Quick Question

LET'S say you're the sort of person who was tempted to write, "Why's that old lady Madonna the Halftime show?" I think you should first be required to answer the question "Th' fuck are you watching the Super Bowl Halftime Show for in the first place?"

Don't get me wrong; I think the world would be a better place today if Madonna had married Courtney Love. But why does anyone care? Would y'all be happier if it had been Katy Perry up there lip-syncing and sucking?

Weekend Leftovers

OUR story so far: at the end of the 1970s, with the inherent contradictions, internal infirmities, and lunatic and nuclear-fueled grandiosity of its post-war self-congratulation period in tatters, after Vietnam and the unconscionably tardy recognition of Civil Rights, the predictable ebb of the economic hegemony we had enjoyed since the rest of the developed world had been reduced to rubble in the 40s, with gas lines reminding a small percentage of the populace that there really were repercussions for stopping the Marshall Plan West of Suez, and for finagling the creation of the State of Israel for a temporal domestic political advantage, without regard for the rights of anyone who happened to have lived in the region for the previous millennia or the history of the Great Game; with those same gas lines convincing the majority of auto-Americans that brown people needed to be taken down a peg by one of those irresistible military interventions, like the one that had worked so well for us in Indochina; with a Republican President having disgraced himself, his collection of stooges, flunkies, and brownshirts, his party, and his country by, well, being a Republican and acting on it, Good Old American Know-Who stepped to the fore, and a coalition of corporatepeople whose privilege depended on the US taxpayer paying to defend it, the few paranoid Nixonites who'd escaped prison, and disgruntled Americans who wholeheartedly supported civil rights for all Americans, but didn't want their children showering with Negroes in public school, found in Ronald Reagan the man who would restore to America its glorious fictional Morning, and to the wealthiest among us their Gilt-given right to exploit people, provided they didn't reference skin color while doing so. Any more. Or not obviously.

Strange as it may seem, thirty years of insisting that our problems weren't real has somehow have failed to solve them. So that in the first and possibly only quarter of the 21st century, USAmerica has a wrecked economy, a much bigger oil habit, the finest, most competent, and best equipped military machine ever to be thwarted by a nation of goatherders, and has pretty much finished shipping all its manufacturing jobs to Asia while putting everyone who used to fill those jobs in prison. And we achieved all this by the simple expedient of believing that the more you cut taxes the more revenue you raised, and that anything Liberals believed was designed to cut America to Her knees.

I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Nor is it a revelation that the one group which has actually benefitted from all this is the one which started out with all the money and power in the first place.

And one of the things they've done is see to it that their idiot progeny became Important Social Observers, the way their role models in the vibrant British aristocracy used to send their own mental defectives into the Church.

Which brings us to Megan-Jane McArdle-Galt, notable non-genius, Senior Fucking Editor at a once respectable publication, and former possessor of the world's least-imaginative nom de plume since the invention of cuneiform.

I don't read her, if that's what one calls it. I saw her once or twice in her guise as Ayn Rand's adoring and maybe-a-little-too-interested-in-the-terms-of-the-Will granddaughter, which left me astonished to find she'd gotten a real job writing, if that's what one calls it. And which led, eventually, to my shocked discovery--I've been blasted twice by household current and once by a faulty lawn mower sparkplug wire, and shocked is an accurate description--that she was, in fact, in early middle age, and not a fourteen-year-old whose wealthy and connected parents thought she was precocious.

So I was waiting for a couple days for the inevitable Susan G. Komen Says It's Sorry That You All Misunderstood, and…

And, wait, was this not the four thousandth recapitulation of Iraq War II? Did not everyone with any sense and a minimum of healthy skepticism know exactly what was going to happen here? And that the credulous majority, including Senior Fucking Editors at a once respectable publication, would immediately take the thing at face value? All that anyone needed to know was Komen's size, administrative pay structure, and its history of derisible litigiousness to know that a) the original story was the sort of diaphanous hubristic bullshit unique to Our American Colossi, b) it would be contradicted, and probably twice, within eighteen hours, before c) likely being denied altogether, with standard non-apology apology and standard non-active course of action. Knowing that Nancy Brinker once held the Shirley Temple Chair of Applied Protocolistics in the Bush II administration was just a little paint on the lily.

…and somehow I wound up clicking on Megan-Jane. This, specifically, which led me to go back--of my own volition!--for That and The Other.

All of which confirmed the age-old journalistic wisdom of not letting anyone with no writing talent exercise it more than twice a week.

Anyway, somehow I ran into the erstwhile Ms Galt's first mental pretzel, which requires exactly 60 words, not counting the long quote from the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, before we got:

Though I'm pro-choice, I...

Which of course meant that Megan-Jane was about to thoughtfully disprove her own claim so the rest of us didn't have to bother.

Though I'm pro-choice, I don't share the outrage that was roiling my Twitter feed this morning.

Okay. So I realize that catching Megan-Jane in a contradiction or a rhetorical inadequacy is like collecting Bushisms for Slate. And this would be a perfectly consistent position, provided that anyone out there had been arguing anything like the opposite.

But, one: as with the Republican party, absolving yourself from the requirement of knowing what you're talking about, rather than trying to sound how you feel, doesn't make you exempt. And, two: no one said you had to be roiled because you support, or "support", reproductive freedom. Just as no one said Komen had to support Planned Parenthood. Besides, Komen is wealthy, and poor women are poor, so we all knew which side your natural sympathies fell on.

What upset people--people who constitute a considerable portion of Komen's donor Rolodex--was the transparent excuse that Komen had changed its bylaws to exclude any organization under investigation, which a) meant Planned Parenthood, exclusively, and b) meant "any two-bit cracker Congressional headline seeker, or state or local Christofascist. could sever that link at any time." This was a political act by an arrogant behemoth designed to placate people who are actively trying to supress a Constitutional right. One which, by the way, you claim to support. It didn't have to roil you. But if that claim means anything at all it should have at least made you understand where people who objected loudly to the decision were coming from.

Let's say this again: whether you think it's justified or no, Komen has a board which gets wealthy from its donors; and if you do think that's none of the donors' business you might at least expect that it do something like this with a reasonable amount of intelligence. The fact that Komen has a "right" to do something doesn't make it above criticism; the fact that the people making that decision earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year yet are completely tone deaf being a prime example.

Planned Parenthood has been a brave, and often lonely, defender of legal rights, often for the most under-defended of our fellow citizens. Someone who is Pro-Choice But..., and has missed that fact, hasn't paid enough attention to the issue, or the politics of the issue, to have an opinion worth noting.

We later got this:

I'm tempted to credit shifting public opinion, but polling about abortion has been pretty stable over the last 15 years. It could be a shift in the donor base, or the board itself. Or perhaps it's a more subtle shift in opinion. While most people think that abortion should be legal, most people don't support the current state of abortion law; polling seems to suggest that the majority either wants abortion to be illegal in all cases, or legal only in the first trimester--and even then, possibly only in the case of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. A majority of people polled say that abortion is morally wrong. And pro-life identification runs neck-in-neck with pro choice.

which would sew the package up tidly; one cannot be "pro-choice" in this environment and simultaneously report that "the majority" wants abortion restricted to the first trimester without pointing out the absurdity of the idea, legally, ethically, and rhetorically. Else one is not pro-choice, merely unwilling publicly to oppose abortion in all cases. It's like being a Vegan for the duration of your stay at some hipster bar.)

And the thing was capped, less than two hours later, when her Randian sense that somewhere someone of Wealth was being dissed was fully awakened by the sun moving to the other side of the solarium. Megan noted:

But more broadly, the worry about charity overhead has gotten completely out of hand. I've heard from more than one frantic foundation fundraiser who can't raise a dime for overhead--everyone wants their money earmarked for programs.

Maybe someone should alert Komen. They could earmark the money they send to Planned Parenthood. Oh, sorry. That money's fungible.

To start with, Planned Parenthood spends about 16% of its annual budget on . . . overhead and fundraising. Now that they know, how many of the people who were angry about Komen's overhead are going to also withdraw their support from Planned Parenthood? I suspect the number is zero, but I could be wrong.

I'm guessing that the number of people Megan expected to click that link was also zero, since it took you not to the proof of her claim but the cover sheet for the report.

But seven or eight pages of diligence later one discovers what one already knew suspected all along: that the addition of "overhead" to fundraising costs was designed to get Planned Parenthood closer to Komen's numbers. And that Megan McArdle talks shit.

Komen's fundraising expenses are 7.5% of revenue. This is apparently considered acceptable by the sorts of persons who rate such things. Planned Parenthood's is 4%.

What Komen has been questioned about are its Administrative Expenses (especially the amount paid to its upper echelon), which run 11.8%. Planned Parenthood's "Management and General Support"--your guess is as good as Megan's as to whether the two are congruent--is 12%. But Planned Parenthood operates health care clinics across the country. Komen raises money.

Should a reasonable person expect their operating expenses to be so similar?

For that matter, should Megan?

Is It Even Possible To Set A Record For Biggest Conventional Wisdom Feedback Loop?

Jacob Weisberg, "Is Mitt Romney Al Gore? The Republican front-runner is too handsome, too rich, and too pompous." February 1

RIGHT on schedule, and right in the expected location, Beltway insiders look for a new place to snooze now that the Republican primaries are over. Sooo over:

Republicans are doing something quite strange at the moment. They are in the process of choosing a candidate whom hardly any of them actually likes. Though Mitt Romney won the Florida primary handily yesterday, rumbles of dissatisfaction with him continue.* Romney isn’t so much winning the Republican nomination as having it default to him for lack of any compelling alternative.

The case for voting for Romney goes as follows: Of the Republican presidential candidates, he is the only one with any real chance of defeating President Obama in November. In support of this electability hypothesis, Romney’s advocates elaborate such qualities as the candidate’s lack of any obvious mental defect, the nonextremity of his views, and his vastly superior financial and organizational resources. Seldom, however, do his half-hearted supporters evince any affection or enthusiasm for the man himself. They generally acknowledge Romney to be an insipid, somewhat blank personality, who is almost absurdly variable in his positions and core beliefs.

Quite strange at the moment? At the moment they're being forced to choose. For the past year they been bouncing around a Dodge 'Em Car collection of mental defectives in an effort to find Anybody But Mitt. Maybe that's normal, expected behavior, but it's still fucking strange.

Weisberg knows this, of course. And the truth is that the combination of Press biorhythms and a collection of Republican candidates so pathetically lacking in the basic qualities Republicans apparently require of their national candidates--a) susceptibility to gravitation and b) the ability to form sounds approximating English--the qualifications that made Sarah Palin the most popular part of the ticket 3-1/2 years ago--made the whole grim Alabaster Republican parade open to criticism for the first time the Reagantot generation learned to type. Though Slate's arch political columnist opted at first to tell us what a skilled orator Michele Bachmann had turned out to be.

This is precisely what happened in '96 with Bob Dole, and last time 'round with the "moderate" and Press favorite emeritus-turned-geezer John McCain. Movement "conservative" candidates have been uniformly short of brainpower since Ronald Reagan picked up the Goldwater mantle. The Press refuses to say so. The only time Palin was called a ninny four years ago is when Peggy Noonan and Chuck Todd thought their mikes were off. We went though eight years of Obvious Obliviousness of George W. Bush; Weisberg made some bucks on the man's foolish utterances, but only after 2000, when America was informed (as it will be again, shortly), that this made Ol' Dubya just our kind. Strange? This is what the Republican party has been since 1980.

In this respect, Romney strongly resembles two similarly unloved Democratic nominees from the recent past, Al Gore and John Kerry. Gore and Kerry both suffered from the same characterizations that get applied to Romney—too wooden in person while too flexible in their views. Their supporters often argued that qualifications were what mattered. But ominously for Romney, both Gore and Kerry lost winnable races because of their flawed personalities. George W. Bush, on the other hand, got elected and re-elected, despite his enormous, substantive shortcomings, because ordinary people found it easy to relate to him at a personal level. They felt he wasn’t trying to be someone different from who he was.

And this sort of nonsense is now celebrated! By a guy who writes about politics for a living.

So lemme ask you something: assuming that you, unlike Weisberg, were sentient, conscious, and/or did not get all of your political information from transcripts of Tony Blankely's comments on The MacLaughlin Group or David Broder columns in 2000--and thus have a fighting chance of recalling that Al Gore actually won the 2000 election--were you aware of any groundswell of eagerness to share a couple Mickey's Big Mouths with George W. Bush? Or was that pure Beltway blather that later hardened into something resembling calcified thought, or frozen spittle?

The public usually picks up on this authenticity gap—the space between who the candidate really is and how he wants to be seen. In each case, the problem manifests itself in a slight different way. A technocrat by nature, Gore disliked the performative side of politics. He wildly overcompensated for this by angrily shouting his speeches at rallies and demonstrating ardor for his now ex-wife with a soul kiss at the Democratic convention. His hyperbolic passion on the campaign trail made it a simple matter for Republicans to brand Gore as a compulsive exaggerator who claimed to have invented the Internet. Kerry’s problem was that he was pompous, too senatorial, and loved of the sound of his own voice. This allowed the Bush re-election campaign in 2004 to paint him Kerry as “French”: an effete snob and an unprincipled flip-flopper.

In 2000 the Press went out of its way to avoid mentioning Bush's enormous, substantive shortcomings. Who th' fuck cared about Gore's earth tones, aside from Maureen Dowd? And who th' fuck cares what Maureen Dowd says, or "thinks"? Gore may have had some serious shortcomings as a national candidate, but they weren't the ones the Press clucked about incessantly. Kerry may be a stiff, but what "made it easy"for Republicans to pull the Flip-Flopper gag was that the Press ate it with a spoon. And the Swiftboating, which Weisberg seems to've forgotten, was a national disgrace of the first order. I still think about it every time the locals run another Soldier Dad Hero Veteran story, which is pretty much every day. The Press had the opportunity, and the obligation, to treat that story with the harsh light of truth it deserved. Instead it treated it with the deference it's given every crackpot Republican idea since the Nixon administration.

Is it really the Press' job to tell me someone's "in love with the sound of his own voice"? Instead of, you know, the words that're coming out? Who's the Press had love affairs with since whoring for Reagan? Ross Perot. John McCain. George W. Barack Obama. Sarah Palin, with an asterisk, since she was just a media clown. Then basically everyone on the Republican dais except Romney, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum (all still in the race), as well as a half-dozen non-candidates like Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, and My Man Mitch, even if Cain was Palin Redux, and nobody gave Bachmann any real chance, except your man Weigel, Jake. There's a fucking track record to be proud of.

Has the recent history of Western Civilization been much improved by the fact that the Press helped us avoid electing a President who looked ridiculous in tank commander garb? Or in suitably punishing George H. W. Bush's impatience or Al Gore's tailor? It wasn't Democrats calling Gore a serial prevaricator or Kerry a flipper back then, and it's not Democrats calling Romney a professional windsock now. Good Lord. Romney's not a wooden campaigner. He's a lump of expired canned ham, personally, but that's got nothing to do with anything. He's a phony. He's not phony just because he's a pandering politician, though he's one of the most memory-free in, well, memory; he's a phony because his act is bullshit. The way George W. Bush's act was bullshit. And the only thing worse than that is a national punditocracy which tries to tell us in spite of it all that the important thing is whether a candidate seems genuine while he's shoveling.

Florida: Not America's Only Talking Doodle

Ross Douthat, "Gingrich 2012? Going, Going, Gone". February 1

OKAY, Mitt Romney may be inevitable--I don't particularly care; Republicans do lots of stupid shit, too much to worry about it unless it threatens to become law--but can we drop the pretense that Florida voters, or Republican voters generally, are making what in normal humans is known as a "decision"?

Florida voters, if pollsters are even remotely connected to the Earth's gravity, chose Romney, switched to Gingrich, then fled back to Romney when they discovered, last Thursday night, that Gingrich was a lunatic. None of which makes anything approaching sense.

How is the Republican horde still given the credibility inherent in the concept of decision-making? Do we really need to reiterate the last six months of their presidential choices?

If there's anything to be said for the Republican rank-and-file, as illuminated by three-and-a-half states so far, it's that it has looked surprisingly intelligent in dumping Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, and to've cooled to Herman Cain before he dumped himself. This, however, doesn't stand up to scrutiny; somebody had to drop out of the race, and the odds were that it would be some loon. In fact, there weren't any odds. It was a sure thing.

Speaking of which:

Last week, New York magazine’s John Heilemann pointed out a deep truth about Newt Gingrich’s peculiar presidential campaign: The very media elite that Gingrich delights in hammering has actually been in his corner all along. The press likes a horse race; the press likes outsize personalities; the press favors an underdog; and the press even takes a strange sort of delight in being ruthlessly attacked.

With luck, next week Mark Halperin will explain to Ross that the sun is hot.

Which, of course, says nothing about that segment of the Press which has tried to boost Romney out of sheer embarrassment with the rest of the Republican field. Right, Ross?

Tuesday night’s Floridian drubbing won’t change those incentives, so we can expect a last burst of media chatter about how Gingrich could still recover, ride a wilderness campaign to a Super Tuesday comeback and fight Romney tooth and nail all the way to the convention.

Media chatter=what other punditasters are saying.

But Florida’s primary was closed to independents, Florida’s electorate was as conservative and Tea Party-friendly (though not as evangelical-heavy) as South Carolina’s and Florida’s large senior population once looked like it would give Gingrich an edge. If the former speaker couldn’t even come close to beating Romney in such relatively favorable terrain, it’s hard to see how he can hope to compete with him anywhere outside the Deep South.

AKA the Republican rank-and-file. Listen, I'm not touting Gingrich, or Santorum. I'm just saying that maybe voters are looking at, you should pardon the expression, electability. Which is another way of saying that the rank-and-file is beginning to recognize that "conservatism" is a form of national poison. Maybe John Heileman can explain why that analysis never finds the light of day.

Republican voters have had a veritable ethanol-flavored beer tasting of "conservative" candidates. None got the boot for being "not conservative enough". They're gone (or going, going) because "real" "conservatives" are too nutty for the "conservative" party. And if a pure conservative is not superior to a Massachusetts Moderate, then "conservatism" no longer has any argument at all.

Olio: May You Live In Interesting Times, And A Mid-Sized Market Hosting The Super Bowl Edition

• A week or two ago I saw the most jaw-dislocatingly stupid thing I'd seen on local teevee "news", at least until the next time I turned it on: in reporting on the monthly state unemployment numbers, whichever useless shill I'd subjected myself to ignored until the end of the report the fact that Indiana's rate--9%, the neighborhood of which was, leading up to the 2008 gubernatorial elections, was the most important piece of evidence for Mitch Daniels' economic miracle--is now worse than the national average (and way north of Ohio's (8.1), while Kentucky (9.1) and Michigan (9.3) have both appeared in the rear-view mirror, not that he mentioned any of that), instead focusing on the one-month jobs creation number, which was, apparently, the greatest in the entire 6000 years of human history.

Which number did not budge the unemployment rate. We're all glad that 15,000 Hoosiers found jobs last month. And it's not like I think that local teleprompter readers compile their own statistics. It's just interesting that three years ago how Indiana compared with surrounding states was the chief measure of economic progress, and now it's a mumbled afterthought.

• You can imagine what's transpired when the modern-day local teevee news operation's natural inclination to Jaycee boosterism meets something like The Super Bowl. But do yourself a favor. Don't.

I swear that everyone doing remote reports while standing has been fitted with a catheter.

Which is not much of a surprise, since a couple weeks ago they were all beside themselves at the prospect of Jack in the Box returning to Indiana.

Seriously.

And who can blame them? People were lined up across the parking lot.

But for chrissakes, how does this infest the only print reporter in town with a political beat ?

Some of the more curmudgeonly Hoosiers among us are intent on noting that all of the city's problems will remain after Jimmy Fallon and Alec Baldwin leave. Yep, they will. Just as they would have without a Super Bowl. Expecting more is expecting too much.

I've been a critic of outsized public spending on professional sports stadiums and what it says about our priorities. And I'd trade this Super Bowl for a city full of super schools without blinking.

But it's not as simple as either/or. There's no doubt about the benefits that sports bring to this city, and the benefits of this particular game are obvious. The Eastside legacy project and the economic boost for local businesses are but two examples. Perhaps most important is the reminder that it sends to the city about the benefits of thinking big. This city has become what it is -- and it's something to be proud of -- after decades of thinking bigger than our weight class.

The "Eastside legacy project" is, essentially, Indianapolis' version of the annual NFL "Let's give 0.00001% of our teevee revenues to some poor side of whatever town gets to hand us a Super Bowl". In exchange for which Indianapolis--whose new Teabagger mayor was crying poverty at the same time--matches those funds and builds a practice facility for the visiting team to equal the practice facility we built the (privately-owned, need I remind you?) Colts. (Explain that one in terms of economic benefit, would ya?)

They've done a good job. The $1 million in matching NFL funds has become--reportedly--$154 million.

But where th' hell was that money? Those schools Mr. Tully "wishes" we'd improve could have used that sort of cash over the last twenty years. He should know; he spent a year in one of 'em without noticeably losing the conceit that it's all the fault of bad teachers. Maybe he should spend a year drinking straight out of the raw-sewage receptacle known as White River. Then tell us what it is or isn't reasonable to expect.

Funny how this excuse always sides with Circuses, and against Bread.

• Brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson points us at this Muncie Star Press editorial supporting the latest religiocrank legislation moving in the Indiana General Assembly (Motto: Quick, Kansas Is Gaining On Us!"):

The legislation allows schools to authorize "the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life" and specifically mentions "creation science" as one such theory.

And specifically mentions no other.

Creationism is the belief that the Earth and its creatures were created by a deity.

But creation "science" has been forced to back away from the deity routine.

Opponents will argue this bill chips away at the separation of church and state and brings an unwelcome mixing of theocracy and scientific theory into the classroom.
Not necessarily.

It's true; you can use the Bible in public schools. To teach the Bible. Problem is that you're not supposed to use it to teach the Bible exclusively. And religious diversity, as we all know, leads directly to Sharia law.

We see nothing that would change that here, and note the bill stresses "theories" on the origins of life.

Sure it did, because one of our citizen farmer legislators heard from some other state's citizen farmer legislators--or a teevee pastor--that such language makes it all fair to teach Christian just-so stories alongside natural selection in biology class.

No worries, though. I'm sure Mitch "Culture War on the Back Burner" Daniels will be weighing in on this any minute now.

Where Are The Snow Globes Of Yesteryear?

David Brooks, "Hope, but Not Much Change". January 26

THE drool of idiots and the haughtiness of kings is in all eras the same; it's the flattery and excuses of the sycophants, the toadies, the mouthpieces, the Yes men and the ass-kissers that changes.

There's no question about the discomfort being felt by the David Brooks/Mitch Daniels wing of the Republican party now that the Republican Presidential Sweepstakes has come down to: Mitt Romney, who is, essentially, what would have resulted had they been able to replace George W. Bush's non-existent aptitude for public speaking with Ronald Reagan's highly-overrated one; Rick Santorum, the reverse; Newt Gingrich, the most accomplished of the post-Nixon race-baiters, who they're forced to pretend has turned into a lunatic since the glorious days of his glorious Republican Revolution of the Week; and Ron Paul, the Ghost of Anti-Fluoridationism Not-Quite Past. I'd like to know what the problem is. It's like they took Reagan and cut him in quarters, nurtured the Four Horsemen of his Middle-American Appeal in petri dishes, and grew themselves a primary season. So, okay, Herman Cain would make it the Five Blocks of Granite, both numerically and intellectually. I miss him, too. But you can't have everything.

And this has all come about because Sarah Palin was so toxically ignorant, and so illiterately greedy? How long has Rush Limbaugh been a major player in Republican politics again? The party took Nelson Rockefeller out and shot him before Mitch Daniels was old enough to vote. Who do they think they're fooling? You broke it, you bought it.

This has lead, in a direct line, to David Brooks using prime New York Times Opinion Mall space to begin a column thus:

The Simpson-Bowles report wasn’t just a policy document. For a few months, it expanded the national debate. Everybody seemed to realize that the country was beset by large challenges that could no longer be neglected: soaring debt, lagging growth, wage stagnation, family breakdown, political dysfunction.

Suddenly, there was a sense of urgency. There were grand plans coming from all directions.

Yeah, remember that exciting Twenty Minutes? Anyone?

Anyone remember believing that Simpson-Bowles would change anything? Or knowing anyone who believed that? Anyone think there was anything about Simpson-Bowles that couldn't be extrapolated ahead of time, just by knowing who Simpson and Bowles were? Anyone remember being surprised/dismayed/dumbfounded when Congress ignored it?

Anyone, in other words, remember Simpson-Bowles as anything other than a cloak of idiocy designed to give everyone inside the Beltway who favors Cupidity over Insanity a few weeks of cover?

It’s sad to compare that era of bigness to the medium-sized policy morsels that President Obama put in his State of the Union address. He had some big themes in the speech, but the policies were mere appetizers. The Republicans absurdly call Obama a European socialist on the stump, but the Obama we saw Tuesday night was a liberal incrementalist.

There was nothing big, like tax reform or entitlement reform. There was no comprehensive effort to restore trust in government by sweeping away the tax credits and special-interest schemes that entangle Washington.

A lifelong Republican mouthpiece, a youthful liberal transformed by beatific beam of Milton Friedman like Ben-Hur swigging from Jesus' bottomless canteen, wishes a "Democratic" President would come up with the big ideas necessary to salvage the mess he and his fellows have made of things ever since Ronald Reagan bought a microphone.

(By the way, did anyone else see Mitt this week do his "I didn't pay for this microphone, but…" schtick? The only genuine moment in primary season since the Three Babblers dropped out. About halfway through you could see that he realized he was about to 1) use humor on a Republican audience without the subject being watermelons in the White House garden, and 2) use an historical reference, even though it was one of their own, and well within the lifetimes of most of the old white people present. There was a flicker when Romney almost froze, before instincts born of seven years on the Republican stump took over and he realized that facts go right over everyone's head, regardless, and relaxed.)

Some of the ideas were lamentable. Instead of simplifying the tax code, Obama would muddy it up with more tax loopholes for corporations as long as they conformed to this or that industrial policy.

"Hiring Americans". But I agree, Dave. The tax code is no place to encourage American corporations provide American jobs. The criminal code would be much better.

It’s odd that an administration that once wanted to do everything all at once now should be so gradualist. Maybe its members were scarred by the traumas of health care and the 2010 election. Maybe they just want to win the election, so every policy has to be politically easy instead of politically challenging..

Assuming this administration once "wanted to do everything"--including the younger sisters of Republican voters, I think--is that really so odd? We'd'a been a helluva lot better off today--probably--if that actually were the case. And Obama would already have 2012 won, especially against your bunch.

Legislatively, the president has to build a center-left governing majority that can overwhelm those Republicans who will never support him. That can be done only with ground-shifting policies.

Now you tell him. Y'know, the President had a center-left governing majority. It was called "the people who elected him". And the first thing he did after he was elected--hell, the first thing he did when he secured the nomination--was to run to the other side of the aisle and ask them to friend him. These are the instincts of a man who resembles…David Brooks.

It was an historic opportunity which nearly matched FDR's, but the President wanted Tim Geithner and Larry Summers to run things, and John Boehner to approve his every move. This wasn't a miscalculation; no one with an ounce of sense would have calculated that way in 2009. It was pure Democratic "centrism", the sort of "centrism" which could travel 98% of the distance to meet David Brooks halfway, but which considers rank-and-file Democratic voters only slightly less repugnant than rank-and-file Republicans. (And which, may I say, is a compliment I gladly return, mutatis mutandis.) What was missed should not be forgotten. Nor should we have to endure some Republican "moderate" telling the rest of us about it, three years and a busted flirtation with the Teabaggers later. It was as true an example of the utter moral and intellectual failure of the American center as the Bush administration was of the Right.

If Duchamp Were Alive Today, He Could Hang Mitch Daniels In A Museum And Label It "The Fountainhead"

HERE'S the best thing about Mitch Daniels giving the "rebuttal" to the State of the Union address: it got local news hairdos to talk about something other than how many days are left until the Super Bowl.

And the worst thing? I happened to walk through the living room just in time to hear one of 'em say something about what an honor it was for Daniels to be picked.

Because, look: this is one of the many, many things in this country which could be improved by the simple expedient of letting me make the decision. The Official Opposition Party Rebuttal to the Republic-old Tradition of the State of the Union Address is a crock of shit. Every bleeding idiot American, all 300 million of 'em, gets to reply to the State of the Union, at the top of his lungs and while it's going on, if he chooses. The Official Reply is nothing more than the habitual media tendency to fellational genuflection to Power and the two Parties which monopolize it. Was there an Official Democratic Response to Bush's Taliban Out of Town by Sundown speech? Or his bullhorn babbling on 9/16, or whenever it was he came out of hiding? I mean, other than "Hooray for the Glorious Republic!"?

And the damned thing isn't actually a response, of course, but a made-for-teevee taped prebuttal designed to level talking points at what Tout le Beltway knew was going to be in the speech, delivered (for Republicans) by some Tiger Beat jerkoff heartthrob. This is precisely the sort of "honor" Mitch Daniels deserves. The sort that comes in cans, and you buy off supermarket racks.

As for the speech itself, well, do I have to do anything but yawn? Obama's "extremism" "divides the nation", a nation, we might add, in which everyone still enjoys his Bush tax cuts, including, or especially, people in Mitch Daniels' (and Mitch Daniels' bankrollers') tax bracket. (Do we still have tax brackets?) This comes from a guy who gave the big stage wink to "Right to Work" legislation last year (but wouldn't get behind it publicly, since he was"considering" running for President while he was running for President). But who this year is behind it whole hog, after "studying the problem" over the past twelvemonth.

I don't know who this fools, but anyone it does should be legally precluded from ever complaining about our politics. Because this is precisely what's wrong with our politics: our public men have no commitment to the barest requirements of honesty, intellectual or otherwise.

My personal favorite, as always, is Mitch Daniels, Voice of How If We Just Eliminate All Public Responsibilities on the Wealthy, Provided They Agree To Heroically Hire People If They Need To, and Let Them Dismantle the Safety Net in the Name of Saving It, Republicans Will Agree Not To Enact Any Crazy Social Legislation Until They're Done. To The Extent That Mitch Daniels Can Guarantee It, or Be Held Accountable When It Doesn't Happen.

Reader, this is the guy who couldn't run for the Republican nomination because he suggested putting social issues on the back burner, who had to run to Laura Ingraham or one of those other "conservative" transvestites to apologize the very next day, and who, when he was still pretending he wan't running for President but was, had to agree to name Mike "Choirboy" Pence his successor just so he could carry Indiana. Mitch Fucking Daniels has a helluva lot more to fear from Social "Conservatives" than you or I. Spot anyone on the Debate Dais in favor of gay marriage, did you? Heard a Congressional Republican leader touting the Time to Cool It on Social Issues gag? Mitch Daniels is the designated Official Voice of the Non-Existent Republican Party on this. Because it was his best-paying job back when it looked like Sarah Palin was the next nominee, and now he's committed. Have we not spent the last nine months being clearly informed just how much weight Social "conservatives" have to throw around in their own party these days?

Last year Mitch Daniels signed a bill blocking Federal funds from going to Planned Parenthood in Indiana. And his is what passes for a credible voice on cultural détente in the Republican party.

And the guy who wrote the first three Debt-tumefying Bush budgets, and who crafted the blank checks Congress signed for Afghanistan and Iraq II, is now a strict Deficit Hawk. Which is right in line with the idea that The Brain thinks entitlement spending busts budgets it's not a part of, or that capping the amount of income subject to FICA taxes artificially low has no connection to wealthy Americans enjoying excessive Social Security benefits, or that "compromising" for the sake of "jobs creation" just happens to be identical to "giving the wealthy, and the party of wealth, everything they demand".

Y'know Dick "Moderate" Lugar, being threatened, or "threatened", in his reelection bid by Indiana Teabaggers, is running ads (in January!) about how he's fuckin' this Obama guy up but good. Pipeline! Obamacare! Whoo-hoo! Forget how anybody can believe these guys; I can't find anything anyone would claim to believe in the first place.

Funny Pages

ITEM: Bring Back Bill Clinton to stop Newt Gingrich! says guy in newspaper which sluiced Ken Starr's flaccid and leaky member and batted 1.000 while doing so. If by "batted a thousand" you mean "whiffed on everything, but gave Congressional Republicans enough cover to keep the investigation going 36 months longer than it should have, legally."

By the way, I love how the same Press which has faux-balanced every crackpot Republican scheme for the last forty years into One Side of the Coin gets all nervous an' shit when Republican figures "reveal" themselves as babbling anchorites.

ITEM: Speaking of which, the race to be the next Dean Broder continues unabated; Dan Balz explores the subtle nuances between the Official Beltway Script

In some respects, the contest between Romney and Gingrich falls into a familiar construct of Establishment vs. Insurgents, and yet neither candidate is the ideal to play his assigned role

and the grudging sort-of facts (Romney is an Establishment figure, but a moderate; Gingrich is a loon; The "Insurgents" are, in point of fact, the actual Republican party minus its rich-guy corporate wing) which is the fiery forge where Beltway Vulcans temper the Conventional Wisdom and pronounce it Indestructible.

ITEM: Meanwhile, loc. cit., let's allow Catholic organizations to claim religious exemptions, provided they choose to make a stink about it. Meaning, of course, Conception in all its various pathologies; they'll still be withhold employee taxes aimed at enriching the Rich, frequently executing the frequently Poor, and the ongoing $ trillion/year plowshare-sword conversion operation.

The reader's, if not the Post's editorial staff's, attention is directed towards the state of Utah, and its banning of polygamy just in time for Statehood, or the strictures placed on the Native American church.

Okay, it's been a rough few decades for Catholicism, especially its Likudnik USA faction. By the way, it's interesting to note how closely the Papacy parallels US post-war politics. You've got the Don't Ask Questions about Franco, Dr. von Braun Is On Line One, era, during which (previous) Fascist sympathies were judged as slightly less abhorrent than Communism. Followed by the miraculous appearance of Mr. Charisma, who turned out to be something of a Pink, followed by Nixon, followed by Reagan, followed, now, by Dick Cheney. The Catholic church has spoken very clearly about the enormity of contraception, wanton killer of theoretical souls, vs. the in-house PR difficulty presented by an ecclesiastical hierarchy with the collective morals of a troop of baboons. I'd like to think it's time now to use your Vow of Silence voice. Reproductive freedom is every American's Constitutional right. I know you don't like it. If you feel aggrieved about your tax money being appropriated for things you don't approve of, kindly find your place in line with the rest of us taxpayers.

ITEM: If you union teachers would give up your unreasonable demands to belong to a union we'll get this education reform nonsense dreamt up by your sworn enemies in high gear.

Y'know, far be it from me to point out that D.C. fucking schools are the ones which were reformed by the brilliant Michelle Rhee, before she took her snake oil wagon off in search of greener pastures. When's the evidence start pouring in about the unmistakeable benefits of giving each and every child a wonderful, caring, nurturing teacher who'll be here any minute, just as soon as that Right to Work thing is settled?

Okay. I don't care. Same fucking bullshit, same disastrous results for poor students, same pocket-lining opportunities for the next Neil Bush. Really, I just wanted to add this:

In recent remarks commemorating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Cuomo spoke of his increasing intolerance for a school system that regularly fails so many of its students. “Our schools are not an employment program,” he said, according to a report in the New York Times.

Right. They're an employment training program. For imaginary jobs. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by how well they did on some one-shot, high-pressure math questions in third grade!

I have a dream today. But, dammit, I keep waking up.

Crackers

Frank Bruni, "Of Mouselike Bites and Marathons". January 21

Jane Black, "What Paula Deen didn't bring to the table". January 20

FULL disclosure: George Eff Will's wife didn't do anything for Rick Perry, and my Poor Wife watches food porn. Two distinctions: my wife doesn't cook, and so inflicts those horrors on no one but herself, and her regular job actually benefits people, and society at large, if you'll pardon my outdated notions.

The Paula Deen pre-obituaries I happened to read were eye-openers for me. I suppose this is something of a disclosure as well, but I have no patience for that deep-fried, mushmouth-and-grits accent. I mean, if that happens to be your accent, fine; what I object to is hearing it from people who are being paid handsomely to communicate with English speakers, unless they are certified experts in some field and speaking to a national audience is not their main gig. Neither is true of Deen. Any time I walked into the room while that woman was on I wondered how she ever finished a recipe in just a half hour with two extra syllables wormed into every word. And I'm from Central Indiana, which, in terms of dialect, is Kentucky.

Plus I swear--this is on scant evidence--that it got thicker as time went on. At any rate, the thing obviously wasn't put on, but that doesn't mean it wasn't phony as NASCAR's good-ol'-moonshine-runners image. You don't have to speak like Edward R. Murrow--hell, you don't have to speak like Edward R. Murrow to read the news, anymore; thanks Roone!--but Indecipherable is schtick. ESPN uses subtitles on people who speak more plainly.

Paula Deen is not some sweet old Suh-thur-un lady who cooks "traditional" fare; she's the product of cable network brass and producers and agents hiding a reality-show on state fair cuisine from the rubes. Has this information not made it inside the Beltway?

The fooderati may brand Deen a menace to a healthy society and a culinary joke. But there’s a reason that her shows are in constant rotation on the Food Network, her 14 cookbooks have sold 8 million copies and her magazine, “Cooking With Paula Deen,” has a circulation of more than 1 million: Americans relate to this sassy, nonjudgmental former single mom. And they like her food.

Are we trapped in faux-balanced everything now like miniature marshmallows and Bac-O-Bits in lime Jell-O?

And this was the first of several things which struck me about the pre-obits: Deen and her deep-fried butter-on-a-doughnut cuisine were somehow accepted as authentic, and the mark of the seriously misguided way our simple-minded forebears did things (which does nothing so much as pat us on the back for the superiority of our herd. Bruni's piece is freaking awful):

The research that [Allison Adato] recounted to me and the book itself, “Smart Chefs Stay Slim,” to be published by New American Library in April, describe a populous crowd of food professionals who work out diligently to keep the ravages of foie gras at bay.

They have private trainers. They play tennis or soccer. They climb rocks or box or do yoga or bicycle or run. Adato’s book spotlights four chefs and restaurateurs who have run marathons, including Art Smith, who cooked for Oprah Winfrey for 10 years and was once more than 100 pounds above his current weight. It could also have name-checked Bobby Flay, who has run three.

Wealthy celebu-chefs have private trainers, and the leisure to work out. Let's emulate them.

Except--as Bruni gets around to mentioning, as really is the point of the piece--the food porn these people put out is just as salacious as Deen's, but grabs the other, more "accomplished", side of the schtick.

Isn't this the fucking point? If Deen's Type II is a message from God, or a piece of irony stuffed with bacon, and cheddar, and Canadian bacon, and Canadian cheddar, then so be it. But is her hypocrisy worse than Flay's because hers comes with a mushmouth and grandma's lack of New York fashionableness, and because Flay wisely doesn't eat his own cooking?

It's not. Classic cuisine is every bit as contraindicated, healthwise, as Deen's phony down-home concoctions, but with less use of potato chips as an ingredient. And dollars to deep-fried Kashi says that the masterworks of those other celebu-chefs--at least the ones prepared out of sight of the customer--owe more than a little to the knowledge that fat, sugar, and salt = flavor.

It's not that Paula Deen has diabetes. Millions do. Millions more have eaten like wealthy piglets and lived to be 95. It's the fact that she hid it until she had an endorsement deal, then--by virtue of being a "celebrity"--gets the opportunity to defend this behavior. It's the fact that no one ever gets called on this anymore provided they're "winning"--winning defined as "making money on th' teevee". The idea that Deen is excused because she moves a lot of magazines--the Lumpenproletariat has spoken, according to the guys in Market Research!--is a sad excuse for accepting a world in which one need not be knowledgeable, or honest, or forthright, to be authentic. Just fool some of the Demos some of the time.

Paula Deen isn't going to become a spokeswoman for healthier eating. That's already established. Th' fuck is someone hoping for that, anyway? Th' fuck do we put up with all the other phonies?

Piers, n. : The Vertiginous Self-Loathing That Follows An Ill-Considered And Lube-Free Bout Of Sodomy With A Fatuous Clown

SO Piers Morgan asks Rick Santorum how he'd counsel a raped and pregnant daughter:

“I would do what every father must do: Counsel your daughter to do the right thing.You can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that too could ruin her life."

“This is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that son or daughter was created, it still is her child.”

Okay, first: we have to raid British teevee to find this guy? For fuck's sake, this--The Kitty Dukakis Gotcha!--is the way we still ask this question? Santorum's willing to sentence thousands of women to death in childbirth because the representatives of a 2000-year-dead imaginary carpenter tell him so. What does how he claims he'd counsel his own child have to do with anything, except the apparent expectation that he might suddenly admit that his one claim to campaign contributions doesn't apply to him personally? Sure. Sure he would.

How many times do we imagine Rick Santorum has practiced answering this question for a national audience? You think some consultant asked him if he could choke up on "son or daughter", maybe just a little?

It's like asking Mitch Daniels whether some incident of corporate rapine would cause him to burn his five copies of Atlas Shrugged. What's he supposed to say? "Wow, ya got me, Piers. I'm actually a total fraud, and just in this for the money. You Brits are tough."

How 'bout asking Santorum about women who're fortunate enough not to be part of his brood, whom he nonetheless helped sentence to much riskier medical procedures regardless of their religious beliefs, or the wishes of their parents?

And if you have to ask stupid questions, how 'bout following up by asking him why he doesn't have the courage to defend his theological beliefs without weaseling? It's not an easy choice? According to the Roman church it is, at least morally. It's certainly one Rick Santorum is ready, willing, and eager to make in millions of cases where he doesn't know anyone involved, or the medical issues, or anything else but the Pope's wishes. You wanna trap him in hypocrisy, ask about the hypocrisy which claims that procedure designed to save his wife's life at the expense of his "baby" differed qualitatively from 99.999% of late-term abortions.

Santorum is a loathsome slug; he's Newt Gingrich without the entertainment value. He may deserve to have any sort of frothy mix hurled at him, in public. The public, on the other hand, deserves better. Just for the novelty, if for nothing else.

Purity Of Essence

SHORTER David Brooks: "Sure, Mitt Romney's character has been shaped by piratical capitalism and kooky theology. But only the good parts."

Okay, for starters: the issue with Bain isn't whether Mitt Romney obeyed the law, and it's certainly not whether we can find right-wing mouthpieces willing to defend him in public by spouting some blather about the American "system"; it's whether one can do everything up to the letter of the law and thereby claim to have been ethical, even moral, beyond question. It's whether there are different rules for the rich guys who make the rules than for the poor schlubs who keep imagining, against all evidence, that they are voting for honest men. And it's about just how much plutocracy Republican shills will defend without losing their self-appointed status as spokesmen for the Real America.

There's no sacred text of Alexander Hamilton which consecrates what was done at Bain. There's no shrine to unfettered rapine honored in every American household. What Bain did--what Willard Mitt Romney and his two hard-scrabbled Hahvahd degrees did--was take every advantage of a gamed system, a gamed system we can call, not for want of a better term but because there is no better term, the Reagan Revolution.

Faced with a troubled, stagnant economy which was in trouble, and had stagnated, largely because its multinational colossi did not want to be bothered adapting to a changing world--one in which energy wasn't plentiful and cheap, one in which the United States did not stand as the only global player, one in which consumers had begun to take their rightful place in the endless merry-go-round of merchantilism--in other words, the world of the 21st century, the one we're failing to adapt to today--unless their built-in advantages were preserved. So the Reagan administration, and the Western-Southern alliance in the Congress, defanged and dismantled the legislative safeguards which had for two generations somewhat leveled the playing field, and protected the vulnerable public from the worst of Boom and Bust. Which allowed the "visionaries" and "tenacious achievers" to bleed the system, to convert assets into cash. Meanwhile destroying the assets.

Fooled plenty of people. Made Reagan look like an Economic Miracle Worker, provided you didn't look too closely or ask why he simultaneously had the worst jobs creation record of any post-war President. Until his successor inherited the snake oil inventory.

That's what Romney did; his tireless efforts were designed to prove that any idiot with money can make more money, provided making more money is the only thing he cares about.

Mitt Romney is running for President of the United States, not the CEO of Citicorp. I know, GOP shills aren't supposed to recognize any difference. But the rest of us do, and we haven't had any choice in the matter since 2007. Romney chose money over morality; now that choice has bitten him in the ass. If it was all so innocent--heroic, even--in the first place there'd be no need for all the hoop-jumping going on in its defense.

Speaking of which, Dave, I know it's tough to come up with 800 words defending the inexcusable, but turning 600 of the over to a recapitulation of some guy's book about the Pioneer Mormon Romneys? And, you should pardon the expression, fer chrissakes:

It is a story of relentless effort, of recovery and of being despised (in their eyes) because of their own success. Romney himself experienced none of this hardship, of course, but Jews who didn’t live through the Exodus are still shaped by it.

Only if they ignore the clear historical record that nothing like the Exodus happened, since nothing like the Egyptian Captivity happened. Modern Jews, of course, are entirely justified in being shaped by the Holocaust, but you didn't wanna go there, right? Especially since the victims of Hitler's genocide are all now unwitting Mormons. And while Romney's progenitors certainly faced an armed and bigoted populace, that was nothing compared to what African-Americans faced, so I glad you skipped that too, Dave. So, I'm sure, is the rest of the Mormon hierarchy, which finally got around to making colored boys into men in 1978. When Willard Mitt was thirty-one.

I'm sorry. Was that a cheap shot? Is it unfair, since "Mitt Romney can’t talk about his family history on the campaign trail. Mormonism is an uncomfortable subject." ? Y'all sure expected Barack Obama to explain Jeremiah Wright.

Dodging A Bollock

Chris Cillizza and Dan Balz, "Rick Perry to end presidential candidacy, expected to endorse Newt Gingrich". January 19

LAST week someone--I negligently failed to note who--said that Colbert hid the utmost seriousness of purpose behind being silly, while the Media hides its profound silliness behind a guise of seriousness. So:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry will end his bid for the Republican presidential nomination today and is expected to endorse former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, according to two sources familiar with his thinking.

Gingrich himself said via email this morning that all he knows is “not much. Rumors.”

[Emphasis mine.] Please, It's too late to start. And if you've decided to anyway, please aim little higher. Like off the ground.

Here's a couple of ideas: 1) What are we supposed to make of the profound silliness at the center of the Republican presidential race? and 2) Why aren't any Republicans bothered by it?

J. R. "Rick" Perry has been governor of The Republic of Texas for eleven fucking years, during which he had amply demonstrated that his wits, while perhaps sufficient to manage the world's largest manure field, fall quite a bit short of what's required for serious national office, even in our debased age. Yet Perry was treated as a Force that demanded reckoning with, long before he entered with a pratfall, and it became okay to laugh at him.

Now he's gonna toss to Gingrich, a liar, a blowhard, the world's least credible academician, a petty criminal yet too incompetent to try covering his tracks, a racist, a despiser of pettier thieves, as well as the less fortunate, and a smug little doughboy with the morals, and ethics, of a syphilitic polecat. The Press doesn't like the man. Not for any of the above, but because he speaks down to them instead of offering professional courtesy.

Four years after it nominated a laughingstock to be Vice President of the United States--and learned that she was wildly more popular among the faithful than the War Hero in the top slot--the Party of Burke Weekends at David Brooks' has offered up two talking hairdos and six--make that eight--certifiable lunatics. At every debate stop the Republican rank and file cheers, loudly and long, for dog-whistle racism, cheery threats of political violence, and expressions of a fervent and twisted distaste for anything approximating reality. What does Brooks have to say about it? What does George Eff Will have to say about it? "Gee, I wish Mitch Daniels was running"