Little Man, You've Had A Busy Day. You Lying Bastard.

I HAVEN'T had much to say about Mitch "Booster Seat" Daniels since the day he announced that his wife wouldn't let him run for President, which, oddly, was the same excuse John Wayne gave for staying home and making movies in which he won WWII singlehandedly instead of, you know, actually winning it singlehandedly on the side of the Pacific where it was actually fought. Except Wayne was taller.

Immediately after that touching display of family loyalty taking precedence over the patriotic responsibility to kill Freedom's Enemies he hoped someone who could take the heat would take up, Daniels seemed to me to be sulking. Or gloating. It can be difficult to tell. It can be difficult with him even to know if there's some difference, or some moment in the day when he isn't doing one, or the other, or both.

Who knows what he was doing this summer. (He turned up, as usual, at the State Fair, most memorably around daylight after a storm had toppled the stage at a Sugarland concert, killing and maiming dozens, to announce that the one thing we did know about it already, after a thorough overnight search by flashlight, was that it was an Act of God. God's liability, it turns out, is even more restricted that the state's. After the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that the maximum payout the state was liable for, in total, was $5 million, he turned up again to express his heartfelt opinion that the Legislature oughta make an exception in this case, now that he knew he wouldn't be fighting against one in court.) Daniels has been a full-time campaigner since 2004 (or, rather, had been up until last May), but a part-time governor since the 2006 short legislative session, when he, or his handlers, finally figured out that running around the state mouthing off like a petulant runt wasn't making him many friends. He's been quick to grab at the limelight--turning up last fall, for example, to tout tax breaks for some venture-capitalist/LED sign entrepreneur with a track record of stiffing investors in California--and slow to grab hold of the responsibility stick (he's currently fighting a subpoena from IBM requiring him to testify in the billion-dollar FSSA boondoggle case, on the grounds that He's the Governor, Goddammit, and shouldn't have to take responsibility for his decisions, or be placed under oath).

Daniels did appear last month to announce that the state he manages like a financial wizard had just found $300 million dollars mistakenly put in the wrong account and ignored. This just happens to be roughly--and by "roughly" I mean "precisely identical to", and by "just happens" I mean "bullshit"--the amount Daniels has reluctantly cut from Indiana education over the past seven years. His plan is to give the money back to "its rightful owners, the taxpayers", meaning "figure out some way to base the payments on total declared income, not actual tax payments". The good news there is that it isn't up to the Governor. The bad news is that it's up to the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™. (This has been something of a boon for fans of Daniels' public displays and black comedy; the only thing the Randian Supereconomicbrain could say in response was "Hey, it's found money!" Seriously. He's said it by now to every political reporter in the state, and never been called on it, to my knowledge.)

Mitch also turned in an interesting performance a couple weeks ago, after a brain trust consisting of Homeland Security Duct Tape specialists, plus state and local fire and police forces, which look to Homeland Security the way a piglet looks at a vacant teat, suddenly devised occupancy limits for the Indiana State House, just in time for Right to Work II. After about three days of various doughnut-inflated functionaries solemnly responding how sorry they were to seem like they were restricting Free Speech, and how the whole thing had been under review since last year, making it just a coincidence that it came out just as the Republican legislature hoped to strip unions of their rights, Daniels simply rescinded the new rules, making a mockery of a week's worth of bloated CYAs from bloated officials. Or it would have, if citizens of Indiana understood mockery any better than they do the connection between fried pastries and bloat.

Speaking of good news, this is Daniels' last year in office. Speaking of bad news, we're already announced that "Choirboy Mike" Pence will be his successor, and he's had a year to confer with God on future plans.

And that meant, last night, Mitch's final State of the State address. Making it his first and only as a pure Randian gun for hire, since last year he was still required to watch his step during last year's Presidential campaign coffer-filling mulling of a national bid at the behest of three or four Ivy League Campus Republicans. So this year Mitch can announce that Right to Work legislation is absolutely crucial to attracting new jobs to Indiana. After last year, when he just hadn't had enough time to study the idea. And after, apparently, an adult lifetime spent reading Hayek and Friedman and never getting the message.

And of course neither that oversight nor the cranial-explosiveness of the contradiction kept Daniels from claiming the SupereconomicRandianbrainsuperiority of his every act:

Tonight, while states elsewhere twist in financial agony, Indiana has an honestly balanced budget, a strong, protective reserve in our state savings account, and the first AAA credit rating in state history, one of just a handful left in America. Our credit is better – imagine this – than that of the federal government.

Another host of states raised taxes again last year, while Hoosiers are taxed at the lowest levels in a long time, thanks in part to the lowest property taxes in the nation.

By the way, among many other tricks, "honestly balanced budget" means "having promised to push repayment of the principal on the state's $2 billion unemployment fund debt to the Federal government (the same one with a lower credit rating than ours!) onto the administration succeeding the Choirboy's two terms, in 2020, by figuring out how to pay $70 million per annum in interest and penalties, which we'll be bequeathing to future legislatures, as well". Naturally, if we paid off that debt, which was owed in full last year, the way you or I would be hauled into court if we didn't, that "protective reserve in the state savings account" would be a $ one billion hole. Or roughly twice the inflated figure Daniels used when he inherited one. (That inflated figure itself being not Debt, but the difference between the two-year revenue assumptions made in 2002 and the actual figures for 2004, which the long-session 2005 legislature was supposed to address all along, as was the general practice. And as has remained the general practice during the Daniels Miracle. That "debt" was originally reported as $250 million, but growed like Topsy later. So in effect Daniels has quadrupled (at minimum) state debt despite fobbing any number of fiscal responsibilities off on local governments, and slashing state spending, including education, on a series of decreasing Procrustian beds that fit together like those Russian doll-within-a-doll dealies.

As we've been at some pains to note here, what Indiana has done in the Daniels era was shift property taxes to sales taxes by hiking the latter 17%, benefitting (surprising how such things turn out) mostly the owners of commercial property, not homeowners. Indiana's total tax burden is about at the national average, and right in line with all of its neighbors except Ohio. (Illinois was brave enough to enact a temporary income tax surcharge to deal with its debt, something Daniels proposed in 2005 and retracted 20 minutes later in 2005.) Indiana has the highest discrepancy between tax burden and income level in the Midwest, again excepting Ohio (Kentucky's is worse, too). It also manages to be worse than big-tax liberal havens New York and California, and all of New England save Maine and Vermont. This is apparently the sort of thing which greatly pleases a bond-rating service, especially when coupled with an apparently unlimited willingness to replace government services with a thin veneer of service-like substance.

Outside of major urban areas, which add in their own tax rates, it's still cheaper to live or work in Illinois. And somehow they've managed to do that without Miracles.

Har Har Har

John Dickerson, "The Great Republican Humor Crisis of 2012: Why is this crop of presidential candidates so incredibly unfunny?" January 8

Ouch.
-St. Stephen, noted first century ad-libber

TEST your psychic abilities! Here's the fourth line from the third paragraph of Dickerson's piece:

Great presidents who faced trying times were known for their humor.

See if you can guess divine the subject of the seventh and last line. If you come up with the quote into the bargain you're Psychic Hotline material.

Did you guess intuit "Ronald Reagan" and "Mommy, I forgot to duck," after he was shot? Ooooh, so close. It was Reagan and "I hope you're all Republicans," to his doctors after he was shot.

I don't think the Press cares for that Mommy stuff. Because the Press has no sense of humor about itself.

Okay, so it's usually reported as Honey. Maybe he called Nancy something different in public (even with a couple of slugs in him) than he did in private. Either way, that one's a funnier line than the doctor quip, which I'm guessing he may have used in some form or another a few hundred times.

Don't get me wrong; just because I think Ronald Reagan was more caustic substance than caustic wit it doesn't mean I object to anyone characterizing him as funny. Sure, I wasn't amused, and I think there's a real debate to be had over whether Reagan was genuinely funny or just a trained seal It's the fact that once I saw the sign which read "Presidential Humor Litany Next 3 mi." I fucking knew, not only that Reagan would be on the list, but that he'd bring up the rear, like movie credits where a half-day's work by De Niro or Brando netted him the screen-filling "and So-and-So" slot at the end of the actors' scroll.

Because, say you're John Dickerson, and you're writing a piece focusing on the humor deficiencies, as opposed to the charm deficiencies, the intellectual deficiencies, or the complete absence of personal honor among the current crop of Republican Presidential hopefuls. Say you need to fill up a few column inches with historical comparisons. Okay, you have two Presidents who were paragons of wit and humor: Lincoln and FDR. You have one who was funny enough to've been a standup if he hadn't been born six or seven decades too early; dollars to doughnuts says "Silent Cal" would be on NBC's lineup these days.

But if you use Coolidge you're up to three, and you haven't named any Presidents much of the Slate readership will be familiar with. (There's not much else; Grant once remarked that he knew only two songs, that one was "Yankee Doodle" and the other wasn't. But we aren't writing an anthology here. I understand John Tyler did a withering impression of Henry Clay once he was on his third sherry, and there was something funny about James Buchanan, but that's it; the modern Slate writer has got to go modern.)

George W. Bush was funny, in the same way that setting plastic Army men ablaze with a magnifying glass or obliterating prairie dogs with high-powered rifles are, but reminding your fellow Slatesters how they lined up behind that bozo in Aught One probably gets your tray tipped in the employee cafeteria.

Besides, imagine writing a piece these days on Presidential humor and leaving out Reagan. It would be like naming The 100 Greatest Rock Guitarists and leaving out Eddie Van Halen. How much email do you want to have to answer, anyway?

So the obvious solution is to include Reagan, and put him at the end, following Kennedy. The cultured Brahmin and the trained performer. And the twin fonts of horrible Oval Office decisions of the last half-century.

The point is that whether you've actually mistaken John McCain's "Chelsea Clinton, the White House dog" jocularity for wit, or are just dong the standard Beltway insider genuflection toward the Reagan Ranch, you're going to miss the obvious answer to your question. Why are the current crop of Republican Presidential hopefuls (not to mention the rest of the party) so unfunny?

Because while a blind pig can find a joke as easy as an acorn, real humor requires honesty.

And not personal honesty, necessarily; honesty of purpose. The only way most of those guys could have a standup act would be as insult comics. They've got the nasty down, but not the speed of wit (Gingrich has the speed of wit, but not the quality of wit; like all Republican would-be quippers he's never worked a house that didn't applaud louder the worse he got). And there's no way in Hell any of 'em will admit that that's their natural line. Are there Christian insult comics? Some deadpan Mormon wiseass who just hasn't yet broken out of the burgeoning Provo scene?

This isn't necessarily any less true of Democrats. But let's be honest about it, huh? What've we got to lose? Republicans aren't funny because they're all either True Believers or pretending to be True Believers, and neither group is permitted any levity. It's not a matter of "convincing" Mitt Romney he should lighten up. What we see out there is Mitt Romney lightened up. Consider what passes for humor from Newt Gingrich, and imagine Rick Santorum swinging for the fences sometime. Even those of us who'd appreciate a Santorum candidacy in the opposite sense that George Eff Will will don't want to see that.

Mr. Dickerson, the reason you guys want to see some human traits on that Republican dais is just so you'd have something to dwell on besides the truth. But if you'll just report honestly, the jokes'll take care of themselves.

Saturday Olio: In Fairness To Lawyers, Shakespeare Didn't Really Know Any Journalists Edition

• Binyamin Appelbaum "A Hidden Cost of Military Cuts Could Be Invention and its Industries".

One thousand, five hundred three words, of which one thousand fifty six have been excreted before we get this:

Military spending does not compare well economically with many other forms of government spending, some experts say. Professor [Robert] Pollin [an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst] calculated in a recent analysis that $1 billion in spending on health care produced an economic benefit about 14 percent larger than spending on defense. The impact of spending on transportation, education and energy were even larger.

A recent study of federal spending since World War II by Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko, both economists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the economic benefits from nonmilitary spending were at least 50 percent larger than those from defense spending during periods of normal growth.

Although I have to admit that those who like their news served up with a bit of comedy won't want to miss

“The central thing that distinguishes them from other agencies is that they are the customer,” Professor [Daniel] Sarewitz [ director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University] said. “You can’t pull the wool over their eyes.”

We'll just ignore the track record of pretty much every major weapons system since Eisenhower, and ask whether the reader--or Professor Sarewitz, for that matter--has ever gone camping wearing what the Pentagon does with actual wool.

• Shorter Lisa Miller, "The new evangelical vote":

"The incredible transformation of Evangelical Christian voters into open-minded cosmopolitans over the past twenty years can be seen in the fact that many of them voted for Romney in Iowa".

• Shorter David Weigel, "Newt Gingrich and the NAACP" :

"Gingrich's comments about the NAACP and food stamps have been widely misconstrued as racist by everyone who doesn't pay as much attention to Newt Gingrich as I do, because he's been calling Barack Obama the 'food stamp President' for months now without once mentioning his race."

It's A Long Hard Climb, Boys, But I Swear To Ya: The Sea Of Mediocrity Is Just Over Those Mountains.

Doyle McManus, "Is the tea party over?" January 5

LEMME ask you: do you look around at US America and see anything real? It's a goddam landslide of crappy merchandise, crappy values, greed, shit-for-brains, guns n' penises, 19th century backwoods religious mania which was already theologically out of touch in the Age of Steam, and food unfit for mammalian consumption. And the whole thing is driven by the utterly nonsensical idea that technology moves us eternally forward and solves every Problem before it becomes Troubling, so we can just do whatever th' fuck makes us money. (Exempting, of course, the 80% of our fellow citizens who think a Magic Jewish carpenter tells them they're right about everything.)

"Well, by golly, I believe that America is exceptional, and I'm not apologizing for it!" is Mitt Romney's campaign. And he's the electable one.

Y'know, I look at the fucking parade of non-entities on cable "news", and on the remedial teleprompter-reading class the local stations begin every night at five, and I find it hard to forgive the twenty-something professional hairdos, but I do understand that an utterly self-fixated, disposable, money-is-all-that-matters culture is all they've ever known. It's not an excuse for living your life in professional vapidity; I have no idea why any of these people wanted to go into "journalism" as opposed to any other outlet for egomania. But the blame for the condition of their industry belongs back in the 70s; they inherited it.

But how th' fuck can you wake up in the morning and find yourself Wolf Blitzer? How th' fuck do you get to be 71 years old and Tom Brokaw, still donning a prop trench coat to add your profound speech impediment to the coverage of the Iowa Fucking Caucuses? (Because The Battle for Twelve Delegates in the Search for a Presidential Candidate Under a Steaming Pile of Brain-Dead Grifters just wouldn't have the same gravitas if it didn't pull Tom in from, I'm guessing, a book tour.) How do you not simply go on air some night and howl like an ill wind from the Kingdom of Tortured Souls?

How much better can ya eat?

What possesses a man gone to gray in the coverage of politics to write this:

A year ago, the tea party movement looked like an irresistible wave sweeping through the Republican Party. Anyone who hoped to win this year's GOP presidential nomination, it seemed, would need to embrace tea party activists' stringent demands for smaller government, lower taxes and deep cuts in spending.

I know we've been over this before , but 1) like the Teabaggers weren't Republicans in the first place, and 2) a known astroturf operation from the get-go to boot, which 3) echoed the Republican party's stringent demands for smaller government, lower taxes and deep cuts in spending for the past thirty years, leading to 4) a decidedly mixed bag of election results resulting in the installation of a couple of wingnuts in the US Congress, instead of the wingnuts who would have won in those districts otherwise, and 5) the addition of Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell to a national pantheon already full to brimming with the likes of Sarah Palin, Joe the Plummer, and Chuck Norris.

It is only in the Press in which those ideas are granted the status of Grand Philosophical Concept, and not Deceptive Sales Practice.

The tea party has changed the political landscape in ways that are likely to last for a while. Every Republican candidate, for example, at least claims now to be a fiscal conservative.

Yeah, its a Jim Rockford 180 from John McCain's "I'm A Wild-Eyed Tax and Spender" campaign of four years ago.

And it's not really the tea party's fault that its favorite candidates, Bachmann and Perry, stumbled. Bachmann, who founded the Tea Party Caucus in the House, never found a way to turn that into a qualification to be president. Perry, whose resume was strong on paper, proved so inept in televised debates that he couldn't remember which Cabinet agencies he wanted to abolish.

This is like saying you can't blame Jehovah's Witnesses when the people who knock on your door have no understanding of primate evolution.

According to the "entrance poll" sponsored by news organizations, about a third of those who voted in the GOP caucus pronounced themselves "strong supporters" of the tea party; of those, 30% said they voted for Santorum, 17% for Gingrich and 16% for Paul.

But then, you can't blame the Teabaggers just because Teabaggers don't seem to understand what they stand for, right?

Romney tied with Perry for fourth place among strong tea party adherents. In fact, it was Romney's first-place showing among non-tea partyers that made him the statewide winner — by just eight votes.

Sure, he won, but only because other people voted for him.

That divide mirrors the fragmentation of the tea party itself. It's always included a mix of libertarians (Paul voters), social conservatives (Santorum voters) and older Reagan conservatives (many of whom were Gingrich voters).

In other words, a wholly-unexpected, new phenomenon in Republican politics. Whose agenda was sweeping the party just one year ago, minus the libertarian and social "conservative" parts.

That's the biggest reason, when real votes were being counted, that Romney came out on top of the Republican field: His opponents split the remaining votes so many ways.

By the way, for those of you keeping score, it took McManus exactly 80 words to go from "30% identified themselves as Teabaggers" to suggesting that the 75% of the vote Romney didn't get consisted of Teabaggers, 47% of whom voted for Santorum or Gingrich, apparently for the same reason that people in a Baskin-Robins order "Double Maple Peanut Butter Swirl" when they really wanted plain vanilla and are in fact allergic to peanuts. Too many choices.

How 'bout we put it another way? How 'bout we note that the modern flavor of the Republican party brand has been trading on an ugly negativity since the 1950s: Red baiting, anti-Civil Rights, anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-sex, anti-science, ahistorical, Xenophobic, and wrapped in international paranoia. All of this, of course, cover for the same old Republican Money party we've had since the Gilded Age. It's worked, to the extent is has, to get Republicans elected. The only other thing it's accomplished--going back six Revolutions--is to convince what was once the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to run screaming from social spending, tax increases, and Defense Dept. cuts. That, and packing the Supreme Court with more religious sinecures than the Vatican.

So, yeah. Revolt on, you Teabaggers! Iowa's done your whittlin' for you. Now find yourself a True Small Government "Conservative" out of what's left, and get back to the business of doing Businesses' business.

Footnote To History

SHORTER Ross Douthat*: Thank you, Iowa Republicans, for winnowing the horrible** into the merely disgustingly unpalatable, preserving, in the process, the one guy with a reasonable chance of winning a national election†, the Catholic†† religious nutcase, and the beard for Republican "libertarianism"‡.

--------

* Somehow the Times found a "conservative" who's willing to put a Panglossian spin on everything that happens in the Republican party. And in public!

** Douthat: "Presented with the weakest presidential field of any major party in a generation…." I realize that, in part, this statement is the result of Douthat's sinecure; like Brooks he is occasionally required to say something refreshingly rational--likely something he overheard--in order to present himself as "'conservative' by thought", rather than, as is actually the case with both men, just another child of privilege rooting for the home team. Like the dog walking on its hind legs it isn't done well, but unlike that circus act, it seems to convince some people. At any rate, it's certainly remarkable; "conservatives", faced with a daisful of abject panderers to the entire "conservative" agenda--economic, social, and religious warfare, with a couple of complete loons thrown in for the completists--don't like any of 'em.

This is the end of the American political spectrum which went clinically and legally insane during Roosevelt's First 100 Days, and which, after a twenty-year courtship, finally convinced the Republican party to accept its troth in 1964. I was ten. There hasn't been a public admission that any flag-lapelin' Republican was wrong about anything since. These people defended Nixon. They pretended Reagan was a genius. They compared George W. Bush to Churchill. They swooned for Sarah Fucking Palin like bobbysoxers at an Elvis movie. Sure, there was some dissatisfaction with "moderates" like George H.W.H.M.O Bush, and Bob Dole, but no wingnut's come in for criticism since Nelson Rockefeller died getting a hummer.

It's a remarkable moment, and, clearly, things have gotten so bad with American "conservatism" that "conservatives" themselves have caught wind of it. Spare a moment of human-heartedness for the backers of Rick Perry. Imagine finding out, after dumping a few hundred grand into his campaign, that you actually can be too stupid for Republican voters. This time.

† So they say. To me, Romney is some committee's idea of a viable candidate. He's Bruce Babbitt. He's John Connally. He's a guy who deserves to run fourth. Just ahead of Mitch Daniels.

†† Maybe it's just me, but this--plus the fact that it's Santorum standing at the end, not Bachmann or Perry or Cain--seems to be how Douthat distinguishes between the various forms of religious mania.

Because, sheesh, of the four it's Santorum who's most likely to drag religious nutjobbery down the Hole, and take the Republican brand, 2012 Edition, down with him, if he survives long enough into the primary season that he decides he has to make Abortion (or Contraception!) a major fight. Maybe the idea here is that Santorum is so personally repugnant that "religious" "conservatives" will be convinced to vote for the "electable" guy, even if he is a Mormon. We'll leave aside the idea of one religious nut Republican being concerned about all the other religious nut Republicans, and ask how well this worked in '88 thru '96.

[By the way, Senator: the reason bringing home a fetus is creepy isn't your religious conviction vs. societal norms; it's the fact that you do what's unnatural just to make showy points about your faith, and frighten your children into eternal submission. Y'all just wanna wallow in that "Look at his precious little fingers" routine. You, or God, can refuse to forgive me, but I find it hard to believe you'd have trucked home a Petrie dish of protoplasm, or some unspeakable six-bodied frog mutant with a single staring eye in the middle, for the enlightenment of your brood; at least I hope not. If your two-year-old got hit by a bus you wouldn't scrape up the remains and put 'em on the mantle. Odds are you'd have held a funeral, like the "normal people" you impugn here. I don't doubt your sincerity. But I don't think "sincerity" means "devoid of religio-political machinations which might put the lie to it when viewed less than favorably".]

‡ Where Paul, on the other hand, serves the Grand Old Party's grand old tradition of throwing bones to the rabid like Roman emperors provided bread and circuses. Can Ron Paul actually believe the stuff he says? Can someone with a Hahvahd education really think that a continuing Paul presence in the GOP race is adding something?

Froth Is Stranger Than Friction

Mackenzie Weinger, "Gallup: Most fluid GOP primary ever". January 2

David Brooks, "Workers of the World, Unite! " (Behind a Republican). January 2

FIRST, does any one else smell fecal matter and propylene glycol?

The lead for Republican front-runner has changed seven times since May, according to a Gallup report Monday, with Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich all making it to No. 1 at some point in 2011….

Meanwhile, the Republican battle most closely mirrors the Democrats’ contest in 2003, when Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark each took a turn at the top spot, Gallup found. Before Kerry secured front-runner status at the start of the 2004 primaries, the lead changed nine times during 2003.

I'm sorry; do you remember it that way? I didn't. In fact, I didn't to the extent that I checked the original article.

And the first thing I discovered was that what was being compared was the year 2003 in the Democratic race vs the last eight months of 2011 for the Republican, probably because Republicans winter somewhere else. My own aggressively indolent research turned up Mike Huckabee leading the field--according to Gallup--last February; would Sarah Palin and Donald Trump wind up in the mix if we included the whole of January-April? Michele Bachmann didn't even make the cut, though she certainly led some polls. Is it too much to ask that someone writing for Gallup bother to look?

One of those nine Democratic ties occurred between January Early and January Mid, and consisted of the Lieberman-Kerry-Never a Candidate Daschle tie somehow transmogrifying into a Lieberman-Kerry tie. Seismographs all over the country must have been set off by that one.

Say what you wanna about the running gag that was Joementum, or how a turd like Dick Gephardt ever managed to lead a national poll, but, c'mon. In 2003, timidly attempting to ride the rising awareness of the clusterfuck in Iraq most of 'em had timidly enabled the previous summer, Democrats faced a wide-open campaign after Al Gore declined to run. That's nothing like the fortnightly hysteria for one Not Romney candidate after the next, followed by public defenestration, which has marked the GOP slug fest since last spring (and I mean "slug" as a common noun).

Look, if you just want to help the Republican party, let alone the Republic all Republicans seems to imagine tottering on the Edge, it's time to stop pretending this stuff is normal, explicable, and chockablock with historical precedent. Our politics have always been screwy; this doesn't mean the kid eating paste in third grade is indistinguishable from the serial arsonist jerking off at a fire. Self-identified and phone-answering Republicans did not hem and haw among a list of United States Senators, Representatives, and a sitting governor. They've backed--in a dizzying display that makes preteen pop culture look sedate--a moronic self-promoter with a reality show, a half-witted Jebus fanatic, another half-witted Jebus fanatic, an even-dumber pizza magnate, possibly the slimiest and most disingenuous politician in living memory, and the remaining Jebus fanatic.

You're enabling! It's bad enough doing it for the sake of Faux Balance. It's another thing entirely to do it out of a natural inclination to flinch which is part congenital and part partisan political ploy:

The Republican Party is the party of the white working class. This group — whites with high school degrees and maybe some college — is still the largest block in the electorate. They overwhelmingly favor Republicans….

The Republicans harvest their votes but have done a poor job responding to their needs.

Says David Brooks, educated on Philadelphia's Main Line and the University of Chicago, and possessor, ever since, of a series of Beltway sinecures.

Santorum is the grandson of a coal miner and the son of an Italian immigrant. For years, he represented the steel towns of western Pennsylvania. He has spent the last year scorned by the news media — working relentlessly, riding around in a pickup truck to more than 370 towns. He tells that story of hard work and elite disrespect with great fervor at his meetings.

First, there's a distinction between "scorned" and "ignored because he's a colorless, humorless professional scold who can't be separated from his 13th century worldview far enough that the press could write about him without imagining it was angering all the snake-handling religious bigots it seems convinced inhabit every Applebee's and Red Lobster between the Alleghenies and the Sierra Nevada".

Second, he's the son of a clinical psychologist and his wife, both of whom worked for the VA. This is why grandpa and the Old Country make that guest appearance. If you go back far enough, everybody's ancestor dug for something for a living. If Rick Santorum ever got calluses from a hard day's work, they were on his ass, and came from pulling all-nighters in the Dickinson Law Library.

His worldview is not individualistic. His book, “It Takes a Family,” was infused with the conservative wing of Catholic social teaching. It was a broadside against Barry Goldwater-style conservatism in favor of one that emphasized family and social solidarity.

Forgive me; I keep meaning to pick it up. And forgive me if I imagine the whole thing was more broadside at Hillary Clinton than Barry Goldwater. The religious right has had thirty years now to get out from under the yoke of secular conservatism. Seems it's a helluva lot easier impugning Mammon Conservatives in print than it is turning down their campaign contributions.

While in Congress, he was a leader in nearly every serious piece of antipoverty legislation.

For "serious" read "Republican-sponsored" and for "antipoverty" read "anti-New Deal". Santorum's name was on "compassionate" "conservative" legislation for the same reason Britney Spears' name is on some abominable simulation of perfume. Republicans inside Washington realize they can't just sever the safety net (at least they used to recognize it, back in the days when Santorum had an actual elected position), so they needed Jesus as a wingman.

On the stump, he cries, “The left has a religion, too. It’s just not based on the Bible. It’s based on the religion of self.”

You mean he doesn't mention Goldwater?

But I suspect he will do better post-Iowa than most people think — before being buried under a wave of money and negative ads. And I do believe that he represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system. Perhaps, in less rigid and ideological form, this working-class experience will someday find a champion.

Jesus Fucking Christ. The closest that Republican dais gets to a non-Mormon, non-loony-nutjob religious babbler is Newt Gingrich, and just because he's clearly a Devout Cynic; he certainly had the sound political instincts to get himself right with God, and Catholicism, to boot (and so under the protective cloak of Abortion is Murder), before he ran. Hell, Gingrich is more "authentically" working class than Santorum. Bachmann and Cain are too, and they're just as Jesus-mazed as he is. Can't you even be bothered to try anymore, Dave? Wishing (that is, pretending to wish) for a populist Republican sans religious mania is like hoping to find a purebred mongrel.

The Calm Confidence Of The Republican Playing Liar's Poker With House Money

Haley Barbour, Sarah Palin, Mitch Daniels, and Herman Cain, "If I were campaigning for president…". December 30

I'M NOT sure which I enjoyed more here: the one-stop reminder of how easily a couple of financial industry and National Association of Manufacturers shills like Mitch Daniels and Haley Barbour could become the "voices of reason" in the Republican party, or the recognition that it is possible to be Sarah Palin, or Herman Cain, and not be the clear idiot in the Republican room.

If I were campaigning for President? They all did. Look at the results. Check out that current list of people these four couldn't beat.

(By the way, isn't Herman Cain still technically running for President? Or is the fact that he's now overtly fleecing donors just a joke the rest of us are supposed to enjoy being in on? Is that the explanation for the odd "campaigning for" construction, instead of the more natural "running for"? So the Post could include the insights of Herman Fuckhead Cain? For that matter, how much money did the other three haul in before obvious, Pawlenty-like defeat just ahead, combined with the requirements of reporting contributions, ended their campaigns? How Much Money I Made By Not Being a Presidential Candidate sounds like a much better article.)

And, if you can forgive my provincialism, neither Palin using the opportunity to push imaginary sales of her imaginary book, nor Cain repeating "Nine, Nine, Nine, Nine…" in the corner, comes close to matching Daniels' performance as the Thinking Man's Widow and Orphan Defenestrator:

Tax reform, domestic energy production and a regulatory pause must be advocated as indispensable for poor people, unemployed people and, especially, young people. All ties must be broken in favor of private growth. Today’s blind, anti-growth zealotry must be contested as the cruel, pro-poverty policy it is. Prospective reforms to save the safety net must be advanced with aggressive confidence. With survival literally at stake, and broad consensus required to enable major changes, arguments about secondary issues should be muted.

I ask you: out of Incontinent Tax Cutting*, Utter Deregulation, and Rescuing the Safety Net, which one d'ya suppose will wind up falling short under the next Republican President/ Congressional majority?

Leave us note, for the record, that Mitch Daniels had the opportunity to test-market his Prospective Reform magic on the safety net of the 15th most populous state in the nation, with solid Republican legislatures behind him, and created instead a $1 billion computer-system boondoggle he is currently spending much of his Not Campaigning time trying to figure out how to avoid testifying about in open court.

And while you'd think that seven years of Daniels had inured me to his "intellectual" antics, it's Palin's, and Cain's, garden-variety (if weed-choked) cupidity which are almost comforting in their familiarity; Daniels' faux-populist concern for "jobs"--from a governor who, freed from last year's demand to look like he might be considering a Presidential campaign, not just a capital-raising venture, is all set to back this year's Right to Work push by the Indiana state legislature--still turns my stomach.

But, mostly, what I'll never get used to is this "broad consensus" bullshit which insists on "stressing our commonality", just so long as it's that portion of commonality Mitch Daniels has for sale; everyone else is "blind". It's the consensus-building of the fundamentalist preacher, which Daniels assuredly is. And it'd be different were it some sort of untried solution to the millennial doom Daniels insists we're headed for, and not the same old shit he's helped peddle for thirty-some years, the same shit that got us into this mess in the first place, without his even the having the courtesy to find some new bottles to shovel it into.


_____________

* Daniels tax "cutting" as governor of Indiana owes less to the theories of Milton Friedman than to Friedman's predecessor, Phineas Taylor Barnum.

Are There Really People In America Whose Political Outlook Is Informed By David Weigel?

ROY Edroso has a has a blog. . David Weigel has a job with the Washington Post Corporation. Go on, see which one speaks plainly and reasonably about the Paul newsletters (we in no way mean to diminish the accomplishment), and which one spends forty-eight hours trying to absolve libertoonianism (and himself).

(By the way, who, exactly, wrote the memo that told Slate columnists to step up the twitterpace of their output to Swoony Preteen level? I keep waitin' for Yglesias to post his dry-cleaning bills.)

Now, two things here, right off the bat. One: Weigel's the guy who earned the eternal admiration of Huffington Post liberals by bravely saying "Rush Limbaugh is a racist" everywhere except in print. And "resigning" over it, after one of those rare outbreaks of "conservative" outrage, when it did become public, before--Fortune smiles on the saintly--emerging 48 hours later with a gig at the Post-owned Slate, where everyone is expected to be a libertarian who sneers at Republican racism and backwoods rabidity, the better to excuse his own Republicanism.

I did not understand then, and do not now, why calling the Republican party "partly racist" is the mark of anything other than 1) having paid a minimal amount of attention to politics sometime during the last hundred years, and 2) the ability to type. The only cause of Weigel's célèbre in liberal circles was that the Right was outraged. It apparently never occurred to anyone to consider that it was outraged not by what he wrote, but by what he thought and didn't write.

Second: it's fucking Iowa. Paul is roundly, and pointedly, ignored by the Press until he becomes the latest piece of flotsam to wash ashore from that shipwreck of trainwrecks known as the Republican Presidential Pre-primaries. Then someone in the Press decides to take a look at, not so much the crackpot shit that Paul actually espouses, but the signifier of crackpot shit which was exposed about him the last time he ran for national office.

Sure, sure: it's too much to ask that the Press treat this stuff to the level of respect and attention it actually deserves; they've got to print something, after all, and please don't ask that it be real news. But why is it too much to ask that the obvious trend in Republican primary preference, the remarkable elevation and rapid descent of the Not Romney Lunatic of the Month that's been going on since last January, be reported as though the stenographer has eyes? "Ron Paul latest piece of rotting junk unearthed in furious Republican tunneling to the bottom"?

That's not Weigel's fault, he's just a part of it. But tell me, where are the brave anti-racist stands now that they're well known? Answer: right where they always were, in the easy dismissal of ugly traits most sane people dismiss out of hand.

Somehow the story--possibly the major one of our times--of how the Reagan party gets away with pandering to racists while maintaining the support of hundreds of pundits who abhor racism is perpetually lost under the noses of the Press. But Weigel compounds this--or obscures it--by letting the polls decide whether the "old news" of Paul's newsletters is important. Republicans say no! Liberals being joined by conservatives! Gay liberal bellwether Dan Savage doesn't care!

By itself this would merely amount to yet another example of the mass-market press defending the script, rooting for the horserace, and avoiding heavy lifting. But Weigel decides, simultaneously, to get miffed that the Times story on those newsletters--written, of course, after the Paul surge--ignored the contribution he and Julian Sanchez made to the story four years ago at Reason.

Last week, I quietly harrumphed about this big New York Times take-out on Ron Paul's old extremist ties, reminding readers that Julian Sanchez and I reported a lot of this stuff first. Sanchez, who's now at the Cato Institute, hits the Grey Lady a little harder. He has a good reason.

The implication [of the NYT story] is that even though the newsletters were a focus of national attention four years ago, Paul’s fellow travelers were content to gloss over this ugly history—quietly complicit in this pandering to racism—until the bold bloodhounds at the Times sniffed out the scoop. It looks rather different if the Times is just rehashing the highlights of what a libertarian magazine explored in greater details years ago.

Now, I don't know what the bold bloodhounds at the Times are doing, or implying, about the story. I don't care enough to know. Or, to rephrase that, it doesn't make one bit of difference to the real story. If Libertoonians were aghast at Paul's racist, homophobic, Xenophobic, and anti-Semitic newsletters four years ago, or fifteen years ago, then they've done precious little to show it. You can't simultaneously denounce racism and pretend it has no consequence unless your poll numbers plummet. You can't crab that the Times has no sense of history, then write as if the last 23 1-/2 hours have settled all issues for all time. You can't rely on Dan Savage to tell you whether you should be outraged by blatant homophobia in one particular national candidate, but not another.

Unless you're a libertarian, I mean. Then anything but self-awareness is permitted.

Posting May Be Light

ROY:

When the dust settles I'm afraid it'll be Romney with a briefcase and a fountain pen, trying gosh-darned hard to get America to switch insurance companies.

I'm no prognosticator, which means, above all, that I don't have to phone in one of these cutesy faux-self-deprecations at year's end (designed, you'll note, to reinforce the Offical Pundit Script even as they supposedly highlight what pundits got wrong. Imagine a real column in which Dana Milbank confesses his errors. It would take the entire year to do it. The wisdom of confining oneself to "predictions" when doing such things is shown by the fact that Weigel doesn't have to admit anything nearly as embarrassing, or self-revealing, as his paean to Michele Bachmann's knowledgeable and polished initial debate performance).

I have no idea what Romney's path to the nomination looks like. I know he has unlimited funds, God bless America, and a collection of opponents who couldn't govern a home daycare operation without one or two swingset strangulations per annum. That may be all he needs, or he may be so personally devoid of personhood that support coagulates around one particular non-Romney in response. You heard it here first.

What I do know is this: the supposed Teabagger Agenda is just the corporate agenda, and Romney's the corporate candidate. And so's Obama. Some of us think the 5-10% difference between them is important, vital even; that difference, for the Republican rank-and-file is what the headline writers call The Culture Wars. And they are busy fighting a protracted partisan conflict over whether that shit needs to be saved to rile up the yokels, or spread across every front page in America.

In a sense, then, the Republican party has become the Democratic party, with an entrenched leadership machinegunning the human waves of the unwashed and their sharpened sticks. Meanwhile Democrats get to keep up their thirty-year rope-a-dope attempt to become the Thinking Man's Corporate Lackey party.

Can someone remind me what the intervening three decades of hubbub was all about, again?

Funny, The Actual Confederate Army Spent A Lot Of Time Retracing The Campgrounds, Looking For Edible Kernels Of Corn In Piles Of Horseshit, Too.

Jindal tells Iowans that Rick Perry is the best choice for the GOP.

AND I'm indebted to Halloween Jack for pointing out the picture above, at Roy's:

Not a lot to add to the commentary on the text; I just wanted to mention the picture that accompanies the article, in which Perry possesses the mien of a used-car dealer who is telling you that the car that you're looking at is a great car, a steal really, and you know that he's full of shit and he knows that you know that he's full of shit, but it's all that you can afford and you need to get to work and you can already see the days ahead when you're cursing the damn thing as it falls apart around you in slow motion. I hesitated to use the used-car-dealer metaphor, because it's been a political cliche ever since Nixon, but it fits so well here.

I know I sound absurd, or more absurd than usual, but I still say it was a major failing of the Nixon era that a half-dozen years later a man who looked like Ronald Reagan--the death rictus, the coiffure of one of Larry Welk's minimum-wage singing stars, the practiced Hollywood carriage--Reagan moved like a man who was accustomed to being carried everywhere, and not in the character-building, struggle-just-for-a-normal-existence way FDR was; more like a foot-bound Chinese wife--and that orange dye-job which he insisted, until he couldn't remember to, wasn't a dye job, not because that fooled anybody but because he felt obligated to sound like he'd fooled himself--could become President. No matter what came out of his mouth. Which, mind you, was even worse, but that's beside the point.

Who, in 2011, is fooled by that Perry air? It's a look that screams "Hi, my intellectual vapidity is only exceeded by my unwarranted self-regard". It's a look that traces at a glance the last thirty years of American social and economic decline.

It's not just the picture of a guy who's been carefully schooled in how to look for the camera. It's a picture of a guy who's been carefully schooled in how to look for the camera because his handlers fear that some stray shot some day might actually reveal his actual soul. Which is so awful that laughable plastic routine up there is preferable.

I swear to God, it may very well have been my callow youth which convinced me, in the early 70s, that by the time I was middle-aged people in America would be meeting at the local bar to drink beer, swap lies, and pass around joints, or that American foreign policy would no longer mean aiming billion-dollar aircraft carriers at Third World nations. But I was absolutely convinced that the risible hard sell and ring-a-ding-ding insincerity of black & white television advertising was dead as the Dodo, and I still can't figure out what happened there.

Don't Worry. Some Wealthy White People Are On Their Way To Help You.

OUR story so far: in the 1920s the Indiana Klan took over state government. It's often noted that the Indiana Klan--which separated itself from the national Klan, probably so it wouldn't have to remit 10% of its rape victims to the home office--was more anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant than anti-black. (In my youth I would occasionally hear this factlet recounted as though the speaker was convinced they'd had a recruitment office on Indiana Avenue.)

Around this time, but no doubt wholly coincidental to the Not Racist, Just Religiously Bigoted Klan's bribery program for every local official who preferred legal tender to going to prison on trumped-up charges, Indianapolis segregated its schools, beginning with high school, and gradually working its way back. After the Second World War de jure segregation was replaced by quieter de jure segregation, until a Federal court ruling in the early 70s desegregated Indianapolis Public Schools by transferring some of its students, along with a lot of its cash, to the white suburban districts where the sons and daughters of the original segregators had fled.

Meanwhile, in the late 60s, faced with the terrifying prospect of enough African-Americans voting that the Party of Lincoln would itself become a Minority, Dick Lugar, Spanish-American War veteran and "Nixon's Favorite Mayor"--an honorarium he sadly no longer lists on his c.v.--together with the Republican majority on the City Council and a GOP-controlled Statehouse, annexed all the white suburbs out to the county line. The three political vestiges of the old boundaries which were allowed to remain in place were 1) the Indianapolis police and the Marion county sheriff, plus local fire departments; 2) the eight or twelve or fifteen hopeless tangles known as Township governments, and a couple of autonomous town governments; and 3) nine separate school districts. I'll bet you already guessed that one.

It, of course, had nothing to do with racism. Or at least no more to do with racism than the Indiana Klan did.

That little trick lasted thirty years, assuming you imagine electing a Republican who called himself a Democrat, and a Democratically-controlled City/County Council, closed a chapter. Bart Peterson, elected in 2000, immediately set out to rectify eighty years of overt racism in local education got himself the right to found charter schools the way soft drink producers create new and exciting brands. He also created, in 2006, something called The Mind Trust, a non-profit organization which, and I quote "is taking a bold, new approach to education reform. Driven by results, we are strategically building a network of the nation’s best education reform organizations here in Indianapolis. Together, these organizations, led by visionary education entrepreneurs, are already putting their ideas into action and working to transform our schools." [bold emphasis of "bold" in original]

Now, if you're as big a fan as I of our nation's results-driven, visionary education entrepreneurs and the dozens of metaphorical new and exciting soft drink flavors they dream up every day--backed by results!--you will already realize that Indianapolis Public Schools are failing. Because, otherwise, what's an educational entrepreneur supposed to sink his teeth into? And, no doubt, you'll have tumbled to the idea that the solution to this problem lies in Better Test Scores, Higher Graduation Rates, and the sort of Entrepreneurial expertise which can't manage to accomplish anything unless unions are broken, benefits cut, and working conditions run through the Dreadfulizer 3000. Because only then will we be able to attract the highest-quality applicants.

(It's interesting, isn't it, how much time Our Nation's Entrepreneurs spend solving every problem except giving people decent, meaningful jobs at living wages? Based on this model, I guess we need a tax-exempt consortium of acrobats, beekeepers, or gerbil enthusiasts, to figure out how to solve our economic woes.)

Of course, The Mind Trust being a savvy, well-connected, and going concern, it doesn't actually say "End Socialist Union Socialism" in its Mission Statement, since the sort of people who pay it to work toward that end don't really want it publicized that that's what they're up to. In fact, when they came out with their Big Plan a couple days ago, about which the whole town is artificially buzzing, because the local news outlets have devoted every non-Super Bowl-related minute to it--that is, about one minute--the We Need Great Teacher thing was mostly boilerplate. The two Big Ideas were 1) reducing the administration by 80%, and using the proceeds to give everyone free pre-school; and 2) eliminating the elected School Board, and replacing it with a committee appointed by the mayor and the City-County Council.

In other words, African-Americans, say goodbye to the last vestige of your voting power in Indianapolis. [By the way, school reform is such a vital, pressing problem that The Mind Trust will be waiting until 2013 to press its agenda with the (then safely ensconced for two years) state legislature. The suggestion that voters in the IPS district be given a referendum before becoming the only public entity in the state denied the right to choose its own school board was met, predictably, with something short of enthusiasm.]

Listen, I'm no fan of the school board, nor its superintendent Eugene "Cufflinks" White (in what we in the IPS extended family have come to expect from White, he issued a statement yesterday that the Plan wouldn't work. "And besides," he added, "I'm already doing all those things.") There's no question that the Administration building is full of functionaries, supernumeraries, flunkies, and associate flunkies.

But if you're looking to clean house from the top down, do you really call in a charity golf outing's worth of entrepreneurs? People who can't function without six secretaries and a private jet?

The Mind Trust site lists the following on its Staff page:

Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Executive Vice President
Vice President of Education Initiatives
Education Initiatives Associate
Vice President of Strategic Growth Initiatives
Individual Giving Manager
Vice President and Director of CEE-Trust [where the job of Vice President is to "oversee The Mind Trust’s efforts to support education entrepreneurship nationwide through his work as director of the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust). So he's the liaison to himself.]
CEE-Trust Associate

And they're currently looking for a Manager of Operations.

There's also thirteen people on the Board of Directors (shame on you, Jane Pauley), a veritable Who's Who of Eli Lilly/Gates Foundation/Mitch Daniels Crony/Corporate Consortium to Fuck Public Education.

My favorite bit, though, is the capsule bio of Founder and Chief Executive Officer (and former Peterson Director of Charter Schools) David Harris:

"David Harris is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Mind Trust. Under his leadership, The Mind Trust has raised $25 million to advance the work of education entrepreneurs in Indianapolis and accelerate positive change. Since its launch in 2006, The Mind Trust has supported the Indianapolis launch of 11 high-impact entrepreneurial education ventures, supported critical research and policy work designed to improve the climate for education innovation, and garnered widespread attention from local and national media, with The Indianapolis Star declaring that The Mind Trust is 'at the center of the reform movement in Indianapolis.'"

Yup. Half a decade of sweet-talkin' the Gates Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and helping make the anti-public school/Republican war on unions sound reasonable and caring. Guess maybe it's time to start thinking about education some now.

The View From Centrist Command

Andrew Bacevich, "The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq marks the end of American supremacy". December 16

SO the wingnuts are growing concerned they may sound too detached from reality to win a national election. This is the principle difference between a wingnut and a centrist.

In fact, it may damn near be the only difference.

In American history, every now and then we get a definitive ending. The crash of October 1929 ended the Roaring Twenties;

Um, well, Professor, it didn't, actually. It may've damped the spirits of people who owned a lot of stock, but the Great Depression didn't begin for another six months or so. I wasn't there, and my people were Midwestern farmers and railroadmen, so they didn't do much if any Roaring, or Flapping, or Stock Speculating. Anyway, my point is that if you wanna talk American historicity, not history, let's call it that.

VJ Day ended World War II. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq this month, while less dramatic, also marks the passing of an era.

Unfortunately, not the Era of Unwarranted Hubris. Nor the Era of Extraordinary Stupidity, nor Resistance to Brick-Wall Reality, nor of Imaginary Military Supremacy.

Launched in 2003 amid assurances of a rapid victory, the war is ending nearly nine years later with the United States settling for considerably less. Undertaken to demonstrate our supremacy, the war has instead revealed the stark limits of American power. It has laid waste to the post-Cold War era of great expectations once thought to define the future.

Y'know, it's fucking remarkable: while the Cold War was going on there were vast numbers of Americans who understood that our power--our multiple-global-destruction power--was extraordinary limited in application, consisting, mainly, of our ability to destroy human life as we knew it. And that question had been settled as a practical matter--meaning "answered" not "the people on the wrong side of the argument shut up"--in Korea, the first motherfucking time we tried to use our military hegemony and H-bomb supremacy to dictate to the rest of the world, and realized it was no substitute for actual fighting. Yet here we are.

Remember the 1990s, which opened with the Soviet Union in its death throes and the United States riding high? The Cold War reached a peaceful conclusion, and a new historical chapter, seemingly rich with promise, dawned. Led by the United States — its preeminence affirmed in 1991 by Operation Desert Storm — the world was moving from darkness into light.

Historicity, not history; I remember a lot of idiots talking that way. I don't recall it making any of them correct.

The first claim was ideological: The collapse of communism signified the triumph of liberal democracy, a victory deemed definitive and irreversible; viable alternatives for organizing society had ceased to exist.

Okay, it's possible that you and I just differ as to the extent that these claimants can be believed. My answer is "Nada".

Then again, perhaps it's because I paid attention to their commitment to "democracy" from the 50s t0 the 90s.

The second claim was economic: The end of the Cold War had unleashed the forces of globalization; with the unimpeded movement of goods, capital, ideas and people, previously unimaginable opportunities for wealth creation beckoned.

Yes. Yes it did. For them.

This is the thing that kills me about American right-wing corporatism masquerading as economic "freedom": when, exactly, did it triumph over the Marxist critique? Because a corrupt authoritarian regime begun in its name collapsed in a heap of paranoia and militarism, suddenly the moral pre-eminence of those who control the means of production was established for all time?

Y'know, Soviet military spending bankrupted the largest nation on earth. And instead of this being seen as a cautionary tale about our own out-of-control militarism, it somehow became proof positive of the inherent superiority of capitalism, the guarantee that our brand of political perfection was the One True Path, and, somehow, that John Paul II really was infallible.

Did we use that Cosmic Demonstration of our own superiority to, I dunno, end poverty, provide for basic medical care, replace fossil fuels, work for international brotherhood? No. Just in case you weren't paying attention. We used it to scream bloody murder about a Peace Dividend.

The third claim was military: Advanced information technology was revolutionizing warfare; armed forces able to exploit that revolution would gain unprecedented effectiveness.

Of course the interesting thing about that--aside from the fact that it merely recapitulates the "Whoever gets the A-bomb/H-bomb/atomic-powered airplane/controls Indochina/lands on the Moon" routine--is that it didn't prevent us from continuing to spend outrageous sums on Old Technology.

History had rendered a verdict: The future belonged to America and to those who embraced the American way.

And History, as we all know, is written by the most objective observer available.

For anyone unwilling to accept that verdict, there was U.S. military power. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” journalist Thomas Friedman wrote in 1999. “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Y'know, actually, that was for all those willing to accept the verdict. It's what they really meant, in fact.

Then came 9/11, which left the almighty superpower looking less like history’s architect than its victim. From the outset, President George W. Bush’s response to this affront sought not simply to avert further attacks on the American homeland, but to quash suspicions that history might not be tilting in America’s direction after all.

Isn't it curious how America is History's Annointed and The Country That Can't Face the Truth?

As measured by the number of U.S. troops killed, maimed or otherwise scarred, the Iraq war ranks as a comparatively modest affair. Even taking into account the far larger number of civilians killed,

First I've heard of it…

injured or displaced, Iraq trails well behind the really big wars of the modern era. Not casualties but consequences define the significance of this lamentable episode. There it ranks ahead of Korea and Vietnam — neither marking a decisive historical turn — and even alongside World War II.

Fer cryin' out loud: Korea should have marked that historical turn. Vietnam did, but the Military-Industrial Complex, as the old saying goes, didn't know it was dead, and forgot to fall down. Instead it bankrolled a forty-year effort aimed at obfuscating the history of those wars, and re-militarizing American sentiment. I don't know how committed the Defense establishment is to advanced information technology, but I do know that when the chips are down and they need a Jessica Lynch or Pat Tillman, pronto, it's Old Fashioned Lying gets the call.

The beliefs to which the end of the Cold War gave rise — liberal democracy triumphant, globalization as the next big thing and American dominion affirmed by a new way of war — have all come to rest in that unmarked grave reserved for failed ideas. Those who promoted and persisted in the Iraq war wielded the shovel that helped dig the hole. This defines their legacy.

It'd be nice if it took the shovel out of their hands, too. No such luck.