PMC Commentary

"Definitively shredded," yet ...

Emily Bazelon, of Yale Law School and Slate, is as agreeably intrigued by Judge Leon's ruling on "time-sensitivity" as I was, although she ends on a note that seems to me rather questionable, if not flatly dubious:

[I]n the most breathtaking portion of his opinion, Judge Leon says that the government “does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack” or otherwise aided the government in any time-sensitive objective. The government presented evidence about “three recent episodes,” but none “involved any apparent urgency.” Next comes a devastating footnote: The government could have presented more evidence in secret, only to the judge. But it didn’t. What about the 54 thwarted terrorist attacks that some NSA backers have proclaimed? Judge Leon says no one showed any proof of them to him. I know doubts about the veracity of the government’s claims have been raised before today. But it’s amazing to see them so definitively shredded by the judge whom the government had every reason to persuade.

It’s in part because of this woeful showing that Judge Leon granted the motion of the plaintiff.... That mean he thinks they’ll likely win once the case is fully presented, by both sides, in later proceedings.

"Definitively shredded" seems about right. Yet the deference shown by the judicial branch to the executive in the area of national security has been strikingly broad and rarely refused in recent years.

It's understandable that the courts have been reluctant to deprive the executive of any useful weapons in its "war" on terrorism, but courts--probably--are also simply unwilling to risk blame on themselves, should a major attack come in the wake of having upheld some strain of strict constitutionalism. Hence the courts thrust the duty to censure the executive back onto the vaunted, collective wisdom of The People, or, God help us, our representatives in Congress.

 

A real 'Thought Leader,' and a real man

I don't know whom David Brooks had in mind when he penned this morning's whimsical "Thought Leader" column-- the TL being, in his youth, according to Brooks, "[un]armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some ... for attention," yet "In the [aged] fading of the light, he is gravely concerned about the way everything is going to hell"--but I do know this. The most authentic Thought Leader I ever met, and the closest to true intellectual greatness I ever came, was one Leon Keyserling.

Not long before his death in the last century, an economist friend and I met Mr. Keyserling and his gracious wife for lunch in Washington D.C., where Keyserling had labored as an FDR New Dealer and later as chairman of President Truman's Council of Economic Advisers. Needless to say, this giant of Keynesianism had arrived at superannuation before I was ever graced by his hospitality, but it was instantly clear that he was never unarmed with fascinating ideas or ever in any way bothered by the professional "snark" of other TLs.     

Keyserling was class on stilts, if I may be permitted to so aptly cliche his bearing. His erudition sprang effortlessly and unpretentiously; it was simply a part of the man, not a show. He had nothing to prove by then, and something, I'm not quite sure what, but something else in him suggested to me that he had never felt any personal "proof" was required. His love of ideas spoke for itself.

Perhaps the most telling part of our lunch conversation came when he asked me what two dead persons I would wish to converse with, given the metaphysical opportunity. In a second I answered, "Hitler and Stalin," because of my fascination with the political leadership of pure evil. Just as quickly Mrs. Keyserling recoiled, "Oh my, I couldn't abide those monsters." But Leon, still shoveling salad, said "No, no, I understand, I understand." What he understood was the necessity to understand--the need to know why "everything" has always tended to "[go] to hell."

It appears Mr. Brooks never met him. For if he had, his column today would have come with at least one critical exception.

 

"Ghastly" AND "inefficacious"?

Quite aside from D.C. District Court Judge Richard Leon's many constitutional objections to the NSA's sweeping data-collection program--an "indiscriminate" and "arbitrary" Fourth Amendment breach, "almost Orwellian" in reach, he wrote--it was his questioning of its pragmatic usefulness that seemed especially damning: 

[T]urning to the efficacy prong, the Government does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature.

That strikes at the heart of the government's repeated justification of the program and undermines its pleading for constitutional latitude, which, since the constitution is no suicide pact, the courts have often granted in national security cases. But here, the government's inability to buttress its legal theories with expositions of practical outcomes leaves it looking pragmatically naked and legally feckless.  

Is that, in fact, the case? I can't really say, for I'm neither a constitutional scholar nor privy to presidential briefings. And I learned some time ago that the blogosphere is likely the unworthiest venue in which to litigate the matter. The ACLU (though not a plaintiff in the D.C. case) may be capable of mustering intellectual detachment--which constitutional questions absolutely require--but the blogosphere is so weighted with ideological and partisan baggage ... Well, let's just say it's downright mortifying to stumble across, in the blogosphere's vast expanses, once-upon-a-time GWB-detesters who now defend warrantless snooping, as well as once-upon-a-time GWB-defenders who now detest it.  

Which leaves us with the eminence of the NY Times' editorial conclusion: "For seven years, these constitutional issues have been adjudicated under 'a cloak of secrecy,' as Judge Leon put it. Now, that cloak has finally been lifted in a true court of law"--where these constitutional issues have always belonged.

And one doesn't have to love or admire or even defend Edward Snowden to be thankful for his cloak-lifted light. 

 

Yet another "amusing development"?

Chait:

One of the more amusing developments in the Obamacare debate has been watching conservatives turn from denouncing the health-care law for its lack of high-deductible insurance to denouncing the health-care law for its high-deductible insurance....

Episodes like this one have grown so familiar that they’ve lost all capacity to surprise.

Or amuse, much, since so much of good comedy relies on the element of surprise. 

I'm not sure what I'd call my general reaction to conservative nincompoopery these days. A weariness, I suppose, or something akin to it, but rarely anything approaching despair. It takes a bit of mental conditioning, but it helps to recall, upon reading each fresh piece of contemporary conservatives' silliness, that this too shall pass.

As Chait points out, they have no political program and no coherent philosophy of government and no anything else but a whole lot of No's--and in American politics, that's a destiny of doom.    

But good God they're a tedious bunch. There are times when one thinks they'll never shut up and they'll never go away. And indeed one would be right in thinking that. They've always been with us, as even cursory historical surveys of the paranoid style aptly demonstrate. At the moment they're merely experiencing a peak due in no small part--and this only underscores the pseudoconservative base's profound shallowness--to the president of the United States' skin color.

Still, they would have gone nearly as berserk over a woman Democratic president, or for that matter any Democratic president, since the only true foundation of their belief structure is that they and only they should be permitted legitimacy and power.  

One can't argue with that, or debate it, or constructively attempt any dissuasion of it, since it's as crazy as it is Neanderthalic--and, while perhaps mildly amusing, also damn tiring.

 

Dear Francis: Now that hurts

Via Media Matters, Pope Francis, responding to the right's hateful attacks on resurrected Christian caring as some sort of devilishly Obamian Marxist plot, reminds an Italian newspaper that in his opinion "Marxist ideology is wrong," but on the other hand "I have met many Marxists in my life who are good people, so I don't feel offended."

Now that's just cruel, Francis. Very cruel. 

Right wingers simply cannot enjoy their malicious tantrums if you smile and tolerantly pat them on their simple-minded little heads. They particularly delight in punching up--which, let's face it, is the only intellectual direction they can swing--hoping their target will sink ever down to their level. 

So when you, Francis, absorb their windbagging punches by smiling the smile of the condescendingly tolerant and refuse to respond in kind, you but make a little hell for these hotheaded imbeciles.   

Is that really the charitable, Christian thing to do? I don't know, Francis. Geez, I'm still trying to figure out why Fox Business' Stuart Varney was upset by what he called your "neo-socialism," given that He for whom you vicar was the Ur-socialist. 

 

One or two "abysmal fools"

The Des Moines Register did some polling and found that "Iowa Republicans are wowed by Paul Ryan ... [who] is wildly popular here with a 73 percent favorability rating, a surprise finding that reveals he’s at the forefront of potential 2016 GOP presidential candidates in the nation’s kickoff voting state."

An aside. Yesterday I mentioned I had just read Nicholas Wapshott's admirable book on the titanic J.M. Keynes-Friedrich Hayek battle, the latter of whom, though perhaps not as idolized by Paul Ryan as Ryan has openly idolized Ayn Rand, still ranks among the congressman's more important, umm, philosophical influences.

Yet Ms. Rand, rather delightfully, wrote (according to Wapshott) in the margins of her copy of The Road to Serfdom (Hayek's frenzied anticipation of Keynesian intelligence as a leading indicator of utterly savage totalitarianism) that Friedrich was a "God damn fool," an "abysmal fool," an "ass," and a "total, complete, vicious bastard."

Don't you just love the intellectual coherence and smooth interconnectedness of the far right--and therefore Paul Ryan? 

 

Yeah this is a groaner, but I couldn't resist

The NYT caption to this NYT photo: "Former Representative Bob Dold, second from left, in Libertyville, Ill."

He's awfully young, isn't he? Not to mention small, and one of those rare ultraconservatives to have undergone a sex change.

 

The GOP never disappoints

The Murray-Ryan budget accord was a textbook case of some truly nasty zero-summing. It was (is) bad economics, inhumane policy and blockheaded politics for Democrats, hence it was classic Republican economics, vintage Republican policy and, politically, a brilliant stroke by the GOP.

Republicans entered negotiations with one all-consuming objective: avoid another publicly despised, party-imploding government shutdown. That singular GOP goal loomed far larger than any adherence to sequestration or Pentagon-fattening or phony deficit-slaying, especially given the dangerous proximity of the preceding shutdown. So naturally Democrats obliged Republicans by agreeing to stiff more than a million desperate Americans--and at Christmastime, no less--so that the government that was shafting them could stay open so as to continue being of no help.  

In brief, Democrats possessed delectable political reasons to force another shutdown that Republicans would never permit. That, anyway, is my take, and the GOP's acceptance of higher spending only confirmed, I would argue, the GOP's beggary for mercy. But Democrats came up characteristically short in stretching Republicans on the negotiating rack--hell, they even managed to make Republicans look like the reasonable ones and themselves like the scandalously craven. That was quite a feat, akin to Japan repo-ing Guam on the U.S.S. Missouri.   

But wait, what's this we hear? Haaallelujah! Haaaallelujah! Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelu-u-u-jah ...

We, as a caucus, along with our Senate counterparts, are going to meet and discuss what it is we want to get out of the debt limit. We don’t want 'nothing' out of the debt limit. We’re going to decide what it is we can accomplish out of this debt limit fight.

Thus spake Zero-summed-tootsie Paul Ryan, on "Fox News Sunday." God I love this guy.

My enduring love assumes, of course, that Democrats won't repeat in the next debt-limit showdown their shamefully blockheaded politics of the budget accord. My guess is, they won't; on this, at least, they now have a record of holding firm.

And yet as unspeakably stupid as another debt crisis would be for Republicans, they may very well prance right into it, per that Randian Nietzsche of overreach, Paul Ryan.    

 

"The neo-paleo-Keynesian counter-counter-counterrevolution," maybe, but still the same old resistance

In his blog (or is that "on" his blog?; I've never quite mastered the blogospheric preposition) Krugman applauds the "strong revival" among economists--an important distinction--"of some old ideas in macroeconomics. It’s not just new classical macroeconomics that’s in retreat; we’re also seeing, within the Keynesian camp, a distinct if polite rise of neopaleo-Keynesianism."

I don't much follow the cat-fighting among professional economists, which I imagine is no less disgracefully petty than that among other high-brow academics. But I would hazard an outsider's guess that some of the older Keynesianism is back in fashion because of generational recycling of ideas. A few decades ago, politics reigned supreme in the discipline of history, for instance, until baby-booming assistant professors discovered race, gender and class as The Explanations of All Historical Change; politics was out (as nothing but old white guy history) and they quickly gutted analyses of "class"--too Marxist (conceived by an old white guy), as well of course as undeferential to race and gender. This rendered the discipline monotonously predictable. I'm confident, though, that in time freshly minted assistant professors, in desperate searches for journal material and thus professional survival, will rediscover politics and economics as having had at least a little something to do with the past.

Well don't I sound disgracefully petty, not to mention frightfully digressive, for after reading Krugman's post this morning I merely wanted to note something I read last night, from Nicholas Wapshott's wonderful volume, Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics. Actually this came straight from J.M. Keynes himself, in his Means to Prosperity, a forerunner of his masterpiece, The General Theory:

[W]ar has been the only object of governmental loan-expenditure on a large scale which governments have considered respectable. In all the issues of peace they are timid, over-cautious, half-hearted, without perseverance or determination, thinking of a loan as a liability and not as a link in the transformation of the community's surplus resources, which will otherwise be wasted, into useful capital assets.

Thus Keynes--in 1933, a crucial watershed in more than European economics--admonished governments, especially his own (Great Britain), for their chronic failures in addressing domestic human needs with the same daring fervor that they had always unleashed on foreign foes. (Keynes, by the way, saw right away in the aftermath of the first world war the promise of another, because of the stupidly punishing economics of reparations being practiced by the victors.)  

How little has changed. How much we seem back where we were. Eighty years later, the "new classical macroeconomics" is indeed in retreat among economists, yet governments still cowardly fret about deficits while still in the viciously lingering grip of recession; they're still "timid, over-cautious, half-hearted, without perseverance or determination" when it comes to what Keynes called "the tasks of peace."

And that's my Sunday morning lay sermon on economics, which I'll cut short lest I move to my political soapbox, whose message, at any rate--and certainly after 80 years--is self-evident.

 

All I want for Christmas is for Fox News to shut the fuck up

Sorry to be so tardy to such pressing issues as the racial identity of a mythical character whose sole, ethereal reason for being is to bring delight and wonder to children of all racial identities throughout the globe.

I guess I assumed that even the diseased nitwits at Fox News could muster up enough decency to leave Santa Claus alone, for Christ's sake. When they instead engaged, I withdrew. For after a week of reading about Fox News' type of absolute perfection in right-wing politics--the indescribably insane Rep. Steve Stockman--my nutso quota was full.  

But Fox News believes in pioneering fresh bounds of insanity, rather than merely promoting that of others. Hence the political press then feels obligated to interview, say, Harvard scholars to help disentangle Fox's gnarled pixilation. To wit, "because the mythical Santa isn’t real, he doesn’t have a race," explains Professor Laura Nasrallah to Politico.

I repeat, explains Professor Laura Nasrallah--to grownups.

Am I also wrong to assume that there's now nothing left--no last, unmolested symbol of goodness--for Fox News to sully through its grotesque politicization? It seems to me they have, over the years, now covered the gamut. 

But, yes, I'm probably wrong to assume any such thing. Because I am, I'm reasonably sure, not nearly as fucking nuts as Fox News, and that puts me at a distinct disadvantage in foreseeing just how fucking nuts that network can yet get.  

 

Huckabee righteously reconnects

In 2008, Mike Huckabee "had so little money to live on that he had to leave the campaign to give paid speeches."

Asked if he was financially comfortable enough now to give up his lucrative television job [and run again for the presidency], Mr. Huckabee, who lives in a beachfront home on the Florida gulf coast, conceded that this was "a big issue."

I recall Mr. Huckabee assuring supporters in 2008 that he was destined to win that year--there was just no doubt about it--because He was on his side. It appears the Arkansas preacher since revised his fundamental faith: Look out for Numero Uno, baby, and trust not in destiny or garbled communications from On High, which can work in not-so-mysterious ways.

Yet now that Floridian Huckabee owns a beachfront home, the Lord, I suspect, will resume His faith in Huckabee, or so we'll soon hear. Jacksonian democracy's jettisoning of property requirements for the franchise was one thing, but the Creator of billions of galaxies still insists that His earthly saviors first possess a respectable bourgeois portfolio.

Mysterious, indeed. But one thing's for sure. Pope Francis has it all wrong.

 

A reasonable agreement, and a shocking one

Serendipity.

It seems Salon's Brian Beutler is thematically on the same page as my previous post (with some slight difference, on immigration reform's prospects):

It remains true that the biggest differences on the right are strategic, not substantive. And I think the poisonous environment in the conservative movement--and specifically the bad blood between GOP leaders and groups like Heritage Action--has obscured the fact that in many instances the two factions’ incentives still align.

And shock.

For it also seems--I'm beggin' ya, please pray for this wretched sinner--that I agree with Erick Erickson:

[Boehner's] histrionics surprised a great many people. What he is doing though is strategic.... His temper tantrum today had very little to do with the present fight, but the next fight.... He’s been staffing up for the immigration fight in the House. Today, he fired the first real shots in that battle. He’s done as Speaker. This is all legacy building now. And if he has to cry on television and attack his conservative base, he’ll do it.

Parenthetically, another slight difference with Beutler. In his piece, he "yearn[s] to be proven wrong." In my earlier piece, I didn't--but only because I think the GOP has long since moved us beyond such innocent yearning.

 

A question of timing

Yesterday, as the GOP (and we along with it) suffered just another day of its interminable "civil war," it was for some reason sensationalistically newsworthy that John Boehner exploded: "Frankly, I think [the tea party goons] are misleading their followers.... And frankly, I just think that they've lost all credibility."

And frankly, I can't imagine why any Rhett Butler conservative would any longer give a damn about this cranky, immature, delusional, conniving Scarlett O'Hara of a hopelessly pseudoconservative party.

Or, in more straightforward terms, I question Boehner & Co.'s timing--the vile belatedness, that is, of this soi-disant Old Guard, whom the older guardians, say, DDE and Everett Dirksen, would scarcely recognize as their own ...

Just as I question their primordial ethics: Where was these liberated conservatives' outrage--any outrage--when their party plotted from President Obama's Day One to undermine national unity, sabotage recovery efforts, deprive millions of healthcare, screw the vast unemployed, and in general prolong the nation's misery?

Was any of that conservative, be it of an older, newer, or any other variety? To paraphrase Mr. Boehner, Hell no it wasn't. Establishment Republicans were wholly complicit in Radical Republicans' betrayal of America, and, to paraphrase the speaker once again, I just think they lost all credibility then--right from the get-go.

What, then, are these outraged conservatives actually outraged about now? America's plight, perhaps? Pshaw. Nothing so petty could upset their tranquil indifference to suffering--unless of course the suffering is their own. They have long brooded over their lost internal status and thus are presently making their revanchist play--not for America's benefit, but for their own.

Have "grounded" establishmentarians differed substantially, in policymaking terms, from the lunatic radicals? Certainly as a matter of overall political survival the party's John Boehners would move forward on immigration reform. Other than that, though, have they demonstrated any friendly familiarity with modern macroeconomics? or any antidotal hostility to the Reaganite poison of always problematic government? or any attenuation of the GOP's insane opposition to higher taxes?    

Nope.

Establishment players had years to back off from the madness, yet they only encouraged, fostered and caressed it. Now, Boehner-embodied, they're throwing a hissy fit. But ask not for whom the fit is thrown, for ...

 

Two words

Krugman's Sanity's take, in two words, on government's spending contractions while still in the grip of economic sluggishness: "awesomely destructive."

What makes it awesome? That American government--from local to federal--has pulled back at a rate "unprecedented" since Korean War-demobilization, and "when the private sector is still deleveraging," no less, "and interest rates are at the zero lower bound" (that is, it'll never again be cheaper to borrow, so as to invest).

Needless to add, "awesomely destructive" is alternatively known as "Republican-imposed policy," which Republican pols are (incredibly) now defending louder than ever. Government must be drowned for the economy to breathe, they cry, just as they're squealing that their beautifully destructive sequestration is melting (which, like all Republican squealing, is way overblown--but please, do let them proceed).

Yet what they're actually saying--what they're actually admitting--is that they are responsible for the sluggish recovery. Austerity has ruled government spending since the uptick of Obama's stimulus (see Krugman's graph), and with austerity has come precisely the slow growth they decry. This isn't really Obama's economy. It's McConnell's and Boehner's.

This is also not a complicated story, nor for Democrats should it be a difficult one to tell. Republicans have consistently strangled our best empirical hopes--from the Jobs Act to SNAP to extended unemployment benefits--for a more rapid recovery. There, that's the story, in less than 30 seconds, with a morality tale (e.g., slashed food stamps) thrown in.

And yet how often do you hear it? How often do you hear from Democrats that this economy, which is roundly condemned by Republicans, is largely owned by same?

 

From RedState, a must-ramble

Erick Erickson Presents ...

An Epic Survey of Conservatism's Travails and Triumphs over lo these past few decades ...

Starring, Bill Clinton as the anti-hero, George W. Bush as the Villain, and those happy-go-lucky United Citizens of the Supreme Court as the Dudley Do-Rights of Virtue UnBound ...

Follow Erick along as he depicts the creeping-to-leaping madness of pseudoconservatism as a quasi-coherent movement of some perceivable value to anyone but the movement's exploitative Ericksons ...

Thrill to, and perhaps even spill your breakfast over, Erick's directorial phantasmagoria of cluttered thinking and horrendous history--all delivered with a dazzling prolixity that rises and yea verily rises evermore to an orgasmic conclusion ...

Yes you won't want to miss this Erick Erickson Production that all his friends are talking about, and which is, as they say, a real piece of work.