PMC Commentary

Have a happy Taoist Easter, and watch out for the moralists

From the NYT's op-ed page, a hip, Easter Sunday proverb:

Objective moral truth doesn’t exist, and ... even if it did, our grasp of it would be tenuous.

That's from science writer and psychology sleuth Matthew Hutson, author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane, which I have not read (although it sounds like an indispensible investigation not into psychology, but right-wing philosophy, minus the "sane" part). As for the cognitive proverb above, I'll leave it to you to decide if the universal absence of objective moral truth is a universal truth, one dripping with moral implications.

As for me, I bend to the Taoist approach to such matters. If you're unfamiliar with Taoism, it's kind of the Episcopalianism of Asian religio-philosophy, which means it doesn't take itself too seriously. I like that. It's also profoundly nondoctrinaire, which I like even more. And when it comes to morality, Taoism scoffs, which I positively adore. 

Being Chinese in origin, Taoism is characteristically loaded with paradoxes, among which there is none greater than that which addresses morality. In Taoism's exceptionally brief 'bible' of 81 chapters (the Tao Te Ching), the 18th reads, in part (from the Stephen Mitchell translation): "When the great Tao [the 'Way'] is forgotten, goodness and piety appear." Which is only to say, when a people's natural, inner ethos begins to slip away, some external, artificial morality will (must) be imposed.

Think Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee and all the other moral fascists who possess The Answer, which we must obey, they'll lecture, if the peace is to be kept--which only confirms what Matthew Hutson observes: that even if some objective moral truth did exist, our grasp of it would be tenuous.

The Anti-Obama's Apology Tour

Ben Carson is peaking way too soon.

The Johns Hopkins medical star, who possesses oodles of neurosurgical knowledge and a Herman Cain grasp of political economy, has rocketed to messianic superstar status in the right's overnight-sensation, empty-entertainment complex as the Great, Anti-Obama Black Hope of 2016. This would have been fine for Ben Carson, except this is early 2013. Worse, he keeps talking.

I caught some of the Hannity Whisperer in a repeat broadcast last night. Sean had devoted an entire February hour to Carson Worship, complete with a studio congregation of right-wing talk radio hosts, Breitbart columnists and think-tanking propagandists. For 48 fascinating minutes the good doctor prescribed powerful platitudes of no known benefit as the miracle cure for all our socioeconomic ills, and the audience gobbled them up. This awe-struck reception so pleased God's only Sean, he reinvited Brother Carson to the pulpit last Tuesday, whereupon Brother Carson proceeded to once again speak his mind. Big, big mistake--you know, the whole gays, NAMBLA, bestiality thing.

That was the evening on which Dr. Carson's political education began. Spewing dimwitted banalities about the Lord's blessing of supply-side economics is one thing--an ignorance among ignorant friends sort of thing; no one really cares--but hurling hateful assaults against millions of decent Americans as boy-molesters or goat-humpers or God-knows-what tends to get noticed outside the toxic bubble that is Fox primetime.

So already the Anti-Obama is on an Apology Tour: "Now perhaps the examples were not the best choice of words, and I certainly apologize if I offended anyone." The usual contradiction.

Carson gets extra points, though, for adding that "I certainly believe gay people should have all the rights that anybody else has," however marriage "has traditionally been between a man and a woman and nobody should be able to change that."

Putting aside Carson's added inconsistency, he should be glad he's profoundly wrong in his own, Clarence Thomas kind of way. "[T]he point that I was making was that no group of individuals, whoever they are, whatever their belief systems, gets to change traditional definitions."

Retro-project your brain, say, a hundred years. Think "physician." Think "Supreme Court Justice." What human "definition" comes to mind? In fact, what defined, official, medical- and law-school admissions qualification comes to mind? Exactly. White skin, preferably male.

So, darn. Just ask Herman Cain. Even in the roiling pathology of the right's empty-entertainment complex, three months of publicly defending ignorant inconsistencies were a good two-and-a-half months too many. Three-and-a-half years of the same? The prognosis ain't good. 

P.M. Carpenter's official statement of apology

When I was Young I often thought of, and just as often presented in terms, right-wing pols as villainous swindlers, slithering miscreants and downright decadent motherfuckers who could benefit the nation only by leaving it, perhaps across great bodies of water, or, quicker yet, merely the Rio Grande.

During sit-down interviews with myself on "pm carpenter's commentary," I have used these terms that were commonly used during my days growing up in humble, Midwest abodes of impeccable virtue. I know that such terms are not used in the same way nowadays, and I meant no disrespect.

From Limbaugh, a keeper

Rush Limbaugh's remarks on giving up the same-sex marriage fight as an "inevitable" loser are receiving lots of amused attention, but this line, only loosely related to the issue of gay marriage, is what strikes me as genuinely amusing, Limbaugh-style:

[T]he left really excels at changing the language to benefit them politically.

Yes, such as "death taxes," "death panels," "climate change," "small businesses" (rather than capitalism), the Affordable Care Act is a "government takeover of healthcare"; and in 2007 the right's High Imperial Kleagle of Klownish language, Frank Luntz, even went so far as to instruct us that "Orwellian" language is actually an exercise in "absolute clarity."

No kidding. Luntz wouldn't. Neither would Limbaugh, the GOP's Most Right Imperial Kludd & Philosopher King.

Political burlesque

Ed Schultz, wherever you are, please pop a blood pressure pill. Because the Wall Street Journal (the actual newspaper, not its Ministry of Poopaganda) reports that the "White House is strongly considering including limits on entitlement benefits in its fiscal 2014 budget ... such as reductions in future Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security payments."

The story goes without saying that the WH's strong consideration is nothing but an undigested bit of bluff, a blot of maneuver, a crumb of contrivance, a fragment of underdone ploy. It is a phantom of negotiations past, and hasn't a ghost of an upcoming chance. Since any such proffered budget of entitlement grazing will be tied to additional revenue hikes, most Senate Republicans will recoil in histrionic alarm and the GOP House will simply flatline in horror. Nor would House or Senate Dems abide the cuts.

Hence, as everyone knows (and in this case that trope is legitimate), the WH's 2014 budget will be as fictional and fantasy-laden as the Ryan budget, the Senate budget, the Progressive Caucus budget.

Nevertheless, everyone will also react to said budget as though it's real: Schultz, wherever he is, will clutch at his chest; Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh will decry Obama's relentless, "confiscatory" despotism; the Ministry of Poopaganda will exhaustively explain how the president remains an exasperating blockhead; the Republican congressional caucus will repeatedly plead that dear God haven't we've already suffered enough from the brutal oppression of roughly 4-percent tax hikes on $450,000+ incomes; the Democratic congressional caucus will boldly defy this presidential paean to premature compromise; and the mainstream media will report that both sides have a point.

Or, I suppose, we could all pretend that we've already played out this charade, and move directly to another of equal unproductivity.

A clear message, and its uncomprehending reception

Chait's brief truth, quoted in full, against a political, Strike-Up-The-Band-boosterism myth that just won't die:

At his remarks today touting support for background checks on guns, President Obama said, "Nothing is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change." Actually, since background checks command 90 percent in the polls but lack support from Republicans in Congress, pretty clearly millions of voices calling for change are less powerful than holding a House majority. They're also less powerful than a Senate majority. Or even 41 Senators, who can stop anything they want. A well-funded lobby probably beats millions of voices calling for change, too.

Basically, everything is more powerful than millions of voices calling for change.

In turn, this reader's comment is characteristic of the left's deafness--an eerie, 'right'-like refusal to face unpleasant realities; a preference to be comforted, not challenged:

It's a call to action, JChait. 
What would you have him do, tell the American people that they're basically f*cked, thanks to GOP obstructionists and the gun lobby?

Absolutely. That's almost certainly what Chait would have Obama do, though I presume to speak for Chait.

I can't imagine any presidential call to action more powerful than the truth--the plain truth that all this unpleasantness will ruthlessly persist until the broader electorate comprehends just how "basically f*cked" it really is, because of immovable GOP obstructionism.

No sugarcoating, no smoke-blowing, no Andy Hardy rallying of the virtuous masses against congressional intransigence. Just a call to vote the culpable, aforementioned fuckers out of office.

It's personal

I just tweeted:

Odd that GOP House is defending #DOMA at cost of $3 million but voted to cut cancer-research funding for my late, cancer-stricken wife.

I detest those bastards with an indescribable passion.

And it's not just business, John and Eric. It's personal.

The explosive, shocking details

The Post's Eric Wemple devotes a stunning 3,000 words to the investigative proposition that Fox News daytime is ... biased.

The GOP's problem isn't same-sex marriage

The Times' Thomas Edsall argues that establishment Republicans' threatened sanity on cultural issues will not cause "mass defections of white evangelical and born-again Christians," since "on pretty much every noncultural issue--government spending, taxes, the regulatory state and national defense--the Christian right holds orthodox Republican views virtually identical to those of mainstream Republicans."

He provides Pew Research data to back up his claim. When asked about government regulation, the Christian right "tops" Catholics and "Mainline Protestants" in opposition to it, just as the Christian right is abnormally pro-military and, as you'd expect, exceptionally "patriotic."

In short, evangelical conservatives are essentially the selfsame breed as nationalistic, economic conservatives; therefore, insists Edsall, counterthreats of flocked desertions issued by the GOP's Huckabees and Perkins are just so much bombast--the faithful "are unlikely to bolt the party."

The empirical background of Edsall's constituency argument is almost indisputable. Subsequent to the Tea Party's surge, researchers began looking into its demographics and they found lots and lots of older, white, Christian conservatives. It seemed the Tea Party was merely another name for the same old ultraconservatism of the Billy Graham-John Bircher variety: aging, right-wing thumpers of enormous conceit.

The spark behind their intense, political reengagement? Racism--which is to say, the disorienting rise of a black Democratic president.

So I'm comfortable with Edsall's general argument as to the GOP's composition, which is as verifiable as conservatism's early-1960s fusion of social, economic, and defense conservatives. Edsall roams into less knowable territory when he confidently suggests that should the GOP embrace, say, same-sex marriage, committed evangelicals would not "join an exodus to a third party" or "stay home." Perhaps they wouldn't. I don't know. The point is, neither does Edsall.

Yet he travels from the less knowable to the downright surreal in even imagining that on some Iowa stage, in late 2015, Jeb Bush or any other reasonably sane wannabe will protest his party's cultural irrationality. Because alongside Jeb will be Rick Santorum and Ben Carson and all the other unreasonable, base-pandering wackos, each gobbling up a statistically significant portion of caucus-attending, homophobic, nativist Neanderthals. Jeb & Co. will have no place to go but farther right.

The GOP's problem isn't same-sex marriage. It isn't Mike Huckabee. Nor is it Santorum or Rush Limbaugh. It isn't even the ebbing culture war--never has been. The GOP's problem is its caucus-primary system. In keeping or pulling it farther right, it is the GOP's candidate-selection process that is killing the party.

Mike Huckabee explains eternal truths

Here's Mike Huckabee explaining that Christian fundamentalism is an objective standard.

It'll blow your mind.

Having subjective standards, you see, "means that we’re willing to move our standards based on the prevailing whims of culture." And that's bad.

For example it became fashionable for women of the early 20th century to demand the right to vote; and even though sound, solid, prevailing tradition had for centuries revealed that women were excessively emotional and insufficiently rational, sudden whims swamped objectivity and permitted the subjectivity of male capitulation on female suffrage.

Other examples of such silly subjectivity abound, of course. Mere cultural whims decided, for instance, that being unable to recite the entire U.S. Constitution verbatim or ignorance of how many bubbles are in a bar of soap should not bar an African American from voting, just as whim, pure whim, once steadily advanced the American worker from helpless dog to rights-endowed human, and moved seniors from squalid impoverishment to dignified retirement.

Whim, all of it whim. And insidious whim, at that. For don't we now take it for granted that women and blacks may vote and workers have rights and seniors possess dignity? I believe we do (assuming we aren't consumers of Fox News). But just look at the proud traditions we're missing! Ah that noble past, those wondrous yesteryears, the sequential eras of unquestioned racism, misogyny and oppression: yes those marvelous objective standards ...

... set by the nation's Mike Huckabees.

The unworrisome Senate

The Hill:

The razor-thin margin of passage for the Senate Democratic budget highlights the challenge Majority Leader Harry Reid will have in steering President Obama’s legislative agenda through the Senate.

I remain puzzled by journalistic or civic worry over the Senate's dysfunction. Yes, systemically it's troublesome, but as a practical matter, for at least the next two years, it's utterly inconsequential. Remember the House? This House? The GOP House?--that dyspeptic daycare in which responsible, adult legislation takes a holiday?

To be sure, Speaker Boehner could do the mature and democratic thing by allowing a Republican-minority/Democratic-majority coalition to seize the day. But Speaker Boehner would then soon become Member Boehner, and the speaker has demonstrated of late a decided unwillingness to rejoin the lower ranks of the chickenshit coop.

So hell, in the upper chamber let defecting Democrats defect and filibustering Republicans filibuster. The Senate's dysfunction is no worse than superfluous at this point.

Blurred history

Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court:

[T]hat unfortunate race ... had for more than a century before [the Constitution's adoption] been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court:

Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children's schools, or as boarders in their home....

I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible--murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals--and could exhibit even 'animus' toward [homosexuality].

Or toward blackness, for that matter, since blackness among blacks is as preventable as homosexuality among homosexuals?--which in Scalia's world no straight man is bound to respect.

The contorted upside to a non-'sweeping' ruling

It's easy to be in general agreement with Maureen Dowd's sentiment:

[T]he fuddy-duddies seemed to be looking for excuses not to make a sweeping ruling.... This court is plenty bold imposing bad decisions on the country, like anointing W. president or allowing unlimited money to flow covertly into campaigns. But given a chance to make a bold decision putting them on the right, and popular, side of history, they squirm.

I too still hold a seething, incurable grudge against "this court" for the W. thing. (This isn't precisely the Bush v. Gore court, but its ideological composition is close enough.) To my mind, the Gang of Five--2000 Version--permanently degraded and for generations despoiled the United States; it unconstitutionally enthroned an unelected blockhead and his malevolent sidekick to the highest offices of the land, which they proceeded to bury in unjust war and unjustifiable debt--and, just for good measure, forever desecrate American honor by blessing torture as official national policy.  

So yes, there's that, one "bad" decision which, through the bad guy's subsequent court appointments, ensured the Citizens United decision as well.

It's not quite as easy to agree with Dowd on the specifics, though. In yesterday's case there's the issue of "standing," which, it seems, troubles the court's liberal members. The straightforward trouble: the pro-Proposition 8 petitioners lack a legitimate reason to even be in court. Such a ruling would still leave California's Prop in shambles, however it wouldn't rise to the "sweeping" level yearned for by Dowd and so many civilized others.

The upside? At least the liberals would be obeying, you know, The Constitution--that rare impediment to whatever the "conservative" Justices happen to feel like doing on any given day, in any given way.

The neoconservative irony

I recall noting years ago that one of the many tragic consequences of fighting the neocons' idiotic Iraq war would be that future international crises perhaps justifiably calling for American intervention on humanitarian or strategic grounds would suffer neglect because of American exhaustion--and wariness of another Iraq.

US Secretary of State John Kerry [has] said ... the death toll in Syria may have reached 90,000.

But the neocons simply had to have their war, no matter its consequences, since, at the time, it was the only "good" war to be had.

Syria is today a dramatic humanitarian emergency with staggering escalation of the conflict and dire humanitarian consequences, [U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told The Cable last week], but more than that, the Syrian conflict represents a serious risk for regional and even global peace and security.

I don't know if Syria is the better, the smarter, the justifiable intervention that I had in mind years ago. But it's damn close. And yet, who was it who actually preempted the likelihood of American intervention? Ironically enough, the very neocons who are itching to foment another one in Syria, but can't--largely because of their idiotic Iraq war.

Jeb Bush, bridge builder

Jeb Bush tells Newsmax that when it comes to gay marriage,

I would prefer it to be a state-by-state issue. That’s how we have dealt with a lot of issues in the United States.

Well, sure, a sensible opinion. After all, that a gay resident of Mississippi should expect the same civil rights as a gay resident of Vermont is as prima-facie preposterous as a 1950s black man expecting the right to vote in just any old American state. How rude.

On the other hand, by the time of the Iowa caucuses perhaps Jeb will have taken the even bolder position of meeting gays more than halfway: their marriages can count as 3/5s of a "normal" one. 

Republican visionaries, still building bridges to the 18th century.