Presumably, Demands For Full Four-Year Tuition Refunds Began Pouring In At 8 AM This Morning

INDIANAPOLIS Racist Star Evapolink:

Butler University Commencement

Remarks by Governor Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.

May 9, 2009

[Butler University is a private liberal-arts college in Indianapolis with an enrollement of 4500. It is nationally renowned for its Fine Arts program, a first-rate College of Music, its overachieving men's basketball teams, and world-class binge drinking. World-class binge drinking, formerly an intramural sport, replaced Lacrosse in 2007, thanks to the efforts of current President Bobby "If 18-Year-Olds Are Allowed To Drink And Drive, It Means They'll Drive Off Campus, Solving My End Of The Problem, Anyway" Fong. Butler still ranks as a Division III Hockey powerhouse, reflecting its long-standing reputation as one of the nation's premier Midwest destinations for rich college-age fuck ups from the East. Notable grads include Peter Lupus, strongman Willie Armitage in the original Mission Impossible series, and, pound for pound, considered the biggest prick ever to live in Marion County; convicted former Illinois governor George Ryan, best known as Not The Guy Who Married Jeri Ryan; and the Reverend Jim Jones. Check the Wiki page if you think I cherry-picked that list.]

Governor Daniels:

[snip of customary remarks sucking up to parents, faculty, Butler Basketball, binge drinking, and, first and foremost, to Mitch Daniels himself]

Among the grossest and most arbitrary of such lumpings is the idea of a generation, a generalization at war with the obvious reality that any age cohort is widely diverse, containing heroes and villains, angels and devils, geniuses and fools.

In other words, strap yourselves in for the grossest and most arbitrary lumping of a generation you are likely to hear between now and the time they wheel you into some futuristic Republican cost-cutter's wet dream of a nursing care facility.

Even though the whole notion of a “generation” must be discounted as the loosest of concepts, within limits it is possible to spot the defining characteristics of an age and the human beings who create it. Along with most of your faculty and parents, I belong to the most discussed, debated and analyzed generation of all time, the so-called Baby Boomers. By the accepted definition, the youngest of us is now forty-five, so the record is pretty much on the books, and the time for verdicts can begin.

Followed by the hangings.

Which leads me to congratulate you in advance. As a generation, you are off to an excellent start. You have taken the first savvy step on the road to distinction, which is to follow a weak act.

Ten thousand comedians out of work, and we get this.

I wish I could claim otherwise, but we Baby Boomers are likely to be remembered by history for our numbers, and little else, at least little else that is admirable.

The reader is, of course, welcome to finish the speech from here. If we do not it is only because this dry-shod crossing of the ocean of Mitch Daniels soul confirms precisely everything we've been saying about the perpetual sexual juveniles of Mitch's generation of Sixties Republicans and their thirty-five years of taking revenge for that Prom Night humiliation out on the rest of us.

We Boomers were the children that the Second World War was fought for.

Well, we were the unfortunately-delayed missionary-position romp people dreamed of while fighting that war, maybe. They had real children back in those days, too.

Parents who had endured both war and the Great Depression devoted themselves sacrificially to ensuring us a better life than they had. We were pampered in ways no children in human history would recognize. With minor exceptions...

The Displaced, the Polio-Stricken, the Non-White...

we have lived in blissfully fortunate times. The numbers of us who perished in plagues, in famine, or in combat were tiny in comparison to previous generations of Americans, to say nothing of humanity elsewhere.

Let us pause for a moment to ask: Do you have a fucking point? Because it sounds like you're either accusing me of egotistically not contracting smallpox, or of being insufficiently grateful that I didn't. Science, like Time, marches on, occasionally impeded, for a span of eight years to A Fucking Millennium or Two, by the forces of authoritarianism and religion. I'm grateful, yes, that the Germ Theory of disease has supplanted Astrology, Humors, and Exorcism, at least outside the modern American Republican base. I'm grateful I was never bled, purged, or redlined. On the other hand, Mom used to put butter on our burns, an Achilles tendon injury ended my basketball career, and we used to play Lawn Darts unsupervised. Suck it, cosseted current Butler grad!

This reminds me of my very favorite Roddenberryism, the way "Bones" McCoy would periodically break into a weepy fit because "in the 20th Century they used to cut people open to perform surgery. With knives."

All our lives, it’s been all about us. We were the “Me Generation.” We wore t-shirts that said “If it feels good, do it.” The year of my high school commencement, a hit song featured the immortal lyric “Sha-la-la-la-la-la, live for today.”

As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.

For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

Psalms 103: 15-16

Other, Bigger Hits from the Summer of Love For Everyone But Tiny Daniels: "To Sir With Love" (Lulu); "I'm a Believer" (Monkees); "Your Precious Love" (Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell). Hundred-word essays on the deep philosophic meaning of each, with emphasis on how they capture an entire generation's world-view, are due one week from today.

[By the way, kids: nobody ever wore an "If it feels good, do it" t-shirt, unless it was an extra in Psych-Out or The Trip. They sure weren't wearin' 'em in the halls of North Central High School, 1967, where the fashion was Oxford button-collar shirts, grey slacks, oxblood belts and Bass Wejuns, purchased from Roderick St. John's at Glendale Mall. God I hate nostalgia.]

As a group, we have been self-centered, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, and all too often just plain selfish. Our current Baby Boomer President has written two eloquent, erudite books, both about….himself.

Just in case you were wondering: one, yes, this is the sort of "witicism" one confronts on a regular basis in Indiana politics, and two, yes, this is precisely the sort of belch of fetid swamp gas Mitch's soul emits when he really gets going.

As a generation, we did tend to live for today. We have spent more and saved less than any previous Americans.

Details forthcoming, I suppose.

Year after year, regardless which party we picked to lead the country, we ran up deficits that have multiplied the debt you and your children will be paying off your entire working lives. Far more burdensome to you mathematically, we voted ourselves increasing levels of Social Security pensions and Medicare health care benefits, but never summoned the political maturity to put those programs on anything resembling a sound actuarial footing.

Christ on a Cracker, who was touting this guy as Presidential material the other day? Look, if we're going to play this stupid game, let's play it. From the end of WWII to the present day, every administration has left its successor a larger deficit than the one it inherited except the first Boomer president. The worst of the lot, of course, was the one whose first OMB director was Mitch "The Brain" Daniels, a man with no economics expertise whatever but a big stock of platitudes and an uncanny knowledge of when to bail on Water Company stock; followed closely by Ronald "The Great Deficit Cutter" Reagan's. Every WWII-generation administration raised the debt I've been paying all my working life, too; the difference being that my Social Security benefits were cut in 1983, and may yet be again if the people who lie about Social Security insolvency for a living have their way. We can argue about whether military/corporate entitlement is a bigger part of the problem than social entitlements, if you'd like. In the wake of what's occurred after thirty years of one side mostly controlling that argument--namely, both the military and the social safety net in tatters--we'd be happy to oblige. But fer fuck's sake, the idea that Ken "Not A Boomer" Kesey brought America to her knees with a t-shirt, while Mitch "Seven Years as a Political Sinecure to a Major Pharmaceutical Manufacturer, Thirty Years on the Taxpayers' Dime" Daniels stood by, unable to bring his Big Platitude Guns to bear in the tempestuous seas, is more an illustration of what actually happened as an entire political party went to pieces because the hippie chicks laughed at their shortcomings than it is an illustration of How We Failed.

Our irresponsibility went well beyond the financial realm. Our parents formed families and kept them intact even through difficulty “for the sake of the kids.” To us, parental happiness came first; we often divorced at the first unpleasantness, and increasingly just gave birth to children without the nuisance of marriage. “Commitment” cramps one’s style, don’t you know. Total bummer.

Fun fact: The divorce rate skyrocketed in the 50s, and did so without the help of Mitch Daniels, or as he's known in these parts, Husband #1 and #3 of Crazee Cheri Lynn Herman Daniels-Something-Daniels. Thirty years of effective control of the national legislature. How's the National Divorce Prohibition Amendment coming along, again?

Today, if you are thinking about standing on the shoulders of the past generation, I’d say “Please don’t.”

For one thing, if you stand on Mitch's shoulders you still won't be able to see over the podium.

Non-residents are reminded that Daniels thinks the big problem for his administration has been that Hoosiers just aren't smart enough to keep up with him.

Current Butler grads are further reminded that, should all go according to form, you will be listening to some bozo lie through his teeth on Commencement Day, 2032. There's no time like the present to shoot yourselves; the rest is downhill anyway.

A Brief Note On The Inadvisability Of Sequestering Yourself With Like-Minded Thinkers For A Quarter-Century. With Mustard On Top.

PLENTY enough has been made of Dijongate already, but a Wonkette commenter (who said, roughly, Dijon mustard? That shit was only marginally exotic in the 80s.) reminds us that history is too often the Dead Relative Who Left Us Some Crappy Candy Dish or Something. Real Men Don't Eat Quiche came out in the early 80s, and was an instant mega-success of the Hoola Hoop/ Where's The Beef/ Ricky Martin sort. And the fact that it was a satire was, in certain quarters, well, totally missed.

And, granted, missing the point was actually a badge of pride in some percentage of those quarters, though you won't think that would include nebbishy guys who aspired to passing the Bar some day. Nevertheless, this, a misperception of a satirical poke at social trends thirty years ago, Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs meets Fern Bars replacing Chop Houses, with Wine in place of Corn Beer, is, if not the origin, at least the engine which drives the continuing obsession with condiments, leafy vegetables, and their possible link to someone overhearing you imagining you're gay. A one-note joke, misunderstood, then incubated over and over in a hothouse, and brought out occasionally in order to demonstrate that the same idiots who missed the point a generation ago still find it uproariously funny. Dudes. If Jethro Bodine with a mouthful of caviar is funny it's because of his unlettered expectations, not because no one should bother knowing the difference between Sevruga and Shit-on-a-Stick.

Friday Tuesday Garden Blogging

1) Because I knew it was going to rain for three days following; and 2) because it's AP portfolio submissions week and my Poor Wife is using up camera batteries like the Bush administration went through substandard military hardware, except productively. It is her camera, though I wish she wouldn't use that as an excuse to treat it like it's her camera.

Dead nettle (pinkish flowers) and Siberian bugloss (blue) showing why I put up with their constant attempts to take over the entire yard. I knew the nettle was intrusive--it's intended as a groundcover--but the bugloss not so much. Its flowers are an etherial blue, though, and the foliage is nice the rest of the season. What I didn't know about the nettle was its shape-shifting; I bought only the white, with white flowers, and now there's three leaf patterns and at least that many flower colors. The little hosta, one of my favorites, is Chartreuse; the blue one's Halcyon.

More evidence of the takeover, plus the eared pot, picked up on a lark, which was the first non-terra cotta pot I'd ever bought. That year my Poor Wife decreed No More Terra Cotta in the garden (she was, as usual, right), and when I went back to the store they didn't carry 'em any more. This is the first time it's gone in the garden, instead of being displayed in its full glory, but I thought it looked great with the red double impatiens. The stone pot (with the 12 Apostles carved on the side) holds the just-now mass marketed exotic impatiens, which are hooded, and which violate the standing principle of No Yellow Flowers After Easter rule, but I liked 'em and the red ones were too lipsticky. The big hosta is Hadspen Blue; the tiny one Gingko Craig, another personal favorite. The one in the middle is Patriot, or Independence, or John Wayne Totally Kicks Commie Butt, or something; I bought it because Fire and Ice, which had just come out, was sold out. You might also note the Lily-of-the-Valley around the stone pot, one of my Poor Wife's favorites, which I planted like three years running without telling her and which didn't show up until five years later.

One-eared gargoyle and bush rose.

In the foreground is the new trellis our neighbors sprung for because we didn't kill their animals over Spring Break. When I suggested it my Poor Wife said she was concerned about the dangerous-looking tips on those coils. "Look, they're not sharp," I said, fingering one. "That's what I mean," she said. I suppose I could have arranged things better for the picture, but that's just Tuesday's state of potting stuff. The glowing red neon stool under the table in the corner used to be uncleanable white, so I painted it in March with plastic paint. Burgundy plastic paint. Never buy paint from Goldman Sachs.

You Two Get Out Of The Sandbox And Let The Little Kids Play

Q: What's the best thing about reading the Gail Collins/ David Brooks "Conversation" about Who Will Replace Souter?

A: It means you're not watching Ann Althouse and Slate's Emily Bazelon's Blogginheads conversation about Who Will Replace Souter.

Just. Shut. Up. I'm all for Jon Stewart destroying cable news shoutfests--the only problem is that so far he's stopped at one--but the larger issue, which began about the time he entered grade school, isn't the frivolous treatment of public affairs, it's the mentality behind it--ever since the large-scale contagion of Happy Talk news in the early 70s, news gathering has been mostly indistinguishable from a twice-divorced rate adjuster in his mid 40s with a paunch and an obvious combover sucking in his gut at Happy Hour. It was one of those things, like an omelette, herpes, or Mark Burnett, which was impossible to stop once it got started.

I've said it many times, but that's not gonna stop me. First you had kowtowing to the Nixon-psychopathy-inspired/ Safir(e)-penned attack on the Press, fittingly delivered by a small-beer grifter named Spiro Something. Two weeks later, Sally Quinn was a journalist and Barbara Walters was a network anchor, which led inevitably to Tom Brokaw. And of course from there it's a straight line to Matt Drudge.

And direct from there to the New York Times calling an online section The Blogs, and including a regular exchange of lo-cal paragraphs between Gail Collins and David Brooks. The nattering nabobs of positivity. Now, I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that no one out there has suffered more telling wounds from the Internets' daily, hourly, demonstration that there are 10,000 people in this country who write better and think more clearly than the punditasters of the Times and elsewhere, and hundreds of thousands more who're more interesting, even without Sources. So, naturally, the Times responds like the Nabisco board in an old Jay Leno routine, back when he was funny (yes, Virginia!):

Chairman: Keebler is killing us with these soft cookies! We need to do something fast! Ideas?

Wobbly Voice from the Back Somewhere: Sir? I was thinking...maybe we could...bake fresh daily and use only the finest ingredients...

Chairman: How the hell did he get in here? Security! Security!

Honestly. Each of you has nine-hundred fucking words in the Newspaper of Record still to go this week, if you really feel you must broach the earth-shaking developments of David Souter's pending retirement.

And, seriously. Don't.

Look, no amount of shrinkage of the public "career" of professional bow-tie model Tucker "I Had To Choose Between Food And Health Insurance, With Only An Enormous Family Fortune As A Safety Net" Carlson is going to do the trick. It is simply not believable that two pundits chattering about "Should He Nominate A Woman?" would be unaware that the very act of doing so constitutes a (loaded) answer to the question. This is the equivalent of a pair of sportscasters being unaware that praising the "natural ability" of a black quarterback is racist. It may have been a legitimate question when Bush was replacing Sandra Day "The Barbara Walters of Jurisprudence" O'Connor, or when he was replacing Harriet Miers, for obvious reasons. But it is not an issue now, any more than "Should Bush Appoint a Conservative?" was one then. Just. Shut. Up. Barack Obama was elected President. Addressing the White Male bias on the Court is a legitimate matter of public concern, not just a "Democratic" "issue". Grousing about "affirmative action" or "political correctness" are small-town carnival peep shows. Not to mention Republican. Can't we at least keep our powder dry until something actually happens?

Not, apparently, with the perpetually smirking Brooks around:

Third, I’m guessing, with a high degree of confidence the nominee will not be up front about abortion. I for one, like this. I am desperate to preserve the distinction between the job of a judge and the job of a legislator. It’s like the difference between a reporter and a columnist. One exists to live up to the impartial standards of the profession, while the other is just about personal views.

It's like I keep tellin' ya: this is what happens when an entire end of the political spectrum sits in its room talking to itself for a quarter of a century. Trans-global Rhetorical Atrophy Syndrome. One awaits the day when Brooks, or any of the other Burke-besotted Originalists he pals around with weekends, denounces the most egregious example of legislating from the bench in the history of Constitutional law, the specious inclusion of corporations under the Fourteenth Amendment while a century passed with the intended beneficiaries being pointedly excluded. I ought to mention that one waits for this without holding one's breath.

That’s why I hated Obama’s empathy talk. It’s not central to interpreting the Constitution.

Neither is "Fuck you, you half-educated corporate shill". But I'm within my rights to say so. And not just Constitutionally.

Oh, So That's Why The Times Needs Two "Conservative" Writers: The Competition Breeds A Better Audience Of Imaginary Animals

David Brooks, "The Long Voyage Home". May 4

Ross Douthat. "A Hole in the Center". May 4

Oscar Levant and Bernard Herrmann were discussing the myriad ways conductors have interpreted the first four bars of Beethoven's Fifth. "How would you play them, Oscar?" Hermann asked.

"Oh, I'd omit them," Levant replied.

via Clifton Fadiman, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes


IT is, from where I sit, May 6, 2009 of the Current Era, and the beginning of the Second 106 Days of Franklin Delano Hussein Obama's Charm Coup. You can subtract roughly ten weeks to get the date of the Official Demise of the Current Republican Party last November. Back up a scosh over two months from there--the day before John McCain introduced Sarah Palin to her first audience which was not simply too numb to care--to find the last time Republicans could claim a ray of hope, and that one being that Barack Obama would manage to lose the election, not that the Republican elephant would suddenly stomp its way back from utter disgrace. It's about two years back from there, to the beginning of Campaign '08, to their last real hope, which involved a massive write-in vote for Joe Lieberman, possibly linked to Ward Churchill endorsing Hillary, Hillary endorsing Ward Churchill, or a high incidence of contrail episodes up and down both coasts. Shortly before, with the Schiavo case, all those Republican factions Brooks is always telling us about suddenly split upon catching sight of one another. Prior to that, of course, i.e. the first Bush II term, everything was going perfectly.

So I suppose my question is, th' fuck are both "conservative" Times columnists writing Wither Republicanism? columns yesterday? Don't they at least call ahead to make sure they aren't wearing the same outfit?

Now, I have no problem entering into this sort of ratiocination--though the rarefied Burkean air does make it difficult to catch your breath--but, y'know, for me it's more like two bucks worth of Army men, a magnifying glass, and a sunny day in July. Maybe actual Republicans ought to be a bit more circumspect about laying out the sorry remnants of the family linen where decent folk can catch a glimpse. As Basho, or maybe Keye Luke, said, "There can be no future for your party until you shut th' fuck up about the future of your party".

Or maybe it was that guy in Mystery Men. Anyway, the big shocker is that both of them think the key to a Republican resurgence is for the party to start looking more precisely like themselves. (This is not actually Brooks' theme this time, unlike the last seven or eight times he's solved the problem, though it can be a little tough to tell since he projects everything onto people who have actually been to The Olive Garden. This, not exactly by coincidence, offers Brooks the ability to alter, even reverse, his public opinion by proxy whenever the last one crashes in flames, as they inevitably have, taking out an orphanage, a hospital, and an orphanage hospital. Brooks, by the way, appears to be the only man on the planet who imagines no one notices this.) Wasn't that what Douthat was up to with last weeks' piece, which imagined the now-chastened Not Ross Douthat Republicans crawling back to him after a Cheney election fiasco? Wasn't he on the hustings before this gig, peddling a book about the same topic? Arlen Specter? Weren't you hired to talk about Jesus?

Okay, let's deal with that Brooks piece.

Well, that didn't take long.

Seriously, is the greeting card industry as bad off as newspaper publishing? Can't Hallmark come up with a line of condolence cards for Republicans and give this man the job he's fit for? "Sorry for your loss, but remember, the American people will never lose the drive to succeed!" Imagine being seated next to this guy on a Trans-Pacific express flight:

• Republicans generally like Westerns. They generally admire John Wayne-style heroes who are rugged, individualistic and brave.

• Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they would not be the party of untrammeled freedom and maximum individual choice. They would once again be the party of community and civic order.

• Republicans are so much the party of individualism and freedom these days that they are no longer the party of community and order. This puts them out of touch with the young, who are exceptionally community-oriented. It gives them nothing to say to the lower middle class, who fear that capitalism has gone haywire. It gives them little to say to the upper middle class, who are interested in the environment and other common concerns.

• If the Republicans are going to rebound, they will have to re-establish themselves as the party of civic order. First, they will have to stylistically decontaminate their brand. That means they will have to find a leader who is calm, prudent, reassuring and reasonable.

Thus David Brooks, the erstwhile U. of Chicago liberal sophomore who saw the light at a Milton Friedman speech.

And look: I don't care if David Brooks changes his mind. He should. But you spend twenty five years, not simply as a steadfast privateer, but as a man with a public soapbox urging us to greater and greater heights of creative greed, and now, suddenly, it's time to worry about "community." Own th' fuck up, then. I'm pretty sure no one was keeping the last quarter-century's results of rampant Reagan Republicanism on the vast majority of Americans from you just to spare your digestion.

And Douthat. Sheesh. It's bad enough that the Times went looking for another "conservative". Did it have to look for a cut-rate one?

What’s required instead is a better sort of centrist. The Reagan-era wave of Republican policy innovation — embodied, among others, by the late Jack Kemp — has calcified in much the same way that liberalism calcified a generation ago

We won't speak ill of the recent dead, but the idea of Jack Kemp is another matter. It's worthy of note that the same party that's looking for a way out of its current state of being as dead as Jack Kemp still spouts off about the glorious snake-oil hucksterism of Supply Siderism even as it begins the process of picking off the feathers and cleaning up the tar it just received as a result.

And so in place of hacks and deal-makers, the Republican Party needs its own version of the neoliberals and New Democrats — reform-minded politicians like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton, who helped the Democratic Party recover from the Reagan era, instead of just surviving it.

Yeah, thanks; always interesting to get a history lesson from someone who wasn't there and never's bothered to look. First, Jimmy Carter wasn't "the calcification of American liberalism"; that's something you memorized from your party's Lil' Reaganaut Historicity Flash Cards. Carter was the Southern, moderate response to the defeat of George McGovern. Second, whatever other talents they may have, the primary political concerns of both Senator Hart and Governor Clinton seem to have revolved around their own Presidential asperations; they were the public face of the DLC in that they represented a Boomer break with New (or Old) Liberalism for the easily convinced, in a way Sam Nunn or Chuck Robb did not. I'm unaware of anyone, to this day, who imagines the Democratic Leadership Council had, has presently, or will, in any imaginable future, ever acquire any principles other than the one about McGovern-Mondaleism being insufficiently lucrative; and if you can name me a single example of someone they inspire I'll be able to start a list, and Evan Bayh can get his 2016 campaign goin'. To pretend--or simply to not know--that the Democratic party throughout this period housed a Scoop Jackson/ Sam Nunn wing is simply a result of being too convinced to have to bother looking, and one suggests the creation of the DLC "led" to Clinton's victory in '92 the same way other people eat things they find at convenience stores.

No equivalent faction — rooted in conservatism, but eager for innovation — exists in the Republican Party today. Maybe something like it can grow out of the listening tour that various Republican power players are embarking on this month.

Or maybe this cream the doctor gave me will continue to keep the flying anal monkeys in check.

Maybe it can bubble up outside the Beltway — from swing-state governors like Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Minnesota’s Tim Pawlenty,

Checked Daniels' record lately? We thought he'd just forgotten to pack his high chair, but it turns out he's actually become invisible. [Incidentally, Ross, whatever else Mitch has done, if anything, he's pretty much tried to keep the religious nutball wing of the party under wraps. And that's in Indiana, Ross. Just so you know.]

or reformists in deep-red states, like the much-touted Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Utah’s Jon Huntsman.

A dead guy and Mitt Romney, Except With Daughters. Really, you guys didn't learn anything from that Big Jindal PR Rollout?

But to succeed, such a faction will have to represent something legitimately new in right-of-center politics. It can’t sound like Rush Limbaugh — but it can’t sound like Arlen Specter either.

And for now it'll just have to remain a beautiful dream.

Okay, But What If The Only Way To Make Terror Suspects Talk Turns Out To Be A Hummer From A White House Intern?

Jacob Weisberg, "All The President's Accomplices: How the country acquiesced to Bush's torture policy". May 2

Michael Kinsey, "Where the Buck Stops". May 1

JON Stewart, to Cliff May, last week's featured torture apologist: "Why can't they say 'We were scared'?"

I thought it was pretty sad--Please, oh please, Mr. Torture Apologist, won't you love pretty flowers, too, so we can be friends again?--but at the time I wasn't aware we were desperately searching for some new sort of jurisprudence that puts juries on trial first.

I don't live in New York. I don't actually live anywhere an invader would be interested in conquering, at least not directly, and a savvy one--i.e., one smart enough to have an entire plan of action designed ahead of time, and not wait for a few deadenders to fire up an insurgency--would realize early in the planning stages that a state government which has demonstrated time and again it can be bought off by pig farmers, beer distributors, and fireworks retailers cannot possibly be worth wasting actual ordnance on. A necklace made of shiny bullets would likely do the trick.

(And, okay, maybe it's just me, and maybe this required a certain number of miles on the odometer, but a couple decades ago thousands of Americans sent themselves to hospitals after receiving free samples of Sunlight Dishwashing Liquid, which, because of the pretty pretty lemon on the bottle they added to their iced teas and drank up, resulting in the largest mass outbreak of diarrhea not linked to Taco Bell in this nation's history. If you seriously wanted to bring this country to its knees, rather than just impressing the hell out of heavenly virgins, a manufacturing license and a decent-sized mailing list would beat the hell out of a squadron of 747s. Good Lord, if the old Soviet Union had simply been poised to take advantage of Janet Jackson's nipple slip we'd all be driving Zaporozhets now. Not that that wouldn't necessarily be an improvement.)

I didn't begrudge anyone his fears then (though plenty begrudged me mine, which concerned what sort of monster those monsters had released, and not if I'd be caught at Lowe's when SPECTRE hit the local mall). And, again unlike what generally travels down the pike in return, I'm willing to exclude hindsight, although the only thing about the Global War On Somebody To Exact Revenge On I didn't see the basic outline of--and this requires no psychic powers or lucky Leftist guessing, just a reasonably broad perspective on US foreign involvement since 1946--was how utterly incompetent the Bush administration could be in pursuing it.

So let's accept for the sake of argument that the truth of "After 9/11 may Americans were scared shitless" does not require the wholly permissible addition of "by professional chatterers, lapel-pin manufacturers, permanent-warfare buffs, mass-market 'news', and, especially, the Bush administration and the Republican party generally". I'm not sure how this comes to be regarded as a Lifetime Pass. "I was scared" is a legal defense in some instances, but not a Get Out of Jail Free card. There's a reckoning due even under the best of circumstances, and the era of 9/11 Changing Everything was rarely that. The threat was made out to be exponentially larger than anything short of complete derangement would have accepted, and this was used to justify short-sighted tactics which made things much, much worse. There's a reckoning due. It would have been best had it come once reality began to reassert itself, but no regular observer of human beings could imagine that was likely.

That reckoning wasn't going to come from the Bush administration, and, as it turned out, it wasn't going to come through empowering Congressional Democrats; it certainly wasn't going to come via acknowledgment of large-scale street protests of the Iraq War. It wasn't going to come in bunting-wrapped newscasts. To suggest, now, that the lack of some sort of official reaction or recognition of public oppositon then dooms us all to Eternal Unindicted Accomplicehood is to announce the News Script has acquired the patina of Holy Writ. It's vile. It's galling. It's what these people do, over and over. Kinsley:

Indignation comes cheap in our political culture. Polls give the impression that the proper role of voters is to sit like a king passing judgment on the issues as they pass by like dishes prepared for a feast. "No, I'm not in the mood for waterboarding today, thanks. But I think I'll have another dab of those delicious-looking executive-pay caps." Prosecuting a few former government officials for their role in putting our country into the torture business would not serve justice or historical memory. It would just let the real culprits off the hook.

To which we can only reply, "Th' fuck it would." Y'know, while all this was going on the national "news" outlets were falling all over themselves to atone for the treasonous reporting of facts they permitted to slip out during the Vietnam War. Americans were not only being told, repeatedly, that "We don't torture", they weren't about to hear any different when it actually counted. What did the pictures from Abu Ghraib--they ones we did get to see--do to public confidence in how our Great Freedom Mission was being conducted? What would an actual demonstration of what waterboarding really is have done? And if there's a network news executive somewhere brave enough to have put that on the air in 2003 I'd like you to introduce me to him. Was he hiding under the desk with Keith Olbermann, ripping and reading Pentagon-approved copy? Sure, there were brave souls, real journalists, out there covering the actual story, though none at Slate, as I recall. And God bless 'em. But this is the old "Story on Page One, retraction on Page Seventeen" tale. And y'know, Mike, we both grew up during Vietnam, so I'm sure you're as aware as I am that plenty of Americans would just as soon sweep this sort of thing under the rug the moment it becomes inconvenient (a sizable chunk of those would prefer to celebrate it, as they're doing now). That's the opposite of truth. Fer chrissakes, what does it take to get people to begin to realize this attitude always leads to disaster? I mean, how many more disasters?

Of course this is not so much an argument as it is a professional courtesy and a bit of special pleading: holding bad actors accountable, unless they're caught fucking the help, claiming to have written Love Story, or Windsurfing Without Proper Equipment would empty press rooms around the country quicker'n the internets have. And clam up unnamed sources, and dry up open bars into the bargain.

And, of course, that's just for the sake of argument. The fact is the Bush administration fanned those fears at every opportunity, with its characteristic regard for accuracy. The mayor of New York at the time, Rudy Somebody, purposefully kept the casualty toll over six thousand for weeks after he'd been told every last name on the list was duplicated. He kicked and screamed again when the official count threatened to dip below 3000. What public demand did that address? Giuliani didn't get re-elected, or even re-upped for the duration of our pants pissing. Can we throw him in the slam?

The fact is these people are supposed to react coolly and rationally. Especially in such times. The public is free to panic, or overreact, or watch Howie Mandel.

[Weisberg's just more of the same, but this paragraph still manages to explain things well beyond words, as well as make the practiced Googlenaut begin to consider just how much prison space we could scare up if we let all the drug offenders go:

The justification of torture was in the air soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. Time bombs began ticking on 24 in November 2001. That same month, my colleague Jonathan Alter wrote in a Newsweek column (which he has since regretted) that we should be open to the idea of "transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies." Alan Dershowitz argued for legitimizing torture through a system of judicial warrants. "It is wise for American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods work," Mark Bowden wrote a couple of years later in the Atlantic, referring specifically to the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And that's what liberals said.

His emphasis on liberals. My emphasis on who qualifies. Some universes can be bound in a nutshell.]

The public is an Ass. What else is new? It's never justified giving everyone with a functioning intellect head wounds just to even things out. It's a big country. Plenty of room for mass atonement ceremonies during Cheney's treason trial.

Psychologists? Check. Ex-Army? Check. Think Consuming Coca-Cola™ Is Sinful? Check. Okay, The Program's All Set.

SCOTT C., presently on such a roll he's practically a one-man double-play team, brought us word last Friday of Michael "The Audie Murphy of the Glorious Patriotic Internet De-Pantsing of Scott Beauchamp" Goldfarb jumping on another burning tank to strafe The National Socialist People's American Broadcasting Company:

ABC runs a report showing the names and faces of two CIA contractors who may have had a role in the waterboarding of KSM and Abu Zubaydah. The network apparently outsourced this report to a freelancer named Matthew Cole, whose record in Nexis includes just three bylines...

That's forty-seven words, and our two major contentions are already smoking hulks, which, I believe, in Weekly Standard parlance is known as "par", if not "earning your bonus".

We'll get to that in a moment, but first, could someone please explain to me what is gained by typing "KSM" without ever committing to "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed"? Is it the time savings? Sheesh, I type 35 wpm with a strong tailwind, and it must take me all of two seconds. Not only can I spell it now, I can give you two variants. "Abu Zubaydah", who is never "AZ" for some reason, I have to look up every time. Is it the illusion of being an Insider? The sweet, sad nostalgia for childhood's lost GI Joe or walkie-talkie? The faint tightening of the scrotal sac at the thought of piercing bound, naked, hairy brown men?

Okay, the answer is d) all of the above; I knew it all along. So let's begin: one, ABC reveals the identities of two CIA contractors, which will lead to Goldfarb demanding to know--rhetorically, since his possession of the "real" answer is already built into the question--whether the Obama administration will investigate the leaking of their identities; two, it turns over contol of its entire news operation to a leftist reporter with an obvious agenda and almost no experience...

-- two stories for Salon (one of which about "how Bush administration aid to Pakistan helps fund insurgents who kill U.S. troops"), and one for the San Jose Mercury News just two days after 9/11 reporting "anxiety about a backlash" among Muslims, who assure the reporter that the attack "has nothing to do with Islam."

which is the point at which we start to get really curious, since we'd already clicked the link to the ABC story and seen "Brian Ross" at the top of a tripartite byline, with ABC producer Joseph Rhee riding the caboose.

This, of course, doesn't mean Ross' name wasn't basically just slapped on Cole's work; we don't know, and neither does Goldfarb. What it most certainly does mean is you've got Ross bringing the story to ABC's table, a guy who is something less than a raging Bolshie, and something less than a believable reporter, but Goldfarb ignores him, for some reason. Which leads us to do a bit of searching. We don't have Nexis, though we believe it exists, even though Goldfarb says it does. We do have the Google. We type "Matthew Cole". There's a confusion of 'em. We type "Matthew Cole salon". The fourth link mentions The New York Observer, Wired and GQ on his resumé, alongside Salon; typing "Matthew Cole wired" gets us his home page, which links to stories in New York Magazine, Details, ESPN, and Congressional Quarterly as well. Now, I'm not sure what Nexus sets you back per month, but I think The Google's free. Although it's likely my own search took a lot longer, especially as it had so many more items to find.

But these are small potatoes, and not particularly new; we were even more curious about the insistence those names had been leaked, something we were just about to explore when the next paragraph sucker-punched us.

Cole repeats the now throughly debunked claim that Zubaydah and KSM were waterboarded 83 and 183 times respectively.

Now, we pride ourselves in remaining fairly-well informed, politically, for someone who also gets a modicum of fresh air and occasional exercise not related to chasing those damn Henderson brats off the lawn. Yet somehow the thorough debunking of the 83/183 waterboardings stories had escaped us. Perhaps because we don't have Nexus. So back to the free search grind, which, we're surprised to learn, doesn't exactly confront us with cascading debunkings but does, eventually, lead to a FAUX story from last Tuesday, in which "a U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation program" told The Fair and Balanced Network that it was all a big misunderstanding; that's 83 and 183 pourings of water, not sessions. Geez, we're not barbarians!

Well, at this point I'm not sure it's even necessary to go on, since we obviously don't torture people, and I've been a fool to question FAUX, the Bush administration, the CIA, and the Standard all these years. This leaves clearing up who leaked the identities of two CIA-associated medical professionals who were only trying to Save America Herself. By now I'm so thoroughly versed in googling I've thinking of trying the Advanced Search, but I type in "Mitchell Jessen" first and, Lo! and Behold! the two, both former military officers who had been involved in SERE, the simulated torture of military personnel for training purposes, and who were known as The Mormon Mafia have, in fact, been in the news and connected to the CIA torture program since 2005 at least, when James Elmer Mitchell was interviewed by Jane Meyer for this piece in The New Yorker; both men, their company, their rather remarkable lack of credentials, and the, er, shocking circumstances of their swift rise to prominence in the highly competitive emerging field of Bio-Electrical Interface Applications Consulting, all featured prominently in stories in Vanity Fair (by Katherine Eban) and Salon (by Mark Benjamin), in 2007, at which time they were said to be under investigation by the Bush Defense Department.

(Incidentally, the reasonable reader could have understood from the first sentence of that ABC piece, which references a new focus on the two, that ABC wasn't revealing their identities, their CIA connections, or anything else. In fairness to Mr. Goldfarb, it really isn't all that easy to make shit up constantly.)

Investigate the Leakers! Y'know, I went to grade school, through fourth grade, with a kid named Roger Knox. He was considered "slow" in the book larnin' department, but I thought he was the funniest and wittiest ten-year-old around. We combined forces on an unofficial, hand-lettered class newspaper--he drew the comics--which landed me in my first pot of political hot water. And every so often he'd suddenly turn his desk upside down, and start scribbling on the seat with crayons while gobbling handfuls of school paste. The teachers would just declare an early recess and march us off quietly. This is, no doubt, what ought to have been done with the whole Phony MSM Outrage Gotcha! Cult long ago, and perhaps now should expand to include the Flotsam That Used To Be A Political Party altogether (though I'd personally opt for at least one straightforward report on the real Swiftboating/Kerngate business in the hopes it might dilute Phony MSM Outrage Gotcha! of the Week by 10% or so).

We will leave Mr. Goldfarb to shriek about fluoridation, low-hanging power lines, and snooty squash-court reservation clerks; it was good, though, to be reminded of Mitchell Jessen (I'd seen, and forgotten, Eban's Salon piece, back in the day when this seemed like heaping dirt on a still-dangerous Cheney-Bush regime, instead of digging dirt up).

And it's interesting to reconsider how, in addition to the enormity of ignoring the law, raging concerns over our security, and the importance of rationality and semantic consistence to our daily well-being, and torturing in our names; in addition to lying about it and concocting legal wormholes to wriggle away through; in addition to ignoring all evidence of torture's ineffectiveness and then co-opting the actual intel accomplishments of standard interrogation techniques, to consider, I was saying, just how fucking puerile and stupid and sordid the whole business was. You just wanna torture somebody, waterboarding's been on the menu for centuries. What we need to ask ourselves is what sort of "experts" "devise" (or "reverse engineer", in an absurd attempt to pretend crossing "Jesus" off the script of a pretend torture session, and replacing it with "Mohammed" in a real one constitutes expertise) the naked anthill, pee-pee photographin', suppository-obsessed and feces-smeared, Sammy-Hagar-turned-up-to-11 playground routines while imagining they're doing anything other than torturing people in custody? Let's say it again: you can either piss your pants on a daily, if not hourly, basis over the SPECTRE of global terrorism, or you can defend this sort of Laurel and Hardy meet Dr. Strangelove and discover they all have an abiding interest in psychosexual infantilism. Not both. We may have been paying Mitchell Jessen $1 M/yr tax free. A little street recognition should be small price to pay. We're entitled to know who approved this little government-sponsored Musical Theatre for Sexual Psychopaths program. Not to mention locking 'em up.

Just. Shut. Up.

CLIFF May, torture apologist, in the Corner:

Re: Not Pro-Torture, Just Pro-Facts

...in just about everything I’ve written and said, I’ve taken pains to emphasize that I oppose torture. However, I do think (1) it’s important to define torture so we know what we are talking about, and (2) all forms of “stress and duress” utilized to elicit cooperation from a terrorist in possession of life-saving information are not torture.

Every opponent I’ve debated on has taken this tactic — labeling me as “pro-torture,” refusing to grapple with definitions, and refusing to consider whether there may be methods of interrogation that are unpleasant but fall short of torture.

The full Stewart interview from Tuesday night is here, if you want it. I'm on record as wishing those Daily Show interviews would just go away; unlike Colbert's they grind the show to a screeching halt half the time, and when they don't it's generally because they're delightful fluff. I realize it's easier than trying to write another ten minutes of comedy every night, but Jon's no interviewer, and especially when he has some axe to grind they tread dangerously close to the Olbermannesque, with the exceptions that Jon doesn't come across as having an Ego too big for the studio, and that he'd be somewhat justified if he did.

When he decides to tear somebody a new one, McCain, say, whom he'd kissed up to after Honest John played kissyface with Bush, or whatisname from the whatchacallit financial news, he winds up shouting platitudes. It's Jon, so it's believable and sorta cute, like a comedy routine without the jokes, but compare Stephen asking Peggy Noonan whether it was Reagan or John Paul II who won the Cold War.

And that Cliff May shite above is a case in point. It was practically the first thing out of his mouth: "I'm not pro-torture". At which point Jon made a funny about going to commercial.

Okay, it was early in what was a planned five minutes. And it's Jon. But May's routine here is the essence of what had happened to the story last week, as the Right tried to shift the shame from the revelations of how wantonly we did use torture to how specious an abstract concept it is willing to turn torture into and then defend. How is it we come to be discussing, yet again, the teevee thriller "philosophical" "justifications" for torture as though we haven't been over it a few thousand times already? It's like saying, "I'm not a racist, but...." We don't need what follows repeated. We're not deaf. We're not avoiding the argument. We've rejected it, several hundred reiterations ago.

That the Bush administration was torturing people is established. It was established beyond dispute two weeks ago, when the numbers "83" and "183" were printed in the same sentence as "in a month". At that point every previous attempt to justify our use of torture--the Ticking Time Bomb gambit, the Only Way To Extract Certain Information ploy, and the What We're Doing Is Perfectly Legal ruse--shriveled up and died like a spider on a hot stove.

That any of those is treated as an actual argument in the first place is bad enough; none rises above the level of suggested essay questions at the end of a high school civics textbook chapter. But how do they reappear as "answers" or "facts", of the Corner sort, after this month's revelations? They don't. At this point, assuming you are anti-pro-torture, it's yourselves you ought to be questioning. This is the dog that didn't bark of the whole sordid tale.

Yet May is allowed on th' teevee to say, e.g., that the CIA called the Bush administration to say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wouldn't talk, and could they try something a little stronger? despite the fact that it's now March of 2003, the torture program has been in place for a year, and if they'd spent any time at all trying to get him to talk without torture those waterboardings must have come every 18 minutes instead of every four hours. He's allowed to say "we only waterboarded three prisoners, all high al-Qaeda officials", despite the fact that he knows no such thing, and to repeat the latest Crazy Islamic Theology canard, that Allah requires these guys to endure interrogation to their utmost limit before spilling, because the noted Islamic scholar Abu Zubaydah told the CIA just that. According to the CIA. After they tortured him.

And this, y'know, despite the fact that we learned a couple weeks ago that Abu Zubayday had already provided us with all the important information we got from him before we waterboarded him every eight hours for a month. I used to think that sort of thing qualified as a contradiction, or as trapping someone in a lie. Now it's more like a tic.

Why is it we're still hearing this when those hypotheticals--what loony Cornerites call facts--didn't rise to the level of justifying the bullshit "he talked after 30 seconds" routine back before that one became inoperative? Why do we need a "definition" of torture based on how close to the line we can get, or what sorts of categorical euphemisms qualify as "acceptable"? If you fall from a 14th story window you're dead, from the fall; it's not ameliorated by calling it a Deceleration Event or a Routine Gravitational Occurrence, nor by the fact that the building had a nurse on duty. The Geneva Conventions are not a collection of suggested high school debate topics. If we are gnawing over what "shocks the conscience" means, rather than what "183 times in a single month" means, it's because we are looking for ways to justify torture, not guidelines for avoiding it. "Pro-torture" is really one of the nicer things Cliff May ought to be hearing said about himself.

AND let's say this one more time: if we truly had a situation where Time was judged of the essence, and a field commander judged that physical coercion was the only way to extract information, he'd use it; and no doubt this has happened many times. We're not having this conversation because any one of those "hypotheticals" came into play, or because an episode of unauthorized torture came to light (again, nobody's even bothering to claim we were getting intel from Abu Ghraib). We're having it because the Bush administration specifically sought to torture al-Qaeda "officials", and god knows who else, and to do so under cover of cutesy "legal" "opinion". I realize that Jon Stewart, e.g., has not seen these guys in operation as long as I have; if he had the idea that Dick Cheney, e.g., would torture captives just for the sake of the kitten-in-the-woodchipper psychic satisfaction it brings (long distance, natch), would not reside as some sort of Horrible Thought in the far corners of his head, but operate as a sort of manual for dealing with that end of the political spectrum, day-to-day. As it has for me, for decades.

If We Can't Have A Better Narrative, Can't We At Least Find Better Narrators? Vol CLXXI

GAIL Collins, in the latest installment of The Conversation, her ongoing discussions with David Brooks, apparently the Times' attempt to make either or both of them appear more tepid:

But my big question is how long the Democrats can refrain from becoming appalling.

Too late, but you only missed by a few decades.

When the Republicans took control in 1994, even those of us who were saddened about what the change would do to the Clinton agenda had to admit the Democrats had it coming. They’d been in power most of the time since the New Deal, and had become way too arrogant and inward-looking. They didn’t believe the public would punish them, either for corruption or for ignoring the voters’ complaints and concerns.

Okay, so the early 90s was the time when I really started smoking crack, as opposed to the three or four times daily of the previous five years, so maybe it's my memory that's faulty, but the Clinton agenda? Wasn't that the one whose cornerstone was National Health Care, which was shot down by the Democratically-controlled Congress? And the colossal stink over Don't Ask/Don't Tell, the sorry-assed Fish Nor Fowl non-solution reportedly spurred by fears of what the Democratically-controlled Senate might do in response to an executive order?

A bit simplistic, sure, but our point is how did the '94 midterms make a politically-savvy reporter fear for an agenda which was already in shreds and a Presidency which was already encircled by Clinton Scandals, Inc., spurred on by egregiously erroneous Times reporting by Judith Miller Jeff Gerth?

And the rest, if anything, leaves us more puzzled. Arrogant and corrupt those Democrats may have been (but remarkably so, Gail? For Congress? Y'know, since you've already bought two scoops of Republican Revolution Hallucination, you can get our Rainbow-Winged Spumoni Pony for just $1.25 extra), but "didn't believe the voters would punish them"? This is the party which had turned tail and skedaddled at Reagan's shadow, and a dozen years later there still wasn't anyone rounding up stragglers. Bill Clinton his own self rose to national prominence in the mid-80s drive to Make Democrats Indistinguishable From Republicans. Okay, maybe they didn't think they could lose control of Congress, but Thinking About the Party comes in, at best, at #4 on any Congresscritter's list of things to worry about, and the first three are "Get myself reelected".

What surprised me was how fast the Republicans became worse. The bloom was off the rose before you could say Tom DeLay.

And if there's something just plain odd (read: "precise transcription of the GOP talking-points version of history") about that construction--not to mention the notion of that Post-Reagan Revolution, post-Dixiecrat defection, DLC-heyday deficit-cutting Democratic Congress as the direct descendants of the New Deal--the idea that one would be flabbergasted by the speed with which a "revolution" led by a congenital liar and transparent con man like Newt Gingrich could "turn into" Tom DeLay is simply off the charts. I mean, one did not need to be a Democrat (or even just an admirer of The Clinton Agenda), a skeptical reporter type, or even particularly well-versed in contemporary politics to know, long before '94, that Gingrich was a public scoundrel of the highest order. Anyone who actually believed The Contract with America was a "Contract" "with" "America" was too gullible to live. Hell, after that it took me three more years to once again accept "The" as an English article, but then I live next door to Danny Burton's district. For cryin' out loud. Forget policy, which is too wonkish and boring for most Times pundits; by 1994 the details of Newt's first divorce were widely disseminated. I'm sure they were familiar with that.

Speaking of which, hasn't Newton Leroy Cincinatus Gingrich spent enough time in the public arena? Isn't he supposed to be back t' plowin' by now? I mean in the fields, not in his publisher's secretarial pool.

It's Like David Brooks, But With Those Links All The Kids Are Tweaking About!

Ross Douthat, "Cheney for President". April 27

OKAY, that started out as a larf, but let's have this out right now: links are not footnotes you stick anywhere. They're not the Post-It Notes of scholarship, or commentary, or whatever it is Ross Douthat does as a substitute for those. If your job, inexplicably, is to write 800 words worth of punditast once a week for The Newspaper of Record, then at least try to maintain the form. Seven-hundred fifty-three words, Ross, and seven fucking links. Why didn't you throw in a couple of Netflix pop-ups?

N.B.: ever' last one of 'em is insubstantial. Write "Sean Hannity interview with Cheney", link to Sean Hannity interview with Cheney. Write "Cheney takes the fight to Obama", link to Arthur (A. G.) Sulzberger piece (nice touch, that) about Cheney taking the fight to Obama, (which, into the bargain, was roundly criticized for being a pure steno job). Conservatism on "talk radio dials" takes us to Rush Limbaugh's site, where he's expectorating, or farting, or something. Thanks for clearing that up, Ross!

Sure, sure; somebody at the Times--maybe you--thinks this the way to reach the hot young crowd that flocked to The Atlantic to read you and the other over-ripe juveniles. Just like somebody at the Times figured you were the best early-declaration juco linebacker who could be turned into a blocking tight end still available in the seventh round. You weren't, and it isn't. By the way, this is one of the pernicious effects of the ubiquitous screaming advertising aimed at the mid-80s IQ, or what you people took to describing as "Freedom" in the early Reagan era, even as it invaded your personal space for someone else's gain: everybody in the country is now convinced that 18-24 year-olds hold some special Key to the Mysteries they are, sadly, too inarticulate to relate to the rest of us, and if we just gear our entire culture to their every whim, as imagined by executives twice their age, it might accidentally pop out like a starlet's nipple flash. This despite the fact that everyone in the country who used to be 18-24 years old actually knows it's complete bullshit; they still want that sweet, sweet nectar. Yet there has to be someone at the Times who remembers when every Allstate insurance agent in the country grew his sideburns to the bottom of his ears to show the Happy Hour hippie chicks he was down with what their Generation was sayin'. It's much, much worse than doing nothing at all, and everybody's just gonna laugh at you, and nobody's gonna tell you you look like a flaming twit. For fuck's sake, I did not click on Ross Douthat's column hoping he'd point me to all the news I needed to Catch Up With Ross Douthat's Flying Intellect, or Get Where He Was Coming From, and if I had done so those links wouldn't have helped me one whit. There is nothing inherent in New Media that abrogates Plain Ol' Sense. You're writing for, or at, people who read the fucking New York Times Op-Ed page. Maybe we could start by assuming that the readership has heard of Dick Cheney? Is perhaps even familiar with his recent appearances on FAUX Sunday News Bunker, or at least his general demeanor and opinion of the current President of the United States? Maybe we could go even further, and figure anybody reading you online knows how to use a search engine (when I saw the link to the Ochs v. 4.0 story it took me exactly five seconds, and Google 0.25 seconds, to find the full transcript of Cheney's March 14 bunker pronouncements. And I'm, like, eighty).

Does this make any sense? Okay, I'll answer: no. It's a silly substitution of appearance for substance, and we did quite well without it before people who would lie about sunrise if they thought there was a nickel in it took over. How 'bout we try correcting that seven times per column? Ross, if you say "Dick Cheney did x last Sunday" in print, under your byline, then Dick Cheney should be assumed to have said or done what you said. If we need confirmation of that because we are perpetually suspicious, well then, we should know how to find it. If we need confirmation because you are either not to be trusted, or less of an authority on saying and doing than someone else, you shouldn't be there. Simple, really.

But then there's the other part, the use of links to Limbaugh or Hot Air to "prove" some contention about whack-job "conservatism" taking over what's left of the Republican party. Really? Because Limbaugh and assorted internet nutballs are badgering "moderate Republicans", which, while they are perhaps not entirely mythological, still counts as the crazy guy down the block, the one who always wears eight wristwatches, killing bacteria by swinging a bat, they're suddenly taking over? Okay, so at least you'll admit they're "ascendant"--unlike Brooks, who would have, and has, simply invented fourteen Republican sects to throw off the count--how 'bout admitting, for once, that they are the Republican party, have been your entire adult life, while Burkean intellectuals like you and Brooks turn out to have been mere paid mouthpieces for Obscene Profit, Inc.? You find them distasteful, but not distasteful enough to have called them out back when you were winning. Quel surprise! Were Limbaugh and the other Assclowns of the Airwaves all chummy-chummy with the likes of you during the heady days of The Power to Fuck Everything Up? No? Then what do they prove now? Okay, I'll answer that: that you're the Trick. That you're the reliable vote for Sarah Palin's party, while ever since Reagan you tried to pretend that They were the Trick. That if you're as smart as you imagine yourself to be now, then you've been a coward for twenty-five years, and you're a coward now. It isn't like these fucks suddenly decided that John McCain was a Bad Idea; they thought he was a fuckin' Commie from the minute he went all weepy after getting caught with Chuck Keating's pecker in his mouth. They're in disarray; you're the ones who've been wholly discredited: don't run the party, implemented your every economic whim and watched along with the rest of the country as it blew up, then complained about the Threat to executive compensation; and have no fucking message left except that your party needs to be more like you. Because you couldn't have been pig wrong and pug vicious all this time, right? Pooches keep allowing themselves to be screwed, is what. You somehow imagine that had Cheney been crushed in November, rather than his crazy Southwest dopplegänger, that all those Theys would have Learned Their Lesson and would be morphing into sensible disciples of Smart Guys like, oh, like yourself. What a novel fucking concept, Ross. Just tell me, how is it that people such as you, who shared a fucking party with those yahoos for thirty years, never figured out what was what until it was over? Huh? So, hope you enjoyed three decades of tax cuts, off-shore shell corporations, and continual attempts to re-win Vietnam. Hope you stocked something away for the winter. If this is the best you got it looks to be very long and very cold. But at least you'll be able to show that phony Al Gore, right?

Oh, So That's What Lou Cannon Thinks About Ronald Reagan

Lou Cannon, "In Reagan's Debt". April 26

WHEN last we tried to avoid the report of Lou "Boom Boom" Cannon he was inaugurating the New York Times 100 Days Blog by inventing ways in which the recently-elected Barack Obama owed his popularity to Ronald Reagan, on account'a Reagan was wildly popular, too. So popular, in fact, that Lou Cannon has taken the rest of his life off to detail it in, I think, seventeen volumes and counting, and not counting the one where he and his son tried to extricate Ol' Dutch from George W. Bush once the latter proved radioactive. (His co-author son himself being the co-author of Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Architect of George W. Bush's Remarkable Political Triumphs, which, you may be certain, was published at the height of George W. Bush not being radioactive.) Plus Reagan had to deal with bad economic news an' stuff, just like Obama does, and Obama praised him on the campaign trail before Hillary made him take it back.

Now, after roughly 2300 hours of reflection, Lou Cannon has decided that Barack Obama owes his popularity, and early success, to Ronald Reagan.

So first lemme say this about the Great Man school of historical simulation: it fills a much-needed void *, but my theoretical objections just don't sink to a visceral level, and I'm happy to read military history, or even the occasional hagiography update. If this is what the Times' editors want to kill trees for nobody's gonna stop 'em, unless it's an increasingly indifferent public. But it's one thing to be condemned to reliving history, and another to rewriting it as People magazine filler.

And if Lou Cannon has now written enough words about to fill the actual gaping chasm between The Gipper's reputation and his actual (positive) achievements, if he either imagines that The Great Communicator's (how many fucking nicknames does a person need, by the way? This was a clue.) Presidency is as important to contemporary audiences as twelve centuries of Roman history was to Gibbon's, or finds the money good enough to pretend it is, it's his business.

By why is it the Times'? Reagan assumed office twenty-eight largely horrendous years ago. That means that anyone over the age of forty-five had the opportunity to vote fer or agin' him twice, and no doubt plenty who were too young to do so yet have accurate recollections of the man and his ersatz-successful Presidency. Why do we have to hear, again, from a man who probably since I began typing has released yet another Reagan book? "Wait, wait, " sez Lou. "I almost forgot. He was really good at communicating stuff."

Sure, to be fair, I've never read a one of 'em; having lived through the actual Reagan while relatively sane, though in constant fear for my brain, the eight Ionesco's Rhinoceros years of his Presidency, followed by the eighteen years of Republican-controlled governments naming everything was wasn't nailed down after the man, plus the three-year coverage of his funeral, I'm about as likely to pick up twenty of his biographies as the theoretical survivor of the Spanish Inquisition is to rent King of Kings (the imdb page includes spoiler alerts). And Cannon's canon is frequently praised as "even-handed", although that praise comes from the likes of George Eff Will, Ed Meese, and Michael Barone, and from the back blurbs of his books. We don't want to push it, but in excerpt and article Lou Cannon comes across as a nail technician to the Conventional Wisdom, something which is guaranteed to the please the George Eff Wills and the apparently unslakable Reagan book-buying public.

A closer look suggests, however, that these two presidents are not as far apart as their partisans and critics believe. For all his thunder about the dangers of big government, Mr. Reagan during his eight years in office preserved the core of social programs that were the basic legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, his first political idol. Mr. Reagan’s high-risk budget director, David Stockman, tried an early maneuver that would have reduced Social Security benefits. After this plan backfired, Mr. Reagan named a bipartisan commission that proposed mild reforms that were embraced by the Democratic House speaker, Tip O’Neill, passed by Congress and extended the solvency of the system for a generation.

The test run was a proposal to withhold taxes on interest and dividends, which was met with was met with so much orchestrated screaming from the Walkers and Portable Oxygen demographic that the Reagan administration turned tail and never broached the subject again.

Conservatives urged Mr. Reagan to take another run at Social Security or other entitlement programs. He never did. As the columnist George Will observed, Mr. Reagan understood that Americans were indeed conservative, and wanted to conserve the New Deal.

Well, one good blurb deserves another.

But lemme tell ya, as someone who lived through this, and doesn't get sent free copies of Lou's work, more's the pity, this is not quite the way I look at it. After Reagan's test-marketed end-run on Social Security was resoundingly thrown in his face--it was widely reported that way at the time--the Best Dressed Administration in History simply invoked the cover story: we weren't attacking Social Security! We love Social Security! Why, Ol' Dye Job's political idol was FDR! He wants to be just like him, and it's really unfortunate that the Social Security program is going to go broke right after Joe McCarthy reveals his list of 497 Communists, and we just need to smarten it up around the edges. To perpetuate it, don' cha know.

Thus Ronald Reagan, pragmatic politician unfairly maligned as an ideologue.

But why? What's fucking "conservative" and "small government" about extending withholding taxes, of all things? It was a sneak attack on Social Security, it was discovered, spotlighted, and the cockroaches started scurrying. You can say this proves him to be a practical politician if you wish; I say it proved him as a lying opportunist spokesmodel for a particular category of Wealth, one which is, and was, largely populated by right-wing ideologues, but not by complete idiots. The idea was to drain the public treasury while simultaneously reducing their own part in it. No one gave a fuck about ideological purity, which was just a sop to the yahoos who voted 'em in anyway. Somehow the man gets credit for dropping his ideology despite the fact that he was too cowardly to try it that way in the first place.

This is the thing I will never understand, at least beyond the extent to which I do understand it, namely, that lying comes as naturally as breathing to some people. Reagan ran for President nearly as long as Harold Stassen did, as a one-note candidate: the scourge of the National Debt. He then managed to nearly quadruple it in eight years once he had the reins. The solution to the Debt was not exactly a secret, and certainly not an arcane one: either you raised taxes (anathema to his handlers), cut "defense" spending (anathema to his party, especially after Vietnam), or you attacked Social Security. This the Great Communicator did by sending up a trial balloon, painted black, at 2 AM of a moonless night, after which he said Fuck It and spent like he was on shore leave. He greatly accelerated the Kid Meets Candy Store theory of "defense" spending, with, e.g., Star Wars, the Navy's Incontinent Carrier Construction Program (ICCP), even the revival of the overpriced-before-the-cost-overruns Continually Evolving Mission (CEM) B-1 bomber just because Carter wisely 86d it; everything, in fact, except the spare parts, maintenance programs, and personnel retention a genuinely pragmatic man might have insisted on. We are presently living in the fucking midst of a reality-based smackdown of this and his supposed economic miracle. Which, of course, means he gets credit for Defeating the Soviets and Saving Democracy Herself.

So no, perhaps Reagan wasn't a raging ideologue. Perhaps he was more an ideologue and a practical politician, combining the worst features of each in one highly-marketable package. If you, or Barack Obama, need a lesson from all this you might consider a paper on How it is Some People still don't think Once was Enough.
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*Stanislaw Lec or Moses Hadas, I think. I get them confused.

Saturday Last Friday, i.e. Yesterday, Garden Blogging

Former basement-dwellers enjoy a day on the deck, joined by rookie annuals.

Autumn-blooming clematis.

Somebody's idea of a joke.

Big maple and myrtle. I didn't capture the periwinkle blue, but you can see the

world's most unfortunate, psycilocibin-induced mulch color in the background.

Oddly "Big Maple and Myrtle" was a short-lived radio comedy (six episodes) in 1938,

part of the ill-fated "Pall Mall Comedy Carnival", in which American's most luxurious

cigarette brand sponsored an entire evening of programming. Myrtle was a Southern

socialite "temporarily embarrassed" by the Depression, and Big Maple the colored maid

who kept the household fed and fiscally afloat through her many amours with local tradesmen.

The humor--most contemporary accounts actually deny there was any--came from

Big Maple's mangled English, as when she'd tell her employer, after revelations of

the most recent financial dilemma, "I gots to set to confabulatin' 'bout dat." The program

was wildly unpopular in the South, not because of Big Maple's casual sexuality, of course,

but because her confabulatin' outsmarted a white banker in episode two. On second thought,

it was Big Mabel, so just forget I brought it up.