Ain't Gonna Play Sun City

Indianapolis Star photo/ Matt Kryger

DAVID Hyde Pierce joins Carmel Center for the Performing Arts Artistic Director Michael Feinstein, above, in opening The Tarkington, the intimate 500 seater which takes its place in a princely Public/ "Private" diadem with the Carmel Palladium at its center. Feinstein is pulling down a reported half-mil a year to lure other big names to the place, so that first-night royalty, your Real Estate Barons, your Furniture Kings, can tell friends and family they seen that guy from teevee.

And, okay, people in Carmel don't talk like that. Carmel's the other side of the Marion/Hamilton county line from Indianapolis, and owes its twenty-year metamorphosis from sleepy farming/antiques whistle stop to Richest City in Indiana to the completion of the interstate highways, specifically the Federally-funded I-465 ring it borders, and well ahead of schedule in the 60s, thank you, combined with the subsequent influx of money and white people escaping public schools the government put Negroes in, and a rock-solid one-party system.

Carmel became an extension of Indianapolis' "cultured" side of town, the North, in the late 70s to the 80s, a time when people with money stopped respecting wit and started respecting real estate holdings. And so it came to pass the City of Nouveaux and Racists decided to build itself a big culture center, and start drawing off the sort of midsteam-to-slightly-inside popular music/ dance troop/ Broadway road show performer who had only five or six alternative showcases available in Indianapolis. And it gave half a mil (reported) to Michael Feinstein, who, and this is not exactly my forte, not that anything really is, does not appear to me to be someone who'd have been filling 500 seaters in Central Indiana on a regular basis without this relationship. I don't recall anyone ever telling me they were headed out to the big Feinstein show at Clowes, or the Circle, or the IRT, or the State Fair. Hey, can-can a son gout, whatever. I don't particularly have any use for Feinstein's crooning, or drenching myself of an evening in a double-dark chocolate truffle of The Great American Song Book. I'm glad someone works to preserve the greatness of Gershwin, Porter, Arlen, Kern, and Carmichael (that's two Hoosiers, in case you lost count); I'd just rather hear them sung by Fred Astaire. Or Lotte Lenya. Let alone someone who could sing.

Of course one thing that will bother me forever is the whole "Let's pretend those dreadful 50s and 60s did not exist, unless it's time for some campy good fun" ambience; so maybe Feinstein blasts Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, and Lowell George when he's home, but there's just no way he could sell it to the swells. But they, on the other hand, are just appropriating the wit of Ira Gershwin and Dorothy Fields, and Betty Comden, and maybe a little Fats Waller some night if they're feeling naughty; they sure ain't votin' for Sophistication. And when Robert Johnson, Willie Dixon, and Muddy Waters, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, Smokey Robinson, and Holland/Dozier/ Holland make the cut, I'll let you know. Until that time this isn't a movement, it's a cultural tic from the same people who brought you Disco. And Nile Rodgers can send me all the unkind emails he wants.

Without question the real issue here is just that Hamilton County, Indiana, is the poster-child for solid Republican rule/ pro-bidness, anti-tax rhetoric division, while taxpayers are still on the hook for anything their elected representatives fancy, though it won't be public housing or low-cost medical insurance. But, y'know I look at that picture and see two accomplished professionals whose marriages Indiana does not recognize, by order of the party that Hamilton county bankrolls. This is between them, their consciences, and their accountants. I'm sure there are bigger and more fitting windows I could be breaking elsewhere, myself. But just for the record, I'll be skipping the Spamalot touring company, thanks anyway.

You Expect Full Credit For Turning In This Paper Sixty-Five Years Late?

SURE sure, it's Politico. But then we're the country that hosts Politico, and worse, like agar-agar hosts the pneumococcus bacillus. This is the fucking United States of America, which used to mean something; if Rick Perry and Karl Rove are significant players in our national politics it no longer means anything better than Hold Your Nose. Rove's artificial genius is founded on the fact that his man--the poster boy for unearned privilege, alcohol-induced Korsakoff's syndrome, and the worst President this country has even been inflicted with, bar none--"won" an election decided by the Supreme Court in a fucking decision it tried to disavow at the same time it announced it. If America really was exceptional, in a good way, that never would have happened. If America had the fucking sense God gave most mammals Karl Rove would be hiding out in another hemisphere. Meanwhile, Rick Perry is almost literally a Bag of Hair. A feud between these two is not news, because neither of them is anyone worth giving a shit about. And we're not going to solve anything until the public discourse is reported on by people who are honestly dedicated to the truth, who think it matters, not overgrown versions of the kid on the playground who'd eat a worms for a quarter.

Sorry, this started out to be the caption to that photo, but for fuck's sake. You don't think there's something deeply, deeply disturbing about a country where those two holes in the atmosphere play a meaningful role in politics? I don't know how anybody believes that Rick Perry is a game-changer, a bull in the bullpen, a formidable candidate assuming-the-race-will-be-decided-on-Phony-ass Telegenics, a sort of bargain-basement version of The Candidate, other than the fact that it worked for Sarah Palin * four years ago, when "Hey, she's hawt" was the only Right/Redneck reaction (that is, public reaction) that initial weekend, while everyone in the country with an IQ above hypothermia went "Wha' th' fuck is this idiot the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee?"

Okay, so there is reason to take Rick Perry seriously as a candidate, because, c'mon, lookit who's actually been President the last few decades. It doesn't mean you can't register a little shock.

Jacob Weisberg, " Lessons of the Crisis: The debt-ceiling debacle revealed that politics is broken in every possible way and there's no point in explaining complicated matters to the American people." August 4

At the level of political culture, we have learned some other sobering lessons: that compromise is dead and that there's no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people. The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed. It has been astonishing to watch Obama's sheer unwillingness to give up on his opponents after their refusal to work with him on the stimulus package, health care reform, or the extension of the Bush tax cuts last fall. A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president. But surely even he now realizes there's no middle ground with antagonists whose only interest is in seeing him humiliated.

This is what I came here to say something about, and it's similar. Namely: where th' fuck have you been? It isn't like this behavior is something new in the Republican party. This is how the Republican party has been behaving for forty years now. This is the economic version of Adam and Eve on a Dinosaur, and a Christmas Tree on Every School Lawn Republicanism. And it's not like nobody's mentioned this in your adult lifetime, Mr. Weisberg.

What it is like, is like everybody agreed to treat these people as though they were not seriously disturbed, and disturbing, in exchange for fewer angry phone calls, now emails. The party of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, of Phil Gramm, eventually, and Newt Gingrich, had to be treated as though its crackpot schemes and transparent scams and residual (ha) racism and Bronze Age skygazing were just alternate ways of ordering the universe.

Seriously, this didn't just all th' sudden jump up and bite you in the ass, did it? In your adult lifetime, Mr. Weisberg, the US Congress has contained Strom Thurmond, John Stennis, and Jim Eastland. Okay, sure, they were all Democrats, but it ain't like Ronald Reagan didn't out-crazy a coot in nesting season. C'mon. The mass-market media has been cozying up to Republicans since Reagan got hold of telecommunications regulation, not that Big Business and Republicanism are particularly strangers in the night. Your bosses like tax cuts, lack of supervision, and stock-market upticks. The attitude trickled down. Now the Republican party is all intransigent and crazy and shit? Now? By any chance was that Schiavo business the first time you noticed any religious nuts in those parts?

It's been crap all along. And not the sort of crap people repackage as Tootsie Rolls **, either. Really disgusting crap. And no one called it. People fucking celebrated the "roaring" "success" of "Ronald Reagan" in the 1980s. After that it just became a question of how big the scam could get, and how much lower, ethically. If any.

_______________

*And, earlier, for JFK.

**And no offense intended to the fine people at Tootsie Roll, Inc. It's just the old saying about how someone couldn't tell a Turd from a Tootsie Roll, coupled with the fact that big name confectioners were among the most gleeful of compliers when Ronald Reagan asked all patriotic industries to please cheapen their products while obfuscating the change from consumers, with their Protections and their Complaints and their contribution to Democratic causes, although this was something the candy companies had pretty much been doing on their own already. Merchantilism, schmerchantilism. See that Stephen Jay Gould essay on the incredible shrinking candy bar, circa 1978 if memory serves, for once. † Look up what happened in the cattle industry under Reagan, while you're at it, in case you don't know.

† The author has an eidetic memory--he was that young--of the first time he scrounged a nickel for the candy machine at the local swim club, obtained his preferred (already odd/snobby at such a young age) Polar bar, which was a knock-off Milky Way with a white glazed top, I think, the icing signifying the cool crispness of the Arctic, tearing off the wrapper, and discovering that the shape of the candy bar was now being played by a black cardboard insert, notable for its previous absence, and the bar itself had withered by 10%.

The Battle Elephant In The Room

WAS it depressing, or just depressingly familiar, when David Leonhardt told Stephen Colbert Tuesday night that "Medicare is by far the dominant source of our deficit"? Leonhardt has a Pulitzer for his work explaining the intricacies of the economic system, yet he can't be bothered to look.

And sure, sure, he meant well. He meant we have to get health care costs under control. He meant we have to raise taxes to pay for the shit we buy. He wasn't calculating how many poor people can die in the streets before the stench starts wafting over to some of our tonier gated communities.

But he's fucking dead wrong, and wrong seven ways from Sunday.

Medicare--it provides less than half the medical expenses of its beneficiaries, the elderly and the disabled--is 13% of the Federal budget. Total Medicare spending in 2009 was $484 billion. In 2009 the total interest on the National Debt attributable to military spending was $390 billion. That's the interest we pay on all things military (including VA costs and military pensions) for having acted, since 1946, as though it were perpetually 1944.

Our ten Nimitz-class supercarriers represent a $450 billion collection of holes in the ocean in construction costs alone; they're scheduled to be replaced by 2040 by an equal number of Gerald Ford-class hulks at twice the cost, assuming you believe 2005 estimates, which you shouldn't. That's construction costs. Not development, nor maintenance, nor upgrades, attendant fleet, staffing, planes, aviation fuel, or the cost someone will eventually bear to do something with the twin reactors when we don't need 'em anymore. That's our supercarrier Navy. No one else in the world has any. Their role is to intimidate tenth-rate military powers, since we haven't figured out how to invade any on the ground.

Which is distinct from figuring out why we need to invade any, since that answer is either too amorphous to pin down, or too brutally self-reflective to ever see the light of newsprint.

Why in the world would someone like David Leonhardt make this mistake? Is it because, as a Reagantot (born 1973) he's spent his entire life being lied to about it? Medicare, like Social Security, is a trust. You pay a separate tax bill into the fund. Eliminate it altogether and you get that portion of your taxes back, and good luck saving it for when you can't work. This has been lumped into the "social spending" category--public health, hospitals, schools--by the American Right and Democratic centrists since the Vietnam war, in order to insist it was The Great Society, and not a wasteful and useless jungle conflict, which was destroying the US economy. It's an argument disguised as a fact, and apparently no one born after the Nixon administration can be bothered to notice. Fer chrissakes, we spent nearly $700 billion on "Defense" in 2010 not including the costs of however many wars we're in now, and that's if you believe it's the one thing the government doesn't lie about. Subsuming this as "national security" is like imagining Wal*Mart is the most successful Mom & Pop hardware store in the country.

Look, children: you've been sold a bill of goods, including the confusion of the honor of military service with the less-that-honorable uses to which it's been put over the last sixty years. You got sold the idea that the war in Vietnam was divisive because dirty hippies spit on returning veterans, and not because the goddam thing was a lie from beginning to end which a large portion of the citizenry slowly came to realize, and object to. There's nothing in this country so bloated and wasteful as our military budget; there's no government expenditure anywhere else in the world that begins to match it. Caring for our elderly and disabled citizens is not a discretionary item; it's a measure of our humanity. I don't know how the argument got so twisted, but I do know that a moment's thought should be enough to untangle it.

And so long as we're here, could we just mention something else? Namely, that even if you buy the "conservative" "argument" this shit doesn't work, or even make sense. If "social spending" was the sole, or even the largest portion, of our budgetary woes, then it ought to be reformed. If doing so is too much for our career legislators, we ought to encourage them in the most direct fashion to find new careers. Anyone who believes the same party which hit the fucking roof because its own man--Bob Gates--proposed scrapping so worthless a piece of military marital aid as the F-22 is not going to address the real problem. We're fucked. We've been fucked since Ronald Reagan tore down the solar panels on the White House. At least we could get the history right while we swirl down the drain.

Forget It, Jake. It's What Passes For Wisdom.

Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake, "Liberals hate the deal. So what?" August 3

David Weigel, "Bachmann vs. Romney". August 3

SOMETIMES you gotta wonder whether Sarah Palin is too smart for the room. Cillizza:

Liberal anger and disappointment with the president is real. But will it have real political consequences heading into 2012?
The answer is “sort of.”

The most obvious impact will come in fundraising, where virtually no one in the Democratic donor base — affluent (and liberal) individuals, trial lawyers, organized labor — is happy with the deal.

While Obama’s $86 million haul in his first three months of active fundraising suggests he will have few problems raising the money he needs for his reelection campaign, it will almost certainly be more difficult for House and Senate Democrats — many of whom voted for the final deal — to collect cash from a disgruntled donor base.

So fundraising "sorta" affects politics?

A secondary, but far harder to gauge, impact is on the question of enthusiasm.

One of the keys to Obama’s sweeping victory in 2008 was the fervent following — in terms of campaign contributions and volunteer hours — from the liberal base of the party. Their energy proved infectious as the Obama effort went from campaign to cause.

Even before the president cut this debt deal, some of that intensity of feeling had worn off as liberals grew discouraged by what they believed to be a series of concessions made by Obama — from not closing the Guantanamo Bay prison to an extension of the Bush tax cuts.

I know, I know: that's Chris Cillizza twice this week, and it's only Wednesday; next stop, correcting the grammar at Townhall. And I know it's nothing new, or out of the ordinary, but just look at how the argument is constructed: Liberals are angry. This may affect campaign contributions for the people they're angry at. They may also lose enthusiasm. Bear in mind, the next time some schlub at the Post fills six column inches with a piece about how the sticker on his toaster warned him not to use it in the bathtub, that this is how their own wise men speak.

We will hear, shortly--from "a Democratic consultant sympathetic to the liberal cause"--that liberals and progressives have no where else to go (and nowhere is this truer than for the sympathetic Democratic consultant). Interesting, then, that a couple years ago "conservatives"--who'd just been shellacked at the polls the second straight time--could form An Entirely New Party, to widespread Press acclaim, which later just happened to be captured by the Republicans.

We might add here that the Obama campaign famously succeeded in, and by, motivating large numbers of new voters, a bloc which had a proven track record in losing interest immediately afterwards, and that their lack of motivation helped seal the 2010 midterms. With any luck, not voting will develop into a life-long habit. Meanwhile, if I might suggest it, any "Liberal" or "Progressive" who now finds himself with Nowhere Else To Go should consult a specialist about how the 110th and 111th Congresses were wiped from his memory. I can't personally recall when Liberals and Progressives had any place to go at all, let alone One Glowing Possibility. Maybe back when the Washington Post practiced journalism.

Meanwhile, I was gonna write about Weigel's backhand "defense" of Joe "They're All A Bunch of Terrorist Bombers" Biden's unprecedented use of metaphor, a piece which was supposed to inform curious Slate imbibers that David Weigel Is Immanently Reasonable while reminding them in a stage whisper that Joe Biden is not. But when I went back to quote the thing he was on to Round 14 of Michele Bachman Talk Like This, But Mitt Romney Talk Like This, a game which, for the life of me, I can't imagine who Weigel thinks is interested in. On their recent ads:

One's a primary ad; one's a general election ad. They really are polar opposite campaigns. When Romney eventually opposed the debt limit hike, he did it as a press release, an afterthought, because who is this voter who's going to cast a November 2012 vote based on which presidential candidate wanted to hike the debt limit?

When, y'know, Iowa hasn't been relevant to a Presidential primary since Carter '76, and that was just from the novelty factor. The only reason anyone would pay attention to Iowa is in the hope that it propels some cracked bride of Jesus into Serious Candidacy, apparently just for the sport of it.

If you're a Republican, either the distinction between Mitt Romney, rich guy panderer, and Michele Bachmann, insane Tax Cutting Jesus Lady, mean everything to you, or they mean nothing. Is there some middle ground? Some Centrist Undecideds out there trying to make heads or tails of the race? Pah. Republicans are either gonna hold their noses and vote for Mitt, because Hair, or they aren't. If you're nutty enough to believe Michele Bachmann is qualified to be President--even of the United States, the Satis House of Geopolitics--then no evidence of anything matters. If you aren't a Republican, why do you care about either of them?

Mostly I enjoyed how once again with Weigel Disingenuousness pats itself on the back for being so even-handed. Bachmann "remain[ed] elusive on just how the budget would be balanced this year." S'funny, but as far as I recall it, you could say that about every Republican candidate for anything, going back at least to Ronald Reagan's first campaign. That's not criticism; it's hitting fungos to yourself. Mitt, on the other hand, eventually opposed the debt-ceiling hike. And this is supposed to be a slashing criticism of a guy who's changed every single one of his original positions in search of the Republican nomination?

American Exceptionalism: Building New Shit To Replace The Old Shit We Couldn't Afford The Maintenance On Because We Were Busy Building New Shit

Alec MacGillis, "Angry liberals seek silver lining in debt-limit deal". August 1

FIRST thing we do is add "vertebrate" to the requirements of office:

“It’s a surrender to Republican extortion,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who voted against the deal. “It’s one thing to say we want this, we don’t want that as part of negotiations. It’s another to say we will destroy the country and the economy if you don’t do what we want.”

"Now, honey, you know you can't chop your sister up into little pieces and run her through the garbage disposal. Mommy and Daddy will buy you a cat instead."

So why in hell did your party "do what they wanted" anyway? You don't believe in negotiating with terrorists, just in giving in to their every demand so they'll go away?

Because it sure seems to me that Democratic concerns focused almost exclusively on the potential damage to markets. Which, agreed, was considerable. But we've suffered thirty-five years of real damage thanks to Republican shenanigans, though the markets have weathered that a helluva lot better than the average Americans who used to be the Dems bread-and-butter. Saying "they were holding us hostage" is pure melodrama. If Default was too serious to contemplate as a means of demonstrating to America just what loons the Republicans really are, then you should have solved the problem earlier. You could have caved in last March, or last December, just as easily. Now we're all going to share in a decade-long disaster, probably much, much worse, and none of us has any say in the matter any more. Except to vote you all out, and replace you with assholes of the same or even larger diameter.

Your Next President If It Isn't Michele Mitt Romney said yesterday that he wouldn't have stood for even a whisper of potential revenue increases on some future world, or any talk of reducing the Defense budget. And he's the sane and sensible one in the race, by Republican standards. So it ain't like you've even stopped the hemorrhaging. In a lot of ways, bleeding to death over a decade is worse than doing so in five minutes.

Yet again the default Democrat in me wants to ask how we got here in the first place, and that little voice answers back, "Because the Dems couldn't do a goddam thing with unprecedented majorities two elections running. Because, despite a hostage crisis, a center-right President wouldn't show half the audacity of his miserable predecessor and become a functioning emperor." It's always too late to go back.

I'm sorry, but I just don't fucking get it. Why does Barack Obama want to be President? For the perks? He acts for all the world like what I've long suspected him to be: a guy who thought he was running for Vice-President, who suddenly found himself unexpectedly in the driver's seat, with too much money at stake to back down. Barack Obama is like the goddam Hollywood vanity project a hundred yes men said yes to back when he was hot.

And why do the rest of these fucks want to be Democrats? Because they're more comfortable worshipping Ronald Reagan from afar? For chrissakes, if there's a real Democrat in this country who hasn't expected Republicans to act precisely this way for the last twenty-five years it's because he's not that old. But somehow Congressional Democrats just don't seem to see it. Somehow. The only things accomplished by Democratic presidents over the past twenty years were 1) not being convicted by the Senate; and 2) staring down the Republicans over a government shutdown. Maybe the circumstances are slightly different today, but a stare is still a stare. At the very least maybe you guys coulda been prepared to face the eventuality.

Look On The Bright Side. Now We Won't Need Death Panels.

Chris Cillizza,"The debt-ceiling deal: Winners and losers". July 31

Peter Wallsten and David Nakamura, "Did Obama capitulate--or is this a cagey move?" July 31

Ezra Klein, "Democrats will lose now. But they can win later." July 31

IF you'd like to forget for a moment what input you had into the Great Debt Ceiling Compromise, or "Compromise"--your choice of fries or cole slaw with your shitburger--I recommend casting about until you find The Cool Kids' Analyses. Because just think about it: which would you really rather do, get the 1500 calories a day you might manage in your golden years from premium cat food, or escape, without medical assistance, a world where Ezra Klein and Chris Cillizza don't just have jobs as political commentators and open-mike-night standup comics, but are charter members of the Liberal Media Emailers Club?

Wallsten and Nakamura:

But for a White House eager to improve its standing with centrist independents who have been fleeing Obama, even a losing deal can be a winning strategy.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of where, besides "inside the skulls of Beltway insiders", these centrist independents reside, let's ask exactly why they've been fleeing Obama. Because he was too centrist? Because the reasonable, middle-of-the-road Republican party pointed out his Socialist World Domination scheme? Because previously he just hasn't shown the leadership that utter whimpering capitulation signals to your average demanding Difference Splitter?

Cillizza:

Losers

Liberals: As the basic framework of the deal emerged, liberals began voicing their discontent about a bargain that left their side wanting more. With no revenue in the initial phase of the legislation and Medicare cuts on the table in the second phase, there’s not much for the ideological left to celebrate.

Same question, in reverse: where are these people, aside from the actual America none of these fucks knows anything about except how to fly over? The only liberal official I heard from during the whole mess was John McCain.

(Okay, I heard Chuck Schumer with David Gregory. Schumer made sense. Which meant nothing he had to say would be reflected in any final deal. As if we needed confirmation.)

Klein:

But Democrats will have their turn. On Dec. 31, 2012, three weeks before the end of President Barack Obama’s current term in office, the Bush tax cuts expire. Income tax rates will return to their Clinton-era levels. That amounts to a $3.6 trillion tax increase over 10 years, three or four times the $800 billion to $1.2 trillion in revenue increases that Obama and Speaker John Boehner were kicking around. And all Democrats need to do to secure that deal is...nothing.

Look, I don't give a fuck if you really are only 23-years-old. You've already had a lifetime's worth of proof that the Democratic party will never be able to take advantage of any hand it's dealt. Saying "oh, wait, the Dems will get it back in a lame-duck session when the Bush tax cuts expire" is like saying "Good news! The Democrats have a fillibuster-proof Senate majority!"

Friday Monon Knee Warmers

Ben Harper and The Five Blind Boys of Alabama, Take My Hand
Fountains of Wayne, Please Don't Rock Me Tonight
Leon Russell, Dixie Lullaby
Bruce Hornsby and Ricky Skaggs, Come On Out
Richard X. Heyman, Hand Prints
Rufus Wainwright, Across the Universe
Brenton Wood, Gimme Little Sign
Sam Phillips, Raised On Promises
ZZ Top, Stages
Ryan Adams, Chin Up, Cheer Up

What Krugman Says, Vol. DCCXLV

Paul Krugman, "The Centrist Cop-Out". July 28

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

AND, we might add, perpetrating a shameful sell-out to the Nixon administration, one which has gone on now for forty-three years without the slightest hint of a public reevaluation. We've had a fuller discussion of the appropriateness of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for fuck's sake, and we still would be if Rand Paul wasn't a pussy.

And it's Nixon; this is the last guy your modern journalistic celebrity would admit he'd bend over backwards for rather than tell the truth about.

Question

IS there any reason I shouldn't just imagine that everything in this country not originally constructed of shit has been turned into shit by reverse alchemy, Republican rhetoric, and Democratic cowardice?

ITEM: here are the stories on the Politico homepage:

The summer of liberal discontent
Still waiting for Obama
Pols cash in on the debt debate
TPaw's connected Iowa consultants
Has Obama betrayed the Left?
DNC head: GOP could spark 'chaos'
Biden, McConnell look for way out
Podestas lead FEC bundling list
McCain: Tea-party freshmen 'foolish'
Tea Party founder blasts Boehner
Freshmen coalesce around Boehner plan
GOPers chant 'fire him' at staffer
Boehner quiets rebellion on right
Perry put out feelers on Fox debate

Yeah, I know; it's Politico. Still, are they not nominally adult men and women paid to follow domestic politics? Do we need twenty-five stories which say the same thing, none of which has anything to do with any "reality" that doesn't have "political" in front of it? We've done this shit for thirty years. The greatest acting performance Ronald Reagan ever gave * was his histrionic hissy fit at raising the Debt limit to $1.4 trillion, on his way to more than tripling that. We've lowered taxes, cut programs, and demonized the poor for three decades, and we're worse off than ever. This is not a part of the story?

Weigel. (Seriously, I toyed with the idea of just saying "Weigel"):

Eight months ago, in an interview Democrats love to send around even more than they like to call Republicans "extremists," Boehner predicted that the vote on the debt limit increase would be the "first really big adult moment" for new Republican members of Congress. Democrats read that as Boehner saying that Republicans would have to suck it up and raise the limit. Instead, it's turning out to be an entirely different kind of adult moment: Movement conservatives are seeing the value of playing politics, and trying to convince themselves that pure partisanship can be principled, too.

Down with the Tyranny of Meaning, Comrades!

Look, I turned 21 at the tail end of the first Nixon administration. So I lived through two Reagan and three Bush administrations as an adult. These people don't scare me anymore, because they've already done their worst; I'd just like to know why a regular paycheck and some cadged drinks convinces them they don't need to look any further than their own reflections. A handful of connected financial institutions stole from practically every American in the country, and no one seems to give a fuck so long as he's got a plasma teevee. House Republicans now object to raising the Debt Ceiling to pay for programs they--minus the eight or ten new ravening ideologues every high-water Republican election brings 'em--voted for, simply because they feel they now have carte blanche to blame all that on the President. As well they should, because he's the guy who keeps insisting they can be reasoned with. [I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the little Which President Said This About The Deficit (Surprise Answer: Ronald Reagan) moment in his speech the other day, since, 1) I was trying to imagine what audience his speechwriters thought that would work on; and 2) I love the idea that a professed Christian thinks you can shame believers by quoting holy writ.] And some fuck calls this "principled" on the grounds, apparently, that it's possible to put words together in that order and still have them recognized as English.

There are clear, calm, level-headed solutions to our economic problems. Those three adjectives insure that they're not going to be listened to. And this apparently disturbs no one at Politico, or Slate, or anywhere else all our Iraq War-flogging geniuses hang their shingles these days.

Listen: my Social Security taxes went up during the Reagan administration in order to solve the "insolvency" "problem". Take it away from me now. I'm ready. But at least one of you fucks is dying in the gutter before I go.

___________

*Yes, it's a new record for Steep Grading Curve.

Pawlenty-Bachman: It's Like The Bum Of The Month Club, But Without Joe Louis

Richard Cohen, "The GOP's real headache: a lack of courage". July 25

Amy Gardner, "Pawlenty struggles to step out of Bachmann's shadow". July 27

LET'S give Richard Cohen credit, for once, the way we might credit a glacier for a glassworth's of thaw:

Still, Pawlenty should become Mr. Republican, a term once reserved for Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio. He personifies the near-total lack of leadership among leading contenders for the GOP nomination. Not only will they not confront Bachmann and the nonsense she spews, but they diligently turn their backs on their obligation to educate their own constituencies. For the time being, they seek to become president only of the 119,188 Republicans who voted in the 2008 Iowa caucus, and then only those whose conservatism has been set in concrete.

S'funny: Cohen and I are the same age, and if I saw a headline reading “Pawlenty Questions Bachmann’s Fitness” I would, assuming I gave it an instant's thought, have figured it was about her cardio workouts. Or, sure, her migraines. I would not have imagined, let alone hoped, that one Republican Presidential sweepstakes loser would have criticized another on substance, because first I would have been forced to imagine a Republican Presidential sweepstakes contender talking about substance. And the last one of those I recall was John Anderson, in 1980, at the dawn of the Ascension.

The only Republican Presidential primary season since 1964 containing anything resembling a clash of ideas was '96, and you have to use "ideas" in the loosest possible sense there to make it fit, the same way you have to use "Pat Buchanan" and "viable candidate", or "Alan Keyes" and "sane".

'96 was the primary season where Nixonians went to die, not that they were being repudiated, renounced, or killed off by anything better, but just because the Snapple of Reaganism had out-branded Gall and Wormwood, mostly by outliving it. Sure, Nixonite Bob "Bob Dole" Dole got the nomination, to widespread indifference. But the only other Nixonian to make a showing was Indiana Senator Richard "Dick" Lugar, who was handed his walking papers early, but not before he attempted, in desperation, to out-Reagan Reagan by proposing to eliminate the income tax. After that Lugar spent much of the following decade sulking that he'd pimped himself out for no return, waking only on occasion to appease the ACU vote tabulators and try to make himself look too statesmanlike to care.

Buchanan, of course, had worked for Nixon, rounding up grandmothers for Chuckles Colson to walk over, but by '96 he was more the Ur-Crazy Republican, except the confusion of ancient Israelites and modern Israelis hadn't quite been perfected in him. The first "wide-open" GOP primary in twenty years also gave us such archetypes as Keyes, Steve Forbes, and Phil Gramm, the former Dixiecrat who was essentially Jack Kemp without the sound economic ideas. That's pretty much the breadth of the party since.

True, it was hard to get down to actual issues with Bill Clinton's dick on your mind constantly, but it's not as if even that one produced any real fireworks. And since then there's been one mold. The most that happens in Republican primaries is that some "establishment" Republican--Maverick John McCain, 9/11 Rudy Giuliani, Mitch "Groundswell" Daniels--becomes the darling of the chattering class for about twenty minutes, never quite long enough to actually criticize the Raging Dementia he's supposed to serve as an antidote to. Tim Pawlenty isn't going to criticize Michele Bachmann, Crazy Jesus Fluoridation Lady. For chrissakes, where would that sort of thing end? Bachmann may indeed, okay, is too much of a lunatic to be President of a United States still populated by people who wish it to continue, but criticizing her without angering the base would be like picking all the prehistoric toads out of your coal. Pawlenty doesn't lack the "courage" to attack Bachmann. Well, maybe he does, I dunno, but it would be suicide to try. And that ain't something that started when the first Teabagger misspelled something on his placard. Nor is it some 11th Commandment horseshit. No one in the Republican party dares to attack the Crazies, because they've allowed them to take over enough of the party that you'd have to kill the patient to get rid of 'em.

By the way: the impression that this is some form of cowardice, or pure political calculation, is unwarranted speculation at this point. We're talking about people who've been Republicans their whole adult lives, all of it in the Silent Majority/White Backlash era, and never shown the slightest intention to reach for some Spackle, let alone the bug spray. I don't endorse the idea that Mitch Daniels is smarter than Sarah Palin just because he named Atlas Shrugged, and not the New Testament, as his five favorite books. In fact, I'd suggest that there's your answer. Assuming you're interested, for some reason.

Tuesday Olio

• Anybody seen the Inhofe family lately?



I do hope they're enjoying their summer.

• Yeah, it's been hot here, too--it's the fucking end of July, fer chrissakes--and it's supposed to get hot again, which is good, because the local teleprompter readers were really in their element, and it seems a shame to interrupt. Last week Channel 8 ("Your 24 Hour News Source") had a dietician on two days running to explain which fruits and vegetables ("watermelon") contained a lot of water, evidently for the benefit of the people who knew they needed to hydrate ("not a word"*) but don't like the taste of the stuff.

No doubt you've endured this sort of thing, too, and if so, thank Richard Nixon, since all of this traces to the Happy Talk format bullshit of the early 70s, when White People, as defined by Which Cracker Ass Yelled the Loudest, grew weary of all the bad news, as defined by anything which made White Cracker Ass politics look bad. So now, not only would the local hairdos rather talk about Nothing, most of 'em don't remember a time when that wasn't the accepted practice. So large amounts of money change hands for advertising slots during a ninety-minute festival of people talking about the weather, which you can get for free from any cashier, barber, or salesman in town. You would imagine that in the intervening forty years at least one college-educated news producer would have edged a cautious toe in the direction of a different pool, but no. Somehow it occurs to no one that for a solid week eighteen of every twenty-two minutes of local news was devoted to advising people who were hot to look for shade.

Not to mention that the advice comes from people whose only non-air-conditioned moments in summer are when they get sent out to do remotes on how hot it is.

• Republicans are recalibrating on social issues, Part 4,763:

Two of the most prominent social conservatives looking toward the 2012 presidential election -- Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann -- now have suggested deferring to the states on marriage laws. That stance meshes somewhat with former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman's view, and he is perceived to be the most socially moderate candidate in the GOP field. For a party that has in the past remained adamantly opposed to gay marriage, the coming presidential race may be the forum where that position gets a fresh look.

Y'know, a year ago all Mitch Daniels had to do was stand up (okay, and prove to voters he was standing up) to brush aside the Palinistas; today the entire Republican field is one big religious mania, and the rank and file is desperately hoping that Rick Perry will join in. It is abso-fucking-lutely clear that no candidate will be tossing the Religious Right overboard, certainly not when every last one of 'em is trailing Obama by somewhere between six and infinity points.

Saying "Waall, if'n New York wants queers to marry I guess we cain't stop 'em" doesn't exactly seem a reformulation of the GOP brand to me. Not that it seems like a rallying point, either, and we might act like we've all been to a Republican rodeo before. The minute this attitude hurts Bachmann or Perry in the slightest it'll be adjusted right quick. Or, more likely, they'll just deny they ever said anything so darn foolish. When there's no more political mileage to be squeezed out of the thing, that's when the Republicans will "recalibrate". And you'll know the time has arrived, because it'll be accompanied by an insistence that gays are the real homophobes.

__________
* at least not to me; "hydrate", as an intransitive verb, means "to cause to undergo hydration", meaning, to combine with water, which is not what you do when you drink a glass of the stuff, but saying it that way makes you sound all scientific an' shit.

And You Felt Compelled To Share This Why?

Ross Douthat, "Anders Behring Breivik May Be a Euro-Conservative, But He's No Fundamentalist Christian, So There. Plus Bill Clinton Times Infinity". July 24

I KNOW, we've played this game before, but, really: supposing you had some degree of influence over the contents of The Nation's Op-Ed Pages of Record, is this the sort of thing you'd continence? Even supposing you felt, for philosophical, political, or economic reasons that the section should reflect "both sides", or "a wide-ranging sample of contemporary viewpoints", or "some sop to the Right as a CYA for Anthony Lewis Russell Baker Frank Rich uh, whoever the Liberal is there now"? (Oh. Maureen.) Is "Ross Douthat answers some guy at Daily Kos" what you had in mind? Or "Ross Douthat Weighs In On the Burning Question of Just How Christian Some Nutjob Norwegian Mass Murderer Is"? Do you not expect something for your money? Absent the Times Douthat would be saying this same shit to strangers on the bus, provided he could find one so crowded that people had to sit next to him.

It takes him six words to mention Al Gore, and a restrained 437 before Bill Clinton exposes himself. Clinton, you'll recall, single-handedly rolled the entire Republican party in eau de McVey after the Murrah Building bombing. Douthat certainly remembers, because he was all of fifteen, and no doubt took extensive notes.

Never mind, of course, that the Oklahoma City bombing--once Bob Dole's instant analysis that "Arabs" were the obvious perpetrators became inoperative--marks the first of two occasions in postwar US history when the party on the Right opposed unfettered police powers (the other being John Ashcroft's post-9/11 intervention on behalf of responsible owners of private arsenals the size of Chechnya's).

Timothy McVeigh’s connections to Republican politics were several degrees short of tangential, but Clinton successfully linked the heartland terrorist to talk radio and the government shutdown, implying that McVeigh’s crime was part of a broader story of antigovernment conservatism run amok.

You'll have to forgive me forgetting that that occurred; somehow to me the Oklahoma City terror bombing was a big enough deal that I didn't look to Bill Clinton to explain it to me. But, then, I was just an adult.

Listen, goddam it: there are dozens of people chattering on the internets as we speak, and it doesn't matter what any of 'em are saying. It certainly doesn't matter enough that the Times has to pay some maroon to do this little tap dance every time another of his petards goes off unexpectedly. Nutjobs sometimes kill people; sometimes enough people that they impinge themselves for a moment on the raging Korsakoff's Syndrome that is popular culture and political commentary. It may be that we need to understand such people better, that we need to air our opinions about their possible motives. If so, having Ross Douthat to do it for us is worse than not doing it at all. There's plenty of room for these gotcha games to play themselves out endlessly; if Douthat needs to participate he should give up the grueling one-column-per-week pace that was encroaching on his parenting time earlier this year and stick to yelling at the six or eight people who watch him on Bloggingheads. The fucking thing about tragedies such as Norway is that in the end they don't mean anything at all. And if we are going to talk about them, maybe our first (and, wishful thinking alert, our only) consideration ought to be how to keep weapons which permit mass killing out of the hands of people willing to commit mass killings.