The Carpentariat

Let's ask Tom

Convicted-felon Tom DeLay had this to say yesterday about confirmed-adulterer Newt Gingrich: "[H]e's not really a conservative."

K-Street-manipulator Rick Santorum concurred, saying "there was a conservative coup within three years of him becoming the Speaker."

Several of DeLay's House contemporaries, including convicted-mail-fraud-artist Duke Cunningham, perjurer Bob Ney, Gingrichian-adulterer Bob Livingston, and Man-Pageboy-coordinator Mark Foley, were not available for comment on this urgent question of what goes into the making of a true "conservative."

Divine balance

FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver:

[T]here is enough evidence — when you look carefully at the day-to-day [polling] results — to conclude that Mr. Romney has re-emerged as the slight favorite in Florida.... [I]t looks as though Mr. Gingrich’s surge may have reached its apogee over the weekend.

The bad news is that Romney's positive trajectory will likely subtract tonight from his pitiable attempts at predatory snarling. The good news is that Gingrich's negative trajectory will unquestionably add to his predatory snarling.

The Lord taketh away, and the Lord giveth.

Gingrich's sinful virtue

You know, it could be that Gingrich -- superb Catholic and reformed mortal sinner that he is -- is only trying to popularize and thus further democratize the venial sin (or what I assume is the mere venial sin) of embellishment:

After nearly a week on the defensive, CNN's John King reports ... that Newt Gingrich's claim about offering witnesses to ABC News in his defense — to rebut the network's interview with his second wife, Marianne Gingrich — was not true.

Well blow me down.

Of course it could also be that Gingrich is only working his way through what you might call the rather middling deadly sins, chiefly Pride -- which, come to think of it, though, the unexcelled Catholic G.K. Chesterton disdained above all its deadly competitors, since the prideful man "prey[s] on society in the name of his own genius (or rather of his own belief in his own genius)." Now there's a parenthetical "ouch" if I ever read one.

Well, whatever. Let us not fuss about sinfulness and virtues, especially in a man whose singular virtue appears to be an awesome talent for bamboozling the boobs. For instance take a look at this comment left on the Politico story:

I think that the terms politician and liar are synonymous. So we have to judge them by their actions.... It is based on that, that I support Newt first. He can huff and puff all he wants but at the end of the day, his record of success is irrefutable and for that, he has earned my support.

"His record of success" was a funny-enough phrase. So the commenter really shouldn't have added "irrefutable." To wit, perhaps the highest "success" Gingrich now touts is a surplus budget under Bill Clinton, whose surplus-compelling budget bill Gingrich rallied his troops to vote against. While doing this, Big-Idea Gingrich also played the part of a prophet in declaring that Clinton's budget bill would bring the fury of a "Great Depression" down upon us, guaranteed.

Still, one must give credit where credit is due; for it is comments, like the one above, that demonstrate Gingrich's creeping (and creepy) success in making the lesser political sins more democratically embraceable. Some -- those of a decidedly weaker stomach and higher mind -- would label any public acceptance of Gingrich's corruption a "slippery slope." I, however, tend to view such acceptance, to whatever extent it actually exists, as mostly the pathology of a dying, pseudoconservative species.

'An honest thinker'

I was just reading an analysis of the 17th-century political philosopher John Locke when I encountered this charming assessment:

To those who expect from a philosopher startling paradoxes and novel 'discoveries' he inevitably appears as pedestrian and unexciting. But he gives throughout the impression of being an honest thinker. In reading him one is not forced to ask oneself constantly whether he can possibly have believed what he was saying.

And that's really the essence of all political thought that we respect and value, is it not? Even if it is thought with which we ardently disagree. Simple honesty; no games, no gyrations, no clever dodges or obfuscations, no b.s. Just straightforward, here's-how-I-genuinely-see-it opinion.

As you probably expected, and more likely hoped, I am going somewhere a bit more contemporary with this.

When you read the above quote, did you not fleetingly think of how contrary its conclusion was to conservative thinkers and GOP pols of today? How many TV interviews have we all suffered through with, say, a Bill Kristol or Rich Lowry or Mitch McConnell or Eric Cantor, in which we were forced constantly to ask ourselves: Can he possibly believe what he is saying?

And that would seem to be the simple test -- the fundamental question that voters are asking themselves -- that conservative thinkers and GOP pols are universally failing these days. Their credibility and, for want of a better term, 'authenticity' are shot -- and they've been shot not by an opposition in possession of an even greater cleverness or more elaborate gyrations, but by their own hands.

(-)Romney

I said this only two days ago but I'll say it again. Mitt Romney is fast becoming as unelectable as Barry Goldwater, George McGovern, or David Duke. He's not merely imploding; he's disintegrating.

From the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll:

Among independents, Romney’s unfavorable rating now tops 50 percent — albeit by a single point — a first in Post-ABC polling back to 2006. Just two weeks ago, more independents had favorable than unfavorable views of Romney; now, it’s 2 to 1 negative....

Even "among his fellow Republicans, negative ratings have jumped from 18 to 32 percent." The even better news? Within his party Romney retains a 58 percent favorable rating -- which means they may yet salute him in Tampa.

Once all the stupefying splendor of Newt Gingrich has passed, the GOP faithful will shudder the confetti, they'll look around, broodingly, and they'll resume their ... ahem ... support of Willard Mitt Romney, that latte-drinking, biscotti-munching, wind-surfing, French-speaking caveman of the Caymans.

Of Orwell, Luntz, Berle and Aristophanes

Mitch Daniels, stand-up comedian:

It’s not fair and it’s not true for the president to attack Republicans in Congress as obstacles on these [economic] questions. They and they alone have passed bills to reduce borrowing, reform entitlements and encourage new job creation, only to be shot down time and time again by the president and his Democratic Senate allies.

I gather that Mr. Daniels steals at least some of his ideas from that celebrated comedy writer of ancient yesteryear, Aristophanes, who once poignantly put in the mouth of another wantonly humorous demagogue: "I am the dog, since I bark in your defense."

For a mascot the GOP should nix the pachyderm and go with a snarling canine; perhaps one of those "ugliest-dogs-of-the-year" mutts.

SOTU

In reading President Obama's State of the Union address, one encounters a dizzying mass of nearly 6,500 words. There's all the stuff that constitutes the quintessential SOTU; there are the tax credits for patriotic businesses, there's the light-hearted call for deregulating dairy farmers, there's the stirring vision of developing clean energy, and so on. Check, check, check, and more checks. Yet somewhere in all that, there is a transcendent thought, a theme, a thrust which the president originated and then told his speechwriters, Build me a SOTU around that. You know, like the Kohler-faucet-packing couple in the television ad, who, evidently having survived Bush economics, instruct their architect to "Build us a house around that."

Last night's thrust? A mere 36 words, a passage not only of transcendent thought or a compelling theme, but 36 words of prodigious, Obamian continuity which articulate nothing less than the Republic's survival:

We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas.

Candidate Obama campaigned for two years on this incontrovertibly pragmatic and rather virtuous concept, yet he's been forced to govern for three against the destructive and deepest grains of political malevolence. We have, courtesy the universally obstructionist GOP, entered an era of no mere partisan contentiousness; ours, instead, is an era of winner takes all -- and in the GOP's ideological construction, there can be only one winner, ever: the GOP. And in its absolutist pursuit of unmitigated power, a smoldering wasteland may be required.

We are well on our way.

As was instantly re-reflected in the pseudoconservative, post-SOTU responses; in the official one, from Gov. Mitch Daniels, self-consciously bugabooing the Obama administration's "constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others"; and in this representative species of right-wing hackdom: Obama's address was "shockingly barren" and "transparently partisan."

The irony of that latter observation is this: There is a gathering realization among small-r republicans that the only effective antidote to the big-r breed's transparently partisan poison is a crushing, thoroughgoing partisanship from across the aisle. In 2012, either the electorate unambiguously humiliates and renounces the party of malevolence and ideological rigidity, or that party will wreak yet more destruction on our ever-expanding wasteland of a teetering Republic.

To that effect, yes, President Obama's SOTU was partisan. Because, at long last, it had to be.

Has it come to this?

The Wall Street Journal editorial is titled "The Gingrich Challenge," thus named, I imagine, after rejecting the sincerer headline, "Never Let Them See Us Sweat." The editorial's sangfroid is admirable, if not laughable, leaving me to additionally imagine only the quantity of brandy snifters consumed in the course of its exquisitely painful composition. 

What has resulted from Newt Gingrich's South Carolina victory? Mayhem? Chaos? Gentlemen GOPers leaping from Wall Street's glass and steel, ten stories up? No, no. A "useful uproar," that's what. You know, just as the uproar amidst 1968 Chicago was useful. Hey, when one makes a most agreeable living by writing unapologetic horseshit for the privileged classes, the sturdier stuff of a stiff upper lip is on occasion required.

And stiff indeed is the editorialist's lip. I quote with supreme amusement:

As for the GOP establishment, such as it still is, Mr. Gingrich's re-emergence is likely to cause a panic attack. They don't believe he is electable. [Merely because he most assuredly is not?] Our advice would be to relax and let the voters decide.

Good grief, has it really come to that? Letting the vast, unwashed proletariat decide?

"Watson, the needle."

Self-importation

Will Romney's neologism of "self-deportation" lead to illegal immigration being more softly described as "self-importation"?

And if not, why not?

"Your papers, please."

"Sorry, I have none. I self-imported."

I like it.

Good timing is everything, and sometimes impossible

E.J. Dionne:

[Romney] attacked and attacked and attacked again ... Romney set the agenda ... What surprised me was that Gingrich never even sought to find a way to turn things back on Romney, to force Romney to answer questions about his own record -- at Bain Capital, as governor or on anything else.

Dionne speculates -- correctly, I think -- on causation: Gingrich's (over)confidence. But I also think Dionne overestimates the intensity and effectiveness of Romney's attacks. To me they fell rather flat, and as I speculated at the time, this was probably because they represented new material to Romney. And Romney doesn't do the aggressively "new" very well.

Plus, I thought Gingrich's precalculated nonresponse response was likely at least passably compelling to his target audience: Look, we all knew what Romney would say tonight -- all of which he only now finds attack-worthy. Ergo, his motives are corrupt. Gingrich perhaps should have been more explicit in this tactic, nevertheless a tried and true debate tactic it is.

Furthermore, Gingrich knows that Romney has been pinned behind a kind of natural eight ball all along, which has forced the characterizing issue of his somewhat feckless counterattacks. To explain, an analogy. A friend of mine a few years back was asked by a U.S. Senate candidate's campaign to join it as a consultant. He agreed, and upon his arrival at campaign headquarters he was promptly informed that the candidate, who was leading comfortably in the polls, would be going negative at the staff's recommendation. As the staff saw things, their opponent would soon pull out all the negative stops, and they'd simply beat him to the punch. My friend freaked. No! he protested. You're going to blow it! You go negative now, while you're ahead, and it will reveal a weak sensitivity and turn the negatives back on you. Matters became rather heated, the staff persisted, and my friend resigned in disgust. The early-negative candidate? Well, that candidate hasn't been heard from since.

The irreproachable moral to that story is that Romney's belated attackiness isn't entirely a failing. He's only been doing what my friend's candidate should have done. Naturally, this puts him in an untimely squeeze, but he had little choice. To sharpen his claws (and thus his game) any earlier against Gingrich could have been even more politically calamitous. The downside to Romney's understandable prudence, though, is that his attacks are now merely predictable and not very polished.

Gingrich and the Demagogic Style

The most exemplary Gingrichian "fact" in the Fact Checker's post-debate analysis is the final entry:

"I went to a Goldwater organizing session in 1964. I met with Ronald Reagan for the first time in 1974." — Gingrich

... Gingrich neatly skips over the fact that he was southern regional director for the presidential campaign of (northeast liberal!) Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in 1968.

Of course the beauty of running the kind of factless, emotion-based, anti-intellectual presidential campaign that Gingrich is running, in the classic Demagogue Style, is that one's followers are not apt to check facts, since, as anti-intellectuals, they disdain the taint of learning, or correction, which might accompany an education. If they are confronted with any undesirable realities of indisputable facts, they simply write them off as yet another elaborate plot laid by the sinister media, who, for reasons never disclosed, have it in for their infallible candidate.

As part and parcel of the American anti-intellectual tradition, the Demagogic Style comes with this built-in, self-defense mechanism. The more the demagogue is attacked, the internally stronger he becomes, the more devoted is his base. The trick for the demagogue in a higher-office contest, though, is to begin with a sufficiently broad base, because adding outsiders -- those who've been less susceptible to the demagogue's dark, insular universe of deception -- becomes increasingly difficult as the demagogue is increasingly exposed to assorted lights of scrutiny.

It is here that Gingrich meets a fragile future. For his present base of support is, as they say, perhaps miles wide, but only inches deep. The mass and nearly instant abandonment he suffered in Iowa was a leading indicator of his candidacy's exceptional fragility, which, even as magnificently inept as he is, Mitt Romney experiences to a far lesser degree.

The GOP debate

We're only eight minutes into the debate and Romney has worked "disgraced" into his soliloquies, with respect to Gingrich, three times.

***

Gingrich just turned Romney's own capital gains argument on its head, slamming Romney's head to the mat in the process. Romney had no response. He just stood there, speechless.

***

Mitt Romney is a mere, teething pup of an attack dog; he doesn't do vicious well, and this latest exhibition of the GOP Kennel Club demonstrates that truism again, and brilliantly. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, is a chronically underfed mastiff who drools rabid saliva before breakfast (usually a nice Mitts Benedict with hollandaise) and then slathers his victim's blood like Prego.

Already it's nearly too ghastly to watch. These things should be rated for television by some tasteful, discriminating censor. The horror! And in primtime no less. Nonetheless, here we are, and Romney, through what seems like strangely rehearsed dispassion, is being slowly exsanguinated.

***

On Cuba, Gingrich just time-warped himself into an Allen Dulles, circa 1961.

Please take my word for this: Notwithstanding Newt Gingrich, most historians actually do learn something from reading history.

***

Perhaps it's only because I've been up since 3 a.m., but this debate, too, seems as though it is rapidly fading into listlessness. Of course listening to Rick Santorum invade Iran for the 18th(?) time doesn't help.

***

Romney is of a genuinely robotic mind. His assaults against Obama are rhythmic and fluid (even if asinine), while his stabs at Gingrich are stunted, uncertain, and perambulatory. And it's clear this is only because he's performed the former a gazillion times, and the latter only a few.

***

Well, in defending W.'s tax-cutting failure to invigorate the economy, Gingrich just validated one of Obama's inevitable arguments: things would have been worse, said Gingrich, without the tax cuts ... (or stimulus?). You'll be seeing that one on video tape.

***

This debate was one of undeveloped potential. Romney scored no points -- same old Romney, really -- while Gingrich began with a dismissive sneering that held vast promise, but soon withered -- probably because he wanted to appear "presidential." But that's not what got him where he is; and a domesticated approach will get him no farther. I suspect he'll be more animated in the next debate, because I suspect he'll have to be.

 

The guns of January

Only a Truly Righteous Man of God would so willingly trample on the Ninth Commandment in hieing from friendly political competition to a desperate felony accusation:

"At the time he was lobbying Republican congressmen for Medicare Part D, was he working, or were his entities working, with any health care companies that could have benefited from that?" Romney asked. "That could represent not just evidence of lobbying but potentially wrongful activity of some kind [emphasis, the Lord's]."

On the other hand, Mitt's so cute when he's frenzied angry.

Romney as Macbeth

The most delightful feature of the political circus still on tour has profoundly transfigured. Remember, in those days of yore, when our most transcendent joy came in watching the GOP's stumblebums assault and vilify one another and in general eviscerate each other's electability -- especially Mitt Romney's, which was perceived with some minor justification as the one realistic threat to President Obama? Well, none of that, any longer, makes any difference. Now they're all unelectable, and probably Mitt Romney most of all.

This election will be scored as historic mostly in the sense that never before has a party so disowned, so abused, so thoroughly trashed its only presidential hope (possible exception: the Whigs and Henry Clay). Far, far more effectively than Obama or any Democrat ever could, Romney's compadres have reduced him to a bandaged, sputtering contender of an Elia Kazan film. Given the pounding he's taken in this election cycle, Mitt couldn't now get himself elected as State Auditor of Utah.

It's a thing of pity ... almost. And what makes me so uncommonly pitiless is that Mitt has been as abusive, as decadent, as monstrous as any. He deserves all the wickedness that his way comes.

Putting on our thinking caps

Politico's "Arena" asks: "Is Gingrich an embarrassment to the GOP?"

Oh, I don't know ... was Minnie Pearl an embarrassment to 'Hee-Haw' humor? ... was John Wayne an embarrassment to B Westerns? ... was Mussolini an embarrassment to fascism?

Damn! these infernal brain-teasers.