The paradoxical pity of such cultish arrogance is that it's injurious to the very administration that the unmitigated loyalists support. No administration is well served by bloc-subservience--the paradigmatic proof of that being, for all time, the George W. Bush administration. Any great presidency--a category which Obama still has a shot at--not only asks for disagreement, it demands it, for it's the only protection the president has against a bubbled cluelessness and journeys down very dark alleys.

In short, Obama's occasional critics are the best friends he has. And indeed, as a student of history, Obama knows that better than anyone.      

On Egypt policy, Hobson's in charge

Josh Rogin reports that "the Obama administration has decided to temporarily suspend the disbursement of most direct military aid ... to the Egyptian government while it conducts a broad review of the relationship," although the administration "won’t publicly acknowledge all aspects of the aid suspension and maintains its rhetorical line that no official coup determination has been made."

This would seem to be one of those rare significant policy shifts that's imbued with no significant consequences. The GOP will grouse, of course--it's "too cute by half, leaving the U.S. with little leverage in Egypt and appearing to condone gross violations of human rights in the process," said a Republican operative--but at present the U.S. can either apply pressure or not, with just about equal influence. Meaning none. 

After decades of a Metternichian mindset followed by the rudest of awakenings in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States is finally growing up. Being a world power no longer by definition means "powerful"--and no amount of neocon swagger or avowed "moral authority' can change that equation. Tolstoy observed that kings are but history's slaves, and the culminating wreckage of the Middle East's history is proving--with respect to President Obama's optionless predicament--correct.  

Which is what puzzles me when it comes to passages such this, from the NYT's Roger Cohen:

For the United States and Europe, [Egypt] amounts to a colossal strategic failure. Nothing ... was more important than getting Egypt right. President Obama, who began his presidency with an attempt to build bridges to the Arab and Muslim world through a speech in Cairo, has seen his greatest failure in that very city. Post-Tahrir Egypt stands now as a monument to America’s declining influence in the world, even in a nation receiving $1.5 billion in annual aid.

That seems both naive and confused. Obama's "failure" is Egypt's failure, just as Truman never "lost" China. What's more, Cohen concedes as much when he notes that Egypt's implosive chaos is a "monument to America's declining influence in the world"--an enervation that preceded Egyptians' indifference to Obama's sound, bridge-building advice.    

Cut the aid, suspend the aid, continue the aid, whatever. The Egyptian military will do only what it perceives is in its own best interests, in large part because the once-puppeteering United States is now just another outsider.