PMC Commentary

For now, Mitt Romney is the best of both weird worlds

Nancy Pelosi commented to The Hill: "Let me put it this way — I hope [Mitt Romney is] their nominee….. He might be a nice person — no offense, no offense — [but] let’s save you time."

Oh, let's not. Let us instead revel, with as much false dignity as we can muster, in the prospect of another Romney nomination. My highest hope is that the GOP will return to 1964 and nominate a True Believer, à la Ted Cruz or Rick Perry, but politics tends to regress to the mean, suggesting Mitt. (For the moment I simply refuse to even entertain the ghastly idea of a Bush III nomination.)

I very much want to see Romney's latest iteration in full bloom: as a man not only of the people, but of the littlest and poorest people, the discardable people, the scum of the 47 percent. And by God he'll do it. I don't know how he'll do it, in terms of tortured policy proposals (assuming he bothers), but we can rest assured that he'll do it with his usual insincerity of burning earnestness. Such is Mitt's greatest talent — the ability to look straight at the camera and blather in vertiginous circles. For students of first-rate demagoguery, Mitt Romney is an indispensable gift.

But there's another and equally delightful reason I so value a Romney nomination-in-progress: The far-right's Ted Cruzes will grow absolutely, violently and psychotically palsied at even the thought of another "moderate" leading their party to doom. We'll have Cruz & Co.'s spectacles atop Romney's spectacles to watch. Then after that fateful day, in November 2016, Cruz Inc. can spend another four years telling the GOP's surviving wingnuts that if only they had nominated a True Believer …

Which, someday they might do, just to get it out of their system, temporarily, anyway. Witness the wingnuts' lingering attraction to 1964 — a masochistic attraction that has the Clinical Manual of Psychiatric Diagnosis and Treatment written all over it.

 

Rubio is arguably the best WHAT?

NRO's Jim Geraghty goes heterocosm on us: "Marco Rubio: He’s arguably the best communicator in the Republican party."

Yes, mine is a cheap shot. But honestly, who could ever forget -- or, other than Geraghty, want to forget -- this? 

 

 

Netanyahu & the GOP: Partners in fuckedupness

McClatchy reports that

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing growing criticism in Israel for a planned speech to the U.S. Congress about Iran....

In Israel, critics have characterized Netanyahu’s trip as an election ploy and a slap in the face of the Obama administration after it’s worked hard to deflect challenges to Israel at the United Nations and most recently at the International Criminal Court.

The criticisms are biting, ranging from Netanyahu's scheming is "dangerous, it’s toxic and it’s not so funny anymore" to "The American political system can't stand [Netanyahu's 'brutish'] behavior" to the charge that the prime minister is "destroying our strategic relations with the United States for an election speech."

As I see it, all of this fallout comes from Netanyahu's close association with a gang that really, really can't shoot straight. Remember that just a couple months ago the GOP had won it all, it had grabbed the reins of power and it would ride roughshod over a vanquished president. It would set the agenda; it would force Obama's hand; it would protest, rage, on occasion maybe develop an actual policy and then ascend even farther as it cleared a path for the next Republican president. Such was the narrative. And then … then … then the majority GOP went into battle, and they've been blasting themselves in their floppy, oversized clown feet ever since.

It's what they do. They always overreach. Give them a toy or two and they want them all, including the shiniest of all — the framing of foreign policy. Clever chaps, aren't they? They took a simple speech invitation — for which diplomatic protocol was clear — and out of excessive cleverness, they fucked it up. Again, it's what they do. Netanyahu's fuckup was in not realizing that Republicans fuck up everything they touch.

 

The plutocracy strikes back

The Washington Post:

A network of conservative advocacy groups backed by Charles and David Koch aims to spend a staggering $889 million in advance of the next White House election…. The amount is more than double the $407 million that 17 allied groups in the network raised during the 2012 campaign…. The figure comes close to the $1 billion that each of the two major parties’ presidential nominees are expected to spend in 2016…. [The Kochs'] resources will go into field operations, new data-driven technology and policy work, among other projects, along with likely media campaigns aimed at shaping the congressional and White House elections.

For those who still believe that ultraconservative money is of declining influence -- a belief once nurtured by Karl Rove's magnificent Crossroads failures -- there's also this. Last weekend, the Koch brothers' fundraising gala "celebrated a crop of new U.S. senators whose victories helped put the Senate back in GOP control. Their bids were lifted by the Freedom Partners network, which had pledged to spend close to $300 million in the run-up to the November elections." Among the grateful beneficiaries were Iowa's Joni Ernst, Arkansas' Tom Cotton, and North Carolina's Thom Tillis.

It's sickening. There's no better desciptive word for it. Just sickening. More than 100 years ago, Congress statutorily prohibited corporate contributions to federal campaigns. And yet in the past few years -- vastly abetted by a Supreme Court as indifferent to the commonweal as any Gilded Age bench -- the financial and industrial powers that be have not only regained their 19th century influence, they have, one could argue, surpassed it. 

They've surpassed it not so much in direct bribery -- the old trusts, too, of course, spent liberally -- but in their contributions to public despair. In 1907 -- the year Congress prohibited Koch-like contributions -- Progressivism was in full throttle and the public up in arms. They would tolerate the plutocracy's ownership of the political system no longer. Today? As Harry Reid so well demonstrated in the last election, mention of the Koch et al's political power merely engenders public yawns. What has pervaded the body politic, it seems, is a profound sense of hopelessness: There's no way to stop the plutocracy's insidious intrusions into the public arena, so why worry, when nothing can be done. 

It's a kind of mass giving up, and to democracy, it's more dangerous than the Kochs.  

 

An O'Malley story with no real story

Politico's exuberant headline — "IT'S ON! Hillary Clinton rival ramps up in Iowa" — travels from the sublime, to the questionable, to the less questionable, and finally lands with a thud of the utterly incongruous:

[The sublime] The first rustlings of a Martin O’Malley presidential campaign can be heard faintly in Iowa.

[The questionable] Surrogates for the former Maryland governor … have begun talking up O’Malley and scheduling meetings with officials and activists.

[The less questionable] Many observers believe O’Malley is hoping to use a presidential run to raise his profile and secure a spot as Clinton’s running mate or a cabinet secretary.

[The utterly incongruous] The former governor currently has no plans to travel to Iowa…. [H]e will appear March 7 at a Democratic event in Topeka, Kansas. [A spokeswoman] said no one is working on his behalf in New Hampshire.

From ramping up to no Iowa visits scheduled, all of which sandwiches the "Its On!" story's only believable entry: that O'Malley is running for veep.

 

The blizzard of ignorance still awaits us

I can't tolerate broadcast news so early in the day, so I've been navigating print reports of the "Snowpocalypse," which seems anything but. Or should that line end with a question mark? I can't really tell. To us provincials, the situation is somewhat sketchy.

The NYT reports that its city "was spared from the worst" -- a happy turn that banished the story from above-the-fold headlines to the lesser segment of "More News." The story goes on to note that "the National Weather Service [has] acknowledged that the predictions had been off-target," which no doubt will be used by detractors to blast not the NWS, but Mayor de Blasio and climate-change confirmers. "This will most likely be one of the largest blizzards in the history of New York City," the mayor had cautioned; that it's not is not reason to celebrate, but to scoff. Let the George Wills of the world commence. 

On the other hand, the Boston Globe reports that "Massachusetts is under siege Tuesday morning by gusting winds, relentless snow, and coastal flooding." Its front page blazes with headlines about thousands without power, an offline nuclear plant, and businesses being "forced to scramble."

But back to those detractors. ThinkProgress is running a useful piece for the layperson, titled "The Climate Science Behind New England's Historic Blizzard." Historic or not, the underlying science is undeniable, which is why George Will, corroborated by such climatological giants as Rush Limbaugh, will giddily proceed to scoff on the basis of lay ignorance -- and political partisanship! -- always a sound line of reasoning against hard science.   

 

Unemployment trutherism is back (already)

You can dress up crazy in boutique glasses and a Brooks Brothers suit, but crazy is still crazy.

This axiomatic profundity is brought to you today by Rick Perry, who says, according to Dave Weigel (via HuffPost), that the plummeting unemployment number has "been massaged, it's been doctored" — thus reviving one of 2012's crazier aspects: BLS trutherism.

Mr. Perry also won the Iowa Freedom Summit's Twitterdee-Twitterdumb primary, reports the Washington Post.

The possibilities for a truly awesome GOP primary season are unfolding, daily, at an exponential rate. Tomorrow, someone — if not not Perry, then Paul or Huckabee or Romney — is bound to question the methodology and validity of polls showing Hillary thumping them all.

Socratic self-examinations are once again on hold as Republicans plunge ahead, straight into 2012, crazy as ever.

 

The House Freedom Caucus misfires, right off the bat

I've never quite grasped the necessity of mission statements, and that of the newly established House Freedom Caucus — the farther-right alternative to the House's far-right Republican Study Committee — is a barking testament to my incomprehension:

"The House Freedom Caucus gives a voice to countless Americans who feel that Washington does not represent them. We support open, accountable and limited government, the Constitution and the rule of law, and policies that promote the liberty, safety and prosperity of all Americans," the mission statement reads.

Well, how nice. Too nice. Nobody "feels" that Washington represents them, but that scarcely makes tea-partying wingnuts of us all. And who doesn't support every elusive virtue, from accountability to the rule of law, as well as every commonsensical objective, let's say, "prosperity"? And all those opposed to liberty? Please feel free to raise your hands, notwithstanding the contradiction.

Thus the first official act of the rogue-going House Freedom Caucus is a declaration of absolute mush — a bit like party platforms, except that platforms used to mean something, while the Caucus' mission statement never will.

The HFC has missed a splendid opportunity to say exactly what it's all about: that it's a feral bunch of pseudoconservative misfits, even for the modern Republican Party — which in itself says a lot — hellbent on destroying any last vestige of genuine conservatism that may yet survive the party's increasingly rigorous tests of ideological purity.

Now that's a mission statement whose necessary authenticity I could have grasped.

 

Walker gets punked

I had never heard of the punk band, Dropkick Murphys, but its members seem pretty smart, having tweeted Gov. Scott Walker to cease and desist from playing their music at his political events: "please stop using our music in any way … we literally hate you !!!"

I see sleepy-eyed Scott as more of a Perry Como man, anyway.

 

Palin's conservative reviews — quite unsettling

It's a trifle worrying when I find myself in agreement with … them.

Byron York: [[Palin delivered a] long, rambling, and at times barely coherent speech … [much of it] quite petty."

"Long and disjointed," said one conservative activist.

Said another conservative activist: "Terrible. Didn't make any sense."

Sam Clovis, conservative extraordinaire: "Palin was a sad story Saturday. With every speech she gives, she gets worse and worse."

Said a "well-connected Iowa Republican: "Calling Gov. Palin's remarks bizarre and disjointed would be charitable."

Conservative blogger Craig Robinson": "Of all the people I talked to about Palin's speech, only one person didn't have a negative reaction."

***

This is bad, not good at all. As long as it was just "radical leftists" (to use a Saturday Palinism) like me laughing or groaning at the GOP's most flamboyant nitwit, the universe seemed somewhat in harmony. Now, I won't know what to think, if they start thinking.

Perhaps this is merely a cosmic belch.

 

The Iowa Freedom Summit: Bush blew it

The only newsworthiness to come out of the most newsworthy political event of last week was the remarkable lack of anything new. While it's true that Scott Walker finally proved he can deliver a speech without transporting his audience to Oz's field of poppies, and while it may also be true that that's news in its own Colbertian newsiness sort of way, the Iowa Freedom Summit was but a tedious replay of the far right's eternal unhappiness. Speaker after speaker sought to fill the assemblage's grim void with rousing, make-believe bombast about the triumphal corner they're about to turn, but speaker after speaker has been performing the selfsame act since at least 1964.

The patsies just never tire of it, they never lose grip of the proffered fantasy: that somehow, someday America will return to a savage, Gilded Age thunderdome of fierce Hayekianism, blessed by a national Christianity bereft of its Social Gospel. They're on a bizarre holiday from reality, and their tour guides aren't about to slap them awake. The latter see profit in further deluding the pre-deluded.

That's the most unfathomable angle to this particular traveling circus. While most of the Summit's speakers — Cruz, Carson, Perry, Trump, Santorum, Palin, Huckabee — are as self-hornswoggled as the far-right multitude, others — Walker and Christie — are conspicuously aware enough to know where the reddest of brick roads leads: to an electoral abyss. Still, they pander — Walker, vaguely, Christie, delicately — which will doom them down the road, in the general election.

Which is precisely why Jeb Bush should have joined Saturday's circus. He has already conceded that he must lose the primary to win the general, which is a profound paradox of the highest Republican truth. Steve King's summitry spectacle was Bush's prime opportunity to slap the crowd that will never vote for him anyway — to at least gently remind them that Common Core is no communist conspiracy, and self-deportation is rather unlikely to catch on — and thereby appeal to those rank-and-file Republicans who haven't completely lost their minds.

Why should Bush have taken the risk? Because it wouldn't have been a risk at all; because he already knows that a nomination achieved by schmoozing King's crowd is a nomination not worth achieving — because such a nomination is a sure, general-election loser. Better to lose in the first half of 2016 than squander another half-year in a punishing gauntlet of no ultimate material value.

 

Sarah Palin's thunderous flop at the Iowa Freedom Summit

I'll say one thing for Sarah Palin. Unlike most pols, or, in her case, imitation pols, she manifestly rejects the aid of professional speechwriters; instead she marches to the heat of her own bummer of disorderly rhetoric, as evidenced yesterday at the Iowa Freedom Summit. As I tweeted after serendipitously catching her act live on C-Span, "Palin seems to think 'Iowa Freedom Summit' means freedom from a theme."

When I saw her being introduced by the Summit's co-organizer, Steve King, I prepared to take notes. Alas, Palin offered no thread to grab onto. She ricocheted from thoughts on her dog to Ronald Reagan to military veterans to the national debt to Obama's golfing to gun shows to Iowa's virtue to immigrants to constitutional conservatism to energy policy to Hillary's doom to Chris Kyle's heroism to the evil GOP establishment and, naturally, to seemingly endless references to her put-upon family. None of this collected gibberish was extemporaneous, however. Palin was speaking from notes, which someday may double as a public service exhibit on amphetamine abuse.

How did the Summit's audience react to Sarah's shtick? That was the one interesting part. I saw maybe a quarter, perhaps a third, certainly no more, clapping in response to Palin's stock ridicule and rambling. She threw slab after slab of raw red meat to the ultraconservative assemblage, who, on whole, yawned, as though they were done, done, done, I tell you, with this narcissistic harpy. An even worse injury came just after Palin's, uh, speech, when the other co-organizer, Citizen United's David Bossie, began introducing Rick Perry: "We saved the best for last," he said. Ouch.

All of which effectively amounted to Iowa's first straw poll of the GOP's proliferating slate of ill-fated crackpots. The day before her Summit appearance, and the day before that, Palin told the press that "You can absolutely say that I am seriously interested" in a presidential run. She was only being her usual insincere self, of course — trying to pre-puff her Iowa gig — but by and large the Summit audience was resolute in offering no encouragement, just in case Ms. Palin was being, for once, genuine.

Sadder yet? Her performance yesterday didn't even rate a Politico mention in its Summit recap. Now that's what you call an "existential threat," to one's fading fame.

 

Whence, and whither, the "invisible primary"?

The NYT's Andrew Rosenthal complains that "This is the period when overpaid political consultants talk about the 'unofficial start' of the presidential campaign – a notion as meaningless as the 'official start.'" His complaint has merit. Mitt Romney's campaign, for instance, has officially commenced in a quasi-official blur of unofficiality (were there such a word), and the metamorphosis from one stage to the next will be noticeable to no one but political taxonomists and the Federal Election Commission, which no one bothers to notice.

Even more complaint-worthy, however, is this year's obsession among the enlightened elite with the term "invisible primary" — roughly synonymous with "unofficial start." It was in occasional use four years ago, and perhaps before that — it's nowhere to be found in Safire's Political Dictionary, 1993 ed. — but I don't recall its compulsory use. Now, no pundit who's "in the know" will permit a column or "Hardball" appearance to escape the burden of this rather instant cliché. To do so would expose one as being out of the political-hipster loop, in which status and laurels of insight are conferred not through demonstrating original thought, but by deploying the latest in cool-kid rhetoric. (Little has changed since high school, I guess, and I say "I guess" because I never attended high school, having been thrown out on my sorry incorrigible ass after five days as a sophomore.)

No, these days one must never reference the embryonic stage of a presidential campaign; one must instead reflect on its "invisible primary" implications, which fundamentally are no different today from what they were in 1896 or 1968: Who can raise the most boodle? From there, the embryonic scans suggest the leviathans. But one's diagnosis of this elementary process will seem much keener if one blathers shamanistically about mystical invisible-primary goings on.

In brief, "invisible primary" — or "dark money," or the "deep state," or some other such buzzwordy commonplace — is in fact an empowering, 24/7 paradigm shift for the chattering class who cherish inside-baseball nontransparency in their journalistic poise. Did I miss one?

 

Marco Rubio outfoxed me

Eleven days ago I confidently predicted that Marco Rubio would slither his way out of the GOP's presidential snake pit this cycle. My confidence seemed well grounded: Rubio is not only uncharismatic, he's actively repulsive; he possesses no national constituency; he's stunningly ignorant of the very intellectual territory upon which he has staked his political ambitions — foreign affairs; Lord only knows from where his money will come (if any does); his fellow Floridian Jeb Bush will dominate the home scene; and Rubio looks, acts, and openly thinks like a cranky adolescent.

The poor boy hasn't a prayer of achieving the nomination. None. This was my thinking, which I believe remains conspicuously valid, and for that reason I was just sure that Rubio would bow out.

So naturally, ABC News is reporting today that "Sen. Marco Rubio has begun taking concrete steps toward launching a presidential bid."

I should have seen that coming. If all logic points that-a-way, Marco will straightaway lunge the other way. All along, he was one move ahead of me.

 

How can Peggy Noonan write while looking over her shoulder?

Peggy Noonan's latest is uncommonly amusing, incorporating, as it does, her de rigueur assertion that "Mr. Obama deserve[s] to be embarrassed" by John Boehner's untoward speaking invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu — because, you see, Obama "has demonstrated no regard for the Republicans of Congress, and now they are showing no regard for him" — as well as Peggy's honest belief that the invitation "is still a bad move, a damaging snub that makes [domestic political] divisions more dramatic."

On whole, Peggy is clearly seething at the disrespect shown by House Republicans toward her former institutional employer. But she can't just come out and say that — and only that. Any such conscientious and resolute imbalance in contemporary conservative analysis can be a job-killer — which is to say, in this instance, Peggy's job. Hence thoroughly incoherent tribute must be paid to "bad," "damaging," conservative radicalism and its contemptible manners.

This, in both style and substance, is what conservative commentators have been reduced to: ungovernable paranoia. Yet it's no longer a fear and loathing of ghastly liberals hellbent on one-world domination, but a fear of their own correct-thinking enforcers. Be happy in your work, say the pseudoconservative thought police; and watch yourself, because we are.