P.M. Carpenter

Ron Paul: dancing with devils

There is the most uncharming little minuet taking place between the far-right wingnut world and major (of sorts) candidate respectability.

We understand that [Ron} Paul is not a white nationalist, but most of our people support him because of his stand on issues.... Also, our board recognizes that most of the leaders involved in the Fed and the international banking system are Jews.

Those profundities are, via the NY Times, brought to us by one Don Black, a kind of field fuehrer, you might say, for the neo-Nazi site "Stormfront," whose followers believe that the 20th century's greatest failure was its genocidal inadequacies.

The Web site is one of dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of likeminded sewers of monomaniacal morons; and if you've a site whose comment section has ever been under cyberassault by this pathetic scum, you'd understand a) why "white nationalism" needs the slickest possible public relations arm it can muster and b) something of the brutal stupidity of Hitler's original brownshirts.

Now here's Ron Paul, uh, explaining why he refuses to refuse the above's support:

I’ll go to anybody who I think I can convert to change their viewpoints.... I’m always looking at converting people to look at liberty the way I do.

An intriguing political strategy, that. Rather than launching a national movement for "liberty" by shot-gunning major swaths of the reasonably sane electorate, Paul instead targeted, through newslettery winks and nods, the incurably crazy and the insufferably bigoted. Which he still denies, which is what makes it all so insulting.

A cliffhanger? Really?

On ABC's "This Week," network-correspondent Jonathan Karl just took the Beltway's on-ramp to infinite job security by issuing the undefiant prediction that the 2012 presidential race will be close. Karl may not believe one syllable of it (he does, after all, seem like a bright lad), but for a Washington journalist to blast at the consecrated walls of safe, conventional wisdom is to rudely discombobulate the media's Frankensteinian creation of fairness -- meaning coverage straight down the middle, no matter the evidentiary imbalances; and commentary so bland as to be tasteless: both meanings.

Just what, at the moment, is the evidence for a close contest, which any tuned-in journalist would cite?

Let's see. We have a sitting president whose personal approval rating ranks somewhere in the neighborhood of Bing Crosby's; whose record of foreign policy achievements is so manifestly stellar it has the opposition fancifully wallowing in the dirt; whose domestic record of uninterrupted private-sector job growth and declining unemployment is positively awe inspiring when one stops to consider the ruthless, monolithic obstacles erected in his path by the sociopathic GOP; and whose head-to-head matchup numbers against a cold-blooded outsourcer or a disgraced wannabe despot or an early-Alzheimers governor or a utopian Bob Taft rather consistently indicate anything from a thundering blowout to at least a reasonably solid win.

And, this sitting president has yet to really begin campaigning.

So of course network correspondents are wont to join the nail-biting Beltway choir of always conventionally wise agnosticism and predict a real humdinger of a cliffhanger. 

Those congenital Puritans

Here's a fascinating little George Will aside from his shockingly competent, though predictably selective, column today about the extraordinary banality of this season's Republican presidential crop:

[Eugene] Debs ran [for the presidency] in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912, and in 1920 from prison, where the progressive Woodrow Wilson administration had sent him for violating the Espionage Act by speaking against World War I. (President Warren Harding, who is as despised by today’s progressive intelligentsia as Wilson is adored, commuted Debs’s sentence and invited him to the White House.)

And here's H.L. Mencken, on Debs, Wilson, and ... :

Confronted, on his death-bed, with the case of poor Debs, all his instincts compelled him to keep Debs in jail. I daresay that, as a purely logical matter, he saw clearly that the old fellow ought to be turned loose; certainly he must have known that Washington would not have hesitated, or Lincoln. But Calvinism triumphed as his intellectual faculties decayed. In the full bloom of health, with a plug hat on his head, he aped the gentry of his wistful adoration very cleverly, but lying in bed, stripped like Thackeray's Louis XIV, he reverted to his congenital Puritanism, which is to say, bounderism.

In the introductory ellipsis above one is tempted to insert "Will," for who else today radiates the same decaying intellect, the same triumphant Calvinism, the selfsame congenital Puritanism as once had by Woodrow Wilson as the bounderish George F. Will?

But, gentle Sir, and dear Madam, this is mere humbug on my part. Thus I shall end instead as does Will: Merry Christmas.

Astonishing

Sean Duffy is from Wisconsin. Sean Duffy is 40 years old. Sean Duffy is married; he has sired six children. Sean Duffy was a county prosecutor for eight years. Since January 2011 Sean Duffy has served as a freshman Republican in the U.S. House. And this, according to the NY Times, is what Sean Duffy, after 40 years of life -- 10 of them in public service -- has learned about the American political system:  

[W]hat I’ve come to realize is that in divided government you don’t always get what you want.

It seems incomprehensible that Duffy's congressional constituents failed to notice, back in 2010, what surely must have been the many other signs of his astonishing slowness on the uptake; what most schoolchildren learn in civics class required Duffy's (equally astonishing) election to the United States Congress.

So let us comfort ourselves this holiday season in the recuperative knowledge that the 112th Congress perhaps isn't so much systemically dysfunctional as it is just plain stupid. For stupid can be remedied.

And the winner is, Herman Cain!

Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism somewhat disproves its aim in reporting that "Among Republican hopefuls for president, Herman Cain was the most covered candidate in 2011."

Who itches for a fight?

The NY Times' Timothy Egan refutes "the conventional wisdom, which holds that those in the military support a [commander in chief] itching for a fight":

[T]hese soldiers, sailors, air men and women, and assorted boots on the ground know the cost — in trauma, in lives ruined, in friends lost, in good intentions gone bad — of going to war far more than the 99 percent not currently serving.

Egan's second proposition is, I think, unimpeachable. And because of that I'm skeptical as to the degree of conventionality embedded in the preceding "wisdom," at least barring Homer's exhilaratingly savage times, whose exhileration never materialized in Ilium, either.

Something I read a few months back in Evan Thomas's history of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, in his marvelous Sea of Thunder, couldn't help but register and add to my skepticism. If ever we engaged in a "good" war, an inexpressibly righteous one of towering revenge, which surely would outlast the horrors of war, it was that half of a global one against the Japanese. No? Yet the American boys who enlisted with such patriotic extravagance soon witnessed their "itch for a fight" on the rapid mend. One brief passage, from Thomas:

The crew was largely populated by teenagers who began the morning believing they were immortal and invincible. By evening, the survivors would be prematurely old men.... [Some] acknowledged that most of the brave talk, before the battle, about wanting to "see a little action" was obliterated by the first salvo of 14-inch shells. [One seaman] recalled simply thinking at the time, "I want to be home."

I emphasized those three words above to highlight the tenuousness of any such fighting itch. Elsewhere, another seaman related that when he saw his buddy's head rolling across the ship's deck, repaying the enemy for even Pearl Harbor just didn't matter anymore. He, too, just wanted to go home.

We'll always have our Caesars and Napoleons and Custers and Curtis LeMays, but most real uniformed men, if they've even a smattering of wits about them, itch for peace -- and that's a little something of conventionality that's been recorded throughout the ages. 

Charles Krauthammer, amusing revisionist

In his righteous pursuits of this wicked president and his diabolical Democratic allies, Charles Krauthammer is compelled, from time to time, which is to say habitually, to cut a few corners. In the literary art of polemics, this is OK, for it takes a lot of manure to grow a gorgeous rose -- the presumed though metaphorical material object of insubstantial polemics -- and today's is a real red beauty.

Having characterized the payroll tax cut as "one of the worst pieces of legislation in years," as "the perfect campaign ploy: an election-year bribe," and as "shameless pander[ing]," Krauthammer proceeds to ask with macroeconomic indignation:

What employer is going to alter his hiring decisions — whose effects last years — in anticipation of a one-year tax holiday, let alone two months?

The answer, of course, is none. No rational employer, anyway, would elect to commence hiring based merely on vague anticipations of a two-month, one-year, five-year or even permanent tax holiday (i.e., tax cut). And your scornful acknowledgement of that macroeconomic fact of life, Mr. Krauthammer, only belies all the nonsense tripping off the disingenuous tongue of John Boehner & Co. -- that employers require, above all, certainty in the tax code.

They do not. What they require is consumers consuming, something they'll do more of if they've more money with which to consume -- duh -- which is called increased aggregate demand, which leads to new hires to satisfy it. This is the "A," the "B" and the "C" of the Keynesian ABCs, Mr. Krauthammer, which, essentially, you just agreed is holier than Boehner's Laff-able supply-side Scripture. In brief, all sane employers are by loose definition grubby yet rational Jerry Maguire players: they must first see the money.

But all that, Mr. Krauthammer, was a mere trifle of your incurable crankiness compared to this magnificent whopper of your awesome insight:

The Democrats set a trap and the Republicans walked right into it.

Can't wait, I just can't wait, Mr. Krauthammer, for your forthcoming history of the Second World War: "Stalin's Red Army set a trap and Hitler's Wehrmacht walked right into it."

The offensive guilt-by-association defense

Andrew Sullivan:

In supporting Ron Paul, I am backing one of the few candidates in the GOP field not to have exploited racial code words, homophobia, illegal immigration, or generalizations about Muslims that come easily to the mind of, say, Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain, who actually said he wouldn't appoint a Muslim to his cabinet! I am backing one of the few GOP candidates not to have endorsed torture and to have opposed the Iraq war. To pick Paul out as the core bigot in this crowd, and to regard anyone who backs him as tainted by bigotry ... seems to me to be perverse.

Oh, damn. Sullivan was doing just fine until that last part.

For the phrase, "to regard anyone who backs him as tainted by bigotry," is a straw man, or at least it is to anyone sensible enough to find such an alleged, sophistic taint contemptible.

Hey, I know the feeling. I received I don't recall how many emails throughout 2008 regarding my anti-Hillary "misogyny," when my written opinions were little more than a clean combination of pro-Obamaism and anti-Iraq-warism, contra-Hillary Clinton's 2002 Senate vote. The latter's gender had no more to do with my 2008 political preference than, I'm sure, "bigotry" does with Sullivan's 2012 GOP endorsement.

The only legitimate question here is one of judgment: Does Ron Paul, given his inadequately explained history, now deserve a fair man's endorsement? I think not, and I also think I'm pretty fair (as I believe Sullivan is; he's merely experiencing a momentary lapse of excessive redemption).

To those who have so endorsed, however, I'd add that to play the diversionary self-defense card of contempt-worthy guilt-by-association is itself, well, rather perverse.

We told them so

I'm no Middle East expert, but in 2002 and 2003 I was, along with many other non-experts and consummate experts alike, writing hysterically about the ghastly headlines and ledes we inescapably would be reading once the immense folly of Bush's coming war was over:

Explosions Rock Baghdad Amid Iraqi Political Crisis

A wave of coordinated explosions ripped across Baghdad early on Thursday ... jolting a country already unsettled by a deepening political crisis.

A few days ago, President Obama said that "history will judge" the wisdom of our Iraq invasion. But history already did, the "will" is superfluous, and this is one "We told you so" in which there is no self-satisfaction whatsoever to be had.

A re-clarification

A couple of days ago Ezra Klein attempted to clarify House Republicans' latest tantrum:

The single most important thing to understand about the ongoing debate over the payroll tax cut is that it’s not about the payroll tax cut.... Rather, Democrats and Republicans are arguing over the price Democrats are willing to pay and Republicans are willing to accept in order to extend the payroll tax cut for a full year. Republicans want, among other things, the Keystone XL Pipeline and further cuts to discretionary spending.

Understood, as far as that goes. Yet were this President McCain asking for a one-year or two-month or friggin' decade-long payroll tax cut, would House Republicans object? Would they burden any such bill with extraneous demands for this and that? Of course not.

It is House Republicans who insist the "ongoing debate" is indeed about the payroll tax cut, and, indeed as well, that somewhat duplicitous insistence is what has defined (which Ezra Klein failed to clarify) not only Republican tactics, but this entire debate. And the debate isn't really about those "other things" -- "the Keystone XL Pipeline and further cuts to discretionary spending." It is instead, quite simply, about denying President Obama a commonsensical, Keynesian band-aid to a limping economy.

It is about denying President Obama, period.

The Mysterious Will

In these desperate, post-modernist times of epistemological commotion and semantic chaos, the last thing we needed was for America's Supreme Bean -- George Will -- to come along and further muddy those other things up. But this morning, perhaps only because He writes in mysterious ways, this is precisely what Will has wrought.

Let us cut to the quip. Are these two passages in urgent need of some serious hermeneutics?

Gingrich’s campaign against courts repudiates contemporary conservatism’s core commitment to limited government....

He disdains the central conservative virtue, prudence....

The Book of Job is a piece of cake, and Abraham's willingness to disembowel his son Isaac mere child's play, compared to the interpretive efforts required of Will's cabalistic revelations of "contemporary conservatism." That would be contemporary conservatism, as in, contemporary, that is, "marked by the present time," which is to say, current.

Did you know that this conservatism is "prudent"?

Not only that, prudence, or so it is bellowed by the Mighty Will, is contemporary conservatism's central virtue. Yes, the party of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, the philosophy of Joe Walsh and Louie Gohmert, the raison d'etre of Rand Paul and Jim DeMint -- and this leaves aside the party's Scott Walkers and Rick Scotts -- that party, as ruled by its contemporary ideology, is dedicated to the virtuous proposition of ... prudence.

Will did not write that it ought to be, but that it is.

We also learn of Will's tribal "commitment to limited government": and that, we suppose in our earthly ignorance, would be the peculiar kind of limited government that, say, forever gluts the Pentagon, or tells you which variety of genitals you can touch in holy union, or what agricultural products you can smoke -- and further tells fully half the population that its body isn't really its.

But, Blasphemy! We must further suppose that that is what any disputation with, or interpretation of, Will would entail. For He has written, and we must absorb -- fundamentally, as His inexorable spawn, Newt, would say.

Good demagoguery gone bad

There was an encouraging sign yesterday that John McCain's creeping senility can in fact bob and weave, as demonstrated in his shockingly lucid criticism of his House counterparts' refusal to extend the payroll tax cut:

It is harming the view, if it’s possible anymore, of the American people about Congress.

Sadly, however, John's sudden improvement seems to have come at the cost of Eric Cantor's acute slippage:

[T]he people of this country are beginning to wonder about the body on the other side of this Capitol and are wondering what the leader over there has against the middle class of this country.

Now, now, Eric, you know better. You know that populist, insurrectionist rumblings are rarely if ever ignited over what half of one-third of a government is doing at the tyrannical behest of its bourgeoisie-despising majority leader; assuming, even, that you, Eric, could make such a preposterous rap stick.  

American demagoguery is a delicate thing. It is not, as many republican adepts believe, always cruelly unrighteous, for it can be adorably wicked, as it was, say, in the playful hands of Boston's James Michael Curley; and it is not always ill advised, as Huey Long's material improvements of his swampland of a state proved; nor is it always rhetorically smooth, as the often drunken incoherence of Joe McCarthy revealed. But it does require at least some subatomic smidgeon of truth, reality, and above all believability -- and here, on all three indictable counts, Eric Cantor has pitiably transgressed. Harry Reid has it in for the American middle class?

One could conjure more threaded evidence for the old lunatic bugaboos that Gen. George C. Marshall was a Stalinist sympathizer and President Eisenhower a fellow traveller, as the John Birchers raved, than for Cantor's peculiar desperation that Harry Reid is plotting against our vast and sainted Babbittry.

In short, Mr. Cantor has heaved the envelope of sniveling, rabble-rousing Crazy to unacceptably unbelievable extremes. He has left even the abstract and post-expressionist artists of American demagoguery behind, thereby endangering its immediate future. And woe to him who knows not his limits, or the limits of his craft.

Hang tough

Thus spoke John Boehner:

[T]he issue now is will the president engage with the Senate Democrats and bring them to the table so we can resolve this and give to the president what he has asked us to give him: a one-year extension of these expiring programs.

Oh we get it. Speaker Boehner and pals were trying to be helpful.

Ah, screw it. When one is contemplating contemporary GOP politics, ridicule remedies nothing and reason is futile. Excepting maybe Sen. Scott Brown, who's been terrified into reasonableness, all the usual partisan, pseudoconservative yahoos will line up before the cable cameras and yap away with identically insufferable propaganda; see above.

Their dishonor is bottomless, their shame nonexistent, and their arrogance awesome. That much is known; hell, how couldn't it be, since they flaunt each like a tinhorn dictator does his unearned medals. So all reasonable eyes shift to the president and Harry Reid, urging, Hang tough.

The adult mind of Ron Paul

Jonathan Chait, pace Andrew Sullivan, assesses Ron Paul's standing:

Paul’s supporters seem to believe that the media ignoring him is the only thing keeping him from challenging for the Party nomination. More likely, it’s the only thing that’s allowed his candidacy to progress to this point. If more people actually understood the full scope of Paul’s fringe-right views, a huge portion of his support would peel off.

I would like to think that Chait's point is self-evident; that if the "huge portion" is indeed peelable, it hasn't peeled off only because of an inadequate education. There are others among Paul's supporters, however, who are well aware of those "fringe-right views" but have dismissed them as forgivable relics of Paul's now-rehabilitated past: What, that sweet, lovably fumbling old guy who has so enthralled us in so many debates with his visionary simplicity? Can't you other folks see how genuine he is, how his character is so splendidly solid -- now?

No, we can't, really. Or, rather, perhaps we shouldn't.

When Ron Paul published repeated editions of that selfsame filthy bile -- the above-referenced "fringe-right views" -- he wasn't some confused, half-educated, soul-searching kid in pursuit of a comforting worldview. He was an adult, an advocate, a high "professional" man of medical science and electoral politics, and yet a ragtag pusher of the some of the lowest cultural hate and division. It is simply inconceivable that, by the late 20th century, anything remotely close to a healthily developed mind could have harbored such Neanderthalic public opinions.

Paul's did.

For reasons insufficiently explained, some of Paul's supporters argue that Newt Gingrich's past should haunt him, and Mitt Romney's past should haunt him, and so forth. But Paul? He's owed not his past, but a pass. Oh well, without hypocrisy in politics ...

The New Know-Nothingism

Ron Paul, on his publishing past:

"I absolutely, honestly do not know who wrote those [racist] things," Mr. Paul said in an interview on CNN [in 2008].

If he can't competently manage a pulp newsletter, how in hell can he manage a complex nation?

By not managing it, of course, which might be true to the libertarian creed, but would also yield the same inattentive, sorry results.