PMC Commentary

Bill Kristol, dissing Mitt

Bill Kristol finds Mitt Romney to have been insufficiently patriotic last night:

What about the civic propriety of a presidential nominee failing even to mention, in his acceptance speech, a war we're fighting and our young men and women who are fighting it?

Mr. Kristol, I realize that you and other rootin'-tootin' neoconservatives had other priorities at the time, so you may have forgotten, but we were once militarily involved in a rathole called South Vietnam, whose immense and senseless loss of life Mr. Romney vociferously supported while safely distanced.

His sons, it's important to add, are carrying on the family tradition of pillow-fighting manliness.

In brief, Bill, this may not be the best time for Mitt to be raising the issue of "civic propriety."

Point of order

Any self-presumingly authoritative criticism that opens with a grammatical error,

You can agree with everything that Rachel Maddow or Ed Schultz say on MSNBC and still oppose their right to say it ...

... I instantly view as a trifle suspect.

I'm also beginning to wonder about Harvard. The author of the above, the NY Times' television critic, Alessandra Stanley, went there, and of course so did Mitt Romney, who said last night, "if you ask Ann and I what we'd give" for something or other. Yes, I often ask iself, or meself, such questions, too. For instance is there a difference between "and" and "or," as well as between the nominative case and the objective? Methink there is.

The Warlock of Eastwick

The Actors Studio's James Lipton appeared on "Now," just now, to critique Clint Eastwood's ... performance? His critique, in a word: "disrespectful"--disrespectful of Barack Obama, of Obama the man, of Obama the president, of the office of the presidency itself.

For Lipton, this was rather strong.

My reaction to Lipton's assessment: So what else is new?

Let's get this straight, let's have it out, let's just say it like it is, once and for all: modern Republicans are bigoted barbarians. Half are racist ignoramuses and the other half are ignorant racists. You needn't be black for Republicans to hate you; brown will do, or, in a pinch, yellow. If you're white you're OK, unless of course you're a woman--you silly, flighty-headed thing, in such desperate need of an old, angry white male's paternalistic protection.

Yeah I know. The above parts add up to more than the whole. But that's about the only thing "special" about the modern Republican Party: its outsized bigotry and ignorance.

Chris Hayes, on "Now," smartly mentioned the relevance of Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man in relation to Eastwood's disrespect. GOPers should read it, he said, if they'd really like an informed idea of how a black man in America might feel; forced, rather invisibly, to look up at his white overseers, who in turn supply the respondent's answers. Hayes' thought was a good one, except that GOPers would have to find someone to read it to them.

I come back, though, to my "So what else is new?" attitude, which is why I didn't watch the proceedings last night. I'm learning to hate like a Republican. And I don't like it.

Which David Brooks?

Brooks is either experiencing the erratic downside of an especially nasty bipolar break or he's methodically softening the ground for as-close-an-Obama-endorsement-as-NYT-editorial-policy-will-allow column:

[The GOP] won’t be a worthy governing party until it treads the course Lincoln trod: starting with individual ambition but ascending to a larger vision and creating a national environment that arouses ambition and nurtures success.

Brooks' "Lincoln-trod course" is essentially lifted straight from an Obama stump speech.

One can see President Obama as an "American System" Whig (Obama even uses Henry Clay's original term for public-private cooperation, a concept to which Lincoln fiercely subscribed) or see Mitt Romney as a states-rights, hard-money, tough-shit Jacksonian. Or one can be less historical, I really don't care. But however one chooses to see these men, only one in reality is made of the "Burkean conservative" stuff for which Brooks yearns.

And it sure as hell isn't Romney, who's mired, along with his party, as Brooks observes, in a "rampant hyperindividualism" which can only sweat and smother in an uncompassionate, dystopic nightmare of voided "community."

Welcome back, David. This time I hope you stay put.

An evening salvaged

I opted for the breathtaking originality of Virginia Woolf's genius and a walk with my daughter in the cooling, late-summer air and a C-Span panel-discussion on the Tuskegee airmen's courageous contribution to the civil rights movement and thus ended the evening with my mind stimulated and my soul refreshed and my sanity reasonably intact. 

This, I could not write had I spent the night in the GOP sewer. It wasn't as though the sewer would be gone tomorrow. It wasn't as though Mitt Romney's Shakespearean tragi-comic crowning as King Liar and all the attendant absurdities would fail capture on video tape. And it wasn't as though all that wicked splendor and majestic farce was in any way fleeting, something in need of instant, blogospheric commentary and journalistic judgment before it slipped and oozed and reeked right back into the groundbreaking cloaca of the GOP's special little hell. No, it would all be there the next day, just as it was the day before, and it shall be next week, as it has been all summer.

The Republican Party has discovered the base-hypnotic magic of indifferentiation: lie low, and stay there--and I don't mean "lie" in any prostrated sense. We in the clean world assumed Romney would shift to the middle during the general campaign, as is customary. Yet the thought occurred to King Liar and his sociopathic staff of double-troubling witches and warlocks that this, for the big guy, would prove unquestionably fatal; he'd lose the base, which was precariously held at best. Better to go so indescribably negative that the political filth would altogether alienate independents from the political process--voila, a base election in which a besieged incumbent must defend from a fixed fortification while the challenger is free to attack viciously from any direction and violate every standard of decency and break every traditional rule of engagement.

It's what hellish sociopaths do. Their particular acts may be unimaginable to small-r republicans right up until the moment they hurl their despicably unthinkable rot--Obama's gutting Medicare, Obama's gutting welfare reform, Obama will raise your taxes again, Obama apologizes for America, Obama resents small-business success, Obama's economic policies (sociopathically obstructed for two years) have failed--but their hydra-headed depravity never disappoints.

But, back to the GOP's carefully delimited psychotic episode of last night. What, around 4PM Central, did I expect? What Andrew Sullivan summarized at precisely 11:20PM Eastern: 

[A] sad evening for an actual reality-based critique of Obama's record, or a coherent set of proposals for the future.

Yes, but I suffered it not, and yet I didn't miss a thing.

Planning the evening

Let's see ... at 8PM Central there's "Little House on the Prairie," never been a big fan of that, but ... or, I have Clarissa, aka Mrs. Dalloway, who was charming in The Voyage Out ... ah, also at 8PM there's "Steven Madden Footwear" on the Home Shopping Network ... on the other hand I still have, egads, roughly a thousand years of Gibbon to go ... mmm, "Crime Inc." on CNBC, but that's too terribly similar to tonight's MSNBC theme ... more D.F. Wallace is definitely out, otherwise I'd be joining Kate Gompert in the fetal position ... ah here we are, The Weather Channel, a saner, more thoughtful and far less predictable television alternative to that perfectly coiffed hoax in a Costco shirt.

Ezra Klein, ready to snap

I get the distinct feeling that Ezra Klein is about to rip those fair-and-balanced lungs from his WaPo superiors and feed them to his pet hellhounds (or whatever's carnivorous and handy):

So far in this campaign, you can look fair, or you can be fair, but you can’t be both.

That declarative statement was preceded by self-conscious admissions of Klein's having "wanted us to bend over backward to be fair, to see [Ryan's speech] from Ryan’s perspective, to highlight its best arguments as well as its worst"--you know, the sort of cub-reporter/wide-eyed-wonkishness enthusiasm that only a managing editor who also worries about corporate ad revenue could love.

Later, Klein made what I thought at the time was a rather puzzling appearance on MSNBC. "I want to be careful here," he said, and then he went on to observe that brazenly lying campaigning motherfuckers tend to be brazenly lying governing motherfuckers. Well, Klein was a trifle more careful in his language than that, but we got the point.

Anyway, it wasn't until I read his WaPo confession that the connection became clear--or at least I think it's clearing up: Ezra Klein has simply, finally had it with the Romney-Ryan campaign, and he ain't gonna take it no more, no matter what his future reactions "look" like.

Silver's lining

Nate Silver notes the significance of Gravis Marketing's rather ill-timed (because conventions are destabilizing) Ohio poll, which shows Obama leading Romney "by less than 1 full percentage point":

[W]hy does this qualify as good news for [Obama]? Because this firm has had Republican-leaning results in the other states that it has polled.... Once the model adjusts for the firm’s "house effect," it treats Mr. Obama’s nominal 1-point lead as being the equivalent of a 4- or 5-point lead.

What's more, Ohio, when it comes to "electoral calculus," means more than one state:

Ohio has a 30 percent chance of being the tipping-point state, meaning that it would cast the decisive votes in the Electoral College. That’s as much as the next two states on the list, Florida and Virginia, combined. It’s also as much as Colorado, Nevada, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Michigan and North Carolina combined.

I have yet to read an electoral-count analysis of a Romney victory that's anything than other an almost fantastic collection of ifs and maybes, whereas an Obama victory is virtually assured by even the smallest slip by Romney. And as the saying goes, Nobody's perfect.

A "mountain of cow dung"

I suppose Roger Ailes is able to sleep at night for two reasons: 1) He hasn't a conscience and 2) he can nevertheless assure himself that he does, since he permits the occasional Truth to emerge on FoxNews.com, such as this little gem from "Fox News contributor" Sally Kohn:

Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech....

The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth.

Ms. Kohn proceeds to skewer the lies, although her corrections are superfluous addenda to her singularly stabbing thesis, which is, as suggested above, that Paul Ryan is but a floating fragment of the GOP's massive array of fecal bunco-artistry.

I'm beginning to take heart in my long-suffering cri de coeur that anti-Romney strategists should stop with the fact-checking already. A moment ago I heard a Democratic strategist on MSNBC passionately howling that Ryan is lying, he's just lying. The strategist left it at that. The anchor asked for details, but they didn't matter. And the strategist seemed to understand that. Well done.

Countering the Big Lies

This morning the Washington Post and NY Times editorial boards and all rational pundits are livid. It seems Paul Ryan, among others, fibbed last night at his party's convention. Repeatedly. The GOP's vice-presidential nominee fibbed about Medicare, fibbed about budgets and fibbed about plant closings, just as the GOP's presidential nominee cannot deliver (nor will he tonight) so much as the time of day without some insidious twist.

WaPo pounds Ryan for, for example, "skewer[ing] the president ... for creating and then walking away from a bipartisan debt commission" from which Ryan, too, walked away. The paper duly pounds Ryan for other factual molestations as well. The NYT similarly rebukes Ryan for twisting this issue and that, as the paper proceeds to straighten the relevant realities.

Worthy efforts, proper corrections, noble sentiments all. And utterly impotent.

Big Lies are effective for the simple reason that they avoid facts, which, on complicated issues, can be complicated things. Facts are fussy and confusing and thus often annoying. When pressing one fact against another "fact" that's designed only to deceive, you're only exasperating sedentary packs of prefrontal cortexes which are far more content with easily comprehensible simplicity: i.e., the soundbitten Big Lie. Hence attempts at slaying the Big Lie with a slew of annoying facts can be counterproductive.

Enter the Post's Jonathan Bernstein, who "gets it." After noting at midnight that virtually every element of Mr. Ryan's earlier speech was either "a staggering, staggering lie" or a "bit of mendacity – lazy mendacity, incredibly lazy mendacity," Bernstein concludes:

But really, the proper response to a speech like this isn’t to carefully analyze the logic, or to find instances of hypocrisy; it’s to call the speaker out for telling flat-out lies to the American people.

The Big Truth: Romney-Ryan are telling flat-out lies. Period. I know this sounds kind of silly, but get much deeper than that and only the disorienting weeds await you. Most of the electorate dislikes being lied to, however more than a few pundits and pols mistake that sentiment for an invitation to correct said lies with loads of facts. Wrong. Just pound the fact that the liars are lying; one can pretty much leave it at that. It's the more powerfully tactical flipside of the powerfully tactical Big Lie--more powerful because the American electorate really dislikes being lied to.

My mistake, I peeked

Well hell like the boys in Love's Labor's Lost I broke my vow of abstinence. I peeked. I left it muted, but there was Sen. McCain, looking imperial and probably barking jingoistically but I wanted (needed) no confirmation of that. Then came a Matthew Yglesias tweet about a "cranky deranged warmonger." Yep. And then Rachel Maddow was looking super wound up so I unmuted the damn thing and therein lay my mistake. What she said ruined my whole evening, something about having a "really robust debate" in this country about foreign policy etc etc.

A debate among whom? The persuadable portion of the electorate is maybe 3 percent, and they're scattered throughout 50 states, only five or six of which are critical to the presidential election. The political math begins to read like quantum physics. We've got Bob in Ohio on whom the Obama and Romney campaigns are spending tens of millions to force a final goddamn decision and then there's Louise in Florida and Jack in Iowa and that's about it. A billion bucks later and no minds change and we'll have a vote. And Obama will win, because he's already leading in most swing states and voters aren't changing their minds.

So there's an underlying contentment within me. I'm not panicked. Romney is doomed. On the other hand it really would have been pleasant to have had a "really robust debate" in this country about something, before the levers came down. But it's not going to happen. Instead we'll get two more months of Mitt Romney's remorselessly perfidious lies. And if those lies get him close? It'll be even worse next time.

Pew Research: majority see Paul Ryan as a young, unknown conservative idiot

What a delightful piece of reporting from Pew Research:

Of those offering a word [to describe tonight's ascendant demigod], 37% describe Ryan in clearly positive terms, using such words as intelligent, good, energetic , honest and smart. Another 35% of the words used are clearly negative in tone, such as idiot, extreme, phony and scary. The remaining 28% of the descriptions were not clearly positive or negative, such as conservative, unknown and young.

I particularly enjoyed what most of us would probably regard as unnecessary clarification, that for example "idiot" is "clearly negative in tone." Thank you anyway, Pew. 

What is clearly intriguing, though, is Pew's classification of "conservative" as "not clearly positive or negative." This presents an interpretive puzzle. Pseudoconservative Republicans who think they're "conservative" are actually extreme scary types who wouldn't know a real conservative from a Mugwump. And many liberals who despise what they call "conservatives" are in reality the apotheosis of real conservatism (liberals, as opposed to pushy progressives, tend to advocate gradual change). And the "real" conservatives who still call themselves conservative? There are, maybe, give or take one or two, about three of them left.

Hence "conservative" has evolved into a thoroughly confusing epithet which, though perhaps "not clearly positive or negative," is at least utterly meaningless. Ergo the word is perfect, I suppose, for the Romney campaign, which stands for whatever the hell you want it to.

Yep, it sucks all right

Josh Marshall walks right up to the line of going Full Beltway on us by issuing a near apologia on CNN's behalf. The camerawoman-peanuts story "puts CNN in an exquisitely awkward position," writes Marshall, since "There’s a normal and correct tendency for a news outfit not to want to make itself into the story."

Marshall then acknowledges that "this goes way beyond that," though, because of CNN's market-maneuvering into the middle. The network cannot now afford to offend either partisan side, otherwise its careful positioning collapses.

All of this is offered in the way of an explanation, but it comes across (it did to me, anyway) as at least approaching the sympathetic: CNN's position is exquisitely awkward.

No, it isn't. It is, rather, deeply non-journalistic.

No network news executive should be in the business of news as a meticulously balanced ideological scorecard. Yet when CNN decided to play the middle, it didn't just box itself in--it cut itself out of much of the real news, such as the sick, soul-eaten corruption of today's Republican Party, and now a huge story concerning itself.

Fox News may be a screaming whore and MSNBC a higher-priced escort, but at least they make little pretense for what they are. CNN? It's more like a moralizing Molièrean hypocrite. And there's no excuse for that--nothing even close.

Andrew Sullivan expatiated on CNN with greater economy than Marshall:

CNN sucks ... because this awful notion of balance - which requires journalists to be lobotomized when assessing reality - is "on-brand."

Good place for a final period.

This is how we survive you animals

Convention officials released this statement after "attendee[s] at the Republican National Convention in Tampa threw peanuts at a black female CNN camerawoman and shouted at her 'This is how we feed animals,' according to David Schuster of Take Action News":

Two attendees tonight exhibited deplorable behavior. Their conduct was inexcusable and unacceptable. This kind of behavior will not be tolerated.

Not tolerated ... when there are cameras about. Otherwise "this kind" of behavior shall be legislated, codified and institutionalized in the GOP's revamped political system.

The first reader comment I came across in Daily Intel's coverage of this incident was all too suggestive of how shamefully "the base" was bound to react: 

David Shuster + TalkingPointsMemo + CNN = mendacious garbage, always.

No one can change ignorance that profound. It quite literally has to die out, which, praise Jesus, is precisely what the GOP's most cherished demographics are doing.

"I had a tear in my eye"

ThinkProgress' final entry in its live-blogging of last night's Republican convention is, thanks to CNN's Erin Burnett, hilariously revealing of just how awful political reporting has become: 

[Ann Romney's] speech was just one of the many memorable moments and I have to say this Wolf, when he came out and her talking about the love for [Mitt], I had a tear in my eye and I think a lot of people did.

One can't even parody that. Of course she said it on CNN, so no one was watching but ThinkProgress' monitor. Still ...

Fox News? It's more than mere parody; it's a doppelgänger of the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda. I'll pass. Mass hypnosis isn't my thing. OK well what about MSNBC's coverage? Four words: Tom Brokaw, Ed Schultz. Being whiplashed from the conventionally cretinous to the hysterically panicked is more than my already palsied mental state can handle. I don't know. Maybe MSNBC absented at least Brokaw last night. But having watched the network's comically plate-spinning and seemingly ubiquitous Michael Steele earlier in the day, I figured I'd get hit by one clown's pies or the other's. Better to play it safe and avoid the whole scene.

So much for the cable news networks. That leaves us with PBS' coverage, which is rather a tragic story itself, in that PBS is statutorily subject to political intimidation and thus exhibits an overwrought composure impervious to even decent outrage. I can just barely imagine the horror-struck visages of PBS producers confronting the guest-hosted convention coverage of an hysterical Ed Schultz. Somewhere, there's a balance, but it sure as hell ain't on TV.