The Carpentariat

Of Hayes and O'Donnell

With no detectable sense of irony or sarcasm, Salon's Alex Pareene comments:

Various right-wingers have been crowing about MSNBC’s ratings woes, with, for some reason, lots of conservatives piling on Chris Hayes, whose new weeknight prime-time show hasn’t been a runaway ratings success. (I have no clue why the right hates Hayes, especially considering that part of his whole deal is that he regularly asks conservatives to appear on his show and then engages with them civilly. He’s not O’Donnell!)

The answer to why the right hates Hayes is, of course, contained in Pareene's (feigned?) cluelessness. Hayes, unlike some of his MSNBC colleagues, does seem to enjoy civil debate with the ideological enemy, and generally he has the argumentative edge because whole troughs of facts are on his side and not the enemy's. He rattles them off like I could only my ABCs. It's really quite impressive, if one happens to agree with Hayes--and, I can imagine, quite infuriating, if one doesn't.

If Hayes is lucky he'll avoid catching the television "star" bug, a case of which O'Donnell has bad. I recall the day he contracted it. For months I had watched O'Donnell calmly, reasonably confronting pseudoconservatives on various MSNBC shows. Then one day, on "Hardball," I believe, there sat O'Donnell smirking his way through a Pat Buchanan argument until Boom!--O'Donnell lit into Buchanan with a volley of interrupting invectives that startled.

It seemed out of character. But perhaps O'Donnell--whom Pareene describes as "the insufferable smug self-satisfied liberal caricature everyone thinks all of MSNBC is"--was merely holding his badass self back, until groping for stardom. Just months later, he had his own show.

An intervening fight

Chait characterizes Obama's upcoming, simultaneous nominations to the D.C. Court of Appeals as a "strong opening move" in the aftermath of forfeiture: 

Senate Republicans have enjoyed so much success bottling up his nominations not only because they have seized unprecedented new powers, but also because Obama has done so little to challenge them until now. The Senate Republicans have in a sense filled a power vacuum caused by Obama’s inattention. They may well hold on to that power, but now, it seems, they’ll have to fight for it.

That much, but only that much, is clear. The NY Times describes Obama's new strategic doctrine of overwhelming numbers (in the form of multiple nominations) as "more aggressive" and a "dare" to Senate Republicans--language that promises a summer substitute for a debt-ceiling battle delayed until, possibly, winter. 

A substitute issue will do, as a gently sloping ramp. But sooner or later there has got to be a spectacular showdown if Obama's second term is to amount to anything at all. Only another debt-ceiling fight holds enough potential sex appeal to engage the public; it's doubtful the electorate will get riled up over a Senate that's been broken for years. And Mitch McConnell knows it.

So yes, this is "a strong opening move" by the administration. But I'd hate to see the White House expend powder now in a skirmish it probably can't win--when the major offensive is just a few months away. 

Beyond hypocrisy

The ghastly gist of Republican "grumbling," observes The Hill, is that President Obama has offered "little follow-through ... on deficit talks" since their Jefferson Hotel soiree in March.

"We've made no progress. None," said a GOP senator who had dinner with Obama earlier this year. "There's no process in place. Right now we just have 20 Republican senators meeting and talking to themselves."

Meanwhile, notes the NY Times and Washington Post:

Republicans who’re unable to repeal it also refuse to permit any tweaks or technical correction that would help it work better.

That "it" would be the single greatest down-driver of long-term healthcare costs--ObamaCare--costs which any budget analyst will tell you are the single greatest up-driver of future deficits.

So as Republicans grumble that Obama isn't serious about debt, they're doing everything possible to crank it up.

That old descriptive standby of political charlatanism--"hypocrisy"--no longer even faintly conveys the twisted, deceitful malice of the modern GOP.  

The headless House, and other horrors

In profiling the desperate self-preservation that has come to define the voiceless speaker of the House, Politico's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei demonstrate, once again, that they just can't help themselves: 

"You’ve never called the president and said, 'Let’s talk about immigration so when it hits the floor …'"

"I’m busy trying to organize my own guys," the speaker replied.

Think about this for a moment: The two most powerful men in the world’s most powerful country haven’t bothered to talk to each other about drones, immigration, debt, taxes or anything else for nearly five months. No wonder Washington is such a mess.

The thrust of the Politico piece is that John Boehner is a speaker without a speakership by historical standards, that he "has little ability to work his will with fellow House Republicans" and he "would much rather drink wine with members at night than twist their arms in the daytime"--but Washington's a "mess," the article concludes, because this country's two most powerful men aren't talking.

Allen and VandeHei do courteously note that Boehner "hasn’t bothered to initiate a substantive conversation" with the president this year and a "White House official ... pointed to Boehner’s declaration after the fiscal cliff that he was done with one-on-one negotiations with Obama." Thus Obama would find even attempts at bipartisan cooperation, as the dark humor of "Casablanca" once put it, a trifle one-sided.

But we've a mess, folks, because these two men won't "bother" to talk.

It's really quite astonishing. Even when the political press--per its paradigm of Allen & VandeHei--concedes reality, lays bare the facts and provides uncontested evidence of only one side as the fiercely intractable side, it nonetheless discovers that both sides are reigning in sin.

Your megalomaniacal Memorial Day treat

Guess who? (No, come on. You gotta guess before peeking.)

[This moron] has spent more than $1 million on electoral research for a potential presidential run in 2016....

"Everybody tells me, 'Please run for president. Please run for president,'" [said the moron]. "I’m a Republican, but before anything, I love this country."

Huge hint: Assume the above, all of it, is a lie, an unmitigated fantasy intended only for self-promotional purposes, and bingo, there's your answer.

Dole's a WHAT?

Bob Dole's negative remarks are receiving lots of attention. His tormented plunge into the sorrows of GOP radicalization--"[Reagan, Nixon and I] might have made it" in this tinderbox party of violent neuroses, "but I doubt it"--and his forgetful call for yet another organizational self-assessment--close the damn doors "until New Year’s Day" and think for change, you halfwits, think--are the soundbite stuff of instant analysis, though no analysis is needed.

Dole's depressed, but of the soundest mind. He's also merely the latest in a long line of demoralized, utterly disaffected GOPers--a line growing since at least 2008, when Congressman Tom Davis barked his famous recall notification.    

Thus in Dole's negative remarks there's nothing new, nothing to see, nothing particularly noteworthy. He's just another old-timer recalling saner days. But what of his affirmative remark--his supposedly clarifying comment that, unlike the violently neurotic in charge, he's a "mainstream conservative Republican"?

What does that mean? What has it ever meant in the Republican course of contemporary conservatism? That he, for one, is a fiscal hawk? Or that he's a wastrel like Reagan? That he's a social conservative? Or a libertarian? An isolationist, a Fortress America type, or an interventionist of the neocon variety? A centrist, a pragmatist, an idealist, an ideologue or a philosopher?

What's at the core of it? Just what does it mean to be a "mainstream conservative Republican"?

Wasted rumblings within the flat-lining right

Krugman conveniently, compactly links three reviews of the minor swell in the Mugwumpish commentariat:

Jonathan Chait has an interesting portrait of Josh Barro; Mike Konczal, citing this and also a longer discussion of “reformish” conservatives by Ryan Cooper, argues that there really isn’t much to see here. I agree.

All three are good reads. If you haven't the time for them, Krugman's collective assessment, beyond "I agree," is that today's discontented conservatives--e.g. David Frum, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponnuru; Andrew Sullivan has been omitted, evidently because he regularly frames himself as something of an orthodox Democrat--"hint at some flexibility .... but ... always find a way to support the Republican position whenever it actually matters." In brief, says Krugman:

The point is that there remains essentially no room for independent thinking within the conservative movement.

That might be problematic for "the conservative movement" if anyone at its top or bottom cared. In the long run it's a huge problem that it's not a problem now--no political party can subsist indefinitely on intellectual stagnation--but for the moment the movement can be fairly characterized as populist and circular. Pols at the top follow the passionate dictates of dogmatists at the bottom, whose dogmatism is fed and reinforced by Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere and the loudest, most odious pols at the top, who dare not gainsay the bottom.

The conservative movement's circular populism is a death grip. Right wingers in, say, Iowa and South Carolina--the base--don't give a damn what, say, National Review thinks, as the conservative movement once did, back, say, in the ideological-formulation days of Bill Buckley. It's all savagery now.

Cruel, but no joke

Thanks in part to the lingering bedevilment of states' rights and a sympathetic U.S. Supreme Court, but thanks in much larger part to the morbid machinery of Republican spite, nearly 6 million Americans will be denied government-assisted healthcare next year because they need it most. 

In the Jurassic provinces of, say, Texas and Mississippi and Kansas, the very poorest of the uninsured will encounter this sort of perversity, as described by an interfaith activist in Perryland:

A lot of people will come in, file applications and find they are not eligible for help because they are too poor. We’ll have to tell them, "If only you had a little more money, you could get insurance subsidies, but because you are so poor, you cannot get anything."

It's a Catch-25 in which the selfsame number of Republican-ruled states "have balked at expanding [Medicaid]," observes the NY Times, "in part because of concerns about long-term costs"--but in reality because of a squalid indifference to poverty and a grotesque hostility to all things, anything, Obama. 

"The history of Medicaid shows that it took several years for some states to sign up in the 1960s," concludes the Times, "raising the possibility that additional states may decide to expand eligibility in coming years." That's of some empirical comfort. In the meantime, though, children's asthma will go untreated, early stages of cancer will go undetected, heart disease will go unmedicated, and an absence of human decency will remain the hallmark of truly reptilian GOP politics.   

Proservatism

Sullivan calls on "conservatism" to tackle today's socioeconomic challenges:

This conservatism would embrace universal healthcare as a bulwark of democratic legitimacy in an age of such extremes; it should break up the banks and bring back Glass-Steagall; it should drastically simplify the tax code, ridding it of special interest deductions; it should construct an international agreement to prevent the egregious and disgusting tax avoidance of a company like Apple; and it should seek to invest and innovate in education and infrastructure.

Hello? In 71 words, that's roughly the Democratic platform.

For years I've argued that the Democratic Party--as it principally seeks to protect certain social institutions, such as Social Security and Medicare, from the mindless ravages of pseudoconservative nihilism--is the new conservatism. It's not your father's party any longer; it possesses not even the shell of its former, crypto-utopian, Age-of-Aquarius self. In addition to their Anti-Ravage designs, today's Dems advocate a desperate, philosophical status quo ante: Glass-Steagall, progressive taxation, educational and infrastructure investment, some form of universal healthcare.

No new conservatism is needed to pursue these ideals, no new conservative party is needed, and the conservative Andrew Sullivan need not dream of one. It's already on his ballot.  

The irrational as the rational choice

Charlie Cook files a couple of accusatory charges against congressional Republicans that can't possibly stick. First, he's incensed at what he sees as a kind of political malpractice:

By trying to turn everything into a scandal rather than saying Obama’s policies are wrongheaded ... Republicans are focusing on attacking a guy whose name will never again appear on a ballot.

It's true that Republicans need to somehow reignite Benghazi and keep it on an IRS equivalency scale, which should be easy enough, since facts on the ground are, for Republicans, never a relevant obstacle. Benghazi's a twofer; with the African socialist you get Hillary, whose prospective presidential territory Republicans need to soften up or rend into rubble as assiduously as they can.

It's also true that the IRS "scandal" lacks that magical something of Benghazi--a path to get at Hillary. On the other hand the IRS means taxes, and in the mind of many, taxes mean Democrats, and Barack Obama is "Democrats" rolled into one. So this singular, generically Democratic scandal is to Republicans worth a thousand of Obama's "wrongheaded policies" for the 2014 midterms, which are the obvious priority over the following, presidential election. First victims first.

Which leads us to Cook's second, rather puzzling charge: 

Blinded by their hatred for President Clinton, Republicans made irrational decisions [in 1998], and they are making the same mistakes today. For some House Republicans, their view of the president is a natural by-product of representing districts that are custom-drawn, conservative cocoons, where everyone pretty much thinks the same. These districts aren’t representative of the nation as a whole.

Well of course they aren't. Neither is Nancy Pelosi's. But just what, Mr. Cook, is so irrational about a Republican Houser pandering to his custom-drawn, conservative cocoon, where everyone pretty much thinks the president should be impeached and the IRS closed and Remember Benghazi! should be the rallying cry for 2016? 

Sure it's nuts, but it's also perfectly rational.

How to know you shouldn't be there

A Democratic, three-term Connecticut congressman who sits on the Financial Services Committee describes the process of writing Wall Street legislation--which isn't too strenuous, since Wall Street is writing much of it itself--as "appalling," "disgusting," "wasteful," and inviting of "conflicts of interest and corruption."

But, what the hell, ho-hum, it's "the world we live in."

If you're a congressman and you hear yourself saying something like that, something quite as appalling as the corruption itself, then go home. Just go the fuck home and never come back.

The Brown Peril

So what accounts for Barack Obama's election to the White House? The youth vote; the women's vote; eight hideous years of GOP fiscal mismanagement; a bloody, almost laughably ill-advised, unprovoked war; or maybe even something as straightforward as a stunningly inept opposition candidate attached to an epically wretched running mate?  

Ponder no more. For Congressman Steven King has crunched the complexities, and out popped this answer:

[I]t's clear to anybody that can do any kind of statistical analysis that Barack Obama wouldn't be President of the United States without Ronald Reagan's 1986 [immigration] amnesty act.

Now you know.

From there, you might also suspect that Rep. King's cold, calculating, statistically oriented mind would lead to the inescapable extrapolation of nothing but more Democratic presidential victories unless Republicans make peace with this brown, election-determining monolith. But you would be disappointed.

When the President of the United States came to the Republican Conference … he said to us, you must pass comprehensive immigration reform, Republicans, or you will never win another national election. I'm trying to help you.

He's not trying to help Republicans. We have some people who will take the bait on that.

It's like a scene from "Scary Movie 33" or something. "Hey, there's a monster behind you. No, really, there's a monster behind you. No, really, I'm not kiddi ... oooo, never mind. Oh that had to hurt."

The nonsmoking popgun

Krauthammer, with a riveting tutorial on how to keep the paranoid tribe in a foaming, frenetic froth as the iceberg of Obama's chilling corruption melts into a blameless sea:

Does the IRS scandal go all the way up to the top? As of now, doubtful. It’s nearly inconceivable that anyone would be stupid enough to have given such a politically fatal directive from the White House (although admittedly the bar is rapidly falling).

But when some bureaucrat is looking for cues from above, it matters when the president of the United States denounces the Supreme Court decision that allowed the proliferation of 501(c)(4)s.

In short, folks, it turns out that there's nothing there, but that nothing is huge. The nothing is still enormously scandalous. The IRS's eye-winked, head-nodded culture of corruption all stemmed from presidential remarks at a 2010 campaign rally in which piles of anonymous cash were denounced--denounced! can you imagine that?--as "a threat to our democracy."

Thus an admittedly doubtful, nearly inconceivable, immensely stupid nothingness that never happened is fashioned into a materially culpable "cue." Obama is condemned by the very lack of evidence. That's Krauthammer's higher bar of indictment.

Obama's speech

An excellent presentation, beginning with an excellent, opening volley against the neoconservative wet dream of perpetual war, since even the limited ones have historically "compromised our basic values."

Obama is trying to get out of a foreign-policy box built for him by the George W. Bush administration's ideological propagandists and perpetuated by Republicans' military muscularism. Wars, though strike-up-the-band glorious for some of the political class, simply cannot last forever. And this one--the so-called war on terror--is long overdue for retirement. That Obama chose to announce said retirement four months after his second inauguration shows the lingering political power of neocon ideology and the president's better-protected eagerness to forcefully confront it.    

One phrase deployed by Obama really struck home. In America's continuing battle against terrorists, there is "no moral safe harbor." Not, anyway, for a president, this one or the next. Virtually every counterterrorism path that a president pursues is a trade-off--a little security here for a piece of your liberty there; 10 innocents killed in exchange for a thousand later saved--and it's just so damn refreshing to hear a president admit it rather than suppress it through a fog of uberheroic, hyperpatriotic neocon bullshit. Wars do compromise our values; we eventually become what we hate; and President Obama appeared to be running the clock back. He knows where this is headed, and it ain't good.

In the service of that knowledge he announced more "targeted" counterterrorism efforts and "heavily constrained" drone strikes overseas, while here at home he has asked his attorney general to "review" the Justice department's reckless expansion of its investigative practices into security leaks. That the latter issue has become a weirdly balanced and therefore exceptionally dangerous one, Obama seemed to appreciate. The leakers--not the press--are the problem here; so work the problem, not the irritant. That, anyway, appears to be Obama's new instructions to Justice.

On Gitmo, well, what can one say about Gitmo, other than that it's an impossible problem exacerbated by impossible congressmen. But, finally, although he didn't use the phrase, it sure was good to hear him refer once again to the benefits of "soft power" over hard; to note, in so many words, that one freshly built school in Afghanistan is worth two brigades of firepower.

A really excellent speech.  

McConnell's culture of stupefaction

Mitch McConnell's WaPo op-ed is an absolute hoot. It begins with the not-too-dubious assertion that "the Obama administration’s commitment to the First Amendment" is questionable, but of course that's the case with every presidency and goes to the eternal question of snowballing executive power rather than "the culture of intimidation" exemplified by the IRS "scandal," which is what McConnell specifically wants to exploit, so that he can generally trash political-finance disclosure. Like I said, it's a hoot.

Take, for instance, this passage:

[T]he unionized employees who populate the IRS and other agencies across the country routinely take their cues from union bosses, whose political donations and speeches show their support for the White House. When it comes to rewarding friends and punishing enemies, the IRS is not alone.

Now that's a thing of demagogic splendor if I ever read one. Union bosses! Cues from! Political reward and punishment! Conspiracies!

Real tip of the iceberg stuff. And not a shred of evidence.

McConnell goes on about "left-wing journalists," the "speech police," "old-school 'enemies lists,'" a "left-wing playbook" and "liberal thugs." My God, he even mentions the Socialist Workers Party, which he reveals as exempt from finance disclosure since 1974, but in deeper reality hasn't been heard from since 1974. 

I notice Kilgore is amused by McConnell's urgent thesis: that of "hiding the identity of big campaign donors." And I quite agree with Ed, "you have to admire [Mitch's] chutzpah." But is the rugged Kentuckian's op-ed really about campaign finance? To me, it reads much more like a hastily scribbled propaganda flyer for the McConnell reelection campaign, whose potential supporters just can't get enough of spooky socialists and terrifying union bosses.