P.M. Carpenter

Hints of yet another Republican shutdown

We're heading into the fall, which means we should button up for the crisp imbecility of congressional Republicans. Congress reconvenes September 8, and it will have but a fortnight to pass a continuing resolution to keep the federal government's doors open. But passing a CR requires a semblance of consensus, and of course consensus is antithetical to splenetic Republicanism's absolutism, so naturally there's already talk of a government shutdown.

Welcome back to American representative democracy--a revamped system of one-party chaos in which compromise and negotiations are anachronisms, thoughtfulness is an abomination, accountability is a relic, and any actual governance is a joke.

The latest jokester? A man who would be (the mind so violently revolts the fingers can barely type this) president of the United States--the inexpressibly hapless Marco Rubio, who said yesterday that "There will have to be some sort of a budget vote or a continuing resolution vote, so I assume there will be some sort of a vote [that enjoins executive action on immigration]." Continued Rubio in a speculative vein that chills, "I'm interested to see what kinds of ideas my colleagues have about using funding mechanisms [such as that of defunding Obamacare] to address this issue."

Straitjacketing President Obama on a humane immigration policy is merely one Republican humbug; there's also much demagogic dread to be had on that scourge of American virtue--the utterly harmless, largely helpful, self-funding Export-Import Bank--and on new environmental rules intended to help save our little cosmic outpost. Heaven forfend! Thus Rubio is eager to hear Cruzian "ideas" on how to muck it all up.

Yes, we're heading into the fall, which, once again, carries a double connotation.

 

Libertarianism may want you, but do you want it?

Tim Fernholz, via The Dish, points to some recent Pew Research findings on the dubious groundswell of libertarianism in America--dubious, since "only 11 percent self-describe as libertarian and understand what the term means":

Libertarians ... leaned strongly against any interference in business or help to the poor, though not as strongly as you might think: 41% of libertarians saw government regulation of business as necessary, and 38% supported aid to the poor.

As The Dish notes, those stats suggest that "libertarianism" is perhaps a cool-sounding ideology to some--God knows it has simplicity going for it--although a sizable number of them fail to appreciate what it actually means: a return to pre-New Deal conditions in which markets are free to pummel you and your family into abject powerlessness.

Ideologically pure libertarians often promise a future in which big bad government won't be around to make your life miserable (just how government is presently doing that is rarely evinced). Yet what they omit is the historical fact that their ideological dreams were all too real throughout the Gilded Age--followed by the excruciating, hardly "Gay" depression of the 1890s--and the Coolidge-Hoover Jazz Age--followed by you-know-what. Which is to say, the ruinous, real-life consequences of libertarianism are anything but theoretical or unknown.

 

Some may not like Obama's Syria strategy, but a strategy it is

Aaron David Miller, after reproaching President Obama for a foreign policy that is "messy" and "seemingly devoid of strategy," and after enumerating five reasons why bombing ISIS in Syria is a really bad idea, arrives at a messy conclusion that to me seems endowed with quite a bit of strategy:  

Unfortunately, there is no short-term answer to the Islamic State in either Iraq or Syria. A few bombs--or a few hundred--might save innocent lives and kill a few jihadists, but it's not going to do much beyond that. A long-term strategy of arming, training, equipping, marshaling allies, addressing Iraq's political dysfunction, well ... is long-term.

And that, oddly enough, is perhaps the most compelling reason President Obama has to act in Syria.

Since Washington can't sit on the sidelines and wait for the results of a long-term approach, it'll do what it does best: find the middle ground. The battlefield will be expanded; airstrikes in Syria will happen. Does it all lack for strategy? Is it a prescription for mission creep? Yes and yes. But blowing up a bunch of very bad people feels good. And whether you approve or not, it's coming.

I fail to see how enacting a short-term strategy that allows the successful evolution of a longer-term strategy is an absence of strategy. Yes it's unsatisfying; few Americans desire reengagement in Iraq or any spillover into Syria. But this is the world Obama confronts--a damned messy one. Constructing grand and elegant strategies fit for Foreign Affairs is perhaps a pleasurable intellectual pastime, and in theory those strategies--with which Miller blesses us not--are beautiful machines of smooth logic, but they're hardly practical when an invading horde of ungodly madmen is slaughtering innocent minorities and posing a lethal threat to America's global interests.

 

From RedState, an untoppable outrage

Based on Repair Man Jack's latest entry, I'm guessing the chief prerequisite for a RedState.com diary job is an inexhaustible measure of outrage. Just check out Jack's quasi-opening paragraph to a truly remarkable screed: 

There is something genuinely tiresome about the tone of a lot of political commentary regarding how medical doctors spend their time caring for people in other countries. There is also something utterly profane, inhumane and despicable about how cynical individuals project disingenuous motives unto the charitable actions of others. Particularly when they perfectly happy to make excuses for the blatant disregard for duty displayed by certain other people whose political beliefs are more to their liking. The cynical disrespect shown to Senator Rand Paul for spending his holiday donating his skills as an eye doctor to poor children in foreign countries coupled with the pathetic excuse-making we here [sic] for the Pitching Wedge Presidency of Barack Obama invokes a certain moiled nausea in anyone not so far in the tank for this president that they need to be breathing Nitrox.

Makes you want to catch your breath, doesn't it? You will note the presence of "pathetic" above. In his concluding paragraph, Jack again hits us with references to a "pathetic hack," a "pathetic, incapable mediocrity," and something to do with the "basest, most crass, most pathetic among us."

I'm curious. Mediocrities may be pathetic, but are they by any definition incapable?

Well, let's not quibble. Jack is outraged, and for Erick Erickson, that's good enough.

 

In Syria, the lesser of three evils

Beinart:

From Somalia to Kosovo to Libya, the problem with America’s humanitarian interventions has never been ascertaining the nastiness of the people we’re fighting against. It’s been ascertaining the efficacy and decency of the people we’re fighting for. That’s a particular challenge in the case of ISIS in Syria.

I’d love to believe our government is wise enough to surmount that challenge. I’d love to, but I don’t.

One of the two inefficacious, indecent "fors" is of course Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. The other, notes Beinart, is even more problematic: the "moderate" Free Syrian Army:

Citing research by the University of Virginia’s Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl, [international affairs professor Marc] Lynch argues that the moderate/jihadist dichotomy that governs much of the American discourse about opposition fighters in Syria doesn’t hold on the ground, where various armed groups have engaged in "rapidly shifting alliances." As Abu Yusaf, an ISIS commander, recently told journalists with The Washington Post, "Many of the FSA people who the West has trained are actually joining us."

But back to Beinart's doubts about our government's wisdom to overcome these problems. I'm not sure "wisdom" is the right word.

Unlike antsy, arm-'em-at-all-costs neocons like John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the Obama administration has been wary of the FSA from the get-go, and at any rate wise enough to appreciate that weapons in the hands of even authentically moderate rebels might well wind up in far less agreeable hands.

As for Assad, no further "ascertainment" of his indecency has been necessary for some time. 

Where does that leave Obama? With the awareness that two of Syria's three evils are lesser ones--indeed an awareness that dictates to, and modifies, currently accepted wisdom.

 

Obama's inescapable Syrian fiction

Were I Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser, I would avoid at all costs any press scrutiny of my proposition that in Syria, "It is not the case that the enemy of my enemy is my friend." That may be temperamentally correct, but pragmatically it's a fiction worthy of a Tolstoyan tome.

We're already drawing a reconnaissance bead on ISIS in eastern and north central Syria, to be followed by--what else?--U.S. airstrikes. And though the Syrian government, so to speak, is going through the diplomatic motions of protesting any U.S. violations of its airspace, why on earth would President Assad object tactically to Americans bombing the bejesus out of a cardinal threat to his very existence?

Obama "is loath to be seen as aiding the Syrian government, even inadvertently," writes the NYT. But he is where he is, and I see no escape from it--other than the semantic route of Ben Rhodes' fiction. In an accompanying NYT piece, "Analysts said it was unlikely that the United States would change direction and publicly ally with Damascus against ISIS"--"publicly" being the key word of appearances.

Bush-Cheney's monstrous imbecility continues to haunt Obama, as it almost certainly will his successor, and his successor's successor. There were no murderously rampaging, caliphate-declaring jihadists in Iraq before 43 & Sidekick (who's who is your choice) decided to remake the neighborhood, and remake it they did--into the squalid, byzantine, transnational abyss it now is. "Joining forces with Assad would essentially permanently alienate the Sunni population in both Syria and Iraq," added Rhodes; yet with ISIS now murdering Americans, what option has Obama other than effectively aligning with two Shiite, Sunni-alienating governments?

About the best Obama can now do when addressing questions about our de facto alliance with Assad is to keep Ben Rhodes close by the podium, then point and say, simply, "What he said." It's an inescapable fiction, and I feel for him.

 

Play the 'MTP' ban game. It's fun!

Kilgore suggests "permanently" banning from the new "Meet the Press" the potential panelists of Peggy Noonan, Bill Kristol, David Gergen, David Brooks and George Will. He welcomed suggestions for other bans from readers, which netted Tom Friedman, Cokie Roberts, Mary Matalin, James Carville, Rich "Starbursts" Lowry, Michael Gerson and, pointedly enough, Chuck Todd.

I would add anyone who has ever had a show on, or has appeared on, or hopes to have a show on, or plans to ever appear on, Fox News. The same general sentiment goes to anyone associated in any way with the Weekly Standard. 

And Al Sharpton. Cornel West (my further thoughts here) got at least one thing right in his Salon interview: "When you say the name Al Sharpton, the word integrity does not come to mind." Which of course takes care of Cornel West as well.

 

Bibi's in trouble

No explanation from JPUpdates (Jewish Political News) as to why, but

A poll conducted for Channel 2 news shows that Netanyahu’s approval rating has dramatically dropped to 38%, down from an all time high [of] 82% as ground troops entered Gaza last month.

It's hard to imagine that the plummeted gap of 44% now think Bibi too soft on Hamas, but I suppose that's possible. The other possibility, of course, is that more and more Israelis have had enough of Netanyahu's endless intransigence on a two-state solution to this otherwise intractable mess.

 

The mystery of Chuck Todd's demystification

In defining his new "Meet the Press" role as a kind of network Hermes to the Beltway gods, Chuck Todd adds yet another layer of viewer distress to our ancient chants of Gregorian Egads!

I think the job for all of us, particularly in political reporting is to demystify Washington for the American public, but then also try to translate the American public’s frustrations for out-of-touch Washington people. When things are going well in the political journalism world, it’s because we’re playing that role of basically being the translator, being the interpreter between America and Washington.

Distressing indeed is Todd's conceit that he somehow speaks for me, you, all of us--as though there is an "all of us," which there isn't. Even worse is that Todd believes in the popular myth of "out-of-touch Washington people."

If anyone on this continent knows what the homefolks--by and large--are thinking, it's Washington's self-preserving, poll-embracing politicos. They'll happily shift with any state or district breeze, and of course their pollsters' fingers are always in the air.

Lack of awareness isn't the problem. In fact an excess of awareness is more like it. With profound local prejudices have come profoundly unhelpful red-state pols, mucking up all within reach.

If you really want to speak for me, Chuck, please give the anarchic goons my undying antipathy.

 

Maybe now

Turning from defense to offense, and from comments on policy to comments on style, I very much endorse this anonymous Democratic strategist's criticism of the White House's confused, confusing, and even disheveled midterm-elections approach to that old political bugaboo of "messaging":  

"[The president] has to make the case for our agenda," said one Democratic strategist closely monitoring Obama’s effect on the campaign trail. The White House, the strategist said, launches an effort, makes "the case for a week and then moves on as if the case has been made. His opponents make the case against him--and against the government--every single day."

Mine is an old and by now tedious complaint, which, if you're a regular reader, you know well: the White House's political operation sucks. To me, this has been obvious for nearly two years; almost immediately after Obama's reelection it became strikingly evident that congressional Republicans and their media hatchets were going to go after the president like Emilio Barzini after Vito Corleone. They quite soon displayed not the scantiest suggestion of any course correction. The scenery was going to get bloody, no doubt about it, and yet the White House debated tax policy with these thugs and co-negotiated an immigration bill that was destined for nowhere.

Only recently has the president morphed, on occasion, into Michael. It is demonstrably untrue that Obama hasn't the stylistic wherewithal or political temperament to go and stay on the attack, as many of his defenders argue (That's not his style, they quite literally say, again and again). Any review of his 2008 and 2012 campaigns puts a .38 to that argument toot sweet. It is, or at least can be, his style with seeming ease. But with those two campaign exceptions, his attacks have been sporadic to the point of incoherence.

Perhaps now that his ill-timed vacation is at an end, he'll get serious. Yet I have thought that before, only to be disappointed.

 

Cornel West's Thomas Frank interview: really not much more than pathetic

I won't make too much of Thomas Frank's description of Cornel West as "a man who deals in penetrating analyses of current events," since West himself, in a weirdly compelling interview with Frank, nullifies the interviewer's assessment right off the bat:

The thing is [candidate Obama] posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair.

West's critical survey transcends the sweet innocence of contemporary political ignorance. His is instead a masturbatory progressivism aimed at sadomasochistic voyeurs and wrapped in a deeply self-conscious malevolence. From his opening sentence--candidate Obama "posed as a progressive"--one appreciates the strategic deceit to come, since of course candidate Obama posed as no such thing. From his debutantish national convention speech of 2004 to his 2009 inauguration, Barack Obama made clear his rejection of narrowing labels and confining ideologies. He embraced only one ism--that of the philosopher William James' ultimate repudiation of all other isms: pragmatism. This, West knows as a philosopher himself; and yet this, West conceals and distorts.

Compounding his intellectual transgression, West goes on to lament that Obama has failed to live up to the political tradition of FDR and Lincoln. Which was? You got it: a political pragmatism that infuriated the more ideological camps. This, West also knows, or at least as a public intellectual he damn well should.

By FDR and Lincoln's pragmatism I mean their policies--not their personal styles, which, naturally, were idiosyncratically unique to both men. As evidenced by the latter's slow-walking of emancipation to the former's impeccably conservative First New Deal, both presidents aimed with great caution at the politically possible and least disruptive. Such was Obama's intent in the policies--from a delicate approach to Wall Street to refraining from war-crime prosecutions--that West denounces. One can honorably dissent from those policies, but one cannot honorably insist that they violated some sort of lost Rooseveltian-Lincolnesque political standard--not, anyway, if one knows much of anything at all about American political history, which I assume the public intellectual in question does.

Questionable. That seems to most charitably define West's critique of the Obama administration. A less gracious definition entails a deceptive pomposity playing to a gullible progressive crowd. But that's OK. FDR and Lincoln suffered from the selfsame kind of insufferable loudmouths.

 

Obama, and golf, and politics

I have already bemoaned the godawful p.r. of the president's attendance at swanky fundraisers throughout this crisis-laden summer of '14, so it should come as no surprise that I'm not altogether placid about the timing of some of his golf games. The media uproar has stretched unabated since Wednesday's offending tee, and on it shall go tomorrow, since this morning Maureen Dowd carves a few more divots in Obama's hide. Raw meat for another round.

Dowd's whimsical assault is also no surprise, of course. It's what she does. She generally gives not a fig about the merits of her snark; she knows only the Kantian, snark-thing-in-itself. But it's fresh material for today's and tomorrow's purportedly somber political talk shows, because it's morally outraged snark--even borderline Tartuffian, you might say, because of its morbid morality. Which is why I don't trust it. However that's neither here nor there. The media will eat it up.

My disgust lies more on the pragmatic side. To wit, the White House's political operation continues to perplex. Here it is, only two full months away from those desperate midterms--midterms in which the president's approval rating is a critical component of Democratic turnout--and the WH's political team allows a (or rather another) perfectly avoidable p.r. disaster to unfold.

I, for one, may be publicly resigned to the very real prospect of a victorious GOP in November. But this Democratic president shouldn't be. Nonetheless that's what the WH's indifference to bad p.r. signals: political indifference.  

I don't get it. By now the WH knows that it cannot, in fact, reinvent the game of politics as some sort of postpartisan, technocratic hoedown. Yet it still behaves as though it can--as though unpleasant p.r. has no pragmatically compounding consequences, as though the media circus is politically immaterial, and as though the electorate, deep down, is as down to earth as the WH is. It just isn't so. There's still a game to be played, and it's not that of golf.

 

The expectations game for Obama is getting a bit wild--and confusing

Ruth Marcus has written another of those "Guess the thesis" columns so common to the unceasing demands of the insight industry. I don't blame her as much as I blame the demands. 

On the surface, her thesis at first seems clear (if not obvious) enough: President Obama's historical legacy will look better when it's, well, historical. She reviews his major first-term achievements--this is called "fleshing out" one's argument, which generally entails, as it does in Marcus' column, a bland, word-chewing, somniferous repetition of items already well known by readers--all of which is meant as a setup for that sensational moment of insight, which Marcus eagerly and tantalizingly previews in her opening hook:     

Yet events of the past few months--specifically, the rise of the Islamic State and the accompanying specter of a renewed terror threat to the United States--have raised the alarming prospect of a legacy even more dismal than suggested by the current grim poll numbers.

Here, one races to add one's own "yet": a sitting president's grim poll numbers don't suggest his historical legacy (Bush Sr. proved the rule, which Bush Jr. is also proving by its exception).

At any rate, Marcus teeters betwixt a "disappointing presidency" thesis and that of history's more objective--and thus more favorable--judgment, only to announce her "biggest disappointment" (which throws her back into the Disappointment School) and "the biggest threat ... to his legacy," which is that of foreign policy. She then plays the counterfactual game (see: word-chewing), which she also concedes is utterly pointless:

It is impossible not to wonder whether a more experienced hand in the Oval Office might have done a better job trying to manage this difficult situation. The what-ifs are legion: What if Obama hadn’t been so eager to remove the last U.S. troops from Iraq and had secured an agreement to keep some in place? What if Obama had armed the more moderate Syrian rebels?

This will remain unknowable. What’s known is this: The central focus of Obama’s remaining time in office must be figuring out how to eradicate this menace.

Which, conspicuously, cannot be done. Organized crime, fanaticism, insurgency, terrorism--call ISIS what you will, it is but the most recent manifestation of them all--are as old as organized religion and politics. The expectation that one man, one U.S. president, can "eradicate" an ancient and perpetual plague and only thereby protect his legacy is, at best, foolish. Ruth Marcus has to know that. So, after reading her column, one is left wondering: What did she just say?

 

A GOP Senate: a happy fatalistic view

The Monkey Cage has shifted the basis for its Senate forecast from a "statistical model"--"that is, expectations based on factors like presidential approval, state partisanship, incumbency, etc."--to an emphasis on polling, which has reduced its handicapping of a GOP Senate by a remarkable 23 points.

Before you take much comfort in that, be it known that the Monkey Cage's reduced odds for a GOP Senate are now at 63 percent, which is forbiddingly close to the (NYT) Upshot's odds-making of 61 percent, up from 54. On August 4, his most recent gaze into November, Nate Silver predicted "the most likely outcome involves the Republicans winning about the six seats they need to take over the Senate, give or take a couple."

I shall once again note that a two-chamber Republican Congress during Obama's final two years should unsurprisingly make for a boffo Democratic comeback. Only one certainty haunts the modern GOP: It always overreaches. (In fact Mitch McConnell is already promising to do just that.) Its base always and absolutely demands a tightening of the rack, because of, you know, THAT MAN in the White House. And because no coherent strategy for, you know, actual governing is left in Republicans' playbook, they deliver. The party now exists only for politics, and those politics are suicidal.

The Monkey Cage has its prediction, and the Upshot and Silver have theirs, so here's mine: A 114th Republican Congress will spell the effective end of the Republican Party. So see? Perhaps things aren't so bad.

 

From hawks, a magnificent assumption

Eli Lake says the Obama administration is now "signaling" a whole new war against ISIS, a claim he largely bases on JCS Chairman Martin Dempsey's words yesterday: "[ISIS] will have to be addressed on both sides of what is at this point a nonexistent border. That will come when we have a coalition that takes on the task of defeating ISIS over time."

With that statement, Lake takes some considerable liberty: "But there is little question that if such a coalition is to take shape, the United States will have to lead it."

Ultimately, any coalition's defeat of ISIS will mean that coalition's deployment of ground troops, since air power can only do so much. And while Lake can perhaps imagine President Obama committing the U.S. to leading a ground coalition, I can't. 

The administration's strongest "signal" is, it seems to me, not that of Dempsey's on Thursday (which Lake has juiced), but that of Obama's on Wednesday:

The people of Iraq, who with our support are taking the fight to ISIL, must continue coming together to expel these terrorists from their community.... From governments and peoples across the Middle East, there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer so that it does not spread.

I could be wrong (which has to be the silliest, most needless disclaimer ever), but Obama's signal seems pretty damn clear: Yes this is a coalition fight, but in terms of ground-warring it's their coalition fight, not ours.