The Carpentariat

The United States Senate: Romper-Room Daycare

Talk about Congressional dysfunctional! -- which I did, in fact, in this morning's column; and now more squalid tales of infinite immaturity from our kept lawmakers, who are forever embedded in Washington to, as rumor once had it, take care of The People's business.

Yesterday on the floor of the Senate Dianne Feinstein charged Republicans with "Machiavellian delay" over Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, just so they could "dig up dirt," as the Politico put it, to which Jon Kyl sputtered that the whole lot of them sounded like "squabbling spouses."

And sure enough, soon enough he snarled, "Sen. Feinstein, I don’t appreciate having my motives being questioned." Which is a hugely objectionable part of modern American politics: too few motives ever get questioned, and way too few pols ever answer when asked.

Meanwhile Tom Coburn labeled the entire deliberative chamber as "childlike," and Lindsey Graham, always the unctuous one out to punch his own ah-shucks ticket, protested that "Some people say [Democrats] are just afraid she can’t stand scrutiny and they’re trying to push this [confirmation] through so the public doesn’t really get to know who she is and what she’s about. Well, I think that’s a cynical view that I don’t share." Good boy.

The Draculaesque Dick Cheney no longer presides over the Senate, so, without fear of again being told to go screw himself, Pat Leahy paused to ask the obvious: "Why should we question virtually the same schedule that [Chief Justice John] Roberts had, who was a man nominated by a Republican president?"

For the answer to that, Mr. Leahy, see Mr. Coburn's characterization of the Senate's emotionally arrested disposition, above.

As the Politico noted, these are the ... uh ... adults? who are about to revamp American health care. Well, at least their sorry butts are insured, as are, for most, their jobs.

The Right goes bananas explaining James von Brunn

First things always first, which, in this case, is that I wish the news media would at least get Brunn's name correct. In German, "von" means "from," or "of," hence in a surname it means from, or of, a particular region or town. Therefore to write of "Mr. von Brunn," which I've read almost without exception, or even more inexcusably, Von Brunn, is to reference "Mr. from Brunn."

It's Mr. Brunn, just Brunn, like Bismarck. Got that, ladies and gentlemen of the press? (A similar, French-to-English linguistic misdemeanor is committed when one writes of "de Tocqueville," as in referencing that great sociopolitical observer, Mr. of Tocqueville.)

Anyway, with that pedantic point off my chest, I wanted to offer this morning a real gem of journalistic insight, which also relates to the hideous case of Mr. Brunn. It comes from our capitol's right-wing answer to the People's Daily, the Washington Examiner -- your "insider source for everything local," says its all-the-news-that's-fit-to-print tag line.

Specifically, it comes from one Kathy Shaidle, who's identified rather redundantly by the Examiner as its "Conservative Politics Examiner," indeed, the only kind of examiner the Examiner has. Moving along, however, sometime yesterday Ms. Shaidle stopped to observe purely for our benefit that "The anti-semitism of von Brunn is the first thing one notices when visiting these bizarre websites. However, like those of most 'white supremacists', many of von Brunn's political views track 'Left' rather than 'Right.' "

Her proof? Well, you see, Mr. Brunn had "unleashed his hatred of both Presidents Bush and other 'neo-conservatives' in online essays" (so I guess Pat Buchanan is a leftie?). "As well," Ms. Shaidle continues, "even a cursory glance at 'white supremacist' writings reveals a hatred of, say, big corporations that is virtually indistinguishable from that of anti-globalization activists." Huh? I'm sorry, but I got lost somewhere among those prodigiously separated dots.

Shaidle does correctly raise "Brunn's advocacy of 9/11 conspiracy theories" as a "commonality with individuals on the far-left" -- some individuals, anyway -- but that's the one and only commonality she's able to convincingly grasp. And, need I point out, she writes here of a commonality, not a left vs. right difference, which she at first huckstered.

And in her concluding point to this relatively short piece, she again forgets what the essential point of her piece supposedly was: that being, again, and as quoted above, that "many of von Brunn's political views track 'Left' rather than 'Right.' " Says Shaidle, "In fact, anti-semitism is something the New Left and the 'Far Right' have had in common since the 1980s." (Far Right in quotes, but not New Left.)

Her proof here? David Horowitz's defection from left to right. But wait ... did Ms. Shaidle not inform us that anti-Semitism was but another commonality between far right and new left? If so, then why the hell did Horowitz bother to defect?

I have no idea. But it's all rather amusing, and for your reading pleasure, it's right here.

Luntz strikes again

Here's a Luntzian pickup ...

Republican Congressman Peter King just did an interview on MSNBC in which he repeatedly referred to the "Civil Liberties Union."

That's the American Civil Liberties Union, Peter.

Jesus, they just can't resist this schoolyard name-twisting stuff.  How sad and pathetic.

Newt Gingrich's impoverished supply of Big Ideas

I have questioned again, in this morning's column, all this "Big Idea" business that envelops Newt Gingrich like some kind of celestial aura. Really. I'm stumped. Because I can't seem to locate even one.

This morning, for instance, I rather heroically visited his Web site, Newt.org, which presented itself as most helpful in transporting me to yet another page, "12 American Solutions for Jobs and Prosperity."

Perfect, I thought. Now I can finally encounter not just one Big Idea, but a whole dozen of them, fresh from Newt's Big-Brain factory.

But, alas, I came away somewhat dispirited about America's prospects for jobs and prosperity, since Newt, in fact, had utterly nothing new or Big or nation-saving to say about them.

No less than half of his "12 Solutions" are -- you guessed it -- tax cuts in one form or another; and the balance of Newt's solutions to employ and enrich us all entail merely lower government spending, less government fraud (now why didn't I think of that?), "affordable energy," union-bashing, advocacy of undefined government "rules that create jobs" (say, isn't that what his Web site was supposed to enlighten us about?), and -- yes, I've saved the best for last -- "a 21st century air traffic control system that will reduce delays in air travel." Breathtaking.

Still, I persisted in my plucky pursuit of Big-Idea Newt. Perhaps someone else had delineated -- on Newt's behalf; you know, because he's so diffident about taking credit for brilliance -- a few of his Big Ideas. And the first relevant Googled result was a Huffington piece, from 2007, which noted that in his CPAC appearance that year he "repeatedly stressed that conservatives have better solutions and proposals than Democrats ... yet despite his praise for solutions and proposals, Gingrich did not go far to elucidate what big ideas conservatives could put forward to make America better."

Yeah, but I hear you cry ... the Huffington Post? -- come on, be fair. And my answer to that reasonable objection would be that there were no accompanying pieces from the Google search I performed that did, in either a friendly or unfriendly way, spell out just what, precisely, all these Big Ideas of Newt's are.

And that is because, I am left to conclude, they simply don't exist.

Palin's plagiarism -- a big thumbs up

OK, what am I missing? Why would anyone object to Sarah Palin's plagiarism of Newt Gingrich's material -- for that matter, anyone else's material?

I mean, yeah, sure, her comedy routine suffers a dire hit when she speaks in anyone's voice other than her own, but as far as her political future goes, her only hope is to repeat nothing other but someone else's words.

The current brouhaha all came about, as you know, because some overachieving goo-goo muckraker at Huffington Post claimed on Saturday that the Alaska governor, last week, had verbally pilfered from the Newtster. As just one example:

Palin urged her audience "to remember first that Ronald Reagan never won any arguments in Washington. He won the arguments by resonating with the American people."

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, had already advised us -- with probably quite liberal cooperation from conservative p.r.-maven Craig Shirley, so Palin's theft was merely of the indirect nature of literary larceny -- that "Reagan never won an argument in Washington. Reagan won his arguments in the country with the American people."

Translation from both: President Reagan bamboozled the electorate on a vast and admirable scale, which we Republicans have been coming up short on ever since. So please, let us get back to basics.

Come on, guys. For this, Ms. Palin is assaulted? It's the same old interchangeable drivel that we've been hearing from every Republican pol at least since Katrina exposed the Bush administration as the most hapless regime since Reagan's.

And hell, we ought to give her credit for resisting the egotistical urge to formulate her own thoughts, such as they are, in her own words.

No, if I've any criticism at all of Sarah's negligible little crime, it's that she didn't bother to steal from someone brighter than Newt.

Sarah Palin, "screwing" her base?

In my morning column I reviewed the latest GOP attempts to sustain the regular regeneration of Goldwater’s 1964 pace-setting salute to simplicity – to reduce all sociopolitical complexities to the merest of groveling soundbites – and I referenced, principally, Sarah Palin and her Anchorage tribute to talk-radio huckster Michael Reagan, both of whom boldly refuse to take flight from “self-proclaimed intellectuals” and, of course, and “the liberal media.”

Well done, Sarah, and you go, girl.

What I did not reference, however, was one portion of her speech that caught my fancy more than any others. It was irrelevant to my morning column’s topic, so I omitted it, but I still very much wanted to share it with you, which I hereupon do:

She opened her introductory remarks, her introduction to Mr. Reagan, that is, by hailing him as a man who’s willing, and I quote, “to screw the political correctness that some would expect him to try to adhere to.”

“Screw”?

Such a bawdy flourish isn’t likely to endear Ms. Palin to the incurably pious, which is, as we know, her one and only base. So we must also wonder: Is she making an early stab at broadening her … uh, appeal?

She did instantly return to chestnut-alms for the self-righteous, rambling on that her dishonorable domestic enemies do bark at her to “sit down and shut up,” but naturally she won’t, because “I just can't, because I love my state. I love my country.”

Yet not once in her own further defense did she add, “So fuck ’em.” But will we yet hear that from Ms. Sarah, as she works to expand her base? Who knows. And stay tuned.

"Corporatist" Obama?

The Obama administration's senior advisor David Axelrod just appeared on CNN's Sunday morning chat show, "State of the Union," and I was struck by what appeared to be his singular accomplishment: the selling of consistency.

The host, John King, tried tripping up Axelrod on assorted points that King posed as administration flip-flops -- namely, Obama's Cairo indictment of the previous administration for its "war of choice" in Iraq, despite Obama's repeated pledges to avoid looking back; and the issue of health-care mandates, which candidate Obama opposed and president Obama is warming to -- but Axelrod dispatched each with convincing ease.

How did he manage that? The answer is just as easy: With rare and minor exceptions -- such as, for example, the negligible time-extension of U.S. combat troops committed to Iraq -- the Obama administration has, in fact, been astonishingly consistent not only in its policy execution, but its policy transition, from campaign trail to Oval Office.

Whether the matter has been that of sending additional troops to Afghanistan (which I opposed, but that's not the point here) or the broad outlines of health reform or the size of a stimulus package, etc., etc., this administration has been abnormally consistent.

Which goes to the main point that Axelrod's CNN appearance triggered in my mind and which I wanted to quickly raise this morning: Some, unfortunately too many, on the left have concluded that Obama immediately betrayed his liberal or progressive "values" (as if he ever had any, they snidely insert) through, if nothing else, his furtherance of corporate bailouts and what they label as his generous handling of Wall Street.

And here's the real kicker, the item I wished to pointedly address: FDR, the founder of modern progressivism, would never have done that, they invariably add. Indeed, I've received more than a few emails from self-described progressive readers who have cited an imaginary history of FDR in his first 100 Days having boldly assaulted the highest ranks of American corporate power. Obama, they say, is a "corporatist," because he's wimpishly failed to follow FDR's lead.

We shouldn't have to remind the present malcontents that in FDR's first term he was himself assaulted volubly and at times viciously by the left for having mollycoddled, not assaulted, those ranks of corporate power -- principally through the outright corporatist instrument of the National Recovery Administration, which sought to alleviate "destructive competition" through a moratorium on antitrust laws and the creation of "industrial self-government."

That's the nut of it. Roosevelt suffered roughly the same criticism -- from the left -- that Obama suffers today, yet somehow Roosevelt is hailed as the beau ideal of modern progressivism, while Obama is its traitor. Go figure.

A Liz Cheney-Rush Limbaugh twofer: Can it get any better than this?

I wish I could say the radical right's expanding exasperation with its shrinking influence had by now become breathless, but unfortunately (although rather amusingly, too, I must confess) it is all too pumped with windbagged fume and fury which show no sign whatsoever of resigned deflation.

Merely the past 36 hours have confirmed this cheeky proposition beyond any reasonable doubt. Yesterday, for example, the distaff spawn of Dick C. appeared, soon after Obama's Cairo speech, on MSNBC, with Andrea Mitchell, and within five minutes Liz had breathlessly denounced the speech as -- ready?:

... a "disservice," "naive," "troubling," "dangerous," and, just for good measure, she threw in the detached observation that Obama's administration, in general, is "threatening" that resplendent wall of celebrated national security that dear old dad had labored so long and so selflessly to erect.

Liz also got herself so snarled up in pop's web of fabrications and lies -- he never, really, or at least not for long, you see, claimed a connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein -- that even Ms. Mitchell felt bound to -- gasp -- gainsay her guest. But Liz, dipped as she is in dad's basement vat of buttery pettifoggery, slipped from Andrea's searching grasp.

Ms. Cheney's was indeed a breezy tour de force of self-serving ignorance; on the other hand it couldn't hold a candle to Mr. Limbaugh's appearance, on Fox News, the night before, in which he pumped both his gasbag and Sean Hannity.

"If al Qaeda wants to demolish the America we know and love," said the fat whore to the middling one, "they better hurry, because Obama's beating them to it." Oh, golly, what good fun can be had betwixt two such brilliant minds.

But here's my question: How many Republican congressmen scurried to Capitol Hill's pressroom to denounce Rush Limbaugh's calling the president of the United States a traitor?

Answer: Not one.

It seems a liberal's play on an Army general's name is literally cause for Congressional acts of incensed condemnation, but an old broadcasting pal's direct attack, in the same light, on POTUS is only a cause for silence. If only Liz and Rush felt the same.

Newt Gingrich: Bumbling diplomat at large

Newt Gingrich, the GOP's lethally loose-lipped Big Idea Man, indeed had the brainy presence of mind yesterday to renounce all that "racist" lingo of his which was causing Hispanics to fear his party like a five-alarm fire.

So he "backed away," as the LA Times put it, "from those comments" about Sonia Sotomayor's true inner self, "but continued to question whether her philosophy qualified her to become the first Latino on the high court."

In short, he looped back just as he was backing back. He retained the essential accusation, only stripping it of its "r" coloration.

"Racist," he said ungallantly, and I say ungallantly because he made this retraction in a subdued statement -- when have you ever known this guy not to grab the closest microphone to shoot off his eager mouth? -- "should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable.

"My initial reaction was strong and direct -- perhaps too strong and too direct," wrote Gingrich, who just couldn't resist the mealy-mouthed "perhaps."

"The sentiment struck me as racist, and I said so. Since then, some who want to have an open and honest consideration of Judge Sotomayor's fitness to serve on the nation's highest court have been critical of my word choice."

Can you believe this incompetent clown? He just admitted, without, evidently, even realizing it, that his initial "consideration of Judge Sotomayor's fitness to serve on the nation's highest court" was indeed a whispering-campaignlike and dishonest one.

And that, gentle reader, is merely one small example of the kind of Big Idea thinking and diplomatic discourse that Newt believes would work splendidly well from the White House, circa 2013.

Holy Mother of God, where does the GOP find these abysmal pols and how in God's name do they ever get so elevated?

Dick Cheney has finally hit the bottom of despicability

It is now conceptually impossible that former vice-president Dick Cheney could ever become any more despicable. What an absolute lowlife, even among his twofold ranks of repudiated politicians and confirmed torturers.

One would think that once -- just once -- this slimy, slithering racketeer of boundless, recidivist national torment would actually stand on two human feet and take personal responsibility for something, anything, that went wrong under his watch. Just once. Any admission of real fallibility. Even the Devil would cop to pride.

But not this punk. Hell, if nothing else he hasn't the time, but that's only because he's too busy pointing his stubby little finger at others for all the Bush administration's monumental foul-ups.

I was going to let his typically abrasive National Press Club appearance on Monday pass without comment, because it was, well, so typical, until I read this morning in WaPo about the cloven-hoofed one having "personally over[seen] at least four briefings with senior members of Congress about" the CIA's use of systematic torture, a bull-in-the-china-shop oversight that reinforces suspicion that the U.S. Constitution was debilitated for years by only one principal assassin.

On Monday, however, Cheney made sure to blanket the criminally prosecutable blame: "We all approved it," he said, as he continued his propaganda campaign for the declassification of non-existent proof of torture's non-existent effectiveness.

He also blamed the then-head of the counterterrorism program, Richard Clarke, for "obviously miss[ing]" 9/11's warning signs; and, in effect, he blamed CIA director George Tenet for the colossally imbecilic Iraq War: "The prime source of information on the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was George Tenet.... That is not something I made up, that is not something I thought of. That is what the director of central intelligence was telling us."

But, as mentioned, we can always look at the upside: Dick Cheney simply cannot get any more despicable.

Sestak is still stirring, and agonizing

Pennsylvania's Rep. Joe Sestak, Sen. Arlen Specter's present cause of only moderately sleepless nights, appeared yesterday on Chris Matthews' "Hardball" to re-reannounce that he's still strolling, not running, for the Senate nomination.

Sestak said -- again -- that he's "personally" committed to taking on Specter, but the critical "go" for his still quasi-campaign remains an undispensed grant from his family, which more likely means that he doesn't have all his finance ducks yet lined up. Repeated network appearances for the purpose of saying you're in, but not yet, added to past declarations of family support, make no sense otherwise.

One can easily appreciate Sestak's quandary, which is to say, the money's hesitation. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Specter-supporter arm-in-arm with President Obama and V.P. Biden, had also appeared on MSNBC earlier to predict that in a Sestak-Specter match-up, Sestak would "get killed."

Specter, said Rendell, will raise exponential multiples of whatever Sestak can, plus the sitting senator for 30 years has been an attentive constituent-services pol and, as mentioned, he has the president's, as well as the influential governor's, machine support. Ouch, ouch, and ouch.

Matthews opened the interview by showing the latest Quinnipiac poll, and a seemingly devastating showing it was: Specter by 29 points. Yet these are volcanic political times, and in Pennsylvania, Obama just may have bet the wrong farm.

Matthews, a Philadelphia native who knows Pa. politics, positively radiated Sestak-supportive glee in reviewing Specter's abhorrent record of key support for the Bush administration's key and immensely destructive policies. The host was clearly encouraging Sestak to make the run and was pointing the way; through pounding on Specter's record, Pennsylvanians might decide that forgiveness, despite Rendell's confidence in his man, is out of bounds.

So, Rep. Sestak, why not? Last night you seemed genuine in your protestation that, for you, the Senate is no career-climbing move. You achieved that, you said, with your admiral's stars. So why not make this a national campaign? -- raise your money online from around the country, from coast-to-coast progressives, from veritable legions who'd love to see Specter sent packing.

You just might pull it off. What, really, do you have to lose?

A Michele Bachmann revue

In my morning column I helpfully, even heroically, I think, suggested to the GOP that it abruptly sever relations with sizable portions of its base, but I had no time or space to recommend that it do the same with some of its own Congressional caucus.

Like ... Minnesota's Rep. Michele Bachmann, about whom I began to offer, here, an itemized list of sound reasons, in my own words, as to why the GOP should disown her, until I realized -- well, duh -- the most precise indictment of Michele Bachmann is, of course, Michele Bachmann in her own words.

For instance how soon we forgot that on one fine day just a couple months ago, Ms. Bachmann referenced the "Hoot-Smalley" Tariff -- a Hoover administration bill she somehow accredited to FDR's Depression-exacerbating hands.

Or two summers ago, when foreign-affairs specialist Michelle reinforced the chief reason behind our divine and continuing mission in Iraq: To wit, in the Green Zone "there's a commonality with the Mall of America, in that it's on that proportion. There's marble everywhere. The other thing I remarked about was there is water everywhere. [Saddam] had manmade lakes all around his personal palace -- one for fishing, one for boating." Ooookay.

Or in March before last, when she meditated that the scariest "massive Big Brother intrusion into our homes and our lives" is -- ready? -- these "newfangled, hippie-environmentalism, group-sex fluorescent light bulbs."

Or how about this March, as Congresswoman Bachmann pleaded with her fellow Minnesotans to be "armed and dangerous" against President Obama's plan to turn down the global heat, which, in Michele's opinion, "has the potential of changing the dynamic of freedom forever in the United States."

Or a month later, when biologist-physiologist Bachmann wondered why would we ever want to regulate "carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, [since it] is a natural product of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs on Earth. It is a part of the regular life cycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can't even exist without it." Now why didn't climatologists think of that?

Or perhaps one month earlier, when this congresswoman of the people convulsed in deliberative agony that we are "Running out of rich people in this country."

Finally, although there are others and this surely won't be the last, the grandmammy of 'em all, the one that launched Rep. Michele Bachmann into the public limelight and electorate's heart, from October 2008, her desperate plea on "Hardball" that investigations be launched into "anti-American" members of Congress; adding that as for Obama, "I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views," too. And "that's what the American people are concerned about."

That's not quite all they're concerned about, Michele.