PMC Commentary

A doosey of a far-right meltdown

Going garden-variety tea party may be a little-noticed journey of historical ignorance and partisan infantilism, but being Mississippi Tea Party is such a violent immersion into a heart of political darkness and psychiatric rabies it evokes from rational onlookers both horror and humor.

To wit, snippets (with thanks to ThinkProgress' alertness) from the MSTP's official "STATEMENT ON OBAMACARE RULING":

The history books will mark this date as the day our constitutional republic was killed. It will now rest with We The People to decide if it will be resurrected or left to rot in the shallow grave dug for it....

The all out oppression of all people has begun....

When a gang of criminals subvert legitimate government offices and seize all power to themselves without the real consent of the governed their every act and edict is of itself illegal and is outside the bounds of the Rule of Law. In such cases submission is treason.... To resist by all means that are right in the eyes of God is not rebellion or insurrection, it is patriotic resistance to invasion....

[M]ay godly courageous leaders rise up in His wisdom and power to lead us in displacing the criminal invaders from their seats and restore our constitutional republic.

It remains unclear how caressing one's squirrel gun or polishing one's assault rifle at a drunken, drooling convocation at the local Pentecostal bastille will operationally serve the MSTP's holy purpose of "patriotic resistance" to "criminal invaders." But, who knows, maybe a wickedly devious ambiguity is the impenetrable genius behind their otherwise stunningly manifest threats of open rebellion and treason.

On the other hand, I doubt these prehensile memo-throwers experience physical and intellectual ease in even opening a beer can, what with their lack of opposable thumbs and heads lodged firmly in ass.

But back to the sane, sober, clean world, in which we're reminded that what passes for the "far left" in this country (still breaking the inhuman chains of city council-opposed bicycle paths!) almost inexpressibly detested yet nonetheless accepted Bush v. Gore and Citizens United as legitimate laws of the land, however intellectually illegitimate those Supreme Courts may have been in arriving at them.

The left's ultimate response (by and large)?--organize and mobilize and vote for a president who might very well have the opportunity to replace retiring, intellectually disturbed Justices with those of more jurisprudential and less partisan minds.

Simple maturity--a character trait seemingly forever absent among the far right.

George Will's strained victory lap

The political genius of George Will's grunting, artificial victory lap--"If the mandate had been upheld under the Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court would have decisively construed this clause so permissively as to give Congress an essentially unlimited police power"--is its unempirical implication that future Congresses otherwise, and inexorably, would indeed have sought unlimited police power.

It's the old government-as-bogeyman thing, about which pseudoconservatives and ideologically damaged conservatives like Will are forever ringing alarm bells. The feds are a comin', the feds are gonna getcha, the feds will countenance no limits on power, and so on. The traditional school of conservatism framed such warnings in comparatively subdued tones and with remarkable intellectual decorum and historical perspective, while today's pseudoconservatives simply scream Bogeyman!--as though he's a given, right under the bed.

Yet it must be remembered that American Congresses have always played "activist" catch-up to the population's demands for expanded civil rights, for women's rights, for gay rights, for workers' rights, for progressive taxation, for environmental protections ... ad infinitum. These causes never erupted from power-hungry congressional cloakrooms; they instead met conservative resistance there.

Painful though it is, perhaps that's how it should be, in that major social change achieved radically rarely if ever sticks. (Just ask the Russians, or Chinese, or Cambodians, or the 18th-century French.) At any rate, that's how it has always worked in this country, and--assuming the pseudoconservatives don't get their radical way--that's how it always will; Congress is habitually behind the curve.

But let's allow George his fantasy, I suppose. This morning, it's pretty much the only thing he has to boast about.

A Savage affliction

I didn't know right-wing-talker and screed-crapper Michael Savage had epilepsy. Saw this on The Dish and couldn't resist passing it along:

Let's talk about [Chief Justice] Roberts. I'm going to tell you something that you're not going to hear anywhere else, that you must pay attention to. It's well known that Roberts, unfortunately for him, has suffered from epileptic seizures. Therefore he has been on medication. Therefore neurologists will tell you that medication used for seizure disorders, such as epilepsy, can introduce mental slowing, forgetfulness and other cognitive problems. And if you look at Roberts' writings you can see the cognitive disassociation in what he is saying.

--Michael Savage, mentally slow victim of many, many cognitive problems

From the right, high-dive sophistry

You probably won't be surprised to learn from Charles Krauthammer, who paused from his London Olympics training in high-dive sophistry to explain it, that yesterday Chief Justice John Roberts nobly used all his conservative powers largely to rescue the Court's reputation from years of ... liberal jurisprudential arrogance and degeneracy.

Roberts, writes Krauthammer, is "acutely aware that the judiciary’s arrogation of power has eroded the esteem in which it was once held." Krauthammer then categorically asserts: "Most of this arrogation occurred under the liberal Warren and Burger courts," which yielded "four decades of popular protest and resistance."

Perhaps, Jon Kyl-like, Krauthammer did not intend his observation to be a factual statement. Even a cursory search of public opinion of the Supreme Court produces contemporary items such as this, from the Christian Science Monitor: "Twenty-five years ago, two-thirds of Americans approved of the way the Supreme Court was doing its job. Today, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News poll, that number is just 44 percent."

Thus 14 years after Roe v. Wade, which Kruathammer marks as the watershed in public disdain of the highest court, the Supremes enjoyed broad public approval. Yet Roberts, according to Krauthammer, was saving the Court--oh, incidentally, there was that Bush v. Gore thing, "Whatever one thinks of the substance of" it; no mention of Citizens United--from four decades of preponderant liberal arrogation and arrogance.

My London money is on Charlie, you know, in the high-dive sophistry competition.

An expensive laugh

Never has a "contempt" vote been more felicitously named. It's easy, even seductive, to get upset with congressional Democrats, who are too often too disunited or too compromising or too undefined. But not since the 1850s have Democrats (excepting 17 of them) been as dishonorable and flatly contemptible as this present mob of House Republicans, whom Lincoln or T.R. or Eisenhower would have disowned years ago.

Many of us greet each day thinking, Well, at least that hateful bunch of psychotic radicals can't transmogrify any more hatefully, or psychotically, or radically. And yet virtually every day, they manage to surprise us. This will of course be their downfall, but good grief how they make each day seem agonizingly long.

I concede a certain element of humor in all this: i.e., they've no idea of how utterly stupid and hateful etc. they appear to be, and regularly prove. But my, my, what a nationally costly way to get a good chuckle.

BuzzFeeding frenzy

Oh the irony -- BuzzFeed runs a breaking news piece about the "Fucking humiliating" and "Moron[ic]" and "Shameful" and "outrageous and embarrassing" news coverage by CNN this morning, yet BuzzFeed somehow misses the prominent fact that Fox News was just as shamefully moronic.

And of course it's always fucking humiliating, to have to call it Fox News.

ANOTHER shower

Eric Cantor just said that after Republicans repeal ObamaCare (which won't happen), then Republicans will finally have a chance to do healthcare right (naturally, no specifics).

That would be the same chance the Republican majority in both houses had in 1995, in 1997, in 1999, in 2001, in 2003, and in 2005.

Apparently, seven's the charm.

What frauds these people are. Even Nixon wouldn't buy a used car from these slippery and trickiest of dicks.

Although Charlie Cook, of the Cook Report, writes that "If you’re waiting for a retreat of tea party politics in the House Republican Conference and a resurgence of Blue Dog Democrats in the next Congress, you are likely going to be disappointed," I nonetheless find it ethically inconceivable that the American electorate would return a majority of these swindling buffoons and swinish racketeers to the United States House.

Mitt Romney-->Hot Shower

What else can one say about Mitt Romney's "rebuttal" than that it was shockingly unsurprising. This man is an indefatigable, shameless, amoral liar--and we expected every syllable of this morning's compounded lies.

It's actually sickening; just listening to Romney's lies is a sickening act. What's more, while listening I always feel like another shower is in moral order. To subject oneself to a Jim Jones presidential candidate--from one of the two major parties, no less--is a nearly indescribable act of degrading participation in pure, wretched filth.

Good God, is Romney really the best the GOP could do? After eight years of George W.?--who, as I recall, cost me 2,920 additional showers?

The politics of it all

This, from Politico's emailed "Breaking News," is just pathetic:

The House will vote on a full repeal of Barack Obama's health care law during the week of July 9, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said Thursday morning. The scheduling of another repeal vote came less than an hour after the Supreme Court upheld the health care mandate.

Atta boy.

The other politics of this decision are going to be fascinating to track--more from the Democratic than Republican side. Congressional GOPers will naturally exploit at every opportunity the sinister, galloping fascism of President Obama's validated constitutional concern for millions of the uninsured. And Obama is expected to issue a strong reaffirmation of both his concern and his legislative cures. But what of Democrats, congressional district by congressional district and state by state?

Some are already heading for the hills--and not those of North Carolina. This is precisely the wrong strategy. They should be taking names, kicking ass, and letting God sort out the casualties. They should, in short, be wholly endorsing Obama and 'ObamaCare'; they should be selling the latter as they should have sold it years ago.

There are months to go before Election Day. And the electorate stands persuadable, just as they were persuaded--within only a couple of weeks--to Obama's side during the debt-limit debacle. Right now, the electorate very much likes the ACA's constituent parts but dislikes the legislation itself, which is like supporting free speech and religious liberty and trials by jury but opposing the Bill of Rights.

The Dems can do this. They can turn this thing around, and in the process put Eric Cantor's strategy to the torch. But first they must seek the unity of Eric Cantor's party.

Roberts and Marshall

From SCOTUSblog:

The money quote from the section on the mandate: Our precedent demonstrates that Congress had the power to impose the exaction in Section 5000A under the taxing power, and that Section 5000A need not be read to do more than impose a tax. This is sufficient to sustain it.

My sense ...

On John Roberts' part, this is vaguely similar to Chief Justice John Marshall's ruling in Marbury v. Madison, which, in laying down the legal concept of judicial review, indeed found irregularities in the executive's argument. But since the underlying cause before the Court--created by Congress--was itself flawed, the executive's argument in effect prevailed. In sum, Marshall found a way to hold for a president he detested (Jefferson) while asserting his own independence and affirming his own authority.

Marshall's ruling was brilliant then, and Roberts' is almost equally so.

One also profoundly suspects that Roberts saw an opportunity to stem the inescapable rage the Court faced otherwise; and in this sense Roberts was as political as judicial, but for once it was a prudent--and in that sense acutely conservative--kind of politics.

With Roberts having joined the Sane Gang of Four, we may have just turned a long and agonizing corner.

Memo to self: Wow!

Last night's posting, slightly revised: In response to the Supreme Court's ruling, you, John Boehner and Eric Cantor and Mitt Romney and Mitch McConnell and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, now have three but only three proper responses from which to choose. That of Rick Perry, "Oops"; or Emily Litella, "Never mind"; or George W. Bush, circa summer, 2003, "Ah shit!"

Good night, John-John, Eric, Mitt, Mitch, Rush and Fox. Sleep tight, and let no more bugbears bite.

E.J. Dionne, brutal elitist

National Review's Ed Whelan sometimes sits and thinks, and sometimes he just sits, yet at other times he sits and thinks and then decides to defend the defenseless against the violent oppressions of elitist liberalism which, as we know, pretty much rules all.

Today, for instance, Whelan shields the pitiably shy, reserved Antonin Scalia from that notorious rabble-rouser and pamphleteering polemicist, E.J. Dionne, who has suggested with all the verbal brutality of an Amish prayer breakfast that Mr. Scalia should--oh dear, smelling salts please--resign. You can of course read Whelan's full and noble counteroffensive, like a Cossack to Crimea, here, nonetheless I found this passage irresistibly noteworthy:

[F]ar from "questioning President Obama’s decision" [on immigration-enforcement policy], Scalia is expressly agnostic on it, as language that Dionne quotes but doesn’t grasp ("The president has said that the new program is 'the right thing to do'.... Perhaps it is, though Arizona may not think so") shows.

My italics.

But yes, sometimes Ed sits and thinks, and sometimes he just sits, and at other times he sits and thinks and ponders new frontiers in gullibility for a readership that mostly just sits.

Memo to D. Issa

In response to the Fortune piece, you, Darrell Issa, now have three but only three responses from which to choose. That of Rick Perry, "Oops"; or Emily Litella, "Never mind"; or George W. Bush, circa summer, 2003, "Ah shit!"

Good night, Darrell. Sleep tight, and let no more bugbears bite.

Did we miss something?

Reuters:

"If they want to win an election, they need to be in their districts," says NY Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill ... will not attend [the national convention in Charlotte, NC], an aide said....

Three Democratic lawmakers from West Virginia ... have said they also will pass on Charlotte: Senator Joe Manchin, Governor Earl Ray Tomblin and U.S. Representative Nick Rahall.

Three other endangered Democrats in the U.S. House--Pennsylvania's Mark Critz, New York's Kathy Hochul and Bill Owens, also of New York--have said that they will stay away from Charlotte....

In Montana ... where there is a competitive U.S. Senate race, Democratic Senator John Tester and his challenger, Republican Representative Denny Rehberg, will both skip their parties' conventions.

Why of course. After all, it was Democrats who passed a House bill demolishing Medicare as we know it. It's Democrats who for the last two years have done nothing to create jobs. It's Democrats who have substituted job creation with a medieval attitude toward, not to mention medieval treatment of, women and women's rights. It's Democrats who have blocked road construction and bridge repair and have pushed student loan rates to the edge of disaster. It is Democrats in a McCarthyite witch hunt who are consuming official time through idiotic talk of gun-control conspiracies. And it was Democrats who damn near blew up the country over a routine debt-limit increase.

Jesus! No wonder the above-cited are reluctant to join their fellow Democrats at the national convention. If they meet to brag about a record that brazenly contemptuous of the American electorate, they're sure to lose.

Grow a couple, Politico

Think what you will of (probably former) Politico reporter Joe Williams' impolitic Tweet about "the Politico shitburger" and his rather uncontroversial sociopsychological findings, presented on MSNBC, about Mitt Romney feeling just peachy only around "white folks." I myself am inclined to forgive Williams' indiscretions, since the modern lure of "straight journalists" to cable news and social media appears to be both irresistible and irreversible; with that magnitude of exposure, many a foot will be inserted in many a mouth. So--so what?

Williams' professional complaint this morning, however, seems closed to any real controversy:

Journalism in this country has always prided itself on being fearless, independent, willing to push back on government. Now we’re not even willing to push back on our own critics.

Politico ran scared. That's the nut of it. Now, sometimes running scared is the supremely smart thing to do; very few old men tell tales of having fought--not fled--the bear in the woods. But to flee from the pissants of the despicable Daily Caller and the insufferable Breitbart.com is the act of a dumb coward.