I read the Post's Jennifer Rubin as one would a weather vane and a hospital vitals chart. Her public pathology reveals not only the symptomatic, gangrenous rot that defines our modern era's pseudoconservatives, but acts as well as a kind of wind-blown sewer from which we can smell the right's next, malodorous tranche of nation-screwing frenzy.
Her latest is a bittersweet paean to what could not be, for now, but might still be:
More was not possible [in the debt deal]. You can’t get Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform bill with only the House. You can't insure an adequate level of defense spending with only the House. You can’t get Medicaid and Social Security reform with only the House....
[A]t least we are moving in the right direction.
It's thoughtful of Ms. Rubin to send a pre-ransom note, about which just a couple of observations should be made. First, why do I get the feeling that her editorial "we" is far more exclusive than the usual "we" as a people? Why do I get the feeling that she is writing for the "we" of hers only; a narrow, shocktroop brigade whose revolutionary public-policy tactics stand foursquare opposed to authentic conservatism's primal requirement of broad social acceptance? Hence my above "pseudoconservative," by which the Post's editors should require Ms. Rubin to identify herself.
As notable is her implied confidence that we or you or a bicameral assembly of radical rightists will yet balance our books by breaking the coddled backs of the insanely privileged on Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. But the topper is her handwringing over an adequate level of defense spending -- the current level of which outpaces all the advanced world combined, plus the Klingons.
Thus we can see -- smell -- the right's next unholy creation of national hysteria: its righteous defense of defense and national security, which will play nicely into the right's need to compensate for -- meaning, more plainly, its desire to launch a vicious assault on -- President Obama's rather admirable national security record.
The NY Times' Joe Nocera smells what I do:
[T]he threat of defense cuts is supposed to give the Republicans an incentive to play fair with the Democrats in the ["supercongressional"] negotiations. But with our soldiers still fighting in Afghanistan, which side is going to blink if the proposed cuts threaten to damage national security? Just as they did with the much-loathed bank bailout, which most Republicans spurned even though financial calamity loomed, the Democrats will do the responsible thing. Apparently, that’s their problem.
And ours. The deeper problem is that one cannot honorably negotiate with dishonorable people.
In the last 24 hours I've read several distinguished commentators observe that although the debt deal was perhaps execrable in many ways, wasn't it delightful that the system worked? -- that those tea partiers showed everyone how to do it? -- that they agitated and campaigned and got themselves elected and then toiled for change? -- that that is how representative democracy is supposed to work?
No, not really. Representative democracy implies honor and good faith on the part of its representatives; and threatening to butcher one's violently seized captive is neither honorable nor faithful. It's just gangsterism.