PMC Commentary

American political history, 1876-2100

This morning the NY Times' Charles Blow resurrects some classic American historiography: the (now) universally accepted historical thesis that Jim Crow had far less to do with Southern African Americans and ingrained Southern racism per se than with the Southern aristocracy's playbook of distracting and dividing poor Southern whites.

Late 19th-century agrarian Populism threatened to unite the two races, socioeconomically and politically, and therein lay the aristocratic landholder's peril: the potential of restructuring commonplace tenancy and shareholding arrangements of horrific imbalance as well as the pernicious crop-lien system (borrow, borrow, borrow from "the Man" against those crops, so as merely to survive to borrow again), not to mention that many Populists "fused" politically with Republican tickets, which of course further threatened to bring The Southern Democracy (that is, the autocratic Democratic Party) to its crotchety knees.

Now those were problems, for the faux aristocracy. How to nip them in the bud? Per Mr. Blow:

In 1965, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described how the strategy of separating people with common financial interests by agitating their racial differences was used ... explaining that "the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow."

He continued that Jim Crow was "a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man." He called this "their last outpost of psychological oblivion."

And that, in a peapod, is late 19th- and early 20th-century American Southern history. All of its other history is somehow connected, related, inherent within and radiated out. All of it. Every last bit of it, from politics to economics to law to education to literature to gender relations to ... well, all of it, plain and simple. There are quite literally no exceptions. The American South stewed and rotted in its contrived racism; it divided ignorant whites from potentially allied blacks; it repressed blacks to near invisibility and kept the whites ignorant, it kept them poor, it kept them so seething with hatred at an imaginary foe and puffed up with delight at their own imaginary superiority that they hadn't the time to ponder how deeply and thoroughly they were being screwed by their "betters" -- the white aristocrats.  

Roosevelt's 1936 coalition began creating cracks in the system, black veterans' Second World War experiences furthered those cracks, and the Civil Rights Movement exploded them all to hell. But of course since the '60s we've experienced new fissures through old corruptions; principally the 'Southernization' of American politics and now, to quote Blow, "the right ... is reaching for new frontiers. The language and methodology are different, but the goal is the same: to deny, invalidate and subjugate, to distract from real issues with false divisions."

Yet at the bottom of our electoral pit there lies an ignorance from which those "false divisions" can spring. Racism is merely a form of ignorance; far more sinister, to be sure, than the ignorant belief in, say, the job-creating benefits of deficit-slashing in a recession, but ignorance nevertheless.

And that is the greatest challenge of modernity: somehow overcoming historical ignorance. Collectively we took a great leap forward in 2008, we'll take another, I'm confident, in 2012, and in time, I'm further convinced, the profoundly ignorant hard right in America will be as segregated from mainstream politics as was a black, 1890 Mississippi sharecropper. 

The Gasoline Strategy

Jonathan Kay, the Canadian observer of conspiracy-theory madness, which he has chronicled in Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground, provides, in the Post, his synopsis of this peculiar but not uncommon species.

There are the "Apocalyptic Doomsayers," he writes, who envision a cosmic conspiracy behind every earthquake and brush war; there are the "Failed Historians" -- just ideologues, really, who "shoehorn history into preconceived templates"; there are the clinical crazies; there are middle-aged men (mostly) attempting to "reinvent" and reignite their failed, miserable little lives; and finally, in Kay's opinion, there are the "Fakers," the Trump and Trump-like opportunists whose "sudden interest in [e.g.] birtherism smells like a publicity stunt."

A fair compendium of original instigators and in-the-trenches, foot-soldiering perpetrators, no doubt. Yet such a guide to the beguiled poorly reflects or assesses the enormous national harm perpetrated by those outside the formal, mechanical structures of conspiracy-theory lunacy -- and it is there, just outside the clinical madness, that the enormity of harm can flourish.

Thus it is here that Kay's analysis is self-limited in its import (that is not, I should add, an intellectual transgression on Kay's part, since his thesis intended to go no farther). It may indeed be true, as he writes introductorily, that "What distinguishes them [the five, aforementioned psychiatric categories] from the rest of us isn’t a big bankroll or a particular political persuasion — it’s a twisted relationship with reality." But, those who make something newsworthy of that twisted reality are prodigiously bankrolled and emphatically of "a particular political persuasion."

The GOP's Boehners, Cantors and McConnells and all the little Boehners et al have amused themselves by polluting debate and inflaming the public arena with their cringe-evoking innocence of, "I take Obama at his word." No, they didn't invent the lunatic theories in which our arena is awash, but they weren't about to full-throatedly dispel them through conclusive rationality, either. Instead, they consciously chose to pour barrels of gasoline on what otherwise would have remained a smoldering, underground malevolence.

In a court of law, in, say, a character defamation or slander suit, who would be more liable? The drooling, half-crazed, passionate apocalypse-shrieking lobotomy candidate who had hurled the pertinent accusations or the monied, three-piece-suited overseers who had coldly, strategically labored to maximize the drooler's intended harm?  

Hence my discomfort with and reluctance to devote much attention to the actual crazies, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the proper umbrella term for the entire lot of birthers, truthers, Holocaust-deniers, ideological extremists, and so on. They're diseased, and one can no more cure them with rational argument and empirical evidence than one could talk an emergency-room visitor out of his acute appendicitis.  

The attention, rather, should be lavished on the GOP suits: those cold-blooded, mealy-mouthed, gasoline-splashing poltroons who have confirmed before the electorate yet once again that they cannot be trusted with instruments of power.

The Keyes to Bedlam

There are some crackpots who are at first so repulsive that one dreams of court-ordered exile, but whose crackpottedness in time becomes such a fascinating and regular feature of politics, one can no longer imagine living without it.

Alan Keyes leaps to mind; he never disappoints, he wafts eloquently in his madness, and we all -- all of us -- are the richer for it.

To wit, we thrilled when he recently lived up to our expectations by demanding, via WorldNetDaily, that the GOP House "move to demand proper forensic examination of the new [birth-certificate] evidence Obama has released." Yet, in this demand there inhered something of the too expected. Could he not do a trifle better?

Well, he already had, only I missed it. Two weekends ago, in the words of People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch, Keyes "urge[d] Congress to impeach President Obama on the grounds that Obama is supporting international interventions in Libya and the Ivory Coast so as to establish a 'precedent' whereby were he were to lose his reelection bid and refuse to 'give up power,' the international community would intervene militarily in the US to keep him in office."

Now that's crackpottedness of the paradigmatic sort. And we love him for it.

Of Keynesian dropouts and activist buffoons

Reports the Washington Post:

A growing number of Democrats are threatening to defy the White House over the national debt, joining Republican calls for deficit cuts as a requirement for consenting to lift the country’s borrowing limit.

These Democratic, Keynesian dropouts hail from North Dakota, West Virginia, Arkansas, Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri: purplish territories of the simplistic and befuddled; territories soon, probably, to expand in numbers, as even more voters are beguiled by befuddled simplicity.

Even though "The White House has condemned efforts to attach additional measures to the debt-ceiling issue" -- Jay Carney, for instance, has blasted such deliberations as a "dangerous, risky idea" -- I'll give you one shot at guessing who the activist left will scorn and blame when concessions and compromises inevitably materialize.

For all its rather progressive triumphs during President Obama's first two years -- healthcare reform, financial re-regulation, the stimulus package -- the Democratic Senate is essentially a conservative body. It sat in willing complicity with Republican efforts to water financial reform, to subdue the more public aspects of private healthcare's modifications, to weaken stimulating demand with supply-siding tax cuts.

Yet, I'm a political realist. I understood why Senate Democrats hailing from swing-voting states with a penchant for electorally conservative revenge shied away from whole-hogging those bills. I didn't much like it, but I understood it. The White House understood it as well; just as it understood that it's but a campy fantasy of self-satisfied activists that a president can sit a senator down and successfully instruct him to vote himself out of high office.

In brief, President Obama embraced unwelcome compromises for what they were: choiceless extortions. Because that's the way politics, representative democracy and Washington work. Always have, always will. 

But who got the blame, from the blame-issuing left? The extorters? -- or the extorted? Yep. That guy.

Prepare for a repeat of self-righteous horror and misdirected blame-laying on parade.

McConnell's empty 'Take that!'

Mitch McConnell:

I understand that the Majority Leader would like to have a vote on the House-passed Ryan budget and we will. But we’ll have a vote on the President’s budget at the same time. Since there is no Democrat[ic] budget in the Senate, we’ll give our colleagues an opportunity to stand with the president in failing to address the problems facing our nation while calling for trillions in new spending, massive new debt and higher taxes on American energy, families and small businesses across the country.

I would say, I've got news for you, Mitch. President Obama and Senate Democrats could stack gazillions in new spending on (your) massive old debt and lay waste to American energy and denounce even the concept of family and indeed propose no less than the outlawing of small business -- and yet, few would notice or care, since the electorate would be too busy storming the streets and rupturing town halls over the Medicare-killing, "House-passed Ryan budget."

But Mitch already knows that. So I won't bother.

A Dick Morris primer

If you don't read dick Morris' columns in The Hill -- yeah, that Dick Morris -- then you're missing a brand of exotic brilliance that only a reptilian Fox News analyst can provide. The high substantive mysteries of his mind surely border on the ineffable; nevertheless he labors weekly revealing elaborate nothings of any value except that of high entertainment.

His latest? A grand, splendiferous twofer: an observation on the state of President Obama's nefarious "tack to the left," and a prediction -- framed in a stunning tautology that only Mr. Morris could proffer as insight -- that "Obama will lose in 2012 for reasons very different from his victory in 2008." (Go ahead, I dare you, ponder the glittering, blinding imbecility of that line for a while. Warning: You could go mad, mad I tell you.)

Ah, but Dick shall render unto us some proof of his deep, probing, predictive analysis. Ready? Here's the setup:

By the time the next election comes around, voters will see all around them evidence of his weakness and incompetence.

Yes, it's everywhere, this "weakness and incompetence"; it's mounting, it's unmistakable, it's simply impossible to any longer ignore. Prosecutor Morris' Exhibit A -- and I kid you not:

It is now evident in the escape of Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan.

Superfluous italics mine.

But you demand empirical evidence, Mr. Morris hears you cry. Well then good enough. Brace yourself, you reality-deniers:

A president who attacks the rich and seeks to divide the country might be able to rely on the base to keep his approval ratings in the low 40s, but he has no way to get reelected.

You know, like Franklin Roosevelt -- never, after 1936, to be heard from again.

I'm sorry, I can't do it. I just can't do it. I intended to paw Morris' ineffability like a tomcat with a toy, but I see that time is already running short this morning and my patience with this idiot even shorter.

So I'll wrap with this. You may wish to order a signed copy(!) of Dick's latest analytical tome -- Revolt! How To Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs -- and you can do so online. I know, because it says that at the end of his columns. But first, you may also wish to ask yourself, Why would Morris need to write, and why would I want to read, a book titled How to Defeat Obama when the sinister target "has no way to get reelected"?

Staying sane in insane times

The essence of a four-page story in today's Politico -- "A new era of accusation and innuendo" -- was poignantly captured in this brief passage:

The decline of traditional media and the rise of viral emails and partisan Web and cable TV platforms has meant the near-collapse of common facts, believed across the political spectrum.

In addition to poignant, one could even say horrifying. Or at least it seems so at times: There's a new age upon us, one of electronic ignorance and instant reaffirmations of unmitigated idiocy. Recent "news" stories seem to prove just that.

But to fervently believe in a truly New Age of even higher ignorance would require a willing ignorance in itself: that is, a willingness to dis- or un-remember the age of "Ma, Ma, where's my pa? Gone to the White House, ha-ha-ha"; or the age in which John Adams struggled to sack pernicious rumors of his "monarchism"; or the age of communist witchhunts of such anticonstitutional intensity as to morph into the nearly unbelievable; or the age of Lincoln as villain, the age of Calhoun as saint.

And all without the Internet or cable TV.

It's the only remembrance that keeps me sane.

Ignorance by design?

I've never really determined if right-winging emails such as the one below, from Tea Party Express, pass along to their duped herds an ignorance of the facts by design or through sheer, well, ignorance:

Barack Obama and his administration have turned up the heat this week - demanding that the debt ceiling be raised above $14.3 TRILLION.

Liberal politicians in Washington ... advance these doom-and-gloom propositions if we don't take immediate action to spend more money and grow government bigger.

Well enough is enough!... This time we demand the politicians act like responsible adults and get their addiction to deficit spending under control. We're in debt and don't have the money for more big government spending.

One wonders. Is anyone at Tea Party Express aware that the debt ceiling applies to past commitments, such as unfunded GOP tax cuts and unfunded GOP wars and an unfunded GOP prescription-drug program? Those "liberal politicians" are merely trying to keep financial pace with the fiscal headaches created by conservative drunks with a national credit card.

Obama's base

Also from The Hill:

President Obama told supporters in a video message Thursday their frustration with the "pace of change" during his time in office is a reason not to pull back but rather to redouble efforts for his reelection. 

Obama acknowledged that some of his liberal supporters have felt "impatient" over the administration's follow-through on some 2008 campaign promises.

It's at times like this that I feel "the call." No, not that one, nothing quite so celestial and thus garbled. Just the clear, conscious need to write in measured, restrained tones.

So let me put it this way: Minutes ago I posted a short piece on Sen. Rand Paul's need to suggest to his base that they grow up. To Obama's base: Ditto?

That wouldn't be fair. For the overwhelming majority -- roughly 85 percent at last glance -- of Obama's base is indeed grown up. It already comprehends what Obama explained in the video. 

It is, rather, the loud, insufferably sanctimonious liberal "leadership," dwelling especially in the blogosphere, that requires a few lessons in mature politics, from which there derives understanding and acceptance.

Yet their interest in brushing off understanding and refusing acceptance is a vested one. And, as has been pointed out many times by many others, one simply cannot convince someone else of the plain and simple truth of this or that if that someone's livelihood depends on not being convinced.

So where does that leave Obama? In pretty much the same place he was in months ago, or 2-3 years ago, and where he'll be in a year or two hence: with the vast majority of his base fully behind him. 

The others? The so-called "professional left"? Well, what more can one say? The important thing, I guess, is merely to start caring less.

Sen. Paul's mistaken worry

Cute, but typically off-topic:

"I’ve come to New Hampshire today because I’m very concerned," joked Sen. Rand Paul in New Hampshire today. "I want to see the original long-form certificate of Donald Trump’s Republican registration."

Described as "a Tea Party favorite" by The Hill, Paul's principal worry about Trump is his political record of a liberal bent; which is to say, Paul wants a true "conservative," and he doubts Trump's credentials. "Let’s look to Republicans who not only talk the talk, but walk the walk," he added. "If we find the right candidate, I see no reason why we can’t win in 2012."

If Paul were genuinely interested in educating his Tea-Party base, however, he'd be delivering a quite different, very simple message: Grow up. 

Yesterday, for example, after being presented the nth proof of Obama's place of birth, professional Tea Partier after professional Tea Partier appeared on MSNBC and squeezed doubt and suspicion into every answer to every question about the birther issue. One said we can't be absolutely certain about any proof, another said there remains a 10-20 percent that the released certificate is a fraud, yet another said further verification is needed, etc. etc. 

Sen. Paul, your party, your base, your "kind" doesn't need a true conservative just yet. What it needs first is some maturity. Then you can worry about 2012.

The politics of 'Hey, over here'

Yesterday I termed the president's release of the already conspicuously explicit a "concession to madness." The NY Times similarly editorialized that Obama "stared directly into political irrationality." The Washington Post, too, said the White House undertook an "embarrassing" and "disturbing" countenance of "complete nonsense."

Those likeminded assessments, I think we can agree, represent a consensus of adult opinion on President Obama's extraordinarily dismaying yet perhaps necessary degradation. Obama, as the Times put it, "practically begged the public" to get real, get serious, and get off the preposterousness of a certain New Yorker's racist birtherism.

Yet from there the adult consensus seems to break down. Once we depart the essence of universal dismay and enter the field of political motivation, opinions begin to diverge.

Although yesterday I questioned the political wisdom of the president's veering from his customary course of ignoring ignorance and adopting instead the Clintonian war-room mentality, the Times editorialized that "Obama was tactically smart to release the certificate and marginalize those who continue to keep the matter alive."

I can't say that I at all disagree with that observation on the tactics, yet from Obama's point of view its object -- dispositive marginalization -- must appear rather unachievable. I mean, good lord, the line separating lucidity from skulduggery was drawn long ago, even as marginalized thinking went mainstream. Because you know what, NY Times? In America, racism is mainstream -- and birtherism was, is, and always will be about one and only one thing: race.

Nevertheless, in my opinion Obama tried -- with what I found to be remarkable and characteristically impressive sincerity -- to transcend the garbage and seek higher ground. In the Post's opinion "there was a certain amount of play-acting in Mr. Obama’s assertions of injury" that was politically motivated. "If anything," editorialized the Post, "the decision by ... Donald Trump to seize on the 'birther' issue played into Democrats’ hands: It allowed Mr. Obama to position himself as the sane grown-up to Mr. Trump’s 'carnival barker.' " The Post is far from alone here; its political assessment finds concurrence across adult lines.

Yet I protest those particular political grounds. Marginalization and "grown-up" distinctions had already been spectacularly achieved, to the extent they were ever achievable. Hence to the other extent that there were politics involved in Obama's actions yesterday, those politics -- and this is something that Beltway thinking has never comprehended and perhaps never will -- were precisely what Obama outlined. That is, they weren't the politics of birtherism: they were the politics of Medicare and the debt.

Both -- especially Medicare -- were being drowned out by thundering Trumpism. Not washed out, of course, but muted enough by comparison to do political damage to Democrats: damage, in the sense that Democrats were failing to reap the full benefit of the electorate's Medicare outrage. Political gifts such as the Republican House budget come along maybe once in a generation or two; thus for Democrats this is no time for distractions from the GOP's gift of Medicare-abolitionism.

In Obama's calculation, he could tamp down Trumpism by sobering the media. In my initial calculation, Obama's attempt at tamping would only amplify it. We'll see. Meanwhile I'll make my own concession -- not one to madness, but to Obama's heretofore unerring political instincts.

Why try?

See? One simply cannot out-flank the clowns of birtherism, or anyone else with a like disease:

"[D]on't let the WH distract you w/the birth crt from what Bernanke says today," tweeted the Harpy of the North.

So now the birther distraction is actually a White House distraction from the earlier non-distractions which the distraction-adepts were keenly fixed on all along. But that damned Obama administration, oh, they're a wily bunch, now trying to introduce the Birther Issue! into mainstream American politics. Those scoundrels, those darkhearted scoundrels. 

I'm sure you've attempted debate with people like this -- folks who either loop back to their original argument after a timely intermission from your crushing thereof, or simply jump to other accusations in the form of argument and continue heaping accusation upon accusation until you no longer even know what the debate is about.

All you know for sure -- the only thing you learn from the extraordinarily distasteful experience -- is that determined idiots cannot be educated. So why try?

As for idiots who merely sympathize with idiots? Same story. Waste of time. Which is becoming the story of American politics.

A concession to madness

One insuperable problem with moderates' argument that the White House should have released the president's original birth certificate "long ago," so as to circumvent "the country's polity [from being] almost paralyzed with distraction," as Andrew Sullivan opines today, is stated in Prof. David Brion Davis' foreword to Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia:

[Any] attempt to define a paranoid response to a make-believe conspiracy could be perceived itself as part of a new ideological conspiracy. For example, if I produce documents to show that a given conspiracy does not exist, this may now be interpreted as a cover-up. As [the Encyclopedia's editor] Peter Knight has put it: "Contemporary conspiracy culture is therefore always poised on the edge of an infinite abyss of suspicion."

So, did the release allay suspicion among the insanely suspicious? Of course not. Did it relax the nation's near "paralyz[ation] with distraction"? Of course not. Did it feed the production of more conspiratorial cover-up theories? You bet it did. (Just browse the Internet today. It's horrifying.) And does it now dominate the news even more so, as it will tomorrow, and God knows how long throughout the debt-ceiling debate? Of course.

For several years Obama brilliantly dodged the Clinton War-Room Mentality: the by-now conventional belief in politics that every rumor, every cretinous story, every trickle of innuendo should be met with overwhelming and countervailing force. Crush rumors early and crush them hard, otherwise they'll bloom and live on. That was the theory then, and it's generally practiced in politics now (except by the nation's greatest politician, Barack Obama, whom I'll yet label a convert to it). 

Because ponder for a moment the successful degree to which the practical application of that war-room mentality benefited Bill Clinton. Did you ever see -- besides Obama -- a pol so thoroughly engulfed by maniacal conspiracies and lunatic conspiracists? Every Clinton campaign and Clinton White House denial launched new fleets of suspicion. I've got to say, I always had my doubts about the entire Clintonian approach.

And then came Obama, who simply brushed off loathsome bullshit with elegance, class and style. Sure, the conspiracy theories thrived, but see above, which is where Obama stayed in relation to them.

Today, his was a concession to madness. If the mountainous evidence already presented in clear disproof of conspiracy theorists isn't good enough for them, then fuck 'em. That was the old Obama Doctrine -- temporarily violated. I suspect we'll see a return to the old way, soon.

Sickening

Politico's Ben Smith compresses my conflict over the White House's release of the bloody obvious:

The move suggests White House pollsters saw real danger to Obama here, and saw the distraction as hurting him more than Republicans. It's also a remarkable concession to the kind of freakshow politics that this White House disdains, but has found itself unable to ignore.

The comment sections to swill stories such as this are generally too much for my tolerance, but today I made an exception. Yep, just a peek revealed that the thundering truth is never truthful enough for the right-wing lunatics who've pushed this idiocy this far. An early sampling:

There is no way I believe this now after 3 or 4 years. This gave them all the time they needed to further set up this Obama FRAUD.

And,

It's not (or ever has been) simply about his birth, and it's NEVER been about color. It STILL is about all the records from his past - grades, medical, travel, birth, etc., etc. We know NOTHING about this guy...and a story about taking time to "convince" Hawaii is BS.

And,

The signature at the bottom of the page says this could be "an abstract." Under race of his father, it says "African." Is that what they would have said way back in 1961, or would they have said "Negro." HHHHHMMMMMMMMMMMMM

And,

FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE FAKE ZERO IS A FREAKING FAKE.

The vile Trump is on the air at the moment. Now, in effect, he's demanding education records; in further effect he's questioning a black man's ability to matriculate and excel at intellectual hotbeds like Columbia and Harvard Law.

Feed them and they will demand more. Give them more and they'll demand yet more.

It's sickening.

No, no, if they come, it'll be Calais

Suit up for a delightful journey through GOP denial.

This morning's NY Times' "House G.O.P. Members Face Voter Anger Over Budget" is a near comedic survey of electoral wrath and disowning of same by those who wrought it. For heedless Republicans this is their occupied France of spring, 1944; it's Napoleon's troops on June 17, 1815; it's an impending rout of reactionary fatuity like we haven't seen since feudalism's demise.

OK, that's stretching things a bit. But it is a joy, and transcendentally so.

For your amusement ponder, for example, this befuddled quackery from Pennsylvania's Rep. Lou Barletta: "My town halls are being disrupted by Democrats.... I am not sensing the general public is angered over Medicare reform. When I explain that people over 55 are not affected there is almost a sigh of relief."

Put aside for a moment the GOP representative's implication that town hall meetings should be for friendlies only -- not, heaven forfend, an opportunity for concerned citizens to confront their somehow-elected malefactors. As usual, the rules of democracy are deemed different by Republicans, for Republicans. No, Barletta's real topper was that phrase about "sigh[s] of relief" coming from constituents who realized his exacting malevolence was aimed not at them. Intriguing. Why did Barletta believe the over-55 crowd was so relieved? -- and, notwithstanding his protestations of a carefree "general public," would not the 54-crowd in reality be feeling a trifle cheated upon witnessing the 55-crowd's immense relief?

Otherwise, in their budget proposal did House Republicans not virtuously dynamite our seed of national destruction: Medicare? Would not patriotic citizens of all ages applaud these saviors and demand only to know why we must wait 10 years -- 10 long, depraved, ruinous years -- before righteousness descends and their blessed budget-balancing edict begins to take root?

Meanwhile, back in Berlin, early June, 1944, in a conference call "House leaders sought to reassure Republicans that their budget approach would eventually carry the day," reports the Times.

One could erupt in savage and sarcastic commentary. But let's just savor that line instead; just sort of let it hang there, while standing back, admiring the depths of self-deception to which the suicidal leaders of Boehner-Cantor-Ryan are willing to go, dragging to hell their troops along with them.

Makes you smile, does it not?

Still, we've yet to arrive at the truly heartwarming part. Which is: "Officials familiar with the [conference] call said that rank-and-file lawmakers did not seem alarmed at the response they were getting."

June 5th. Hey, Heinrich, see any ships out there? Nein. All clear and A-OK. Ja, it's lookin' good.