PMC Commentary

Eric Cantor's "civil war"

The Radicals are now leaking and pooping on their once-reliable majority leader, Eric Cantor:

In a closed-door conference meeting on Wednesday, Cantor told one GOP member that if they blocked the Senate-passed Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) from coming to the floor, they’d cause "civil war" in the ranks....

Cantor’s comment irked some Republican aides, who told National Review Online that such strong language is inappropriate.

Having helped press the toilet's lever, Cantor is inveighing against the GOP's vortex of madness at the eleventh hour. He was with the Radicals when radicalism seemed ascendingly sweet; now he's turning whiter than a Mississippi redistricter at the prospect of being flushed with these malodorous flunkies.

Will he save himself? Who knows? We do know he hasn't any principles to rescue, so that lightens his load. But what's more, who cares? Cantor's only consistency has come in playing the odds of personal advancement; this reptilian opportunist wouldn't know a national interest if one wiped his ass for him. He is truly one of the more despicable specimens of contemporary Radical Republicanism--and now it's abandoning him, or he's abandoning it, or something like that, if anyone any longer cares.

Of genuine interest, however, is the question of his party's "civil war." At long last, has its outbreak arrived? Will the Tea Party split into a third? Are establishment Republicans reclaiming the high ground?

With this bunch predictions are rather useless, since bumbling amateurism has so often been in command. The best we can do is stay tuned.

You be the judge; it's beyond me

I swear I'm not sure. This Politico op-ed, by one Keith Koffler, is so laughably dumb it may be a parody. But if that's the case, it's also so seemingly sincere that it throws me hopelessly off the scent, leaving behind only slack-jawed bewilderment.

The mystery begins with the title--"Republicans need to go negative"--which, one would think, is enough stunning irony to guarantee nothing but its unmistakable continuation. In accordance with this theory the author immediately urges--with what seems like self-evident seriousness--that though negative they must go, "Republicans should not lower themselves to the level of a president who routinely lobs ad hominem political epithets their way."

OK, that's absurd, right? Most presidential observers of mere human patience have prayed for five years that just once Obama would explode by lobbing an ad hominem political epithet Republicans' way. No luck. The man seems to be congenitally incapable of spontaneous ire. Hence Koffler keeps the reader on the this-must-be-a-parody hook.  

Yet then he segues into a bizarre litany of right-wing orthodoxies to be pitted against "a left-wing philosophy that is curbing freedom and prosperity for all"--and finally he substitutes his rabid foam with a drooling tribute to ... Ronald Reagan.

So hell I don't know. Keith Koffler is either a fucking lunatic or he's the most brilliant satirist since Swift.

The spreading "scandal"

This scandal is immense, it's breathtaking, it's unheard of in the annals of WH pushback, and, wouldn't you know it, Breitbart.com is on it:

Lanny Davis, who served under President Bill Clinton as special counsel to the White House, told Washington, D.C.'s WMAL [and 'Breitbart News editor Larry O'Connor'] this morning that the Obama White House had threatened the Washington Times over his column, warning that the Times would suffer limited access to White House officials and might have its White House credentials revoked.

This tentacled scandal is of course kids' stuff. It's the press' right to be suspicious or obnoxious or even profoundly wrong and it's the WH press secretary's right to react like an emotionally hurt adolescent. Both of these occur with daily regularity, and their essence occurs far beyond the zeniths of power. For instance I once wrote a column in which I merely quoted a Politico piece unfavorable to GOPThink, and almost instantly I received an irate, retraction-demanding email from a Capitol Hill Republican staffer from which one would have assumed I had accused his boss of possessing the maloriented sexual ethics of a Catholic priest or some such godawful thing.

Kids' stuff, GOP-style. But everybody does it; everybody always has, and always will. Yet to Breitbart it's shocking news, which soon enough will go mainstream.

Run, Bob Woodward, Run!

The latest scandalous wisp in the media's teapot.

[Politico's intrepid Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen] have obtained, exclusively, the exchange:

... I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.

From email, WH economic adviser Gene Sperling to WaPo's Bob Woodward.

Re: Latter's insipid "claim" that Obama has "moved the goal posts" in fiscal negotiations.

If the email was indeed a "veiled threat," as VandeHei and Allen characterized Woodward's reaction to it, then I guess my powers of subtlety are failing.

In context, Sperling's email was a massive genuflection at the Washington altar of establishment apologies--think Twain and barrels of ink--and even if one nixes the exonerating context, it's still clear that Sperling meant an intellectual regret only. 

But, whatever. By tonight Sean Hannity and Breitbart.com will have Woodward on the lam in Canada's witness protection program, having fled just in the nick of time from Obama's capital city drones and jackbooted Kenyan hitmen.

Post-racial, partisan discrimination and the VRA

In conspicuous but indirect relation to yesterday's Supremely expressed prejudice against the Voting Rights Act, the NYT's Thomas Edsall plows through mounds of conflicting social science before answering the question, "How salient is race?" His assessment is cryptic:

I would say the ability of the United States to go from legal segregation a half century ago to the election of a black president suggests there is enormous elasticity in the American political system, and that the country has the capacity to deal with what it now faces, both inside and outside its borders.

You may take that answer to your local sibyl, who will be happy to translate it into equal inscrutability.

But what if Tom Edsall and the Five Supremes are asking the wrong question? What if the VRA's Section 5 contemporarily has far less to do with identifying racial prejudice than it does partisan discrimination? What if the 21st-century editions of white citizen councils in control of local and state voting procedures have grown sophisticated enough to care less about skin color than Democratic proclivities?

As Edsall's impressively researched column shows, you can get any answer you want to the question of racism's endurance in America. But partisan identifiers are indisputable, entailing not just race but socioeconomic status, education, religious affiliation, and of course empirical voting patterns within precincts.

Do scheming Republicans really care if you're as pink as they are? Maybe not so much anymore. Who knows for sure? But unquestionably they do care if your geopolitics, so to speak, suggest anything but Republicanism. And therein lies the democratic value of Section 5, which, rather than erased, would be better extended to Ohio and Pennsylvania.

A pitiable waste

Michael Kinsley writes that "President Obama might well dream of killing off the Republican Party," which Kinsley characterizes as a mere "political fantasy," whereas I'd argue it's a national necessity.

Nonetheless his New Republic piece on Republican self-pity is vintage Kinsley, aged in a vat of sober reflection: 

According to some Republicans, Obama is even responsible for the war of recriminations now going on inside the Republican Party. And not just because he beat them. Because he (in the words of columnist Charles Krauthammer) used "ruthless skill ... to create an internal civil war" among Republicans. What a magician! What a masterful, powerful, brilliant performance. A man like that ought to be president!

Look. President Obama has no superpowers. He is a skilled politician who plays the game well.

And, to me, that's what makes this whole damn experiment in Republican implosion and the president's dignified forbearance thereof so paradoxical. Obama indeed plays the game as well as any of the wiliest, friskiest White House pols of the past, yet he's probably the least interested president--ever--in all this opponent bashing and schoolyard jockeying.

The poor man just wants to do his job. He simply wants to do what he was elected to do. And in his election and reelection there was nothing devious, nothing Machiavellian, nothing "responsible for the war of recriminations now going on inside the Republican Party," which is rendering the performance of his job impossible.

So at the helm we've perhaps American political history's most capable policy president who's reduced to full-time sufferance of the squabbling, purely self-interested children of Congress. What a waste. What an absolute waste of personal talent--and national opportunities. 

An unignorable "Well, duh"

"The logic here is simple enough" that even a House Republican could understand it: the sequester's "adverse effects on jobs and incomes," remarked Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke yesterday, "would lead to less actual deficit reduction in the short run for any given set of fiscal actions."

This linear simplicity suggests that "actual deficit reduction" is not Republicans' objective, as advertised. Slower growth--from which will emerge even higher deficits and thus a more sharply perceived urgency for government's downsizing--is.   

I confess that I might be giving too much credit to the strategic Republican mind; the above scheming requires that mind to think three moves ahead, as opposed to the GOP's seeming, one-two apishness of "We cut now, deficit go down."

But, I'm wary of being too sure of too generous credit. The other day I referenced the criminal mastermind, Keyser Söze, who famously admonished that "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." There's at least a whiff of the same trick in Republicans' convincing lack of any coherent strategy.

Read it and laugh

We all knew it was inevitable--the ghastly return of far-right prophet Morris, Dick. Yes, yes, I know, Dick's about as reliable for political prognostication as Sarah Palin is relevant to econometric analysis, but damn he's fun. Here's some of his latest:  

President Obama’s massive and voluble campaign against the sequester has a deep political motivation that is not apparent on the surface....

He knows the economy is tanking. He realizes that we are headed for a double-dip recession. He expects unemployment to soar. He understands that his almost $300 billion in tax increases this year will drive us into recession. So he needs an out.

That’s where sequestration fits in: If it goes into effect, he can blame Republican budget cuts for the economic disaster that will probably unfold this year.

Naturally this is all just a setup for Dick's familiar prediction-as-possible-wish-fulfillment: "Obama’s blame game won’t work.... Voters will pay him back for his economic stewardship in 2014. Big time."

Left unmentioned is that by force of electoral orneriness presidents traditionally lose partisan seats in midterm meltdowns; but then such mention would only deny this contemptible Dick of a prognosticator his expertly derived insight. He's on a desperate road to credibility recovery, and he needs a schtick.

What probably won't help, however, are passages (same column) like this one:

FDR faced his own double dip when the economy crashed in 1937 and joblessness rose back up above 20 percent. The causes were the imposition of the Social Security tax--no benefits were paid out until 1940--and the Wagner Act, which gave unions new power and radically increased wages.

Say what? The cause of the 1937 recession within a depression was FDR's abrupt withdrawal of government stimulus in an ill-advised attempt to cut the deficit. Couldn't Dick at least feign a little honesty, at least once? Collapsed credibility is really hard to rebuild atop incredible inaccuracies.

Which reminds me. Since CPAC's organizer has said that Chris Christie is out but Sarah Palin is in, because "CPAC is like the all-star game for professional athletes; you get invited when you have had an outstanding year," I can only assume that Morris, Dick--whose outstanding professionalism, like Palin's, even Fox News could no longer stomach--is somewhere on the agenda?

Cheer up? Things couldn't be much worse?

Milbank's summary of Senate Republicans' disgraceful behavior yesterday in the confirmation of Chuck Hagel is borderline despondent. He writes that "It was one of many moments from the past few weeks that Joe McCarthy would have admired"--and that was one of his more cheerful observations.

I note this only because Dana Milbank generally finds some humor in even the bleakest of partisan degradations. And if he's stuck for giggles, he simply exaggerates the banal. But neither inclination applies this time, and the banality of Republican disgrace needs no exaggeration in its unalterable unfunniness.

Why are congressional Republicans behaving this way now, so soon after what many believed was November's reset?--you know, behaving this way and that, molesting distinguished nominees and further hobbling a crippled economy?

Two logical possibilities suggest themselves: 1) Republicans really are endowed with the anarchic Hobbesianism and yet primordial cryptofascism of Adorno et al's "Authoritarian Personality"; or, more charitably, 2) Republicans are, in the best of hyperpartisan bubbleology, merely honoring Mitch McConnell's infamous 2010 pledge to make Obama a one-term president. Effectively speaking, that is.

(I suppose one could argue an admixture--that congressional Republicans are, by and large, pathological cryptofascists hellbent on the full-blown anarchy of American Dream-cancellation for precisely four years--but why spoil some blogospherically perfect reductionism?) 

Of these two possibilities, I fear--or, like Milbank, I'm somewhat despondent about--the second one more. Because as a sustained political program, it's also quite workable within the American system of governance (of sorts).

A day in the life of American governance

Today, Speaker Boehner said that U.S. senators should "get off their ass" and resolve the catastrophically pending sequester, which most of Boehner's members voted for, and then Majority Leader Eric Cantor whined something so typically repugnant that no one listened, and then Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy demanded of the president that "It is time for leadership," which the president most recently displayed in producing a draft for immigration reform, for which he got handed supreme Republican indignation and was told to never ever to do that again, and now it's reported that the Senate indeed "plans to vote on two competing measures to replace or modify the sequester, but neither is expected to achieve the 60-vote threshold needed to advance"--that being the Republican custom of blocking everything on which the GOP urges progress--and so the president is wandering around Virginia, joined by at least one other House Republican, Scott Rigell, who wants his own party's leaders to fucking do something, which, in the end, so to speak, will produce nothing more than Speaker John Boehner telling the Senate to get off its ass.

And there you have it, one day in the life of American governance.

Is presidential "greatness" now disallowed?

Greg Sargent generously characterizes David Brooks' morning flimflam as "a good faith effort to describe what he’d like Obama to do to change things," which "boils down to this," in Brooks' words:

[Obama would] transform the sequester fight by changing the categories that undergird it. He’d possess the primary ingredient of political greatness: imagination. The great presidents, like Teddy Roosevelt, see situations differently. They ask different questions. History pivots around their terms.

I confess a romanticized fondness for Brooks' "great man" theory of the presidency, notwithstanding that virtually every critical examination of it renders friendly observers such as yours truly a bit shaken. Because "great presidents," like T.R. and Lincoln and the second Roosevelt, were in reality "lucky" enough to be swept up in the current of transcendent and often cataclysmic historical forces already in play. (It should go without noting that these same men who possessed the extraordinary leadership abilities to attain this nation's highest office would have also possessed the same leadership abilities to confront their unique challenges wisely. Nonetheless presidential luck--however grimly or bloodily manifested, from great depressions to world and civil wars--remained luck in the sense of the inescapably and impersonally driven.)

Yet T.R., Lincoln & Co.--however grimly severe the partisanship of their ages--presided not in the seeming ossification of 21st-century American politics. And this passage, from a NY Times presidential profile of October, 2010, has haunted me ever since:

In their darkest moments, White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed, no matter how many bills he signs. Everything seems to conspire against the idea: an implacable opposition with little if any real interest in collaboration, a news media saturated with triviality and conflict, a culture that demands solutions yesterday, a societal cynicism that holds leadership in low regard. Some White House aides who were ready to carve a new spot on Mount Rushmore for their boss two years ago privately concede now that he cannot be another Abraham Lincoln after all. In this environment, they have increasingly concluded, it may be that every modern president is going to be, at best, average.

Put another way, true presidential greatness is perhaps now inadmissible, since it could hurt the opposition's feelings. Politics is becoming that petty.

Brooks doubles-down: the NYT columnist as Fox Newser

David Brooks writes that his most recent transgression against overt reality and basic fairness prompted him to rethink Obama's mistakes and his own "dissatisfaction" with them. And this, from the penumbral universe of desperately thrashing-about conservatism, is what Brooks' ponderous rethink comes up with:

The problem is that [Obama's 'Democratic orthodoxy'] locks us into the same debate framework we’ve been stuck in since 1980, which has produced so much gridlock. If politics is framed [as big government versus small, as the individual versus the collective], then the country divides and policy stagnates. We will keep having these endless budget squabbles. The dysfunction will metastasize.

A moment of silence ...

There. Perhaps by now you've absorbed that offensive barrage of fanciful bullshit. You don't believe it, because it's patently unbelievable, but you've absorbed it. And its thrust is unmistakable: The right, from fringe to core, has got nothing--nothing but make-believe tales and pseudo-realities and a weird kind of deeply disingenuous post-conservatism which even the post-conservatives don't really believe. Because it's patently, provably unbelievable.

To pin the label of "Democratic orthodoxy" on the most philosophically pragmatic president since FDR--as well as a president who has taken as much unhinged heat from the orthodox left as from the intoxicated right--is unbelievably offensive enough. Yet Brooks compounds this trespass by falsely witnessing the president's responsibility for government's resultant gridlock, division, stagnation and dysfunction.

Not even Sean Hannity believes that. He too says it, of course, because it's patently, provably--and best of all--offensively untrue, which is what passes for conservative analysis in these post-conservative days.

David Brooks has sunk to that.

Klein's flawed assumption

Ezra Klein tries to make sense of things:

As I understand it, the GOP has five basic goals in the budget talks:
1) Cut the deficit.
2) Cut entitlement spending.
3) Protect defense spending, and possibly even increase it.
4) Simplify the tax code by cleaning out deductions and loopholes.
5) Lower tax rates.

He then outlines the fundamental incompatibility of Republicans' hostility to the White House's attempted accommodations of the former's stated goals, noting that "I’ve asked some Republican sources to explain their thinking to me. But none of the answers quite seems to add up..... Perhaps I’m missing something?"

In fact, Ezra, the underlying problem may be that you've included too much; that is, you have accepted as premise #1 the Republican goal to "cut the deficit." While this is a noble-sounding marketing slogan for the GOP, it is politically antipodal to the party's deeper objective of goal #2--"cut entitlement spending"--which, to be somewhat repetitive, becomes politically more palatable only by not accomplishing goal #1.

Put another way, one should not accept at face value anything the GOP says (is it really still necessary to say that?)--especially when it comes to deficits, and especially since it was the GOP that deliberately cranked them up. And having gone to so much trouble to wreck our fiscal house, why would the GOP want to help rebuild it, which in short order would only let entitlements off the hook? 

Finally radicalized nearly to the point of clarity, the contemporary GOP is left with one fundamental goal: to destroy the welfare state, along with anything that smacks of a welfare state, which includes earned entitlements. And that cannot be accomplished through logical fiscal policies, nicely ordered, beginning with "cut the deficit."

The GOP's squeeze play

Some indiscreet reality:

If [the sequester is] not reversed, federal spending at the discretion of Congress will eventually fall to a new five-decade low. Cuts of even larger size are scheduled to take effect every year over the next 10, signaling an era of government austerity ...

... in the midst of an unemployment depression.

This, eighty years after the ideation of countercyclical economics and less than two months after the International Monetary Fund's "mea culpa" that "it did not fully understand how government austerity efforts would undermine economic growth" in Europe.

Now no one is arguing that America's sequester will equal Europe's severity. But some do wonder why Republicans' ignorance of modern macroeconomics persists, to which I would counterargue that there is probably little such ignorance. Most GOPers--other, that is, than its incurably ignorant Louie Gohmerts and Rand Pauls--understand with lethal precision what misfortunes austerity will inflict. And nothing could make them happier.

Republicans adore deficits, the ratcheting up of which has been their political program for roughly an uninterrupted 30 years. The squeezing of private investment? Pshaw. Stratospheric deficits mean the squeezing of social safety nets; austerity means even higher deficits due to lower economic growth; thus what is popularly marketed as "conservative fiscal prudence" is in fact a latent pathogen--additional austerity now ensures an even tighter squeeze later.

But that, I imagine, tells us nothing the GOP doesn't already know--and love. It wins on both ends of the squeeze play.

Sidewinding self-governance

The right is fittingly giddy over a Wall Street Journal report:

Senior aides to House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have begun discussing a bill being prepared by House Republicans to fund government operations through September. Republicans want the bill to extend operating funds at the lower levels set to kick in Friday and to give more flexibility to the Pentagon to manage its cuts.

Such re-legislated defense-spending "management" will likely assume the form of "evasion," while domestic spending is held accountable for its deficit sins. This was expected by many. Perhaps less expected by some is this pusillanimous reaction to yet more Republican extortion, threatened at an abruptly turned table: 

[A]n aide to Senate Democratic leaders said such a measure might be politically difficult for [Democratic] lawmakers to oppose, lest they bear the blame for shutting down the government.

Now I ask you. Do you think Republicans would be pre-palsied about the political consequences of playing hardball? And do you think they'd be leaking to the WSJ--at the beginning of negotiations for Christ's sake--that they're prepared to cave?

It appears the next two years will bear the same relationship to last year's election results that a firecracker bears to a rocket launch. Representative democratic self-governance my ass.