PMC Commentary

The lastest in madness in one stroke of a key

A Politico lede:

The House descended into chaos on [Thursday], unable to plot a path forward on a bill to address the [border crisis].

I'd bet, I'd just bet you that, as a time-saver, every Politico keyboard is programmed to spit out that particular sentence at the touch of one key; all that's required of the reporter is to fill in the [day] and [issue].

I have refrained, and I shall continue to refrain till it's all over, from commenting on today's abominations in the House. As long as the Republican majority is in town, things can always get worse. And I'm sure they will. So what's the point of analyzing what amount to merely transient transmogrifications? 

 

Israel could end this war in an instant

Ezra Klein joins Jon Chait's despair:

In recent years Israel seems to be making its problems insoluble. The continued growth of the settlements is morally indefensible, but it's also deeply counterproductive: every Israeli home built in the West Bank makes a two-state solution that much harder. Israel's peace movement has collapsed, and its government has become more bellicose and aggressive.

More incisive is this passage from Jeffrey Goldberg, who, as Klein notes, is "more sympathetic to Israel's operation in Gaza" than either Klein or Chait is:

Reversing the settlement project, and moving the West Bank toward eventual independence, would not only give Palestinians hope, but it would convince Israel's sometimes-ambivalent friends that it truly seeks peace, and that it treats extremists differently than it treats moderates.

This has puzzled me for some time. Israel's spokesmen can't say it enough: This war could be over in an instant; all Hamas need do is cease firing rockets. But seldom do we hear American analysts declare that this war could be over in an instant; all Israel need do is renounce its policies of illegal settlements and brutal blockades and earnestly commit to a two-state solution. Such an act would end the rockets, the bombings, the slaughter of women and children.

Politically unrealistic on Israel's part, you say? That might be, for the moment. But so is it unrealistic to think Hamas can back down. It is now fully invested in this war, because Israel is fully invested in policies of oppression and land theft--as it has been invested for decades. And that should settle the question of which side, from an ethical point of view, should back down first.

 

Ouch

Historian Michael Kimmage pens a devastating review of Rick Perlstein's latest tome for The New Republic, leaving this rubble at the end:

Rick Perlstein is a superb researcher and writer.... Before the Storm and, less memorably, Nixonland brought an intelligent enthusiasm to the history of American conservatism.

The same cannot be said for The Invisible Bridge. Running to some 880 pages, it is far too long. The Watergate section has endless citations from the tapes and the proceedings that are hardly digested into narrative.... The narrative energy dissipates in a welter of detail, paraphrase, and digressions, such as the several pages Perlstein devotes to summarizing the plot of the film, The Bad News Bears.... Worst of all, The Invisible Bridge takes the freshness of Before the Storm and turns it into formula. Its narrative of break-down and division is rigidly predetermined, a narrative of inflated melodrama without much real suspense.... [A] historian of Perlstein’s ability could have accomplished a great deal more with this material. In future installments he should work out another paradigm for his narrative. There was no golden age of unity prior to the postwar conservative movement, no garden of Eden awaiting its snake. Goldwater’s conservatism was as much the harbinger of a new consensus as it was the cause of eventual fracturing, one of many such storms in the republic’s long history.

I loved all of Before the Storm's roughly 700 pages, but I confess I surrendered roughly 300 pages into Nixonland's 748, which seemed more like 1,700, and, in my view, suffered from the same flaws that Kimmage attributes to The Invisible Bridge--a "welter of detail, paraphrase, and digressions." Some of the welter was interesting, but there are always others books beckoning.  Once I found myself scanning rather than reading Nixonland, some other book called. I don't recall which one, but I'm sure I finished it. I very rarely give up on a book. Infinite Jest was another Nixonland-like attempt of mine, but that unsalvageable mess I happily relinquished.

Somehow, Proust could take a handful of rather insignificant memories and convert them into more than 3,000 pages of sheer delight. But most historians--even those working with subjects of epic significance--aren't Marcel Proust, and they should know their limits. Nearly 900 pages on Ronald Reagan is one of them. 

 

"This is asinine"

I guess he slips in and out of perceptiveness:

This is asinine. This continued killing of women and children in a way that appears to be indiscriminate is asinine. The United States of America--we cannot be associated with this if this continues. This is so bad, not only for the Israeli people, but for us.

--Joe Scarborough, former congressional captive of the Israel Lobby

 

"Stop the hate"--by voting it out

There does seem to be a bit of overkill in the DNC's, DCCC's and White House's exuberance about impeachment. I'm mostly in agreement with Joe Klein:

This is smart strategy on the part of the Obama political operation, right? Well, grudgingly, yes. But it’s also cynical as hell. The White House is playing with fire, raising the heat in a country that is already brain-fried by partisan frenzy. There is something unseemly, and unprecedented, about an administration saying "Bring it on" when it comes to impeachment....

What if he simply said, "I’m done with fundraising. This is an important election, but there’s just too much going on in the world right now"? His political folks would hate it, but I suspect it might be more effective, and presidential, than sending out tin-cup emails.

I question the peril of the WH "raising the heat in a country that is already brain-fried by partisan frenzy." Here, Klein concedes a fait accompli that simply can't frenzy itself to a higher intensity. The WH isn't so much "playing with fire" as it is fighting fire with fire; and in politics, that's a rather standard-issue tactic. Cynical, yes, but also smart, as Klein notes. 

The WH's impeachment-marketing campaign does, on the other hand, clash with the cooler, softer appeal that President Obama is marketing from the stump, as he did in Kansas City, Mo. yesterday: "Stop being mad all the time," he implored Republicans. "Stop. Stop just hating all the time."

It's a difficult circle to square. Does Obama want the GOP to stop hating? Or to start impeaching? 

I profoundly agree with Klein's exhortation that Obama should declare "I’m done with fundraising...; there's just too much going on in the world," etc. etc. In that, there would, I'd wager, be popular appeal--and increasing his popularity is a strategic necessity in this midterm election, even if the stunt of a fundraising cease-fire would be nearly as transparently cynical as begging for impeachment.

To me, the cleaner message is Obama's "stop the hate" plea, which ties in nicely with his additional observations as to all that remains to be done legislatively. But of course it won't be done by haters and obstructionists--so just throw the hateful, obstructionist bums out.

 

A weak case for an impeachment stampede

Media Matters stirs a weak pot of tea, asserting--in a piece titled "The Right-Wing Pushes Back: No, We Really Do Want Impeachment"--that "as many in the conservative media grow more insistent that the Republican Party will not and should not impeach President Obama, major right-wing figures have started pushing back to keep the impeachment option on the table."

The major figures cited by MM are three--Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin--and the proofs offered by MM of a pushback campaign are these: a Drudge headline, "Surrender: Boehner Rules Out Impeachment"; a Limbaugh remark, "Republicans are doing everything they can to tell people 'we're not going to impeach, we're not going to.' It's purely defensive, it's rooted in fear, and I think it's a miscalculation"; and Levin telling his audience point-blank: "Here's the dead truth--Obama should be impeached. But he won't be impeached."

In other words, the evidence fails to support the allegation. In its headline, MM virtually screams a widespread, well-orchestrated pro-impeachment campaign, only to then whisper some vague, quoted gobbledygook--except that of Levin's words, which outright contradict the notion of an imminent impeachment campaign. 

Media Matters seems not to be bothered by its headline/text incongruence. That I don't mind so much. In a violently competitive Internet market, often incongruent click-bait is what it is, and it's not going anywhere. What disheartens is that Media Matters is essentially playing the same propagandistically misleading game that its daily right-wing targets play. The left should be better than that.

 

"Profiles in Pandering"; a shameful day of mockery

Perhaps the best-known and least-read work of American history is John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. Its thesis is simple enough: just because politicians are on occasion sustained by a plurality of buffoons, the politicians themselves need not always act like one. They can stand against misguided, uninformed, and even sometimes calamitous public opinion when true duty calls, and an honorable independence from the ignorant mob is called for. In short, representative democracy does not mean voting the sick conscience of the people.

Today we witnessed the final death of Kennedy's thesis in the Republican Party. I'm hardly going out on a speculative limb when I say that most House Republicans realize the utter absurdity of the lawsuit authorization they just passed. It is a foolish "bill" based on a foolish premise pressed by a foolish base. Its passage was the ultimate abdication of a thoughtful representative democracy.

The bill also demonstrates why the founders were somewhat terrified by democracy itself. They contemplated the prospect of majority buffoons in the House representing a broad buffoonery, and thereby promptly raced to the concept of an indirect democratic Senate, as well as an Electoral president. For all their meditative talk of republican Everymen, the founders were frightened to the bone by the sainted People.

Have House Republicans made a mockery of representative democracy? Not really. They're only reflecting the malevolence of those who put them there, just as the founders suspected they would. But pols such as Representative, Senator and President Kennedy envisioned a better kind of American democracy--one in which a few would resist the partisan tug of mindless pandering. And it is that which House Republicans made a mockery of.

 

Who else has Wasserman been interviewing?

Writing for the Washington Post, David Wasserman, the Cook Political Report's House analyst, makes the astonishing claim that "never have I met any candidate quite as frightening or fact-averse as Louisiana [GOP] state Rep. Lenar Whitney, 55, who ... is running for Louisiana’s open 6th District." What is the basis of Wasserman's horror? These two items:

When I pressed Whitney repeatedly for the source of her claim that the earth is getting colder [my emphasis], she froze and was unable to cite a single scientist, journal or news source to back up her beliefs.

To change the subject, I asked whether she believed Obama was born in the United States.... [S]he replied that it was a matter of some controversy.

Such garden-variety dunderheadedness Wasserman finds exceptionally "frightening"? She sounds like a Republican moderate to me.

 

Nativist monkeys with machine guns

Earlier today I received a commercial email that led with the following script:

Developed by military experts and over forty engineers, TrackingPoint precision guided firearms virtually eliminate shooter error. Their Tag-Track-Xact system more than doubles the proficiency of a skilled shooter by maximizing accuracy, taking into account a slew of variables such as wind speed, air pressure, and temperature. Such unprecedented accuracy enables shots at distances many shooters have never before attempted up to 1200 yards. With the included software, shooters can even capture their shots on video, right through the scope.

Who was it from? The sender's name on the email: "Border Activists"

 

A predictable pattern: Bush, Putin, and Netanyahu

In March 2003, Gallup reported that 72 percent of Americans supported the Iraq war. "Roughly the same number approve" of President Bush's leadership, said Gallup. Then came reality and the real war. You know the rest.

Earlier this month, Gallup reported that 83 percent of Russians said, from late April to early June, that they approved of President Putin's leadership. Today, reports the NY Times, "there is growing alarm in Russia that the festering turmoil in Ukraine and the new round of far more punitive sanctions ... will ... damage the economy to the extent that ordinary Russians feel it." Says an opposition member of Russia's Parliament: "I hear more and more critics." Putin's popularity clock is already ticking.

Among analysts, much has been made of recent polling showing that 87 percent of Israelis disfavor a cease-fire, which implies a commensurate approval of Prime Minister Netanyahu's leadership. The NYT also reports today that "at least 20 people were killed by what witnesses and United Nations officials said was the latest in a series of strikes on United Nations facilities [in Gaza] that are supposed to be safe zones." This was not the first such strike. Accordingly, international condemnation of Israel and Netanyahu is now deafening, and an economic squeeze is likely to follow.

Anyone else see a pattern here?

 

House Republicans now have it in for ... the Pope!

The Republican abyss is truly bottomless.

A drafted resolution that "seeks to honor Pope Francis is stuck" in the House, reports The Hill; "The dearth of GOP members [favorable to] the measure could be attributable to assertions that the pope is 'too liberal,' according to a Republican backer of the legislation."

What can one say? Intelligent retorts to the asinine "too liberal" charge against this infinitely decent man are too obvious to even bother spelling out--so obvious, I as a non-Catholic would nonetheless need to seek absolution for the sin of arguing with idiots, were I to do so. Which I won't.

What does that leave? Merely a kind of speechless awe at the true bottomlessness of contemporary Republican malice. God help them.

 

Dear Ruth: You're playing Ted Cruz's game

Ruth Marcus:

Ted Cruz must be Texan for chutzpah.

The Texas Republican gave an interview to NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell the other day, during which he was asked about political dysfunction in Washington. Without a trace of irony, embarrassment or self-awareness, Cruz placed the blame for political dysfunction solely on Democrats.

I could be wrong, but in my reading of "chutzpah" there's at least an interpretive hint of probity, some element of self-honesty, even if that honesty is aggressively and offensively twisted. In Ted Cruz, I detect no such ethic. Not a dram of it. Comparisons of this unscrupulous rogue to Joe McCarthy abound for good reason: the Wisconsin viper no more believed his accusatory humbug than the malevolent Texan does; to both, uh, gentlemen, public service meant only career enhancement.

Some demagogues of lore--say, Boston's James Michael Curley--hold a warm place in my heart because they were not only insistently lovable, they actually tried now and then to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Hence the demagogic deployment of argumentum ad populum. (In Curley's case his rhetorical attempts were occasionally made from jail. Now who couldn't love that?) Most demagogues, however, are of Cruz's banality of drivel, which is embraced as sincere only by the irreparably uninformed.

It was with no little surprise, then, that I found Ruth Marcus "galled" by Cruz's pretend chutzpah. Because that's precisely the reaction he hopes to instigate. If the commentariat were to dismiss his disingenuity with the absence of ceremonial despair it deserves, the Texas senator would be history--just like Joe McCarthy.

 

The ghosts of WWI

Le Monde editor Sylvie Kauffmann has a fascinating op-ed in the NY Times on Europe's varied, nationalistic reactions to World War I's centennial. "While our German and British neighbors have been passionately debating theories about the origins of the war or its utility, all is quiet on the French front," she observes. "We don’t feel like looking beyond our attics"--family histories, forebears' memoirs, computerized death tolls, that sort of thing. It's a centennial of global destruction as a deeply personal experience--memories of a great war removed from grand theories of responsibility. "This is a very consensual centennial," she writes. As far as France goes, that is.

Kauffmann attributes Cambridge historian Christopher Clark's absolutely magnificent 2012 work, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, to Germany's "reopen[ing of] an old debate about the country’s guilt." Yet the "debate" has rendered less a contestation than a landslide. "Only 19 percent of Germans [now believe] their country bore chief responsibility for the outbreak of the war," notes Kauffmann, since Clark deftly presents a history of "shared aggression, paranoia and a reckless game of brinkmanship on all sides, not just in Berlin." Indeed, in The Sleepwalkers' conclusion, Clark keenly alleges that the Great War's origins are "not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over the corpse.... There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character."

In Britain, wouldn't you know it, traditionalist Tories are still fighting the upstart, Anglo-critical leftie rabble, "with Conservatives criticizing 'revisionist' views of the Great War as a futile, insane loss of life orchestrated by criminal generals." Yet it is scarcely revisionist to recall, as Adam Hochschild brilliantly does in To End All Wars, that throughout the war's mechanized slaughter much of the British brass clung to the insane belief that its cavalry could soon come to the rescue. And when I say cavalry, I mean the 19th-century variety: we're talking horses.

Few of the Great War's actors seemed to appreciate how modern technology--tanks, planes, machine guns, massive artillery--had forever altered the grim face of war. Had they done so, they would have also appreciated that Clausewitz's maxim--"moderation in war is an absurdity"--would manifest itself in exponentially immoderate carnage. One theory among those on the origins of World War I holds that military minds were eager to test their new toys--having no real idea of their destructive power--thus they welcomed if not encouraged the war's onset.

Far more dangerous than the insane lure of technology's potential, however, is the madness of nationalism unbound and "honor" defended and "credibility" maintained. God knows one needn't read history to see its destructive power. Just read the papers. And if you reside, say, in Arizona or South Carolina, you can just ring up your honorable, incredibly nationalistic senator and ask how him how his "III" project is going.

 

Dark, and funny, times

The NY Times Magazine's Mark Leibovich hilariously ponders the "homage [that] must be paid" by Republican hopefuls to Iowa's governor, Terry Branstad: 

If there’s one thing every Republican presidential candidate can agree upon, it is that Branstad represents the peak of American leadership, if not the pinnacle of all human achievement.

Though comical in his assessment, Leibovich is rather unhappy about politicos' Iowa schmoozing. "It would be one thing if all of this early activity and attention in Iowa resulted in a smarter electorate, better candidates or a more authentic version of democracy," he writes. But instead it's a perpetuation of an unrepresentative, narrow, secluded, insider's circus: an importuning candidate, a favor-granting governor, and the "discerning voter" who, W.-like, believes he or she can read the candidate's soul from a "Hi" and a handshake. In short, it's pigshit--the wildly malodorous goo of America's presidential-selection process.

And God help me, I love it. I know I'm not supposed to. I'm supposed to brood and lament the shallowness of it all, to think deeply depressed thoughts about the unrealized promise of an informed electorate weighing the relative values of thoughtful, miscellaneous statesmen. But I'm a political realist, and I know pigshit is a marvelously slick ointment for the wheels of democracy. In fact I find the prospect of a shifty Chris Christie tangling incoherently with a slithering Ted Cruz on some Des Moines, pre-caucus stage an exhilarating one. To me, the coming buffoonery only reinforces all those assorted maxims about the precariousness of representative democracy.

Republicans' Iowa caucus won't be so much a selection process as a warning. These, believe it or not, are the best the party has. And Democrats will follow suit. Dark, and funny, times. Let's do get on with them.

 

From Chait, a must read

Chait's latest is important not only because it Chait's; it's important because it reflects a growing uneasiness, I'd wager, among America's liberal Jews:

It is not just that Netanyahu is able to identify Hamas’s strategy--to create "telegenically dead Palestinians"--yet still proceeds to give Hamas exactly what it is after. It is that Netanyahu and his coalition have no strategy of their own except endless counterinsurgency against the backdrop of a steadily deteriorating diplomatic position within the world and an inexorable demographic decline. The operation in Gaza is not Netanyahu’s strategy in excess; it is Netanyahu’s strategy in its entirety.

Concludes Chait: "Like many liberal Jews ... I recognize that the facts change, and I have changed my mind."

Bit by bit, faction by faction, Netanyahu is losing by "winning." This was not unexpected. From the outset his strategy had "Iron Doom" written all over it, and yet he persists in carrying it out. Violent retaliation and continued strangleholds are his only strategy, and it is a loser by which, in the long run, he'll go down.