PMC Commentary

Salvation postponed

I hesitate in upsetting your holiday tranquility with this news, but just as Hume awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber--and in the precarious nick of philosophical time, no less--so I must rattle you from your postprandial stupor, gentle reader, in relating that Joe Scarborough has told The Hill that "he likely won’t run for public office again for another eight years."

Oh the huHamity!

Some might think his timing is suspiciously coincidental, in that Scarborough also opines that Hillary Clinton is likely to occupy the White House for, true enough, the next two, four-year terms. But no. Joe assures us that he's thinking only of his 10-year-old daughter, whose unbegun let alone unfinished secondary education--another eight years, get it?--trumps in Joe's tender heart any manly dalliance with saving the free world.  

But that's OK, I guess. We'll still have Mr. Scarborough, perched on his MSNBC soapbox, revealing otherwise seldom heard but profound political truths: e.g., the GOP should "work aggressively" to attract more voters; Republicans should not settle for just the House; and the party should nominate in 2016 "an ideological small government conservative" who is also "pragmatic" as well as confident in promising that "our country’s best days are ahead"--and, presumably, that agriculture is important, our rivers are full of fish, and you cannot have freedom without liberty.

Now there's a man for you, Jeremiah Johnson.

 

Of Baldwin and Buchanan

The other day I commented, with no particular druthers, on MSNBC's firing of Alec Baldwin. The man's habitual foul slanders were destined to doom the guy's network career, so his termination came as less a surprise than a kind of inexorable fulfillment. Although I didn't much care at the time that MSNBC had sacked Baldwin, I've pondered his firing since, and have vaguely decided--due to one particular--that I was wrong.

Because, at the risk of pulling an Emersonian, hobgobliny consistency, I recalled that I had protested Pat Buchanan's firing by the same network, due to Buchanan's rather steady revelations that he was at least mildly neo-fascistic and, indeed, morbidly xenophobic. Yet I was able to both overlook Buchanan's diseased personal politics and dismiss his narrow stupidities, since, in my opinion, his even older-school abilities at plying disinterested political analysis more than compensated for his episodic paranoia and gleeful authoritarianism.

In the world of cable-network commentary, Buchanan stood virtually alone in his capacity for damning his side and praising the other, assuming such damnation or praise was objectively warranted in the study of tactics. I have come to cringe at the predictability and abject partisan slavishness of network commentators, especially those from my own side. But Buchanan, with all his flaws--and it's undeniable that they ran deep--could stand back from it all and deliver with that old Nixonian steeliness an impersonal reading.

I miss that. And at the time of his firing I protested his dismissal. Yet how in good conscience can I believe that that protest was fair, but also accept as fair the sacking of Baldwin for transgressions no worse than Buchanan's? A studied neo-fascism and explicit ethnic prejudices balanced against a hot-tempered fool's foul mouth?   

Andrew Sullivan wrote after Baldwin's firing "that explicitly homophobic slurs directed at actual human beings as a way to degrade them doesn’t have a 'but-he’s-a-liberal' exception." I quite agree. He added, "It’s ugly and would not be tolerated if directed against any other minority group," thus "MSNBC did the right thing." 

It's here we enter a very gray area, for while MSNBC perhaps "did the right thing" in firing Baldwin--I remain open to persuasion on this--Sullivan also believed, as I did at the time, that Buchanan's firing was misguided. Observed Sullivan: "That his ideas are often repelling should precisely be why he should stay on MSNBC."

Again, I agree, or rather, agreed. And that's a problem.

 

Dear Pope Francis, sign me up

Eugene Robinson pauses to note the secular wisdom of Pope Francis, who unleashed an apostolic broadside this week against the golden calf of Reaganism:  

[Trickle-down economics], which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.

As harsh as that passage may read, Francis was actually being generous for the moment in allowing a collective "trust in the goodness" of our prevailing system--a generosity of spirit he soon and necessarily betrayed, for the reality of our willing omissions is unmistakable. To wit, in Francis' words:  

To sustain a lifestyle which excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us.

Indifference is scarcely trust in the goodness of trickle-down rot. Indifference is tutored, learned, practiced, cultivated and refined; it's that indispensable, inhuman shield against an army of socioeconomic "facts." This, Pope Francis confirmed when he followed his indictment of our developed disregard with that most damning of adverbs: Almost. We are "almost without" awareness of our coldness--which, ethically, is far worse than being oblivious; indeed, obliviousness would be a pardon.

Francis had best watch himself. If he persists in counseling pure Christianity, which is approximate socialism, he'll find himself reigning over another Great Schism. And just as ironic is that this socialist agnostic would find himself a devoted Catholic. 

 

OK?

Be whole, be happy if you can, and thus give comfort to woman and man, be gentle, be caring to child, pray that her days be wondrous but mild, be thankful, where thanks be owed, to all who despite yourself love you, young and old.

And be safe out there.

--PM

 

Baldwin, Logan, and D'Souza's "Trayvon," with exclamation point

It's one of those curiosities of acceptable American-English insults that Alec Baldwin would defend himself from having impetuously called a paparazzo not a "cocksucking faggot," but a "cocksucking maggot" or a "cocksucking motherfucker" or a "cocksucking something"--but heaven forfend, he protests, "'faggot' is not the word that came out of my mouth."

I can only assume that Baldwin's thinking here--perhaps reflecting that of the censorial powers that be--is that had the press accurately reported his hurled epithet, MSNBC would have overlooked not only his intended slur of cocksuckers--in my book, an admirable breed of either gender--but his slander against that oldest of social taboos, motherfucking. My Webster's Tenth Edition tells me that "faggot"--usu. used disparagingly--came into print in 1914, although its origin is unknown (a seemingly logical etymological guess: a combination of "fay" and "maggot"?), which means that in less than 100 years "faggot" has surpassed in public scurrility that for which the emperor Nero has received some really bad press for roughly 2,000.  

At any rate, Baldwin's been sacked by MSNBC--an always imminent event that, since the day of his contract signing, qualified as the science of physics' first recorded, known absolute.  

CBS' Lara Logan, however, has been issued merely a "leave of absence" (but an absence nevertheless) for having executed a journalistic monstrosity of remarkable aforethought and, most likely, personal prejudice. She flamed a story of such cocksucking maggotry (I use that modifier in its more vernacular sense) that the far right, naturally, was all over it. Her phenomenal ineptitude--if not intentional malice--did its lasting damage, in that since the far right's echo chamber never corrects itself, the story remains fixed in the diseased minds of its inhabitants.

The incurably inept Dinesh D’Souza, on the other hand, can tweet this--"I am thankful this week when I remember that America is big enough and great enough to survive Grown-Up Trayvon in the White House!"--and, without the faintest disapproval from his camp's censorial powers that be, scurry right back, should he so choose, to full employment by the Heritage Foundation or American Enterprise Institute or some other reactionary propaganda tank.

D'Souza's "light-hearted" comparison of our biracial president of the United States to an assassinated black youth was black-hearted enough, but not nearly enough for this idiot, who indeed thought it whimsical to add an ironic exclamation point.

Speaking of irony, Mr. D'Souza makes a good part of his living by touting the virtues of his Christianity.

Nonetheless I must admit that he is somewhat blessed, in that there is nothing, apparently, too outrageous that he could ever say which put him in dutch with his mammonist overlords.

 

Michael Steele's con job

For me, one of contemporary politics' few enjoyable pastimes is that of watching former RNC chairman Michael Steele proudly peddle himself as a through-'n-through Establishment Guy--a Prospero-like shazam that comes complete (most often on Chris Matthews' "Hardball") with Steele's worldly tsk-tsking of the incorrigible, establishment-wrecking tea party types.

Three years ago, however, as chairman, Steele vigorously embraced those tea partiers, for they, as his then-visionary mind foresaw matters, were the GOP's future. For instance, as a TPM story from 2010 reported, Steele in that year sent a memo to his committee members "in which he highlighted his efforts to reach out to the tea party and drive turnout by reaching out to the Republican grassroots. And he took a less-than-subtle shot at establishment types who kept the fired-up conservative activists in the tea party at arms length for most of the cycle."

But that was then, before the tea partiers thoroughly humiliated the establishment and brought the Grand Old Party to a historic low point. Now, Steele is almost disdainful of them, as though he and he alone had been warning his party of their creeping influence and power, all along. This quote, in Politico, is representative of Steele's self-denial: "This process is one that has been unfolding for a while, so the idea that you are now going to wrestle control back from the people who vote, good luck with that.”

Perhaps this bit of history will someday find its way to Chris Matthews' eyes; and then, just maybe, Matthews will start calling out Steele on his unbroken-Establishment con. It's true that such an intervention would rob me of no little enjoyment--my pornographic love of naked political guile compels my fascination with watching Steele so completely turn his own recent history on its head--but Steele's angle, it seems, is that he wants back into elected office. And frankly, he's flakier than even the tea partiers.

Generic cretinism

Before us we have a choice. We can plunge into justified despair, or we can stop reading polls for a good six months.

Democrats a month ago held a 50%-42% advantage among registered voters in a generic ballot, which asked respondents to choose between a Democrat or Republican in their congressional district without identifying the candidates.... A new CNN/ORC poll indicates the GOP now holds a 49%-47% edge.

Due to the former, I'm leaning toward the latter.

 

A Georgia mystery

Rep. Jack Kingston, who is mired in the congested swamp of Georgia's U.S. Senate Republican primary, has introduced the "Small Business Fairness in Obamacare Act," which he announced on a local, conservative talk-radio show yesterday. Best I can tell, the bill merely redefines "full-time employee" from 30 to 40 hours. What makes Kingston's announcement of some considerable interest, though, is less the bill announced than the announcement itself, which unfolded in this manner:

There’s some criticism, 'Well, are you helping improve this law when you make that change? And should we be doing that?' A lot of conservatives say, 'Nah, let’s just step back and let this thing fall to pieces on its own.' But I don’t think that’s always the responsible thing to do. I think we need to be looking for things that improve healthcare overall for all of us. And if there is something in ObamaCare, we need to know about it.

Remember, speaking those lines was a Republican congressman running in a Senate Republican primary in a Southern state against such bedimmed luminaries as Reps. Phil Gingrey and Paul Broun, the latter of whom, you no doubt recall, is also a medical doctor who believes that modern embryology, among other sciences, is packed with "lies straight from the pit of Hell." In other words, Broun is what you might call, with good reason, the perfect Republican candidate. Needless to add, GOP perfection despises Obamacare and thus will have nothing to do with it, except vote for pointless real after pointless repeal.

Why then would Mr. Kingston introduce--on conservative talk radio--a bill to modify rather than outright kill the dastardly Obamacare?

I haven't an answer, because I can't read Kingston's mind, but several possibilities avail themselves, the two more obvious ones I'll introduce first. It could be that Kingston is, even for a Georgia GOP primary, abnormally stupid; or, could be, he has a death wish, pure and simple.

Or maybe he believes that in a crowded primary field he needs something, anything recognizable in a hot-button sort of way, to reposition himself apart from the others. Or perhaps he only sought media attention, in line with the axiomatic "all publicity is good publicity." Less likely is that Kingston actually believes in his bill as a positive tweak--it is now axiomatic as well that Republican pols possess a monolithic aversion to anything helpful--and least likely of all is that his internal polling is showing more Georgian support for Obamacare than we otherwise assume.

However, could that be an actual possibility in the polling of Republican primary voters? Might Kingston have stumbled on some heretofore unknown leading indicator? It is that slimmest of possibilities--but a possibility nonetheless--that is mind-blowing.  

On the other hand, later came the inevitable clarification from Kingston's office: "He essentially said that we don't just need to wait for Obamacare to die under its own weight, we need to be looking for solutions that would replace it." The clarification is, conspicuously, a muddied self-negation, for the congressman's bill doesn't even pretend to "replace" Obamacare--never mind that the congressman said flatly, and not "essentially," that letting Obamacare "fall to pieces on its own" would be irresponsible.

Thus the clarification, in combination with the announcement, was probably but a play for both sides.

Still, a Republican pol playing two angles of the normally absolutist Obamacare issue--and in a Southern state, no less--is a seismic doubling of conservative strategy. And if it works for Kingston, we could be looking at utterly altered midterm elections, nationwide.

   

Mr. Foer, you forgot something

In "Obamacare's Threat to Liberalism," the New Republic's Franklin Foer is largely and inexplicably oblivious to the overriding factor in late 20th- and early 21st-century American politics, which is Republicanism's grinding negativity and nihilism.

As I read Foer's piece, which is an elegy for the electorate's loss of faith in liberalism's aspirations and thus in government itself, I kept anticipating some introduction of the undeniable thesis that Republicans have for 40 years played the merry midwives of that public loss. Yet these two passages were as close as Foer got: 

Vietnam and Watergate hardly reflected well on Washington, stagflation seemed the product of incompetent economic management, and the rising racial resentments of the white working class created an ungenerous mood.

And:

Fortunately for the New Deal, Twitter didn’t broadcast every farmer’s sad encounter with the Agriculture Adjustment Act. But the culture of modern Washington, with its hyperventilating media and legislative saboteurs, takes pornographic pleasure in magnifying failures—which in turn erodes the public’s willingness to give liberalism another shot.

Note the disembodied nature of the mobilizers of white resentment and of the distasteful culture of Washington and its hyperventilating media and legislative saboteurs. Do we not know who they are? Are they not to be named? Is there some reason we should be so delicate as to mention these impersonal factors while leaving the personalities behind them unidentified, unstressed, unresponsible?  

Was it liberals who introduced the modern machinery of think-tank propaganda into American politics? Was it liberals who debuted an entire television "news" network as a brazenly partisan arm of one party?--or who took to the wireless and pounded the opposition daily with all manner of Limbaughesque slander?--or who persuaded huge chunks of the white population that food stamps were an ethnic phenomenon?--or that their government, in one form or another, is out to get them? That, in brief, government's unnecessary, government is suspect, indeed government is always the problem?   

The American electorate has been so unremittingly and sufficiently brainwashed as to the evil of government and the free markets' splendor that it takes very little trouble in any fresh liberal program--hence we come back to Foer's title subject, Obamacare--for the public to suffer a collapse in confidence.

But it's essential for commentators to remember, and to constantly remind others, just which is more responsible--the brainwashing or the programmatic troubles themselves--for the public's searing unease about its own government. Foer neglected that essential journalistic duty.      

 

"Now the difficult part starts"

I think Democrats would be well advised to temper what are their unquestionably premature declarations of the Geneva Accord as a primal Middle East reset and, for the Obama administration, a foreign policy triumph. Cause for such celebration may yet come. But they should wait. A half year isn't long.

For all of the drama of late-night make-or-break talks in Geneva, the deal that Secretary of State John Kerry and his negotiating partners announced early on Sunday was largely a holding action, meant to keep the Iranian nuclear program in check for six months while negotiators pursue a far tougher and more lasting agreement.

"Now the difficult part starts," a former IAEA official tells the NY Times. Yet to be negotiated, as we all know, are nothing less than the fundamentals: the extent, for instance, of Iran's uranium-enrichment program, and the future of its plutonium program at Arak. Even the lifespan of a comprehensive deal is in question.

Were I to bet on the likelihood of an ultimate Obamian triumph, sure, I'd go heavy. But it is well to keep in mind that though the United States is negotiating with pragmatic religious fanatics, fanatics they remain, and they, not President Rouhani, sit at the top Iran's power structure. And there's no one so devilish as the self-sublime.

There's always that kicker to keep the cork in the champagne. Better to remember that now, rather than later, with egg on one's face. Again, a few months isn't a long time to wait.

 

Bibi Netanyahu, the forever problem child

Who ever would have thought that Halperin-Heilemann's cheeky little political tell-all, Double Down, would, of all books, have been the one to reveal that highest-level admission which would, in turn, lead to a fundamental shift in 21st-century world diplomacy? Yet it does. For it was during the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, according to the tittering authors, that Barack Obama conceded the awful truth about our principle Mideast, ahem, ally: "We all know that Bibi Netanyahu is a pain in the ass."

Unless dictated word for word by Bibi himself, there's no diplomatic deal with any of his neighbors that could ever be short of apocalyptically "dangerous" and a "historic mistake"--which is what renders this quote, from a former Obama administration official, so unfathomable: "The Palestinian issue is the big casualty of this deal. Now that they have an Iran deal, over the strong objections of Israel, it’s going to be very hard to persuade Netanyahu to do something on the Palestinian front."

That's either some stunning naiveté or the sourest of grapes. It's going to be hard to ‎induce Netanyahu to adopt a more humane, more realistic policy toward the Palestinians? To cease the ever-expanding atrocity of Israeli settlement sprawl? To accept that his nation's hegemonic grip is increasingly inflammatory, simply unsustainable, and utterly antithetical to U.S. interests--and thus, in the long run, Israel's?

When has Netanyahu ever displayed the slightest regard for President Obama's diplomatic position, or demonstrated a willingness to do anything less than shore up his own political one?

Right.

And the answer to that is what makes this reporting, from the Jerusalem Post, so unsettling. Said Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Liberman, last night: "We are in a new reality that is different from yesterday.... We will do what we must and will not hesitate for a minute--and there is no need to add another word."

Possibly only some face-saving and all too familiar saber-rattling. But we can't know that. What we do know is that Prime Minister Netanyahu harbors little concern for President Obama's very delicate situation--and that he takes for granted America's eternal sufferance. Unsettling indeed.         

 

Right on cue

The terms of the Geneva Accord announced last night are virtually designed to expose U.S. domestic criticism of them as either political hackery or demagogic hawkery.

The diplomatic agreement is little more than a watchful feeler. Its conditions concede the potential fluidity of the Iranian situation and thus stipulate a punishing status quo ante, should things flow backward; it's a beginning testament to "trust, but verify"--by now a veritable commandment of Republican foreign policy scripture. 

The agreement is, in short, a Churchillian invitation to jaw-jaw rather than war-war and a Reaganesque test of earnestness, from all sides.  

So sure enough, today's American conservatives want no part of it--a sentiment they insist on broadcasting with a stunning, and of course deliberate, obtuseness.

"Unless the agreement requires dismantling of the Iranian centrifuges, we really haven’t gained anything," tweeted Lindsey Graham, who doubtless will go right on insisting that throughout the history of practical diplomatic accords, "Z" has always come before "A."  

Kelly Ayotte also sourly tweeted her profound "skepticism" of the agreement, which in itself is a near renunciation of the sainted Ronald Reagan's verification scheme; Marco Rubio inexplicably stated that "this agreement makes a nuclear Iran more likely"; and Eric Cantor slimed the deal with his "concern" that ...

Oh, who the hell gives a damn what Eric Cantor thinks.

It was Sen. John Cornyn, though, who best displayed contemporary conservatives' gut-level, adolescent maturity: "Amazing what WH will do to distract attention from O-care."

Thank goodness for what The Hill's foreign affairs blog described as Secretary of State John Kerry's deadpan response to the aforementioned absurdities, which no longer stop anywhere close to our waters' edge: "Gee, you mean the members of the other party are criticizing the president? I can't imagine that."

 

Racing to the moonshine

I don't know. It's a close call.

On the one hand, Jonathan Chait asserts that the "silliest bit of hand-wringing may be the fear that allowing majority-vote confirmations for judges will pave the way for radical Republican judges.... Except Republicans have been committed to doing this exact thing for years... The threat to nominate more Scalias is about as frightening as Iran threatening to cut off its donations to the Jewish National Fund."

On the other hand, we have the superlative silliness of the hand-wringers themselves. At first, for instance, John McCain apocalyptically grieved that "Now there are no rules in the United States Senate," and then he suggested--egads!--that the Senate's usual legislative efficiency may be chilled by the rule change.

And, as you know, where there's a McCain, there's a Graham: "I just think after today, legislating's going to be pretty tough." (Dick Durbin put Graham's nostalgia for the Senate's earlier efficiency in perspective: "We put the government back in business thank goodness, but beyond that the strategic helium reserve bill is really the centerpiece of what we’ve done.")

As New Republic notes, Senate Republicans are protesting on--what else?--high principle that "Ending Filibusters Is Unconstitutional and Un-American." So, they threaten, should we regain the majority, "We'll Do it, Too." Because, of course, a high principle is at stake.

What all this silliness may well come down to in the 114th Congress is President Obama spending his days vetoing tumbrels of ACA repeals (along with dead-letter mounds of other imbecilic legislation), passed by GOP majorities. Then, and only then, will congressional silliness achieve its highest perfection. 

 

Is this Meester Caarpenter?

I just experienced the most eloquent telephone scammer ever.

He was one of those Indian chaps who've been calling all over Great Britain and the United States, identifying themselves as either Microsoft employees or Cyber Security agents and telling their marks that their computer is spreading (or in this case, mine was receiving) all sorts of terrible viruses.

They then provide computer instructions to the "callee" so that he, the technician, can fix the problem--which of course only provides the scammers with access to all the mark's computer content.

I played along, OKing his every instruction, and when he proudly asked what my screen was showing at one final point, I said, "It says this is a fraud being run by criminal clowns out of India."

His response was pitch perfect: You Americans are motherfuckers.

That rather concluded our little conversation, but it was worth it.

 

Would Kennedy have taken us out of Vietnam?

The second most-asked question about the brutally truncated Kennedy administration--the most-asked question being that truly idiotic one, Who killed Kennedy?--is whether the 35th president would have bogged us down in South Vietnam, as his successor did.

Lyndon Johnson's unflinching answer of "yes" was always self-interested, as, to some extent, are everyone's answers. Ordinarily they tell us more about the respondent--if he or she admires John Kennedy, then the answer is "no," with the corresponding opposite among non-admirers. Thus you can take my opinion for the worth I just assigned it.

My opinion is no, JFK would not have bogged us down in the manner of LBJ. Kennedy's learning curve in the White House spiked after the disastrous Bay of Pigs, and his education was immersed principally in suspicion--suspicion of U.S. intelligence, suspicion of military minds, suspicion of the best and the brightest and, above all, the hawkish.

Yet his public signals suggested confidence, as politically they had to. Kennedy was facing the aggressively anticommunist Barry Goldwater in the '64 campaign, so his support of that era's popular foreign policy theories, dominoes and all, was, for public consumption, indispensable. After Goldwater, however, Kennedy could more overtly be his own man, which as president he had indeed become. In reviewing his record of a growing intellectual independence from the assorted Wise Men of the early 1960s, I have come to believe that Kennedy would have pulled back from Southeast Asia, having recognized it as the bottomless sinkhole it was.

Perhaps the pithiest observation of Kennedy as president I've ever read comes not from a historian, but from the novelist Saul Bellow, who in Herzog meditated that Eisenhower's "tragic successor would have been interested" in difficult questions about our deepest "national purpose," but not Ike, "nor Lyndon. Their governments could not function without intellectuals--physicists, statisticians--but these are whirling lost in the arms of industrial chiefs and billionaire brass. Kennedy was not about to change this situation, either. Only he seemed to have acknowledged, privately, that it existed."

That, I'd say, is an incisively fair assessment of Kennedy's push-pull growth in office. And because of his overall growth, I'd venture that ultimately he would have drawn a line when came to the dire prospect of risking so many American lives in Vietnam. In sum I believe others' intellectual abstractions would, for Kennedy, have turned very real, and he, in turn, would have backed off.