It's Worse Than I Thought, Just Like I Always Thought

Joan Walsh, "Rand Paul’s missing spine: I thought he was a joke, but after he filibustered over drones, wondered if I'd been wrong. Nope." April 24

YE Gods and pygmy goats:

I was on vacation when Rand Paul staged his filibuster to get more answers about drones from the Obama administration, or else I probably would have embarrassed myself by praising him.

Were you on vacation, or taking leave of your senses? If the latter, did the airlines lose your luggage?

I’m concerned about drones and targeted assassinations and I think it’s a perfect place for a left-right alliance.

Stop it.

So I was glad to see Paul’s filibuster.

Which had nothing to do with targeted killings, and everything to do with making the Obama administration initial a piece of paper about targeting killing of Americans on American soil. Which some wiseasses on the Right thought was a big PR deal. And which has about as much to do with the US drone program as Sadam Hussein had to do with 9/11.

Bonus points one: the filibuster was actually about Benghazi!! Benghazi!!!! BENGHAZI!!!!1! and the urban legend behind Paul 2.0's concern about drones--there's an urban legend behind everything the man believes, Joan; look it up--was the idea that the Interior Department or Homeland Security or the US Department of Sharia Law is flying drones over federal waterways to snoop on Western ranchers and oil and mineral interests, aka, Sen. Rand Paul (Kook-Kentucky)'s natural constituency.

Bonus points two: assuming there's any earthly reason for any sentient voter to desire a left-right alliance on anything, "targeted killing of Americans on American soil" ain't it, and a signed policy statement is utterly worthless even if it was. There's plenty enough wiggle room under standard federal law enforcement powers to fly a fleet of drones through, on either side of the truck you are driving. Either the current President of the United States has no plan for the wholesale killing of Americans on American soil via Death Drone (just as the previous President of the United States did not mastermind the 9/11 attacks), or else the world is so fucking irredeemably insane there's nothing a piece of paper, forty days and nights of filibustering, and Protective Sponge Helmets for every citizen ("They're Just Like The One Rand Paul Wears!™") can do to protect us.

Bonus points three: somebody smarter than Rand Paul--yes, it is a large sample--came up with the "make Holder sign this" routine. Paul's "opposition" to drones, such as it was, was just one anti-fluoridationalist fantasy hitched to another-Benghazi!! Benghazi!!!! BENGHAZI!!!!1!--and I'm not quite sure how anybody managed to miss that, or think well of him for an instant. Even while on vacation.

Even though I disagree with Paul on virtually every other issue and generally consider him to be kind of a joke, I’d have been happy to be proven wrong. Maybe he had a conscience. Maybe he would become a much needed civil liberties leader on the right.

Just for the record, how can you consider someone a joke without actually realizing just what sort of joke he is?

Alas, I haven’t been proven wrong.

Except for that narrowly-avoided "Rand Paul, Much Needed Civil Libertarian on the Right!" column.

Mr. Filibuster, the tribune of civil liberties, now says that drones should have been used against the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston – not only that, he told Fox’s Neal Cavuto, they should even be used against someone robbing a liquor store. 

Strangely enough, Cavuto himself seemed a little spooked by the technology that was deployed in the hunt for 19-year-old Dzohkhar Tsarnaev, including the thermal imaging that was able to find him in a boat and even to get some sense of the extent of his wounds.

Okay, so now would be a good time not to imagine you saw signs of incipient humanity in Neil Cavuto just because he was standing next to Rand Paul.

“I have never argued against any technology being used against having an imminent threat, [or] an act of crime going on,” Paul replied. “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a Drone kills him or a policeman kills him.” 

Wow. So Paul has gone from “your rights to trial by jury are precious, that no American should be killed by a drone on American soil without first being charged with a crime, without first being found to be guilty by a court” to “If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and 50 dollars in cash I don’t care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him.”

Hey, I don't know if he's telling the truth, or if he even recognizes "truth" as a category, but so far as I know Paul avoided speaking of imminent threats. That was part of the charade. Professional wordsmithers are supposed to catch that sort of thing.

Back during his filibuster, I briefly thought Paul might prove a formidable 2016 GOP presidential candidate, if he channeled American discontent with the Obama administration’s drone policy and other national security excesses. I shouldn’t have worried.

Nor admitted it in public, Joan.

Listen, Guys, The Comedy Thing Is Just Not Working Out

David Brooks, "A Second G.O.P." January 28

SHORTER David Brooks, Twenty-Five Years in the Making: "Okay, so it turns out that the party won't remake itself in my image. But it should definitely do so in those areas where this would be an instant political winner."

T.H.E. fuck? Can we leave it at that? Can we simply note that, without getting into any details of this or any of his other Yale-approved middlebrow penseés, David Brooks is the freaking embodiment of that bloated, bureaucratic, partisan Washington he claims to distain? He sits in a $6 million house, cranks out 1500 words in a tough week, goes on the teevee to say them in different words, and all of 'em are the fucking same. All of 'em have been the fucking same for a quarter century, since he touched the hem of Milton Friedman's child-labor-factory garment. And all of them are guaranteed, guaranteed, to accomplish nothing. 

Here, just for the record, is The Idea:

It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It’s smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton. 

The second G.O.P. wouldn’t be based on the Encroachment Story. It would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis. 

Olson argued that nations decline because their aging institutions get bloated and sclerotic and retard national dynamism. Murray argues that America is coming apart, dividing into two nations — one with high education levels, stable families and good opportunities and the other with low education levels, unstable families and bad opportunities. 

The second G.O.P. would tackle both problems at once. It would be filled with people who recoiled at President Obama’s second Inaugural Address because of its excessive faith in centralized power, but who don’t share the absolute antigovernment story of the current G.O.P.

Now, honestly, after I got over that Sheraton/Westin metaphor--professional word smithery!--I was reminded of P.J. O'Rourke. Not for the reason you might imagine, but because the great NatLamp Sunday newspaper parody included a Mr. Fix-It advice column, where someone wrote in that the morning sun was too strong in his front window, and the columnist recommended lifting the house off its foundation and rotating it 90º.

America is beyond wondering, or caring, whether Brooks actually believes this shit, or even believes there's someone out there who'd find it "thought provoking". We already know how Brooks and his insider ilk--self-proclaimed minorities in a minority party--have come to political prominence over Brooks' working lifetime. No, the single question left is one, really, only specialists can feign interest in: is the Republican party really this inept? 

Remember that if Brooks is to be believed (I kid!) we're talking about the Party of Burkean Weekends. A party he now suggests must be abandoned across the vast empty stretches of its actual influence, to nativist, gun-totin' yahooliganism. Where'd those people even come from? Didn't you used to consider them The Help? (Although, it is the height of magnanimity, giving something you have no claim to over to its actual owners. I do hope this doesn't start a trend.)

In the meantime, where applicable, the Republican party will return to prominence by explaining to East Coast Elitists and Midwestern Progressives that what they really need is a combination of neo-Randianism and Uncut Racism. 

What problem does this solve, now (let alone How)? Losing the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections? Who ya gonna run? You had two guys on that dais last time who could, conceivably, have been said to fit that mold; one of 'em was your nominee. The one who'd been running for seven years and had all the money. The other couldn't outpoll Herman Fucking Cain. Your problem isn't changing electoral demographics. It's the fucking Republican party. 

Listen, Professor, most of us understand that none of you really wants to reform the Republican party; the real reformers are the Teabag arsonists. You're only interested in gingering the old nag so somebody'll buy it in 2016. There's a certain amount of schadenfreude involved in seeing you people squirm the way the rest of us have for the past thirty-five years as you gave them power and prominence in exchange for their supporting whatever corporate-friendly (wink wink) candidate you'd selected. But, really, I'd'a just as soon we'd passed on the whole thing.

There are a few tactical problems with this. For one, it didn't work that way from the start. Your boy Reagan was forced (I'm being kind) to fluff religious maniacs and unrepentant racists. Two things kept those appendages from nominating your last Presidential ticket: the surfeit, and complete insanity, of their Teabagger choices, and the strong desire among the faithful to kick the colored guy out of the White House by voting for "someone electable", who they confused with Mitt Romney. Think it'll be that way next time? Go ahead and bet against Santorum, then. For another, the Money in the Money Party isn't in Eastern banks anymore; it's in the hands of Middle Western and Further Out Western cranks. Again, take it up with Reagan. And Goldwater. 

While you're at it, you might consider that you hooked the easy marks the first time. Jebus, the Flag, and Cheap Oil and Mineral Rights got you in the mess you've finally noticed. You really think you're going to hoodwink your way out of it?

For the life of me, Professor, just what th' hell's wrong with the Democratic party? It's wishy-washy. It caters to Big Business. It'll start just as many wars as the Republicans, though it tends to end them, eventually. Why don't you and your seven followers pretend to be Democrats, instead of pretending to give a fuck about anyone else? Too much ethnic food on the free buffet?

And Why Isn't "Bridge Salesman" At The Top Of Everyone's "Hot Careers" List?

Ron Fournier, "Why Te'o Hoax, Armstrong Lies Should Matter to Washington". January 17

Pat Forde, "Notre Dame presents believable explanation for Manti Te'o girlfriend hoax". January 17

OUR story so far: The University of Notre Dame is a lot more concerned--a lot more--with imaginary dead girls than real live dead girls.

Reactions:

On an unnerving night when it was hard to know what to believe and who to trust, Jack Swarbrick convinced me. 

Chin quivering and voice catching, the Notre Dame athletic director fought emotion in describing Manti Te'o as "the single most trusting individual I have ever met." I know Swarbrick fairly well over the course of maybe two dozen interactions, both professional and personal – well enough to have a read on his personality. This was not a high-paid suit engaged in damage control; this was a man who sincerely believes that the most popular Fighting Irish football player in decades was wronged far more than he was wrong.

Pat Forde is not a stupid man. Neither is Mike Greenberg, who took the same tack this morning. 

I don't know Jack Swarbrick. Maybe he's the last honest man in America. If so, then, maybe he could hire some investigators to look into those two rapes, the reports of victim intimidation, and the death by suicide linked to his football team. Now would be a good time. When they happened would have been even better. 

Because otherwise, Jack Swarbrick is the mouthpiece for a bunch of well-heeled and self-righteous sharpers, and the only damage they're concerned about is damage to the brand. You wanna vouch for him personally, fine. Do so in person. In public, Jack Swarbrick is not entitled to wring his hands, and shed a couple tears, and have the rest of us, including professionals, lose our senses. He is entitled to call a press conference and fall on his sword as a momentary distraction. But that moment has now passed. You wanna take a wait-and-see attitude, fine. Please, do the rest of us the courtesy--we're the ones who do not have any accused rapists playing ball for us--of leaving the insults to our intelligence to the people who have a buck to lose.

Stories like these leave knots in our stomachs, because we so desperately want to believe our sports heroes are pure. We have the audacity to hope, too, that our politicians are at least competent. It's the same for movie stars, CEOs, pastors, generals, teachers, cops and leaders of all sorts: We build them up and break them down because we expect so much out of our national institutions. 

And, as I wrote nearly a year ago, most institutions are failing to adapt to these times of great change. What if, in the future, that trust isn't restored?

I did not "find it hard to know what to believe" last night, and I have no marrow-deep desire to find a sports hero, let alone wish for his purity. I won't claim that either opinion certifies me sane. I will say that the opposite should at least give you pause.

I appreciate the sentiment, Mr. Fournier. I even clung to it once, in my salad days. I'm not sure how a ten-year-old child could harbor any illusions about public honesty any more; maybe we should just fucking go ahead and break the news to 'em. I agree with you that trust needs to be restored. But not in the future. Yesterday.

But politicians take note? Please. You're at least sixty years late, in terms of the current cycle. Lies are the fucking official denomination of our politics. Half of your fellow citizens pledge fealty to a political party which believes in nothing but self-aggrandizement, full speed ahead, and it doesn't matter to it which side of a Sacred Principle it comes down on, or was espousing as recently as yesterday afternoon. That's the party of Principle, of course. The other is a set of craven careerists and bagmen, dedicated to the unspoken Principle that it's really best not to make too big a deal about things. Like the slaughter of a couple dozen elementary school students. Enjoying that debate, are we? Utter, jaw-dislocating stupidity and little of it coming from actual politicians, aside from the few who can reliably be found sucking up whatever nickels are lying around loose. That debate is Money vs. Reluctant Sensibility. Wanna bet on the possibility of simple, sensible control measures ever appearing in a fucking bill, let alone beginning to ease, slightly, a national disgrace?

For that matter, anybody wanna put money on Jack Swarbrick? 

Let's Just Say It: Thirty Years Late Is Not "Current"

Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein, "Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem". April 27

FIRST, via Pierce, do not click this link, unless you--unlike the author--find a picture of Rachel Maddow schmoozing Sarah Palin and Andrea Mitchell something other than a suitable replacement for the lost syrup of ipecac.

 (It's okay, Progressives, Madow wore jeans!

Sock it to the Man. Palin, meanwhile, was simultaneously drinking for free and endorsing Richard Mourdock in the Indiana Republican primary, despite the fact that what she knows about Indiana politics in general, Dick Lugar specifically, or anything and everything which can be described as an "issue" is what you can see from the Rat Islands.)

 Speaking of which:

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

Pfui. Both of you have punditological careers dating to the Carter administration. Did you sleep through the Reagan presidency? Miss the rhetoric of the Nixon years? Tricky Dick didn't deliver the famous "Silent Centrist Majority" speech, y'know. Though he might've, since it's you guys who remained silent while the Republican party went from cabal of 19th century capital pirates to cabal of 19th century capital pirates cosseting Nixonian lunatics, to cabal of Nixonian lunatics who revere 19th century capital piracy in thirty years. Fer chrissakes, a guy trapped in Arctic ice in 1950, and thawed out last week, would have a tougher time recognizing the policies of the Catholic Church than he would the Republican party.

It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.

The GOP hasn't "moved from the mainstream". It's gained more power. The "center of power" hasn't gone much of anywhere. It may have followed Goldwater West and South, thanks to the evil genius of Nixon, but it's not exactly a seismic shift from Joe McCarthy to Jesse Helms, from John Wayne to Glenn Beck. When th' hell was it Chuck Hagel's party? When was it Nelson Rockefeller's, for that matter? They called Truman a commie, for chrissakes.

The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

Question: is all of this designed to palliate the conscience of the American centrist, or is it really what it purports to be, the slowest recognition of the extent of a brick wall since the Mogols? Eisenhower had to name Richard Fucking Nixon as his running mate. The contemporary Republican party was born in 1964, not coincidentally the same year the Johnson administration decided that black people could have some rights. It's the party of Bill Buckley's racism, and of Pat Buchanan's, as well as Steve King's, of Carl McIntire's religious mania and Pat Robertson's, as well as Rick Santorum's. It's the party which wrapped every little adventurist foreign excursion from Korea to Iraq II in patriotic fervor, and which found it necessary to rewrite the history of every last one (excepting, maybe, the Glorious Liberation of Grenada); Nixon's traitor hunt of 1946 was little different than Andrew Sullivan's in 2001, and, no, he's one of yours. No one with eyes and ears could possibly have missed this, apart, somehow, from the DLC and today's tiny island leper colony of sadder-but-wiser centrists.

What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

It's the virus causes the wart. Not vice-versa.

 Okay, sure: the Republican party has become increasingly dilatory and obtuse in the halls of power, but that's not a change of the last four years. Had Republicans had the power in 1981 they would have dispensed with all the Reagan sainthood bullshit and just rammed through their radical agenda, instead of getting Democrats to agree to do it for them. And there's no question this has been facilitated, both by a venal and cowardly Democratic party, and a venal and cowardly Press. But, really, enough of this stuff. I'm not gonna make common cause with Democrats, or rueful Republican centrists, who suddenly notice what the GOP has become, and expect a medal for saying so. The time to speak up was thirty years ago, when this stuff was just as plain, and was being covered by a transparent rewrite of unpleasant history, and a clear retrenchment on individual rights. Y'know, when Reaganism was the Wave of the Future the Republican platform had no more chance of actually governing than it does today. David Stockman was just as big a liar as Paul Ryan. I'm going to settle for having been right about this shit all along, and hope we don't kill too many innocents when it all blows up. Don't offer to help me shovel now. You've already done enough.

Olio

• We're leaking, but the good news is it can't possibly be brain fluid: four days after we got 400,000 pages on the Great Cluster Fuck in Iraq, the Times coverage--after thoughtfully including a top-of-the-Sunday-frontpage exposé of how Julian Assange Just Isn't Our Kind (Daniel Ellsberg went to a psychiatrist!)--I'm convinced, by the way, that absent Ben Bradlee and whatever honor remains among thieves, the Times would have hired Sally Quinn away from the Post years ago--the whole thing's down to a box in the corner. So Last Week! I am reminded of what I said in 2002: the main argument against our invading Iraq, or anyone, for that matter, is that this country is too juvenile to handle it. We should have picked up on this when the warfloggers blamed Life for My Lai. Now our newspapers can't handle the news.

Reggie Bush returned his Heisman. On his own. Just saying'.

• On the other hand, "Karzai takes money from Iran" has legs. Or maybe that's just to make up for "Secret donors run US campaigns: Who are we to judge?"

• My memory's going: has there been a national election since 1980 which was about anything?

• GM PAC gives Mitch McConnell $5000. In other news, Mitch McConnell accepts $5000 from GM.

Enjoy the next couple months, motherfuckers, until the Teabaggers take over.

• Somerby:

As we’ve noted, every journalist flies to Finland to examine its high-scoring (middle-class) schools. This furthers a preferred press corps narrative: Our own public schools are a mess!

But please note: No one has ever flown to Finland to explore a second question: How do they provide health care at such a very low cost? Here are the OECD data for the U.S. and Finland:

Total spending on health care, per person, 2007:

United States: $7285

Finland: $2900

How weird! Why does no one fly to Finland to examine this major achievement?

• You gotta get up pretty early in the morning to slip a similarity past a Post staff writer:

Nevertheless, the similarities to Beck's rally are just the sort of thing Stewart himself would satirize on his show if, of course, it weren't his rally and his TV show in the first place.

• No, really: Joe Frontiera and Dan Leidi, columnists, consultants, and concerned clip-art bystanders, "Don't Get Fooled Again: The Baby Boomers' leadership failure".

• Your Moment of Zen:

Admirable is he, who when he
sees lightning, does not say
"Life goes by like a flash."

-Basho

Have We Lost The Ability To Tell The Truth, Or Is It Just Permanently Misplaced?

I SWITCHED on the teevee this morning, as part of the continuing melee involving things I record, things I have time to watch, and the inadequate amount of disc space available for keeping things I'll never get around to watching. Every so often I take the time to transfer something to DVD, so I can file that away and ignore it. And the teevee was set to CBS, because my Poor Wife, God love her, insists on imagining that Indianapolis Public Schools might one day delay the start of classes when the roads are a skating rink, even though she knows it'll never happen, so she'd been checking the local weather/traffic reports. Before I could switch to the list of recorded programs the CBS morning show was on me, and this being the Top of the Hour, they were covering two actual minutes of actual "news", or near-news. And the top story was the Madoff business, and Whomever It Was was speaking to Michael Santoli, the associate editor at Baron's in charge of being telegenic. (And by the way, can we do away with this sort of thing now that everything's crashed in a heap? If nothing else, on the grounds that the inverse Good Looks-to-Ability-to-Speak ratio of the past quarter century has brought us nothing but exponential increases in Bad Luck? I'd like to get my financial news and analysis from someone saggy for a change. Save the hunks and bunnies for celebrity gossip; it's not like they won't dominate 95% of your broadcast anyway. Maybe it's just me, but considering all that's gone on the past eight years, maybe turning over serious news to people who don't look like they might have a mistress with a coke habit stashed somewhere they're having trouble affording, or like any given night before they might have imbibed any given club drug, would be a good idea, or at least a nice gesture.)

Anyway, Santoli says something to the effect that, well, the SEC is feeling some embarrassment right now, because it thinks more could have been done to uncover the problem, but it's really not possible to catch a well-run Ponzi scheme any quicker. Which prompts Whomever It Is to ask, "Then what regulations should we put in place so people can feel safe about their investments?"

Whoa, there Little Lady. Did you say regulations? Because within that fifteen seconds the world shifted on its axis. We don't need more regulations, says Mr. Santoli's suit; we just need investigators to do a better job. These, of course, being the very same investigators who moments before had no way to detect such a scheme before people experienced enormous losses.

It turned out the Madoff story had replaced the Blagojevich saga as today's #1 hit; the Embattled Illinois Governor might want to consider hiring an escort or accidentally overdosing on prescription medication if he's desperate to regain the top spot. This morning's shocking revelation was that Rahm Emanuel had had "detailed discussions" concerning the appointment of Valerie Jarrett to the seat Mr. Senator Obama is vacating. This, of course, plus the news that Jessie Jackson, Jr.'s political career is in such disarray that he decided announcing that he'd been a long-time, secret, and, apparently, remarkably ineffective police informant sounded like a step up. Though this is not exactly how the story was reported. (In fairness to CBS, all it did report was that Jackson, Jr. sources were saying this.)

(Jackson, Jr.'s story was treated as a revelation elsewhere, despite the fact that part of it consisted of his recollection, years later, that Blagojevitch had asked him for a campaign contribution, perhaps in exchange for Jackson's wife getting the top state Lotto post. Perhaps several years from now someone will think to ask him why his wife was up for the top Lotto post in the first place.)

Now, far be it from us to question the news judgment of professionals, but we are sometimes left to wonder whether "thinking things through" is simply discouraged or is explicitly banned. The story probably owes more to timing than anything else--except hair, maybe; have we considered, as a nation, how often our news stories, as reported by people whose careers revolve around image, turn out to revolve around hair?--but I think it likely that the teleprompter readers and Op-Ed editors figured Blagojevich would be gone by the weekend. Now they're teetering on the brink of a major story which will involve Nothing But Talk, and frequently coming from the mouths of a State Attorney General or legislative whip. Not exactly public restroom toe-tapping code when it comes to Ratings Gold, is it?

The alternative is setting up a lasting whiff of Eau de Scandale Présidentielle. Again, we're not suggesting conspiracy, just the way the "news"business works; in my lifetime we've had Sherman Adams (Eisenhower; Nixon's Checkers speech predates me), Bobby Baker, Billy Sol Estes (LBJ), Beebee Rebozo (Nixon), Burt Lance (Carter), the entire Reagan administration, and Everything but the Kitchen Sink (Clinton), while somehow the guy who'd traded his family name and access for twenty-five years of self-enrichment while drunk as a Freshman got a pass. So I guess we'll see. Still, as Bob Somerby and others have pointed out, "alleged", which used to be the eighth most-used word on the evening news, after "the", "a(n)", "be", "in", "hair", and "thundershower activity", suddenly dropped off the charts last weekend, only to sheepishly return once it became clear Governor Blagojevitch wasn't gonna bust out cryin' like Duke Cunningham, and video of his 18th century French commode would not be immediately forthcoming.

The whole thing's topped off--for the political internets habitué, not the intended network audience--by memories of a snowy Fitzmas long ago, the bright, cold days when legions of Left Blogtopians imagined they could almost hear hoofbeats on the roof. That one too involved crusading I-dotter Patrick Fitzgerald, who took a slam-dunk case of national security violations made for partisan gain reaching at least to the Most Repugnant and Least-Competent Marksman in our history of Vice-Presidents, and turned it into a single perjury trap for one of his aides. Somebody call Vegas and check on the odds of Blagojevitch being struck by lightning while still in office in 2010.

Roe

THIRTY-five years. I'm old enough to remember back-alley abortions, in particular a young girl who stumbled down the stairs at my girlfriend's house in 1971, screaming. My girlfriend's mother, a staunch liberal Christian, had arranged the operation, and my girlfriend was the only one who'd known she was there, or who she was. I remember thinking about her when I heard about the Roe decision a couple years later, and hoping she'd never go through it again, legal or no.

As an anniversary, Roe seems to me to be a day for somber reflection, not in the form of a meditation on the "moral" issue of abortion, but on the corrupt manipulation of our public discourse, from the "Thanks for watching" card I got in response to asking the old MacNeil-Lehrer Report, circa 1976, what standing a Catholic priest had that put him on their panel discussion, through Professor Newt Gingrich telling Stephen Ambrose that anyone performing an abortion in the 19th century would have been tried for murder (and getting away with it), to Justice Kennedy's bizarre impersonation of a B-movie backwoods Family Court judge. The public issue has always been phrased as a question of "moral values", of "when Life begins", or the "rights of the Unborn", despite the fact that opposition to reproductive rights has always been a minority opinion in the decades since Roe. We might ask here if the reader was taken aback momentarily by the peculiar circumlocution "Unborn", or whether it's become enough of a commonplace that we zoom right by. How much of our debate concerns a "Right to Life" which is not even properly a term of the debate (or, reversed, occupies the center of a very different space: what is a woman's right to her own life?). Framing the issue as "choice" arose only after the buzzwords of the anti-rights crowd had completely shaped the public debate. (How many times have you heard about "partial birth abortion"? Can you, without looking, give the proper term for the procedure?)

But it's not about "choice", it's about rights, a proposition which has never been given fair hearing. Roe came precisely at the time when the television networks (still the public's #1 source for news, but so much more so then) were busy caving in to Nixon's Press paranoia and Agnew's delivery of Bill Safir(e)'s alliterative onanism. In the interests of "fairness" the minority opinions of the Right were not just aired (as they always had been), but treated with kid gloves. Cassocked Right to Lifers were never asked to denounce contraception as murder, a stance which would have split the movement and might have drastically changed where it stands today. Birth control didn't peek out of the closet until the Bush administration neared the summit of Mt. Hubris. One never hears the anti-choice advocate asked to give a simple answer to the basic question of who controls a woman's body, she or the State, of what will stop back alley surgeries, of how they can call abortion "murder" while denying that woman who have them will be tried for a capital crime.

Instead it's a thirty-five year history of harassment--to put it nicely--of citizens trying to exercise a Constitutional right, in part because Roe is never presented as such. Imagine a national effort to scream in the ears of African-Americans between the doors of their vehicles and those of the polling place. Imagine a "Voting Crisis Center" set up down the block designed to trap unsuspecting voters into casting worthless ballots. Imagine an interstate terror ring being ignored by the FBI for the duration of three presidential terms.

Okay, it ain't that hard to imagine. I'm from Indiana; I have to show my driver's license now to vote, to prevent "fraud" no one's ever demonstrated. But at least the challenge to that law gets reported on something like its merits; at least reports of voter intimidation aren't covered as differences of opinion. The harassment of women seeking their right to a medical termination of pregnancy is attacked everywhere with impunity. We're reminded by the juxtaposition of the holiday that for the better part of a decade after Brown public schools across the South were simply closed, rather than comply. Much the same has occurred for thirty-five years of Roe, much of it achieved by physical coercion, yet somehow this is treated as part of an ongoing national debate, and not as a source of ongoing national shame.

Let's Us Compromise And Do It My Way

Peggy Noonan, Erstwhile Presidential Nut-Sack Admirer, "A Time for Grace:
America needs unity in dealing with Iraq. That means the president must lead." August 31

THE difference between Peggy Noonan and, say, Jonah Goldberg is the difference between a semi-sordid "accidental" drowning where police find three empty fifths of White Horse Scotch in the trash, just atop last Wednesday's newspaper and a shoebox full of ripped-up love letters from the mid-60s, and the guy who accidentally kills himself trying to use a plunge router to open a can of pudding. For the former, we recognize a shared humanity that was lost somewhere along the way, too long ago for redemption, while the latter serves no discernible purpose, except perhaps as a reminder to throw out that aluminum cookware and not huff paint thinner.

The only reason anyone would ever discuss what either of these two have to say is that they are given valuable space in the public press to do so. If we chanced upon Peggers or Doughboy reading aloud their latest contribution while seated on a bus-stop bench we'd either walk away briskly or maybe hand them a couple of bucks, depending on our point of view. They and their ilk have been so drastically wrongheaded for so long as to defy the frickin' laws of chance. So we don't actually read either one of them so much as try to get the stain out of the carpet before it sets, after checking that our gloves are free from minute holes, and we don't rebut them so much as try, somehow, to get the smell out of the house before decent company shows up for tea. Here's Peggy, hacking up a four-year-old hairball:

What will be needed this autumn is a new bipartisan forbearance, a kind of patriotic grace. This is a great deal to hope for. The president should ask for it, and show it.

Thank Gore for the internets; even long familiarity with Noonan would not keep one safe were one trying to read this stuff while hurtling through traffic hanging on to a strap.

I mean, it's curious. It's fair to say, without meaning to ascribe any falsity of motive or unseemly hubris to it, that Noonan would describe herself, at minimum, as an aspiring penitent searching for The Light, whereas my own theological needs could be satisfied by accientially stumbling upon the Olsen twins in the middle of a three-day tootsky fest. Yet while I was known to associate with semi-dedicated Quaalude aficionados, I never knew a one who would set fire to your couch with a forgotten cigarette one day, then call you up the next to say he hoped we'd both agree we needed to be more careful with matches.

Well, Quaalude talk always makes me nostalgic, so I took a little trip through the Peggy Noonan archives, back to a place where the Iraq adventure was just beginning. Please do not get ahead of me.

And not only did I learn there was gambling going on in this establishment, I found that at a time when one might expect the utmost national seriousness, when the nation was arguably undertaking a step as serious--and as driven by tub-thumping bloodlust--as our entry into WWI, a time when, at least according to "conservatives" like Peggy, "Conservatives" Like Peggy represented the national consensus, at this moment of extreme peril, as we were preparing to send young men and women to fight in a land which, according to Peggy, "everyone" believed possessed nuclear weapons and the trigger was in the hands of a madman, at this moment I say, well, surprisingly, Pegs wasn't feeling all that bipartisan!

September 22, 2002:

One senses they [the Democrats] are looking at the whole question merely as a matter of popular positioning

February 24, 2003:

Mr. Clinton is by nature a partisan and, deep down, an embittered one. Mr. Carter is a very nice, confused man of considerable vanity. Both of course have full rights of free speech and a right to their views.

But if they cannot offer unity, couldn't they offer discretion? Whatever their views, they should not put them forth in ways that undercut an administration that, right or wrong, is attempting to get a fair hearing from the world in order to take the steps it thinks necessary to make it safer from terror regimes.

Ibid:

Mr. Clinton, on the other hand, has taken to telling the world that "we should let Blix lead us to come together." Mr. Clinton calls Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, "a tough honest guy who is trying to find the truth." Does Mr. Clinton speak of the American president with such approbation? No. He treats President Bush with equal parts derision and faux sympathy.

March 3, 2002 (the bloodshed will begin in just over two weeks, guaranteed now; it is, in case you've forgotten, a war which has been denounced as unjust by Peggy's theological Father, a man she will otherwise limn as the irresistible spiritual force of the 20th Century. This week, Peggy informs her fellow citizens that the Democrats have attempted to thrive on snob appeal. As always, I leave the pronouns to her discretion; if you stare at a fixed spot on the wall the vertigo will be lessened):

In the Democratic Party now, and for some time, I have not perceived that they are trying to get us to a good place. They seem interested only in thwarting the trek of the current president and his party, who are, to the Democrats, "the other." When the president is a Democrat you now support him no matter what. You support him if he doesn't have a map, and isn't interested in markers, and is only interested in his own day-to-day survival.

Ibid:

An example: abortion. The Democrats became the party of what they called abortion rights. Fine. It seemed to them right at the time and a step toward human progress. But now, 30 years later, after all the things we've seen and pondered, after all that science has shown us, the Democratic Party has grown not less radical on abortion, but more. Your party won't even agree to ban third-term abortions--which is the abortion of a baby who looks and seems fully human and capable of life because he is. The Democrats oppose parental consent even in the cases of 14-year-olds who are themselves children. It opposes directing doctors to inform frightened young women before an abortion is performed that there are other options, other possible paths.


This is so radical. So out of touch with the feeling and thought of the vast middle of the country. So at odds with our self-image as a nation. We think we try to protect the vulnerable. We think we're kind.

We think we're about to bomb Iraq into a democracy.

We can, of course, go on (and on and...). How by way of contrast the Republicans would never continue to support a President who'd abandoned his principles, or turned destructive, or behaved in a grossly offensive manner (which, of course, means doing something with his penis other than stuffing it and a pair of tube socks into a flight suit. How astonishing it is to realize that in four short years George W. Bush could fuck up so badly that discovering the Clenis™ obsession was still alive on the brink of--for all Peggy knew--nuclear annihilation seems surprising and almost quaint!). We'd find that ten days before we plunge into war her personal humidity is such that she pens a bodice-ripping fantasy about bin-Laden's capture. That on the 24th, which will become the bloodiest day of the war to that point, Peggers will gush about the Good Thing which is about to occur, as the Civilized World, roused from slumber and Democratic do-nothingism, teaches the bad guys a lesson they'll never forget. It's a day after the day at Nasiriyah PFC Jessica Lynch will never forget, at least what she remembers of it. It's just under four years before the Vice-President will confuse her with Jessica Simpson at a ball game. In that same column, Peggy will tell her readers that George W. Bush is no stereotypical Cowboy, but a steely-eyed Rocketman bound for the stars.

Then she'll sort of trail off, even disappear for a couple months. Mel Gibson's Jesus slasher flick will occupy her Holidays, especially after John Paul II pronounces it Oscar™ worthy. As with a lot of warfloggers, the following March will roll around without her seeming to notice the war supposedly ended nine months earlier. The days of rose-colored target screens will fade in the memory like Bill Clinton's erection, and the argument will somehow shift to irrelevancies like soccer balls and school paint jobs, of spider holes and how many dead-enders still await our swift justice. There would be no recognition, let alone admission, that things weren't going swimmingly, despite the fact that they were not. Undeniably not. In one more month the Abu Ghraib photos will come out, all except the ones that don't, and Peggy will bemoan the the publicity boon for our enemies, while celebrating our near-compulsive need to get the truth out. No, really. She'll also ponder how far we've fallen due to the Feminists' insistence that female soldiers be allowed to make fun of prisoners' ding-dongs just like the guys do. No. Really.

And at some point, like a lot of print warfloggers who could manage it, Peggy will just sorta begin pretending that she's cast a jaundiced eye on the whole operation, and her admiration of the Presidential Package will sorta shrink back up to where it's not quite noticeable, and she'll allow as how the thing didn't quite work out like every Civilized Westerner would have expected, but it's time to forget all that and back the President, and if we do maybe she'll use some of her pull to get him to admit the rest of us were right a little. Even if it was for all the anti-American reasons.

Outrage in the World of...Wait a Minute, Did You Say Journalism?

Rachel Sklar, "Paula Zahn Resigns From CNN: Another Graceless Exit, Courtesy Of Jon Klein." HuffPo, July 26

Wow - is history repeating itself? Because it sure feels like the fall of 2005: Bright young star is built up at CNN as the next big thing, while older, established network stalwart, on the job in earnest since September 11, 2001, is shunted aside with ostentatious silence from the brass and hushed whispers from everyone else. Sound familiar? Today, it's the story of Paula Zahn 's wholly unsurprising resignation from CNN amid the hoopla of Campbell Brown 's ascendancy — but it might as well be the tale of Aaron Brown being not-so-subtly shoved out in favor of Anderson Cooper just over a year and a half ago. What they both have in common: The utter lack of grace and class on the part of CNN, transparently elbowing yesterday's stars out of the way for the newer, younger model.

WOW, okay, so, like, Dick York has been replaced by Dick Sargent. I'll admit, I'm having a hard time getting too worked up about it. Or maybe it's the eternal optimist in me: I don't really see it as America losing an all-purpose carnival shill. It's more like we're gaining a dedicated Bush fluffer.

And this, I've just learned, follows Klein replacing dime-store mannequin Soledad O'Brien with Malibu-Stacy-soundalike Kiran Chetry (may her adenoids hold out for the 7.25 years she's got). Did the quality of teevee morning news suffer as a result? Is that even theoretically possible? And where do I even find CNN, on the off-chance I'd need it? It's somewhere near Headline News, I think, the sister operation which used to bring you headline news, as I recall it, and now brings you Glenn Beck and Nancy Grace. Gee, I hope there's not a line of Pretty Faces waiting to bump those two off.

Ms Sklar, do you know the one about the English lawn? Gina Lollabrigida tells it in Beat the Devil. Maybe Bogart (they're married; it's a very funny picture) does the punchline. It's been a while since I've seen it. An Italian visitor asks the British peer, "However do you get those wonderful English lawns? I'd love to have one back home." And the reply is, "First you get a piece of land. Then roll it every day for six hundred years..."

It's remarkable, in a disposable culture, how quickly crap becomes the baseline. It seems like only yesterday that Paula Zahn was reading recipes off a teleprompter, and looking around for someone she could push out of an anchor chair, and here I turn around and someone is writing wistfully about her thirty years as a journalist. Journalist? Hughes Rudd was a journalist. His replacement by the smarmy Bill Kurtis and the descent of CBS Morning News into the cess of entertainment news is a tragedy. Linda Ellerbee and Lloyd Dobyns working in promotion is a tragedy. Paula Zahn getting kicked out a the sandbox so the younger kids can play is not. It's an opportunity for her to spend her newly discovered free time on her hobby, chasing nesting birds out of trees. Call it an American success story, circa 2007.