PMC Commentary

The Oxymoronic Mr. Bauer

Gary Bauer, former head of the Family Research Council, once said that "moderation is a failure,” but “a principled conservatism can win big." (Washington Post, November 25, 1998)

Pardon me, excuse me, just passing through … but isn’t moderation the principle of the word, “conservatism”?

When did the ‘contract with America’ expire?

Just before the 1994 mid-term elections, Bill Clinton warned voters: "Don't let them sucker you" -- the “them,” of course, being Republicans, and one of the issues in question, of course, being Social Security.

Then-House Whip Newt Gingrich responded, of course, that Clinton was running around lying to voters about Republicans and Social Security’s endangered prospects. Social Security, of course, is "off the table," Gingrich said, and no cuts, of course, were being considered in observance of his party’s "Contract with America."

Republicans, of course, hailed the contract with unprecedented public relations fanfare. Now, of course, the contract is being amended. Where’s the Republican fanfare now? And what happened to the “off-the-table” Social Security pledge in relation to the contract’s terms?

Oh well. The contract also promised “to end [Congress’] cycle of scandal and disgrace.”

Of course.

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The wit and whimsy of John R. Bolton

A few quotes from the newspaper archives. They may help you sleep better if, by some miracle, Mr. Bolton should come to represent us at the United Nations.

Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), March 14, 1999:
"It's not the kind of decisive striking you would need" to promote "the preferred way to get rid of him, the 'ambitious colonel' route.” -- John Bolton, former Bush administration official, now senior vice president of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington

The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec), August 2, 2000:
''The [Canadian] Chretien government has gone out of its way to stick pins in the U.S.... Moral posturing only goes so far.” -- John Bolton, foreign affairs specialist who advised the Bush campaign on its national security policy platform

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 10, 2000:
"I'm with the Bush-Cheney team and I'm here to stop the vote." -- John Bolton, GOP attorney (Response by court administrator, Terre Cass: “Do you have a copy of the order? And he said, 'No, I don't.' He was very rude.")

The Boston Herald, December 12, 2000:
"You cannot psychoanalyze pieces of paper." -- John Bolton, GOP operative, on Florida recount

The Irish Times, December 18, 2000:
"We would have to pose the stark question: are you with us or with them?" -- Defence specialist John Bolton on future relations with Britain because of the [European defence force] proposals

The Ottawa Citizen, December 28, 2000:
"A lot of [Canadian foreign affairs minister] Axworthy's initiatives are poorly disguised anti-Americanism." -- John Bolton

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Keep 'em Comin', Dave

Is David Gelernter, a Yale professor of computer science, really the best conservative voice the L.A. Times could come up with as a columnist? Chances are, he is, which is why his writing is so illuminating. It’s as muddled, wrongheaded and misleading as most conservative thought itself.

Take Gelernter’s piece from this morning, if you’ve the stomach:

How could anyone be opposed in principle to private investment accounts within Social Security? I could understand Democrats arguing that "private accounts are a wonderful idea but the country can't afford the transition costs right now." But mostly I hear Democrats saying they're a lousy idea, and that President Bush wants to wreck Social Security — because, after all, he wants to let you keep a great big whopping 4% of your payroll taxes in a private account instead of handing over every cent to the government. How on Earth could anyone be opposed in principle to letting taxpayers manage a minuscule fraction of their own money (their own money, dammit!) if they want to?

Notice anything wrong with that? I don’t mean opinion-wise. I mean monstrously, objectively, flat-out wrong.

Yep, that’s right. You got it. Gelernter says Bush’s plan entails diverting 4 percent of your payroll taxes into a private account; not 4 percent of your income subject to payroll taxes. The difference, of course, is huge – which also describes either his ignorance of proposed policy or willingness to deceive. I’m not sure which is worse in a man who purports to enlighten the public.

My guess is that Michael Kinsley, editorial and opinion editor for the L.A. Times, read this garbage before it went to print, felt the intentionally deceptive or woefully ignorant passage leap out at him, and proceeded to smile and wave without a word as it headed off to press. He had to know the columnist is only doing harm to his own camp.

I'm with Mr. Kinsley. I say let’s see more of David Gelernter in print, unedited.

Calling Frank Luntz

“[Republican Senator] Gregg and his House counterpart, Representative Jim Nussle of Iowa, say the budget will fulfill Mr. Bush's goal of cutting the federal deficit in half over five years, bringing the figure down to $210 billion in 2010.”

vs.

“Because the conference agreement … calls for substantial new tax cuts and increases in funding for defense and international programs, the budget resolution would increase deficits over the next five years by $168 billion, compared with the deficits the Congressional Budget Office estimates would occur if there were no changes in policies.” (emphasis in original)

One Day’s Nightmarish Journey into the merciless news

Jesus! Just scanning the New York Times late this afternoon was to plunge headlong into the nasty abyss of surreality-based BushWorld. There it all was, screaming at me within the span of a moment’s glance: international chaos, looming domestic disaster and fiscal insanity run amok. I hadn’t planned on drinking tonight, but after the Times and all its unfit news, I did. The experience reminded me of my old college prof who said that after hearing Kennedy’s “Missile” speech he raced to the liquor cabinet, thinking such solace would be his last. Things are getting that weird out there.

On the right side of the page, as always, was the online market report. The Dow was down again, way down, nearly 130 points. The reason? “The American economy slowed [took a dive] during the first quarter to its weakest [most anemic] pace in two years, the government reported [broke down and admitted] today, as business spending faltered [see above, “dove”] and the trade deficit widened [blew up]… Today's data [unbelievably bad stats] on growing inventories [bunches of unsold stuff] and rising prices [hellacious inflationary trends] suggest [are a surefire sign] that the downturn [depression] may be worse [unimaginably more horrible] than expected, some analysts said [choked].”

In the front page’s middle was a photograph of scandal-plagued and reelection-troubled Tony Blair, all-too-willing victim of BushWorld-Think, and just to the left of that was the headline, I kid you not, “Woodpecker Thought to Be Extinct Is Sighted in Arkansas” -- making me think for a brief moment that Tony had taken it on the lam in the comforting arms of his old pal Bubba.

But no, Blair was still in Britain, though I imagine Arkansas is looking pretty good. New details had been released on Tony’s decision to join George in Iraq, and things weren’t quite what Tony had been saying. It seems his attorney general had told him prior to the war that since the U.N. Security Council had set the first Iraq war’s cease-fire terms, "it is for the Council to assess whether any such breach of those obligations has occurred.” And then, typically British, the A.G. had delivered to Tony the understatements of the year: “The U.S. have a rather different view: they maintain that the fact of whether Iraq is in breach is a matter of objective fact which may therefore be assessed by individual member states. I am not aware of any other state which supports this view.” Capital. Just capital. But it’s bombs away anyway, heh old boy?

Tony, however, assessed the rancid situation differently than the same rancid situation has been assessed in the U.S. “It was about a decision. I took it. I have to live with the consequences of it.” Consequences? They have those in British politics?

As if all that wasn’t enough, then bam! – on the left side of the page, a $2.57 trillion federal budget for 2006 is announced by GOP fiscal conservatives. "If you like deficits, you're going to love this budget," said Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, followed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi saying that "there may be as much as $8 to $10 billion in combination of Medicaid and Medicare cuts."

That was followed by the news that critical support for the budget by moderate Republican Senator Gordon Smith, who had “spearheaded a drive to eliminate reductions in the growth of spending on Medicaid,” had been secured, but even better, that the selfsame moderate had recommended that this Congress “create a commission to study the future of the program.” It was all too much.

Seeking relief, I turned on the Michael Jackson cable network, CNN, only to be instantly confronted by BushWorld-Speak and the amateur “We still at war” news hour, in which George just as instantly and rather bizarrely insulted his own party for “balking at doing hard work.” It was grim. Grimmer than grim, actually.

Yes, chemical solace … the only escape, indeed, professor.

Dems “failed to muster 60 votes to stop a GOP filibuster”: sound familiar?

How many times in the last decade did we read headlines like the one above from 1995? Nevertheless, a few usually reasonable voices to the left of center have either half-heartedly or whole-heartedly agreed with the current Republican effort to change Senate filibuster rules. To permit a minority to block a legitimate up-or-down vote on judicial nominees, so goes the argument, is intolerably undemocratic.

A recent L.A. Times editorial summed up the “reasonable” contention this way: “The filibuster is a reactionary instrument that goes too far in empowering a minority of senators.” (The Times didn’t stop there. It said the Senate should also “nuke the filibuster for all legislative purposes.”)

Why such a radical urging from the usually tame Times? Because eliminating the filibuster on all matters might help reduce both sides’ hypocrisy, according to its editorial board. Democratic senators who hated the tactic during the Clinton administration now love it, and Republican senators who then loved it now hate it. “Politicians' lack of consistency on fundamental matters …,” the Times philosophized, “is far more corrosive to the health of American democracy … than any number of Bush- appointed judges could ever be.”

While I hold out the slim possibility that the Times may be right and I’m wrong, I do know without any doubt that if it thinks anything is going to halt Republican progress on reinventing hypocrisy to yet-scaled heights, then it's following an altogether different party than I am. These right-to-the-right-wing boys can flip on a dime and never blush – not even for a moment. Take that moment yourself and consider, for example, how they just tried to stick Democrats with their own descriptive, but now politically radioactive, label of a “nuclear option.” They’re shameless -- shamelessness being something else they’re reinventing.

Remember that it was the mere turn of this century when you were regularly reading items like this: “Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., [said] that he and at least 13 other Republicans will block confirmation votes on every judicial nominee sent to the Senate by President Clinton in his last year in office [San Diego Union-Tribune, January 22, 2000].”

Or this, of which I have also lately reminded readers: “From virtually the beginning of Clinton's presidency, [Republicans] have blocked, stalled and shut down judicial confirmations [St. Petersburg Times, September 26, 1999].”

Or, as the Boston Globe noted this morning, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid “pointed out yesterday that Republicans have led filibusters against presidential nominees for various jobs in 20 of 30 cases, including six of the 13 who were judicial nominees.” And what’s more, “several of President Clinton's judicial appointments could not be filibustered because the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee never sent them to the floor.”

Furthermore, do you recall Democrats during Clinton’s administration racing en masse to drop the bomb on the parliamentary right to filibuster, whether on judicial nominations or any other appointment? Remember when Republican skies were falling over something as harmless as a new surgeon general, one Henry Foster? Well, “overnight efforts by Clinton and Senate Democrats to persuade … Republicans to … permit the nomination to be decided by a simple majority went for naught.” In the end, they “failed to muster 60 votes to stop a GOP filibuster [(Tampa) Tribune Wire Service, June 23 1995].” But you didn’t hear a peep about changing the rules of the game.

No, it’s no longer about hypocrisy. The GOP is too far gone for us to be frightened by that common and relatively minor malady.

What it’s about now is bullying. The Republican leadership has succeeded so well at ad hoc bullying that they’re spilling over into a more formal autocratic frame of mind – and there’s another unmentionable “f” word for what can happen anywhere if political bullies aren’t stopped.

Give Republicans the Senate rule-change and you give them another inch, another mile, another milestone on a road we do not want to travel. Compared to it, I’ll take hypocrisy any day.

George and Alex

I’ve been reading Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton in between national scandals and political mushroom clouds, so I haven’t gotten far. Nevertheless it’s a great read, but oh, the woes of inevitable comparison.

As a boy, AH suffered this “grim catalog of disasters” in only four years: “[his] father had vanished … mother had died … cousin and supposed protector had committed bloody suicide … aunt, uncle, and grandmother had all died … [he was] left alone, largely friendless and penniless … surrounded by failed, broken, embittered people … [and] shadowed by a stupefying sequence of bankruptcies, marital separations, deaths, scandals, and disinheritance.”

He went on to make a few contributions to his adopted home, America.

GWB, on the other hand, suffered from youthful money, a prestigious family name, all the advantages of privilege, the best schools, protectors by the bucket and silver spoons by the tray-full.

He also went on to make a few … contributions.

I swear, if it weren’t for FDR and JFK, the above suggests a constitutional amendment barring any person of early inherited wealth from high office.

Another daring stance from the Republican You-heard-it-here-first machine

"People want to know we stand on the side of victims of crime instead of the side of criminals" -- Representative Dennis K. Baxley of Ocala, Florida

Elizabeth, I’m comin’ to join ya’ honey

From today’s NYT: “Orders to U.S. factories for big-ticket manufactured goods plunged 2.8 percent in March, the biggest setback in 2 1/2 years…. It was a far worse performance than analysts had expected.”

Let’s see … factory orders down, stock market tumbling, dollar falling, trade deficit rising, national debt ballooning….

Yep, just another jim-dandy Republican economy.

We “could be a menace” – J T Dolan, A Founding Father of Modern Conservatism

In the beginning, Republican Dudley Do-Wrongs accused liberals of unraveling America's moral fiber. That was OK with many of us, since much of the fiber that Republicans had in mind needed unraveling. But still, as long ago as the 1960s it angered liberals that politics was morphing into a shallow, moral-values game of crass one-upmanship.

Then, Republican leaders went and did a silly thing. They backed themselves into the most extreme section of the right wing -- the wing inhabited almost solely by insufferable, fire-breathing fundamentalists. So now, if one believes the polls, it seems the GOP has pretty much honked everyone off except Focus on the Family subscribers, and even they are getting testy with their sponsors.

In short, old anger on the left seems to have metastasized into fresh, general electoral disgust.

Some said liberals remained angry because the country at large wouldn’t concede that George W. Bush is a duplicitous bumbler. Some said it was because liberals merely resented their long, well-deserved ideological decline. Others said a seedy impeachment, a stolen election and illegal war kept liberals in a boil.

Some of these are true, some not. But there's a more seminal cause of lasting liberal anger. And in view of Americans’ historical forgetfulness, it’s not surprising that this intra-liberal anger took so long to metamorphose into the plain disgust we see among the much larger body politic today.

And the seminal cause was this: The post-Watergate movement of the “New Right” -- a well-orchestrated confederation of political action committees, think tanks, neoconservatives, social conservatives and economic libertarians -- introduced into American politics a fresh supply of opportunism. As I have written before, in a 1980 Washington Post interview one of the New Right’s founding fathers, John Terry Dolan, elaborated on the movement’s “cutting edge of politics.” He bragged that New Right activists “are potentially very dangerous to the political process.” We “could be a menace,” Dolan boasted. We “could amass this great amount of money and defeat the point of accountability in politics. We could say whatever we want…. A group like ours could lie through its teeth.”

And that's just what Dolan’s group, the National Conservative Political Action Committee -- “Nickpack” -- did, along with dozens of likeminded, equally well-financed groups. To discredit what it called the failed Liberal Establishment, the New Right crushed opponents with outrageously false attack ads, painted dissenting opinions as disloyal, and contaminated American politics with an unprecedented barrage of half-truths and whole untruths about liberal motives, the “liberal media,” the “liberal elite” and the “liberal agenda.”

Paul Weyrich, a right-wing contemporary of Dolan, mused that the New Right’s war on liberalism was “the most significant battle of the age-old conflict between good and evil … that we have seen in our country.” Zealousness inspired the movement to bar no holds. Any expediency drafted in the cause against godless liberalism was legitimate. The end, quite simply, justified the means.

Now all the overreaching and the lies that naturally came with it, the grandstanding -- and not least of all -- the utter inattention to the country’s real needs are taking their toll. We seem to be witnessing a genuine disgust with the incumbent power in America that sprang from the New Right -- and it seems to be growing deeper and wider, rooting far beyond the left itself.

What’s more, the disgust seems rooted in more than just Tom and Bill’s theocracy du jour, or even George’s imperial bumbling and domestic cluelessness. It seems more of a “We’ve-had-it” disgust with the very seeds of modern conservatism.

“I am the dog, since I bark in your defense”

The Democratic National Committee recently commissioned a poll on the obvious and, unsurprisingly, came up with the obvious. It wanted to know if red-state voters were influenced by moral values as much as actual political issues in the presidential race, and if so, for whom they voted. “Yes” and “Bush” were the answers. Well blow me away.

The poll also found these voters are “tremendously cross-pressured between their pocketbook concerns and their moral values concerns,” which I can only interpret as meaning they’re right on the verge of chucking some values for cash. Again, unsurprising. (What does surprise me is that I’m writing for free -- hint, hint -- when I could be out huckstering polling services to political committees.)

DNC Chairman Howard Dean said the poll’s results point to the need for Democrats to reformat their delivery: “Democrats wonder why people vote against their own economic interest. The answer is that Democrats don't connect with people's fears about how to raise their children in a difficult social environment” – that voters think the Dems’ remedy is a bigger-badder government that will “raise your children for you.”

“Connect” and “fears” are, of course, the key words in that passage, and the first is why the Democrats have been on the losing side for some time. It’s not that they don’t connect or don’t try to connect with voters’ fears. It’s that they don’t exploit them, like you know who.

Take the so-called “death” tax. While Democrats engage in reality-based tutorials about the estate tax affecting only a fraction of a fraction of the filthiest rich who drop dead before retaining a crafty tax attorney, Republicans are occupied with scaring the bejesus out of lower middle-class folks into believing some Darth Vader of an IRS angel of mortality is going to confiscate the trailer home when grandpa keels over.

That’s not “connecting” with voters’ fears. That’s exploiting them after having invented the fears to begin with. And that’s one reason Republicans have succeeded.

Their success also results from manipulating the humbug of “common sense” as much as exploiting outright fear. The party’s chief of manipulative humbuggery, Frank Luntz, prides himself with having helped right-wing politicians understand “the clear, common-sense way to say what you mean.”

Again, take the death tax. Luntz asks, “When I die … I may pay a tax. What else would you call that other than a death tax?” Gee Frank, maybe I’d call it an estate tax, since I’m dead and therefore my estate pays the tax. In addition, would you say you “may” die someday? I noticed you slipped “may” pay a tax after the definite “when” I die. It then becomes commonsensically outrageous to many people that taxes should follow death. A trifle convoluted, yet the thrust of it sticks in the electoral mind.

But Frank knows that. He didn’t get rich by not knowing the tripe he sells to politicians — and what they turn around and sell to voters — is anything less than manipulation. If he’s really wedded to pure common sense because common sense always makes sense, then I suggest he join the Flat Earth Society. Look about you, Frank. Does the Earth look round to you? Of course not. Common sense tells you it’s flat.

At its most fundamental level, though, what Frank Luntz sells is demagoguery. His Republican clients buy wholesale, sell retail. I know it, you know it, Frank knows it and Howard Dean knows it.

And that’s where Dean’s dilemma arises. Should Democrats continue trying to connect or should they start exploiting? We know which one has the upper hand. It always has. A playwright as ancient as Aristophanes could parody the demagogue and his panderings …

Then listen and be attentive!...
I am the dog, since I bark in your defense.

I don’t have an unqualified answer to the “connect vs. exploit” question. And I’m glad I’m not Howard Dean. I’m afraid I might be tempted to just go with what obviously works.

"Nuclear Option": the Origin

As you’ve probably heard, Republican pols are now charging that Democrats devised both the term and the strategy of the term, “nuclear option,” in relation to the U.S. Senate filibuster controversy. They say the Democrats invented the phrase to describe their destructive plan to shut down Senate business if they don’t get their way. The words “nuclear option” have, let us say, an uneasy connotation that no political party would want to be associated with.

It is just as probable that you won’t be surprised to learn that the Republicans are fibbing again.

A Lexis-Nexis search revealed this -- the first reference to the term that offered any attribution:

Senate Republicans have one weapon -- what Majority Leader Bill Frist and his colleagues have called the "nuclear option," because it would blow up the current rules requiring a 60-vote “supermajority” to end a filibuster.

The line is from the Washington Post, November 28, 2004.

Aha! some would say. Just a liberal-media rag wanting to punish the GOP.

Aha! I would say. The line was written by Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute.

Beyond Hypocrisy

The word “hypocrisy” doesn’t begin to describe what the Republican Senate and White House are up to these days with respect to judicial appointments. They claim that all the president’s nominees deserve, in Dick Cheney’s words, “an up-or-down vote,” that “there is no justification for allowing the blocking of nominees” for ideological reasons, and that Democratic obstructionist “tactics of the last few years … are inexcusable.”

“Hypocrisy” is a poor designation because all politicians are hypocritical at times. And generally some minor distinction in differing positions on like subjects can be found to justify backtracking and mealy-mouthed double-dealing.

But contemporary Republican hypocrisy makes the word pale in its significance, for the GOP has reached down into the lowest, yet-unexplored depths of political debauchery and redefined the very essence of hypocrisy. It has discarded even the pretense of consistency and hairsplitting distinctions, instead choosing to simply write off its own solid history of judicial-appointee obstructionism as a kind of negligible non-history. For the party and its supporters the inconsistent past just doesn’t count – it is hereby expunged.

But it can’t be expunged for the consistently curious, because the past has a stubborn habit of recording itself and sticking around in print. And as a public service to those of that curious bent, I thought I’d replay some of that stubbornness in print:

From the St. Petersburg Times, April 14, 1994: “Republicans had been threatening to hold up the nomination [of a federal court nominee] indefinitely.”

From the New York Times, December 9, 1994: Senator Orrin Hatch, the new chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told Clinton administration “officials that he was now the principal gatekeeper on who gets to be a federal judge.”

From the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, November 12, 1997: “Any Clinton administration nominee who harbors ideas that don’t measure up on the GOP litmus test will have a tough time getting by [the Republican Senate’s] checkpoints.”

From the New York Times, January 2, 1998: “Mr. Hatch and his fellow Congressional Republicans … have delayed consideration of many of President Clinton’s nominees.”

From the St. Petersburg Times, September 26, 1999: “From virtually the beginning of Clinton's presidency, [Republicans] have blocked, stalled and shut down judicial confirmations in an attempt to keep jurists with the slightest liberal bent off the bench. Of the 62 judicial nominations put up by Clinton this year, the Senate has voted to confirm only 17.”

From the San Diego Union-Tribune, January 22, 2000: “Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., [said] that he and at least 13 other Republicans will block confirmation votes on every judicial nominee sent to the Senate by President Clinton in his last year in office.”

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 11, 2000: “Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott pushed through the confirmation of two federal judges Thursday, defying an effort by his fellow Republicans to block all nominations submitted by the Clinton administration.”

From the San Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 2000: “Confirmation votes [on two nominees] had been delayed for years by conservative Republican senators who charged [they] were liberal activists named to a federal appeals court that already leans too far to the left. [One nominee] had to wait four years before yesterday's vote, the longest delay in history for any federal judicial nominee.”

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 28, 2000: “Clinton said that he had been trying to get a black judge on [the 4th U.S. Circuit Court] for the last five years but that he had been stopped by the Senate Republican majority.”

OK, review over. Update time again. The White House and Republican Senate now foam with high indignation that judicial nominees deserve “an up-or-down vote” and its denial is “inexcusable.”

That’s more than hypocritical. It’s sick.