PMC Commentary

That's cold, Ross

Ross Douthat assesses the GOP's frontrunner:

The White House might prefer to face Rick Santorum in the general election, but an out-of-touch rich guy running on Medicare cuts and an ill-considered tax plan will make for a pretty inviting target in his own right.

If you are the frontrunner, there are -- insert throat-clearing here -- four little words you never want to see yourself described as by one of your party's leading Establishment voices: "A pretty inviting target." One of the other occasional frontrunners would of course be delighted to see himself described as an inviting target, since being a target means somebody cares enough to hurt you. To really, really hurt you. Alas, Santorum and Gingrich's masochistic days are numbered.

Mitt Romney's even deeper weakness is, however, evidenced in Douthat's previous wording: "The White House might prefer to face Rick Santorum." Think about that. Say, two months ago, would Douthat or any commentator have written anything but that the WH would prefer to face Rick Santorum? Would there have been any equivocation, any question, any doubt whatsoever?

Yet, Douthat's correct. No paid cognition in Chicago or the WH's political office would any longer summarily opt for a run against Santorum, over Romney. And for the latter, there's no fall conceivably greater than that. Again, think about it. The WH would now actually have to stop and meditate: Whom do we prefer to run against? Mitt Romney, or an unemployed, former U.S. senator who was booted from office in electoral disgrace and campaigns against the sainted John Kennedy and routinely offends 51 percent of the population? Yep, that second guy might actually be the stronger candidate. Hmmm.

Snowe on Schlesinger

I enjoyed Olympia Snowe's play on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s words:

I see a vital need for the political center in order for our democracy to flourish and to find solutions that unite rather than divide us.

That is, Sen. Snowe sees a political need for a Vital Center in a healthy democracy, even if, I grant you, Schlesinger's theory pertained to foreign, not domestic, affairs. Still, quite clever.

One strains to locate other enjoyment in Snowe's announcement, however. Her pessimism -- "I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term" -- is rather ghastly, nonetheless I suppose "up" is pretty much the only direction the Senate can go.

I find it ironically peculiar that my entrenched cynicism should pale in Snowe's dark shadow, yet a thorough drubbing of the GOP this year should -- should -- begin to reverse the hyperpartisanship she observes.

Not yet redneck enough, Mr. Goldwater

Before proceeding, I must say that my favorite part of primary night was hearing Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a Romney man, refer on MSNBC to "Communist China." I don't know that I've heard that rather antiquated term since Everett Dirksen, but considering that the GOP remains the party of hula hoops, bomb shelters, Davy Crockett hats and June Cleaver gowns, no doubt the nostalgia was intentional. (Odd, though, that no one else attending my combination "Out of the UN!"-Tupperware party last night seemed taken aback.)

But back to the present reality, however frightful it may be. And for me at least, that reality is beginning to blur. Which is to say, does it really make much difference whether it's Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum as the GOP's standard-bearer? To put it in Gingrichese, Is there, any longer, any fundamental distinction between these two ideologically hyperventilating gigolos?

Sure, Santorum is the True Believer. Yet the party's base is the wind, and Romney is the flatulence, so as the wind goes, so goes Mr. Romney. Thus as a practical, operational matter of Party Ideology Unbound, with either gentleman we get an umpteenth tax cut, marriage police, and mushroom clouds over Iran -- and who in, or out of, his right-wing mind could ask for anything more?

Speaking of Communist China ... When we actually did that with some regularity, the modern GOP's prototypical Libertarian-Social Moralist, Barry Goldwater, had first to face down liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller for the presidential nomination of 1964 -- the year of the party's official right-wing detonation. Extraordinary, is it not, that in 2012, Goldwater would not have survived Iowa, being the "'60s liberal" that he would be deemed.

My most cherished Goldwater quote, which years later he intoned not out of delight, but despair: "Perhaps I'm one of the reasons this place [Washington, D.C.] is so redneck."

Wrong again

From the Washington Post:

The former Massachusetts governor said he was "not enough of a pundit" to evaluate how his comments [about Cadillacs and NASCAR owners] are received by voters struggling through the economic recession.

It's not a question of punditry, Mr. Romney. It's a question of your humanity.

Dear Mr. Jindal: Please don't feed the buffoons

Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, at a Republican Governors Association news conference this week:

President Obama is clearly the most liberal president we’ve had. You’d literally have to go back to Jimmy Carter’s years in the White House, back in the 1970s, to match the liberal ideology, to match the incompetence.

This is, as they say, a free country, so everyone has a right to interpret "incompetence" as they see it. But contemplate the egregious history in Mr. Jindal's comments. Obama "is clearly the most liberal president we've had" -- which knocks the founders of the New Deal and Great Society down one ideological peg, at least; then to confuse matters, Jindal asserts that Obama is equal in liberalism to conservative Democratic president Jimmy Carter.

Which is it?

Is Jindal actually unaware of what the 1980 Kennedy-Carter primary battle was all about? -- as Jules Witcover put it in his history of the Democratic Party, that "New Dealers ... abhorred Carter's lack of passion for the old party commitment to government as an engine of aggressive and imaginative change"? Or does Jindal merely believe that since his base mindlessly believes that Carter was a flaming liberal, by virtue of his party label alone, then why tamper with their atrocious history?  

The most peculiar aspect of Jindal's revisionism, settled among the vastness of GOP revisionism, is that it accomplishes only two things: 1) a few buffoons in the GOP base let loose a Hurrah! and 2) it becomes yet another laughingstock item to everyone else. 

Why do they do this to themselves? There ain't no future in it.

Calling Edmund Burke

I had underestimated David Brooks' philosophical disaffection until I reached his stunningly alienated, elegiac conclusion in this morning's column, in which he essentially ranks the contemporary GOP as commensurate with fascist persecution:

First they went after the Rockefeller Republicans, but I was not a Rockefeller Republican. Then they went after the compassionate conservatives, but I was not a compassionate conservative. Then they went after the mainstream conservatives, and there was no one left to speak for me.

Not merely pols but commentators, too, of every ideological stripe are fond of dog whistles, but make no mistake (as if one could here). That was no whistle or wink; that was a loudspeaker blaring to the authentically conservative compound: Run for your lives, our once-noble movement has ignominiously degraded into utter philosophical depravity. Again, Brooks:

In the 1960s and ’70s, the fight was between conservatives and moderates. Conservatives trounced the moderates and have driven them from the party. These days the fight is between the protesters and the professionals.... The big difference is that the protesters don’t believe in governance.

And the protesters are winning, if they have not in fact won -- a consequence chiefly of the professionals' pusillanimity.

Brooks asks, finally, what virtually every unintoxicated student of American political history has been asking for years (i.e., more than five):

[W]here have these party leaders been over the past five years, when all the forces that distort the G.O.P. were metastasizing? Where were they during the rise of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck? Where were they when Arizona passed its beyond-the-fringe immigration law? Where were they in the summer of 2011 when the House Republicans rejected even the possibility of budget compromise?

I can answer that, Mr. Brooks. They were lounging in their cloakrooms' soft-leather, wingback chairs, breezing their eyes across conservative columns that dwelled, for example, on socioeconomic functions of "happiness," rather than conservative columns that relentlessly smashed the emergency glass and frantically rang the alarm bell: Has this party gone fucking nuts -- or what? Granted there have been a few conservatives, such as Andrew Sullivan, doing just that; but on the whole authentic conservatives have tended to sigh and tsk-tsk instead of unambiguously condemn.

And now, it may be too late. The Republican Party may be irredeemable as a conservative party. It, and the radical philosophy it has embraced in a smothering death-hold, no longer, as law professor Carl Bogus poignantly writes in his latest work, Buckley, embraces a conservative "philosophy of caution and prudence," or is aware of "the dangers of unintended consequences," or fosters "community -- a hallmark of Burkeanism," or rejects "military adventurism," or ponders the merits of "pragma[tism]." Rather, "Conservatism [is] now based on immutable truths of human nature and Christian values," which of course isn't conservatism at all -- not, anyway, the authentic conservatism of Edmund Burke or Russell Kirk or Robert Taft.

For heaven's sake I as a democratic socialist am more authentically conservative than just about any self-identified conservative is these days -- assuming, that is, one properly interprets "conservative" as "Burkean," as did, for instance (and as Bogus notes), Sen. Eugene McCarthy; in whose philosophical camp one must also include Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama.

At any rate, it's good to see David Brooks finally ringing the bell with unmistakable clarity, even if the horses have already stampeded out of the barn.

Gingrich will again be the story

I take E.J. Dionne's predominant point about electoral prudence -- in fact we have all taken it, since Thomas Dewey -- but on this one minor-est of premises within a minor premise (which I have duly italicized) I dissent: 

Democrats have an interest in the Republican contest going on indefinitely. Romney victories in Tuesday’s Michigan and Arizona primaries would likely shorten the process, and ending the nomination battle quickly is the precondition for a Republican counteroffensive.

What evidence exists that Romney victories tomorrow would in any way shorten the GOP's primary process? I don't see it.

Doubtless, two more Romney wins would contribute immensely to Romney's inevitability, but such inevitability has so far failed to impress or persuade a very substantial portion of a quite disgruntled GOP base. Yes, he da man; but they don't have to be happy about it, and of that, they've made no secret. And just because Romney may walk off with Michigan and Arizona tomorrow, as he's already done with New Hampshire and Nevada and Florida, there's little reason to think the base will suddenly be wild about Willard. 

Both Gingrich and Santorum can live off the land (and a couple of billionaires) till June; which is to say, for us they can make life a delightful hell for Mitt Romney. In time, the base may have to swallow the former governor, but till then, they don't have to savor him. Thus enter the would-be spoilers, whose permanent doom Romney must continue to heavily invest in -- because one never knows.

And, if I may ... I still believe Newt Gingrich is "the story," more so than Rick Santorum. The latter was merely the last to be elevated to national notoriety, and like all the others -- Bachmann, Cain, etc. -- he'll fade, assuming he doesn't stupendously dynamite himself first. The base will remain in need of a Romney-alternative, though. So then comes a recycling process. And who's first in line? Who, that is, will be left?

Yep, Newt.

What Kennedy said, and what Santorum said he said

Like Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum does not or perhaps cannot "do nuance," an intellectual defect which might be correctable through a college course in critical thinking, but such a refinement would, I suppose, only make Rick a "snob." Hence he's forever immured in a black hole of blind pomposity.

QED, the curious ignorance (?) he displayed yesterday on ABC's "This Week." Responding to George Stephanopoulos' puzzlement about his retching over John Kennedy's historic, 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, Santorum said, "You bet that makes you throw up" -- "to say that people of faith have no role in the public square?" Also:

I don’t believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. The idea that the church can have no influence or no involvement in the operation of the state is absolutely antithetical to the objectives and vision of our country.

Perfectly fine accusations, except what Santorum said Kennedy said is not what Kennedy said. At all.

For starters, Kennedy addressed the central concern of the small-minded bigots who had felt compelled to evince their palsied neuroticism: 

I am a Catholic ... [yet] it is apparently necessary for me to state once again -- not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important only to me -- but what kind of America I believe in.

I am a Catholic. Now I ask you: Does that sound like a presidential candidate who "[said] that people of faith have no role in the public square?"

However what Santorum utterly failed to capture, through ignorance or design, was Kennedy's central concern -- that being that his faith was a matter of personal conscience:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute....

Whatever issue may come before me as President ... I will make my decision in accordance with ... what my conscience tells me to be in the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressure or dictates.

Kennedy was emphasizing an institutional separation; he never denied that his conscience was influenced by his faith. Indeed, to have done so would have been absurd, thus making Santorum's claim -- that Kennedy held the "idea that the church can have no influence" on a chief executive --  "absolutely antithetical" to what Kennedy actually said and to what Santorum grossly misrepresented.

The only pertinent question remaining, then, is whether Santorum is ignorant, or deceitful? And if the latter, would someone please ask Rick why he abjures God's Ninth Commandment?

A realist is an idealist who's been mugged by Afghanistan

For any old dogs out there who remain faithfully leashed to the insanity of nation-building against a primitive nation's will, culture, religion, patriarchy, tribalism, ineradicable superstitions and resolute medievalism, it doesn't require much refashioning of one of the oldest dog's formulations to begin a mental recovery: A realist is an idealist who's been mugged by Afghanistan.

What an unspeakable horror, these last few days, as well as an irremediable future. " 'The mission requires us to spend time with our Afghan counterparts, and lately we haven’t been able to do that,' said one military official in the east who spoke on the condition of anonymity." Hence we've experienced a momentary breakdown in the permanent hopelessness of a "modern" Afghanistan; even before this breakdown, in-country journalists were filing story after story of "counterpart"-Taliban cooperation and collaboration -- stories depressingly reminiscent of South Vietnam and the Viet Cong.

The history of the U.S. presidency is saturated with chief executives who in rather short order turned to the primal concern of foreign affairs as a way of escaping the immutable burden of recalcitrant, tribalistic Congresses. But after three years of the diabolical Karzai and his devious allies and Karzai's equally villainous foes, President Obama is probably beginning to think that John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mitch McConnell aren't so bad after all. 

Mr. President, we're begging you. Let's wrap up this abominable failure of nation-building -- now -- because its future is truly irremediable.

'The fateful move'

Profound, and more prophetic than Rossiter, himself a conservative, ever imagined:

When a conservative once decides, as many articulate conservatives seem to have decided in explosive America, that the best of all possible worlds was here yesterday and is gone today, he begins the fateful move toward reaction and ratiocination that turns him from a prudent traditionalist into an angry ideologue.

--Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion, 1955

Our boy is growing up

From Politico: "Rick Santorum has a new punching bag: the press."

And here he is, our boy, the former U.S. senator and current guardian of American virtue, in Michigan, on Friday:

I shared my vision with you tonight because it’s probably the only time you’re going to hear it because most of the folks who are going to be reporting here aren’t going to write about it. They’re going to write about some controversial thing.

Imagine that.

"Dateline: December 5, 1941, The White House, Washington D.C.

"President Franklin Roosevelt held an Oval Office press conference today to announce a dramatic improvement in domestic Kewpie Doll production and to share his vision of ever-expanding doll production. The president also mentioned we might soon be at war with Germany and Japan, but he held the presser principally with respect to Kewpie Doll production, so here's the skinny on that ...

"More on the global war situation, as the president allows."

The ultimate Tea Party, with Mitt dragged behind

The Post's Bernstein takes issue with Krugman on Romney:

I’d be very surprised if Republicans really do press austerity if they win unified control of government....

[A] lot of the anti-Keynesian talk we’ve heard over the past three years is almost certainly partisan, and not ideological, in nature. George W. Bush didn’t react to either recession during his time in office by championing spending cuts, after all.

Before going any farther, I first wish to point out that for all his tsk-tsking of President Obama's European bias, it is in fact Mitt Romney who has consistently advocated a European-style approach to U.S. economic recovery. To hear Romney tell it, when it comes to social-economic policy Obama is some sort of riddling Otto von Bismarck wrapped in a mysterious Clement Atlee inside an enigmatic François Mitterrand; yet it is Romney, in bewildering accord with his party's economus ignoramuses, who has repeatedly touted the disastrously foreign Merkel-Cameron-Sarkozy policy of strangulating austerity. Best stop there. If we get off on a Romney-hypocrisy jag, we'll be here all day.

The larger point requiring observation is that Jonathan Bernstein believes that Romney as president would re-re-re-convert to a some brand of Keynesian pragmatism, rather than, as his party now promises, ideologically slashing his (our) way to an economic apocalypse. And my point is, maybe Romney would indeed hew to sensible, empirical Keynesianism. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn't. Who knows? Which is one of the more troubling and most disturbing problematics with what is laughably called "contemporary conservatism": in reality an unmindfully erratic bunch of ever-shifting unpredictability with no core except, it can be argued, a nihilistic and anarchistic one.

I use these terms not lightly, but rather precisely. Contrary to common perception, anarchy isn't a political system, so to speak, in which everyone runs around like Emperor penguins stealing their neighbors' nest-pebbles, but rather a system in which there is, simply, no central authority (i.e., federal government); and nihilism isn't so much 19th-century Dostoyevskian agony or Nietzschean despair as it is the oversimplistic idea that things are so bad, it would be preferable to wipe the social-economic slate clean and start from scratch. 

In other words, anarchy and nihilism are the very "philosophical" species of the tea-partying radicals and revolutionaries who've been shoving the Republican Party farther and farther rightward for years now -- and revolutionaryism has a nasty habit of out-radicalizing itself, since the revolutionaries themselves feel the perpetual need to demonstrate their ever-purer purity.

Thus, before we realize the politico-philosophical catastrophe descending, we could -- "if they win unified control of government" -- be stuck with a Congress-cum-National Asylum full of Michele Bachmanns and Herman Cains, with a Gulliver on top, strapped by his loopy Lilliputians to idiotic policies such as "austerity."

The thing is, you see, with these guys, one never knows anymore.

A blast from '62

In a private letter from Bill Buckley, Jr. to William Loeb, almost exactly 50 years ago (March 5, 1962): "Why is it our side is afflicted with all the loonies?"

One would think they would have sorted that out by now.

Spielberg's epic: Mitt Romney's 'Duel'

Have you seen Steven Spielberg's docudrama about Mitt Romney's 2012 primary campaign? It was made, prophetically, in 1971, it starred Dennis Weaver and a really irrationally vindictive truck, and it was titled "Duel." Some film buffs and political experts still debate the believability, or unbelievability, of the movie's ending, in which the pathetically desperate traveling salesman (Weaver) triumphs over the mechanized leviathan's blind rage. The film's irony, however, which we'll get to, is profoundly unmistakable.

If you haven't seen it, you should. Brilliant allegories like "Duel" don't come along every day. In it the faceless, mindlessly hateful tanker truck is of course the GOP base, which pursues Weaver, which is to say Romney -- something of a poor schmuck of a guy who's just trying to do his day job -- at every literal turn. Romney, driving a Plymouth 'Valiant,' no less, has done nothing to deserve this monstrous pursuit and deadly chase. But, it is what it is. And since the trembling, sweat-soaked Romney can't change what it is -- either the base itself, or this duel to the death -- he somewhat haphazardly plots the tanker's kill. Successfully. The truck -- that is, the base -- goes over a cliff.

This imagery and allegorical docu-melodrama leapt inexorably to mind this morning when I read Paul Krugman's latest, which is a kind of variation on Speilberg, in that Krugman posits that the trembling, sweat-soaked Romney "is, in fact, a closet Keynesian." Krugman says this because Romney recently said that "If you just cut ... spending you’ll slow down the economy" -- which is something that Romney isn't allowed to say by the predatory, samizdat-hunting base. What Romney said is perfectly rational, mind you, and there's not a mentally balanced economist alive who'd dispute it, but such rationality has a way of being capriciously targeted for brutal extermination by those who would be Romney's followers on his road to the White House.

Romney is of course quite aware of this irrational pursuit; indeed his self-conscious hyperawareness is what makes the poor schmuck so excruciatingly uncomfortable in his own skin, and just as excruciating to watch. He has perforce become a Costanza-like Lord of the Idiots, who must halt whatever instinctively intelligent judgment is about to come out of his mouth and instantly substitute the precisely moronic opposite. This, for irrational reasons not yet wholly determined, the base demands, and Romney is (mostly) delivering.

The immense irony of this Spielbergian tragicomedy is that nominee Romney will, true to form, swerve at the last minute in yet another desperate attempt to save his own ass; the base, too, will likely espy the precipitous, electoral catastrophe ahead and begin grinding its gears into downshift, to avert utter disaster; but it will all be for naught -- the raging, irrational base will mangle itself into oblivion.

And Mitt Romney? Deprived of a truly emotionally satisfying triumphalist moment, he'll just wander back to his quarter-billion, poor thing.

A relative disaster

Best line yet, from Roger Simon:

[T]he 90-minute debate proved Einstein’s theory that time can actually slow down.

And that space is warped, or at least the space between their ears is.

Let's see. We've got one guy who thinks the Founders envisioned the United States of America as forever entombed in the literalism of 18th-century wording; and another guy who confuses Scriptural symbolism, metaphors and figurativeness with authoritarian literalism; and a grandiose guy who literally sees himself as the Savior of Western civilization; and yet another guy who merely wants to skim across his homestate's right-heighted treetops so he can quite literally put an end to all this annoying competition, to which he is not accustomed, and never expected.

All of this light-speed imbecility, as Simon notes, has conspired to retard time -- and it's warping more than the imbeciles on stage. Their party is speeding to critical mass; and when the time comes, it's going to be quite the explosion.