PMC Commentary

Unrestrained lunacy

John Boehner emailed his accomplices this afternoon that:

Discussions are underway on legislation that will cut government spending more than it increases the debt limit, and advance the cause of the balanced budget amendment, without job-killing tax hikes. Those talks are moving in the right direction, but serious issues remain. And no agreement will be final until members have a chance to weigh in.

The opportunity for sarcasm is too on-the-nose. I'll pass.

Meanwhile, the Senate's GOP leadership is breathing a political sigh of relief that was unimaginable just a few days or even a few hours ago. Said Mitch McConnell, with remarkable justification, on CBS's "Face the Nation":

I don't think we've been hurt at all.

And here's a fascinating possibility. Through a coalition of conservative Democrats and giddy Republicans, the GOP's extortion of course sails through the Senate. Yet the House Tea Party Caucus (who all along have insisted they'll vote against any increase in the debt ceiling) votes in negative alignment with infuriated House Democrats, thereby constituting the death of the deal. Whereupon the GOP, given its far superior messaging skills, delightedly relates to the American electorate that it was Congressional Democrats who precipitated what would then be a materialized default.  

Things cannot get any weirder than they are -- and at this grotesque point, no speculation is unthinkable. American politics is now defined only by unrestrained lunacy.

High Noon and the Tea Party Gang

Today's drama will have little to do with the contemptible debt deal under discussion, as outlined by a cheerful Mitch McConnell moments ago on CNN's "State of the Union": about $3 trillion in discretionary cuts, a joint congressional committee to recommend future slashing, a bogeyman "trigger" device to frighten each side into earnestness, a "mechanism" that allows Congress to vote in delight against an inexorable second-stage ceiling lift, and, of course, "no tax increases" -- in other words, a wholly intoxicated attempt at deficit reduction.

No, the real hijinks of our disintegrating and already dysfunctional democracy will commence around high noon, as mild-mannered Marshal Will Kane, played by mild-mannered Nevadan Harry Reid, faces off, on behalf of 300 million quivering townfolk, with Frank Miller's Tea Party Gang, recently populated by such ideological thugs as the wily Rand Paul and revoltingly glib Mike Lee.

From The Hill:

Leaders will have to rely on the goodwill of every member of the upper chamber to agree to unanimous consent to speed legislation through the Senate in time to make the deadline.

[A] senior GOP aide said members of the Tea Party Caucus ... would not drag out the floor procedure to delay a deal sanctioned by Democratic and Republican leaders.

Yes, we've grown accustomed to associating "goodwill" with "Tea Party Caucus," so there's no reason to suspect any pending skulduggery from those fine fellows (but we can hope, see below). 

The same goes for their degenerate compatriots in the House, where any extortion legislation passed today will then head, possibly to save us all (?) in the nick of time.

But I repeat, I would have preferred no deal at all; I would have preferred a week or two of unremitting Economic Hell -- in which outraged townfolk would torch these swinish goons out of their air-conditioned styes and back onto their respective floors for a clean vote -- to the purgatorial salvation of ideological miscreants. Who, if successful in today's legislative designs, will be back, bigger and badder than ever.

An insult to fraggees

If memory serves (and if any military historian out there knows better, please advise) I recall reading somewhere that during the Vietnam war the highest percentage of U.S. casualties suffered by rank was that of lieutenants; one reason being that a significant portion of these junior officers were shot by their own troops -- "fragged" -- who rather understandably objected to being ordered into suicidal environments. (It was for this reason that my oldest brother, who flew helicopters then and there as a warrant officer, Darwinianly declined a promotion.)

Of course it wasn't the lieutenant's keenest desire to order those poor bastards into combat. However the finer points of military command tended to muddle themselves as the stark horror of wading like a neon target through some godforsaken rice paddy settled distressingly in ass-drafted minds. The lieutenant was only following his own orders, yet ...

Right. Not fair. Not fair at all.

And that's why I resist Kathleen Parker's "fragging" metaphor in her column today:

If the nation defaults on its financial obligations, the blame belongs to the Tea Party Republicans who fragged their own leader, John Boehner.

Speaker Boehner was following no superior's orders yesterday. He was saving his own neck. In the U.S. House he's both a general and commander in chief, and if Boehner possessed any political blood uncontaminated by contagious cowardice, he would have gone down fighting rather than poltroonishly coddling his troops.  

Boehner wasn't fragged. He just let himself be pushed -- in craven retreat.

Malignant rodents

From The Hill, the understatement of the week: "[S]ome veteran Republicans worry their party could be seen as intransigent."

Note the use of the conditional, which only amplifies the hilarity of the yeomanly euphemism of "intransigent" for sadistic, venomous, and mad as a hatter.

Yet how many "veteran Republicans" are cited? What number of worried and worldly old bulls does The Hill reveal to be brooding about their party's demonic descent?

Two -- one, George Voinovich, is retired from the Senate, and the other, John McCain, recently made a flagellant appearance at the Church of Hannity to renounce his impetuous heresy.

Otherwise, Republican sentiment -- which I can only assume is a prevailing sentiment, given the paucity of outspoken dissidents, not to mention recent events -- persists in the infantile notion that governance is merely a who's up, who's down political game. A former John Boehner and Mitt Romney adviser, for instance, clearly sees the biggest of all essential pictures: "President Obama has the most to lose here because he’s presiding over the chaos." (Insert "tee-hee").

Which ironically brings us to the inescapable argument that Republicans, in this momentary question of political gamesmanship uber alles, are profoundly correct.

In ordinary, responsible and sane times, one would sanely be writing to one's congressman or senator or praying to one's god that such a crisis as this be averted. But this era of Republican "intransigence" is neither ordinary nor responsible nor sane -- indeed, what Republicans have wrought are extraordinary times that call for insanely extraordinary measures: a full-spread national swan dive straight into the roiling economic Styx, after which a spiritually cleansed electorate will most assuredly march to the polls with cathartic dynamite in mind and blow these Tea Partying Radical Rightists straight to hell.

I see no other way but the absolute worst of ridding ourselves of these malignant rodents.

Forcing Obama's hand

A rather stunned Sen. Kent Conrad just reported on "The Last Word" that Mitch McConnell has informed Harry Reid that he intends to filibuster the Reid proposal. Needless to say, this maneuver collides with any workable solution to Congress' self-imposed debt crisis prior to the default deadline.

I repeat my earlier speculation that congressional Republicans may be intentionally forcing President Obama into what the House will later maintain, in impeachment proceedings, was a usurpation.

From earlier today:

It may be that congressional Republicans privately have removed brinksmanship from the table; that their revised plan is to ensure that no default-avoiding bill, under any circumstances -- not even their own -- shall emerge from Congress; and that a guaranteed default will thereby force President Obama to reluctantly exercise the Constitutional option next week, thus creating the grounds for another year-long distraction: impeachment.

They've now left our solar system

We are way, way beyond mere political polarization. House Republicans can't even see Earth from wherever they are. It's expected that Iowa's Steve King would appear, as he did moments ago on MSNBC, to reeducate us about a default not really being a default, or that Tennessee's Marsha Blackburn would have appeared earlier to deny that Speaker Boehner's plan yesterday wasn't actually "in trouble."

But this, from The Hill, suggests a whole new plateau of abject, otherworldly self-delusion:

Despite vows by the Senate to defeat Boehner’s plan, many House Republicans, including Boehner, had thought a strong vote on the Speaker’s initial debt measure would have forced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to accept the plan and send it along to President Obama [italics mine].

 

Impeachment may be the objective

This thought does occur.

It may be that congressional Republicans privately have removed brinkmanship from the table; that their revised plan is to ensure that no default-avoiding bill, under any circumstances -- not even their own -- shall emerge from Congress; and that a guaranteed default will thereby force President Obama to reluctantly exercise the Constitutional option next week, thus creating the grounds for another year-long distraction: impeachment.

Deprogramming Brooks

I'm enjoying the unseemly, internal, and rather lop-sided spat at the NY Times, mostly because of its unseemliness. It would appear that Paul Krugman has decided he has a readership of one: David Brooks.

As the latter inches farther away on the lunchbench from his increasingly lunatic associates on the right, he resists asking, unlike whom Andrew Sullivan labels as the "arch-Tory Charles Moore": "[I]s the Left right after all?" And Brooks' timidity drives Krugman nearly as crazy as the right is driving Brooks.

In his writing Krugman now resembles a diligent deprogrammer who's forever on the verge of breaking his Moonie-like charge, but can't quite get him to emotionally snap and blurt humiliated confessions of Wrong-Thinking. So Krugman has resorted to remote taunting, a kind of "You know who you are -- David."

Krugman, two weeks ago:

There aren’t many positive aspects to the looming possibility of a U.S. debt default. But there has been, I have to admit, an element of comic relief — of the black-humor variety — in the spectacle of so many people who have been in denial suddenly waking up and smelling the crazy.

Today:

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

Other examples abound, but you get the point. Such cattiness from the old grey lady. Unseemly? Sure. But it's a hoot.

Governance and ideology

"When the House takes action today, the United States Senate will have no more excuses for inaction," said Speaker Boehner, just prior to cancelling all essential floor activity for the day. Again.

They did however first rename some post offices, which for the GOP House is a remarkable feat of efficiency, discipline and organization.

Somewhere, Cantor is resharpening his fangs and reloading his venom sac. Well done, Eric. Bye-bye, Boehner.

It could be, John, that all of your weeping and sobbing and blubbering instilled something less than dread of reprisal in your juvenile-delinquent charges. Remember Niccolo's words: "[I]t is far safer to be feared than loved if you cannot be both." And if you never quite got around to reading the classics in political philosophy, surely at some point you've watched Vito exclaim: You can act like a man!

On a more serious note, all of this does bring to mind a fascinating scholarly article I once read on extremist right-wing government and bureaucracy. The author's model was a very well-known one, which for decades since has been grudgingly hailed for its ruthless efficiency (getting the trains to run on time, that sort of thing), so the academic writer/researcher decided to take a thoroughgoing, archival look at the government's actual, day-to-day operations. Turns out, because those in charge were little more than subliterate right-wing goons and gangsters, in reality they ran their government and its assorted bureaucracies very much as one might expect a bunch of subliterate goons and gangsters to run a government and its assorted bureaucracies. Things were a mess: calls not returned, letters not written, orders not given, conscientious follow-ups virtually nonexistent, critical decisions on all manner of exigencies postponed or forgotten -- all leading to a vast organization that teetered incompetently on collapse.

But by God they knew their ideology. It reigned supreme -- right up till its catastrophic, short-lived end.

The self-evident problem? Ideology is unsuitable for actual governance, which is all rather fussy and dull compared to the violent ecstasy of staging a revolution and brashly holding forth on utopian (or dystopian) ideals.

The latest McCarthyism

I have always found the most trenchant insight of McCarthyism's foremost historian, Ellen Schrecker, to lie in the concluding chapter -- "A Good Deal of Trauma" -- of her magnificent Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America.

As we assess the consequences of McCarthyism's assault on the left, we encounter a world of things that did not happen: reforms that were never implemented, unions that were never organized, movements that never started ... [and] questions that were never asked. We are, in short, looking at "might have beens" and at a wide range of political and cultural possibilities that did not materialize....

McCarthyism was only one of the many factors that made a new wave of reform unlikely. Still, for a few short years in the late 1940s, the American people had more political options then they would ever have again. McCarthyism destroyed these options, narrowing the range of acceptable activity and debate.

Put in another, shorter way, the crime of McCarthyism lay as much in what it subtly prevented -- socioeconomic progress -- as in what, and whom, it actively destroyed. That is, McCarthyism was an extraordinary national distraction of almost utter fabrication; it brooded, it raged, it preoccupied the country at a moment of enormous promise -- the extension of New Dealism -- and one is hard pressed to imagine that its timing was unwitting or coincidental.

I suspect that someday historians will look back on this Tea Party/Radical Right era as merely a variation on McCarthyism: the assaults on the left; the reforms stalled or killed; the questions never asked, since we consumed ourselves with the question of debt, "narrowing the range of acceptable activity and debate"; the unmaterialized political and cultural possibilities which a black, progressive president had potentially opened -- the Tea Party/Radical Right as "one of the many factors that made a new wave of reform unlikely."

I suppose there's an even simpler way to put it: The Right has always known how to press our buttons, and thus distract us from progress.

'Bye-bye [insert name here]'

Speaker John Boehner just appeared live to promote his "bipartisan" solution. Then Eric Cantor slithered to the mike to denounce the sinisterly partisan Harry Reid. Then Kevin McCarthy whipped around to decry the irresolute White House and applaud his noble, fairminded bosses.

And there you have it: the honorable House leadership.

When the vote occurs this evening, I just hope we see a replay of the 1993 budget vote; I hope as scatterings of Tea Partiers vote "Yea," their uncompromising colleagues yell, "Bye-bye [insert name here]."

Cold, calculating pragmatism: Dionne's centrism (I think)

E.J. Dionne's column this morning made my head spin. And as I tried, in my vertiginous state, to put my finger on why, I couldn't, really, because my problematic surroundings, erected by Dionne, were but reflections of semantics -- with which one can always do virtually whatever one wants (see, e.g., Socrates, QED).

Dionne pours the contrast:

Moderation in politics is about balance. It means believing in a vibrant and innovative private sector and a government substantial enough to do what the private sector doesn’t, and it means enforcing sensible rules for economic competition. It means incentives for success, help for those making their way up, and security for the sick, the aging, the poor, the unlucky. It means balancing our love of individualism and our desire for community. This, in turn, means that reducing the budget deficit can’t rely only on cutting programs. Yes, taxes need to go up.

And then he cements it:

Centrism is something altogether different. It’s not a philosophy. It’s a position based on calculation. It doesn’t start with fixed principles. It measures where everyone else stands on some political spectrum at a given moment and then frantically adjusts.

All perfectly reasonable, right? Well it is, if you're of E.J. Dionne's elevated moderate temperament, which scorns unprincipled centrism. And therein lies the problem that I referenced above: Through the use of a couple of tame modifiers, I just radically reframed Dionne's definitions. It's a game we can all play: a modern conservative would scarcely define moderation or centrism in Dionne's way; and I myself, as a democratic socialist, would unquestionably define both of them differently.

To me, fiscal moderation implies a highest marginal tax of 95 percent on millionaires, a 100 percent estate tax on all those valued above a few thousand bucks, absolute equity in the financing of all K-12 schools, single-payer healthcare ... you get the point. To a genuine conservative (and by that I don't mean crackpots in Congress or cretins in tricorn hats), of whose counterarguments I confess a genuine if not paradoxically sympathetic understanding, my "moderation" makes me a crazed Menshevik; to notional Bolsheviks, I'd be a weak, abominable sellout of unmistakable reactionary tendencies.

So where does this leave us when it comes to defining moderation? Marooned.

Let's move on, then, to centrism -- which, after giving Dionne's working definition some thought, I'll argue that he's confused it with workable pragmatism.

Contrary to Dionne's centrism, pragmatism is a philosophy and, quite compatible with Dionne's centrism, it's a position based on calculation. It starts with fixed principles (from the left, for an Obama; from the right, for a Reagan) and then measures where everyone else stands on a given policy at a given moment and then frantically adjusts. The resulting product, usually, is something roughly midway.

But that's OK, because "midway" lies not far from either advancement to some pursued ideal or reversal from a retrievable mistake.

The trick is to move most everyone a bit one way or the other; the left's historical difficulty, however, is that because we're an organically conservative people, the right has always possessed an easier job of it.

The impossible dream: reasoning with a Tea Partier

In today's Washington Post, Judson Phillips, the Tea Party Nation's founder, stakes out his organization's historic commitment to ineffable ignorance:

We do not have a debt crisis. We have a spending crisis. There is only one way you get to a debt crisis — you spend too much money.

Let us review with haste: No debt crisis here, just a spending crisis; however we to got to this debt crisis -- the one he just declared nonexistent -- by spending too much money.

But let's review in another way, shall we? Let's say you, Mr. Phillips, have $100, and you spend that $100, perhaps imprudently, even recklessly. Do you have a debt crisis? No, of course not. You're just broke.

The crisis, Mr. Phillips, comes when you borrow $100 for a tax cut, and borrow another $100 for another tax cut, and then borrow another $100 for a new entitlement program, and then borrow another $100 for a war, and then borrow yet another $100 for yet another war. 

And then you skip town, you retire, let's say, to Texas, on a government pension, and you leave your entire, misbegotten indebtedness to your unfortunate successor.

In a way, Mr. Phillips, you're quite correct. You don't have a debt crisis. He does.

You see, Mr. Phillips, we can quibble from now till next week's apocalypse about the wisdom of all your spending; we can argue and differ and do both rather violently about the fiscal smarts or ideological stupidity behind all of it; we can both haul out charts and graphs and think-tank propaganda to defend our respective positions -- but after all of that, one thing and only one thing will still be standing with a magnificent terribleness: We still owe all that money you borrowed.

This isn't like your world, Mr. Phillips, which is to say, it's not make-believe. These are real debts that we really owe. And beginning next month, unless we borrow more, we simply cannot repay them all. And that's called default, defined by Webster's as "a failure to pay financial debts."

Catch that, Mr. Phillips? Webster casts no moral or partisan or ideological judgment here; he doesn't on p. 300 of his tome point a finger at us and add: "because you spent too much money."

Pseudoconservatism's third partyness in the making

When even the Wall Street Journal's editorial board sees dangerous weirdness to its right, it's time to press Armageddon's pause-button and at least for a moment savor the procreation of pseudoconservatism's third partyness. The WSJ:

Strangely, some Republicans and conservative activists are condemning [Boehner's proposal] as a fiscal sellout....

The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against ... Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell into GOP Senate nominees.

The likes of whom, along with the Bachmanns and Palins and Perrys, will be running again but as wholly irrelevant third-Tea-Party children, draining GOP votes but on the upside liberating that party from its present madness. 

Behold, a return to two-party sanity, just as soon as our colossal nervous breakdown is over and the tea-party brats have been sent to their own sandbox.

The demonic Rick Warren

Straight from Christ's tweeting evangelical vicar, Rick Warren:

HALF of America pays NO taxes. Zero. So they’re happy for tax rates to be raised on the other half that DOES pay taxes.

Unfortunately all too many of the first half DO -- to emulate the capitalizing Warren -- pay taxes, and I don't mean just payroll or sales taxes.

No, they witlessly pay a soul tax, euphemistically called a "tithe," to squalid religious demagogues like Warren, in the delusional belief that some god gives a good goddamn whether or not they've financially ponied up on Earth.

So keep tweeting and alienating the meek and poor, "Pastor" Rick, and perhaps thereby you'll reduce the sum or religious mega-ignorance.