PMC Commentary

'Every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger'

BuzzFeed notes that "the figure who permeated both the undergraduate and graduate courses" in geopolitics that Chuck Hagel has taught for three years at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service was "former President and five-star General Dwight D. Eisenhower":

The senator even kept a large portrait of the former president, painted for him by his brother, in his office at Georgetown. In his book, Hagel wrote that Eisenhower is the man he'd "put up on my Rushmore."

Hagel's admiration for Eisenhower, adds BuzzFeed, is "one reason he meets some of his most intense opposition from those who fear cuts to America's massive defense spending." Perhaps they're thinking of this sort of earnest rhetoric, from President Eisenhower's 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Observes Jean Edward Smith, in his excellent Eisenhower in War and Peace:

The ideas for Eisenhower's speech did not bubble up from the bureaucracy. They did not reflect a cabinet consensus...; they did not derive from learned professorial research; nor did they represent the work product of policy think tanks. They were pure Eisenhower. Ike believed the country wanted peace, and he was determined to provide it. War was neither a board game nor a seminar exercise for armchair intellectuals (italics mine).

Smith penned those words in 2012 with his own era in mind, as much as Ike's.

The Hagel hearing

... which I'm watching, which I wish I could say is enlightening, but it's only depressing--the same old neocon Grump-Crackpot faction, as represented today by McCain, Sessions and Inhofe. James Inhofe, whose density of mind is beyond any sober comprehension.

The American consensus

Writing for the New Republic, political historian Alan Brinkley (whose 1982 masterpiece, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression, is instead your loss if you haven't read it) asks: "The L Word Lives: Is it safe to say 'liberal' again?"

It seems it is, although liberal politicians remain skittish and progressives probably a bit jealous of the left's old lover. It's too early to know if the electorate has swung officially "liberal," and politicians, being followers, will surely wait for voters, via Gallup, to rule on the "liberal" question. As for progressives, they finally convinced the rank-and-file left to use their hipper, less terminologically toxic moniker; and yet now here it is, liberalism, under the streetlight again.

Whatever. I still intuit a distinction between liberalism and progressivism, the former being more incrementalist and FDR-like (hence more Obamian) than the rowdier, impatient latter. My previous attempts to demarcate the two schools drew but little notice, however, so I cashiered the effort. Alas, my withdrawal from the labeling battlefield has drawn as little notice as did my active engagement, which is a real ego-crusher. 

Yet I am so pleased to read that my more recent and aggressive campaign--noting not the differences between liberalism and progressivism, but the similarities of liberalism and conservatism--has found its way into Brinkley's brief essay:

[T]he liberal creed remains one that even many conservatives, if they thought about it, might agree with. Modern liberalism means liberty for speech and the press. It means freedom of religion and a separation of church and state. It provides equal rights under the law. Other elements of liberalism have begun to emerge in our own time:  protecting the environment, securing social security and health care, stopping unnecessary wars, supporting the poor, feeding the hungry, helping the homeless.

By "conservatives" Brinkley means, of course, genuine conservatives--not the nihilistic fanatics and anarchistic bombthrowers of the contemporary GOP, who essentially cling to their guns and religion and "conservative" label because they market well. And Brinkley is correct: Go ahead, dear genuine conservatives, reread his itemization and locate, if you can, even one to which Burke or Lincoln or T.R. would object.  

"Most of all," continues Brinkley, "liberalism in our time means the support of equality," which converts negatively into the struggle against "economic and social inequality," which positively and rather naturally reconverts into championing equality of opportunity. And who, as they say, would argue with that?

This, it would seem, is the new American consensus, and it looks remarkably like the old American consensus. It is traditionalist and experimental and characterological and pragmatic and hesitant and forward-looking; it is both profoundly liberal and imperishably conservative. And since it is both, it is really neither.

Seeking the Ma Barker vote

From the You-Can't-Make-This-Shit-Up Department:

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Wednesday during a Senate committee hearing on gun control ... that magazine capacity should not be restricted because "there could be a situation where a mother runs out of bullets because of something we do here."

Touching.

Why? Because it hurts, that's why.

Jared Bernstein on GDP contraction:

[T]he role of diminished government spending--austerity at time when we need a fiscal push--is a useful reminder that it’s not nature that has us stuck in this slog, it’s policy. One would hope this report would remind Congress what a terrible idea it would to allow the sequester--$85 billion in spending cuts in 2013--to take effect in March.

Yet Chait notes that "The GOP’s stated plan is to ... implement the sequestration cuts":

What’s more, Republicans remain publicly committed to the notion that this will help and not harm the economy.

Why of course. Because it's a "terrible idea."

To me it is simply inconceivable that anyone, even any Republican, could honestly believe that "applying medieval techniques [of] bleeding the patient," as Bernstein frames it, could be anything but a terrible idea. Others have argued that modern Republican pols really are that dumb, but I stand firm in my conviction that their imbecility is mostly an act. Had President McCain been caught in such a fourth-quarter fix, this Republican-controlled Congress would be doing what Republicans have done for other Republican presidents since Eisenhower: furiously shoveling government money out of each chamber's door.

That the contemporary GOP is so willing to inflict economic pain on innocent millions only to hurt Obama politically is merely one more measure of just how unAmerican this wretched party has become.

GDP gobbledygook

Although the Associated Press reports that "the drop in gross domestic product wasn’t as bleak as it looked" (it "was mainly the result of ... [g]overnment spending cuts and slower inventory growth, which can be volatile" [my emphasis]), we should brace for much more of this kind of overreactive, counterfactual wisdom, from National Journal's Ron Fournier, formerly of the Associated Press:

"An economic recovery has begun," Obama said in his inaugural address. "America’s possibilities are limitless...."

Well, no they’re not--at least not until we get our fiscal house in order.

... which wrongly implies that the federal deficit and national debt are the economy's chief drags. This anti-Keynesian obscurantism just never seems to die its long-overdue and deserved death.

Krugman is so right: Washington's "Very Serious People" are easily among either the least knowledgeable or the most disingenuous.

Erick Erickson's long goodbye

RedState's Erick Erickson uses 23 words to say that he "was not going to say anything" about leaving CNN for Fox, but gosh darnit the world is abuzz with rumor so he's decided he "should say something," whereupon he expends another 1,029 words saying it: He's leaving CNN for Fox. (Five words.)

Yet these 66 words, toward the end of Erickson's long goodbye, made the read worth it:

Frankly, before I went to CNN I was oblivious to the fact that there are ways to say things, without sacrificing or compromising my view or principle, that come off as more respectable and honest without invective than how I might have otherwise said them. There are ways to say things that draw people to you and ways to say things that push people from you.

To be Ericksonesque about this, let's elaborate. Mr. Erickson was 35 years old (thank you, Wikipedia) when he joined CNN as a professional commentator on national political affairs--which is to say, broadly, a commentator on the human condition--who was nonetheless "oblivious" to the kindergarten precept that "invective" can "push people" away. That's an astonishing confession, largely in that it's also inadvertently revealing of the far-right's alienation from even the most fundamental of human dynamics. Kind of spookily Nietzschean, you might say, which itself dredges up even darker images of the uncompromising, doctrinaire mind.

And against folks like that, I myself have no problem whatsoever with deploying "invective."

Republican fission

Politico's Dylan Byers has reservations about David Brooks' latest incoherence:

I'm ... skeptical about this "coalition of the incompatible." That's what the Republican party is now. If it worked, the factions wouldn't need to split.

What fascinates is that the factions held together as long as they did. The Republican "fusion"--namely Bill Buckley's engineered coalition of libertarians and social conservatives, united by their mutual hatred of communism--is roughly a half-century old, yet many observers present at its creation had prodigious doubts about the political unity of classical liberalism's atomism and more traditional conservatives' communitarianism. Barry Goldwater's '64 presidential run was fusionism's first major outing--the Arizonan libertarian barely tolerated his campaign's desperate mixture of religious conservatism and politics--and was, as well, damn near its last. Few appreciated at the time just how inspired and determined Goldwater's "movement conservatives" had become, and even fewer comprehended (including Goldwater) what a full embrace of the religious right the Republican establishment would execute.

From there, it was a short road to enduring crackpotism. Republicans had white backlash working for them in addition to self-declared (and Democratic-conceded) ownership of God and flag and plenty of well-funded propaganda machinery and, above all, an unprecedented willingness to ruthlessly demagogue absolutely anything, anytime, in any campaign. The assorted fringes flocked to the welcoming GOP, since the GOP wanted every last vote for its accumulation of raw power, and it never fussed about imprudent acquisitions.

And now, it's all collapsing, as most everyone assumed it would--but much sooner.

A real Mitch of a reelection effort

Yes it's early and not entirely fair to pitch an incumbent against a generic savior, but this, for Mitch McConnell, from a Louisville Courier-Journal poll, is bad:

With his re-election bid just a year away, those opposed to U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell outnumber his supporters 2-1 among Kentucky voters....

[Thirty-four] percent said they plan to vote against McConnell--while just 17 percent say they will vote to give him six more years. Forty-four percent said they will wait to see who is running against him before deciding.

So the Senate minority leader's top priority now shifts from burning Obama to saving his own butt by protecting his right flank, which in turn imperils even the most digestible bipartisan cooperation on, say, immigration or gun control. And that, combined with Speaker Boehner's ineluctable bunker mentality, promises two more monotonous years of 2010's election results.

Perhaps I'll take up writing movie or restaurant reviews.

High science

I just this very minute started a new daily medication, whose accompanying, three-page pharmacological exegesis begins: "It is not known exactly how this medicine works."

Well, am I not feeling better already or what?

Brooks: sort of calling it quits

David Brooks is now calling for a free-soil Whiggery north of the Mason-Dixon and out to the Pacific which would peacefully coexist but compete with the Republican Party's nihilistic feudalism of "the South and rural West." This "second G.O.P," as Brooks calls it--that is, the first G.O.P. aforementioned--"would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis."

Yes we might, but if we do, then goodbye second G.O.P. Rallying millions of profoundly disaffected conservatives and befuddled centrists to the cry of "Remember Mancur Olson!" isn't exactly the motivational stuff of Lexington and Concord or the October Revolution or the Arab Spring. And slogans are important; in fact they're supreme, especially when your new movement is founded on the somniferous exigencies of Mancur Olson and Charles Murray.

Suspecting this, Brooks takes a more explanatory stab at what the new Whiggery could mean:

The second G.O.P. ... would be filled with people who recoiled at President Obama’s second Inaugural Address because of its excessive faith in centralized power, but who don’t share the absolute antigovernment story of the current G.O.P.

Putting aside that Brooks' characterization of Obama's inaugural speech as an "excessive faith in centralized power" is merely the same old hyperbolic humbug against which Brooks is simultaneously inveighing, there is already a superabundance of authentically conservative Democrats who naturally "don’t share the absolute antigovernment story of the current G.O.P."

Thus a G.O.P.-winged duplication of thoughtful conservatism is, by now, and by definition, superfluous. Your party's real problem, Mr. Brooks, is that the Democratic Party (assuming it doesn't lose its head and overreach) is fast becoming the American consensus party--a rough coalition of moderates, liberals, progressives, and Burkean conservatives. In short your party, Mr. Brooks, is being squeezed out of business, because your business party failed to plan, failed to diversify, and failed to strive for anything but the quick profit. 

Palin's talk wasn't cheap

The University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs calculates that given her $3 million, three-year contract at Fox News, where she spoke 189,221 words, Sarah Palin earned $15.85 for every one for them. 

She said, for instance, "heck," 28 times. Boom. $443.80, right in Sarah's pocket. "Ronald Reagan"? Forty-one times. Bingo. $1299.70. "President Obama"? Ca-Ching! $24,916.20, perhaps the single largest transfer payment to a member of the poorly working class in American history.

Now you might think "You betcha" was a real moneymaker for Palinesque eloquence, but alas she said it only twice. $63.40. 

Roger Ailes would have saved a bundle had he only paid me that $47.55 I asked for in personnel-consulting fees, three years ago: "You'll be sorry."

Turning the debate

On "Morning Joe," Paul Krugman said that on his "list of things to worry about, the long-term deficit is probably No. 5, No. 6," adding:

There’s lots of stuff, if we had a government of philosopher kings, there’s lots of stuff I’d be for. Given the reality of our political, partisan, polarized [world], I want the president to be pushing for job creation. That should be his top priority.

It seems from that passage that Krugman believes job creation could be a part of our present political reality, although I haven't the vaguest idea as to how he might nurture such a belief. Nonetheless his "top priority" is politically astute in the form of a much-needed counteroffensive to Republicans' unremitting deficit pounding, which will only intensify as the 2014 elections approach.

Being deficit hawkish but a bit less deficit hawkish than Republicans is a political loser for Democrats and the White House. Invigorating the nation's sluggish economy ranks three-and-a-half times more important to voters than ending the deficit, and Democrats have nearly two years to educate voters on how accomplishing the primary goal would lead, at any rate, to satisfying the second. They must swing this conversation around to the voter's benefit, and away from Republicans'--i.e., all the deficit scolding.

From death panels to debth panels

Every four years, betwixt the other four years, panicked brigades of the ethnically bleached and propagandistically saturated swamp the polling booths while whole armies of the demographically emergent stay home. Variations in this electoral imbalance do occur, but the gist of most midterms is that palsied neuroses and predatory ignorance dominate.  

Given that brief, one-step forward, 435+33-steps back history of our staggering electoral system, it's rather easy to predict with highest confidence that the 2014 midterms will come packaged in blazing hysteria over the "misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit," as E.J. Dionne puts it today. Mitch McConnell is already stoking the fearful bugaboo as the "transcendent issue of our era," even though conservative economists such as the Financial Times' Martin Wolf know from empirical data that "It is far more important to promote recovery." Wolf's eminently conservative advice: "Just calm down."

Now of course Wolf understands that tranquil reason is hideously incompatible with political conservatism, but political conservatives understand that not one crimson hayseed is reading Wolf. GOP voters, like tittering children 'round the campfire, positively love to be frightened--and lucky for them they have a boundless supply of on-air bogeymen who daily relate hair-raising stories of swarthy leftist wastrels, which promptly make the base's pink ass turn ivory white. These terrified asses then dutifully vote.

And give them credit. That much they "get." They understand what habitual voting can accomplish, while too many--in fact "the many"--don't.

Paul Ryan asks for "a chance"

Speaking to the National Review Institute yesterday, Paul Ryan made a fitting pitch for the stupid party's 2016 presidential nomination:

[W]e can’t get rattled. We won’t play the villain in [Obama's] morality plays. We have to stay united. We have to show that--if given the chance--we can govern. We have better ideas.

If given the chance.

Just when should the clock start on their purportedly denied chance? Did it not in fact start during the 1980s, as ideological profligates jettisoned Eisenhowerian fiscal conservatism? Did it not start in the 1990s, as Republican ideologues battled the economic doom they assured us would come from Clinton's books-balancing prudence? Or when they attempted, out of political pique, to unseat a legitimately seated president? Or when, early in the next century, the same ideologues gutted the public treasury through more inequality-expanding tax cuts? Or when they launched a little-considered, wholly unprovoked war? Or when they embraced war criminality in the name of official U.S. policy?

And the clock hadn't started, or was no longer running, when Republicans chose to obstruct every post-crash recovery effort and oppose greater healthcare accessibility and threaten national default and squander four years of responsible co-governance by shrieking instead about Kenyan-telegraphed non-Hawaiian birth notices and absently sired neo-Marxist anti-colonialism and star-chamber-like death panels and the alarming dismay of teleprompters and even the soul-exposing disgrace of eating arugula for Christ's sake? 

However ...

If given the chance--we can govern.

This isn't a political party. It's a parody.