It's Never Too Early To Smack A Few Fungos

Arthur B. "Yes, I Still Show My Face" Laffer, "Reaganomics: What We Learned (Shit Still Floats)". February 10

HERE'S everything I know about Economics: 1) it's often called "The Dismal Science" after Thomas Carlyle, who was only half right; 2) it seeks to understand the use of resources and of production, though, alone among the "sciences" it does so by eschewing adequate description for naked acquisitiveness; 3) Bertrand Russell and George Barnard Shaw both dropped its study as undergraduates, one because it was too difficult, and the other because it was too easy, but I can never remember which was which; 4) The artificial excitement generated by the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Economics to Milton Friedman for his seminal unification of the theories of Charles Ponzi and Willie Sutton led to precisely the sort of thing anyone familiar with a college faculty would have predicted. In fact, it had the same effect on Economics that the whole, comparable, Superstar Chef thing has had: a slight reduction in the prison population coupled with someone's greasy fingerprints all over your business; and 5) and this is more an opinion that a fact, it turns out we should have done the theoretical work on the atom bomb at White Sands, and dropped the thing on the University of Chicago. Hindsight's 20/20.

Anyway, Arthur Laffer's still with us; I'm not sure whether this should be added to Economics' list of unpardonable sins, or chalked up to the same slackjawed American credulity which kept James Doohan in the public eye for thirty-five years.

For 16 years prior to Ronald Reagan's presidency, the U.S. economy was in a tailspin—a result of bipartisan ignorance that resulted in tax increases, dollar devaluations, wage and price controls, minimum-wage hikes, misguided spending, pandering to unions, protectionist measures and other policy mistakes.

But enough about Nixon.

No, really, I'm sure Laffer demonstrates this somewhere, though here isn't that place. Having lived a good chunk of my unlettered life during that period, including an abortive launch into the American economic system, I have to say that my own vertiginous reaction to those times seemed to have mirrored what was going on behind them, and that, for example, the Cold War, the hot War in Indochina and the two Oil Embargoes seemed to play a supporting role. Not to mention the gradual loss of US global economic hegemony as the Second World War receded in the rearview, but then, whadda I know? The early 60s saw the publication of Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed; the later 60s saw the growing concern over the crap culture of Saturday morning kiddie teevee, the safety record of nuclear power, and the toxic effects of cigarettes and Tab™ (separately, let alone together). These are the sorts of values that economists typically do not fit on cocktail napkins.

It's the dawn of the environmental and consumer movements. It is, conversely, the dawn of the anti-environmental and anti-consumer movements, funded by corporate shells with names like Americans for Responsible Cyclamate Consumption. It's the beginning of a decade-long effort by Detroit to avoid making safer, more fuel-efficient cars, and if the track record there doesn't tell you everything you need to know about the fight over evil government regulation I think there's a seat on the Americans for Responsible Voluntary Childseat Use board of directors with your name on it.

In the late 1970s and early '80s, 10-year bond yields and inflation both were in the low double digits. The "misery index"—the sum of consumer price inflation plus the unemployment rate—peaked at well over 20%. The real value of the S&P 500 stock price index had declined at an average annual rate of 6% from early 1966 to August 1982.

Compare, of course, the 180 years previous, with no ignorant tax increases, dollar devaluations, wage and price controls, minimum-wage hikes, misguided spending, or pandering to unions, when the stock market did nothing but go up. Are you even trying, Doc?

For anyone old enough today, memories of the Arab oil embargo and price shocks—followed by price controls and rationing and long lines at gas stations—are traumatic. The U.S. share of world output was on a steady course downward.

Q.E.D. For those of you not old enough to remember, we saved a little gas for you. Though for those of you both young and curious, all the superstar economists and all the world's cocktail napkins mostly conspired after this to keep US petroleum consumption at or above 50% of the world's total, by, for example, screaming bloody murder when Jimmy Carter mentioned conservation.

Then Reagan entered center stage.

Okay, whichever one of those Brits dropped economics because it was too simple, I'm with him.

His first tax bill was enacted in August 1981. It included a sweeping cut in marginal income tax rates, reducing the top rate to 50% from 70% and the lowest rate to 11% from 14%. The House vote was 238 to 195, with 48 Democrats on the winning side and only one Republican with the losers. The Senate vote was 89 to 11, with 37 Democrats voting aye and only one Republican voting nay. Reaganomics had officially begun.

Yes, and what a glorious almost thirteen months it was, until he was forced to sign the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982, the first of four tax increases marking the rest of his term, designed to counteract the bracing effects of Reaganomics!, such as the 25% stock market decline in the interim.

Changing tax rates changed behavior, and changed behavior affected tax revenues. Reagan understood that lowering tax rates led to static revenue losses. But he also understood that lowering tax rates also increased taxable income, whether by increasing output or by causing less use of tax shelters and less tax cheating.

Moreover, Reagan knew from personal experience in making movies that once he was in the highest tax bracket, he'd stop making movies for the rest of the year.

Ahem. Though we will admit, when you don't wanna do something, bullshit's as good a reason as any.

And so it was with his tax cuts. The highest 1% of income earners paid more in taxes as a share of GDP in 1988 at lower tax rates than they had in 1980 at higher tax rates.

Q,E.D.! Jesus Christ, does this shit really fly in Economist circles? Or do they just have a good laugh about it while snorting blow from the bungholes of catamites?

By 1988 that top 1% of income earners had collected sixty fucking percent of the wealth created during the Reagan years; the top 20% got 99%. Were they paying that much more in taxes? Because that would make it a wash.

On the regulatory front, the number of pages in the Federal Register dropped to less than 48,000 in 1986 from over 80,000 in 1980.

And it took only 1.4 million new Federal bureaucrats to handle the reduced work load! Y'know, somebody, sometime--I nominate Mitch Daniels--needs to explain to me why simple is always better than complex, except when they decide it isn't. You don't go to a mechanic who can only work on flathead Fords. You don't go to a doctor who stopped studying surgery when anesthesia was introduced. If this were just proposed as an ethical argument that would be one thing, and bad enough at that. But it's not; it's supposed to be a declaration of apodictic certainty even though the facts say otherwise. Incontinent deregulation has been a decidedly mixed bag, which even Republicans are willing to admit if we're talking about Jimmy Carter. Our fucking food supply is at risk thanks to "Reaganomics", which, incidentally, somehow managed to confuse "simplifying regulations" with "letting major industry donors write, and enforce, their own safety regulations". Today, thanks to incontinent deregulation, I can choose any of a dozen telecom providers to hand my personal information over to the Feds, warrant-free (Efficiency!), and use whatever crappy phone/plan combination I deem least offensive to call my Poor Wife and explain why I'm stuck at the airport waiting for some deregulated sub-carrier to show up and cram me onto a flight. In exchange, some bozo selling crooked and unregulated derivatives gets to steal my life savings without missing any work days due to incarceration.

With no increase in the minimum wage over his full eight years in office, the negative impact of this price floor on employment was lessened.

Thank you, sir, for removing the negative impact of a price floor from my employment so I can watch my wages decline for a lifetime. May I have another?

The results of the Reagan era? From December 1982 to June 1990, Reaganomics created over 21 million jobs—more jobs than have been added since.

Okay, where do we begin, exactly? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the combined Reagan/Bush I jobs creation number is 18.5 million, considerably less that Clinton's 23.1 million, which is, in itself, larger than those imaginary 82-90 numbers. Second, did Reaganomics end in 1990? I guess I missed the ceremony. Always interested when I hit an unexpected bump. Is it 1990 because that's when Bush I had to raise taxes (again, after St. Ronnie did it seven times) to deal with the overwhelming success of Trickledownism?

Finally, there's that "added since", which incorporates the eight horrible years of Reagan Lite. Without attribution.

And none of this is really, ultimately meaningful, except that we may note that the whole Reaganomics game comes a cropper when simply compared (honestly) to his successor, not to mention once we note the steady decline in real wages for 80% of the population since that glorious day when Ronald Reagan entered center stage, a good quarter century after he should have been reduced to playing the Nelson's befuddled neighbor with the pruning fetish.

Back Home Again--Daniels 2012 Update Edition

Everything about the Reagan White House was stage-managed.

-Montag, in comments at Roy's.

I BELIEVE I've mentioned before the three things which infest American culture to a greater degree now than they did in the days when I felt confident they'd disappear under their own dead weight: putting people in prison for smoking weed, the power of hard-sell advertising to push people's buttons, and Reaganism. The last doesn't mean I thought the Right was going to wise up, or something; just that I figured--let's make that "to a high degree of certainty"--that the Reagan presidency would be all the evidence moderately sane people needed to be done with it, that they'd look back at it sorta shamefacedly, as they would swallowing goldfish, or roller disco, or breaking Indian treaties, and move on quickly. Or at least a sizable percentage would. It's not like I felt it would be replaced by something more than marginally better. I spent most of '82 confidently predicting to anyone who'd listen that Reagan wouldn't even run for reelection; apparently that came within a couple more months of recession of proving true.

But of course in the event it proved about as wrong as could be, as the guy I'd figured got elected just so America could show itself how much it hated Jimmy Carter, and who had already proven--without equivocation, Reader!--that he possessed neither the intellect nor the interest to lead anything grander than a Jaycees parade, that his ideology was a sham, his economic "program" a crock, and his view of American history hopelessly entangled with the oeuvre of Cecil B. DeMille, where it wasn't shaped by D. W. Griffith, was reelected in a landslide over Walter "Where's the Beef" Mondale, the Hubert Humphrey of his generation. The subsequent eight-month improvement in the GDP, on its way to hurtling downward towards the Crash of '87 and the longest recession in post-war history, convinced Americans of the erroneous Republican portrayal of Reagan as a sort of Economics idiot savant, and, somewhat more accurately, convinced them that he worked just as well asleep as awake, so no one disturbed him for the Iran-Contra scandal or the S&L implosion.

I'm a lot sadder but no wiser these days; I haven't the foggiest idea of how the Daniels campaign pulled off the same bullshit twenty years later, and without even the tiniest uptick in any economy Mitch has had his mitts on to blow out of proportion. Just turning Daniels' record into something tentatively approaching competence requires, first, that you simply disregard his three years directing Bush's OMB and, second, that you agree to accept the accounting trick which "solved" Indiana's "deficit" while simultaneously pretending that a $2 billion debt to the Feds doesn't exist, and that a 17% increase in sales taxes is not a tax increase.

And all that gets you to the place where you can say, "Hooray, Mitch 'The Blade' Daniels! He sorta temporarily plugged a budget shortfall in Indiana so long as he had Republican legislatures which simply slashed spending by whatever percentage was needed, regardless of consequence! Just the solution we need in Washington!" This is an electoral strategy which apparently requires that anyone old enough to remember the Gramm-Rudman Act is now so old they're automatic Republicans.

Like I say, I'm no wiser, but I've got no idea how this plays out in Republican presidential politics, where Daniels is so impure of thought he had to swear to Laura Ingharam that he was the most anti-abortion governor in the state's history. I'm not sure how you position yourself as The Rational Alternative in an asylum for the criminally insane anyway, and then he's got to do so with a record that doesn't withstand scrutiny.

There's a lot of bushwa these days about Reagan's pragmatism (and little note of the Fibonacci increase in Republican lunacy). But Reagan ran as, and was, a full-fledged nutjob for his day; that his actual governance might've fallen short of banning fluoridation and legislating ketchup as a basic food group always seemed to me to have more to do with a residual level of sense the country still couldn't manage to shake. Now it has. Now Mitch has been forced to flay any remaining flesh from Indiana's public schools in the hopes of reviving some Republican PATCO nostalgia. Forced to actually speak to, I mean at, a group of teachers at the Statehouse last week he informed them that they made too much money! "Twenty-two percent more than the Hoosier taxpayers who pay your salary!" said the man who cashed in ten years as a Senatorial aide to the tune of 50 million dollars. Of course the average public school teacher in Indiana in 2009 actually made less than the Indiana median household income, but that sort of thing never bothered Reagan, did it?

Turns Out Steaming Bullshit Will Melt Ice, But You Need An Awful Lot Of It

FIRST off, we're indebted to alicublog commenter Freshly Squeezed Cynic for pointing out this bit of humor from the Michael Reagan Wiki page:

"One childhood story he has told that introduced him to politics was how at the age of eight, he asked his father for a raise in his allowance. At the time, around 1953, his allowance was $1.00 a week. Ronald Reagan said that since he was paying 90 percent of his earnings to the federal government as income tax, he was not able to increase Michael's allowance. Mr. Reagan further said that when the President would give him a tax cut, then he could give his son an increase in his allowance. This, according to Michael, was how he was introduced to the subject of tax cuts and how that affected people."

Okay, we're not sure who's lying--the smart money's on "Michael Reagan, Ronald Reagan, whoever relayed the story, whoever posted it to Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, and your ISP"--but there's this: the top marginal tax rate in 1952 was a nominal 92%; that was on income over $400,000. In 1953 Ronald Reagan was two years removed from making Bedtime for Bonzo; that is, he wasn't a movie star. He was what he always was: a contract player with a major Hollywood studio--Warner Brothers--which didn't make either of his two 1953 popcorn pitchers (Tropic Zone and Law and Order). He didn't make $200,000 per on those. He seems to've still been contracted to the Brothers Warner, but he'd "renegotiated" his contract around 1950 to allow him to take work outside the studio. It's difficult to find out what his contract might have paid him (I saw "$2500 a week" given as his peak somewhere, with no time frame specified; GE reportedly gave him $125,000 a year in 1954), tougher to decide what is believable, and impossible to figure why Warner would still be paying him in the Fifties when it didn't use him in any pictures. I doubt the Screen Actors Guild was making up the difference, though maybe HUAC had a generous per diem for friendly witnesses.

In short: it's unlikely Reagan was in the 90% bracket in 1953 (which had only been reestablished because in those days we made some attempt to pay for our wars as we waged them); it's simply not the case that he, nor anyone else, was "paying 90% of his income" to the government (perhaps 90% of their incomes over $400,000, in which case they needed to spend some of the net on better accountants); $1 a week seems pretty generous to me for an 8-year-old in '53 (a dozen years later I'd get 25¢ at ten); and if you show me the eight-year-old who's swayed by an appeal to marginal tax rates I'll show you a family of fucking liars. Reagan may have, and apparently did, gripe to High Heavens about the income tax. Maybe he really was more incensed about taxes than he was the fact that he was that his acting services were no longer required.

Many years later, Reagan would famously tell Don Regan, who in many ways was older than eight at the time, that he'd "lazed around" rather than make more movies because all the income would have gone to taxes. Have a look at what he "chose" to do in the period, and consider what he might've passed on. Consider that it was William French Smith and Ed Meese who engineered the California real estate deals which, in the early Sixties, made him wealthy enough to run for President for sixteen years. It forces you to admit it: a Festival of Confabulation is precisely the way we should celebrate The Gipper Centennial.

Meanwhile, it was a fun week in Indianapolis, which is all set to host Scab Bowl LXVI next February, or May, or maybe. To begin with, we sent all our elected officials, public school superintendents, and surplus news/sports/weather hairdos to Dallas, an act which managed to improve local conditions despite the fact that a foot of ice fell from the sky almost contemporaneously. At least it did until communications were reestablished.

The same storm that sent much of Indiana home for the week dumped on North Texas, which isn't prepared for it, and is too full of pussies to deal with anything that can't be shot or given a lethal injection. So beginning about Wednesday we were treated to gleeful accounts of how Big D wasn't ready for the Super Bowl, and how the bars were half-empty, and how This Couldn't Happen Here, which was sorta ignoring the point that we still couldn't get kids back to school four days later. By Thursday this could only have been described as "gloating". By the time the thing was over--after the Roof Avalanche Scandal, the Extra Seating Scandal, the Mouseketeer Forgets The Words To The National Anthem Scandal, and the The Blackeyed Peas Just Weren't All That Good* Scandal † --Mayor Gomer was reduced to publicly chalking the whole thing up to Bad Luck. Like he's got to explain Bad Luck to the city which has him as its Accidental Mayor.

And this was before it came out that some bozo Dallas councilman put on a sash and gave Mike Vick a Key to the City Saturday.

There has, in short, been enough whistling past the local graveyard to wake the dead. My favorite of the genre was the near-constant reminder that the Red State Small Government Powers-That-Be who've been swiping tax dollars since 1969 to pay for all this were wise enough to plan for covered walkways between all the venues they've bought with our money, so no out of town visitor will get his shoes slushed, so long as he stays at, and eats all his meals at, the new World's Largest Marriot, or one of the other fine hotels and gravy centers downtown, and doesn't venture outside to get a look at the local culture. Which I personally don't recommend anyway.

This was really capped off by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell assuring the locals that there really, really would be a Super Bowl LXVI, cross his heart, swear on a stack of Paul Tagliabue's last speech to Indianapolis, the one where he swore the NFL absolutely had to have a franchise in Los Angeles, unless we ponied up for a new football barn. One that would bring us a Super Bowl. Promise.

___________________

* Okay, let's just mention here that like the BCS College Football Championships and the Second Iraq War, the agitators for a More Hip Hopful Super Bowl halftime got exactly what they demanded, and where are we now? Nothing survives being thought of, and even if it did, nothing survives being thought of by a committee. As with those two earlier examples of the power of modern American thinking, people were jumping ship before the damn thing was ten minutes old, and rightly so; the question is how they ever convinced themselves any different, and why the rest of us don't know better than to listen to people who think this sort of thing amounts to a problem dying for a solution, which they or their committee just happens to have. It's the motherfucking half-time show of a motherfucking football game. It's time to go to the can, and hit the fridge. It does not need to appeal to a "younger" audience. It shouldn't appeal to anyone. Twelve minutes is exactly right. If America has to be entertained in the interim, let Snooki come out and fall down, or let Texas execute a prisoner.

† The aftermath of the Great Halftime Fiasco unleashed not only the sort of wholly unlettered, Snopes-worthy speculation which makes you despair of Democracy ("Who gets to chose the halftime entertainment--the NFL or the host city?" was a favorite query for the legal minds who inhabit the comments sections of local media sites), but encouraged some itinerant hairdo to elicit from Mayor Gomer the fact that he "hopes it isn't Lady Gaga".

That's A Wrap. Right?

I PURPOSELY didn't tune in to the Super Bowl until the coin toss, to guarantee I'd miss the Reagan Fluffing; this morning I sought it out, just to make sure it had managed to be worse than I imagined, which is what I imagined. It was.

Make no mistake about it: much of my dislike of the man is visceral, and all of my visceral dislike is defensible. He was a liar, a nutjob, and a dolt. The patented Charm would have left me cold even if I ever saw evidence of it poking through the hate-filled right-wing politics, which I didn't: I saw Jayne Mansfield and Dagmar exhibit the same congenial ease among throngs of well-wishers, and neither of them should have been President, either. Reagan was a product of the studio system. If you didn't master that malarky you wound up like Frances Farmer, assuming you ever made it to the screen in the first place. You know what they said when he ran for Governor of California: Jimmy Stewart for Governor. Ronald Reagan for Best Friend. Wit? I'm still looking for the joke. "I paid for this microphone"? "We begin bombing in five minutes" ? The man spent too many years surrounded by too many fluffers. It's why Bob Hope made all those bad movies. Look, a wise man does not say "How many trees do you need to look at?" He does not say, in the late 20th century, that evolution is just a theory. A wise man does not claw his way to the middle of an overpaid, almost-wholly capricious trade built on flim-flam and flummery, then use his position to expound on the wisdom of that system and the opportunity it provides all men. Had Reagan used the Bully Pulpit to give every American a decent shot at success I might've at least believed he believed it; that he used it to enrich his handlers--at the expense of that Middle America he pretended to be a part of--says what about him, exactly?

And another thing: go, if you dare, and watch that God, We Need One More Hagiography and Mindless Military Celebration To Really Get This Super Bowl Off To A Great Start deal if you must. Listen to Reagan honor the Challenger astronauts. Don't ask what part he might've played in their demise. Listen to him eulogize the dead on Utah and Omaha beaches; don't ask about the time he sent the second greatest armada in the history of the world to save twelve med school students from 80 Cubans. Ask yourself why there's a goddam asterisk after everything these people claim he ever did. Ask yourself why someone needs a sappy, bombastic soundtrack and a Parson Weems narrative before they imagine they've convinced anyone. Ask yourself how the NFL could throw a flag on Green Bay for "excessive celebration" and keep a straight face.

We Are All Centenarians

MARIA Schneider dies; William Grimes turns this into a Land O'Lakes commercial.

Really? The woman was assfucked, in a film, forty years ago, and that's all you can talk about? Twice? In an obituary? That wasn't just so you could say "anal intercourse" in the Times, was it? Or so you could pronounce audiences at the time "scandalized" by the behavior (whereas the modern audience would be fine with it, but troubled by the high fat content) instead of pointing out that the percentage of Philistines remains fairly constant, generation after generation?

Sheesh. And the poor woman was typecast, you say? However could that have happened?

Great. Something Else To Look Forward To.

Jennifer Medina, "Lavish Centennial Plans Testify to the Strength of Reagan’s Influence". February 2

IF posting is light, if anyone cares, it's not because of winter-related traffic snarls, the demands of ice clearing on a man my age, nor even the notable, uh, physical effect unexpected school vacations have on my Poor Wife. The simple answer is that for some reason, possibly weather induced, I tried to read Maureen Dowd's column on Egypt yesterday.

Oddly, the effect was not unlike an early spring: horrible misshapen fleshy things of an unnatural pallor sticking up where they don't belong, and the water company flushing the lines so that what comes out might be technically fit for human consumption, but not for any human technically fit to make his own decisions. I'm still trying to get the taste out of my mouth.

[Preteritio alert: This post is not going to say anything at all about "Iran-Contra", "South American Death Squads," or "Senseless, preventable deaths of 241 American military personnel as a direct result of this country's Middle East policy being turned over to the wishes of a mythical 2000-year-old carpenter, variously mis-translated and indifferently studied". Because you can make the fucking case against Ronald Reagan without those.]

So, first: the odds are long that Ms Medina writes her own headlines, which means, at long last, it's time for headline writers to get a byline so we know who to hurl rancid government cheese at for this one. Lavish Centennial Plans testify to nothing more than two generations of Reaganauts having no better argument than mindless hero worship, no progress to mark since his second inaugural, and not enough sense to distinguish between kitschy public display and actual achievement. Which, come to think of it, was how he got elected in the first place.

No, if you need a testament to his Lasting Influence, it's this. As in this, the fact that the New York Times is apparently afraid not to join in the general hagiographyin':

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — Ronald Reagan would have turned 100 this Sunday, and nearly seven years after his death, one might think he were still alive and leading the Republican Party.

Still alive? Being brain-dead didn't stop him before.

Along with the requisite speeches and academic panels, the festivities include: a Rose Parade float, a six-foot-high cake, commemorative stamps and jelly beans, a Beach Boys concert, a tribute from the Jonas Brothers and a video homage at the Super Bowl, which is also on Sunday. The memorials, including a 21-gun salute and a graveside wreath-laying by Nancy Reagan, are expected to draw hundreds of former aides and supporters.

Here's my favorite thing about incontinent Reagan Tributizin', which, younger readers may not realize, has been going on non-stop since Election Night 1980, when he single-handedly saved the Republic by defeating Jimmy Carter: the way it never fails achieve Unintended Self-Parody in the first ten seconds. (While we're at it, a Special Thanks to the NFL for taking time out of its busy schedule of holding cities and states hostage for the price of the stadiums it needs to salute the Father of Modern Private Enterprise in such a fitting manner.)

Reagan is not the first former president to enjoy the honor of a centennial celebration, but it is hard to remember any that were quite so lavish, speaking to his enduring role in American politics. (This weekend’s festivities at the Reagan Library here, the highlight of a year’s worth of events around the country, will cost roughly $5 million; by contrast, the cost of Lyndon Johnson’s centennial in 2008 was a mere $500,000.)

Bear that in mind, when you're planning your own lavish memorial: the Wealthy throw bigger bashes.

And a number of the prospective 2012 presidential candidates will be on hand to offer their praise during the revelry, among them Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, who has just written a book about Reagan and, in an interview, called him the “most successful president at actually achieving his specific and articulated goals.”

Ladies and gentlemen, Your Country in a Nutshell. Where it belongs.

The accolades illustrate the unusual durability — at least among Republicans —

What? Your modern Republican is precisely distinguishable from the average Former Jonas Brothers Fan in that his crushes last forever. My god, these are the people who thought "Miss Me Yet?" with a picture of The Worst President in the History of the Republic was a milestone in the annals of political humor. David Brooks will publicly blow the corpse of anyone who opposed the French Fucking Revolution, fer chrissakes. Repeatedly.

of the Reagan legacy, which has endured even as so many institutions have been under attack. Reagan’s near-idol status in the G.O.P. is so ingrained that when potential party chairmen were asked last month to name their political hero, the moderator hastened to add “aside from President Reagan.”

In other words, it took Grover Norquist only thirty years before he figured out he needed to add "besides the Bible" if he wanted to get any honest essay answers--in house, remember--from young seminarians about The Book Which Most Influenced My Life. Big deal. For twenty-five years no Republican would have dared say anything else.

If the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation has any say, that qualifier will be repeated for decades.

“Our job is to promote the legacy of his words and work, which were simply incredible,” said John Heubusch, the executive director of the foundation and a former Congressional aide, who said that Reagan inspired him to enter politics.

Either John Heubusch doesn't know the meaning of "incredible", or there's at least one Republican who enjoys a good public leg pull.

“I’d go toe-to-toe to debate with anyone who said he was not a transformational president. He certainly was.”

And we're still in doubt on that language question, since Mr. Heubusch didn't specify what sort of transformation.

Staff members at the foundation are careful to point out that the money for the events and for the museum’s $15 million renovation came entirely from private fund-raising. “President Reagan would not have wanted Congress to spend any money on this,” said Stewart McLaurin, the director of the centennial events, who also went to work for Reagan in 1984.

Because if there was one thing President Reagan was known for it was minimizing the pomp and circumstance surrounding the office.

What about the presidential Jelly Belly jelly beans? Reagan was a famous fan, so it is certainly possible that he would look kindly on spending $24.95 for the special edition Reagan Centennial box. Along with 50 flavors of jelly beans, the box comes with a copy of the Declaration of Independence, a brief history of Reagan’s life and several of his quotes.

The Reaganisms include the lofty: “I can assure you that personal faith and conviction are strengthened, not weakened, in adversity.” And then there’s his philosophy on jelly beans: “You can tell a lot about a fella’s character by whether he picks out all of one color or just grabs a handful.”

Jesus Christ, does anybody buy this shit? I mean for free, let alone at $30.00 for an six-ounce commemorative bag?

Perhaps it is hardly surprising for Reagan, who was known as the Great Communicator, to be quoted so extensively.

“He’s referred to all the time because he’s extraordinarily quotable and inspiring, as much as Lincoln and more than anyone else in the 20th century,” Mr. Gingrich said.

That's Professor Gingrich to you. Case closed.

The love for Reagan is not universal, of course, and liberals do not hold him in such high esteem.

“Reagan holds unique status today because the Republicans don’t have anyone else,” said Paul Begala, a former Clinton aide and a political strategist. “They can’t lionize Eisenhower because, by today’s standards, he was a liberal. They can’t lionize Nixon because he was a criminal. Who have they got left?”

Fifteen paragraphs and we get to…Paul Begala? Who is more-or-less correct in his assessment of the Republican bench, though he might've added that they can't use Lincoln since he opposed the ideal minimum wage, but that's beside the point. The story of the Reagan presidency is precisely the phony PR rep that was built up around it and calcified faster'n the Presidential Brain. It's the reason Reagan's noted pop historian has this to say:

Mr. Cannon said that the popular view of Reagan had only improved with time, although his approval ratings were higher than many other presidents when he left office.

“There’s always a certain nostalgia,” Mr. Cannon said. “But the reality is he really did help end the cold war. The world now ain’t a walk in Central Park, but it’s certainly a much safer place than when Reagan took office. And he convinced Americans to believe in themselves.”

Higher than Many! a qualifier now used because Bill Clinton left office even more popular, and without the 24-hour lionization service. Reagan left office popular, not exactly like an old whore or an ugly building, but because there was a collective Oh Shit! moment in American politics when both the worst of his shenanigans and the real-world effect of his disconnected leadership came to light, and people decided they'd rather not be called to account for voting for him in overwhelming numbers despite ample evidence which argued against it, and decided to fall back on a sort of instant nostalgia for the trumped-up economic accomplishments of the middle of his reign. Of course that one's inoperative now, too, in light (never did a man's lasting influence depend so much on changing the rules every so often in order to keep him in the best light), again, of Bill Clinton's better numbers. Not to mention our clearer view of the effects of thirty-years worth of increasing income disparity and WWIII levels of Defense spending. So we fudge that now, and show another round of Berlin Wall clips. Horseshit. Ronald Reagan was the paid spokesmodel of a few wealthy Goldwaterites, and he managed to stick around long enough to get elected when the sea happened to change. He promised to eliminate the National Debt and nearly quadrupled it. He spoke about Middle American values, and handed the keys to the country to piratical mercantilists. He cured our post-Vietnam military defeatism by signing a blank check for every high-tech gadget the Pentagon pushed his way, reducing our nuts-and-bolts readiness in the process; Ronald Reagan is a major reason why we could have blown Sadam Hussein and the rest of the Middle East to Allah five-hundred times over, but couldn't successfully occupy a country with no air force and a tenth-rate military already defeated. Make no mistake about this. The Soviet Union was bankrupt before Ronald Reagan ever took office, and the United States government had known this for a decade. Th' fuck do you think we spent all our time studying in those days? Ronald Reagan chose to spend us near to bankruptcy alongside it. Take your pick of reasons; none of them involves "reality". His was the morality of the small-town cop: determine how much graft is acceptable, how much sticking your nose into other people's business you can get away with by calling it "surveillance", and when you're finally found out protest loudly that things would've been much worse if Stalin had been in charge. A tacky Rose Bowl parade float is a fitting tribute for the real Reagan. Assuming it had a vacuum attachment that sucked money from honest people along the route.

The C Word

Geoffrey Wawro, "How the US Will Lose Egypt". January 31

THEY tell me that if I turn off Wi-Fi, graphics, and all other CPU-intensive applications I can get my our used blackbook to run on battery power for six hours, and we can huddle around the LED screen for our last moments of warmth.

Y'see, there's an ice storm on the way, following last night's ice storm, and if you've ever wondered just what it would take to get your fellow citizens to resort to cannibalism, buy yourself a teevee station and broadcast two days of warnings about "the biggest ice storm in twenty years".

I always get caught flat-footed by this stuff. I went on a typical shopping trip yesterday afternoon, carefree, and it took me to the meat case before it dawned on me why they were out of everything. Everything. I suppose it's debatable whether this represents the true, libertarian, kill-your-neighbor-for-the-last-box-of-Cap'n Crunch soul of modern America, or it's just a sample of why we've been manufacturing mass-market fear since 1945, but it's undeniable. Blind lust for anything on Your Grocer's Shelves and the existential dread of being locked up with oneself for up to 48 hours. Keep this in mind the next time someone within your hearing is blathering about The Founders: modern America would be reduced to a nation of panicked five-year-olds by the prospect of two days without indoor plumbing. Five to one says the Chinese are well on their way to perfecting the Toilet Clogging Ray, right alongside the Internet Porn Disruptor.

It's not a pretty picture. One of the local channels had a camera in the hardware store up the block, and a woman was proudly--proudly--buying every emergency candle they had in stock, apparently unconcerned at just how well-armed her fellow citizens are. The owner of the joint seemed mazed by it all, and, believe me, this is a man it takes a lot to maze when his cash registers are operating at capacity. People had bought him out of ice scrapers. Who waits until a major ice storm to buy an ice scraper? The same guy whose idea of emergency preparedness is to get to the store ten minutes ahead of the emergency, and five minutes ahead of his neighbor, and buy up everything in sight. No wonder this country freaks out when some guy sets his underwear on fire.

Which I guess brings us to Egypt:

So far the Obama administration seems to be getting it right on Egypt. The president has called for an “orderly transition,” and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has warned there must not be “a takeover that would lead to oppression,” a clear reference to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

More than just the right words will be needed. The Obama team should be looking closely at Washington’s awful mismanagement of the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 to make sure they do not repeat the errors of the Carter administration.

Okay, Professor, you lost me at Hello, as the kids say nowadays; I've never been quite clear as to why, when the chips start flying, America's pundit class suddenly gets all warm n' fuzzy over Diplomatic Language, which it can't wait to ridicule at all other times. Egypt's had thirty years of repression on our ticket, and now we're worried about it? Wait, forgive me for taking things at face value. What you mean is that the most important task for any American administration in times of Middle East Crises, however defined, is to make enough anti-Arab references to keep Israel happy, right?

The revolutions in Cairo and Tehran have much in common. Both simmered under the rule of corrupt strongmen who had held power for three decades. Both were triggered by new media—audiocassettes in Iran, Twitter and Facebook in Egypt—and both exploded in major regional states, with big populations, strong internal security services and powerful, U.S.-supplied militaries. Both dynasts, Hosni Mubarak and Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlavi, were regarded in Washington as “family friends,” to borrow Hillary Clinton’s phrase. Both had complex societies, with big swollen cities like Cairo and Tehran containing both the most and least educated people in the country: a relatively narrow educated elite and a broad mass of slum-dwellers. The strategic threat of that—then and now—was outlined by the U.S. ambassador in Tehran in 1970, when he predicted, with astonishing accuracy, just how Iranian demographics would shape the coming upheaval. Since most Iranians were “poorly educated and highly ignorant,” any truly democratic movement would “be in a reactionary obscurantist direction under the clergy.”

Both involve brown people, and Mooslems, and exhale carbon dioxide.

Here's the funny thing about that: the aggregate discovery of Some Guy Who Said Something Which Later Proved Prescient has yet to give us the slightest notion of how to identify him ahead of time, or what to do if we did. The fact that Churchill warned us about Hitler does not mean his idea of tramping across Scandinavia in 1939 to aid the Finns was a good one. The fact that he warned the world about Stalin does not seem to've kept him from making secret deals with, uh, Stalin. Somehow we keep finding in History precisely the lesson we were looking for in the first place. I've got no problem with people pointing out errors, or the reason for them--do it all the time myself--but treating the past as though it should have been as keen-sighted as the present is just horseshoe. (I typed "horseshit"; my spell checker didn't like it. But I find I like "horseshoe".)

The Carter administration was as startled by the revolution in Tehran as Obama was by the wave of revolutions from Tunis to Cairo. Just before the regime began to totter in 1978, Carter’s CIA had predicted that nothing much would change in Iran through 1985: “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even pre-revolutionary situation.” As Carter reacted to events in Iran, rifts in the U.S. government confused and demoralized him, and prevented Washington from acting swiftly and decisively to steer the Iranian revolution in a moderate direction.

Carter's CIA? C'mon. The CIA has clearly been a right-wing kookathon since its inception. The CIA recruited William Effing Buckley, fer chrissakes. What kind of an organization thought Bill Buckley would make an effective spy? Or an effective anything, other than headmaster of an exclusive boys' school? What sort of organization employed James Jesus Angleton for a lifetime? Presidents don't own the CIA. They may or may not share its major preoccupations and pathologies, is all.

So the Carter administration was startled by the Iranian revolution. So we're startled by Tunisia and Egypt today. So fucking what? What does that amount to compared to the Really Good Reasons we've had for supporting oppressive regimes in the region? The Shah was a bulwark against the Commies? You'll notice that they fell some time after he did. Saddam Hussein was a force for moderation in the region too. Defined, of course, as "not so ideologically anti-Israel as to be incorruptible". So Jimmy Carter wasn't quite sure what to do about the Shah. Too bad that wasn't true of Eisenhower. Too bad we haven't had more Presidents lacking apodictic certainty. Too bad Carter didn't wish away the Shah, Pinochet, and Marcos. Too bad the US can't do so, even if it ever finds the moral courage necessary. It's not the fucking way things work. Either we excuse the questionable ethics required to operate this sort of "real world" diplomacy, and we take the lumps when it goes wrong, or we speak out forcefully for international justice. Playing both sides is strictly for domestic consumption. For the “poorly educated and highly ignorant.”

Supposing it was simply a matter of Carter giving the nod to the Iranian army. What is that supposed to have accomplished? Thirty-five years of universal brotherhood? Bullshit. In the postwar period, when it had something approaching the half-global economic and military hegemony it has come to hallucinate as its birthright, the United States installed that sadistic inbred on the Appropriate Peacock Throne for the sake of Standard Oil, and out of nostalgia for what was left of the Great Game. That was a fucking mistake. The fact that it went on, somehow, for twenty-five years is not Jimmy Carter's fault.

Supposing that Jimmy Carter didn't know just what to do? What he didn't do is send the Marines, the way his five immediate predecessors did. Funny how History remains so silent about the efficacy of that little program, when she's got so many bad examples to choose from.

Kids Today

Kevin "America's One-Time Next Great Pundit and One-Time Mr. Michelle Rhee" Huffman, "A Rosa Parks moment for education". January 31

I WAS having such a good weekend I figured I'd better check out the Spontaneous Student Uprising to Draft Mitch Daniels I'd heard so much about. One embarrassing (and, really, is there any other kind?) and embarrassingly white YouTube video later I ran into this:

Who is Mitch Daniels?

Daniels is arguably the best Governor in America. In his first year leading Indiana, he transformed a $600 million deficit into a $370 million surplus. Daniels signed the Healthy Indiana Plan that expanded medical coverage to 132,000 uninsured people, passed an $870 million property tax cut, and directed Indiana — a state with 2 percent of the nation’s population — to account for 10 percent of America’s private sector job growth in 2009.

When you add his experience working in the White House, the U.S. Senate, as an executive of a respected policy think tank, and a major corporation, you can see why one pundit said that Daniels would make the best President of any Republican hopeful.

I am not even gonna say it (again). I just want to ask one thing: How did this budget miracle take place? Why, if Mitch has The Answer, aren't we doing that everywhere? Why isn't he explaining how? He doesn't even explain how he did it in Indiana. [Here's the short version, for the study-adverse: 1) Find a state where the legislature traditionally does little or no budget work in even-numbered (read: election) years. 2) Get elected. 3) Announce, loudly, that the difference between the projected budgetary requirements of two years previous and the real-world requirements of the present--which just happened to reflect the two years of the Bush II Jobless Recovery Part I, Mitch Daniels, Director--constitutes Deficit Spending! since "Standard Accounting Procedure in Republican and Democratic administrations" doesn't really have that Zing to it. 4) Find a Toll Road in your state. 5) Sell it to the same schnooks and crooks who bought the Chicago Skyway and now have no way of getting people on their private drive from the East except through you. 6) Announce, loudly, that the difference between the sale price of public property in your trust and the "deficit" "you" "inherited" represents your Big Brain at work. 7) Run for President.]

I mean 7) Be coy about running for President so a wholly spontaneous, grassroots initiative of college students concerned, above any and all other concerns, about The Deficit can form a fucking PAC to urge you to run. Th' hell happened to people over the last twenty-five years? You can't just open a free Facebook page without begging for tax-exempt contributions first?

I may be somewhat inured to these sorts of shenanigans, but I'm not going to get over the underlying willful stupidity in this lifetime:

Last week, 40-year-old Ohio mother Kelley Williams-Bolar was released after serving nine days in jail on a felony conviction for tampering with records. Williams-Bolar's offense? Lying about her address so her two daughters, zoned to the lousy Akron city schools, could attend better schools in the neighboring Copley-Fairlawn district.

Williams-Bolar has become a cause célèbre in a case that crosses traditional ideological bounds. African American activists are outraged, asking: Would a white mother face the same punishment for trying to get her kids a better education? (Answer: No.)

Meanwhile, conservatives view the case as evidence of the need for broader school choice. What does it say when parents' options are so limited that they commit felonies to avoid terrible schools? Commentator Kyle Olson and others across the political spectrum have called this "a Rosa Parks moment for education."

Yes, the entire span of the political spectrum: from a Townhall contributor with a right-wing educational "reform" foundation to a news reader on NPR, all the way to a couple of black people. All agree that the only way to improve public education is to throw in with the "conservative" forces which have been trying to destroy public education since 1956.

if you are poor, you're out of luck, subject to the generally anti-choice bureaucracy. Hoping to win the lottery into an open enrollment "choice" school in your district? Good luck. How about a high-performing charter school? Sure - if your state doesn't limit their numbers and funding like most states do. And vouchers? Hiss! You just touched a political third rail.

Williams-Bolar lived in subsidized housing and was trapped in a failed system. In a Kafkaesque twist, she was taking college-level courses to become a teacher herself - a dream she now will never realize as a convicted felon. It's America's version of the hungry man stealing bread to feed his family, only to have his hand cut off as punishment.

Y'know, here's the interesting thing, to me: We've been listening--and implementing--these solutions since before Mr. Huffman entered Swarthmore. As the "solution" to our "lousy schools" they're the Cup that never runs dry. But no one seems to mention that you can drink for thirty years and you're still thirsty.

There is no fucking set of circumstances under which Charter schools cease to be a Lucky Lotto deal. Indianapolis is creating Charters as fast as our Republican, or Republican-Democrat mayors can sign the papers; this hasn't changed the refrain about "failing schools" one bit. We've passed out vouchers in this country for a quarter century; if there was a single example of this making any difference it would've been repeated so often that by now we all knew it by heart. If the incontinently-deposited Charters in Indianapolis were performing any better than their public school counterparts there wouldn't be any discussion any more.

I don't know the particulars of Ohio's educational system. I don't know what made the actual "lousy school" Ms Williams-Bolar was supposed to send her children to so lousy, and I'm guessing nobody's eager to tell me. I won't condone nor condemn what she did, nor the way the Not Lousy suburban school district played hardball with her, from hiring a PI to demanding full tuition once she was caught.

Here's what I do know, and here's the one thing that's inescapable in this little morality play: Ms Williams-Bolar was trying to send her children to a fucking public school. Because the funding equation we enshrine, and the district lines we draw, are what make our poorest families send their children to our poorest schools. And the next time I hear someone from Teach for America offer a solution for that which doesn't sound like Mitch Daniels' Unexplained Miracle Touch will be the first time.

Thanks. A Lot.

David Brooks, "Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Burke: Being an Imaginary and Contentious Discussion of the Day's Events between two esteemed and noble Shades vying for the Hand of Mr. David Brooks, Esq." January 27

FIRST, somebody better fucking explain to me what God told Mike Pence, since otherwise the only honest explanation I have for his preferring to apply his inerrant Christian insight to Indiana, or as it's known in the Midwest, That Space Between Ohio and Illinois, rather than to the nation at large is that he's a lot less confident in private than he is in public. All other explanations involve large sums of money changing hands.

Mike Pence has considered himself a player on the national stage since he got to the House. This is something that happens to a lot of Indiana Representatives, and nearly all of our Senators. He's a cross-section of the Republican party. He's the perfect embodiment of fiscal "conservatism" and military profligacy wrapped in Jebus. He is not just what the Republican party wants, he is what it insists is the only way back to the City on the Hill. Mike Pence doesn't have political positions, or opinions; Mike Pence has The Answer. How can he give that up? What for? So Indiana can pass a 48 Hour Waiting Period, Plus Ultrasound, Plus Being Told That Fetuses Feel Pain, Plus Being Forced to Watch Other People's Sepia-Toned Home Movies Before You Can Get An Abortion bill? I mean, before we can pass another one? No, I don't want him as Governor, but in reality, after Mitch Daniels there's very little left to fuck up without declaring Outright Culture War, which these types have been too smart to do up to this point. The Indiana budget is FUBAR; you can't cut taxes because the only ones we have left pay your salary; six years of slashing education is going to show up in results at some point, not to mention that the Republican program is to fuck that up worse while we're at it; and if it comes to it you're only going to have Mitch Daniels to point a finger at. Losing fucking proposition unless your only concern is the lining of your own pockets. Christian know-it-alls really need to consider very carefully whether they want to step out front and try to run things, as opposed to wagging their fingers from the middle of the mob.

And, in case you're not from around these parts, consider that Lt. Governor Becky "Now Superfluous Y Chromosome" Skillman was shoved off the stage came down with that lifetime non-debilitating disease with no name or symptoms which took her out of the race right when Pence was making noises about running for Prez; consider Daniels' track record with exterminating threats before they occur; and consider the shitpot full of money he's sitting on, money which wants Palin on the sidelines, and doesn't want surrogate Palins popping up anywhere. With Pence gone it's Huckabee, Palin, or Not Christian Enough.

Two things: one, a week or two ago I heard some teevee blatherer talking about how "early" the President was indicating he'd be a candidate again; fuck, by this time in 2007 there were already twenty Republicans in the race, weren't there? The 2008 race began the minute they pulled the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo. The reason there aren't that many now is simple: the former Half-Term Governor of Alaska can obliterate any contender at any time at this point, Pence being the one exception, probably, because he's purer than she is. I think the logical conclusion we can draw from Pence dropping out is that the race now becomes an effort of the "fiscal" "conservatives" such as Daniels to raise enough slush to give Palin a lifetime non-debilitating disease with no name or symptoms, or another miracle pregnancy.

So I ain't in a great mood, and damned if Brooks doesn't choose just this moment to write an imaginary debate between 18th century cabbies, one of whom sounds like a Times intern trying to ape Montaigne without actually reading more than a paragraph, and the other which sounds like Milton Friedman. The "literate" consumer is supposed to understand that these represent the twin poles of Brooks' "principled" "moderate" "conservatism"; actual literates will, of course, just move on. I urge you to do so, in the strongest terms imaginable. I'm sorry. I already have a headache. Hamilton's 18th century neo-monarchist capitalism never confronted a smokestack, an interlocking directorate, a Ponzi scheme, a shortage of raw materials or a financial panic. Making him the mouthpiece of modern-day Teabag libertoonianism is, simply, too stupid for words.

Evidence Of Life On Mars

Jonathan Martin, "Mitch Daniels: Heartthrob of the elites". No, really. January 22

THAT title (mine), meant to be sneeringly condescending, of course, yet reminds me that last week my Poor Wife and I watched NOVA scienceNOW! ("The PBS Series With The ShortingOUT CAPSLOCKkey!") which is narrated by the affable and charismatic NEIL deGrasse TYSON, co-host of The Daily Show. The episode was entitled "Can We Make It To Mars?" and, since "No" apparently would have left them 59:49 short they went with "If We Pretend We Could Make It To Mars, Can We Make It To Mars?" There may be something to be said for blurring the distinction between hopeless optimism and unfettered hallucination, but this wasn't it.

We never quite mentioned who it was who was paying for all these overripe Star Trek fanboys to Live The Dream of thinking up impossible space motors or developing the Thousand-Year Jeno's Pizza Roll. I guess maybe PBS is a little sensitive about that sort of thing. Even my Poor Wife, who, we can safely say, is more sanguine about this stuff than I, on the grounds that no one on this or any other habitable planet could be less sanguine about it than I, found the thing cloying after about twenty minutes. Columbus! Magellan! With enough luck, some day we'll manage to get a dozen humans to Mars with enough of them still alive to enjoy being stranded there and looking at rocks no one's ever seen. How many billions ya need?

You know, you never see health care presented that way, or education, or nutrition, or Social Security. Isn't it interesting how many trillions of actual dollars we spend perfecting "adult" versions of little boys' toys, and how easily the scam perpetrates itself? Maybe we need Freddy Freeclinic, the Healthcare Provider with Laser-Surgery Eyes, or Rick Rational, Social Security Administrator by Day, Living Wage Advocate by Night, Batteries not Included. Somebody call the Chinese.

Anyway, Brendan, who I thought was a friend of mine, launched that latest in the never-ending Daniels flackery my way a few days ago. It's from something called "Politico" which is some sort of internets deal, kind of a Slate with the amusing stuff--intentional or inadvertent--removed.

And this one is a pinnacle, of sorts, since it postulates Daniels as a great favorite of the Elites and Punditologically Adept, which is explained by recasting unexamined bullshit from those earlier right-wing publication fluffings as simple morality tales for children.

If pundits and columnists represented the GOP base, Mitch Daniels would be the odds-on favorite for the presidential nomination in 2012.

And as an added bonus, the aggregate IQ of the GOP base would rise .005%.

The Indiana governor has been showered with favorable coverage from political thinkers and analysts in recent months, most of which heaped praise on his thoughtful and principled approach to governing while celebrating his serious yet down-to-earth mien.

As my dear granny used to say, "Th' fuck talks like that?"

“Of all the Republicans talking about the deficit these days, Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, has arguably the most credibility,” claimed The New York Times’ David Leonhardt in an Indianapolis-datelined economics column recently.

And which, as we noted in an Indianapolis-datelined turd in Leonhardt's Single Malt, reached that conclusion by avoiding all evidence to the contrary, including the billion-plus the state owes the Feds, plus interest and penalties. In fairness, Leonhardt stopped short of the full-on hard-on Daniels gives the Wall St. Journal and Rich Lowry and Steven Hayes at NRO. But he bought the image, which is a lot more important to Martin than that wonky details stuff.

Daniels is hardly the first presidential prospect to be greeted with bouquets from the cognoscenti as the Last Honest Man in politics.

Though it is possible he's the Most Dishonest Man to hold the title. Which probably says more about the cognoscenti than Daniels.

There is a long, bipartisan tradition of White House aspirants who play the truth-teller role and they almost invariably receive better reviews in print than at the polls.

Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas, Ross Perot, John Anderson, Lamar Alexander and John McCain in 2000 all won plaudits from elites for their willingness to speak hard truths about the real problems facing the country rather than just pandering to the partisan rabble.

Ross Perot? Lamar Alexander? Can I just stop now?

Usually, as it is now, much of the admiration is rooted in the truth-teller’s focus on the looming fiscal iceberg and willingness to tell audiences what they don’t want to hear.

And, as it is now, none is rooted in the truth-teller actually telling the truth.

Better yet, the candidate pushes aside the divisive social issues that are thought to be non-negotiable with the party bases.

Daniels voiced such an idea fairly explicitly in a much-buzzed-about Weekly Standard profile last summer, calling for a “truce” in the culture wars so the political class can get down to the business of repairing the country’s finances.

Let us pause for a moment and ask--sure, it's not the first time--how exactly one gets to be an Elite Punditating Cognoscenti type while remaining utterly innocent of the fact that people running for public office try to position themselves by saying shit?

Here, again, is the deal: Big fucking deal. Daniels tells some guy at the Weekly Standard that he's more interested in repealing what's left of the New Deal than making useless and divisive attempts to inject Backwoods Jesus into every political issue. In return, what? I'm supposed to regard this as a guarantee? Because the Punditatin' Elites would never let him go back on his word? The Religious Right won't be vetting his Attorney General the way they have every Republican AG since Bush I? There won't be an immediate cut-off of aid money to any third-world country where any health-care provider mentions to a pregnant woman that abortion is legal in the United States? What? Absent Mitch Daniels' Presidential imprimatur, Snopes will run out of crackpot emails? The man never even defined where he intended to locate the back burner. He read some fucking political tea leaves, and said something that sounded like an uptrend.

He's not gonna out-Christian Sarah Palin, or Mike Huckabee, or Mike Pence. We all know it. He's kept the religious nuts in line, mostly, in Indiana--in fairness, they get the same Back of the Hand from the Republican party generally every legislative session (allowed to introduce bills in the strategy sessions, which die there), because they're fucking nuts. Recognition of this fact does not make you a moderate. And it wasn't long into Daniels Campaign Protective Coloration #2 that Mitch announced his "fifty-year" church membership, which is something I've never heard him mention before. If Mitch Fucking Daniels becomes the Republican nominee it'll be with the acquiescence of the Religious Right, not over its howling objections.

But it’s not just his policy outlook that titillates the elites. The diminutive Hoosier has nurtured a profile as a mature politician whose outlook extends beyond the next news cycle and whose demeanor exudes seriousness.

As David Broder wrote last fall: “[H]is record of accomplishment is dazzling.”

Okay. I do rest my case. Or rather, you just made it for me.

He went to all the right schools (Bachelors, with honors, at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and a law degree, with honors, from Georgetown), learned at the knee of a political Wise Man (veteran Sen. Richard Lugar) headed up a think tank (Hudson Institute), was a top executive at a Fortune 500 company (Eli Lilly), and for two terms has been a governor, where, as the mandarins’ formulation goes, all the real policy innovations take place.

Alternately: from a fairly well-off family (paternal grandparents were Syrian immigrants); became weaselly faux-moderate Dick Lugar's butt boy while still in high school; suckled that teat for sixteen years; became president of the proto-neo-con and anti-environment Hudson Institute shortly after Indiana Republican government largesse convinced it to move to Indianapolis; left after three years to become Eli Lilly's Republican fixer; left after a decade to destroy the US economy for George W. Bush; left to become Governor of Indiana.

Granted, this beats hell out of Sarah Palin's c.v., but it doesn't exactly fill me with the Warm Glow of Guaranteed Open-Minded Moderation, somehow.

What makes Daniels different from, and potentially more formidable then, his truth-telling predecessors is that he’s not just The New York Times’ idea of the ideal Republican. The man known as The Blade during his tenure as Bush 43’s first OMB chief also has more traditional conservatives swooning.

I hate to be Johnny One-note here, but is there anyone on the planet other than Beltway insider Punditasters still referencing Bush 43 Nicknames as though they were badges of honor? While we're at it, is there anyone else who still says "Bush 43"?

“He’s a Reaganite who is not trapped in 1980s nostalgia,” wrote National Review editor Rich Lowry last year. “He’s a fiscal conservative who believes not just in limiting government, but in reforming it to address people’s everyday concerns; he’s a politician of principle who refuses to sell his program in off-puttingly partisan or ideological terms.

Well, he called 2006 Indiana House Democrats "car bombers" for refusing to agree with him, and then he told the rest of the state it was too backward to understand the perfection of his tiniest idea. But those are really terms of endearment in these parts.

So for "makes more traditional conservatives swoon" read "NRO, Weekly Standard, and WaPO flunkies agreed to blow him back when he looked like their best hope to avoid an "Abbot/Costello '12" ticket. Back when the Right was talking about "post-Reaganism". For twelve minutes. And for "politician of principle" well, just lie down until the fit passes.

The idea of a skilled manager who is passionate about ideas, can claim real policy accomplishments and speaks bluntly, but not bombastically, has thrilled influential conservatives like Will and Charles Krauthammer who see a Palin nomination as akin to a suicide pact.

Y'know, despite my estimation of the collective wit of George Eff Will and Charles Merkwürdigeliebe Krauthammer, it doesn't really surprise me that a Palin nomination would frighten 'em. Being thrilled by Mitch Daniels, on the other hand…

That Sputnik Moment Was The Problem, Bub.

shown actual size

OKAY, so it's time to admit that it's Public Education which is the failure, that Our Schools are just the bedsores the thing has developed from the inattention of mean-spirited and sadistic family members drooling over the old girl's money, and move on. It's failed, clearly. Nice idea. Successful in its day, the way grandma musta looked hot in that neck-to-ankle swimsuit back before Radio. But fatally flawed. There's no money in Communism *, and Education seeks to make people smarter. People do not take kindly to this.

In fact, as we clearly see, people run screaming in the other direction. When I was a lad the Horoscope was a daily feature in the Indianapolis Anti-Fluoridationist. It was buried somewhere; it came with 19th century graphics, and you followed a number code to read your personalized message, which is what drew my seven-year-old self; I remember it taking about a year before I could read all twelve messages by looking at the pile of words, rather than following the code. It was a dumbshit amusement. This was in the day when computers were the size of a house, plate tectonics was scoffed at, and Velcro was for plants. Today, you may have noticed, astrology is fucking news. What's the point of education? At the twenty-minute mark of Monday night's NBC News With Brian Williams' Suit he read the story of Oprah's imaginary sister. Let's leave alone the woman's public relationship with Honesty over the years; Jesus Fucking Christ, if I wanted Oprah news I think I could find it. Lemme know when she cures cancer. Or books bin Laden.

Now, I'm not saying that the President's Sputnik reference wasn't a fairly slick political move, or what must've seemed like a slick political move, grading on a Slick Political Move scale, which is to say bullshit in pursuit of self-aggrandizement at the expense of your fellows. Let's hit Republicans right in the American Exceptionalism! Boy, that'll mean they have to adjust their Budget Cutting Rhetoric to reflect their easy platitudes!

Listen, if there are educated men out there who still believe that Pointing Out Their Total Fucking Cognitive Dissonance has any effect on the Republican party then there's simply no point in educating anyone.

The American government--hell, every American with a subscription to Popular Mechanics--knew that Sputnik was a gimmick. Same as we fucking knew twenty years later that the Soviets were bankrupt. Nobody let on, because panic is good for business. At least the Defense business.

This is the goddam fucking hell of it, Mr. President: we came out of WWII as the only major power whose hair was still in place. Global economic hegemony, aside from our erstwhile Allies the other side of the Dnieper. So, of course, we started a religious war with them--because otherwise our own religious paranoids would have voted Republican--and set about gobbling up all we could everywhere else, rather than establishing sustainable growth patterns. This is known as the genius of capitalism.

The program started cracking in the late 50s, about the time Sputnik launched. Death from Above! Nukes on the Moon! Our response, sir, was to use this to justify continuing "Defense" expenditures at WWII levels in perpetuity. This was back, of course, when you actually had to justify that sort of thing. Quaint, really.

What did we get out of it, besides Tang, a multi-billion-dollar Space War Agency with nowhere to go now, and massive debt? This is the problem, sir. The same way all those qualities you admire in Ronald Reagan are the problem. We can't go on peddling this shit to ourselves. We can't go on letting "does it make money for Congressmen and GE?" be a final arbiter. That's the goddam thing that has to stop. American Exceptionalism is the fucking reason America is no longer exceptional. I sympathize with your plight. No one realizes more than I that the fight was given up decades before you came around. But then, I didn't ask you to run for President. And this shit ain't helpin'.

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* Where is A. Whitney Brown?

Back Home Again

Now is the winter of our discombobulation

Made ice fog by the smoke machines of Channel 8.

PREVIOUSLY on Bats Left Throws Right: Forty years of pretending its congenital Nixonian road rage is "just a nervous tic", and that dementia was a condition which beset Ronald "Gipper" Reagan only later in life, has led to a modern Republican party in which both Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence could be seen as viable Presidential material by a percentage of its base which exceeds the sampling error; forty years of explaining how we Actually Won in Vietnam but Lost on CBS, and pretending it is "basically okay with" racial equality has resulted in a Republican base which will buy, and eat, any shit the Brand shovels in a bag; forty years of running from the rhetorical swordsmanship of Spiro Agnew leaves that portion of the mass-market media which isn't completely in the bag with the social and analytical skills of the whipped dog.

And as we've mentioned before, it's possible that there's no better place to see the results, unvarnished, than ringside at the nightly Attempted Teleprompter Reading on a local, mid-sized market channel in a Hopelessly Red State such as, well, my own. It's like looking at the results of thirty years of Reaganism by checking bumfights.com. The locals lack the talent, the awareness, and the consciousness required to make this stuff deniable, let alone plausibly deniable. A pinnacle, or nadir, of sorts (records were made to be broken!) was reached last week when Channel 8 featured back-to-back performances by former Marion County Prosecutor and currently unindicted co-culprit Carl "Facetime" Brizzi; Brizzi was so compromised by his butt-buddy and chief campaign backer Tim Durham's Ponzi dealings that he refused to run for reelection last year. His replacement is a Democrat, which is the reason we keep Democrats around in these parts, and he fulfilled a campaign promise to refile the drunk-driving charges against IMPD Officer David Brisard, charges Brizzi had dropped without a hearing because when police finally got around to testing Brisard's BAC (and got a .19, two hours later) the draw was performed by a technician who might not be eligible to do so under one reading of a revised state law. (Brizzi, who was best known in these parts for his myomorphic nose for poon and television cameras, is currently under professional investigation for his using all that preening time to, among other things, prejudice cases pre-trial. So it's not like Channel 8 has any reason to steer clear of him at this late date.)

Of course 8 can't really be expected to try, anymore; its Statehouse man Jim "The Dean (Broder) of Indiana Political Reporters" Shella gave up pretending sometime during the Bush administration, and now confines himself to trying to shape Mitch Daniels' talking points into an inverted pyramid, just from force of habit. Here's Shella's three big stories of the week:

• Mitch Daniels' Super Colossal Brain singes Illinois, by reacting to its recent income tax increase by inviting Illinois businesses to relocate to Indiana.

• Mike Pence, winner of a straw poll in Iowa, currently running even with Daniels in New Hampshire despite five minutes, compared to five years, as a candidate, and the object of a seeming groundswell of interest in his economic/religious credentials, will no doubt run for Governor.

• Dick Lugar is going to be challenged in the 2012 primaries by the awesome power of 150 Teabaggers.

Okay, just to shag the fungo first: anybody's who's spent five minutes watching Indiana politics knows Dick Lugar could switch from Republican to NAMBLA and still win a twenty-second term. It's one thing to puff this sort of shit up to the level of news filler; it's quite another to say "Lugar is prepping for a fight" because he's holding a fundraiser.

As for Pence, well, again, I have no idea what the man will do. But there's no question that a Pence presidential run would hit Daniels in the solar plexus; there's no question that Pence is a better match with the Republican rank and file, who are the people who vote in primaries, being a sort of Mike Huckabee without the tax increase, or Sarah Palin without the trailer; and there's no question that wherever "Governor" came from it wasn't Pence's mouth. Shella--the longtime host of a local PBS program White People Laugh At Each Other's Jokes About Inside Indiana Politics,--asked his panel this week whether Pence's speech about Federalism didn't mean he was definitely running for Governor. Funny how Pence giving up the #3 position in House Republican leadership didn't have any deeper meaning.

But mostly it's been a week of slightly frostbitten, somewhat strangled (there's really no other kind on the Prairie) mirth at the impending war with Illinois Daniels sparked because he saw a moment's self-aggrandizement in it. Illinois, which has a two-party system, voted to raise taxes for the next few years to deal with its deficit. Indiana, which doesn't, will deal with its own deficit the way it has ever since Daniels' original plan to--what was it, now? oh, yeah--temporarily raise taxes to reduce its deficit was shot more fulla holes than the Moran Gang, and in less time, too: it will slash education spending, raise taxes that don't count as taxes, and fob the rest off on local government, then declare another miracle surplus.

The goddam petulant child routine would have been a hoot on some sensible planet. Right after the vote Daniels was urging disaffected businesses to relocate in Indiana (to someone who looks down on Daniels--yes, it's a large club--his little neener neener had the distinct aroma of Speech I Used To Win the Lovely Cheri-with-an-i Back for Marriage #2). By week two we're spending taxpayer dollars on ad space to encourage just that. Never mind, of course, that for the first six years of his administration Indiana's income and corporate taxes were actually higher than Illinois'; never mind that our base sales tax is 17% higher, thanks to the Daniels' increase. Never mind that this flood of new businesses is coming from Illinois, not Indonesia, and might thus be expected to bring along all their employees, rather than create jobs for any of the 10% of Hoosiers who don't have one.

Of course if they promise new jobs that counts in Indiana. The one guy doing so was the owner of Jimmy John's Sandwich Joint Franchisers and Labor Intimidators, Jimmy John Liautaud, who's so angry about the Illinois tax increase he's planning to move--to Florida. And suddenly add "about 80" employees to his staff of "about 100", as, you know, a Freedom Dividend. Again, it's one thing to drag this dickwad part of the story; it's quite another to swallow him whole.