PMC Commentary

Snowden's "Live Chat" Twitter feed

I haven't read that many submitted questions yet, but the best so far is: "Who do like in the super bowl?"

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This one is probably for real: "Is there anything you know about the USGovernment withholding info on extraterrestrials?"

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Snowden's live chat with questioners was tardy, causing one to hilariously ask, Isn't Russian 8GMT [3 pm Eastern] the same as Germany's 8GMT?

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Snowden allays mass panic; to wit, "is [it] possible for our democracy to recover from the damage NSA spying has done to our liberties?" I genuinely feel sorry for such angst-afflicted souls. At any rate, Snowden reassures her: "Yes."

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Assuming Snowden is correct on this, he has an exceptionally valid point:

One of the things that has not been widely reported by journalists is that whistleblower protection laws in the US do not protect contractors in the national security arena. There are so many holes in the laws, the protections they afford are so weak, and the processes for reporting they provide are so ineffective that they appear to be intended to discourage reporting of even the clearest wrongdoing. If I had revealed what I knew about these unconstitutional but classified programs to Congress, they could have charged me with a felony.

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I hope this one elicits an answer: "Why did you not restrict your leaks to what you considered clear NSA violations of US law? Why expose international programs?"

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Snowden's response site is infuriating; it frequently spins and reloads--only to proffer no updates, no new answers, no new nothing--just spinning and blank reloadings.

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This question is probably from the extraterrestrials guy: "Do you know another truth about the 9/11 than the official story?"

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Truly incredible technology for a super-hero-anti-spook. Snowden's site is slow, sloow, sloooow. It's like the old dial-up, only connected by string to tin cans.

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Snowden's sort-of, quasi-answer to the "international programs" question: "When we’re sophisticated enough to be able to break into any device in the world we want to (up to and including Angela Merkel’s phone, if reports are to be believed), there’s no excuse to wasting our time collecting the call records of grandmothers in Missouri." Translation: we wouldn't have known about the NSA's full capabilities had data on international spying not been published. 

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One questioner asks that which has really frosted my butt since the entire Snowden affair began: "Do u regret not betraying USA when Bush was prez knowing u would've been hailed as a hero by same media"--and I would add, the same partisans--"now condemning you?"

I ordinarily overlook hypocrisy as just standard-issue politics, but I've read so much of it from folks I know, at an empirical and intellectual as well as a gut level, would have praised Snowden under Bush, but have condemned him under Obama. And that hypocrisy has been unavoidably remarkable.  

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Snowden erects an insurmountable hurdle to satisfactory domestic reform:

we need to recognize that national laws are not going to solve the problem of indiscriminate surveillance. A prohibition in Burundi isn’t going to stop the spies in Greenland. We need a global forum, and global funding, committed to the development of security standards that enforce our right to privacy not through law, but through science and technology. The easiest way to ensure a country’s communications are secure is to secure them world-wide.

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Q: "what’s the worst and most realistic harm from bulk collection of data? Why do you think it outweighs national security?"

Snowden's response is largely a repetition of his WaPo interview, but this abridgement is worth posting:

Fundamentally, a society in which the pervasive monitoring of the sum of civil activity becomes routine is turning from the traditions of liberty toward what is an inherently illiberal infrastructure of preemptive investigation, a sort of quantified state where the least of actions are measured for propriety. I don’t seek to pass judgment in favor or against such a state in the short time I have here, only to declare that it is not the one we inherited, and should we as a society embrace it, it should be the result of public decision rather than closed conference.

See, however, my recap of Sean Wilentz's cynicism about Snowden's overall assessment.

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I guess I missed something. Snowden: "current, serving officials of our government are so comfortable in their authorities that they’re willing to tell reporters on the record that they think the due process protections of the 5th Amendment of our Constitution are outdated concepts."

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Snowden's final pitch:

even the President now agrees our surveillance programs are going too far, gathering massive amounts of private records on ordinary Americans who have never been suspected of any crime. This violates our constitutional protection against unlawful searches and seizure. Collecting phone and email records for every American is a waste of money, time and human resources that could be better spent pursuing those the government has reason to suspect are a serious threat.

The constitutional questions remains, however, and any intel hawk would tell you that wasteful data is wasteful only until it's needed, relevant, and valuable. As both an intel and constitutional layman, I couldn't begin to authoritatively demarcate legally valid data from the justifiably banned.

But it's noteworthy that Snowden, too, dodged the actual question, which is a very old one, as old as liberal democracy: "They say it’s a balance of privacy and safety. I think spying makes us less safe. do you agree?"

Snowden addressed this by conceding merely that "Intelligence agencies do have a role to play." But what of the balance? What's is its precise tipping point? When exactly does safety cross the line and violate legitimate privacy and civil liberties?

I'm still troubled by Snowden's earlier remark that, ultimately, only vigorous international governance of intelligence capabilities can answer such questions. That, we plainly will never see. It's utopian. That renders Snowden & Co.'s ultimate answer forever unatttainable--meaning no satisfactory reforms, in their view, can ever be passed at home. Thus grounds for permanent paranoia.

 

"What are they smoking?" indeed

Book of Virtues (smugness being the supreme one) author Bill Bennett and his "Morning in America" radio sidekick Christopher Beach presumably gave this a lot of thought, and this is what they came up with, in "What Are They Smoking?":

The logic is dumbfounding. For many years, health-conscious liberals have waged a deafening, public war against cigarettes. Smoking bans in public places like restaurants and bars have been enacted in states all over the country.... Yet, when it comes to smoking marijuana? Crickets.

It's the analogy that's dumbfounding.

One can still get legally stoned on alcohol in many restaurants and every bar, and though temperance fanatics no doubt exist in some "health-conscious," earth-motherly liberal circles, I'm not aware of liberals en masse advocating a ban on getting libationally stupid, which in no way affects others' health. Nor, however, am I aware of liberalism's marijuana-decriminalization efforts embracing any advocacy of a teetotaler's right to light up a stupefying doobie at Applebee's, which might very well affect others' health. Hence what Bennett and Beach find in such hypocritical conflict is, in logical fact, in perfect accord.  

 

A Carson flashback

Karnak, mystically pondering and then announcing envelope's content: "Like all super PACs, [Priorities USA] would be barred from coordinating spending and strategy with Mrs. Clinton if she entered the presidential race."

Blows envelope open.

Removes slip.

Reads text: "Name an arse, a farce and a parse."

 

Not so fast, Andrew

I just finished reading that Sullivan "just finished reading an article in The New Republic [by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz] and feel the need to take a shower." More profitable would have been for both gentlemen to have grabbed a dictionary of political philosophical terms, for Wilentz's original ambiguity about what constitutes "the modern liberal state" no doubt contributed to Sullivan's soiled overreaction.

In another context I touched on Wilentz's takedown of Snowden, Assange and Greenwald here. My principal and inexcusably unspoken objection to it was Wilentz's assertion that the threesome "despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it." I cringed at that early point in Wilentz's piece, for he failed to immediately explicate the term--"modern liberal state"--nor anywhere did he follow up with any sort of clarification. That absence of clarity, I knew, would compel cries of derision from the threesome's defenders (which in some ways includes myself). And sure enough, Sullivan obliged: 

Sean Wilentz’s attempted "exposure" of Glenn Greenwald, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden is so incoherent, muddled, and, in the end, laughably trite that I actually forced myself to read it again. On the second reading, it just got worse. Somehow, opposing the NSA’s unprecedented surveillance is an attack on liberalism. Yep, you read that right. Somehow, a trio of very different people, an activist, a journalist and a whistle-blower/criminal, with transparently very different backgrounds, politics and agendas, all form something terribly dangerous to the liberal state.

Maybe I'm misreading Sullivan, and if so, I extend my apologies. But it seems as though he thinks Wilentz is talking about liberals' liberalism, rather than liberal democracy, which is what Wilientz is actually talking about, and which (admittedly) vaguely holds that the social contract between the people and their government can entail a "surveillance state" to a democratically approved extent.

Snowden himself has conceded the legitimacy of such an arrangement. Wilentz, however, simply doesn't believe Snowden's recent protestations of ideological innocence or purity--as a political historian, Wilentz smells a grudge against President Obama--and his disbelief extends to those of Greenwald and Assange's as well.

That's pretty much it. That's essentially what Wilentz's meandering is all about. These three men, no matter what they might say now to appear more reasonable, would never, in Wilentz's view, "hand the state modern surveillance powers, even if they came wrapped in all sorts of rules and regulations that would constrain their abuse" ... because they are paranoid libertarians with an itch for the anarchic.

Which stands in ideological opposition to the liberal state--not the "liberal state."

 

Where there's a way there's a Will

Two years ago National Review's resident commentator on constitutional law, Matthew Franck, remarked with borderline contempt on George Will's "strange turn" and "mystifying evolution" on the matter of judicial activism, his evolution being that he was now making arguments "that the George Will of ten or twenty years ago would have greeted with withering derision." Concluded Franck: "[I]t is preposterous that [Will] could have been right in 1985, 1988, 1990, and 2005--and also be right today."

Not a problem. Though Will once held that conservative doctrine is a rather musty old thing, prudently but unfashionably clinging to universal truths and an ageless wisdom, Will now sees that conservatism must be nimble--and, if necessary, changeable in a wholesale way. When, for example, its professed fidelity to empirical evidence becomes inconvenient--say, evidence of global warming--one simply molests the statistics to "prove" that a fastidious prejudice can indeed trump irrefutable science.

Or, suppose that for decades conservative wisdom held that legislative majoritarianism should trump judicial activism. Let's further suppose that throughout these decades of cherished belief, conservative politics were on the electoral rise and left-leaning jurists were dominating the courts. For conservatives, this would be a most happy confluence of circumstances--one that just happened to align with universal truth. Democratic surges, good; judicial activism, bad.

But then let us suppose that the combined bugaboos of demographic diversity and horribly gone-wrong conservative policies began dooming conservatism's majoritarian ethic; yet--hello, what's this?--conservatively appointed jurists were now dominating the courts, and perhaps for decades more.    

What to do? What ever is Will to do?

You got it. Time for some wholesale changeability in ancient verities, time for Will to argue that democratic surges are bad, judicial activism is good; that "Conservatives clamoring for judicial restraint, meaning deference to legislatures, are waving a banner unfurled a century ago by progressives eager to emancipate government, freeing it to pursue whatever collective endeavors it fancies, sacrificing individual rights to a spurious majoritarian ethic."

My dear Mr. Franck, there's nothing "mystifying" about Will's agility. It's older than the myth of unflinching conservative fidelity. It's called disingenuousness. 

 

A note on Krugman's note

In his blog post, "A Note on the Political Economy of Populism," Paul Krugman argues the inseparability of smarter macroeconomic policy and Obama's attack on inequality, and in doing so he strikes a political sentiment I've been brooding over for a year:

[T]he public doesn’t "get" macroeconomics; lines like "American families are having to tighten their belts, so the government should too" still resonate. You could blame Obama for not using the bully pulpit to teach the nation why this is wrong, and I wish he had made more of a stand. Still, the fact is that this is just a hard story to get across--God knows, half the macroeconomics professors in America don’t seem able to understand it--and no politician has ever managed to do it. Consider public opinion in 1936, just after FDR had won a smashing reelection victory. Did the public give credit to his heterodox macro policies, and favor their continuation? No.

And, as Krugman further notes, FDR paid for backsliding in the public's direction. Always a fiscal conservative at heart, he reverted disastrously to neoclassical economics in '37, whose predictable outcome earned him an electoral asskicking in '38. His successor, HST, also failed to fully embrace, or even understand, Keynesianism. In a 1972 interview, Truman's chief economic advisor and dedicated Keynesian, Leon Keyserling, recalled the president saying, "Leon, you are the greatest persuader I ever knew. But nobody can ever convince me that the government can spend a dollar that it's not got."     

Thankfully, Obama doesn't require convincing. He already "gets" macroeconomics, the countercylical fundamentals of which are not nearly as popularly intimidating as phrases such as "countercylical fundamentals." The upshot: When aggregate demand slumps, government picks up the slack with dollars it hasn't got; when private demand revives, the government cuts back and pays down the debt. This is not hard.

What's missing is what Krugman laments, as I do: Obama isn't using the bully pulpit to teach the nation why doing anything else is wrong. 

An important distinction needs to be made here. For any president to use the "bully pulpit" to pressure a truculent, backward Congress into passing intelligent legislation is an almost invariably doomed affair, something along the lines of Wilson's League of Nations fiasco. But for a president to use the bully pulpit to merely argue the intelligence of, say, a Jobs Act is essentially a deferred legislative desire--a political maneuver via public enlightenment. To use the old cliche, that use of the bully pulpit can help to move the ball. This Congress will never pass a smart jobs bill, and that's that. But the next Congress, intelligently chosen, might.

This president, any president, must find ways to become his own explainer in chief. No one else possesses the power of his megaphone. No one. But damnit, he's got to use it, and Obama has got to use it to teach the nation why Republicans are despicably wrong. Otherwise, his attack on inequality will ultimately sputter and fail.  

    

A Megan McArgument

It seems all those GOP House votes repealing Obamacare in whole or in part were superfluous, for the enduringly entertaining Megan McArdle has already declared the law "beyond rescue":

The law ... lacks the political legitimacy to survive in the long term. And in a bid to increase that legitimacy, the administration has set two very dangerous precedents: It has convinced voters that no unpopular provisions should ever be allowed to take effect, and it has asserted an executive right to rewrite the law, which Republicans can just as easily use to unravel this tangled web altogether.

Yet even if we grant McArdle her very darkest predictions--and they are numerous--she's the one left with confronting the stark sociopolitical fact that Obamacare has also convinced voters that none of its popular provisions should ever be allowed to expire. Not even a President Rand Paul would attempt to banish the ban on, say, pre-existing conditions as uninsurable ones, or higher premiums based on the anatomical structure of one's genitals. Republicans may be prone to suicide, but even their pathologies have their limits. Besides, there will never be a President Rand Paul, or any other president like him.

And that leaves McArdle's confident prediction that Republicans can "unravel this tangled web altogether" as nothing more than a gutted conceit. That there exist flaws in Obamacare can't be denied, but such flaws are those intrinsic to privatized healthcare, and not the government's regulation of it.

We should, rather, consider Obamacare an impressive step forward in the unstoppable healthcare dialectic: next will come, maybe, Medicare for 55+, or Medicaid for increasingly higher income groups, until finally we achieve single-payer--which always made the most sense anyway.    

  

If another GOP POTUS, a Bush III, for sure (according to Chait)

Chait foresees that ...

If and when Republicans regain the White House, profligacy holds the key to their ideological salvation. Liberating themselves from austerity will allow them to back away from their brutal campaign of confiscating food stamps, Pell grants, and low-income tax credits, and still hand out tax cuts for the 1 percent. Tax cuts for one and all! That, after all, was the Bush formula.

Chait also concedes that "it may be hard to imagine Republicans abandoning their demands for austerity after having waxed hysterical over the debt for five years." Yet hard though that be, that Republicans would in fact do it lies at the infinitely nebulous core of modern Republicanism: Whatever it takes.

The GOP would giddily starve the government of yet more revenue while gorging on higher defense spending, just as they'd faithfully promise to balance the budget someday soon. Alas they can't at the moment, they'd admit with no little gloom, but only because of Obama's past fiscal faithlessness and congressional Democrats' intransigent bleeding hearts.

For me (unlike Chait: "the reality [is] that the Republicans can’t be kept out of total power forever"), the upside is that my doubts that Republicans in any current manifestation will ever again have a realistic shot at controlling both the legislative and executive have achieved a (perhaps dangerous) level of invincible confidence. Christie is done, over, outta here, and in his massive wake there lie no other Republican WH possibilities. After 2016, the GOP will be left with internal reform or extinction.

 

Michael Barone is on it

Speaking of journalism ...

I've always been puzzled by the twofold-base reaction to Politico, or, as Politico LIKES to put it, POLITICO. Whenever it publishes what the Democratic base views as an unfavorable piece about some Democratic pol, the cyberpaper is assailed by said base as a perpetually scheming right-wing rag; conversely, whenever it publishes what the Republican base views as an unfavorable piece about some Republican pol ... well, you get the point.   

In reality Politico is, in its journalistic essence, just a horserace sheet full of "insider" tips, a bit of scathing anonymous handicapping mixed with Establishment clairvoyance. Because we all love gossip, Politico is always the winner. What Robin Leach is to plutocratic self-absorption, Jim VandeHei is to political analysis.

But back to Politico's irate partisan readers, their fury being substantially fed by their ideological priests in other cyberpapers. Today's example is the Washington Examiner's Michael Barone, in "Is Politico telling the full story about Wendy Davis?" In the question itself lies the answer, of course. From innocent beginning to merciful end, Barone observes: 

There has been lots of coverage in Politico on the charges against New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie and members of his staff. About Texas Democratic state Senator and governor candidate Wendy Davis, not so much....

[All its reporting] is a pretty weak offering from a publication that aspires to present a definitive account of American politics. You might get the impression that Politico wants to promote--or rescue--Wendy Davis’s candidacy.

Why of course it does, because, as everyone on the right well knows, it's a left-wing rag--until, that is, somebody at Politico writes something in defense of Chris Christie or in criticism of President Obama, rendering it a right-wing rag. 

At least this seesawing of outrage provides some amusement amid the puzzlement. 

 

Ezra sparks another round of journo-gazing

With Ezra Klein's previously anticipated, now official departure from the Washington Post there has come another tide of insider commentary on journalism's future. As a resolute outsider, I've been reading it for the last hour. And in the category of "most concise assessment" of Klein's independent venture, I'd say the award goes to Bill Grueskin, of Columbia Journalism School:

[Jeff Bezos] doesn’t see his Washington Post purchase as a philanthropic venture. It’s very hard to see how a Washington Post site could ever generate the kind of revenue that would meet, much less surpass, [a $10 million] expense base.

When leaders of organized religions huddle in their regular meetings, they discuss not how many souls they saved last month, but how much moolah they raised. It's a business, not a crusade. If metaphysics can't resist the vulgar materialism of financial survival, how could journalism be any more virtuous? It's just a business; and if any of its new, idealistic ventures don't begin there, they sure as hell will wind up there, or they'll be gone, or obscure (hello).

It's for reasons of that elementary, even self-evident logic that I tend to agree with the Guardian's Michael Wolff on Klein's venture, rather than Andrew Sullivan, who, I also think, misapprehends Wolff's fundamental point, which is this:

The flight from journalist institutions has much to do, obviously, with what everyone assumes to be bleak futures within them. But, curiously, the escape is to an even more difficult economic landscape. At a cost per thousand advertising rate on the web or in mobile of $1 or $2--pretty standard--Ezra Klein will make, optimistically, $8,000 a month, before expenses, if he has a million readers (assuming four page view per unique visitor). Klein apparently has the idea to build out his brand to encompass much more policy coverage, perhaps attracting more visitors and offering more pages to view. Still, it's hard to think how the 8-figure investment he is reportedly seeking, could ever, in a million years, pay off.

Wolff's argument is arithmetical, not sentimental. Hence I find no mystery in it. But Sullivan does:

[Wolff] finds it mysterious that some writers might actually be in new media not just for the money but also for the freedom to say what they want whenever they want in ways not constrained by highers-up.

Perhaps Wolff is indeed mystified. I can't say. But, again, to me he, like Grueskin, is simply making a straightforward argument about the ultimate "higher-up"--that one true, undeniable supreme being: Cash Flow. In a capitalist society, it's all and always about Sinclair Lewis' Babbittry, not Alan Watts' freedom.

 

"Paranoid libertarianism," or just "obviously crazy"

This, in USA Today no less, from the University of Tennessee's Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of pettifoggery and Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds:

With the ongoing revelations that [the NSA] has been vacuuming up telephone conversations from, basically, every American, the thing it needs most is for people to trust that it wouldn't abuse these huge powers....

Spend a little while on Twitter or in Internet comment sections and you'll see a significant number of people who think that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.

A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory. But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy.

But Glenn Reynolds is--as a fox--although any conscientious editor at USA Today should have stopped this mendacious prick at his 13th word: the NSA "has been vacuuming up telephone conversations." There's little excuse for an accomplished propagandist to be so careless in the choice of his lies; there's no excuse whatever for an experienced editor to miss it.

Two days ago a reader forwarded to me a New Republic piece from the authentically distinguished historian Sean Wilentz, who argued this about what he called the "paranoid libertarianism" of Snowden, Assange, and Greenwald: 

Where liberals, let alone right-wingers, have portrayed the leakers as truth-telling comrades intent on protecting the state and the Constitution from authoritarian malefactors, that’s hardly their goal. In fact, the leakers despise the modern liberal state, and they want to wound it.

I believe we can safely add the Glenn Reynolds of this nation to Wilentz's cast of characters. Yet some modification is in order. I doubt that Reynolds is as paranoid as Greenwald et al; he just wants to wound, or destroy, the modern liberal state. Period. And he's willing to trash any last vestige of intellectual integrity to expedite it. Distinguished professor of law my ass. 

 

Fair and balanced

Joshua Black, Christian evangelist, taxi driver and Republican candidate for Florida House District 68, said of President Obama: "I'm past impeachment. It's time to arrest and hang him high."

To which Black's Republican neighbor and candidate for House District 67 reacted: "You aren't seriously calling for the killing of Obama are you? I know you are crazy but good heavens. U R an embarrassment."

But it's the Tampa Bay Times' gentlest of understatements that makes this story so charming: "Black's opponent in the House race, Democratic state Rep. Dwight Dudley"--is there a Mrs. Dudley Do-Dwight?--"said Black has the right to disagree with Obama's decisions. But he shouldn't call for Obama's hanging."

 

Larry's hallucinatory prediction (Is dope now legal in Virginia?)

Larry Sabato writes that "Low job approval numbers for President Obama, should they persist, will make it difficult for any Democrat to win [in 2016], even with the party’s seeming Electoral College edge and growing demographic advantages among minorities and the young."

And that, I guess, stands in opposition to the theoretical ease with which any Republican will sweep to victory, even with his party's insurmountable Electoral College deficit and solid but singular base of just old, cranky white guys.

I'll have what Larry is having. It's dreamily escapist.

 

Obama, Year Six, and the question of hope

E.J. Dionne:

If the sole criterion for judging the past five years is whether the country is better off than it was when Obama first raised his hand, the answer is clearly yes. The economy and the health-care system are on stronger ground. But Obama lifted hopes about politics that transcend this most basic test of his stewardship. He underestimated the ferociousness of the opposition he would face and the importance of constantly cultivating allies. He’s now obligated to harness his new realism to a final try at fulfilling his larger pledge.

This "larger pledge" Dionne quotes from Obama's first inaugural address: "On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."

Perhaps in diligently pursuing this unfulfillable aspiration, or so the judgment of history may be, the Obama administration began to unravel. Petty grievances, false promises, recriminations and worn-out dogmas have for centuries defined politics as a kind of normative strangulation. However tediously choking they may be, they are nonetheless the stuff of politics, and no more alterable than when Thomas Jefferson in his first inaugural address declared that "We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists"--immediately after which the young republic's vicious partisan war resumed. 

But what of these alleged political ills in themselves? Are Democratic, liberal or progressive grievances against the GOP's obstructionist goons "petty"? Were Obama's promises to better the economy and improve access to healthcare "false"? Is it wrong to recriminate the recriminatory? And above all else, are center-left convictions about the benefits of Keynesianism or the necessity of government intervention into healthcare markets "worn-out dogmas" or enduring verities?  

It seems, in my view, that President Obama can be justifiably faulted less for underestimating "the ferociousness of the opposition" than for underappreciating the durability of politics as a bloodsport. In his first term, he judiciously held his fire; the grim spectre of the GOP's "angry black man" counterassault was all too real. Subsequent to his second inaugural, however--he was now safely removed from reelection threats, yet it was incontestably clear that the opposition's ugliest spots wouldn't change--Obama should have reemerged with elephant guns blazing. 

Instead he continued to hold his fire. Indeed he continues to hold his fire, just as virtually his every political friend would like nothing more than to watch him kick the crap out of Republicans--which is both an easy and infallibly necessary task. 

As president it's his job to righteously denounce their pettiness, their falsities, and what are indisputably their "worn-out dogmas." In doing so, he would reinvigorate his own partisans, inspire the marginally political, and quite possibly convert a midterm-indifferent electorate into a pro-sanity fighting machine.

 

Multiple choice test of endurance

Sarah Palin has perhaps outdone herself in the "She said what incredibly stupid thing?" department by posting which of these four identically stupid things on Facebook?

a) Mr. President, in honor of Susan B. Anthony and all who commit to ending any women's oppression, no more playing the gender card.

b) Mr. President, in honor of Franklin D. Roosevelt and all who commit to ending any economic despair, no more playing the recovery card.

c) Mr. President, in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all who commit to ending any racial divide, no more playing the race card.

d) Mr. President, in honor of Jesus Christ and all who commit to ending any earthly disharmony, no more playing the religion card.

What really puzzles is Ms. Palin's self-identification tag on her Facebook page, next to which are a distressing four million "likes."