PMC Commentary

The right is making room for that crazy leftist Hillary

Amusing.

For weeks we heard from the right that Obama's inaugural address was a virtual but determined declaration of leftist war against every sacred American value honorably accumulated since John Adams crapped in the new White House. No doubt you recall that. Now, though, and only 100 days later, the right sort of suggests that Obama has disastrously "shifted" to the middle--but that, it turns out, is only an excuse for, in particular, HotAir to observe:

Actually, Obama isn’t in the “middle” on Keystone or on Social Security and Medicare, either — he’s nowhere.

What's more, "Even his victories turn out to be flops," continues the site's Ed Morrissey. 

The details of Nowhereville and flopped victories are unimportant. What's significant, I think, is that the right--at least as expressed by Morrissey--is dropping its hysterical leftist angle on Obama's second term.

They're moving on. There's Hillary to confront. And by the end of the next three years, Obama will likely be portrayed by the right as a sort of Bill Clinton-like centrist saint, compared to Bill's mad, radically leftist housewife.  

Sen. Jeff Flake, of the really right stuff

Jeff Flake's mendacity is really quite impressive, even for a Republican senator. On his Facebook page today he points to a column "written by The Arizona Republic's Joanna Allhands," which, he explains, "captures the complexity of the [recent gun-vote] issue better than anything I've read." 

I just read it myself. It captures nothing, it elucidates nothing, in fact it actually evades complexity by merely linking to a local-news segment with Sen. Flake, who brazenly lies in the interview about the background-check bill. He says it covers all private sales--it does not--which the government then keeps a record of. It doesn't.  

The Arizona Republic's piece, that aforementioned piece by one Joanna Allhands, the one titled "Defending Jeff Flake"? It describes the guts of Flake's mendacity as a "nuanced view." The opinion piece wraps:

Flake reviewed the amendment as intellectually as possible and made a judgment call, knowing full well that it would tick off both sides.

Is that not what we say we expect from our lawmakers?

So in the end what Flake has is a bit of a Dick Cheney-NY Times-Meet the Press-thing going. He first comes to a political conclusion, whereupon he feeds the media information as to that conclusion, and then the media complicitly regurgitate his original bias, and presto--he points to the media as an enlightened, independent source of defense for his conclusion. 

When your mendacity sinks to Dick Cheney's level ... 

Sanford for President(ial nominee)!

I think the immeasurably entertaining Mark Sanford would make an excellent--indeed a kind of splendidly collective--GOP presidential candidate in 2016, don't you?

He has the gaffe-proneness of Mitt Romney, the awed cluelessness of Herman Cain, the stunningly arrogant hypocrisy and double standards of Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum's sanctimony and Rick Perry's wholesale unsuitability and Michele Bachmann's riveting witchhunting prowess, all in one.

He's a well-versed master of Republican bogeymen--labor unions! and earmarks! and oh heaven help us, Nancy Pelosi!--so his prep time would be minimal, thus the GOP could get started on its losing campaign straightaway. Plus, his singular though collectively representative candidacy would abolish the need for a whole bunch of other GOP presidential candidates to vomit in undifferentiated speeches the very same bogeymen for nearly two horrible years.

We'd all be grateful. Obama's Democratic successor is as good as already nominated, so Republicans might as well proceed with their loser--and, besides, it looks as though Mr. Sanford will be extraordinarily available for a while.

Obama's presser 4/30/13

The only real thunderbolt that always storms forth from any of President Obama's press conferences is the striking realization of the enormity of the opposition's mindlessness. And this morning's presser was certainly no exception.

Embedded in some of his answers to some of the questions was some serious, substantive stuff, such as his explanation of the enduring, inherent difficulties in coordinating intelligence between former Cold War foes. Mostly, though, his presidential job at the podium required him to swat at mammoth flies who, in the form of pesky little pachyderms, ceaselessly buzz around and gum things up.

What about this ominous "red line" they're so excited about? Has one even been crossed? That remains to be seen. Unshockingly, the president first needs evidence of who might have used sarin, when it was used, how it was used. Then maybe, maybe we'll know if the line's been crossed. Till that moment of edification, though--which in fact may never come--we should resist assuming otherwise. None of this obligatory caution will stop the opposition, however. That's the only safe assumption here. 

Then of course there was Benghazi--that immense target of sheer opportunism which must forever be held upright. On to Guantanamo, which is in indisputable conflict with our national-security interests, but that makes no difference to the hardliners; then on to the issue of the sequester, on which the same hardliners have taken anfractuous positions throughout, but ... whatever. 

Next presser? Different subjects, perhaps, but same flies, same buzzing, same mindless opposition to any reasonable resolutions.  

Converting insanity into custom

Just how slippery has the GOP's slippery slope of shakedowns become? This slippery.

To wit, the Washington Post's Jonathan Bernstein appreciates that Republicans' next act of ruthless brigandage--that old debt-limit chestnut, this time loosely rooted in the spectral plain of tax reform--amounts to no "real policy demands" but "just extortion for extortion’s sake."

Agreed. The History Channel's Vikings has been superfluous.

Yet Bernstein titles his piece (if indeed he titled it), "GOP’s debt limit threat goes off the rails," noting along the way that "What I’d point out, in terms of how ridiculous this is, is that Republicans don’t have a tax reform bill for anyone to agree with."

On the specifics, agreed again--but the overall sentiment, born of psychological erosion, is disturbing.

The GOP's latest debt-limit threat cannot go off the rails, because debt-limit threats, other than the old-school pro forma ones, are intrinsically nuts. By any definition of political responsibility, threats to vaporize the global economy can never be on the rails. 

In turn, pointing out that Republicans lack a proper policy weapon to carry out their extortion is not what demonstrates "how ridiculous this is"--for this, the threat itself, is what's ridiculous.

We enter an exceptionally slippery zone when we begin with earnestness to distinguish mentally pre-derailed debt-limit threats from somewhat legitimate debt-limit threats. They're all illegitimate and deranged. Period. Noting the unique lunacy of one threat from another is one thing. But the lunacy's uniqueness isn't what makes it lunatic.

In sum, failure to observe such journalistic prudence only endows debt-limit threats with the power to become a fixed feature of our political landscape.

Could Rand Paul possibly make 99?

He's heading to South Carolina as well, subsequent to his Iowa and New Hampshire trips in May. Says CNN's lede, "To say Rand Paul is testing the 2016 waters would be an amusing understatement."

No doubt. The only question is, Why?

I was just playing with an interactive electoral map, and when allowing Paul the most liberal acquisition of states I could imagine, the results are a Democratic win, 358-180. In this count I give Paul the Old Confederacy (less FL, NC & VA), his home state, WV, IN, OK, MO, from KS up to ND, and of course UT, WY, MT, ID & AK. 

Even by 2016 there's an outside chance Paul could lose TX & GA, rendering the count 412-126. Throw IN & MO back in the Dem column, and we're looking at a Paul loss of 433-105.  

Of course given that we're talking about Rand Paul & Mouth, he could, conceivably, break 100--in the wrong direction.

The next "conservative" subtlety

Republicans' Apocalypse Option #3, as sketched by WaPo (whose reporting, observes Chait, reads like an Onion story):

House leaders launched a series of meetings last week aimed at convincing rank-and-file lawmakers that tax reform is both wise policy and good politics and should be their top priority heading into talks with Democrats over the need to raise the federal debt limit.

Forget entitlement reform. That's so ... Republican. And this is the age of dogfood-rebranding. Plus, President Obama has agreed to entitlement reform. So it's off the table.

And forgot all that older jazz about the size of government and federal spending and the bogeyman-deficit-gonna-come-get-ya. The bogeyman is vanishing. 

So a new nightmare is needed.

And it is:

We're all going to die if we don't have tax reform!

Clean, simple, and colossally stupid. The perfect Republican plan.

I especially like this part:

GOP aides ... said tax reform has emerged as the best option for House leaders determined to act early, avoid blame for another debt-limit crisis and associate the party with policies that help ordinary families.

So they're going to "avoid blame for another debt-limit crisis" by igniting another debt-limit crisis, and "help ordinary families" by utterly devastating the world, national, state and local economies.

And they still call themselves conservatives, which is the only part I'm a bit unclear about.

Sandra Day O'Connor's less-than-perfect confession

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's conscience, a trifle late:

[We took Bush v. Gore] and decided it at a time when it was still a big election issue. Maybe the court should have said, "We're not going to take it, goodbye."

But of course they did take it, which gave them "a less-than-perfect reputation," says O'Connor in a garbled translation of the straightforward truth: an irreversibly disgraceful reputation.

Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision, [continued O'Connor]. It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn't done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.

Sweet Jesus. "Maybe." "Less than perfect." "Probably."

Hey I've got one. Perhaps the decision was a little, kind of, sort of, fucking grotesque?

I have already--nearly two years ago--elaborated on that assessment's particulars, which unfolded throughout eight squalid years of the plaintiff's pestilence. I won't repeat them here. I will however repost the better portion of the assessment's penultimate paragraph:   

Barack Obama is doing his damnedest to make it all better, to heal the wounds, to correct our course and put the ethical, socioeconomic and loosely philosophical meaning of "super" back into "superpower." If he's unsuccessful--if the ruggedly ignorant Americanism of tea partyism, Cantorism, McConnellism and Romneyism or T-Pawism proves to be insurmountable--then that compound noun of once-great distinction will not improbably become a thing of the irretrievable past.

Well, we made it past the historical footnote of Romney. Maybe, someday, we'll yet overcome W.'s enduring pestilence.

I can understand that

Understatement of the decade, from the Washington Post:

Obama is skeptical that the back-slapping politics employed by some of his predecessors can overcome the deep divides in Washington.

Yes, when the opposition reacts to your every substantive overture with bone-chilling paranoia, skin-crawling reentrenchment and bloodcurdling protestations of leadership failed, "skepticism" is probably in order.

You don't say

The NY Times on those "wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags [that] have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president":

[The C.I.A.'s] main goal in providing the cash has been to maintain access to Mr. Karzai and his inner circle and to guarantee the agency’s influence at the presidential palace....

[M]uch of the C.I.A.’s money goes to paying off warlords and politicians, many of whom have ties to the drug trade and, in some cases, the Taliban....

Some of the cash also probably ends up in the pockets of the Karzai aides who handle it....

That is not a significant concern for the C.I.A., said American officials familiar with the agency’s operations.

Once you get over the ghastly obscenity of more than 2,000 American lives having so far proved insufficient to "maintain access" to the palace, you're left only with the Kennedy-era-like comedy of bribes, corruption, criminal conspiracies and systemic depravity being of "[in]significant concern for the C.I.A."  

And it's such a shock, too. Who would have guessed that this medieval arena of misogynistic oppression, religious superstition, sectarian bloodletting and endless tribal warring would have been unamenable to the parlor-room splendors of the Enlightenment?  

The Republican game plan as chaos theory

Ezra Klein writes that "Washington being what it is, Democrats losing on sequestration is taken to mean that Republicans have won on sequestration. But that’s a conceptual error wrapped in a sad commentary about modern-day politics," because sequestration's "persistence means both political parties lose. As does the rest of the country."

From a civic text's point of view, fair enough. Bad policy is bad policy; it takes everyone down. But I would suggest that from Republicans' view, that's the whole point. This is their modern-day politics wrapped in what appears to be a conceptual error, yet if the ultimate objective is the degradation of government, national decay and general chaos, then Republicans win--conceptually and materially.

Klein counts the GOP win on sequestration as a loss because the party once "wanted entitlement cuts. They’re not getting them. They wanted to protect defense spending. Instead, the Pentagon is getting gutted while Medicare and Social Security are left mostly untouched. They had an eye towards tax reform. Nuh-uh."

I would more than quibble with the assertion that cutting a few billion from the bloated monstrosity we call the defense department is a "gutting"; furthermore, Medicare and Social Security are untouched for now, but tomorrow is another day; and the holy grail of "tax reform" will always be with us. Meanwhile, vital government services for the nation's "takers"--such as preschool toddlers and hungry seniors--are indeed gutted.

So what exactly in Republicans' lip-smacking dystopia have Republicans lost?

What's more, their base couldn't be happier, since sequestration's queued, airport inconveniences have now been culled from the needs of the pesky lumpen. This bodes poorly for other mitigations, which Klein correctly envisioned last week: "sequestration is no longer particularly politically threatening, but it’s even more unbalanced: Cuts to programs used by the politically powerful will be addressed, but cuts to programs that affect the politically powerless will persist." The partisan-flipside effect? Despair and demoralization among the Democratic Party's base, especially the progressive base that is so indispensable to midterm turnout. Their mistress has been whoring again.

As Klein's colleague E.J. Dionne notes this morning: "deficits don’t really matter to many of the ideological conservatives shouting so loudly about them now. Their central goal is to hack away at government."

This cause, they have advanced. And they advanced it with Democratic assistance. No, one little FAA bill makes for a political earthquake not. But the fault lines add up to a general undermining of political stability--in short, political chaos. And that serves Republican interests, as it does any nihilistic party.

Well, that's Friedman's judgment for you

In a Tom Friedman column appropriately titled "Judgment Not Included," the globalist savant asks about Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's reasoning, as offered to interrogators:

[W]hat in God’s name [do U.S. wars in the Middle East] have to do with planting a bomb at the Boston Marathon and blowing up innocent people? It is amazing to me how we’ve come to accept this non sequitur and how easily we’ve allowed radical Muslim groups and their apologists to get away with it.

Who's "we"? I know of not one American who's "come to accept" the jihadis' non sequitur of stupid wars as a justification for terrorist bombings, let alone allows radical Muslims to "get away" with the non sequitur.

Perhaps Friedman means to say that we too casually dismiss the absurd for what it is: absurd. But does that translate into "acceptance"? Hardly.  

Or perhaps Friedman guiltily feels the sting of blowback, however irrationally expressed it often is.  

The irresistibility of insiderdom

I suspect criticism of the White House Correspondents dinner will grow over the years in proportion to the event's public relations unsightliness, meaning the criticism will have no more effect than other wholesome criticisms of Washington's wretched practices, however the criticism itself will become part of the annual ritual.

The Brokaw camp will routinely ask, "Are we doing [the public's] business, or are we just a group of narcissists who are mostly interested in elevating our own profiles?" And the sophisticated camp will respond, Oh look, how cute, they're at it again, those goo-goo types--they who never concede our good and grace-filled works, such as raising $100,000 in scholarships! (Which is less than one of Karl Rove's PACs can raise before breakfast.)

We often hear journalists lecture the Beltway political class with this socio-psychological advice: If you boys were to stay in town more and socialize more and maybe become bourbon-and-branchwater buddies as they did in the old days, you'd find cooperation a bit easier. It's much harder to demonize during the day some fellow you played poker with last night.

There is at least some smigeon of truth to this, as demonstrated daily not by the politicos, of course, but by journalists themselves. Many of them go confoundingly easy on those pols who deserve unambiguous demonization because they're schmoozy members of the insiders club. Too many journalists cannot, to borrow from the old line, eat the pols' food and drink their booze and screw their women and then write against them, meaning that they indeed have no business being there.

As Dana Milbank puts it:

The dinner’s charitable origins were long ago obscured by journalists’ desire to be players--to flatter the powerful and the famous and to feel powerful and famous themselves, at least for one night. Lost in this cozy celebration of wealth and fame is the journalistic notion of holding the powerful to account without fear or favor.

Rather than " 'The All the President's Men' Meets 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,' " it's " 'Network' Meets 'Ragtime' "--which will ultimately produce a remake, "The Grapes of Wrath."

In praise of doubt

Now this is what presidential wisdom looks like, with its subtleties emphasized:

[W]e now have some evidence that chemical weapons have been used on the populations in Syria. Now, these are preliminary assessments. They're based on our intelligence gathering. We have varying degrees of confidence about the actual use, but there are a range of questions around how, when, where these weapons may have been used.

One is tempted to muse that the last Bush administration could have used similarly heavy doses of such doubt and skepticism, but of course that would be folly. Doubt and skepticism of perilous adventures were never in short supply at the Bush-Cheney school of maladministration; they were, rather, utterly absent, for they were also the enemy itself.

Swagger doesn't ask questions. 

Praise Jesus. Obama does.

Domestic "red lines"

One rudely bewildering product of the NYT's scornful editorial on yesterday's "governing" disgrace--the Times concludes, "A single senator or a single president could have put principle before a little political pain and said no"--is the sacrificed reality that Obama could have had it both ways; instead he chose the singular path of indignity.  

Congress' pamperization of the middle class and the business class and the affluent and itself, as it brazenly disregarded the voiceless and powerless, was veto-proof. The Senate was unanimously shameful, while the House might as well have been. The arithmetic of dishonorable buffoonery added up to only one sum: the stench of Republican audacity and Democratic cowardice would prevail, no matter what. 

Thus, having insisted all along that it would reject any slicing and dicing of sequestration's inherent stupidity and gross unfairness, the White House was perfectly free to do just that. Congress' pamperization would have proceeded; the White House would have kept its word; a telling capitulation would have been avoided.

I disagree with the Times that Obama's "political pain" would have been "little." Passing, yes--but acutely intense. Yet Obama's courageous counterargument could have provided quite the nationally educational moment--and its strength of character would have demonstrated to all that presidential "red lines" exist at home, too.