The Carpentariat

C'mon, let's see some blood

The Democratic presidential contenders staged the second of their cluster conferences Sunday evening, and it came off slightly better than the first, by virtue, if nothing else, of Chris Matthews' absence.

I'd still like to see a group beating, a real free-for-all, a libertarian dream of a no-holds-barred slugfest, in which one question -- Why; or if you feel so disposed, Why not? -- is asked at 7PM and till 9PM the candidates improvise.

That would better simulate the warring chaos encountered by real political generalship, in which no plan goes as planned, and undoubtedly would reveal whatever real, nonconsensual leadership and ingenuity exist among them.

But all that is merely procedural, not to mention a pipe dream. We have what we have and we'll never get anything better; the outside consultants and staff advisers and organ grinders would never expose their performing primates that way, so it's best to watch what we do have in a state of suspended awareness.

That means witnessing candidate-on-candidate attacks as anything but strategically staged -- calculated, scripted, rehearsed, memorized and played out in a mutual farce. There's always at least one of these in every mass press conference, and Sunday's came in John Edwards' assault on thoroughly suspecting Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

"There are differences between us," said Edwards in his preamble to knifing his erstwhile colleagues for toadyism on the Iraq war. "And I think Democratic voters deserve to know the differences between us. I think there is a difference between making very clear when the crucial moment comes, on Congress ending this war, what your position is, and standing quiet."

The assault itself, of course, wasn't "very clear," but it was clear enough. Like a reformed boozehound, Mr. Edwards was upbraiding others for insufficient temperance.

Obama, there's no doubt, bested Clinton in the comeback department. He noted he had always been sober, even while others -- wink, wink -- were slopping up gallons of bonded opportunism. "So you’re about four and a half years late on leadership on this issue," he told Edwards, while Clinton muttered only small somethings about "casting votes that actually make a difference from the inside."

But that was it; it ended there. Because of the forced gentility of these things, Edwards couldn't charge headlong into Obama and Obama couldn't re-whack Edwards over his nicely coifed head. We were all deprived of what could have been an enlightening moment of primal, undignified, gloriously revealing and honest rage.

What a pity.

His Meshuga Majesty

Why didn't the Bush administration go public with this sooner? What fun is institutional psychosis if one doesn't strut one's demented selves all the way? What good is a ravingly mad monarch if he suppresses the best of his raving madnesses?

I speak, of course, of the White House's most recent unmitigated incoherence -- the one about Iraq being molded along the lines of the "'Korea model,' a reference to the large American presence in South Korea for the 54 years since the armistice that ended open hostilities between North and South."

It seems that for some time the executive asylum's chief occupant has been rambling privately about this model during visiting hours. One can easily imagine the observers' gapes of incredulity, and that George II mistook these looks for admiring awe.

In time, it further seems, the Boy King became so impressed with his magnificent intellectual feat that he decided he simply must share it with the world, this being fitting and proper, and this he has now done.

Last week Tony Snow got the green light, and it was about time. He "publicly reached for the Korea example in talking about Iraq," saying "Korea was one way to think about how America’s mission could evolve into an 'over-the-horizon support role,' whenever American troops are no longer patrolling the streets of Baghdad."

Mr. Snow garbled his metaphor, for quite obviously he meant to say "over the rainbow," but I doubt the regal Wizard noticed (the garbling came around feeding time), and the gaggle was just as obviously too busy gaping with abovementioned incredulity to call him on it.

Within 24 hours Defense Secretary Bob Gates piled on, also raising the specter of a Korean Iraq, saying "a long-term American garrison there was a lot smarter than the handling of Vietnam."

This is an old rhetorical trick that became a humdinger of outmoded tricks once Bush & Co. released the 2003 Iraq model. There was a time when any half-witted foreign policy proposal could be floated credibly and realistically as long as it was "smarter than Vietnam," which naturally characterized any proposal, no matter how cracked.

But, as referenced, that was before Iraq. The worst-possible-comparison bar has been lowered -- way lowered -- and Mr. Gates' failure to comprehend this new reality is testimony to the power of blinkered institutional delusion.

The news piece quoted above was swarming, as one would expect, with counter-perceptions of domestic horror at the Korea-model "idea." I won't regurgitate them here. They would occur to a six-year-old. But my otherwise favorite entry was this: "Nor is the idea popular in the Middle East."

Translation: The Middle East's precise reaction has been memorialized in that "You want it when?" cartoon.

But in answer to the lead question -- Why didn't they go public with this sooner? -- I can happily report that I have no earthly idea. I say "happily," because I'd be seriously distressed about my mental status if I started pre-tracking the inner thinking process of the executive asylum we know today as the White House.

Even the diplomats have had enough of crazy Uncle Dick

Lord high muckety-mucks at the United Nations aren't given to blunt language. These gentle practitioners of persuasion generally float to the bureaucratic top by virtue of their congenital capacity for listening to even the world's worst barbarians with a pleasant and lenient smile.

There's little evidence that they ever progress much farther than this internal civility -- just look around you, for heaven's sake -- but, nevertheless, civility, understatement, prudent euphemisms and mealy-mouthed tactfulness are the tools of diplomatic success, as defined by this international body of inertia.

So you know when one of them says something akin to what you might blurt out after a few beers at your obnoxious brother-in-law's pool party, he's been pushed beyond all human tolerance. He's taken all he can take; he's been diplomatically mum long enough, but by God enough is enough, and he explodes.

That clearly was the case yesterday when Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency's director general, blurted in disgust on BBC Radio about the "new crazies" who want to "go and bomb Iran."

The new crazies are, of course, the selfsame old crazies who have already demonstrated the less than salubrious effects of armed intervention into the hottest of the world's hot spots. They now propose more of the same deadly medicine because they are, well, crazy.

Dr. ElBaradei knows they're crazy, Iran knows they're crazy, Europe knows they're crazy, even the Bush administration at large knows they're crazy. But what made this diplomatic "incident" of frankness so interesting was that even though Dr. ElBaradei accurately and bluntly diagnosed the mental condition, it was 43's own secretary of state who explicitly revealed the patient's identity.

"The president of the United States has made it clear that we are on a course that is a diplomatic course," said Dr. Condi Rice in the wake of Dr. ElBaradei's diagnosis. "That policy is supported by all of the members of the cabinet, and by the vice president of the United States."

It was like defending one's crazy uncle. "We're all quite sane in this family, even Uncle Bert" -- which of course confirms that Uncle Bert has indeed descended into madness and is now and forever known, especially to his own family, as a bughouse imbecile.

Naturally, it was known far and wide well before yesterday that Uncle Dick, too, is crazy, and even foreign diplomats are approaching Dr. Rice's overt anxiety and personal outting. "We fully believe that Foggy Bottom is committed to the diplomatic track," said a European pooh-bah earlier this week, "but there’s some concern about the vice president’s office."

Webster's: "concern: n: an uneasy state of blended interest, uncertainty, and apprehension; also the condition of scared shitlessness, used esp in diplomatic patois."

A short history of a long death

Peter Berkowitz, a Hoover Institution senior fellow, has written for the Wall Street Journal an ambitious and largely thoughtful lament on the sorry state of conservatism. "The American right," he says, with both regret and praise, is in a "cauldron of debate," whereas "the left," with its "ranks increasingly untroubled by debate or dissent," is not.

Putting aside the misguided tendency of both camps to see each other as monolithic in thought and unified in deed, and putting aside as well the left's very real and considerable infighting, Mr. Berkowitz has a point: The right is unraveling -- ideologically, organizationally and emotionally.

He states the right's current troubles with accuracy: "The divisions within contemporary American conservatism -- social conservatives, libertarians, and neoconservatives -- arise from differences over which goods most urgently need to be preserved, to what extent, and with what role for government."

What he doesn't say, however -- not explicitly, anyway -- is that the modern right is an elaborate, dizzying concoction pasted together as late as the 1950s and early 60s. It was an uneasy alliance then -- the social traditionalists, economic libertarians and hyperglandular anticommunists (yesterday's neoconservatives) -- and it's a mess of conflict now.

The unraveling was bound to happen. So what surprises is not that it's happening; what surprises is that it took so long.

These differing schools of conservative thought always knew their separateness would keep them in the minority, electorally speaking. They stewed and pondered and argued amongst themselves throughout the 1950s. What to do, what to do.

Then, in 1960, a conservative strategist who regularly wrote for and philosophized in the National Review had an idea. Frank Meyer, a former Marxist still enchanted by the possibilities of the dialectic, envisioned an ideological synthesis. He saw that traditionalists and libertarians, both having sizable anticommunist contingencies as a kind of unifying glue, could, if they really tried, forsake their eccentric differences for the sake of electoral gain.

After all, he wrote, "on neither side is there a purposeful, philosophically founded rejection of the ends the other side proclaims." Both schools were in fundamental agreement, as Meyer saw it, yet "each emphasizes so strongly" its own pet bugaboos, "distortion sets in" -- not to mention guaranteed political failure.

Meyer's solution: Cool it, all of ya. Quit your bickering about the edges and learn to love each other by hating your "common enemy" -- those menacing, "collectivist" liberals.

And that's precisely what Barry Goldwater did four years later. The good libertarian-anticommunist senator had always disdained the injection of social "moralism" into secular politics, but he swallowed his hidebound convictions nevertheless and set out to chastise and Puritanize America. He damn near gagged on it, and ultimately he regretted having done it and despised the movement conservatism -- the New Right -- that mushroomed from it. But in '64 it was his only presidential hope.

Goldwater failed, of course, but others, in time, succeeded.

The conservatism that stemmed from Meyer's synthesis was, indeed, a smashing success. It split conservative Democrats from their political home, sucked in theretofore unworldly evangelicals and nurtured yesterday's now-discredited neoconservatives.

But that hodgepodge conservatism was also precarious, artificial and ultimately unworkable. There really are irreconcilable divisions between religious conservatives, economic libertarians and socially indifferent neoconservatives -- and they can all thank George W. Bush for having brought those stark differences once again to the fore.

If there is, as Mr. Berkowitz overstates it, unity on the left now, its political lure comes chiefly not from that unity, but from the opposition's returning disunity. But that's no way to win and keep winning.

Hence there is wisdom in his parting words: "Conservatives, facing uncertainty about George W. Bush's legacy, and the reality of their own errors and excesses, have good reason just now to read and ponder" their ideological heritage. ""Progressives, too prone these days to perceive difficult moral and political questions as one-sided and too keen to characterize their allies at home in the defense of liberty as enemies, have good reason to do so themselves."