P.M. Carpenter

Chris Christie and the audacity of mendacity

Here is New Jersey's Star-Ledger editorial board's Tom Moran, who's feeling rather uncharitable:

Most Americans don't know Chris Christie like I do, so it's only natural to wonder what testimony I might offer after covering his every move for the last 14 years….

My testimony amounts to a warning: Don't believe a word the man says.

If you have the stomach for it, this column offers some greatest hits in Christie's catalog of lies.

Don't misunderstand me. They all lie, and I get that. But Christie does it with such audacity, and such frequency, that he stands out.

Having catalogued Christie's greater lies — what the editorialist calls his state's "painful moments" — Moran then fingers Christie's press strategy:

[Network news reporters] are facing a crowded Republican field with more than a dozen contenders. They can't be expected to know this stuff. Which is why Christie prefers to sit down with the national press. It's easier to get away with these lies. For now.

What Christie has going for him are a) the GOP's adoration of rude behavior and b) the GOP base's susceptibility to Cyclopian pandering. From Christie, they'll get plenty of both. But what I fail to comprehend about Christie is precisely what I fail to comprehend about all other Republican comers:

Once the nomination is secured (which, notwithstanding his advantages, seems an exceedingly unlikely future for Christie), what then? How does any Republican nominee take the 2012 electoral map and improve on it in the red column? Is there a political strategist alive who honestly believes Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio or Scott Walker has a shot at turning Pennsylvania red? Or Ohio? Or Wisconsin or Michigan or New Hampshire? At the utmost outside, Florida's 29 Electoral votes might be in play for Bush or Rubio, but there, the "improvement" would end. And 29 aren't nearly enough. (Neither, by the way, does it help to add Virginia's 13. In fact, one can also throw New Hampshire and Wisconsin in the red column, and a Republican still wouldn't make it.)

As for Christie, if he actually believes he could outperform Bush nationwide, then he's only lying to himself.

 

Obama's approval rating is up. Otherwise?

The good news in CNN's latest update on Obama's approval rating is that it has inched higher, to 50 percent. However the bad news is, it seems to me, threefold.

One, the marginal body politic remains as fickle as ever. Obama is the same president with the same skills and same accomplishments that he possessed a month or a year or even several years ago, yet his approval rating bounces around as though he is somehow an ever-improving or self-degrading man. It's a perpetual source of dismay that the center is so inconstant; it's what we expect, nonetheless we never get used to it.

Two, his disapproval rating is 47 percent — a percentage that may strike you as familiar. Or at least it should, for it is also the percentage of the 2012 presidential vote that the strikingly incompetent Mitt Romney managed to rack up. This suggests that even though Obama's popularity has gained in strength, the dead-enders among us are as populous, negative, and determined as ever.

Which leads us to the inseparable problem of number three — inseparable, that is, from electoral fickleness and dead-ended determination. Perhaps you had hoped along with me that by 2016, the "vast middle" would have moved nearly as vastly to the center-left, as it is rumored to have already done. Yet in CNN's latest poll, center-left Obama's approval-disapproval ratings resemble rather remarkably the 2012 election's result (51 percent, Obama, to Romney's aforementioned 47 percent). This is a snapshot way of saying: Little has changed, and perhaps not a damn thing has changed, not yet anyway. The percentage of persuadable American voters remains stuck in the low single digits. It's quite likely that 2016 will be 2012 all over again.

Which, it should be admitted, is OK, since the presidential outcome will be the same as well. What I hoped for, though, was a Republican thrashing so bloody, that alone would persuade the party powers to conduct a more earnest autopsy. Another two to four years of these yahoos-as-are will seem unbearable, and in fact may be unbearable.

 

Tippecanoe and Christie too

If Chris Christie was striving for flawless excellence in his announcement speech, he succeeded. It was perfectly awful. I haven't been so bored since a Kansas City Chiefs playoff game.

Here is a man, as Christie told and demonstrated it, who rose from humble origins to extraordinary heights of insufferable pomposity. And that was just the beginning of his predictable, yawning ironies. He is now also the man, he tells us, who has gone from being a "sit-down-and-shut-up" kind of brute to being a skilled  practitioner of salon chat and subtle persuasion. Perhaps the most magnificent irony came when Christie proclaimed that he's the one man who can alleviate national anxiety.

Ponder that one for a moment. 

And of course we all know how he'd do as president whatever it was he said he'd do. He'd do it by — Leadership!

I find it helpful to compare presidential potential with past presidential performance, based on personality. When I set my mind to this task in the case of Chris Christie, the first presidential name that sprang up was that of John Tyler, who for years has been ranked by political historians at the George W. Bush level. Tyler left the White House despised by everyone, having alienated all.

Think of coarse sandpaper, and you have conceived the Tylerian personality. Or, you can watch Christie's announcement, already floating somewhere, I'm sure, in the cloaca of YouTube.

 

Having failed my stress test last week because of my inability to even complete the damn thing, this morning I'm returning to the bowels of ventricular science to have an unstressful stress test, which is called a "MUGA scan" — for Multi-Gated Acquisition — or, as I like to call it, for simplicity's sake, a Synchronized Multigated Acquisition scan. I trust that clears that up.

Anyway, my reason for telling you this is to note the obvious: I'll be a bit tardy in posting today. See you post-MUGAing.

***

Update: Not to worry. In a bizarre sort of way, I passed the MUGA scan with flying colors, because it was the wrong test, which was something rather pertinent discovered in the pre-test process. So after an hour of being poked and exsanquinated in preparation for irradiated blood being replumbled into my system like a Mr. Coffeemaker, I left — the MUGA having been cancelled. It seems some bugger mercifully, that is, more simply, called a "nuclear stress test" is what I require. Of course it is. A nuclear stress test, I'm informed, takes twice as long. I have not yet scheduled it.

My sincere thanks for your sentiments of concern, but, really … see first updated sentence. I'm as healthy as a Rosinante. (Can you tell I've been rereading Cervantes?)

I shall now settle in to watch the latest loser, Chris Christie, enter the Great Republican Tail-Chase.

 

Alabama's Justice Roy Moore, sharp as ever

Words of extraordinary incomprehension, from none other than Alabama's supreme justice, Roy Moore:

"Just who do they think they are when one person can reverse 200-and-something years of precedent in our country and thousands of years of precedent in western civilization?"

You know, Justice Moore, a lot of people asked President Lincoln that very question when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Both Lincoln and his order had something to do with what you like to call "morality," about which you further ask:

"Is there such a thing as morality anymore? Sodomy for centuries was declared to be against the laws of nature and nature’s God. And now if you say that in public, and I guess I am, am I violating somebody’s civil rights?"

No.

And out of moral obligation, my First Amendment rights, and a complete lack of curiosity, I won't ask you, Justice Moore, how you like your blowjobs.

You really outdid yourself with this one, though:

"Welcome to the new world. It’s just changed for you Christians. You are going to be persecuted according to the U.S Supreme Court dissents."

Or, of course, according to the Court's majority, you won't be.

 

Of American democracy - and Freud and me

In a (confessedly dubious) "consumer survey" poll, the Washington Post asked 800 respondents who, among the group of Martin O'Malley, Booby Jindal, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, George Pataki and Lindsey Graham, was running for president. Respondents could choose one name or all six, or any variant betwixt, or choose "none" of the aforementioned group.

And here's what the Washington Post got back: "Only 7 percent of the respondents got the answer right."

***

A by-the-way note of importance: Freud was right. I had no conscious intention of typing "Booby" rather than "Bobby," but something deep in my id throttled my customary orthographic precision and forced my fingers to produce a somewhat figurative correctness instead. You were a sly one, Sigmund.

 

A weary, eurozone-torn Krugman

From Paul Krugman in his column today, some pretty nimble stumbling about, as well as a touch of precise ambiguity:

[I]t’s time to put an end to [the] unthinkability [of Greece leaving the euro]. Otherwise Greece will face endless austerity, and a depression with no hint of an end.

That's Krugman's conclusion — one preceded, however, by this:

[H]ave I just made the case for "Grexit" — Greek exit from the euro? Not necessarily.

Elsewhere, on his blog, Krugman seemed less fearful of commitment:

[M]uch as the prospect of euro exit frightens everyone — me included — the troika is now effectively demanding that the policy regime of the past five years be continued indefinitely. Where is the hope in that? Maybe, just maybe, the willingness to leave will inspire a rethink, although probably not. But even so, devaluation couldn’t create that much more chaos than already exists, and would pave the way for eventual recovery.

Yet there's always the giddy-up of other ambulations:

I’m on semi-vacation this week, doing a bicycle trip in an undisclosed location…. I was planning to do little if any blogging, and will in any case do less than I might have otherwise given the events.

Which leaves me feeling like Brandon De Wilde screaming at Alan Ladd: Paul! Come back!

 

 

Attorney General Ken Paxton has it down - cold

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton prefers the title of "Governor."

Accordingly, he has issued the mind-boggling opinion that the law-determining Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges is "lawless." Thus, says Paxton, "the Court weakened itself and weakened the rule of law."

Ergo, in a heroic attempt to strengthen the rule of law, Attorney General Paxton says further that Texas judges, Texas county clerks and employees of those county clerks are free to ignore what is in fact the law of the land, however much Attorney General and future Governor Paxton believes it to be lawless.

The old ways of nullification die hard, but the ways of politics are eternal.

 

Of Posner, Bartlett et al: a truly conservative uprising

Conservative appellate judge Richard Posner has some fun with John Roberts:

The chief justice criticizes the majority for "order[ing] the transformation of a social institution that has formed the basis of human society for millennia, for the Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs. Just who do we think we are?" We’re pretty sure we’re not any of the above. And most of us are not convinced that what’s good enough for the Bushmen, the Carthaginians, and the Aztecs should be good enough for us.

As for Samuel Alito's dissent, Posner leaves an even larger pile of ripped-up rubbish, such as Alito's assertion that traditional marriage laws smartly "encourage potentially procreative conduct … within a lasting unit that has long been thought to provide the best atmosphere for raising children." Replies Posner: "That can't be right." What of the sterile? Are they forbidden to marry? And when it comes to advisable atmospheres for "raising children," which is better? — to permit parentless children to "languish in foster homes?" or to provide them with the emotional and financial stability of adoption by gay couples?

Judge Posner, I'll remind you, is a conservative. Yet he abjures the contorted logic, the cynical sneers and the arm-folded stubbornness that have come to define the character of modern conservatism — as strutted by modern Republicanism.

It is a challenge, I'll grant you, to get a good handle on just when Republicanism was on a sustained roll, from the standpoint of human decency. Sure, there were civil-rights-supporting Republican pols in the 1960s, but their heads were soon on the party's chopping block — and they haven't peeped over the log since. And there were Republicans of TR's visionary sensibilities at the turn of that century; alas, they were rather rapidly subsumed by the blind banality and ill-schooled shopkeeping of W.G. Harding & Co. Indeed one must travel back to Republicanism's Genesis and its Adam, Abraham Lincoln, and subsequently to the almost biblical virtues of Radical Republicanism (with which the marbled Lincoln clashed, and, absent a J.W. Booth, would have clashed further), to locate the party's prolonged ethical reason for being.

How delightful it is to now watch authentic conservatives — who, Burkelike, harbor progressive realities — rip into counterfeit conservative minds. Posner, as noted, is one of the blessed authentic. But there's also Bruce Bartlett, whose latest enterprise has been to expose the fraud of Fox News as a legitimate news network; and then there are the banished conservatives, such as Andrew Sullivan, who, from time to time, persist in skirmishing against the dead pseudoconservative weight of modern Republicanism's contorted logic, cynical sneers and arm-folded stubbornness.

I wish them all well. They'll get there. Someday, they'll get there.

 

Must-read RedState hysteria: It says more than you might think

In his latest and characteristically brilliant book, The Daemon Knows, Harold Bloom remarks that because he had attended many a Christian-fundamentalist service throughout the American South and Southwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, "The rise of the Tea Party did not surprise me…. I listened closely to hundreds of American knowers, who in one sense knew nothing yet in another way knew everything, because they were all the subject and the object of their own quests."

The same-sentiment marriage of theological certainty and political dogmatism is a common feature of the American right. Its streiffing for ultimate simplicity is its singular quest, for in simplicity there comes emancipation from tiring intellectual effort. Diversity, the complexities of modern life, human differences of all manner are menacing and even hellishly tormenting things. Best, then, to be gone with them; better to halt all forward sociocultural movement, to idealize the antebellum South (via, e.g., Southern Agrarianism), and then to work one's way back to a medievalism in which the lower-as-well-as-upper-case church swaddles the peasants in comforting ignorance and drowns secular authority in a Norquistian tub. The right would then have it: paradise regained.

In the service of this ultimate simplicity comes RedState-diarist Streiff, who has scribbled in his cold, dimly lit monkish cell perhaps the most reactionary but funniest response yet to Obergefell v. Hodges. He has somehow combined fear, loathsome exaggeration, recondite mockery, chest-pounding history, tittering schoolyard innuendo and thundering contradiction all in one brief opening:

The Supreme Court decision Friday making homosexual marriage not only legal but giving it a status superior to heterosexual marriage was ominous (never mind that the lead defendant’s name sounded like a rank in the Wehrmacht). In his majority opinion, one which cavalierly overthrew well over 6,000 years of human history in the service of Kennedy’s vigorously, if vicariously, twitching nether regions, Kennedy laid out a road map for the eradication of the legal ability to oppose homosexual marriage. This is the key section:

"Finally, it must be emphasized that religions, and those who adhere to religious doctrines, may continue to advocate with utmost, sincere conviction that, by divine precepts, same-sex marriage should not be condoned. The First Amendment ensures that religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to their lives and faiths, and to their own deep aspirations to continue the family structure they have long revered."

Justice Kennedy could not have been clearer. "Religions," "religious doctrines," "religious organizations" and "persons" are all secure in their First Amendment right to advocate, protest, sniff, or bury their heads. He left no breathing space for a constitutional crisis or any overturning of our cardinal Rights. Yet, somehow, Streiff huffs and puffs in Huckabeean indignation and declares that "In Kennedy’s view, only religious organizations and religious persons would be allowed to dissent. This means that while your priest or pastor would be able to refuse to participate in a homosexual marriage it is nearly impossible for your actual church to do so." One can read Streiff's passage over and over, but after each reading one is guaranteed to leave with absolutely no idea as to what the writer is talking about.

Ah, but I leave the best for last. Here is RedState intellectual strife at its finest:

[S]mall churches … will be confronted with a loss of their tax exempt status and the personal bankruptcy of their corporate officers if they do not allow homosexual weddings. The effect this will have on small congregations will be profound. Some will become "house churches", much like what you see in Communist China….

This decision was beyond bad, it was a profoundly evil decision that was calculated to not only endorse homosexual marriage but to use the entire force of federal law enforcement to punish dissents. America is now a post-Christian nature [sic]. We will soon be communist China.

Hey, he warned us.

Of course our predicament may be less dire than this. Indeed it could be that the far right, which knows everything and nothing, is merely the subject and object of its own quest — a quest I'm pretty sure I accurately sketched in my second paragraph.

 

The week that was: a bonfire of sanities

What can one say about a week in which a Republican Supreme Court affirmed the Heritage Foundation's Marxism of healthcare and the right of your gay neighbor to marry for love; a week in which the Confederate flag swiftly transmogrified from a symbol of "pride" to a movable scar of disgrace; and a week in which the most offensive man in America, Donald Trump, became the statistical presidential frontrunner in the party of Lincoln?

It doth fog and delight the mind, this flurry of decency, though it be entangled with the enduring darkness of the nation's dimmest.

There is, especially, something about the puritanical abomination of true love that excites the lower orders to summits of outrage. All around them God, if you like, has dropped inescapable hints as to the splendor of human and natural diversity, and yet the vocally pious scream Wrong, it's all wrong, it's as wrong as the fossil record. The champions of these earthly salts — the latter of whom I pity far more than disdain — are quite happy, of course, to rally ignorance and prejudice, and arm for the Apocalypse.

I won't trouble you long with the roster of such demagoguery. Trump's was — unsurprisingly — ineffably incoherent. Scott Walker's was bland and predictable, although we repeat ourselves: "The only alternative left for the American people is to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to reaffirm the ability of the states to continue to define marriage." Mike Huckabee's was fiercely entertaining: "We must resist and reject judicial tyranny." Ted Cruz's was, I must admit, inventive: What this country needs is a "constitutional remedy to the problem of judicial activism and the means for throwing off judicial tyrants," by which he means "judicial retention elections" that would "[render] the justices directly accountable to the people" — a kind of tea-party judicial branch which would have horrified the Madisonian ethic. Bobby Jindal's was hilarious: "The Supreme Court is completely out of control…. If we want to save some money, let’s just get rid of the court." And Jeb Bush's, in a knowing conflict of conscience, read like a P.O.W. note from the Hanoi Hilton: "The Supreme Court should have allowed the states to make this decision." In his next public appearance I expect that with his eyelids he'll tap out in Morse code, "H-e-l-p m-e."

The award for most intriguing reaction came, however, from the incomparable Louie Gohmert: "If Moses, Jesus, and contributors to the Bible were correct, God’s hand of protection will be withdrawn as future actions from external and internal forces will soon make clear. I will do all I can to prevent such harm, but I am gravely fearful that the stage has now been set." We do so appreciate Louie's vigilance and his apparent eagerness to fight the Divine Will, which is blasphemous enough. But what really fascinates is that Louie seems riddled with theological doubt and apostate wonderment: If Moses, Jesus, and contributors to the Bible were correct? Good God, I bet that lit up the Huckabee Hotline.

But back to some sanity. I suspect Anthony Kennedy had a bet going with Antonin Scalia that with Jim Obergefell he could bring Andrew Sullivan out of retirement. Kennedy won. Sullivan has returned, however briefly, to rejoice but also "to rebut the entire line of being 'on the right side of history.' History does not have such straight lines. Movements do not move relentlessly forward…. History is a miasma of contingency, and courage, and conviction, and chance."

From what a historian would call a synchronic view of history, Sullivan is correct. (See how it's done, Louie?) He's as correct as George Will is correct in limiting his survey of global warming to a decade or two. But from the more expansive diachronic view of history, I'd argue that Sullivan has it wrong. Human history, it seems to me in a quasi-Marxist sort of way, is an unstoppable force of progress. Its trajectory is depressingly jagged in the short term — meaning decades — but over the centuries it's essentially upward. In time, the convictions of the uncourageous are overwhelmed by courageous convictions, such as Sullivan's, such as yours, and such as mine (however Montaignean they may be). We as a species stagger and grope quite a bit and we've a helluva long way to go, but human decency — whether God-inspired or not — is much more vivid in the Age of Obama than it was in the Age of Ramses, Nero, Charlemagne or John C. Calhoun.

What we witnessed this week — a particularly high point of human decency — is sure to be followed by new lows. Of those, the uncourageous never run out. But in the greater scope of things, what we also witnessed this week was the inexorable meeting of both true progressivism and authentic conservatism, at the intersection of Sullivan and Sanders.

 

Look here! Cable-news ADHD.

Two sequential days of historic Supreme Court decisions, and CNN is obsessing on the lethal, inevitable plugging of an escaped thug. Good grief.

I now return myself to rereading Cervantes (whose hero could have nailed both thugs in two chapters). 

 

Wayne Root, ferreting out the real story behind the Obamacare ruling

Speaking of classic literature … A gentleman by the name of Wayne Root writes in The Blaze:

It’s time to start asking the question. It’s time to be cynical. It’s time to assume the worst of this government.

Has Supreme Court Justice John Roberts been blackmailed or intimidated?

Doubt me? On the same day that Justice Roberts and the Supremes upheld Obamacare – again – the key IRS watchdog reported to Congress that the IRS purposely destroyed evidence of a crime.

Is the idea implausible that this same Obama administration that orders IRS attacks, then orders destruction of key evidence, would stop at nothing to save Obama’s signature achievement? Is it impossible to believe that Obama and his socialist cabal that learned from Saul Alinsky that “the ends justify the means” would hold something over a Supreme Court justice’s head?…

This doesn’t seem odd to you? This doesn’t smell rotten?

This piece of intellectual profundity — titled "Was Supreme Court Justice John Roberts Blackmailed?" — has garnered 18,700 "shares," whatever that means. It could mean that Mr. Root's readership is, in scope, only 42 percent of that of some "progressive" blowhards who are similarly fond of parataxis. But it could also mean something more, and that something is directly related to the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 Trutherism: the utter inability of thousands, even millions of Americans to accept any straightforward explanation of a historic event and jump instead to a conspiratorial finding; Oswald was in cohoots with, well, everyone of evil; George W. Bush and Dick Cheney wired the Twin Towers for implosion; and Justice Roberts upheld Obamacare because he was being blackmailed by, as Mr. Root calls it, the "Obama Crime Family." The least acceptable explanation to such folks is that Justice Roberts upheld Obamacare because Justice Roberts believed it was the right thing for the Court to do.

The Internet is an odd little place, is it not?

 

Obergefell v. Hodges: A Solomonic decision

What can we learn of immediacy from classic literature? We can of course reach back to the antiquity of Sapphos to appreciate today's Supreme Court ruling — or, one may be surprised to find, we may also look to the early and more puritanical modern era, which contained the rebellious genius of William Blake and his 1793 "Visions of the Daughters of Albion":

Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot; is bound
In spells of law to one she loaths: and must she drag the chain
Of life, in weary lust! must chilling murderous thoughts, obscure
The clear heaven of her eternal spring! to bear the wintry rage
Of a harsh terror driv'n to madness, bound to hold a rod
Over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night
To turn the wheel of false desire....

Blake regarded 18th-century English marriage laws as relics of a misappropriated Christianity. And though here he writes of the burdens of loveless heterosexual marriage, the possibility of an Obergefell v. Hodges opens wide.

We're not quite the swiftly evolved modernists that we fancy ourselves. As the much older literature of perhaps Solomon's Testament put it: "The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."

For me it's a mystification that today's conservatives — our traditionalists! — so consistently misapprehend what humanity has understood throughout the ages.

 

Same-sex marriage; The Apocalypse Cometh - reposted; and other thoughts

From yesterday:

As pleasurable as it is to see the Court's defense of Obamacare today, that's nothing compared to the incomparable pleasure of watching the right's reaction to it. The poor dears are simply beyond rage, and I have the distinct feeling that ACA-covered cardiovascular stress tests (of recent familiarity) are being ordered by the thousands, if not the millions, as I write.

The right is spitting mad, as the old imagery has it, they're clutching their chests and huffing and puffing and grasping their shrinking swinging balls, wondering and groaning: What in God's name has happened to this blissfully assbackward country?

An acute case of anti-pseudoconservative sanity?

And if we think the right is emotionally and physically collapsing over today's Supreme decision, just wait till the Court prohibits those assorted state prohibitions of legally married love — you know, between those people.

Rank homophobia will convert to mass Santorumism, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker will attain new heights in dimwitted demagoguery, and Jeb Bush will find his own balls in a vice. Oh dear, oh my, how to placate the spitting-mad, decency-torching villagers without burning up all general election hope? Don't sweat it, Jeb. That was never possible.

And of course need I remind anyone that all this fury will come in the immediate wake of the GOP's bars-and-stars' forced retirement? The liberal bastards just elbowed their way past the Moronic Scions of Confederate Veterans and now they've successfully defended six-million desperately needed healthcare subsidies — damn! — and they're about to throw rice at thousands of newly, happily and legally married queers.

Oh, Jesus, oh Lordy Lord, piss on that proverbial fire, grab the kids, call in the lapdogs and unleash the hounds. All hell is breaking loose.

***

Update:

What I find interesting although unsurprising about the Court's marriage decision is its intersection of liberalism and libertarianism — both ideologies, obviously, springing from the same root of "liberty." Justice Kennedy's libertarianism is disputed by some of that school, yet it seems vivid enough to me. What proper business is it of government to decide the puritanical boundaries of marriage? Along with human understanding of human relationships, societies evolve, and in the personal relationships between private citizens the government should stay the hell out of the way. Acting contrarily only limits liberty rather than protecting it for the "traditionalists." This is a philosophical insight of some considerable conspicuousness; thus modern conservatives — at least four of whom we can name — fail to grasp it.

It is also where true libertarianism meets authentic liberalism.