PMC Commentary

The pompous Mr. Will

This morning George Will rolled out one his habitual yacht-club favorites on "This Week": When I turned 65, he said, I showed my physician my Medicare card, who said, "Congratulations, George, now you can send your medical bills to your children."

Oh how droll, how deliciously dry, George. I say, my good man, I almost laughed--right out loud. Oh my, we simply must tell Father that one. He'll think it ch-a-a-arming.

So much for my imagined soliloquy. Here's what I actually thought:

Mr. Will, you ... are ... a ... prick. A real, indifferent prick.

For years you have fattened as a pretentious, sesquipedalian parasite on the thundering stupidity of pseudoconservative boobs. And now, although you could easily pay your own goddamn medical bills--a cherished freedom of economic activity to which you claim to subscribe as matter of indomitable principle--you stick them, and us, with those bills.

I could go on. But frankly, Mr. Will, pompous pricks like you deserve short work of it. 

Romney and Romneyism: scoundrel and last refuge

For months we've heard from the punditocracy the second fallacy nearly as often as we've heard the first.

Fallacy #1: This is going to be one close presidential election, a hair-raising nail-biter, right down to the wire, it'll be close, very close.

Fallacy #2: Mitt Romney has a real sharp staff.

Look at it this way. Had those not been fallacies all along, we would, with only two months to go, not now be reading in the NY Times that:

Romney is heading into his nominating convention with his advisers convinced he needs a more combative footing against President Obama in order to appeal to white, working-class voters and to persuade them that he is the best answer to their economic frustrations.

Hence the resurrected birther filth, the vilely mendacious welfare assault, the preposterous Obama-as-Medicare-slasher offensive. These "moves," writes the Times, "reflect a campaign infused with a sharper edge and overtones of class and race."

Samuel Johnson has been revised. Patriotism is no longer the last refuge of a scoundrel. Anything that vomits from the Romney campaign is.

Notwithstanding on-background confessions from the "real sharp" Romney staff that their man is almost certainly doomed and they finally know it, that Pickett was a piker when it came to suicidal charges, that, "Animal House"-like, this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture, the punditocracy will likely persist in Fallacies #1 and #2--sort of like Thing One and Thing Two, amusing little subplots that keep the audience tuned in and spaced out.

A pure disgrace

In reviewing the lily-white purification of the modern Republican Party, the Daily Beast's John Avlon does a reasonably admirable job--until the very last paragraph, where, groping for a starburst finale, he loses all touch with reality: 

Mitt Romney--whose father, George, was an advocate for a more inclusive Republican Party when he was governor of Michigan--might be in a strong position to address these hard truths and make amends. But that will require the political courage to admit his party’s failings on this front, recognizing the lost legacy of diversity is a rational reaction to specific policies the GOP embraced in the not-so-distant past.

I don't recall the last time any commentator seriously coupled the words "Mitt Romney" and "political courage" as a working concept, yet this wistful frivolity lives on as perfunctory tribute to noble journalistic objectivity. Political courage will not suddenly spring from the cowardly mind of Mitt Romney, Mr. Avlon, and you know it--mostly because it's Mitt Romney himself who understandably insists on carnival-barking his sniveling opportunism, since subtle messages and nuanced statements and any real, detectable courage are fatal propositions when addressing the Bible-clutching, Obama-hating, Koch-sucking, lily-white and toothless base.

(One historical addition to Avlon's review: At the era of Reconstruction's end, the Republican Party, to the fury of Radicals, abandoned and betrayed Southern African Americans in exchange for a concentration on Northern industrialization. The party's postbellum dedication to blacks' sociopolitical equality expired with predictable haste--there was money to be made. Blacks remained loyal to Republicanism only out of brief memory and long habit.)  

As to the GOP's putrid lilification, Andrew Sullivan astutely notes:

[I]t's not something the Democrats should be gleeful about. It's a national tragedy - another reason why this polity is in danger of coming apart at the seams.

He framed that in the context of a vigorous two-party system--that in which each major party must remain strong for the benefit of the other's long-term health. Chess grandmasters simply cannot stay sharp if they play only against the country's Todd Akins.

Yet that's where we are. The opposition team is now altogether fundamentalist, obscurantist, and stupid. It hasn't just settled for the lowest common denominator, it glories in it. And I'm beginning to have my doubts if it, like the South, can ever rise again.

"Born and raised" here? I'd deny it.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus (say, what kind of name is that, anyway; and isn't it also peculiar that Priebus's Wikipedia page contains no family or ancestral information?--and that there's a date of birth, but no birthplace?) was befuddled that Atlantic's Molly Ball was even curious about yesterday's birtherism rebirth. "It's a distraction. It's a nothing issue," said Priebus. "[Romney] was referring to the fact that he was born in Michigan to make the point, 'I'm a Michigander' to the people of Michigan."

And that he returned on an "aircraft."

Whenever I return to my home state, I'm occasionally asked, "So, where ya from?" But you know what? Not once have I ever thought to answer, "Here, and no one's ever asked to see my birth certificate." It would be like answering "What's your name?" with, "Carpenter--not Priebus or Smith or Jones--but Carpenter."

At any rate, Ball goes on to observe:

The most troubling part of Romney's statement is the implication that Obama is somehow to blame for the birthers' conspiracy theorizing -- that there are some people you can look at and tell they were "born and raised" here, and others who make you wonder, for some reason.

But, goodness me, the way things are going, I'm beginning to wonder only about the ones I can look at and tell instantly that they must have been "born and raised" here: the nitwitted nativists and gunfreaks and the manifestly ill mannered and visibly unstable and the aggressively stupid and frightfully aggressive ... the Donald Trumps and Rush Limbaughs and the John Sununus and Hank Williamses and the Paul Ryans and Sarah Palins and the Mr & Mrs Bachmanns and Ted Nugents and all the other mockeries of genuine conservatism and traitors to real Republicanism and huge embarrassments to even simple, honest Americanism.

An explanation, an apology, and another explanation

It's a shame not nearly as many readers will see, in the Altantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates' eloquent elaboration on his crude jab at President Obama in the mammothly circulated NY Times; last Sunday's piece in which he accused Obama of "going to the dark side, by walking the G.O.P.’s talk, by becoming the man Dick Cheney fashioned himself to be."

Here, from "Fear of a Black President," is that indispensable elaboration:

I am, like many liberals, horrified by Obama’s embrace of a secretive drone policy, and particularly the killing of American citizens without any restraints. A president aware of black America’s tenuous hold on citizenship, of how the government has at times secretly conspired against its advancement—a black president with a broad sense of the world—should know better. Except a black president with Obama’s past is the perfect target for right-wing attacks depicting him as weak on terrorism. The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on every­thing. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.

With that, I apologize for my earlier harshness toward Coates. Perhaps he had this coming Atlantic piece in mind when he so abruptly, nakedly dropped that gratuitous dime on Obama.

I very much recommend Coates' Atlantic piece. "Fear of a Black President" breaks no new analytical ground from a socio- or politico-historical angle, but it's the best summation of race and politics in contemporary America I've yet read. Really, you should read it.

I do wish to add just a few words about his powerful concluding paragraph:

I think back to the first time I wrote Shirley Sherrod, requesting an interview. Here was a black woman with every reason in the world to bear considerable animosity toward Barack Obama. But she agreed to meet me only with great trepidation. She said she didn’t "want to do anything to hurt" the president.

I'm not black. I'm English, German, Irish, native American and, according to family lore, a bit of some ravishing, flamencoing Cuban whom a white male adventurer once "passed in the (Caribbean) night," as they say. Who knows. Who cares. But I do know this: Much as many among my preceding and very white generation once protected their Franklin Delano Roosevelt like real mama grizzlies, times ten, I find myself similarly inclined toward Barack Obama. In the heavy midst of trying to pull this nation together, after the unspeakable beating it had taken at the hands of imperious moneygrubbers and indifferent politicians, FDR suffered not only from the right's continuing barbarity, but from the soaring self-righteousness of some on the left. I chose--and I've been pretty successful at it, I think--to forego those easiest of cheap shots: President Obama doesn't do enough of this; he does too much of that; he's a bought-and-paid-for tool of Wall Street; he's an uncontrollable warmonger, just like Bush (or Cheney) ... you know the routine. For heaven's sake, what Obama inherited was about as wretched as what Roosevelt got--plus two wars--so could we please cut the man some slack?

Or, as Shirley Sherrod put it, I don't want to do anything to hurt the president. He just plain doesn't deserve it.

Slapstick absurdity

I finally "get it." By God they're working in shifts.

It was about the time of Todd Akin's outlandishly buffoonish comment that I was thinking, You know, it's about time for Mitt Romney to say something immensely stupid--it's been a while. But, as noted, Mr. Akin stepped in to take up the slack. Now that that's been a few days, though, Mr. Romney has returned to work. He punched in this morning:

Now I love being home in this place [Michigan] where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital. I was born in Harper Hospital. No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.

His staff, feeling legitimately raped--again--by their cretinous candidate, rushed into the press's arms:

The governor has always said, and has repeatedly said, he believes the president was born here in the United States. He was only referencing that Michigan, where he is campaigning today, is the state where he himself was born and raised.

We've 70-how-many-more days of this slapstick absurdity?

Compared to Mitt Romney, Richard Nixon was the Fred Astaire of small talk and human warmth in crowds.  Really. No kidding. I've never seen anything like this man. He is, hands down, the world's worst politician. 

One is just a statistic

It was Joe Stalin who reputedly observed that while one death is a tragedy, a million are just a statistic. And it is we Americans who love proving the cynical old commie wrong.

Thousands of us, separately and individually and divided by blocks or miles, are slaughtered each year by criminal gun-owners. Tragedies? Hardly. We think nothing of these statistics; indeed we even refer to victims of everyday violence as those who've become a "statistic," and we advise our children on how to avoid becoming a "statistic" themselves.

What perks us up is when a psychotic gun-owner in a twinkling empties his little pellets of constitutional freedom into a crowd, usually killing several and injuring many more. Not that's a tragedy. Film and analysis at 11:00! ... and 11:01 ... and 11:02 ... and ... till next time, coming soon.

Sorry, Uncle Joe. We've got you dead to rights on this one. The more the merrier.

A question of shrillness

David Axelrod--in Michael Grunwald's aptly named Swampland of "The Party of No" (an article adapted from the author's The New New Deal)--suggests, without suggesting it, a revisitation of what constitutes "shrill": 

It was stunning that we’d set this up [a 2009 pre-stimulus-vote confab between Obama and House Republicans] and before hearing from the President, they’d say they were going to oppose this. Our feeling was, we were dealing with a potential disaster of epic proportions that demanded cooperation. If anything was a signal of what the next two years would be like, it was that.

Even worse have been the last two years.

The seed of Republicans' malignant siege, though, was the stimulus affair, whose lead-up loosely coincided with Jeb Bush and Eric Cantor's Sitzkrieg of a "Listening Tour." Remember that? Mr. Cantor's deceitful ass on highstools in pizza parlors, pretending to ponder scattered electoral urgings for the GOP to act like responsible adults? Cantor played along. Hmmm. Good thought, Sir. Oh, nice thinking, Madam. And all the while he and Messrs. Boehner and McConnell were plotting a sabotage of the president's recovery efforts as a real "disaster of epic proportions that demanded cooperation" played out.

Now that, I'd call shrill. Indeed I would go so far as to call it treasonous. Republicans didn't oppose Obama's stimulus package because they were philosophically opposed to stimulus measures; they had voted many times under many Republican presidents for the same spending. Rather they were opposed simply because they politically opposed President Obama; and to complicate his tenure, they were eager to betray millions of Americans with prolonged and needless suffering.

In short Republican pols in the last Congress and this have proved themselves to be sadistic, sociopathic bastards who are probably feted at al Qaeda tea parties. America faces no external threat as monumentally twisted and vicious as internal Republicanism. The contemporary GOP peddles a Hobbesian state of nature in which Americans' lives are not merely brutish and nasty and short(er), but acutely divided and thereby rather easily oppressed as well.

Some of modern journalism's self-appointed hall monitors--those pious acolytes of preening civility--have ruled the above sort of observations out of bounds, strident, shrill. But of course they don't live daily with the squalid material consequences of shrill Republican malice.

Humans did (and DO) roam with dinosaurs

The Times' Timothy Egan and Paul Krugman conspire this morning to give no mercy.

First Egan reminds us that "58 percent of Republicans believe God created humans in the present form just within the last 10,000 years," and then he proceeds to "a quick" and ghastly "tour of the crazies in the House" who legislate in line with this theological whackdom--limiting himself, because of space, to John Shimkus, Joe Barton, Jack Kingston, Michele Bachmann, Todd Akin and Paul Broun.

Paul Krugman settles for just one crazy in the House, whose superior craziness, however, has naturally raptured him to the GOP's presidential ticket. While the leaders of Paul Ryan's church have issued a verdict of reasonable doubt about his comprehension of the New Testament, Ryan's real religion, notes Krugman, springs from another fictional work that "is a perennial favorite among adolescent boys. Most boys eventually outgrow it."

But not our boy Paul: Imminent Nominee for the Vice-Presidency of the United States.

I find Egan's piece the more intriguingly despairing and philosophically challenging, in that it poses something of chickens and eggs. Do morons serve in the House because 58 percent of their base are self-admitted imbeciles? Or are 58 percent of their base imbeciles because morons serve in the House, and thus encourage, from their national platform, an American educational system modelled on the intellectual integrity of Elmer Gantry?

Well, whatever, we'll leave it to Republicans to sits and thinks about that. Meanwhile, the rest of us can work on finally finishing that "64-page speech by John Galt [which] even Friedrich Hayek admitted that he never made it through."

GOP Management Services Inc.

Just a quick thought on what poor managers of anything these Republicans have become.

If you were in charge of organizing a quadrennial convention at the height of hurricane season, would you suggest it be held in coastal Florida?

And they want to manage the country. Again.

Preaching, again, against the Big Lie

Michael Tomasky pounds the 'Big Lies' offensive:

[Romney-Ryan] know that the truth would crush them electorally. And so it follows that they know they must lie. They must lie about their Medicare plans. They must lie about the effects of their tax plans on average people and rich people. And they must tell a number of lies about Obama, all the better if they involve race, as the welfare lie does.

There's no debate here. Ask the rare honest GOP strategist, and he'll readily concede the point. Pour a few martinis into the more typical GOP strategist, and he'll concede the point, too. There is just no debate: Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are incurable liars, whether by nature or necessity.

There is some debate, though, on how to counter the lies. Argues Tomasky:

The Democrats’ job, of course, is to expose this charade for what it is and make Romney and Ryan defend their actual positions.... Romney and Ryan are terrified of a real Big Debate. Obama and Biden need to drag them into one.

I would argue that Tomasky is sound in his intent, but a bit vulnerable in the result. There's likely no way Romney-Ryan will "defend their actual positions," nor, more importantly, is there any sure way for Democrats to "make" them do so. The GOP ticket will just defensively pile more lies on the heap of lies they've already told.

An exclusive concentration on exposing the lies, though, might erode what little credibility Romney-Ryan possess among the even littler class of still-persuadable voters. In 30 seconds it's impossible to explain both how Romney-Ryan are lying about Medicare, for instance, and what Democrats are doing to preserve it (I am largely assuming Tomasky's position here, which is perhaps unfair). One can, however, expose the lie in a short, direct punch.

In sum I would argue that Democrats should devote essentially all their resources to a merciless assault on the Big Lie tactic itself, rather than expending valuable resources on unfolding the more self-evident truth.

Sometime earlier this week I mentioned my yearning for the same "Big Debate" for which Tomasky yearns. It's unfortunate that we can't seem to get there. Ever. Blocking the way is either impermeable polarization, or assorted social issues--which in reality presidents rarely deal with--or just plain, steadfast Republican Lies. Yet if we can break that last barrier--the GOP's unfailing recourse to patent dishonesty--if, that is, Democratic pols can make it enormously costly for Republicans in electoral terms, then the GOP might someday have to resort to actually telling the truth. And then the "Big Debate" will effectively resolve itself, all on its own.

The greatest threat to what is broadly portrayed as the American Way of Life has, in 225 years, come externally only once; that being the mid-20th century. Otherwise it has stalked from within, from slavery to Jim Crow to communist witch-hunting to "unitary" executive power. Today's predator is an oligarchic plutocracy--re-aroused from the Gilded and Jazz Ages--which can materialize only through the Big Lie. Hence that is not only the proper target, it's the only target worth aiming at.

Sorry to get so preachy.

Pissing in the rightward wind

Pop quiz. Who said, "At the heart of liberalism really is ... a belief that government should replace God"?

Was it ...

A. Ayman al Zawahiri?

or ...

B. Todd Akin?

OK, contemporary headlines give it away. But it's astounding, is it not, that the answer could just as well be "A"? And yet the actual speaker (the quote is from a 2011 interview with Tony Perkins) sits in the United States House of Representatives, vocally huckstering not the United States Constitution, but Christianist Sharia law.

One of Akin's fundamentalist pals tells the Washington Post that Akin "is just a remarkable scholar of our country’s heritage." To Glenn Beck he's a genius, no doubt. But anyone with even a passing comprehension of American history knows that it was the Founders, intellectually steeped in the carnage and chaos of Europe's religious wars, who passionately believed that government should indeed replace God in the structure and exercise of ... government.

But what's the use. Trying to educate the religious right about American history is like trying to convince supply-siders that slashing taxes doesn't increase government revenue. They absolutely know what's what, and that's that.

Oh, the elliptical portion of the above quote? In liberalism there is also "a hatred for God." There, I guess I'm only shocked at Akin's implication of godless liberals' belief in one.

Do fanatics ever listen to themselves?

In Mo, an odd little election

This is encouraging, although I take Rasmussen's polling about as seriously as I do PPP's: "Embattled Democratic incumbent Claire McCaskill has now jumped to a 10-point lead over her Republican challenger, Congressman Todd Akin."

What an odd little election. Democrats are rooting for the Republican, Republicans are rooting for anyone but the Democrat and their own Republican, biased polling organizations are cross-biasing their samples, GOP billionaires are brimming with cash but have nowhere to go, Ann Coulter is reduced to "officially hating" one of her ideological finest, and Missouri's Todd Akin will be sadly absent when his neighbor Kevin Yoder goes drunkenly skinny dipping in Tampa's hurricane-washed convention center.

Why do other folks follow sports, when we've got this?

About that Texas judge crackpot ...

Liberals are missing the story on the crackpot judge in Texas who's predicting--in the dire event of Obama's reelection--an Obama-ordered, U.N.-led invasion of the United States, accompanied by assorted "civil unrest, civil disobedience, civil war maybe." (Maybe?)

Is it news that right-wing crackpots are ... uh ... crackpotted?

Of course not. But there is news here. The judge continued:

And the sheriff, I've already asked him, I said, "You gonna back me?" He said, "Yeah, I'll back you." Well, I don't want a bunch of rookies back there. I want trained, equipped, seasoned veteran officers to back me.

And into what does that translate?

A tax increase, endorsed by the judge, of more than $800,000--alongside $2 million in cuts, which is just about a 2:1 ratio, which is about 5 times greater than the 10:1 ratio which the crackpotted GOP presidential nominee won't accept on the federal level.

[T]he sheriff needs to expand his staff by seven deputies to reduce call response times, minimize officer fatigue and reduce the turnaround time for investigations ... [and to prepare for the coming invasion, which is only prudent].

So see? Even in this Texas crackpot there is an element of fiscal sanity, lacking in Mitt Romney. And that's the story.

Guess what? Medicare-lovers love Medicare

From the Not-Really-News-But-We-Spent-All-This-Money-On-Polling-It-So-Here-It-Is department:

[T]o likely voters in Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin ... the Romney-Ryan proposal to reshape Medicare by giving future beneficiaries fixed amounts of money to buy health coverage is deeply unpopular.

That earthshaking banality is reported by the NY Times, and was uncovered by new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News polls. We may now consider ourselves informed.

Or are we? Still left to fathom is Mitt Romney's frankly unfathomable decision to put Medicare's angel of death on his ticket. Did Lincoln opt for Wendell Phillips? Or McKinley, J.P. Morgan? Or Kennedy, the archbishop of Baltimore? All such choices might have been boldly Romneyesque; on the other hand the names Lincoln, McKinley and Kennedy would be as obscure today as the name Romney will be tomorrow.

True, voters don't vote for or against presidential nominees through their vice-presidential candidates. But Romney's formal alliance with Paul Ryan has only elevated the latter within the GOP's hottest ideological circles while broadly reinforcing and even compelling every cold, negative image of the former--the people-firing, plutocrat-loving Grinch who wants to steal poor seniors' twilight. Ryan? He's the cute little dog with the single antler.

The most plausible and frequently circulated explanation of Romney's choice is that Ryan would help with the base. And since this was shaping up to be a base election, a base-embraced, ideology-bronzed evangelist would be a profound plus. That thinking, however, defies decades of the empirically profounder. See above. Romney had already peddled and prostrated himself before the GOP's heartless masses; the addition of Ryan couldn't possibly add to Romney's base vote, which would either buy Romney's undignified groveling, or not.

So Romney inherited all the reinforced pillars of Ryan's negatives--chiefly, Medicare's scheduled demolition--and, predictably, none of his positives. And now--subsequent to about a millennium of Medicare's vast popularity--we're informed that in critical swing states the "Romney-Ryan proposal to reshape Medicare ... is deeply unpopular."

Well I'll be darned.