P.M. Carpenter

There they go -- went -- again

Now here's a not unfamiliar lede:

The budget scoreboard so far: Republicans 1, Democrats 0.

Democrats threw in the towel Friday, just two days after delivering a chest-thumping rejection of the GOP plan to ...

Etc., etc., and so on. You know the story, the pattern, the altogether recognizable disgust in the pit of your sickened stomach.

True, there is (possibly) a strategic upside to this seeming abomination of a cave-ation: "Senior Senate aides say that by averting a shutdown over the short-term bill, Democrats have positioned themselves as responsible stewards of government spending, which will help them when the two sides grapple with the longer-term budget and raising the statutory limit on the national debt."

But the appearance is grim. Quite grim. "What’s the use of a hard line," asked one Democratic aide, "if you’re going to back off it in two minutes? These guys are the worst at playing chicken that I’ve ever seen."

Which reminds me of that underlying difficulty that has awaited Obama before his every turn: In their fatiguing complaints about the president's "timidity," progressive activists too often neglect that he has from the start been burdened by an essentially conservative Congress -- one that is itself decidedly timid.

"Democrats in Congress didn’t have clear backing from a White House anxious to avoid the political risk of a shutdown," writes Politico's Jonathan Allen -- although "economic," not "political" risk, would have been more accurate -- "and they faced serious pushback from some of the 23 Senate Democrats up for reelection in 2012."

Just as they, and the president, faced serious pushback from Senate Democrats up for reelection in 2010.

Obama's is not timidity; it is, rather, an intelligent balancing of progressive desires with conservative realities.

Global disparities

From Beijing:

Officials have used state-run media outlets to dismiss any comparisons of [Middle East] regimes with China. At the same time, they have stepped up public comments on the need to ... tackle problems such as the growing income disparity between the rich and poor.

The leaders of this authoritarian capitalist nation may wish to remind themselves -- and just about now seems likely -- of their socialist roots.

When the growing disparity between rich and poor will trouble our liberal capitalistic nation is, however, anybody's guess.

'Surprising' indeed

I would have described them as "dumbfounding" or "maddening," but The Hill -- I assume because of its greater acceptance of today's average American voter as hopelessly clueless -- characterizes its polling results on the blameworthy aspects of a government shutdown as only "surprising." To wit ...

Twenty-nine percent of likely voters would blame Democrats for a government shutdown, compared to 23 percent who would hold Republicans responsible....

It gets worse:

[A]mong independents: Thirty-four percent would blame Democrats, while only 19 percent would blame the GOP.

Furthermore, it seems, these days, that with age comes not wisdom but a remarkable disconnect from looming reality:

Although some Democrats have said that Social Security checks would be in jeopardy if there is a shutdown, the survey finds that senior citizens are less likely to see a negative impact than younger voters. Only 36 percent of seniors (those 65 and older) see a negative impact, compared to 51 percent of middle-aged voters (40-64) and 46 percent of young voters (18-39).

Let me guess: The 64 percent of seniors who anticipate no "negative impact" are the same who want President Obama to keep his filthy socialist hands off their Medicare?

Perhaps this poll is an outlier. Let us pray.

Smart attempts at dissing the far right

Mitch Daniels is one smart pol, as is Mike Huckabee. Both foresee the electoral train wreck I visited earlier today: for Daniels that prospect has meant distancing himself from the far-right extremist crowd, and now comes Huckabee, sounding similarly sane.

Huckabee on Michelle Obama: "She's been criticized unfairly by a lot of my fellow conservatives."

Huckabee on the birther issue: It's an "obsession" and "waste of time."

Huckabee on Obama's religion and past association with Jeremiah Wright: "If people went back and heard every sermon I heard when I was a little kid and some of the more fundamentalist pastors were yelling from the pulpit at me, if they took every one of those sermons and lifted out of them certain phrases and things, it could be scandalous, but only out of the context of the bigger picture."

In another Politico piece, Huckabee is quoted as observing, in a direct and frontal assault on Palin, Bachmann & Bedlam Inc., "The people that are sitting around saying, '[Obama is] definitely going to be a one-term president. It’s going to be easy to take him out,' they’re obviously political illiterates – political idiots, let me be blunt."

Huckbee is too clever to be uncalculating. The first above-linked Politico story relates that "those who have known Huckabee for years say his rhetoric is less tactical than the former Arkansas governor simply being himself."

I'd grant him some degree of positive personality, yet on balance the thrust of his recent comments reveal -- for political cynics, which means anyone who follows politics -- a far heavier slant toward strategic thought.

It's fascinating to watch the GOP's smarter pols trying their damnedest to back away from GOP extremism.

For the GOP, chronic troubles

Politico observes in today's almost superfluous top story -- "President Obama looking a lot less beatable" -- that "aside from the traditional advantages of incumbency, Republicans are also fretting about the strength of Obama’s campaign infrastructure, the potential limitations of their own field and, particularly, the same demographic weaknesses that haunted them in 2008."

Were I a GOP strategist, none of those factors would unduly trouble me -- except the last.

Obama's incumbency is just one of those political facts of life, I'd say to myself; Republicans are hardly poor fundraisers and ever since Our Supreme Court redefined brute corporate muscle as free speech we're even better at it, I'd remind myself; and as for the "potential limitations" of our field? Come, come, we haven't fielded a competent candidate in quadrennial memory, yet somehow we've managed a pretty good record of victories.

But that last one, dear God that last one: "the same demographic weaknesses that [merely] haunted [us] in 2008" will seem like rabid Spielbergian poltergeists in 2012. By frightful 2016 and terrifying 2020 there's only the unspeakable beyond -- a geographically centripetal party, constituted more and more by fewer and fewer aging, cranky, Limbaugh-listening white guys with a fondness for dressing up as Confederate reenactors. 

Said a tuned-in, former GOP "political operative," presently a congressman: "The electorate will look much different in 2012 than it did in 2010. It’s going to be younger, browner, and more to the left."

That's an assessment with which I'd have no quibble, though I'd refine the last component to, "less to the right." For years, Gallup's annual tracking has shown little shifting within the nation's ideological makeup; roughly 40 percent conservative, 20 percent liberal, the second-ranked remainder betwixt.

Notwithstanding these inescapable factors -- or so I'd say to myself -- what do we in the GOP do? You got it: We march farther and farther to the extreme right, we exalt our extremists, we celebrate and honor them, we hurl out of acceptable bounds any internal criticism of them and we thereby intensify our alienation of the young, the browns, the blacks, the women, the gays -- virtually anyone with an open mind and a heart yet to undergo bypass surgery.

What's more, the longer we stew in extremism the greater the odds we'll be marooned in 2012 and beyond by nothing but unelectable extremists as candidates. They'll be the only ones who can survive our extremist primaries.

That's what I'd say to myself, then I'd have a stiff drink.

For the GOP, 2012 presents unique problems. But for the longer term, its problems are characteristic and chronic.

See ya!

If you've even a dram of confidence left in Sarah Palin's capacity to reemerge as the GOP's leading presidential candidate, consider this.

Moments ago on ABC's "This Week," Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley, who would not be governor of South Carolina had it not been for Sarah Palin's enthusiastic endorsement, was asked if she'd return the favor in the event of a Palin candidacy.

Ribbit, ribbit, cricket-chirp, cricket-chirp, rustling underbrush murmurs of flight.

The bane of practical, workable politics since 1789

"The highest priority of America’s current political radicals is not to balance government budgets," writes Frank Rich this morning, "but to wage ideological warfare in Washington and state capitals alike."

In his affirmative portion, Rich is no doubt correct. "Ideological warfare" is the GOP's means to the ends of its ultimate ideological nation, in which dissenting, leftward approaches to government are viewed as the scattered, vestigial ramblings of the defeated Left's village idiots and merely tolerated with winning chuckles.

The reason I have no doubt of that is that the ideological left envisions a similar ideological victory someday; at the diseased core of political ideology is an almost religious faith that brooks no real dissent, since one never compromises with the divined and unarguable Truth.

Yet Rich errs, I think, in setting the ideological stage by denying that "America's current political radicals" are undevoted to balanced budgets. The fiscal insignificance of their cuts, say, to Planned Parenthood and Head Start (as Rich points out by way of examples) are but the opening and distant guns of a massive assault on all government born after 1932, as well as against, even, a few of its Progressive-era forefathers, such as the Sixteenth Amendment and worker-protection laws.

Rich found himself bullied into that introductory flaw, however, because he was itching to write: 

The [radicals'] real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks.

Therein lies the more thunderous error: the intentional conflation of cause and effect -- the dubious conclusion or at least the ham-handed insinuation that those tea-partying Congressional yokels are "crippling" organized labor, etc., not because they devoutly believe that organized labor is just one of Socialist Satan's diabolical instruments, but because, bluntly, they're being paid to do so.

Rich compounds his error by revealing some proof:

Koch Industries and its employees form the largest bloc of oil and gas industry donors to members of the new House Energy and Commerce Committee, topping even Exxon Mobil. And what do they get for that largess? As a down payment, the House budget bill not only reduces financing for the Environmental Protection Agency but also prohibits its regulation of greenhouse gases.

Now it could be that Koch Industries heaps mounds of largess on selected House members because those House members are already ideologically in tune with Koch Industries and the latter would prefer the formers' campaign war chests be pumped to the creaking lid.

Look at it this way. If Dennis Kucinich in the House and Bernie Sanders in the Senate receive $2500 checks from Barbra Streisand, it's not because Barbra hopes that in consequence they will vote how she prefers they vote, but because she likes the way they've already voted. And they'll continue voting the way they vote, whether Barbra sends them checks or not. They believe in what they're doing, and they're not doing it for the money.

(Maybe Gov. Scott Walker does. I don't know, but the man seems to possess the principles of a wounded polecat.)

My point here, though, is merely that Rich & Co. does its anti-right argument a vast deal of harm when suggesting the ideological warfare being waged by the right is waged chiefly or largely because it is bought and paid for. Such an argument strikes not nearly close enough to the sinister core of the right's truest motivation: It does what it does principally because it absolutely believes in the uncomprising Truth of its absolutist Ideology -- the bane of practical, workable politics since 1789.

Newt knows his (third) party

Should Newt Gingrich refrain from 2012 presidential combat, our body politic will be just a little bit sadder, a bit more despairing, for each morning its romper-room republic will be a less inviting place in which to rise, stretch, yawn and ask with eager eyes: So, what extraordinary imbecility has candidate Newt uttered lately?

Just days away from quite possibly announcing his intention to replace President Obama, he suddenly decides it would be far more judicious to simply remove President Obama. This, I gather, is one of those "Big Ideas" for which Newt is forever exalted by small-minded people.

While molesting the towering legal difference between "not defending" and "not enforcing" (one unconstitutional section of) the Defense of Marriage Act, Newt pondered the horror of Obama's despotic decision with Newsmax: Impeachment is "something you get into much later, but it is clearly a dereliction of duty and is a violation of his constitutional oath."

Clearly.

On the other hand, said Newt in a clear and subsequent statement, "[I]mpeachment is clearly not an appropriate action."

Confused? Don't be. For this is but another manifestation of semi-candidate Newt's political Tourette's, which, as president, would on a weekly if not daily basis send markets tumbling, populations scattering and armies mobilizing.

But, he made the news and that was the real point. Newt seems to have learned long ago that, when passably thoughtful and thus self-muzzled, he's as dull as a Senate confirmation hearing. Let Newt be Newt, however -- which means, let his silly, inner unseriousness gush forth -- and his magnificent absurdities are invariably construed by the base as the splendor of Big Ideas.    

Less dog-whistle than gong politics, Newt knows how to deliver; he knows his business; he knows that insulated Republican primary voters watch Newsmax interviews and devour the Drudge Report but never read his inexorable, saner clarifications in, say, the New York Times afterward. It's as though our politics no longer dwell in the serious substance of two differing parties, but rather two altogether different universes.

Hence the hell of it is, within the contemporary GOP's universe the only manner in which a candidate can soar is to stoop as low as possible -- pandering to the inanities of birthers, catering to hard-currency whackos and Fed-slayers, caressing the religiously paranoid, emboldening the jingoistically delusional, proposing the removal of valid officeholders.

It wasn't that long ago that this sort of "strategic" approach to high office was the pure, lunatic territory of purely third-party zaniness: the risible history of single-issue or singularly demented American political parties is legion. Many of these parties once envisioned or still envision themselves as someday supplanting one of the two major parties, whereas, rather curiously, the GOP seems hellbent only on supplanting one of the thirds.

A West-ward heave

This is priceless.

When far-right Florida Congressman Allen West held a town hall meeting this week, his constituents "whooped with glee" and "erupted with delight" when told of "cuts to a jet engine program" and "the curtailing of environmental regulators" and of West's vote "to return unused stimulus dollars to the nation’s Treasury."

Then out came the pie chart, showing the giant slice of the budget consumed by Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid, untouched by lawmakers. “We have got to make some hard choices,” Mr. West said. “We’ve got to tackle that right now.”

The room of roughly 400 people grew silent.

It seems that with the contemplation of personal sacrifice, you get crickets. And once West & Co. commence to actually gutting those wicked government programs so directly benefitting the base, those crickets will morph into vipers.

Mr. West et al, I do believe you've stepped in it.

Sobriety alert

As we junkies -- the George Pattons of the bloodied political battlefield; We love it, God help us, but we love it -- savor the prospect of a GOP-ruinous government shutdown, it is sobering to remember that 

White House officials are deeply concerned that even a short interruption in government services, while no economic knockout blow, might slow a recovery that has just recently gained momentum.

Which, by the way, would come on top of a gathering storm of rising oil prices.

Thus if you know someone who is wondering why President Obama seems not to be savoring the winning politics of a shutdown prospect as much as we junkies, there's your answer.

Bill's little problem

Somewhere, yesterday, Bill Kristol I'm sure sat with an incorrigible case of priapism, what with him no doubt having seen this headline in The Hill: "Obama not ruling out military action in Libya."

Congratulations, Bill. And good luck with that -- rather, both thats.

Liberalism as the new conservatism

Charles Krauthammer describes Democrats as the "avatars of reactionary liberalism, desperately trying to hang on to the gains of their glory years" -- by which, I can only assume, Krauthammer means when America's middle class thrived and before the New and Newer and Newest Rights launched their thundering assaults against it.

In a way, Krauthammer is perversely correct. Liberalism today is in a sense reactionary; that is, it harks back to a distant and promising if not perceptible Golden Age -- a time when workers organized against impersonal profiteering by the few, the elderly attained a decent standard of living and accessible health care, educational opportunities opened for the poor, civil and human rights were on the march, and average but upwardly mobile Americans not unreasonably anticipated an even more prosperous future for their young.

All in all, not a bad accomplishment. Yet liberalism has waned as huge swaths of Americans' preferred, for want of a better word, ideology. The reasons for that shift are many and complex and not the thrust of this brief post -- the thrust of which is, rather, an observation about Krauthammer's very unintended thrust.

Which is to say, one could intelligently argue that modern liberalism -- in its attempts to preserve the fading past, to conserve past progress, to cherish the once-honorable and once-honored, to advocate only gradual change and to continue embracing accepted change as the societal good -- is the new and de facto conservatism.

That other "conservatism" today is but the radically, regressively "progressive" party (as Krauthammer toys with the term), in that it's indeed herding us with ever-progressive force into an ultimately inescapable pit of middle-class desolation, socioeconomic immobility, cultural stagnation and the crassest of Huxleyan dystopias.

For the betterment of their electoral chances in this nominally conservative environment, I can even envision the day when liberal pols finally take it upon themselves to declare their political values for what they've so rapidly become: a species of old-school conservatism.

How about it, Charles? Willing to switch labels?

The infidel Daniels, a smartly plotting man

David Brooks could be right in estimating Mitch Daniels as the GOP's "strongest candidate for the presidency." On the other hand, for now, that's not saying much.

The party's current crop of presidential candidates includes a multiple personality, a barely rehabilitated neoconfederate, a habitually hypocritical womanizer who -- praise Jesus! -- God has forgiven, a once-qualified and passably competent governor who's degenerated into the vilest of demagoguery, and a Baptist preacher.

Now comes, maybe, the W. administration's massive-deficit sorcerer -- who at CPAC "spoke for those who believe the country’s runaway debt is the central moral challenge of our time" -- yet even he, as not unjustifiably assessed, is the "party's strongest candidate for the presidency." You don't say.

Which, in fact, Brooks doesn't, since he also broods that Daniels "is seriously thinking about not running." Why? "[B]ecause Daniels," ventures Brooks, "is a normal person who doesn’t have an insatiable desire for higher office."

Well, I can't know about that, since I can't get inside Daniels' motivational sensibilities. But it could be, it just could be, that Daniels' desire for higher office is as insatiable as John Thune's, but like Thune, he knows that in 2012 his Democratic opponent is looking unbeatable. Since leaving the Bush administration, Daniels has learned to add, all the way up to 270.

One never knows, of course. Daniels' coyness about future plans could be but typical pre-presidential-candidacy coyness. If so, its contours are mighty strange as a setup for the suddenness of next year, although his recent admonitions are perhaps a longer-term plea for party sanity.

To wit, Brooks notes that Daniels "rankled some in the [CPAC] audience" by declaring that "purity in martyrdom is for suicide bombers." With what seems an intellectual commonness to those on the outside but was likely a challenging insight to those on the inside, Daniels bluntly suggested the Republican Party "will need people who never tune in to Rush or Glenn or Laura or Sean."

Heresy. Stake-burning heresy. It recommends outreach to moderate voters, which further and quite logically implies a moderation of message. And to the modern GOP, that's like asking a Pentecostal pulpit-pounder to cool the temps in Hell.

As though really asking for it, Daniels also told the Weekly Standard, as Brooks reminds us, "that Republicans should declare a truce on social issues until the debt crisis is taken care of." Adds Brooks through magnificent understatement: "A few activists are still upset."

So who knows. Maybe Daniels will run and maybe he won't. Against the immense formidability of President Obama, the will or the won't makes little difference; either way, in 2013 Daniels will be outside the White House looking in. What does seem profoundly likely, though, is that Daniels recognizes his party's presidency-losing lunacy as his party is ideologically configured today, and he is softly attempting to turn it centerward for 2016 -- which is what I once thought Tim Pawlenty would attempt in 2012, before he went crazy. 

Psy-opting out

Call me appallingly jaded if you like, but upon learning that "Rolling Stone has learned ... the U.S. Army illegally ordered a team of soldiers specializing in 'psychological operations' to manipulate visiting American senators into providing more troops and funding for the war," I had to check the calendar.

Wait, this comes after Vietnam, does it not?

Yes, I know, what the Army is alleged to have done was illegal(!). So it's nothing to disregard or treat lightly. The story is newsworthy. But is it news?

By that I mean, is this a story whose content could not have been reasonably guessed at by anyone who's ever read the sorry, twisted history of our military involvement in South Vietnam?

Then, Army bullshit had a direct pipeline to Washington -- that is, when it wasn't being consumed "in-country" by congressmen and senators and visiting, high-ranking defense officials. If it hadn't been for the type of "psy-ops" described by Rolling Stone today, there would then have been no ground war extending past 1966 or '67, at the latest. 

The Army, the military, the assorted brass dissembled about virtually everything. You name it. Body counts, enemy strength, the enemy's weariness, the enemy's political program, indigenous dispositions, the brilliant expectations of coming U.S. campaigns, the Jeffersonian virtue of South Vietnamese pols and their troops ... on and on.

Listing what the U.S. Army lied about to American pols is a fool's errand; better to simply ask, What did it not lie about?

The Lt. Coloneling whistleblower on the Afghanistan operation told Rolling Stone that his mission, had he chosen to accept it, was: "How do we get these guys to give us more people? What do I have to plant inside their heads?"

Hell, again, nothing new. Just check the military manual: under South Vietnam, see grotesquely bloated funding and personnel requests; also see subsections on endless promises, submerged truths, brazen distortions, and propagandistic mind-games on its own civilian bosses.

Sorry to be so jaded. I know I should be outraged, or at least I'm told I should be. To me, though ... It's what the military does.

Now and ... then?

For a sense of the cumulative numbing-dumbing effect of official party propaganda, check out these words, which are both observational and additive, from Florida State Rep. Dennis Baxley:

There’s absolutely an undercurrent of rage in Florida.... I don’t think people are nearly as worried about government shutting down as they are about spending us into oblivion. The first time they heard it - that was a shock factor. Now it’s like, 'Great, why don’t they shut down the government for a couple of months?' 

"Great." 

I can think of many a description for vital services and desperately needed entitlement and transfer payments being abruptly terminated, but "great" isn't one of them. Nonetheless that's the "different emotional response" by many to a government shutdown now, says Baxley, than a mere few weeks ago: a paradoxical combination of desensitization and overstimulation, a kind of programmed mass hysteria, one also reminiscent of many a darker age.

Traditionalists, we might call them, see a steady march of progress on humanity's historical path. Postmodernists, on the other hand, say we're the same barbarians we always were -- "progress" is an illusion. 

This year, score one for the postmodernists.