PMC Commentary

Three years of this

Jesus! it's still some time away from their formal presidential campaign and I'm already disgusted by the Clinton sleaze.

"We are careening from crisis to crisis instead of having a plan, bringing people to that plan, focusing on common-sense solutions and being relentless in driving toward them," says Hillary.

"When people sneeringly say, 'McAuliffe is a dealmaker,' I say, 'Oh, if we only had one in Washington during that shutdown,'" says Bill. Also, "This economic thing, it’s terrible. Median family income ... is lower than it was the day I left office.... We need somebody who wants to do something about it."

The quotes are from a Washington Post story--"the Clintons' ... implicit rebuke of the Obama years"--saturated in ironic awareness. Here they now stand, having presided over America's second worst era of political polarization, belittling Hillary's former boss for failing to embrace compromise and fumbling negotiations with GOP gangsters.

As noted, WaPo characterizes the belittlement as "implicit." It seems more jackhammered to me.

I understand Hillary's present need to offer some "hope" and "change," or the hope for change. She needs an angle. And were there even the faintest element of ingenuousness in her and her husband's offerings, I'd overlook them as mostly standard-issue political horseshit. But for them to suggest that Barack Obama owns any responsibility for our chronic polarization is an inexcusably, unendurably dishonest display of nothing but cheap hackery.

Three years of this? Run, Ted, run. We need the comic distraction.

 

Let 'em whine

Remember when House Republicans, dedicated overseers of good government that they are, were emotionally hurt by the White House's "snub" in briefing House Dems last week on Obamacare's rollout, but not the majority? Remember their anguish, their indignation, their pain?

Well yesterday the WH met with them. I haven't any idea why, except that invoking the politically incomprehensible seems to be the WH's way of doing things these days, so that's what the WH did. It met with them. Sort of.

"A handful of members showed up," reports Politico. "About 10 to 20 members came to hear what [the administration] had to say."

I'm a bit surprised that even 10 showed up, and I'd be shocked to find that 20 actually did. In modern politics it is axiomatic that House Republicans are interested only in gumming up everything and learning nothing. So be it.

The WH's first mistake was in ignoring them last week. Why permit them the theatrical opportunity to wobble and knee-buckle over their infamous fainting couch?

The WH merely aggravated that mistake in correcting it, however. Republicans whimper and whine, and the WH tucks them in. Such reactive gestures are both touching and advisable when directed at small children and perhaps big manly crybabies when sick, but toward House GOPers they only invite more mischief.

Screw 'em.

 

Now that's Rich

Rich Lowry, in his Politico send-up to galactic misrepresentation, scores precisely one accuracy while engaging the neverending Obamacare debate: that of most "liberal pundits ... tiptoe[ing] around Obama’s flat assurance about keeping your insurance if you like it." MSNBC's corralled smugness of late (Why we just can't believe some people didn't understand all this, all along--after reporting for three years on the public's vast cluelessness about the law) is at least somewhat offset by the self-honesty of liberalism's Jonathan Chait, which of course Lowry giddily quotes: it "currently feels like a lie."

It feels that way because it was--because it had to be. Too much infant disclosure would have killed Obamacare's good in its cradle, given Republicans' uniform hostility, and the president and congressional Democrats knew it. So they took the political tack of ancient tradition: It takes a lot of manure to grow a beautiful rose. Lowry & Neocon Co. did exactly the same a few years back in pumping their cherished war, which was a trifle more harmful than disingenuously improving millions of healthcare policies. At any rate, this too will blow over.

But do read Lowry's piece in full. It's an oddly comforting testament to the immutability of pseudoconservatism's reliable underhandedness. My favorite passage: "It’s a little late to get or expect any Republican buy-in.... That would have required serious compromise back in 2009." Lowry later concedes that "what [Democrats] really wanted was single-payer," yet the gobsmacking political reality that the entire bill was an immensely serious compromise in bending to Republican demands of private insurance blows right by him.

As noted, however, you really should do your own treasure hunting. There are many a remarkable gem in Lowry's little bundle of bullshit (for instance I just took another dive and came up with: "it’s possible more people will be uninsured in 2014 than if it had never passed").

Don't cheat yourself. Hie thee to Lowry's world. You won't regret it.

 

A brilliant incompetence

If the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll is on the right track--which only 1 out of 5 Americans believe the country is--the GOP can exhale and then hug its abysmal approval ratings all the way to its reswearing-in ceremonies in 2015.  

Republicans have perfected all the governing arts of incompetence 'cept one: they have a demonic talent for making everybody sick to death of politics--just about everybody, that is, but their base, which thrives in sulfurous turmoil, abundantly supplied by the demonically talented. To do aught good never will be our task/But ever to do ill our sole delight. I can't recall if that's from Milton's Arch-Fiend or the GOP platform.

But, as Sebelius said yesterday ... Whatever.

It's working.

Sure, the NBC/WSJ poll finds Republicans' positive rating at a net-negative of 31 percent. For them, though, not to worry, really, for "the poll also shows that the political gains that Democrats made during the shutdown have eroded somewhat"--italics mine--as in cut in half, from an 8- to 4-point advantage on the question of who should run hell's asylum next time.

Meanwhile, "Obama’s approval rating has declined to an all-time low as public frustration with Washington and pessimism about the nation’s direction continue to grow." 

These are the electoral classic of a pox on both houses, which to the GOP's delight will only fester into a monstrous indifference to the midterms--unless President Obama and congressional Dems start showing some goddamn passion in reversing the trend.

I'm not big on "passionate" politics myself, but for the love of Mike that's often the realistic imperative of this ad-populum racket. Republican pols "get" that, hence they serve up passion in spades and thereby animate their base. Most Democratic pols? They're busy conducting support groups for the grievingly bullied. It's pathetic, and more than that, disheartening, and even worse, ill-motivating.

 

The Sebelius hearings

I happened to catch some of this morning's monotonously offensive Republican grilling of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius--and I confess my disappointment in her, as well as the administration's response in general to the GOP's hobgoblin quackery.

Sebelius et al should have taken a flame-thrown page from New Jersey Congressman Bill Pascrell: Are you serious what you just said? Are you really serious? Because, to you and me, obviously the Republicans were not. To many of the less politically junktified, however, their outrage could be mistaken as sincere.

I'm all for civility, but in politics one-way civility can look suspiciously like a canine appendage tucked between weakened legs. Sebelius had already accepted responsibility for all that's gone wrong in Obamacare's breathtakingly inept rollout--in my opinion, she should have taken her accountability to the ultimate point of resignation, but that's a different topic--and a show-trial display of endless self-flagellation is but a proper part of dutiful shame.

But House Republicans weren't content with that. Instead they insisted on hurling aggressive abuse at Sebelius, much of it aggressively ignorant, too--and those were the many instances in which her cool civility should have taken a holiday: Are you serious what you just asked? Are you really serious? For three years we've suffered you burrowing boils on humanity as we've tried to accomplish some actual good in the face of your many cheap, opportunistic dishonesties. And now I find that you still don't understand even the law's most elemental basics. Try educating yourselves before wasting my time; I'm too busy trying to fix what you helped to fuck up.

Or something like that, which isn't even a lack of civility, really. It's just the truth.

 

Cruz by the book, that book

There is a key passage in Eric Hoffer's The True Believer that helpfully elaborates on David Denby's questions and answers about Ted Cruz's "nihilistic charade":

Hitler, who had a clear vision of the whole course of a movement even while he was nursing his infant National Socialism, warned that a movement retains its vigor only so long as it can offer nothing in the present.

Nothing, that is, but anger, disaffection, fierce antipathy to the present order. Only through the exaltation of the fanatical leader can a splendid new age of creativity and innovation--a rebirth--come about; until then, nothing but hatred must be poured on the ancien régime.

In other words, Cruz is only doing his thing by the book.

 

Divine comedy

All my worries were allayed this morning when I read that "Former U.S. House Majority Leader Republican Tom DeLay told a tea party group that God has told him to lead a constitutional revival."

It's a Barabbas thing, I guess.

 

Second-term woes?

Maybe President Polk had it right. Get in, get it done, then get the hell out of Dodge.

Going into office--literally going into office--he had his inaugural address labeled "palpable knavery and babbling folly" by the nation's leading newspaper; he faced the formidable Whigs; his own party had split into factions and was nursing hurt feelings over the nomination ruckus. 

Nonetheless Polk, prone to self-righteousness and ferociously determined, blew by his opponents and accomplished every major objective he had outlined on Day One. He pledged and served a single term, in which he got his tariff reform, established an independent treasury, acquired the Oregon territory in prickly negotiations with Britain and stole the American Southwest from Mexico.

Then he left, leaving all the blowback to successors.  

Just about now, President Obama is probably wondering why he didn't make a similar pledge: One term and I'm outta here, for second acts are too commonly those in which all the accumulated crap of the first hits the buzzsaws.

Either that or second-term presidents stumble or blunder exceedingly well on their own. In recent history we've the inept examples of Nixon, Reagan, Bush II (whose second-term blundering was more of an extension, really); and even the great multi-term FDR made a spectacular mess of things with his attempted Court-packing and ill-conceived budget-cutting. 

This morning the NY Times cites Harry Truman--another second-term sufferer--as having observed that "the pressures and complexities of the presidency have grown to a state where they are almost too much for one man to endure." That was true then, and, as the Times notes, perhaps truer now, given "metadata technology"--as well, of course, as our inexhaustible media circus.

Yet outspoken presidential weariness reaches back to the earliest eras of our republic: Barack Obama isn't charged with penning his own letters in response to vast correspondence, or having to greet jobseekers and idle wanderers in the White House.

James K. Polk was physically spent upon leaving office. He died three months later.

But, leaving moral judgments aside--a Polk successor, Grant, regarded his predecessor's war as "one of the most unjust ever waged"--our 11th president did get the job done. In one term. Would he have faced second-term woes? Unquestionably, for they are as certain as first-term woes.

But are second rounds actually cursed? Only in that they possess an added kicker: inescapable accountability, from Day One.

 

The poetic economist

Krugman--yeah that Krugman--asks, "when and why did we stop reading poetry? Educated people used to read it all the time, or at least pretend to; that’s no longer the case. Frankly, I don’t read poetry except on very rare occasions. What happened?"

Can't say that I know, Paul. However my guess is that our pedagogic post-Sputnik obsession with math and science sorrowfully amounted to something of a zero-sum gain.

I never read poetry myself until the gorgeously written palinodes of W.H. Auden got me going, only a handful of years back. These spurred me on to--yep, here I go again--the peerless H. Bloom, whose Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer to Robert Frost, all 959 pages of it, now dwells not by my bed, but on it, in the place of my eternal love.

 

You get what you vote for, Tom

You have to wonder if tea partiers like Tom Hackett, a Georgia retailer who's now out of business because of sagging consumer demand, is familiar with any economic theories beyond those of the Cleveland administration.

"I’m going to go hide for two years,” he said, until “he”--President Obama--is on his way out. “It’s sad. People are hurting. There’s no reason for it to be happening, other than what he’s doing.”

Hackett, 58, called Obama’s entire agenda anti-business: “It’s like, ‘What can we do to kill the economy?'"

Tom, it's like, several things: insist on oodles of tax cuts in place of direct spending in a stimulus bill; deny the economy follow-up stimulus in the form of even a modest jobs bill; cut federal assistance to state and local governments, which further costs communities vital employment; gut discretionary spending across the board; exacerbate shaky consumer confidence by riveting the nation with unnecessary doubts; shut down the government for a few weeks; and threaten financial self-destruction.

But I shouldn't have to tell you, Tom. At its most fundamental level, you're the reason behind all of it.

Elmer Erickson

Erick Erickson is sad. He is eloquently sad, lovingly and pugnaciously sad. He leans against the bar of the Old Home Sample Room, the most gilded and urbane saloon in Macon, Georgia, and requests the bartender to join him in "The Good Old Summer Time," the waltz of the day--and to join him as well in fond remembrances of when National Review was pure.

Erickson also quotes Sinclair Lewis (though not Gantry), hence my plagiaristic variant.

His latest, as always, is worth the read. It is his commonplace mixture of bad history and worse conclusions. It begins by reminding us:

In William F. Buckley’s mission statement for National Review, written in 1955, he did not mention winning elections. That’s not to say it is unimportant, unneeded, or unwanted. But it was not mentioned.

This lapse was principally the result of conservatism having been, at the time of NR's inauguration, in a pitiable state of muddled division. Social conservatives were intensely wary of the libertarian faction, and in both camps there squatted the supremely anti-communist. The ultraconservative base was splintered to the point of electoral impotence--and it was that which Buckley intended to remedy, through an ideological fusion. ("Reason within tradition" was, as I recall, how Buckley's chief and former Trotskyite strategist, Frank Meyer, put it.) In short, first things first.  

Erickson's dismissal of Buckley's underlying intent in establishing NR is, of course, for a purely Ericksonian purpose: to keep the flagging tea-party lunacy flying. Elections? Pshaw. Majorities? Harrumph. Erick is made of more piously heroic stuff.  

Still, he is sad--so sad that some in conservatism seem to understand that a permanent minority won't get them very far.

 

Doesn't get much funnier: "Lincoln’s negatives are 'through the roof'"!

The only thing that mars this delightful New Republic piece on Beltway tabloidism is that it's labeled "Parody." Would we somehow have mistaken "What If POLITICO Had Covered the Civil War?" as a solemn sort of counterfactual, historical reset? 

It's like labeling Anna Karenina "Fictional Biography," or Romeo and Juliet "Tragedy," or the Old Testament as "Musings by a bunch of uptight patriarchs not to be taken literally" (OK, so maybe some editorial labeling is in order).

At any rate, here's a taste of TNR's disturbingly funny channeling: 

NEW BATTLEGROUND POLL: Lincoln’s negatives are "through the roof" in Va., N.C., S.C., Ga., Miss., Ala., Louisiana, Ark., Tenn.  PLAY-BOOK TRUTH BOMB: Lincoln is not going to improve these numbers if he refuses to press the flesh. A playbooker telegraphs: "I don’t know what happened to the gregarious guy we saw in 1860. Jeff Davis hasn’t been invited to the White House for cocktails once since Abe became president!"

I also particularly enjoyed this one:

NOT-S0-GREAT EMANCIPATOR:  "Lincoln Proclamation Stirs Controversy," by Jethraux VandeHei: "Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was bound to rile opponents who already viewed the president as high-handed and arbitrary…. Congressional Democrats have vowed to hold hearings, which could put border-state Republicans in an awkward position…."

I confess my voyeuristic pleasures. I still read POLITICO, as do all political observers who regularly bemoan its "insider" superficiality. Otherwise we'd have only vaporous suspicions to ridicule. 

But let's face it: POLITICO is so often shallow because today's politics isn't exactly a deep racket. It was once the creative art of compromise surrounding the social sciences of complex policy; now it's almost exclusively a dull, brutish, uninspiring battering ram.

We all know who made it that way--and it's that phenomenon we tediously cover, with the thuggish knuckledraggers as stars. They've made politics personal; it's no longer business. But it is POLITICO's, whose personalities-driven tabloidism can at times be useful in sorting out the insipid chaos that is modern politics, even if the publication's really crappy "lack of leadership" stories accompany it.

 

More on Keller vs. Greenwald

Sullivan notes the similarity of our decisions in the Keller vs. Greenwald debate, although he says "the advantage" goes to Greenwald. (My take here.) It is, I suppose, only an indicator of the debate's invasive nuances that a professed conservative sides with the "radical" and a socialist finds comfort in traditionalism. 

Yet how we arrived at our differing conclusions helps to explain them, for both, based on their underlying premises, compel a certain inevitability of logic. To wit, Sullivan writes that Greenwald's "idea of journalism is inherently more honest--declaring your biases is always more transparent than concealing them. That’s why, I think, the web has rewarded individual stars who report and write but make no bones about where they are coming from. In the end, they seem more reliable and accountable because of their biases than institutions pretending to be above it all."

Permit me to approach this from a personal angle. I was trained as a historian (with some political science thrown in)--which is a kind of latter-day journalism--and in my opinion history's Glenn Greenwalds have perpetrated immense harm on the discipline. For several decades they have infested the writing of history with highly personalized methodologies, meaning their own political biases. They're quite shameless and open about it, yet they simultaneously declare their written "findings" ... The Objective Truth. Even when I agree with them, politically, I'm appalled by their prejudice, which I know guided their research--in search of only the truth, right?

Oddly enough (and you must keep in mind my political leanings) my favorite professor in grad school was an inveterate political conservative who believed in writing history from a judicious distance; my least favorite historians in print were the leftist ideologues I agreed with, because I suspected their work of a too-keen selectivity. In short, the Greenwalds--be they of history, or journalism.

By way of a popularly known example, perhaps the godawfulest history book ever written was the marvelous Howard Zinn's A People's History. As a polemic, it's great stuff. As American history, it is wretched. For sure, Zinn wasn't shy about "declar[ing his] biases," as Sullivan applauds, however he proved himself less "reliable and accountable because of" them. The general reader? He or she has no idea just how badly misleading A People's History is.

Do we really want an entire world of journalism like that?

Separation is doable. For instance the Wall Street Journal possesses a Zinn-like wretchedness from the other side in its editorial pages, however its reporting is almost universally praised as straightforward and, to use the dread word, objective. It is a respected paper, albeit with ideological buffoons in charge. To me that's OK; I know its editorializing is fiction and its reporting is journalism. And I know where I can find each. They're clearly marked.

Will any such distinctions exist in Greenwald & Co.'s upcoming presentations in his new venture? My guess is no, for that would only throw into question the purity of discovered truths.

It seems what we need is fewer answers and more questions asked. And advocacy journalists and opinion writers--hello, self--have a hard time with that, since, after all, we do have the answers.

 

A Cruz snooze?

This is intriguing, even if NBC News explains it by way of Iowa's disgruntled Ron Paulites:

Cruz addressed a somewhat muted crowd of GOP activists who attended the annual [Ronald Reagan] fundraising dinner.... Previous speakers at the dinner include former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; her appearance, in 2010, drew nearly three times as many attendees.

The key to 2016's fireworks is Ted Cruz's sustainability. So for him the above, obviously, is ominous. It wasn't that what Cruz had to say drove them away. They just didn't show up. In Iowa.

Whether this mostly reflects the Paulites' jealousy or a simmering pre-knowledge of Cruz's electoral lethality remains a question. But for Cruz, it doesn't look good.

 

Yawn, stretch, apocalypse, yawn ...

Having terrified the nation and horrified the world with unmeetable and indeed unfathomable demands on government's grownups, and having waved "So long," for now, to those thrilling yesterdays of some really novel imbecility, now "GOP leaders are struggling to come up with an agenda to fill the 19 legislative days that are left in 2013," reports Politico.

It's just not the same, dammit all it's just not the same without global destruction on the menu. How somniferous are the quotidian challenges of routine governance--oh, you know, helping to create jobs, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, housing the poor, in general assisting those who are disadvantaged because of government's prior neglect. 

That sort of thing is for other Congresses, I guess. This one goes in for either nap time or hair-raising weeks of impending doom. And now is the moment for their blankies.

The House ... will finish its work week Wednesday. After that, the House is out of session until Nov. 12. Internally, Speaker John Boehner and senior Republicans aren’t discussing coming back early from the scheduled recess, but instead, they are wondering if they’ll cancel some of the remaining days in session.

Would it be unconstitutional to just cut them all checks for $174,000 for next year while authorizing competent substitutes to do their jobs? We do have a few "loose ends" that require some attention--see above--and it might be nice if we had a Congress capable of providing it. This one is out to fucking lunch.