PMC Commentary

The GOP’s elephant in the room

Jeff Jacoby, the Boston Globe’s resident conservative, doesn’t usually get it. Most of his columns - reality-based disconnects of Heritage Foundation fantasies and talking-point drafts for the Limbaugh crowd - leave the thoughtful reader either slackjawed or in stitches. But on Wednesday he actually got it, and perhaps the only thing that rendered readers slackjawed this time around was how “it” could take so damn long to occur.

Mr. Jacoby, it seems, just discovered that present-day, self-ballyhooed conservatives - specifically, those in Congress and the White House - aren’t … well, conservative. In what must have been a etymological epiphany, it came to Jacoby that “conservative” comes from “conserve,” as in to fiscally conserve, and his lads in power aren’t doing anything of the sort.

I don’t know if it was his keen, investigative skills or the endless stream of kids-in-the-candy-store headlines for five years that tipped him off, but whichever it was, he’s hot on the story. And just plain hot. He feels betrayed.

Jacoby noted that in the conservative beginning - the mid-1960s, when Moses B. Goldwater was carving political Truth in stone to fight Pharaoh L. Johnson’s fiscal plague - the “GOP complain[ed] about creeping socialism and reckless federal spending.” LBJ and his minions in Congress dominated the electoral landscape and were spending like prodigal SOBs. It was a fiscal nightmare from which conservatives were to wake us up.

But, pined Jacoby, “one political party is still running the show in Washington and still spending as mindlessly as ever…. The incumbent in the White House, a Texan named Bush, burns through money even more extravagantly than the Texan named Johnson…. The conservatives are aghast…. Bush, who has never vetoed a single bill, shows no interest in fiscal self-control. And neither does the leadership in Congress, a crew of wastrels next to whom the LBJ Democrats of 40 years ago were penny-pinching skinflints.”

Then came Jacoby’s incredibly arrested epiphany: “Suddenly, with a start, you realize something astonishing: Bush is actually a Republican. The House and Senate are controlled by Republicans. They walk and talk and spend like old-time Democrats, but in fact they belong to the GOP. Somewhere along the way, the heirs of Goldwater and Reagan became clones of Johnson and Hubert Humphrey. The party of fiscal sobriety turned into a gang of reckless big spenders.”

Put aside Jacoby’s laughable inclusion of St. Ronald among the fiscally responsible, as well as his omission of the Gipper as the presidential prototype of today’s fiscally irresponsible nitwits. That’s just part of the fundamentalist conservative catechism, and we should be condescendingly gracious in allowing conservatives a few comforting political fables. What’s important is that he got the contemporary big picture right and he done writ it large, which is more than one can say for most other conservative columnists.

This angle - the fiscally irresponsible, utterly non-conservative-GOP angle - is one Democrats should be embracing passionately throughout the midterm and presidential elections. Sure, other activities, like reaming Tom DeLay, are fun. It’s always satisfying to rip a new one for corrupt, pompous thugs. And when they tire of hammering The Hammer, Democrats will always have Jack Abramoff, Bill Frist, David Safavian, Karl Rove, “Scooter” Libby and Lord yet knows how many other satanic insiders to kick around. But all such good things and fun times come to an end, sadly, and these stories likely will be mere political footnotes by late 2006 and 2008.

As political backup it’s also wise to establish some actual principles - now there’s a thought - and a leading one, foolishly handed to Democrats, is what Republicans cynically claimed as their exclusive own for decades: fiscal responsibility. The GOP reaped widespread electoral support from what they long ago turned their backs on. So the electorate remains in waiting for someone, some party, to be the responsible adult. It’s a deep well of support that’s waiting to be tapped.

The president’s funk could be bad news

I once heard the actor James Cagney reminisce with eloquent brevity about his hard-drinking father. By the time of the younger Cagney’s adolescence, pop, he said, had swilled himself into that psychological vortex of “a good man going downhill fast.”

Most liberals would redact the “good” from that character sketch to describe George W. Bush’s current and personal state of affairs, but even conservatives and their more right-wing and militant brethren privately concur these days with the “going downhill fast” part. Never has a fall from presidential grace occurred with such rapidity and conspicuousness.

Katrina and Rita were huge stories in their own right, of course, but the latter took on a unique hugeness only because it followed the former’s hugeness being simultaneously overshadowed by the huger hugeness of Bush’s incompetence in responding. Political fallout, not nature’s, became Katrina’s primary narrative, and a political eulogy became its color commentary. Bush’s swagger swiftly devolved to feigned humility, then abject supplication. He desperately needs voters to cut him some slack, and the man who claims not to care about polling numbers is now willing to say or do anything to bump them up.

The man who once famously, and proudly, also claimed not to read newspapers - hence by implication, not to even follow the news - now seems to be consciously suffering the effects of their collective negativity. He who puts others in harm’s way and happily instructs them to stay the course appears to be unhappily drowning in his own. A Newsweek story portrayed an acute presidential funk that, left untreated, contains the seeds of chronicity. Saturday, sitting in Rita’s Colorado command headquarters …

the president was hearing mostly good news [about the hurricane’s unrealized horror]…. The president didn’t look all that relieved or happy, however. His eyes were puffy from lack of sleep (he had been awakened all through the night with bulletins), and he seemed cranky and fidgety. A group of reporters and photographers had been summoned by White House handlers to capture a photo op of the commander in chief at his post. Bush stared at them balefully. He rocked back and forth in his chair, furiously at times, asked no questions and took no notes.

Bush’s reported frame of mind reminded me of stories circulating in the late 1990s about Bill Clinton’s funk. The official White House word was that he could “compartmentalize”; that when other business called he could put aside his impeachment problems and concentrate on the issue at hand. Aides later admitted that was less than true; that Clinton would often drift off during important meetings, clearly obsessed with his plummeting political fortunes.

Bush doesn’t have to fear congressional impeachment, but he’s being subjected to a de facto impeachment by public opinion. And he knows it. He knows he is no longer top gun and the only mission he can accomplish these days is that of hanging on by his political teeth. That’s quite an ego demotion for a man who once fancied himself the Anti-FDR and global dragon slayer of historic note.

What’s more, according to a Washington Post report the president’s funk “is changing the psychic and political aura of the White House…. Aides who never betrayed self-doubt now talk in private of failures” - failure in marketing what was billed as a noble war; failure in undoing the New Deal’s principal plank of Social Security; failure, even, in the fundamentals of preparing for the easily foreseeable.

With the economy destined to tank and Iraq’s civil war looking hopelessly irresolvable, these same aides have to be thinking about a midterm-election strategy: perhaps another little war would do. What else does the funkster in chief have as an option to pick up his spirits, and his numbers?

That’s the White House’s transitional “psychic and political aura” that should worry.

Now for something completely different

The most uplifting piece of political commentary I have read in years - and I mean that literally - has come from the pen of none other than right-winger Robert Novak. His column last week filled me with hope. I coulda kissed the guy.

Novak had attended an Aspen, Colorado political forum staged annually by Republican financial angel Theodore J. Forstmann of the prominent New York buyout firm, Forstmann Little & Co. Gathered were more than 200 “mostly prestigious” types, and guess what? “For two full days,” reported Novak, “George W. Bush was bashed. He was taken to task on his handling of stem cell research, population control, the Iraq war and, especially, Hurricane Katrina.”

What made that synopsis especially uplifting was this: “The critics were no left-wing bloggers. They were rich, mainly Republican and presumably Bush voters in the last two presidential elections.” For two full days these movers and shakers of supply-side splendor confabbed over such diverse issues as world poverty, human rights and the international economy - and “the connecting link,” Novak noted with as much surprise as lament, “was hostility to President Bush.”

Oh happy days. Even the economic royalists are restless. Even the sole beneficiaries of Bush’s plutocratic quagmire are sinking into the realization that although wealth may not trickle down, incompetence does - and that is no way to run a railroad. Ultimately the entire social infrastructure will crash and derail even their own, self-satisfied agenda. That, at least, is the kind of overdue foresight one assumes has occurred to this crowd.

The joyous turnabout that Novak observed and grudgingly reported did not stop there, either. The fat-cat dissatisfaction with Bush, he wrote, is of historic proportions. “Longtime participants in Forstmann Little conferences … told me they had not experienced such hostility against a Republican president at previous events.” Face it, Junior. When you no longer look better than your one-term pappy, you’ve got big, big problems.

Over the weekend the New York Times took just enough time off from screwing its readers with extortionist subscription demands to make this broad and rather insightful analogy with respect to the president’s nose-diving popularity: “While Mr. Bush has been worrying about low expectations in schools, he's been ratcheting the bar downward himself on almost everything else…. The American public has much higher expectations than he does for the president and his government.”

Based on what Novak heard and saw in Aspen, the NYT’s emperor-with-no-clothes assessment, it seems, has finally trickled its way up and into the brains of fat-catdom. It’s unfortunate that it took the perfect storm of Katrina to fully expose Bush’s running aground of the world’s only superpower ship of state. Those who have been worrying less about corporate profits for the last five years and more about the gathering clouds of Bush’s dark incompetence are only surprised that it took the disastrously obvious to enlighten.

In sketching the contour of American political cycles, historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once noted that its chief characteristic is that once the left positions the country into proper working order, the resulting prosperity leads the electorate to start thinking like Republicans. So the right finds itself swept into power, only, of course, to foul things up. This prompts a return to leftward national thinking, which once again improves matters, which once again leads to Republican complacence, and so it goes, on and on.

If Schlesinger was correct, then the right’s forecast of a permanent Republican majority was doomed from the beginning. But there can be no doubt that George W. Bush has sped the inevitable - and the embarrassing cold-shouldering delivered unto him at Aspen by a critical base might have indicated just how soon this cycle’s end may come.

Right answers, wrong questions

Bush’s approval rating is finally beginning to slide into Herbert Hoover territory. He has a long history of doing what he shouldn’t have and not doing what he should have; and voters, whose political consciousness always suffers from attention deficit, are just now sobering up to the disastrous binge Bush has been on since virtually his first day in office.

What is odd about voters’ revised opinion of Bush is that it largely springs from the two things he has had the least control over - a natural disaster and climbing gas prices - while those things he indeed has had control over - a needless war and reckless fiscal policies - remain sources of only mild discontent.

As evidence of this disconnect I offer a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll, which states that “less than half approve of Bush’s handling of Katrina. Less than a third give him good marks on gas prices.” Now God only knows how the other half could actually approve of Bush’s handling of the Katrina crisis, but the fact remains that the fiasco’s genesis - the storm itself - lay outside any presidential authority to avert. As for gas prices, a little world-market thing called supply and demand dictates their direction and there ain’t much any president can do about it.

Yet it’s the uncontrollables - a storm and oil supplies - that exercise the electorate and bring a sudden but long-overdue shift in its broader opinion. There was this statistical conclusion by the AP-Ipsos poll, causing me flabbergasted wonder: “[Bush is] no longer considered a strong, decisive leader by many voters, a reversal from the 2004 presidential campaign when the wartime incumbent successfully cast himself in those terms” (emphasis added).

Putting aside the electorate’s susceptibility to Rovian demagoguery, one marvels that only now do voters question Bush as a “strong, decisive leader.” Like Voltaire’s observation that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, blundering into a colossally stupid war was neither strength, nor decisiveness, nor leadership. If you hand a grenade to a three-year-old and he lobs it at your curmudgeonly neighbor, you wouldn’t think to compliment the lad for, say, his decisiveness. You would, of course, be a trifle embarrassed at having given him the grenade to begin with, but you’d also conclude his action merely was that of an immature mind incapable of comprehending consequences and the value of human life.

The other leg of Bush’s “strong leadership” has been his systematic reversal of fiscal responsibility and the advancement of a plutocratic, social nightmare. Yet, to pay for the post-Katrina cleanup, only “29 percent wanted to delay or cancel Republican tax cuts.” Now, I put it to you: Since maybe one percent of the nation benefits from Republican tax cuts, wouldn’t 99 percent of a sane electorate want to cancel the idiotic things, whether there was a coastal region to fix or not?

The public is slowly coming around to seeing Bush’s deficit crisis in play, but it took an unrelated natural disaster to spur even minority doubts. That’s not much of a testament to democracy.

The upside is that the public is coming around at all. And the AP-Ipsos poll revealed the potential depth of future electoral disgruntlement: “nearly all Democrats and two-thirds of independents [have] soured on [Bush’s] presidency”; “GOP strategists worry about a decline in [their base’s] enthusiasm as next year’s midterm elections draw near”; and “by an 8-point margin, voters are more likely to call themselves Democrats than Republicans,” when no such spread existed just a year ago.

The downside? The AP put it this way: “Bush’s best hope may be that Democrats miscalculate as they struggle to find a unified voice post-Katrina.” Oh, how true. Republicans have more than hope; they can almost always count on Democrats miscalculating and struggling and failing to find a unified voice.

Effective politics is about developing a disciplined organization. Good politics is about developing a message and educating voters. Smart politics is about knowing how to lead with both. And let’s face it. Democrats are developmentally disabled. A downside, indeed.

Abbott and Costello Meet Reality

In a speech at Brown University, John Kerry said Katrina had "stripped away any image of competence and exposed to all the true heart and nature of this administration. The truth is that for four and a half years, real life choices have been replaced by ideological agenda, substance replaced by spin, governance second place always to politics."

Ouch.

What did White House defenders say to that? Well, as the New York Times put it, they leapt into rapid-response mode by “accus[ing] Democrats of trying to take political advantage of a tragedy.”

But there is no “ouch” there. Just laughter, because such a pathetically inadequate retort not only fails to defend, but actually confirms what Kerry charged. In responding to blistering, legitimate and widespread criticism of gross mismanagement by merely accusing critics of playing politics, the White House demonstrates its unswerving loyalty to spin over substance and politics over governance - and both tactics underlie the administration’s overarching, strategic ideology-in-practice of always keeping its agenda safely removed from reality.

OK, you say, that’s old news, nothing has changed. But things may have indeed changed. The Bush administration may have finally overplayed its ideological hand by showing itself, in a momentary crisis of its own making, as substance-less and politically debased than ever imaginable in American presidential politics.

It is clueless, utterly lost in knowing what to do, other than spend tens of billions of tax dollars on the kind of government programs it has ideologically opposed to overcome socioeconomic problems it has routinely denied and neglected. And, of course, the whole sorry attempt is enraging none other than - and especially - its ideological friends.

But what else is a desperate, cynical administration to do, other than plow ahead with contradictory, laughably imprudent policies slapped together in a slipshod manner and try to weather the resulting storm, just like it made Gulf Coast residents do for day after agonizing day.

Oh, that, and force some subordinate schmuck to try to explain what in hell it’s doing, a comedic farce which Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post recently reproduced. Here are chief economic adviser Al Hubbard and chief domestic policy adviser Claude Allen hanging out to dry before the press last week, in all the administration’s hapless splendor. I’ll leave it up to you to decide who is Abbott and who’s Costello.

Q: Al, where's the money coming from for this?

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Where's the money coming from? It's coming from the American taxpayer.

Q: Right, but you're already spending more than you take in, so how much more is there to --

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Well, if you want to know the --

Q: Are we going to have to borrow it, or are you going to raise taxes? I mean, if it's coming from the taxpayer that suggests maybe you're going to have to raise taxes.

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: The last thing in the world we need to do is raise taxes and retard economic growth.

Q: So where does the money come from? Obviously, you've got to borrow it or [make] offsets in the budget, what?

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Well, again, the money is going to come from the federal government, it's going to come from the federal taxpayer....

Q: Allan, can I just clear this up? So the money will be borrowed, so it will add to the deficit, right?

DIRECTOR HUBBARD: Well, there's no question that this -- the recovery will be paid for by the federal taxpayer and it will add to the deficit. That's right....

Q: Claude, do you -- can you name any specific programs that will be cut or eliminated already in order to make room without adding too much to the deficit in order to pay for Katrina relief?

MR. ALLEN: No, I cannot name any programs that will be cut. In fact, we did not focus on that.

Is a more inept presentation possible, even conceivable?

And those were the experts - visible personifications of an administration in political freefall.

Rich beyond opinion

In a perfect world every Bush supporter would be required by law to read Frank Rich of the New York Times. Of course, in a perfect world there would be no need for such a law, because a president by the name of George W. Bush would not exist for supporters to support. As a nation we’d be far too civically virtuous to ever put such a clown in any public office, let alone the Oval one.

Nevertheless we are stuck with Mr. Bush for another three grueling years, thanks to the founding fathers having never anticipated this magnitude of incompetence and thus providing no constitutional prescription for curing it midcourse - unless, it almost goes without saying, there is high-crime evidence of that highest crime, oral sex.

So here we are, helpless in watching the agony of executive incompetence take its toll with virtual impunity. And to my mind, Frank Rich is the keenest observer of the toll taken, the best commentator on the reality behind the constructed Bush image, and in general the most eloquent of the swelling ranks of Bush-bashers.

Yesterday’s weekly installment by Mr. Rich was yet another stylish example of his keenness, incisive deconstruction and inimitable eloquence. In a mere 1530 words he revealed the Bush administration’s true character, which I’ll further distill to its very essence.

George W. Bush is a “blowhard and snake-oil salesman,” Rich wrote, whose only true talents are “rampant cronyism, the empty sloganeering of ‘compassionate conservatism,’ the lack of concern for the ‘underprivileged’ … reckless lack of planning for all government operations except tax cuts, [and] the use of spin and photo-ops to camouflage failure and to substitute for action.”

Now I ask you, could an honest conservative spot one flaw in that portrait? Go ahead, my right-wing friends, and label it partisan, get out of the way the fact that Rich doesn’t like Bush, never has. Attacking the messenger’s motives is a pointless but routine tactic in the rhetorical pursuit of destroying an argument. So go ahead. First say whatever you like about Rich’s motives and partisanship. But then what are you left with? A supremely accurate assessment - are you not?

The Downing Street Memo wasn’t the final proof behind all the “snake-oil salesman” talk? FEMA’s top personnel didn’t prove beyond any question the misplaced “cronyism” practiced by Bush? The latest poverty statistics don’t reflect the propagandistic cruelty of “compassionate conservatism” under Bush’s leadership? Did even Bush’s pet project - the Iraq invasion and its aftermath - show anything but a “reckless lack of planning”? As for the administration’s spin and photo-ops, well, let’s just say it’s undeniable that they would make Michael Deaver proud.

If nothing else, the Katrina crisis and Bush’s criminal negligence in response have helped to dispel Stalin’s famous maxim that one death is a tragedy, while a million deaths are a statistic. “The hurt always comes down to one life, one family,” Bush feigned in a recent speech. But that is not what the nation saw on its television screens and that wasn’t what the nation reacted to with such abhorrence. What America saw was the predictable outcome of years of official neglect, malignant inattentiveness, absent trickle-down benefits and most of all, the nation saw unprecedented presidential incompetence unveiled by the needless suffering of thousands.

As Rich thoughtfully concluded: “Having turned the page on Mr. Bush, the country hungers for a vision that is something other than either liberal boilerplate or Rovian stagecraft. At this point, merely plain old competence, integrity and heart might do.” I ask again: How could anyone, conservative or otherwise, in his or her right mind or even a tad touched, argue with that after all we’ve witnessed?

“March of the Pinheads”

We didn’t need more evidence of the Christian right and its socially conservative allies having gone completely ‘round the bend, but they have graciously provided it anyway. In a New York Times piece titled “March of the Conservatives: Penguin Film as Political Fodder,” the mass psychosis and bizarre belief system of these two camps came into light with slackjawed clarity.

If you like nature films and haven’t seen “March of the Penguins,” you should, because it’s a good nature film. If you prefer political documentaries and haven’t seen “March of the Penguins,” then I’d suggest you see an actual political documentary - unless you’re interested in taking a kind of cinematic Rorschach test.

I’ve seen the film, and what I saw was a nature film, a nice piece of work that depicts the struggle of a rugged species - the emperor penguin - having adapted to a hostile environment that no other bird in its right mind would have, or different evolutionary makeup could have. It’s just the way things worked out. The Christian right and friends have also seen it. What they saw was, well, I’ll let the Times summarize it:

“On the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily.com, an opponent of abortion wrote that the movie ‘verified the beauty of life and the rightness of protecting it….’ Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, told the young conservatives' gathering last month: ‘You have to check out ‘March of the Penguins.’ It is an amazing movie. And I have to say, penguins are the really ideal example of monogamy.…’ A widely circulated Christian publication [said it made] ‘a strong case for intelligent design.’”

The beauty of life? All life? Such as that lost in an unnecessary war supported by many of these devout believers? And Lowry got it wrong, unless he meant to endorse serial monogamy. As for intelligent design, surely there are better showcases than some poor bird stuck in a vicious climate.

In short, as the Times put it, “conservative groups have turned its stirring depiction of the mating ordeals of emperor penguins into an unexpected battle anthem in the culture wars.” Yep, even frozen birds can’t escape the selective, hyperinterpretive eye of fundamentalist moviegoers. For some reason, this is the crowd that can’t understand the difference between symbolism and literalism in the Bible - who take the symbolic literally and the literal symbolically - but can decipher all manner of hidden and deeper meanings in a simple nature tale.

And that’s all it is. A nature tale. “We did not have discussions of what should be in from a social, cultural or political perspective at all,” said the president of the film’s distributor, National Geographic Feature Films. “We just wanted to make sure that it was accurate.”

But that’s where the Christian right saw its opening - through the producers’ omission of political commentary regarding facts of global warming - not too important to right wingers, but of supreme importance to penguins - and evolutionary theory. Because the producers left the obvious commentary out, the right saw its opportunity to put its own in - to distort and degrade the simple tale for political advantage.

And therein lies the moral of this story. To the self-proclaimed sacred crowd, nothing is sacred. It can even take a simple little bird tale - behind which, but left unnoted in the film, is a tale about creatures who are products of evolutionary development and vulnerable to man’s environmental insanity - and turn it right on its head. And for what? A cheap shot at some political brainwashing.

“You know what? They’re just birds,” said the vice president of the film’s co-distributor, Warner Independent. But not to the Christian right. These birds are an opportunity. A shameless opportunity to score a few political points.

But it’s the opportunism’s pettiness writ large that unsettles. When even emperor penguins become political pawns, it’s a sign not just of a cultural war being waged, but of a willingness to wage total war: a war on the educated mind - indeed, a war on educating minds.

Conservatism’s favorite fallacy

In the context of weighing racial and class-based factors in the federal government’s woeful response to Katrina, the Washington Post related this succinct portrayal of the president’s political philosophy with respect to combating poverty:

“In the place of traditional poverty programs, Bush has touted faith-based social service programs, calling them more efficient and effective than those run by the government. Many programs of an earlier generation, he says, have served only to perpetuate the plight of the poor.”

Forty years of relentless right-wing campaigning on the fallacy that government programs “have served only to perpetuate the plight of the poor” has convinced a majority of Americans of the fallacy’s truth. But it has taken root among the electorate only because most Americans don’t examine the assertion’s basis any more than our intellectually lazy president has. It is received knowledge, not informed opinion.

At its core, conservatism is a profoundly antigovernment philosophy, not a pro-opportunity philosophy. The idea that proactive government perpetuates poverty, rather than poverty resulting from society’s structural flaws, is merely a cover story for reducing the cost of government to the haves, leaving the have-nots to the wolves. This may seem like an obvious point, too obvious to note even, and to an informed electorate it would be. But millions of Americans, having bought into conservatism’s simplistic solutions, have also bought into the idea that conservatism stands for a positive philosophy of alternative approaches to social betterment rather than a negative philosophy of limiting government at all social costs.

Without going into a dry, detailed history of what government programs have, in fact, done for the poor, consider again what the Post wrote about Mr. Bush’s views - that he “has touted faith-based social service programs, calling them more efficient and effective than those run by the government.”

Really? Are his faith-based programs somehow something new against which we can now evaluate the ineffectiveness of government?

Hardly. For private social-service programs dominated before the New Deal (and later the Great Society) intervened. It was the inadequacy of such nongovernmental assistance that brought about government’s efforts to do what private charities, principally churches, had been unable to do.

The deployment of Bush’s generous private-over-public aid as a national ideology to fight poverty and provide opportunity had plenty of opportunities itself to work. Prior to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance - need I go on? - those at a socioeconomic disadvantage had little to count on but what private charities had to offer. And it was precious little. The depth of charity’s inability to meet national needs became overwhelmingly apparent during the 1930s, and it was this that launched a fundamental change in approach.

Contrary to the right’s rhetoric and revisionist history, the New Deal wasn’t a manifestation of a bunch of wild-eyed socialists intent on destroying volunteerism and private charity for the sake of erecting big government. The New Deal came about only because private means of assistance had repeatedly failed as society’s principal fallback.

Conservatives love to hark back to a nostalgic America that never existed - to a bygone age when everyone pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and only when it couldn’t be helped did the struggling ask the local church or community chest for a hand, which was always there for them. It wasn’t, of course, and it was capitalism’s unsparing nature that finally showed the inadequacy of private aid.

Modern conservatism is founded on a deliberately constructed, rose-colored historical myth. What perpetuates poverty is government’s inattentiveness, not its pro-activism. Again, this may seem bloody obvious to you, but far too many Americans have never stopped to consider the basics.

Demagoguing failure

It is often astounding to read what passes for brilliant strategic thinking these days. You’ve read the newspaper stories and watched the talk shows in which “party strategist” after “party strategist” bloviates on the contours of contemporary politics - a theatre of the pompous in which the mere title of “party strategist” conferred by the media lends profundity to his or her words. Gee, this must be deep stuff, thinks the political consumer. This guy is a “strategist.” It says so right by his name.

Few have shone in the political strategy game more than Newt Gingrich. This Lazarus-like, once-disgraced pol recultivated his image of grand strategic thoughtfulness with exquisite self-promotional skill, and the press and commentariat have happily fed the image. Newt has big ideas, thinks big thoughts, sees the big picture, it is routinely reported in a big way. Ideas come rolling out of him, comments the commentariat, while others - the lesser, mortal strategists - sit and stew in their antique commonality.

Katrina has visited upon Newt yet more opportunities for quoted profundity. “Both parties have a great opportunity - and a great risk,” he revealed in a recent interview. “One of the two parties is going to be the party that brings the country into the 21st century … and you can’t say today which party will win that battle.”

Yes, that’s why he gets the big money - for big thoughts, such as one party is likely to dominate the other early in the 21st century, which he astutely observed happens to be the century we’re living in. Relevance. Always relevance. That’s key to strategic thinking. Bring big concepts down to a level the little people can grasp.

And there’s the dramatic introduction of suspense: “You can’t say today which party will win that battle.” Here, Newt owns up to a dollop of vulnerability. He can’t predict the future with certainty. He may be a political god, but gosh darn it, he’s still one of us in some ways.

The funny part is, if Gingrich’s party follows his strategic advice, we can predict with virtual certainty which party will win the battle of the American mind. Furthermore, that his party will follow his advice is even more than a virtual certainty: it’s an ironclad certainty. And Newt’s advice has been the same since he concocted the Contract with America.

Demagoguery. Don’t be shy about it. Shy demagogues are losers and timid demagoguery never got anyone anywhere. That’s the whole point of demagoguery, you morons, Newt would say as an expression of his big thinking. Demagoguery is all about blasting a deceptive and shallow message with the shamelessness of a … well, a Newt Gingrich.

“In 2006, if there isn’t some turn of events, Iraq combined with Katrina and the large budget deficits to follow will create an opportunity for non-incumbents to move in,” said American University political scientist James Thurber.

Think about that for a moment. Iraq, budget deficits and Katrina. Did not two of these three exist before the 2004 elections? Were not two of these three under the management of the majority party?

Yet how did the controlling party manage to overcome the accountability otherwise due from botching foreign policy and the nation’s finances? By demagoguery. Pure, plain, demagogic hogwash, delivered in classic Gingrichesque style - meaning shamelessness. Divert electoral attention from the majority party’s repeated failures to the opposing party’s lack of moral values and patriotism. Hammer that message home. Don’t ever bow to reality. Stay on message about the ungodly, unpatriotic opposition.

It has worked since the 1980s. Demogoguery was the “big idea” of that era’s New Right, the shameless movement in which Newt Gingrich played a shamelessly opportunistic role.

So how are Republicans demagoguing their failed response to Katrina? By blaming state and local authority. That would be state and local authority that Republicans have always, and without qualification, declared far more responsive to people’s needs than the big, bad federal government, as popularly advertised.

Is there a disconnect here? Of course there is. But demagogues don’t mind, if you don’t. Newt knows we don’t. That’s the essential framework that allows his demagoguery to flourish.

Da Grate Communikator

It was one of those did-it-really-say-that? instances, a flash of disbelief at the astoundingly inane in print. But there it was, nevertheless, in yesterday’s opening to a Washington Post editorial:

“President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina has been, to put it kindly, faltering. He has fallen short both rhetorically and substantively. The rhetorical failure is less important but perhaps more surprising for a politician with his strong communications skills.”

George W. Bush, yes, that George W. Bush, has strong communications skills. George W. Bush, as in the oratorical bumbler, the malapropism master, the syntactic offender, the mind-of-mush thinker, the verbal stumbler, the deer-in-the-headlights responder, the cerebral clown - that George W. Bush has “strong communications skills.”

Well, he can read from notecards. Not always flawlessly, but he manages to get the words out eventually. He can memorize and deliver a few soundbites; again, not flawlessly, but he manages the gist. More telling, however, is that Bush has virtually no knowledge of history or economics or sociology from which to extemporize, so when he tries the attempt comes out as muddled nonsense - as ahistorical, aeconomic, asociological, a-everything as understood by the informed world - but, according to the Post, he has strong communications skills.

The genesis of this perpetrated myth seems to be those few minutes in 2001 when he put his arm around a fireman and bellowed through a bullhorn that he’d get Osama, which of course he never did. But that started the myth rolling in right-wing circles and then was often echoed by the MSM - the utter asininity that George W. Bush is a strong, or even competent, communicator.

Five years of globally embarrassing verbal gaffes and repeated shows of intellectual sclerosis have done little to erase the myth among the hard and devoutly partisan right. Fine. That’s politics. Still, one would think a paper as esteemed as the Post would either not repeat it at long last, or at least pause to note that the myth should forever be laid to rest.

When Ronald Reagan was publicly cultivated by the right as a Great Communicator - a man whose mind was as full of mush as George W. Bush’s - the media played along with it and the bar has been so low ever since that anyone capable of reading from a 3X5 index card could hop, skip and jump over it with nary an effort. Just sputter the well-honed words of some speechwriter - someone who spent years refining his or her rhetorical craft - and you too can be proclaimed a great communicator. Daniel Webster must be rolling his eyes as he turns in his grave.

But I’ll lay off George for a moment and turn instead to this other bit of published wisdom by the Post:

“Some of the administration's political opponents are reacting to the administration's fumbling with barely disguised glee, hoping it will hobble the administration's policy plans…. For the president to be rendered a lame duck more than three years before he leaves office would not serve the country well, at home or abroad.”

How a politically savvy bunch of editorial board members could write and actually print such misplaced, holier-than-thou, boneheaded slop is beyond intelligent imagination. Of course there’s glee. And it’s damned justified and honorable glee.

In effect, the Post suggests that the administration’s plans for more tax cuts proceed unimpeded. That the administration should charge forward with destroying Social Security. That it limp along in Iraq without the opposition “hobbling” it through all possible means to save lives and resources.

Had the editorial board stopped to think about the abysmal consequences of an unhobbled Bush administration, it would have written, “For the president to be rendered a lame duck more than three years before he leaves office is, no doubt, five years too late, but there’s no better time than the present.”

(New works, new look, on my art page. Click here to visit.)

Indulging George

George Lakoff, the political guru who wields cognitive linguistics as an analytical weapon, has written extensively about what you might call tough-love conservatism and how the mental framework of tough love (theoretically) dominates hard-core conservatives’ thinking and their behavior toward others.

It’s about time they started applying it to their Child King.

The lead sentence in a New York Times piece must have caused nationwide, there-he-goes-again ruptures of laughter sprinkled throughout long spasms of dismay: “President Bush … vowed today to find out what went wrong in the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.”

That would be the federal response to an expected disaster. That would be a 9/11-style investigation into another disaster compounded by yet more federal screw-ups - before, during and after - which the president “vowed” years ago would never again take place on his watch. He would investigate, he would get to the bottom of it, he would take all necessary precautions and make the necessary corrections to see that the precautions were honored.

Never again. That was his pledge, pure and simple. And he failed, pure and simple. But what has the tough-love conservative electorate repeatedly done? Give him another chance. And another. And then another. Pat him on the head like an indulgent parent would an unruly child and say, “There, there, dear, we’ll overlook it.”

How many mistakes must be made before hidebound conservatives “get it”? - before they accept that George W. is a delinquent adolescent with no intention of learning from past mistakes and no intention of correcting future behavior. He is snubbing his nose at his supposedly tough-loving “parents,” knowing they’ll excuse him, excuse his behavior, excuse his irresponsibility and go along with him in blaming the dog for eating his homework.

George W.’s much-maligned dog in this case has already been singled out and named. Said our recalcitrant child, the "bureaucracy's not going to stand in the way of getting the job done for the people."

There you go. It’s all the bureaucracy’s fault. Master George had nothing to do with it. It’s not like he’s at the top of that bureaucracy. He’s just a strapping shaver whose self-discipline begins and ends with physical training regimens.

"What I intend to do," said he, "is lead an investigation into what went right and what went wrong." Which is like Willy Sutton leading an investigation into that rash of bank robberies committed suspiciously close to home.

And we can forget about a worthwhile investigation from the Capitol Hill enablers as well. “The chairwoman and the ranking minority member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said hearings would be held.” Those would be hearings controlled by the majority parent-party which has abetted young George W.’s delinquency for five years, excusing failure after failure, debacle after debacle, crime after crime.

"It is difficult to understand the lack of preparedness and the ineffective initial response to a disaster that had been predicted for years, and for which specific, dire warnings had been given for days," Republican Senator Susan Collins said.

Mother Collins may be perplexed, but for years everyone else has watched as she and her indulgent, conservative co-parents have allowed George W. to run amok. He gets pass after pass, while others suffer the consequences.

The neighbors have finally had enough.

(New works, new look, on my art page. Click here to visit.)

Our re-inflatable president

The Bush administration’s handling of the Katrina crisis has been inspiring. It has inspired red-staters, at long last, to shake their heads in disbelief at their superstar’s staggering cluelessness. It has inspired conservative pols to run for cover while pointing their fingers at the clueless one. It has inspired usually supportive newspaper editorial boards to grow uniformly critical. With the natural exception of Fox, the cable networks finally have been inspired to unleash reporters to question America’s leadership. Even talking heads like former right-wing loyalist Joe Scarborough can no longer look into the camera’s eye and pretend that the cretinous thugs at the top and far to the right have done anything right.

In short, the Bushies have once again demonstrated just how good they really are at running things.

So naturally we on the left once again launch into optimistic speculation that this time - this time - boy, did they ever blow it. They’re ruined. The truth is out. Everyone now knows what we knew from the beginning: George W. Bush is Marie Antoinette with a press agent.

But pardon me if I remain skeptical. How many times have we written the political obituary of this pestilent gang?

Right from the start we thought the public would immediately turn on the gang leader when the latter immediately turned his back on his 2000 campaign promises. Those environmental controls he supported, for instance? Never mind. The election was done stolen and over. Different-tune time; an egregious bait and switch that the left just knew would come and just knew would disaffect the public when it did. Yet what transpired? A huge national yawn. That’s what.

Soon there were all the widely reported predictions as to what would happen to the budget deficit - none of it good - when W. slashed taxes and increased spending. It all came to pass. National reaction? Bigger yawn.

The surest signpost of the administration’s demise was, of course, the Iraq fiasco - a blunder so monumental that words like fiasco and blunder fail to describe its gravity. Then came the political coup de grace - a little thing called the Downing Street Memo, culpability in writing. Remember that? The public doesn’t. Never really cared. A crime far worse than Watergate and at least as bad as extramarital oral sex - and the scandal went nowhere. Thousands dead because of lies - and no political price paid.

Need I go on? Draw up your own Bush-blunder laundry list, then recall how each and every time we on the left thought: That should do it. That should convince the public of this administration’s clownish incompetence. That should speed an end to the madness. And the outcome? A dip in W.’s numbers, only to rebound and stabilize.

Now we have witnessed yet another monumental blunder - one in which, again, untold innocent lives have been, and remain to be, lost, because of the Bush administration’s colossally backward, prowar, antisocial ideology. And this one so huge even most of the typically timid MSM now read like a Paul Krugman piece, such as that of last Friday: “the response you’d expect from an advanced country never happened … a stunning lack of both preparation and urgency in the federal government’s response … our current leaders just aren’t serious about some of the essential functions of government … they like waging war, but they don’t like providing security….”

But to repeat, I remain skeptical as to lasting damage. The national disgraces perpetrated by this administration don’t disgrace the perp for long.

Still, there’s that one variable this time around - press coverage, both print and electronic, has been almost universally hostile (meaning objective), for a change. Perhaps the MSM will stay reawakened to its watchdog duties and realize that whatever loss of “access” it sustains is more than compensated by some self-respect.

(Note: I've updated my art page. Click here to visit.)

From the archives

(I am on Labor Day hiatus. This piece from the archives: May 19, 2005)

“The ideology of ignorance”

Reading journalists’ reports from Iraq is like being sucked into a time warp where ancient incompetence comes flying at you with mocking vengeance. It’s a confirming experience as well -- a confirmation that policy makers will never learn as long as ideology is seen as capable of trumping history.

This time around the Bushies were the best-and-brightest “adults.” They were the steely-eyed realists who understood the world as it is and how to handle it. They alone -- the neocon grownups and hard-asses -- could overcome the wimpish stain of Vietnam on America’s ego.

Iraq I? The Balkans? Child’s play. Not nearly enough to refurbish our standing in the world and erase those 1960s remnants of failure. They would do it right, in a big way, in the Middle East, and start with Iraq. They could hardly wait for excuses. In fact, they didn’t wait. They just made some up.

Now we read tales – literally from the Independent press – that reveal how similar the screw-up in Iraq is to that of Vietnam decades ago. To wit …

“The extent of US failure to control Iraq is masked by the fact that it is too dangerous for the foreign media to venture out of central Baghdad…. US forces seldom venture into much of Iraq.” Needless to say, journalists and doughboys weren’t too fond of careening around South Vietnam’s unhealthy countryside, either, and for the same “scurry, sniff, flinch” reasons.

During our Fallujah assault, the Independent noted that as we were being told of that “victory,” “at the same moment an insurgent offensive had captured most of Mosul.” The same Whackamole game played out from village to village in … yep … Vietnam.

And there was this: “Washington [has] never appreciated the fact that the US occupation was so unpopular.” Why? “Their massive firepower meant they won any set-piece battle, but it also meant that they accidentally killed so many Iraqi civilians that they were the recruiting sergeants of the resistance.” Ask any surviving South Vietnamese peasant what he thought of US forces and their “massive firepower” and you’d get the same frame of mind.

So how do you deal with locals distrustful of your presence? Easy. “The solution for the White House has been to build up an Iraqi force to take the place of US soldiers” – many of whom have “mutinied … or refused to fight.” You of course will recall the vast cooperation we received from the South Vietnamese regular forces, which operated in a perpetual state of getting up to speed. And now the New York Times reports that in Iraq the “build up” may take a bit longer than projected. Well blow me away.

Just as familiar is this chestnut: “The US army [is] also too thin on the ground.” Again, the difference between the Iraq situation and Vietnam is one without a distinction. True, in Iraq, Washington never planned enough troops. So we’re losing. In Vietnam the brass was forever citing a precise number of troops to achieve victory, which Washington gave them. We still lost. The old right -- the neocons’ predecessors -- concocted the myth that Washington starved the military in Vietnam and that was the reason we lost. But the fact is, there are never enough troops to occupy a nation that doesn’t want to be occupied. Ask the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the Soviet Empire….

That, combined with the Independent’s concluding remarks, sum up the cause of failure redux: “The greatest failure of the US in Iraq is not that mistakes were made but that its political system has proved incapable of redressing them.”

There you go. That just about says it all. During Vietnam, Washington’s political system was enmeshed in the ideology of battling communism. It failed to comprehend the war’s nationalist roots and its fundamental construct of a civil war rather than expansionist aggression. So whatever wasn’t working was better than what they perceived as the alternative. And of course policy makers and the military always dangled victory in Vietnam. Let’s keep at it a little longer and we’ll have this mess cleaned up.

Ideology, entrenched thinking, false hope and fear of admitting failure and reversing course -- the combined causes of lasting pain in Vietnam.

As George C. Herring reflected in America’s Longest War: The Unites States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, “Failure never comes easily, but it comes especially hard when success is anticipated at little cost.”

Talk radio

(I am on Labor Day hiatus. This piece from the archives: May 6, 2005)

This morning I’m headed off for parts so redneck they make Capitol Hill’s Republican cloakroom look like a bi-sexual commie bastion. I speak, of course, of the Missouri-Arkansas Ozarks. I once lived there, still have family there, and in a few hours will be rejoining them in the 19th century.

For most Ozarkians the pope has nothing on infallibility compared to St. Limbaugh, whom they regard as one of the world’s most astute political philosophers. In fact, he’s regarded as the world’s only political philosopher, since they would be as stumped as George W. Bush to name a real one.

One of the area’s former U.S. congressmen provides the perfect window into the pedigreed brain. The particular blowhard I have in mind spent years puffing his reputation as a state-tax limiter and social welfare-basher, only to run for Congress and do … absolutely nothing. Nada for six years, except for immortalizing his congressional tenure by voting “No” on everything – including federal disaster relief for San Francisco after a devastating earthquake.

(Update: He would have happily voted against disaster relief for the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast as well, but on serious, ideological grounds, of course. As he once explained on talk radio after the SF emergency, why should we in the Ozarks help, through tax dollars, someone hundreds of miles away?)

On second thought, I believe he did introduce one bill. Something to do with homosexual public school teachers and their Liberal-Elite-backed plot to enslave our kids into thinking and doing sick, sick stuff. I recall his being on local talk radio once, delving into really detailed descriptions of what he insisted were quite customary male-homosexual practices. He got so carried away with the ins and outs of these blow-by-blow descriptions I could have sworn I detected heavy breathing. I was tempted to call in and say, “Down boy.” Talk about your textbook, latent-homosexual homophobia. It was priceless.

Not once did any hyper-drive-conservative caller ever ask him during one of these talk-radio appearances how he could be so damned anti-government but willing and eager to accept nearly $20 grand a year in congressional retirement pay for only six of years of, ah, public service. Not once. (I did, and he stuttered more than during one of his famous anal-sex tutorials.)

And talk radio is where it’s at there. After all, America’s supreme political philosopher dwells in Talk-Radioville, wherein Truth happily dwells. I could provide endless examples of just how sharp much of the discussion is on Ozarks talk radio, but a mere two must suffice for now, since I’m in a hurry.

Back in the late 1990s, when we toiled under Bill Clinton’s wicked empire, one weekend-morning radio host said he had it on excellent authority that Slick Willie had secret plans to use the coming Y2K crisis as cover for a martial-law decree canceling the 2000 elections. He was dead serious.

But my all-time favorite? A regular called in one morning, a few years before the above, complaining about Hillary Clinton’s insidious, socialist health care scheme. He summed up his complaint, I kid you not, this way: “How stupid does she think we is?”