Need We Say More? Vol. LXXXVI

Times Teaser:

Aggressive Acts by Iran Signal Pressure on Its Leadership
By SCOTT SHANE and ROBERT F. WORTH

A flurry of actions and statements by Iran this week suggest its leaders are responding frantically, and more unpredictably, to the tightening of sanctions.

LOOK: it is now the 13th month of a Republican presidential campaign--as in President of the United States, the Leader of the Free World, a man who commands an actual nuclear arsenal, not just some aluminum tubes--so freighted with idiocy, illiteracy, hysteria, backwoods religious mania, Xenophobia, howlers, whoppers, bad sci-fi plots, galloping juvenilia, sexual phobias, spittle-flecked nationalism, off-hand wagers larger than most people's life savings, and, of course, the mandatory hushed reverence at the mention of "Ronald Reagan" that we ought to at least think twice before we start calling other people's leaders "frantic and unpredictable".

Wednesday Olio: Don't Forget Yer Helmet Edition

That's not grooming, it's a martial art.

• Maybe If We Tried Explaining The Problem Accurately, Pt. 1 (via Weigel):

SCHEIFFER: And Senator Blunt from Missouri, one of your Republican colleagues, he wants an amendment now that would allow any group that had a moral objection to this, to not have to pay for birth control pills. Are you willing to go as far as Senator Blunt wants to go on this?

SENATOR MITCH MCCONNELL: Yeah, it's not a moral objection. This is about the free exercise of religion. And under our constitution, you don't take a poll to find out how people feel about a constitutional freedom...

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, I-- I guess what I'm asking you though is-- is are you willing to go as far as Senator Blunt now wants to go and just write in legislation that would ban any group that had just a, quote, "moral objection," not just a religious group but just any group that had a moral objection to that? Would-- would you be willing to push that in the Senate?

"As far as Blunt wants to go…" is inside baseball. "Moral, not just religious objections" is an attempt to shame a Republican with evidence of Constitutional misfeasance and religious pandering, and whaddya you think the reaction's gonna be, Bob? Access to abortion, let alone contraception, is a Constitutionally-protected right, same as free exercise. Why do these guys always get a free pass? (Because you're too cowardly to ask the question, that's why.)

• Maybe If We Tried Explaining The Problem Accurately, Pt. 2. I appreciate, really, the fact that Fred Kaplan even raises the issue. But “addressing the problem” and “tiptoeing around anything that might ruffle the script” are mutually exclusive:

Today the attention is leaning more heavily on the rest of the budget, which is where the fate of the economy—and the election—is more likely to be decided. But after the economy gets better and we’re out of Afghanistan and it’s a little bit politically safe to talk about these things, a serious discussion needs to be had on what the military should be doing, what kinds of weapons it really needs, and how much it needs to spend for them.

Th' fuck? “Once the economy gets better?” One way to improve the economy is to spend our money on anything but the military, which has the worst return record in the entire budget. “Once we're not at war”? The United States has been involved in a major conflict 30 of the past 60 years, and we've got one foot in Iran at present. Those wars--Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I and II, and Afghanistan--meant a combined total of nothing to US security. “When it's politically safe to raise the issue”? Heaven help us all.

The point isn't "we're spending too much on carrier groups". The point is we've got no mission for carriers at all, save intimidating tenth-rate powers, and we would be a lot better off if we were required to do that, if at all, by using smarts first. A five-carrier navy is probably sufficient, given a sane, rational, and an honest admission of what our role is. That would be--lemme do the math real quick--approximately five more carriers than anyone else in the world has, excluding Britain, and theirs are docked somewhere with For Sale signs hanging to leeward. Yeah, I said "given a sane, rational, and an honest admission of what our role is." You wanna cut the military budget, just a little, in some safe and friendly rhetorical environment easily obtainable by anyone who cares to pull one out of his ass? Then start overcoming the sixty years of Defense budgets so irrational they'd be involuntarily committed, if corporations were people. We've spent that money--the Atomic Powered Bomber! the B1! the B2! the twelve carrier navy!--just to placate the screaming irrational militarists on the Right, and so that everyone involved in Defense procurement could get well. A rational reduction in the US Defense spending? Right. Wake me when the conversation starts, Fred.

And by the way, “why are there as many as 552,100 troops?” is a peculiar question coming as it does from one of Slate's many Iraq war floggers. Investment in troops is practically the only military expenditure that pays off to the general economy.

• So last Sunday, afternoon or after dark, depending on which story you get, IMPD arrested Timothy Wolf, the 65-year-old who's coached basketball at Martinsville (IN) High School for 64 years. Wolf was arrested in Eagle Creek Park; he was charged with indecent exposure.

That's what we know. What we don't know is the identity of the 17-year-old girl (not charged) who was in the car/ out of the car/ somewhere in the park at the same time, and whether she was a Martinsville student.

Here's another thing we don't know: whether any of the locals reporting on the story bothered to ask.

Now, this is their favorite sort of story, for the opportunity it gives them and the audience to be prurient and moral scolds at the same time. (Okay, so it's their third favorite sort of story, after: “Would you like to know what's happened in the Super Bowl Village in the five minutes since we last reported on it?” and “Here's what somebody twitted about a dead celebrity.” )

Okay, so, confusion reigns a lot of the time, at first, with police reports, but it's not as if Sexual Perversion, Especially Involving Someone Student-Aged coupled with Perp Could Be Described As a Teacher/ School Staffer hasn't been automatic box office for decades now. The guy's a 65-year-old schlub employed on the taxpayer dime (before he suddenly retired), and in loco parentis. Where, besides his school, is he meeting 17 year olds? If you're protecting her identity so be it, but the question is a real one. No one even acted as if it had occurred to 'em.

Channel 8 originally reported that he'd been discovered in his car "with his pants unzipped". Which was either a euphemism, or else half the 65-year-old men in Marion county should be locked up.

• That'd be the same Channel 8--listen, I think the "news" is biased, but generally towards the status quo, and to the extent that the status quo resonates with people in the news producer-on-air-talent tax bracket. But 8's political reporting has been hinky for years now, and Jim Shella, the David Broder of Local Political Pundits, ought to be made to wear a CO detector if he's gonna stovepipe so many Republican talking points.

Yesterday around 5:30 I happened to walk through the room as one of their anchors said this about the House Republican cave on the Payroll Tax Cut extension (mind you, now, the debate has been news all year): "The House is set to vote on the Republican bill to extend payroll tax cuts. Some Democrats may object…" I don't know how you out-FAUX FOX any plainer than that.

All In Favor Of Chaotic Markets And Ordered Lives...?

David Brooks, “The Materialist Fallacy”. February 13

SO it turns out that Charles Murray is to the “conservatives” at the Times what Halley's Comet is to a superstitious medieval peasantry.

This is Brooks' second Murray column in two weeks, meaning this one is designed to make it appear that his earlier teenaged crush has been accompanied by the appropriate somber adult reflection on the issues. In other words, it's even worse.

It is, in fact, a near-textbook example of what makes Brooks truly awful: the “I'm a stern-task-master instructor at an exclusive high-school for overachievers” tone, the “comparison” of competing conservative and liberal “philosophies” made up on the spot for the sake of the piece, the ensuing demolition of the liberal philosophy by application of Brooks' iron Fiat, the wholesale larding of a piece--already sporting a fat-to-muscle ratio so high it would cause people in Muncie, Indiana, to goggle in disbelief as it waddled by--with various pop-sociology and -psychology treatises, roughly 90% of which, should the reader go to the trouble of tracking them down, turn out to have been written by economists or political scientists, the backhand assertion that these findings Brooks is sharing with us are universally acknowledged in their fields, or whatever fields they were aimed at, leading us--by process of scientific ratiocination and proper living--to the Economic Republican position. The only thing missing is the “I'm a moderate, and boy do the ‘conservatives’ beat me up over it” simpering (see PBS News Hour, The), absent because he can't pull off that one and the “Newt and Callista Gingrich Endowed Chair of Applied Psychobabble at Southland Mall Community College” tone simultaneously.

To be fair, Brooks does mix it up this time. For reasons of his own the "conservative" philosophy has become twain: a “neocon” philosophy (we abandoned bourgeois social norms) and a “libertarian” philosophy (social programs encourage indolence and baby-poppin'). There must be a distinction here, and a good reason why we're ascribing “major” philosophical lines to groups which did not exist in the 1970s except in some Sociology lab. The 70s! When neocons and libertarians could have “congregated” jointly at a refrigerator box and not been able to link hands around. A congregation of libertarians in the 1970s consisted of two people buying Atlas Shrugged bumping into each other in the college bookstore check-out line and discovering they're in the same Freshman Comp section.

Now, your guess is as good as mine. Is this the typical lazy Reagantot history from someone who came of age in the 1980s, and assumed the past was just like the present, only longer? Was Brooks throwing a bone to Charles Murray, after throwing him a boner two weeks ago? Are we trying to hide what the New Nixon Republican Coalition was actually saying about race and class in those days? Or is Brooks just rewriting a current flap as though it represented Eternal Verities, the better to rhetorically humiliate vast stretches of one's imaginary opponents?

Of course the “libertarian” and “neocon” “philosophies”of “the 70s” immediately disappear from the piece, having co-performed their function as The Only Theory Standing Now That David Brooks Has Razed The Liberal Village. This is part of the Brooks MO: announce the “real belief” behind competing Left/Right opinions (maybe “Center/Right” is more accurate, not that we want to introduce “accuracy” at this late date); spend the next 300 words disputing the liberal philosophy, buttressed by quotes and scientificalism; then declare the liberal philosophy dead by “possibly several” paper cuts. Which makes “conservatism” the winner. And still undefeated heavyweight champ. This is generally stated with a soupçon of ambiguity as to Brooks' personal support, the better to continue peacefully grazing on the prairie margins of PBS and NYT liberalism, which is where congenital simpering and the increasing lunacy of his party have forced him to ruminate.

Here it is in action:

As early as the 1970s, three large theories had emerged to explain the weakening of the social fabric. Liberals congregated around an economically determinist theory. The loss of good working-class jobs undermined communities and led to the social deterioration.

Do we have to go on? I'm sure liberals were in favor of jobs in the 1970s. I trust that they were. Used to be both parties did. I just can't say I remember running into the argument, at the tail-end of the post-war US economic hegemony, that the manufacturing jobs still humming across the Rust Belt were the cause of social disintegration. I remember a lot of liberals talking about the alienation of the working man, or the privileged idiocy behind the anti-environment, anti-safety, anti-regulation, You'll Buy Gas Guzzling Behemoths And Like It attitude of the Big Three, which was just then beginning to bleed market share to smaller, better-built vehicles, and would have finished ceding the future to Japan by the end of the decade. That's the way liberals actually talked in those days, as I recall it.

So the alternative explanation, Mr. Brooks, is that you're somehow trying to fob off some contemporary Democratic argument as the guiding star of the "liberal" point of view, rather than a specific response to the clear, dismal, and beyond-the-help-of-pop-sociology Reagan record. Which, unsurprisingly, owes its popularity among liberals not to the 1970s, but to the latter days of the Clinton administration, when their man's economic record so eclipsed that of St. Ronnie of the Miracles.

Which means there's no value to examining this cornerstone of American liberal thought; but supposing it were actually of vital importance. So what? If you're hungry, do you weigh the competing culinary philosophies of Northern China and Northern Italy, or do you decide what you'd like to eat?

And if there was some value in demolishing a single-clause definition of Liberalism, wouldn't you still be required to, you know, do so? Maybe I'm way off base, Dave; not only do I not take your point on this, I'm not sure you have one. It seems to run:

1) Neo-conservatives (in the 70s!) argued that "the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms led to social disruption."

2) It's still a good idea to finish high school, even if there aren't any jobs.

therefore:

3) "[E]conomic determinism would be bad enough if it was just making public debate dumber. But the amputation of sociologic, psychological and cognitive considerations makes good policy impossible."

Q.E.D. If I missed some subtlety in the middle there that explains all this, kindly let me know, ℅ this blog.


JUST another word about Murray Worship at the Times Op-Ed Carnival. It reminds me of nothing so much as some winking conjugal scene in Hayes Code Hollywood, where one foot is kept firmly planted on the floor, and the real action is off-screen. Neither Brooks nor Douthat wants to shower in Murray's antebellumisms, but will take just a splash behind the ears; neither wants anything to do with his conclusions, which apparently admit the ungodly hybridization of libertoonianism and religious mania has no more prescription for the doom and Negroes it sees everywhere than do either of those programs alone. This is unacceptable to either man, as they prefer to believe, at least in public, that a good talking to by Pope or Sociology prof might still turn this thing around. Murray seems to exist as way for Brooks and Douthat to demonstrate how quickly they'd point to evidence if by chance they had any.

Anyway, Aren't Subtitles French?

Ross Douthat, "Can the Working Class Be Saved?" February 12

MR. Douthat, Mr. Brooks? For the record, the title of Charles Murray's new opus is Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 [emphasis mine, and Murray's, too]. I guess the advance copies they delivered to the Times left that last part out.

Now then, before we go any further: Charles Murray is not a thinker, or a scientist. If we'd like to be kind we can call him a paid political blatherer, like the two of you; it's nicer than "shitstain". We might also mention a Ph.D from M.I.T. in what is grandiosely known as Political Science, because, frankly, we're no longer concerned about the reputations of elite Eastern academies getting any worse.

Here's the deal: if you want to tout Murray's ideas, come back in 50-100 years and try to resurrect him in a world where he's justifiably forgotten, and where you might be able to apologize for his racist idiocies without anyone understanding what th' fuck you're talking about. Until then, no.

CHARLES MURRAY’S “Coming Apart,” the book that’s launched a thousand arguments this winter, is a brilliant work with an exasperating conclusion. What’s brilliant is Murray’s portrait, rich in data and anecdote, of the steady breakdown of what he calls America’s “founding virtues” — thrift and industriousness, fidelity and parental responsibility, piety and civic engagement — within America’s working class, and the personal and communal wreckage that’s ensued.

What’s exasperating is what the author suggests policy makers can do about the social crisis: in essence, nothing.

Murray has now perpetrated any number of books which could be refuted on their back covers. The late great Stephen Jay Gould on The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in the year of its publication:

The general claim is neither uninteresting nor illogical, but it does require the validity of four shaky premises, all asserted (but hardly discussed or defended) by Herrnstein and Murray. Intelligence, in their formulation, must be depictable as a single number, capable of ranking people in linear order, genetically based, and effectively immutable. If any of these premises are false, their entire argument collapses. For example, if all are true except immutability, then programs for early intervention in education might work to boost IQ permanently, just as a pair of eyeglasses may correct a genetic defect in vision. The central argument of The Bell Curve fails because most of the premises are false.

Similarly, Murray's premise here--if, indeed, Murray's real premise is not "write an apologia for my employers at the American Enterprise Institute"--that the conveniently white underclass is suffering, not from thirty years of Republican (and Centrist Democrat) economic malignity, but from a kind of systemic cultural Dirty Hippiehood, is as easily tossed on its absurd clown face. Hell, let's just start with that "1960-2010" schtick Ross had to leave out of the title for spatial concerns. Let's make it "1950" instead. We still see a decline in marriage, and the explosive rise in divorce rates. The decline in church attendance begins here.

Yet the employment picture is almost continually rosy, a big mystery unless you happen to be in on the fact that the US was the world's only post-war global economy.

If Murray’s prescription for the social crisis is an exercise in libertarian wishful thinking, this liberal alternative is a mix of partisan demonization and budgetary fantasy. It was globalization, not Republicans, that killed the private-sector union and reduced the returns to blue-collar work. It’s arithmetic, not plutocracy, that’s standing between the left and its dream of a much more activist government. Even if liberals get the higher tax rates on the rich they so ardently desire, the money won’t be adequate to finance our existing entitlements, let alone a New Deal 2.0.

The Crux of the Issue and How to Miss It! The fact that complex considerations surround every object of human ratiocination does not moot everything, nor exclude the possibility of the adequacy of simple explanations adequately considered. If it did, Ross, your Church would be out of business, just to name one notable example.

The question (for "liberals") isn't who can cough up what explanation for the decline of everyone outside the upper upper class in the past three decades; it's "when are we going to acknowledge the disconnect between the claims that Reagan tax-cutting would Save the Day, or at least the Morning, and what actually fucking happened?" Higher tax rates, and the closing of the more egregious tax loopholes the rich and their enablers have written into the tax code, is a question of fair domestic policy, not magical solutions to the decades-deep hole we've dug while Republican/libertarian fiscal policies held sway.

By the way, where was this trenchant analysis while this was actually going on? Where were you? Where was Murray? Busy blaming the underclass for not being more like yourselves: married (Murray's such a believer he's done it twice), religious and libertarian, hard-working on a deadline, white, Hahvahd educated, and willing to understand the distinction between work and theft, and excuse the latter when it's on a large enough scale.

Where's that analysis, by the way? Whatever happened to that America that jailed financial swindlers and war profiteers, which was outraged by the big and powerful screwing the poor and defenseless? That strove to increase equality, care for the needy, reward loyalty, and shun rapacious self-love? Do you imagine you're the only ones who can play this game? The late 70s and early 80s were the busted sluice gate of greed, self-absorption, libertarian self-regard, and the re-writing of inconvenient recent histories of our international adventurism and domestic abuses; it's also the time when an entrenched ruling class (of both parties) chose unlimited campaign spigots and property rights over basic fairness and reasonable, responsible growth. But that sort of thing gets a pass, since the very wealthy aren't constrained by those universal laws you just made up. Thank goodness they still have some advantages left.

Pawn Takes Bishop

Amanda Marcotte, "Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception". February 10

James Vicini, "U.S. Catholic bishops oppose Obama birth-control plan". February 11

DEAR Amanda: I can't say I wish I shared your sunny outlook, because I don't; this President fighting his way out of a corner he painted himself into would be news, but only because he's rarely, if ever done so. Maybe if I had some rooting interest. Maybe if he'd given me much reason to root for him.

Rather than, of course, against his abhorrent opponents.

The fun part of this is that Obama just pulled a fast one on Republicans. He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.) With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they've been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they'll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception.

If rationality trumped irrationality in this country, Liberia and Burma would be the only two countries on earth that haven't adopted the metric system.

When this stops going double for people who insist they talk to dead carpenters, lemme know. Meanwhile, here's what the U.S. Conference of Bishops had to say:

…Obama's proposal "continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions."…

The bishops said the compromise failed to provide "clear protection" for many employers who might oppose birth control personally but not be classified as a religious institution, and thus ineligible to seek exemption from the federal mandate to provide free contraception as part of every insurance package.

So, forgive me if I'm not overwhelmed if all the intellectual and political willpower of the Obama administration/campaign managed to come up with a Plan B.

Because I've been hearing this since I had the audacity to vote for George McGovern in 1972, sending the Democratic party into a tailspin it's still apologizing for. That was less than a month after Roe was argued for the second time. In the intervening forty years public opinion has been significantly swayed by squishy, religious-based, religious-inspired, and religion-funded arguments, such that today we are at loggerheads, where then it was a matter of a mouthy minority pushing to enshrine its Bronze Age beliefs. One big reason for that drift is that the attitude was allowed to develop in a vacuum, because the Democratic party has run screaming from defending it ever since. (Ditto Acid and Amnesty.)

So, forgive me, but Scoring Rhetorical Points on the Republican Party may be great for Obama's reelection campaign, which may or may not be good news for the battle over the composition of the Court. Otherwise, maybe it's time to look at what defending the fucking Constitution might do for Democratic chances, not just in 2012, but into the future. The President of the United States finessed the showboating Bishops and the corrupt intellectual sluggards of the opposition party? Now they have to make a different defense of what is actually the indefensible? Whoopee.

Friday Olio: Shorter Than Mitch Daniels' Tube Socks Edition

• Shorter David Brooks:

"Yes, the David Brooks Republican candidate for President is a complete stiff, but here's some 50s pop sociology which would explain why he's an inept panderer as well, assuming we were all as intellectually rigorous as tweeners at a slumber party".

Look, Romney is your problem. So, too, is finding excuses for the impotence of Republican "moderates" in the face of the mass lunacy of 98% of the party. I leave you to it, Dave, with my best wishes; but you've had six years now to come up with something on Romney, and all you've got is a wish sandwich and some sidewalk psychoanalysis of the Post War Suburban Boom?

Enough, really. You and all the other public thinkers of the Republican party have tried to portray this field as insufficiently electable as though that was just a projection of their Q ratings. Even the recent admissions of the obvious--that Herman Cain is a buffoon, Michele Bachmann a religious maniac, Rick Perry a vapid aging pretty boy--have had to pretend that Sarah Palin isn't a Republican icon, that George W. Bush and Ronald W. Reagan weren't celebrated for their doltish anti-intellectualism, that the modern Republican party isn't, in fact, a coalition of the wealthy, their paid spokesmen, and whatever Lowest Common Denomivoter they've caught in their nets over the past sixty years. For fear, of course, that speaking sense would cost you elections.

And what's it gotten you? You think Rick Perry's a bumbler, Newt Gingrich (another one-time Hero) has "baggage", and that Mitt needs a personality transplant. Your opponents think it's what you've been running, and nominating, and fucking defending since Nelson Rockefeller died of hummer-induced thrombosis. Who's right?

• Shorter Kevin M. Ryan, Indianapolis Star, Super Bowl Sunday:

"Now that the opportunity for sensationalistic headlines has passed, and prior to the actual arrest records becoming public record, I think we can all agree that the scare stories about International Child-Sex Slavery, Inc., and its annual descent upon the Super Bowl host city are wildly exaggerated, while noting that the effort may very well have prevented as many as two or three underage prostitutes from working the crowd."

Shorter Kevin M. Ryan, one week before last year's Super Bowl:

"Look out, Dallas! Thousands of enslaved underaged prostitutes are headed your way, just like they did in Miami last year!"

Evidently Mr. Big got away again this time. Quit tippin' him off, for fuck's sake.

• Shorter Charles Merkwürdigeliebe Krauthammer:

"I'm willing to be as disingenuous about theology as I am about politics. Surprised? Plus, Catholic hospitals, which no one with a smattering of familiarity about current events could ever imagine the Obama administration was going to cave on."

Quick Question

LET'S say that, because you were Pol Pot, Joe Stalin, or Mariah Carey in a previous lifetime, you're reincarnated as a Slate writer. And not just that, but one assigned to the "Explainer" column.

Now, in view of what you stand to lose if you fuck up this time--life as, say, Mitt Romney's dog, or Bill Frist's cat, or Mitch Daniels' barber--would you not take care to note--to explain, even--that your claim that "millions, probably" of children are sexually abused by their teachers is based on what children themselves told pollsters? And maybe avoid calling it "the best available study" instead of, oh, "made-up shit of no probative value"?

Hey, I don't mean to belittle the fight against child exploitation, but if you wanna put an end to it maybe "agribusiness" and "the Roman Catholic Church" could find their way onto the list. How many children get fucked in school every day by the Texas and Louisiana State Boards of Education?

Pigeons From Hell

Ross Douthat, "The Persistence of the Culture War". February 7

Kathleen Parker, "Obama runs roughshod over religious freedom". February 7

I LET Douthat in here, not to run up the rhetorical score, nor even to goad the ungoadable Grey Lady for the worst choice in Opinion columnists since the guy Douthat replaced, but because he represents the cutting edge of the Religio-Cultural argument in this country: thirty years out of date, friendless even in its own party, and theologically, uh, facile.

The Culture War is Back! pants young Ross, apparently forgetting that he's been covering the Republican Presidential race in his voluminous spare time.

Okay, so there was one other reason I brought him up:

Before he disappointed his many admirers by declining to seek the Republican nomination, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana told the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson that the gravity of the economic and fiscal challenges facing America’s next president might require calling a temporary “truce on the so-called social issues.” On culture war controversies like abortion and same-sex marriage, he suggested, “we’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while.”

The comments earned Daniels a round of criticism from social conservatives, and they probably would have haunted him on the primary trail. But in a sense his point was understandable — and given his own firm anti-abortion record, he probably thought he had the credibility to deliver it. To everything there is a political season, and in an era of high unemployment and record deficits a president who picked too many fights on non-economic issues would find himself an ex-president soon enough.

Isn't is abso-fucking-lutely remarkable how such a simple little gag as Daniels' flew over so many heads? Especially in our nation's typing class?

I mean, it's bad enough that this got treated at face value, coming as it did from one of the most disingenuous PR concoctions in all of American politics. Why is it treated as though President Daniels could have, or would have, called such a truce? It was patent nonsense then, and it was patent nonsense again when he used it in that State of the Union response. He used it at the Weekly Standard, in 2010, as a declaration that the Money Boys who run that national pea-shake game known as the Grand Old Party weren't going to follow Sarah Palin down the drain pipe, and he used it again two weeks ago in a risible attempt to assure rational Americans that the Republican party isn't held hostage by religious fanatics. It meant about as much, each time, as any other advertising slogan. Or as anything else Mitch "Indiana Doesn't Need A Right To Work Law" Daniels says when there's money on the line.

(Daniels own "firm" anti-abortion record consists, like most things about the man, of hot air and spittle. He kept the cranks in the Indiana Republican party from pulling any funny stuff until he'd been reelected--every Life Begins At Conception Act or Act of Conception Act, died in the organizational period before the General Assembly met. Then, having been convinced by his own Presidential bull of the need to get with the Republican times, namely the 1870s, he defunded Planned Parenthood last year, before his wife, the Lovely Cheri-with-an-I, told him he couldn't run.)

Let's get to some award-winning journalism:

Most Americans can hardly believe we’re having a national debate about birth control in the 21st century — more than 50 years after the Pill became available and decades after condoms became as commonplace as, well, balloons.

The reason for the incredulity is because we’re actually not having a debate about birth control. To repeat: The debate is about freedom of conscience. It ain’t about the Pill.

Does this mean most Americans have slept through the intervening forty years of conscience clauses, including the radical agitation of the Bush Comedy Administration, and are just now waking up?

This particular episode is significant because the Obama administration has provided the narrowest conscience protection in our nation’s history, according to legal experts who are challenging the administration’s rule.

Well, if legal experts who are challenging the administration agree…

We have a long tradition in this country of working around religious differences so that people are not forced to violate their faith to satisfy a secular mandate. This is the essence of the debate.

Sure, sure. Tell it to the Mormons. Tell it to people who think they should vaccinate their children with Jebus. Tell it to Catholic young men who might object to serving in the military in an unjust war. Set it to music and whistle it while you go try to join the Native American Church.

Tell a Quaker employer he doesn't have to withhold taxes that go to military spending. Tell a Christian Scientist employer he doesn't have to without Medicare contributions. Tell Bob Jones University it can still accept Federal monies but go back to hatin' the coloreds.

When the state insists that one’s religious beliefs be supplanted by another’s, in this case by secularism, then might one argue that the state is establishing a religion in contravention of the Constitution’s intent?

Sure one might. Just as one might tap dance with no legs, provided words were all that was needed.

Come to think of it, they're exactly the same.

And "secular religion", Kathy? Secular religion.? The Roman Catholic Church, with nearly two millennia of intellectual history behind it, is going to borrow arguments from backwoods Baptists?

The new health-care reform act’s mandate that Catholic institutions pay for insurance to cover birth control and even abortifacient drugs (a.k.a. “morning-after” pills) runs deeply contrary to fundamental Catholic teaching.

Yeah, fundamental for a hundred fifty of the last two thousand years. And it's "Catholic institutions" being mandated to pay only if you ignore the fact that Catholic religious institutions are exempt.

And, okay, look: some of y'all get a little emotional about this; lots of your fellow Catholics do not. I realize it can trigger the occasional exaggeration. The Catholic Church is not being "forced" to "pay for abortions"; the Catholic Church as any other employer in the US will be mandated to provide comprehensive medical insurance to the people it employs while seeking to make a profit. I'm sure you all are actually willing to be reasonable about this, and as respectful of other people's beliefs as you demand they be of your own.

These are tough, emotional issues, to be sure. But consider that we allow even Nazis to march because we believe so fervently in freedom of expression.

All righty, then.

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.