P.M. Carpenter

Misty watercolored memories

Gail Collins whimsically notes that  

Right now concerned citizens are probably asking themselves: What will happen if the federal government shuts down? [and] ... Whom can I blame for this?

To which I can only reply with confident solemnity that most American citizens are not asking whom they can blame.

Otherwise, Ms. Collins astutely observes that

All hope for averting disaster lies with Speaker John Boehner, who used to be a strangely tanned blowhard but is now regarded as a beleaguered statesman.

Which is shorthand for the right's decaying transmogrification. To paraphrase political philosopher Lily Tomlin, No matter how cynical they become, it's never enough to keep up. 

In the Republican Party, today's blowhard is destined to be tomorrow's statesman in comparative relation to the night's new crop of bigger blowhards. By now, Ronald Reagan is a little bit pink, Dick Nixon is to the radical left, and Dwight Eisenhower is just plum Stalinistic.

A national mugging

GOP House to Democratic Senate and every last voter: Hey, buddy, got a deal for you. Rather than rob you of the 100 bucks you got on you, I'll extort only fifty now, but fifty again next week. I'm just that kind of bandit, considerate and compromising to the end.

On this elongated mugging, Harry Reid has demurred. Said the majority leader's spokesman of the House's stopgap pillaging of a mere $2 billion a week: "This isn’t a compromise, it’s a hardening of their original position.... It would impose the same spending levels in the short term as their initial proposal does in the long term, and it isn’t going to fool anyone."

Ay, there's the rub. For Republicans are even better at fooling folks than at wreaking fiscal destruction. It's an experience thing; they first had to hone their skills at mass deception in the 1960s and '70s before leveling responsible government during the 1980s and beyond. If your interests lie more in theology than politics, you might say it's an Original Sin thing.

But, whatever. Muggers are muggers and their sociopathic tendencies of instant gratification naturally incline them to thoughtlessness, which happens to be a not uncommon characteristic of the American electorate to boot. So the muggers figure they're on pretty safe ground.

They can again pillage, plunder and rape fiscal responsibility in the name of political nobility, and then later -- again -- dramatically tsk-tsk the regrettable shambles and rubble that is our fiscal condition. And the victims will cheer them.

Or this time, maybe not. That's the $61 billion question -- or, for the GOP, gamble.

One would like to think that Republicans' manic overreaching on the nation-dooming threat of collective bargaining would trigger the electorate's suspicion of their federal accounting claims as well. So far, no signs of that. But who knows. The centrist electorate, being uncentered, can turn on a politically well-spun dime -- which, however, and, unfortunately, isn't exactly the currency of Democrats.

Perhaps this well help: "[A] nonpartisan study by Goldman Sachs ... said the GOP spending plan for $61 billion in spending cuts could reduce Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth by 1.5 to 2 percentage points in the second and third quarters of the year."

Orrrr, perhaps it won't. Logic and rationality are poor combatants in a street fight, especially against the Bloods, who specialize in piercing, stiletto volume and jackhammering repetition.

"I’m not sure how Senator Reid rejected spending cuts that he hasn’t seen yet," said some delightfully distorting Baghdad Bob of Eric Cantor's propaganda department, "but it certainly reinforces the notion that he is willing to shut down the government rather than cut one penny in spending."

Harry, you brute.

I've a confession, though. As dreary as political things are, for us junkies they don't get much better than this.

My reformational plea is soundly Augustinian: Permit me, Big Guy, to do a chastely bit better -- but not yet.

A Napoleonic strategy

I just watched President Obama condemn in the strongest possible terms the senseless, useless violence being conducted by the Qaddafi regime, after which Chris Matthews, David Corn and Howard Fineman promptly condemned Obama's "timidity."

I had to laugh, because in this crisis, as in the Egypt affair, Obama only seems positively Napoleonic: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

Left-right delusions

Said a "GOP leadership aide" to Politico about the prospect of a government shutdown: "It’s obvious that we have the more reasonable position."

And you know what? He believes that. I've no doubt whatsoever that he honestly believes that, just as I'm sure that some on the left believe their own delusions -- e.g., that Wisconsin voters could not possibly have known what wicked schemes candidate Scott Walker was up to, hence those voters were "tricked" and deceived -- are not delusions at all, but honest assessments of today's political landscape.

Here's the thing. Republicans' singular objective since 1933 has been to return this nation to 1932. You can pretty much add a period to that, and leave it there, since there's little else of any altering import to add. Sure, there have been times of two-party peaceful coexistence or even detente. But fundamentally, and throughout, the Republican goal has been the destruction of anything New Dealish, and that includes, to borrow the GOP aide's presumption of obviousness, the collective bargaining rights of labor unions, whether public or private.

How, especially these days, any Wisconsin voter could have missed this primal reality of reactionary Republican intent is, as I wrote yesterday, simply beyond me. How often and how loudly must Republican pols scream it? -- not in their campaigns, for heaven's sake, which they're quite unlikely to do, but in their elected and official acts?

Yet the party line, according to some on the true-believing left (whom I heard repeatedly on MSNBC last night), should nonetheless be that Wisconsin voters were indeed duped. Candidate Walker never expressed that as governor he'd do what he's doing. So, according to the true believers, true democracy has been denied.

A pleasant fallacy, perhaps, but good grief, how utterly assbackward. True democracy implies informed voters -- the opposite of which, in Wisconsin, there happened to be a plurality.

They weren't tricked or deceived; they just didn't know what they voting for -- when they should have. 

Depends on what the definition of "past" is

It took a U. of Penn student to ask Newt Gingrich what the vocational press avoids: 

You adamantly oppose gay rights ... but you've also been married three times and admitted to having an affair with your current wife while you were still married to your second. As a successful politician who's considering running for president, who would set the bar for moral conduct and be the voice of the American people, how do you reconcile this hypocritical interpretation of the religious values that you so vigorously defend?

Answered Gingrich: 

If the primary concern of the American people is my past, my candidacy would be irrelevant. If the primary concern of the American people is the future ... that's a debate I'll be happy to have with your candidate or any other candidate if I decide to run.

The student, poor thing, was confused. A Democratic candidate's past is of critical importance, worthy of endless examination and, if necessary, fictional creation. A Republican candidate's past is merely the past. 

Are we as a nation still not straight on that?

The bafflement of cause and effect

The far right's counterfeit antiterrorism argument -- "They hate us for our freedoms" -- endures; now transferring to domestic liberalism, which, 60 years ago, was precisely how Joe McCathy's anticommunism conducted its assault on the sinisterly pin-striped, phony Brit-accented 'Liberal Establishment.'

From Tea Party Express, via email, on "The Wisconsin Labor Mobs":

The efforts by Barack Obama's "Organizing for America" ... and labor unions continue to expand....

Friends, they are trying to stop us because of how successful we in the tea party movement have been.

The propagandistic chestnuts just never rot, do they.

Another thought-free Kristol piece

From Bill Kristol this morning, a little something shockingly bad. Even from Bill Kristol.

From its stilted writing to its neocon sentimentality to its nakedly subjective critique of the Obama administration disguised as intellectual analysis to its clumsy attempt to ratify military interventionism as a uniformly noble principle -- it is, all of it, just awful.

I'm almost sorry to do this to you, but I quote: "It is of course possible, and probably likely, that the Arab Spring of 2011 will fail.... There would still be a case, for reasons of honor and duty, for the United States to try to help, to do the right thing, to stand with the opponents of tyranny, even if one thought them likely, even nearly certain, to fail."

So it is "possible" and "probably likely," "even nearly certain," that currently successful revolutions will "fail" -- "But we don't know they'll fail," writes the epistemologically crackerjack Kristol. (Is he still writing Rumsfeld's material?) He simultaneously conflates doing "the right thing" with doing Bill Kristol's thing, thus not only does the premise support the conclusion, the conclusion supports the premise -- hell, the conclusion is the premise.

And what are the associated, logical factors? Well, they've vanished; I should say, rather, they were never there. No doubt while his headphones blasted Wagner, Bill had one of his infamous Nietzschean inspirations. It would be, you see, "terrible" if the United States were to merely stand by, twiddling its thoughtful thumbs, when instead it could take "aggressive efforts, covert and overt, direct and indirect"; and that "means considering the use of force when force is used to kill innocent civilians" and it "means a full-scale engagement of the U.S. government, an across-the-board effort with allies and international organizations, a real focus on the challenge these times present."
 
A full-scale engagement. Guns blazing. Bombs dropping. The Great Satan having his Western way in the Middle East just as its indigenous, quasi-democratic revolutions are succeeding.

Having some doubts? Wondering, are you, about such a terrifyingly, reflexively militaristic approach? Bill explains ...

... and his explanation literally sent chills up my spine, as it would anyone's, whose eyes also had read the philosophical foundations of 1920s and '30s fascist movements:

[I]t would be terrible for the United States to have stood by, encumbered by uncertainty, weakened by sophistication, paralyzed by self-doubt, as we did little more than watch the uprisings across the Middle East and fret as a possibly historic moment slips away.

Action. Eradication of thought. Certainty. Emotions. Doubtless movement. Crushing force. Brutal determination. Historic moments. Action for action's sake. 

Not only because that moment could vindicate American principles and mean a gain for American interests but because we claim those American principles to be universal principles....

We claim, therefore they are. Simple as that. And to validate our principled argument, we'll bomb the bejesus out of any foreign land that resists these universally American principles.

Here, one senses less the ideology of Kristol's father's neoconservatism than his father's old Trotskyite days. Even though what was once called the Third World was capitalistically unprepared for the staged introduction of comprehensive socialism, why not blunder ahead and force the ill-timed movement anyway?

But back to Junior, who also observes within the span of two uninterrupted paragraphs: "What exactly to do in each case is complicated; it depends on difficult judgments of facts on the ground," although (next paragraph) "at such moments we can't depend on analysts and commentators."

Oh well. He lost me at the near certainty of failure among the apparent successes.

But, naturally, most of Bill's gibberish was but a predetermined construction so as to write: "This is a time when one looks, necessarily, to the president. So far, one looks in vain."

Like I said: just awful. It's worthy of the intellectually pornographic likes of the Weekly Standard, but somehow Bill keeps popping up in what's now called the mainstream press, once called the respectable press.

Any wonder why the descriptive shift?

A few minutes with Rummy

Donald Rumsfeld just appeared live on "Andrea Mitchell Reports," presumably only to reconfirm for us how fortunate we are that W.'s vast array of criminal misfits is no longer in high office. Times may be bad, jobs scarce, the economy not quite up to par and tea-partying Jasons are lurking and slashing everywhere, but at least we can thank God that Rummy & Co. is gone.

Intelligence? He's barely heard of the word and is thoroughly unfamiliar with its wartime implications. I kid you not. Intelligence, you see, wasn't his department. That was someone else's job. Not Rummy's. In fact, he's pretty sure Colin Powell knew more about the intelligence racket than anyone else in that crazy, mixed-up world of a rootin'-tootin' administration, so if you've questions about intelligence, Andrea, go ask Colin.

Tyler Drumheller? -- the CIA's top man in European covert operations who warned the administration about "Curveball"'s ... uh ... questionable veracity and with whom even I'm familiar? I quote Rummy, from the interview: "Never heard of him."

You get the point. Nothing, nothing will ever dynamite Rummy and his fellow war criminals from their unshakable, Nuremberg defense of absolute ignorance. It's the only defense they've got.

A perilous precedent

In the longer run I suspect Democratic pols across the country will rue the creative day their local embodiments took flight from Wisconsin.

David Brooks sets the stage (or two-ring circus):

Whatever you might say about Walker, he and the Republican majorities in Wisconsin were elected, and they are doing exactly what they told voters they would do. It’s the Democratic minority that is thwarting the majority will by fleeing to Illinois. It’s the left that has suddenly embraced extralegal obstructionism.

Uncomfortable truths, but truths nevertheless, even if, to some, Brooks perhaps overreaches in his use of "exactly." To me, he does not.

Any plausibly aware Wisconsin voter should not have required candidate Scott Walker's airing of 60-second ads bluntly advocating the busting of public-sector unions to appreciate the gross reactionaryism that was on the way with Walker's election. Virtually all of late 2010 was about one exceptionally nasty, very bad moon rising from Republican pols everywhere. They made no secret of their hostility to all manner of modernity, to differing strains of legitimate pluralism, to the fundamental concept of coming and reasoning together.

To their tea-partying bands of GOP agitation, the nation's November elections were akin to Enabling Acts -- and their elected leaders were determined to not disappoint.

True to their word, they haven't. And how any Wisconsite could have missed the GOP's intentions is beyond me. Remember, this turn to reactionaryism was hardly sudden: choose your own number of decades if you like, but multiple they have inaurguably been in which the Republican Party has steadily decayed into the ideological rigor mortis of right-wing imbecility. How any moderate voter could have believed that 2011 would be the GOP's year of statesmanlike maturity is ... well, I already said it.

We should also remember that Wisconsite voters in all their La Follettian splendor chose to terminate the brilliant senatorial career of Russ Feingold in preference for a corporate shill. They weren't tricked, they weren't bamboozled; no amount of even the cleverest of right-wing propaganda could have genuinely swindled Wisconsin's voters into believing their ultimate decision was anything but towering, self-destructive stupidity.

Nonetheless that's the democratic process. The barbarians sometimes win. In Wisconsin, they did.

Thus Brooks is uneasily but realistically correct in concluding that "It’s the Democratic minority that is thwarting the majority will by fleeing to Illinois. It’s the left that has suddenly embraced extralegal obstructionism." Their flight is inspirational -- no question about that -- and in its own way, courageous. But make no mistake: there was in November a pro-Walker voting majority and a pro-GOP state senate majority, so the flight is indeed "extralegal obstructionism" -- one perhaps fine for now, but what of the future? 

What happens, say, if Democrats capture the statehouse by a slim majority in the next election? What's to prevent minority Republicans, upon any legislative provocation, from simply evacuating the newly reconstituted progressive state and fleeing to their truer ideological homeland of, say, Iran or Zimbabwe? And in protest of such Republican poltroonery what counterargument could the homeboy Dems honorably stage? 

There won't, of course, be one. For Wisconsin's elected Dems -- in league with one-time Lexington-Concord Texan Dems -- will have already presented themselves as the founding fathers of antidemocratic, extralegal obstructionism -- as an example for all to follow; all those, that is, who won't particularly give a damn how the last democratic majority voted.

In short, Wisconsin's Democrats could be setting the national stage for a truly anarchic headache, one in which voting majorities and majority wills matter not in the least to whichever minority party. It pains indeed to argue that, but I can't see the argument's flaw.

A dreadful fool

I just made the egregious mistake of watching a few minutes of the GOP's best friend, Cenk Uygur, on MSNBC. What a dreadful fool.

He was lambasting President Obama -- again -- this time for not involving himself and fighting enough in the Wisconsin budget-union-political battle. His guest, Ed Rendell, calmly explained to the adolescent host that the president probably wouldn't want to entangle himself in 40+ state-budget conflagrations, and besides, the Wisconsin battle is about the workers, not the president.

Uygur didn't want to hear that, naturally. Because to Uygur, the Wisconsin battle isn't really about the workers, or even the president. It is, rather, about Mr. Uygur: how loud Cenk Uygur can be, how outraged Cenk Uygur can be, how bloody self-righteous Cenk Uygur can be.

The workers are a showpiece, a stage prop, a mere trifling for Uygur's extended melodrama. And the president? In Obama, Uygur is disappointed not because he's presidentially restraining himself in this fight, but because Obama isn't delivering a screaming, podium-pounding, four-year food fight that Uygur could relish.

What a dreadful fool ... excepting that Mr. Uygur was sly enough to somehow con MSNBC out of an hour of network time and, I assume, some pretty good pay.

Say what?

On CBS' "Face the Nation," Hayekian wunderkind Paul Ryan said that President Obama's federal spending "is the same economic methodology that was used to say that if we passed the stimulus bill, it would keep unemployment from hitting 8 percent. High deficits [and] uncontrolled debt mean job creation goes away today."

No doubt the "8 percent" forecast was, shall we say, ill advised. Accordingly, forecaster Christina Romer is teaching again, not governing.

But we should also remember that at the time of stimulus negotiations most economists insisted that to get the job done a proper bill would come in at around $1.2 trillion, not $800 billion, and most of it in direct spending. This, House and Senate Republicans would not allow.

Moreover, in a debate with any competent Keynesian, Rep. Ryan would find himself lathered in righteous ridicule if he tried defending his utterly unempirical comment that "High deficits [and] uncontrolled debt mean job creation goes away today."

There is simply no economic basis for that assertion. None. It springs from either profound ignorance or intentional deceit.

I wish I could say that since it comes from a House Republican we therefore have a clue which, but unfortunately the GOP's expressed opinions seem about an even mixture of both. 

You think?

I adore understatements. Today's is a twofer: "I don't think [Huckabee] felt that Romney had a real core of convictions," GOP strategist Ed Rollins told Politico.

'A bitter irony'

Politico:

Hostility to public sector workers, including teachers, is at an all-time high amid a recession and a new national mania for curbing the tide of fiscal red ink.

E.J. Dionne: 

Consider all of the problems taking a back seat to the deficit in Washington and the media. You haven't heard much lately on how Wall Street shenanigans tanked the economy in the first place....

Paul Krugman:

The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

Observes Dionne further, "Thanks to the Tea Party, we are now told that all our problems will be solved by cutting government programs" -- with a little union-busting to boot.

Concludes Krugman, "There’s a bitter irony here."

Personally I experience more the bitterness than savor the irony.

In today's earlier post I acknowledged Lindsey Graham's partly legitimate debating point about the consequences of elections: Wisconsites democratically installed a 19th-century union-buster with a disgraceful penchant for fabricated crises and disingenuous arguments. Now they "get it." Yet any moderately informed electorate would have recognized the serpent before giving it the chance to strike. They just couldn't be bothered with educating themselves.

Thus we stumble from crisis to crisis or fabricated crisis to fabricated crisis, 9/10s of which are the product not of democracy denied -- as we're witnessing in the Middle East -- but of democracy unbounded.

The concept of the "virtuous people" is as preposterous as that of the "benign dictator."

Funny thing

Lindsey Graham had a point. On "Meet the Press" yesterday, he held up "this ...

campaign flier I have ... from the last election cycle where Wisconsin unions said, 'If you elect this guy, Scott Walker, he's going to reform or limit collective bargaining.' He was open about what he was going to do about contributions to pensions and retirement, and he told the people of Wisconsin, 'I'm going to change collective bargaining because it impedes progress when it comes to education. It's too hard to fire anybody, it is too complicated. And I'm going to change that system.' So, in a democracy, when you run on something, you do have an obligation to fulfill your promise. He didn't take anybody by surprise. He's doing exactly what he said. There was a referendum on this issue, and the unions lost.

As I understand the preelection history behind Wisconsin's labor-management troubles, candidate Walker indeed campaigned as a kind of Gov. Calvin Coolidge eager to bust the power of public unions. He wasn't shy about it; he strutted around like a Heritage Foundation sandwich board and bellowed the perils of worker-organization to any gubernatorial dictatorship, either Silent Cal- or Huey Long-style, take your pick.

A plurality of Wisconsin's boobeoisie promptly voted for him. Democracy in action. End of story. So you, dear protesters, should quit your whining.

Graham had a point. But he would have scored a point had he and his fellow union-busting Republicans similarly proclaimed an untamperable, Democratic mandate following the 2008 elections.

To be sure, Graham has uncomfortable differences with tea partiers, and some have been quite public; still, I never in 2009 heard the South Carolina senator instructing, say, feral town hallers across the country to sit down and shut up and permit healthcare reform to proceed, because Barack Obama campaigned on such reform, and now he has an impeccable mandate to carry it out. 

Funny thing. In the GOP's universe, there are Republican mandates and then there are swinish, Democratic insensitivities to the people's will -- no matter which side wins the election. Funny thing.

The GOP's 'Crisis' Funhouse

OK, let's think for a moment. Why is this NY Times statement a true and solemn characterization of present reality, although in a rational world, it would be laughed at?

"Budget deficits and the nation’s growing debt load have emerged in the last few weeks as the consuming issues in Washington...."

Is the jobs crisis over? Has wildly high unemployment been tamed?

That's the issue Republicans ran on a mere three months ago, that's the issue they promised to tackle with singular intensity forthwith, and yet that's the issue least mentioned by Republicans in the last few weeks.

When they're not talking about creating jobs they are talking about ... abortion. Or better yet, when not talking about creating jobs they are talking about re-recreating the image of healthcare's reform of private insurance markets as an even more sinister version of Stalinistic Five Year Plans or Maoist Great Leaps Forward.

The abovequoted statement is true, of course, because Republicans haven't even the patina of an outline of the foggiest notion of the vaguest idea as to how create jobs without creating demand. Because it can't be done. It's been known for nearly 100 years that the government should and must spend when the private sector cannot, assuming one wishes a speedier recovery. Sacred supply-sided tax cuts can provide help, but only fractionally that of direct government spending. That's not liberal economics or leftist economics of any sort of any ideological economics. It's just known, empirically proven, workable economics, which they reject.

Hence, the jobs crisis they understandably couldn't resolve when in the minority they can in no way resolve when in the partial, governing majority.

Hence II, time to change the subject. High unemployment was yesterday's crisis. Today's crisis -- notwithstanding yesterday's persistence -- is budget deficits.

This phantasmagoria of constantly shifting and perpetually morphing crises is the Modern Republican Way. It essentially hatched in the 1930s, when FDR's modest interventions in sainted capitalism either portended or sealed our doom; a doom which then suddenly loomed absolute when it became rather obvious that the New Deal president -- internationalist warmonger that he was -- also intended, in cahoots with the snooty Brits, to crush world fascism.

And so we turn the page -- on to the Dem-caused crisis of the late 1940s and 1950s: communists in the State Department, communists in our schools, communists directing our films, communists everywhere. Ahem. Seems they weren't, actually.

But not to worry, because from there, following a relatively brief pause to regather their thoughts and reassemble the troops, Republicans moved the national conservation to the hysterical crisis of our Liberal culture -- a crisis that included, egads, human freedom erupting for all manner of humans different from bourgeois whites and straight folks and Christian snakehandlers.

Yet even that nation-ending crisis couldn't match the demagogic lollapalooza of global terrorists -- not much more than swarthy communists, really, only now with scimitars, not sickles.

And into that mix, early on, was -- remember? -- our crisis of government surpluses. The federal government, in 2001, and later again, was taking in just too damn much money and The People, especially The Beautiful People, deserved some of it back.

Hence III, we've a "budget crisis" -- one that even a prime originator of which, Gov. Mitch Daniels, as W.'s OMB director, can now proclaim as an "enemy lethal to liberty and even more implacable than those America has defeated before."

Yes, worse than supermanlike world communists, worse than supermanlike global terrorists, worse, even -- dare I say it? -- yes, yes, worse even than the Civilian Conservation Corps.

I could go on, but doing so would only confect the impression that I don't take deficits seriously, which I do.

Our deficits are serious, but manageable, and decidedly not of crisis proportions. In time, once the recovery is complete, some combination of prudent spending reductions and modest tax increases (plus higher federal tax revenues from higher employment) can and will slay the stealthy dragon of deficits, which breathes fire not yet, despite what the massive deficit-creating Mitch Daniels tells you.

And then? Republicans will imprudently slash taxes again, and so on, and so it goes.

And somewhere between then and now, they'll invent a few other national crises, just to keep our hysteria fresh. It's all they've got.