P.M. Carpenter

And the vote is in

The votes are in, well, one anyway, mine: 2010's least rational, most memorable comment posted by the online right:

P.M. Carpenter is a Communist HACK sitting on his but [sic] in our Universities [sic]... These people [sic] pose a bigger threat to Liberty and Freedom in the US than does Al Qaeda..

Gotta love it. So characteristically compressed with wild assumption, reckless fire, mindlessly feral passion and, of course, linguistic ignorance.

True, I would have copped to the commie charge when I was "in our Universities," but that was years ago, before the world's "communists" proved themselves as irredeemably flaky as capitalists. Now I'm just a mellowed, democratic socialist -- a term so misty and muddled as to defy any real ideological attachments, which is why I like it. 

Their salvation could be their ruin

Earlier this month The Caucus' Michael Shear efficiently framed the GOP's predicament as three stand-alone developments urging one irreducible conflict: "the assumption of power by Republicans in the House," "the [Republican] presidential campaign," and "Tea Party lawmakers ... reshap[ing] the conversation in Congress and on the campaign trail as Republicans adapt their rhetoric to a new political power at the grass roots."

Their presidential candidates are already sniping at each other, each positioning him- or herself as the genuine standard-bearer of medieval, nihilistic GOP Writ; popular causes, such as DADT and START, have split the GOP's Congressional caucus and promise yet more divisions; and debates on spending, entitlements, fiscal sanity and specifically on raising the debt limit will push tea partying lawmakers to their own limits, which is to say, those of their base.

As Shear pungently summed things up: "What began as a story about divisions inside the Democratic Party has quickly become a vehicle for revealing the differences in political philosophy inside the Republican Party."

Those revealed differences, still in the development stage, nevertheless have progressed from the acute to the chronic.

From November, 2008 to roughly January-February of the following year, all the political buzz was about what Republicans would do -- what would they do? They had just taken a brutal shellacking from voters, Barack Obama's center-left vision navigated the political waters unopposed, and in this conservative vacuum there whirled GOP minds: What do we do? Veer left? Seek the middle? Stay right?

Because the GOP had no strategic leader at the time, by a kind of CommitteeThink it chose, naturally, the easiest route: it stuck to its philosophical status quo. It then got shoved further right by tea partiers.

But that far-right territory the GOP will not and cannot hold. Virtually everything -- from electoral demographic mutations to inescapable national necessities, such as tax hikes -- works against it. The GOP's reinvigoration through tea party fervor is a singular or perhaps two-time phenomenon; if Republicans are to remain a vital and material force in America's two-party system, then tea partyism is slated for doom.

For now, it's a crutch, a fix, a GOP addiction. But as our collective fiscal problems mount and loom as an undivertable monster to be engaged head-on -- without incinerating the hugely entrenched social fabrics of, say, Social Security and Medicare -- then irreconcilable tea partyism, like all abused narcotics, will become the GOP's worst internal enemy. Its shelf-life is painted in neon.

All of which is just another way of saying that it's not the center that can't hold. It's the right -- and that collision course with reality has by now progressed as the GOP's chronic and most internally corrosive problem.

A better way?

There's got to be a better way.

The new Republican [House] rules will gut pay-as-you-go because they require offsets only for entitlement increases, not for tax cuts. In effect, the new rules will codify the Republican fantasy that tax cuts do not deepen the deficit.

It gets worse. The new rules mandate that entitlement-spending increases be offset by spending cuts only — and actually bar the House from raising taxes to pay for such spending.

That's from this morning's NY Times' editorial titled "Deficit Hypocrisy," which fumes and fulminates from its opening crack of indignation to its last gasp of disgust about the GOP's "warped mind-set"; it wallows furiously in Republicans' mad fiscal indulgences, it protests the wretched indecency of bad math and superb demagoguery.

Which is what the NY Times editorial board, most of its columnists, about half of the cable news industry, all of what passes for liberal radio and the entirety of the progressive blogosphere have been doing for years ... and years. Fulminating. And fuming. And protesting -- to evidently little effect, since here we are, again, not at all far in time from twelve years of almost laughably grotesque GOP Congressional rule and eight years of this country's worst, most profligate president ever.

In short, somebody ain't gettin' the message; indeed, a whole lot of somebodies -- in fact, statistically speaking, most of the somebodies out there, since most everyone doesn't read the NY Times, listen to cable news or liberal radio or even glance at progressive cyberscreeds. And even if, let's say for one day, they did, into which whole of utter incomprehension do you think words like "codify" and "offset" would tumble?

No, for once Sarah Palin, even if for all the wrong reasons, has something right: the media, whether from intellectual cause or effect, are limp and impotent. Yes, it is a damn shame that so many voters have the political IQ and reading comprehension skills of a slow-witted chimpanzee, but that's the country we live in. It is what it is, and nothing within the next few years is going to change the sea of ignorance in which we find ourselves collectively awash. It would seem the re-educational media have become not merely impotent, but collectively irrelevant, since counterarguments to the Fox-styled hogwash of misleading simplicity are by their very nature more complicated in structure and delivery.

Which reawakens my earlier but brief thought that the Democratic Party, through the DNC, DCCC, DSCC, should stop relying on indirect, talking-points messaging through assorted media and start counterpunching the Republican agenda directly: 30-second, 60-second spots of punchy, pithy, voter-reeducation on primetime television -- not, for heaven's sake, on MSNBC, the choir, but during all that highly rated garbage of, for instance, folks marooned on Pacific isles and trying to kill one another, or whatever it is they do, in those enlightening electronic venues.

And start the counterpunching now; don't wait till the next campaign season. Run the little advertising buggers for 365 days. Surely the money can be got. After all, the sordid Supreme Court has declared that American democracy is for sale. And, well, the Dems had better start selling a better sort of it -- now.

No offense, but ...

Ever wonder how the improbable likes of incoming Speaker John Boehner, who is self-evidently one of the dimmer bulbs in Washington, ever gets elected to the United States House of Representatives in the first place?

The shortest answer, of course, is that it depends on the congressman's district; he doesn't get himself elected, "The People" do it for him.

Yes, the people, we those virtuous people, or in Boehner's case, they those virtuous people. Which leads us to the residents of southwest Ohio, home of the state's mostly rural 8th Congressional District. Which in turn leads me to an H.L. Mencken essay that I reread today, "The Anglo-Saxon," in which Mencken cites a sociological study done of southern Ohioans, circa early 1920s: in other words, the intellectual forebears of "The People" who elected John Boehner to the U.S. Congress.

I quote from the study:

Here gross superstition exercises strong control over the thought and action of a large proportion of the people. Syphilitic and other venereal diseases are common and increasing over whole counties, while in some communities nearly every family is afflicted with inherited or infectious disease. Many cases of incest are known; inbreeding is rife. Imbeciles, feeble-minded, and delinquents are numerous, politics is corrupt, and selling of votes is common, petty crimes abound, the schools have been badly managed and poorly attended. Cases of rape, assault, and robbery are of almost weekly occurrence within five minutes' walk of the corporation limits of one of the county seats, while in another county political control is held by a self-confessed criminal. Alcoholic intemperance is excessive. Gross immorality and its evil results are by no means confined to the hill districts, but are extreme also in the towns. 

Mencken didn't provide a citation for this study, so I did a little looking around and ... what do you know? He wasn't joking; it's from a scholarly article titled "Community Disorganization," from The Journal of Social Forces, 1924, by one J.F. Steiner.

And now you know how, at least indirectly and given some time, the likes of a John Boehner can get elected to the United States House of Representatives in the first place -- by the syphilitic, inbred, feeble-minded, criminally corrupt, poorly schooled, alcoholic and grossly immoral People.

My apologies, naturally -- as well as condolences -- to those in the 8th District smart enough to have voted against Boehner. No offense.

It's almost here

If you worry about the post-holiday blues, then don't. The circus, packing all its clowns, is nearly in town.

About a dozen Republican presidential hopefuls will soon be declaring their intention to plague moderation and decency by out-right-flanking the other 11 on the campaign trail. Reports Ballot Box, The Hill's campaign blog, their handwringing over announcement-stagecraft has already begun.

"Republican candidates’ creativity will be tested with their decisions on how to tell the world they want to defeat Obama," writes the blog. In other words, their "creativity" will be a test not of ideas (Stop it, now you just stop that giggling, right now), but of what high-tech bells they can ring, what electronic stunts they can pull, what media tricks they can perform. With dogs. And ponies.

Democratic pollster Peter Hart, clearly out of touch with the insubstantial sizzle of Republican campaigning, advises the impossible: "I'm not a gimmick guy. I think you want to make an announcement that reflects your seriousness about being president. The ability to find that locale, that backdrop and the crowd that allows you to say it in the right way is important."

Well, damn. Perfection is out. The Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, is already taken -- was taken, in 1980, by Ronald Reagan. As the NY Times' Bob Herbert wrote during the run-up to the 2008 campaign: "[Reagan] knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, 'I believe in states’ rights.' "

But Republican pollster Tyler Harber, positively giddy about the gimmicky, suggests the most novel approach. Ballot Box paraphrases Harber as saying that "highly rated conservative talk shows are an attractive option for candidates, particularly for Huckabee, who hosts one himself."

Now that I'd tune in for. Isn't there an old Robin Williams film in which he violently debates himself?
 
"You always have a target population in mind that you want to reach when you announce," added Harber, which, to my mind, pretty much confines every announcement to some Fox affiliate in Iowa.

Epolitics.com's Colin Delany, however, predicts "A Twitter announcement" as "Much more likely," which is far from anyone to redudiate.

The circus is almost here.

Wha-Wha-Wall Street's whine

Among the many miscellaneous, putrid lies and deceptions uttered by top banking executives in Politico's superb coverage of the White House-Wall Street spat, this one, to my mind, leads the mangy pack:

"You have to understand, it is very personal. [Obama] raised money from us. Then he started calling us bad people. So forgive us for not wanting to buy him a drink after getting punched in the eye."

Flash: Candidate Obama didn't so much "raise money" from elite bankers as they voluntarily doused him in it. They're businessmen. They don't donate cash to politicians based on warm pangs of sentiment. They back winners -- in 2008's case a sure winner -- in the hope that those winners will then back them. Political finance is almost always mercenary, not friendly. Even schoolchildren understand that.

Hence this hawked deception of presidential betrayal is as about as bankable of a lie as any of their familiar others.

Divine logic

Congressional Quarterly reports that the GOP House leadership now insists "that the entire Constitution be read on the House floor on Jan. 6."

In their heroic voyage of originalist symbolism, let's hope they don't get snagged up on that divine Judeo-Christian plan of three-fifths-of-a-person.

Oh but that, they say, was a secular compromise. Well, then, what else in God's Constitution, as GOP "originalists" see it, was muddied by man's temporal inhumanity to man? And once the text's divine infallibility is denied, doesn't that open other passages -- such as "general welfare" -- to non-fundamentalist, un-tea-partyish interpretations?

You'd better watch it, boys. You just might open a debate that you'll regret.

A Keatsian vision

I was reading Keats last night -- well, doing my yeoman's best; abnormally huge swaths of early 19th-century British poetry are so overgrown with naturalistic sentimentality as to gag even an Oprah audience -- when I encountered this gem of a line: the "still unravished bride of quietness."

One of my immovable impediments with poetry, even the truly transporting stuff, is that I, an American barbarian, tend to filter its soaring metaphors through a grubby lens of political interpretation. And sure enough, when I confronted Keats' "unravished bride of quietness," I thought of Congress this reposing, hushed holiday week.

By next week, she'll be ravished. Or, to clarify by banishing the passive, she may be ravishing us.

To listen to cable news chatter or read progressive Web sites, however, there's no question as to which will be which: the debauchery will be an unsightly one-way street, with exalted tea partying lawmakers spelling instant doom for New Deal remnants and Great Society vestiges and Obama's accomplished agenda -- doom, indeed, for America itself.

How pleasant it was, then, to read Eugene Robinson's calming reminder this morning, "Danger ahead for the GOP," in which he realistically notes that "It's going to be a challenge for Republicans just to maintain party unity, much less to enact the kind of conservative agenda they promised to their enthusiastic, impatient voters."

As a frequent analyst on the cable shows Robinson does his yeoman's best to feed the audience's fever, but I always detect a pensive unease with the task and he generally restrains both himself and the host's unbridled panic. Nonetheless he's much better, more soothing, more thoughtful, in print -- precisely as he is today: "In the Senate, there could be as many as 11 Republicans who might defect and vote with the Democrats, depending on the issue"; and though "The new House will be decidedly more conservative than the old House," Robinson's (accurate, I think) "reading of the electorate is that voters want Congress to tackle big problems rather than waste the next two years mired in gridlock."

A minor difference of opinion. That, I think as well, is the beauty of the new House. I doubt they'll be able to help themselves; they'll thunder and roar and launch witless investigations and shove some of the silliest legislation you could ever imagine straight through and on to the Senate, where it'll crash and burn, regardless of its moderate-Republican population. The resultant gridlock will infuriate voters, who will turn on the House's uncompromising culprits.

Robinson concludes that "some Republicans already know, and others will soon learn" that "the idea of small, limited government may be appealing, but this is a big, complicated country."

The unmistakable implication is that those reeducated House Republicans will switch from high- to low-heat madness, and come to Obama and Democrats and reason together. Here, my doubts are even deeper, because any meditation of reasonable, responsible governance will be cancelled by their fear of being primaried by an even fresher brood of rabid tea partiers.

Nevertheless, Robinson has it about right: there's "Danger ahead for the GOP" -- far more perils for them than for President Obama, Congressional Dems, or the country at large.

The GOP's master

The "small amount" mentioned is, according to the Congressional Budget Office, $143 billion over the next 10 years:

The new Republican [House] rules skirting "pay-go" requirements have the support of an influential Tea Party group, which suggested the strategy in a memo to Republican leaders earlier this month. In the memo, FreedomWorks said the deficit reduction provided by the [health care] reform law is "a small amount" and that the savings would "vanish" in the next CBO estimate.

To note the GOP's hypocrisy on deficit spending would of course be superfluous. It's who they are, it's what they do -- and since their scandalous predations haven't yet unforgivably shocked the American electorate, perhaps they never will.

Democrats may wish to note to the electorate, however, that Republicans' allegiance not to taxpayers or the nation's general welfare but to a ruthless, disembodied, invincible Ideology now predetermines their legislative course. Continued tax cuts to the wealthiest among us may blow a bigger hole in the deficit, dear Mr. & Mrs. Taxpayer, but their Ideology demands the sacrifice. And though the health care reform law may help to close that hole, their Ideology forbids it. Ideology's price tag is immaterial.     

The average American voter tolerates political hypocrisy, because to this voter politics and hypocrisy are indistinguishable. A fair tolerance. But the average American voter detests ideology, when asked to think about it, because ideology hems in practical solutions. And Americans are a famously, immensely pragmatic people who dislike being hemmed in.

If Democrats can't immediately reaffirm that case, then they may want to rethink their core communications strategy, beginning with a rollout of voter-education television ads, for roughly 365 days next year. No kidding.

Where's the outrage?

A spokesman for Gov. Haley Barbour says the governor's ritzy, taxpayer-funded whirlings around the nation on a private jet are "an effective marketing tool in a state that really needs it."

The spokesman is probably right, and scores of Republican pols would defend to the death Haley's pricey travels, even though they recently denounced as unconscionable U.S. Speaker of House Nancy Pelosi's humble roamings on a government plane.

But said Democratic state Rep. George Flaggs of Mississippi: Barbour's "traveling doesn't bother me. I know that the governor may or may not use the plane for political purposes. That's what politicians do."

Come on, George. Come on, Dems. You're supposed to declare such political commonplaces commmitted by the opposition as unprecedented outrages -- as diabolical violations of the public trust which prefigure no less than the apocalyptic collapse of democratic virtue itself.

So come on, guys. Get with it. Work up some outrage, however outrageous.

Jon Stewart's triangulation

Asks the New York Times:

Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?

And does that make that comedian, Jon Stewart — despite all his protestations that what he does has nothing to do with journalism — the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow?

Maybe so. After all, we live -- nay, survive -- in a braver, newer media world, where the journalism at, say, Fox News has nothing to do with journalism, either, despite the network's protestations.

Is our parallel journalistic universe, in which Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite's investigative progeny is an expletive-spewing comedian, really so hard to accept -- coming on the heels, as it does, of having abetted the impeachment of a president for being infinitely wise in the consumption of his 10-minute coffee breaks, or of having failed to ask his unelected successor about the wisdom of igniting an unprovoked war, or which now covers and thereby promotes a hyperborean halfwit as a legitimate presidential candidate?

No, I see plenty disquieting but nothing incongruous about a Network jokester acting as an "angry prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our times."

This phenomenon should, however, also act as a wake-up call to MSNBC, which gluts its primetime programming with the sincerest impersonators of Howard Beale (I exempt Lawrence O'Donnell, who merely radiates amusement at all that which so volubly precedes him), only to be upstaged, outclassed and overcome by the real thing -- on a comedy channel.

MSNBC labored many an evening on the hypocrisy of the 9/11 responders bill being blocked by the most politically depraved exploiters of 9/11, to absolutely no effect. Then comes "The Daily Show" and boom, the depraved spring into corrective, humiliated action.

Which tells us at least one thing: MSNBC's "factual" act as a counterweight to the propaganda organ of Fox News is perhaps a primal but impotent scream. The left was already deficient in ideological or potentially mobilized numbers, so its viewing makes little difference; the right doesn't care, for it's watching Fox or reading Going Rogue; and the politically interested middle switched channels long ago to hear its news quite literally as a joke. 

Keith Olbermann can angle his body, bend downward his chin, peer over his glasses and upraise an eyebrow all he wants, but that makes him an Edward R. Murrow not. Nor does Rachel Maddow's jackhammer sarcasm substitute for Eric Sevareid's droll sardonicism. And Ed Schultz's ravings throughout Walter Cronkite's old time slot? No comment.

I do give MSNBC credit for trying. Some alternative to Fox's factually creative spin machine is needed; it was once called straight news, but Lord knows our national addiction to entertainment has remorselessly smothered the bejesus out of that. The thing is, though, when MSNBC is trumped by the likes of an unembellished comedian in exposing the hypocrisies of our time, there's something in its noble efforts that's misfiring.

Another Sunday, another sermon

We all do it, but Frank Rich has developed a drooling passion for it: recalling a prototypical modern America that never was, one virtuously united in a far-sighted, "can-do," spirited belief in economic democracy and national progress.

"America can’t move forward until we once again believe, as [we did in the late 1950s and JFK era]," Rich thematically concludes this morning, "that everyone can enter Frontierland if they try hard enough, and that no one will be denied a dream because [of oppressive wealth inequality]."

Rich does acknowledge that "Many of America’s more sweeping changes since 1956 are for the better," such as organic progress -- then unimaginable -- in the areas of civil and women's rights. "But," proceeds Rich with a quickly dismissive pen, "for all those inequities, economic equality seemed within reach in 1956, at least for the vast middle class."

This school of idealistic thought has come to crowd the modern progressive mind; we should dream big dreams, think big thoughts, idealize an idealized past, and thereby amplify some rapturous future that awaits us -- if we believe. Belief, coursing through the national soul like a reinvigorating elixir, comes foremost.

Here's my problem with that: It's humbug.

OK, that's the short version, a bit less explanatory than perhaps desirable. The longer (but not long) version is that the historic rise of America's middle class throughout the 1950s and 1960s came as a direct product of the profoundly pragmatic minds of New Dealing men and women who had stopped dreaming and started doing. Because of the absolute necessities of the 1930s' and 1940s', they put aside their grand utopian urges and pushed and hustled and grabbed whatever progress could realistically be had at the moment.

As R. Hofstadter noted to lasting effect in The Age of Reform, the ideological personalities of left and right essentially traded places in the '30s. The activist left cashiered its transcendent progressive dreams and instead sought practical, experimental, whatever-works incrementalism, while the right retired its hard, dollars-and-cents, no-nonsense approach to governing and began screaming in protest and slopping about in a reveried, non-existent utopia of an Ideal America Lost.

The reactionary right is, by definition, still there -- adrift in evocative thought of either "True Grit" or "Ozzie and Harriet" -- but the left is slipping, losing its grip on the hard, pragmatic, Rooseveltian step-by-step struggle for progress.

All of which is reflected in Rich's rather cheaply opportunistic observation: "President Obama [has] called for more spending on research and infrastructure, more educational reform and more clean energy technology. (All while reducing the deficit, mind you.) Worthy goals, but ... you realize something more fundamental is missing from America now: the bedrock faith in the American way that J.F.K. could tap into during his era’s Sputnik moment."

Let us not forget that JFK, however, had not sufficiently pulled us out of the horrific McCarthy era to avoid sucking us straight into the even more horrific Vietnam era. All that "bedrock faith in the American way" -- here, over there, everywhere -- soon ran aground, first in Southeast Asia, then at home. America's immeasurable hubris in its "can-do" spirit doubled back on itself -- a lesson in spiritual moderation.

The thrust of Rich's exhortation, I get. We all get it; we all tend to look back and see some version of a nobler America that never was. I also take and appreciate Rich's point that Obama has got himself lost in the policy weeds, and now needs to present himself not as a fastidious gardener but as an artist before a very large canvass, painting a broad and beautiful landscape, into which there lies a discernable path.

Yet, Mr. Rich, a little humility, please. I believe Obama already profoundly knows this and that an uplifting Grand Presidential Narrative -- of the old progressive style -- is on its way, since, after all, a campaign is underway. But he also knows, as FDR knew, that real progress comes only step by step, that it's cumulative -- and that idealism, though spiritually transporting it may be, is but a minor partner to his rather unsexy workhorse of progressive pragmatism.

Every man a king

The Times' Roger Cohen, with the best, one-line summation yet of Western Civilization's rather sudden bassackwardness:

What we are witnessing on either side of the Channel is the double whammy of a debt-ridden public sector making cuts wherever it can and a bonus-addicted private sector making cuts wherever it’s profitable — with the resultant disaster foisted on a general public.

The irony is that Western Civilization democratically hails the "general public" as absolute king, while in reality the body politic operates mostly as a powerless constitutional monarchy. Adding insult to irony, "powerless" is not improbably the better-case scenario, for when handed the formidable democratic opportunity to actually improve their lot in life, said democratic monarchs are as likely as not to hand the reins of public power to the sacred free-market, good-government-despising quackery of a Boehner & Co., which in unconcealed cahoots with the bonus-addicted private sector will then double down on the double whammy.

Merry Christmas.

Let the misreadings begin

Dana Milbank:

What got Obama in trouble in the first place were the extraordinarily high expectations that the nation had for his administration - and that Obama's campaign had encouraged....

[N]ow Obama's return to messianic status ... risks unlearning the valuable lesson in humility.

A more precise misreading of political circumstances is unimaginable. Obama now has an incentive to set expectations even extraordinarily higher; for when they encounter obstruction, the ensuing condemnation of the perverse obstructionists will be that much louder.

The GOP's really sticky wicket

I once observed that Mr. Shakespeare had in mind the likes of Fox News polemicist and GOP assassin Dick Morris when he wrote, "Never hung poison on a fouler toad." But, alas, though still a toad, Morris' modifier would now be "funnier," not fouler.

What prompts this literary revision? Morris' most recent ravings in The Hill (12/14), in which he referred to the eminently reasonable Barack Obama as, on the one hand, an "obstinate ideologue" of "socialist principles," who, on the other hand, having "[come] in from the cold of his extreme far-left positions," now "looks like a wimp."

This Bronx cheer from Morris was of course to be expected. It came on the heels of Charles Krauthammer's declaration of Obama as the undisputed winner of the tax deal, an explosive commentary that rattled many another commentator's window and soon shattered their instant, monolithic analysis of Obama's deal as a "capitulation."

Anyway, long-term and far-reaching analyst that he is, Morris then crowed that "Obama is checkmated as long as Republicans hold firm."

What the cheerleading Morris and likeminded extremists somehow neglected, though, is that some conscientious Republicans know how to read opinion polls; as a result they understand that the last thing most voters want is for President Obama to be "checkmated," each Democratic proposal gridlocked, every recent Congressional triumph reversed. The electorate has demanded a thoughtful, fast-moving chess game of offensive give and take, not some stagnant, predetermined checkmate.

Alaska's Democratic Senator Mark Begich has summarizedwhat Morris & Co. obstinately refuses to fathom: "[T]he pendulum moves very quickly right now," he told Politico. So quickly, it already seems that Mitch McConnell could have been referring to his own, discombobulated party when he quipped this week: "If they think it's bad now, wait 'til next year."

For there is, at least for the moment, an unmistakable unraveling process at work within the Grand Old Party. Its self-destructive miscalculations have abounded, most recently in opposition to the 9/11 responders bill and DADT and New Start. Said exiting Senator Chris Dodd, with more psychiatric accuracy than he may have intended: "It was crazy opposing Start -- crazy -- and [McConnell] shouldn't have done it."

Added Dodd, with prodding empathy: "I don't think Mitch is terribly comfortable with the tea party types" -- who are already transforming McConnell into a pitiable laughingstock. I don't think Mitch is terribly comfortable with that, either, nor will he remain at ease as he watches, say, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Lisa Murkowski and Scott Brown drift ever more regularly into the Democratic column.

Reports Politico: McConnell's "claim that his 2012 objective was to unseat Obama may have appeased his party's right wing, but it has tested extremely poorly in Democratic-sponsored focus groups of independent voters.... Meanwhile, Obama has adopted a feel-good tone of bipartisan comity, appealing to independents turned off by the partisan rancor of the last two years."

My dear Mr. Morris, if anyone is checkmated, it's Republicans. They can burrow in obstructionism and thus concede 2012, or they can move in Obama's direction and concede 2012 -- get themselves picked off in primaries, that is, one reasonable Republican at a time.