P.M. Carpenter

More rational democracy

A new Washington Post/ABC News poll finds that "It’s not unusual for the president to take the heat when gas prices rise: George W. Bush’s job approval rating correlated with the price of gasoline across his two terms at -.84, a very strong relationship. Obama’s approval rating has correlated with the price of gas at -.71."

A few days ago on this subject I wrote that I didn't comprehend this economic-political relationship that so obviously thrives in the electorate's mind. Someone wrote to express surprise at my "surprise," since, as referenced above, presidents have historically taken the heat for high gas prices. But I never expressed surprise. I only wrote that I failed to comprehend the relationship, since the relationship is in reality nonexistent -- and therefore incomprehensible?

No, I have never comprehended it, and I never will.

A real puzzler

There are three men temperamentally qualified to run (and were indeed running) for the GOP presidential nomination. One of them just checked out, because “Either he didn’t see a path to the nomination or he didn’t see a path to 270."

That, according to Politico, from "a longtime Barbour supporter [who] noted the governor’s cunning as an operative."

Care to guess which challenging path, in Barbour's thinking, counted for more?

Barbour's competition for the nomination was 1) a flip-flopping dandy, prototypical designer of GOP-detested "ObamaCare" and the least favorite of the powerful religious right, and 2) perhaps the blandest, most contrived politician from north of the Mason-Dixon line to hit the stumps since Thomas Dewey. I have an educated doubt that Barbour was quaking in the Mississippi mud over either of these "threats."

Which leaves us ...

This is a bluff

This is a bluff ...

“If the president doesn’t get serious about the need to address our fiscal nightmare, yeah, there’s a chance it [the debt limit vote] could not happen,” John Boehner told Politico today.

What does Boehner want? Not just discretionary-spending cuts, but an "altering [of] the nation’s entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid" as well. You know, a total revamp of a half-century of two giant social programs in a few days.

No one could be that stupid or reckless.

This is a bluff. Such preposterous extremes confirm it.

More adults needed

Today in a "Morning Joe" appearance Barney Frank made an excellent fiscal case against our burdensome and disproportionate funding of NATO, whose original and quite reasonable raison d'etre is gone, said Frank. As he dryly observed, we don't need to protect France from Belarus.

Frank harbors an imposing intellect and perhaps the most formidable debating skills in the U.S. Congress, but here, on this topic, historically speaking, both failed him. We never had a military raison d'tre for NATO. Our reason was hysterics, politically motivated.

As a rule I refrain from quoting myself. Nonetheless on February 12 of this year I made the above case rather succintly, so I'll duplicate that commentary here but not the effort. To wit,

Stalin never regarded Western Europe as a legitimately targeted arm of the USSR's proper sphere of influence.... Yet American politicians, right and left, played into anticommunist hysterics of the wildest brands. Soviet bogeymen were everywhere, constantly pushing and prodding -- even militarily, given half a chance.

Much of this hysteria emerged from a (deliberate) misreading of the eminent diplomat George Kennan's 1947 Foreign Affairs article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," in which he urged that "the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies."

Hence the United States' military "containment" policy -- a policy grossly misapplied from Kennan's urgings, since he had intended (too ambiguously) a more effective policy of political and economic containment of the Soviet Union; not, for sure, the military abomination of NATO, which only compelled in turn the military abomination of the Warsaw Pact.

There are assorted lessons to be learned from our NATO debacle: for sure, foreign-affairs and military-expenditure lessons, as well as the lesson of foolishly long-term commitments overseas; but in a much broader sense, the general lesson of political hysteria.

We rarely, that is, ever seem to learn. Demagogues and partisan propagandists and political mountebanks of varying ideological stripes have an almost magical ability to entrance us into foolish courses of action, after which we step back and shake our heads and vow, Never again. Yet in short order, we're back at the races.

Our deficit hysteria is but the latest instance of intensified foolishness. Sure, the deficit is a problem -- a long-term problem, one to be pondered now but acted upon only later. You'd find not one competent economist -- any, that is, not on a Republican payroll -- who would disagree with that assessment. Yet here we are, in the grip of a recession when spending is most needed and with a debt ceiling (constructed from past commitments) that requires raising, and yet we've thrust ourselves to the edge of an apocalypse, all because John Boehner knows not how to control feral tea partiers who've whipped the nation into deficit hysterics.

Such is democracy, I guess. But it seems uglier and more concentrated in its dark potential than usual, even uglier than when we collectively fretted about the Soviet bogeyman. Then, we possessed money and resources and singular power to throw around. No longer. What I'm saying further, I suppose, is that we can no longer afford to be so damned foolish and inexcusably gullible -- and yet even further, that we desperately need more than just one adult in the room.

Reconnecting

David Brooks' piece  today is titled "The Big Disconnect" -- as their political parties react feebly to persistent economic, entitlement, energy and immigration problems, "Americans have lost faith in the credibility of their political system" -- yet this public "disconnect" is precisely the attitude desired by Republican strategists, who thereby regard themselves as connecting quite effectively.

Well, they were, until the Ryan proposal. More on that later.

Nothing depresses what was once called civic virtue and drives down voter turnout like despair: the electorate's helpless feeling that no matter what, problems will be neither resolved nor even soberly addressed. So, since January 2009 Republicans have heaved one monkey wrench after another into the machinery of effective government and government responsiveness. They have filibustered, slowed, attacked, thwarted, obstructed, done everything imaginable to grind good government and economic recovery to a pulverized rubble.

Although President Obama and Congressional Democrats performed with remarkable, one could say even heroic, effectiveness for two years -- achieving historic healthcare reform, financial reregulation, the auto industry's salvation, an almost reasonably sized stimulus package, etc. -- Republicans were "patriotically" on hand to loyally perform their opposition duty of disinformation, destruction and delay. It worked like a nightmare. In November 2010 we got what a depressed electorate and consequently smaller turnout were determined to deliver unto us: a larger GOP Senate minority and a House majority of downright Gothic horror.

After a mere four months of these alternating prophets of doom and rootin-tootin revolutionaries in office, the statistical result has been what Mr. Brooks itemizes: "There is a negativity bias in the country, especially among political independents and people earning between $30,000 and $75,000 (who have become extremely gloomy)." What's more,

The share of Americans who say they trust government to do the right thing most of the time is scuttling along at historic lows. Approval of Congress and most other institutions has slid. Seventy percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, according to The New York Times/CBS News poll. Nearly two-thirds believe the nation is in decline, according to a variety of surveys.

Well done, Grand Old Party. You took a crippled nation in pain and delivered more debilitating blows to its ribs. "Over the past months" -- notes Brooks rather cowardly, that is, without assignment of proper and pointed blame -- "we’ve seen a fascinating phenomenon. The public mood has detached from the economic cycle. In normal times, economic recoveries produce psychological recoveries. At least at the moment, that seems not to be happening."

One need not wonder why.

In the process of demoralizing Americans, though, Republicans committed an enormous, twofold strategic error. It was introduced as politically pragmatic. Barring Keynesian measures they despise (and knew to work), they were left with no realistic measures whatsoever in living up to their pledge to create jobs, the actual creation of which, of course, at any rate would not have helped their efforts to defeat Obama in 2012. (America first, always America first.) So they pivoted hard to deficits and debt as monstrous distractions. So far, so good, politically speaking.

Then, however, from a whopper of ideological compulsion came a political stunner of almost unthinkable magnitude: in tackling the deficit bugaboo, they would reduce government outlays by murdering Medicare. They said so. In writing. With ribbons and bows. Glory be.

Which loops us back to the Brooksian "disconnect." Which is to say, not for long. For public despair is being replaced by national outrage -- squarely at Republicans.

An uncommon preciseness has been introduced to the 2012 campaign. Rather than the indefinable miasma of economic lethargy, from which cacophonous voices of blame are raised and partisan fingers are pointed this way and that, we now have the stark poignancy of clearly identifiable villains -- yep, those guys. If the electorate ever wanted to "connect" its roiling anger to a rewarding outcome, 2012 will be the time. And it will stand 2010 on its head.

Talk-radio politics

Chris Matthews, David Corn, and Howard Fineman just spent 10 minutes on "Hardball" attempting to understand just how House Republicans could have ever been so politically blind as to pass the Medicare-euthanizing Ryan budget. Fineman, at one point, advanced the theory that they simply got themselves sucked into a "group mentality," one driven by their underlying need to please the tea partiers.

And that, it would seem, is the only plausible theory. Remember, we're asking how they could have been so politically blind -- not ethically or ideologically blind, which, of course, they are as well, and to an extraordinary severity.

A momentary but related diversion. I once lived in a small market that came equipped, naturally, with small-market talk radio, quintessentially right wing. Its host was polite but non-committal as to the lunacies -- among which there were many and most rather exotic -- professed by his callers. I asked him once about his audience, and his experienced reply was: You've got to keep in mind that these people live in their own little world; they listen only to themselves and likeminded callers and likeminded pols and they block out all others -- they think they're in the majority. 

That's the bottom-up sewer from which more than a few House Republicans emerged. They are talk-radio politics personified; they are insulated; they listen to no others; they are "GroupThink" such as few groups ever thought; they spring from the depths of the isolated right's ignorance; they pat each others' back daily in the halls of Congress, enchanted by their own wisdom and foresight.

In brief, they realized not that what they were doing politically was so remarkably stupid or blind. Indeed, they were riding high, sure that others would carry them to political Elysium -- because the only others they know are themselves.

Fundamentally hateful

I can't say I had ever been acutely impressed by Jay Carney's performance as White House press secretary, but that changed when I read this:

When a reporter asked how Carney could not know whether the White House issued a statement ['commemorating Easter'], Carney shot back, "I'm glad you are asking me these key important questions, guys."

Carney only doubled his capital with me when he excoriated the "preposterous" Rev. Franklin Graham for suggesting on ABC's "This Week" that the president, in Graham's words, "has some [birth-certificate] issues to deal with."

Still, I would like to take this opportune moment to thank unHoly Man Graham for proving, once again, that God doesn't even pretend to have personal representatives on Earth from the hateful school of Christian fundamentalism.

The anti-Palin bowel movement

I suppose its protagonists and defenders would argue that it's akin to wooden stakes and silver bullets -- bloody, though necessary to finish the inhuman beast -- but the "self-styled anti-Palin movement," which today Politico devotes an uncommonly four sensationalistic pages to, and whose eponymous target is indisputably "petty and unintelligent," makes me feel a bit unclean.

Is it justified payback for all of Sarah Palin's uncleanliness? -- a foul, filthy platform of suffocating ignorance coupled with often inexplicable malice? Perhaps.

Ms. Palin, however, has finished herself. Payback, though politically rewarding and ethically justified, is at this point superfluous. She's a universal joke, a dismissed Mouth, a ditzy dingbat, a shrieking unimportance of mere reality-TV stature and, even more telling, Fox News commentary.  

She has hit bottom, never to rise again from her subterranean grotto of the black political arts. She can't even successfully peddle her books to the imminently institutionalized, borderline-personality crowd any longer. Hitting back now puts the hitter on something of her level.

She is toast, kaput, finished to all but the drooling Pat Buchanan and tea-party revolutionaries, also finished. And any attention sent her way only perpetuates an imaginary prominence.

Which means of course I'll write something about her again next week. Thus, too, the "anti-Palin movement": it knows great and marketable copy when it sees it. 

Blinkered progressivism

Paul Krugman re-dons the innocent's clothing this morning by observing that the Congressional Progressive Caucus's "People's Budget" envisions a balanced one by 2021, while protecting, as are, Social Security and Medicare quite literally from here to eternity. This theoretically doable feat is accomplished through some spending cuts, especially defense; chiefly, though, the budget "increases revenue partly by imposing substantially higher taxes on the wealthy ... calls for a rise in the Social Security cap ... [and] modestly raise[s] taxes even on middle-income families."

So, asks, Krugman, "if the progressive proposal has all these virtues, why isn’t it getting anywhere near as much attention as the much less serious Ryan proposal?"

His first and partial answer is brutally correct: "it has no chance of becoming law anytime soon."

Put in another, more personal way ... I could devote, I suppose, all my writing to asking why lawmakers don't for heaven's sake slap a 100 percent inheritance tax on immense fortunes and marginal rates of up to 95 percent on obscenely high incomes or, for that matter, impose a statutory cap on such incomes. All of these fiscal measures, among others deemed just as radical by our conservative zeitgeist, are cherished paradigms in my pixilated little idealistic world but yet perfectly achievable in a wholly sane and caring one. Yet, ahem, they have absolutely "no chance of becoming law" in this one. Hence I waste neither my time nor yours writing about them.

Krugman adds a modestly good point: "But that’s equally true of the Ryan proposal." I say modestly good because Krugman seems not to notice that Ryan's budget -- passed by a predatory herd of unvirtuous goons elected by the same unvirtuous "People" referenced by the enchanted CPC -- has indeed passed the House, which lends at least some influence on Senate lawmaking and presidential signatures.

In short, representative democracy demands it due, from time to time, and at the moment the People are getting a bellyful of it.

Krugman goes on: "The answer, I’m sorry to say, is the insincerity of many if not most self-proclaimed deficit hawks. To the extent that they care about the deficit at all, it takes second place to their desire to do precisely what the People’s Budget avoids doing, namely, tear up our current social contract, turning the clock back 80 years under the guise of necessity."

Unquestionably that's the motive, the aim, the underhanded hogwash being fed the gullible People by the ruthless Ryanistas. Yet Krugman's fuller explanation still fails to answer his original question: Why, from deficit-hawking lawmakers, is the CPC's budget not "getting anywhere near as much attention as the much less serious Ryan proposal?"

The answer, conspicuously, is not because Democrats -- whether "self-proclaimed deficit hawks" or not -- possess a "desire" to dismantle the liberal legacies of the New Deal and Great Society. They are, however, terrified by the spectre of the right's much easier electoral go of things should Democrats, en masse, effectively declare as their 2012 campaign slogan: "Higher taxes!"

For denouncing such is the right's highest specialty. The socioeconomic class and income-bracket distinctions among those higher taxes would be scattered and lost to the demagogic winds.

Mr. Krugman, Democrats finally have Republicans just where they want them: openly and brazenly advocating, at long last, a great and magnificently Neanderthalic yearning -- Medicare's abolition. So now you suggest that Democrats muddy these clearest of opportunistic waters by advocating, in return, higher taxes? On the steps of a presidential election? And congressional elections? In this country? -- the one that recently installed that predatory herd of unvirtuous goons?

Just more blinkered progressivism. That's all, in closing, I can say; but it also says why there aren't more "progressives."

Where do we get these guys?

This idiot hails from both the state and the party of Lincoln: "[W]e’ve got time here to deal with this ... [debt-ceiling] problem," said Rep. Joe Walsh, on CBS' "Face the Nation," "and the administration’s got to get serious and recognize that we’re not just going to give them a vote to raise the debt ceiling unless they fundamentally change the way this city works."

You see, this whole national debt-ceiling problem is "overstated," added Walsh.

Precisely. Just as the persistent virulence of nativism in America is overstated, according to the far right; just as liberal fretting about poverty in America is overstated, according to the far right; just as preposterous worries about crumbling schools and collapsing infrastructure and unaffordable healthcare are overstated, according to the oblivious and eccentrically heartless far right, out to change the way our needlessly compassionate Capital city works.   

I wonder how many times Mr. Walsh has been hungry. I don't mean just really ready for a meal: I mean so hungry he'd be willing to steal the damn thing -- not to "overstate" hunger. I wonder how many times he's denied himself healthcare, from seeing a doctor, from having a chronic illness looked at and seen to -- not to "overstate" the mere inconvenience of disease. I wonder how many times he's had to watch a loved one slowly wither from the elements because of inadequate housing and heating -- not to "overstate" the discomfort of bone-chilling temps. I wonder how many of Mr. Walsh's five children cannot afford textbooks for school -- not to "overstate" the wastefulness of ignorance.

But you know what? Forget all that, forget all those questions. I guess I don't really wonder those things about Rep. Walsh. Because he's got his, and what he's got -- most tragically -- is a complete absence of conscience. I do, however, wonder how a plurality of his Illinois constituents could ever have voted for such a heartless idiot.

Of bombthrowing and sidelines

Dana Milbank offers a smile-inducing fly-over of the conservative crack-up in progress.

There's the "birther dispute" that's driving some of Bedlam's keepers to the brink of "sanity"; there was the revolt by 59 Republican House members against the House Republican 2011 budget; there's the revolt by virtually all of the pseudo-Republican semi-presidential quasi-candidates against the House Republican 2012 budget; there's accumulating statistical evidence that the howling yahoos and naked primitives of the right-wing underbrush haven't a clue as to who or what their semi-presidential choices are; and "there are fissures among conservative opinion leaders" -- translation: infantile squabbles of self-limiting import among infantile blatherskites.

As they say: They have met the enemy and ...

Meanwhile, overnight I received this enlightening email, from the Tea Party Express-allied 'Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama': "The reason we ... have started our efforts so early is that we learned the lessons from watching MoveOn.org smear Republicans leading into the 2008 elections, as they worked for almost 2-years to make it almost impossible to win" (I hasten to assure, neither the bold nor italic is mine).

Fellas, if I may be so presumptuous as to rework Socrates: The unexamined campaign is not worth conducting. Sure, I appreciate that the upshot of your email is to peel cash from the aforementioned howling yahoos so as to amplify your own personal comfort; indeed, I enthusiastically support your efforts to subtract from the sum total of efficacious right-wing finance. But even the yahoos and primitives may be inclined to scratch their thick skulls in spasms of self-doubt when you suggest that it was -- egads -- MoveOn.org that doomed your epically hapless team in 2008.

But here's the thing, which I'll address to all of you far-right boys and girls ensnared in the conservative crack-up, not just the peelers and peelees at the 'Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama.' Deep down, in the spookiest, most mysterious recesses of your reactionary brains, you don't really want to win. You didn't in 2008, you don't in 2012. Because you're not governors; you're tea-heaving anarchists. You're not regular Army; you're renegade snipers. You're not respectable campaigners in support of respectable candidates; you're ill-schooled agitators and prehensile bombthrowers and manifest racists and orgiastic nihilists.

Read your Adorno et al. Your outsized, overgrown, grotesquely elephantine and way-too-loud professed love of our country is a barely self-aware mask for your primal compulsion to destroy it and all of its civilized decency.

That's Step One. But think for a moment: What of Step Two?

Aye, there's the rub. There is no desirable Step Two. With the 'Lost Cause' finally won, you'd be left with governing the rubble. Your sniping would have no targets but yourselves, and the tea you'd be heaving would be your own. Political campaigns and political opponents to get exercised about? They, too, would be gone, since you'd finally have that authoritarian personality at the top of your ideological heap, to salute, drearily, forever.

No, O ye of excessive faith and fervor, ye birthers and budget-busters and Medicare-slayers and True Believers in the Coming of the one-and-only True Leader -- just to veer, apologetically, from Adorno to Hoffer -- you don't really want that. No, you want to aim those slingshots and throw those bombs -- from the sidelines. Like an inconsolable child, you're happiest there.

What else did we expect?

The NY Times' Charles Blow opines that "the right is making itself smaller by applauding [Donald Trump], and, in so doing, forfeiting what little moral and intellectual standing that they have left."

Come, come, Charles.

The Rev. Franklin Graham -- he of towering moral standing -- tells Christiane Amanpour: "Donald Trump, when I first saw that he was getting in, I thought, well, this has got to be a joke. But the more you listen to him, the more you say to yourself, you know, maybe this guy's right."

Here is one of God's glittering agents on Earth, perfectly capable of overlooking the moral questionability of spending one's life, betwixt serial marriages, amassing material wealth. Move over, Charles Blow and Jesus Christ, there's a new morality sheriff in town.  

Pursued Amanpour, "So, he might be your candidate of choice?"

Answered Graham, "Sure, yes."

Which revealed Graham's towering intellectual standing as well. Sure, yes. Hey, why not? Why not choose a blithering demagogue who makes hateful fools out of us puritanical poltroons with his Birtherism Babel that a child of eight would laugh at. Why not? Seriously, why not?

One might think that Franklin Graham would choose his preferred leader of the free world with a trifle more caution and circumspection. But if one thought that, one would be forgetting that he's as much of a blithering demagogue as Trump.  

Symmetrical nonsense

In this week's Washington Post historian Sophia Rosenfeld took us on a tour of the quackery, charlatanism, and especially the paradoxes of "common sense" politics as relentlessly hustled by the deceptive right.

Just as any fool can look to the sky and see that the sun orbits the Earth -- the horizontal scanning of which reveals a remarkable flatness, by the way -- so for example can a Tim Pawlenty declare with sonorous authority at CPAC: "On what planet do they try to reduce the deficit by spending even more?"

Pawlenty knows better, of course. Yet that brand of buffoonery sells, and sells quite well, to predisposed buffoons -- the kind who would have cheered with self-satisfied knowing at Galileo's burning; the kind whose exceptional buffoonery Copernicus preferred to simply note on his death bed, rather than face their ignorant wrath alive.

That, however, is not an option for President Obama, who understands, as Rosenfeld put it, that "common sense is rarely a match for the messy and complicated business of governing." Pawlenty can bray at CPAC with otherworldly pretense and Glenn Beck can add to his obscenely gained fortune by selling books which declare that "To spend your way out of debt defies common sense," but Obama hasn't the luxury of playing such mind games. He hides it well, but deep down he surely agonizes over the absence of the uncommonly sensical option of further spending our way out of debt and unemployment. It's doable, it's very doable, but he isn't allowed to do it. Congress is populated by Pawlentys and Becks.

Still, Rosenfeld stated only half of Obama's problems. She identified wrong-headed common sense as a rallying cry among only the right. To read Rosenfeld is to suspect that the Pawlentys and Becks and Palins are the exclusive merchants of this particular political humbug -- that "for all its homespun appeal, [common sense] has often been a vehicle for precisely the opposite of what it suggests: subjectivity, partisanship and demagoguery"; again, pretty much exclusive terrain for dimly lit conservative pols and activists.

Yet that's an asymmetrical analysis. Is there no "commonsensical" subjectivity, partisanship and demagoguery on the left?

Why, it just made sense -- common sense -- for example, that President Obama merely had to fight, fight, fight for a public option, and the immense power and influence of the imperial presidency (which yesteryear the left despised, incidentally) would have kicked in. All those Democratic senators who refused to support the public option because of state politics or ideological objections would have collapsed in agreement with the awesomely persuasive president. We very well could have had our public option, we've been repeatedly informed by so many of the left's luminaries, if only Obama had barnstormed the country and strong-armed those senators -- which, in reality, more likely than not would have simply crashed the entire healthcare bill.

This progressive line of commonsensical attack was and is infused with unhealthy doses of "subjectivity, partisanship and demagoguery," plain and simple. I suspect that, like Pawlenty, many of its purveyors knew better then and know better now; but hey, it pulls in progressively irate readers and viewers. Their object of desire certainly wasn't virulent, like the right's many virulences, but their appeal to the left's "common sense" was every bit as deceptive. Indeed, the more pragmatically commonsensical and speedier route to a public option or even a single-payer system, as Obama keenly understood, was a short-term healthcare victory: another political defeat in this public policy arena would have decisively killed reform's prospects for at least another generation. In brief, Obama saw far beyond the left's (unworkable) "common sense" of the moment.

There's also the progressive fantasy (read demagoguery) of the American electorate as a progressive electorate -- hustled, for example, with laughable demagogic distinction by the befuddled mind of Cenk Uygur -- because Americans, you see, like Social Security and Medicare. What other commonsensical evidence does one need to see the impressively obvious? -- that the electorate's self-interested support of what is by now conservatively traditional government assistance proves Americans' thoroughgoing progressivism?

I trust that second sarcasm answered the first.

Suffice it to say, Obama knows better. He also knows -- knew -- that the simplistic, progressive common-sense fixes of our banking and financial markets were no "match for the messy and complicated business of governing," as Rosenfeld wrote -- of the right only. He knew as well that painfully swallowed concessions on upper-end tax cuts were economically non-sensical but politically inescapable.

Well, one could go on. The short points to be underscored, though, are that 1) the subjectivity, partisanship and demagoguery of "common sense" exist on both sides, and 2) Obama could sure use a little more help and understanding from his own.

Debating the Unknowable

Good lord I am embarrassed for Rational Man every time I read one its members writing about and conflating religion and God -- two distinctly separate subjects. The first is intellectual play. It is disguised as a deeply profound intellectual exercise but in reality it's nothing but abstract masturbation.

Religion is man-conceived, man-devised, man-commanded and man-executed. It has nothing to do with God, who may or may not be. Fact is, that little item is Unknowable, which is all we know about Him. And without knowing the answer to the question of God's existence, religion itself becomes an utter waste of intellectual talent; it either debates the finer points of a vast non-existence, or, oppositely, it debates a vast existence that has been conceived only by the small mind of secular man.

You wish to believe in Christianity, or Islam, or Judiasm or Taoism or Voodoo? Knock yourself out. But for Heaven's sake don't fool yourself into thinking that God has sent some special Word -- internally contradictory in Christianity alone, let alone in contrast to other divine revelations -- to clue you in. He hasn't. Otherwise the most brilliant of theologians would have long ago settled on some ethereal consensus. They haven't.

If He is, He is unknowable. What or Who or How or If He is is all unknowable, and that's as close to knowing as we can get. That, as they say, is the theological bottom line.

What prompted my embarrassment over Rational Man venturing any opinion above and beyond this, well, fundamentalism of the absolutely unknowable, was first David Brooks' droning on this morning about the value of a "rigorous theology," since 

No matter how special some individuals may think they are, they don’t have the ability to understand the world on their own, establish rules of good conduct on their own, impose the highest standards of conduct on their own, or avoid the temptations of laziness on their own.

So the answer to one's human ineptitude, I guess, is not to strive individually for the highest of ethical planes but to slavishly live one's life according to what some stranger stoned on goofweed, perhaps, scribbled some 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. Call me skeptical.

Anyway, Brooks' intellectual authoritarianism motivated Andrew Sullivan to respond:

[T]he ultimate test of religion for a non-atheist is not: is this or that religion useful? Or even: is it necessary?

It is, rather: is it true?

Well now that is indeed the eternal question, is it not?

And the answer is: Who the hell knows?

No one does. No one ever can. No one ever will. It's Unknowable.

Gerson's slapdown: may we have another

The Post's Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter, presents a devastating review of the movie "Atlas Shrugged," and the "adolescent" ideology behind it. He does, toward the end of his piece -- in condemning the "rigid ideology" of socialists who "take a similar path, embracing equality as an absolute value" -- commit the Randian error of overly simplistic hostility to quite complex, opposing views, but all in all Gerson's column is a must read of old-school conservative clarity.

It impels one to recall that contemporary conservatism is not, after all, monolithic in its insanity, and some of it, even, is strikingly sane -- so much so that it makes itself a worthy and honorable opponent.

Why this has evolved as the minority position of today's conservatism is a fascinating subject, but unfortunately I think one that has more to do with analyses of demagogic democracy and electoral conquests than political philosophy.

At some vague and expansive point in postwar American history, having been thumped by transcendent Rooseveltians once too many times, conservative pols and conservative strategists turned to the dark populist side to win elections: they loosened their grip on philosophical lucidity and opted instead for the tawdrily demotic. Communist witch hunts rolled into the sad spectre of fundamentalist Christian revivals and denunciations of characterological and even congenital differences. So they were off to the demagogic races, because by God that, they discovered, is what wins elections.

Still, one sees that the old conservative school -- the one "generally suspicious," as Gerson writes, "of all ideologies, preferring long practice and moral tradition" -- survives. It's just a shame that only the rudest emergings of pseudoconservative extremism, such as Ayn Randism, are what it takes to call out the old cons in defense of their old school.