P.M. Carpenter

Yes, it's (sort of) official. Impeach Hillary!

Well, that didn't take long. From our friends at Special Operations Speaks PAC, an antsy email.

***

Fellow American,

Hillary Clinton must be impeached.

You read that right: Hillary Clinton must be impeached by the United States Congress.

This is the best way to reprimand Hillary Clinton for her lawless behavior as Secretary of State and prevent her from holding "any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States" per Art. I, Sect. 3, Cl. 7 of the Constitution.

Congress can – and must – impeach and disqualify Hillary Clinton from entering any and all offices in the United States.

The fact that Hillary is out of public office does not prohibit Congress from successfully exercising its constitutional power to impeach her for her actions as U.S. Secretary of State.

***

I'm not a jurist, and more to the thankful point I'm not a pseudoconservative crackpot, so I can't speak with authority to Special Operations Speaks' claim that Hillary can be retroactively impeached and so disqualified from future office. Nor am I inclined to think that SOS PAC holds the slightest sway with John Boehner. What its email does reveal, however, is both a future of many very entertaining missives in my inbox from the far right, as well as the camel's nose of what President Clinton will have to contend with for several miserable years.

 

About that whole dead GOP thing

A reader forwards Slate's Jamelle Bouie's pushback on Daniel McGraw's Politico piece on the demographic death of the Republican Party and therefore, by vague extension, the party itself — a case, by the way, that I have made far more aggressively than McGraw did. Responds Bouie:

What happens when [older] voters disappear from national electorates, as they will over the next decade? And what happens if the next cohort of Republican voters—their children and grandchildren—have more liberal views on social issues and the economy? Does movement conservatism survive as the dominant ideological force in the Republican coalition? Or will new Republican voters—from young white transplants to states like Arizona to upwardly mobile Latino immigrants in Georgia—adopt and change conservatism to meet their needs?

Your best bet is for the latter. Any Republican Party that drives in 2024 or 2028 is one that looks substantially different from the one that exists today. No, that doesn’t mean it’s a diet version of the Democrats, but that it’s responding to a different set of voters than it has now. In all likelihood, it’s reconciled itself to the reality of the welfare state and works to alter its shape and incentives. It’s more permissive on public morality—tolerant of same-sex marriage, for instance—but still a home for more traditional voters who oppose abortion and are uncomfortable with rapid social change.

Demographic trends and social movements can fracture coalitions and create new ones. But—barring catastrophe—the parties survive. The future will have a Republican Party, and it will be conservative. It just won’t be the same kind of Republican Party with the same kind of conservatism.

This may seem contradictory of me, but I'm inclined to agree with Bouie's thrust. Where we differ, I suppose, is on the matter of definition; i.e., the Republican Party might well die, so long live the Republican Party. For if it survives, it will be as different from the ghastly abomination it is today as the Democratic Party is from the ghastly abomination of its slavocracy, Jim Crow, states' rights and small-government days.

Some modern conservatives revel in tying the old Democracy to the contemporary Democratic Party, but no sober observer sees the party of James Buchanan or Ben Tillman or Grover Cleveland as the party of Barack Obama. Not even close. They are entirely separate breeds of vastly differentiated ideological outlooks, related in name only. Likewise, in 10 or 20 years Democrats will revel in tying their radically revamped opposition to the W.s, Jindals, Cruzes and Gohmerts of today. It'll be a good shtick for the dipsomaniacally partisans of the future Democratic Party, but that's about it — a shtick.

Where Bouie and I would also disagree is that tomorrow's GOP (again, assuming it's human enough to evolve) most likely will be but a diet version of the Democratic Party, which is an essentially conservative body that's not about to let loose of the center. All Republicans can do is ape Democratic ideology, while adding some rather insignificant twists here and there. And around those insignificances will revolve the whooping and hollering of tomorrow's traditional partisans. The real opening and the real, fundamental differences, I suspect, will lie on the left.

 

Charles Blow, on black thugs and white outlaws

Charles Blow has a piece on loaded language which I cannot agree with more, or less. His starting point is the largely lily-white biker-gang violence of last weekend, which he generically relates to the preceding violence of Baltimore and Ferguson, all black. "There is something about black violence that makes some people leap to a racialized conclusion that the violence is about our fraying culture — that it’s not simply about people behaving violently," writes Blow, "but about the entirety of the environment from which they sprang. Black violence stops being about individual people, and starts being about the whole of a people."

Would any fair-minded reader be compelled by disagreement with that? With every black ghetto's black riot (of which there are shockingly few … considering) we get the usual platoon of usually white "character" roadsters on cable TV — the bourgeois Burkeans decrying the breakdown of the black family; it's about missing fathers and welfare mothers and internal-institutional collapse, all of which is inherently "colored." Black "thuggishness" is both the symptom and result of this cultural breakdown.

WSJ-reading aristocrats and middle-class moralists are rarely so happy as when they can look down their aquiline noses at "those people." Poor white violence, Wall Street thievery and all manner of white-collar malefactions say nothing of whites as a "people," but a few hundred black thugs bespeak a racial problem — racial failings and inadequacies.

Against this, Blow protests in question form: "Does the violence in Waco say something universal about white culture or Hispanic culture? Even the question sounds ridiculous." Which it does. Yet it's here, it seems to me, that Charles Blow derails: "President Obama and the mayor of Baltimore were quick to use the loaded label 'thugs' for the violent rioters there. That the authorities have not used that word to describe the far worse violence in Waco makes the contrast all the more glaring."

Somehow, according to Blow, the thuggish whites of Waco are let off the linguistic hook in society's characterization of them not as thugs but as "outlaws" and "bikers," which, "while pejorative to some, still evoke a certain romanticism in the American ethos. They conjure an image of individualism, adventure and virility."

Do they? To me, and I should think to millions of others, they conjure images of ignorance, organized crime, wanton brutality, misplaced masculinity, arrested minds, utterly marginalized lives, grime and vomit, not to mention really poor taste in all things sartorial.

To call them mere thugs would be a terminological upgrading, it further seems. And to say that only "some" of us — which is to suggest, a dismissible minority — hear the term "outlaw bikers" as a "pejorative" is to imply the same sort of misguided generalization that Blow condemns.

There's no doubt that Corleoneism has been romanticized in American culture, yet much of that romance entails ways in which its spidery Michaels have webbed their way into the broader culture itself (our businesses, our politics, Catholicism, even our philanthropies). We rarely if ever refer to these thugs as outlaws. Those Waco-type bikers, on the other hand, are proper outlaws in the literal sense of the word — they are outside the law in every way; indeed, they are altogether outside their racial communities, be they white or Hispanic. They are as much outcommunitarians and cultural, self-willed outcasts as they are outlaws.

Thus if violent bikers are outside every culture and every law and every community but their own, how could idiosyncratic references to them be improper?

 

What clever reverse psychologists these editorial writers are

The Newark Star Ledger proves Chris Christie's point!

"New Jersey is in such rotten shape after his six years in office" possibly because of its "rotten job market" or the governor's "high property taxes" or his "crumbling transit system" or his "broken promise on pensions" or his "private jets" or even "the Bridgegate indictments," writes the paper's editorial board.

And so "It's no wonder that New Jersey is screaming a warning to the rest of the country": "God forbid" he should leave our state, for we need him now more than ever.

That, anyway, is how I read the Star Ledger's editorial, as I'm sure you do, and as Gov. Christie will.

 

Who will rid us of this troublesome creep? Alan Grayson and the Temple of Senate Doom.

A commenter's recommendation (thank you) of Ron Fournier's latest Fournierite suffering, "I Don't Believe Hillary Clinton," led me to a far grimmer and masochistically funnier National Journal piece, "Democrats Have a Todd Akin Problem," by Josh Kraushaar.

Rep. Alan Grayson is the Todd Akin of the Democrats — except that he's louder, more outrageous, and has millions of his own fortune to spend however he sees fit. And Democrats are nervously expecting the former trial lawyer to enter the pivotal Senate race, challenge the candidate [Rep. Patrick Murphy] party leaders view as more electable, and raise holy hell in the process.

For Democrats, what makes his candidacy more threatening than amusing is the sheer number of ways his candidacy could directly cost them control of the Senate. Winning Florida is crucial to Democrats' hopes of taking back the majority; without it, the path to winning at least the four seats necessary becomes much more difficult.

Kraushaar counts the "number of ways" Grayson could cost Dems control of the Senate, but the principal way is simply for Alan Grayson to be Alan Grayson. As I myself have recounted for the past five years, and more recently just six days ago, the man is a "boorish contrivance" and "grotesque opportunist" with "distinct glimmers of pubescent evil"; he is "crude, bullying and thuggish."

Steve Schale, a Democratic strategist and former Obama operative, looks at the Problem of Grayson more pragmatically: "If you're Russ Feingold, it would be a distraction. Every day any Democratic campaign could have to respond to what a guy in Florida said, it's a problem. There's a reason why Republicans want Alan Grayson [to] run for the U.S. Senate."

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have it about right: attack and counterattack pseudoconservative humbug like a honey badger, but in doing so, retain some dignity. Alan Grayson and his "devoted fans on the progressive wing," as Kraushaar describes them, have it precisely wrong: attack and counterattack like a fucking lunatic.

 

Modern graft, generally honest

From Milbank, some good advice:

If [Hillary Clinton] really thinks money is corrupting politics, she can take concrete steps right now. She could pledge to return immediately to the public finance system and call on pro-Clinton super PACs to cease and desist — if her Republican opponents will do the same. The Republicans won’t, of course, but then Clinton would have gained the moral high ground she now lacks.

Milbank also believes that Hillary, as president, might "find some Republican support for legislation to restore public financing of elections." As President Obama would say — Seriously?

Hillary will be lucky if the Republican House doesn't shut down the government on January 21 and then blow up the economy with a debt-ceiling thump the day after (or whenever we reach the idiotically mandated thing). Compared to what's headed for Hillary, Obama's relations with House Republicans will look like Don Draper's harmonious Coke ad. The madness will not abate, I'd wager; it will only grow and exponentially flourish. And Republicans won't wait till the night of her inauguration to plot their malignant intransigence. Indeed, I suspect they're already meeting.

As for Clinton & Competitors' honest graft, Brooks Jackson titled his volume thus in 1988, but it could have been written and titled nearly a century earlier. Saideth George Washington Plunkitt in 1905: "I've made a big fortune out of the game, and I'm gettin' richer every day, but I've not gone in for dishonest graft…. There's honest graft, and I'm an example of how it works." And so it has gone.

Milbank is right. The money racket stinks so bad, even Hillary's appearance of trying to clean up the sewer would be progress.

 

I was a teenage Bandido (not really)

From the NYT op-ed page, this is some pretty good parody:

This [Waco] tragedy stemmed from the criminal actions of a fringe minority that does not represent the democracy-loving values of the majority of tolerant biker gangs devoted to freedom, denim, mutual understanding and leather accessories.

As a moderate biker gang member, who has never met the suspects, visited Texas or even seen the TV series "Twin Peaks," I offer a full-throated condemnation of, and apology for, their violent acts….

In a familiar pattern of rhetorical retribution, people are demanding: When will moderate bikers take responsibility for crimes committed by these violent extremists?

The op-ed's author, Wajahat Ali, a playwright and Al Jazeera journalist, goes on to amusingly assault the Republican presidential field, Fox News, and in general our culture of hysteria:

[P]otential presidential candidates cynically exploit the issue with anti-biker memes like "biker gangs are at war with the West" and "the biker gang world needs a reformation." One prominent governor has accused bikers of belonging to "communities of people that don’t want to integrate" into America, while cable TV news pundits warn of "no go zones" in towns and cities allegedly infiltrated by radical biker gangs.

Ali concludes by urging "peace-loving citizens to reject this worrying trend of Bikerphobic bigotry" and promotes the social-media usage of "#notmybikergang." His funniest line: "The liberal mayor of New York has invited local chapters of Hells Angels for a beer-and-prayer meeting this weekend."

Which reminds me … If you've not read H.S. Thompson's Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, you may want to. This mid-1960s work launched Thompson's national fame, which held up with good cause until its strange, terrible, and incoherent end. It's a riveting read, an exploration into the psychosociological pathologies of horrifically violent young men who could also be eerily cordial to outsiders such as Thompson — until they weren't, which Thompson discovered the hard way.

I've never known any hardcore bikers the way Thompson did, or for that matter, not even the more sophisticated members of a #notmybikergang. As a rebellious teenager I did, however, consort with some rather rough types, some of whom had been in and out of reform schools and state penitentiaries virtually all their lives, which was a way of life in their impoverished community. Crime's acceptance was best reflected by my best friend's casual remark at a late-night poker game. I had said to my friend, "Hey, where's your brother? We could use another hand." My friend replied, "Oh, he's robbing a warehouse. He'll be a little late." Everyone in the room shrugged. The brother was merely "at work," at the office, so to speak.

About a year later the brother was dead. And about a year after that, my best friend was shot and killed in a bar dispute. I never enjoyed the culture's violence — in fact I never understood it; the whole macho thing — but as a permanently expelled would-be high-schooler I admired the added "freedom" from what I'd soon be calling "bourgeois values" and I positively reveled in the culture's way of telling authority what to do with it.

I have, as you've probably noticed, somewhat mellowed since then. And I remain thankful that I never indulged in Thompson's extreme psychosociological research. I might not have survived it, and I would have missed Ali's parody this morning.

 

Bruce Bartlett's whopper of a Fox News assessment

Bruce Bartlett's 18-page pdf report, "How Fox News Changed American Media and Political Dynamics," is an avalanche of interesting reading. But if you haven't the time, here are some highlights:

*Fox’s bias is so bad that even some conservatives can’t stomach it. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, one of the most conservative Republicans in Congress, has said [in 2014], "There are certain shows on Fox I can’t watch. Because they’re totally not fair and totally not balanced."

*"One of the real changes that comes when you start running for President – as opposed to being an analyst on Fox – is I have to actually know what I'm talking about." [Newt Gingrich, 2012]

*Fox has an "enemies list" of people who are not permitted to be interviewed on the network. All proposed guests are vetted by senior executives and banned if they have criticized Fox or hold views likely to rile its conservative viewers. Media reporter Jim Romenesko has documented many cases of Fox blacklisting. I know for a fact that I am banned from Fox and blogger Andrew Sullivan and others have told me that they are, too.

*Those who watched Fox News almost daily [in 2010] were significantly more likely than those who never watched it to believe that:
• most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (8 points more likely)
• most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
• the economy is getting worse (26 points)
• most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
• the stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
• their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)….

*A 2015 Farleigh Dickinson national poll again found that Republicans and Fox viewers were more likely to be misinformed about factual matters relating to public policy such as the false beliefs that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq….

*Republican voters get so much of their news from Fox, which cheerleads whatever their candidates are doing or saying, that they suffer from wishful thinking and fail to see that they may not be doing as well as they imagine, or that their ideas are not connecting outside the narrow party base.

*"Fox has now become a problem for the Republican Party because it keeps a far right base mobilized and angry, making it hard for the party to move to the center or increase its appeal, as it must do to remain electorally competitive" [a Columbia University political scientist].

The quickest though broadest take from all this? Hysteria, pandering and narrowing the mind is never a good idea or intelligent tactic — in politics, yes, occasionally, but not in news, not in commentary, and most certainly not in the long run. Fox is dying just as surely as its party is.  

 

Hillary takes questions

Flash! Breaking News! Just In!

Today, Hillary Clinton took questions from the press.

One of them she deftly avoided. "Do you believe the world is better off without Saddam Hussein?" That's a minefield, and she danced around it by answering an unasked question. (She said only, again, that her Iraq war vote was a mistake.)

But the minefield remains intact, since a yes answer would re-situate her among the Iraq-happy neocons, and a no answer would align her with the Baathists. Either would be played up by the opposition with almost equal joy.

So how does one answer such a question? One doesn't.

 

The Bandidos: One state down - who's next?

For two weeks my wife and I once hosted a couple of teenage Japanese cultural-exchange students, one of whom feared for his life upon even the thought of venturing outdoors (his parents insisted he come). The poor lad had witnessed United States gun violence on Japanese TV for some years, and he came convinced that flying lead was just around every American corner. He was terrified — visibly terrified. When he left, he was still convinced that he had barely escaped a near certain death in these here united states.

The lad was a victim of cultural generalizations. I felt sorry for him then (his co-traveler, by the way, was one of the most adventurous, fearless boys I have ever encountered), and I have often wondered if he ever overcame his susceptibility to media-generated hysteria.

I similarly wonder how many, say, Alaskans — already spooked, like our neurasthenic Japanese teenager, over the Jade Helm rampage! that hysterically swept up 27 million of our bordered, fellow Americans — are now convinced that the state of Texas is, as an AFT agent just said on CNN, "dominated by the Bandidos."

I understand what he meant, but let's face it: This is cable nip and click bait, which of course is why I hypocritically put "Bandidos" in the searchable title. My next move, were I a true wizard of blogospheric mass-marketing, otherwise known as mass-pandering, would be to scream: Well dang piss on the fire and summon Jesus and grab the kids and shield the womenfolk of Texas, for the entire state is being overrun by bearded, bald-headed, pistol-packin' morons on motorized bicycles!

I once knew at least one Japanese boy who was intellectually innocent enough to fall for that sort of thing. But we also know that's not only a foreign phenomenon.

 

It's not cockiness. It's numbers. And a man named Jeb.

A Politico contributor, Daniel McGraw, takes a look at some somewhat sepulchral demographics:

There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all. The party’s core is dying off by the day.

The only question — and its a feeble one — is, Can the GOP somehow replace enough of its dead voters with healthier but ideologically arrested ones? Alas, that's not only a feeble question, it's one of the trickster sort. It's already answered in McGraw's opening.

Youthful voters are alienated daily by GOPers, of both the congressional and wannabe presidential species, who must cater to those on one of their last few breaths, since they are the ones who vote in GOP primaries. The party's once-popular, age-divided wedge issues have caught up to it, and they're now killing it.

What's more, merely staying even in the voter count would be of no benefit to the GOP in its White House pursuit. The Electoral map is aggressively blue; it would take one helluva splash of red to turn it otherwise.

And some readers have wondered why I so casually dismiss a competitive race in 2016?

Republicans' only hope is or was or might be twofold: That Hillary conduct a repeat of the world's second-most stinky campaign (Mitt Romney retains the title), and the nomination of anybody but Rubio, Walker, Huckabee et alia, meaning Jeb Bush. Hillary's sagacious silence is reducing the odds of the first, however, and Jeb is self-destructing by the hour. In fact, his most lethal self-destruction began on January 20, 2001.

Jeb Bush is nonetheless the best they've got. Is anyone still puzzled by my dismissiveness?

 

For the GOP, there is always that untapped reservoir of …

Somewhere, according to CNN/ORC polling, there are 3 million American adults who have never heard of Hillary Clinton.

The poll has an error margin of 3 percent, so there may be as few as 2,910,000, or there may be as many as 3,090,000. The perfectly benighted among us may only be the sixth generation of imbeciles about whom Justice Holmes once wrote, in which case, no offense is intended by yours truly. Or, they may be reality TV addicts hooked on Cheetos and self-abuse as well, in which case, every offense is meant.

But just know this: One of every 100 adult Americans you see each day, on the road or sidewalk or in the grocery store, has never heard of Hillary Clinton — a woman reasonably well known in Norilsk, Siberia and in the deepest dark of the Amazon jungle.

That, my fellow Americans, leaves 99 percent of the adult population to decide our fate in 2016. Of them, about 35 percent — those with the greatest at stake, since they have the least in fact — are not registered to vote. So about 65 percent of the adult population can have its say in 2016, depending on turnout, which, despite immensely debated questions of war and domestic tranquility, declined from 62.3 percent in 2008 to 57.5 percent in 2012.

Still, that's a pretty good chunk of voters to woo at the presidential level, you might think. Obama last motivated 66 million to turn out; Romney, 61 million. That's a lot of engaged voters.

One problem for the Republican nominee, among dozens of pathological others reported in a somewhat recent autopsy, is that "a significant majority of the electorate, upward of 90 percent, know how they’ll vote," says Scott Keeter, a statistical pooh-bah at Pew Research Center. And every one of them has already heard of Hillary Clinton. The Republican field is populated by a vague and sprawling gang of cannibalistic cutthroats who also possess the peculiar habit of cutting their own. This behavior is expected to proceed singularly, in the general.

"You’re talking about 10 to 15 percent of the electorate who are in play," observes Keeter, "and then you have to factor in enthusiasm and turnout." On the Democratic side, this could be problematic. Familiarity is both Hillary's friend and fiend; her Pew polling is "like that of an incumbent facing re-election," as the NY Times paraphrases Keeter. Voters know her, and then again they know her.

On the Republican side, though, the enthusiasm-turnout question could result in answered calamity. Enthusiasm for what? Science-deniers, supply-siders, union-busters, cowboy-booted libertarians, cowboy-booted McCarthyites, warmongers, raving evangelicals, or close kin of America's worst president? Whoever attains the nomination prize, so to speak, and whatever his particular sins, he'll be colored by all the others'.

So ruthlessly, he may need the votes of America's 3 million imbeciles or TV-addicted self-abusers who have yet to hear of Hillary Clinton.

 

Jindal's divine guidance

Bobby Jindal is trying to lay the (eventual) blame on the Deity:

"For some time now, my wife Supriya and I have been thinking and praying about whether to run for the Presidency of our great nation," Jindal said in a statement.

For one to believe in such divine confabs, one must also believe that the Lord took managerial lessons from FDR, the latter of whom would often assign the same task to several different staffers while convincing each that he was just the right man for the job.

So far, on the Republican side of presidential rollouts, has there been one who hasn't been asked by the creator of the universe to "restore the American Dream"? Did Huckabee not receive Jindal's selfsame memo? — as well as Rick Perry, Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Ben Carson?

I haven't checked Jeb Bush's rhetorical record on this. Just trying to keep up with his mystical beliefs about the Iraq war is job enough.

 

Speaking of irony …

… either that of Lindsey Graham or of other far more entertaining showmen, such as Don Draper, a wonderful line comes to mind from "Doc Martin," a British comedy-drama series nearly equal to "Mad Men" in its excavated insights into the human condition.

In one choice segment, the series'  father plumber/restauranteur earnestly and rather innocently explains to his son in a moment of delicate troubles: "Just remember, for every problem there is a solution. And vice versa."

Though a socialist I be at heart, that speaks to the conservatism of my inner mind (or is it the other way around?) and is, above both, a tidy testament to philosophical skepticism. Progressives are often attentive to only the father's lead advice, and modern conservatives to only his latter.

There is a happy mix: incrementalism — a blend of Burke and Debs, which Barack Obama "gets." It's a shame he's outmanned by Washington's Lindsey Grahams.

 

Will these infernal ironies never cease?

I can finally agree with Sen. Lindsey Graham:

I'm running because … the world is falling apart.