P.M. Carpenter

Obama's newser

At his afternoon newser President Obama just reintroduced what seems a radically foreign idea to the House tea party caucus: that "one faction of one party in one house of Congress in one branch of government" can huff, puff, blow and bluster, but it cannot--and in this instance will not--dictate that government's course. The founders were pretty firm on that point, especially given their antipathy to political factions to begin with, which, ironically, today's "Tea Partiers" are reaffirming as enormously judicious all over again.

This is basic stuff. Indeed it comes no basic-er, as President Obama noted right off: Congress has two essential functions--to pass budgets and pay the nation's bills. Neither function should be subject to endless stipulations and add-ons and amendments of mind-boggling extraneousness. There are 364 days to bicker about such additional things. But at least one day a year? Just pass a goddamn budget. Do your goddman job. And shut the fuck up till tomorrow. That's not exactly a quote, but it's close.

Over the weekend I read an advance copy of Chris Matthews' Tip and the Gipper, which is so far superior to his Kennedy book ... Never mind. This isn't the place for a review. I merely wanted to observe its singular, well-made theme: There really was a time--and it wasn't that long ago--when two strong political leaders of vastly different worldviews worked together while fighting like the ardent partisans they were. Both were grownups, and both understood the importance of getting stuff done, while also understanding that what could be done would never satisfy either leader entirely.

And yet this afternoon, today's grownup went to the podium in the White House briefing room, all alone.

Boehner's jam

The Hill, among others, reports once again that John Boehner, he of those baby blues and bronzed epidermis and a bucket of battered balls, is embracing "the Tea Party’s strategy aimed at thwarting ObamaCare" and thus "betting he can win the public relations battle against President Obama’s bully pulpit."

I still don't see it, neither the "embrace" nor the "bet." The speaker is smarter than that. He's severely jammed up, sure, and step by step he's trying to get both himself and the House unjammed. But embraces and bets imply confidence in that which is embraced or bet on, and by all other accounts Boehner knows that the Tea Party's strategy is futile, because its p.r. value is negative.

Yet, it's odd. Boehner's a pragmatist, which usually contributes to sound governance. But in this case an idealist is called for; not an idealist of the otherworldly Tea Party sort, of course, but of the much older and genuinely conservative variety of actual ideals: chiefly, first do no harm. In the House circles Boehner travels in, that would take real, idealistic courage.

Yeah, let's hope

Almost unbelievably, Luke Russert just reported on MSNBC that an ultraconservative House member had just told him that he and his fellow irreconcilables see their shutdown-eve, pre-Obamacare-launch shenanigans as another eleventh-hour "Pickett's charge." Judging by Russert's tone, the GOPer said this cheerfully, as though the first Pickett's charge was, oh I dunno, even remotely successful?

The original was, of course, R.E. Lee's dumbest idea of the war. A frontal assault by exhausted troops on an open field in the wake of a woefully ineffectual artillery barrage (largely because the South blasted away perpendicularly--which tended to under- or overshoot the mark--rather than obliquely, which is more likely to hit at least something along the way).

I don't know who first used the term, "unmitigated disaster," but I'd bet whoever it was, he said it with a Southern drawl while looking back on Gettysburg. And yet its tactical roots are what some House GOPers now giddily say they wish to emulate.

Almost unbelievable. 

Marshalling unawareness

First things first. I like Josh Marshall. This is nothing against him. But his latest--"Broken Windows, Broken States"--which is intended, I suppose, as some sort of blockbuster revelation, is instead simply dismaying.

I quote, with my emphasis appropriately added:  

[N]o honest observer can deny that the rise of crisis governance and various forms of legislative hostage taking comes entirely from the GOP. I hesitate to state it so baldly because inevitably it cuts off the discussion with at least a sizable minority of the political nation. But there's no way to grapple with the issue without being clear on this single underlying reality.

The "underlying reality" is unmistakable to those who follow politics closely, yet he hesitates to state it "so baldly." In God's name Why?

Well I hesitate to attribute a deeper motive, but I suppose his hesitation also comes from a fear of being labeled by his journalistic colleagues as "polemical." Egads, the shroud of shrillness!--even when the polemical is no longer intrinsically polemical at all. It's just the plain truth. But put it plainly and you might be marked by the toady scribes of conventionalism as shrill.

Marshall's piece unhinged me a bit. I admit it, so some of what I'm writing now may in fact be shrill. Yet being journalistically subtle and tame and country-club sophisticated has failed to evoke the public's proper consciousness about much larger and far more important matters--which, in so many words, Marshall admits: 

[Republican radicalism] has become so pervasive that I believe it's lost on many of us just how far down the road of state breakdown and decay we've already gone.

Journalists--all journalists--had an ethical obligation to baldly point that out long ago. It was, after all, impossible for them to miss.

A false hope

No it's not funny, but yes this, from Politico, is hilarious:

Boehner, who also faces in coming weeks an even more daunting battle with Obama and Reid over raising the $16.7 trillion debt ceiling, may need a shutdown now in order to reassert control over his members and cool their passion for a winner-takes-all showdown with Democrats.

Parliamentary Psychiatric inquiry, please, or rather a point of clarification ...

A shutdown, if not a default, is precisely what Boehner's barnburners have been itching for, because the barnburners are, as their moniker implies, insanely hellbent on a nihilistic cataclysm. Thus a nihilistic shutdown--prelude to a cataclysmic default--might somehow "cool their passion" for precisely that which they're aiming for?

Later in the Politico piece, their dissociative madness is acknowledged: 

On conference calls and in conversations on the House floor, many conservatives say they need a shock to the political system to have a chance of extracting something from Obama. This isn’t a government shutdown, they say, but rather a slowdown. They are betting the American public won’t turn on House Republicans like they did in 1996.

Note the intensity of their epistemic closure, so common to fanatics--"On conference calls and in [internal] conversations on the House floor"; their fundamental inability to focus on any serious objective, so common to the scrambled thoughts of the disordered mind--to "extract" something from Obama; and their primal emphasis on political fallout as opposed to crippling national wounds, so common to purely self-concerned sociopaths--"They are betting the American public won’t turn on House Republicans."

Elements of reason are presumed capable of penetrating all that? Evidence of destruction will somehow dissuade those set on destruction? Chaos won't simply make their day?

No, for Boehner there's only one way out of their nuthatch:

Either [today], or a few days after the government shuts down, enough House Republicans--somewhere around 120 members--could go to the leadership to ask for a clean CR.

The aforementioned "could," I'd wager, is at this moment descending in the form of a must--from the speaker.

I'm so easy

My daughter just bargained for a new iPhone, which she told me runs $200. She has $120. For $40 she'd read any book, under 500 pages, of my choosing--except Shakespeare--and she would figure a way to earn the remaining balance. For $60 she would a read a Shakespeare play.

In the course of her negotiating she blurted that she'd read all of Proust's In Search of Lost Time in exchange for the entire $200. She thought I'd balk. Instead I said it was a delightful deal, should she care to shake on it. But first I informed her--I thought it only fair--that the first 50 pages (of some 3,000+) are of Marcel's memories of getting to sleep one night as a boy.

This compelled some serious reconsideration on her part.

She's reading Richard III.

Which she'll love! and I'm out 60 bucks.

I would have never succeeded as a union negotiator. I really stink at this.

What next?

Ezra Klein favorably quotes a Wall Street analyst on the logic of rooting for a shutdown as a debt-limit release valve:

[I]f a shutdown occurs, we would be surprised if congressional Republicans would want to risk another difficult situation only a couple of weeks later. The upshot is that while a shutdown would be unnecessarily disruptive, it might actually ease passage of a debt limit increase.

If one assumes that logic still carried any weight with the House GOP, Klein and the analyst would be correct. In the immediate wake of a shutdown "business leaders, Wall Street, voters and even many pundits," notes Klein, "will begin exerting real political pressure to force a resolution before a default happens." Realizing they're beat, House Republicans would then capitulate.

But there's a pronounced problem contained in Klein's sensible logic of older-school politics: These "outside actors," he continues, would "[pressure] the Republican Party to cut a deal," which the outside actors would undoubtedly do. But cut a "deal" with whom? Harry Reid has made it clear he'll cut no deals, as has the White House, as it must. And given the generic correctness of John Boehner's belief that "House Republicans are insanely reckless," in Klein's words, does anyone imagine that, post-pressure and deal-less, they would simply surrender, as the saying goes, quietly?

This leads us to the probable resolution. Boehner will, in time, be forced to acknowledge as speaker that there's no such thing as "House Republicans": there are party Republicans, and then there are Tea Party irreconcilables--and it's time to cut loose the latter's control of the former.

Rep. Peter King has estimated that roughly two-thirds of his partisan colleagues agree with him (and Boehner) that the current House strategy is insane, but they're too cowered by Cruzian forces to speak up. As primaries loom, most will remain cowered. Yet some didn't win election or reelection by an obscenely gerrymandered margin, and it is they--in palsied alliance with House Democrats--who can break the deadlock.

At this superannuated point in Boehner's career, what, really, does he have to lose, other than the obvious? The key word is superannuated. Go play some more golf, John.

There is, however, one other possibility, which is almost too dreadful to ponder: a year of one- or two-month continuing resolutions and debt-ceiling lifts, a perpetual game of chicken, an unremitting course of governance-by-threat and extraordinary instability--at least another year, and possibly three, of ceaselessly destructive deadlock.

In brief, the effective end of Obama's presidency, while John Boehner retains his speakership.   

House-issued turbans, maybe?

Now comes another fatwa based on al-Republicans' shrillia law, this one declaring (again) their sainted abhorrence of a government shutdown.

Yet--Alhamdulillah!--the government need not shut down as long as it, in its entirety and with servile obedience, bends--Insha' Allah!--to al-Republicans' divinely instrumental will.

Jesus Christ! they really do look more like terrorists every day.

The virtue of not arguing with idiots

We’re right on the merits, but I don’t think we want to argue on the merits. Our argument is not that our argument is better than theirs; it’s that theirs is stupid.

      --WH official, explaining to Dana Milbank the administration's refusal to entertain any Republican offers but "clean" ones.

It's an essential strategy, whose absurd alternative has played out all week in various cable-network interviews with GOP lawmakers.

Invariably (except at Fox), the host's initial question is, How can it be politically acceptable as a negotiating tactic that you'll blow up the economy unless your demands are met? The Republican response instantly shifts to the demand side--as a litany of grievances: the debt and deficits are too damn high; the American people abhor Obamacare; we need more energy independence; the ease of malpractice suits is appalling; und so weiter.

Back to host. Yes, well that, in part or in whole, may be true or untrue, but the question is, How can it be tactically acceptable to the White House that you'll blow up the economy unless your demands are met? Answer: the debt and deficits are too damn high; the American people abhor Obamacare ...

At this point or soon thereafter the host generally surrenders in a blast of frustration by engaging one of the Republican's many complaints. But Congressman, deficits are plunging! Then the inevitable, You call $700 billion a "plunge"? And then off they go to the Keystone pipeline or some proposed tax reform or some other subject, any other subject except that of the initial and indispensable question: Why would the White House negotiate with terrorists?

At that point in the interview the terrorist has won. Pipelines and taxes on medical devices have absolutely nothing to do with paying past bills and keeping the government open. The stupidity of the terrorist's linkage is grounded in its utter irrelevancy.  

Of course that stupidity transforms to inspired brilliance once any of its particulars is ruled allowable. So for the White House, the only way to win is not to play. 

Cruz now leads the pack

From Public Policy Polling:

Ted Cruz is now the top choice of Republican primary voters to be their candidate for President in 2016. He leads the way with 20% to 17% for Rand Paul, 14% for Chris Christie, 11% for Jeb Bush, 10% each for Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan, 4% for Bobby Jindal, and 3% each for Rick Santorum and Scott Walker.

Another way to read those numbers is as an aggregate of hard-right preference--i.e., the percentages for all the candidates minus Jeb Bush's and Chris Christie's--which totals 67 percent. A full two-thirds of GOP primary voters prefer to either go down in idealogical flames with a Cruz or Cruz-lite, or, more amusingly, believe that only a "true conservative" can retake the White House.

This belief, as you know, is now among the base's holiest of pieties. Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bob Dole and G.H.W. Bush (Part II)--all, according to the base, were congenital losers because of their inherent conservative apostasies (and G.W. Bush was so swiftly defrocked as a big-government conservative that his name among the faithful is now little more than an unmentionable). Only a real conservative can win back the White House, say the devout, by which they mean some breed of Cruzian critter.

Equal to this myth is the prayerful bitch that It's never been tried. According to Limbaughlike scripture, ye of eminent right-wing faith hath been deprived every four years like celestial clockwork of an authentically Reactionary One. This is, of course, just not so. All one must do is look back a bit farther, to '64, when the eminently reactionary Barry Goldwater--with an electorate much whiter and more rural than today's--gathered up all of 52 Electoral College votes against LBJ's 486.

And 67 percent of GOP primary voters now pray to give that another go, God bless 'em.

Twit Patrol

Priceless:

[E]arlier this week Ari Fleischer accused Twitter of letting President Obama use more than 140 characters in his tweets before walking back his claim. [PPP finds] though that 13% of GOP primary voters nationally do think Obama's allowed more than 140 characters to 36% who don't and 52% that aren't sure.

I'm especially fond of the majority's chin-stroking opinion here--as though this drivel is actually worthy of any thought. 

Self-preservation is killing them

Ryan Lizza looks at the ironic effects of Republican gerrymandering:

[P]arty discipline has broken down on the Republican side. On the most important policy questions, ones that most affect the national brand of the party, Boehner has lost his ability to control his caucus, and an ideological faction, aided by outside interest groups, can now set the national agenda.

Through redistricting, Republicans have built themselves a perhaps unbreakable majority in the House. But it has come at a cost of both party discipline and national popularity.

They need only cater to mostly white, mostly rural and mostly ill-schooled constituents, which means they can all pretend that the nation never elected Barack Obama or a Democratic Senate or cast more Democratic votes for the House.

They all, all of them, from constituents to GOP congressmen, can live not only in a swaddled ideology, but in a naked trope--a fool's paradise.   

Authoritarian anarchists: a really weird combo

Assuming John Boehner's sincerity in his repeated avowals that he'll never allow the U.S. government to default--which would otherwise cause, among other known knowns, the final destruction of his party--then he'll have, it seems, no choice but to open the floor to a clean debt-ceiling vote.

For astonishingly it further seems he hasn't the GOP votes for even the dirtiest debt-ceiling bill ever--merely the latest one under "consideration," the one that slams the brakes on Obamacare, forces Keystone's construction, guts consumer protection, changes tort law, pollutes the air and converts public lands to corporate oil playgrounds. In short, the one--and let's just characterize this as what it is--that fascistically nullifies the last national elections.

No, all that's too moderate, say some House hardliners, who object that it lacks "specific spending cuts" and fails "to tackle entitlement reform," according to The Hill. "The problem for me is it doesn't address the debt," says, for example, Rep. Tom Rooney of Florida. "How can I possibly justify that?"

Don't bother. There's no compelling answer to willful, entrenched ignorance. An aggressive aversion to reason is simply that; and if it's aggressive enough, it's simply unalterable.

And then there are hardliners--and this is even more astonishing--who seem convinced that President Obama is just joking, that he's staking his entire presidency on an evanescent bluff, that at some magical moment he'll fling his palms from his eyes and yell Peek-a-boo, let's talk! 

Here's Idaho's Rep. Mike Simpson: "When Obama says he's not going to negotiate on the debt ceiling, that's just baloney. Ultimately, he will."

Ultimately, he can't--precisely because of Simpson & Co.'s insistence that he will.

The upshot of House Republicans' assorted Disabling Acts is that ultimately Speaker Boehner will have to loop back to his primal vows that he'll never permit default. Which is to say, at some point he'll be forced to helplessly throw up his arms and open a "clean" vote to the full House.

I just can't see any alternative, because Boehner's own caucus isn't allowing one--his very own authoritarian anarchists are forcing his hand.  

What if ...

So far the White House is standing admirably firm in the face of the GOP's growing list of absurd demands in exchange for a debt-ceiling lift, saying it's Republicans' "constitutional responsibility" to do, well, to just do its goddamn job.

That seems a reasonable-enough expectation from the president, does it not?--for one of America's two major parties to behave like it's one of America's two major parties? Yet as the GOP plunges us daily into a phantasmagorically obscene sequence of fiscal events, on the streets you'd never know it.

The streets are quiet.

Which led me to wondering: What if the circumstances were reversed? What if a President Romney were trying simply to do his job by asking a Democratic House to do its job and raise the debt ceiling so that the nation and possibly the world would be spared a ruinous act of insanity, and that Democratic House simply said No?

Would our streets still be quiet?

In late 2000, upon the mere prospect of legitimate presidential votes being counted, Republican goons stormed the counting house and essentially demonstrated an eagerness to unleash a civil war--unless they got their way, their count, their man.

Thus it now requires little imagination to assess the probable Republican rank-and-file response to such a ruthlessly intransigent Democratic House.

And yet, reverse that situation--that is, ponder today's reality--and what do we have on the streets? Just another day.

And that, I think, says a lot about at least one fundamental and exceedingly critical difference between America's left and right.

Their true colors

The last person I heard say "God bless Ted Cruz" was the morbidly Christian Sarah Palin. Hence it only seems right that GOP Congressman Peter King--he of little such faith--says he's receiving oodles of "vile" phone messages from the piously born-again-with-their-heads-up-their-asses crowd.

"The vehemence of the phone calls coming into the office. I don’t care, people can call me whatever they want … I haven’t heard such vile, profane, obscene language," King said on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe."

"I’m not saying Ted Cruz is responsible for all his supporters, but he has tapped into a dark strain here in the American political psyche here, and again, the most obscene, profane stuff you can imagine all from people who say they support the Constitution" ...

and love Jesus.

The American far right makes a habit of it. They take a back seat to no one when it comes to proclaiming a passionate love of country and God, and yet no one so regularly despoils both of them more.

Their hypocrisy isn't shocking. Not at all. By now it can't be. It's just tedious.