The Carpentariat

Heaving stupefactions on enigmas

The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks has a piece whose essence I defy any lay reader, professor of logic or palmist to unravel. It's either an exercise in covering official tautology or proof positive that absolutely no one in the Bush administration has any idea what the others are doing. It's unfathomable in its substance, agonizing in its purpose, and ultimately pointless in its drift.

I don't blame Ricks. After all, this is the Bush administration he's covering, so unfathomability, agony and pointlessness are inescapable. And for all we know Mr. Ricks repeatedly pointed out this truism in his original copy, only to have some neocon editor take a delete key to it. Who knows? All we do know is what's reported, which is to say, what's mysteriously murky.

The reader's towering confusion arises from sentences like these: "U.S. military officials here are increasingly envisioning a 'post-occupation' troop presence in Iraq that neither maintains current levels nor leads to a complete pullout"; followed by, "this plan is emerging as a point of convergence between the two capitals"; followed by, "Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and White House spokesman Tony Snow both recently made comments indicating that the administration is thinking along the same lines as military officials here [in Baghdad]."

Military officials there are envisioning a post-occupation policy to be devised -- constitutionally speaking -- here? There's some civilian-military "plan" in need of "convergence"? Was the administration's Bob Gates recently detached from the Pentagon, or the Pentagon here from the military there? Does Tony Snow really dispense hand-puppet signals and issue coded verbal messages from a Washington podium to give a nod to independently designed and executed U.S. military operations in the Middle East?

In short, just who the hell is on first? Who the hell is in charge? Who the hell formulates policy and who the hell executes it?

The White House must "indicate" that it's in agreement with the military, as though the latter is a 19th-century, filibustering, freebooting, mercenary kind of foreign-legion operation that prefers, but doesn't require, the former's imprimatur?

Of course all this reporting orbits around the staggeringly stupid idea of the "Korea model," that vastly dissimilar construct applied to vastly dissimilar Iraq -- the one in which we stay in Iraq forever and accomplish with a smaller contingent that which was unaccomplishable with a larger one.

Brilliance is often defined simply as the ability to see things in a uniquely different way, and this one's so different in its stupidity it almost loops all the way back around to abutting genius. This geometric near-abutment is, no doubt, what the White House and U.S. military have mistaken for the extremely, eccentrically clever.

The article goes on, heaving more stupefactions atop enigmas. For example "a reduction of troops, some officials [military officials?] argue, would demonstrate to anti-American factions that the occupation will not last forever while reassuring Iraqi allies that the United States does not intend to abandon the country."

Go ahead. I dare you. Try to make heads or tails of that split-the-difference contradiction.

Nor do "officials" in this reportorial mix ever take a whack at, for instance, such imponderables as what becomes of the smaller contingent when Iraqi forces are queued up at the bank cashing their unearned paychecks as unpleasant militias are ravishing the countryside. The American contingent just stays in its cot, reading Nietzsche? Or does it call for, oh, a bigger contingent -- one of about, oh, 150,000?

There was also this: "U.S. officials [military officials?] also calculate that underneath the anti-American rhetoric, even Shiite radicals such as cleric Moqtada al-Sadr don't really want to see a total U.S. pullout, especially while they feel threatened by Sunni insurgents."

Now I know I'm just a novice, but here's an idea. Why don't you fellows stop calculating and just call him and ask? And don't tell me you don't have Sadr's number, for that would be as far-fetchedly incompetent as your not knowing, after six years, where Osama bin Laden is.

In closing, I can't express my level of profound regret over never having made a career of the military. Here I have sat, useless and destitute and, in due time, probably homeless because no employer in this brave and illiterate new age cares to hire an obsolete doctor of philosophy in American history, when I could have been building a nice, secure, comfortable pension in some Pentagon cubicle or on some desert isle of needless conflict, dreaming up grotesquely deformed ideas that White House nincompoops and my very own joint chiefs of staff would take seriously.

"The fault, dear Brutus ..."

Looking every bit the three-starred, generally confounded kind of dupe who would agree to take Bush's Iraq war reins, the Army's Doug Lute testified before the Senate this week, and it wasn't pretty. It wasn't pretty at all.

It is unclear why -- other than out of a competitive spirit; even dupes in Dupedom do battle for top honors -- Lute accepted this most ignoble and impossible of missions. His anguished testimony was more that of a coroner than presidential adviser.

The jig, he said in so many words, is already up. Notwithstanding U.S. hectoring and surging, those sectarian mob families charitably called Iraqi political factions "have shown so far very little progress" in making, huh, any progress.

What's more, added the lieutenant general, "I have reservations about just how much leverage we can apply on a system that is not very capable right now." Not very -- as in not one iota, one whit, one measurable dram.

Yet only two months ago it seemed to retired Marine Corps General John Sheehan -- he who had refused a shot at Czaristic Dupedom -- that the larger problem was in Washington, not Baghdad; and to be even more geopolitically precise: the White House.

In his April 16 dressing-down of an op-ed in the Washington Post, General Sheehan went so far as to spell out in immensely brutal terms why he had said thanks, but no thanks, to the job. He "knew that a White House position of this nature would require interagency acceptance," and he saw none would be forthcoming. He knew that "Cabinet-level agencies, organizations and their leadership must buy in to the position's roles and responsibilities," and he saw they wouldn't.

"Most important," he wrote, "Cabinet-level personalities must develop and accept a clear definition of the strategic approach to policy," and he further saw there'd be no such development; or in the off chance there was, no such acceptance.

Why? Because after chatting with the president's entrenched and insider war-machine, Sheehan "found," astoundingly, "there is no agreed-upon strategic view of the Iraq problem or the region."

The White House was, and is, all over the strategic road, from "the Woody Hayes basic ground attack" strategy -- meaning just slogging it out block by block -- to the "security [with] benchmarks" strategy -- meaning meaningless timelines -- to the third strategy that answers the question of "where does Iraq fit in a larger regional context?" -- about which, as General Sheehan quickly reckoned, the administration is hopelessly, haplessly bewildered.

Its only discernible strategy, he candidly wrote, is the gasconade of bellowing "we are going to 'win,' even as 'victory' is not defined or is frequently redefined."

And with that, John Sheehan resigned from considering the job -- a luckless one, as he readily saw, doomed from within. Doug Lute, however, is scouting for blame elsewhere.

Edward R. Murrow once issued this caveat to Joe McCarthy, which today could apply to Czar Lute as well: "Had he looked ... in Shakespeare's 'Caesar,' he would have found this line, which is not altogether inappropriate: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.'"

Obliviousness is not a belief system

There was a time when world leaders probably thought that George promoted muscular unilateralism because he believed, rightly or wrongly, in muscular unilateralism. It has its pros, it has its cons, but after weighing both, the "uni" was distinctly advantaged over the "multi" in this complex and cross-purposed world, so he opted for the uni. In other words, George had actually put some thought into the matter.

But comments made and intentions revealed at the G8 meeting this week surely have advertised to world leaders that there's no such underlying reasoned-out system of belief or charted course of analysis that led to the one over the other in George's thinking.

Rather, George is simply out of it, awash in the smallest of small worlds, one in which his sandbox is quite literally the only sandbox that counts. If one wishes to call it a belief system, fine; but it's that of a toddler's, who, because of limited reasoning capacity, simply can't see that he and his needs aren't at the center of the universe and that others have real needs as well.

George's demonstration of this "thinking" at the G8 came fast, furious and compacted -- and it must have left the others flabbergasted.

First, "the White House effectively derailed a climate change initiative backed by one of President Bush’s strongest European allies, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany" -- a blatant derailing that sent both nations careening onto entirely different tracks. George, however -- and I'm now convinced he said this with utmost sincerity -- publicly observed that any such characterization of derailment would be a "gross distortion."

While he was at it, blindly and further alienating the world, George also lectured Russian President Vladimir Putin that the missile defense system he wants to plop down in Russia's backyard is nothing for Vladimir "to be hyperventilating about." Now, the U.S. may have regarded Russia's installation of missiles in Cuba way back when with something less than equanimity, but I question if George honestly reflected on this incongruity, or that it even came to his mind.

Yet, right smack in the middle of all this unilateralist thinking, George launched against his fellow leaders a devastating critique of -- what else? -- their shortsided, insulated, indifferent national self-interest, that being the backbone of rugged unilateralism. "I'm frustrated that the international organization [the U.N.] can't move quickly enough" on Darfur, he said. "I don't know how long it's going to take for people to hear the call to save lives. ... Enough is enough."

Was George being hypocritical? No, not really, not if he's intellectually incapable of comprehending just how stupendously hypocritical his hypocrisy is. Others see it and can't help but trip over it -- it is, after all, a hypocrisy that announces itself with banners, skyrockets and the Marine Corps Band -- but George is oblivious, even guilelessly oblivious, to its every strand.

It must have been this toddler-like obliviousness -- the very opposite of any reasoned-out worldview -- that nurtured George's unilateralism. Nothing else so nicely accounts for its artless puerility.

Why not go the whole, indecent nine yards?

I was vastly disappointed by the federal appeals-court panel that just ruled against the Bush administration in Fox et al. v. the Federal Communications Commission. This was an opportunity of Marbury v. Madison proportions -- that hoary case from which the Supreme Court took the almost trivial issue of a justice of the peace's presidential appointment and bada-bing built the broad legal construction known as judicial review -- and the court wasted it.

This time around the appeals panel (drawn from the United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, New York) "struck down the government policy that allows stations and networks to be fined if they broadcast shows containing obscene language."

The panel's correct but circumscribed reasoning was, in a nutshell, this: "If President Bush and Vice President Cheney can blurt out vulgar language, then the government cannot punish broadcast television stations for broadcasting the same words in similarly fleeting contexts."

A conspicuously sound decision, employing the conspicuous goose-and-gander rationale. So far so good, but not nearly far enough.

Not far enough, because although the appeals panel waded into the expansive legal territory of "indecency" and "vulgarity," it limited itself to indecencies and vulgarities that merely "referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities."

Why stop there? Just as Chief Justice John Marshall stopped not in 1803 at the limited matter of a government appointment, the New York appeals panel should have broadened its ruling to encompass the broadest territory of the indecent and the vulgar -- which is to say, the defining characteristics of the Bush administration.

It wasn't enough for the panel to point out, for instance, that since the vice president feels free to instruct U.S. senators to self-fornicate on the Senate floor, Keith Olbermann should feel free, on the air, and as a matter of law, to request the same of Bill O'Reilly.

For indecency and vulgarity have surpassed the merely scatological. They now form, by all appearances, the unconstitutional basis of de facto presidential and vice-presidential powers.

The court should have brutally acknowledged this new reality and issued forth the broad thoughtfulness that since plenary indecency and vulgarity -- from warrantless wiretapping to torture to partisan prosecutions -- have become the accepted legal standards for executive power, what then in the names of indecency and vulgarity aren't properly and legally allowable?

Somewhere, John Marshall is grieving. Federalist though he was, he would have seen the poetic opportunities in this case involving two men of insatiable appetites for power and savored going whole hog.

Imbecility²

First, let's settle any dispute as to the the winner of last night's Republican cluster conference. The victor was, of course, candidate-in-waiting Fred Thompson. There's something about a man running for the nation's highest and most demanding office who advertises his stupendous incompetence right off the bat by avoiding any public test of his abilities. Now there's a man for this hapless century for you.

As for the others' 120 minutes, it seemed to me it was all over after Q&A #1. What followed Wolf Blitzer's question about the advisability of a touch of thermonuclear destruction laid on Iran was a veritable geyser of mindless bellicosity. Excepting Ron Paul, the Republican candidates suited up in brownshirts and armbands and went to work on yet another preemptive catastrophe thrust upon hundreds of thousands of utterly innocent human beings.

Their bloody pandering to the basest of human beings here was a national embarrassment that made me, and, I would hope, millions of others, cringe at the thought of its airing around the world.

I watched every preposterous, flag-waving minute of the "debate." Although there was nothing that topped the tactical nuking episode last night, this morning both the New York Times and Washington Post led their reporting with the immigration issue. Either the GOP itch to launch unprovoked warfare has become a commonplace yawner, or both papers arrived at the debate late, missing its defining moment.

At any rate, my friends, the others, my friends, jumped all over, my friends, John "My Friends" McCain for his compromising and compromised stance on the matter. McCain's only defense was to tie everything -- and I mean everything -- to national security, two little words he uttered with monotonous regularity. I almost felt sorry for him; it was a too-late-to-change-now, desperate display of "I'd rather be right than president," which nobody ever swallows.

The most civilized among them was Ron Paul, as mentioned, and the most articulate was Mike Huckabee, both of whom haven't a prayer. The most laughable were Tommy Thompson and Mitt Romney. Thompson as president, he kids you not, would send the current one around the country to lecture "the youth of America about honesty, integrity, perseverance, passion, and serving the public," while Romney, whose every utterance was backed up by a chorus of angels singing 'God Bless America,' proved he has yet to look up the meaning of "non sequitur."

But when it came to pure, unadulterated rambling, Rudy took the prize. Wolf simply could not shut him up as he, for example, discoursed endlessly about the "very, very important" issue of Scooter Libby's righteous pardon, since "a man's life is at stake." The irony of Rudy's improperly placed concern and compassion was thunderous.

Other than the near-unanimous urge to waste any potential foe who so much as looks at us cross-eyed, the thrust of the debate was that of a tent revival meeting. There is no earthly collectivity that loves God more than these boys, and they let us know that at every opportunity, even the inopportune ones -- invoking His name 24 times.

Whenever I watch another of these tours de force in imbecility, I quake for my country. If these men are the best that democracy has to offer, if they are what democracy calls forth, it's all over.

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."