PMC Commentary

To complete your Friday ...

Wonkblog presents the plaintive wail of a righteous First Amendment defender. I can relate.

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A minor p.s.: What's truly ironic if not a bit humorous about this debate is that I (and many, many others), in opposing the Obama administration in the DOJ matter, am actually the one defending Obama's openly stated position, while Obama's core supporters, in defending the Obama administration in the DOJ matter, are actually the ones opposing Obama's openly stated position. Go, as they say, figure. Things can't get much weirder than this.

When a drop isn't really a drop

The Republican scream machine can pat itself on the back, since in the last three months Hillary Clinton's favorability rating has dropped nearly 10 points (from 61 to 52 percent). Quinnipiac's polling director attributes the slump to the ill effects of the Benghazi bug.

But has anything really changed for the worse, or simply caught up to electoral reality? Quinnipiac says "48 percent of voters [now] blame her either a little or a lot for the death of the American ambassador in Benghazi." If that statistic seems familiar, it may be because Mitt Romney received 47.2 percent of the national, 2012 vote. Partisanship--not Benghazi--is behind the fundamental accounting here; any issue would have served Benghazi's purpose.

What, on the other hand, should worry the scream machine is Quinnipiac's associated polling. Rand Paul's favorability rating stands at only 32 percent, and Jeb Bush's--the adult's--is an embarrassingly paltry 29. Clinton beats them both in a head-to-head by 8 points.

So scream away, GOP machine, and add a few more pats on the back. You'll lose the White House--again--but probably not by double digits! Victory is yours.  

One step forward

From yesterday's properly lop-sided meeting between the press and the powers that be--WaPo, the WSJ, Politico, New Yorker and the NY Daily News met with the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, the chief of staff to the attorney general, the deputy chief of staff and counsel to the attorney general, the chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, the principal associate deputy attorney general, the deputy assistant attorney general, the chief of the Policy and Statutory Enforcement Unit, and the acting director, Office of Public Affairs--it is reported that

Holder ... indicated that the decision to label Fox News reporter James Rosen as an "aider and abettor" in a criminal investigation wasn’t necessary.

Thank you.

Then came rumors of a mission impossible:

[T]he Attorney General sought to assure the journalists that he and the DOJ were trying to seek a balance between the demands of national security and the free flow of information.

Can't be done. "Free flow" means free flow, and "balance" means external or even prior restraint, which didn't go down too well with the Supreme Court in NY Times v. U.S., the Pentagon Papers case. Thus, short of amending the Bill of Rights, true balance means unconstitutional.

Ted Cruz, beaten path(finder)

The ideological struggle to cast Ted Cruz as some sort of politically innovative genius is on, and so far the result is more comedic than sobering. Take, for instance, Business Insider's "Last Night, Ted Cruz Proved That He Is The Future Of The Republican Party." Got that? He proved it. How? Brace for chortling: 

During his 35-minute speech that roused a crowd of high-profile New York Republicans, it couldn't have been clearer where the GOP's rising star from Texas wanted to move--away from the divisive rhetoric of a failed 2012 for Republicans and onto a path that could set them up for success in 2014 and 2016.

If there's any phraseology foreign to Ted Cruz's character, it's that he's repulsed by divisive rhetoric. Discord and division predictably ooze from the McCarthyite hotdogger; they're his necessary shtick--beating the drums and riling the right-wing tribe of true believers against the socialist infidels. Innovative? Pathfinding? It's as old, as trite, as anthropologically outmoded as knuckledragging reaction against the New Deal.  

The latest myth under construction is that Cruz, unlike the deplorably unfeeling Mitt Romney, just loves the "47 percent" all to pieces. The myth-building Business Insider piece dares to label Cruz's Everyman sentiment as "a profound shot at Romney's narrative." But the deeper profundity escapes us, because Business Insider, very much like Ted Cruz, dares not to tell us how the Texan tea partier's love could ever be requited, since altogether lacking in Cruz's courtship is a coherent, come-hither political program.

In a comical paean to some reality, though, the Insider intones: "It remains to be seen, however, whether the policy prescriptions Cruz advocates will win him the crowds that the Republican Party covets." But what are the particular policy prescriptions on which hangs considerable doubt, according to the story? Cruz's opposition to wildly popular background checks, Cruz's opposition to wildly popular immigration reform, and Cruz's support for decimating the global economy in another debt-ceiling showdown. Infernal political mysteries all.

At any rate, the real profundity of Business Insider's propaganda piece may just be its titanically ironic essence: that Ted Cruz is indeed the future of the Republican Party. If so, the party should ask only that, when he's done, he turn the lights out.

You're wrong, Walter

In playing the contrarian, Walter Pincus executes a deft, but deceptive, maneuver:

When First Amendment advocates say Rosen was "falsely" characterized as a co-conspirator, they do not understand the law.... While getting my degree at Georgetown Law School ... it became clear that reporters could be labeled co-conspirators, aiders and abettors or accessories in criminal leak cases.

It is of course true that a journalist can, under current law (which is one reason why the Espionage Act should be repealed), be characterized as a criminal co-conspirator. Pincus' assertion here is merely a straw man; informed First Amendment advocates don't dispute this claim.

The problem, Mr. Pincus, is that the attorney general himself testified that "In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material--that is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy."

In short, Mr. Pincus, it's the attorney general of the United States whom you're in profound disagreement with--not First Amendment advocates, who are as justifiably nervous about the dangers of such "potential prosecution" as Attorney General Holder claimed to be.  

The good old days

John Stossel, appearing this morning on "Fox & Friends," with the dufus Steve Doocy: "[W]hen people are needy you want them [to get] help. But think about the [Great] Depression. That was before there was any welfare state at all. How many people starved? No one."

Chimed Doocy, "Right, good point."

Good point? Do these clowns have any idea how utterly asinine that sounds? Raw Story notes "One 1933 study of 514 children in New York [which] found that more than one-third were in 'poor' or 'very poor' health," just as the U.S. Armed Forces soon found that tens of thousands of young American males had grown up so pathetically malnourished they were unfit for military service. Perpetual neglect of its own citizens actually posed a threat to the United States' national security.

Even more asinine was Stossel's confused reference to the Great Depression as a comfy antecedent to the welfare state. The Great Depression created the welfare state. Franklin Roosevelt wasn't just sitting around on his socialist throne one day wondering how he could muck things up for 21st-century libertarians. People were starving, having already lost their jobs and lost their homes and even their hope; traditional sources of charitable relief almost instantly went belly up trying to heal an imploded civilization.

Government, Mr. Stossel, was the only solution. And only idiots don't know that.

The DOJ mess

Doubt is rapidly dwindling about Attorney General Holder's creeping passion to spend more time with his family. He's boxed himself out, so to speak.

"In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material--that is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy," testified Holder earlier this month to the House judiciary committee, although potential prosecution is precisely what he had signed off on.

That self-constructed trap is, in itself, untenable. Yet attempted escape is even worse. The attorney general's only conceivable "out" is to claim that Justice never intended to prosecute the reporter in question under the 1917 Espionage Act--one of the most contemptible pieces of war-fevered legislation ever to pass Congress--although a criminal finding was, in effect, factually presented to a federal court so that warrants could be obtained.

Now what can Holder possibly say to that? We were just joking? Stretching the truth? Hoodwinking a federal judge?

After Holder packs his bags, an excellent rebeginning would be to hold a wake for the WWI-era Espionage Act, which--along with its dead sister legislation, the Sedition Act of 1918--was an offensive tangle of constitutional law and a skulking threat to civil liberties. Combined, they represented so much of what critics of Big Brother overreach have for decades deplored: government secrecy--always secrecy, then some more--and the (potential) kneecapping of any who object. 

"What John McCain doesn't know" ... is vast

Joe Klein has some indispensable advice as well as a retrospective insight for John McCain, insightful advice which McCain and his fellow neoconservatives have promptly dispensed with:

McCain’s trip is a perfect metaphor for the problem of involving ourselves with the Syrian rebels. ['A few years ago, McCain made a well-publicized walk through a Baghdad market, didn’t get shot at, and pronounced major progress in Iraq afterward. A few weeks later, I made the same walk but actually spoke to the shopkeepers—all of whom were supporters of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi’ite militia leader.'] We may be siding with the greater evil. We may be throwing fuel on a fire that could consume the region. Our track record when it comes to such things is dismal.

The secret of neocon ballsiness is exceedingly straightforward. It's ballsiness. Never concede reality, never admit errors in judgment, pound always with simplistic, absolute certainty and present nothing but apocalyptic options.

It's the specialized foreign policy edition of domestic, garden-variety demagoguery, which is why it suits Republican pols so well.

In Dole v. Bachmann, the defendent prevails

Dionne ventures that "sound conservatives" such as Bob Dole, who would like to see their party "shut down for a while so it could 'spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas,'" are almost hopelessly outgunned by the power of "Bachmannism," which "substitutes accusations for ideas and paranoia for an agenda."

The Minnesota right-winger deserves to be memorialized with an "ism" because she perfected a tactic well-suited to the current media environment: continually toss out outlandish, baseless charges, and, eventually, some of them will enter the mainstream media.... Get just a handful of your accusations and strange takes on reality into the political bloodstream and you’ve won.

That is indeed how Bachmannism works in the current media environment. Yet Bachmannism, as McCarthyism, worked at least as well in an older, technologically primitive media environment, and of course rank demagoguery and shameless showboating have been around since democracy's seedlings of ancient Greece.

So what's the trigger? The media are simply the conduit, as Dionne rightly notes. But perhaps Bachmannism isn't so much substituting "accusations for ideas and paranoia for an agenda" as it is confirming its party's conceptual irrelevance--and the implications here are profound, for that renders the sound conservatism of Bob Dole & Co. as irrelevant as Michele Bachmannism.

Really, other than accusations and paranoia, what could contemporary Republicanism have to conservatively offer that Democrats haven't already structured as party doctrine? Go ahead, survey the topical field as played by Dems: deficit reduction--even at the worst possible time--check; an expansion of healthcare coverage and a bending of its cost-curve mostly through private means, check; an aggressive, backseat-to-no-man national security stance, check; the statutory permanence of virtually all of Bush's temporary tax cuts, check; on and on.

Republican conservatives can proffer no authentically conservative ideas because Democrats have already appropriated them. The Dems have squeezed Republicans into a kind of Madness by Necessity: When the other guys are already assiduously whacking deficits and terrorists, all you've got left are baseless charges, strange takes, and rather justified paranoia.

Spooky, but The Answer is out there

Not so odd, when you consider that Bachmann's career decision was being formulated at the time. From the Brad Blog:

So, I was minding my own business on Memorial Day afternoon, just starting to light up some coals for a backyard BBQ with a few neighbors, when --- THWACK! --- a dead rat fell from sky and landed hard on the patio pavement no more than five feet from where I was standing.

No doubt dogs were howling and black cats were fornicating and marbled icons were bleeding, too.

Do what about what?

Marco Rubio's is the kind of logic that compelled George W. Bush to invade Iraq after Afghanistan's Qaeda attack. I quote the senator: 

So the only answer to [the IRS kerfuffle] is to repeal Obamacare.

Perhap's you've seen that Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman ludicrous dog of a 1954 film, "Magnificent Obsession"? It's due for a topically timely remake. 

A killer ticket: Clinton-Christie

Gov. Lincoln Chafee's (R, I, D, depending on the winds) reported decision to make another switch reminded me of a whimsical thought that occurred yesterday: Clinton-Christie.

Don't mistake. I don't much like Chris Christie, in fact I find him a revolting blowhard. There are no policy preferences or ideological bends to my recommendation, which in this case is merely the stuff of raw politics.

Where's the downside?

For Christie, it's all a plus. He's a popular, moderate GOP governor with national ambitions, but he's shackled by a vastly unpopular, immoderate party whose primary base prefers the extremist Cruzes and Pauls. His future as a conservative Democrat is far brighter.

Only about a year ago he confessed he lacked the experience to be president, so--assuming that a few, transpiring months haven't made a newly capable man of him--eight years as veep would do him a world of preparatory good. He's young. What's more, there's no veep like an attack-dog veep. He's a natural.

For Hillary Clinton? An absolutely unbeatable "unity" ticket. Of course it wouldn't really be a unity ticket if Christie switched parties, but it's close enough. He'd be making a statement to all rank-and-file Republican moderates that the water's just fine, over there, in the blue column, which would result in a Clinton landslide of possibly historic proportions (particularly since she would have eliminated her only possible worry).

Both would get the credit for pulling the nation together in a kind of post-Obama, post-partisan maneuver.

It has potential. It won't happen, because it's unorthodox--and politicians who get as far as Clinton and Christie don't get there by being unorthodox (notwithstanding the 1864 presidential election, although Lincoln's in a class by himself). But it's a fun thought to toy with.

Dowdy

With the reportorial lifting provided by Jonathan Alter, Maureen Dowd belittles that which I admire most in this president:

At East Room events, Alter writes, Obama’s vibe was clearly: "I’ll flash a smile, then, please, someone get me the hell out of here. It wasn’t that he had to be back in the Oval Office for something urgent. He just didn’t want to hang out for an instant longer than he had to, even with long-lost Chicago friends." The president sometimes "exuded an unspoken exasperation: I saved Detroit, the Dow is up, we avoided a depression--I have to explain this to all of you again?"

Regrettably, yes. Our attention span is wanting. Real, lasting, major accomplishments can't hold up to the piercing drama of scandals, sensationalism and scuttlebutt. Politics is not known as a game, or a sport, for nothing.  

Still, I too believed the nation--after W.'s eight horribly hair-raising years--was ready for a term or two of quiet competence. A changeup, if you will; or "normalcy," as the neologist and president W.G. Harding called it. But I was wrong, nearly as wrong as you, Mr. Obama. As I and others began warning during your first term, you simply cannot take the intelligence of the American electorate for granted. If you've a major fault, Mr. President, it's that: You seem to believe we'll "get it," naturally.

Nope, you've got to hammer it. It's tedi0us and tiring and seems utterly unnecessary, I know, but it's part of the game. And you can't change the rules. I admire you for trying, but ... 

The GOP's silent majority

Someday, cowering Eisenhower Republican pols are going to reconnect with the reality that their base is not their base. Greg Sargent has the numbers from a recent WaPo-ABC News poll:  

Republicans say disaster spending does not need to be offset by 52-36. Even Republicans who agree with the Tea Party say the same thing by 49-42.

This mirrors another recent Post poll, which found that a majority of Republicans, 54 percent, disapprove of the spending cuts being imposed by sequestration.

I'll say it again. Democratic pols in light red districts who fail to openly promote themselves as Eisenhower conservatives are squandering a magnificent opportunity to make inroads in those districts. Sooner or later Republican pols will recognize their lapse in judgment--and the opportunity for a Democratic realignment will be gone. 

A darkish day for the mainstream liberal media: Goodbye, Michele Bachmann

I once heard a political cartoonist remark that the darkest day for his profession was that of Nixon's resignation. The ski nose, the beady eyes, the 5 o'clock shadow, the V sign, all the physical manifestations of a monumentally soulless corruption--gone. Tricky Dick's White House exit may have been salubrious for the body politic, he said, but it was a disaster for cartoonists.

So it might have been for "the mainstream liberal media" in the unsettling wake of Michele Bachmann's forced retirement, which the, ahem, congresswoman says will be subject to the aforementioned scribblers' "detrimental spin." And it's true, some may be shortsighted enough to celebrate her departure, oblivious to the darkness of a merry imbecility lost.

But Bachmann's exit, devastating as it is, will leave behind a joyous vault of Bachmannesque vapidity, due in no small part to Bachmann's influential presence. She soon may be gone, but she'll keep on giving. Those crazed, fiery eyes, in search of unAmerican colleagues; those whacko lips, exhorting us to rise in furious revolt against energy-efficient lightbulbs; those Ed Wood productions of her demented addresses to the nation--yes, they'll be gone in body, but they'll be with us in spirit. For we'll always have Michele's tea partyism.  

So I salute you, Congresswoman Bachmann. You may have darkened this day--this particular day--but tomorrow, endless tomorrows remain ablaze with the spectre of your flakiness.