P.M. Carpenter

"And now here's Walter Cronkite, with the CBS Evening Entertainment"

Nate Silver provides an extensive, objective breakdown of attention received by GOP presidential candidates in the MSM versus blogs:

In traditional media outlets like The New York Times, these five candidates are receiving the most coverage: Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty.

[T]he top five in the blogosphere has Ms. Palin and Mr. Gingrich accompanied by three somewhat more controversial candidates: Donald Trump, Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann.

Silver then gently offers a dubious conclusion:

Democratic-leaning blogs may in essence be rooting for a car wreck on the Republican side, paying more attention to the candidates who would be the most disruptive to Republican hopes of reclaiming the White House.

At the same time, some candidates who are receiving a fair amount of mainstream media attention ... have yet to gain significant momentum in the blogosphere.

It's incontrovertible that Democratic blogs would be "rooting for a car wreck on the Republican side." Yet that is not, I think, why they're "paying more attention to the candidates who would be the most disruptive to Republican hopes." Rather, blogs pay more attention to the freaks because readers, quite simply, prefer freakshows to seminars. Put "Palin" or "Gingrich" in a linkable headline and it'll get hits -- guaranteed -- while Romney and Pawlenty, two candidates with more realistic chances at the nomination, are online yawners.

I'm mostly untroubled by the blogosphere's obsession with the GOP's baboons and blatherskites to the undue exclusion of others of slightly less baboonness (hell I must be; I trade in it myself). Bloggers never promised to uphold the highest aspirations and virtuous integrity of the First Amendment. What does trouble, however, is cable and network news' ratings-obsessed overdedication to those who will never advance. If one watches, for instance, MSNBC for an hour or so, one would think Michele Bachmann is the frontrunner, and Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin a close second. Meanwhile, he who shall remain nameless is obscuredly climbing the rungs of nomination, hence it is he, of course, who is the real story.

But "he" isn't yet a moneymaker for the networks, while the blithering grotesqueries are. And that is an abdication of their journalistic duty.

I understand network/cable's commercial and shareholder demands. But those are no excuse for continuing to call themselves "news operations," as opposed to entertainment outlets.

No longer overlooked?

The NY Times report on CIA operatives on Libyan ground tends to reinforce my earlier speculation, of March 20, that President Obama's more manifest efforts have concealed a cunning strategy. 

From the Times: "[S]mall groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks [my emphasis] as part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help bleed Colonel Qaddafi’s military....

"In addition, the American spies are meeting with rebels to try to fill in gaps in understanding who their leaders are and the allegiances of the groups...."

I repost "A huge hidden motive, overlooked," from Sunday, March 20, and have italicized the specially relevant passages for your convenience:

Richard Haass, who is using his stint as president of the Council on Foreign Relations as the first in his 12-step recovery program of Bushies Anonymous, made a powerful case on "Meet the Press" this morning against American intervention in Libya. To distill his varied concerns, I'd say Haass's overall worry is that of the United States missing the clicheish "big picture"; that Libya is of little strategic interest, that its oil reserves as a percentage of the world's are minor, that this is a civil war whose future we can't fathom, and so on -- all billowing up to his central point: By concentrating on Libya, we're missing not only the big picture, but the bigger picture. 

David Gregory, who is using his stint as host of "MTP" as the first in his 12-step recovery program of Lazy Journalists Anonymous (Gregory's indignation at Scott McClellan's What Happened, which charged White House journalists of the W. era with near criminal negligence, was truly a sight to behold), visibly thrilled at Haass' pushback on the Obama administration. (My apologies for this hateful paragraph. But I've reserved in my heart a special place of resentment toward David Gregory ever since I witnessed his phony outrage at McClellan's intensely obvious accusation -- Why, we were constantly querying the Bush administration, how dare McClellan question our professionalism, responded a truth-hurt Gregory.)

At any rate, Haass' case was so powerful, it retriggered in my mind the countervailingly powerful observation of: President Obama knows all that, he weighed those factors, and he cannot have possibly mistaken a miniature for a broad canvass; so why the shift, what bigger big picture, which Haass is in fact missing, could he have in mind?

My speculation is this: Obama's intervention has little to do with Libya, but a lot to do with American counterpropaganda efforts against al Qaeda. Our intervention on the side of Libyan insurrectionist forces, which may very well contain Qaeda associates, could eviscerate the latter's anti-American street cred.

Reported the Wall Street Journal on Friday: "Groups such as al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb are active in Algeria and other countries in the region and have sought to bolster the opposition to Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi." Indeed, how embarrassing for al Qaeda as it finds itself fighting in cahoots with rebels that a U.S.-U.N. coalition is attempting to rescue from otherwise certain slaughter? The Western propaganda value of such odd bedfellows is, as they say, priceless.

White House counter-terrorism official John Brennan "told reporters Friday that the U.S. is trying to make sure that 'the terrorist elements' active in the region don’t 'take advantage of the situation,' " adding that "the U.S. recognizes that some leaders of the Libyan rebellion are simply trying to throw off 'the yoke' of dictatorship, and the Obama administration wants to work with those people."

I'll bet. And "those people" will not only be more receptive to Western influence in the wake of a successful revolution, their would-be Qaeda comrades will have American-provided egg all over their red faces.

Obama is always a step -- or miles -- ahead of his critics. Neoconservatives would have somehow antagonized the rebellious forces, and thereby would have pleased any associated terrorist forces. Instead, Obama has essentially embraced the lot of them.  

After Libya, marketing the United States as the Great Satan of the Middle East will be al Qaeda's most unbelievable challenge.

Nothing simpler

Said Republican strategist John Feehery of GOP presidential candidates' guaranteed, stentorian negativity about any budget compromise reached:

They’ll all have to attack it. No matter what John Boehner does, he’ll be criticized by these folks because they’ve got to run against the political establishment, no matter what.

That's true, although I'd emend that part about "run[ning] against the political establishment" to "running against political reality"; and of course they do so because Republican primary voters dwell in an eerie nuthatch of unreality that may make my skin crawl but their presidential candidates smile, bow, and coddle and cater like Dr. Watson ready with the needle.

Anyway, Mr. Feehery was doing just fine in his political strategerizing, I thought, until he went and added this: "It all makes it very complicated."

He can't be serious. But, if he is, then Feehery knows not what "complicated" looks like. Unified string theory is complicated. Getting a handle on John Boehner's emotional instability is complicated. Good cheesecake is complicated. But standing before a herd of delusional wingnuts and denouncing the sanity of these Obama-influenced times is not complicated -- not for the Newtster, the Mittster, the Donald, the T-Pawer ...

Indeed, nothing could be simpler.

Kids' stuff

So a budget deal is back on -- "negotiations ... appeared to make headway" yesterday, reports the NY Times -- whose endgame entails a number that "would fall well short of the $61 billion House Republicans have endorsed" and, according to Politico, sedates the ideological mania of a House Republican caucus now "described as subdued."

The Times, in its reporting, is fiercely lucid about Democratic traction regained: "Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ... said negotiators had effectively settled on $33 billion in reductions from current spending, a substantial difference from the $61 billion endorsed by the House in February."

Now, any "substantial difference" achieved -- if achieved it is -- over opponents' demands is a victory for the achiever, is it not?

After all, an aggressively reactionary Republican majority swept into the House only three months ago, eager not to create but destroy. And like a metronome on speed, that majority has been escalating its destructive demands like clockwork, since January, its momentum seemingly inexorable, its determination unstoppable.

So, again, if its plenary demands are checked, its momentum punctured and its determination barricaded for now, this, for its opponents, would be a good thing, would it not? The public relations value alone would be cork-popping: Hey, look at us, we outflanked their extremist pillaging and averted a shutdown of vital government services that you depend on; you wanted moderation -- we delivered just that, and they didn't.

This of course is what the progressive victors would chant, arm in arm with their progressive allies and cheerleaders in the media. No?

No.

Instead, all along, we've been smothered by progressives' dark messages of ubiquitous doom, with distinct emphasis on the rather ancient fact that roughly $30 billion in spending impalements was where the wicked Count Paul Ryan began his intended mass slaughter. Adept propagandists know that message-repetition is the indispensable foundation for any message-success, and sure enough, there they are, progressives, pounding the airwaves and print and blogosphere with ceaseless reminders that Budget Chairman Vlad I will, no matter what transpires next, have his embryonic and evil way. For the reactionaries it's message-mission accomplished, courtesy the left.

Is it important to note -- to stress, to hammer, to accentuate with Chesire-like grins -- that the GOP's once-insurmountable fiscal apotheosis has been sliced in half and essentially gutted? Is it perhaps noteworthy that the Democratic Senate dismissed the egregious House-passed bill merely as ... well, a bad joke? Is there cause to rally the progressive base by simply declaring a substantial victory?

Sure, but if a budget deal materializes along the abovementioned lines, you're not likely to hear those pronouncements -- not from the victors. Why? Because in truth "the victors" enjoy wallowing in perpetual doom; it rewards their paranoid sense of unjust persecution and validates the impossible struggle -- which only they are plucky enough to nonetheless undertake -- of their utopian superiority.

In short, it's kids' stuff.

Inherit the windbags

After lamenting that "pundits are trying to will a 'sane' GOP field into existence," Slate's David Weigel goes on to ask, "To what extent is this a 'crazier' field than the GOP's had before...?"

His answer:

There's a lot of precedent for Iowa or New Hampshire voters elevating someone that isn't electable -- Alan Keyes in Iowa in 2000, Pat Buchanan in New Hampshire in 1996, Pat Robertson in Iowa in 1988. But there hasn't been a year quite like 2010, when the Republican base had multiple choices between George Will-approved candidates and hard-liners, and chose the hard-liners.

The unnoted exception, of course, was 1964, which was the disastrous germination of all the craziness that flowers before us today.

Incomprehensible

One can understand Chuck Schumer being caught unawares as he was game-theorying, to Senate colleagues, the opposition's "extreme"-ness as a delicious, shutdown talking point. He didn't know. But this, from a presumably aware Howard Dean, is unpardonable:

"If I was head of DNC, I would be quietly rooting for it," said Dean, speaking on a National Journal Insider’s Conference panel Tuesday morning. "I know who’s going to get blamed – we’ve been down this road before.

"From a partisan point of view, I think it would be the best thing in the world to have a shutdown," said Dean. He added that as a statesman, he is not rooting for a shutdown because of its harmful effect on the country.

He added? A "statesman" doesn't add that the nation's welfare is, oh, by the way, of paramount importance, seeing how the latter remark's common sense gets washed out by the torrent of the opposition's glee over the former's stupidity.

I started to write something to the effect of Dean's gaffe being "unbelievable," but these are, after all, professional Democrats we're talking about -- an incomprehensible assembly of strategy-bleeding bumblers who can screw up even the most mouth-watering, the most drool-worthy of political opportunities.

An abysmal unseriousness

Roll Call reports:

Last week, during an interview with conservative talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, likely presidential candidate and former Speaker Newt Gingrich ... recommend[ed] that Congressional Republicans insist that Obama agree to repeal the health care reform law in exchange for GOP support to raise the debt ceiling.

Against which, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl observed:

I always appreciate an idea from Newt, and the others. But sometimes they may be out on the hustings and not be aware of internal negotiations or procedures or time constraints or something like that.

Something like ... a seriousness of purpose? Or a serious purposefulness?

The point of Roll Call's piece was that GOP "hopefuls" -- a euphemism for predestined "losers" -- are stumping the country self-centeredly, paying little to no attention to their party's legislative realities and in general making a mockery of presidential campaigning.

These are also the folks who relish promoting our nation's founding ways, as well as what they chronologically mistake for the nation's founding ways. And in one unmistakable sense, they are, yea, verily, imitating them. The presidential campaigns of 1796 and 1800, for example, or those of 1824 and 1828 were, among other characterizations, political tutorials in the most preposterous of electoral degradation.

Yet fast-forward to, say, 1860, or 1896, or 1912, 1932, 1948, 1960, 1980 or 2008, and one encounters presidential campaigns of the most profound seriousness -- even if occasionally one-sided, and even if voters didn't everywhere appreciate them -- about this country's very soul, and its direction, its purpose.

Which is the very subject the "hopefuls" contend they wish to reintroduce. Perhaps, however, they're retrogressing a bit too far. Rather, that is, than imitating the often mindless and invariably vicious campaigns of 1796 et al, they should ponder their successors -- the ones in which real and serious debates took hold. If they did so, they just might find that by 2016 or 2020, GOP "hopeful" isn't by definition a mere euphemism.

A cynical take on cynicism

Is the mounting speculation over an unavoidable government shutdown merely a mounting indication of an imminent deal?

When so much dark harmony reigns among the Beltway's pundits and pols, we should probably resort to the kind of perverse cynicism that assumes brighter days ahead. I don't trust unanimity in Washington, and it's a prodigious unanimity we're enduring: Doom, there's nothing but doom ahead, folks, and all the result of that other guy.

Generally, for each guy there's at least some forensic evidence of the "other guy" argument. But not this time. The budget dispute, to frame it modestly, is as one-sided as disputes come, which makes it more of a tantrum than a dispute. And the sheer irrationality of the tantrum is so unimpeachably evident -- the fitful rejection of an exacting, split-the-difference compromise on spending cuts, coupled with a widespread government shutdown over the fiscal insignificancies of National Public Radio or Planned Parenthood -- that even the enablers are now marooning the instigators.

Initially, there was a corresponding dispute over which partisan side would more greatly suffer from a shutdown, yet that dispute, too, seems to have gone the way of the polemical platypus -- it's now less a primal dispute than a towering consensus that Republicans, alone, are on the exceptionally bad public-relations hook.

From the NY Times' editorial this morning -- "Speaker John Boehner knows the public is likely to blame Republicans for the pain of a shutdown" -- to Politico's straight-up coverage -- "Republicans are nervous about appearing intransigent under a barrage of Democratic attacks contending the GOP’s tea party wing is making 'extreme' demands" -- there's something of a concerted given out there that Republicans' customary unity is fragmenting beyond all expectations.

When, for instance, a Republican senator (a moderate, to be sure, but still, a Republican) can be found to venture that "we all would suffer" from a shutdown, one's universal spin-translator need not work overtime to spit out: "We, and we alone, are screwed."

Boehner "gets it," I'm sure the shrewd Mitch McConnell gets it, and even the hideously duplicitous Eric Cantor, I suspect, gets it. They all get it, deep down, where future House and Senate seats are politically calculated -- and to this cynical crowd, the politics of "it" are all that matter.

Indeed, their cynicism rivals even mine, which, the more it observes the former's, anticipates a "surprise" budget deal.

The Art of the Heel?

Ezra Klein reported on "The Last Word" that Eric Cantor is laboring (possibly) as a saboteur of John Boehner's budget negotiating position with Democrats. If Klein's reporting is correct, then Cantor is the actual nitwit he works so diligently at merely sounding like.

For Cantor to essentially convert from majority leader to factional rebel in the service of a tea-party-endorsed government shutdown would be tantamount to a self-declaration of an open Democratic season on House and even Senate Republicans. The House GOP majority would be as good as gone, and Cantor's dreams of a Speakership would go with it.

Politico, on the other hand, characterizes the content of Klein's reporting as "the Democratic narrative," and instead frames Cantor's position in this way: He "risks undercutting efforts by the speaker’s office to bridge the House’s differences with President Barack Obama while also contending with tea party freshmen resistant to compromise." A critical verb, and my emphasis.

Either way, he's an odd little man, is he not?

James Madison is chortling

Michael Kinsley asks the question: "How have so many presidents gotten away with [skirting the Constitution's 'declaration of war' clause]?"

Then, some distance away from the question, he provides the answer -- unwittingly? I'm not sure. "[W]hy should members of Congress get to mouth off about war all day but not have to take shared responsibility for the yes-or-no decision?"

Precisely. John Boehner, Tom Price, John McCain, Jon Cornyn, Roy Blunt, Diana DeGette, Bruce Braley, Rand Paul and scores of others can snipe from the cloakrooms and score facetime on "Meet the Press" -- all without having to cast a definitive yea or nay. Of all its Constitutional prerogatives, actual decision-making isn't jealously ranked by Congress as one of its indispensable ones. 

To restate what should be an unnecessary argument to all but the Constitutionally obtuse (who are, after all, hopeless), Barack Obama is doing nothing the Founders did not expect. They were all too familiar with executive power and the executive's outsized use of that power and thus they established a system of checks and balances; in cases of war, that Congress alone could declare it. They understood that American presidents would naturally gravitate to a self-concentration of power -- if it is to be checked, it is Congress' job to check it.

What they perhaps did not anticipate was that Congress would evolve as a mass of wholly self-interested, blathering reelection-experts who would happily abdicate their Constitutional responsibilities if such an abdication enhanced aforementioned reelection.

So let them blather. And let Mr. Kinsley ask his questions. For it is not President Obama, nor was it even George W. Bush or Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman, who defined the "war powers" field. It was, and it remains, Congress.

Platonic political finance

Have you ever wondered what the Platonic ideal of 'Lost Cause' news stories looks like? Well, you're in luck, because here it is:

Top House Republicans and Democrats are raising millions of dollars for redistricting fights, opening the floodgates for what could be a $30 million campaign funded in part by unregulated, unreported soft money....

[C]ampaign watchdog groups worry that it could lead to abuses and a lack of transparency for millions in big money donations.

Oh my.

Mugwumpism, 2011-style

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, in a statement:

It is clear that because Senator Reid refuses to make any spending cuts, he instead plans to force a massive future tax hike on families and small business people. In the scope of our debt crisis, if Senator Reid and Sen. Schumer force the government to partially shut down over these sensible spending cuts, Americans will hold them accountable.

In that one sentence I count seven factual errors. That, however, is the least of Cantor's problems. Because an eighth and far more serious error lies in the intro: Mr. Cantor is no longer the House majority leader, he's merely a leader (along with Speaker Boehner) of one ultraconservative faction. His may be the majority faction of the Republican caucus, but the House Republican Party itself is now but an internally warring hybrid, or fragile coalition, of the GOP and, distinctly, the Tea Party.

Sen. Chuck Schumer smartly sees the wedge:

The problem is a large percentage of those in his party think compromise is a dirty word. So the Speaker’s going to have to make a choice. He can cater to the Tea Party element ... that will inevitably cause a shutdown on April 8. Or he can abandon the Tea Party and these negotiations and forge a consensus among more moderate Republicans and a group of Democrats.

Forget the old divisions between social conservatives and (socially liberal) neoconservatives, or earlier, Republican isolationists versus Republican internationalists. This is instead the stuff of good old 19th-century Mugwumpism (the act of reformist GOPers aligning with Democrat Grover Cleveland), except in this go-around, the Mugwumps -- roughly, the comparative moderates -- won't be bolting their party, just solidifying it by either jettisoning the tea partiers or watching the tea partiers self-jettison into the obscurity of third-party status.

That, anyway, is the transcendent hope.

The Obama 'Doctrine,' as clear as the Bible

Having scanned the Internet for a consensus of the befuddled, I'd say the Post's Eugene Robinson bundled and bowed it nicely:

The Obama Doctrine calls for humanitarian military intervention when it is both necessary and feasible. This does not include every situation in which civilians are in great peril.

"It is true that America cannot use our military wherever oppression occurs," he said. "But that cannot be an argument for never acting on behalf of what’s right."

What he didn’t do, though, was explain exactly how "what’s right" differs from what isn’t. He didn’t explain how factors such as politics or oil should figure in decisions on whether to intervene. He didn’t explain which conflicts are worthy of ground troops and which are not. The Obama Doctrine’s outlines are clear, but the details are hard to make out.

In short, presidential moralists remain in a tizzy, having not yet determined how many diplomats can dance on the head of a pin. Like humanity's children down through the ages, they look to the heavens and importune, Tell us, please tell us "what's right" -- now and for all times.

The honest splendor of Obama's UnDoctrine is precisely that it does not pretend to know today what might be right tomorrow. Such conjuring is better left to Puritans and Ideologues. Robinson & Co. is looking for some fashion of a Three or Four Commandments, or maybe a mathematical formula for interventionism in which the variables aren't really variables. We should know, for instance, that politics accounts for, say, 40 percent and oil accounts for 60. Or perhaps oil accounts for 55 percent and politics for 45. Fifty-four percent and 46 would undo the math and properly bring the whole thing crashing down.

I suppose at the root of such resistance is an aversion to human ambiguity. We don't want answers so much as we demand predeterminations; we'd like to think that global politics and its occasional corollary of regional conflict resemble a kind of preestablished moral physics. Event A occurs, which sparks B, which then results in C -- each and every time.

This we demand -- or I should say, some demand it -- of commanders in chief. Unfortunately they sometimes deliver it, even though each Event A is distinguishable from other Events A, which either should or should not spark B.

Not to go all Rumsfeldian on you, but how is one to know, until A happens and all its knowable elements are known?

Yet what strikes me as most incongruent is that so many of our yearning, anguished absolutists of doctrinaire diplomacy are undoubtedly also Sunday religionists who somehow find peace and mental comfort in worldly contradictions of literally biblical proportions. Their Judeo-Christian God wasn't -- and still isn't, I assume, since He has sent unto us no exacting editors -- fussy about consistency; He could say one thing one millennium and the confounding opposite the next, yet somehow it all blends together in acceptable text.

In other words, they cut God some slack, but for this U.S. president, they don't.

Our 'common humanity'

If one insists on an 'Obama Doctrine,' what we heard tonight was as close -- given the speech's core as well as peripheral pragmatism -- as one will ever get: The pursuit and defense of our "common humanity and common security."

Does that exclude unilateral action? No.

Does it guarantee multilateral action in every instance? No.

Is Wilsonian-Carteresque humanitarianism an element? Yes.

Is liberal interventionism an element? Yes.

Or no. It depends.

And that's what I love and admire about it: The Obama Doctrine, if one so insists, is, simply put, a matter of judgment.

A moment with bliss

A few minutes ago I turned on MSNBC in preparation for President Obama's Libya address, and there I was, face to face with a young and pathologically idealistic progressive explaining to Cenk Uygur that our budget woes could be ameliorated by U.S. corporations returning their offshore profits to the continent and then paying their proper 35 percent in income tax.

Just like that.

But here's the best part: It was so naive -- pitiably so -- even the customarily naive and wildly idealistic Mr. Uygur informed the lad that he might, just might, have a spot of trouble getting U.S. corporations to agree to his ingenious plan.

Don't get me wrong. It's refreshing (if at times embarrassing) to see such young people express a belief in higher idealistic goals. But somehow they fail to see the yawning chasm that separates them from those goals. Their objectives are either sloppily or meticulously laid, yet rarely is mention made of how we achieve those objectives. It's as though the "ideal" materialized is but a mere inconvenience of planning, something to be done once once profundity and outrage are exhausted.

This, further, is my essential problem with MSNBC as a programming voice of contemporary progressivism. It batters us mercilessly with this problem and that or this and that blissful objective, yet rarely -- never? -- do its hosts and guests delineate a detailed, step-by-step roadmap to achieving solutions. The result, too often, is merely 24/7 lip-flapping.