PMC Commentary

I like Francis

If Pope Francis keeps this up, I'm in mortal peril of getting religion next year … or, well, maybe sometime:

"Inequality is the root of social evil," Francis tweeted in March, after months earlier slamming "trickle-down" economics as a "crude and naïve" theory….

Francis will [also] issue an edict urging the world's 1.2 billion Catholics to do what they can to fight climate change.


Francis' exhortations are both humane and perfectly reasonable, so naturally American conservatives are both outraged and indignant.

"He's modeling the church as a place for open disagreement," said Vincent J. Miller, who chairs the University of Dayton's Catholic theology program. "In that sense, one of the most important changes he's making is that conservative politicians are now openly disagreeing with him."

Openly and harshly disagreeing with him. Sen. Rubio has framed the pope's Cuba policy as anti-democratic, Rep. Diaz-Balart has pretty much pegged Francis as a Castro-chumming "oppressor," and the U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC's director is running his mouth about papal influence on U.S. policy like a 1960 Southern Baptist. One can just imagine what they'll say when the pope reveals that God's atmosphere is out of his His hands, and in ours.

It's (almost) enough to make me want to attend mass, and perhaps say a prayer for the pope. Not only do American conservatives not see "the church as a place for open disagreement," for 30 years they've swaggered and bullied as though the political arena is no place for disagreement, either.

Odd, is it not, that conservatives have become absolutists, while the vicar of the Ultimate Absolute prefers to open the floor for debate.

 

The not-so-mysterious problem that was Scalise

From the New Orleans Advocate's Stephanie Grace:

This is what I remember about the first time I met Steve Scalise nearly 20 years ago: He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage.

I was a new reporter covering Jefferson Parish, and Scalise, now the majority whip in the U.S. House of Representatives, was just starting out in the Louisiana Legislature (I’m going from memory, but the exchange obviously stuck with me). It would be several years before I would fully decode just what he meant by the sentiment.

I don't wish to be unkind, but, Stephanie, several years?

If I ever met an Italian-American pol who told me he was like Benito Mussolini without the baggage, I do believe even my newly sprouted journalistic antennae would stiffen on the spot. That's not to say my instant "decoding" would be accurate, just that a few dozen follow-up questions would, uh, seem in order. Was the politician joking? Was that his weird sense of humor? Was Mussolini, in his eyes, actually a hail fellow well met who only got carried away, rather impolitically? That sort of thing.

Incidentally, Speaker Boehner, as of yesterday, insisted that Steve Scalise "has my full confidence as our whip." Too bad Boehner was lying. My guess is that Scalise's crimson parachute is already packed. 

 

Yes, but 2014 lacked 1942's excuse

This morning, a bit of what's become political trivia.

Politico's Jonathan Topaz reminds us that "Turnout in the [2014] midterm elections was at its lowest level since 1942, a major point of concern for Democrats." That we knew. 2014's miserable turnout — the worst in 72 years — was, last month, a regular journalistic feature of political analysis. What I don't recall reading in the press was why turnout in the 1942 midterms was so ghastly, and thus so devastating for congressional Democrats. The answer to that question lies, paradoxically, in one of the Democratic president's greatest successes: our invasion of Northwest Africa, known as Operation Torch.

It was the kind of offensive military operation that American voters had clamored for. We seemed stuck. With the exception of Midway, the Japanese were dominating the Pacific Theatre, while Hitler was pounding the Brits in North Africa and still threatening to crush Russia. Meanwhile, we sat — or at least we seemed to be sitting, which tanked Roosevelt's popularity. But what voters didn't know was that FDR, contra his top military advisers and secretary of war's urgings, had been planning Operation Torch, which would catch Rommel in North Africa, and thus Hitler in Europe, completely off guard.

Here's the thing, though. The secret operation of Torch was scheduled to materialize just days after the midterm elections. Roosevelt could have moved its execution up — a mere one week would have done it — but the military asked for more time. The president granted it, knowing he'd win the African offense but squander his domestic, political opportunities. He suspected he'd get pummeled in both House and Senate elections, and indeed he was — because disappointed Democrats stayed home.

FDR's was a gutsy, visionary and self-sacrificial decision — just one of the reasons, in case you've been wondering, he sits atop this site.

 

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A Webb untangled, I think

I'm biased, but this, from CNN, satisfies me:

"Adding up numbers across several years for a sensational headline doesn't tell the story," [a Webb campaign] spokesperson said. "The activities of the PAC increased in 2014 when Jim Webb decided to re-enter the political discussions of our country."

The spokesperson added that the payments were "well within the law" and "much lower" than typical compensation.

Webb's daughter, Amy Webb Hogan, drew most of the disbursements, charging her father's PAC $24,000 in 2014 alone for "administrative consulting services," which included administering, managing and designing the PAC's website, Sen. Webb's personal site and creating the Webb2016 website….

Sen. Webb's wife, Hong Le Webb, made $13,800 in 2014 for "website services," which included "vetting design consultants, negotiating contracts and content management," Webb's spokesperson said. She also received more than $1,000 in travel reimbursements from the PAC.

Sen. Webb was also reimbursed $4,100 in travel expenses tied to an August 2014 trip to Iowa to campaign for candidates and meet prospective key supporters in the key primary state.

Based on this information, I'd wager the story will blow over. Webb's political operation is damn near invisible compared to the sprawling Clinton campaign, and as such it understandably depends on the labor of family members. I might have preferred outside consultants and web designers and the like to assist Webb in gearing up, but as his spokesperson contended, the cash available for such services was "much lower" than prevailing industry wages would have demanded. What else, then, was he to do?

Webb's comparative invisibility is, for now, his best friend. He's not yet big enough to make an inviting journalistic target. And by the time he is big enough (I hope), this will be an old story.

 

Reader traffic between Christmas and New Year's is like a 10-day extension of Sunday's wee hours. So, there's that. Plus, my daughter is out of school this week. These items add up to only one sensible conclusion: I should stop reading political news, and she and I should go out and play. I hope you can do the same. See you later.

 

A tangled Webb already?

Oh, Christ. Business Insider:

Federal Election Commission reports show that [Jim Webb's Born Fighting PAC], which received nearly $1 million in donations, gave a relatively small portion of that money to political candidates and groups. At the same time, nearly 10% of the contributions received by the PAC went to Webb's family….

Business Insider contacted Webb's staff about this story Monday afternoon and was asked for a list of specific questions. His staff has not yet responded with answers.

When they come, I hope they're good ones. The Democratic presidential race needs Webb, and it needs him desperately. I grant you that much of my opinion comes from a gut feeling. I'm convinced that Hillary Clinton's political stumbling will rival Mitt Romney's of 2012, and thereby surrender to her Republican opponent some easy points. But there's an empirical record, too, to confirm my guts: her wildly mismanaged '08 campaign; her gross mishandling of HillaryCare; her rocky book tour. A simple book tour! for heaven's sake.

The Webb story may be little more than a sensationalistic scoop without benefit of underlying sensation. I can't yet find updates to the story, but I'll keep looking, and will pass them along.

 

A couple housekeeping notes

A belated housekeeping note before the new year.

I've been meaning to remind readers that I do read the comments. Some time ago, one disappointed commenter mused that others' reflections seemed to go (as I recall) "into a void," because I remained silent to each. Perhaps I was ignoring readers' remarks? I assure you that is not the case. I read them all — although on this site, for some reason, "all" means somewhat sparse — and I find them nearly all remarkable in their perceptiveness. I especially welcome, and enjoy, intelligent disagreement.

I choose not to respond, however, only because of my editorial philosophy, which holds that the comment section is, rightfully, for commenters — and commenters alone. I've already had my say, and it seems to me rather rude to take another whack in reply. Whenever I'm so substantively shaky or incoherent as to make my case unpersuasively the first time around, I figure I should live with the consequences. And whenever I find criticism flawed, I figure readers — perceptive as they are — will see the flaw as well, therefore there's no need for me to rub it in.

So, I beg you not to take my silence personally. Like Frasier Crane, I'm listening.

***

Oh, one other housekeeping note. The Facebook Like "interface," or whatever the frustrating thing is called, has been on the fritz for some time. Some "Likes" register on this site, and some do not. But from what I can tell, your "Like" does in fact register on FB. So if you're puzzled as to why the little FB bubble says "0" after you've liked a post — and thereby assisted me in my eternal pursuit of expanded readership — please know your "Like" has done its job. I think. And I thank you. Thanks as well to re-Tweeters.

 

The new, new, NEW GOP

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise admitted yesterday that in 2002, as a Louisiana state rep, he addressed a white-supremacist, Neo-Nazi, KKK-associated, David Duke-founded group known as EURO (the European-American Unity and Rights Organization). Scalise protests that he knew nothing of the organization or its ideology.

At the time, swirling amidst Scalise's professed ignorance, the New Orleans hotel hosting the racist gathering publicly acknowledged its mortification at having booked the confederate conference of dunces, an out-of-state minor-league baseball team in need of rooms knew enough of the group to avoid its venue, and EURO had already made national headlines for its assorted imbecilities.

One can believe whatever one wants to believe about Scalise's defense of know-nothingness, but one cannot deny the hilarity of the Washington Post's magnificent understatement: "The news [of Scalise having addressed a white-supremacist, Neo-Nazi, KKK-associated, David Duke-founded group] could complicate Republican efforts to project the sense of a fresh start for a resurgent, diversifying party."

Nearly as funny and equally unhelpful to Scalise's defense is the amicus brief uttered by Iowa's Rep. Steve King, who blathered to the Post that "Jesus dined with tax collectors and sinners. It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, it’s the sick." A lofty comparison indeed, however the point of King's parable is that Jesus knew he was dining with sinners (unless, of course, he was inadequately staffed).

Whatever. The 114th congressional party of robust values is off to a rather bumpy start. Its #3 man comes recommended by David Duke as a "nice guy," its Staten Island rep is an office-resigning felon, and its wannabe ass-grabbing inebriate from Texas, Rep. Blake Farenthold, is being sued for harassment.

Welcome to the "fresh" faces of the GOP.

(Hey, it's not the New Year yet. I can still afford to be hysterical.)

 

The Education of GIs—then

From the NYT's review of When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II, the best line I've read today: "[The author] seems to think that Is Sex Necessary? was some kind of self-help book and not a parody by James Thurber and E. B. White."

On a more serious note the reviewer identifies The Education of Henry Adams as popular fare among GIs. This surprised me — not because it's a bad book, far from it. It's a true classic, brimming with Emersonian Self-Reliance, peppered with Mugwumpish rodomontades against establishment incompetence and corruption, and blessed with such charming remembrances as Henry being led to school as a recalcitrant 5-year-old(?) by the quiet but stern hand of the very aged, former president John Adams. What surprised me is that GIs actually took to a weighty classic amid all the blood, mud, and terror.

I would have guessed Thurber, and for relief, virtually nothing but Thurber.

 

Jeb would lose by only an elephant's nose

Unintentionally funny. After detailing Jeb Bush's possibly smoother-than-once-imagined road to his party's presidential nomination, based on the latest CNN/ORC poll, CNN Politics ends with this:

Out of all of the seven head-to-head GOP match-ups with Clinton tested, Bush fares the best, trailing her by just 13 points.

By just 13 points.

On average, Romney trailed Obama by only 3 or 4 points throughout the general, and finished 64 Electoral College votes shy of his rather mandatory target.

Now obviously Bush's (or whoever's) gap will close somewhat as the presidential season goes into full bloom — and Lord knows Hillary's habitually impolitic, I-just-can't-help-myself utterances would help close it — but losing by only 64 EC votes would be among Jeb's greater challenges.

Parenthetically, CNN omitted Romney-cum-candidate from this latest poll, which, in my opinion, renders it pretty much useless. As you know, I'm betting on Romney to run, and Bush's early entry into the money race has likely increased the odds of an emergent Romney campaign — soon, as in early 2015 soon. And once Mitt is in, Jeb's in even deeper trouble.

 

A little less hysteria? I'll second that.

This morning both Krugman and Dionne conclude what has been a loud, tedious, and all-around politically exaggerated year with calls for a more moderate new one. Krugman, of course, assesses the expiring circus from an economic angle — which has an encouragingly positive slope, as long as we "avoid more self-inflicted [austerity] damage" — though at the root of the recovery's tardiness have been remorseless, fright-wigged pseudoconservative inanities about President Obama as a degenerate "job-killer," a Marxist "redistributionist," an "anti-business" radical, etc. etc. In a word, we've progressed economically despite all the political silliness, and Krugman's implicit hope is that this conspicuous progress will dampen said silliness.

Dionne, on the other hand, has watched the circus' ill-mannered antics from a more politico-cultural point of view. What's so enchanting about him is that his Catholic faith in redemption simply never gives up. "I am all for boisterous debate and tough political and philosophical competition. It’s how I make my living," he writes. "But our democratic system would be healthier if it … reserved the harshest invective for things that are genuinely monstrous." Alter Dionne's conditional "if" to a healthier democracy when we stop with the mountainous invectives over molehills, and you've the meat of Dionne's philosophical outlook.

Still, he notes, there's that eternal tug between light and polemical darkness:

The reaction to Obama is part of a larger difficulty that involves pretending we are philosophically far more divided than we are…. The boundaries on the left end of what’s permissible in the public debate have been pushed well toward the center. This makes the hysteria and hyperbole all the more incomprehensible.

Except it's not. Unacceptable, yes, but incomprehensible, no. On the right, a depraved, easily recognizable symmetry has been playing out for some time. Its leaders are led by their hysterical followers and the followers are, in turn, pragmatically led by even more hysterical and hyperbolic leaders. In brief, hysteria works — it's the one effective talisman against evil primary challenges.

No doubt we'd see the same symmetry on the left were it not for what Dionne sagely observes: The left, today, is the center. Which is another way of saying that the left is contemporary politics' genuine conservatism. "[E]ven people who call themselves socialists no longer claim to have an alternative to the market as the primary creator and distributor of goods and services," notes Dionne — just as most American leftists honor God, country, family and community. While the right has lost its soul in philosophically deracinated fits of extremism and hysteria, on the left a level-headed Burkean faith in tradition and institutions thrives.

Even so, I'll cop to some of what Dionne charges. In my own dismay against the right's radicalism, I too often paint a post-impressionist picture of what's actually a false American divide. Philosophically, we possess a greater unity than our politics reflect, in that many Republicans possess little idea of just how disastrously their party has derailed. What we lack in our unity is public enlightenment — a wider knowledge that Obamacare isn't the Devil's tool, that Keynesianism isn't Marxism, and that regulation of business evolved only out of natural capitalist animalism.

In other words, I'll try to do better next year in tamping my own hysteria — and here's a New Year's wish that President Obama does better in the arena of public enlightenment.

 

Rosenbaum and Amis on Hitler

I just watched, on C-Span, an hour-long discussion between writer Ron Rosenbaum and novelist Martin Amis on the meaning of, or "explanation" of, Hitler. It was an engrossing hour, as one might expect, but I confess an abiding ignorance. I detected the same in both Rosenbaum and Amis.

I'm not sure Hitler can ever be "explained." Amis came close in describing Der Führer as a "barely literate tramp" who failed at everything but "getting death up and running" — and as a unique mass murderer, in that Stalin's Ukrainian Terror of 1932-33, for instance, was understandable in terms of political ideology, whereas Hitler's Final Solution was, and remains, inexplicable as a whole. I think that's a fair comparative analysis; brutally pragmatic, but fair. Unfortunately, it leaves the phenomenon of Hitler impenetrable.

To some, the larger phenomenon of Nazism seems straightforward enough, which has always mystified me. I recall once having drinks with a professor friend — a Europeanist — and after discussing the political mechanics, so to speak, behind the rise of National Socialism, I remarked that its familiar narratives (to be found in Bullock, Taylor, Kershaw et al) failed to explain, to me, just how the hell Hitler pulled it off; how, that is, he managed to plunge one the world's greatest and most refined cultures into the basest of depravities. My friend responded, "What do you mean? It's all right there, one can trace it step by step."

True enough, yet in Hitlerism there was something — again, to me — that transcended the historically comprehensible. I hesitate to call it metaphysical, but still …

An hour later, I can no more "explain" Hitler than Rosenbaum or Amis could.

 

Update auf kaputen Computer

Many thanks to the readers who offered moral support, general commiseration and even technical advice in the wake of Friday's computer collapse. Thanks also to my daughter for her interim Lend-Lease policy regarding her MacBook, which, if you've a teenager, you know was no little sacrifice. God only knows the music videos she missed during my 36 hours of blitzcrapped siege.

Early in my time of technical woe I pondered the wisest course, and it came to me in a meditative flash: Fuck it.

Yes my old computer possessed years of accumulated links, notes, etc., and yes they could all be retrieved (probably), but there was something to be said not only for a fresh path and a clean slate, but for the liberating power of letting them go. Old notes gone, new thinking required, perhaps? Plus, I understand nothing of techno-gibberish, and to me my ignorance is bliss; even the thought of parleying with some unintelligible high priest of recovery and resurrection was most dispiriting. Furthermore, I had also decided to switch to a Mac someday, since the new and improved Windows, from what I had seen, is indeed new, but anything but improved.

So, with a burned-over credit card in hand I soldiered yesterday afternoon to the nearest Apple store and this morning I'm gazing at an iMac monitor the size of a multiplex screen -- i.e., their smallest one. I refused to fret over Friday's loss. Only for higher things shall I reserve my preternatural gift for such fretting. In short, Fuck it.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I didn't much feel like writing about politics this morning. That's why.

 

The paradox of censorship

This Saturday morning, a briefly noted paradox--or, rather, a paradox in question form: Why is it that two centuries of First Amendment artistic freedom can (or perhaps must) produce aesthetic garbage like The Interview, whereas Western civilization's greatest masterpieces -- singularly produced by Western civilization's greatest writer -- emerged under (or perhaps from) government censorship?

This is certainly not an original question or freshly observed paradox. But it does persist as a real puzzler.

Shakespeare was, perforce, always looking over his shoulder; he knew of his government's murder of Christopher Marlowe and its torture of Thomas Kyd, and it scarcely required a genius to say to himself, Methinks I'll be more careful, when it comes to powers that be.

Accordingly Shakespeare danced around his era's immensely obtrusive and potentially fatal religious disputes -- in his sociocultural works we detect no personal preferences, whether Protestant, Catholic, agnostic or atheist -- and in his dynastic plays he addressed the supremely delicate question of regicide, while somehow evading royal displeasure. Thuggish, bone-crushing censors lurked everywhere, and artistically Shakespeare responded to official censorship, well … let's say, with much prudence. And yet no artist ever wrote more brilliantly or profoundly on the "issues" of his day, as well as those of the ages.

All this, no doubt, was what Iago-like Harry Lime (Orson Welles) was getting at in his short, incisive Third Man oration: "[I]n Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love -- they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

This post is bound to be misread by a few, notwithstanding this protestation that I in no way endorse censorship. We are led to wonder, though, if at least some of Shakespeare's revealed genius was not a product of it.

 

Mein Computer ist kaput

I haven't been silent this afternoon. I've been silenced. My laptop--a tender 7 years of age--bit the staticky dust this morning. Sustained, even heroic efforts by a perfectly inept technician--me--have failed to revive it. Naturally I had nothing backed up; seven years of links, files, research notes, everything ... gone, all because I'm as piss-poor a manager as George W. Bush.

I'm using my daughter's computer (a Mac, which is alien to my Microsoft-embedded brain; for example to scroll down, I must scroll up) to write this brief but desperate missive. In the morning I shall attempt a more dispassionate post on something political. For now, disorientation reigns. Thank you, and good day. Mine stinks.