The Carpentariat

Well, I've seen no complaints or groans--yet--about the photo to the right, so I guess it stays. Its presence has nothing to do with ego; I just thought that as you read a visualization of your host in his natural habitat, sans horns and trident, might be helpful. My (thinning) hair is longer now, the beard tends to come and go--depending on my daughter's directional thumb--and I don't ordinarily lounge in a Caribbean-flavored shirt. Otherwise, that is I, for good or ill.

(I guess Facebook doesn't like it. A few readers did, right off, but Facebook wiped them out.)

 

"The Clinton Machine"

First Read notes the various components of "The Clinton Machine," and how they're expected to play out in the near future:

Bill will be the campaigner, Hillary will talk policy and try to be the statesman..., and the Clinton-leaning interest groups are going to punch back against any GOP attacks. And oh, it was interesting to see Clinton confidante Harold Ickes back on the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee yesterday as the party begins to lay the groundwork for how its delegate-selection process will work in 2016.

"The groundwork"? Whatever worked against them in 2008.

I already feel a bit of Peggy Noonan's "malaise," since the Clinton Machine's operation is depressingly familiar. It leaves nothing to wonder about, or speculate on. One could write its 2016 script today, and not be surprised for the next three years. 

Bill will schmooze on the stump, and in interviews he'll take elliptical shots at Obama's "lack of leadership"; Hillary will talk policy in an uncompelling policy-less kind of way, leaving herself abundant room for narrow interpretations; and Clinton-leaning interest groups will savagely castrate foes and even mildly critical friends alike.

Meanwhile, the GOP will refashion the United States of the 1990s as some sort of American Buchenwald, this time with Hillary--not Bill--as the grimly monocled Kommandant. We'll all--all of us--want to run for the sanity-saving hills, except the Millennials, who will be in the generational dark as to just what in God's name the GOP is so hysterical about.

The Machine's money will in all probability crush any challengers along the way, notably the immensely qualified Joe Biden, whose gut political instincts could otherwise outsmart all the imminent, metric-driven beanheads of the Clinton operation any day. "I’m not sure this is a moment for caution or deliberateness," Biden reflected recently (via Glenn Thrush). And he's right; the electorate has about had it with little, indetectable steps toward overly cautious nothingness.

Yet Hillary will play the safest of games, because she can. As her party's nominee, she'll be running in the general election virtually unopposed. (Rand Paul? Jeb Bush? Yeah, right.) Why upset a sure thing?  

So if you too are already feeling a bit malaised, it's understandable. In fact, it was always that most Clintonesque of descriptions--inevitable.

 

High Noonan

"The constant mischief of the progressive left is hurting the nation's morale" is Peggy's inaugural sigh, which gets funnier as one proceeds throughout the rest of her syrupy self-pity and really bizarre delineations.

Just who is the "progressive left"? According to Ms. Noonan, it's embodied in that towering testament to centrism, President Obama, who "brags he has a pen and a phone ... [though it's] not clear why he mentioned the latter since he rarely attempts to bring legislators over to his side." See what I mean? (See opening sentence.)

No president in the history of American political pragmatism has practically begged the other side to land on common ground--let alone "bring" them to his side--yet Noonan sees aggressive "mischief" in what virtually everyone else sees as a crushing stagnation. 

"[V]oters and taxpayers feel bullied, burdened and jerked around," continues Peg. And why's that? Because of Obama's despotic regulations! That's why.

Despite these burdens, I too continued, only to then learn that solely because of Obamacare "People already enraged by canceled coverage, higher premiums, huge deductibles, lost doctors and limited networks, fume"--although even more "people," as I recall, were years ago enraged by canceled (or often unattainable) coverage, higher premiums, huge deductibles, lost doctors and limited networks.

About midway, I finally "got" what Ms. Noonan is saying here: "It's all part of the malaise, the sclerosis"--of right-wing horseshit, which just keeps flying.

 

Epistemic closure? Or a mindful gush?

Regrettably, I missed watching live coverage yesterday of the tea party's 5th anniversary of political pathology; I missed watching, for instance, Rep. Tim Huelskamp suggest that radical control of only one-half of one-third of government is no "excuse"--as the traitorous John Boehner has claimed--for not controlling all of government; I also missed the slithering Word of Ted Cruz, who insisted the--his--government shutdown was somehow successful in "stopping" Obamacare. It was, I gather from this morning's press, quite an education that the attending tea partiers received.

I did however happily catch a few minutes of C-Span's repeat coverage last night. The presenter (I caught the coverage, but not his name) was there to defend his fellow tea partiers from the filthy accusation of racism. This he did by unleashing some Limbaughesque table-turning: he simply accused the opposition of same.

Yes, as the presenter energetically instructed his gaping audience at some length, it's the Democratic Party that bears the sinister legacy of Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klanism. What all that had to do with Democrats of the last half-century or any contemporary racism on their part was left uninstructed, but the tea partiers loved it. Not even that swarm of ill-schooled reactionaries could have missed the historical incongruities, but they loved the pitch nonetheless.

"Epistemic closure" is the term most commonly used to describe tea partiers' and associated pseudoconservatives' impermeability to facts, history, and the empirical like. Such closure is of course not exclusive to Tea Party Inc., as, in 2016, we'll witness in the Democratic Party's pacific exaltation of a rather hawkish nominee. Internal references to what transpired 13 years prior will be shuttled aside--indeed essentially shut down. Still, that sort of closure can be written off as mere partisanship, though "closure" it taxonomically remains.

No such blending or blurring can be conscientiously applied to tea partiers, however. Their closure is less partisan than pathological; likewise it seems to stem less from any ashamed defensive stance (i.e., Democrats' forthcoming one) than aggressive, unmitigated, self-knowing and perhaps even self-loathing hate. In a word, they hate everything except the joy of hate. That much they know, or at least sense. And in that, their epistemic closure is actually more of a mindful gush.

 

Christie corpse watch

Now-unredacted messages between Gov. Christie's Port Authority guy, David Wildstein, and in-office aide, Bridget Kelly, show that:

Wildstein sent Kelly a picture of Rabbi Mendy Carlebach, later writing: "And he has officially pissed me off."

"Clearly," Kelly responded on Aug. 19.

"We cannot cause traffic problems in front of his house, can we?" Kelly wrote.

"Flights to Tel Aviv all mysteriously delayed," wrote Wildstein....

"Perfect," Kelly wrote.

Were I some New Jersey hack wishing to secure my $150,000, governor-appointed job, I would happily ingratiate myself with that governor through such monkeyshines. If, however, I were a hack who also understood that the governor would in no way abide such crap, I would passionately avoid committing it.

And therein lies Gov. Christie's political obituary, no matter what, from here on out.

    

These aren't gaffes, slip-ups or bloopers

Politico presents what it calls "The best Biden gaffes, slip-ups, uncomfortable truths and plain old bloopers ... in all their endearing glory." But aside from a few uncomfortable truths, I find them only endearing. To wit:

On ambition: "I never had an interest in being a mayor ’cause that’s a real job. You have to produce. That’s why I was able to be a senator for 36 years." —March  29, 2012

Indeed that's why anyone could be a U.S. senator for 36 years, which was all Joe was saying.

On the presidency: "I’d rather be at home making love to my wife while my children are asleep." —June  22, 2006

What sane man wouldn't?

On the stimulus bill: "If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there’s still a 30 percent chance we’re going to get it wrong." —Feb.  6, 2009

Realism, baby. And some brutal honesty.

On his audience: "What I’m trying to say without boring you too long at breakfast, and you all look dull as hell, I might add. The dullest audience I have ever spoken to. Just sitting there, staring at me. Pretend you like me!" —April 27, 2012

Again, realism.

Had remarks like these come from Hillary--mutatis mutandis, as to gender--the Clinton camp would be deploying a brigade of spinning heads to tell us in contorted English they don't say in plain English what they say in plain English. Biden? He just laughs them off, not only because they're funny--"You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking"--but mostly because anyone horrified or embarrassed by them isn't really deserving of much more than a laugh. 

"The Fake Debt Crisis"

Matthew Yglesias posts this tidy little chart on "The Fake Debt Crisis" (from Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century):

What does it show? It shows, explains Yglesias, "that on a net basis the United States of America does not have any public debt and perhaps never did." I have emphasized that striking conclusion, although the key word is net.

The conventional way for debt scaremongers to measure the national debt is to compare gross public debt to GDP. But the normal way you measure the debt load of a business or a household is to ask for a net figure. Just because you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in mortgage debt doesn't mean you're a pauper. In fact it probably means you're a rich person who owns an expensive house.... [I]t's simply not the case that a large amount of gross debt is a sign of overextension. It's typically a sign of prosperity and creditworthiness.

The scaremongering, however, won't relent. It's an easy conservative sell as long as the debt is Obama's or some other Democratic president's. Once, or rather if, conservatives get their own man in office, debt, once again, won't matter.

 

Cruz's jelloclad promises

Having "told other Republican senators that he wouldn't help outside groups targeting his [ideological] opponents" in primaries, Ted Cruz this morning said he "didn't rule out involvement in GOP primaries this year against incumbent Republican senators," and that "he had made no 'ironclad promise' to stay out of the primaries."

His demagogic stock just increased in value, in my opinion. That's the way to do it, Ted--a complete, unapologetic betrayal of your own party, solely for your own (seeming) good.

I have read widely on the inimitable Joe McCarthy, but I didn't live through his faithless antics. As a voracious student of demagoguery, I have always rather regretted that. McCarthy rivaled Huey Long and often outdid even the vicious "Pitchfork" Tillman in strident, strategic abuse. All such verbal skulduggery fascinates me, for its enduring appeal says something foreboding not about demagoguery, but about representative democracy.

Cruz may not be up to McCarthy's preeminent stature in the game of democracy-contamination and logic-poisoning, but he's trying. I'll give him that much. Plus his efforts provide me with a miraculous kind of post-nostalgia. And for that, I thank him.   

 

Dear Rand, thanks a lot. --Mitch

Rand Paul comes to Mitch McConnell's conservative ... defense? ... over the latter's procedural support for proceeding with a debt-ceiling vote. "It's not like we're talking about Arlen Specter here."

Could Paul not have thought of someone a little less turn-coated to soothe conservatives' anguish over McConnell's decision to do the only sane thing?

 

The right's projection

In a post-veto state of low indignation, National Review's Rich Lowry argues that religious intolerance is perfectly harmless and, once codified, even nobly American. The Arizona bill, he writes, gave no one "carte blanche to do whatever he wants in the name of religion"--although the intrinsically uncompromising nature of any Creator's absolute supremacy in all aspects of human life would by definition render any secular burden placed on it a "substantial" one.

That's no mere reductio ad absurdum on my part. It is a real threat to any modern society even approaching the pluralistic. Christ Himself anticipated this peril and thus commanded, "Render unto Caesar." Crisis averted. But what the hell, how many fundamentalist Christians deeply read Jesus?

At any rate, Lowry says that "For critics of the Arizona bill, the substance was almost an afterthought." Their reaction, he insists, was mostly reflexive: "They recoiled at the very idea that someone might have moral objections to homosexuality or gay marriage."

If Lowry was going for the cartoonish--the stereotypically neurotic, hypersensitive gay community and its effete liberal allies--he succeeded. But in doing so he succeeded more in revealing, as already suggested, the right's comic-book appreciation of the world--one that reduces human complexities to hysterical vapors and sniffs at some imagined sort of instantaneous "recoil" at centuries-old bigotry.

From there Lowry reveals his own One True Faith, the free market, which, as in everything, "has a ready solution for these couples: There are other bakers, photographers and florists." Yes perhaps the Yellow Pages could begin segmenting kosher vendors by their degrees of willingness to countenance less than kosher consumers; perhaps we in America could then achieve the social stability of a Baghdad.

That, it would seem, is Lowry's most vivid dream: a kind of theological economic libertarianism in which pluralism gets turned on its head. "The critics of the much-maligned Arizona bill," he writes, "pride themselves on their live-and-let-live open-mindedness, but they are highly moralistic in their support of gay marriage, judgmental of those who oppose it and tolerant of only one point of view on the issue--their own." Yet their point of view is merely one of pluralistic inclusiveness--not intolerant exclusion, which is Lowry's.

 

Only in a Republican-controlled state

Only in a Republican-controlled state could the governor's veto of a manifestly pointless, idiotic bill be breaking news--a bill that would accomplish nothing but social division, loss of interstate business, and tons of bad publicity. Only in a Republican-controlled state.

 

The Artful Cantor

Chait has some fun trying to grab the rolling mercury balls of Eric Cantor's long-promised alternative to Obamacare. But, alas, it seems an impossible task. He concludes:  

[T]he problem isn’t that Cantor and Boehner and Ryan would rather lay around on the sofa drinking beer and playing video games than write their health-care plan already.

It’s that there’s no plan out there that is both ideologically acceptable to conservatives and politically defensible.

Or even workable.

There's Obamacare, or there's single-payer, or there's any Republican plan--which for them would be worse than nothing, since their guaranteed gutting of derided mandates would return us to the insurmountable scourge of pre-existing conditions. Thus Republicans offer the political safety of nothing, leaving only single-payer as Obamacare's alternative.

I have a recurring male fantasy, one a bit different, I further imagine, than most male fantasies. It's that tomorrow we all wake up to find a Republican House majority, a Republican Senate majority, and a Republican in the White House. Their first item of business, of course, is to repeal Obamacare by noon and replace it by the cocktail hour. Zanizess assuredly would ensue, for just what in the fuck would they do?

And I know how it would turn out. They would indeed demolish Obamacare, only to be left with having to then reassemble the damned thing so as to escape the public's wrath.

I do imagine they'd make one major change, though--"they" being fiscally responsible Republicans. They'd put the whole thing on the nation's credit card.

 

Fox runs the table

February's cable-news Nielsen winners, depressingly uniform:

Total Viewers: The O’Reilly Factor (2,937,000); The Kelly File (2,337,000); Special Report w/ Bret Baier (2,114,000); The Five (2,107,000);  On the Record w/ Greta Van Susteren (1,938,000)

Adults 25-54: The O’Reilly Factor (450,000); The Five (358,000); The Kelly File (354,000); Special Report w/ Bret Baier (315,000); On the Record with Greta Van Susteren (299,000)

"[N]either CNN or MSNBC were able to crack the top 20 in either" total or primetime audiences, notes deadline.com. 

I should think MSNBC's president, Phil Griffin, is counting the miserably long days till presidential season. While the right fulminates year round, every year, the left seems to get animated only every four.

It's the damnedest thing--a testament to both the left's disproportionate youthfulness and its rather capricious attitude about the gravity of the franchise.

The right, for all its immersion in little to no to wretchedly bad information, gets it: the most effective means to accomplishing what one seeks in public policy is ... the vote. Simple as that--although that seems too complicated for the left.   

 

Stupid, not stubborn, as a Missouri mule

The latest in a flood of state Republican lawmakers trying to get in on the election-year culture war against gays and lesbians is one Wayne Wallingford, a Missouri state senator from Cape Girardeau (home of Rush Limbaugh), who has, according to my old hometown newspaper, the Kansas City Star, "filed legislation that would allow Missouri business owners to cite religious beliefs as a legal justification for refusing to provide service."

"We're trying to protect Missourians from attacks on their religious freedom," said Wallingford. "Businesses should be free to practice their religious beliefs," he added.

But here's the kicker, and it almost comically unmasks the abject demagoguery of the state senator's legislation: "Wallingford said he still supports outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace."

How, you might reasonably ask, is it a protection of a Missouri businessman's religious freedom to permit his discrimination against those whom he commercially serves, but not an assault on that same freedom when it comes to mandating non-discrimination in hiring?

If a religious bigot finds catering a gay wedding an unconscionably objectionable act, and he is freed from doing so under legislative cover of Republican lawmakers, why would the same lawmakers require him to genuinely consider hiring the perhaps qualified bridegroom?

The Republican senator's remarks make no sense. But I repeat myself.

 

Relative enthusiasms

As an overall projection of 2016, today's New York Times/CBS News poll says little we wouldn't suspect. Still, it contains some surprising data; some of it quite astonishing, such as the seemingly permanent fall of Ted Cruz, for whom only 24 percent of Republicans are supportive of a White House bid. 

If Cruz was basing his presumed ascent on the demographically descending as well as on the exotic anticipation of a mass conversion to political insanity--and it seems he was--then among the first bloc his performance was peachy, but the second remains elusive. He bubbled himself in a withering and wholly regional movement--a shocking miscalculation for any competent demagogue, though for Cruz, it was a breeze. I'll miss him.

Also of interest is that Republicans are evenly supportive of Jeb Bush and Rand Paul--each receiving about a 40 percent thumbs up--which represents a nearly perfect symmetric cleavage between the now-indefinable GOP Establishment and the always indefinable currents of Paulism. Rubio receives an appropriately bland 32 percent showing, and Christie is under water: "more in his party say they do not want him to seek the presidency (41 percent) than say they do (31 percent)."

My guess (probably lame, this far out) is that Republicans eventually will settle on a Romney reincarnation in the Rubio-like blandness of Bush. This means we're peeking at the most unimaginative, uninspiring presidential campaign since Coolidge vs. Davis, since "More than 8 in 10 Democrats say they want Hillary Rodham Clinton."  

We're not entirely without hope, though. Paul is laboring mightily to run as something other than what he is--the Senator from Nullification--and a sudden 42 percent of Democrats now say they'd like to see a Joe Biden bid. So both have plenty to work with, and the day is young.

 

How to politick

Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy just delivered a tour de force in politics 101 on "Hardball." You'll want to look for it on MSNBC.com or YouTube tomorrow. It was dynamite, and my thought coincided with Chris Matthews' contemporary remark: "Hey could you give President Obama some of that juice?" It was golden dynamite.

Malloy lit into Matthews' other guest, that indefatigable apologist for all things tediously Republican, Michael Steele, as well as the desperate Bobby Jindal, who was too craven to appear (Matthews invited him). He ripped them and their party for their opposition to a minimum-wage increase and he did it entertainingly and passionately and with facts, which he spewed rapid fire.

As for the entertainment portion of his verbal offense, he said the next Republican product on the market will be a foam they can spray around the mouth so they wouldn't have to work it up themselves.

It was dynamite. It was beautiful. It was a tour-de-force lesson in taking charge of an agenda and taking the fight to Republicans. After Malloy's pummeling, Steele was shaky and dazed.

The Malloy-Steele showdown was no contest. Steele was intellectually flabby and, as a Republican, characteristically uninformed, while Malloy was sharp and unafraid and on top of his argument all the way.

This was an interview you need to see. Malloy showed Democrats how to do it. I just hope he gives private lessons.

 

Could be the eeriest photo ever shot

... by the Jerusalem Post's Marc Israel Sellem:

 

Is Sullivan on board?

Jesus! someone of some blogospheric stature is now writing what I've been pounding, rather hopelessly, and to a response of resounding boos, for 14 very long months. Or at least I think Sullivan is: 

Right now, there seems little cost to continuing to ride the tiger of senior rightwing rage--as the GOP looks confidently toward the mid-terms. The checks on it, however welcome, seem tactical and defensive rather than structural and positive. The lack of any unifying, multi-cultural message is gaping. Until these problems are more deeply addressed, until someone is capable of tackling them with clarity and reformist urgency, an entire generation may be lost to the left.

Checks on right-wing extremism and all its concomitant nihilism not only seem tactical and defensive, they incontestably are tactical and defensive--because that's the Democratic and liberal way of playing the game of politics. Heaven forfend they should say something or propose something that might offend some mossback who will never vote Democratic anyway; better to play it safe, which means campaigning in a way that's as uplifting and inspiring as a donkey patty.

No one on, or to, the left--and here, the responsibility lies squarely with President Obama--has yet to construct an intrinsically powerful narrative fit for a 10-minute stump speech on the ravages of today's right: its malicious assaults on the long-term unemployed, its indifference to rebuilding our infrastructure (which would bring in the newly employed), its (once-unimaginable) threats of global financial destruction, its utterly witless shut downs of the government, its determination to stall all progress on all fronts until it has retaken the White House.

These obscenities, and countless others, are the stuff that electoral dreams are made of--but only for those willing to be grimly honest with the electorate at large.  

More than that, as Sullivan notes, is the absence of a countering, unifying message as a cure to what ails us from the right--a message imbued with the kind of "clarity" and "reformist urgency" from the guy at the top who literally wrote the book on such things.

He needs to suit up again. And he needs to do it now, before the right consumes his final three years with more paralyzing nothingness--a nothingness furthermore mixed with the banalities of the next presidential campaign by no less than the queen of banalities, who may indeed cost the left an entire generation. 

 

Downright funny insanity

From The Hill:

Washington lobbyist Jack Burkman on Monday said he is preparing legislation that would ban gay athletes from joining the National Football League.

"We are losing our decency as a nation," Burkman said in a statement. "Imagine your son being forced to shower with a gay man. That’s a horrifying prospect for every mom in the country. What in the world has this nation come to?"

There's not a mother in America who must only "imagine" her dear straight son showering with a gay man, since every son has showered with gay males since at least middle school.

What is horrifying, however, is that Washington lobbyists not only buy Washington politicians wholesale, but that the lobbyists now write their goddamn legislation for them, too--and that act is reported as political business as usual.

It makes one want to shower.

 

Won't somebody please help that poor man?

In a wholly predictable response to DefSec Hagel's proposed military budget--which boldly shrinks Pentagon spending by an increase of $22 billion (only in America)--that preternaturally befuddled senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, said "I am concerned that we are on a path to repeat the mistakes we’ve made during past attempts to cash in on expected peace dividends that never materialized."

By "past attempts to cash in" I assume Sen. Rubio meant the steady increases in military spending proposed by the last sniveling, weak Democratic president, Bill Clinton. As for those subsequent "peace dividends that never materialized," could Clinton's Republican successor's decision to launch an unprovoked war in Iraq and a sustained ground operation in Afghanistan--total tab, $4 to $6 trillion--have had something to do with it?  

Rubio's fiscally conservative approach to military spending is logically akin to the GOP's tax-cutting philosophy: When the times are unrestful or peaceful we must pump up the military, just as when the economy is doing poorly, or for that matter quite well, we must cut taxes. Both narratives possess the lone virtue of simplicity.

The fiscally conservative result, as witnessed from Reagan through W., has been explosive deficits and of course a higher and higher national debt--both of which, however, can simply be blamed on the next weak Democratic president.

It's an easy story for the GOP to keep straight, although keeping a straight face in telling it can be difficult. But in Marco Rubio's cognitively diminished case, you know what? He may actually believe it, poor thing.