PMC Commentary

Well, Herman got something right

OK. Maybe this is the official bottom.

"Here's what I need you to do to help me get [to the White House]: Stay informed," said Herman Cain to an "enthusiastic audience" in Dayton, Ohio today. Because, you see, "Stupid people are ruining America," added Cain.

Not a hint of self-knowing sarcasm. Not a wink, nor a nod, nor a grin. Nor was it anything fresh. Cain pronounced this particular insight much earlier this year, well before he began his climb to the top of GOP polling; it's sort of a cross between a Nuremberg rallying chant and a Huey Long slogan -- the perfect giggle line for the stupidest people in America.

Does it vaguely foreshadow the march of some conquering fascism? Of course not. But here, along related lines, is a fundamental difference between the hard, hard right and the squishy left, which the latter chronically fails to grasp: Virtually every member of the right helps to organize and then vote, making their collective voices disproportionately and extraordinarily powerful. The left? It paints signs and carries banners and protests inextinguishable human flaws, such as greed.

Is it any wonder we have a House-full and half a U.S. Senate of little Herman Cains?

GOP socialist con't

My apologies to, as a socialist, myself. I should have added "spendthrift" to the preceding piece's title, since no conscientious socialist (and to my mind, that's something of a repetition) would ever have been as fiscally irresponsible as contemporary conservatives have been.

Which is to say, no socialist would have said, Let's help seniors with their prescription drug costs, and let's do it simply by putting it on a credit card; no socialist would have even begun Bush's and his Republican Congress' idiotic wars, let alone put their costs, too, on a credit card; and, quite obviously, no socialist would have ever battled to permanently cut taxes in the face of so many collective needs.

That is, no conscientious socialist would have done those things. Sure, many a GOP socialist would, and did, but the genuine article wouldn't.

Newt Gingrich, GOP socialist

Former Reagan/H.W. Bush official Bruce Bartlett reminds us that in 2003 Newt Gingrich wrote this in the Wall Street Journal about the Medicare prescription bill:

Every conservative member of Congress should vote for this Medicare bill. It is the ... largest and most positive change in direction for the health system in 60 years for people over 65....

Although some conservatives may complain about the cost of the drug benefit, this benefit was designed within the framework of the budget resolution.

Or, as Bruce Bartlett also reminds us, "according to the latest Medicare trustees report (p. 146), the unfunded liability of Medicare Part D is $16.1 trillion."

Then again, for contemporary conservatives that's something of a mere rounding error when compared to their eternal plutocratic tax cuts and their endless, unfunded wars.

An admirable consistency

You may not agree with the Republican Party, but at least it stands for something -- and is then firm in its principled resolve. From The Hill:

Republicans earlier this year dismissed an extension of the [payroll tax] cut as a "sugar high" that would do little to create jobs.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell [now says], "I think at the end of the day there’s a lot of sentiment in our conference ... for continuing the payroll tax relief."

GOP lawmakers also suggested that ... there was little appetite on their side of the aisle for the expanded break proposed by Obama in his September jobs bill.

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona ... said [Sunday] that the current payroll tax cut had done little to stimulate the economy.

GOP leaders in the lower chamber have [now] said they are willing to work with the White House and Democrats on the payroll tax cut.

Republicans on Tuesday dismissed the upcoming payroll tax and millionaire surtax vote.

Got that?

Cookie-cutter idealism

Once again, participatory democrat Katrina vanden Heuvel extols more democracy as a cure for the unpleasantness of democracy, while also recommending the singular brutality of an imperial presidency to deliver blunt-force trauma to the contentious democracy we have:

We need a transformational presidency, able to smash the failed, entrenched and corrupt politics of the center.... And what this nation desperately needs isn’t partisan unity, but a fierce and growing movement that will challenge not just the wing nuts of the right, but an establishment in both parties that has failed the country.

In unrealistic brief, a putsch, a revolutionary cadre, a proletarian dictatorship led by anyone but the complacent proletariat -- and all of it topped by a somewhat violent though resplendently virtuous Man of Steel.

You know, cookie-cutter idealism, freshman-year progressivism, an MGM-musical kind of splashy boosterism which, in vanden Heuvel's cool and precise 1,000 words, manages to advance absolutely nothing.

What, exactly, does Ms. vanden Heuvel oppose? "Failed, entrenched and corrupt politics." What does she propose? "Challenging" those who have "failed the country."

Sort of takes your breath away, does it not? A new kind of politics, a new age of enlightenment; one in which we soundly reject failure and corruption, while embracing, well ... success and clean living.

How do we get there? I haven't the vaguest fucking idea. Nor does Katrina vandel Heuvel.

Intellectual Newt

I just heard the brilliant, articulate, intellectual Newt Gingrich say on a "Hardball" clip that Herman Cain's troubles pose a "difficult decision for he and his family."

Did they not teach the objective case of prepositional phrases at Columbus, Georgia's Baker High School?

"Intellectual" my ass.

'The hard right-wing turn'

Jonathan Chait:

One thing about the hard right-wing turn the Republican Party has taken since 2009 is that many of its supporters genuinely seem not to grasp what’s going on. Take former George W. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, a moderate who sometimes criticizes especially heartless positions taken by some members of his party.... He’s a useful stand-in for the mindset of Republicans who share a loyalty to their party but lack a deep attachment to its right-wing platform.

Another thing about the hard right-wing turn the Republican Party has taken is that its spectators to the left are forever postdating its birthday.

Since 2009? What about 1999, shortly after the GOP had attempted the extraconstitutional repeal of a legitimate presidential election? Or a year later, when shock-trooping right wingers, had they not gotten their electoral-college way by means of a corrupt Supreme Court, would have ripped this country apart?

Or one can revisit the 1980s, the decade in which right wingers first envisioned the inglorious possibilities of a bankrupted and deeply indebted federal government. "Trickle down" was always less about further fattening the 1 percent than emaciating the one institution actually capable of achieving socioeconomic progressivity.

Or, breeze back to the 1970s, the decade in which the Republican Party's frothingly ideological New Right discovered the electoral pixie dust of unabashed demagoguery: braying about busing, the Bible, and white backlash.       

Or, dial back to the Goldwater era of the early 1960s, when the GOP's post-McCarthyites rediscovered the extraordinary value of unfettered rhetoric -- which laid the foundations for those magnificent, fundraising mailing lists to be used by their successors, the New Rightists.

All of whom, of course, were the ideological descendants of rabid anti-New Dealers, who were the real, and original, drivers of the Republican Party's "hard right-wing turn." Today we hear different voices, but the same noise.

Not to wade too deep into the philosophical weeds, but it was the 1930s -- and certainly not our post-Bush decade -- that essentially formulated America's prolonged dialectic: the struggle between some semblance of collective, socioeconomic equity and a dystopia of capitalistic feudalism. I suspect 2012 will come to reflect a synthetic breakthrough of some sort; the tension, at long last, seems too taut not to snap, resulting in a far greater measure of national re-unity and re-purpose.

Too Hegelian? Probably. On the other hand, present circumstances appear untenable.

The War of the Ruses

Once the Romney machine rediscovers that inevitability is for fools, the Gingrich contraption will discover what the former's unlimited funds and tight organization can do. Newt's last seven words to South Carolina's 'AM News' on Monday, for instance, could not have been better scripted for ridicule by Mitt's own hired guns:

[I]t’s wrong to go around and adopt radically different positions based on your need of any one electorate because then people have to ask themselves, What will you tell me next time?

Say, on global warming, on Freddie Mac, on the individual mandate, on an Obamian foreign intervention.

Newt will argue -- indeed he did argue to 'AM News' -- that "It’s perfectly reasonable to change [a] position if facts change, if you see new things you didn’t see" before. That is, it’s perfectly reasonable to change one's position if facts change and one's name happens to be Newt Gingrich; or, it's perfectly reasonable to change one's position if nothing whatsoever changes, as long as the second stipulation still applies.

Gingrich's righteous hypocrisy may be legend, but he's pitting it against Romney's well-financed hypocrisy: a quarter-billion personal dollars, which are quite aside from a six-year ground game and a platoon of media mafiosos hired to launder Mitt's image -- and to dirty up others of equal sin. Newt? Free media. That's pretty much it, and that's not much of a contest.

To those rooting for Gingrich to pull off a miracle by upsetting Romney, though, I'd advise caution. For Mitt Romney may be Barack Obama's more beatable man. Guaranteed, Romney will split the GOP's various factions; tea partiers, especially, and en masse, will either vote third-party fringe or stay home. Gingrich, as wormily contemptible as he is, can nonetheless rather genuinely market himself as a man of contemporary GOP convictions.

In short, Romney will shatter the party, while Gingrich can unite it. Meanwhile, the Occupy movement could splinter the always wobbly left, while the known variable of a bad economy works further to suppress Obama's independent turnout.

So, beware of The Gingrich.

Too well to think

We have returned from the blood-red environs of Southwest Missouri, home of the pathologically self-interested-averse. Many a yardsign or bumper sticker my daughter and I passed which announced America's doom, because of a certain you-know-who's residence in the White House, the socialist bastard. It seems that if we as a conscientious, liberty-loving people don't act quickly, these United States could find themselves no longer the luxuriating land of milk and honey, as George W. so thoughtfully left them.

In our mostly unmindful absence I did bother noting the greater amplification of Newt's delusions of grandeur and the sensible skedaddling of Barney Frank. One trusts these eerie, x-trajectories of congressional careers bode nothing more than happenstance -- that the gods aren't playing with us ... again.

I'd go on, but I'm declaring this my seventh Day of Rest; I'm simply too well, momentarily at least, to think any further about American politics.

OK, just a word

I'm so glad I wasn't seized last night, or this morning, by the mad urge to take to keyboard or drink against competitive madness. Instead, I'm letting that two-hour stage of fools and its haunting by this nation's worst-ever foreign-policy nightmares -- its Wolfowitzes and Addingtons -- pass like a Dickensian "undigested bit of meat, a blot of mustard ..."

The horror was unmitigated -- unmitigatable -- by the occasional flickers of enlightenment from Paul and Huntsman. For they, in their primary unplausibility, were even less real than the ghosts of Bush's past: the unrehabilitated Wolfowitzes, for sure, but mostly the jingoistic boneheads who would have us relive, over and over, the muscular arrogance of neoconservative certainty.

Is despair a mortal sin? I don't know. I'm not up on my Catholic doctrine, although it's not my doctrine. Yet despair is all I could feel last night, watching that monstrous beauty pageant of Obama derangement syndrome, to employ an accurate cliche, in which even the righteous extermination of Osama bin Laden possessed a lamentable downside.

Well, I shan't go on. I'm supposed to be relaxing this week. Better to just flush the entire, ghoulish experience through my alimentary canal and be done with it. Only to resicken, next week.

This bird takes flight

With charming daughter in tow, am leaving town early to forge many rivers, traverse many woods to Grandmother's house. We shall return, on the 28th.  

The very happiest of Thanksgivings to you and your family. Be careful out there.

--Phil

The Archangelic 99

Nothing has ever reminded me so much of H.L. Mencken's "The Archangel Woodrow" (Wilson, that is), than E.J. Dionne's column today, on the Occupy movement:

[T]his movement has accomplished things that the more established left didn’t....

[I]t provided the media with a committed group of activists to cover, a good story line and excellent pictures...

[I]ts unconventional approach fit nicely with current media conventions. And its indifference to immediate political concerns gave the movement a freedom of action that others on the left did not have....

[T]he Occupy demonstrations are precisely about the concerns of Americans who have been sidelined economically....

This movement is about something much bigger than "occupying" a particular space....

More important, the movement should remind itself of its greatest innovation, its slogan[!]: "We are the 99 percent."

Now, Mencken, on "the whole Wilsonian buncumbe" and its ...

ideational hollowness, its ludicrous strutting and bombast, its heavy dependence upon greasy and meaningless words, its frequent descents to mere sound and fury, signifying nothing.

But, perhaps not nothing, entirely, in Dionne's otherwise meaningless case. For he does wedge in this critical piece of advice, which all along has been the only critical step that will render benefit:

[The Occupy movement] should also want to help political figures such as [Elizabeth] Warren, who understood far earlier than most the costs of inequality and of the abuses of financial power.

Street protests are pleasant-enough affairs. They're emotionally rewarding. They provide a fleeting sense of humanity solidified. But, other than acting as the unnecessary precursor to the hard work of political action -- organizing, phone-banking, canvassing, door-knocking, leaflet-distributing, getting-out-the-vote, coffee-and-tea-partying and fundraising -- they are utterly valueless, mere sound and fury.

The envy of the world

The marvel of our representative democracy:

The [super]committee won’t even bother to hold votes on dueling proposals to show where they stand, as some originally thought. There’s little reason for Republicans to vote for new taxes, and Democrats to embrace entitlement cuts — if both plans are dead on arrival and step on their own political messages, sources say.

Those messages? Finger-pointing, framing, blame-laying, posturing, demagoguing, tub-thumping, bitching, moaning, and infantile braying. And that's just the warmup. For Republicans, then comes filibustering and propagandizing. And lying. Lots and lots of lying.

Anything but legislating. Or taxing.

Techno-burp

Sorry for the interruption earlier today.  "The system," Typepad, was being dyspeptic. It seems access has returned.

--PM 

The right sets sights on "technocrats"

Krugman surveys what he sees as a rough terminological balance:

There’s a word I keep hearing lately: "technocrat." Sometimes it’s used as a term of scorn — the creators of the euro, we’re told, were technocrats who failed to take human and cultural factors into account. Sometimes it’s a term of praise: the newly installed prime ministers of Greece and Italy are described as technocrats who will rise above politics and do what needs to be done.

Right-wing word-assassination alert: like "liberal" or "community organizer," the words "technocrat" and "technocracy" are scheduled for the dustbin of searing derision. These terms were born within the reformist eras of Progressivism and the New Deal, hence they bear -- they must, right? -- the distinguishing mark of the Bolshevik beast.

I'm a bit surprised they've lasted as long as they have (although "liberalism" and "socialism" -- especially the European variety -- helped tremendously to draw the right's fire for decades). For what "technocracy" denotes is what the New Deal, organically, was all about: Forget ideology, urged Roosevelt, and just give me something -- something, anything, grounded on the best available empirical data, or even your best guess of technical expertise -- that might work. He cared not if the root of the idea sprang from conservatism or social democracy, from Edmund Burke or from Karl Marx.

"Technocracy" is essentially another way of saying "pragmatism." And to ideologues, nothing could be more abhorrent. To them, this authentic American (non)philosophy is like an unwanted quantum mechanics of their happily unified political field theory: pragmatism means that what works today may not work tomorrow; unpredictability reigns; we must forever adjust our methods to compensate for the unexpected -- in short, conscientious, hands-on governing is required. For a right winger of simplistic, notional, hands-off consistency, it's enough to induce the vapors.

But how do I know the term "technocracy" -- technocrat, technocratic, etc. -- is doomed as nothing more than a derisive substitute for "pragmatism"? I know, for He has written:

Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from "data" ... and who believes elections should be about (in Dukakis’s words) "competence," not "ideology."

That was George Will, from last month. The final Word.