PMC Commentary

Be right back

An early morning post is below, but now off to a mid-day outpatient surgery for my daughter, whose umbilical hernia she is blaming on my incompetent cord-cutting. Oh the ingratitude of it all. At any rate she'll be good as newly delivered (before paternal intervention, that is) by mid-afternoon, at which point, however, her real problem will begin: Once back home, I'm her nurse. 

update: All went well there, and from here, that's all.

Oh, one other update. I have learned that Go, Dog. Go! still works as therapeutic bedside reading for a sore, ailing teenager. Always stick with the classics, that's my motto.  

How about a nice game of Conspiracy Theory?

It's not impossible to imagine that GOP Sens. Lee, Rubio and Cruz have been so busy devising villainous methods of the federal government's destruction that they never had time to learn how that government works. Mike Lee, for instance, may be one of his party's crown jewels of duncedom--conference committees are secretive cabals of skulduggery and betrayal which should be avoided at all costs, he has warned the citizenry--but surely his Capitol Hill staff is aware that "even if the federal government shuts down, Obamacare can still continue pretty much apace," and has advised Boss Lee accordingly.

In brief, his radical team effort to defund Obamacare through a government shutdown is not only "silly" and the "dumbest idea" some of his Senate colleagues have ever heard of, it's simply unworkable. By now, Lee and his friends surely know that. 

So why persist, other than for propaganda value? Perhaps merely to embarrass the bejesus out of Mitch McConnell, or better yet, sabotage his reelection labors. "Among those supporting Lee’s plan is Matt Bevin, the Republican leader’s recently launched primary challenger," reports Chris Cillizza. And "McConnell is not a signatory on the letter Lee circulated to win support for his plan."

For the Senate minority leader, chronic obstruction is one thing, but acute stupidity is another. And yet he may be forced to sign on to the latter nevertheless--which could expose McConnell not only to Democratic ridicule in his general election campaign, but to charges of colossal failure in his primary. For while it's true that shutting down the government won't--can't--accomplish Obamacare's defunding, Kentucky's tea-party base isn't likely to uncomplainingly accept such a reality.

To the Senate's tea party gang, Minority Leader McConnell has always been a suspicious wheeler-dealer and closet traitor, ready to sell out the moronically honorable purity of principle the tea partiers so jealously guard. No matter how often he proves himself otherwise, McConnell will never be embraced as a true and faithful "made" guy--and the Senate tea partiers' "defunding" strategy just may be their way of whacking him.   

Manning

Kevin Drum expresses what is probably the consensus view:

I never thought that Manning had any chance of avoiding conviction on the basic charges related to publishing classified information. Nor did I think he deserved to be. But Judge Lind acquitted him of the egregious charge of aiding the enemy, and then went a step further and also acquitted him of leaking the "Collateral Murder" video. That leak was clearly a case of justified whistleblowing, and she was right to view it that way.

Brace for a thousand minor variations on that theme.

Is this what they call check and balance?

New news, old news, same old news even before Obama's Bargaining speech this afternoon:

NY Times: "Republicans dismissed the proposal."

Washington Post: "[W]ithin hours, Republican leaders in the Senate and House had rejected and ridiculed the idea."

The Hill: "House Republicans quickly said they don't see much of a deal."

Associated Press: "[Obama's] offer was immediately panned by congressional Republicans."

Politico: "House Republicans said the president’s proposal isn’t a compromise at all."

Reuters: "A spokesman for John Boehner ... criticized the idea even before the release of the plan's details."

And my favorite, from CNN: "Early reaction from Republicans to the outlines of the president's plan was not receptive."

Opinion and rhetoric

Ezra Klein observes that stagnated public opinion about Obamacare "speaks to a broader truth about political rhetoric":

The things people in Washington say always have less influence than people in Washington think. It’s true when presidents are talking. It’s true during national campaigns. And it’s even truer for the continuing, bitter war over the health-care law, which everyone but real obsessives has tuned out.

I would wholeheartedly subscribe to Ezra's view were it not for empirical evidence that sometimes the things people in Washington have said have had a much profounder influence than those people in Washington ever dreamed.

Which is to say (as just one example) if the nascent conservative movement from Goldwater to Reagan had chosen to buy Ezra's argument that rhetorical wars are essentially futile, that no doubt would have been a happy choice for the nation, but disastrously self-defeating for the movement. Its origins lay in hoping to be competitive with an American liberalism that had dominated the political landscape from FDR to LBJ; its evolving reality mushroomed into its own, multi-decade electoral dominance.

It organized, it persisted, it repeated itself, it crafted a communication strategy designed to persuade. And it was wildly successful. But first it had to reject the argument that rhetorical wars are "always" disappointingly uninfluential. 

Republicans at York-town

Republicans are squabbling over Obamacare, national security and immigration, and their ramifying squabbles are turning bitter and delightfully public. Which leads Byron York to ask, "Are Republicans too divided to have a civil war?" His take:

It’s more likely that this is just a rocky time for a rejected and confused party. The conflicts inside the GOP today just don’t line up in the configuration of a classic civil war.... Perhaps chaos would be a better description.

He may be right. The GOP's squabbles may proceed no further than pinballing chaos, at which point a sobering panic will take hold, returning organizational unity. On the other hand it is instructive, perhaps, to recall that revolutionary movements tend to be impressively unified at birth, but in maturity they unravel in acrimonious dissension. As movements' once-thrilling pieties age into received wisdom, the founding pietists morph into the conservative Old Guard in the eyes of the revolutionary newcomers wanting to rattle the cage, be seen, and make names for themselves. The outcome is less civil war than universal bloodbath, leaving each faction too wounded, weak, stigmatized and isolated to stage a leadership coup.  

Which takes us back to York's analysis:

[A]t least some of [the GOP's] division is entirely understandable. It’s what happens to parties when they don’t have a leader. And Republicans, after two straight presidential losses, have no one who even approaches national leadership.... The coming battles inside the Republican party will be a series of moving fronts, with changing sides and changing tactics. It could be ugly at times, and it could be serious enough to ensure a chaotic presidential primary fight in 2015 and 2016. But all-out civil war? Probably not.

No one who even approaches national leadership. That's the key passage here, and it militates against York's larger argument of temporary chaos. 

In 1952, having lost five straight presidential elections, Republicans similarly engaged in an epic, interventionist-isolationist battle for ideological dominance. But the cunning Dwight Eisenhower was no blustering Chris Christie. Because he came to the GOP as a leader and not as a brawler, Ike was able to subdue the isolationist forces of Mr. Republican, Bob Taft; unify his party; welcome the vast middle; and leave the isolationists ... well, isolated. Christie will only alienate them.

And to flip the script, just as Christie was no Eisenhower, for damn sure Rand Paul is no Mr. Republican. He's more party pooper than hail fellow well met, more tea partier than party loyalist, more third-party founder than wound-licking also-ran. 

Now let's get this straight

Chait mocks Howard Dean for dissing, in today's Wall Street Journal, a key component of Obamacare while representing "McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP, a Washington lobbying firm."

Perish that slam, Jonathan. McKenna Long & Aldridge isn't a "lobbying firm." According to its own Web site, it's a "public policy adviser"!

... and our extreme mortification

Andrew Sullivan:

In what can only be described as an extract from the annals of extreme chutzpah, the Clintons--yes, the Clintons!--are now weighing in, via surrogates, to force Anthony Weiner from the race for mayor of New York. Apparently, the Clintons believe that an embarrassing dick pic--along with lying in his apology--should be enough to force the horny narcissist from the race.

My jaw is hovering near the floor-boards.

Mine's not, although my heart's there.

Look, I know her presidential nomination and subsequent election are virtually certain, and that I should accept what I cannot change. But good grief, I'm just not sure I can bear another two years of the old Clinton scandals--whether real or imagined--rehashed by the GOP bile machine on the campaign trail, followed by four to eight more years of Clinton scandals, whether real or imagined, new or old, truly scandalous or not.

We all have our snapping point, and with Hillary and Bill I reached mine back in 2007. First came their insufferable airs of inevitability, even though Hillary had hawkishly lost the nomination four years earlier when she voted for that damned idiotic Iraq war. Then, after Iowa 2008 and Barack Obama's actual inevitability, came the fully steaming and equally insufferable Clinton attack machine, in any and every attack mode.   

Sure, it was just politics, and enemies are often tomorrow's friends, as the Clintons indeed proved to nominee and president Obama. So it's not a grudge I hold. It's more of a sick, withered feeling: I just can't take up to another 10 years of the Clintons' scandal magnetism. Perhaps I'll write about literature, or art, or chess or something--something, anything at which I am far less acute than politics, because even in that, I have my snapping point.  

The Limbaugh/Hannity slump

Although Politico cautions along with "industry insiders" that rumors of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity's dumping by Cumulus Media (40+ stations) remain in the scuttlebutt stage, they're looking uncommonly hopeful. "Cumulus has decided that it will not renew its contracts with either host, the source said," or rather a source said. 

Better and broader yet, Media Matters writes:

Cumulus isn't the only radio company reporting financial losses associated with Limbaugh's show either; other radio companies have also reported significant losses directly attributable to either Limbaugh's show or the intensifying advertiser fallout.

Noam Pattiz, CEO of Courtside Entertainment, best summarized the industry wide [post-Fluke] effect, noting that a "tremendous chunk of advertising revenue was wiped out in terms of support for national talk radio programs." Pattiz added that "the movement in talk radio to some degree is moving away from conservative talk radio and into other genres [namely, sports]."

On the other hand, continues Politico, "Cumulus is also expected to move some of its existing talent--which includes Mike Huckabee, Mark Levin, and Michael Savage--into one of the [Limbaugh/Hannity] slots."

Granted, that would still leave dozens of stations one Limbaugh and Hannity short, yet I'm sure that Levin and Savage, especially, would he delighted to compensate for any vileness deficit.

North Carolina's virtuous political gangbangers

Sometimes we Americans at large are insufficiently thankful for the kind of honest, overkilling gangsterism that some of our states, such as North Carolina, are imposing on a perfectly secure electorate.

In the aforementioned Tar Heel state, for instance, alleged voter fraud amounted to 0.000738 percent of its 2010 midterm ballots cast, while in 2012 the state racked up an equally unstaggering 0.00174 percent of alleged voter fraud. In other words, no problem.

Now your typical political gangster, intent on rubbing out any pesky opposition, would disingenuously plead a case that's simply not there. He would inflate the voter-fraud figures or blow out of all proportion some particularly egregious past instance of fraud, or something like that. But not NC's House Speaker, Thom Tillis of Mecklenburg. No sir, here's a hooligan who tells it like it is:

There is some voter fraud, but that's not the primary reason for doing this.... [T]here are a lot of people who are just concerned with the potential risk of fraud.

OK, so he fudged a little. He really meant to say there are a lot of Republicans who are concerned with the potential risk of a massive democratic turnout (small d intended), which is of course inimical to the ruling State's ideology. But give him a break--the atypical honesty he did muster is refreshing: this voter-fraud bill has nothing to do with actual voter fraud.

They stepped in it

It seems we did have a national debate after all, and the civil libertarians won, or at least they're winning. As David Ignatius notes: "Public uneasiness was suggested by a Washington Post-ABC News poll [last] week showing that 74 percent of those surveyed believe NSA surveillance of telephone records intrudes on the privacy rights of some Americans."

The NY Times adds that "what began on the political fringes only a week ago has built a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable."

Or rather is unstoppable. And Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of the House Judiciary Committee put her finger on the "why" of it all: "a grave sense of betrayal," she told the Times, which further observes that "Since the Bush administration, lawmakers had been repeatedly assured that such indiscriminate collection of data did not exist."

This is one of those rare instances in which this White House, to use the vernacular, asked for it. The NSA's data collection itself--the mere existence of a digital vault containing billions of numbers--was never the paramount offense in many civil libertarians' eyes. Glenn Greenwald can recount all the ghost stories of illicit midnight snoop hauntings that his imagination can conjure, but what really steamed so many on the public sidelines was the compulsive secrecy of a program that required virtually none--and that the Security State's chieftains lied to Congress about it. 

It now appears that legislative remedies are inevitable. As agreeable as though remedies are, what's downright heartwarming is that so many Obama administration-friendly civil libertarians have been philosophically consistent in their hostility to the NSA's furtive overreach. We all recall when (post-reelection, regrettably) the NY Times nailed the Bush administration for its unwarranted overreach, and we recall as well the unmitigated outrage of left-leaning libertarians. Thankfully, most refused to drift into silence with successive partisan winds. It makes one proud of the left.

The impossibly elusive dream

It seems the anti-establishment right's new philosophical paradigm is to present the ideologically attractive yet knowably unworkable as merely a victim of insufficient "self-knowledge, substance and strategic thinking." Thus somehow the unworkable really could be workable--a creative end run around reality, more than a bit like textbook Marxists insisting that Sino-Soviet economic policies could have worked, had it not been for the economic policies of the Soviet Union and Red China.  

As Exhibts A-Z in a singular sentence, there's this from Ross Douthat's column today:

There might indeed be a "libertarian populist" agenda that could help Republicans woo the middle class--but not if, as in Rand Paul’s budget proposals, its centerpiece is just another sweeping tax cut for the rich.

But of course the centerpiece of Rand Paul's proposal is far more than that. Its core transcends the usual pseudoconservative simplicity of sweeping tax cuts for the rich ("a low flat tax for individuals and corporations") by soaring to a revolutionary nihilism that would wreck the middle class while obstructing the poor's path to it: an "opt-out" for Social Security; an arbitrarily devastating balanced budget in five years; the departmental obliteration of Commerce, HUD, Education and Energy; and the block-granting of all federal "welfare programs"--"e.g. Medicaid, SCHIP, food stamps, and child nutrition."

In other words, Rand Paul's proposal would indeed be peachy, were it not for Rand Paul's proposal.

Ross, it won't work. Give it up. Scratch it. "Libertarian populism" is just an internal contradiction which you can turn inside out or plop upside down or stand on its head, but a contradiction it will remain. The vast American Middle will not opt for gutting itself--simple as that. You can gussy up its essential nihilism all you want, but libertarian populism is both antithetical to authentic conservatism and profoundly, politically unrealistic. There's your "self-knowledge."  

Pat Buchanan's caliphate

We got trouble my friends, trouble with a capital T, as indicated by the presence of progressive pols in your community. For "Progressivism," as Pat Buchanan approvingly quotes from the latest edition of Modern Age, "leads inevitably to utter irrationality and eventually political, as well as moral, chaos."

Yes, we got trouble. Condoning the Affordable Care Act or restricting carbon emissions or jerking with the Koch brothers' taxes could make you go blind.

Never mind that America's reddest, more puritanical states are also its most socioeconomically "chaotic." ("[S]tates with the highest poverty rates are all red: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Texas," notes the New Republic's Jonathan Cohn, while "states with the lowest poverty rates are all blue: New Hampshire, New Jersey, Vermont, Minnesota, and Hawaii. The numbers on infant mortality, life expectancy, teen pregnancy, and obesity break down in similar ways.") Just strike up the paleoconservative, theocratic band and for heaven's sake "Consider how far we are along the path that liberalism," continues Buchanan, "equates with social and moral progress":

Ronald Reagan was the first and is the only divorced and remarried man elected president. But the front-runner in the New York mayor's race today quit Congress as a serial texter of lewd photos to anonymous women. The front-runner in the city comptroller's race was "Client No. 9" in the prostitution ring of the convicted madam who is running against him.

Well there you have it. Damning evidence of liberal mission creep. Ah, but you say you want incontrovertible proof that liberalism and progressivism (Buchanan, not I, equates them) are leading us to the hellfires of a "mentally and morally sick society?"

Thirty year ago, homosexual acts were crimes. The Supreme Court has since discovered sodomy to be a constitutional right. State courts are discovering another new right--of homosexuals to marry. To call homosexuality unnatural, immoral or a mental disorder will soon constitute a hate crime in America.

Oh my. Next thing we know, the wife-beating "rule of thumb" will be slated for legal retirement.

For now, though, even old grey ladies of a liberal bent wink at our moral desolation:

One suspects the [NY] Times does not really have any moral objection to what Weiner is up to on his cellphone. The Times just does not want the city it celebrates as America's citadel of progressivism to be made a staple of late night comedians--and a running joke for the rest of us out here in Cracker Country.

Whoa. If that's the case, then how is immoral progressivism leading us to political chaos and utter irrationality? The Times' reasoning sounds pretty politically rational to me.

Well let's just never mind that either. We should dismiss any contradictions and simply confront Buchanan's palsied neuroticism head on: 

Once we cast aside morality rooted in religion ... who draws the line on what is tolerable in the new dispensation?

Whose religion? Mississippi's? Rick Perry's? Vermont's? Barack Obama's? Thomas Aquinas'? Martin Luther's? Muhammad's? Buddha's? The Shakers'? No, I insist that mine be adopted nationwide: a sort of agnostic pantheistic mush of profound doubt and inner turmoil.

Still, Buchanan has a point. Prior to modern progressivism's casting off of religion-based morality, America experienced successive Golden Ages of, for instance, religion-inspired abolitionism, feminism, workers' rights and education reform. However it also suffered from religion-inspired slavery, mysogyny, oppression and obscurantism. The key point, though, is that the former overcame the latter as devotion to doctrine weakened--the very doctrine that Pat Buchanan works to restore.       

Yeah, there's that

This isn't helpful, Tom.

"The only way Republicans will lose the House is to shut down the government or default on the debt," said Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, a former National Republican Congressional Committee chairman.

Keep it yourself, will you please? Your boys are doing fine, just fine.

King Dong