I have to admit I’m overjoyed that Newt Gingrich won in South Carolina.

Not that I’m a Gingrich fan, mind you, but the way he won seems indicative of some heartening trends. Obviously the victory itself, in dramatic come-from-behind fashion, combined with the reversal of the result in Iowa’s caucuses, drastically reconfigures the race for the Republican nomination. The increasing nastiness of the campaign fits the mood of many in the Republican base, and indeed of their world view. It indicates that the Reagan rule is dead and the Republican monolith disintegrating.

The relationship between the country clubbers and the fundamentalists, always exploitative, has become verbally abusive. Kansas has begun to realize that something is the matter, though without knowing precisely what, a familiar situation after all to the fearful authoritarian mindset as Altemeyer describes it. The two groups never had much in common in the way of interests, with one focused on extracting money while the other played morality police. Neither really has much use for the other’s obsession, and it was a pairing bound to rupture at some point. At this point it looks serious for the Republicans. But one must ask whether prime Republican candidates who could rise above the current crop might have opted to wait for 2016, and whether such candidates might rebuild the coalition.

The way (She Turned Me Into a) Newt managed to pull off his surprising victory bodes well for our side, too, it seems to me. Although he personally backed out of the fray after drawing blood on first contact, a Super PAC in his camp released an anti-Romney film, which portrayed Romney as a capitalist predator in ways that sometimes reminded one of a union organizer back in the day. It’s a natural theme for a populist, which is Gingrich’s current garb. The small business person, whom Republicans have long professed to love but rarely actually taken out on a date, is indeed among the targets of ruthless, predatory big business people like Romney and Bain Capital who earn their money by creative destruction, also known as profiting by firing people. Gingrich has a ready audience when he points to Romney as emblematic of the folks who move South Carolinian jobs overseas.

Occupiers who wonder if the protests left their mark can rest assured after Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina. Even the Republican base is now sufficiently angry to be set off by an anti-Wall Street message. Social dominators, Altemeyer tells us, tend to overreach in their megalomania, and it looks like they have once again tried to gather too much of the goodies into too few piles, a cyclic situation we’ve no doubt faced for many millennia.

With Gingrich’s attack on Romney’s wealth as ill-gotten, a concept previously unknown to many Republicans, inequality is once again taking center stage. The idea that maybe we shouldn’t slant all our society’s rules to benefit those who already have massively more than they need is now speakable. The barrier has been broken, and Gingrich will probably compare himself to Nixon going to China. Or perhaps Cæsar crossing the Rubicon.

Plus, what could be more entertaining than a disgraced former Speaker of the House running as an outsider?

From Tom Degan at The Rant, a line I wish I had written:

Well over a year ago I predicted on this site that the religious bigots and crazy people who long ago hijacked the “the party of Abraham Lincoln” would never nominate Mormon Mitt Romney. “David Duke will be named head of the NAACP before that ever happens” I speculated at the time. It appears that I might be forced to eat a healthy dish of crow on the occasion of Mitt’s victory in the New Hampshire Primary last night. This is not to imply that the half-witted “base” of that party are happy about what happened last evening. Anything but. Let me put it to you this way: The Republicans just got the news that they’re pregnant and they’re trying to fall in love as rapidly as possible.

Tacked on to the end of The Rude Pundit’s daily scatology is the question below. None of Romney’s Republic opponents will dare to raise it, for fear of having to answer it himself. However we can surely count on the truth-seeking pit bulls of the MSM to… Okay, okay, forget it.

In other words, everything Mitt Romney wants to do would harm Americans. Everything. So of course he’s gotta get out there and be the total dickhead he always was and always will be.

Here’s the question someone needs to ask, repeatedly, of Romney: “If you had been elected in 2008, what would you have done to clear the wreckage left behind by George W. Bush?”

Tom Engelhardt points us to a list of the top twenty contributors to Mitt Romney’s campaign, courtesy, as he says, of “the invaluable OpenSecrets.org website”.

Goldman Sachs ($367,200)
Credit Suisse Group ($203,750)
Morgan Stanley ($199,800)
HIG Capital ($186,500)
Barclays ($157,750)
Kirkland & Ellis ($132,100)
Bank of America ($126,500)
PriceWaterhouseCoopers ($118,250)
EMC Corp ($117,300)
JPMorgan Chase & Co ($112,250)
The Villages ($97,500)
Vivint Inc ($80,750)
Marriott International ($79,837)
Sullivan & Cromwell ($79,250)
Bain Capital ($74,500)
UBS AG ($73,750)
Wells Fargo ($61,500)
Blackstone Group ($59,800)
Citigroup Inc ($57,050)
Bain & Co ($52,500)

Thomas Frank is out with a new book (excerpted in The Guardian), and the promotion includes an article at TomDispatch.

The TomDispatch article takes the form of an open letter to the Tea Party, though given their Authoritarian and Social Dominance tendencies Tea Party members are highly unlikely to read it. In the letter Frank urges Tea Partiers to get behind Mitt Romney because he’s actually their kind of guy: an explicitly anti-worker free-market capitalist who doesn’t really care about anything but money and is thus quite comfortable switching positions on social issues when necessary.

Not only that, but Romney embodies the hypocrisy of the movement as well, railing against big government while being heavily subsidized by various aspects of government policy. The Tea Party disliked Romney’s embrace of the TARP program, for example, but how much difference is there between the bankers’ demand for TARP in the face of their free-market rhetoric on the one hand, and on the other the Tea Party’s demands encapsulated in the now-iconic sign reading “Keep your government hands off my Medicare”? Both want everything that’s coming to them, and everyone else should keep their greedy hands off.

Pointing out that everyone who withdraws money from a bank that’s been bailed out by the FDIC is taking a government bailout, Frank talks to the TPers about bankers and TARP.

The reason they — I mean, you — do these things should be as obvious as it is simple: “free market” has always been a high-minded way of saying “gimme,” and when the heat rises, the “market” is invariably replaced by more direct methods, like demanding bailouts from the government you hate. Banks get bailouts for the simple reason that they want bailouts and have the power to insist on them — the same circumstances that got them deregulated in wave after wave in the Eighties, Nineties, and Aughts.

In this sense, Romney, who is loud and proud when it comes to the need for further deregulation, has actually been more consistent than you. He’s the gimme candidate of 2012 and so he should really be your guy.

Frank is an excellent writer, but more importantly a perspicacious observer. He likes to start by describing a well-known situation in such detail that we’re struck by the depth of his hipness. Then he steps back from the immediacy and applies a deep knowledge of history, particularly the history of popular movements in the US. This leads the reader to an almost postmodern realization of the nature of the spectacle. Which is immediately followed by a realization of the ridiculousness of the whole thing, in this case the idea of capitalism as a value in human life, something God-given and not to be violated at our peril.

That we don’t have pure capitalism in America is not a revelation vouchsafed to the great Tea Party awakening. For decades, the idea has been a staple of the left, where the limited-capitalist model is generally understood as a good thing. The state is involved in the economy all right, the libs say, but that’s because it has to be. A complete free market would be a disaster, something not even the business community itself wants to try. The real problem, from the liberal perspective, is that government doesn’t go far enough — it merely doles out public subsidies of one kind or another while shareholders of private companies walk off with the profits, in the now familiar scenario of socialised risk and privatised gain.

The revitalised right simply turned this argument upside down. Yes, government had its finger in every segment of the economy, and that’s what was to blame for everything that had happened. Market forces had never been truly free, and therefore they bore none of the blame for our current predicament. And so the obvious answer arose from a thousand megaphones: get government out of the picture completely. Until the day free enterprise was totally unleashed, capitalism itself could be held responsible for nothing.

I think you should all watch this holiday beauty:

From The Liberal Curmudgeon:

I have been perplexed for some time why Newt Gingrich is routinely acknowledged even by his bitter enemies within the Republican Party as a “genius,” but the answer turns out to be simple: he acts exactly like one of those obnoxious elitist intellectual know-it-alls that the right-wing know-nothings think is the hallmark of an intellectual. He is constantly reminding us of his doctorate in history; he routinely claims he understands issues more deeply than anyone else; he has made a career of denouncing or (when he had the authority) eliminating professional expertise that might challenge his own certain pronouncements; and he is a veritable fount of crackpot “big” ideas (mining minerals on the moon, protecting the United States from sci-fi doomsday scenarios, and “fundamentally transforming” everything as a first step to doing anything.

Another useful rule of thumb: real geniuses, as opposed to simple egomaniacs, do not generally refer to themselves in the third person.

We need more rich persons like this:

…I’m a very rich person. As an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, I’ve started or helped get off the ground dozens of companies in industries including manufacturing, retail, medical services, the Internet and software. I founded the Internet media company aQuantive Inc., which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. in 2007 for $6.4 billion. I was also the first non-family investor in Amazon.com Inc.

Even so, I’ve never been a “job creator.” I can start a business based on a great idea, and initially hire dozens or hundreds of people. But if no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate.

That’s why I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.

When businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it is like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it’s the other way around.

It is unquestionably true that without entrepreneurs and investors, you can’t have a dynamic and growing capitalist economy. But it’s equally true that without consumers, you can’t have entrepreneurs and investors. And the more we have happy customers with lots of disposable income, the better our businesses will do.

That’s why our current policies are so upside down. When the American middle class defends a tax system in which the lion’s share of benefits accrues to the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer…

Why you never, ever want to get Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on your case:

Perry lumbers onstage looking exceedingly well-groomed, but also ashen and exhausted, like a funeral director with a hangover… Then he waves and walks offstage. The whole thing has taken barely 10 minutes.

I can’t believe it, and neither can the assembled crowd of Georgia conservatives, who hesitate before breaking into polite applause. I feel like a high school cheerleader who just had her leg jizzed on in the back of a convertible. That’s it? It’s over? That was Rick Perry’s stump speech?…

After all, you have to go pretty far to stand out as a whore and a sellout when you come from a state that has produced such luminaries in the history of political corruption as LBJ, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. But Rick Perry has managed to set a scary new low in the annals of opportunism, turning Texas into a swamp of political incest and backroom dealing on a scale not often seen this side of the Congo or Sierra Leone…

Perry is a human price tag – Being There meets Left Behind…

He sweats profusely. He can’t stand still. When he does manage to get off a zinger, he cracks a smug grin, looking like he’s just sewn up the blue ribbon in a frat-house dong-measuring contest.

Generals are said always to be fighting the last war. In a similar vein, I wonder if we’re not on the verge of discovering that the political powers still think the previous world order, which to many seems to be collapsing, is just in a slump and will come roaring back with all the benefits of another speculative bubble. All it takes to put things right, whispers power to itself, is a little nudge here and tweak there; the machine’s in fine condition, it just needs a tuneup.

The current Democratic version of this delusion seems to be that all Obama needs to do to be re-elected is strike some fighting postures and anoint himself once more the champion of the 99% in resistance against the 1% who’ve financed his entire political career.

The sad thing is, it’s probably an accurate view, if only because the opposing field comprises such a sorry bunch. To my mind it’s a loss that Bachmann is falling out of contention, because a prolonged visit to the big stage would have made her quite an entertaining figure. But the Republicans continue to find entertaining characters to parade before America’s television cameras, distracting attention from the serious business of frustrating the business of the country.

So in a way you can understand how it came to pass that Harry Reid decided to employ what might be called the atomic option, a sort of mini-nuclear option. The nuclear option, you recall, was originally the threat back when the GOP held the Senate to eliminate the filibuster, which the Democrats occasionally used to stop or delay bills they didn’t like for whatever reason. Once the Democrats took over, their traditional instinct to compromise away the store kicked in, led by the Compromiser-in-Chief without doubt but ably assisted by Majority Leader Reid-in-the-Wind. And of course the Republicans discovered a new-found delight in the fairness of the filibuster, and began to employ it at every opportunity. Thus, again, the Republicans argue for silly bullshit, and the Democrats meet them half way. So they do it again, and get another half. And so on. Any time now the Republicans will decide they’ve got enough.

Now, with the 2012 election season nearly upon us, Obama and Reid need to find some nifty tricks to re-engage the constituents they’ve lost over the past three years of shirking Constitutional duties. So Obama decides to pose like a fighter after years of being begged to take that role, in a situation carefully chosen for political effect immediately before the election. Reid, blowing along, uses majority rule to overturn a Senate convention that everyone knows the Republicans will exploit to the hilt the next time they take the Senate, with the rather limited object of avoiding a vote that would likely reveal Democratic disunity. A couple of years ago, in the flush of the Obama victory, this sort of maneuver with the object of moving some socially valuable legislation such as a real jobs bill would have seemed risky but bold and forward-looking, a hopeful sign. Today, employed to prevent a political embarrassment, it seems weak, calculated, and ineffective, no more than a political ploy that will inevitably backfire with much greater consequences than whatever benefit its use engenders.

What we need is to fight for our positions in the world and to democratize our country. It may just turn out that we are witnessing the first realistic possibility of it; and the old order, rapidly changing though it is, can’t keep up. Perhaps we’ll look back in a few years at the Arab Spring as the beginning of a world-wide movement to take power back from the oligarchs and return it to the hands that actually own it: ours. Eric Cantor’s increasingly concerned about he calls the mobs occupying Wall Street? Well he oughta be, because it’s the front man who always gets it first in the movies, and Occupy Wall Street is coming for the people Cantor fronts for.

Why do they hate us? You don’t suppose fifty years of overt hypocrisy could be related to it, do you?

“When we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that can lead to a new member of the United Nations, an independent, sovereign state of Palestine living in peace with Israel,” Obama said in [a] 2010 [UN speech].

So now here we are a year later, and the Palestinians want him to live up to that. Naturally he didn’t mean it, it was just a bunch of rhetoric; but it cost him big with pro-Israeli voters in the US, and it left him vulnerable once again to the charge of saying one thing and doing the opposite. Supporters of Israel are angry with him for pushing to end settlement activity; supporters of Palestine are angry with him for failing.

Politics is the art of compromise, they used to say, but in the US it hasn’t been true for at least thirty years. When Reagan came into office we gave up our last shred of seriousness and replaced it with full-time PR. JFK had nearly weekly press conferences where he spoke directly with reporters who had at least to pretend to be interested in the country’s welfare. Reagan was carefully protected from questions because, being both stupid and uninformed, he always made a fool of himself when he tried to answer. They came up with the idea of keeping the rotors on the Presidential helicopter running while he walked to the White House door so that reporters would be unable to shout questions at him as he walked past.

As the empire fails, we’ll see more and more of this kind of behavior, completely out of keeping with the actual situation. Leadership in the US continues to act as if we’re the sovereign power and everyone else knows they must defer, but it isn’t true. In fact the world has seen us lose our grip, hand control of our economy to China, and expose our military weakness by being unable either to win or withdraw in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is why now is the perfect time, from a game-player’s point of view at least, for the Palestinians to go to the UN in search of recognition.

Most likely the US will end up vetoing the Security Council resolution in favor of statehood for Palestine, very possibly being the only negative vote. This will, as the former Saudi intelligence chief and ambassador to the US recently pointed out, make the US toxic in the region, or more precisely more toxic than at present.

Ironically, Obama is doing all this for political reasons as his support among Jewish groups in swing states like Florida drops and Netanyahu continually thumbs his nose at the President. Yet Obama has his UN ambassador proclaim that:

There’s no shortcut, there’s no magic wand that can be waved in New York and make everything right. In fact, there’s a risk in that because if you’re an average person in the Palestinian territories and your hopes have been raised that by some action here in New York something will be different, the reality is that nothing is going to change.

And why is nothing going to change? Because the US will continue to fund and support the occupation it claims to be against. Everyone can see this but Americans; we’re fooling no one, and endangering ourselves in the process. Obama is doing this for political reasons, and it isn’t working. That is simple ineptitude.

Here’s an excerpt (via Jay Bookman), but watch the video for the full intellectual experience. That Rick Perry will probably be the GOP’s White Hope in 2012 would be hard to believe — if we hadn’t just lived through eight years of George W. Bush.

SMITH: Governor, why does Texas continue with abstinence education programs when they don’t seem to be working? In fact, I think we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate in the country.

PERRY: “Abstinence … works.”

(audience laughter)

SMITH: “But we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate among all states in the country. The questioner’s point is, it doesn’t seem to be working — abstinence education.”

PERRY: “It, it, it works. Maybe it’s the way it’s being taught, or the way it’s being applied out there, but the fact of the matter is it is the best form of — uh — to teach our children.”

SMITH: “Can you give a statistic telling me that it works?”

PERRY: “I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life, abstinence works …”

Karl Rove attacks James Richard Perry (incidentally, is America ready for a president with three first names?) and Seasoned Political Observers examine the tea leaves as far back as the 1990 race for Texas agriculture commissioner.

It’s simpler than that, people.

Rove is a courtier, at the moment without a king. If I had a shot at becoming president, Rove would be indifferent to the fact I am a socialist, agnostic, semi-anarchist enemy of everything he thinks the Founding Oligarchs stood for. He would be prancing around me 24/7, blowing kisses and moistening his lips suggestively.

That Rove is sticking it to Perry today has nothing to do with old feuds. It means only that he needs a new king and he doesn’t think he could make this particular enemy of the people into one.

So he’s abandoning Perry early as a signal of friendship and availability to all the other Republican hopefuls.

Speaking of whom, I went to a meet-and-greet Saturday with four Democratic contenders for our district’s seat in the U.S. Congress. One was the speaker of the Connecticut House, another a House representative, and the other two were very young men with no political experience but impressive backgrounds in academia and foreign affairs. Each spoke briefly, then answered questions and worked the crowd for an hour or so.

On the drive home it struck me that any one of the four would in all likelihood make a better president than any of the Republican aspirants. (I’m open to persuasion on Huntsman, but just barely. My general feeling about anyone who would seek the nomination of today’s Republican Party is summed up by the old graffito: A man’s ambition must be small, to write his name on a shit-house wall.)

Why should I sound off on President Obama’s talk yesterday, when the Rude Pundit has done it better? And in language suitable, at least in this carefully chosen excerpt, for reprint in a family-values blog:

Yesterday, the Rude Pundit wrote that President Barack Obama was suffering from delusional thinking when it came to dealing with the GOP. Then, as if to prove the him correct, Obama spoke shortly after the Rude Pundit scribbled his bloggy meanderings, and the President doubled down on the delusional as a way of supposedly calming the panicky markets and populace. At some point, one must wonder who the hell Obama is talking to. Because the “most - reasonable - guy - in - the - room - c’mon - independents - love - me” train was blown off the tracks by the depraved mad bombers in the GOP.

Seriously, check this out. Obama said, “Making these reforms doesn’t require any radical steps. What it does require is common sense and compromise. There are plenty of good ideas about how to achieve long-term deficit reduction that doesn’t hamper economic growth right now. Republicans and Democrats on the bipartisan fiscal commission that I set up put forth good proposals. Republicans and Democrats in the Senate’s Gang of Six came up with some good proposals. John Boehner and I came up with some good proposals when we came close to agreeing on a grand bargain.”

It’s as if Obama has created this imaginary friend called “Mr. Nice the Elephant,” and he’s so happy to have Mr. Nice the Elephant around to play with that he just wants everyone to know about Mr. Nice the Elephant. He may as well have said, “Mr. Nice the Elephant and I come up with great ideas all the time. We should all have a pal as terrific as Mr. Nice the Elephant. Isn’t that true, Mr. Nice? He says it’s true. You just can’t hear him, but I can.”

How must you feel if you’re a Member of Congress these days? Embarrassed? Unclean? Do you mind being classified with the creepy-crawlies?

There was a time when members of the U.S. House of Representatives were not held in the same esteem as slugs, rodents and lice. But nowadays, when they’re not carrying on like demented five-year-olds, they are featured in ads fleeing from the Orkin man or checking into a Roach Motel.

How did so many Congressmen and Congresswomen fall from respect to obloquy? How many times have you heard your neighbors say, “Let’s get rid of all of them in the next election? Wipe the slate clean and start over. The next batch couldn’t possibly do any worse.”

This is of course the old “Throw the bums out!” refrain, but it doesn’t bode well for the country when people start to think of Congress as so much mildew. It will be a sad day when voters bring bottles of Tilex to the polls. And this day is coming soon.

Was it always thus? Well, maybe not always but too often. The problem seems to be that so many Congresspersons can’t hold a thought for very long. They forget who they are, where they are, and why. Many of them don’t seem to grasp the fundamentals of representative government, and those who do can’t seem to cope with those who don’t. This pathetic corrosion of reasonable governance has now infected both houses and the Oval Office. Nobody can do anything except to vigorously do nothing.

So now, after an incredibly drawn-out and tiresome exercise in schoolyard power politics, we have a “deal,” a bill that creates another commission to study the debt problem and come up with recommendations. Congress apparently forgot that we’ve already done that — twice. But why do something only once if you can spend another few millions doing it again, and again, all the while calling for fiscal responsibility?

Fiscal responsibility used to be the byword of the Republican Party and Republicans are still trumpeting this conceit as the bedrock of their political philosophy. Once upon a time it was a respectable, if selfish, position, but now mainly draws exasperated guffaws and clucking from all but the most deranged right-wingers, the tea party extremists, for instance. Except for its own highly paid ideologues and a profoundly ignorant and mean-spirited segment of the electorate, no one in the GOP, including its elected officials, can possibly believe in its claim to fiscal responsibility.

George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress added more than four trillion dollars to the national debt, which he carried as a non-budget item, off the books, as it were, to finance not one but two ill-advised wars, wars that have accomplished absolutely nothing except to take or ruin the lives of thousands of American soldiers and countless Iraqis and Afghans. Bush loaded more onto the national debt than any president in history.

He also lowered the tax rates to give an unneeded bonanza to the richest people in the country, did much to protect the various exemptions and tax advantages enjoyed by some of the richest companies and then he tried to privatize Social Security, an idea that some scholars have called the single-most irresponsible initiative ever undertaken by an American president.

But, hey, fiscal responsibility takes many forms. And sometimes the people, they just don’t know what’s good for ‘em. But that’s what we’ve got the tea party for, to show us the way. And that’s what the Democrats are for, to mount the loyal opposition — Quiet Please! — and then to roll over so the Republicans can scratch their bellies. Thanks so much; that feels so good.

The very thought of it all brings to mind the first verse (actually, the only verse) of a favorite childhood rhyme:

My name is J. Millbank the Snail;
I have horns and a shell and a tail;
The people go by me,
Say, “Yecch! Oh how slimy!”
And I never get any nice mail.

…how to figure out which harlot would just as soon see the baby drowned in the bathtub. Once King Solomon determined that, he returned the baby to its mother. Once our solons made the same determination, they decided to leave the kid with the kidnapper.

There’s a upside, though. The harlot who actually gives a shit about the baby will be granted visitation rights. Details yet to be worked out, but the best guess at the moment is from five to seven p.m. on the first and third Tuesdays of the month. Supervised visits, of course, so she won’t smuggle in food stamps or Medicaid.

Then came there two women, that were harlots, unto the king, and stood before him. And the one woman said, O my lord, I and this woman dwell in one house; and I was delivered of a child with her in the house. And it came to pass the third day after that I was delivered, that this woman was delivered also: and we were together; there was no stranger with us in the house, save we two in the house.

And this woman's child died in the night; because she overlaid it. And she arose at midnight, and took my son from beside me, while thine handmaid slept, and laid it in her bosom, and laid her dead child in my bosom. And when I rose in the morning to give my child suck, behold, it was dead: but when I had considered it in the morning, behold, it was not my son, which I did bear.

And the other woman said, Nay; but the living is my son, and the dead is thy son. And this said, No; but the dead is thy son, and the living is my son. Thus they spake before the king.

Then said the king, The one saith, This is my son that liveth, and thy son is the dead: and the other saith, Nay; but thy son is the dead, and my son is the living. And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king. And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other.

Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.

Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof.

Gary Hart:

What seems especially unjust — and this is a matter of justice — is the surrender of national progress to the forces whose old ideas brought on the conditions now deemed to require retrenchment to a more primitive past. Resistance to paying for the national and social policies of a great, good, and progressive society by those most able to do so, by those who have benefited most handsomely from American society, by those most protected by the pillars of American strength, is not only aggravating, it is unjust, unfair, and immoral.

However one views history and divine providence, nations are judged and unjust ones are found wanting. Etched on the walls of the Jefferson Memorial are these words of Biblical implications: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

You really have to hand it to the tax-cutters for doggedness; no matter how many times it fails, they never waver from their chosen strategy. Why should they, when it brings in so much cash?

Perhaps you read about Sam Brownback’s brilliant idea to get people to move to the rural parts of Kansas. If not, it’s a hoot, so check it out. Basically the rural counties in the state have been losing population, some rapidly. Now that he’s governor, Sam figures to bolster the count by offering tax breaks to people who move there. This is only state tax, of course, which averages about $1,800 per Kansan. But if $1,800 for five years isn’t quite enough to move you to the Kansas outback, wait, there’s more! How about if we pay up to 20% of your student loan, maxing out at $15,000? Then what would you say to living in Colby, which seems to be the largest settlement in the specified 50 counties? After all, jobs may be hard to find, but housing is cheap! The weather is less than optimal, but you won’t pay state taxes for the first five years. Think of everything you could do with that $9K — trips to New York, San Francisco, Hawaii, anywhere…

I never thought I’d be holding up Bill Clinton as a profile in ballsiness, but here goes. This is from historian Taylor Branch’s 2009 book, The Clinton Tapes:

On tape, Clinton said he had pleaded for calm, and he described the climactic confrontation since as deceptively quiet. A week ago tonight, he almost whispered to Gingrich and Dole his reasons to veto their last, loaded resolutions keeping the government afloat. “You’re not the only people with convictions,” he told them.

His spiel extended full credit for sincerity to the other side. They all wanted to balance the budget, but they could finish the job without riders to the budget that would throw 380,000 kids out of Head Start. Or slash college funds or Medicaid.

If he must close the government to uphold countervailing values, so be it. He promised Gingrich and Dole that they would feel his priorities before this was over. Gingrich especially seemed shaken by the final notice. They were going over the cliff after all, and the Speaker quickly confided his surprise. All his calculations had assumed Clinton would bend or fold.

Clinton said he thought Gingrich and his caucus were fooled by their own propaganda about the moral force of their proclaimed crusade. In the past week of shock or shutdown, as the President’s approval ratings skyrocketed while those of Congress plummeted, they clung to hopes that the adverse reaction was temporary panic. The president thought the mainstream press fed their delusion by attributing his success to nimble posturing and salesmanship — anything but a strong stand on principle…

Since the 1980s, Republicans projected absurdly high growth and low inflation in order to conceal their massive accumulation of public debt, while the Republican Congress now was predicting years of low growth and high inflation to justify their maximum cuts in nonmilitary programs…

His polls had shot up nearly to 70 percent with the likeliest voters, 55 and older, even though he had not yet gotten to veto appropriations slashing Medicare and Medicaid. He said these shutdown vetoes were magnificent teaching tools … If the next continuing resolution contained more poisoned riders as the price of reopening the government, he would veto that, too, gaining a platform to explain. “There are horrible things in there,” he said. “People have no idea.”

…and that nice Bachmann couple have made it:

Along with offering faith-based counseling at his clinic, Bachmann also gives presentations at various conferences. In November 2005, he and Rep. Bachmann both ran sessions at a “Minnesota Pastors’ Summit” in Eden Prairie, Minnesota: hers focused on the gay marriage amendment she was trying to push through the state legislature, and his was titled “The Truth About the Homosexual Agenda…”

The climax of the presentation was when, according to Prins, Bachmann brought up “three ex-gays, like part of a PowerPoint presentation.” The trio, two white men and a black woman, all testified that they had renounced their homosexuality. “One of them said, ‘If I was born gay, then I’ll have to be born again,’” Prins recalls. “The crowd went crazy.”

This is from a speech by native-born Iowan Michele Bachmann, announcing in Iowa her candidacy for president of Iowa and the other 49 states, none of which can hold a candle to Iowa, poor things.

My late father-in-law was also from Waterloo, although he was too modest to boast of it outside the family. His were the instinctive good manners of the American peasant, and he would never have lorded it over those unfortunate enough to have been born in states without caucuses. “T’warn’t no big thing being born in Iowa,” he would say to us young’uns. “Ma done the hard part.”

But enough of my own deep roots in Waterloo. Here’s Congresswoman Bachmann:

It’s great to be in Iowa and even better to be in Waterloo where I was born. It’s fitting to be here at the Snowden House, the place that once served as the home of the Waterloo Women’s Club. I stand here today in front of many friends and family to formally announce my candidacy for President of the United States…

I often say that everything I needed to know I learned in Iowa. It was at Hawthorne and Valley Park Elementary Schools and my home, both a short distance from here, where those Iowan roots were firmly planted. It’s those roots and my faith in God that guide me today. I’m a descendant of generations of Iowans. I know what it means to be from Iowa — what we value and what’s important. Those are the values that helped make Iowa the breadbasket of the world and those are the values, the best of all of us that we must recapture to secure the promise of the future.

Below is footage of Congresswoman Bachmann groping George W. Bush as he flees her advances like a Guinean housekeeper in the Hotel Sofitel. Bush himself was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, although he never gives speeches about it. It’s like he was ashamed or something.

This is from the maiden speech of Florida’s Senator Mark Rubio, and a childish, thought-free piece of work it was. In it he asked, trembling with fear for the world beyond our borders where there be dragons:

If America declines, who will serve as living proof that liberty, security and prosperity can all exist together?

Gosh, that’s a tough one, but I’ll give it a try. Great Britain, maybe? Canada? The Netherlands? Costa Rica? France? New Zealand? Norway? Switzerland? Australia? The Isle of Man? Japan? Ireland? Sweden? Belgium? Spain? Germany? Italy? Iceland? Denmark? Luxembourg? Austria?

There must be others, but I’ve got to go now. They’re calling me for din-din.

“When are people going to learn? Democracy doesn’t work.” Homer Simpson seems to me to have underestimated popular capacity, but not popular performance. Take, for hilarious example, Der Gropenführer.

Schwarzenegger now is seen negatively by 75 percent of state voters and has the approval of just 20 percent of Californian voters, with 5 percent having no opinion, according to the survey by Field Research. His ratings are worst in his hometown of Los Angeles, where 90 percent of respondents gave him a thumbs down, the poll showed.

He’s even lower rated than Gray Davis, whom he ousted in a slickly marketed recall election, or Pete Wilson, who managed his campaign, previously the two most unpopular governors of California.

This is stunning, just completely stunning. What sort of electorate can we hope to muster when people who lived around someone, saw his life, and watched his actions are shocked when the single most likely event actually happens? How can we hope to have a working democracy when the population at large is unable to predict even the most obvious future outcomes? Really, folks, you’re surprised to find that Ahnold has fathered a child outside his marriage? Do you need directions to the bathroom?

Bob Altemeyer talks about the authoritarian mindset operating from above and below, one imposing and the other seeking controlled situations. Twenty-first century Americans project similar unconscious archetypes onto authority figures, a trend especially noticeable among those whose religious beliefs persuade them that some entity outside themselves will do the work involved in saving them.

When I hear the despairing tone in friends’ voices — all hope lost! — I try to comfort them by pointing out that had we elected Kerry, Biden, Clinton (Hillary, in this case, but either), Gore, or Lieberman we’d be in pretty much the same boat. Unfortunately, this doesn’t prove to be of much assistance.

So it might not be helpful to point to Daniel Ellsberg’s interview on CNN’s In The Arena blog. In the interview he tells how Abraham Lincoln explained to his former law partner William Herndon his opposition to President Polk’s deliberately provoked Mexican War. Ellsberg quotes from Lincoln’s letter:

The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.

Unhappily that Constitutional frame has collapsed completely, and we’re left with an American princeps; a republic in form only, in reality a principate backed by an all-consuming war machine.

…as has been pointed out repeatedly by Glenn Greenwald, and Bruce Ackerman, David Swanson and others, no president has so blatantly violated the constitutional division of war powers as President Obama in his ongoing attack on Libya, without a nod even to the statutory War Powers Act, that post-Pentagon Papers effort by Congress to recapture something of the role assigned exclusively to it by the Constitution.

This open disregard of a ruling statute (regardless of his supposed feelings about its constitutionality, which Obama has not even bothered to express) is clearly an impeachable offense, though it will certainly not lead to impeachment — given the current complicity of the leaders of both parties — any more than President George W. Bush’s misleading Congress into his crime against the peace, aggression, in Iraq, or President Johnson’s lies to obtain the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

From Kitty Kelley’s dissection of the Bush dynasty, The Family:

As President, Bush kept a male fertility figure, which he had received from the President of Mozambique, in the Oval Office bathroom. The carved wooden statue, facing the toilet, stood three feet high and was anatomically correct, if somewhat exaggerated. The President kept a roll of toilet paper on the extended male organ. He liked to send young women into the bathroom and watch their reaction when they emerged.

“Alixe Glenn, who was deputy press secretary and about twenty-six years old at the time, told a group of reporters about George Herbert Walker Bush’s weird sex thing,” recalled one White House correspondent. “She said the President told her to go into his bathroom and wash her hands. She did as she was told and came out red-faced with embarrassment. The President thought it was killingly funny.”

TODAY'S QUIZ
1. Why did the President of Mozambique think this was an appropriate gift?

2. Why did Ms. Glenn tell this story to reporters?

3. Why didn’t they print it?

4. If George Herbert Walker Bush were president today, would he Tweet?

5. If so, what?

6. Would Andrew Breitbart post it?

7. For sheer classiness, would you prefer (A) a president who finds it funny to embarrass a young female employee by exposing her to a giant wooden penis from Mozambique or (B) a president who allows a smitten young female employee to fellate him? “Neither” is not an acceptable answer; this is not a test of your political correctness. Choose one, and be honest.

8. Now rank the two presidents again, this time on the basis of psychosexual health.

9. Go to the bathroom and wash your own hands, as necessary.

No link to this, because I'm at a library on a PC rather than an Apple, and am therefore terminally confused. But it's from Rick Hertzberg's New Yorker blog, a link to which will be found in the sidebar to your right.

The era of the modern sex scandal began in 1988 with Gary Hart, Donna Rice, the S.S. Monkey Business, and the Miami Herald. It seems almost quaint now, but back then it was de rigueur for the press to maintain that the sex scandal of the moment was not really “about” sex. What it was “about” was lying, which in turn meant that it was “about” something more important than sex, i.e., “character.”

The problem is that lying is an inherent part of adultery and, by extension, of any illicit or potentially embarrassing sexual activity or proclivity. By itself, the fact that a person has lied about sex tells you nothing about that person’s general propensity to lie. Unlike most citizens, prominent politicians like Gary Hart, Bill Clinton, and Anthony Weiner make speeches by the hundred, give media interviews constantly, and have extensively documented public records. If the politician is a habitual or characterological liar, the public record will show it and the lying-about-sex is redundant. If the politician is not a habitual or characterological liar, his lying-about-sex is misleading — is itself a lie, in a way.

I’ve been so caught up in all the work involved in grad school that I very rarely get to post, and often even fall behind in knowing what’s going on. Thus I might be behind, so bring me up to date if so. But isn’t it a pretty big deal for the recently-retired intelligence chief to have characterized the country’s chief executive and defense head as dangerous and unstable decision-makers likely to take military action for political purposes?

This appears to me to be what Meir Dagan, former head of Mossad, is saying about Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak. Apparently he believes they are contemplating an airstrike on Iran in response to the expected UN General Assembly vote in September to recognize the Palestinian state within 1967 borders. He is also claiming that two other recently retired officers agree: the chief of staff of the military and the head of Shin Bet.

This appears to translate in American terms to having the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the directors of the CIA and the FBI retire in quick succession and begin to say publicly that the President and the Secretary of Defense were dangerous warmongers likely to start a war so they could hold onto their personal power and enrich their friends and sponsors.

Of course, such a vote in the UN may be an expression of widespread world opinion, but as the note appended to the Times report on the upcoming vote points out, it will have no force in international law because the United States in its role as permanent member of the Security Council will veto the required recommendation. This is exactly why such status was created, to entrench existing power structures.

Now that Obama has joined the European position on using 1967 borders with land swaps as a starting position, pressure on the Israeli government to respond to the so-called Arab spring has increased, in other words, but not to the point that a Palestinian state might actually be recognized by the UN. The US will undoubtedly prevent that from happening.

Still, just to see Obama moving in that direction must be unsettling to Netanyahu. And to have his recently-retired intelligence chief call him out for poor judgment is not likely to evoke whatever warm and fuzzy side Bibi possesses. Should be interesting to watch. Hopefully no one gets bombed.

… the mystery of what ails Limbaugh’s dittoheads and the Tea Party and Fox News listeners and Glenn Beck fans and birthers and the entire alumni body of Liberty University as well as the electorates of Texas, Oklahoma and South Carolina. It turns out that these unfortunates may suffer from frontotemporal dementia, rendering them unable to recognize lies and sarcasm. No cure is in sight, but at least their malady now has a name.

While millions of dollars are being spent on scientific research to find an early detection system for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco think they have found a simple method. They say senior citizens unable to detect sarcasm and lies are likely victims of dementia.

By asking a group of older adults to analyze videos of other people conversing — some talking truthfully, some insincerely — a group of scientists at the University of California, San Francisco has determined which areas of the brain govern a person’s ability to detect sarcasm and lies.

Some of the adults in the group were healthy, but many of the test subjects had neurodegenerative diseases that cause certain parts of the brain to deteriorate. The UCSF team mapped their brains using magnetic resonance imaging, MRI, which showed associations between the deteriorations of particular parts of the brain and the inability to detect insincere speech…

The ability to detect lies resides in the brain’s frontal lobe. In diseases like frontotemporal dementia, this is one of the areas that progressively degenerates because of the accumulation of damaged proteins known as tau and the death of neurons in those areas.

Because the frontal lobes play a significant role in complex, higher-order human behaviors, losing the ability to detect lies is only one of several ways the disease may manifest. The first signs of the disease may be any number of severe behavioral changes. People sometimes behave in socially inappropriate ways or undergoing fundamental shifts in outlook — switching political affiliations or changing religions, for instance.

Here’s Jonathan Chait on “Liberalism’s Bumper Sticker Problem:”

The bumper sticker problem is endemic for American liberalism. On foreign policy, it’s actually a murky split, with ideologies cutting across both party coalitions. But on economics, there’s a persistent phenomenon of conservatives having clear bumper-sticker answers and liberals lacking them. That’s because, as I’ve argued before, conservatism is philosophically anti-government in a way that liberalism is not philosophically pro-government. “Market good, government bad” fits on a bumper sticker. So does “Government good, market bad.” The problem is that the former pretty well describes the Republican philosophy, while the latter describes the philosophy only of a tiny socialist fringe operating mainly outside the two-party system.

Here’s my solution to the problem: BE KIND TO STRANGERS. What’s yours?

Is Barack Obama too sane to be president? Here’s Dana Milbank:

As Obama’s capacity for complex thought can become a liability, so, too, can his cool rationality. Politics often rewards the emotional over the rational. Nuclear deterrence, for example, works only if your enemy thinks you are crazy enough to destroy the world.

Such “strategic irrationality” can be useful in negotiations. If your opponent thinks you really might do something crazy — like, say, shut down the federal government over a small budget dispute — then you have more power to bluff. But because Obama is unfailingly rational, opponents aren’t afraid of him doing something crazy.

“If the logic of a threat doesn’t make sense, it can still work if [your opponents] think you will be in the grips of an emotional reaction that’s not under your control,” says Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University who specializes in behavior and emotion. “With Obama, it doesn’t seem there would be any emotional reaction that is not under his control.”

Just about four years ago the Grand Old Tea Party held a cattle call in South Carolina for its hapless crew of presidential hopefuls. A lot of the old gang are still around and still hopeful. One is Ron Paul, for whom I’ve had a soft spot ever since. Here’s why, from my post of May 16, 2007:

Sure enough, Pastor Mike Huckabee had the crowd in giggles right off the bat with this thigh-slapper: “We've done what Senator McCain has suggested. We've had a Congress that's spent money like Edwards at a beauty shop.”

My, how they laughed! The folks wouldn’t have been more delighted if good old Mike had just gay-bashed Mark Foley or Ted Haggard or Ken Mehlman or Mary Cheney or Karl Rove’s beloved stepfather. Probably less delighted, actually.

But enough of that.

A few minutes later an odd thing happened. Some guy that nobody ever even heard of grabbed a mike and committed common sense, right up there on the stage with women and innocent children watching.

It came as a mild but not unpleasant shock, like pulling up the lid and finding a rose in the toilet …

The perpetrator was named Ron Paul, who turned out upon investigation to be an obstetrician with libertarian leanings, an Air Force vet and an obscure Texas congressman who once represented Tom DeLay’s old district. Here’s some of what he said:

We’ve started with — we’ve just — the Republicans put in the Department of Homeland — it’s a monstrous type of bureaucracy. It was supposed to be streamlining our security and it’s unmanageable. I mean, just think of the efficiency of FEMA in its efforts to take care of the floods and the hurricanes…

We were spending $40 billion on security prior to 9/11, and they had all the information they needed there to deal with the threat, and it was inefficiency. So what do we do? We add a gigantic bureaucracy, which they’re still working on trying to put it together, and a tremendous amount of increase in funds…

There’s a strong tradition of being anti-war in the Republican party. It is the constitutional position. It is the advice of the Founders to follow a non-interventionist foreign policy, stay out of entangling alliances, be friends with countries, negotiate and talk with them and trade with them.

Q: Congressman, you don’t think that changed with the 9/11 attacks, sir?

No. Non-intervention was a major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attack us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years …

We don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics. So right now we’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting. We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us. (Applause.)

Q:Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attack, sir?

I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we’re over there because Osama bin Laden has said, “I am glad you’re over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.” They have already now since that time — have killed 3,400 of our men, and I don’t think it was necessary.

MR. GIULIANI: Wendell, may I comment on that? That’s really an extraordinary statement. That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th. (Applause, cheers.)

And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that. (Applause.)

Q:Congressman?

I believe very sincerely that the CIA is correct when they teach and talk about blowback. When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. A reaction to that was the taking of our hostages and that persists. And if we ignore that, we ignore that at our own risk. If we think that we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred, then we have a problem.

They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there. I mean, what would we think if we were — if other foreign countries were doing that to us?

This is the first time I can remember that any candidate for the presidency, of either party, has taken seriously the question that Osama bin Laden once suggested we ask ourselves: Why didn’t his men attack Stockholm? The misnamed “War on Terror” can only be won once we react to that question like grownups, not like Rudolph Giuliani and the fools who cheered him so wildly last night.

I’ve just finished listening to President Obama’s speech laying out his plans to save the nation’s economy from Paul Ryan, the trust fund baby from Wisconsin.

No politically significant number of American voters watched along with me, because who watches long speeches in the middle of the day? (People whose minds are already made up, that’s who.) Too bad, since it was a simple, clear and convincing takedown of the Grand Old Tea Party’s plan to push our economy underwater for the third and final time.

However (you knew there’d be a however, didn’t you?), one thing struck me as the speech went along. Take a look:

We’ve laid down railroads and highways to facilitate travel and commerce…

We won’t be able to afford good schools, new research, or the repair of roads and bridges – all the things that will create new jobs and businesses here in America…

It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them…

We’ll invest in medical research and clean energy technology. We’ll invest in new roads and airports and broadband access:

We are the nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness…

Every reference to railroads is in the past tense, as if no further attention needs to be paid. The golden spike got driven in 1869, after all. Maybe I’m making too much of what may have been an innocent and meaningless oversight. But in my experience major presidential addresses to the nation tend to be vetted pretty carefully by a great many players, each fighting for at least a mention of its pet projects. And not a historical mention.

Note: I love to say I told you so. At 8:18 p.m., CNN Radio moved the story from which this comes:

(CNN) — President Barack Obama’s plan for a national high-speed rail network suffered a serious setback as a result of the fight over budget cuts. No money will be allocated for high-speed rail projects for the remainder of 2011…

The budget bill says the amount of money for “Department of Transportation, Federal Railroad Administration, Capital Assistance for High Speed Rail Corridors and Intercity Passenger Rail Service shall be $0” for the remainder of fiscal year 2011. Another section of the bill rescinds $400 million from the funds that were already budgeted for high-speed rail in 2010…

From The Mahablog:

We’ve got a status quo that even a president can’t break out of, folks. It’s bigger than him. We could bring back FDR himself, and in the current political climate, he’d be just as hogtied.

I’m not saying that President Obama is above criticism; not at all. I’m saying that we’re never going to get the president we want in the current political climate. Even a candidate blazing with the most fiery passions of populist economic progressivism and liberal values would be reduced to cutting draconian deals over abortion and tax cuts even to implement a few mildly progressive tweaks.

So, perpetually screaming that Obama has sold us all out or is no better than Bush is pointless and infantile. Grow up and face reality. It’s the system, stupid.

Obama is not the president of Sweden. He is the president of a country in love with ignorance, superstitious and easily frightened. The system of government which he nominally heads has resisted significant structural change for more than two hundred years of the most stunning scientific and technological advances in human history. We provide him with hot poultices and leeches, and resent him for not conquering cancer.

For more on this, Mahablog points us to BooMan’s treatment of the subject, from which this comes:

I stopped being very idealistic when I finally got around to making myself understand our system of government. I don’t get disappointed by a whole lot because my expectations are so low. I see a real threat out there. I see a threat to our way of life and to all humanity, and it stares me in the face every single day. That threat isn’t coming from Barack Obama or the Democratic Party. It’s coming from the other side of the aisle. And insofar as the Democrats are failing to meet the challenge (and they are failing) the real culprit is deep and structural and ingrained in our system and in our laws…

…Jimmy Carter promised us during his campaign for the presidency. He did not add "but no better," although he should have — as he was shortly to discover. I just came across the following paragraphs in my files. I wrote them 20 years ago, and post them now for whatever relevance they may have today:

Communism is a worse system than ours not because its ideals are too low but because they are too high. It assumes intelligence and good will to be widespread among the higher primates, which is wildly counterfactual.

Marx forgot that where we stand depends on where we sit: that the worker raised to a boss becomes a boss, no better and no worse than if he had been born a Rockefeller. And so communism inevitably fell to the Stalins, which is to say to newer, smarter, stronger and crueler czars.

Our own system was fashioned not by scholars sitting in the British Library, but by experienced men who were, most of them, fed up with kings and czars whether hereditary or self-made.

The safeguards they built into the Constitution meant that if we would never be governed by a philosopher-king like Marcus Aurelius, nor would we suffer under a Nero. The voters would choose from the unexceptional middle where most of them comfortably resided, dimly suspicious of their betters.

So far this has protected us from an excess of either good or evil in our leaders. Perhaps the misfortune of the first is balanced by the benefits of the second; perhaps not. A truly wise and good president would certainly be fun to try, though.

Unfortunately such a president, to be effective, would require a wise and good citizenry, congress, and courts. But a government for the people being rendered impossible by the people themselves, we must be content to muddle along with what we have. It is what it is, and it could be worse.

On the evidence so far offered by history Americans will turn in times of great stress to an FDR rather than to a Huey Long or a Father Coughlin. Even in times of lesser stress, we do not send a MacArthur or a McCarthy to the White House; we send an Eisenhower. Although a Reagan may have stocked his administration with scum like John Mitchell, James Watt and William Casey, they were not president.

The worst we can manage when it comes to Hitlers or Stalins in the White House seems to be amiable front men for evil. The latter do as much damage as they can in eight years, but it always falls short of fatal. Or has so far.

Robert Stein at Connecting.the.Dots reminds us of what the late, great Adlai Stevenson once said:

“The hardest thing about any campaign is how to win without proving you’re unworthy of winning.”

Chuck Butcher at Chuck for… says something that probably needs saying:

In Wisconsin half of you bothered to vote. Half. That means about a quarter of the eligible voters picked your elected officials. How many of you teachers didn’t bother, how many of you public janitors didn’t bother, how many whatevers of you just didn’t bother?

That begs the question of how many of you ignored your actual interests to vote against Obama or for some social right wing hobbyhorse that you won’t get. In point of fact, regarding the “Family Values Party,” not only won’t you get it but they don’t bother with it themselves.

You folks are providing endless amusement for the national media. What the hell, you haven’t listened to what the GOP has actually had to say? You didn’t pay any attention when reputable analysts said, “liars, liars, pants on fire?” Are you now saying, “We thought we were voting for reasonable, responsible Republicans,” and continue to believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa?

At Ketchup Is A Vegetable, Brady Bonk easily outshoots the NRA. Not that it matters. In a nation of cowards, fear beats logic every time.

A threatening person enters your home. You pick up a gun from your nightstand, and you successfully fire it into the person’s chest, ending his life and protecting your home. The police shake your hand and send you on your merry way and tell you what a good person you are.

It seems more likely to me that you’ll end up killing someone in your family or yourself and end up in jail or dead.

I mean, you think the guy on the phone this morning regularly takes his gun to a range? You think he’s had classes in gun safety, think he’s bothered to learn how to properly handle a firearm?

And, further: Do you think he has a fire extinguisher in his kitchen?

Well, I mean, come on. If your reason for keeping a firearm in your nightstand is that you have to defend your home, don’t you think you should be equally prepared to defend it from fire? And which of the five types of fire extinguisher does he own? And does he know whether to pick up his A, B, C, D, or K model depending on which sort of fire he’s got?

Does his family have an escape route in case of fire? Has he seen about installing a tougher deadbolt? Reinforced the windows? Locked down his sliding glass doors? Has he plugged unused electrical sockets? I mean, if you’re going to be the kind of guy who’s interested in defending his home and his family, then be that guy or stop with the bullshit nonsense…

As a student of psychology soon to be tasked with providing an approximation of mental health care, I noticed with particular alarm Sam Stein’s post about the 45 percent reduction in recipients of public mental health services in Pima County, Arizona, in 2010. In January, 3,000 people were dropped because they were deemed not to be actively displaying symptoms of mental illness. In July, 3,800 more were dropped because they didn’t fall below the federal poverty line. So in Pima County alone, 6,800 former recipients of public mental health care were set adrift, from a previous total of 15,000.

There’s no reason to think Loughner, the shooter, got any publicly funded mental health care, and he wasn’t one of those dropped. But you only have to read two or three of his sentences to realize that he needed it, and the statements of his former professors and fellow students to know that he should have been getting it because he was clearly exhibiting the signs of serious mental illness.

Interestingly, Arizona, which has one of the most expansive views of the right to bear arms, also has one of the most expansive views of the right to declare your neighbor completely whacked.

Under Arizona law, any one of Jared Lee Loughner’s classmates or teachers at Pima Community College so concerned about his increasingly bizarre behavior could have contacted local officials and asked that he be evaluated for mental illness and potentially committed for psychiatric treatment.

Mental health experts say that, unlike many other states — where little can be done to force an unstable person into treatment until he or she becomes violent and poses a danger to themself or others — Arizona is different.

Any person in Arizona can petition the court for a psychiatric evaluation solely because a person appears to be mentally ill and doesn’t know it.

I guess you’d need that kind of law if you figured most of your neighbors were carrying concealed weapons when you met them at the neighborhood bar.

The recent tragedy was not caused by the budget cuts and the dropping of 6,800 Pima County residents. But the shooter was most definitely in need of mental health care, and as predicted the number of suicides, hospitilizations, and police encounters has risen as a direct result of the cuts.

Thus the cost of treating an individual with a mental disorder, previously borne by the state with funds disbursed through the county, is eliminated. In its place are the costs of dealing with the results, whether they be the rare tragedy or the more common hospitilization, suicide, or fatal accident, which in general are borne by the local government. The state government’s budget looks better, but the overall costs are far higher. Just another example of how measuring things monetarily produces results that conflict with reality. Government should not be a business; it should protect the weak and provide everyone with a fair chance, in other words work for the true national interest.

Dennis Jett, professor of international affairs at Penn State and former U.S. ambassador to Mozambique and Peru, has an interesting op-ed on the McClatchy site. His basic claim is that by continuing the Bush tax cuts the Democrats and Republicans have combined to assure that Obama will be re-elected and the United States will decline to a secondary power.

Naturally, he says, this is the opposite of what McConnell says the Republicans are going for. But all Mitch has to do to realize that he can’t beat Obama in 2012, says Jett, is check the lineup of available candidates for the Republicans. Even Obama can beat them.

In exchange for this short-term political win for the Democrats, the Republicans get the long-term win of bankrupting the federal government through war and deficits, and the rich, who fund both parties, walk away with the profits. Turns out it’s more important to all three parties to cut taxes than to keep the country from falling apart.

But, Jett asks, do we really have a problem with high taxes in this country? He looks at studies of the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the OECD, a group that includes pretty much all the so-called developed world and a few of the faster-developing countries from the rest.

These studies show taxes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product in the U.S. are at their lowest level since at least 1965 and are the lowest in the OECD except for Mexico and Chile. At the same time, income inequality and poverty are higher in the U.S. than any other country in the OECD except Mexico and Turkey. As for the accusations that socialism is sweeping the land, only in Korea does the redistribution of income by government have a smaller effect.

The griping about taxes will continue nonetheless. The ability of Americans to have a rational discussion on the subject was long ago put to death by Ronald Reagan’s sound bites. Government became evil and greed became a virtue.

No country can be great if its citizens are unwilling to pay for it. No country will remain great if it neglects the health and education of those citizens who lack lobbyists. The tax cuts may have assured the President’s reelection, but they also ensure America will grow more separate and unequal, not unlike the proverbial banana republics. As a result the U.S. will slowly slip from the leader of the First World to an honorary member of the Third, unless Americans stop believing their exceptionalism stems only from their virtue and requires no sacrifice.

I pass along this from Robert Paul Wolff so you won’t have to waste any more of your time reading crap about Sarah Palin’s presidential prospects.

Back in the early seventies (when the late unlamented Richard Nixon was as yet an undisgraced president), I was sitting around with several UMass colleagues gossiping, as was our wont, about a mutual friend. He had just been elevated from the faculty to a Deanship, and we were speculating about what sort of administrator he would be. Since he had not even served as a Department Chair, we had no track record on which to base our speculations, so we were very much at a loss.

Then Zina Tillona, a Professor of Italian in the Romance Languages Department (since phased out as part of a long, tragic world-wide assault on the Humanities) offered a bit of folk wisdom that, with the benefit of many years of hindsight, I now recognize as truly profound.

“Well,” she said, “most people do most things the way they do most other things.”

At first, what she said struck me as being very close to tautological, but as I reflected on it, I began to realize the deep insight of that simple remark. People have styles of behavior, modes of interacting with the world, that are grounded in their character, and a person’s style of being manifests itself in small things as much as in large.

If a person is perpetually late, lingering with a student in her office rather than promptly moving on to the next student on her appointment list, she will probably continue to be late when it is Deans and Provosts she is dealing with. If a professor’s desk is neat and cleared of all papers, with six pencils lined up in a row, their newly sharpened points exactly aligned, then he will almost certainly be punctilious, precise, and obsessively complete in his scholarly work.

I thought of Zina’s maxim when trying to puzzle out the political ambitions and intentions of Sarah Palin. Would she run for the Republican presidential nomination? Did she even want to be president? One of my sons, to whom I had long since passed on Zina’s folk wisdom, recalled it for me, and went on to suggest that it held the answer to my questions.

Palin has held three significant positions in her life: mayor of Wasilla, Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Commission, and Governor of Alaska. She walked away from the second and third, each time because she saw an opportunity to maximize her fame and personal wealth. She clearly had no interest in actually being Governor of Alaska, nor is there the slightest indication that she wanted actually to be, or even had any idea what was involved in being, Vice-President of the United States.

Since most people do most things the way they do most other things, she will almost certainly run for the nomination, because that is the best way to remain famous and to develop new money-making opportunities without working for them. But should she have early successes in the 2012 primaries, as well she may, she will find some way, before the nomination process is complete, to drop out of the race, presenting herself as a victim of all manner of plots and prejudices.

Indeed, even if she secures the nomination, it is a virtual certainty that she will quit the race before she is defeated on election day. That this will cause chaos in the Republican Party will be of no concern to her, for at no time in her entire career has she ever exhibited the slightest loyalty to anyone or anything beyond her own immediate interest.

The half-way mark of Obama’s first term draws to an end. Most of the fine dreams that brought him to office have so far been frustrated. Worse, the dreamers on whose shoulders this presidency rode to Washington are alternately mocked and patronized, with the barely hidden assumption that anyone to the left of Wall Street is not a serious citizen, but instead is either a wild-eyed leftist who believes that wealth is evil, a bleeding heart who’d bankrupt the country for temporary and futile assistance to the needy, or a simpleton incapable of understanding the complex workings of modern economies.

To some extent this is based on the continuing use of an obsolete mode of thought. After the Second World War, American industry dominated the world in a manner never seen before. The other pre-war industrial powers were largely in ruins, with huge losses in population and industrial plant, while the US homeland was unscathed, and we lost far fewer soldiers from a larger population than we had in our Civil War. We were hurt, but our industries were pumping out new items so fast, our problem was to find ways to create markets. The Marshall Plan was not purely an act of humanity, though it was that, or of smart diplomacy, though it was that in spades. It was also a attempt to get the European market on its feet as fast as possible; otherwise American industries would soon find themselves overproducing and be forced to cut back, sending the economy back into a depressive spiral.

At that time it made some sense to see the success of the American method and its distribution of benefits through a wide swath of society as based on our industrial might, our ability to produce massively more than we needed or could even realistically consume. If our industries continued to prosper, the thinking went, our economy and society would, too. Of course there was a certain silliness to this line of thought; wartime prosperity happened because of the endless markets and full employment the war created. Still, it made sense politically to promise continued growing prosperity to a war-weary public.

So was the US then less plutocratic than it is now? To some extent, perhaps; but more importantly, the plutocracy is now headed by financiers rather than captains of industry. In other words, we no longer make things, we merely shuffle bits, so we no longer need lots of workers. In fact, having lots of workers just divides the pie into smaller chunks, so we prefer the smallest number of workers possible. The result is that an increasing subset of the population is excluded from the economic recovery the media and the administration tout, and many of those who are still included endure worsening conditions.

As our main industry is now Wall Street, we should probably adjust our thinking to include the obvious fact that what benefits Forbes-list types no longer trickles down even to the small extent it used to. People involved in what Calvin Trillin called “this business of securitizing things that didn’t even exist in the first place” only need the person on the street to con, and as a resource when a con goes bad and has to be paid off by the taxpayers. Witness on both counts the recent real-estate meltdown and the scams that caused it.

Thus it’s not surprising that we alternate between Democrats who represent Wall Street and Republicans who represent Big Oil. And unfortunately it’s also not surprising that Americans raised on television and superheros continue to believe that the next representative of Wall Street or Big Oil will save the economy and the environment concurrently, stop the wars, end the torture and the illegal surveillance, and return us to the democracy we thought we had. Though we haven’t had it for a very long time, and only a minority of us even then.

So Obama promises change and delivers not a bit of it. In fact he doubles down on the most horrific Bush policies with the exception of Iraq, from which he transfers troops to Afghanistan. Where we now have a hundred thousand troops and likely at least that many contractors, presumably searching for the hundred or so al Qaeda operatives thought to be hiding somewhere near the border with Pakistan.

Most likely the military presence has nothing to do with projected routes of oil pipelines. It is interesting to note, however, that oil and weapons are two more of the biggest remaining US industries, and that the interests of Wall Street and Big Oil converge when it comes to hostilities, especially those aimed at procuring and securing oil.

In any case, the old model no longer applies: what’s good for American mega-corporations is rarely good for the country as a whole. But American presidents continue to operate on the old model.

From this point of view, we can understand Obama’s promise to find a middle ground as aimed at an audience consisting of the industries represented by the two parties, in particular finance and oil. Seen from this viewpoint, the first two years have been a great success: Obama has maneuvered along traditional lines to please the two greatest destructive forces the country has yet produced, using the tried and true method of foreign war against a helpless adversary. Even better, a mercurial one, so that we no longer need to demonize a nation or a people, which is considered racist nowadays. We can, though, still manage to scare ourselves with belated realizations that our worldwide exploits and exploitations have not always been greeted by the locals with the fondest of regards.

Which, as Frank Herbert said, is the point.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Obama, of course, is no despot. Our system is not despotism but plutocracry, and it’s been that way since its founding. As Chomsky has taught for years, the powerful in America are bent on deterring democracy abroad and restricting it at home, rolling back the twentieth century as far as possible.

Obama is no more an agent of change than he is of despotism. The change he proposes is in the tactics of making deals among American mega-corporations as they divvy up the resources that our lives have become.

Perhaps that’s all he’ll need for re-election. That, and the weakness of any currently available Republican challenger, plus the bitter taste the public still has from the most recent Republican nightmare. Certainly he’s managed to alienate and even ridicule many of the most energetic of his former foot-soldiers, presumably following the classic Democratic strategy of assuming that they have nowhere else to go on election day. Unfortunately many will believe that.

As Gore Vidal says,

Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. “We have a single system,” he wrote, “and in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses.”

It’s passing strange to live in a country where people could take control of their lives and their government, yet choose not to.

History repeats itself, no question. And no surprise either. It was formed and deformed back then by human beings; it still is, and by an unimproved species.

There are two ways of looking at this regular reemergence of past follies in almost identical shapes: either we have learned nothing from our mistakes, never will, and are therefore all doomed; or what the hell, we lived through these stupid patches before and so we probably will this time too. Take your pick, bearing in mind that it is Christmas, a season of hope.

Meanwhile, here’s a patch that I lived through as a young man, more or less intact and still bitching. This description of it is by Richard Hofstadter, in a 1963 speech at Oxford which was later published in Harper’s Magazine as “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Read “socialism” for “Communism” and “Obama” for “Roosevelt” and you’ll feel right at home. Professor Beck and Deacon McConnell make their appearances, too, along with many other familiar folks.

But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and communist schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors discovered foreign conspiracies; the modern radical right finds that conspiracy also embraces betrayal at home…

The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt’s New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for s0cialism or communism. Details might be open to argument among right-wingers, but many would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.

The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by sinister men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

The final contention is that the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media are engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans…

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do.

Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same sense of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

This enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, luxury-loving…

Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through “managed news”; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system.

This enemy seems to be on many counts a projection of the self: both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. A fundamental paradox of the paranoid style is the imitation of the enemy. The enemy, for example, may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry…

One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is precisely the elaborate concern with demonstration it almost invariably shows. One should not be misled by the fantastic conclusions that are so characteristic of this political style into imagining that it is not, so to speak, argued out along factual lines. The very fantastic character of its conclusions leads to heroic strivings for “evidence” to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed…

The singular thing about all this laborious work is that the passion for factual evidence does not, as in most intellectual exchanges, have the effect of putting the paranoid spokesman into effective two-way communication with the world outside his group — least of all with those who doubt his views. He has little real hope that his evidence will convince a hostile world. His effort to amass it has rather the quality of a defensive act which shuts off his receptive apparatus and protects him from having to attend to disturbing considerations that do not fortify his ideas. He has all the evidence he needs; he is not a receiver, he is a transmitter…

Here’s something to give thanks for: Tom DeLay has been convicted, and is facing at least a few years in prison.

Judge Pat Priest has wide discretion in sentencing the former majority leader, who was known as “The Hammer” for his no-holds-barred style during 20 years in the House of Representatives. Mr. Delay could be sentenced from 2 years to 20 years in prison for the conspiracy count, and from 5 years to 99 years, or life in prison, for the money-laundering count.

Nineteen hours of deliberations led the Texas jury to convict on two counts.

The verdict was the latest chapter in a long legal battle that forced Mr. DeLay to step down. The trial also opened a window on the world of campaign financing in Washington, as jurors heard testimony about large contributions flowing to Mr. DeLay from corporations seeking to influence him and junkets to posh resorts where the congressman would rub shoulders with lobbyists in return for donations.

Ideology, it’s said, is often a cover for self-interest, and a good enough cover that even the self can be fooled. I think DeLay probably combines sufficient ambition and insufficient introspection to believe that he’s a good Christian with the interests of America at heart. Even when he’s laundering money.

[ Reposted from May, 2007, because it still seems relevant. ]

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If you live near other people who have cars, you probably hear car alarms going off a lot. If you live in a city, they’re so common you sleep through them or walk past them without noticing. Hey, your car makes that hideous sound at me, I’m certainly not gonna try to save its ass.

My question is, is there any data showing that making obnoxious noises is a good way to keep cars from being stolen? Has anyone heard a story of a car not being stolen because its alarm went off? I expect it must happen, but my completely scientific poll of a few randomly selected friends didn’t add a single such incident to my empty set of knowledge. Certainly the existence of alarms in cars causes thieves to be wary of setting them off. But doesn’t that just add a new challenge for the enterprising thief to overcome?

Seems to me that shutting off the vehicle’s mobility in the absence of a key or code would be a more effective theft deterrent. In fact Wikipedia claims that the NYPD thinks alarms make the crime problem worse, because people ignore them and it makes the neighborhood seem like a place where no one cares what happens.

So why do we keep making cars that emit horrible noises? I suspect it’s somehow tied to our deep human need for security against the vicissitudes of life.

It’s an understandable yearning. As we become conscious of ourselves as individuals, we encounter the idea of death and are forced to consider our own mortality. Many people are so scared by this prospect that they feel they must turn away. My father’s second wife whistled past graveyards (and had migraines). Carlos Castaneda related Don Juan’s advice that death is always over your left shoulder; if you can’t get used to that, you won’t really be alive. I prefer the latter approach.

The problem with the need for security is, it’s impossible to satisfy. Vicissitude happens. Then what? Do we retrace our steps, see if we’ve contributed to the problem and what we can learn, then decide what to do with the here and now? Or do we scramble for the covers and try to reconnect with our lost sense of invulnerability?

We like to think we’d be adults and handle the situation, but we often fail to live up to our own standards. We let things slide, we put off the decision, we don’t open the letter, we decide it doesn’t really affect us.

In part, no doubt, this is a reflection of the universal fear of failure, and the particular fear of consequences. Then there’s the propaganda.

Our media (by which I mean US media; I only know non-US media by the web) and particularly television, encourage a sedentary, reactive style of interfacing with the world. If current TV reality doesn’t meet our pleasure, we switch channels or pop in a movie. We control the input, thus to some extent we control the outcome. (As long as we don’t put on the wrong movie on when the in-laws are visiting. My suggestion: hide the porn in the bedroom closet.)

Keen observers from Chomsky to Bagdikian have noted that advertising aims not only to sell individual products, but equally importantly to create a buying mood. Sales are up! Interest rates have never been lower! No money down! The economy’s taking off! Fewer unemployment claims! Adjustable rate mortgages to fit your needs! This baby’s got all the new features!

In Media Monopoly Bagdikian talks about the pressure on newspapers that results from perfectly rational requests by advertisers. For example, airlines and travel agencies might not want their ads on the same page as a story about a plane crash, or on the facing page. Such restrictions seem unobjectionable individually, but their collective result is to squeeze the amount of space available to certain kinds of stories. Get enough car ads and you’ll either have to add pages, delay some ads till the next edition, or leave out that story about the crash test. Pages are expensive, ads pay the bills, stories can be printed later.

Thus, without censorship, and perhaps without intention (if we believe their public statements), corporations influence what gets reported, and how. More directly, there are now, what, half a dozen corporations that own ninety-some percent of our mainstream media outlets. Are you likely to see a series about problems with nuclear plants on a network whose parent company builds or operates them?

Chomsky reports that the psychology of advertising as developed by people like Walter Lippman involves creating a sense in the advertisee of vague discontent. You should feel like things are great, but not so great that there isn’t something missing. If you just went to the mall, you could find out what it is, and buy it.

I think there’s even a current advertising campaign on this theme, with people buying, carrying, and exchanging It. The transparent mockery of our consumer impulses is meant to indicate with-It-ness: we all realize the silliness of the whole endeavor, but it’s a fun game. And it keeps the economy going. What did Richard Pryor say about God’s way of telling you you have too much money?

I recently traded a half-gig iPod Shuffle to a friend who’s all about Apple in exchange for his old mobile phone. It runs the Symbian operating system, has a normal-looking desktop on a 320x240 screen, a joystick, some configurable keys, a QWERTY keyboard, and so on. It can read PDFs, play MP3s and videos, do email, even run Opera. I can drag and drop those MP3s from Windows Explorer; I don’t need iTunes and its restrictions, or Nokia’s crappy interfaces.

So I basically got the phone for almost nothing. In the intervening weeks, I’ve spent

• $13 to download a Symbian-based chess program, which my students love to play because they can beat it
• $15 on a stereo headset with push-to-talk switch, so I can listen to music and still answer the phone when it rings—the music pauses, then resumes when the call disconnects, and the equivalent thing happens when I’m playing chess or entering a note
• $28 for a two-gig memory chip, which holds around five hundred MP3s (and would hold even more with a more efficient encoding method and reduced sampling rate)

The two-gig chip is about the size of ten postage stamps in a stack. Since you can hot-swap the chips, you can carry a bunch of ‘em and use whichever chip has the application you need, or the one with that song you can’t get out of your head.

Now I’m attracted to the idea that a few of these suckers could be made to transport my entire music collection, in a package about the size and weight of fifty stamps. Then there’s all those cool applications waiting to be downloaded! Let’s see, new tab, eBay, Enter….

And that’s just the phone. Then there’s the computer, the TV, the players of videotapes, DVDs, and CDs. The closet. The kitchen, the bathroom, the living room. The lawn. The car. Where do my needs end? When will I finally be happy, and how will I know?

Bertrand Russell, who studied philosophy, made his name writing about mathematics, and won a Nobel Prize for literature, is a saint in my religion. He replied:

In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired, and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire—such as the acqusition of indubitable knowledge about something or other—as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself—no doubt justly—a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.

And:

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

The problem with his approach is that it requires and creates a certain frame of mind, a certain model of the world, that isn’t as comfortable as the one to which we’ve become accustomed. It’s like waking from a pleasant dream; it’s not so much that the world sucks as that decisions have to be made, consequences and vicissitudes endured. Instead of watching a movie and suspending disbelief, we’re playing chess and making mistakes.

Thus, when Ron Paul suggests that US actions in the Middle East might have irritated the 9/11 attackers more than our concepts of freedom, he pulls back the covers and we shiver.

There he goes again.

President Barack Obama stood by new controversial screening measures Saturday, calling methods such as pat-downs and body scans necessary to assure airline safety.

Speaking at a NATO press conference in Lisbon, Portugal, the president called the balance between protecting travelers’ rights and their security a “tough situation.”

Seriously tough. You’re forced to choose to do nothing, which is sensible but politically impossible; actually try to make air travel secure, a ridiculous concept that would also make it too unpleasant for any but the most dire situations; or implement a silly and useless protocol that harasses regular passengers (that is, non-terrorists) enough to make them feel like something’s happening when it isn’t.

“As you travel this holiday season, I want to remind you that TSA’s mission is to ensure the safety of you the traveling public and we are committed to doing so efficiently, courteously and professionally,” [TSA Administrator John] Pistole said.

In Portugal, the president vowed he’d try to find a way to make passengers feel more both comfortable and safe, whether it is through the current policies or with new ones.

“Every week I meet with my counterterrorism team and I’m constantly asking them whether — is what we’re doing absolutely necessary? Have we thought it through? Are there other ways of accomplishing it that meet the same objectives?” he said.

Yes, there are. Stop bombing and invading other countries. Stop kidnapping people around the world, assassinating foreign leaders, and torturing folks. Stop spending two-thirds of the national budget on the military. Stop stealing the resources of other countries. But that would harm our elites, who don’t get patted down at the airport because they don’t fly commercial.

…Which part of “Fuck you” don’t you understand?

“Over the past week, some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell plans to tell the conservative Heritage Foundation, according to excerpts of his speech provided to POLITICO.

“But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill; to end the bailouts; cut spending; and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things,” the Kentucky Republican will say.

I continue to be amazed at the willful blindness of even those who criticize the Bush/Blair warmongering.

There was no single reason why Britain and the US went to war in Iraq. The motives that inspired George W Bush and Tony Blair have been variously dissected, analyzed and psychoanalyzed. It is too early for history to have formed a settled view on the war, but the case that it was a monumental error gets ever more compelling.

There was no single reason? So you’re claiming it wasn’t about oil, that we would have invaded Iraq if its major export was figs or lumber? No one who’s honest with themselves could maintain such a position publicly.

If you want to make a case for multiple aims, then mention at least one of them. Along with stealing oil, there were certainly those who aimed at war profiteering, as always in American society. There were those who needed a nice foreign war to keep their positions of power and privilege. There were those who’d be jailed by a civilized society but were employed by the government in pursuit of murderous pleasures. Any mention of those? Not a bit of it.

The terrible truth about British and American involvement in Iraq seems increasingly to be that it was not just a strategic failure, it was, for the occupying powers, a moral catastrophe.

It is blindness like this that keeps generating the same kind of war over and over. In no sense that matters to decision-makers was the invasion of Iraq a failure. Are we still there? Yes. Is anyone pumping out the oil? No. That is success, folks, not failure. Ask Obama.

Christopher Hitchens:

Populism imposes its own humiliations on anyone considering a run. How many times can you stand in front of an audience and state: “I will always put the people of X first”? (Quite a lot of times, to judge by recent campaigns.) This is to say no more than that you will be a megaphone for sectional interests and regional mood swings and resentment, a confession that, to you, all politics is yokel.

This is from The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer:

But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and — to top it all off a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic. These seven deadly shortfalls of authoritarian thinking eminently qualify them to follow a wouldbe dictator. As Hitler is reported to have said, “What good fortune for those in power that people do not think…”

Intrigued, I gave the inferences test that Mary Wegmann had used to two large samples of students at my university. In both studies high Right Wing Authoritarians went down in flames more than others did. They particularly had trouble figuring out that an inference or deduction was wrong. To illustrate, suppose they had gotten the following syllogism:

All fish live in the sea.
Sharks live in the sea..
Therefore, sharks are fish.

The conclusion does not follow, but high RWAs would be more likely to say the reasoning is correct than most people would. If you ask them why it seems right, they would likely tell you, “Because sharks are fish.” In other words, they thought the reasoning was sound because they agreed with the last statement. If the conclusion is right, they figure, then the reasoning must have been right.

Turns out the Greeks had a word for what ails the Republican Party — Anosognosia. To explore this disorder on its home turf, go to a Tea Party rally armed with official budget figures, agreed upon by economists of both the Keynesian and the Friedman schools, which prove beyond the shadow of a mathematical doubt that the Republicans are, historically, the party of high deficits. Now try to convince any random demonstrator of this simple historical fact.

The thing can’t be done, because the poor devil suffers from anosognosia. It is what allows him to cry out “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” without his head exploding.

Here’s a dictionary definition of what keeps his head together:

Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability.

For more, go here.

First, appearances are everything. To be a good Republican you have to look like a good Republican. Which is not so easy these days. It used to be that a good Republican looked like a small-town banker — an agreeable Kiwanian with a prosperous paunch, dressed in a dark gray suit, a white shirt and a red tie drawn at the neck into a carefully constructed knot. If he had an adventurous bent, the banker might essay a triangular Windsor knot. Winter or summer, he always wore a hat.

The Windsor knot, by the way, is said to have originated with the Duke of Windsor, whose only other contribution to the world was to demonstrate just how thin royal blood could get. Before the war started, the newly minted Duke and Duchess made nice with the Nazis on one of their endless trips to nowhere, and were eventually shuffled off to the Bahamas by an exasperated British government. The Duke spent the war years perfecting his knot and studying the tango. Had he been an American citizen, there is no doubt the Duke would have been a Republican.

Republican women used to look like the banker’s wife, who was considered a style trendsetter and a model of sensible, plump American womanhood. She subscribed to family values before the phrase was invented. She was chairwoman of the annual bake-off fund-raiser for the hospital and wore a silver fox stole in the winter. She also wore a hat with some sort of bird feather in it and thought New York City was the home of the Devil. She was an enthusiastic Republican because her husband was an enthusiastic Republican. That’s all there was to it. She would have thought the Tea Party was inhabited by dangerous lunatics with terrible manners, sort of like the Hell’s Angels.

But all that was a long time ago, before everything got so confusing. Now where does a good Republican look for inspiration and guidance? Where once there was Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater and Dwight Eisenhower, all earnest and boring and utterly unsurprising, now we have John McCain, Michelle Bachmann, John Boehner, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich? Oh, what a rich choice! But first…

No matter how you knot your tie, as a good Republican you will want to keep your eye on the donut. You will want to embrace the essence of Republicanism, the spirit of conservatism; you must long for the way things used to be, or at least say you do, before Big Government came along and ruined everything. You will want to have at hand a few phrases about fiscal responsibility, self-reliance and the American Way, even if you don’t quite know what the American Way is. If you happen to have one of the old GOP handbooks, go through it and cross out Communism wherever you see it and substitute Terrorism with a capital T. Cross out Roosevelt and insert Obama. Cross out New Deal and replace it with Bad Deal. Make sure you’ve got the words of the “Pledge of Allegiance” and “God Bless America” down pat and memorize the First Amendment.

Now you’re ready to adopt the GOP style that suits you. Which do you like best? Boehner or Bachmann, Palin or Gingrich? And don’t forget the Old Pilot. Maybe the bolts have popped out of his wings but he’s still flying the plane, more or less. How about Orrin Hatch? Now there’s a guy knows how to knot a tie. He can do it one-handed while the other hand is busy wielding the scalpel. How about Mitch McConnell? Isn’t he cuddly cute? Nobody said this was going to be an easy choice.

Perhaps it would be easier to make a selection from a list of GOP adjectives and construct your very own Republican persona. Here are a few descriptive words to help you: smug, hypocritical, selfish, greedy, hawkish, myopic, negative, reckless, stupid.

And, finally, let’s not forget wrong.

I just bought President Carter’s White House Diary yesterday, and haven’t got far enough along to have any useful thoughts on it. Just as I arrived home, though, I got a call from Samuel P. Jacobs of The Daily Beast who wanted my opinion on the current craze for comparing President Obama’s problems to President Carter’s.

I didn’t really have any useful thoughts on that either, but that didn’t stop me. For those who give a feces, the result is here.

More good sense, as usual, from Daniel Larison at The American Conservative:

According to the story Republicans tell themselves, they lost power because they spent too much, and they believe they are proving that they understand where they went wrong by opposing all forms of new spending. Even though they may be winning by default because of economic conditions, they very much want to link any success they have with this new opposition to more spending.

It’s a very neat, tidy, convenient and completely false narrative. According to the same narrative, the public supposedly soured on the stimulus because they became anxious about deficits. In fact, the stimulus lost support because it wasn’t enough of an actual stimulus bill, and so did not “work.” In some of the early Republican criticism of the bill, there was a basic acceptance of the belief that enough money spent in the right way would be stimulative. Now that a majority finds fault with the original bill, the new interpretation is that there should never have been one at all.

This makes the same mistake that Barone and a thousand others have made about the health care bill. They take all opposition to a complex, flawed, compromised, unaffordable bill and treat it as if it were all one thing, but opposition to the bill came from many different sources, including from those on the left who thought it was too weak, too much of a sell-out to insurance companies, or insufficiently ambitious in some other way.

Hostility to the compromised bill that was passed does not imply support for returning to the way things were, and hostility to the compromised bill does not necessarily reflect opposition to an increased government role in the health care sector. Barone wants you to think that it does, and he is basing almost his entire interpretation of the public mood and his expectation of a big midterm victory for the GOP on this misunderstanding. Barone’s mistake is the national GOP’s mistake in miniature: he is treating the election as a national one with a unifying theme that has a clear ideological meaning when it isn’t and it doesn’t.

Barone may end up being right that the GOP is going to win the House, but it will have been mostly by accident, because he refuses to acknowledge the real reasons why the GOP is in a position to win. The party is in a similar position: possibly on the verge of a great victory, but unable or unwilling to accept the real reason for it.

…now that you mention it. A correspondent sends this:

Hope springs eternal that Obama may be smart enough to realize that his current accomodationist trajectory is a ticket to one-term obscurity; I wonder, was Obama canny enough to see this, and orchestrate Mayor Daley’s stepping down to get Rahm out of the White House without any blood on the floor? I’m guessing Rahm is the kind of guy to wreck the place on the way out if he was forced to leave.

If Daley winds up in the cabinet in a few months, we’ll have our answer.

Here’s Steve Benen, who knows what happens in the middle of the road:

Lindsey Graham wants Obama to “come back to the middle?” Here’s a silly question for Graham: when might your party “come back the middle?” When was the last time congressional Republicans offered a centrist compromise on literally any policy dispute? When was the last time Graham’s Senate caucus allowed the Senate to vote up or down on meaningful legislation without a filibuster, a hold, or both? When was the last time the GOP mainstream responded to White House outreach with a single idea where the parties could work together?

More good stuff with which I agree, this time from Professor Wolff at The Philosopher’s Stone, who is almost as old as I am and even wiser:

I never imagined Obama was a left liberal, and I didn’t campaign for him under that illusion. I thought he was a centrist, a left-centrist, in the framework of American politics, with the ability to mobilize the center and the left to defend against the horrors promised by the right. I was right about that. Had the depression not hit, he would in fact be doing quite well now, by his own lights, but quite well means successfully pursuing centrist-left policies. In point of fact, he has been astonishingly successful in that regard. The health reform bill … is the best that we could get, given the realities of American politics, and he is the first president in ninety years to get it.

You are mad at the wrong person. The real villain in this piece is the enormous number of Americans — not, I think and hope a majority, but enormous none the less — who are either conservative or hysterically insane with religious fantasies and political paranoia.

Do you want a genuinely leftist president? Fine, so do I. How do we get one? Answer, we change eighty or a hundred million Americans. Let me remind you — and I was there, so I know — that Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter were all Left Centrists at best. My grandfather gave his life to the Socialist Party, and its high point was electing him and six others to the NYC Board of Aldermen. This has NEVER been a country that was hospitable to genuinely leftist politics.

What we are now facing is a threat from the right unlike any I have seen in forty years. We are in danger of losing such tattered remains as we still have of a social safety net, and of seeing maniacal religious fanatics running our country. I am hoping that Obama will tap into his considerable political skills to stop that from happening, but even if he does, we will nonetheless be stuck with a politics that is markedly to the right of where it is now. These are godawful times, made all the more perilous by the fact that the very large number of genuine progressives in this country are dispirited.

Here’s Daniel Larison in The American Conservative, making some excellent points (points, that is, with which I agree).

As I have said before, I don’t think the GOP will win the House, but if that did happen it would primarily be bad news for the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If that seems a little too counterintuitive for you, let me explain. Should the GOP somehow win the House, they will not have earned it and they will not deserve it, and they will proceed to destroy themselves in very short order.

Arguably, there was nothing worse for the American right than to be given the free gift of winning the 2002 midterms, because this win encouraged them to pursue the policies that proved to be their undoing, and a similar win in 2010 would have the same effect of enabling Republicans’ most destructively self-indulgent impulses. As one horrified by the prospect of Republicans in power, Erik should look forward to this.

After all, even if the Republicans won the House there would not be much that they could do once in office, except waste their time as they did in the ’90s hauling executive branch officials before committees to testify on this or that outrage of the week. They would likely be stymied by the Democratic majority in the Senate on any major legislation, and Obama would veto just about anything they passed if it somehow got to his desk. At the same time, Obama would make them into a much more effective foil for his arguments once they had some hold on power, and out of frustration they would become increasingly obsessed with “getting” Obama and become even less interested in representing the interests of their constituents…

In his address to the nation Tuesday night about Iraq and Afghanistan, President Obama took a refreshingly frank approach: “Today we mark the end of our nation’s military commitment in Iraq. Our foolish adventure there has been a catastrophe, a nightmare inflicted on us by a past president whose stupidity was exceeded only by his arrogance. Iraq was a disaster that cost thousands of American lives, God knows how many Iraqi lives, and increased our national debt by an amount that is almost beyond counting. What did we get for this immeasurable investment? Nothing.

“Here’s where things stand now. The Iraqi government, if that’s what you’d call it, is a shambles. The economy is wrecked, and life in Iraq is still so dangerous and unstable that nobody wants to be there anymore. And neither do we, baby. We’re outta there.

“Now we can turn our full military attention to Afghanistan where we’ve been fighting for ten years without any success whatsoever. We’ll be putting lots more troops and treasure into the effort, which will result in many more American casualties and plenty more dead Afghanis, including lots of hapless women and children who keep getting in the way of our smart bombs and missiles. But, hey, don’t look at me. I didn’t start this and there’s no way, politically speaking, that I can just pull out of it. Which would be the smart thing to do.” The President had some other things to say about bravery and sacrifice, etc. etc., but nobody bothered to write it down or record it.

Meanwhile, down the road at the Capitol, Democrats and Republicans in both houses of Congress adopted a resolution to stop acting like willful little brats. Rep. John Boehner, the Republican obstructionist from Ohio and minority leader in the House, said, “We thought it might be interesting to pass some laws that would actually be good for the country.”
Boehner’s counterpart in the Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky obfuscator, announced that from now on he would work with senators from both parties to respond to the needs of the American people. “Tantrums will no longer be tolerated,” McConnell said. “We are also going to try to keep lying to a minimum. We want the Senate to be a kinder, gentler place where work actually gets done.”

Cynical observers of the Senate noted the timing and language of McConnell’s statement, which closely followed a threat by his fellow senators to stone him to death if he didn’t stop acting like a five-year-old with a skin rash.

Many Democrats of dubious standing also clamored to partake of this new Era of Good Feeling. So-called Blue Dog Democrats in the House, who have been trying for many months to play both sides of the fence while also sitting on it, came out in favor of the resolution. The Blue Dogs issued a statement that said in part, “The American people do not want…” Nobody bothered to record the rest of the statement because everybody knows that the Blue Dogs haven’t the slightest idea what the American people want or don’t want. And also, because nobody cares what the Blue Dogs think or don’t think, say or don’t say, stand for or don’t stand for.

Glenn Beck issued a refreshing statement in which he apologized for being a contemptible scumbag and announced that he was retiring from broadcasting to raise pigs. “I’m going to quit while I’m ahead,” said the now wealthy conservative ranter. “I sense that people are about to catch on that I am the worst kind of hate-mongering, lying phony. Even my mother thinks I’m disgusting and I kind of agree with her.”

Over at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, the liberal blabber, announced that she was not going to be cute anymore. And her colleague, Keith Olbermann, said that while he intended to continue his arch ways, he was giving up his insufferable “special comments,” having recognized that what was special about them was that they were pompous and embarrassing.

Rush Limbaugh issued a one-sentence statement. It said, “Who the hell is Glenn Beck and who cares if he’s retiring?”

Bill O’Reilly also issued a statement that said, in part, “Who cares what Rush Limbaugh says on the radio? Doesn’t he know that nobody listens to the radio anymore. Hey, Rush, get a life. Join the parade. This is the twenty-first century and you’re just a fat loudmouth with bad breath.”

Limbaugh is said to have issued a response but nobody heard it.

Joe Barton, a Republican Congressman from Texas, had the right idea when he apologized to BP for what he said was a shakedown of the nice British oil company. He said Obama’s demand for a $20-billion restitution fund amounted to extortion. Barton later apologized for his apology and then he retracted the apology for the apology and then he…oh, never mind. The important thing is that he showed that sense of fair play for which we Americans are famous. Maybe now that this important precedent has been established by a stand-up Congressman we can start making amends to others who have been harshly judged and roughly handled down through the years.

So before one more minute goes by let me apologize to Adolf Hitler. And Dick Cheney.

These men were natural born leaders who had flaws that got blown out of proportion. Hitler still gets bad notices in the press sixty-five years after he gave up the ghost. Just because Dick Nixon always looked like he needed a shave didn’t make him a bad guy, did it? What about beauty being only skin deep? Dick Cheney has lips twisted into a permanent snarl. Does that necessarily mean he’s an arrogant, reckless, power-crazed, ruthless, lying, slimy son of a bitch?

I think it’s high time we apologized to Hirohito and Tojo and lots of other perfectly civilized Japanese for calling them sneaky, murderous devils. Just because of some unpleasantness at Pearl Harbor and Bataan we seem to think we have the right to vilify them. Let’s not remember Pearl Harbor. Most of those ships that sank there were obsolete anyway.

Now it’s the Arabs’ turn in the barrel. Every time you turn on the TV to get the straight dope from Sean or Rush or Glenn or Bill, our thought leaders, another Arab is getting bashed for some alleged outrage. Poor Bin Laden got so much bad publicity he dropped out of sight and went into hiding. I think we should follow Joe Barton’s example and extend a sincere apology to Osama for making him live in a cave. Nobody should have to live in a cave.

As for Hitler, it’s just about impossible to have a quiet, rational conversation about the charismatic German leader. People can’t seem to discuss the eloquent architect of the autobahns without taking extreme positions on one side or the other. Of course he had his faults — who doesn’t? But how many politicians these days could get up and talk for a couple of hours without the aid of a teleprompter? And those autobahns are still fun to drive on.

Can we talk about Dick Cheney for a minute? Now here’s a guy who can’t catch a break from the media. The former vice president has been involved with the oil industry in one way or another for quite a long time, and, if you listen to the insinuations coming from the left, there was something unpatriotic and self-serving in this involvement. I guess vice presidents are supposed to be poor — is that the idea? Do you think Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are poor? Was Ted Kennedy poor? How about Jay Rockefeller, Democrat from the hardscrabble, coal-mining state of West Virginia. Think he’s poor?

What all this adds up to is one big, very good reason to apologize to Dick Cheney. All Cheney ever wanted to do was to do his best for his country. And what did he get in return? A lot of grief, that’s what he got. Well, maybe when Joe Barton gets finished apologizing to BP we can get him to apologize to Dick Cheney. And Bernie Madoff. And Goldman Sachs. And AIG. And General Motors. And Joe Stalin. And Vlad the Impaler.

Are you surprised at the story below? Of course not. You knew all along that the United States Congress is no more capable of controlling its urges than is Wall Street or Big Oil. Once the NRA carved out its own little exemption, you knew with mathematical certainty that everybody else would try to crowd through the door. And that only the lobbies with the shallowest pockets would be left outside, forced to identify their top five sugar daddies.

The purpose of this legislation was to undo some of the damage done done to free speech by the Supreme Court when it gutted the McCain-Feingold Act in January. But the result is likely to be even greater damage to democracy: one (or several) of the smaller lobbies will certainly protest its exclusion in court, complaining reasonably enough of discrimination based on size and wealth.

And then the Roberts court, snickering up its sleeve, will hurry to protect the little fellow — by declaring unconstitutional the bill currently being debated that attempts, however pitifully, to keep corporations from drowning out the rest of us at election time.

And then it will be a long time, perhaps forever, before Congress bothers to tilt again at this particular windmill.

WASHINGTON — House Democrats agreed to exempt an unspecified number of large, well-known interest groups from proposed new disclosure requirements on political advertising on Thursday, seeking to quell charges they were giving special treatment to the powerful National Rifle Association.

The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said that under the last-minute change, “well-established organizations on the right and left” engaging in campaign activity, the NRA among them, would not be required to identify their top donors.

Democratic leaders announced plans for the legislation to come to a vote on Thursday, but that schedule appeared less than firm after rank and file moderates and members of the Congressional Black Caucus raised fresh objections. The leadership arranged afternoon meetings with representatives of both groups, and other changes were possible in the measure.

Under the bill, labor unions, corporations and nonprofit organizations that air political ads or conduct campaign activity would have to disclose their top five donors.

The bill also requires any individual or group paying for independent campaign activities to report any expenditure of at least $10,000 made more than 20 days before an election. Expenditures greater than $1,000 would have to be disclosed within 24 hours in the final 20 days of a campaign.

Who could have guessed, only a short year ago, that mid-term elections would be so darn much fun? Yet here we are, five months away from elections that are usually a major snooze, enjoying all the political melodrama of a high school election for Prom King and Queen — and we’re only at the Primaries.

Some credit is due, of course, to the Tea Party’s transformative pseudo-populism that has turned garden variety conservatives into political contortionists trying to fit themselves into the Tea Party’s anti-establishment agenda — at least long enough to bag some of their votes. The Tea Party’s major contribution to electoral politicking, however, has been to legitimize the prospects of some seriously inexperienced, quasi-anarchic radical demagogues that couldn’t have won the proverbial office of dog-catcher in more rational times. But “the times, they are a-changin’…”

Just as we don’t have a clue how to fix the man-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, neither do we have any idea how to right our seriously listing “Ship of State,” in which our fearless leaders have decided to fire the cannons continuously over the bow, instead of bailing and plugging the leaks, to keep the ship from going down.

If one listens carefully to the campaigning of mid-term candidates (I know, I know, it can be quite disturbing) it becomes very clear that we no longer care very much what our political candidates think (or don’t think) about issues that theoretically impact life in America because, clearly, they don’t live in the same America that we do. Neither do candidates care very much about the general electorate’s thoughts on the issues because the general electorate doesn’t contribute enough to finance 21st century political campaigns — corporations and PACs do that.

The conundrum, for politicians, is that ordinary voters still provide the grease (tax dollars) they need to quiet the “squeaky wheels” that finance their political careers; so ordinary voters must still be courted. And it takes large amounts of money, and political capital, to persuade blocs of taxpayers/voters that the interests of corporate donors coincide with their own public interest.

Voting in America has become very much like playing the lottery — if you are extraordinarily lucky and beat all of the odds, it might pay off in a material way — but no one really expects to win. Meanwhile, for the losers, life goes on very much as usual, without any fortuitous assistance from the gods. Win or lose, millions of people will pony up for lottery tickets, week after week (whether they can afford it or not), because “you have to play to win.”

Politics, like lotteries, depend on a certain predictable level of participation and a great deal of hope and trust. Lotteries take your small contributions, which add up to huge amounts of money, and guarantee that someone will win big; all of those contributors who don’t “win big” can be comforted by the fact that their money has provided some amount of feel-good commonwealth, like better schools or assistance for the elderly.

Those are, I believe, some contributing factors to some of the more sophomoric campaign performances we are currently being treated to and, ultimately, the deadly voter apathy that can only make a bad situation worse; but then who cares to carve out a portion of their Tuesdays to go to the polls and choose between Dumb and Dumber?

Whether you choose to vote with a ballot or vote with your feet, it’s quite educational to take a look at the candidates and their efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of American voters…

Whether you choose to vote with a ballot or vote with your feet, it’s quite educational to take a look at the candidates and their efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of American voters…

Rand Paul, who recently won the Kentucky Republican primary for a Senate seat, gave us our first taste of a true Tea Party candidate floundering for a solid platform as spectacularly as the party that he aligns with. Paul came out of the gate, politicking like a pro running for President, à la Scott Brown; national media were only too happy to provide ample high-profile opportunities for Paul to trot out his half-baked ideological ramblings, committing political hari-kari in the process.

If the Tea Party, whose passion is for installing “newbies” in public office, had any misgivings about Rand Paul being the offspring of Congressman, ex-presidential candidate and Libertarian standard-bearer Ron Paul, Rand’s post-Primary victory-lap performance should dispel any notion that he knows what he’s doing in the political arena.

In the span of a few short days of peddling his “ideology” on national television Rand Paul has managed to be: unceremoniously excommunicated by orthodox Libertarians; publicly eviscerated by a reluctant Rachel Maddow for his stated support of business owners who have been stripped of their “right to discriminate,” by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, against clientele that they deem “undesirable”; mercilessly lampooned for his “accidents do happen” position on the Deepwater Horizon disaster along with his judgment that President Obama was treating BP in an “un-American” way by holding them accountable; excoriated for his view that the Americans with Disabilities Act is unfair to small business owners; and, last but not least, sued by the Canadian rock band Rush for copyright infringement for misappropriating one of their tunes as his during his campaign.

Someone with a little more political savvy than “The Candidate” finally pulled the plug on the Rand Paul Gaffe Machine and there was a brief quiet spell during which it is easy to imagine Paul being trained, by political handlers, to think before he speaks, because the American public is not as forgiving as loving parents or fraternity brothers who are inclined to indulge and, indeed, provide standing ovations for every pearl of pastoral wisdom that drips from the favored son’s honeyed lips.

Paul’s most recent tentative step back into the limelight is a little Op-Ed apologia that he penned for the Bowling Green Daily News that basically begs the public’s pardon for his excess of wonderfulness and pronouncing himself on an equal footing with Martin Luther King, Jr. That should dispel any rumors that Rand might be racist as well as casting himself in the role of the terribly misunderstood, but no less monumental, idealistic intellectual. Which, according to Rand Paul, is exactly what we’re lacking in American government today.

Paul’s “Ode to Himself” Op-Ed starts out like this:

“Kundera writes of a balcony scene in the winter snow of 1948 Prague. Clementis offers his fur cap to the new leader Gottwald. Later Clementis is purged by the Communists and airbrushed from all the photos. All that remains of Clementis is the fur cap on Gottwald’s head.”

Anyone who’s ever attended a pretentious, country club cocktail party knows this guy and also knows how his story ends whether he wins or loses elections. He’s right when he says that he’s not a pragmatist, but wrong when he defines himself as an idealist. He’s a narcissist — pure and simple, and professional politicians are poised to eat his lunch — if he gets a foot in the door.

A recurrent theme that is emerging out of Team Paul is that no matter what cockamamie thing comes out of the candidate’s mouth it’s tangential to the real issues which, I have to assume, he’s keeping “closer to the vest.” Jesse Benton who holds the unenviable position of serving as Paul’s campaign manager made this statement to USA Today regarding the Rush lawsuit:

“The background music Dr. Paul has played at events is a non-issue. The issues that matter in this campaign are cutting out-of-control deficits, repealing Obama Care and opposing cap and trade.”

But, wait a minute Jesse, aren’t Libertarians supposed to be all about respecting others’ property rights?

Then again, at the head of Paul’s Op-Ed piece he reminded readers that:

“I support the Civil Rights Act, but 2010 battles are about government overreach in lives.”

I vaguely remember hearing similar rhetoric, back in the day, from members of my generation who joined the SDS and who subsequently learned (the hard way) that the real world chews up and spits out ideologues for kicks.

The World According to Kirk

In an entirely different vein we have Mark Kirk, candidate for an Illinois Senate seat. Mark Kirk is one of those guys that believe that all you need to be a successful politician is good people skills like the ability to weave a good story — something along the lines of Mark Twain or Will Rogers. And so it is that Mark Kirk’s strategy for connecting with voters is to make stuff up. As a matter of fact, I think it’s safe to say that Mark Kirk finds the truth rather lackluster and lacking in political appeal which is why he doesn’t bother much with it as source material.

Rachel Maddow just did a pretty comprehensive (and entertaining) rundown of those areas in which Kirk has taken some “political license” that is well worth watching.

In the meantime, here’s a summary:

Kirk is now famous for “misremembering” the fact that he did not win the U.S. Navy’s Intelligence Officer of the Year award (Instead, Kirk’s entire unit won a privately sponsored, not a Navy, merit award). Undaunted by the need to publicly retract that “mis-rembrance,” Kirk went on to “mis-remember” that it was his staff that caught the error in his official bio, when, actually it was the Department of the Navy that demanded that he correct his record.

Other notable Kirk “mis-remembrances” include having served in Operation Iraqi Freedom, as well as Operation Desert Storm. And then there was the time that Kirk came under fire while flying a plane over Iraq not to mention his stint at “commanding the war room” at the Pentagon. All Flights of Fancy…

Clearly, Kirk believes that one’s military service is an important distinction when running for office so he has spared no embellishment in distinguishing his own military record. But Kirk’s “gift of gab” doesn’t stop there. As Maddow says: “He also makes stuff up about the world at large…”

Like Kirk’s rationalization that, of course the US should be drilling off its shores for oil, because, after all, the Chinese are drilling off the coast of Cuba and sucking up all the oil that could be ours (which assertion, of course, has no basis in actual fact). And while we’re on the topic of oil, Kirk promises to do his best to persuade the US government to stop getting oil from Iran — he even gives figures of 80 million barrels a day — which should be an easy sell, since the U.S. doesn’t get oil from Iran. Finally there’s the entirely fabricated story regarding the relationship between Somali pirates and France that is so convoluted that it makes me weary to think about it, so you’ll just have to watch the Rachel Maddow clip to hear it in all of its “fabulous” detail.

So. If Rand Paul is “simply a narcissist,” Mark Kirk is simply a liar.

What Happens in Vegas…

And, finally, there’s the three-ring Republican primary circus in Nevada, featuring party-backed casino owner Sue Lowden, a former Nevada GOP Party Chair; business executive and ex-UNLV basketball star, Dan Tarkanian; and Tea Party Express-endorsed candidate, Sharron Angle in a three-way extravaganza of Republican-on-Republican disunity. I have to assume that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must be quite delighted by the entire production especially now that the Tea Party’s Sharron Angle is leading the pack and favored to win the primary in voting today.

Of the three Republicans, no one has been behaving particularly like an establishment politician, but then again we have to keep in mind that this is Nevada. The primary campaign has essentially broken down into a catfight with a detached bystander.

According to Brian Seitchik, Danny Tarkanian’s campaign manager, “Danny’s the only one who’s talking about issues, while Sharron and Sue club each other.”

I guess that’s why Danny was not doing as well in the polls.

Sue Lowden has snagged national attention for comments at a recent town hall meeting in Nevada in which she said that patients could barter with their doctors for health care — she suggested chickens as a once acceptable remittance for medical services. Easy for Sue Lowden to say since I’m sure that health care coverage is not an issue for her now and certainly wouldn’t be if she wins the November election and lands in the US Senate.

Sharron Angle, on the other hand, is of a more generous spirit, as Sue Lowden pointed out in her now-viral ad claiming that Angle had supported a program designed to use taxpayer dollars to provide prisoners with massages and spa treatments — a program of “detoxification protocols” attributed to the founder of the Church of Scientology.

Angle, who campaigned as a morally driven Christian crusader all about cracking down on government spending (and thereby securing the blessing of outfits like Tea Party Express and the Government is not God PAC), decided it might be best to purge her website of any whiffs of Scientology, like her fundraising work with celebrity Scientologist Jenna Elfman.

Elsewhere we have similar shenanigans in what has become known as the Polygraph Primary in South Carolina where Republican Nikki Haley is seeking to replace sex-scandalized Mark Sanford as candidate for Governor. As soon as Haley appeared to “show some legs” in the contest, rumors started to swirl about Haley’s own sex life. Not one, but two, men came forward to allege that they had known the otherwise married Haley “in the biblical sense.”

Both civic-minded champions came forward armed with evidence of the veracity of their claims: one provided text messages and phone logs to make his case; the other brought along polygraph results. Not to be outdone, another of Haley’s Republican opponents, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer jumped on the polygraph bandwagon to prove he had nothing to do with any of it.

According to Alex Pereene, covering the story for Salon, one of the purported lovers is, “Larry Marchant, a local lobbyist and former strategist for Haley opponent (and dimbulb bigot) Andre Bauer, says he had a one-night stand with Haley at a ‘school choice convention’ in 2008.”

The local Fox affiliate was happy to administer a polygraph test to confirm Marchant’s story; the results — inconclusive.

Pereene goes on to note that, “Marchant, suspiciously, ‘admitted’ to the indiscretion the day he was fired from the Bauer campaign, less than a week before today’s election.”

“Haley told the local media that all these allegations happened as soon as polls showed her with a lead over her rivals.”

I don’t know about you, but I have no interest in seeing any of these Yahoos in high office. As parents, most of us wouldn’t want them teaching in our schools so why, in God’s name, would we let them run the country? Maybe it’s a lack of viable alternatives…?

The Rude Pundit straightens Sarah Palin out on why the President shouldn’t do a sit-down with Tony Hayward, the silver-tongued CEO of British Petroleum:

In her latest Facebook posting (which is exactly where Thomas Paine would write Common Sense today so he could only reach people who “like” him), Palin takes Barack Obama to task for not having spoken to BP CEO Tony Hayward directly: “The current administration may be unaware that it’s the President’s duty, meeting on a CEO-to-CEO level with Hayward, to verify what BP reports.” She says that she was “a CEO” when she was governor of Alaska.

Now, while Palin may look at the words “chief executive” in reference to a governor or president and think it’s the same thing as “Chief Executive Officer” in a corporation, it’s that very analogy that has fucked us over. The government ain’t a company. The president ain’t a CEO…

See, a CEO’s job is to make money for the corporation. That’s it. Shit like laws and taxes and safety are impediments that must be dealt with on the way to making money. A CEO has to be a greedy bastard, a cuntish conqueror who doesn’t give a fuck what has to be done to get more money. The second you say that the President of the United States is on an equivalent level with a CEO is the second you reveal that you don’t know fuck-all about government and you degrade the presidency. The logical leap to President-as-CEO is a callous manipulation of the expectations of the governed, and it turns citizens into selfish shareholders…

Couldn’t have said it better myself, and therefore won’t. Here’s The Economist.

Maureen Dowd doinked Mr Obama Saturday with her silly-straw-like wit, faulting his “inability to encapsulate Americans’ feelings.” Yeah, you know who would’ve killed as the president facing a deep-sea oil blowout? Philip Seymour Hoffman. Or maybe Meryl Streep. Did you see them in “Doubt?”

Ms Dowd’s involvement is fitting, as this may be the sorriest spectacle of content-free public hyperventilation since Al Gore’s earth tones. The difference is that in this case the issue is deadly serious; it’s the public discourse that is puerile. There is plenty of room for substantive critique of the flaws in governance and policy uncovered by the Deepwater Horizon blowout. You could talk about regulatory failure. You could talk about corporate impunity. You could talk about blithely ignoring the tail-end risk of going ahead with deepwater drilling without any capacity to cope with catastrophic blowouts. Precisely none of these subjects are evident in the arguments our pundit class is having. Instead we have empty-headed squawking over what the catastrophe is doing to Barack Obama's image…

Below is the revenge of Lance Baxter. He’s the actor who drunk-dialed the freedom lovers at Freedom Works, who got him fired from his voice-over gig in the Geico ads. Probably everybody in the world has already seen this clip, but since I hadn’t, maybe you haven’t.

The real, immutable core concern of the Republican Party is, and has forever been, to shift taxes from the very rich to the rest of us. Everything else — abortion, immigration, creationism, small government, law and order, gay rights — is just bait to lure the suckers into the net. Here’s Daniel Larison at The American Conservative, cutting to the chase:

On the other point, it is not all that remarkable that Republican officeholders are being punished entirely for their fiscal errors. It is difficult to think of incumbent Republicans abandoning their party because of a backlash against their social liberalism, but it is fairly easy in recent years to find examples of fiscal moderates and liberals in the party that the rank-and-file have turned against or liberal Republican incumbents who switched parties at least partly because of disagreements over fiscal policy (e.g., Jeffords).

Indeed, we can look at Arlen Specter’s recent political career as proof that social conservative litmus tests frequently count for a lot less than fiscal conservative tests in the modern GOP. In 2004, the party establishment rallied around Specter on the grounds that the party supported incumbents against primary challengers. To his lasting embarrassment and discredit, Santorum endorsed Specter over Toomey.

Pro-lifers’ objections to Specter’s position on abortion weren’t important enough to Santorum or to the administration to risk losing that seat to the Democrats, and in the end they weren’t quite important enough to the primary voters, either. Five years later, one vote Specter cast for the stimulus made him persona non grata in the Pennsylvania GOP. Had Specter not cast that vote, it is questionable whether Toomey’s challenge would have still driven Specter to switch parties.

In practice, fiscal issues tend to be more important to more Republican activists and primary voters than social issues in almost every contest, except perhaps presidential primaries, and even in these contests it depends. Huckabee translated his strong social conservative record and evangelical Christianity into a sizeable following by the end of the primaries, but he never won outside the South and he was widely loathed in the conservative movement for his fiscal record as governor. His combination of social conservatism and economic pseudo-populism went over very badly with party and movement leaders generally, even though there is some reason to think that socially conservative and economically populist candidates could tap into a much broader base of support nationally.

For party and movement leaders, Romney had become sufficiently conservative on social issues to pass muster, despite having zero credibility on these issues, and what really mattered to them was his position on fiscal and economic issues. McCain took a lot of grief from activists and conservative voters for several reasons, but his opposition to Bush’s tax cuts earlier in the decade was always high on the list of McCain’s errors.

Back when I worked for the United States Information Agency, manning freedom’s ramparts in Casablanca during the Vietnam war, I had a poster in my office that read, “Fuck Communism.” Those were the days, my friend… And in those days, my friend, another popular bumper sticker said, “Fuck Hate.”

This rant from today’s BLCKDGRD is along similar lines:

I remember our time in Deale [Maryland], when we had our friends Henry and Donna to the marina house for a weekend, being told the minute they drove out of the parking lot by four cracker boat owners that if I ever let that nigger and his white skank race traitor bitch back they’d lynch my ass too. I told them to fuck off; my tires were slashed that night.

It’s obvious with my constant cracker this christer that I’m a stone bigot, but I’ve never said I was tolerant. I try to be intolerant to everyone, but I’m not large enough, I’m weak, I haven’t a reservoir of endless hate, I haven’t endless time to hate, I need to focus what hate I can summon on a few select targets — Arcade Fire, Raymond Carver, Terry Fucking Vaughn — that don’t affect the quality of anyone’s life but my own, and on a few large targets that affect the quality of my selfish insignificant life as a happily complicit home-owning, tax-paying, law-abiding, bloody-handed cog in capital’s race to ingest everything, and motherfucking crackers nostalgic for 1920’s Alabama and motherfucking christers jonesing for white jeebus, well, it’s delicious to hate them, it’s delicious to demonize them, it’s delicious to organize to keep them out of our schools, out of our state houses, to keep their hands off our wives’ and daughters’ uteruses, to keep them as marginalized and mocked and furious and ugly as possible.

And yes, I know crackers are funded and encouraged to be ugly to keep rubes like me busy hating them rather than hating what needs hating more, to keep me nostalgic for an America that will never be. I’m working to make my hate more copious, more all encompassing.

One of Gandalf’s nicknames was Stormcrow, “a reference to his arrival being associated with times of trouble, often used by his detractors to mean he was a troublesome meddler in the affairs of others.”

Indeed, Gandalf did meddle in the affairs of others, to the benefit of the good guys and the detriment of the bad ones. He brought information whether it was wanted or not, and forced people to look at it. Some people called that egotistical.

Noam Chomsky hears that a lot too, though Norman Finkelstein has a simple demonstration that it ain’t so. What upsets people so much about Chomsky? Well, establishment figures don’t like the kind of reading on our democracy he gave Chris Hedges of TruthDig from a leading intellectual, even one who’s been blacklisted by commercial media.

“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”

“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”

“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”

This certainly fits with what I’ve read in recent polls. Many of the reasonable people are disillusioned, and the crazies are locked and loaded, prodded by Murdoch but not requiring his provocations to engage in criminal acts that will seriously undermine the fabric of trust in society. The crazies are very likely to win in November because the Democrats are unenthused, the independents are turned off by both parties, and the only really active folks are the Tea Partiers.

We needed an FDR and we got a Carter. But as Chomsky would say, no FDR could be elected or even nominated today, and what FDR did, after all, was bring a corrupt and failing system back to life, when it might have better to replace large portions of it.

I tried to paraphrase Finkelstein’s defense of Chomsky but I couldn’t come up with anything as good as what he said.

“Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity,” said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. “They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”

“Some of Chomsky’s books will consist of things like analyzing the misrepresentations of the Arias plan in Central America, and he will devote 200 pages to it,” Finkelstein said. “And two years later, who will have heard of Oscar Arias? It causes you to wonder would Chomsky have been wiser to write things on a grander scale, things with a more enduring quality so that you read them forty or sixty years later. This is what Russell did in books like ‘Marriage and Morals.’ Can you even read any longer what Chomsky wrote on Vietnam and Central America? The answer has to often be no. This tells you something about him. He is not writing for ego. If he were writing for ego he would have written in a grand style that would have buttressed his legacy. He is writing because he wants to effect political change. He cares about the lives of people and there the details count. He is trying to refute the daily lies spewed out by the establishment media. He could have devoted his time to writing philosophical treatises that would have endured like Kant or Russell. But he invested in the tiny details which make a difference to win a political battle.”

The times they are a-changing, so sooner or later it was bound to happen. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Veteran Rep. Babette Josephs (D., Phila.) last Thursday accused her primary opponent, Gregg Kravitz [pictured below], of pretending to be bisexual in order to pander to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender voters, a powerful bloc in the district.

“I outed him as a straight person,” Josephs said during a fund-raiser at the Black Sheep Pub & Restaurant, as some in the audience gasped or laughed, “and now he goes around telling people, quote, ‘I swing both ways.’ That’s quite a respectful way to talk about sexuality. This guy’s a gem.”

Kravitz, 29, said that he is sexually attracted to both men and women and called Josephs’ comments offensive.

Republican consultant Ed Rollins has spent much of his life working for monsters, but that doesn’t make him stupid. He just fell in with the wrong crowd at a young age. After a talk he gave years ago at the Kennedy School, I came away hoping he’d change sides some day.

He was too smart for the 1980s GOP, and he’s way too smart for the malformed creature it has now become. Which I’m sure he knows. This is from a piece he did today for CNN. Goldman Sachs should hire him, but won’t. He’s too smart for them, too.

…Goldman denied the charges, and its sympathizers accused President Obama — who got nearly $1 million in campaign contributions from Goldman employees — of orchestrating the SEC lawsuit to sell his banking reform package. And then, it turns out that Goldman has done something else dumb — by hiring Obama’s recently departed White House lawyer, Gregory Craig, to help handle its legal strategy.

Craig is an extremely competent and respected lawyer. He knows the town and the players. But Washington is full of competent lawyers and people who know the game. Obama said his administration was going to be different and the revolving door of government service and back to the private sector was going to stop. It hasn’t. This is not the president’s mistake. It is another Goldman Sachs mistake.

And then Monday, Goldman announced its “good news.” In the first quarter of this year, the bank’s earnings of $3.46 billion were 91 percent higher than a year ago. It also announced it has set aside $5.5 billion (up 17 percent) to pay salaries and bonuses to employees…

Here is Ezra Klein, the Great Explicator, explaining why Br’er Mitch is hollering so hard for Br’er Barack not to throw him in dat brier patch:

A bank is judged failing. The FDIC submits a plan for the bank’s liquidation — which includes firing management, wiping out shareholders, handing losses to creditors, and selling off the firm — and gets it approved by the Treasury secretary. Then the FDIC takes over the banks. The $50 billion fund is used to keep the lights on while all this happens. It’s there to prevent taxpayers from having to foot the bill for the chaos that will occur between when we recognize a bank is failing and when we shut it down.

Whatever you want to call this, it isn’t a bailout. It’s the death of the company. And the fund is way of forcing too-big-to-fail banks to pay for the execution. But stung by Republican criticisms, the administration is telling Democrats to let the fund go. And they’re not all that unhappy to see it die. “The fund isn’t a priority for the Obama administration,” reported Business Week, “which instead proposed having the financial industry repay the government for the cost of disassembling a failed firm, an approach preferred by the industry.”

So let’s just be clear: The alternative to the liquidation fund is Wall Street’s preference. That should tell you pretty much all you need to know about whether the industry really views this as a bailout.

So what’s the deal, I’m asked these days, with Pelosi and me, are we still in love or what?

Well, lemme assure you that “what” continues to be the answer. Is she the most powerful Speaker in a century, as lots of people are saying right now? There’s even a Guardian article asking if she’s the most powerful woman in US history.

Admittedly this is not as high a standard here, where we’ve yet to have a female Chief Executive. And if you think about powerful women in US history, at least those who were politically powerful independent of their husbands, the vast majority of them are still alive. Women couldn’t even vote in most states until 1920. Eleanor Roosevelt, to take an example, was powerful in many ways, not nearly all of them based on her husband; but her influence was not that of a Speaker of the House. Governors like Sebelius and Palin are surely powerful — in their states. Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton? Secretary of State reports to somebody, in fact serves at his, underline his, discretion. Speaker of the House is #3 to the football. So, yes, I think by process of elimination she’s the most powerful woman in American political history.

Most powerful Speaker in a hundred years? I’m not a historian of the Congress, so I don’t know how much my opinion counts on this topic. But it seems to me that power involves more than reacting, it involves acting with some purpose. Other than self-maintenance, which of course all power is about. To me a powerful Speaker would convince, or perhaps I should say “convince”, other Representatives to act to change things, to move the ball down the field.

What I see Pelosi as doing is realizing that the Reid blows with the wind, and Obama’s never fought for anything. Her job title will change later this year, she’ll become The Woman Who Used to Be The Most Powerful Woman in US History, if she doesn’t get a bill passed. This gives her just as much leverage as Obama bought himself by making clear that he needed a bill, any bill: namely, none. It does, however, provide two vital items: desperation, and a clear goal. Or, put another way, I’m walking into a jewelry store with my girlfriend wearing a sign that says, “I have to buy a ring today.”

Given the clear goal, and the fact that she’s the Democrat with the most personal status, not to say power, to lose, she was able to coerce a reluctant administration and a weak Majority Leader to engage fully in passing a large bill. Their alternative was a Republican Speaker. Now she’s hoping that the size of the bill, its complexity and time-release nature, will get her over the November hump.

It’s a big gamble, because it’s easier to attack the bill ideologically than to point to immediate benefits for most people. And then there’s the gamble that the substance of the bill will turn out to be to peoples’ liking, which I personally doubt.

But the thing is, she had no choice. In chess terms, she’s not acting with the initiative in hand, she’s responding to threats. I don’t think of that as powerful, though in a sense it is. Being able to organize a successful defense of your citadel indicates prowess, no doubt. But what she defended was her personal situation.

Unless you see the bill as a big advance. There’s the rub. Pelosi would probably argue in essence that although it’s a big giveaway to the insurance and drug companies, she’s created something to build on. She’s not stupid enough to think the bill “covers” a single new person, regardless of her press releases.

The bill mandates the buying of insurance, but it does not, as far as I can tell, require insurance to cover the medical procedures you will need. And notice I say will, because it’s a dead stone lock that you will need them. So how can a business bet that you won’t need them, and still turn a profit? By goosing expenses, of course, but mainly by denying coverage. The bill lists reasons you can’t be denied coverage, and anyone who’s ever dealt with an insurance company knows what that means: the company will find a different reason when it stops being profitable to cover you.

So it seems to me that the overall effect of the bill is basically a negative one. Rather than attempting to fix the problem that we agree is likely to destroy the economy, we’re handing the whole mess over to the people who caused the problem and continue to profit from its existence. That’ll help.

I suspect the Speaker might argue in private that the bill has a chance of making things better precisely because it fails so utterly to make a difference in how we do things. Now that we’re criminalizing those who don’t buy insurance, it’ll be even more obvious how much we needed a public option, that watered-down version of what two-thirds of Americans have supported in polls for decades, single-payer. So Pelosi can claim to have put the inquiry to the country: do we need a public option? Thank God someone had the courage to state that question.

It’s certainly not leadership. Whether it’s power depends on whether your definition of power requires something other than self-preservation. Mine does, so I don’t think of Pelosi as a particularly powerful Speaker. Undoubtedly she’s an astute political player, she grew up in a political family; but she’s also working against the backdrop of the milquetoasts the Democrats have become.

To me the health care bill, despite having some positive features, seems like a failure, overall worse than no bill at all. But it could turn out that it’s only an initial failure which we’ll work to remedy for the next several decades, gradually producing some approximation of a reasonable system. Certainly we’ll be stuck trying to fix the problems Pelosi’s members forced her to insert for a long time. So she’s definitely made a mark on society, and that’s one definition of power.

…or so says former Bush speechwriter David Frum. Myself, I would never impute ulterior motives to the fat freak.

When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say — but what is equally true — is that he also wants Republicans to fail.

If Republicans succeed — if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office — Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less and hear fewer ads for Sleep Number beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished.

For the cause they purport to represent, however, the “Waterloo” threatened by GOP Sen. Jim DeMint last year regarding Obama and health care has finally arrived all right: Only it turns out to be our own.

From Politico:

Pelosi’s great advantage is she has played her cards early and is a proven, aggressive political operative … Yet going forward, Pelosi will have to answer herself for some of the legislative shortcuts taken in her fierce “damn the torpedoes” march toward final passage. “She’s impressive, horrifying at times, but impressive,” said one person who observed the speaker closely in weeks of backroom meetings.

Well, Washington, DC hosted “Armey’s Last Stand” yesterday. About two weeks ago Health Care Reform was officially designated a Tea Party “Code Red situation” calling for urgent mobilization; forthwith a couple hundred TPers dutifully shaped up at the Capitol in their signature Tea Party regalia, carrying their signature “down with everything” posters and placards.

This group has evolved, since their first appearance last year around this time, in ways that would have been impossible to predict. Yesterday’s street theater successfully demonstrated that evolution, if not much else. Over time, Republican Party outpourings of solidarity and support for Tea Party activism have dwindled, coincident with the Tea Party’s repudiation of Republican apparatchiks as just as undesirable as any other target “government-as-usual” group which the TP has singled out for extinction.

Signs of strain were not that difficult to sniff out. By now, everyone has probably seen pictures of the TP placards that were supplied by the RNC earlier in the game. This time around, RNC was still distributing the things but had gone to the trouble of placing “blackout” stickers over their endorsement. Then, too, GOP notables were conspicuously absent from yesterday’s pep rally, signaling Republicans’ wariness of how truly the Tea Party actually speaks for the “silent majority” they profess to represent…

Dramatis Personae

A few die-hard Washington wing-nuts still turned out for Code Red — Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Steve King (R-IA) and Joe “You Lie” Wilson (R-SC) were there to incite hundreds to new levels of insanity. Fox News, doing the best with what they had, described the Code Red Rally as featuring “a host of Republican speakers, including Reps. Mike Pence (R-IN), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Tom Price (R-GA) and Marsha Blackburn, (R-TN).”

Notably missing from that lineup was Sen. Jim DeMint who has been working assiduously at being the Tea Party’s Best Friend in Washington, according to a recent article in Politico. And while DeMint’s efforts might be scoring him points with the Tea Party (although there’s not a lot of evidence of that yet) it’s definitely not making him any more popular with his own party, which appears to have decided to give the TP a wide berth, for now at least.

So, it appears that the past year has brought evolution, some contraction as well as greater “clarity” (if you can call it that) to both the Tea Party and the Republican Party platforms. The Tea Party, despite its astro-turf beginnings, has gelled into what looks like a fairly adamant anti-government movement, strong on fear and loathing and short on solid facts – but, then, in the Tea Party world, facts and people who deal in facts are not to be trusted; history, like the Bible, is meant to validate their views and effectively rubber stamp their agenda “best for everyone involved.”

The Tea Party has morphed into a conservative populist movement willing to take conservatism to new extremes to represent the wishes of a (largely mythical) “silent majority.” I think that the “silent majority” notion is part and parcel of a mythology of fear and imagined oppression; freedom and liberty, in this mythology, are freedom “from anything I don’t like or agree with” and the liberty “to do as I please” without regard to how it affects the common good. Proponents of this mythology populate their world with like-minded fellow travelers who are too meek to speak up – but they’re out there. There also seems to be that Christian Conservative, homespun American Puritan influence that says “this is right and this wrong for all God’s children, end of argument” substantiation not required. And so it is that the Tea Party quickly gets to a place where facts are subordinate to ideology and the ends always justify the means.

If you think I overstate, here are a few samplings of yesterday’s commentary coming from the Tea Party itself:

The following “sentiments” appeared on the America’s News Online website which describes itself thus:

“As a company, AmericasNewsOnline.com is a dedicated group of writers covering the topics that are making a difference in people’s lives. Our goal is to give the reader a balanced perspective of both sides of the news. In our opinion, it should be up to the reader to decide the real truth.

“We have a team of 6 researchers submitting breaking news everyday. With our team’s diverse background, we are able to cover news from different points of view.”

This from contributor Susan Thompson:

“The Tea Party Movement along with a little help from Rush Limbaugh turned the face of Washington red today. Even Barrack Obama is coming with his tail between his legs and is to appear for an interview with Fox News.

“There are members of the Tea Party Movement, in fact all of the Tea Party, that are outraged on the way that the Obama administration and the Dems in Congress are trying to find the sneakiest ways imaginable to pass the healthcare bill. Americans are very much in shock that the Dems would try to ram this bill through with an 80% disapproval rating.”

“Pelosi was heard to be paraphrased saying, ‘Americans aren’t smart enough to figure out how we’re doing this and aren’t interested in the process.’ She went on to same (sic) we will pass this bill for the good of American citizens. The Tea Party is holding strongly to ‘kill the bill.’”

Really, really awful writing aside, this stuff is pure propaganda, not to mention poppycock; but it is emotionally appealing to a crowd that believes that all of their ills have been caused by government and that, furthermore, they don’t need or want anything that government provides. It’s not that they have conflicting views on how the government should operate, no alternative methods are ever promoted beyond “sending Obama’s socialism ‘back to Russia.’”

Speaking to a CNS News interviewer, a woman who would only identify herself as “Jamie” said congressional arrogance is the main reason she came to the rally.

“I’m here, because I’m really concerned about how the legislative process is being bastardized to push this through. Whether you’re for it or against it, if they can bastardize our legislative process like this, what’s to stop them for anything? Why do we even have elected officials?”

Russ Cote of New Jersey told CNS this is the third event he has attended to protest a proposed health care system that he said is unsustainable and unconstitutional: “It’s simple economics. We’re going to go broke. We’re going to go broke fast.”

What these people seem to be saying is that they are afraid – afraid that something is terribly wrong with the day-to-day operation of government that they have, by and large, chosen to ignore lo these many years. They are afraid of “bastardized legislative processes,” the passage of unconstitutional legislation, death panels and socialism — now; despite the fact that extrajudicial renditions, assassinations, the use of torture, and warrant-less wiretapping caused barely ripple in their deeply-running still waters.

Neither do these emotional, impressionable people seem to care a fig about unsustainable health care costs in the status quo, or rampant US global militarization, or rapacious defense corporations defrauding the US government as a matter of course. They don’t even seem to worry much about the erosion of their constitutional rights to privacy and due process or the loss of America’s moral standing in the world due to high officials condoning, even expressing pride in having committed war crimes.

Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid

Why do you suppose that is? My theory is that it’s all in the packaging. People enjoy a good scare, sometimes. Generally, when things are not going so well, it helps to believe that the problem is “larger than life” and that we’re “all in this together.” Anyone with “I told you so, on their lips” is cruisin’ for a bruisin’ and it’s human nature to try to deflect blame and shame.

Republicans have suffered some electoral humiliations over the pickle we find ourselves in and they are more than ready for that to change. The trick is to make enough people believe that the Democrats are even worse or that Republicans, having made the mess in the first place, are the only ones who can effectively clean it up. Clumsiness over this messaging, so far, has engendered some pretty entertaining political positions on both sides of the aisle. For a while the large number of uncommitted Tea Partiers looked pretty attractive to the GOP with its 28% approval rating. In order to come roaring back, Republicans needed some fresh voters. From the beginning, it was pretty obvious what the TP hot buttons were and, in an effort to court them, the GOP made the Tea Party causes their causes.

A year later, clearly Republican leadership is rethinking that one. Appealing to the Tea Party is a lot like herding cats…

Nevertheless, a few stalwarts are still banging that drum for lack of anything better to do. One of those is Rep. Steve King from Iowa who has always had a lot to say that made little sense. The problem with King’s embrace of the Tea Party is that clearly, these Tea Partiers either can’t or don’t want to distinguish between fact and fiction and to them King represents a voice of authority (telling them it’s quite all right to be crazy).

King’s contribution, this time around, was to whip the Tea Partiers into an anarchic frenzy to paralyze the Capitol. He said, “Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can’t get in, they can’t get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people.”

Elsewhere in his speech, he spouted his usual disinformation about the health care bill funding abortion as well as care for 6.1 million illegal immigrants, winding up with an impassioned plea for concerned citizens to “continue to rise up.”

I haven’t yet decided whether I think King is just simple-minded or whether he’s a world-class demagogue – either way, King has spent his years in Washington filling the air with a giant load of misleading crap – below are some samples of King’s wit and wisdom, taken from Wikipedia, which lists links for all comments.

On Joseph McCarthy:

In 2005, King whipped up a group to oppose honoring a Berkeley, California councilwomen because of her “affiliation” with the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Berkeley. Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee claimed that King’s “campaign of innuendo and unsubstantiated ‘concern’ is better suited to the era of Joseph McCarthy than today’s House of Representatives,” King claimed that history showed McCarthy to be “a hero for America.”

On the May 1, 2006 “Day Without an Immigrant” rallies, King offered his opinion to the Op-Ed editor of the Des Moines Register:

“What would that May 1st look like without illegal immigration? There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines that plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of meth that day by 80%. The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.”

[Critics immediately argued that King's daily numbers in the editorial are inflated, based on the incorrect premise that 28% of all prisoners in all American jails and prisons are illegal aliens. King cited an April, 2005 GAO report as the source of that statistic; that report actually says that 27% of federal prisoners were "criminal aliens," a term that includes both legal and illegal aliens. "Criminal aliens" doesn't mean "illegal aliens". State prisons and local jails together hold 92% of US prisoners. The actual percentage of illegal aliens held at the time in state prisons and local jails can be determined by comparing figures for SCAAP federal compensation to states and localities with federal Bureau of Justice Statistics prisoner censuses. Such a comparison reveals that the accurate illegal alien percentage being held was less than 4%, rather than the 28% claimed by King.

In May 2008, King downgraded his original claims about the contents and reliability of the GAO report from which he "extrapolated" them saying: “ . . . that report came back not quite apples to apples.”]

On Washington, D.C.:

“My wife lives here with me, and I can tell you… she’s at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C., than an average civilian in Iraq.”

King said that there were 45 violent deaths per 100,000 in Washington, D.C., in 2003 while he calculated that there were 27.51 per 100,000 in Iraq as a whole.

The Iraqi Health Ministry casualty survey, however, estimated 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq due to the war from 2003 to 2006, or roughly 162.37 per 100,000 per year. The Lancet survey published in 2006 estimated that 2.5% of the population of Iraq had died from the war as of June 2006.

On State Department appropriations:

On June 21, 2007, King introduced an amendment to the $34 billion State and Foreign Operations bill to prohibit funds from being used by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to travel to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan or Syria. When asked why the measure did not apply to Republican House members who had also made trips to the countries in question, King’s spokesman replied that he was unsure whether that had been considered, or why it might not have been.

UPDATE: At the end of 2009, Rep. King went on his own “fact-finding” junket to Afghanistan. Upon his return he reported that he met with President Muhammad (sic) Karzai and found him to be “human.”

On Barack Obama:

On March 7, 2008, during his press engagements to announce his reelection campaign, King made his now famous remarks about Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his middle name, saying:

“ … if he is elected president, then the radical Islamists, the al-Qaida, the radical Islamists and their supporters, will be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on September 11 because they will declare victory in this War on Terror.”

[At the time, Obama said he did not take the comments too seriously, describing King as “an individual who thrives on making controversial statements to get media coverage.” The McCain campaign disavowed King's comments, saying "John McCain rejects the type of politics that degrades our civics…and obviously that extends to Congressman King's statement.”

On the Iowa Supreme Court:

In April, 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that a state ban on same-sex marriage violated the Iowa constitution. King opined that the judges "should resign from their position" and the state legislature "must also enact marriage license residency requirements so that Iowa does not become the gay marriage Mecca."

On the IRS building bombing in Austin, Texas:

Last month, in his closing remarks at CPAC, King said he could “empathize” with the man who flew a plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS employee.

On Washington lobbyists:

On the House floor in February 2010, King made remarks defending and supporting lobbyists as a source of “valuable information”:

“Lobbyists do a very effective and useful job on this Hill, and if anyone gave me information that wasn’t accurate or honest, if they found out about it they would bring it back and correct it to me first. If I thought they were doing so intentionally, they would not come back to talk to me ever. There is credibility there, in that arena, that I think somebody needs to stand up for the lobby. It is a matter of providing a lot of valuable information.”

One might reasonably ask whether Rep. King would recognize “valuable information” if it bit him in the ass …

After King’s latest outing a Huffington Post reporter asked him about his comparison of the Tea Party protest with the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Prague. Here’s how that went:

HuffPo: “So this is just like Prague under communist rule?” the Huffington Post asked.

King: “Oh yeah, it is very, very close,” King replied. “It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over. So there are a lot of similarities there.”

“I look back 20 years ago in the square in Prague ... when tens of thousands showed up there and they shook their keys peacefully and they took over their country and they achieved their freedom back again,” he said. “If you can keep coming to this city, fill up the congressional offices across the country but jam this city. If you can get on your cell phones, and get on your Blackberries and your email, and ask people to keep coming to this town. Storm this city, fill up Washington D.C., jam this capital so they can’t move. And if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of you show up, we will win. We will defeat this bill and you will have your liberty back.”

Of course, part of the reason that Prague is so idyllic is because they have government-sponsored health care — just like you do, Rep. King…

From the Washington Independent:

Kathy Ropte — like Jackson, a member of the Harris County, Ga. Tea Party, had started to move beyond lobbying. As cameras snapped away, she stood in front of the Cannon Building and announced the termination, “to take effect in November,” of pro-health care reform members. One activist chided her for the display, which included a massive sign reading “Waterboard Congress.” Jackson didn’t care. She was in the fight, whether or not health care reform passed.

“One day I turned off American Idol,” Ropte told TWI, “and I turned on Fox News. Before this year I’d never voted in my life.”

Bart Stupak might want to beef up his obstructionism by weighing down the health care bill with the language William Blum suggests below. Go for it, Bart. There are innocent lives to be saved!

About half the states in the US require that a woman seeking an abortion be told certain things before she can obtain the medical procedure. In South Dakota, for example, until a few months ago, staff was required to tell women: “The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being”; the pregnant woman has “an existing relationship with that unborn human being,” a relationship protected by the U.S. Constitution and the laws of South Dakota; and a “known medical risk” of abortion is an “increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.”

…I'd like to suggest that before a young American man or woman can enlist in the armed forces s/he must be told the following by the staff of the military recruitment office:

“The United States is at war [this statement is always factually correct]. You will likely be sent to a battlefield where you will be expected to do your best to terminate the lives of whole, separate, unique, living human beings you know nothing about and who have never done you or your country any harm. You may in the process lose an arm or a leg. Or your life. If you come home alive and with all your body parts intact there’s a good chance you will be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Do not expect the government to provide you particularly good care for that, or any care at all. In any case, you may wind up physically abusing your spouse and children and/or others, killing various individuals, abusing drugs and/or alcohol, and having an increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.

“No matter how bad a condition you may be in, the Pentagon may send you back to the battlefield for another tour of duty. They call this ‘stop-loss’. Your only alternative may be to go AWOL. Do you have any friends in Canada? And don’t ever ask any of your officers what we’re fighting for. Even the generals don’t know. In fact, the generals especially don’t know. They would never have reached their high position if they had been able to go beyond the propaganda we’re all fed, the same propaganda that has influenced you to come to this office.”

Unlike most of us who have been sounding off on the matter, Papa Bonk actually knows the man who recently became his former congressman: Eric Massa. Therefore attention must be paid:

The real tragedy of Eric Massa (who I know personally) is that he was a damn good congressman, a hard working Progressive who took principled stands on tough issues… like Afghanistan and single payer health care. He, like Larry Craig, is in many ways a victim of a culture that causes many citizens to suppress their true selves. If Eric Massa ran again as a gay man I would be there running with him.

Eric made a few big mistakes in bowing out … pointing fingers at Nancy and Rahm, for example. But he also pulled off a major coup … getting on Glennn’s Moron Show for an entire hour. Once inside the viper’s nest, he gave Beck nothing useful and managed to score a couple of points.

He said a good first step towards fixing Washington’s problems would be for the GOOP to stop lying about the facts. He also suggested there would be no real solutions until we had real campaign finance reform. No one has ever been able to say anything quite so true on Fox News without being censored or shouted down. Beck, who is preprogrammed by his handlers to spew fascist silliness for hours at a time … was left speechless.

From Bette Noir’s blog, The Frump Gazette. Which I have just discovered, and recommend. I agree with her about President Obama’s political strategy; I hope we’re both right.

Well, frumps, things are definitely starting to look up for Democrats and the Obama administration if my Lunatic Fringe barometer can still be trusted. I’ve discovered, over the past year, that there is a quantifiable inverse relation between the fortunes of the Obama White House and threats of violence from the far-right reaches of the blogosphere. None too stable at the best of times, these folks have a tendency to fly around the room backwards whenever Obama shows signs of succeeding at advancing his domestic social policy agenda.

Obama has an interesting way of achieving his ends. He allows debate to rage unbridled, allows people to act out and vent melodramatically until we are all simply exhausted by the topic. Then, as we mentally move on, he quietly administers CPR and, next thing you know, dead-in-the-water issues are moving apace toward realization. It’s a pretty impressive strategy, to me, at least.

Just think about the health care reform battle. A year went by while we raged and fumed on our various sides of the issue. As Obama put it in his Health Care Summit, last week, “everything that could be said, had been said.” Gray-haired grannies duked it out with the local teamsters in Town Halls. Conspiracy theorists pumped up the volume and warned us all of The New World Order and/or Socialism/Fascism that lie just around the corner…

Steve Clemons is a bit of a character. It’s really important to him that we realize what high-ranking folks he hangs out with. On the other hand, hanging out with high-ranking folks means you hear a lot of inside takes, and he points us to a particularly important one today.

Surprisingly, the Obama administration is portrayed as failing in its first year because it continues to operate on the principles derived from campaigning, despite their being inappropriate for governing.

According to the Edward Luce article at the Financial Times website, the decision-makers in this administration are basically four politicians in a tightly knit group. These folks accomplished what everyone (except me) considered impossible in winning the White House, and are thus somewhat reluctant to accommodate themselves to outside complaints that their plans are impossible.

This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding — and unexpected — failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion — not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr Obama would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law — and with it would have become a historic president.

You gotta love that. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion. The weak link wasn’t the failure to follow through on campaign promises, no one’s naïve enough to expect that; nor was it the failure to do what two-thirds of the public consistently demanded in polls, namely some sort of Medicaid-like program available to everyone. No, that couldn’t have had anything to do with the failure to produce a bill, just because there was no consistuency other than the insurance and drug companies.

President Obama chose a signature issue for his first year in which he’d taken the only reasonable solution off the table before he began to negotiate. Apparently he and his advisors really saw him as The One, Neo Incarnate, the being whose perfection of purpose could save us all.

I say “surprisingly” because, of course, it isn’t surprising at all. My personal memory tends toward the theory that the permanent campaign came in with Ronald Reagan and Michael Deaver, but Jerry would have a better informed opinion on that score. This was my complaint about the Clinton White House. Bush II was the same, and Bush I only differed by employing smoother thievery.

It’s so hard to campaign nationally that the most productive years of several top-flight talents are required to reach the White House, at which point there’s no time left to learn how to govern. An entirely different skill from that of campaigning, let’s just leave it there.

Hopefully, though I’m not holding my breath, Obama will realize that the reason health care reform failed was not that it was too bold, but that it was nowhere near bold enough. Taking single-payer off the table gave away the game: the President would do anything for a success, which left the most recalcitrant members of Congress in the catbirds’ seats.

And they sure took advantage of that. And that sure was predictable.

Get a new chief of staff, start fighting for the lower and middle classes against the big-money interests, and aim for a great two-term Presidency; or continue to speak like a progressive Democrat while acting like a hawkish Republican, alienate your base, and be as successful in 2012 as your Superbowl pick in 2010. That, Mr. President, is my prognostication, for what it’s worth.

Does anyone know how the Democrats’ health care reform package proposes to prevent the insurance companies from pulling a similar scam?

The largest homeowners insurer in Florida is canceling the policies of 125,000 of its most vulnerable customers beginning Aug. 1, halfway through the 2010 hurricane season.

The company, State Farm Florida, began sending out cancellation notices this week to nearly a fifth of its 714,000 customers, most of them in the state’s hurricane-prone coastal regions.

A spokesman for State Farm said the decision was the direct result of its failure to win a 47.1 percent rate increase from state regulators.

State Farm stopped writing new policies and sought the increase a year ago, saying severe losses from a series of devastating hurricanes in recent years had rendered its business model unworkable. It said that without the large increase, it would be insolvent by the end of 2011.

Suppose there’s a couple of bad flu seasons. Then the next year the insurance companies, one by one, no collusion here, begin demanding 50% rate increases for health care insurance policies, and end up negotiating a deal with the relevant government merely to cancel the insurance of a fifth of their customers. As long as they don’t cancel you for pre-existing conditions or because you’ve hit some lifetime limit, they’re good, right? We can’t force the companies to stay in business, at least in the current environment.

And of course there’s about three-quarters of a million Americans going bankrupt each year at least in part because of medical bills despite having health insurance. What do the Democrats propose to do about this?

They appear to have failed entirely at the one project they set themselves for this year, thus yielding what the Village Voice called a 41-59 majority for the Republicans.

But there’s a positive side, it appears.

David Miller, president of Brightway Insurance in Orlando and Jacksonville, saw a silver lining to the announcement. Spreading State Farm’s customers around to other companies will make the homeowners insurance market more competitive, and the canceled State Farm customers will likely get a better deal from their new insurers, he said.

“I think when they go to shop … they’re going to find that there are actually some tremendous savings, and this could end up being a blessing in disguise for many people,” Miller said.

Which makes sense. Insurance salesfolk are known to lend a sympathetic ear and policy to people in need.

One of the great pleasures of a new article by William Greider is his hopefulness. He still believes we can change the country into something we want it to be, something more like the original promises we made to ourselves at the founding, which we’ve never lived up to. Yet, Greider would probably add.

In the newest, “Political Fever”, he argues that the current discomfiture of the Democrats is a good thing in that it provides an opening for the people to pressure the government.

The Washington Post calls it a “populist brushfire,” and pundits explain why our sudden rowdiness is irrational, possibly dangerous if not swiftly contained. What a rare moment to behold — we’ve got their attention! Events that the major media see as illness are actually the first small signs of revival in our moribund democracy. The rebellions are like early tremors in what could be a deep shift in the tectonic plates of power. If so, the first waves are going to be followed by more waves — lots of them emanating from unexpected quarters — new voices and new ideas intruding on the exclusive parlor talk that passes for political dialogue.

I think Greider finds the whole spectacle fun and exciting because he’s identified with what a lifetime as a reporter has taught him is important to regular folks. He’s worked for the Post and Rolling Stone before his current gig as national affairs honcho for The Nation, and he knows Washington fairly well. But he hasn’t let familiarity kill hope, in part, I think, because he has a better sense of history than most politicians, or reporters for that matter. And he hasn’t identified his hopes and dreams with a particular political party, but with what his sense of history and his experience with people tell him are the big-picture trends.

Right now we’re buffeted by several of those, among them climate change, peak oil, and imperial overstretch. Politicians as a social class ignore these and others for as long as they can, since any viable solutions involve radical shifts in wealth and power from the current outrageously top-heavy structure.

But when a Republican in a pickup truck can take Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, you know it’s a moment at which we’ve got their attention.

This is where liberal-labor progressives can make a difference by exerting “tough love” on the Democratic Party. Do not be subtle about the electoral threat to comfortable incumbents. By refusing to fall into line and instead encouraging voters to talk back, activist groups can scare the bejesus out of Democrats (maybe even the president). People should demand, not beg, that Obama endorse the $154 billion jobs bill the House has already passed. Or blister Democratic senators who refuse to take up labor-law reforms needed to help workers organize. There is a long list of potential targets, if progressives are willing to assert themselves.

Usually, of course, Democrats in Washington do not take this sort of pressure seriously, and Obama’s White House has been dismissive of its liberal base, especially organized labor. Politicians can count, and they typically regard threats from left of center as toothless. But activists in Washington might change that if they reach out and develop alliances with the broad ranks of ordinary people across the country, including unorganized independents and renegade Republicans. Turn away from the policy culture of Washington. Instead, learn how to listen to everyday people, their concerns and aspirations — then learn to talk like them. The right does an ugly, fear-driven version of this. The left can speak for a more honest and optimistic vision of what Americans need. Mobilizing the anger is necessary to sustaining democracy.

We can take control of this country if we choose; the forms of democracy are still in place. The deck has been stacked against us, and the odds are long. But there are so many of us who recognize the actual need for real change, not just belief, that the question isn’t whether we could succeed, but whether we’ll put in the effort required. It’ll take democratic action; but as Greider says in Come Home, America, the easiest and least scary thing you can to do advance democracy is talk with the people around you about what’s going on. Generate conversation, get people thinking, even riled up. When enough people are angry, and willing to call their representatives to express that anger, the system will respond surprisingly quickly. Not necessarily efficiently, or even correctly at first. But it’ll respond, one way or another. As long as we can vote out the incumbents, we can scare them into doing what we want.

Henry Adams quoted a Cabinet member who was his superior responding to an Adams request for patience and tact in dealing with a Representative. The unnamed Cabinet member burst out: “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!”

If we take up our political sticks, Congress will respond. This is not a faith thing, it’s an observation based on the desperation of members of Congress to hold onto that designation. Credibly threaten the Democrats with abandonment, in which case they’ll return to minority status, and see if they don’t respond.

I wonder if the bad news the Democrats have received over the past few weeks isn’t a blessing in disguise.

No, I’m not claiming they’ll learn from their mistakes, pick themselves up, and climb back into the fight. No attentive observer would be that silly.

But consider this. Had Scott Brown not been elected during, and thus after, the debacle the Democrats made of health-care reform, forcing the President to rebrand so hastily that the newly adopted persona is not even vaguely credible, the Democratic leadership would have been forced to deal with their collective nightmare, also known as their constitutional duty.

Fat chance, you say? Who’s gonna force Pelosi and Reid to do what the highest law of the land requires of them?

Well, with all that’s going on right now, how much have you heard about the Chilcot inquiry in Britain? There’s a lot of fascinating testimony being given, admittedly to a bunch of pretty conservative inquirers, but in public nonetheless. As a result, we know publicly and for sure that the UK government was being told before the Iraq invasion in 2003 that the action would be illegal under international law. And not by a voice crying in the wilderness.

While Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, was roundly dismissing the unanimous advice of his top lawyers that an invasion of Iraq would be illegal, officials in Downing Street were strongly resisting similar unwelcome advice, this time from Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general.

Previously classified documents released today at the Chilcot inquiry offer a rare, perhaps unprecedented, insight into manoeuvring at the heart of government about one of the most serious issues to confront ministers — whether to go to war, and the lawfulness of it.

The documents reveal Goldsmith expressed concern to Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, that he was said to have had an “optimistic view” of the legality of an invasion without fresh UN backing. Goldsmith made it clear that was not his view. That was in November 2002 when Goldsmith had been struggling to get his voice heard, the inquiry was told. “Was the attorney general discouraged from giving advice?” David Brummell, the former attorney’s legal secretary was asked. “ Yes,” Brummell replied.

That’s just from today, there’s been lots of other fascinating stuff. What, for instance, have you heard about the Hutton report on David Kelly, who supposedly committed suicide after a BBC report casting doubt on the government’s case that Iraq had WMDs was traced to him? Did you know that Lord Hutton is attempting to impose a 70-year gag order on the records from which his inquiry concluded that the death was by suicide? (Why? To protect the feelings of the bereaved. Where have we heard that one before?) Hutton’s inquiry interrupted an inquest, which was never restarted. Now five doctors are considering a legal challenge to force the government to show them the information on which the inquiry’s judgment was based.

So here’s my point:

• The Guardian has gathered its voluminous reporting on the inquiry into an easily accessible form.
• A search at the New York Times website turns up two articles in the last month that mention the inquiry, published Jan. 12 and 18.
• A similar search at the Washington Post found four articles over the same period, two from AP and two from Reuters, published between Jan. 18 and 22.

If there weren’t so many wild and heavy things happening on this side of the pond, a lot of bloggers — if no one else — would be bouncing these reports around the net, and that would turn into news.

Interrupting an inquest, then hiding the information on which a determination of cause of death was made, looks like something you’d expect in Dallas or Los Angeles.

Public testimony from a former Foreign Office lawyer who resigned in protest days before the invasion provided some excitement for those who believe citizenship is still possible.

The Iraq inquiry burst into life yesterday, thanks to a quiet, thoughtful yet furious woman who ripped into the government like a genteel but very hungry lioness. Elizabeth Wilmshurst was the first witness to get a round of applause from the public.

Although she wasn’t happy about the attorney general Lord Goldsmith giving a legal blessing to the war, she noted the position the Labor government left him in by asking for a legal opinion less than two weeks before the invasion began.

For the attorney to have advised that the conflict would have been unlawful without a second resolution would have been very difficult at that stage, I would have thought handing Saddam Hussein a massive public relations advantage. It was extraordinary, frankly, to leave asking him so late in the day. I think the process that was followed in this case was lamentable.

In the old days, American politics included a certain amount of theater on the grand scale such as the British are now engaged in, much to their credit in my opinion. If only we here in the US can find it in ourselves to grow up enough to examine ourselves and our actions in a similar fashion, we can follow in the footsteps of declining empires of the past toward a reconciliation with the world around us, rather than scrambling for every last resource to exploit on our way down, leaving us both desperate and hated.

But as long as we can debate why Bernanke only needs 51 votes while health care needs 60, we don’t have to worry about the war crimes our government has committed in the immediate past.

What the hell are the Obama people thinking? A spending freeze in the middle of a recession??? This is the evidence of what they’re selling as a new focus on jobs?

It’s good that the Scott Brown election freaked them; they needed to be awakened. Unfortunately but predictably, they learned the wrong lesson. But even my cynicism appears to have misunderestimated the political ineptitude of this administration. I knew I wouldn’t be happy with its policies, but I expected a political machine at least as good as Clinton’s. Come to think of it, a lot of it is Clinton’s. That might explain things…

But after giving three-quarters of a trillion communal taxpayer dollars to the very folks whose Ponzi schemes robbed the taxpayers individually, then cozying up to the drug and insurance companies over health care, then getting beat up in polls and losing Ted Kennedy’s seat, then announcing that the new Obama brand is The Fighting Populist, they come up with one of the dumbest and most anti-populist moves you can imagine.

Obama was fine with $787 billion to Wall Street. He tripled the official US military force in Afghanistan and the increase in contractors is at least as great. And of course the misnamed Defense Department is exempted from the freeze, as the pet projects of the major corporate contributors will no doubt soon be.

Now, at last, the administration turns its concentration to helping the other 90% of Americans, the ones who are being foreclosed on, or struggling under ever-mounting debt caused by usurious interest rates that were illegal a couple decades ago; and everyone who still has a job is worried that it’ll be outsourced to a different continent. What sort of helping hand does the Democratic President offer?

A freeze on spending, except for feeding the war machine.

I guess Richard Nixon was wrong when he postulated that we’re all Keynesians now, because it would be hard to imagine a more wrong-headed move according to the model that made John Maynard Keynes an advisor of governments in the mid-twentieth century. Exactly the opposite of everything Obama’s done was what was called for.

It was easy to figure out what to do, but doing it would have required courage, and Obama appears to have none.

The fight to confirm Ben Bernanke for a second term as Chairman of the Federal Reserve has unfortunately exposed the true nature of Chris Dodd.

Publicly admitting that he was likely to lose if he ran again, because he was seen as being in bed with the worst actors in what Krugman calls the Great Recession, Dodd dropped out in favor of a Democrat who was likely to win.

Now that he’s freed from the restrictions of having to be re-elected, does he act purely on his own view of right and wrong?

Apparently he does.

In voting for Bernanke, the panel’s chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said Bernanke’s “wise leadership” will mean “better days do lie ahead.”

Although Bernanke, 56, appears to have enough votes in the Senate to win a second term, six Republicans and one Democrat on the committee did line up against him. They blame him for not spotting problems that led to the financial crisis, failing to protect consumers and supporting Wall Street bailouts.

Even a stopped watch is right twice a day. It takes someone who’s given up to shill for the worst interests on his way out when he has nothing to lose. Dodd has stood for liberal causes lots of times, occasionally even when it mattered. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

President Obama is back!

“Let me tell you, so long as I have the privilege of serving as your president, I’ll never stop fighting for you,” Obama said at the beginning of a town hall meeting with voters Friday.

This is encouraging news. The question now is, When will you start fighting for us?

I expected Obama to be casting about for scapegoats, but I never thought he was foolish enough to claim that Massachusetts replaced Jack and Ted Kennedy with a Republican because people are still angry at George Bush.

Democrats, from Mr. Obama on down… made a concerted effort to portray the results in Massachusetts as a reflection of long-simmering populist anger, and not a referendum on the health care legislation or on the year-old administration, which came into office facing steep challenges.

“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” Mr. Obama said in the interview on ABC. “People are angry, they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Update: Wait a minute! Is Obama calling himself a Tea Partier???

Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, John Dewey said, and there’s a great truth in that statement.

But politics is also the shadow cast on society by psychology. Of course an aspiring clinical psychologist would say that, but I think I can support the claim. In fact it’s probably self-evident.

In something resembling a democracy, individual psychology clearly influences, and usually determines, personal voting patterns. If you see yourself as weak, helpless, and in need of outside forces to keep you from doing bad stuff, as the Southern Baptists I grew up around apparently do, then you’ll gravitate to strong leaders and forceful foreign policy and anything that makes you feel less insecure. Whereas if you feel confidant, capable, and self-directed, you’re more likely to vote to help others, and to have some compassion for people on the other side of whatever divide is being confronted.

At a higher level, what you think is going on in the world determines how you understand new information and what you think about events that take place. If, for example, you see the Republicans as just this side of evil, and the Democrats as disappointing but noticeably better, then your mental model of how things work involves the ideological necessity of keeping the Democrats in power pretty much all the time. The problem soon becomes apparent, and you realize that, but you still can’t see it.

People don’t like politicians who are weak and don’t know what they believe. If the [Senate health care] bill was worth passing yesterday, it’s just as worth passing tomorrow. All the meta-politics about being for something before you were against it, knowing what you believe or not knowing, being able to get something done. It all comes down to stuff like this.

Late Update: Here’s an unnamed “presidential advisor” quoted in Politico who should get a promotion: “The response will not be to do incremental things and try to salvage a few seats in the fall,” a presidential adviser said. “The best political route also happens to be the boldest rhetorical route, which is to go out and fight and let the chips fall where they may. We can say, ‘At least we fought for these things, and the Republicans said no.’”

I cannot say this enough. The policy front speaks for itself. But the meta-politics is real. It’s a big. But it’s something Democrats have great difficulty with. For a whole variety of reasons voters clearly have a lot of hesitation about this reform. I think the polls make clear that the public is not against it. But the reticence is real. If Dems decide to run from the whole project in the face of a single reverse, what are voters supposed to draw from that? What conclusion would you draw about an individual in an analogous situation in your own life? Think about it.

To me, Josh comes across here as completely bereft of a clue; it’s hard to know where to start. With “politicians who are weak and don’t know what they believe” — recognize any current President in that? Or how much the current Democratic dilemma arises directly from the complete absence of evidence of the President “fight[ing] and lett[ing] the chips fall where they may”, so that it’s now way too late? Or “run[ning] from the whole project in the face of a single reverse” — this is the only negative indicator the Democrats have seen for completely caving on health care reform? What about Obama’s sliding popularity? What about the polls on the bill itself — will the Democrats in general follow the lead of Martha Coakley and claim they didn’t have enough money for tracking polls?

Such a viewpoint leads to frustration, to telling people to just STFU, because it conflicts with reality. Cognitive psychology tells us that emotions are a reaction to the difference between what actually happens and what we expected would happen. Thus we can control our future emotional reactions by setting our expectations appropriately.

If we expect something unrealistic, we can call ourselves realists but events will not meet our expectations. When that happens, people get frantic.

“If it’s the end of health care, it’s the end of the Democratic majority.”

That’s Paul Begala from a few moments ago on CNN when asked whether a Brown win meant the end of health care reform. So true. It really is nothing to fear but fear itself. The Dems have no choice but to finish the job. No choice.

And I strongly suspect that means the House has to pass the senate bill.

One cannot even imagine anything more horrible than the end of the Democratic majority. Therefore, passing a terrible bill that everyone knows is only being enacted as a political ploy to keep the Democrats in power is the best, in fact only, move, because it keeps the Democrats in power.

Witness Massachusetts.

And I just have to point out one more time, there is no health care in this bill. It mandates the purchase of insurance, but does not mandate that insurance companies pay for whatever care you need. Who’s gonna come out ahead in such a transaction?

What lessons will the Democrats learn from losing Ted Kennedy’s seat, as it appears they’re about to? What should they learn?

I suspect they’ll take as a lesson that they should never try to do anything the Republicans don’t want. “But a child could see that’ll fail,” do you say? I admit it. Since the Republicans want to concentrate power and wealth even more, and are willing to tear down as much of the country as necessary to make it happen, the list of things the Democrats would still be able to do would be empty. Which, after all, isn’t that different from what they actually do in practice.

The DLC Democrats will start talking about how silly the left is to want what all other developed countries have. They’ll rattle sabers about Iran, and pal around with the Liebermans, Joe and Avigdor. They’ll find an excuse to confront Russia and China politically, but without disturbing the profits of their corporate owners. In short, they’ll imitate the antics of the losing candidate in the last Presidential election.

Why? Well, that’s the point: it’s what the Democrats want to do, but they need an excuse. They’ve sold their souls to the same sectors of society that have long owned the Republican party; but unlike the Senator from my original home state, Mitch McConnell, and most of those he leads, the Democrats are still shy about letting their constituents know that. Probably because they’d lose their seats in the next election.

Sure, there are a few like Kucinich who don’t fit the mold, and some like Waxman who seem to be chomping at the bit to fight but are restrained by my Representative, the Speaker. But in general, the Democrats are the party of compromise, while the Republicans continue to use the tactic they learned in Reagan’s time of demanding eight times what they want. The Democrats agree to split the difference (again); the Republicans walk away with four times what they wanted, and the Democrats feel good about themselves. Or as Robert Reich put it, the discussion moves to the right because the Democrats keep meeting the Republicans half-way while the Republicans stay put.

The country hasn’t moved to the right, as the polls make clear; but the political conversation moves ever farther from what real people know is happening. The empire is ending; we’ve allowed corporations to ship our economic pre-eminence overseas to the lowest bidder; and as a result, as Greider says, the good times we recently thought would roll forever will never come back. They’re gone for good, and our job is to adjust, not to waltz around the world destroying other countries in a futile attempt to prove we’re still BMOC.

In that light, the lesson the Democrats should learn from Coakley’s apparently imminent loss is that they should have followed through on the promises they made. If Obama had ever even looked like he was making an effort to fight for at least one of the things he told us he’d do, the Democrats would not be in danger of losing Congress again like they did in 1994; but they caved to the corporations and the super-rich far too obviously and quickly. They needed at least to stage a credible fight that played out over time in which they pretended to confront the corporations everyone knows are causing the problems. As it was, Obama made back-room deals with the worst actors, then left Congress to take the blame.

Obama’s above-the-fray strategy got him what he was going for — a bill, no matter what it includes — but it lost him his base. He might get some of the votes back later if he does something they value, but he’s lost the glow of adoration that followed him through his introduction to the national consciousness. That can’t be recouped, and he’ll never again have the momentum he had on entering office. A great opportunity wasted, at a time when we won’t have many more.

At the recent BARBARian gathering the subject of politics arose, as it tends to do. This group originally got together to bitch about Bush in person rather than virtually.

There was, therefore, a good deal of excitement during the 2008 election, and not a little dissension about which Democrat to support. I was one of the few, possibly the only one, who wasn’t used to voting for Democrats at the national level.

Once Obama was elected, the mood ranged from imminent utopia to relief and reasonably high expectations. Plus my cynicism, which never felt unwelcome but was certainly out of place for several meetings.

So it’s both depressing and validating to find that the first meeting in several months exhibited little enthusiasm for the Obama administration or the current Democratic leadership in general. I wish I’d been wrong in predicting that Obama would be no better than Clinton, but you surround yourself with Rubinites and you don’t have a prayer of doing anything that doesn’t destroy the country in economic terms. You believe the hawks in the military and the punditocracy and you lose any chance of ramping down the empire consciously and intelligently, rather than perforce. I.F. Stone quotes Lord Salisbury:

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome;
if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent;
if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.

And if you believe the historians, nothing is new.

What surprises and depresses me is not the bad policies that Obama has adopted, nor his unwillingness to fight for anything but the interests of the worst corporations and the super-rich; that’s what he’s always done. I mean, this guy converted to Christianity as an adult, the same year he entered Harvard Business School. I gave up on Pelosi years ago, before she was Speaker, and haven’t voted for her for decades. And Harry Reid has an impressive life story but I can’t imagine how he ended up as the leader of anything. My guess is that he was the milquetoast to whom the fewest Democrats objected; and if that’s how you’re choosing leaders you’re not headed anywhere, you’re just trying to stay in power.

No, what surprises me is the abject ineptitude of the political calculations. Obama took off the table the single-payer idea that would have carried him through if he’d been what people thought he was. Congressional Democrats went along because they remembered the lesson they mis-took from 1994. Entering a negotiation with the express purpose of passing something, any bill at all, leaves you with no leverage. You’ve already agreed to fail, all you need is some face-saving band-aid. Who wins a negotiation? The party who can walk away.

Imagine for a moment that President Obama had made one of his best speeches on national television, like he’s done for major issues in the past. In this speech he’d called for universal health care like other developed countries have. Not universal insurance mandates, but universal health care, government-managed like other countries’. Single payer, which a majority of Americans have favored for decades. What would his poll numbers look like? He wouldn’t actually have to achieve such a lofty goal; but if he took the lead in negotiations, and he entered with that position, he’d get something close to it if he wanted such an outcome. Clearly he didn’t.

It’s particularly sad because Obama had a rare chance to do something historic and game-changing. It’s the classic Greek tragedy, in which the hero’s character flaws lead directly to the denouement. If only he really was the progressive community organizer people thought of him as being. Of course such a person wouldn’t be nominated by the Democrats, or allowed entry to a Republican gathering.

What would have gotten at least something done was a fighter in the mold of LBJ, someone willing to go into a caucus and threaten to cut peoples’s genitals off politically if they didn’t go along. We needed Obama to say, Here’s what I’m going for philosophically: a public option. I might fail and it would end my career to do so, but I have enormous public support. Those who get in my way will feel my wrath, and I will make sure the public knows which side everyone is on. We needed the modern equivalent of FDR welcoming their hatred. Instead we got what Obama’d always been, a intermediary between the corporate Democrats and the progressives they want to co-opt, to offset the wingnuts and fundamentalists the Republicans depend on.

Imagine what a President might accomplish in this magical time we inhabit were he willing to say, as FDR said about the Citigroups and AIGs of his time,

They have begun to see the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.

What the country needs, as Nader’s said for decades, and reports that his father said to him, is a not a third political party but a second one. I would denominate it the Anti-Corporate party. Wealth would not be the target per se, but the concentration of unaccountable power that corporate wealth brings definitely would be. No corporation should ever be able to dictate to the community, yet today many Americans can’t imagine it otherwise. As Bill Greider says in his newest, Come Home, America:

More important than all the other losses is that people are also denied another great intangible — the dignity of self-directed lives. At work, at home, and in the public sphere, most people lack the right to exercise much of a voice in the decisions governing their daily lives. Most people (not all) are subject to a system of command and control over their personal destinies. They know the risk of ignoring the orders from above. Not surprisingly, many citizens are resigned to this condition and accept subservience as “the way things are,” and their lives are smaller as a result. Many find it hard to imagine that these confinements could be lessened, even substantially removed, if economic organizations were informed by democratic principles.

We find it hard to imagine that democratic principles could inform our lives because television and cinema fail to show that happening. It happens in real life, as Greider has talked about at length, especially in Who Will Tell the People? and The Soul of Capitalism. But anything that needs corporate media to create, distribute, or promote it will be filtered through the idea that corporations naturally control the sources of everything, water, air, algorithms, genetic codes, and all. We need to free our minds.

But we do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us to still believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place. The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached — their fundamental faith in human progress — that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.

For if we lose that faith — if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace — then we lose what’s best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.

Like generations have before us, we must reject that future. As Dr. King said at this occasion so many years ago, “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present condition makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him.”

Let us reach for the world that ought to be — that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.

Can someone explain to me why the repeated invocation of Martin Luther King in a speech designed to justify policies he would have wholeheartedly condemned is not hypocritical in the extreme?

If you want to grab some of Martin’s mantle, you have to take his policies along with it. You can’t triple the size of the war machine’s effort in a poor remote country that did nothing to us and still claim to have inherited the tradition of a person who never saw a war he liked. Own up, Mr. Nobel Prize Winner.

More change that defies belief.

The plan, called Option 2A, was presented to the president on Nov. 11. Mr. Obama complained that the bell curve would take 18 months to get all the troops in place.

He turned to General Petraeus and asked him how long it took to get the so-called surge troops he commanded in Iraq in 2007. That was six months.

“What I'm looking for is a surge,” Mr. Obama said. “This has to be a surge.”

Another in a series of war criminals. At least he can form complete sentences.

You probably know the old joke, how many psychotherapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: only one, but the bulb has to want to change.

I find myself wondering how those who believed Obama would change things are explaining the current situation to themselves. Hopefully we’re all learning about the limits of the American system, and thinking about how we might change it. But the real question is, do we want to change? If not, we’re likely to repeat the same behavior.

In his new book Come Home, America, William Greider opines that

One damaging myth Americans ought to abandon is the naive notion that the celebrity power of the presidency can somehow solve our problems. That faith has been disappointed again and again in recent decades. First, the new leader is built up with miraculous powers, then cast down when he fails to prevail.

Then we search for a new one.

The one we’ve got has finally turned his attention to the problem of finding jobs for the millions of Americans without one. With the official unemployment estimate topping ten percent, the real figure is widely considered to be about twice that, possibly even more. Unfortunately for our purposes, but fortunately for those who made the changes, the methods of calculating unemployment have changed a lot since the Depression, so we can’t readily compare our unemployment figures with theirs. Certainly our general economic situation is dire but not as bad as theirs was. Many people now are in as bad shape as people were then, it’s true; all we can say is that not as many are that badly off now. But it ain’t pretty.

First order of business, naturally, was buying off the bankers. Then the drug companies, then the insurance companies, then the so-called defense industry. That was $787 billion for Wall Street, untold billions throughout the foreseeable future for the insurance and drug companies, and tens, probably hundreds, of billions more for the weapons and logistics required to support the Peace Prize-winner’s war. So now that jobs are finally front and center, the rest of us will get an equally large slice of pie. Right?

Speaking at a White House forum to a panel of business and labor leaders, economists, and others,

Mr. Obama said he would entertain “every demonstrably good idea” for creating jobs, but he cautioned that “our resources are limited.”

The Times article talks about a House initiative to spend some real money on real people. The enormous sum of $70 billion was proposed to ameliorate the suffering of tens of millions, presumably with a straight face. No White House reaction to that plan at print time.

Mr. Obama’s jobs event captured the political and policy vise now squeezing the president and his party at the end of his first year. It came on the eve of a government report that is expected to show unemployment remaining in double digits, and two days after Mr. Obama stressed as he ordered 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that he did not want the financial burdens of the war to overwhelm his domestic agenda.

Fortunately, the administration has devised a plan, based on one that worked in the recent past.

…a program of weatherization incentives for homeowners and small businesses… [c]alled “cash for caulkers,” it would enlist contractors and home-improvement companies like Home Depot — whose chief executive was on the panel — to advertise the benefits, much as car dealers did for the clunkers trade-ins this year.

Yet that relatively modest proposal underscores the limits of the government’s ability to affect a jobless recovery with the highest unemployment rate in 26 years — and Mr. Obama acknowledged as much. Just as he said in Tuesday’s Afghanistan speech that the nation could not afford an open-ended commitment there, especially when the economy is so weak and deficits so high, Mr. Obama emphasized at the jobs forum that the government had already done a lot with his $787 billion economic stimulus package and the $700 billion financial bailout that he inherited.

“I want to be clear: While I believe the government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector,” he told his audience, which included executives and some critics from American Airlines, Boeing, Nucor, Google, Walt Disney and FedEx.

Yeah, that’ll work. The booming airline and steel businesses, plus search engines, cartoons, and package delivery. That’s the kind of thinking that made America great. Greider again:

We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo. Its implications are too alarming. Any politician who says aloud what some of them know or feel in their guts is vilified as defeatist or unpatriotic. Many are clueless, of course, and others are too scared to raise forbidden subjects. I understand their silence and I do not forgive them.

As usual, Scott Ritter tells the straight truth, and as usual, it ain’t pretty.

In short, Saddam had been found guilty of possessing WMD, and his sentence had been passed down by Washington and London void of any hard evidence that such weapons, or even related programmes, even existed. The sentence meted out — regime termination — mandated such a massive deployment of troops and material that all but the wilfully blind or intentionally ignorant had to know by the early autumn of 2002 that war with Iraq was inevitable. One simply does not initiate the movement of hundreds of thousands of troops, thousands of armoured vehicles and aircraft, and dozens of ships on a whim or to reinforce an idle threat.

President George Bush was able to disguise his blatant militarism behind the false sincerity of his ally Blair and his own secretary of state, Colin Powell. The president’s task was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain, where reporters and editors alike dutifully repeated both the hyped-up charges levied against Iraq and the false pretensions that a diplomatic solution was being sought.

The tragic final act of the farce directed by Bush and Blair was the theatre of war justification known as UN weapons inspections. Having played the WMD card so forcefully in an effort to justify war with Iraq, the US (and by extension, Britain) were compelled once again to revisit the issue of disarmament. But the reality was that disarming Iraq was the furthest thing from the mind of either Bush or Blair. The decision to use military force to overthrow Saddam was made by these two leaders independent of any proof that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Having found Iraq guilty, the last thing those who were positioning themselves for war wanted was to re-engage a process that not only had failed to uncover any evidence Iraq’s retention of WMD in the past, but was actually positioned to produce fact-based evidence that would either contradict or significantly weaken the case for war already endorsed by Bush and Blair.

So, does this mean that Bush and Blair and their associates are war criminals like McNamara?

Having played the WMD card so forcefully in an effort to justify war with Iraq, the US (and by extension, Britain) were compelled once again to revisit the issue of disarmament. But the reality was that disarming Iraq was the furthest thing from the mind of either Bush or Blair. The decision to use military force to overthrow Saddam was made by these two leaders independent of any proof that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. Having found Iraq guilty, the last thing those who were positioning themselves for war wanted was to re-engage a process that not only had failed to uncover any evidence Iraq’s retention of WMD in the past, but was actually positioned to produce fact-based evidence that would either contradict or significantly weaken the case for war already endorsed by Bush and Blair.

In other words, yes.

For the first time in history, the entire world contemporaneously saw the blatant hypocrisy of war. The best PR money could buy was unable to convince the global audience that even a shred of legitimacy existed in the imperial invasion of Iraq. Only the most fearful Americans even bought it, though as usual that’s more than a majority. Plus of course Israel, to give credit where it’s due.

Historically, it seems to me, legitimacy is the single most important attribute of a government. Lacking that, it falls, just as a President whose motorcade lacks normal military escorts is prey to the most extreme elements of society. When legitimacy falters, public confidance in society stumbles with it, and the polls seem to indicate such movement now. Obama entered office with the promise to change things, and surprise, compromising has failed to make a difference once again.

The Obama administration is of course not losing legitimacy to the extent of falling to a 1963-style coup; realistically, fight is not what you expect from Obama. But the Democrats have shown no reason why they should be given control of Congress again in 2010.

Doing the same thing and expecting a different result might be a definition of crazy, but it also seems to define the Democratic party since the Second World War. Here we go again.

When the United States went into Iraq in 2003, it had a handful of pilotless planes, or drones; it now has over 7,000. The invasion force had no unmanned ground vehicles; the U.S. armed forces now employ more than 12,000. …

Since taking office, President Obama has shown a quiet predilection for drone warfare. He’s been vacuuming up targets. There are two programs in operation: a publicly acknowledged military one in Iraq and Afghanistan and a covert C.I.A. program targeting terror suspects in countries including Pakistan.

This foreign-assassination thing has always worked to our advantage in the past. Consider, just to take a couple examples, Lumumba and Allende, assassinations for which we’re as widely admired as the Israelis are for theirs.

According to a just-completed study by the New America Foundation, quoted in [Jane] Mayer’s [New Yorker] piece, Obama has authorized as many drone strikes in Pakistan in nine and a half months as George W. Bush did in his last three years in office — at least 41 C.I.A. missile strikes, or about one a week, that may have killed more than 500 people.

The dead have included high-value targets like Osama bin Laden’s oldest son and Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader in Pakistan — as well as bystanders. Circling drones have struck panic. But as Mayer notes, “The embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.”

Well, at least we now have a transparently scummy administration rather than a covertly scummy one.

JFK and LBJ were seduced by the availability of a plausibly deniable option. These days, with half the world’s weapons budget supplied by American taxpayers, deniability is a phantom, an invisibility cloak American politicians cling to as if someone actually bought the illusion. Somebody somewhere must, right? Sure, they’re all Americans, but who else gets surveyed? Pollsters are not roaming the mountains of Afghanistan.

The question, as always, is whether the situation improves or deteriorates when we kill a bunch of folks in some distant land, some of whom may or may not be guilty of something we don’t like. I mean, suppose Afghanistan killed a certain number of random Americans because we as a nation failed to buy enough opium products; how would we react? Oh, we’d say, it’s just collateral damage.

On the other hand, the Obama administration has moved with alacrity to confront the growing threat of insufficient health care. As if! Let’s check in with

…Dr. Gilbert Friedell, a crusty 82-year-old who taught at Harvard and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and ran the University of Kentucky’s Markey Cancer Center. He is a doctor’s doctor. He thinks, however, that too often doctors are a major problem in creating healthy communities. “Health care,” Friedell argues, “has to be a joint enterprise between patients, families and physicians.”

Nationally, Friedell believes, the health care debate has to be transformed.

“Currently the issues are framed as insurance or not insurance,” he says. “Having insurance gives you financial access to a system, assuming there is a system. It gives you nothing more than that. And getting into the system, if there is one, doesn’t tell you anything about the quality of care, the availability of services, the way the patients and families are treated.”

Kentucky’s fifth congressional district, which includes Harlan and Perry counties, has the lowest life expectancy of any district in America: 72.6 years for men and 76.4 for women. Those numbers would be little changed, Friedell says, by either a government-run system or a requirement that all people have insurance. Substantive change, he says, will only arrive built on a basis of re-ordered health values founded on programs like the ones in Hazard.

The same stupid-shit foreign policy. The same wimp-ass Republican social-values garbage. We need a second political party in this country.

Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman, in full smarm mode, has lately been congratulating himself for having the courage to follow his conscience. That poor, wizened little organ has apparently been urging the senator to block passage of the health reform bill by any means possible.

To make it perfectly clear that you can’t blame me for my state’s junior senator, I’m resurrecting this Golden Oldie from last March:

In 2000 a Republican no-hoper named Philip Giordano was running against Lieberman for the senate seat that Holy Joe was clinging to for dear life while simultaneously dragging down the national Democratic ticket as the vice presidential candidate.

I only knew two things about Giordano. One was that he was mayor of Waterbury, which is significant in Connecticut politics. It signifies that you haven’t been indicted yet, but hold your horses. You’ll get there soon enough.

The second thing I knew was that Giordano wasn’t Joe Lieberman, which left me with no option but to cast the first vote of my life for a Republican.

Meanwhile the FBI had already been quietly investigating Giordano for corruption, a process which is more or less automatic when it comes to Waterbury mayors.

During “Operation LandPhil,” as the Bureau called it, the wiretappers snapped to attention one day when they overheard Giordano making arrangements with a local prostitute to bring two girls, aged nine and ten, to his office for oral sex. Now the former Marine is doing 37 years in federal prison.

And still I don’t regret my vote. I’d rather be represented in the Senate by a pedophile than by a whiny, smarmy, sanctimonious warmonger with the blood of innumerable nine- and ten-year-old girls on his hands.

It’s a good thing Change has happened. If it hadn’t, we’d be spending ungodly amounts of money trying vainly to control the world through armaments.

Nonpartisan budget and security monitors report in Government Executive that the “administration’s request for $538 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2010 and its stated intention to maintain a high level of funding in the coming years put the president on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II. And that’s not counting the additional $130 billion the administration is requesting to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan next year, with even more war spending slated for future years.”

The flurry of stories about finally putting the health insurance under the antitrust laws like everybody else have left me puzzled. How could such an outrage have been going on since 1945 without anybody noticing? And by anybody, I mean me.

Here’s the answer, taken from an excellent story by Matthew Perrone of the Associated Press:

But industry analysts say courts have long limited the scope of the exemption to allow federal regulators to intervene in instances where competition could be jeopardized. They note the law has never stopped regulators at the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission from intervening in a merger or acquisition.

In practice, the exemption from federal antitrust laws mainly allows insurers to share data on payments and risk ratings — a useful collaboration among life and casualty insurers. But Wall Street analysts point out that giant health insurance companies like Humana, Wellpoint Inc. and UnitedHealth Group have little need to share data, thanks to their national size and scope.

“While the threat to repeal the exemption makes for good headlines, we can’t really see how it alters the business for the established publicly traded players,” wrote JPMorgan analyst John Rex in a note to investors.

With 94 percent of U.S. health insurance markets meeting the Justice Department standards for “highly concentrated” — meaning dominant insurers face little competition — most academics agree reform is needed. But they point out that federal regulators could have prevented much of that concentration under existing law.

Since 1996, the federal government has cleared 400 mergers in the health insurance field, according to the American Medical Association.

The Washington attorney who brought this to my attention was full of admiration. “Terrific politically,” he said. “Scores major PR points without the need to risk any substantive change. Bill Clinton would have loved it.”

As much as I’ve ragged on Nancy, it’s incumbent on me to praise her when she takes on the villains as directly as this: “…it is well known to the public that the health insurance companies are the problem”. Of course, the drug companies are a big part of the problem too, and Obama’s already folded his hand in that game. But this is something.

The insurance industry may find that it has made a mistake in attempting to rig the debate like it did the last around.

“There is tremendous interest in our caucus, and, in fact, the Judiciary Committee has had a hearing on ending the exemption to McCarran-Ferguson, the antitrust bill,” Pelosi said, unprompted, at her weekly press conference.

The insurance industry gained the exemption in 1945; in most parts of the country, a single insurer has monopolistic dominance and the ability to set prices.

On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) gave rare testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, speaking in favor of ending the anti-trust exemption. Reid is considering removing the exemption in the merged health care bill he is currently writing with other Senate leaders.

I don’t often cheer on Reid or Pelosi, but in this case I’m making a loud exception. Right on, Madame Speaker and Mr. Majority Leader! Take away their antitrust exemption and make them act like the capitalists they claim to be.

The upcoming race for governor of California looks likely to supply our reputation with a new stash of wacky. (Sorry, I’m reading Pynchon’s Inherent Vice and I’m finding myself imitating him.)

We have the classic California Republican in Meg Whitman, a person so obsessed with politics that she first registered to vote at the tender age of 46. She’s recently explained that she was focused on her family and her husband’s job. Apparently being CEO of eBay didn’t take up much of her attention; in any case she seems rarely to have found time to vote even after registering. This might be an issue.

Her positions are infused with a signature combination of naivete and calculation, smarter and more polished than Sarah Palin, who bested her in McCain’s VP sweepstakes, but about the same level of emotional development. Since she once worked for Bain & Co., Mitt Romney’s hideout, it’s not surprising that she’s against gay marriage and supported Prop. 8, though her fans would probably point out that she does support civil unions. Her positions on environment and energy are difficult to determine from her website, which contains the kind of slurpy gobbledygook shifty marketers use to bamboozle the unwary.

For example, on a website that seems to omit any links named Positions or Issues such as most politicians revel in, she promises as Governor to

• Make California the global model for promoting energy efficiency and new energy technologies for worldwide export
• Increase the state’s own energy supply and production by further diversifying our energy sources, including nuclear, biomass, wind and solar
• Modernize our infrastructure to distribute our energy sources more economically and efficiently

Hard to point to anything to disagree with there, or even to pick out any solid point at all. But we might expect to get a sense of her position by noting the three sources her website links to for news about energy issues: the liberal beacon Orange County Register, the friend of the working man Entreprenuer.com, and the oft-quoted Riverside Press-Enterprise. On the environment page, there are two links: another to the Press-Enterprise, and one to a San Jose Mercury News article titled “Meg Whitman: To create jobs, curb environmental regulation”. Claiming that job creation is her overall top priority, she proposes to do so by cutting taxes and reducing regulation. In other words, it’s the same old redistribution from the poor to the rich that the business wing of the Republican party has been hawking for decades.

Whitman’s likely opponents are the current insurance commissioner aptly named Steve Poizner, who apparently has a shot because the industry he regulates will back him to the hilt, with former Congressman Tom Campbell representing the occasionally-rational branch of the Republican party, whose campaign appears quixotic for exactly that reason.

Not surprisingly, the Democrats are stoked about running against anyone from that group. They’re still high from the last election, in which Obama more than doubled Kerry’s margin over the Republicans, 24% to 10%. So the big names are already circling.

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is strongly supported by the Clinton wing, without whose assistance he probably would have lost to his Green opponent Matt Gonzales (as it was, Newsom won 53%-47%, about 11,000 votes). Newsom’s probably best known for marrying gay couples on the steps of city hall because he decided it should be legal, a judgement with which the courts in the end disagreed. Such notoriety would seem to guarantee him a certain base of support, and an equally solid base of opposition. He also has a bit of a weight to carry among the family-values crowd, having divorced his first wife two years into his mayoralty, and had an affair with his secretary who was also the wife of his campaign chairman and good friend, before marrying an actress, who delivered their first child less than a month ago. In San Francisco that kind of lifestyle costs you nothing. But statewide you face quite a different electorate, and calling yourself a Diane Feinstein-style Democrat isn’t likely to make up for the sexual peccadillos and the gay-marriage thing. Or the lack of experience.

The other announced candidate is current attorney general Jerry Brown, former governor, mayor of Oakland, and failed candidate for Senate and President, as well as son of a governor and brother of a state treasurer. He’s not term-limited like Schwarzeneger because the term-limits law took effect later.

I’d love to see a debate between Brown and Whitman. Brown is a smooth politician, but he’s much more than that. I voted for him in 1976, and I would have voted for a Democrat in 1992 if Brown had been the nominee. As a politician he’s quirky, generally socially liberal and fiscally conservative, but not always. He has a long record of actions that progressives and liberals generally applaud, from opposition to the Vietnam War and capital punishment to prosecuting Standard Oil of California, ITT, Gulf Oil, and Mobil for breaking campaign-finance laws, to repealing the state’s oil depletion allowance (essentially a tax break for taking oil out of the ground), to appointing the first black, female, and Latino judges to the California Supreme Court. Although the sentiment is by no means universal, Brown is widely credited with leading a turn-around in Oakland.

He’s also taken some contrary paths, such as inviting the Marines to stage “Urban Warrior” war games in the defunct Oakland Army Base, and offering some support to charter schools, one of which was military. It’s not unknown for progressives to complain that he’s too pro-business, though his record as attorney general has somewhat calmed those waters.

In San Francisco and the Bay Area there’s a sizable gay vote, and California is fairly similar. So Newsom should be able to get a big chunk of that bloc, right? Not necessarily. As attorney general, Brown took the unusual decision not to defend Prop. 8; normally the AG argues in support of laws passed by the voters. That was a relatively courageous act; he took a stand when he could easily have argued that his office required him to defend the peoples’ law. After all, he makes a somewhat similar argument about the death penalty: despite his strong opposition to it — as governor he vetoed a death-penalty law but was overridden — his office requires him to follow the law. But with Prop. 8, he decided that the peoples’ law was bullshit, and he officially refused to back it. Like Newsom, his actions were made moot by the state Supreme Court, but like Newsom, he made his political point.

All in all, Brown has a record of acting on real social problems, whatever one thinks of those acts, and of being willing to consider different paradigms. Both are rare in these declining days of empire when it’s easier to kick the can down the road. Nor were these merely symbolic actions, as a result of which they generated real constituencies. Which is probably why Brown is currently favored to take the Democratic nomination and the governership. I’ve figured for decades that if he lived long enough for the pendulum to swing back toward the left he’d be perfectly positioned. Maybe now’s the time.

What kind of official portrait would he choose this time?

I give the Obama administration credit for trying to learn from the past. But I wonder if the right lessons are being learned.

As Garry Wills discusses in the New York Review of Books, the new President and his principal advisers have largely adopted the methods and strategies of the Bush administration, which Obama campaigned strongly against. Wills explains this as the adjustment a President makes when he learns what any informed citizen would already know, namely the vast extent of the American empire.

Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one thousand military bases in other countries. I say “estimated” because the exact number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations. The secrecy involved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did not even know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.

An example of this imperial system is the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.^[5] In the 1960s, to secure a military outpost without fear of any interference from indigenous peoples, the two thousand Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly expelled, deprived of their native land, and sent a thousand miles away. (It is the same ploy we had used in removing native peoples from the Bikini and Enewetak atolls and Lib Island, so that we could conduct our sixty-eight atomic and hydrogen bomb tests there.) Though technically Diego Garcia is leased from the British, it is entirely run by the United States. It was the United States that expelled the Chagossians and confiscated their property. Diego Garcia has become a vast armory, as well as a storage and staging area and harbor and launch site, from which supplies and air strikes are fanned out over the Middle East, especially to the Persian Gulf and the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. No journalists are allowed to visit it. It was funded on a vast scale by various deceptions of Congress. Even the leasing terms with Great Britain were kept secret, to avoid congressional oversight.

So far the man whose campaign told us that we were the ones to make those changes we’d been waiting for has made very little in the way of substantial change. Certainly the tone is different, and it’s pleasing to see the President appear as the adult in a group of squabbling politicians. It’s even possible that Obama will have the guts to make a popular decision and reduce the commitment to Afghanistan now that Gen. McChrystal has supposedly projected a need for half a million troops to stabilize that country.

Right now the omens are muddy. Consider for example the administration’s recent statements about Iran and the traditional media’s reaction.

Mr. Obama’s disclosure of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility, hidden deep inside a mountain, was a calculated move by the United States and its European allies to gain leverage over Tehran, by exposing it as dishonest. It was a far cry from Mr. Obama’s warm New Year’s greeting to the Iranian people early in his presidency.

When Obama says that “Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow”, he knows that his statement is, as Scott Ritter says, “technically and legally wrong.” In fact Iran has followed its commitments to the letter. The United States, on the other hand, has consistently and blatantly violated its stated commitments in the NPT, as have the other nuclear nations. No one’s fooled any longer about the real purpose of the NPT: to restrict the number of nations who can act as they choose without fear of retaliation. No one’s fooled, that is, except for American citizens, whose religion of paranoia waxes in strength as the empire wanes. “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion”, Gibbon wrote, and history folds back on itself.

In fact, as Ritter describes in detail, Iran itself brought the new facility that Obama’s complaining about to the attention of the IAEA. The US knew about the facility but had hidden that knowledge from the world body. As a result, when the IAEA learned of it and said so, the US had to react publicly.

Obama’s first response was to talk about harsh sanctions alongside Britain and France. Perhaps he’s upping the ante on the negative side while offering, in his weekly Saturday address, “a serious, meaningful dialog” on the positive. We can hope; but so far Obama has proven more adept at the classic political maneuver of kicking the can down the road than at bringing about the kind of change his supporters expected.

For me, on the other hand, his foreign policies have been a tad better than I expected. He canceled that moronic missile-defense bullshit, though I expect that was at least in part a strategic move aimed at appeasing Russia in expectation of future conflicts over resources. His domestic policies have differed from Bush’s only slightly less than I predicted. So on the whole, I’m far from pleased but happier than I expected.

These variations on a theme are all excerpted from today’s New York Times:

‘Athens’ on the Net

During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the president receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote to supporters.

They received 44,000 proposals and 1.4 million votes for those proposals. The results were quietly published, but they were embarrassing — not so much to the administration as to us, the ones we’ve been waiting for.

In the middle of two wars and an economic meltdown, the highest-ranking idea was to legalize marijuana, an idea nearly twice as popular as repealing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy.

Politics and the Age Gap

The latest CBS News poll found that 51 percent of those over 64 said health care reform would hurt senior citizens, compared with 36 percent of all adults surveyed. Just 31 percent of respondents over 64 said they approved of Mr. Obama’s handling of health care, compared with 40 percent over all.

The Recession’s Racial Divide

What do you get when you combine the worst economic downturn since the Depression with the first black president? A surge of white racial resentment, loosely disguised as a populist revolt. An article on the Fox News Web site has put forth the theory that health reform is a stealth version of reparations for slavery: whites will foot the bill and, by some undisclosed mechanism, blacks will get all the care. President Obama, in such fantasies, is a dictator and, in one image circulated among the anti-tax, anti-health reform “tea parties,” he is depicted as a befeathered African witch doctor with little tusks coming out of his nostrils. When you’re going down, as the white middle class has been doing for several years now, it’s all too easy to imagine that it’s because someone else is climbing up over your back.

Boy, Oh, Boy

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

The Body Count at Home

As Mr. Reid recounts, Nikki tried everything to get medical care, but no insurance company would accept someone with her pre-existing condition…

“When Nikki showed up at the emergency room, she received the best of care, and the hospital spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her,” her step-father, Tony Deal, told me. “But that’s not when she needed the care.”

By then it was too late. In 2006, Nikki White died at age 32. “Nikki didn’t die from lupus,” her doctor, Amylyn Crawford, told Mr. Reid. “Nikki died from complications of the failing American health care system.”

Complex arguments are being batted around in this health care debate, but the central issue isn’t technical but moral. The first question is simply this: Do we wish to be the only rich nation in the world that lets a 32-year-old woman die because she can’t get health insurance? Is that really us?

Actually, yes. It really is.

From Stephen Talbot’s letter to the editor in the current issue of The Nation:

I interviewed both men in 2001 for a PBS documentary, The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation. McNamara told me that he’d come to realize the war was a tragedy that could have been avoided…

But Kissinger was unreconstructed, unapologetic. “If you are going to ask whether I feel guilty about Vietnam, the interview is over,” Kissinger said before I asked my first question. “I’ll walk out.”

I told him I had just interviewed McNamara. That got his attention. And then he did something I’ll never forget: he began to cry. Actually, he pretended to cry.

“Boohoo, boohoo,” Kissinger blubbered, rubbing his eyes. “He’s still beating his breast, right? Still feeling guilty.” He spoke in a mocking, singsong voice and patted his heart for emphasis.

It was one of those moments, before the camera rolls, when you get a rare glimpse into someone’s character and it’s even darker than you ever dreamed.

From Politico:

George F. Will, the elite conservative commentator, will call in his next column for U.S. ground troops to leave Afghanistan, according to publishing sources.

“[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters,” Will writes in the column, scheduled for publication later this week.

One wonder why this sage policy guidance never occurred to the tweety-bird of the right while George W. Bush was wandering around Afghanistan’s plains for all those years.

Alas, a lack, one supposes, of balls. One didn’t want to lose one’s access to the very best soirées, did one? But now that the albatross is around the other guy’s neck, Will’s equation has changed.

Pulling out of Afghanistan begins to look like a win-win proposition for the Party of No. It would give the chickenhawk patriots of the GOP a chance to holler surrender monkey at Obama in 2012 — an act akin to handing Jascha Heifetz a Stradivarius.

And not pulling out would be even more certain to defeat Obama’s reelection bid, since he would be hip-deep in his very own Big Muddy by 2012. And Mitt Romney could win just as Eisenhower did against Stevenson, on a promise to get us out of Afghanistan.

Whether Romney actually kept his word once in office would depend on whether he’d rather be remembered as Eisenhower or Nixon.

Now that I’m a certified bachelor in the art of integrating stuff, or more precisely studying how to integrate it, there’s time to re-integrate myself into the civic life I’ve been reading about for the last several months. A big-picture question jumps out at me: is Obama in the midst of a long-term plan to demonstrate that he needs to make big changes? Or is he failing to realize the dire necessity thereof? As Spock might say, insufficient evidence to make a judgment at this point.

Three viewpoints I connected with recently were Dan Froomkin, who discussed the decision point Obama’s approaching on health care, Frank Rich’s “Guns of August” about the gun-toting wackos at the town halls, and Kevin Baker’s “Barack Hoover Obama”, which Harper’s has made freely available. I can’t help quoting gratuitously from Baker, whose flavor throughout is sardonic but measured, overall a really enjoyable and thought-provoking article even by Harper’s standards.

Instead [of imaginative liberal initiatives], we have seen a parade of aged satraps from vast, windy places stepping forward to tell us what is off the table. Every week, there is another Max Baucus of Montana, another Kent Conrad of North Dakota, another Ben Nelson of Nebraska, huffing and puffing and harrumphing that we had better forget about single-payer health care, a carbon tax, nationalizing the banks, funding for mass transit, closing tax loopholes for the rich. These are men with tiny constituencies who sat for decades in the Senate without doing or saying anything of note, who acquiesced shamelessly to the worst abuses of the Bush Administration and who come forward now to chide the president for not concentrating enough on reducing the budget deficit, or for “trying to do too much,” as if he were as old and as indolent as they are.

The common thread of discussion goes that current events are putting the question to Obama. Will he show what believers think is his true self and become a new progressive hero? Will he shed what they think of as his protective coating of connections to the rich and powerful to emerge as a populist, defiantly leading the vast majority of us against the ramparts of established privilege? Or will he be, in fact has he already been, co-opted?

If you’ve read Ryan Lizza’s article in The New Yorker as you should, you know that this question didn’t arise for the first time as Obama came onto the national stage. Early on he showed a talent for gaining support from established money for a candidate with a funny name, a big smile, a great jump shot, and impeccable academics. He made non-obsequious overtures to the right people, he presented a different yet non-threatening face, he made people feel good about themselves, and he managed to goose along a bit of progress by doing so. A Great Black Hope for whom at least some rich white folks could root. If a few wondered whether he was leaving behind where he came from, it’s hard to imagine how it could be otherwise when someone rises as far as quickly as Obama’s talents took him.

The moment approaches, however, so the thread goes, and rapidly, at which Obama will have to decide whether he goes with what believers think his gut tells him, or with the forces he rode into office. As Baker puts it in Harper’s:

President Obama, with a laudable respect for the separation of powers, has left the details and even the main tenets of his agenda to be worked out by these same congressional Democrats. This approach looks like an exercise in democracy drawn from his days as a community organizer, the sort of strategy that helps a neighborhood to decide whether it wants, say, a health clinic or a youth center. What he doesn’t care to acknowledge is that, in the case of the U.S. Congress, he’s dealing with a neighborhood where maybe half want a health clinic and the rest are holding out for grenade launchers and crystal meth.

Which brings me, oddly enough, to my old friend Machiavelli. As I’ve repeated here and elsewhere past the limit of polite excess, Old Nick did not advocate the kind of behavior he described in his most famous work The Prince; rather he described the behavior required of one who would be a prince, speaking with the experience of being tortured after the republic of which he was a part was overthrown by the returning Medicis.

The more you read Machiavelli the more you appreciate his wit. Sure, he sounds ruthless in a realpolitik fashion.

Whenever those states which have been acquired as stated have been accustomed to live under their own laws and in freedom, there are three courses for those who wish to hold them: the first is to ruin them, the next is to reside there in person, the third is to permit them to live under their own laws, drawing a tribute, and establishing within it an oligarchy which will keep it friendly to you. Because such a government, being created by the prince, knows that it cannot stand without his friendship and interest, and does it utmost to support him; and therefore he who would keep a city accustomed to freedom will hold it more easily by the means of its own citizens than in any other way.

I’m flashing on the British in the Middle East…

But he had a sense of humor too, or at least I see one two paragraphs later in prose I imagine Hunter Thompson admiring.

But to come to those who, by their own ability and not through fortune, have risen to be princes, I say that Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and such like are the most excellent examples. And although one may not discuss Moses, he having been a mere executor of the will of God, yet he ought to be admired, if only for that favour which made him worthy to speak with God. But in considering Cyrus and others who have acquired or founded kingdoms, all will be found admirable; and if their particular deeds and conduct shall be considered, they will not be found inferior to those of Moses, although he had so great a preceptor. And in examining their actions and lives one cannot see that they owed anything to fortune beyond opportunity, which brought them the material to mould into the form which seemed best to them. Without that opportunity their powers of mind would have been extinguished, and without those powers the opportunity would have come in vain.

What brings Old Nick to mind is an idea that puzzled me for a long time, but is becoming clearer as years advance. He postulated the existence of three basic entities in social life, the crown, the nobles, and the people, a division I imeediately objected to on several grounds. With consideration, I’ve come to think that Machiavelli is, as usual in The Prince, not telling us what ought to be, but what is, attempting to help us deal with it.

Since arriving at this conclusion, I’ve been seeing applications of the tripartite social scheme everywhere. In the current socio-economic atmosphere of struggle, some recommend fixing the economy before undertaking something as big as health care; others say health care reform helps the economy; and historians point out how many times this argument has happened before.

With businesss/labor/government replacing nobles/peasants/crown, I find myself in the modern equivalent of the peasant petitioning the king for relief, a petition that grants the de facto if not the de jure legitimacy of the king’s superior position. In this sense I understand the rebellion of the militia types and anti-government folks in general. I don’t want the Queen of England marching into my house and telling me what to do; and I don’t get my legitimacy from the government, rather the reverse.

Centrally, though, much of the health care debate seems to me to lack awareness of the corporate influence on the situation; and this is especially true among those most vociferously warning that government hands be kept off their Medicare. Quite obviously we already have the death panels they fear so much, in the private unaccountable hands of insurance and drug companies. Thirty minutes with a decent search engine should demonstrate in detail that the issue with health care is quite straightforwardly corporations versus the rest of us.

Who will bring into the political arena the basic idea, that corporations are destroying us all? And how long before they’re shot?

Mostly I don’t read David Brooks, for a number of reasons. To begin with, I don’t trust the Times, though on the other hand I’ve removed the Post from my bookmark list and speed dial since the Froomkin affair made plain how committed Hiatt is to the neocon/neolib agenda.

But if there’s anything to be said for poor clueless Dave, it’s that he’s a reliable bellwether for the neocon equivalent of the wimpy liberals I’ve ragged on so often. Now that Obama appears to be putting actual political capital behind the push for some sort of public option, the right wing is in full dress alarmitude. Omigod, people who aren’t rich might have health care! What is this country coming to…

Who’s going to stop this leftward surge? Months ago, it seemed as if Obama would lead a center-left coalition. Instead, he has deferred to the Old Bulls on Capitol Hill on issue after issue.

Machiavelli said a leader should be feared as well as loved. Obama is loved by the Democratic chairmen, but he is not feared. On health care, Obama has emphasized cost control. The chairmen flouted his priorities because they don’t fear him. On cap and trade, Obama campaigned against giving away pollution offsets. The chairmen wrote their bill to do precisely that because they don’t fear him. On taxes, Obama promised that top tax rates would not go above Clinton-era levels. The chairmen flouted that promise because they don’t fear him.

One of the joys of reading Old Nick is realizing what a small proportion of his promoters have read anything he wrote. Does Brooks, for example, realize that Machiavelli was tortured for his participation in a republican government after the Medicis’ mercenary army retook Florence?

For his significant role in the republic’s anti-Medici government, Niccolò Machiavelli was deposed from office, and, in 1513, was accused of conspiracy, and arrested. Despite torture “with the rope” (the prisoner is hanged from his bound wrists, from the back, forcing the arms to bear the body’s weight, thus dislocating the shoulders), he denied involvement and was released; then, retiring to his estate, at Santa Andrea in Percussina, near Florence, he wrote the political treatises that earned his intellectual place in the development of political philosophy and political conduct.

In the interpretation of Machiavelli, it’s difficult to find an appropriate terminology. Intellectually the flower of two millennia of Italian political maneuvering, he came to be associated with Satan because he told the truth about power politics.

Just for the hell of it, what say we check in on the actual text? It’s Chapter 17 (or XVII if you like) of The Prince:

Returning to the question of being loved or feared, I sum up by saying, that since his being loved depends upon his subjects, while his being feared depends upon himself, a wise Prince should build only upon what is his own, and not on what rests with others. Only, as I have said, he must do his utmost to escape hatred.

Interestingly, if you actually read Machiavelli and know his personal history, you can easily discern what many others have seen, that in The Prince he is by no means advocating the behavior necessary to become and remain a prince; rather, he’s pointing out what a sleazy business princing is. This impression is heavily reinforced by The Discourses, wherein his preference for the republic is clearly expressed.

In the just-quoted passage, for example, note that the issue throughout is the maintenance by the prince of his power and privilege. The welfare of the people in his domain is a relatively trivial thing; it reflects on his character, but has no separate importance.

Oddly enough, in those days the prince was probably more likely to pay for what health care was available than he is now, because his long-term interest lay with having enough hands to bring in the harvest. Everyone who can work needs to be kept alive is the theory, still, though it be dressed up in fancy garb.

Obama might try to rein in the insurance leeches, for example, but Mr. Brooks is having none of it, because the President has lost his scary mojo.

It’s a good idea, and it might lead to real cost savings. But there’s no reason to think that it will be incorporated into the final law. The chairmen will never surrender power to an administration they can override.

That leaves matters in the hands of the Blue Dog Democrats. These brave moderates are trying to restrain the fiscal explosion. But moderates inherently lack seniority (they are from swing districts). They are usually bought off by leadership at the end of the day.

Ya gotta love this image of the brave moderate, soldiering on in the face of an unending ocean of radicalism that so clearly dominates US politics. (And we let these people vote!)

Like any sensible person I read Doonesbury daily on Slate. Daily, I paid no attention to a little ad-like thingy at the bottom of the page called “Duke’s Video Dump.” Huge, huge mistake.

Today I clicked on it and discovered dozens of videos made during Duke’s doomed 2000 Presidential race. Go here and see for yourself. Hours of good, clean fun for the whole family. Sample topics:

LITTLE CUBAN BOY

Duke proposes formal adoption by the media as a way to resolve the case of Elian Gonzales: “You guys created him, so you should raise him.”

EXPLODING OPPORTUNITIES

Addressing the impending health care crisis, Duke proposes telemarketing for the elderly: “You just strap on a headset, plop a manual in your lap, and boom — you’re earning.”

Father knows best, except, just maybe, when he’s sold us out to his campaign contributors in the insurance industry. Robert Parry at Consortium News:

As the health insurance industry and its defenders in Congress lay out their case against permitting a public option in a reform bill, perhaps their most curious argument is that some 119 million Americans are ready to dump their private plans and jump to something more like Medicare – and that’s why the choice can’t be permitted.

In other words, the industry and its backers are acknowledging that more than one-third of the American people are so dissatisfied with their private health insurance that they trust the U.S. government to give them a fairer shake on health care. The industry says its allies in Congress must prevent that.

The peculiar argument that 119 million Americans must be denied the public option that they prefer has been made most notably by Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, which is one of two panels that has jurisdiction over the health insurance bill…

Talk about your great bumper stickers, huh? Here’s one Pennsylvania Democrat’s welcome to her party’s newest senator:

Pam Janvey, a Democratic committeewoman from Bucks County, found Specter’s presence at the gathering more than a little odd. “Am I in a dream?” she asked.

Janvey said that Specter hit all the right notes in his speech on Saturday and that although she had worked to defeat Specter in the past and never voted for him, she would back him this time around.

“Even when I have worked against Arlen over the years,” Janvey said, “I never felt the kind of fear that I did when I worked against Santorum…”

Here’s Rush Limbaugh again, still scribbling away on the walls of America’s toilets:

They don’t like Gitmo, we have to shut it down. They don’t like what we’ve done, fine, Obama will run around and apologize. I’m telling you, folks, it is not the United States of America that serves as Barack Obama’s role model. It’s other socialist nations that have failed and the concept of socialism that is his role model. I’ll tell you what, stupid little community organizer, organize this.

Sparky Satori at Shorts and Pants reminds us of a former racist activist on the Supreme Court — Chief Justice William Rehnquist. A superior work of snark, found in its entirety here.

November of last year, it was assumed that the USofA had finally vanquished the lingering ghosts of racism and was poised on the cusp of a new post-racial dawn. The long dark night of lynching and discrimination was finally over. “Huzzah!” bleated the media, smugly self-congratulatory.

But that was then. This is worse. And leave it to the hyper-sensitive Republicans to sniff out whiffs of the new racism being foisted upon the nation by its first black President. GOP stalwarts Newt Gringrich and Rush Limbaugh were quick to alert the country to a leading practitioner of this new racism, Sonia “Maria” Sotomayor ["SoSo" to her non-friends]. But she’s not your average garden-variety racist, according to the GOP braintrust. Per Newt and Rush, she is a “reverse racist,” rarer than even the “Albino Negro.” This alone should disqualify her from sitting on the Supreme Court, which has never, ever had any benchers who suffered from an iota of racial insensitivity…

Here’s a snippet from the Nixon tapes to give you an idea of the vetting process from which Rehnquist emerged. Full transcript here. As always with Nixon, fascinating stuff. Sure he was evil, but nobody ever called him dumb.

RMN: Yeah, all right, call me back when you get it. But remember, let’s figure on the Rehnquist thing. The political mileage basically is the same kind of mileage if we were to go with Smith. The idea being that we are appointing a highly qualified man. That’s really what it gets down to.

[Attorney General] John Mitchell: Yeah.

RMN: And also he doesn’t smack of the corporate lawyer as much as Smith.

JM: No, he’s more of a general practitioner.

RMN: Incidentally, what is Rehnquist? I suppose he’s a damn Protestant?

JM: I’m sure of that. He’s just as WASPish as WASPish can be.

RMN: Yeah, well, that’s too damn bad. Tell him to change his religion.

JM: All right, I’ll get him baptized this afternoon.

RMN: Well, get him baptized and castrated, no, they don’t do that, I mean they circumcise— no, that’s the Jews. Well anyway, whatever he is, get him changed.

That rancid rust-bucket that is the Republican Party sits ever lower in the water and appears to be foundering. Should we attempt a rescue or let the wretched old tub sink to the bottom? The vote here is for the coup de grâce. Put a torpedo into her amidships and let her go down without further ado. Glub, glub, GOP; it’ll be a far better world without you.

There was a time when the Republican Party stood for something, or at least appeared to stand for something. It took its name and founding philosophy from the Jeffersonian republican ideal, although the party would soon enough make a mockery of its idealistic name by becoming the champion of short-sighted greed and selfishness, the party of business.

But it started out as the party of the antislavery activists in the 1850s and came to power with the election of Lincoln in 1860. It was the party of the Tafts, dull, toothy Ohioans, who championed a conservative philosophy of self-reliance and fiscal responsibility, a credo now honored mostly in the breach. For reckless economic policy, no party has ever come close to the modern GOP. And it started with Reagan and his supply-side shenanigans. You may recall that Bush Senior referred to this nonsense as “voodoo economics.”

It was the party of Teddy Roosevelt, who took on the big corporate monopolies and, when he wasn’t starting wars or shooting beautiful animals, upheld a certain maverick standard of governmental integrity. It was the party of Grant and Eisenhower, successful warriors, each of whom served two terms in the White House without ever quite getting the hang of the job or looking like they really wanted it.

Then there was handsome, hapless Warren Harding, another Ohioan, and his equally inspiring successor, Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge famously said, “The chief business of the American people is business.” He is remembered mostly for wearing an Indian headdress. And don’t forget Hoover, who said, after the great Wall Street crash, that the markets would restore financial order if given the chance.

And, of course, there was Nixon and his infamous Committee to Reelect the President, aptly shortened to CREEP. And Reagan, who played the part so well many people believed he actually knew what he was doing. And Bush Two. And Bush Two again.

Somehow the country survived two terms of W., but will his party? How can any self-respecting Republican even whisper words of fiscal integrity in the mountainous shadow of a Bush-incurred debt so high it blots out the sun? Well, silly question. Of course they can, have, and will again, but the difference is that now nobody takes them seriously. When Newt Gingrich emerges from under his troll’s bridge to test the presidential waters, is this not a sign that the party is in its death throes?

Meanwhile, all those Wall Street banks, those bastions of fiscal discipline and Republican virtue, have lined up for billion-dollar hand-outs from a Democratic administration. Whether or not the big bailouts were a good idea is debatable. What is not debatable is the spectacular hypocrisy of the big shots that flew down to Washington in private jets to beg Congress for public money. How many of them were not Republicans?

Sure it’s like kicking a cripple, but let’s explore the crossed synapses of the Newt brain anyway. Here’s Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal’s house liberal:

…As an example of this habit of mind, consider the essay that Mr. Gingrich published in Human Events last week. “The current liberal bloodlust over interrogations,” he wrote, referring to the Nancy Pelosi-CIA flap, is merely “the Left’s attempt to hunt down and purge its political opponents.” And yet, in a different essay he published on the very same day (this one in the Washington Times), Mr. Gingrich regretted that, in all the years of Republican rule, “there was a strategic failure to root out the left and the special interests of the left.”

Mr. Gingrich’s side failed to “root out” and destroy their opponents; now he imagines that this is what is being done to his team.

Psychotherapists might call this “projection,” and something similar pervades the essay the remarkable Mr. Gingrich published only two days later in the Washington Post. Here the former speaker can be found calling for a populist revolt in the “great tradition of political movements rising against arrogant, corrupt elites.”

A healthy sentiment, to be sure, except for the fact that “elites” are exactly what decades of conservative rule gave us by unleashing the banks, smashing the unions, and funneling the economy’s gains into the hands of the rich…

Brady Bonk already wrote it, so I don’t have to. Read his full post here:

The timeline in my head: President Bill Clinton is pursued on a variety of trumped up charges by insane people who clinch their teeth whenever they speak his name, mostly probably because President Bill Clinton gets more pussy than any of them could ever imagine. I am just speculating. One ridiculous charge sticks: He lied about sex. On that one silly charge they can hang a million silly hats. To this day, say “Bill Clinton” in front of a conservative. I guarantee you he will not be able to resist joking about Clinton and women and cigars and the blue dress.

Based on Monigate, the newly-appointed Bush administration could declare it opposite day in America. They are warned by transition team officials that international terrorism might be their biggest dread. The warnings are largely ignored in favor of a general consensus to fight the Cold War all over again and, as was likely discussed though we’ll never know in Chaney’s super-duper top-secret energy meetin’s, to go get all of that frickin’ oil. But the Bush Administration could turn its back on the Israeli peace process, could abrogate treaties, could and should, according to their wisdom, do everything the opposite of how that dumb bubba did it, because, you know … he got a blow job…

From Paul Krugman’s blog:

So I see Richard Posner has decided that modern conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. And Bruce Bartlett has a new book saying it’s time to let go of Reagan.

At one level it’s good to see decent people showing some intellectual flexibility (Bartlett, in particular, has always come across as someone with whom one can have honest disagreements.) And yet — why, exactly, should we listen to people who by their own admission completely missed the story? I mean, anyone who actually listened to what Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were saying in 1994, let alone what passed for thought in the Bush administration, should have realized long ago that if there ever was an intellectual basis for modern conservatism, it was long gone.

And the truth is that the Reaganauts were a pretty grotesque bunch too. Look for the golden age of conservative intellectualism in America, and you keep going back, and back, and back — and eventually you run up against William Buckley in the 1950s declaring that blacks weren’t advanced enough to vote, and that Franco was the savior of Spanish civilization.

I’ve always loved the South Carolina accent, especially when employed by women. And we owe ’em for Colbert. But those folks have sure elected some doozies to public office. Exhibit 1: Senator Jim DeMint.

“I don’t think many Americans are going to agree that the Republican party has become too conservative,” he said. “If you look at our record of spending, our record on every issue, the problem I think we have is Americans no longer believe that we believe what we say we do.”

I dunno, perhaps I’m an outlier, but I continue to believe that the Republican party sticks by its guns: torture, corruption, pre-emptive war, and imperial presidencies. Oh, and racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-intellectualism. They’re defined by what they hate, which is why the party does so well among fundamentalists. As far as I can tell, they’ve been pretty consistent on those issues my whole life.

DeMint says he isn’t worried. He denied that the GOP has become a southern party, attributing Republican losses in the northeast to some northern voters who have left the region and moved south hoping to avoid labor unions and “forced unionization.” He said Americans will eventually come back into the Republican fold because of growing alarm about the size of government and President Obama’s fiscal policies.

“I think you’ll see this next election to be totally different,” DeMint predicted. “Pat Toomey, who is running in Pennsylvania, is one of the most mainstream Americans I know.”

I think forced unionization should be applied to Wall Street, then we might have something. And the software biz, as well. But if Republicans have been wiped out in the Northeast because they left for the South, doesn’t that make them a southern party? Oh, no, I forgot: you can only be truly Southern if you’re born there. So moving from the northeast is by definition temporary; you’ll never be a Southerner, though you live in the South for fifty years and die there.

It’ll be a hoot to see what DeMint says when Toomey gets landslided.

The conversion of Senator Magic Bullet may turn Mitch to mulch; at least we can hope. And Specter may not be the only one to move. Consider this quote from the Times report:

“On the national level of the Republican Party, we haven’t certainly heard warm, encouraging words about how they view moderates, either you are with us or against us,” [Maine Senator Olympia] Snowe said. She said national Republican leaders were not grasping that “political diversity makes a party stronger and ultimately we are heading to having the smallest political tent in history for any political party the way things are unfolding.”

Scott Horton over at Harper’s No Comment Blog is rightly agonizing over the fact that we have a torture enabler and what some have seriously referred to as a monster sitting on the Federal Bench. This “subject” ( I use the term here to properly refer to this individual as a prosecutor or police offer would do when an accused is referred to in court) sits on a federal bench judging others who are guilty of much lesser crimes. After all, torturers and torture enablers were routinely hanged by Allied Courts at Nuremburg and in the Pacific Theater after World War II. American court officials routinely participated in these proceedings.

Some may think all of this is quite complicated, but I find it simple since the solution to resolving the problem is quite simple. I am of the opinion that simple problems can be resolved with simple solutions.

Therefore I propose a remedy to the Bybee problem, a problem that every decent lawyer knows is a black eye on the Federal Judiciary and will remain so for years to come if not remedied. I am therefore making an extremely modest proposal which I propose should be taken seriously, despite my labeling this post as partly snark.

The US needs an official representative from our esteemed judiciary to view the proceedings in Spain to ensure that they are carried out in a fair manner. I am sure the Spanish courts would be happy to oblige us if we were to choose the proper emissary. If I were the presiding judge or court official who could carry out the task of assigning the court official to engage in this duty, I would immediately assign this task to a new judge. Since Judge Bybee would have intimate knowledge of what the proceedings were about, he should be sent immediately to Spain to fulfill his judicial duties.

Of course, this might involve the devil and the deep blue sea, rocks and hard places, frying pans and fires and dozens of other things and places that go together like crude oil mixes with water. However, those are individual problems that at least one individual will have to deal with.

However this proposal is not without precedent. Robert Houghwout Jackson was sent to participate in the Nuremberg trials. Why should Judge Bybee not likewise be assigned a task in another country along the same lines? Younger judges should be given the traveling assignments in my opinion and Judge Bybee fills the bill for this assignment perfectly.

I am of the opinion that Judge Jay S. Bybee should be given this assignment forthwith, with Hillary Clinton at the State Department making proper accommodations for his stay, preferably in a five star hotel, for as long as those fine accommodations last. And if free accommodations are given by the Spaniards to one of our own, the Federal Budget would be that much better off. Allowing such an emissary diplomatic immunity is beyond the scope of this modest assignment of course, so that should definitely not be given as it is definitely not needed due to our emissary’s somewhat limited assigned duties. A few select CIA agents might be assigned the task of ensuring the judge’s security.

This assignment should be a mandatory assignment. Refusal to do one’s duty as a judge would of course mean impeachment.

Or Judge Bybee could spare himself and everyone else great embarrassment for years to come by doing the right thing. And he and all right thinking Americans know exactly what that is.

Mr. Obama, are you listening? Some of your former supporters are getting the opinion that you are going to end up letting the Europeans take care of American problems. If we don’t deal with letting the rule of law determine what happens to the torturers and their enablers, then we can expect the pattern and the behavior to repeat itself.

I hope to be dead by then and I don’t and won’t have any children to worry about what they may have to endure when the cycle repeats. Others are not so lucky.

You gotta hand it to the old piece of garbage, he never lets up. Probably that’s related to all the heart attacks.

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort,” Cheney said.

Cheney said he’s asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

It’s a fine gambit from a true player. He certainly knows that no such memos exist, because everyone knows torture is not successful at obtaining information. In fact that’s not its purpose, as Cheney is well aware. It is purely and simply a terror weapon. You attempt to terrorize your enemy by letting him know he’ll be tortured if you capture him. Of course this is moronic at a higher level; if he knows he’ll be tortured, he’s more likely to fight to the death, or to operate in a guerrilla fashion and disappear at the first sign of engagement; thus success is placed further down the road when torture intervenes.

The real reason for torture is simply the joy of it. Those who torture, and who order torture, enjoy the thought, though some apparently don’t have the stomach for the practice. But no one’s stupid enough to think it works. I know at least one person who does claim that, but he has no argument to make; he simply repeats his contention that it works, and that everyone knows it. No facts, no instances, no proof necessary. Clearly he loves violence and wants to engage in it; therefore I see him as the enemy. As, in short, a potential torturer.

Cheney thinks he has the steel cojones necessary to operate in what he thinks is the real world, but I wonder. Often, people like Cheney or Hoover are deep down scared shitless; so they bring out all the worst parts of themselves and project those nasty items onto other people, thus proving to themselves that all that bad stuff really is out there. You create your own reality.

And you try to create others’ realities as well. So Cheney’s latest lie is a fine one, because he knows Obama can’t call him on it. There’s no way to prove there are no memos showing the efficacy of torture, so those who want to torture, and it seems to be a large constituency, can continue to believe there’s proof hidden away.

Smooth as shit, and just as smelly.

Interesting development. Maybe we’ll find out if my theory (two posts down) has anything to it. Judge Sullivan is an old friend and former colleague of Attorney General Holder, who is by today’s announcement taken off the spot.

Holder no longer has to investigate his own department — a job which, if vigorously done, might alienate DOJ’s career bureaucrats and would certainly bring charges of partisanship from the GOP. If the investigation turned into a whitewash, on the other hand, the attacks would come from the Democratic left.

But if done by Judge Sullivan, tough noogies. He’s got life tenure.

WASHINGTON — A federal judge today set aside a jury’s guilty verdict and the indictment against former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, then announced he was appointing a special prosecutor to investigate the government attorneys in the case for failing their constitutional duties to ensure a fair trial…

Holder said an internal investigation had been launched into the matter, but Judge Sullivan said he was not content to allow the Justice Department’s probe to serve as punishment for the lawyers involved in the case. He said he had asked a former military judge, Henry Schulke III of Washington D.C., to investigate the conduct of five prosecutors in the case for potential obstruction of justice.

They are: the head of the Justice Deparment’s Public Integrity Section, William Welch; the lead trial attorney, Brenda Morris; two trial attorneys in the Public Integrity Section, Nicholas Marsh and Edward Sullivan; and two assistant U.S. Attorneys in Alaska, Joseph Bottini and James Goeke…

Is it the television, or the weak beer, or the movies aimed at 19-year-olds, or what?

In the face of a recession that has destroyed billions in family savings and home values, Americans remain convinced that personal initiative and hard work are the key to big rewards, and they continue to repudiate the idea of government intervention to alleviate economic inequality, according to two Pew-sponsored reports.

Not only do voters continue to be convinced, by large majorities, that they, and not government or big corporations, control their own destinies in the midst of the current recession, but they do so despite more long-term evidence suggesting that there is less class mobility in the United States than in most Northern European countries, or in Canada, and that U.S. wages have not kept up with productivity gains for the past three decades.

It’s the attitude of everyone for themselves, and the devil take the hindmost, that makes us Americans. That leaves us far behind the rest of the world as it adapts to conditions that require coöperation instead of the old ethic of competition.

A survey of 2119 respondents conducted by the Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies for the Pew Economic Mobility Project asked: “Currently the country is in a recession. Do you believe it is still possible for people to improve their economic standing?”

Eighty percent answered “yes,” including 56 percent answering “strongly” in the affirmative. Only 16 percent said “no.”

African Americans, Hispanics and persons under 40 were even more affirmative than the public as a whole, with “yes” to “no” ratios respectively 83-15, 86-11, and 85-13.

Makes sense. African-Americans, Hispanics, and young people hardly ever encounter the kind of discrimination that would make you think government action could help. And everyone knows big corporations are blameless by definition.

The new federal government is fast taking shape. Here’s a look at some of the new departments and agencies.

What’s the use of worrying?—that’s the idea behind this arm of the federal government. This department will be led by a cabinet-level official with a fanciful and deeply ignorant view of the world. Several prominent Republicans from the previous administration have been proposed for the job. One in particular seems especially well-qualified.

This is an attempt to recognize and perpetuate the traditions of recent presidencies. Nothing this department does makes much sense. He who forgets history is bound to repeat it, or some such foolishness, is the bugaboo against which this heroically chaotic agency struggles.

Similar to the Optimism Department in outlook, this office, which is run by some of the goofiest veterans of the Obama campaign wars, will consider any and all government initiatives through technologically advanced rose-colored glasses. ‘Nothing is impossible if you throw enough money at it’ is the operating slogan.

Lest the pie in the sky be too tempting to too many, this organization is designed to offset the reckless tendencies of its similarly named sister agency. It will oppose everything anybody in Washington wants to do.

Nothing this updated CIA does will be open to public scrutiny or any other kind of meddlesome interference. Nobody within this comically secretive organization will have the slightest idea what anyone else is doing or why they are doing it. Nobody in the agency will answer to anyone. Everything the agency attempts is expected to fail, just as in the old days, but nobody will know about it.

This much-needed agency will be responsible for keeping Republicans and other regressive types on their reservations, far from any hope of meddling with the elected officials who are actually trying to accomplish something.

The former Federal Communications Commission, today known simply as Gassy Mae, will now devote itself exclusively to this undertaking. The idea behind the project is to find some way, possibly including all-out violence, to silence the TV and radio talking heads whose incessant yammering clogs the airwaves and threatens our sanity. Most of these so-called pundits are ignorant fascist thugs who have grown too fat to get into brown shirts and jackboots. Nobody believes Gassy Mae is up to the job, but it should distract the commission from its usual business of pandering to the media conglomerates.

Designed to assist the Treasury Department in throwing money away, this agency will be responsible for identifying those financial companies that are the most arrogant and badly run and therefore most in need of federal financial assistance. Airline and car companies will also be considered.

Despite its permanent-sounding name, this enterprise is really an ad hoc operation whose only purpose is to make Dick Cheney’s already miserable life even more so. So many qualified people have applied for the job of running this department that the nomination has been set back indefinitely. So far more than a million candidates have submitted their résumés.

Carried over from the Bush Administration, this body was assembled to find a fitting tribute to the heroes of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq who successfully demonstrated that human decency has no place in the war on terror. The commission is expected to continue its dithering and hand-wringing well into the future.

This could turn out to be the granddaddy of all federal government departments. If it ever gets its very large ace off the ground, this baby will show the world what a real bureaucracy is all about. Once the bugs are worked out, you’ll be able to call All Things and arrange to have your boss forced out in your favor, or a hated neighbor’s house bombed, or your children’s teachers disciplined. Doctor kept you waiting? Have the sucker’s license revoked. Covet that big house on the corner? Have the owner dispossessed. Can’t sleep the way you used to? Want new friends? Fed up with the way of the world? Call the Department of All Things and make it right. Your government is here to serve you.

…when it comes to political jiu-jitsu. From medieval Saudi Arabia:

It would be bizarre in any country to find that its lingerie shops are staffed entirely by men. But in Saudi Arabia — an ultra-conservative nation where unmarried men and women cannot even be alone in a room together if they are not related — it is strange in the extreme…

“The way that underwear is being sold in Saudi Arabia is simply not acceptable to any population living anywhere in the modern world,” says Reem Asaad, a finance lecturer at Dar al-Hikma Women’s College in Jeddah, who is leading a campaign to get women working in lingerie shops rather than men…

Rana Jad is a 20-year-old student at Dar al-Hikma Women’s College, and one of Reem Asaad’s pupils and campaign supporters.

“Girls don’t feel very comfortable when males are selling them lingerie, telling them what size they need, and saying ‘I think this is small on you, I think this is large on you’,” she says. “He’s totally checking the girls out! It’s just not appropriate, especially here in our culture.”

Campaigners are calling for a boycott of all lingerie stores that are staffed by men.… “The concept is flawless,” says Ms Asaad. “The concept of women selling women’s underwear to other women is so natural that any other option is just invalid.”

And from medieval Louisiana, as reported by A.J. Liebling in The Earl of Louisiana, his 1961 biography of Governor Earl Long:

“Earl is like Huey on Negroes,” Tom said, “When the new Charity Hospital was built here, some Negro politicians came to Huey and said it was a shame there were no Negro nurses, when more than half the patients were colored. Huey said he’d fix it for them, but they wouldn’t like his method.

He went around to visit the hospital and pretended to be surprised when he found white nurses waiting on colored men. He blew high as a buzzard can fly, saying it wasn’t fit for white women to be so humiliated. It was the most racist talk you ever heard, but the result was he got the white nurses out and the colored nurses in, and they’ve had the jobs ever since.”

This, by Rick Hertzberg a while back, is looking better by the day:

…Centrism sometimes makes sense as a tactic or a strategy — in other words, when it’s a synonym for compromise. But it has no merits as a tool for policy analysis. I suppose you could argue that good ideas occur on a sort of left-right bell curve and that, therefore, an idea is statistically more likely to be located at the top of the curve, i.e., in the middle. But evaluating the merits of an idea on that basis would be like evaluating the literary merits of a novel based on how close its number of pages is to the average for all works of fiction.

Dogmatic centrism not only puts you at the gravitational mercy of whichever side is prepared to move furthest toward its own extreme, it also obliges you to reject certain ideas automatically, without any analysis except spectrum analyses. That’s brainless, and the point holds whether or not you agree with Matt [Yglesias] on this particular issue…

When friends shake their heads in disbelief at the goings-on among the new New Democrats, I commiserate. Fortunately, I got everything I expected from my vote the day after election day.

For almost two decades now, the Democrats have blazed up every joint in sight, only to freeze at the crucial moment of inhalation. Clinton kicked off two excruciating terms of Solomon-esque waffling by splitting gays in the military right down the middle and ended by only half-admitting to being swallowed whole by an intern named Monica Lewinsky. Then came history’s first three-base balk in Florida (with James Baker waving Bush around to score), followed by a senseless war in Iraq that Democrats thought to oppose only once it became inexpedient to support.

All this bullshit, we hoped, might end with Barack Obama. But then came Blagojevich, a sleazeball whose massively publicized success in scheming a way to drop turd in the new president’s inaugural punch bowl is a gate-crashing leap above station on the order of Paris Hilton screwing her way into a speaking role in Gandhi or Amadeus. It’s a political disaster that happened only after Democrats once again froze in the headlights at the crucial moment, trying to flee in two different directions at once while a third-rate bookie in a tracksuit seized control of the U.S. Senate.

We owe George W. Bush a huge debt for making possible the election of our first African-American president — and, of somewhat lesser importance — for giving Jimmy Carter’s once-derided presidency a welcome and well-deserved boost.

The first excerpt comes from The Rude Pundit, embedded yesterday deep within the huge crowd shown in my last post. Read the rest of his description, too. Those familiar with his œuvre will see a new side of the man revealed.

The second passage is from The Atlantic’s Jim Fallows, like myself a former Carter speechwriter.

R.P. — Everyone released purgative, cathartic boos at George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The television coverage may have muted it, but it was there. A young woman half-heartedly said, “Oh, c’mon, ya’ll, that’s mean,” but she cracked up when the Rude Pundit said, “Sometimes a man deserves to be booed by a couple of million people.” The most touchingly surprising crowd reaction was the cheer that went up for Jimmy Carter.

J.F. — In keeping with earlier testimony to the basic good will of the crowd — as I witnessed it as one of the 2 million or so (my crowd here) — the “boos” when George Bush or Dick Cheney appeared on the screen seemed almost perfunctory. People felt they had to do it, but their hearts weren’t in it. To me, the most spontaneous-sounding and surprising cheers were for (a) Colin Powell, and (b) Jimmy Carter, and the most spontaneous surplus-hostility boos were for ... Joe Lieberman. Just reporting on my part of the crowd.

The following piece ran May 17, 2006 under the heading, “Mission Almost Accomplished.” Now that Bush’s awful mission is completely accomplished, I put it up again. No updating seems necessary.

It’s been nearly four years since I first posted my analysis of the nasty psychopathology that has forced George W. Bush to fail all his life, and is causing him to fail so spectacularly now. Consider this from the Washington Post (emphasis added):

Bush’s job approval rating now stands at 33 percent, down five percentage points in barely a month and a new low for him in Post-ABC polls. His current standing with the public is identical to President George H.W. Bush’s worst showing in the Post-ABC poll before he lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton in 1992.

The younger Bush’s career can only be understood as a lifelong obsession with disappointing the father he so plainly hates.

He follows his father’s footsteps in school, as a pilot, as a businessman, and finally as a politician. Unable to fill those footprints, he makes each one seem unimportant by pretending contempt for it. He gets C’s where his father got A’s; he ducks the combat flying that made his father a hero; he burns through the seed money his father’s friends gave him, failing in the oil business which had made his father rich.

Then at last he was taken in hand by a sleazy political op who realized that the father’s name and money would be enough to elect the wayward son governor of Texas. (Polls at the time showed that a significant portion of the voters thought that W. actually was his father.)

Then Rove set out to hand-carry his meal ticket into the White House itself.

Take that, you old fart, junior must have thought as he took the oath of office. Any asshole can get to be president. But even that wasn’t enough. Deep inside, where the Oedipal snakes writhed in his subconscious, there was still work to do.

What better to way to humiliate his father than to degrade the supreme office the old man had spent his life to reach? What sweeter revenge than to slime, like a slug, the presidency itself? And so he enlisted Rumsfeld and Cheney, his father’s ancient enemies, to help in the work of patricide.

Outdoing his father as president, the junior Bush must have known in his heart, was beyond his limited capacities. But his whole life offered proof of his ability to fail, and so he took the only path remaining. He would become, God help the rest of us, the worst president in history.

ß

And speaking of Howard Dean, as I was last night, here’s a clue to why he was frozen out (as if the identity of the incoming White House chief of staff wasn’t enough). It’s by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, writing in the London Review of Books:

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers … are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning — without much evidence — that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

This is by Ross Mackenzie, retired editor of the editorial page at the Richmond Times Dispatch. I know you will feel, as I did after reading it through, deeply ashamed:

The left and the media and the ever-expanding blogosphere, and of course the Democrats, never permitted George Bush to recover from the circumstances of his 2000 election.

They deemed him unacceptable, accidental, illegitimate, likely a conniver in the national outcome — and so took to lobbing their hateful commentaries one after another without end.

On issue after issue they rejected his appeals for bipartisanship, especially in his second term. In his 2004 victory speech, Bush said: “Today, I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support, and I will work to earn it. ... We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us. And when we come together and work together, there is no limit to the greatness of America.”

Yet from Social Security and judges to the surge and terror and continuation of the tax cuts, malign leftists dug in and sought to foil him on every front — to deny him any victory, any success, anywhere.

“Malign” is too harsh? Consider: Television, blogospheric, and newspaper commentaries slammed President Bush 24/7. Nicholson Baker wrote Checkpoint, whose protagonists weigh whether to assassinate him. Twelve thousand San Franciscans signed a petition to rename an Oceanside sewage plant for him—

Hollywood went apoplectic, with Oliver Stone — director of the detestable October-released flick “W” — declaring: “We are a poorer and less secure nation for having elected (Bush) as our president. ... America finds itself fighting unnecessary and costly wars and engaging in dangerous and counterproductive efforts to fight extremism. Even more significant and troubling, I believe, is his legacy of immorality.”

Despite this vicious stream, George Bush persevered and prevailed. The events of 9/11 changed him. Mistakes abounded, but no subsequent domestic jihadist strike ensued. As he noted at the Army War College last month, this staggering security success was “not a matter of luck.” Against islamo-fascism pre-emption (described by the all-knowing as naive, idealistic and wrong) was — as it remains — the right policy for spreading liberty and democracy, particularly in a Middle East that boasts so little of either.

The enterprise in Iraq, following the surge, now approaches victory — the great Osama bin Laden himself having declared Iraq “the central front” in his war against the United States.

Barack Obama repeatedly pronounced Iraq a distraction and - from beginning to end — a mistake. Yet a resolute Bush was true to his values, to his nation, and to mankind’s ultimate cause. Last month he told The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel that liberty can be extended beyond Iraq as long as America continues to believe “in the universality of freedom.”

His early tax cuts helped the country out of the recession Bill Clinton left him. The budget exploded, as did deficits — largely a result of expanded defense spending for the war on terror. (Said Bush in the Strassel interview: “I refused to compromise on the military” — for which thank heaven, given that the first obligation of every administration is the people’s protection.)

Bush was correct about Social Security, despite a spineless, risk-averse Congress unwilling to get its game together. While vastly more nominations would have been better, he managed against obstructionist Senate Democrats to gain approval of 61 federal appellate judges (compare Clinton’s 65), now constituting majorities on 10 of the 13 appellate courts. And he gave us the estimable Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Yes, spending blew out of control — albeit with congressional concurrence.

Problems plagued the war’s conduct in Iraq. Post-Katrina New Orleans was mishandled. Still, Bush can boast hefty tax cuts, major assistance for HIV-infected areas of Africa, significant gains in health care and in education accountability, a multi-ethnic Cabinet (including the first two black secretaries of state), and massive improvements from surveillance to strategic policy.

We invest our presidents with greatly too many expectations. It happened with George Bush and his predecessors, as it is happening with Barack Obama — the latest secular savior. Few mortals can deliver on more than a small percentage of their promises and hopes.

Yet Bush carried two added burdens: (1) difficulty in articulating his goals and (2) relentless hammering by leftists hostile to his values and his success. Then, perceiving him harmful to the Republican brand, many conservatives abandoned him as well. Still and all, his favorable ratings never descended to the ratings for Congress — particularly the Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

George Bush a perfect president? Hardly. The worst president of the past half-century, as too many with ideological axes to grind would have us believe? Compare, oh, Carter and Clinton. A more prudent categorization: The most consequential president since Reagan.

To those cognoscenti who argue such an appraisal is preposterous, remind them of this: The most recent conventional wisdom — the consensus of the best minds and analysts — was (remember?) that because the fundamentals were so sound the stock market could not crash, the economy could not possibly collapse.

Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson — a man of laconic, perceptive humor — noted that “those who travel the high road of humility in Washington are not bothered by heavy traffic.”

George Bush concludes his presidency with abundant accomplishments, not least a safer nation — and still, despite a tsunami of hateful coverage, commendably humble. When the tumult and the shouting die, an appreciative people would escort him down to robust and lingering applause.

In the virtual public houses I frequent, there’s a significant buzz about Tom Geoghehan, who’s running for the House seat being vacated by Rahm Emanuel.

Certified FOBA (Friend Of Bad Attitudes) Mr. Fallows of The Atlantic pointed out this opportunity.

The remarkable thing is that in Geoghegan’s case writing has been a sideline. Day by day for several decades he has been a lawyer in a small Chicago law firm representing steel workers, truckers, nurses, and others employees whose travails are the reality covered by abstractions like “the polarization of America” and “the disappearing middle class.” Geoghegan’s skill as a writer and an intellectual are assets but in themselves might not recommend him for a Congressional job. His consistent and canny record of organizing, representing, and defending people who are the natural Democratic (and American) base is the relevant point.

The people of Chicago would have to look elsewhere for Blago-style ethics entertainment. Tom Geoghegan is honest and almost ascetic. Because it’s an important part of his makeup, I mention too that he is a serious, Jesuit-trained Catholic.

Mr. Frank, late of the Wall Street Journal but known as well for the hilarious One Market, Under God and the right-on What’s the Matter With Kansas?, has weighed in as well.

…Mr. Geoghegan thinks big while Democrats in Washington tend to think small, proposing a stimulus package here and better oversight there. The government’s goal, as he explained it to me a few days ago, should not merely be “to pump up demand again.” It should be to enact sweeping, structural change, “to get in a position where we’re not bleeding jobs out of the country.”

For the view that working people have no business with retirement and health care in the lean, mean, inevitable future, Mr. Geoghegan has a certain contempt. He wants to increase Social Security payments to make up for the destruction of private pension plans and expand Medicare with the goal of arriving, eventually, at single-payer health care. The $700 billion bank bailout, he says, proves that such expenses can be borne. What’s more, they’re necessary.

“Economic security is not only compatible with being competitive globally,” he tells me; “it’s crucial to it.”

It’s a little difficult to imagine a sane person lasting through a session of Congress. But it would be an interesting gambit.

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In re: Caroline Kennedy and Roland Burris, Dracomicron has said it for me at MyDD. So go over there and read it. Brief excerpt:

What I’m saying is, we need to stop being such outrage addicts. This election season was the most dramatic in modern memory, and there was a lot of stuff that we got outraged over, both legitimate and specious... I get that it will take some time for us to chill the hell out, but we need to do it. Barack Obama needs a functional legislative branch that can work on tackling the huge challenges he faces right away, and whether an appointee can effectively and honestly work at implementing his agenda is a bigger concern to me than if an appointee was selected in the dying throes of a corrupt governor’s career.

I guess this is what happens when you cheat and lie so consistently that even the Traditional Media have to admit they know what’s going on.

Of course, the Republicans walk right into the trap, “only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air”. They’ve got a bumper crop of candidates vying to become the Howard Dean of the racist, homophobic, xenophobic creationist party. (If only we could add “the war party.”)

Leading the pack in a certain sense is Chip Saltsman, formerly Mike Huckabee’s campaign manager, who famously distributed a music CD to party members that included comedian Rush Limbaugh’s parody song “Barack the Magic Negro”.

Some Republicans considered this in bad taste; a larger percentage considered it bad PR. Mike Duncan, the current RNC chairman who hails from the enlightened state of Kentucky and is running for re-election, said:

The 2008 election was a wake-up call for Republicans to reach out and bring more people into our party. I am shocked and appalled that anyone would think this is appropriate, as it clearly does not move us in the right direction…

Ken Blackwell is another candidate for RNC chair. You’ll probably remember him best, or worst, as the Ohio Secretary of State who rigged Bush into the White House in 2004. Lately he’s been in the news as an African-American asked to comment on Saltsman’s CD. Predictably, Blackwell, who’s reached the semifinals of the Ward Connerly Imitators Championship while simultaneously racing for the RNC chair, blamed the media for the to-do over the CD.

Unfortunately, there is hypersensitivity in the press regarding matters of race. This is in large measure due to President-elect Obama being the first African American elected president…

Absolutely. There were no racial issues, no hypersensitivity, before the country made the mistake of electing Obama. Now we’ve gotta deal with this extra layer of stuff. If only we’d elected Strom Thurmond back in ’48, none of this would have happend, eh?

Presumably the complete lack of African-American faces among the Republicans in Congress is balanced by the big-tent inclusion of two black contenders for RNC chair. Along with Blackwell, whose loyalties have been proven under fire, there’s Michael Steele, former lieutenant governor of Maryland, who you kinda figure doesn’t have a real chance. Consider, for example, his statement on the Saltsman CD.

…we must be mindful that self-inflicted wounds not only distract us from regaining our strength as a Party, but further diminish our credibility with an increasingly diverse community of voters. As RNC Chairman, I want us to be a lot smarter about such things and more appreciative that our actions always speak louder than our words.

Smarter? You’re running on making the Republican party smarter?? And reality-based??? Okay, well, good luck with that endeavor. It seems a little out of step to me, but what do I know about Republicans?

But all this is the kind of stuff the TM has traditonally lapped up, the horse-race aspect. No need to insert any information or analyze a statement’s truth or falsehood; just report speculation passed in a cab or a bar and call it a day. What’s really encouraging, for a normal citizen at least, though some Republicans will be unhappy, is to see the media reporting critical information, putting copies of contested ballots on the web in a standard format in case claims of impropriety arise.

No longer do we assume that our fellow citizens are as committed to democracy as we are. This is an advance, because it brings our internal models closer to reality. In The Temple and the Lodge, Baigent and Leigh remark:

One has attained a measure of wisdom when, instead of exclaiming “Et tu, Brute!”, one nods ruefully and says, “Yes, it figures.”

Yep, it’s time for ole Dubya to mosey on down the trail, droppin’ his “g’s” as he goes. Be headin’ back to the Lone Star State where it all began, where the legend was born. After all he’s done, that boy needs a good long rest. Kickin’ back in boots and jeans, him ’n Laura, kids comin’ by now and then, all helpin’ put books on the shelves of the Dubya Liberry. Catchin’ them Rangers on the TV and shootin’ some birds when the mood takes him. Nothin’ like killin’ things to make you know you’re livin’.

Cheney liked to shoot birds, too, until he found out it was even more fun to shoot people. “What’s all the fuss about?” he kept saying. “Only shot him in the face.” Admit it now, is Dick Cheney some kind of hoot, or what? There’s another boy knows how to have a good time.

Dubya’s hopin’ for visits from Donny and Condi and the Rover once things settle down, though Condi’s been actin’ a little funny lately. Actin’ like she wouldn’t mind seein’ the back of Li’l Georgie once and for all so’s she can concentrate on rehabilitatin’ her sorry ace. Which is not in the best of shape after years of consortin’ with a war-makin,’ law-breakin’ moron…

So maybe Condi won’t be stoppin’ by, after all. And you know Colin Powell won’t be comin’ by, not after he came out for the skinny guy from Chicago with that long-winded speech on the TV. God Amighty! Didja think maybe he’d never get to the point? Mr. Holier Than Thou. Doesn’t like waterboardin’. Doesn’t like this. Doesn’t like that. Man has no sense of humor, that’s the problem.

Seems like Donny’s a little frosty these days, too. ’Course, Donny’s never forgiven Dubya for bein’ president when everybody knew Donny was smarter and tougher and meaner and had a better plan. Now he’s busy rehabilitatin’ hisself, too, though most people think his raggedy ace is beyond savin’. Should have got it out of town a long time before he did.

Li’l Donny wrote a article not long ago in the New York Times of all places. Covered most of a page and seemed to be about the Surge and how we have won the war in I-Rack but just don’t know it. Donny’s still a little haired off at Dubya for makin’ him take the fall for all the money’s been wasted and all the people’s got killed.

But, hell, Donny’s always been haired off at somebody. Been that way since he was a rasslin’ champ down at Tiger Town. Look funny at him, he’ll take you to the mat with a triple half-nelson and a double headlock. Break your legs, arms. Break your neck. Then he’ll stick your head under water ’til you cry “uncle.”

Dubya could get lonely down there in Big D, with all these people not showin’ up like they said they would. They was like a nuke-you-lar family, you know. Thick as thieves. Peas in a pod. Bugs in a rug. Tight as ticks. Gonna be tough goin’ it alone with just Laura. You can see from her pictures she’s nice but no fun.

’Course, if there’s one thing Dubya knows how to do it’s have fun. Not like Donny and Condi. They’re too busy tryin’ to get they aces out of the fryin’ pan of history. Worried about they legacy or somethin’.

Not Cheney, though. Not him. You can take your legacy and put it… well, you know where. That’s what he seems to be sayin’. You don’t like it, sue me. Indict me. Get too close, I’ll have a heart attack. Cheney’s tough. They’ll never lay a glove on him.

Or Dubya either, come to think of it. Not that anybody’d want to. He did his best and you can’t ask more’n that from a man. People say, Yeah, but his best wasn’t good enough. In fact, they say, his best was the worst we’ve ever seen. People say he lied to us and listened to our phone calls and opened our mail and screwed around with the Constitution and got us into a crazy war and screwed up the economy and generally behaved like a despot — if only a junior varsity kind of despot.

Well, maybe. But let’s not be churlish. We were always told we lived in a country where anybody could become president. And anybody did.

Here’s a brief excerpt from a speech the admirable and usually correct Noam Chomsky gave in Boston last week. In it he explains the difference between a democracy and whatever it is we have.

Certainly not a democracy, if by that you mean a government responsive to the people. Every poll shows beyond question that a huge chasm exists between what we want and what our unitary form of government allows us. Unitary meaning that we only have, effectively, one party.

The goal of advertising is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices. Those of you who suffered through an economics course know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. But industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year to undermine markets and to ensure, you know, to get uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

And when they turn to selling a candidate they do the same thing. They want uninformed consumers, you know, uninformed voters to make irrational choices based on the success of illusion, slander, and effective body language or whatever else is supposed to be significant. So you undermine democracy pretty much the same way you undermine markets. Well, that’s the nature of an election when it’s run by the business world, and you’d expect it to be like that. There should be no surprise there.

This clip, courtesy of Outta the Cornfield, was made at a GOP rally in Denver.

How much is it worth to wake ourselves from this Republican nightmare? Well, the $700 billion we’ve already ponied up seems to be a good down payment, because a lot of people are pissed.

In Kentucky, where I grew up, people tend to feel economic pressure more deeply, because many of them struggle even in normal times to keep their families at subsistence levels of income. They may be strongly culturally conservative, but they also strongly resent the rich East Coast elites who have controlled much of Kentucky for much of its history.

This has made Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s balancing act a tricky one at times, because McConnell leads his colleagues in being in the pocket of exactly those interests. These are not Kentucky interests, though some may keep their horses on Kentucky farms. They’re the super-rich who don’t want to be taxed, the corporations who don’t want to be regulated, those who think we should consider money as speech and corporations as people.

Unfortunately for Uncle Mitch, this is a sub-prime moment to make that case. Kentuckians may not be ready to vote for a black President, but they’re damn well ready to express displeasure at continuing economic distress. They may even manage to replace the worst member of the Senate with Bruce Lunsford, who’s bound to be a least a little better, will caucus with the Democrats, and has been running the kind of ad the Democrats would win big with.

Lunsford’s ad, his first of the race that homes in on the economy, cites McConnell’s vote in 1999 for legislation that rolled back government regulation of Wall Street banking and investment firms. It also highlights the amount of campaign contributions McConnell has received from the financial sector, as tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics.

“McConnell took more than $4 million from the Wall Street financial industry, got rid of the government regulations they didn’t like and let the billionaires and CEOs stuff their pockets with cash,” the ad’s announcer says. “Now Wall Street is in trouble and taxpayers are getting the bill.”

Another ad from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that’s airing in Louisville reinforces those same points using an old-time Wild West theme. At one point, the announcer says “McConnell opened the gate and Wall Street went wild.”

Need to hear more of that.

A dispatch from Michigan, the state McCain forgot but my sister Pat Shure didn’t. She is an honest-to-God hockey mom who knew Bill Ayers slightly back in the 60s when he ran the Children’s Community PreSchool in Ann Arbor.

Lots of things can happen when you’re registering voters in the blue collar suburbs of southeastern Michigan.

Going from one little house to the next past the occasional American flag or tattered Red Wings banner or UAW emblem or “For Sale” sign, most people were friendly. Maybe they just weren’t afraid to open their door to a grandmotherly-looking person in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

When I asked if anybody in the house needed to register, most said “Nope, we already are,” and as always a few answered, “Nah, they’re all crooks.” (Actually, a bit hard to dispute.) Obama supporters said so right away and seemed to know instinctively that I was one of them, maybe because I was THERE.

I was a little hesitant as I knocked on a door with a Police Officers Association decal:

“Sir, are you registered to vote?”

“Un, hah, but I’m not gonna, never do.”

“Have you ever voted?”

“Sure, I voted for Nixon.”

“How’d that go”?

He chuckled. “Not so good.”

An angry dog barking at the window of another house and the sign on the door persuaded me to move on. The sign read, “My shitty opinion is none of your *!#! ing business.”

Sometimes you get to end the day with something really sweet. I was standing outside a Dollar Store in downriver Detroit late one rainy evening, smiling and holding a clipboard that read REGISTER WITH ME, LAST CHANCE. I approached a woman and asked if she was registered to vote yet. Standing ramrod straight she replied, “Chile, I voted for Truman!”

Sarah Palin’s M.O. during her brief political life has been to cozy up to some unsuspecting mentor, then knife him in the back and step over him. Now she’s at it again. Colin McEnroe spells it out:

Palin is pretty clearly running a double campaign these days — one for Nov. 4 and the other for her future position as a leading Republican voice during the Obama era.

It was most noticeable when she openly questioned McCain’s decision to pull out of Michigan. What kind of language do you think McCain used when he heard about that one? This is not a guy who reacts well to being crossed or second-guessed, especially by a woman he yanked out of obscurity five weeks ago.

Since then Palin has announced a bare-knuckles strategy of denouncing Obama as a strange guy with terrorist pals and Stokely Carmichael attitudes. She has again questioned McCain’s tactics — this time his reluctance to brawl and spill blood and bring up Rev. Wright — and openly announced that she will advise him to follow her lead.

Do you not see a little needle directed at her boss in the way Palin worded this? Particularly the phrase “I guess”:

“I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more,” Palin said, “because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that — with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave — to me, that does say something about character.”

“I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up,” Palin added.

You guess? That, my friends, is classic passive-ag[g]ressive criticism…

So that’s at least twice that Wilderness Woman has told her boss to man up. First she called him on the cut-and-run from Michigan. Then she told him to knock off the soft stuff. My guess is that McCain is steaming. He’d send her home if he could. No wonder he renewed his vows to Joe [Lieberman] last night.

Meanwhile, Palin’s no dummy. She can read polls, and she knows that a loss is more likely than a win. She has become a favorite Republican of Republicans…

If they lose this election, the GOP will probably want to get her out of Alaska and into a Senate seat where she can be closer to the limelight and more able to speak out for the loyal opposition. She knows this, and that’s why she’s running two races. McCain may go down, and, if so, she’s not going down with him.

Noam Chomsky may well be right about the former president’s conspicuous and repeated mispronounciments:

The focus is on personalities, on Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, Sarah Palin’s pregnant daughter, or whatever it may be. In that terrain, the Republicans have a big advantage. They also have a formidable slander and vilification machine which has yet to go into full operation. They can appeal to latent racism, as they are already doing. They can construct a class issue. Obama is the elite Harvard liberal; McCain is the down to earth ordinary American, and it so happens that he is one of the richest people in the Senate.

Same thing they pulled for Bush. You have to vote for Bush because he is the kind of guy you would like to meet in a bar and have a beer with; he wants to go back to his ranch in Texas and cut brush. In reality he was a spoiled fraternity boy who went to an elite university and joined a secret society where the future rulers of the world are trained, and was able to succeed in politics because his family had wealthy friends.

I am convinced, personally, that Bush was trained to mispronounce words to say things like “mis-underestimate” or “nu-cu-ler”, so liberal intellectuals would make jokes about it; then the Republican propaganda machine could say see these elitist liberals who run the world are making fun of us ordinary guys who did not go to Harvard (but he did go to Yale, but forget it).

One thing about the Brits, they know their snark. A self-described “liberal European elitist journalist” — Oliver Burkeman of The Guardian — live-blogs last night’s performances in St. Paul:

8.18pm: [Quoting Romney] “I know what makes jobs come, and I know what makes them go.” What made jobs come and go often enough in the past, as Ezra Klein points out, has been the noted private equity firm chief executive Mitt Romney.

8.32pm: Mike Huckabee actually just said this: “My Dad lifted heavy things”. And this: “I was in college before I found out it wasn’t supposed to hurt to take a shower.” It’s something to do with having to clean himself with stones, because he grew up so poor. But this is an almost entirely crazy speech, I’m afraid to say. That’s an unbiased opinion.

8.50pm: Themes of the evening so far: xenophobia, “anti-elitist” rabble-rousing, media-bashing, smalltown boosterism versus liberal city people. Pretty unpleasant, all told.

9.05pm: Wait, wait, wait, WHAT? John McCain was a prisoner of war. He has proved his commitment with his blood. On the other hand, Obama worked as a “community organizer”. “What?” says Giuliani, pretending not to understand. He laughs unpleasantly. The crowd laughs. “Then he ran for the state legislature — where nearly 130 times he was unable to make a decision yes or no. It was too tough. He voted ‘present.’ I didn’t know about this ‘vote present’ when I was mayor of New York City. Sarah Palin didn’t get to vote present when she was mayor or governor.”

“Barack Obama has never led anything. Nothing. Nada. Nada. Nothing.” This is real, jeering anti-Obama stuff, the nastiest we’ve heard, and the delegates are loving it — yelping and whooping.

9.18pm: If you say the war in Iraq is lost, you are saying that Osama bin Laden has won, and that makes you a terrorist. Or something like that.

There’s something rather troubling about the way in which Giuliani enjoys the roiling up the audience. He claps softly to himself, and chuckles.

10.12pm And in a parallel to Obama’s surprise arrival at the end of Joe Biden’s speech, here’s John McCain. “Tremendous, tremendous, fantastic, tremendous,” he says, vaguely hugging the Palins. “Don’t you think we made the right choice for the next vice-president of the United States? And what a beautiful family!” Militaristic music. McCain and Palin are both doing an awful Republican version of Hillary Clinton’s already sufficiently awful pointing-and-smiling thing.

Shortly, these psyched-up delegates will hold a roll-call vote officially to nominate McCain. First, three country singers including John Rich are reading out random bits of famous American speeches and documents, in between lines of the national anthem. Extremely strange.

Brilliant, now Rich is singing his criminally stupid song Raising McCain.

If you’re like many rank and file Democrats, you actually loathe the DLC. In this Real News Network interview, Ralph Nader talks about theDemocratic Party as represented by the DLC. I’m actually watching television again - but only on the net. I check the Real News Network every day for a rundown on current issues in video format. Since their funding model is strictly from viewers and no one else, I made a small donation, I hope you will too. I'm not a fan of some of the things Nader’s groups have been involved in in the past, but I do have respect for Nader and he makes some valid points in this video interview.

It is a little ironic.

The attack dogs will eagerly embrace formerly hated targets. All last week Republicans lauded the achievements and brilliance of Hillary Clinton, seeking to exploit divisions in the Democratic Party. It has rounded up former Clinton supporters who now back McCain and paraded them like captured prisoners of war. “[McCain] really does admire and respect her and honours the campaign that she ran,” said Carly Fiorina, a top McCain adviser. Those are astonishing words from a senior figure in a party which spent two decades demonising Clinton as a left-wing uber-feminist. But that is the key to the success of the Republican attack machine: the past does not exist. What matters is what works now. Democrats know more of the same is coming. “This is going to be the most vicious campaign we have ever faced,” said Terry McAuliffe, Clinton’s former campaign chairman.

How vicious?

There is an industry devoted to publishing anti-Obama screeds. The most popular has been The Obama Nation, by conservative polemicist Jerome Corsi. The book paints a radical picture of Obama as having a secret Islamic past — but critics say the book can be proven to be wrong. Corsi has also called for Obama to take a drugs test and warned that he might create a “department of hate crimes” if elected. The Obama Nation has been a bestseller, relentlessly promoted by sympathetic media figures such as Fox News’s conservative host Sean Hannity. On his show, Hannity allowed Corsi to claim Obama wanted to allow women to have “abortions” even after their child was born. Instead of refuting the ridiculous claim, Hannity merely expressed shock. The incident forced a liberal media watchdog to issue an analysis showing Obama had never actually supported the murder of newborn children.

Though some speakers at the Democratic convention have had their speeches edited by the Obama campaign to the point that the original was scrapped, Kucinich’s speech lost only one sentence: “They’re asking for another four years — in a just world, they’d get 10 to 20.”

A Smirking Chimp commenter by the handle of genboomxer hits us where it hurts.

There is a hypocritical duality in our American culture. We want a saint for president; we want someone with confidence and experience. We want the “Daddy” ideal. On the other hand we want someone who’s not afraid to play dirty to give us what we want. We are the children who idolize “Daddy” as long as we don’t know he’s cheating.

Politically we are one of the most immature countries. We run our domestic and foreign policies like an amoral adolescent with a car, a shotgun and a case of beer on a Saturday night who goes on a rampage, who then shows up for church on Sunday to repent our sins to show everyone that deep-down we’re really good.

A more concise statement of the American character is hard to find. When we’re disappointed in our leadership we blame it on them, as if we had no part in making it happen.

So I guess you wouldn’t be surprised to find the same person pointing to an old Bill Moyers show called “The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis”. It’s just as true now, and just as relevant, as when it was made. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Moyers remains unsurpassed. You kinda get the feeling he’s still trying to make up for the whole LBJ thing, though it’s hard to imagine that he had the power to fix it. Probably LBJ was just smart enough to make him the front man, because Moyers is so clearly a moral person in the best sense of the term.

Froomkin titles today’s post “Bush’s Eternal Sunshine”.

Bush’s approval ratings are in the toilet and there are ample signs that the nation is hungering for a new direction. Yet Bush’s aides say they believe the public’s attitude has improved — apparently because he sees less hostility on his increasingly furtive trips outside the White House — and in a meeting yesterday with a group of sycophantic journalists, Bush insisted that he’s in a great mood.

Emerging from the meeting, National Review’s Larry Kudlow captured the central personality.

Mr. Bush reiterated what he has said in a number of these meetings, that in the office of the president, character matters a lot. He said you have to have clear principles and strong beliefs to execute all the responsibilities that are part of the job.

…I would say as someone who has been privileged to attend these gatherings in the past, not only did the president show the inner strength he always has, but when he does reflect on the tumultuous events of his tenure, he is completely at peace with himself and his decisions.

As if that were praiseworthy.

For Bush supporters, of course, it is: as Colbert said, with Bush you know he believes the same things on Wednesday that he did on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Bush has managed to continue to believe strongly in something that’s blatantly false, and there’s nothing more admirable to people like those I grew up around. They’re disdainful of the personal impurity that accompanies information, which, after all, is of this world, and therefore matters not. It’s such fine folks who’ve been known to decide that all the real books written before a mythical event should be burned, thus creating their own darkness. In which, truth be told, they were probably happy as pigs in their normal environment.

It’s not cleanliness, in other words, but ignorance that’s next to Godliness, according to this view. All you need to know is right there in the handbook He gave us; patience and exegesis will extract whatever meaning you need. If He didn’t find dinosaurs worthy of mention, they must not have been relevant to the plan. After all, you know, it’s possible that dinosaur bones were put here to test our faith, as someone argued to Bill Hicks. Then we find ourselves in the same spot Bush is in: we need to believe in something we know is untrue.

Such a feat of believing requires compartmentalization on a grand scale. If there’s any significant amount of knowledge floating around, keeping those compartments separate becomes prohibitively difficult (as Bob Altemeyer’s studies have shown). Thus the bubble surrounding Bush is intended to accomplish the same goal that heads the list of most everyone still living in my old hometown: the avoidance, or more precisely intentionally maintained ignorance, of facts about the world, in particular facts that don’t fit with existing beliefs.

I blame this all on a guy named Paul. Who can honestly argue that belief matters more than action? Wouldn’t that imply that human beings probably numbering in the billions were created without a chance to believe, thus doomed to torment with no path to redemption?

The New York Times reports that the White House and the Democrats have agreed on a rewrite of the wiretapping rules. It’s not entirely clear why anyone cares to take the trouble. Everyone knows the administration has been ignoring the existing rules; why would a rewrite make a difference?

Perhaps the most important concession that Democratic leaders claimed in the proposal was a reaffirmation that the intelligence protocols are the “exclusive” means for the executive branch to conduct wiretapping operations in terrorism and espionage cases. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had insisted on that element, and Democratic staff members asserted that the language would prevent Mr. Bush, or any future president, from circumventing the law. The proposal asserts that “that the law is the exclusive authority and not the whim of the president of the United States,“ Ms. Pelosi said.

In general, rewriting the law to emphasize to those who knowingly violated it in the past that the law must be obeyed is an ineffective means of making the point.

The Democrats are letting the telecoms off the hook for activities the companies knew were illegal; the precedents were clear. In exchange for this immunity the Democratic, I hesitate to say leadership in this context, can depart grasping the idea that this reaffirmation will constrain a President when the first affirmation did not. It seems to be a textbook case of doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

Or alternatively, perhaps the Democrats have no problem with warrantless wiretapping and torture and illegal wars as long as it’s the Democrats in power at the time. All power corrupts, said John Emerich Edward Dahlberg, and he was right.

If you worked long hard hours and years to reach the upper atmosphere of Congressional leadership for your party, it’d be hard to think in terms of the American empire ending. It’d be hard to realize that there is an American empire to begin with; as Chomsky says, you can’t reach a position of power in the US government without believing that the country is unique in history in acting purely from altruistic motives.

That’s abroad, of course; domestically, it’s devil take the hindmost. In the current case, as so often in recent years, the hindmost is the American public. This is somehow more grating now that we have Democrats controlling Congress. In 2006 we took the reins from the Republicans, too corrupt, incompetent, and downright evil to live with any more, and handed them to the Democrats, who promised, as all parties do in such circumstances, to restore dignity and truth to the institution and to assert the rule of law.

Hah! In fact, they’ve repeatedly capitulated. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the only real accomplishment the Democrats had to show for taking control of Congress was refusing to cave on telecom immunity. Now they’re caving on that too.

I just bought a couple Cindy Sheehan for Congress buttons.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is Not Alex. It’s the antiMcCain, antiwar ad from MoveOn.org which is being called tasteless by the conservative punditry. Being called tasteless by it/them is of course like being called ugly by a frog.

Personally I thought the ad was (1) tasteful, (2) fair, (3) well-produced, and (4) effective. What’s more, (1) the baby was cute, and (2) I fell in love with the young mother.

So, as Thomas L. Friedman might say, and did, Suck on this, okay?

The Obama campaign has put up a web page to rebut the smears, calumnies, false rumors and innuendos, anonymous charges, viral emails, libels, defamation, slurs, sleaze and slander that are standard in GOP presidential campaigns.

In fact the Swift Boat operation is already humming along nicely in high gear. Slime-lovers will find prime specimens at Obama’s new site, Fight the Smears.

In which I thread some beads of the corruption nibbling at the American dream, nay, inhabiting it with a vengeance. In fact, it’s looking more and more like the approach of Nemesis, who you’ll recall is the goddess who brings havoc to you and your plans in payment for your hubris.

Among chessplayers you often hear that chess is life. In many ways this analogy holds up. In fact it’s really closer than an analogy: chess isn’t like life, it is life.

Life involves making decisions about what to do and what not to do, in situations where you can’t possibly gather all the information. In chess there are estimated to be around 10⁵⁰ legal positions, with a game-tree size of 10¹²³ (game-tree size is the total number of legal games, counting different move orders arriving at the same position as different games).

For comparison, estimates for the number of atoms in the universe are around 10⁸⁰.

So you can’t possibly gather all the relevant information; yet you have to make a choice, there’s a clock ticking, and you’ll be stuck with that choice for the rest of the game. You need principles, plus the technique to execute them against resistance.

The decision-making process in chess is so similar to life that it’s a bit scary to consider the implications of machines beating the crap out of the best humanity has produced. But at least it’s a game of rules. Without ignoring the occasional accusations of cheating (by, for example, Kasparov against the Deep Blue team, or by Topalov against Kramnik in the famous World Championship Bathroom Controversy), we expect the outcome of the game to be determined by who played better.

If only life were like chess, and the winners were those who made the best decisions! If we chose our leaders on that basis, our quality of life would be much improved. We’d rid ourselves of servants of the dark side such as Cheney and Greenspan and Kissinger and Albright, and replace them with others like Feingold and Conyers and Kucinich and Waxman, people who find representation of the type envisioned in the Constitution more honorable than playing for Team America in the game of geostrategy.

But no. Corruption and war are profitable; and the war-maker rarely fails to draw greater praise. As Gibbon says:

…as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.

Perhaps this is another gift George Bush will leave us with: the realization that war has become a business, and not just any business but one central to our way of life; that the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about has taken control of our government by holding the economy hostage.

Perhaps we’ll decide, like the folks in Iain Banks’s Culture novels, that money’s just holding us up. When scarcity is the main problem, money provides a huge leg up. When you could feed everyone if you chose, but it’s not profitable enough so you don’t, you’re in essence killing people for money. And even from the purely economic point of view, if every individual were fed, clothed, housed, educated, and provided with transportation and medical care, how much more productive would we be as a group?

What keeps us from doing this? It’s not exactly corruption; bribes aren’t being paid, either explicitly or implicitly, to those who enforce the status quo. Unless you count the money spent on police, and the more numerous private security folks. Not to mention the various methods of enforcing that unusual system of economic class that Americans have evolved. It’s universal and not at all subtle, yet we often manage to ignore it.

To take a single example: I teach in six elementary schools in four districts each week of the school year. The educational opportunities presented to children differ significantly based on the cost of the house their families live in. That’s rational in our world, but I submit that nearly everyone would be much better off if we educated everyone to the highest standard we can manage. Rather than bombing some Asian village, for example. As Eisenhower said, every bomber we build is a school we don’t build. And bombers were dirt cheap back then.

I claim our socio-economic situation waxes and wanes as our ideas veer now toward and now away from a course parallel to reality. The corollary is that our current troubles are precipitated by a hole in our world-watching filters.

Americans are famous, or perhaps infamous, for their go-it-alone every-man-for-himself attitude. As Lisa said, how rebellious, in a conformist sort of way.

In reality everyone knows Americans love a winner. People who’ve never been to Los Angeles root for the Lakers because they think the Lakers will win (as if). Many people here in northern California root for the Patriots (once the 49ers have safely folded) despite not owning a single garment capable of withstanding the weather on a nice day at a Patriots game.

So when fans learn that their team’s best player is a rapist, or that their team taped competitors’ signals, reactions tend to fall into two groups. Some fans feel they’ve been let down by their stars or teams. Others prefer to ignore the revelations and blame the whole emotional mess on the media, or the InterTubes, or whatever: it’s all lies. This second group, one assumes, votes disproportionately for Bush.

Fortunately, there aren’t enough such people to elect him. Unfortunately, that doesn’t control who wins the elections. And corruption at the highest level of civic life sets a standard. Each new world chess champion initiates a fad for certain openings; each new administration has ripple effects throughout society.

So anyone who’s spent much time watching NBA games cannot be surprised to learn that former referee Tim Donaghy has accused the league of rigging games. Donaghy’s already been convicted of manipulating outcomes and is facing sentencing. In the plea letter his lawyer writes:

“Tim learned from Referee A that Referees A and F wanted to extend the series to seven games. Tim knew Referees A and F to be ‘company men,’ always acting in the interest of the N.B.A., and that night, it was in the N.B.A.’s interest to add another game to the series.”

The game was refereed by three tenured veterans: Dick Bavetta, Ted Bernhardt and Bob Delaney. Bernhardt has retired from the league. Under N.B.A. rules, Bavetta and Delaney are not permitted to speak to the news media. However, Delaney, a former New Jersey state trooper, cast doubt on Donaghy’s claims in an interview with ESPN.

“This is not the first time a known or convicted criminal has lied about me before the judicial system,” Delaney said Wednesday. “I have an extensive law enforcement background, and still train police officers. I have dealt with criminals and informants, and I know full well they are capable of doing and saying anything.”

I’m assuming Delany means this to be reassuring, but somehow I don’t find it so. Are we to consider that NBA referees are no more corrupt than your hometown police force would be if it dealt constantly with the amount of money that circulates in professional sports?

Back in 2001 Milwaukee was playing Philadelphia in the Eastern Conference finals. George Karl, coach of the Bucks, later expressed the view that the league had decided Alan Iverson and his Philly teammates would be a better draw for the finals than the Bucks, so they arranged the calls to make that happen. He was fined $85,000, if memory serves, and got calls from several prominent players stating their agreement. (One of them was Kevin Garnett, as of this writing the best player in the NBA finals.)

The FBI has made inquiries about Bavetta, according to a former N.B.A. referee who was interviewed by federal agents last year.

Hue Hollins, who retired in 2003 and has been outspoken about the N.B.A.’s treatment of referees, said he met for about an hour with two agents from New York before last season.

In addition to asking questions about Donaghy, Hollins said the agents inquired extensively about Bavetta. They asked if he ever noticed that Bavetta “was making sure that the home team would win, and I told them I had no idea because I didn’t work with him a lot.”

Well, try watching a game. Bavetta is not the only one, but he’s one.

The most hilarious comment comes from perennial favorite Mark Cuban, who must know something about basketball; after all, he bought a team.

Mark Cuban, the outspoken Dallas Mavericks owner, who has been a leading critic of the N.B.A.’s officiating program, cast doubt on Donaghy’s claim that league officials had orchestrated anything.

“There’s no way on God’s green Earth that David Stern has ever done anything to influence the outcome of a game,“ Cuban told ESPN.com.

Spoken like a man still hoping to be admitted to the country club, and thus continuing to speak well of it even after being rejected. Nixon would have appreciated the number of outs left in that sentence. Suppose this particular earth isn’t God’s, for example? And besides, did anyone accuse Stern of rigging the games? No, it was the referees who did that; Stern orchestrated it. It’s like Bush and Cheney didn’t actually do the torture themselves, they had other people do it, but they ordered it. They’re not complicit, they’re responsible. Same with Stern, though there was no torture or killing involved (as far as I know).

This, to me, is what makes college basketball preferable, though in principle it shouldn’t be. There are few more amazing athletes in the world than NBA players, and the game they play involves much more useful civic virtues than, say, American football. College teams can reach the NCAA tournament with one or two players who’ll definitely make the NBA; three, and you’re an odds-on favorite for the whole thing. But look at the last four NBA teams standing: Los Angeles, San Antonio, Boston, and Detroit: three great teams and one great media market. The league admitted that the decisive call in the fourth game of the Western Conference final was wrong, but they figured that a Lakers-Celtics series would draw a much larger audience than Spurs-Celtics.

It’s the American way.

Just finished listening to Hillary’s speech, which struck me as graceful and useful. And from as much of the subsequent pundibabble as I could endure, this seemed to be the consensus.

So I’ll only bother to add two things that are unlikely to come up in everybody else’s instant analysis.

First, both Hillary and Chelsea clapped back at the audience. New rule, as Bill Maher says: Keep your hands to yourself. Otherwise you look as stupid as every show biz jackass who bounds into camera range clapping for — well, for whom?

If for your own wonderful self, it amounts to an unattractive act of public masturbation. If for the audience, it is the gesture of a desperate suck-up.

The second thing was Hillary’s juxtaposition of two words that I doubt have been uttered in sequence by any major presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, for 30 years. They are “promoting” and “unionization,” presented as a desirable goal.

Not “recognizing the importance of” unionization. ” Not “backing” or “championing” or “defending” it. Promoting it. Maybe the word was carelessly chosen or insincerely spoken. But if not — if the active promoting of unionization by government has become mentionable once more in mainstream Democratic rhetoric — this could turn out to be huge.

Having written for a president who was terrific at town meetings and terrible at prepared speeches, this Gail Collins op-ed made me feel a tiny — barely perceptible actually — twinge of sympathy for McCain’s speechwriters. McCain, you’ll remember, wants to do a sort of buddy road flick with Obama, the two of them spending the summer together doing weekly town hall appearances:

But for all the talk about McCain wanting a “higher level of discourse,” the bottom line is that he is begging to be rescued from the big problem his campaign has encountered: which is that the only thing their candidate is good at is town-hall meetings.

This was driven home Tuesday night when the Republicans decided to try to insert a McCain speech into the Democrats’ final primary night. They were hoping to steal thunder from the moment when Obama clinched the nomination. The actual effect was to offer viewers a chance to compare the skills of the greatest orator in modern American politics with a guy who has never really learned how to read a teleprompter…

Pixie writes:

I think women who believe a woman in the White House would mean someone who would keep us out of military confrontations, someone nurturing and sensitive who would respond to the people, someone who is less testosterone-driven are crazy. When I see women say that, I think, “Honey, any woman who gets to the White House isn’t going to be like you — isn’t going to be a soft-spoken, nurturing type. That’s not the personality that wants to be President. The gender is irrelevant. That’s why Hillary got so far.”

So what happens now? Is Obama totally screwed? Would he ever choose Hagel as a running mate? Or would that actually drive most Republicans away from the ticket?

And I add:

Indira Gandhi, Gold Meir, Maggie Thatcher…

Here’s a picture of Inflatable George I took during the demonstrations at the 2004 GOP convention in New York City. The little fellow is seen wearing his make-believe flight suit.

Want to remove all slime from the election this fall and limit debate strictly to the issues? Rick Hertzberg knows how:

The solution is obvious. Obama should ask McCain to be his running mate. McCain should ask Obama to be his. And both should say yes.

A campaign pitting an Obama-McCain ticket against a McCain-Obama ticket would absolutely guarantee a general-election campaign that would be about The Issues and nothing but The Issues…

Confused by all the blabber last night from Tim and Keith and Chris and Pat? Want to find out what actually happened in Indiana and North Carolina? Go here for your reality pill from Jay Cost, Doctor of Politics. Excerpt:

As you can see, North Carolina performed roughly as we might expect, falling in between Virginia and Tennessee. Nevertheless, it is surprising that the results were closer to the Virginia end (i.e. Obama +29) than the Tennessee end (i.e. Clinton +13). What might explain the difference?

Unlike Indiana, it doesn’t come from Clinton’s core voting group. She did extremely well among white voters in North Carolina. Obviously, she didn’t do as well with them as she did in Tennessee. However, she still trounced Obama among white men and white women, regardless of their religious affiliation.

Clinton’s problem was with the African American vote, which came in at about 33%. Her trouble in North Carolina, as well as the South in general, is that white voters are more likely to be Republican than in decades past. This has given Obama a demographic edge in the region — one that has actually grown in the past few months. Note that African Americans in North Carolina went for Obama more strongly than they did in either Tennessee or Virginia. In fact, we can see a general trend in the African American vote toward Obama — not just in these states, but nationwide. It has not been much commented upon — most likely because African Americans have been supporting Obama more strongly than any other group. Nevertheless, as time has gone on, the African American vote has clustered around Obama much more tightly.

This piece of mine ran several days ago in Salon. com. To see it in its original home, go here. One of the commenters, Blueturtle, made a point that hadn’t occurred to me, but seems aesthetically solid:

Beyond the Left's often correct belief that wearing the flag is facile posturing, there is a larger, deeper problem with the lapel pin.

Isn't it the great unspoken truth that the American flag is simply ugly? Bold, primary colors parceled out in too small stripes and indeterminant stars. It has always paled in comparison to the understated tricolor of France, the composite crosses of the Union Jack, or the beautiful exoticism of any number of developing nations' standards.

The stars and bars speaks for a nation that never could really figure out what it stood for. In response, states' rights and muddled federalism left us with a compromise guidon of cobbled together symbols.

Obama knows that will clash with any outfit that is not made for preschoolers in their bold jumpers.

Flag Pins are for Losers — Literally

Is a man fit to be commander-in-chief if he won't even fly the flag from his buttonhole?

Does that man, Barack Obama, think he's "too good — too patriotic! — to wear a flag pin on his chest?" Because that's what William Kristol believes.

Grow up, the Chicago Sun-Times advises: "Oh for Pete's sake, Senator Obama, pin the darnn American flag to your chest. Otherwise, the poor dope will "catch a world of hurt for ... polarizing comments [that] make him sound like a hardened leftist."

Has Obama's failure to wear a flag pin really done "more damage to his White House hopes than a bomb bursting in air?" The New York Daily News thinks so.

Or is it just possible that Barack Obama knows more about getting to be president than all of these pundits laid end to end, as they probably should be? Is it possible that an empty buttonhole might actually help a candidate of either party, now that the nation's number one flag-wearer is circling the bowl with the lowest presidential approval ratings ever recorded?

Let's go beyond the Beltway and take a look. Out there on the campaign trail, who's actually been wearing lapel flags in this race and who hasn't -- and how's that been working out for you guys anyway?

On April 26 of last year in Orangeburg, South Carolina, the Democrats held the first debate in the campaign that never ends. First thing that morning the candidates were all in a hurry to throw on their clothes, grabbing any old thing that came to hand. Yeah, right.

It was the most important day of their political lives to date, and they agonized over each tiny sartorial decision. Windsor knot or four-in-hand? Blue or red?

Here's where everybody came out on lapel flags. The photo coverage of the debate shows that only Joe Biden decided to wear one. The other seven -- Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd — went without.

Of course you'd expect that from a bunch of surrender monkeys, wouldn't you? So let's turn to the Republicans, tough-talking patriots to a man. Their first debate came a week later in Simi Valley, California. And sure enough, Tommy Thompson, Tom Tancredo and Rudy Giuliani, nonveterans all, were careful to pin on their flags.

Wait a minute, though. Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Sam Brownback, Jim Gilmore, Duncan Hunter, and Mike Huckabee all left their little flags back home on the bureau. And so did John McCain. Hmm.

By May 15, at the Columbia, South Carolina Republican debate, Tancredo had stopped wearing his flag. By June, Democratic candidate Joe Biden had deflagged as well.

The only candidate of either party who chose to add a flag in the course of the campaign was Bill Richardson, who flagged up toward the end of the summer. With Biden's flag gone by then, Richardson had become the only Democratic candidate to wear a flag in the debates.

On the Republican side Tommy Thompson continued to wear his flag till the bitter end, which came in August when he placed sixth in the Iowa straw polls. The empty Thompson slot was filled the following month by Fred. The lobbyist/actor picked up Tommy's banner, so to speak, and was still wearing it in January when he, too, dropped out.

Rudy Giuliani, who probably wears a flag to bed, dropped out a week later after racking up a pathetic 15 percent of the vote in the Florida Republican primary.

Do we see a subtle pattern emerging here? Every presidential candidate of both parties who ever wore a lapel flag during the debates, even as briefly as Biden, bought himself a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

And every major party candidate who remains viable today — John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — has seldom if ever been spotted with a flag in his or her lapel.

Don't think the press hasn't been noticing, either. To this day there has been a steady drumbeat of silence in the media over the flagless-ness of Huckabee's, Clinton's and McCain's lapels.

Nor would Obama's disrespect have made news if only he had thought to point the finger at everyone else still in the race when a TV reporter posed his trivia question back in October. But instead he gave an honest if incomplete answer.

Obama said he had worn a pin after 9/11 but stopped once he began to notice, and here I paraphrase wildly but no doubt accurately, that most of the people still wearing lapel flags were assholes.

On the evidence of the campaign so far, Obama wasn't the only one who noticed.

Clinton, Huckabee and McCain, we may say with confidence, would wear anything or even nothing at all if they thought it would help them win the nomination. Then why, when it came to miniature flags, did the three join Obama in opting for nothing?

Dosed with Pentothal, each would most likely come up with a variant of the answer Obama had hinted at: that lapel flags no longer signify simple patriotism, but something that you don't want sticking to your fingers these days..

For these past six years and more, men with those bright little flags apparently riveted to their lapels have fed the voters a daily diet of fear, secrecy, lies, and a cruel war with neither point nor end.

No sensible politician would want to march under this tiny, metallic banner. Just look at all the fallen stars who did.

Waiting for Dorothy offers us a glimpse into the mind of the Invisible Hand. (Sorry no pictures this time, you’ll have to go take a look for yourself.)

One of the enjoyable aspects of the current election campaign is watching the antics of the wingnuts as they’re forced to choose between John McCain and a firing squad.

Over the past month a new Axis of Evil has emerged — not one based in Damascus, Tehran or Pyongyang — but instead in Cedar Rapids, Charleston, South Carolina, Derry, New Hampshire and Boca Raton, Florida. It is the liberal and “independent” voters in these 4 states that have nearly completed a deed that makes Kim Jong Il envious — the near crippling of the American Electoral System.

These four states have combined their native liberal populism with an imported liberal electorate and have forced the GOP to accept a nominee so distasteful that in more than one poll — the numbers of voters choosing not to vote and those choosing to vote third party actually exceed those who will hold their nose and vote for Maverick, War Hero, Amnesty Supporter, John McCain.

I admit, I’ve always known that South Carolina and Florida were secret hotbeds of liberalism. But I was hoping no one would notice.

I’m not interested in sending any more traffic to the wackos at Human Events Online, but if you really must read the article Steve Thomma, who’s been filing some excellent stuff for McClatchy, links to it.

You don’t have to love Robert Novak to respect his political smarts. Here he is on the fall election and on the South Carolina Democratic debate Monday night:

While both the Republican and Democratic presidential races are undecided going into the massive array of February 5 primaries (which amounts to nearly a national primary), a Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain contest in November looms as the most likely prospect.

That is the match-up that offers the highest likelihood of Republican success despite the continued sniping at McCain by certain right-wing activists…

Clinton and Obama both took good digs at one another, but the heightened negativity is in itself a boon to Clinton. By going negative, Hillary does not hurt her image, but Obama hurts his.

Clinton is already the knife-fighting candidate, and that is part of her appeal. Obama is supposed to represent a new era, hope, and a change in tone. However well-placed his jabs at Clinton, they tarnish his chief virtue. Also, voters still react negatively to attacks on a woman.

This evening, through another in a series of “no duh!” moments, I realized that the Democratic Presidential candidates are arguing over two separate types of discord.

The first began subtly but unmistakably creeping toward center stage after the Iowa caucuses, when Clinton supporters found themselves in a real race and began to say things to the press that caused them to be reassigned to duties out of the public eye. I do not imply that the Clinton machine is the only flinger of mud; but I do assert that, with regard to mud and the flinging of it, the Clintons’ assembly far outguns the combined strength of its Democratic opponents. They have the organization, the campaign experience, the government-related connections, and some knowledge of what it’s like to be in the public eye constantly. Plus memories of just how low politics can really go.

Many Americans find this disgusting. The Democrats haven’t yet begun accusing each other of experimenting on unborn kids. No sirree; Democratic barbs are less direct, more substantial, credible across a larger range of educational backgrounds. You know, things like aggravating racial divides with inept remarks about the sainted Dr. King. Or occasionally slipping in inadvertent drug references:

“To me, as an African American, I am frankly insulted the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues — when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood; I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book — when they have been involved,” he said.

Leaving aside the structural deficiencies of that sentence — what, in fact, is the Obama campaign supposed to have implied about the Clintons? — this seems to me a coach-class insult hurled by an operative of moderate skills and fiery temperament. The motivation such people bring to the table only partially compensates for the disarray their manic activity can generate.

In this case, the incident is unlikely to have lasting significance. Mr. BET, Bob Johnson — the only black American billionaire other than Oprah — has apologized for his remark, and the Obama campaign has accepted the apology. But there’ve been a number of these not-too-subtle low blows since Iowa; and my guess is that if Obama wins South Carolina, especially if he wins handily, he can expect a fuller taste of Rovian tactics from the crowd around his main competitor.

I further guess that absent something both real and serious — unlikely but not beyond imagining — throwing dirt at Obama will only make him stronger. This is precisely the kind of politics Obama is making his name in opposition to. Taking mudballs and holding his position, fuzzy though it be, he appears to stand tall, a man who can rise above the fray, climb the mountain, and bring back the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason.

Many Obama voters no doubt agree with his policies. Many more agree with what they believe his policies are, basing their beliefs on how they feel about him personally. And it’s undeniable that he’s a tremendously charismatic figure, the best set-piece speaker I’ve ever heard, and the sort of person we wish the American system tended to produce, though in fact he’s more of a fortunate anomaly.

Mike Huckabee benefits similarly by coming across as a likable person. Anyone who can hold his own with Colbert twice has proved himself quick-witted and comfortable in his own skin; he gives you the feeling that he’d be a good decision-maker in the sense that he’d make decisions based on what he really thought, felt, and believed was going on. Of course he’s totally bonkers in several areas with respect to what actually is going on, but that’s a separate issue.

But many Obamaniacs, it appears to me, support him because they think he’ll make politics friendlier, less critical and demanding and more harmonious. More like television and less like in-laws. It’s a beautiful dream and a worthwhile goal, though a reader of history might be forgiven for considering it something of a long-term prospect.

I’m all for aiming the society at the flag of coöperation. But at this point in the evolution and training of human consciousness; at this stage in the development of the nation-state; at this historical tipping point between a modern feudalism and a renewed commitment to the path of democracy, with all its surprises, Americans are neither psychologically prepared nor sufficiently informed to participate in creating global harmony. As Bertrand Russell put it, our ethic compels competition, but our situation requires coöperation. We’d better get our minds right or we’ll be spending more than one night in The