PMC Commentary

The Dick Morris is back in the predictions game!

We just knew Dick Morris's absurdly haywire predictions in 2012 weren't enough to keep this good clown down, and God bless him, there he is today, in Newsmax, popping up to tell us to "keep [our] eye" on Rick Perry for 2016.

Morris, whom I never tire of reminding readers was flatly labelled a "cocksucker" by WH colleague George Stephanopoulos in his memoir, All Too Human: A Political Education, precedes his watchful prediction on Perry with this observation about Jeb Bush: "Jeb sure doesn’t sound like he’s running."

And Morris would say that because ... ? ... because last week Bush told about 200 people in New York that he's "thinking about running"? Because he added, "Why would I back down from it? It’s the right thing to do"?

Could be. Morris's twisted mind is unaccustomed to such straightforward musings. No doubt they throw him off the scent. (What deeply disturbs me is that I'm in agreement with Morris on his follow-up sentence: "If he did [run], he could win"--the nomination, that is.)

At any rate, Rick Perry is off to a wildly unpropitious start. He has the confidence of Dick Morris.

 

An incoherent body politic

From the Washington Post, yesterday: "a majority of voters [say] they prefer a Congress in Republican hands to check the president’s agenda."

From the NY Times, minutes ago: "Republican-Led Filibuster Blocks Minimum Wage Bill in Senate."

From Pew Research, last month: "Polls show strong support for minimum wage hike."

***

Yes, We're Number One! For truly there's no working-class consciousness like American working-class consciousness. When detectable, it's all over the bloody map.

For years, in fact since Roosevelt--both of 'em--we demanded heathcare reform, something a bit more like that embraced by, you know, civilized nations. President Obama gave it to us. FDR failed (he never even tried; he knew what to expect), Truman failed, etc., etc. Finally, Obama succeeded. Now healthcare reform, as with pretty much any other reform, is something to be "checked."

Like, for instance, a hike in the minimum wage, or environmental protections, or tax reform, or women's rights and equal pay? No, no, we support those things! But for heaven's sake let's check 'em.  

What we really need to check is for a fucking pulse in our carotid artery, which feeds our collective frontal lobe.

 

Paul vs. Obama

I frankly think [Rand] Paul is going to go a lot farther than people realize.

--Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway.

Count me among them. Paul shows every sign of a first-rate backbencher, but none of the discipline required of a genuine presidential contender. 

I shouldn't be surprised. Paul is a backbencher. On the other hand he's possessed of more charisma and of a kind of carefree daring than your average freshman senator--the latter of which is probably his problem. He hasn't been on the central stage long enough to have become polished in the ways of national presentation, and he seems to naively believe that the virtues of ideology will compensate for any lack of professional demeanor (by which I mean, holding one's tongue).  

Barack Obama was also a freshman senator possessed of considerable charisma. Daring, however, he kept in check. This disaffected many on the rebellious left, but the left wasn't his target audience--the middle was. Thus Obama opposed an individual mandate in healthcare reform and advocated a beefier presence in Afghanistan. This was political maturity talking, notwithstanding his freshman status. And ideology he recognized for what it was and will always be: an intellectual straitjacket.

Sen. Obama's chief virtues: he accepted the possibility that he wasn't always right, and, were anything to get done in Washington, he knew that compromises against virtue were inevitable. Sen. Paul breezily sees the world from one-dimensional views--his; and that's a carefree daring that, rather than expand his base, will merely narrow it.  

 

Money poisons everything

... to lift from Hitchens's assessment of religion. But they weren't talking deities at Democracy Alliance's annual gathering at the Chicago Ritz-Carlton this week. They were raising "more than $30 million for liberal groups," while, to paraphrase Politico's Ken Vogel, they were dodging, rejecting, or rationalizing their responses to "questions about the [Democratic] party’s split personality on the issue.... That is, when they weren’t met with recriminations or even gentle physical force."

Democracy Alliance staff chastised a reporter during an attempt to interview major donor Jonathan Soros [George's son] as he headed toward a panel on campaign finance reform. "Sir, you’re not allowed to go past here," said one staffer, as another grabbed this reporter’s arm to prevent him from walking with Soros.

You might be tempted to call such behavior inexpressibly dumb, but inexpressible it wasn't. Politico put it up as today's feature story, as anyone with even a dram of political sophistication would expect. After months of Democrats bashing the boorishly secretive Kochs and their sinister, ultraconservative networks of hidden cash, what do Democrats do? Why of course. They raise more than $30 million in and around closed-door meetings at the Ritz-Carlton. And with such grace!    

Top Obama White House aide Valerie Jarrett, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes [all in attendance] ignored questions about whether Democrats are hypocritical on big money.

Some readers have issues with Politico. Some see it as blatantly right-leaning, which is OK, since that sentiment is balanced by that of other readers who see it as unapologetically left-leaning. This is standard fare in PartisanWorld, not be taken too seriously. But I think it's fair to say that most readers see Ken Vogel, at least, as playing it straight down the middle; consequently the kind of arrogance shown to him at the Ritz-Carlton only justifies his uncommonly righteous editorializing in his piece: "The liberal strain of the [big money] argument is usually sprinkled with a heaping helping of moral superiority."

Moral superiority--less the old liberal than a newer progressive conceit. One would think they'd have the good sense not to strut it, along with insufferable aloofness, before members of the major political press. But such is the effect of big money.

 

Yale, David Brooks, and the end of history

Mothers, don't let your children grow up to be Yalies. David Brooks is co-teaching a "grand strategy" course there.

I knew times were tough for neocons, but why is Yale so hard up?  

At any rate, Brooks's latest, based on his scholarly pursuits, is a full-throated cri de coeur against President Obama's "insouciance, obliviousness, and self-congratulation" (I'm quoting Brooks quoting a fellow tough-guy academic) in the irredeemable face of Russia's and China's and the Middle East's foul determination.

What we really need, says Brooks, is "the credible threat of political, financial and hard power enforcement."

Here, Brooks is, no doubt, evoking the empirical splendors of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld, though oddly enough he fails to cite their many foreign-policy successes. Humility, I suppose.

Let's just hope that Brooks isn't depriving Yale's students of his inner knowledge of creative writing history and grand strategy.

 

It always comes down to settlements

An abstract of the NY Times' extensive autopsy of "How Nine Months of Mideast Talks Ended in Disarray":

Mr. Netanyahu refused to risk alienating Israel’s right wing by restraining construction in West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements; about 13,000 new units moved forward during the talks. Mr. Abbas, looking for a dignified exit from the public stage and furious over the settlement building, never responded to the ideas Mr. Kerry’s team had formulated for a framework to guide further negotiations.

Mr. Kerry condemned the construction, asking in a television interview, "How can you say we’re planning to build in the place that will eventually be Palestine?"

Added another American official, "As [Abbas] comes to the end of his life and certainly the end of his term in office, he’s fed up. His experience in the last nine months, of settlements gone wild, has just, I think, convinced him that he doesn’t have a partner."

Neither do we. 

 

Democracy goes to work

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that "a majority of voters [say] they prefer a Congress in Republican hands to check the president’s agenda."

I'd like to think these voters thought the pollsters were asking about President Putin's agenda. But alas I think their confusion was even deeper than that. They understood the question all right; they just didn't know that Obama's agenda has been ruthlessly checked by congressional Republicans for the last three fucking years. 

God save us. God save us all from our informed democracy.

 

You'da thought it? A rich racist. Shocking.

Bill Maher succinctly captured my anti-outrage sentiment over the indescribably shocking! Don Sterling affair--"Calm Down, Being an Asshole Is Still Legal"--but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said it better without the modern commentary restraints of 140 characters or less: 

Make no mistake: Donald Sterling is the villain of this story. But he’s just a handmaiden to the bigger evil. In our quest for social justice, we shouldn’t lose sight that racism is the true enemy. He’s just another jerk with more money than brains.

For all of American plutocrats' hand-wringing over the poor's and the middle-class's deplorable sense of entitlement, it's the Sterlings of this world who are most imbued with the unshakable conviction that everyone else owes them something--and whatever they get, it's never enough. Sterling cluelessly ruminated on "who makes the game" of basketball and unsurprisingly concluded that, well, of course, he does--in fact he "support[s the players] and give[s] them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses."

Abdul-Jabbar calls this IPMS (Irritable Plantation Master Syndrome), which in Sterling's case is all too true. But, adding to Abdul-Jabbar's commentary, let's remember the extent to which IPMS broadly permeates corporate America: Its CEOs have convinced themselves they're worth 500 times more than their average black or brown or white employees, who must gallantly keep their needs in check for the greater and more deserving glory of the beneficent, indulgent fat cats at the top.

Sterling's remarks were framed racially. At their root, though, they were class-based. Irritable plantation masters see themselves as unfairly burdened by the whinings of pretty much everyone--all the field hands who have made them so filthy rich.      

 

In 29 other words, "apartheid"

Kudos to John Kerry for doubling down while pretending to back down. His use of the word "apartheid," said the secretary in a statement last night, has created a "misimpression" about his genuine views, which, verily, far from envisioning Israel as an apartheid state, see only this negation: "In the long term, a unitary, binational state cannot be the democratic Jewish state that Israel deserves or the prosperous state with full rights that the Palestinian people deserve."

In short, affirmation of an apartheid state.

Kerry added that were a do-over possible, he "would have chosen a different word to describe" the inevitable outcome of Israel's short-sighted intransigence on a two-state solution. Perhaps. But Kerry's impatient, his boss's tenure is winding down, and diplomatic euphemisms have, for nearly a half century now, availed nothing but the persistence of dreadful realities. It is, at long last, time to cut the crap.

But of course Benjamin Netanyahu is also acutely aware that Kerry's boss's tenure is winding down, and that soon in that boss's place there'll be a traditional Democratic coalitioner unwilling to upset the staunchly pro-Israel, American Jewish bloc.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu can count on sympathetic ravings from America's right, too, such as those of Ted Cruz, who, from the Senate floor yesterday, denounced reason and declared that "America will be with Israel regardless of the status of the diplomatic process" (italics mine). In other words, proper American policy is this: Israel can never ever do any wrong, no matter how self-harmfully Israel behaves, and no matter how damaging to U.S. interests. 

Which is why Kerry is stuck in an honest funk, honestly articulated.

 

War, murder, bloodshed, and the cuckoo clock

In reading classics professor Ian Morris's charming reflections on the sociopolitical benefits of 10 millennia of war, I couldn't help but be reminded of Orson Welles's equally charming disquisition delivered to his friend Joseph Cotton, in The Third Man:  

It's not that awful. You know what the fellow said--in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace--and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

But do read Prof. Morris. His essay, too, is brilliantly bittersweet.

 

Not seniors, but whose seniors

From Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, the best, shortest summary I've ever read of Democrats' now-chronic midterm troubles: 

If twenty years ago, you said the midterm electorate is older, I would have said, 'Yahoo! Glad to hear it.' But now the Roosevelt seniors are dead and the Reagan seniors are voting.

 

A warmed-over baptism

Never original, not even in her characteristically tasteless jokes. Turns out, via the Federalist's Molly Hemingway, that Sarah Palin's "waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists” is merely a reiteration of an earlier, testosterone-pumped witticism, absent, naturally, the wit: "Waterboarding is when we baptize the terrorists with freedom."

Ms. Hemingway, presumably a good Christian, is livid: 

Is waterboarding how we baptize terrorists? However powerful waterboarding might be (and whether or not it is defensible, a good idea or achieves the goals of those who advocate its use), it doesn’t hold a candle to the power of the Christian baptism, as historically understood. Does it deliver those who are subjected to it from the devil, as Christian baptism does? Does it give them eternal life, as Christian baptism does? Is it voluntary, as Christian baptism is? It is none of these things.

Notice anything peculiar about Ms. Hemingway's outrage? In case you missed it, she repeats it: "So it must be noted that, again apart from the debate over such interrogation techniques, waterboarding is the opposite of traditional Christian baptism."

I would think anyone who professes to follow the teachings of Christ would leap to an unambiguously profound condemnation of torture, rather than exclusively expressing indignation over Sarah Palin's "humorous" devaluation of the sacrament of baptism. After all, Christ split from the Pharisees over their allegiance to rituals, emphasizing instead the eminence of good works and human decency. How then could a Christian leave torture as secondary in conscientious importance to the act of baptism? How could torture be consigned to iffy realms of defensibility--be left as an open question in terms of whether it's a "good idea," or pragmatically useful?

If it's mere sacrilege that upsets the contemporary Christian, rather than what actually poisons our souls, then I'll take heathenism. 

 

Trump on wisdom

Leave it up to Donald Trump to see the bigger picture. Conceding that what LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling said "was terrible and despicable," nonetheless he, said Trump, "got set up by a very, very bad girlfriend, let’s face it"--"the girlfriend from hell."

The Politico quotes then vaguely trail off into uncertainty. Was this one about Sterling? Or was it self-referential? "I think he could be out of it, frankly, based on his actions," said Trump. "He could be pretty much out of it in terms of his whole mentality." Some pols and would-be pols love to refer to themselves in the third person. I'm going with the theory that here we have Trump on Trump.

 

A "diminished figure" of intimidating clout

In a lengthy, updated profile of Sarah Palin, WaPo's Robert Costa, formerly of National Review, does his best--and it's pretty darn good--to make her seem ghostly irrelevant:

Four years after using her unique position to propel a number of conservatives ... in the tea party wave of 2010, Palin is today a diminished figure in the Republican Party. Even as she travels to Iowa and elsewhere to bolster her handpicked candidates, her influence in these midterm elections has been eclipsed by a new class of stars and her circle has narrowed.

While true, that goes not nearly far enough. What Costa omits is that prominent Republicans with visions of higher office still don't dare to publicly put Palin in her place.

Hers is of course a small, small-minded, viciously small-hearted place that will, as long as Palin is treated with undeserving deference, keep reflecting on the GOP, keeping it just as small. But aspiring, saner Republicans won't risk alienating the pea-brained Palinites out there. Today's elections always trump the party's tomorrows. Yet the party has no future beyond its reactionary fortresses, mostly Southern, as long as the likes of Palin are unsafe to renounce.

That's quite the dilemma for the saner ones. It's also the much deeper and bleaker story, which Costa chose to elide.

 

A not-so beautiful landmine

Playing today in the theatre of international relations is A Beautiful Mind, Ronnie Howard's 2001 film on the tortured soul of mathematician John Nash, author of the "Nash Equilibrium." Somewhat oversimplistically put, Nash's game theorem holds that when every player in a multilayered contest possesses a known strategy and any change to each strategy is of no individual benefit, then an equilibrium is achieved. 

Or, as the NY Times puts it:  

While some of Mr. Obama’s advisers want him to impose sanctions against whole sectors of the Russian economy, the president has decided against it for now, cognizant of the resistance of European nations that have far more at stake economically, officials said.

And as the president put it:

The notion that for us to go forward with sectoral sanctions on our own without the Europeans would be the most effective deterrent to Mr. Putin, I think, is factually wrong.... For example, say we’re not going to allow certain arms sales to Russia--just to take an example--but every European defense contractor backfills what we do, then it’s not very effective.

As long as the Europeans see no good reason to change their strategy, Obama has no good reason to change his strategy. The problem? Nor does Putin.