P.M. Carpenter

Rand Paul, leading from behind and a bit to the left, or is it the right?

Conservative clarity is suffering, but cliches to the rescue. Here's Rand Paul, with Palinesque syntactical precision, answering a question about whether Kentucky's 'Obamacare-Kynect' should be put to the sword:

You know I'm not sure--there's going to be--how we unravel or how we change things. I would rather--I always tell people there's a fork in the road.

Yes, forks abound. Wise.

Paul's answer gets better:

I was in healthcare for 20 years so we had problems in healthcare but we could have gone one of two directions.

Paul was in healthcare therefore there were problems in healthcare? He may want to tighten up that portion of his rambling. But, back to the wisdom of bifurcating forks:

One was towards more competition and more marketplace and one was toward more government control. The people who think that the government can efficiently distribute medicine need to explain why the VA's been struggling for decade after decade in a much smaller system. And they also need to explain, even though I think we all want Medicare to work better, why Medicare is $35 trillion short. There's a lot of questions that are big questions that are beyond the exchange and the Kynect and things like that. It's whether or not how we're going to fund these things.

Adding millions of veterans to the VA's already underfunded programs had something to do with the VA's "efficiency" (does this really need to be explained to a United States Senator?) just as adding millions of baby boomers to Medicare is, uh, likely to add to Medicare's encumbrances. As for Medicare's current efficiency? It operates at roughly one-tenth the administrative cost of private health insurance.

Paul's penultimate line is less a monument to obfuscation than a knowing tribute to the perils of ideological simplicity. "There's a lot of questions that are big questions that are beyond the exchange and the Kynect and things like that." In other words, My radical libertarianism says kill 'em, kill 'em all, but I'm not about to attack any popularly beloved socialist programs.

Paul's final line, though--"It's whether or not how we're going to fund these things"--is unsalvageable. The question is whether or not to fund them, or, if the first, how to fund them--not whether or not how to fund them.

Still, however he butchers the question, shouldn't Sen. Paul be at the ready with a decisive, intelligible answer?

 

A smart bit of political Carney-val

Now that was smart politics--announcing Jay Carney's departure atop Gen. Shinseki's dismissal. The press corps won't know which way to go.

I just love sharp political maneuvering, and given how little of it we've been served lately, merely a taste is especially savory.

 

Re: Hillary--Sullivan's fear, and my advice

Sullivan has an excellent piece on two neocons' (Robert Kagan and David Brooks) most recent and fitful reaction to President Obama's foreign policy of prudence, a piece in which he "fear[s] that the wisdom of Obama may not prevail in a future Clinton White House."

The fear is well founded and widely shared, though not widely enough. Democrats, I fear, are enthusiastically walking into a doom of their own making. Quite aside from Hillary's record of poor management skills--her last political campaign, alone, was enough of a mismanaged spectacle to shiver me timbers and thus lead me to positively dread the prospect of eight entire years of such top-level incompetence--her Bush-like, 2008 refusal to admit error in the general run-up to, and approval of, the monumentally catastrophic Iraq war was a studied miscalculation of enormous magnitude. She never backed off, she never apologized, she never conceded that either a) she had been duped by Dick Cheney or b) she had failed to review all the intelligence, much of which conflicted with the official screeds. This showed a frightening, Bushian inclination to "stay the course," no matter how conspicuously wrong she had been shown to be.

There's also a "c" possibility, which is this: She was neither duped nor unthorough; she simply voted "Aye" for war because she believed it to be smart politically, as far as presidential politics went. Politically. Thousands of lives hung (and eventually hanged) in the balance, and yet Hillary's chief concern was whatever worked for her aspirations.

OK, so presidential politics is a rough and often sociopathic game. I get it. In 2003, Joe Biden got it too, and was therefore in accord with Hillary on Iraq. But at least Joe had the decency to later apologize and retract his ambitious stupidity. Not Hillary. No, she dug in--again, Bush-like. And that scared the shit out of me, just as it did every other sobered Obama supporter.

I possess no illusions about avoiding a Clinton II. She has the money, the name, the networks, the endorsements, the state organizations and a kind of perpetual momentum. She has no credible opposition internally and for damn sure no credible opposition among Republicans. A Clinton White House is as much of a lock as Obama's was in '08. I also appreciate the uplifting, domestic possibilities of a Hillary Clinton White House working with a Democratically 2016-dominant Congress. The fear? The very real and quite justified fear? That a Clinton II White House will unravel President Obama's legacy of a prudent foreign policy. Hillary tilts to a neocon view of American power--and that inclination is seemingly incurable. 

Democrats will escort Hillary to the White House in 2016. About that, I have no doubt. But they should do so with a bit less enthusiasm and far more wariness. For that will be Hillary's only constraint.

 

Shinseki out, no fixes in

Well that was no surprise. I can only assume that President Obama delayed his firing of Gen. Shinseki so that this headliner wouldn't immediately step on whatever positive headlines he could squeeze from Wednesday's West Point address. That, and Friday is trash day.

As many have pointed out, Shinseki's firing will advance nothing. The real problem, as I noted earlier this morning, remains.

Democrats could turn this scandal to their advantage. But they won't--because they don't know how to play Republicans' game.

 

Snowden, the NSA, and "please proceed"

Although history has demonstrated time and again that from government agencies rolling disclosure is always a dimwitted strategy, the NSA--our top intelligence organ!--has chosen to pursue just that in revealing Ed Snowden's emailed red flags. In an interview with the Washington Post, Snowden sticks it to the NSA but good.

The NSA’s new discovery of written contact between me and its lawyers--after more than a year of denying any such contact existed--raises serious concerns. It reveals as false the NSA’s claim to Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in December of last year, that "after extensive investigation ... we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention."

Today’s release is incomplete, and does not include my correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance, which believed that a classified executive order could take precedence over an act of Congress, contradicting what was just published. It also did not include concerns about how indefensible collection activities ... are sometimes concealed under E.O. 12333 to avoid Congressional reporting requirements and regulations.

One is reminded of that most famous debating tactic, "Please proceed, Governor," whose frolicking antecedent actually came 52 years earlier--and from a Russian premier, not a U.S. president. After we "lost" Francis Gary Powers' U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union in 1960, our government began a laughable rolling-disclosure campaign that for some time was met by Nikita Khrushchev's figurative invitation to "please proceed." President Eisenhower had been assured that the downed U-2 plane's collected surveillance and the pilot himself would have been unrecoverable and dead, in that conceptual order. Khrushchev, however, unknown to Eisenhower, possessed both--the surveillance and a very alive CIA pilot. In one of his rare foreign-policy blunders, Eisenhower persisted in a bumbling campaign of disclosing a disingenuous bit here and a dishonest bit there, which Khrushchev finally and dramatically exposed as a fraud.

He sucked Eisenhower into a major embarrassment, just as Snowden has done to the NSA. And if Snowden has read his history, somewhere he has copies of his "correspondence with the Signals Intelligence Directorate’s Office of Compliance" and that which "include[s] concerns about ... indefensible collection activities." Please proceed, NSAers.

 

VA outrage and the triumph of politics

Some of Republicans' outrage is, no doubt, real. I won't deny that vestiges of basic humanity are incapable of a total scrubbing, even in the wildest days of political opportunism. But would Republicans trade that outrage for a rewinding of the clock--for a replay of the last 10 fiscal years--for the retro-opportunity to fund the Veterans Administration at adequate levels?

Would they, in short, exchange the present abominations for a re-creation of their beginnings, given the chance?

There's a fat one of that. For the supreme Republican ethic is that of eviscerating government so as to righteously deplore it.

It is this that provides us the nauseating hypocrisy of the sniveling Eric Cantor: "This is a core competency question for the White House.... There are lots of issues of competency that are being raised right now about what’s going on in this government."

What's going on? What's going on? It doesn't take much of a political historian to remind the leader of majority imbeciles just what the hell has been going on: insanely ill-advised wars mixed with the gutting of government revenue culminating in extraordinary deficiencies of veterans' care.

And none of it was unwitting. The Bush administration warned the incoming Obama administration of its inexorable train wreck. And yet what fiscal cooperation has the Obama administration received from the Cantors and Boehners and Bachmanns and Gohmerts?--from those now so outraged by the gross deficiencies?--from the veterans-hugging, flag-waving militarists of supply-sided starvation? 

This isn't to say that the VA's exposed malfeasance should be, or can be, excused. Rather than concealing its Hobson's choices, the VA should have been screaming them from every hospital rooftop and at every veterans-affairs congressional committee. It is to say that focusing on the malfeasance only overlooks the fundamentals, overlooks rightful responsibility, and overlooks the emetic hypocrisy and preening political monstrosities of the modern Republican Party--which is the real scandal.

 

Screw reason. Ben Carson listens only to the voices in his head.

Dr. Ben Carson, who's running for the vice-presidential slot on the 2016 Republican ticket, today openly confessed to a rather severe case of psychosis:

I realized that God probably had something special he wanted me to say [at last year's presidential prayer breakfast]. But I didn’t know what it was until the morning of the prayer breakfast. After a while of wrestling with it, I just said, I’m leaving it alone, the Lord will tell me what to say. And that morning, it was so clear in my mind what I was supposed to say.

Which was this. Amid the Creator's daily management headaches of a 14-billion-year-old universe, one expanding and popping with hundreds of billions of sometimes-colliding galaxies, what He'd really like to see is a ... flat tax.

Dr. Carson is shittin' us not. That's what the Almighty told him that morning; blessed are those who would flat-tax each other on that infinitely obscure little speck of dust which its inhabitants call Earth. The Creator desires not more love, nor more peace, nor even, say, a few gun-control laws so that, for Christ's sake, innocent children are less slaughtered on the streets of urban America. No, the Prime Mover tells Carson that He wants a fucking flat tax.

I, uh, have some reservations about this conversation having ever taken place. A flat tax seems sort of, well, you know, small of the Big Guy. But that Carson actually heard the non-existent half of the conversation squares nicely with Bart Ehrman's section on spectral delusions, in How Jesus Became God. Indeed there seems to be a racing pandemic of such delusional thinking throughout the Republican Party. Every contender for the presidential nomination is praying like hell for guidance, and I can almost guarantee you that God will give each and every one of them a huge thumbs-up (which reminds me a bit of FDR's management style, which, upon further reflection, is rather fitting).

The upshot? Carson needs to enlarge his delusions; to go bigger--much bigger. The Christian right will swallow psychoses about God as a campaign manager. But delusions about a God who looks not like Charlton Heston, but Steve Forbes? No that definitely lacks a certain grandeur.

 

John Boehner's tyrannical offensive against the tea party

The House Republican leadership--the We-ish the People's top assemblage of limitless love for individual liberty and, usually, atomistic chaos--wants to ...

change GOP Conference rules to punish members who do not support the party’s nominee [for speaker] during a floor vote. A lawmaker who bucks the Republicans’ choice ... could lose committee assignments--or worse.

I don't know what "worse" means, but my, oh my, how abominably ironfisted of the liberty-loving leadership to issue, or even dream of issuing, such an ominously Stalinist diktat.

Why, I can almost imagine posters of Speaker Boehner smeared in Joker-like makeup, sneering at those tea-party proles who are forever demanding presidential "leadership," but abhor their party's own.

So listen up, you tea partiers. You best strike up the posters again and protest this in-the-works, communist-cryptofascist takeover of your beloved chaos. Otherwise, tyranny! is just around the corner.

 

A neocon vision to die for

Rarely does one find such a textbook example of impenetrable cluelessness as Nile Gardiner's, he of "the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation":

[Obama's West Point address] was delivered by a president seemingly obsessed with image and public perception, rather than the long-term strength of America's foreign and security policy.

Gardiner concludes with the neocon's characteristic, indeed obligatory tribute to the image-obsessed Reagan administration--"confident, assertive U.S. leadership" devoted to "building America's defenses, squaring up to America's foes, and standing with friends and allies"--but his lead evidence as to Obama's sagging leadership is this:

[H]is short-sighted decision to abandon Afghanistan in 2016, with the Taliban lurking in the wings to retake power, following in the footsteps of his withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. Two-and-a-half years after the last American soldiers left Baghdad, the al Qaeda flag now flies over the city of Fallujah, a terrible precedent for developments in Afghanistan once the Stars and Stripes are lowered in Kabul.

Only one conclusion can be reasonably drawn from Gardiner's stirring cri de coeur: Because sectarian and tribal divides have violently bedeviled these regions for centuries, the United States must insert itself likely for centuries more. There, and elsewhere. That is the unwritten prescription of the Gardiner camp: an "assertive U.S. leadership" that would drain the United States into an exhausted crater of self-defeat.

And that, in turn, is the neocon's long-term vision of American foreign policy, which in practice would be a blindingly short one. That the devout McCain and impressionable Romney never got the reins of America's firepower is a blessing for which we can be eternally grateful.

 

The Snowden interview

Brian Williams' Ed Snowden interview last night seemed--and I grant the possibility of some naivete here--an encounter with narcissism, but not treason.

Snowden, like his briefly interviewed compatriot in True Belief, Glenn Greenwald, came across as a temperament almost wholly invulnerable to the notion that his actions might have been flawed or mistaken. There is right, in Snowden's opinion, and there is wrong, and he squarely placed himself among the forces of undisputed righteousness--which in itself is, at best, a manifestation of self-inflation, at worst a disturbing sign of borderline personality disorder. I trust and respect skepticism; and though there comes a time when one must take a stand on the paramount issues of one's day, doing so without the self-awareness of fallibility is a journey into delusion.

But was Snowden's righteousness--or self-righteousness--treason? That seems a stretch. Traitors are motivated by either material gain or malevolence toward their country. Snowden demonstrated neither. In fact he believably professed a deep love of his country and implicitly aligned himself (again with the self-inflation) with its Frederick Douglasses and Martin Luther Kings. He even suggested he'd be willing to trade a spell in the slammer for a return ticket home. These were not the sentiments of a Benedict Arnold.

Snowden's hole card, though, was his lamentation that the American security apparatus' whistleblower "protections" suck. As he told Brian Williams, he tried to do what he believed was right in the right way, but the way in place proved utterly inconsequential. And that's a fault not in Snowden's stars, but in the rabidly self-protective, we're-as-righteous-as-Snowden-is bureaucracy of America's surveillance state.

 

Reaction to Obama's West Point address, in one word

Tedious.

That assessment may be only half as long as my assessment, yesterday, of the speech itself, but it's every bit the match in clarity. Nonetheless, following yesterday's format, I'll contribute a few more words--mostly those from the tediously familiar ranks of really, really tough guys.

National Review lamented, "Not one word about American martial strength spoken at West Point, not one effort to inspire our country’s future military leaders." Here, the Prussian touch and its almost childish awe of "inspirational" militarism are both self-evident and self-explanatory. Children with wooden swords talking to other children.  

Hertiage Foundation featured Texas Rep. Mac Thornberry, who lectured that "Power and influence in the world come from having capability plus the will to use it," which the 20th century's Axis Powers certainly believed; and "distinguished Heritage fellow" Kim Holmes warned that "World War I wasn’t [ever] truly over; World War II was around the corner. If we walk away from Afghanistan too soon, we may need to return again to finish the job." I'm sorry, but making the philosophical connection between Europe's interwar years and Afghanistan's millennium-long tribal conflicts is, unlike Kim H. Holmes', PhD, an abstraction beyond my metaphysical abilities.  

The Weekly Standard? It trotted out Max Boot and Elliott Abrams to respond, the latter of whom said Obama "[took] credit for successful actions attributable to his predecessor." Enough said. Good God and Mother of Jesus, enough said.

Powerline decided to hurl its indignation at Obama's reference to American exceptionalism, and it did so by rolling out the big French gun of Alexis de Tocqueville. "He observed many distinctive features of America--our republican form of government, our industriousness, our focus on the practical, our religiousness, our community spirit, etc. Adherence to international norms played no part in Tocqueville’s account of American exceptionalism; if it had, the Frenchman would have become a laughingstock instead of a sage." Powerline's American-studies scholar neglected to mention that Tocqueville's chief worry about our country was its suffocating conformity to trendy majoritarian ideas--you know, like the nearly decade-long ride of neoconservatism; i.e. catastrophe, QED.

The surprise winner in the follow-up mush of tedious naysaying, however, is the  New York Times. Obama's speech, declared the editorial board, "is unlikely to quiet his detractors," and "many still doubt that he fully appreciates the leverage the United States has even in a changing world." By definition, detractors are expected to be unquieted (which in the case of Obama's foreign-policy sanity is what makes them so tedious). As for unrealized "leverage"--what does that mean? You got me; in fact you got the NY Times' editorial board, which elaborates not. Not one whit.    

 

Mitch McConnell's comical contortion

The Lexington Herald-Leader is nonplussed: "What in the world did [Mitch McConnell] mean last week when he told reporters that repeal of the Affordable Care Act ... is 'unconnected' to the future of Kynect, Kentucky's health insurance exchange?"

The Herald-Leader's editorial board finds itself forced to explain to a United States Senator that Kynect works only because the ACA works; that the ACA's reforms mean "no longer allowing insurance companies to cancel policies when people get sick or deny them coverage because of pre-existing conditions;" that because of the ACA, "lifetime limits on benefit payments" are now a thing of the past; that "federal funding and tax credits ... are helping 300,000 previously uninsured Kentuckians gain access" to Kynect; and that the ACA, via Kynect, has expanded healthcare coverage to Kentucky's poorest.

To Mitch McConnell, though, there's "Obamacare," and then there is Kynect--which is a lot like saying there was the Marshall Plan, but, on the other hand, there was Western Europe's postwar recovery. 

Herald-Leader editors pursued the enchanted mind of Mitch: 

We asked the McConnell campaign for a clarification and were sent the usual talking points and a statement saying, "If Obamacare is repealed, Kentucky should decide for itself whether to keep Kynect or set up a different marketplace."

Notes the editorial board: "Kentucky tried to enact such reforms in the 1990s and found out we were too small a market to do it alone."

My money's on Grimes. That McConnell has twisted himself into utter incoherence isn't his problem--not in American politics. It's simply that he has, at long last, done it once too often.

 

Maya Angelou: No haven in her shadow

Maya Angelou's is one of those obituaries that makes me realize how little I have accomplished in life.

 

Obama's West Point address, in two words

Magnificently sane.

In a few more words, Obama's address, grounded in a mature appreciation of our limits, called for multilateralism--diplomatically whenever possible, militarily if inescapable; it called, given al Qaeda's fragmentation and dispersal, for global "partners" to suppress it; and, in a direct shot at his Republican critics, it called for a world-involved America that leads by example at home--not through climate-change denialism, or unratified treaties, or the obscenities of a Gitmo that the propagandists and paranoids won't close.  

The president's most searing assault on his neocon critics came, however, in his observation that rushing into military interventions "without thinking through the consequences" is hugely consequential. Such is the legacy of the 21st century's neoconservatism: a raging, mindless enthusiasm for firepower, which served only to drain our resources--human as well as fiscal--and our potential as a responsible world leader.

Because Obama's speech was so magnificently sane, let the carping and slander begin.

 

A GOP Senate? Bring it on, for all anyone cares.

Averaging the best guess of Sam Wang--full-time neuroscientist and part-time wonder boy of polling predictions--Joe Biden "might end up with plenty of tie-breaking work to do" over the final two years of Obama's Senate, because Wang "would not be surprised to see a 49-51 split in one direction or the other." 

I don't wish to seem indifferent about this midterm's Senate races, but even a Republican-controlled upper house doesn't particularly worry me. Such would be but superfluously degenerate. Republicans always have the lower house to screw up America, delay all progress, and in general make a laughingstock out of the world's oldest democracy. Thus President Obama's last two years will come down to one of only two possibilities: He'll spend that time vetoing every House-launched, loony-tune bill that passes through the Senate's bigger-brother Republican lunacy, or he'll sit and veto nothing--a Democratic Senate will plug the madness--because there will be nothing to veto.

Either way, it's another stalemate ... unless lightning should strike the electorate and awaken it to the realization that Republican majorities in either house are just another two-year ticket to gridlock and nothingness, which they'll otherwise bemoan, for two more years.