PMC Commentary

The Propaganda Gap

Yesterday, on C-Span, I listened to an exchange of thoughts on the "military-industrial complex" between the grandson of the phrase's originator, David, and William Hartung, author of Prophets of War, a history of Lockheed-Martin's stranglehold on the nation's security apparatus.

At one point, noting that DDE's brilliant inclusion of the conceptual wording "national defense" in his interstate highway act (actually the "National Interstate and Defense Highways Act") facilitated its breezy passage by Congress, Hartung quipped, "If we had a 'National Defense Subway Act,' we'd have a better subway system," too.

That's a good thought, limitless in application. Virtually any bill with "National Defense" implanted in the title is guaranteed a statutory life, given politicians' preternatural fear of looking insufficiently patriotic, or worse, untroglodytically thoughtful.

So how about it? How about a National Defense Medicare-For-All Act? Or a National Defense Really Clean Air and Really Clean Water Act? Or a National Defense Gay Marriage Act? Or even a National Defense Less-National-Defense Act?

Like I said, the possibilities are limitless, if only Congressional liberals would get up to far-right speed by getting in touch with their softer, Luntzian, creatively propagandistic side.

When it rains, it ices

Along with millions of others, I'm sitting in the epicenter of mother nature's wintry wonderland-my-ass. Power outages are expected. So if I vanish for a day or two ... wire some brandy?

The limits of choice

Ross Douthat's column this morning, "The Devil We Know," will be inviting game for the ideologues, both left and right. And I suspect it is they whom Douthat is addressing, although he writes that it is generic "Americans" who "don't like to admit" that

We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.

But history makes fools of us all.

And that, as best I can tell, is just about history's only unimpeachable lesson.

Indeed, one could venture that the history of international relations tends to operate not so much according to predictable, repeating patterns, but according to Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." And then of course there's its corollary, loosely stated as, If everything seems to be going smoothly, you've overlooked some very important factor.

Nonetheless the ideologues persist. They develop magnificent theories by which the world operates; strike that, they develop maginificent theories by which the world should operate, and surely would if only they were given a chance to execute their ingenious schemes. It scarcely needs mentioning that we witnessed the tragic unfolding of such ingenuity during the last administration, a neoconservative train wreck of faith.

Likewise, liberal internationalism's reputation has suffered irreparable blows. I'd argue that L. Johnson's folly -- an inadequate word in view of its stupendous costs in human life -- was more a political response to the right's disgraceful exploitation of the late 1940s and '50s than a well-contoured theory, yet it can't be denied that Johnson was surrounded by the brightest minds who could and did predict the outcome, which, naturally, bore absolutely no relationship to eventual reality.

Even history's realists took certain steps down utterly uncertain roads. How, for instance, could all of Nixon and Kissinger's balance-of-power scheming with China have ever anticipated that nation's turn to capitalism? Metternich's "Congress," too, lasted barely a generation; and the mother of all future diplomatic accords, the "Peace" of Westphalia, hardly ushered in a new age of 17th-century tolerance and cooperation so keenly sought by so many, battered by decades of intolerance's carnage.

What historians of international relations call "presentist" attempts to comprehend the past -- that is, looking backward with the rather unapologetic use of contemporary knowledge -- is even less helpful in understanding the past or present's deepest currents. Take, for instance, Robert Dallek's recent (and admittedly popular) work, The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953. Here we experience the coming together of history's "greatest," wartime and postwar leaders -- Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, Stalin, Mao -- who, muses Dallek, in both their benign and malignant forms should have been capable of preventing the dangerously paralyzed and polarized Cold War era. Following the 1930s and 1940s' unprecedented horrors, these men were "blessed by circumstances favorable to changing international relations for the better. But they didn't, or at least fell well short of what they might have accomplished."

Why? "[T]he flawed leadership of the past," concludes Dallek, "was less the consequence of circumstances than of choice" -- alternative choices which Dallek can see with ease in 2010; however for nearly 400 preceding pages, he delineates each circumstance that led precisely to those choices.

One might say that determinism battled free will, and free will got crushed.

So what's the point of this shortest-ever survey course in international relations? Douthat answers: "The only comfort, as we watch Egyptians struggle for their country’s future, is that some choices aren’t America’s to make." Something the ideologues, and more than even a few realists, have never accepted.

"Accept the reality"

"Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton made the rounds on all five Sunday shows," reports The Hill, "advocating that the people's voice be heard while taking care not to call for a departure of President Hosni Mubarak." A familiar play, Act One.

Scene two, however, was previewed on one of those shows by former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski: Mubarak should "accept the reality" of his hopeless situation and resign.

It's always unclear precisely which hope against what other hope autocrats such as Mubarak envision. The entire world knows this play's denouement -- and it's for damn sure Hillary Clinton does -- yet there dithers the Egyptian president, abjectly alone, without any substantial base of support, cities burning, allies feeling, friends forgetting his phone number. Even "his" military is an adder in waiting.

I'm no psychologist, but reason suffices in assuming that 30 years of obsessive control and unopposed rule at some point transform the lone controller into a kind of fantasy-ruler: this -- the wretched breakdown of all that so meticulously came before -- cannot really be happening to him, "the people" will come to their adoring senses and love him again, some miraculous intervention is sure to occur ...

To stretch a not-entirely outrageous analogy, the sort of delusional otherworld into which Herr Hitler escaped during his final days ... FDR ist tot? ... Gott ist mit mir.

Accept the reality. A simple enough exhortation, especially when inevitability has already swallowed every conceivable alternative -- which makes Western angst over Mubarak's immediate decisions seem a bit unwarranted.

Misquoting the Constitution

In Politico's "Right's weapon: Constitutional force," we again sense the perils of fundamentalist thought -- in this case political -- which can be construed even further in religious terms: as denominational ideology having degenerated into sectarian radicalism.

[W]hile the Constitution is often invoked, and even misquoted, for all manner of conservative causes, perhaps the truest meaning of the new phrase constitutional conservatism is found in the broad, imaginative and sometimes quirky new efforts to hem in the power of the federal government....

[T]he challenges to the health care reform law are just the most visible sign of a broad, national flowering of state efforts to find shelter from the federal government in sometimes-neglected corners of the Constitution that touch conventional political hot buttons such as immigration and gun control, and exotic ones, such as citizenship and currency.

And get this: "there are even proposals for states to begin minting their own currencies."

The Constitution, "often invoked and even misquoted" (hello, Bart Ehrman) -- the political fundamentalist's attempt to embrace and celebrate its most expansive language only to justify the narrowest and pettiest of platforms.

Somewhere, if there is a somewhere, the Founders are no doubt meeting with other Scripturalists, asking, Where did we go wrong? How is it possible, or indeed is it possible, to write general guidelines for human conduct in which the literal won't be misapplied as figurative and the figurative literal?

But of course that presupposes a human community of fundamental integrity.

The real Magoos

Breathtaking. Earlier today MSNBC interviewed American tourists recently landed in Egypt. They "didn't know," according to one, "that all this was going on."

One would think that anyone that cosmically ignorant wouldn't be able to scrape two nickels together, yet there they are, flying around the world and "vacationing" in a foreign land, albeit a bit troubled one at the moment, while here I sit.

I'm doing something wrong. I'm doing something very, very wrong.

Freakshow editorialism

In yesterday's online New York Times, above the fold, top of the page, under "Opinion," a tease reads:

Editorial: Obama and Corporate America

President Obama is right to reach out to business leaders, but his agenda must not be taken over entirely by corporate interests.

Here let us deploy that well-worn phrase, "Well, duh."

Otherwise, honestly, does that preview entice you in any way to read the whole silly thing? (I sure didn't bother.) The Times' sensationalist admonition suggests there's a chance that Obama's agenda could, in fact, "be taken over entirely by corporate interests," while the manifest preposterousness of it all simultaneously smothers the sensationalism. So what's the bloody point?

It's less inexpert yellow journalism than it is merely the empty fatuity of carnival barking: Step right up and be frightened, folks, by the freakishly, patently unbelievable.

The worrisome Hitch

Yesterday I referenced Hitchens's despair that Religion poisons everything. I want to briefly pick up on that again in relation to the politics of the Egyptian revolt, but only after these words from Poison's sponsors, Iranian religious conservatives:

"I am ... optimistic about Egypt," said Mohammad-Javad Larijani, secretary general of the Iranian High Council for Human Rights (yeah, you read that right), who is described by the NY Times as "one of the most outspoken figures among Iran’s traditional conservatives." "There, Muslims are more active in political agitation," added Larijani, "and, God willing, they will establish the regime that they want."

Said another "hard-line cleric" and Iranian conservative: "Today, as a result of the gifts of the Islamic revolution in Iran, freedom-loving Islamic peoples such as the peoples of Tunisia, Egypt and nearby Arab countries are standing up to their oppressive governments." (Friday, this holy man affirmed that he "favors a political system in which elections merely endorse 'divinely chosen' clerical leaders.")

These are of course self-serving exhortations, attempts by deeply embedded beneficiaries of Iran's authoritarian system to justify themselves and their "system" by extending the latter -- by seeing it recreated throughout the Islamic world in its own misbegotten image. As such, one must filter their "optimistic" observations through a bullshit gin.

Still, one also cannot dismiss their sermonizing vision, their transnational influence, their underground financing, their utter indifference to Egyptians' very real material sufferings and their outright hostility to any secular, democratic resolution. Especially in dire cultural-socioeconomic circumstances such as Egypt's, in which poverty and despair float within the brutal and dominant currents of a religious belief in ultimate rewards elsewhere, the comfortable, predatory vultures of metaphysical, authoritarian systems hover.

Which leads us to Hitchens's Religion poisons everything -- again, especially in emerging but struggling nations. He properly quotes Marx (who never "dismissed" religion, notes Hitchens; indeed Marx "took belief very seriously"), a far keener sociologist than economist, on this interrelated point:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
  The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition that needs illusions.

In short, in a wretched paradox that too many devout followers of Islam (in this instance ; there are others of course) too often miss, conservative imams perpetuate real distress as an answer to real distress. They are pushers, they are poisoners of the possible, they are oppressors of the humanly aspiring spirit.

My only fundamental (certainly not fundamentalist) difference with Hitchens is that he habitually conflates religion with god (as he lower-cases "it" throughout his marvelous polemic, God Is Not Great). To my mind, the existence or nonexistence of some unknowable, impenetrable supreme presence bears the same relationship to organized religion as Mitt Romney does to unified string theory. There either is, or there is not, some undiscoverable, extranatural, universal "presence," and leaning one way or the other in a belief about that is perfectly understandable, even logical, and personally inoffensive. "[I]t does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg," observed the latitudinarian Jefferson. But Organized Religion is a wholly separate, man-made, usually ancient and often compulsory conceptualization of secular frets and prejudices resolved and encased by metaphysical and arbitrary meanderings. One could, quite literally, choose Russell's teapot to believe in as The Absolute Answer, and one would possess every bit the logical justification for that belief as in a more formalized belief in Islam or Christianity or whatever. There is in reality an Answer, but we cannot conceivably know what it is, so for God's sake (?) leave it alone.

Oh my, I see I have woefully digressed. Back on track: The point, here, is simply that there exists legitimate cause for unprogressive concern about revolutionary events in Egypt. For if religion can worm its way into the democratic process and governing outcome, it will, and it will then poison everything.

Maybe not so great

On the "Arab Revolt," here's David Ignatius, with whom I share a profound wariness, based on a few hundred years of a seemingly inescapable pattern:

It's an easy revolution to like.... [However] History teaches that revolutions are always attractive in their infancy, when freedom is in the air and the rebellion seems spontaneous. But from the French and Russian revolutions to the Iranian uprising of 1979, the idealistic but disorganized street protesters usually give way to a manipulative revolutionary elite.

In this case, Islamic fundamentalists, perhaps. And as Christopher Hitchens peppers God Is Not Great throughout, with agonized despair: Religion poisons everything.

Let us pray, for the Tea Party commences

"Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a founding member of the Senate's Tea Party Caucus [which, by the way, with yesterday's revival-meeting addition of Kansas Senator Jerry Moran, is either menacingly up to four or pleasingly circumscribed at four, depending on how one looks at it], has pledged to filibuster legislation to increase the debt ceiling," reports The Hill.

(Before moving on to the meat of that quote, let's have a parenthetical moment of reflection on its bracketed insertion.

True, the rather subdued results of the Senate Tea Party Caucus's membership drive -- the two senators above are matched only by the two of Jim DeMint and Rand Paul -- had to come as an enormous disappointment to tea party organizers. But in their valiant tradition of make-believe reality, they now simply count and include non-members as members and thus swell their ranks through the same hocus-pocus by which they'll "reduce" the deficit.

"Thank you for sending me some help," exclaimed a rapturous DeMint, thanking the air, at the aforementioned revival meeting. "I need these guys here. Thank you so much for sending them, Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey [and] Ron Johnson" -- among whom only Sen. Toomey even bothered to appear.

One of these days, some expert de-programmer -- hired by Mitch McConnell? -- is going to throw a steel-reinforced net over DeMint and go to work.)

Anyway, back to Lee, whose upcoming Pickett's Charge against the Yankee spendthrifts of Washington promises more smoke and noise but even less success than the original, has now fired on the engulfing debt of socialist Obama's Fort Sumter. And he's done so with DeMint's selfsame ease of logic and wistful insouciance: "I'm against raising the debt ceiling and so I'm resisting it," declared Lee, simple as that.

What a happy, one-dimensionally caressing world he lives in. He don't like it, he don't like it at all, so he's votin' agin it; as opposed, presumably, to those other senators who'll vote for it because ... well, they just love debt, and can't get enough of it.

But wait. What's this cunning, diabolically clever and somewhat devilishly oleaginous I'm resisting it? Lordy lord, my error. Lee did not, in fact, say he'll be voting against raising the debt ceiling. He said he's against raising it and resists the very hideous idea of it. But he did not say he's voting against it.

How can this be? To what heavenly loophole can we attribute this seeming loss of tea-partyesque virtue?

Why of course. The vintage dodge, the enduring classic, that ingratiating tribute to transcendent nothingness: "The only scenario in which I can imagine not using the filibuster," added Lee, head bowed, eyes darting, tongue sweeping his disingenuous lips, "is if the leadership of both parties agree that as a condition of that they would first pass out a balanced-budget amendment."

Whew. That was a close one. Thank God for the salvational prattle of that old political chestnut, the Balanced-Budget Amendment -- Commandment One in the nine-repeating Decalogue of "Thou shalt fake accountability."

The boil of a Bachmann

The headline alone shouts conservatism's organizational fragmentation and ideological dishevelment: "Michele Bachmann poses challenge for GOP."

When one stops to ponder their implications, those are six remarkably revealing words. Michele Bachmann, she of deep intellectual impairment and self-advertising ethical absence, actually poses a challenging threat to the party of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. With God knows plenty of assistance, she's cementing it as the party only of Joe McCarthy, Glenn Beck and Howdy Doody.

"For all of Speaker John Boehner’s efforts to stage-manage the opening days of the Republican House, handpick his inner circle and keep his party on message," writes Poltico, "Bachmann keeps jumping into the fray. The tea party loves her, the media promotes her, and she is a huge draw on the fundraising circuit ... and there’s nothing Republicans can do about it.

"But Bachmann is more than just a limelight-hungry tea partier — she represents an anti-establishment tension simmering just below the surface of a unified Republican front."

Such an overstatement of the GOP's unification renders it a fantasy. Virtually no party solidarity lingers these days; it's every amplifying crackpot for him- or herself, and Bachmann, now that Sarah Palin is self-immolating, is leading a Pyrrhic charge.

What's left of the old GOP Establishment tolerates Bachmann (and Bachmann's unschooled ilk) out of a desperate sense of the party's preservation. But someday they'll have to stop whining to the press that, as the press puts it, there's really "nothing [they] can do about it." For there's always a chance that she, someday, will leave too little of their party for them to re-launch.

Worse than we imagined

I braved a few minutes of Cenk Uygur's new and probably temporary show on MSNBC the other night. I swear I almost felt sorry for him, and I unquestionably felt sorry for his guest, liberal Democrat Jan Schakowsky.

I never realized that The Cause, conspiring with pressure to fill network airtime, could impel a host to such utter inanities. To wit, Uygur asked Schakowsky -- and I kid you not, he actually asked this -- how she and her fellow Democrats would now, could now get progressive legislation through the House.

I froze in incredulity for the briefest moment, wondering if I had heard what I thought I just heard. Rep. Schakowsky stood similarly frozen on camera for what was perhaps the funniest, split-second double-take since Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First."

Although rapidly fleeting it was, this chuckling train wreck of a television moment also slowed time for those of us unmercifully involved, permitting seemingly expansive thoughts to intervene between question and answer. I recall thinking before Schakowsky replied that a Sam Rayburn or Rep. Lyndon Johnson would have simply responded: Are you fucking kidding me?

But Rep. Schakowsky is a generational part of that genteel species that knows cable news isn't really cable news; it's "pack" programming in which a smiling or snarling host-leader either shares fresh meat with friends or bows back and bares teeth at ideological intruders -- all in the tribal pack are warmly embraced, strangers are suspect, and hostiles are generally pre-banished.

As such, Schakowsky felt prohibited from saying what LBJ would have said; instead she paused momentarily and politely, a bit dazed, and then stuttered that maybe a few House Republicans would hear the angels and see the transformational light and start voting the progressive way -- or, a trifle more realistic, she added, was that she and her fellow Democrats would not, after all, be passing much progressive legislation through this ... uh ... right-winging, tea-partying, revolutionary Terror-Reigning House.

Now, I feel compelled to venture this much, at least, in defense of Cenk Uygur: He knew that. He had to know that. Please tell me that a grown man who can find his own way to MSNBC's studios already knew that progressive legislation has absolutely no hope of survival in this, the most ideologically violent, "executive"-opposing assemblage since the Rump Parliament. 

But here's the thing ... the other thing: Cenk is a True Believer, for whom belief in the celestial Cause must always trump recognition of secular reality. As such, Cenk has acquired a following of abundantly likeminded, reality-denying True Believers who, being in characteristic possession of a frighteningly fawning level of "authoritarian-personality" attributes (they ain't only on the right), look up to their Cenk Uygurs as demigod fountains of eternal truths and utopian hopes that must be ruthlessly peddled and evangelically reinforced. No back-sliding revolution should ever be televised.

And that's what leads to comically idiotic questions wrapped in otherworldly stratospheres such as Mr. Uygur's the other day. The exuberant Struggle endures, even if blinkered beyond belief.

"Pro-American" piffle

Dana Milbank:

Two dozen reporters chased [Michele Bachmann] down a hall in the Capitol complex this week, seeking an explanation for the speech. "I never took this as a State of the Union response, necessarily," she said innocently. The title above the text of her speech her office released Tuesday night: "Bachmann's Response to State of the Union."

Integrity. Always, integrity.

Bada-bing

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll reveals that an extraordinary 84 percent of those who watched President Obama's State of the Union speech registered a "somewhat positive" to a "very positive" reaction (with far more in the latter than former column).

A CBS News poll zoomed straight to the staggering: 91 percent "approved" -- a statistical consensus I haven't encountered since the country realized en masse that Ross Perot was fantastically nuts.

Reports Politico, "Just 15 percent [in the CNN poll] responded negatively to the speech," while in the CBS poll, "9 percent said they disapproved."

Among this 9-to-15 point disapproving audience, Politico further reports, 40 percent had to delay their response until the frothing ceased; 30 percent expressed extreme irritation at being polled about a goddamn Kenyan socialist; and the final 30 percent, all males, hurried the interviewer because they wanted to get back to their Michele Bachmann swimsuit photocalendar (Feb issue) in the bathroom. (OK I made this last stuff up, sort of.)

Obama's open road

By presidential design and ultraconservative temperament, the GOP is stuck in a political box. Last night, Rep. Paul Ryan slammed shut the lid and sealed it.

Inside, with him, were the tedious hobgoblins of campaign fabrications -- the stimulus package created not one job! and healthcare reform is killing thousands more!; the frenzied bogeymen of hyperbole -- Good Lord, we're becoming Greece in a hammock!; and the solemn gremlins of unshakable ideology -- limited government + free enterprise (always) = socioeconomic paradise, even though our most recent, eight-year test of that simplistic hypothesis produced only a hellhole and damn near finished us off.

The New Republic's Jonathan Chait provided the contrast:

Obama framed every issue in specific terms — here is a plan to improve education, here is a factory that is now growing due to my policy, here is a person who would suffer if we repeal health care reform. Ryan’s speech existed almost entirely on the plane of abstraction. Obama’s meta-theme was pitched straight at the center, while Ryan’s was pure right-wing dogma.

Pure right-wing dogma. That, in effect, was the electoral warning label Ryan slapped on the lid before slamming it shut. SOTU-responses generally are not the time to play to one's shrinking base, and I've no doubt that Ryan, Strategists & Co. understood that when concocting his script. But over their shoulders they also heard the thundering, cloven-hoofed herd of the grim-reaping tea partiers, listening for echoes of infidels and apostates.

When their internal Armegeddon comes, Oh what a lovely war it will be.

As for last night's main attraction and grownup portion, though, "pitched straight at the center" seems a fair way to characterize it. I would only add that while pitching to the center, Obama persisted in shifting the center, too, a bit to the left. He called for (implied) massive government investments in clean energy and transportion and information technology and thus new jobs, while ridiculing taxpayer subsidies for immensely profitable oil companies and, to the evening's most exuberant cheers, he called for an uncompromising end to those highest-income tax cuts.

Will this be enough for those insatiable progressive activists? Of course not. For they've surpassed mere insatiability on their Hope-Crosby Road to Utopia; they're now emotionally and even financially vested in their own little box in their own little world, playing to borderline-personality types who can no more tolerate the political hues between black and white or perceive the ideological spectrum between pure good and pure evil than a Michele Bachmann can.

In isolating the factional extremes, Obama is opening a wide-reaching field in which to run, unbeatably.