The Carpentariat

Has the Redemption Gag petered out?

This is from the Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling, but still, yikes!

[I]n South Carolina's 1st Congressional District ... Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch leads Republican Mark Sanford 47-45....

Sanford is still stuck with a 34% favorability rating and 58% of voters [including the Holy Spirit] seeing him in a negative light.

Has the old Redemption Gag finally been played once too often?

The multi-front hysteria war

Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research is peeved at the Washington Post's deficit-hawking Fred Hiatt, but Paul Krugman articulates Baker's peeve with more pizzazz than Baker does, so I'll quote Krugman: it's about "Hiatt’s evident longing for a financial crisis to get action on the policies he believes are necessary to avoid an, um, financial crisis."

I saw Krugman last Sunday in the conventionally wise kingdom of Fareed Zakaria's "GPS," and a bit of the latter's Beltway, Hiatt-like hysteria couldn't help but bleed through. What you are calmly saying about debt is foreign to us, my friend. And for cable TV, "calm" is bad marketing. Won't you please join us in fabricated panic?

Toughing it out

Gun control is looking unlikely. At the moment it's looking unlikely in the Senate. But no matter. Because if gun control had a chance of senatorial success, it would only die in the House.

After Newtown, congressional inaction on rational gun control seems incomprehensible. Yet this is the Congress we've chosen, in all its malignancy. And on this issue, conservative Democrats are as cowardly as standard-issue Republicans are insane.

I'd wager immigration reform is powerfully unlikely as well--it being the second of this 113th Congress' two "opportunities" for which plucky optimists possessed some enchanted hope. How cute.

A comprehensive immigration package would be a historic victory for President Obama, and we--or rather Republicans--can't have that. Deny him they must. Plus for once the GOP is actually correct: Obama would get the credit, while they'd get no new Latino votes.

As for the thought of Republicans doing the right thing merely for the sake of doing the right thing? Uh-huh.

Having dispatched--in either the filibustering Senate or the necrotic House--these two prime legislative candidates for bipartisan cooperation, Republicans will of course proceed to throttle any progress elsewhere; nothing on climate change, nothing on tax reform, certainly nothing on any sort of jobs bill.

You can draw up a legislative list as long or short as you like--the result, if you'll excuse the pun, will be listlessness.

What's more, the Obama economy is doing just well enough to merit another Republican assault. Even the GOP realized we needed a breather from its perpetual sabotage, thus the continuing resolution's uneventfulness.

But there's always the debt limit, as early as May, and what better Mel Brooksian fun for Republicans than a late Springtime for Hitjobbers?

I hope I'm wrong--about everything here. I hope my congenital pessimism and learned cynicism are yet greeted by astounding feats of congressional, which is to say some Republican, decency.

For now, though, my money is staying on cynicism.

You know you're actually on the left if ...

Andrew Sullivan affirms the paramount failing of classical conservative thought:

Here’s Chris Geidner’s profile of Evan Wolfson and me – who were once the only two gay activists of our generation who, despite core philosophical differences, made the once ludicrous idea of gay marriage the cause of our lives. It was a thrilling time in a way – because it seemed simply impossible, yet to us, utterly irrefutable as a logical and legal argument.

Gay marriage, as befits universal principles of human equality and civil rights, is an institution whose time--by rights--should have come long ago. Yet the founder of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, so tightly tethered ancient religious pieties to his contemporary philosophy that certain matters of simple justice were almost forever deemed as conceptually unthinkable as they were politically inadmissible.

True adherents to Burkean conservatism would find Sullivan's findings of the "utterly irrefutable" propriety of gay marriage to be but an insufferable pile of eternal apostasy. Sure, change is inevitable, acknowledged Burke, but God's fundamental principles as articulated by God Himself in Holy Scripture never change. And our purpose in civic life should always be to strive toward God and away from secular adjustments.

This--Burke's near-theocratic strain of political righteousness--has infected conservative philosophy and stunted the West's social growth for two centuries. We still hear it in the mechanical blatherings of "Christian" politicians who pander to "value voters." Today's conservative pols resist reminding their political congregations of the French Revolution's horrors or Jean Jacques Rousseau's radical eccentricities not because few in the audience would know anything about either, but because ultraChristian self-righteousness just never gets old.

Burke (wrongly) believed that certain human traditions--say, the traditional Anglo-family structure--were evidence of God's Design. Now it's true, profoundly true, that a self-identifying conservative can present many "logical and legal" arguments against Burke's unflinching position; to paraphrase Sullivan, one could even joke, tour the country, go on every cable show, speak on campus after campus, agree to talk-radio grillings, and write essays and legal briefs and books in the proper defiance of Burke's conservative philosophy. But that doesn't change Burkean conservatism. It undermines it, but it doesn't change it--the "it" that has retarded human understanding for centuries.

Strike that

In one sentence, Politico's Jonathan Martin twice transgresses against, oh, the humanity of it all:

In conversations with scores of Republicans ... it’s striking how little organic support or even interest there is for a [Paul] Ryan presidential bid so soon after Mitt Romney elevated the Wisconsin wonk to the highest levels of national political stardom.

1. Martin refers to Ryan as a "wonk." I thought we were done with that, seeing how Rep. Ryan has proven himself a recidivist innumerate, and ...

2. Martin writes that Ryan's inside repulsiveness is "striking," rather than "unsurprising," seeing how the following clause contains mention of Ryan's diseased association with the contagiously repulsive Mitt Romney.

God bless Ted Cruz, virtue-baiter

I believe we are winning the argument.
--Sen. Ted Cruz, interview with Dallas Morning News

Lines like that are good entertainment. The villain utters an outrageous claim and the virtuous go crazy. The progressive blogosphere lights up with refuting reams of empirical data--those recent election results and, better yet, poll after poll that conclusively confirms for all times just how center-left the American people really are!--and for a news cycle the liberal cable heads either choke with supreme indignation or giggle in superior disbelief.

It's terrific comedy, riveting drama, excellent copy--and a triumph for Cruz every time. The demagogue explains the inverted process:

It often seems in Washington [that] the ferocity of the attacks leveled at an individual, from Democrats or from the media, is directly related to the effectiveness of that person in standing for conservative principles.

Pretty slick. Proportional outrage is directed not at Cruz's outrageousness, but at his conservative effectiveness--which may be an effective premise only to the folks back home, but so what?

As a larger business model this cycle is necessary to both sides. The left needs Ted Cruz (and Bachmann and Beck, etc. etc.) as much as he needs its outrage. For what, pray tell, would otherwise fill all this empty space and MSNBC's dead air: Some eristic dissection of subsection 3 of section 4 of HR #whatever? 

Thus, assuming a sick normality is the objective, everything is as it should be. The demagogues are barking, the virtuous are raging, and at least the business end of dysfunctional politics is thriving.

Revenge, not atonement

Krugman flags Oxford University economist Simon Wren-Lewis' "thoughtful post on the reasons for austerity mania, in which he accepts the role of special interests but argues that there are also psychological roots":

[W]hen the market starts to punish fiscal profligacy, it is as if a parent has discovered the child’s guilty secret. (The market is seen by many as a mysterious deity.) The politician wants to repent (or at least be seen to repent), and atone for past sins. After eating too many pastries, we go on a crash diet. After deficit bias, we have austerity.

I can't answer for mother England, but Wren-Lewis' psychological theory as applied to the colonies is unconvincing.

For starters, "the market" has not yet begun to punish the fiscal profligacy of the Bush administration or the fiscal necessities of Obama's: interest rates remain low, borrowing is cheaper than ever, and only the market would have been punished had the present administration not averted, through the government's spigot, another great depression.   

Yet the much higher objection to Wren-Lewis' theory is plainly political, here in the United States--i.e., one can't find American pols vacant a "hidden agenda." Our deficit hawks aren't among those complex politicians who "want to repent" and "atone for past sins" because our deficit hawks in Congress--virtually all Republicans--don't actually give a damn about the object of their fiscal scolding.

Did deficits matter when they reintroduced barrels of red ink through unneeded tax cuts? Did deficits matter when they rammed through Congress an unfunded drug program? Did deficits matter when they placed a couple of trillion-dollar wars on the nation's credit card? Of course not. 

But of keener importance still is that none of that was part of some distant history, some ancient time through which the spendthrifts slogged ignorantly but eventually emerged in a radiant light of philosophical guilt and enlightenment. No, in all ways possible they would merely deny President Obama through a feigned abhorrence of the Dreaded Deficit Beast--although they'd have freely financed a McCain or Romney administration with whatever stimuli each undoubtedly would have asked for.

No, Professor Wren-Lewis. Our deficit hawks aren't atoning in some deep psychological way. They're only avenging in their politically shallow way.

AWOL

Nothing political this morning, only a quick note to explain my absence.

My daughter and I are headed to the elaborate ritual of a baptism, this one of a niece-in-law, once removed, who is maybe five months old. She's just cute as a bug and, of course, because of her age, innocent as a lamb, thus the need for any spiritual cleansing is both missing and (to me) wholly bewildering. Still, this sort of ceremonial humbug seems to comfort believers.

Odd ducks, these humans. I try to blend. My daughter says I fail, every attempt. We'll see. Shall return.

***

I blended well enough and I'm further delighted to report that my bewilderment blended into amusement. It seems the parents were actually the ecclesiastical targets of the child's baptism, as it was they who were sworn to church allegiance and the generational handing down thereof. This preceded the formal church service, which was riotously funny--well, to me it was--in that the pastor meticulously lectured her small-town, thoroughly Republican congregation that they, in effect, "didn't build that"; which is to say, what they think is their money from their individual efforts is actually God's money (read: the pastor's) because He granted them life to earn it.

So cough it up. 

And that concluded the day's business.

The party won't be missed

In case you missed it, the Republican Party died yesterday in the eulogizing arms of Pew's Andrew Kohut:

[T]he traditional divides between pro-business economic conservatives and social conservatives [have] narrowed.

The party’s base is increasingly dominated by a highly energized bloc of voters with extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues: the size and role of government, foreign policy, social issues, and moral concerns. They stand with the tea party on taxes and spending and with Christian conservatives on key social questions, such as abortion rights and same-sex marriage....

Ninety-two percent are white. They tend to be male, married, Protestant, well off and at least 50 years old.

The GOP leaves an extended family of Republican millions who never called, sent flowers, or bothered to visit on primary day; thus the late, aforementioned nuclear unit centripetally consumed itself like a grinning, Cheshire dervish.

The end came suddenly, but not unexpectedly, even though the deceased let loose self-confident (albeit pathetic) roars of mammoth rejuvenation just before it greeted infinity.

The GOP's metaphysician has released a preliminary autopsy report. Causes of death: criminal neglect and untreated dementia, exacerbated by poor arithmetic skills.

These two geniuses no better than one

It's just impossible to shrink one's brain to the infinitesimal dimensions of the GOP's erstwhile geniuses:

As Mitt Romney struggled in the weeks leading up to the Michigan primary, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum nearly agreed to form a joint "Unity Ticket" to consolidate conservative support and topple Romney....

"[I]t could have changed the outcome of the general election," [says Santorum].

Yes you could have lost twice as big.

Still, I've no doubt Santorum really believes he could have gone all the way, if only Newt had been reasonable by accepting the second-banana slot. Imagine, a pompous prude at the top of the ticket, joined by a sniveling charlatan as the next wannabe Cheney ... wait, that's pretty much what did run as the GOP ticket, isn't it? 

An insufferable read that'll leaving you begging for more

Ron Fournier's "grand bargain" analysis is a masterful serving of Beltway mumbo-jumbo, seasoned with hocus-pocus, liberally sprinkled with conservative abracadabra and all of it marinated in utter hogwash.

It's a true must-read, if you can get it down.

"[F]inally," writes Fournier in the National Journal, "there may be shared will to compromise." And that will would come from Republicans, right? No. According to Fournier, it would come from Democrats, because you see "President Obama needs fiscal peace to stop his slide in polls" and "Liberal commentators, who for months cheered the White House’s no-surrender stance with House Republicans, are now signaling retreat or retrenchment."

Fournier then stands a Greg Sargent piece on its head by arguing that Sargent is one of those liberal commentators "signaling retreat or retrenchment"; Sargent isn't, he didn't, and Fournier should have either his reading comprehension tested or his integrity-levels checked.

Fournier then unwittingly proceeds to blow up the entire rationale of his own piece--in a nutshell, that "bargaining with the House GOP may be Obama’s smartest path"--by observing that "even token reforms by Obama in 2013, opens the door to deeper entitlement changes in the future"--that is, an out-and-out GOP triumph.

You haven't had enough, you say? You want more abuse? More deception? More insidious hogwash? Then you're in luck:

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Goldwater and the Tea Party

A good recap by Ed Kilgore of the half-century Goldwater-Tea Party continuum--pace the conventional ignorance of Politico's Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen--which warrants, however, two clarifications.

One, it's true that Goldwater "frequently attacked LBJ for waging a 'no-win war' in southeast Asia." But these attacks scarcely preshadowed what Kilgore calls the "Randpaulism" of "the pre-Cold War conservative commitment to truculent unilateralism" (isolationism?), because it's also true that Goldwater suggested the unthinkable use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam--which was profoundly antithetical to conservatism's pre-Cold War ideology, hence Paul's isolationism.

Two, it should always be emphasized that Goldwater's social conservatism of 1964 was, for him, a deeply distasteful political expedience. As an Old West libertarian he never believed religion and politics should mix; yet, his reluctance notwithstanding, he accepted advisers' exhortations to assault LBJ on the 1960s' cultural upheavals from an offensive position of "social morality." And Goldwater regretted the hell out of it: "Perhaps I'm one of the reasons this place [Washington, D.C.] is so redneck," he confessed years later.

Ideologically, though, his mid-1960s social conservatism was an absolute sham--which seems transcendently fitting to always note.

Obama's wanderings in Israel

After noting sundry imperfections of Obama's Jerusalem speech, Peter Beinart declares it on balance "a great, even profound, speech,"

because Obama rejected the Jewish right’s endless rhetoric about Israel having "no partner" ...

because Obama asked Israelis to "look at the world" through the eyes of a Palestinian child ...

[and] because Obama challenged the core narrative of Netanyahu and his American supporters: that Jews are the world’s permanent victims, licensed by their fears to worry only about themselves.

There's an ascending importance in Beinart's list, although the remarkably reasonable Beinart would probably concede the legitimacy of others' reordering. Not to put too fine a point on this, but Bibi Netanyahu's "core narrative" of exclusive self-worry is, in one or another fashion, at the core of every nation's foreign policy and bargaining positions. Iranians are permanent victims, Russians are permanent victims, Venezuelans are permanent victims, indeed we Americans are eternal victims of a world that just doesn't understand how divinely exceptional we are.

To me, what trumps Israel's conceit is Beinart-Obama's rejection of Israel's loose "partnerless" rhetoric, not only because of the extraordinary risks taken by certain Palestinian leaders in pursuing peace, but because of the stupendous, 65-year-old costs of the United States' lonely support of Israel, which has been a strategic nightmare and geopolitical thorn of the first order.

What fraction of a second would Israel consume in abandoning the U.S. as a strategic "partner" if it believed abandonment were in its national interest? Trick question. U.S. administration after U.S. administration has begged, cajoled, pleaded with Israel that it stop doing just that; that it halt its sprawling, illegal, hegemonic settlement program that persists in gutting the chances for an Israel-Palestine peace agreement and thus a more solid basis for U.S.-Israel friendship. Follow-up question: Israel's response to our Judeo-Christian prayers? Answer: Up yours.

Finally, in the middle of Beinart's listed mix there's Obama's humanitarian request that Israelis "look at the world" through a Palestinian child's eyes, which are permitted to see nothing of life's bountiful opportunities. Among the Israeli people, of course, empathy is no more alien than it is to Obama. But to too many Israeli leaders, empathy is a weakness, which is their greatest weakness--but the child's liability.

Don't celebrate yet; there's plenty catastrophe in the wings

Politico's Jake Sherman anticipated yesterday the deceptive comity of today's government-shutdown-averting CR:

[D]on’t be fooled: House Republicans are still planning to push for steep spending cuts or budgetary reforms alongside legislation to allow more borrowing.

In plainer English, another debt-limit implosion.

House Republicans are already scheming: perhaps "a bill in April to prioritize government payments if the nation defaults on its debt," as well as others to follow, from a bill "t[ying] tax reform" to a raised debt ceiling to a bill "tether[ing] entitlement reforms" to same.

Their strategy entails the dubious recognition that it itself--strategy--"is not our long suit," as one GOP congressman tells Politico. (I say "dubious" because it's amazing to watch a minority political party--one so clearly out of favor with the majority electorate--essentially control every domestic agenda.) So this time they intend to stack the battlefield deck, to remove the land mines and corner the president before the fighting begins.

The GOP House will simply claim that it already raised the debt ceiling--nothing to see here folks, it's the president who's being so ornery.

The looming maelstrom leads Ezra Klein to confess that "I was sort of hoping for a government shutdown" today, because while shutdowns are "bad," debt-ceiling implosions are a "disaster."

But that, right there, tells you which one Republicans would naturally choose.

Geez, Quinnipiac really knows how to spoil one's quadrennium

Don't you just hate it when these things are over before they start? It's already the beginning of the end, before the damn bloody beginning's beginning even begins. Quinnipiac:

Hillary Clinton has double-digit leads over either of Florida's favorite sons, former Gov. Jeb Bush or U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, in an early look at the 2016 presidential election.

Quinnipiac University Polling Institute's Peter Brown momentarily takes leave of his senses, as well as the planet Earth, but soon enough re-alights to reality:

We probably won't know for some time whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, but if she decides to make the race, she begins with a sizable lead in a state that Republicans cannot win the White House without.

Oh well, we'll always have the Republican presidential primaries and those delicious debates and Bush's taking of three positions on every issue and our little Marco will still be growing up and Rand Paul will do fierce battle with the equally preposterous Ben Carson, while Chris Christie heaves obscenities at them all.

It's something.