P.M. Carpenter

One heathen's Word for the Day

Sam Harris "spiritually" enlightens Frank Bruni, and Bruni comments.

"You can have spiritual experience and understand the most thrilling changes in human consciousness in a context that’s secular and universal and not freighted with dogma," he said when we spoke on the telephone last week. It was a kind of discussion that I wish I heard more of, and that people should be able to have with less fear of being looked upon as heathens.

I suppose I'm one of those heathens--meaning, in its most straightforward connotation, the "unconverted"--although I've never experienced any fear of being seen as such, nor am I sure the believers with whom I have discussed my fallen state have "looked upon" me, as in looked down on me. In general, they instead seem to harbor invincible hopes of my imminent Christian enlightenment, and they're more puzzled than dismayed by my resistance to The Word.

I, in turn, feel the same toward them. Contradictory fidelity to ancient, eternal Scripture and one of its many mutating, centrifugal doctrines to fit the times has always puzzled me. Collectively, believers strike me as a hopelessly confused lot; The Word is at once singular and universal, yet Christianity's internal differences--from dozens of fundamentalisms and evangelicalisms and assorted "higher" churches to disputes, even, about the divinity of the religion's "founder"--reflect, it seems to me, not some celestial Word, but an abyss of human centrality and all too human thought.

Consequently, aside from vaguely adhering to originalist Taoist sentiments--like Harris, I most admire freedom from dogma--I join Montaigne, with no trepidation whatsoever, in his almost religious fidelity to skepticism. That too, of course, implies an internal contradiction, as does my agreement with Hitchens that humankind's religions are "abject nonsense."

Whither my skepticism then? Who knows? The thing is, though, we heathens don't really care, since our other certainty is this: If a God there be, He doesn't either.

 

McCain-Graham, still at it

That troublesome twosome is at it again--or I should say, still at it--demanding that President Obama get cracking on precisely what he's already doing: assembling and leading "a coordinated, multilateral effort" against ISIS.

Such is McCain-Graham's principal harangue in a NYT op-ed, juxtaposed by John Kerry's op-ed, in which he urges "a global coalition using political, humanitarian, economic, law enforcement and intelligence tools to support military force ... led by the United States."

I await my NYT invitation to write a stirring, McCain-Graham-like op-ed demanding that Eric Cantor resign his leadership post and leave Congress.

Still, with the troublesome twosome there's always the selfsame joker played in its selfsame stratagem: "We should embed additional United States special forces and advisers with our partners on the ground," they write, "not to engage in combat, but to help our partners fight ISIS and direct airstrikes against it."

This advice conspicuously poses at least two enormous problems. Until the Obama administration assembles a "coordinated, multilateral effort" against ISIS, we have, other than the peshmerga, virtually no "partners on the ground" to coordinate with. In fact other than the Kurds, there is no competent fighting force on Iraqi ground other than ISIS, which has been the chief beneficiary of McCain-Graham's nearly peerless Middle East advice--that of a 2003 U.S. invasion (which soon created ISIS' forefather, al Qaeda in Iraq) and our subsequent lavishing of military hardware on the utterly worthless Iraqi, ahem, Army (which has since kept ISIS in the militarily armed pink).

The second problem with piling up U.S. special forces and advisors in Iraq and Syria is, like the first, too obvious to much elaborate on. Last night, C-SPAN3 coyly aired a 1963 'U.S. advisors in South Vietnam' training film, which followed the heroic exploits of an all-American Army captain whose unequaled insights into how the locals could defeat the dreaded Vietcong (they being the locals, too) were damned inspiring--and they would have remained damned inspiring had 1963 not been followed by 1964, 1965, and so on. Sixteen thousand U.S. advisers were bivouacking in that sad, corrupt little country in '63. Six years later, more than half a million U.S. combat troops were doing the same.

That's not to say that certain ghastly events could never carry Obama in an additional advisory or even combat-troop direction. Unchecked, ISIS could threaten the entire Levant; yet checking and rolling back ISIS through a fighting regional coalition endowed with minimal U.S. support should be strategically checked off before ever flooding the zone with American personnel.

On President Obama's part, that's just multilateral, coalition-building prudence--which Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham don't possess.

 

Let's just admit our animal nature

The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn surveys the GOP's most recent extremism (Sens. Rubio and Inhofe on immigration and the environment, respectively) and concludes:

For Democrats thinking about their political prospects in 2016 and beyond, this is good news, given demographic trends. But for now and for the foreseeable future, Republican extremists have the power to block policy changes in Washington, thanks to Republican control of the House and their strong presence in the Senate. The real-world implications of this political situation are millions of people stuck in immigration limbo and a planet cooking to the point where damage is irreversible. That is nothing to celebrate.

The indelicacy of Cohn's final, finger-wagging observation is the sort of moral austerity in politics that we, or at least I, could easily do without. Of course the assigning of millions of people to an indeterminate purgatory and cooking the planet are acts unworthy of celebration to any but Republican imbeciles like Rubio, Inhofe & Followers. But to underscore Republicans' reprehensibility by sermonizing against Democrats' understandable schadenfreude over the opposition's tactical overreach is a puritanical act of Dudley-Do-Rightism I just don't buy.

Now honestly, Jonathan, can you tell us that you never celebrated as Bush-Cheney and their congressional allies sunk lower and lower into malfeasanced depravity and breathtaking turpitude? In the Bush administration's bumbling, nation-damaging ramp-ups to the 2006 and 2008 elections, did you not take a certain, transcendent delight? And as W. besmirched our honor and degraded every conceivable notion of managerial decency, did you not once think to yourself, Oh damn that's a shame, but I couldn't be happier?

Of course you did. It's the ineradicable nature of us carcass-eyeing political beasts. To pretend, as one of the pack, that you're anything but is unseemly.

 

Ted Cruz's perplexing game

The excitement builds:

In recent weeks, the Cruz team signed contracts with three Republican consultants with national experience and ties to some of the early presidential primary states.

I have yet to comprehend this Texas demagogue's presidential strategy. Ted Cruz may be a reckless fanatic and bottom-feeding opportunist, but he isn't stupid. He has to know that his nationwide electoral prospects outdo in oblivion even those of Barry Goldwater's. Cruz could, I suppose, pick up much of the solid South, although I doubt very much that he could carry modern Georgia. And, almost by definition, if one is carrying the neoconfederacy then one isn't carrying Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida.

With Georgia, Goldwater collected 52 Electoral votes.

So in the manifest absence of any political modification, what's Cruz's presidential strategy? Beats me.

 

ISIS, torture, and America's most despicable man

Washington Post:

At least four hostages held in Syria by the Islamic State, including an American journalist who was recently executed by the group [James Foley], were waterboarded in the early part of their captivity, according to people familiar with the treatment of the kidnapped Westerners.

I await Dick Cheney's defense of ISIS' interrogation techniques, since well into the Obama administration he was still defending his administration's use of this brutality. "The notion that somehow the United States was torturing anybody is not true," said Cheney to a gathering at the American Enterprise Institute in 2011. "It produced phenomenal results for us," he continued in a demonstrably untruthful vein, and he added that "any technique that we used on any al Qaeda individual [was] used on our own troops first."

That last line reminded me of Christopher Hitchens' Vanity Fair piece from 2008, in which he pre-countered Cheney's claim: "It was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict."

Hitchens himself underwent Cheney and ISIS' "technique," reporting that 

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it "simulates" the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning--or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure....

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

To Cheney we apply the Hitchens test: If Dick Cheney is not wrong, then ISIS is not wrong.

That's quite the moral company the former vice president keeps.

 

Pew's discovered shifts on Obama's foreign policy are mostly Republican

Pew Research's subheadline--"54% say Obama is not tough enough in his approach on foreign policy"--is both statistically and thematically baffling (a plurality is suddenly hawkish? wanting a "tougher," more aggressive approach to foreign policy?) until one scans the factional breakdowns. While perhaps unfavorable to Hillary Clinton and definitely unfavorable to Rand Paul, the breakdowns retain a considerable partisanship, meaning Obama's sudden inadequacy is mostly an unbaffling Republican thing.

Which is to say, Obama is not hurting among Democrats--especially the more liberal ones, which is to say further, the ones more active in presidential primaries. "Liberal Democrats offer strongly positive assessments of Obama’s foreign policy: 66% say his approach is about right," reports Pew. A plurality (52%) of conservative and moderate Democrats also gives the president a foreign policy thumbs up. The potential danger to Hillary is obvious here, although the answer to the question of just who can successfully exploit that danger remains a mystery.

Sen. Paul, on the other hand, should start popping Xanax now.

On balance, more continue to think the United States does too much, rather than too little, to help solve world problems. But the share saying the U.S. does too little to address global problems has nearly doubled--from 17% to 31%--since last November, while the percentage saying it is doing too much has fallen from 51% to 39%.

Those shifts are substantially red. A year ago only 18% of all Republicans said the U.S. is doing "too little." That percentage has now jumped to 46. Even more perilous for any quasi-isolationist Republican contender is that "54% of Republicans and GOP leaners who agree with the Tea Party say [the U.S] does too little to help solve world problems" (emphasis mine). Again, this is the base that is exceptionally inclined to vote in presidential primaries. And it has turned, it would seem, on the one-time tea-partying Paul. Last year they were with him; the same percentage--54--of "Tea Party Republicans said the U.S. did too much." But they're not with him now.

 

But Obama DOES have a strategy

Six little words. I see that six little ill-considered words--"We don’t have a strategy yet"--are dominating coverage of President Obama's press conference this afternoon, even though the president added that launching airstrikes in Syria must be "part of a broader comprehensive strategy," which already seemed rather well articulated.

The strategy, to repeat? The Iraqis need to get their political act together and their neighbors must arrive as "a consensus approach for rolling back [ISIS's] gains," as the NYT put it. Those two components, plus an arming of the Kurds. That's the strategy, and it's been the manifest strategy for some time. I'm sure Obama would love to take back those six ill-considered words (in fact I hear Josh Earnest doing that for him on CNN, as I write).

The presser's only authentically newsworthy segment regarding Syria and ISIS, it seemed to me, was that Obama is freshly determined to put Congress into a headlock: "I do think that it’ll be important for Congress to weigh in--or that our consultations with Congress continue to develop" he said, "so that the American people are part of the debate."

And since Congress takes much longer vacations than does the president, it'll be a while before that institutional cacophony of fecklessness can weasel its way out of any responsibility for Obama's in-place Syria strategy.

 

Sam Wang has guts

He's risking a superb reputation as a political prognosticator by predicting a 70 percent chance of Democrats holding the Senate, while the NYT's Upshot, WaPo's Monkey Cage and Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, well, are not. Wang's predictive emphasis is on polling. He explains: 

I categoriz[e] models as "Fundamentals-based (Type 1)" and "Polls-based (Type 2)". The major media organizations (NYT, WaPo, 538) have all gone with a hybrid Type 1/Type 2 approach, i.e. they all use prior conditions like incumbency, candidate experience, funding, and the generic Congressional ballot to influence their win probabilities--and opinion polls.

However the Upshot, for one, recently increased its odds to a 67 percent chance of a Republican takeover, explaining that

our forecast is ... at its most Republican-leaning point yet this cycle. So perhaps it is worth exploring why.

Recent polls are one big reason.

 

Russian TV, guest home of the whopper

Touching.

There are active [Russian] soldiers fighting among us who preferred to spend their vacation not on the beach, but with us, among their brothers, who are fighting for their freedom.

--Aleksandr Zakharchenko, a rebel commander in Ukraine, speaking on Russian state-run television

I have a perverse admiration for propagandists who understand that the bigger the lie, the more believable it is.

Mitt might want to look into hiring Aleksandr as a speechwriter.

 

Is Rand Paul practicing deferred gratification?

Rand Paul is committing the same strategic error that Hillary Clinton committed in 2008 (and seems determined to repeat in 2016, thus reducing her core party support): By playing to the general-election crowd before persuading Republican primary voters to his cause, he's adopting a false air of inevitability.

His WSJ op-ed is the latest exhibit--and a slop-studded one at that. For instance he jumps on the POTUS-bashing bandwagon in writing that last "September President Obama and many in Washington were eager for a U.S. intervention in Syria to assist the rebel groups fighting President Bashar Assad's government." Eager U.S. interventionists there were, but of course President Obama was not one of them. He's always been leery of arming Syria's "rebel groups" for reasons too well known to repeat here. Paul also argues that "interventionists are calling for Islamic rebels to win in Syria and for the same Islamic rebels to lose in Iraq," which is an argument steeped in either prodigious ignorance or, more likely, deliberate deceit.

But, this is politics, so Paul's unbroken fidelity to truthfulness is hardly expected. He does, however, fire off a couple of incontestable zingers against his would-be general-election opponent: "Mrs. Clinton was ... eager to shoot first in Syria before asking some important questions," and "We are lucky Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way." OK, "lucky" is indeed contestable, since "Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way" only because President Obama refused her, which--see second paragraph--Paul pretends not to grasp.

Still, they're good zingers. But there's a problem. Paul isn't running against Mrs. Clinton--not yet anyway. He is running against Mitt Romney and a small army of other pseudoconservative nincompoops who are battling for the honor of losing to Clinton. He might want to concentrate on winning that race first.

There is one other possibility which flips my thesis of strategic error, however, and it is this: The young senator knows that Hillary is unbeatable in 2016, but he's betting that after four years of Her Interventionist Highness the nation will be ready for another neo-isolationist Mr. Republican. This may give Paul too much credit for modesty and strategic forethought, but you must admit that he's often sharper than he at first seemed.

 

Misrule meets apathy, and apathy is winning

Gallup, with the latest in mind-boggling apathy from the center-left:

Republicans (42%) are much more engaged than Democrats (27%) in the election at this point....

If there is no significant narrowing of the Republican-Democratic thought gap between now and Election Day, the Republican advantage in turnout could surpass that on Election Day 2010.

One would think that Democratic disgust with Republicans' colossal misrule would by now be vengeful, determined, and even feverish. But it seems that one non-candidate's low approval rating--carved point by point by the aforementioned misrulers--is what influences their "engagement" instead.

You have to hand it to tea partiers; they understand the power of the vote. Democrats either don't, or they just don't care--and that I find even more disgusting than Republicans' misrule.

 

It's Clinton vs. Romney, then you-know-what

According to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll released yesterday, about four times as many likely Iowa caucus goers prefer Mitt Romney to Mike Huckabee, about six times as many prefer Romney to Chris Christie or Rick Santorum, and seven times as many prefer the former Mass. governor to either Ted Cruz or Rand Paul.

These findings are known as "circumstances." And now Romney has let slip on Hugh Hewitt's radio show that "circumstances can change" his immutable refusal to make a third presidential run, although he added that "I’m just not going to let my head go there," which is vintage Romneyesque doubletalk and a grim reminder of what awaits us--again.

In short, in 2016 it'll be Hillary vs. Mitt--two of the most scheming, least sincere, shiftiest as well as most awkward pols ever to haunt American presidential politics--after Hillary dispatches her feeble primary opposition and Mitt does the same. Both will cruise through 2015 accumulating nearly all the financial marbles and super-PAC graft, which will permit both to invincibly slander their internal critics before engaging the even more slanderous main event.

There will be no "national debate." Mitt's campaign will consist of rhetorical hilarities, spectacular hypocrisies and unspeakable demagoguery, as will Hillary's. Mitt will promise more severe conservatism while leaving us all in the dark as to what in God's name he's talking about, while Hillary, in kind, proceeds to bewilder us with centrist mush that her bumbling, squabbling staff will then hopelessly attempt to clarify. And of course both will be the toughest-talking chickenhawks on the planet, while at once pledging to deploy American firepower with unimpeachable prudence.

Both will effectively nullify President Obama's legacy of an Eisenhowerian-Kennedesque seriousness and return to rank Nixonian opportunism; both will be unRooseveltian loyalists to their class while blathering about Hooverian fouls in every pot; and both will unveil weird, W.-like Wilsonian visions for a world according to unsurpassable American virtues and vague theory.

In the end, Hillary will win by 52 to 48 percent and with 300+ Electoral votes. After that, heaven knows what--since Hillary's actual beliefs, assuming she has any, are as infinitely mysterious as Mitt is repetitiously doomed.

 

The coming tidal wave of Republican apologies

The Upshot indeed: "Medicare: Not Such a Budget-Buster Anymore":

The difference between the current estimate for Medicare’s 2019 budget and the estimate for the 2019 budget four years ago is about $95 billion dollars....

The reduced estimates are ... an indication of what’s happening in the overall health care system. Even as more people are getting access to health insurance, the costs of caring for individual patients is growing at a super-slow rate.

Well, damn, this is going to taint many a congressional Republican's reelection campaign. Now they'll feel compelled to go out on the stump and explain to their constituents, with immense shame and mortification, that they were wrong about Obamacare; that their earlier hysteria concerning its Stalinist evils and job-costing destruction and deficit-spiking ruination should be disregarded. Further, they'll feel honor-bound to extend apologies to the president and the spirit of Ted Kennedy, they'll seek forgiveness from misled voters, and they'll promise, finally, to stop acting like the bunch of demagogic buffoons they are.

 

Orwell on fascism's appeal

A delightful find. The American Conservative's Scott Galupo runs across George Orwell's March 1940 (a period of the so-called 'Phony War') review of Mein Kampf, excerpts of which read:

Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.... Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life....

Hitler has said ... "I offer you struggle, danger and death," and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

It should however be noted that, contrary to a strangely enduring myth of popularized history, Hitler was never "democratically elected," and his National Socialists never democratically climbed to a Reichstag majority. Hitler was appointed Chancellor and Nazism ultimately ascended as Germany's sole political power through thuggery and oppression--not through the "psychologically far sounder" basis of a legitimizing democracy.

Plus, when Hitler's offer of "struggle, danger and death" loomed quite real just months prior to publication of Orwell's review, relatively few Germans were enthusiastic in their acceptance. Soon, amid the accumulating rubble and charred bodies, a desire for "ease, security and avoidance of pain" only grew. 

Orwell was not often wrong, but I think he was here.

 

A Syria strategy awaits only Congress

Is this the barren Syria strategy for which Aaron David Miller, a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center and former State Department official, rebuked the president just two days ago?

As Mr. Obama considered new strikes, the White House began its diplomatic campaign to enlist allies and neighbors in the region to increase their support for Syria’s moderate opposition and, in some cases, to provide support for possible American military operations. The countries likely to be enlisted include Australia, Britain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

The NY Times' overview of President Obama's "diplomatic campaign" strikes me--does it not you?--as shades of George H.W. Bush's multilateralism, which over the past couple decades has earned enormous (retro)respect among foreign-policy analysts uncontaminated by KristolThink. Yet in Miller's pop analysis, it is "seemingly devoid of strategy" and little more than a "feel good" approach to "blowing up a bunch of very bad people."

Speaking of blowing up a bunch of very bad people ... all that is left for my politically martial satisfaction is for Obama to approach our brayingly dysfunctional Congress for expanded airstrikes authorization.

Rats, ship.