P.M. Carpenter

Anticipating West Point: Obama's unDoctrine

How to explain a recent poll, cited by The Hill, that showed a nearly 10-point deficit in President Obama's foreign policy approval rating? In a post titled "The Obama unDoctrine," from more than three years ago, I gave it my best. And since circumstances are little changed, I'll repeat myself: "Obama is the near textbook embodiment of complex policies that meet the needs of reality and the moment, rather than what the body politic and the commentariat so often pine for, which is abundant simplicity and tidy slogans."

If I was, and am, correct in that assessment, the paradox is that the outcome of Obama's complexities are pragmatically pined for by the body politic as well. They just don't seem to realize it. Did they desire a prolonged intervention in Iraq? A re-escalation, presently, in Afghanistan? A Syrian intervention? A Crimean intervention? An eastern Ukrainian intervention? Boots on Libyan ground? A war with Iran over a yet-developed nuclear program or with China over some western Pacific rock?

Obama has consistently straddled thoughtful involvement in the world versus military interventionism, which post-W. America demanded as much as desired. And yet, a 10-point deficit--explainable only by an uncomprehending, democratic capriciousness susceptible to propagandistic sloganeering about "weakness" and vacillation. The concomitant paradox: In the oppressive face of such shabby, unthinking criticism about weakness, Obama has stayed tough. He'll take the deficit over some momentary bounce from neocon stupidity. 

In the end, on foreign policy we come to back to Obama's broader, and characteristic, pragmatism--which just happens to be America's defining philosophy, too, even though we sometimes forget it. "Obama's UnDoctrine," I wrote in 2011, "is a universe away from the uniform simplicity of Wilsonian or Bushian idealism.... Idealism is a word closely aligned with ideology, and for good reason: It is a straitjacketing term that, once out of the bag and affixed to its proponent, too often coerces that proponent into grossly ill-advised actions for consistency's sake."

Therein is the neoconservative weakness: a martial consistency for consistency's sake.

Obama's consistency? Agility applied to circumstances. If there's a foreign policy doctrine announced by the president in his West Point speech today, that's the one I expect: the Obama unDoctrine. It may not reverse his second-term deficit, but I further expect that foreign policy historians will someday see it as his greatest achievement.

 

At the EU, an eerie opacity

Krugman's paper is on it, reporting that "European Union leaders are ... meet[ing] in Brussels on Tuesday evening under intense pressure to reform the way the bloc is run after upstart populist parties on the right and left surged in four days of legislative elections ending at the weekend."

And Krugman is there, reporting, via his blog, that he's "sitting in a room listening to EU officials reacting to the European Parliament elections." He declares himself "amazed":

[European Commission president José Manuel] Barroso just declared that the euro had nothing to do with the [economic] crisis, that it was all failed policies at the national level; a few minutes ago he said that Europe’s real problem is a lack of political will.

Concludes Krugman: "The possibility that things are so bad--and radicals have been empowered--because the policies are fundamentally misguided just doesn’t seem to be considered."

One is thunderstruck by historical insinuations. In the 1920s and '30s the European right grew to a wretched prominence largely because of the European Establishment's ill-conceived, ill-managed, postwar, Keynes-lamented economic policies. Transatlantically, the far right and far left also sensed political opportunity because of Hooverian orthodoxy. Yet FDR smothered them both through decisive action. He appropriated their activism, only in positive ways.

That seems to be a history that European leaders are still not quite grasping.

 

Of reptiles and angels: Sullivan on deBoer on Elliot Rodger

Sullivan finds Fredrik deBoer's "extrapolation" of Elliot Rodger's madness "to be a little over the top," though he "understand[s] and respect[s] where Freddie is coming from." I find his extrapolation way over the top, incomprehensible, and disrespectful to intellectualism's proper detachment from knee-jerk sensationalism. Here's deBoer, as best I can reduce his thoughts:

I truly believe that it’s the combination of this association between masculinity and the capacity for violence on one hand, and the ambient postmodernism we live in on the other, that creates these monsters. The knowledge that they are acting like manly men, rather than just being manly men, makes this self-conception a maze they cannot get out of. They are told that they only have value if they embody an ideal they cannot think their way into.

And that’s why traditional masculinity has to die. The association of male value with aggression, dominance, and power is one of the most destructive forces in the world.... It can’t be reformed, it can’t be rescued. It has to be replaced. It’s utterly infected, with the celebration of violence, sexual entitlement, throbbing misogyny, and a fake self-confidence that is almost always hiding total self-loathing.

I haven't the vaguest notion of what Elliot Rodger's mentally diseased implosion has to do with "traditional masculinity." This is in no way a defense of "traditional" or "aggressive" and "dominant" masculinity, which, in my undercurrents of misanthropy, I too find abhorrent. It's just that I can't detect any more of a relationship between Rodger's murderous act and his masculinity than I could between Lizzie Borden and her femininity. Indeed, how the could the act of any madman compel a serious examination of ordinary masculinity?

deBoer adds that "replacement" masculinity "will reject utterly the strangled, stupid, pathetic association between male strength and the capacity for violence." I'm fine with that. In fact I'm all for that. But it does leave us with a bit of a problem. For what of the strangled, stupid, pathetic association between human strength and its capacity for violence so frequently manifested in the world's pathetically stupid Ann Coulters and Sarah Palins? The first morbidly violent cohort wishes to annihilate all adherents of one of the world's major religions and the latter cohort applauds war crimes as a Christian act.

So, as you might suspect, my fearful though rather subdued misanthropy, pace deBoer, is undiscriminating. Humanity--not men or women--for all its wondrous achievements, tends to scare the hell out of me. We're still closer to the reptiles from whence we came than to the better angels some dream of. We're getting there, but the grind of human evolution is ghastly, isn't it? 

 

Is the New Deal left still around?

Having seductively titled its story "Hillary leaves left cold," The Hill then proceeds to dismantle the headline's rationale by identifying "the left" as organizations such as the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and MoveOn.org, and by quoting former Clinton staffers such as Chris Lehane: "Ask anyone outside of Washington D.C. about her, and you’ll see there is a reason why she is so extraordinarily high in all these polls. Whether you are left or center, there is a tremendous amount of support out there."

Regrettably, Mr. Lehane is right. In poll after poll Hillary has registered phenomenal if somewhat inexplicable support among the center as well as the left. More regrettable, however, is that "the left" is formally perceived by the political press as the irrepressibly naive and virtually invisible PCCC types--those who have for years proclaimed an imminent progressive revolution.

They talk with admirable conviction, but only to themselves. You remember them. Some of them assured the country of Scott Walker's certain recall extermination way back when, just as others can speak with assurance today about the triumphant thunder of an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. 

It's pathetic, it's sad, and for damn sure it's not the voice of the authentic, Rooseveltian, ruthlessly pragmatic New Deal left. Is that left even alive? 

 

Joan Walsh forgot the ducks

Joan Walsh: "The Obama election, combined with the Tea Party backlash, served to make the GOP clearly and unmistakably the party of white people, and it doesn’t look like that will change any time soon."

This observation, hammered relentlessly by the left for the last five years, drives me nuts. Obviously the GOP's "irrational, implacable hostility" to Obama's presidency is rooted "clearly and unmistakably" in the party's deafening dog-whistle embrace of a white base. But the explanatory word is "rooted," not make.

Even many political historians continue to slight the GOP's metamorphosis. Some feature Reagan's 1980 Philadelphia, Miss. speech as a bedrock of Republicanism's racial politics, although Nixon still gets much of the credit, so to speak, for having turned the Republican Party into a white encampment through his racially divisive "Southern Strategy." Yet even the latter ignores Goldwater's early 1960s' exhortation: "We're not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are."

He did. Nixon just followed, and Reagan merely exploited a road already long taken.

"Clearly and unmistakably the party of white people" is a project more than a half-century old. The only difference today is that if it doesn't "change anytime soon," it won't be around for another half century. 

 

Greenwald may be setting himself up

What in hell is a "boutique hotel," other than one I know I couldn't afford? Anyway, Glenn Greenwald was speaking at one recently in the vicinity of Harvard University when he revealed, reports The Sunday Times, that his next Snowden project is to publish the "names of US citizens targeted by their own government in what he promises will be the 'biggest' revelation" yet.

"One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?" said Greenwald. "Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists?"

I confess no little excitement. Even the most sanctimonious snoops would be unable to defend the kind of J. Edgar Hoover "dossier" spying on mere poets and pacifists that government officials once swore would never re-occur. My excitement, however, is guarded; it's been tempered by Greenwald's swelling displays of a sanctimoniousness rarely evinced by even ham-handed Michael Hayden types.

The extent of government surveillance techniques revealed by Operation Snowden-Greenwald has been shocking indeed, but any actual prying of the Hooverian sort has been far less than advertised. In fact, to my knowledge, it's been absent. Yet Greenwald persists in shadowy innuendos of an NSA run KGB-amok. His Clancy-like literary inclinations have gotten the better of him.

To wit, here's Greenwald in full extravagance mode, with GQ magazine: "As with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicoloured hues.”

For good, sound, journalistic reasons, Woodward and Bernstein never promised the nation "stupendous water-colored splashiness." They just solemnly delivered it.

 

"The Railway Man," a gentle and brutal film

"The Railway Man," starring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman, which I just saw in a Memorial Day audience of four, is to me a movie about war and forgiveness inside a love story, rather than a love story inside a war film. The Times' Stephen Holden sees it--or I should say, sees Nicole Kidman, the love interest--differently: "Besides being an empathetic helpmate and angel of compassion who gently coaxes [Firth] to confront his demons, she barely exists."

In a big way, yes. Still, in a bigger way, it seems to me, the most telling scene comes early in the film; it takes place in 1980, 35 years after British officer and "railroad enthusiast" Firth has been released from a hellish Japanese POW and railway-building work camp, an experience that left him a shattered human being, haunted endlessly by his wartime torments. He meets Kidman on a train, they talk, an attraction is mutual, and Firth eventually (and rather boldly) asks Kidman if she's romantic. Her reply: "I have to be in Edinburgh by Wednesday."

In my film-assessing opinion, an absolutely brilliant scene loaded with insight into Kidman's personality. She is romantic, but practical. I adored her playfulness. Not a "no" or a "yes"; just "I have to be in Edinburgh by Wednesday." It's this loving practicality that, in time, sees through the deeper insanity of Firth's emotional isolation--his refusal to talk about the demons of PSTD. She, as a former nurse, forces the issue, and resolution comes.

The rest is the war story and its emotional fallout--none of which would make any sense had it not been for the character who "barely exists." 

(I should add that the film is also a righteous condemnation of waterboarding, which Firth's character suffered--the movie is based on a true story--at the hands of his "war criminal" captors. So, fuck you, Dick Cheney.) 

 

In memory of Paul Broun and the religious right

I'm unsure what possessed me this morning to reflect on Georgia Rep. Paul Broun's failed senatorial campaign, but I suspect the hand of Jesus, as the congressman surely would.

Broun, you'll recall, is famous for both his boundless fatuity and the rock-solid belief that the cosmos' prime mover endorses human stupidity. He and his friends have testified to this characterization many times. "He really believes that the Lord wanted him to be a congressman," said one ally--indeed the kind of congressman who would say that "the only Constitution that Barack Obama upholds is the Soviet constitution"; that the Earth is only 9,000 years old; that virtually all modern science "is lies straight from the pit of Hell"; and that global warming is a particularly vicious scientific "hoax."

About all this, Broun knew. See above: rock-solid belief. Or, as a friend of Broun's framed his utter dissociation of fundamentalist lunacy: "You’ll be talking to him, and something will come up and he’ll put his hand on your shoulder and [say], 'You mind if I pray with you about that?' And he’ll just start praying, in regular conversation. You could be out in public at some public event and he’ll stop and pray with you." Accordingly, in 2013, Rolling Stone was compelled to name him one of the "Eight Tea Party Morons Destroying America."

Also that year, as Broun was gearing up for his Senate run, National Review Online observed that a February poll showed that "Broun is at 10 percent" of the expected vote.

In last Tuesday's primary, he won about 10 percent of the actual vote. Fifteen months of campaigning under the Lord's guidance, and in politics, at least, Broun went ... nowhere. He tells Politico: "I’m just trying to figure out right now where my lord Jesus Christ wants me to go and what he wants me to do."

Paul, how many bushes have to burn? The Lord wants you the hell out of politics--and He seems to be herding his flock in the same direction.

 

'WHY Not To Read The Bible'

In "How Not To Read The Bible," the Dish's Matthew Sitman "find[s] it utterly baffling to assume--as [Jessica Misener, writing for BuzzFeed] implicitly does--that our options for reading the Bible amount to a choice between the evangelical belief in Scripture’s 'inerrancy' and the view that it’s little more than an unreliable jumble of tall tales and fables."

I have nothing but empathy for Sitman's bafflement, for I'm utterly baffled by much of humanity's persistent, seemingly indefatigable desire to understand the cosmos and humanity's place in it largely through the writings of 2,000-year-old, culturally entombed Jews and gentiles. I am simply at a loss. Believers often say their organized religions are outlets for their awes, but who needs them? The religions, that is.

I'm in awe of great literature. I'm in awe of great statesmanship. I'm in awe of great art and great science. I'm in awe of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Bellows and Roth. I'm in awe of FDR and Charlemagne and Pericles. I'm in awe of Rembrandt, Titian, Monet, and Newton and Einstein. I'm in awe at the great expanse of the universe. And I know they all exist, or existed.

All I can know about the root of Creation is that it's awesomely unknowable. Modern philosophy exhausted itself attempting to "know" otherwise and formal theology is but an enduring experiment in human conceit. But I'm OK with not knowing; I'll know soon enough. Meanwhile, I'll reserve my awe--and time--for the great many awesome things in this cosmos that I can indeed know.

If a God there be, and He wishes Himself known to me, then He really should find a better way to introduce Himself than through ancient "tall tales and fables." I'm with Jessica on this.

***

By the way, now I'm off with my daughter to see Godzilla.

Mysterious ways, perhaps?

 

George Will, now more Hayekian than Hayek

In a characteristically puckered-up piece of malevolent whimsy, George Will strangles Edmund Burke with the entrails of Friedrich Hayek, only to find even Hayek wanting in the philosophical department of social indifference. Will casts authentic conservatism aside as hopelessly accommodationist and moves on to embrace a contempt for national community that even the atomistic Hayek refused to countenance. And Will thinks himself quite cute for having done so.

"The 2016 presidential candidate we need" is an utterly charmless piece of intended ideological charm. In it, Will imagines his perfect prospect of executive apathy--whom, he implicitly concedes, will be a triumphant Democrat. The only redeeming facet of Will's soulless column is that it wastes no space in dreaming of another Calvin Coolidge; his paradigm of beloved callousness is: "Grover Cleveland, the last Democratic president with proper understanding of [the] office's place in our constitutional order."

For Will, why Cleveland? He reigned--or rather slothed--for four years (second term) during the dementedly named "Gay Nineties," a decade of nearly unprecedented turmoil, severe economic depression, industrial strife and agrarian rage. Cleveland's general response to it all: What business is it of mine? His most famous veto of even meager federal caring came in his dispatch of the paltry $10,000 Texas Seed Bill, "An Act to enable the Commissioner of Agriculture to make a special distribution of seeds in drought-stricken counties of Texas." No way, said Grover:  

I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering.... The friendliness and charity of our countrymen can always be relied upon to relieve their fellow citizens in misfortune.

The demonstrated reality that misfortune was not and could not be relieved by fellow citizens fazed Cleveland not one whit, although it did contribute to the rebelliousness of Populism and Progressivism. Reaction met action, or rather the lack of it. This process of course repeated itself following the sleepy tenures of Will's more partisan catastrophes, Harding, Coolidge and Hoover.  

The only reasonable conclusion to be drawn from Will's unyielding reverie is, simply, that he has lost touch with reality. He was once a public intellectual of engagement with the real world, whose writings I profoundly disagreed with, but enjoyed because they engaged the same world in which the rest of us live. He has, however, grown morbidly detached from that world, our world, the world. He has been sucked into an abyss of pure ideology--hence now his thoughts are less objectionable than just plain worthless.

 

Rand Paul's bleak, evolutionary road

It doesn't take much of a political cryptologist to read the Washington-Hilton--eye-blinking of Sen. Rand Paul as he emerges, day after besieged day, from grueling interrogation sessions with WSJ jingoists, Bushie barbarians, Israel-uber-allists, unthinking neocon-propaganda tanks, and his party's monied super-PAC captors.

"Not only am I for being involved, I’m actually for more involvement than the neocons," he tells the NY Times' Peter Baker, just before, jujitsu-like, he returns to offering only name, rank, and Papa Ron's serial number: "The neocons are really neoisolationists, in the sense that they are so hardened--that everybody should behave like us, and everybody in the world should be in our image--that they discount the concept of looking at things realistically and negotiating with people who don’t have our point of view."

There's a nuance in all that--a slight, though some defenders would say undetectable, shift in Paul's defensive position; he can't help but see the unmarketability of traditional Paulian policy in traditional GOP territory. It just won't sell. So he deploys the rhetoric of global "involvement" while dwelling in the contradictory belief that, as Baker re-reports, "all foreign aid should be eventually cut off."

Paul's contradictions will mount perforce to a breaking point, because Bill Kristol & Co., gripping its Spartan spears and rattling its Spanish swords, ain't about to settle for "realism" and involved "negotiations." (What the hell good are all our bloody toys if we don't use them?)

Thus in Baker's story we see a bit more shift.

This year, [speaking] to the Center for the National Interest, a think tank established by former President Richard M. Nixon,... Mr. Paul said he believed that American foreign policy was "too belligerent." Later, at a private dinner with military brass and former diplomats, he left the impression that he knew he must evolve.

I sort of feel sorry for Paul. Fundamentally, he's right on foreign policy; essentially, he's in Obama's camp, notwithstanding his drone dronings on. Paul believes, as does the president, in the H.W. Bushian concept of foreign-policy realism. But he can't "evolve" into neocon madness without losing his base, and he can't win his party's nomination without beguiling its lunatics. He's a man out of place in GOP time.

 

A somewhat truncated DDoS attack

Yes, it was another DDoS attack.

This one, however, at first endured for only two hours and it ceased--almost miraculously--precisely two minutes before "The Dish" linked to a post I wrote yesterday on Ta-Nehisi Coates' reparations article. How embarrassing for me, and how frustrating for external-link readers (hell, we're used to this, they're not), had nothing but an "Error 404" appeared. Right?

And then it did--about 40 minutes after my site came back online. Typepad, my web host, then careened and staggered through another of its "We're back! ... No, wait, we're not ... Yes we are ... Oh shit, no, no, we're down again ... But's what this? Praise Jesus we are back!" public-relations tours via Twitter. 

So if you're reading this--and there's a good chance you're not--then, yes, we're back. Can you replicate the experience 10 minutes from now? Who the fuck knows.

 

James Taranto, of the WSJ, reaches the apex of twitdom

Following the act of quoting, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal pens perhaps the most staggeringly hypocritical statement ever penned by a modern-day conservative. First, the quote:

Paul Waldman, Greg Sargent's deputy, sees broader ideological implications [in the VA scandal]. "If Democrats are going to argue that government can be a force for good, their most basic responsibility is to make government work," he writes.

Now, prepare to be staggered--if you've any stagger left--by Taranto's parenthetical addendum:

An odd statement. It seems to us making government work is the "most basic responsibility" of anyone who chooses a career in the public sector, regardless of ideology.

But ... but ... but ... one is left speechless in attempting to reconcile Taranto's preeningly noble sentiment with his party's debased, decades-long enterprise of utterly destroying responsible government. This tendentious twit betrays even the decency to acknowledge that contemporary conservatism's ideology is fucking founded on the idea that government, without fail, is the problem--which in itself annihilates any basis for a working assumption that government can "be a force for good."

I'm sorry. I resist as best I can the commonly justifiable urge to call a twit a "twit." For I'm the one who then feels the need for a shower. But some twits deserve it. And James Taranto is surely among the more deserving.

 

IGNORE Brooks, START with Hamlet, THEN move to Tolstoy and Orwell

David Brooks endeavors this morning to encourage literacy by recommending four books for summer reading--A Collection of Essays, Orwell; Anna Karenina, Tolstoy; Rationalism in Politics, Michael Oakeshott; and All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren--all great books, he remarks, that "are about limitation--about being propelled by passions we can't control into a complex world we can't understand."

Emphasis on our lack of unqualified understanding is a conservative project for which this socialist has considerable sympathy. I reject all forms of utopian socialism because they assume a comprehension of complexities quite beyond them; I'm content to let history continue its job--seemingly inexorable--of advancing civilization through the communitarian ethic. Thus, as an opinion writer, I endorse Brooks' assessment of Orwell's assessment of worthy opinion writing: "it's a mistake to think you are an activist, championing some movement. That's the path to mental stagnation. The job is just to try to understand what's going on" (italics mine).

It is in that spirit that Brooks' list puzzles. He includes Orwell and Tolstoy, but he excludes Shakespeare and Shakespeare's Hamlet, who, as incisively defined by the critic Harold Bloom, is "the central hero of Western consciousness" and "is to other literary and dramatic characters what Shakespeare is to other writers: a class of one, set apart by cognitive and aesthetic eminence."

Through the Bard's own impenetrable consciousness, Hamlet is, indeed, the perfect opinion writer: "Hamlet is too intelligent to be at one with any role," continues Bloom, "and intelligence in itself is decentered when allied with the prince's ultimate disinterestedness." Hamlet hasn't the time or inclination to champion any movement; he's far too preoccupied with just trying to understand what in God's name is going on.

It here that the mystery of Brooks' list deepens. Shakespeare was, is, and shall always remain unmatched (though I grant the possibility of Shakespeare's imaginary sister, per Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own). Tolstoy knew this, as did Orwell, both of whom, as noted, Brooks includes in his recommended list--in fact they knew it so well, their knowledge drove them to competitive heights of near madness when it came to contemplating He Who Can Never be Topped. "I believe that Shakespeare can not be recognized either as a great genius, or even as an average author," wrote the insanely jealous Tolstoy in 1906; and Orwell once mused, rather pathetically, that "Lear is not a very good play."

Lists of great books, great movies, great personalities and the like are very dicey things, since lists are bound to exclude great books, great movies, great personalities and the like. But how Brooks' list of readings about human passions and boundless complexities or rather "just trying to understand what's going on" could exclude Western civilization's most sublime demonstration of just that is, well, as beyond me as this often treacherous world was beyond Hamlet.

 

Republicans draft another dangerously incoherent manifesto

The NY Times has a 700-word piece on "a group of prominent conservatives [who have] devised a 121-page policy manifesto aimed at giving the Republican Party a message that will attract some of the middle-class voters the party lost in recent White House races." In keeping with the journalistic ethic of information bad, politics good, the Times devotes precisely 30 of its 7oo words to discussing the manifesto's, you know, policies:

replacing the new health law with tax credits for those who do not receive employer-based coverage; a tax overhaul that benefits middle-class parents; and changes to the student loan system.

So in a story on Republicans' proposed policies, four percent of the story is devoted to Republicans' proposed policies. This seemed a trifle scant.

On the other hand, perhaps it was too much. Chait, for instance, notes that one of the "prominent conservatives" who drew up the manifesto "argues that Republicans should counter the Democrats’ campaign to lift the minimum wage by proposing instead to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit." A fine idea. A fine idea, indeed--except, continues Chait, Republicans are "currently fighting extremely hard to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit."

Maybe the Times' Jonathan Martin simply couldn't bring himself to plow through all the drivel. His survival instinct prevailed: Get in, but get the hell out just as fast as possible. Republican incoherence can in fact drive one mad.