P.M. Carpenter

The Age of Buffoonery

It appears that my week's absence missed nothing out of the ordinary. The right, once again, assaulted the constitution it so dearly loves -- 200 years+ of religious tolerance is plenty, thank you very much; in addition, we hardly need suffer any continued experiments with equal protection -- while the left, once again, displayed the diaphanous quality of its skin.

I no longer feel the need to shame the right, since it so hellishly shames itself as it journeys ever lower through the inner circles of last-chance demagoguery. Just which thoughtful audience is it, I have increasingly asked myself, that requires outside notification as to the right's bizarre and shameful behavior? Is there some unreached segment of the electorate that is both thoughtful in its politics yet ignorant of the GOP's abject degradation? If the audience is thoughtful, there is of course no need to alert it; if the audience is still ignorant, it's beyond hope.

Plus, the intellectual ease with which the right can be attacked has now weakened the left, in that the latter's boundless sense of cognitive (not to mention moral) superiority has rendered it vulnerable to hypersensitivity. Put simply, the left has had such an effortless field day in taking legitimate shots at the right, it has forgotten the value of internal criticism; hence its thinking is becoming as internally despotic as the right's.

Which leads us -- but only momentarily, for this point seems too bloody obvious to dwell on -- to the left's overwrought reaction to Robert Gibbs' comment last week about the cranky "professional left."

I was, at the time, nestled in the beauty of the Missouri Ozarks and thus trying my damnedest to avoid the ugliness of political news, but a few minutes of such were destined, I guess, as my inescapable price to pay. They were spent with Ed Schultz on MSNBC, along with his guest, Adam Green, of BoldProgressives.org. Seldom have I encountered any higher one-two combination of insufferable superiority and undisciplined thinking.

In response to Gibbs, Green ventured that this politically astute White House doesn't "understand" progressives' complaints -- virtually all of which, he neglected to add, have sprung only from unrealistic expectations. As for Schultz, he trailed off -- twice -- into the utterly irrelevant criticism that Gibbs has failed to appear often enough on cable news. Huh?

Now, I realize that these voices reside not in the very highest levels of progressive analysis; nevertheless they were an embarrassment, by virtue, if nothing else, of their public notoriety, of their quite public face. And upon scanning related newspaper stories here and there and catching a few other short MSNBC segments throughout the week's remainder, I further realized that these voices were all too representative of the modern left's rather extraordinary thin-skinnedness, an emotional condition that tends to reveal itself when one's counterarguments are similarly thin.

Finally this is why, I think, President Obama also tends to avoid engaging the ideological extremes from both sides. One can almost hear him, during impromptu remarks, thinking: What in God's name are they talking about? Do they ever get anything right? Are these clowns worth any presidential notice?

Not really.

Out of town this week ... finally taking a little time off ... see you soon.

-- Phil

Get real

Is it official? Is progressive commentary, across the board, now entirely detached from political reality? Has the vocal left knowingly resigned itself to the mere role of professional scold, since the Democratic targets of its enlightened disgust have no room to maneuver away from that which is so fiercely condemned by the lights of insufferable virtue?

I ask -- though I suspect we all know the answer -- having just now read Frank Rich's rather pedestrian but stupendously unattainable thesis: that "even if the Democrats sharpen their attack [on the GOP], they are doomed to fall short if they don’t address the cancer in the American heart -- joblessness. This requires stunning emergency action right now, August recess be damned."

I, like so many Times' readers, have come to expect more from Mr. Rich. But it seems the left's strategic exhaustion and convenient ellipsis of A to Z (that is, omitting steps B to Y) have caught up even to this most literate of progressive observers, leaving him mired in the all too familiar muck of boldly advocating an assault on joblessness, though absent an actual battle plan.

Just why is the Democratic leadership absent another plan to tackle unemployment? The answer entails not the complexities of golf or French cooking or even quantum physics. The answer, quite simply, is that President Obama and the Democratic leadership don't have the votes. Mr. Rich, they're not addressing the cancer of joblessness for the same reason they acquiesced to metastasizing status-quo forces on the public option. They don't have the votes. They ... don't ... have ... the ... votes.

For progressive commentators, this apparent challenge of elementary Congressional math has for some time reduced progressivism itself to the intensely marginal status of dispensable theory, of philosophical autoeroticism, of blithering irrelevance. Of what possible benefit -- to anyone -- is the passionate advocacy of government job-creation or a public option or any other progressive goal if there's no arithmetical path to its accomplishment? If, on the other hand, there is indeed some conceivable path, then for heaven's sake permit us the concept; lay it out, step by step, how the Democratic leadership is to arrive at the mountaintop of Z from its miserably beleaguered A.

For modern progressivism to regain its proper, pertinent and serious place in the national debate, it must first return to its roots: It must travel back to the towering realism, the legislative awareness, the burrowing pragmatism of its founder, FDR, who seldom if ever pondered any subject, foreign or domestic, with philosophical abandon. I'm not insensitive to progressives' unease with hanging up their cherished utopian gloves, and I know FDR's is a hard act -- and tough advice -- to follow. But if progressives fail to re-alight on Earth, if they persist in volubly demanding solutions for which there are no known formulas, they'll only alienate the realistically disposed and continue their marginalization into absolute political obscurity.

Proust on Obama

Just encountered this passage in Proust, which neatly condensed my scarcely unique but oft-stated thesis of democratic (mobocratic) fickleness behind Barack Obama's extraordinary rise and gentle ramp of decline:

"[T]he instinct of imitation and absence of courage govern society and the mob alike.... It is in like manner that the populace banishes or acclaims its kings."

Merely invert those final verbs, and insert "and then" in the place of "or."

Shamelessly unaccountable drollness

No shame. No accountability. But one helluva sense of humor.

How else to describe Sen. John Cornyn's remark that for Democrats to remind voters that high unemployment and suffocating debt came courtesy of the George W. Bush administration shows only that "they are desperately trying to change the subject. People should scoff at it for the joke that it really is."

Or, there's Dana Perino, former press secretary for 43, who topped Sen. Cornyn in shamelessly unaccountable drollness with these lines: "I don't think a lot of people are sitting around thinking, 'Gee, what would George Bush be doing?' They don't care. They have a house they can't sell. They have a job they are worried about losing. All they hear is this whining and complaining and blaming."

Yes, their properties have tanked and their jobs are precarious -- have been since, oh, roughly the fall of 2008. Ring any bells, Dana? And yes, there's been whining and complaining and blaming; also attempts to reverse the damage done, although the folks who sponsored the destruction seem to believe that ruling majorities and the corrective mandates that come with them are but political playthings.

But above all, we have indeed heard blame. Ms. Perino is right about that. To my mind, however, we've heard not nearly enough.

Adjusting for that insufficiency is now the official Democratic strategy, as the Washington Post reported Friday afternoon. Republicans -- see for example Cornyn, Perino & Co. -- have and will continue to respond with cutesy spin, infantile ridicule, and absolutely no mention of their party's responsibility for all the destruction wrought.

It's what they do. They've become the party of the Limbaugh putdown, the Beck sneer, the Palin sarcasm -- and within that faux populist mix there's not a dram of fresh or serious thinking; and it is that insufficiency which has re-earned them the 1950's Hofstadterian epithet of "pseudoconservatives."

Genuine conservatives would have restrained, as best they could, Democratic proposals to cure what ails us, for genuine conservatives are of course genuinely wary of too much change, too fast. But they would not have made a political game of uniform obstructionism; they would not have toyed with, of all things, unemployment benefits; and they most decidedly would not be advocating trillions in extended tax cuts while in the grips of such looming debt.

Out there, somewhere, are millions of rank-and-file, and genuine, conservatives. Democrats, while reminding all voters of the lingering curse of Bushism, might also want to remind those conservatives, specifically and emphatically, that the GOP, tragically disfigured in all but name, has replaced conservative principles with pseudoconservative infantilism.

A Mel Brooks Congress

I'm no economist, but no such training is needed to recognize the deflationary confluence of balanced-budget Hooverism, cheap political opportunism, a heedless electorate and nearly boundless Democratic poltroonery.

"The American people are tired of the games," bellowed Republican David Dreier last week in targeting the upcoming, emergency House bill to save teachers and healthcare for the poor, which is to say, U.S. states. "We should be spending our time getting our fiscal house in order rather than scrambling to score points on the House floor." Meanwhile the House Republican leader's spokesman offered the classic GOP "but": "No one wants teachers or police officers to lose their jobs." Certainly not, so let's do something, right? Wrong. "But Washington Democrats can’t just keep borrowing money and raising taxes for more 'stimulus' spending."

Putting aside the GOP's characteristically creative definition of "raising taxes," the rational economic response to the minority leader is, Sure they can; in fact, sure they should. When was the last time we heard of a need for stimulus spending in a thundering economy?

Nevertheless Politico this morning describes the desperately needed state aid as "politically unpopular" -- a questionable assessment of aggregate polling but spot on, no doubt, in red and purplish districts overrepresented by older, pseudoconservative whites who give not a damn about sane and responsible governance. To take a felicitous line from "Blazing Saddles" 's Gene Wilder, "You know, morons."

So, even though Politico still further describes the impending House vote as a "rubber-stamp" of the Senate's bill, just give me some decent odds and I'll take some action on the possibility of the increasing probability that House Democrats will once again capitulate to precisely the wrong action: none.

"Human like me"

Bishop Harry Jackson, of Washington D.C.'s Hope Christian Church, is black. This afternoon I heard him muse in a television interview that "Some gays may feel that [their homosexuality] is hard-wired in them." Yes, they may indeed feel that, just as Bishop Jackson feels that he's black, which is of course what makes him so.

If only those pesky blacks of the 1950s and '60s had worked up the Nietzschean will to stop feeling black -- thus seamlessly ceasing any need to agitate against all the human brutality and discrimination that came packaged with that felt condition -- this nation would have been spared all those bitter divisions over civil rights.

But no, as far as blacks were concerned, they were hard-wired to be black. In fact, they further felt that this hard-wired way of thinking entitled them to civil rights "as is"; which is to say, being born in a predisposed way to blackness, they deemed it unincumbent on themselves to make the rather rational and extraordinarily decent effort asked of them by others to simply change their colorful ways.

And so there you have it; modernity -- indeed, a kind of post-modernity -- portending our societal ruin, with everyone now free to feel however they wish, be it black, white, homosexual, heterosexual, or just plain human. All the old reliable standards of group superiority are melting away.

I do wonder if the good Bishop Jackson has ever stopped to wonder himself if God feels OK with that.

The Obama-Roosevelt nexus

This week's deliciously tactical comment from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- that President Obama may well become a "born-again moderate" in the wake of November's perhaps presidentially disappointing elections -- doubtless sent many "movement" progressives into guffaws of predictable sarcasm.

No need to expand on that; we already know their distress, which hatched from quixotic expectations. Yet McConnell's deliberately mistaken reference to some sort of distant moderation on Obama's part raises, once again, those immovable parallels between the latter and FDR. It is strange indeed that progressives continue to deify Roosevelt, quite rightly, as the founder of modern progressivism, yet utterly fail to appreciate just how moderate Roosevelt was in the practical application of that progressivism.

As, like so many other American historians, Cambridge's Anthony Badger pointed out in his 1989 The New Deal, Roosevelt's recovery program was essentially conservative, as Roosevelt himself sentimentally was. Nevertheless many of today's progressives have only one mental image of FDR -- that of the fiery agitator, the thundering orator who welcomed the hatred of "economic royalists."

Contemporary progs tend to forget that that speech came not until his fourth year in office, when Roosevelt was feeling competitive pressure from his left and, as Badger further observed, had cooperated extensively with those being regulated -- which is to say, chiefly, banks and big business -- so as to move politically possible reforms into place. The New Deal was never a sharp break from the past; it was "precisely circumscribed," observed Badger, by administration forces as well as those outside of New Dealers' control, such as Southern and Western conservatism, Congressional conservatism, and traditionalist localism.

None of this is to detract from Roosevelt's accomplishments. It's sad to have to qualify the above remarks with that additional remark, but also incumbent whenever historically contextualizing the 32nd president to a progressive audience. Any acknowledgement of political, bureaucratic and sociocultural restraints -- in a word, political reality -- on FDR is somehow interpreted as an offensive diminution of the great man's historical stature and a sure sign of crypto-conservative hostility toward him.

Someday, perhaps 70 years from now, some blogger, should our peculiar, scribbling species survive, will be tapping out a nearly identical piece on the cherished memory of that great progressive president: Barack Obama, moderate that he necessarily was.

On the above date, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker decided that human rights aren't subject to a flip of the democratic coin.

Striving for mediocrity

Last night I watched an arresting 30 minutes of "Charlie Rose" -- a half-hour interview with financier Wilbur Ross, who at one point calmly compressed some rather jarring realities. Foremost among their outcomes: "Within five to ten years [the U.S.] could be a second-rate power."

Ross was soft-spoken and analytical, but braced. An industrial policy? We don't have one. We also lack a comprehensible energy policy (indeed, any energy policy), an efficient transportation policy (favoring interstate-highway transport over rail), and especially under the G.W. Bush administration, groaned Ross, U.S. investment in research and development foolishly suffered. All of this culminating in, "Within five to ten years we could be a second-rate power."

What's more, continued Ross, we now rank 12th in the number of college graduates (having once led the world); and soon, 90 percent of all engineers will be working in Asia. Translation: Goodbye U.S. manufacturing.

Oh, and of course "within five to ten years we could be a second-rate power."

Yet what, I was thinking as Wilbur Ross itemized our national descent, has had us political types exercised, say, for the last week or so -- a week not atypical of any other week in any other year? Some nitwit right-wing hatemonger with video and propaganda skills, Sarah Palin's "hand"-writing skills, and Sharron Angle's evident lack of any skills whatsoever.

Meanwhile, Obama's increasingly unrealistic and brash pseudo-progressive base is dispiriting Democrats in general and thus potentially driving down November's turnout, which could further result in that unhappiest of all prospects -- A Republican House, with subpoena power, ensuring a devastating, utterly deadlocked two years.

I suggest that Mr. Ross reconsider his choice of auxiliary verbs. For at the rate we're going, or rather not going, within five to ten years we will be a second-rate power.

The outrage industry

All cliches are tiresome, but the reputedly Einsteinian one about insanity and repetition has become downright exhausting. It's everywhere, 24/7, to employ another overburdened chestnut, on cable news and it's a special favorite of political bloggers. Don't like the way in which something is being done? Just whip out Albert and stun us with wit.

The insanity cliche lacerates our patience from both political directions, I'm sure, but as a creature of the left I notice its use more from our side. Progressive blogs and assorted hosts on and guests of MSNBC deploy the bloody thing in ruthless pursuit of exposing the far right's unending madness. Look! They, the Becks or Palins or Boehners, are nuts, they're doing it again -- whatever "it" happens to be on that repetitiously lunatic day -- they're nuts, they're doing it again, they're nuts ... You know, Keith (or Rachel or Chris or Ed), this reminds me of what Einstein once observed ...

Yet what seems to go missing in all this is that the left itself is suffering from a rather severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder; like clockwork the right goes berserk, but with Swiss precision the left then always responds as though its piercing ridicule will actually shame the demented buggers into better behavior.

And that of course is nuts. The right is shameless. So, my suggestion? Stop. Just stop. Enough with the Psycho Talk segments and Worst Persons in the Word and on-air giggles of incredulity and overwrought cyber-exposures of the right's conspicuously unbounded daffiness. The largely left-leaning audience or readership already knows the right is nuts, plus the right's congenital immaturity merely feeds off the left's compulsive attention. In brief, the more the left exposes the right, the crazier it gets.

Would anything change on the far right if the invigilating left withdrew its notice? I doubt it. The right's on a high that only ever-greater injections of lunacy can satisfy. The substantive downside of the left's tormented surveillance, however, is that the left is trapping itself in an equally small world of screaming frivolousness and counteractive shrillness.

Yet, it's profitable. Would Countdown or the Huffington Post or Daily Kos survive the extinction of Glenn Beck Unlimited? Again, I doubt it. Thus arm in arm we'll go, this modern-day left and right, into the crepuscular oblivion of what counts as news and information and public affairs, insanely ignoring what really matters. As I just did.

Stop the cheerleading

One of modern progressivism's enduring failures is its belief in the motivating power of national polls. For instance, just look at the polls on unemployment, progs say; We the People -- and isn't it peculiar how the right deploys the same self-majoritarian term? -- care less about climbing deficits than we do plunging jobs. So naturally the pols should listen and advocate (wisely, in my opinion) stimulus, for the time being, over fiscal restraint.

But of course they advocate no such thing. Why? It's seems, according to another of progressivism's enduring errors, that politicians simply enjoy practicing betrayal. They too can read polls, they know what "the people" want, what they demand, yet those pols are unspeakably corrupt, bought off by "corporatist" villains. Such is progressivism's explanatory worldview.

There are, however, a couple of flies in this argumentational ointment.

First, some of its leading lights don't know how to read a poll. This point was driven violently home the other day when I discovered in Firedoglake that a whopping 80 percent of the public supports government spending on jobs. Yeah! We the People speak! Well, actually, 38 percent of the people spoke along those lines, for in reality: When asked if they support spending on jobs, only 48 percent of respondents said yes; when then asked if they still would support spending if it meant an uptick in the deficit, 80 percent of the 48 percent said yes (hence the final 38 percent, and the vastly misinterpreted 80).

How could Firedoglake commit such a sloppy and amateurish mistake? Simple. It wanted to believe in The People.

As for those insensate pols? Here's the Times' Paul Krugman this morning, compressing their insufferable hypocrisy:

[W]e see Congress sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs...; fighting deficits, they insist, must take priority over everything else -- everything else, that is, except tax cuts for the rich, which must be extended, no matter how much red ink they create.

Yet hypocrisy isn't the same as insensitivity to the people's will, which, when analyzed through polling in the assorted politicians' districts or states, commonly reveals an anti-stimulus attitude. That attitude may be in profound economic error, nevertheless it is sainted public opinion. In short, let us indulge in the brutality of relentless objectivity by asking ourselves: Why, in a representative democracy, should a Nebraska congressman give a damn about what the good progressive people of San Francisco think?

Because, I hear you cry, It's the right thing to do. Which, as policy, it is. But wait. I thought that chief among progressive doctrine was an unerring allegiance to what "We the People" demand. Not true, it seems, when representative democracy conflicts with desired policy goals.

The point of all this you've probably gathered. While progressive goals may indeed be desirable, "movement" progressivism suffers from debilitating, organic contradictions which are blisteringly clear to the attentive swing-voting middle -- that is, where most of the votes are.

My suggestion? For starters, that movement progressives stop the celebratory cheerleading; that they stop claiming a majority will they so vividly lack. The true majority may not comprehend the fundamentals of post-Keynesian economics, but they do have an uncanny penchant for recognizing -- and more important, honoring -- self-honesty, the practice of which could someday actually put progressivism in the majority.

Sarah Palin as a democratic Rorschach test

August entries on this site will likely appear only sporadically -- I've several plates spinning on rods, preempting a reliable schedule -- and I'd no intent on writing anything so soon, but seeing Sarah Palin just now on "Fox News Sunday" was irresistible.

Host Chris Wallace wanted to know in their final Q&A segment why her unfavorable numbers among independents exceed her favorability ratings. Ms. Palin's best fabricated guess: the media. Why, Palin wouldn't even know herself if she had only the media's distorted reporting to go by.

Long, circuitous translation: She's running in 2012.

It's a good thing she's getting out and about to correct the media's malicious distortions. For instance earlier in the interview she labeled the (Republicans') scheduled expiration of George W. Bush's tax cuts as "idiotic." Such an expiration would represent a $3.8 trillion tax increase, said Palin, rather than more accurately portraying it as a $3.8 trillion reduction in deficits.

The juicier kicker? She spoke on this engulfing issue of tax cuts vs. deficit reduction for, oh, perhaps 45 seconds. At a stretch, maybe a minute? Yet she read every point she made; she read from quite literally a talking points memo before her. This woman is incapable of memorizing even a handful of biased "facts."

Am I wrong in being amused? Am I wrong in chuckling over what's so tragically the accelerated disintegration of American democracy, as reflected in the superlative "fact" that such a clueless media creation could ever be regarded as a serious candidate for the presidency of the United States?