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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hell, If Newt Gingrich Is An Historian, Everybody's An Historian

Ross Douthat, "The Enduring Cult of Kennedy". November 27

FOR starters, could we please be quit of Douthats, and Goldbergs, and Ben Shapiros (if we aren't quit of him already) recapitulating their parents' wingnuttery, uncomprehendingly, like children playing Ring Around the Rosy recapitulating the bubonic plague? * Ross Douthat doesn't know what happened in the 80s. So now he's going to correct the record on JFK? Or just unknowingly admit the font of most of his understanding?

No matter how many times the myths of Camelot are seemingly interred by history, they always come shambling back to life — in another television special, another Vanity Fair cover story, another hardcover hagiography.

If you get bored, just do what I did: substitute "Jesus" for every mention of Kennedy.

It’s fitting, then, that the latest exhumation comes courtesy of Stephen King himself. King serves a dual role in our popular culture: He’s at once the master of horror and the bard of the baby boom, writing his way through the twilit borderlands where the experiences of the post-World War II generation are stalked by nightmares and shadowed by metaphysical dread.

Y'know, Ross, you're over thirty now, a family man, so perhaps it's time you either stopped behaving like a dick, or took it up full time and tried to become proficient.

The Boomer shit, well, maybe it was clever, in a sallow fashion, back when your beard was the envy of your fellow underclassmen, but look, it's time you started thinking for yourself. Stephen King is a highly successful writer of pulp horror and sci-fi born in 1947. The latter fact makes him a Boomer; the former gives him more in common with a later generation which insists on salving its extended adolescence by calling comic books "graphic novels". If Stephen King was some sort of Bard to my generation I'd accept it. Never read the man, but I heard him talking about horror movies on Turner last month, and he was thoughtful and insightful. Meanwhile, there's plenty of political stuff in the works of Thomas Pynchon, or Don DeLillo, neither of whom depends on mass-market paperback sales to supply him with heft. Not that I'd advise you to step up in weight class.

Incidentally, he's a little tip about insults: if you have to strain to manage it, at least try to do so with a smile, and certainly not with some freshman bullshit about metaphysical dread. And if you have to doubly strain--making Stephen King a bard and a Boomer icon, say--it's really best to just shut th' fuck up.

At its best, King’s new Kennedy assassination novel, “11/22/63” — which sends its protagonist back in time to change that November day’s events — offers an implicit critique of this generational obsession. (I am not giving much away when I reveal that the time-traveling hero does not succeed in freeing ’60s America from the cruel snares of history.)

Oh, Ross, you're always giving more away than you realize.

But its narrative power still depends on accepting the false premises of the Kennedy cult — premises that will no doubt endure so long as the 1960s generation does, but still deserve to be challenged at every opportunity.

Go ahead; at least it means a break in the Reagan hagiographies. But look, Ross-o; the oldest goddam Boomer on the planet had just turned seventeen when Kennedy was shot. Boomers are no more responsible for the Camelot myth than you are for the Clinton impeachment.

The first premise is that Kennedy was a very good president, and might have been a great one if he’d lived. Few serious historians take this view: It belongs to Camelot’s surviving court stenographers, and to popularizers like Chris Matthews, whose new best seller “Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero” works hard to gloss over the thinness of the 35th president’s actual accomplishments. Yet there is no escaping the myth’s hold on the popular imagination. In Gallup’s “greatest president” polling, J.F.K. still regularly jostles with Lincoln and Reagan for the top spot.

Oh, yeah, but Reagan being up there is evidence of sound and solid historical awareness.

Shit. Blah-blah Vietnam, blah-blah Civil Rights, blah-blah Bay of Pigs. I'm not dismissing those because there's nothing to them. I'm dismissing them because Ross Douthat has picked them up like a bum cadges a half-eaten sandwich. People can worship Kennedy, or Reagan, or Martin Van Buren; the can write books where the South wins the Civil War or Rommel rolls into Glasgow, but it doesn't make 'em smart. The fact that people beatify Kennedy doesn't make him any less of a man, the same way the canonization of Reagan hasn't made him any less of an idiot. The question of whether JFK would have "come to his senses" over Vietnam (and it's highly unlikely: Johnson knew the war was doomed before he escalated it; the anti-Commie domestic politics of the day demanded it, especially of a Democratic president) is an empty exercise. It's the United States which bought itself that particular quagmire, and it's managed several more since then, without Kennedy's help. Did he believe that the weight of US military intervention would ultimately defeat the Vietnamese? Yeah. So does half the country forty years after it was emphatically disproven. Was he a slow-moving hypocrite on Civil Rights? Yes. And a politician. But I repeat myself. But ask African-American Boomers what they thought of Kennedy, Ross. Or what their parents thought. Does he deserve all the praise that's been heaped upon him? No man does. Obsequies are always mixed with infusion of poppy. So what? The Kennedy myth harks to the end of an era when American imperialism could still be thought of (erroneously) as a force for Good; compare the ugly worship of George W. Bush while in office. Compare the Great Society and Civil Rights legislation which traded, in no small part, on his interrupted legacy--throw in the enormity of Vietnam, too--with the destruction of international prestige and domestic economy that resulted from the Nixon and Reagan presidencies.

Bobby Kennedy survived to fulfill those silly Boomer promises of change before that, too, was cut short. Ted Kennedy, whatever his failures as a legislator and a man, remained a champion of liberal ideals when there was a bounty on 'em. Where's the comparable legacy of all the Reagan foofaraw? Shouting on AM radio, or filling its own pockets. Or worrying about someone else's rewrite of history when its own is nothing but fiction.


______________

* Which I doubt they are, in fact, but that's a much longer footnote than I have the time, or you the patience, for.

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.

Oh, So That's Why There's A Daily Beast

Michael Medved, "The Democrats' Ridiculous Double Standard on Weiner and Clinton". June 13

FIRST, lemme just say it's nice to see that some on the Right have learned the meaning of "hypocrisy". So maybe "honesty", "integrity", and "equity" won't be far behind.

I'm kiddin'. They already know "equity". Just not in the sense I mean.

Let's just start at the end. Hell, it's like the question about Vivaldi's concertos: did Medved write twelve paragraphs, or one paragraph twelve times?

But the nearly universal liberal position that Clinton—who, ironically, officiated at Weiner’s 2010 wedding—should never have been impeached but that Weiner must go for the good of the country? That awkward straddle makes no sense on any logical level.

I guess we can add "irony" to the list.

Is there really a "nearly universal" "liberal" "position" that Weiner should resign? You'll have to forgive me for not giving a shit. Okay, I (call me a liberal and that porn stache finally comes off) suggested that Weiner should resign, because of Anthony Weiner. Not because of the law. Legally, it's his business. Maybe his district's, if they have a recall procedure. It's also the House's, I suppose, but the odds that the House would actually remove him are microscopic, and if it did it would owe an apology to every other Congress in the history of the Republic. So there's one answer: Clinton should not have resigned because of a concerted partisan effort to remove him, but should--as he did--have stayed and let their bluff play out. Weiner should resign if he feels he owes that as a duty to his constituents. He doesn't. Welcome to the real world, Michael Medved. That's the end of the story, legally.

By the way, voters in Weiner's district--presumably as "liberal" as they come--want him to stay. But maybe Medved means a different universe.

None of the accusations against Weiner so far involve workplace harassment or sexual predation with members of his staff or other government employees. Clinton admitted to a protracted dalliance, including oral sex, with a White House intern.

Including oral sex! Dear me. I wish I'd known that at the time.

Okay, again: I seem to recall an "almost universal" insistence from the Right that the case against Clinton "wasn't about sex"; I don't seem to recall anyone holding Bill Clinton up as a paragon of virtue. An awful lot of people in the mid-90s seem to've run smack into the concepts of oral sex and lying for the first time, and to've required assistance to the nearest fainting couch. It wasn't believable then, and it's not believable now. He got caught in a perjury trap. He should have been smart enough to avoid that on personal and legal grounds. Had he been a private citizen he probably would have, because if he'd been a private citizen the charges never would have been raised. There are a million divorces in the US annually, Mr. Medved. At least one party lies in nearly every one of 'em.

So here's another difference. Weiner, as I said the one time I paid attention to this, as opposed to having it hurled at me, wasn't engaging in sex, so far as we know. He was engaging in juvenilia. What Bill Clinton did something like 40% of married people engage in at some time or other; what Anthony Weiner did no one over 22 should even be capable of.

Tell ya what, though, Mr. Medved. We agree about the Democrats. Fuck 'em for calling for Weiner's resignation. Fuck Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Fuck these people for not just shutting th' fuck up. Don't they pay attention to what makes the Republican party so formidable?

And can I just mention, as a hidebound old fuck, how much I enjoy the Vietnam syndrome at work here? The Right lies about a situation for a decade, gets called, and loses; fifteen years later it's back asking why no one believed it. Jeeze, all Ho Chi Minh had to do was surrender.

I Can Haz Rum And Lash Now, Too?

IT made my day this last Saturday to hear Maine Senator Olympia Snowe place the blame for two-hundred-fifty years of sodomitic obsession in the military, including the last seventy of reliance on faux-science declaring the mental and religious disturbances of wealthy white European males to be the baseline for Normalcy, on the "repugnant" DADT compromise of 1993. Snowe--who is known as a Centrist to Beltway insider publications like The Hill, as it saves them typing "a Republican who votes against the ACU on some major subcategory of legislative issues" over and over--had, as we all know, worked tirelessly for the repeal of this moral excrescence ever since the previous Wednesday afternoon. Take that, you Clinton-era compromise of the principles of equality and fair place all Americans hold dear, save the lunatics of my own party!

Of course it should come as no surprise that Snowe clung tenaciously to the moral high ground she summited only after somebody counted the votes for her--she is, after all, a Centrist--but I have to admit that even I was taken aback, for a moment, by the irony- accuracy- and ethics-free attempts to blame the whole thing on Bill Clinton. The AP story which thudded on my doorstep Sunday along with the rest of the worthless Indianapolis Racist Beacon was accompanied by a headline celebrating the end of the "17-year ban on openly gay troops", as though Pork Chop Hill had been held by the Pink Triangle Brigade, or the Rough Riders were, well, the Openly Rough Riders.

It's like blaming Jim Crow laws on the Kennedy Justice Department.

DADT--certainly no one's idea of a perfect piece of legislation--has, at least, the distinction of being a prime example of the sort of compromise legislation the horrible leftist activists who hold the Democratic party in sway were being lectured about just a week ago; the Paleolithic attitudes toward sexual orientation it supposedly engendered are alive and well and living like wet rot in the platform of the Republican party. None of this came through the coverage. Just Olympia Snowe's brave stance after only fifteen years in the Senate and the reassurances of the Joint Chiefs.

It is worth noting that the present law--until the current pending legislation replaces it--makes homosexuality grounds for discharge, but sexual activity between members of the same gender is not, provided one can prove that one is not homosexual. It might also be noted that what is actually being repealed is the Pentagon's PR response to the gay and lesbian rights movement of the 1970s, when it stepped up efforts to expel gays as a sop to the officer corps' political beliefs, the way women were not permitted in combat until our desire to smack around every tenth-rate country that sass-mouthed us made it necessary to look the other way, and the way the Air Force Academy is now the third largest evangelical mega-church west of St. Louis. So, too, might we mention the faux-science which helped make all this possible, in the 1940s, by declaring homosexuality a form of psychopathy, an attitude which continues officially to this moment. The military, like the Republican party, has a long history of looking the other way about actual sodomy; its principled opposition to homosexuality as a concept dates merely to the opportunity to oppose The Left in retaliation for its being right about incontinent military adventurism and perpetual world-war funding levels. Not that I was expecting Olympia Snowe to bring that up.

You People Detest Boomer Politics So Much, Why Is It Your Nose That's Still In Bill Clinton's Crotch?

Peter Baker,"Acid Test: Memories of Bill Clinton's Impeachment, as Obama's Staff Faces Scandal in Illinois". December 14

OR Hugh Fucking Hefner's, for that matter. What demographic's keeping that show afloat?

And who, exactly, is responsible for dreaming up this turd of a think-piece?

Ten years ago this week, Bill Clinton became the first elected president ever impeached by the House of Representatives, the culmination of a sex-and-lies scandal that consumed the nation and fractured the political system. Although he was eventually acquitted by the Senate, the scars run deep even as veterans of that showdown return to power under a new president promising to repair the breach that still divides Washington.

First, eventually acquitted? It took, like, ten minutes; certainly less time than it took Rehnquist to design that stupid robe of his. Unless you want to start counting from the time the bloated corpse of impeachment was found floating belly up in the Tidal Basin, in which case (since we're so interested in historical precedent that we needed to find a way to make Clinton sound like the first President to be impeached) Bill Clinton was the first President, elected, succeeding, appointed, or breathing, to ever be acquitted before the fucking impeachment took place. Baker wrote The Breach, the ultimate Beltway insider tick-tock about the Clinton impeachment; you'd imagine he'd have a little better grasp on the timeframe.

As key members of Mr. Clinton’s defense a decade ago, Mr. Podesta, his chief of staff; Mr. Emanuel, his senior adviser; and Mr. Craig, his special counsel, bring the lessons of that searing moment to the table as they now serve in President-elect Barack Obama’s inner circle. They learned the imperatives of moving quickly, closing ranks, controlling information and never conceding an inch when the president faces a threat, strategies employed with varying degrees of effectiveness back then.

For crying out fucking loud, Gregory Craig was born in 1945; he was practicing law in DC during Watergate. John Podesta (b. 1949) worked in the Carter Administration. Rahm Emanuel was born in 1959. No doubt the hunting of President Clinton--which had been in full swing for seven years by the time impeachment rolled around--informs something of their present approach to responding to Slimy Partisan Politics and the Newspapers of Record which Enable Them; God knows it gave 'em all enough practice. But I'm going to wager here that each man is familiar with the broader picture of the partisan low-road in America from 1980 on, possibly even including the continuing fucking attacks on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, fer chrissakes. If so this would apparently disqualify any of them for writing for the Times.

And look: even if we were able to make the case for Clinton's impeachment as some sort of Prime Mover of Modern Partisanship. so fucking what?  Which party threw a succession of haymakers at the other's groin? It wasn't an eight-year stalking of lying under oath; it was eight years trying to resuscitate a land-deal swindle (with the Clintons as swindlees), the facts of which were already quite clear when the Times decided (for some reason) to reopen the case to mark the beginning of the Clinton presidency. In fact it is the very measure of how things work that you can reprint this nonsense as 2008 draws to a close without being pitchforked by an enormous mob of people eternally pissed off about your role in ginning the whole thing up in the first place. "[M]oving quickly, closing ranks, controlling information and never conceding an inch", are those some sort of Clinton administration discovery? How can anyone with a passing familiarity with Democratic politics in the Era Begun with the Impeachment of Bill Clinton miss the fact that the Democratic rank-and-file, at least, clamor for more of that sort of Republican-esque, hit-back-twice-and-never-apologize behavior, and blame passivity in the face of underhanded Republican tactics, at least in part, for their big losses in 1980 through 1988? How can anyone discuss current partisanship without reference to Lee Atwater, at the least? Other than working for the Times, of course?

If there's one thing, one thing that wasn't already understood about the Republican party by the time impeachment rolled around it was the degree to which it stood ready to burn everything to the ground using its own marrow for tinder, rather than admit error, let alone defeat. In other words, it served as a preview of the Bush administration, which we may or may not have just barely survived, and which, I'd like to remind the Times, was marked by large-scale capitulation ("cooperation") from Democrats even as it fell into the subbasement of Harry Truman's approval numbers.  

Why would Podesta, Emanuel, and Craig be informed by those tactics? Because, whether they employ them with glee or dolor, they're necessary. Because in no case will it ever take more than ten minutes before what's left of the Republican party tries to exploit whatever flimsy excuse for ginned-up outrages comes its way. And because it won't be more than a week before the New York Times has linked it, no matter how, to Bill Clinton's cock.

But Seriously...

• Obama admits reference to Auschwitz was wrong

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama admitted on Tuesday he was wrong to say his uncle helped liberate the Nazis' Auschwitz concentration camp after Republicans said Soviet troops freed the camp.

Leaving aside the question of how one actually goes about constructing a sentence using a shovel and some children's blocks, the thing that astonished me--and seems to have gone unremarked elsewhere--is that there are Republicans who know the Soviet Union fought against the Nazis.

• Politico Exclusive: McClellan whacks Bush, White House

By Mike Allen

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,” was not “open and forthright on Iraq,” and took a “permanent campaign approach” to governing at the expense of candor and competence.

Next week, Mike Allen is shocked to learn that Mike Allen planted Vandalgate stories for the nascent Bush administration.

• McCain edges away from Bush but seeks his help

By Tim Gaynor

...The Arizona senator said in a speech that he would pursue nuclear arms reduction talks with Russia and China as part of a foreign policy vision that brings back "broad-minded internationalism and determined diplomacy."

"It is a vision not of the United States acting alone, but building and participating in a community of nations all drawn together in this vital common purpose. It is a vision of a responsible America, dedicated to an enduring peace based on freedom," McCain said.

So, correct me if I'm wrong, Senator, but didn't you vote to ignore all that in the first place?

• Oral is Normal

THE NORMALIZATION OF ORAL SEX.
By William Saletan

Every day, thousands of parents sit down with their children to talk about the facts of life. They want their kids to know how babies are made, how serious sex is, and how to protect themselves. For most of us, the topic is awkward enough without getting into advanced stuff. That's why the coverage of President Clinton's blow jobs felt like such a cultural assault. We just want to stick to the basics.

So keep it simple. No vaginal intercourse until you're married, and no fellatio until you get a job as a journalist.

America: Proudly Facing Whatever Portion Of Its Moral Quandries It Chooses Not To Ignore Since 1981!

Joyce Purnick, Voters Accept Divorced Candidates, but They Have Limits." New York Times, March 11

ALREADY in this pre-presidential year, the question is out and about: How judgmental will the public be of candidates, how demanding of idealized personal lives and vintage family values?

Well, it's curious: the headline already answered that question. I'm sorry, the Moose should have told you!

But the thing that's really curious is how the matter is now up to the public to decide. Or, better put, the matter is again up to the public.

As always, I'm happy to accept the news judgment of seasoned journalistic professionals. You say the public had no interest in whether serial monogamist Ronald Wilson Reagan lived up to the old fashioned morality he claimed was a cure for everyone else's ills, and I believe it. An unexpected benefit of this non-interest was that when the 1981 release of Trivial Pursuit proved so popular the question about Nancy "Mommy" Reagan being knocked-up at the altar was just that much more competitive.

But this new, more flexible approach to the Inviolate Code of Marital Morality set down by an angry God did not include philandering, at least not in 1988 or '92. This is because of the well-known asterisk after "'Til Death Do You Part."


Customers who bought this explanation also bought

Ronald Reagan's devout Christianity
George W. Bush's youthful indiscretions
Some useful distinction between marriage vows and military obligations or sworn testimony by Republican officials, where applicable

Sorry, I just spotted the error. The New Moral Code did not permit philandering by Democrats; as I recall it the public suddenly lost interest in the subject when the question of George Herbert Walker Bush's fidelity to his lovin' Babs came up. The public is a bitch mistress, but she gets to decide. Major news outlets are just along for the ride.

[Is Rudy's personal track record as typified by Andrew Giuliani's recent interview a] problem? No, said David Garth, a political consultant who advised Mr. Giuliani when he ran for mayor. “The more trouble the country is in, the more you tend to overlook some of the personal things you may have looked at before,” he said.

That is one theory: The voting public, practiced survivors of Bill Clinton ’s transgressions and former Senator Gary Hart ’s career-wrecking dalliance with a young woman not his wife, is less likely to dismiss a candidate because of personal foibles today, especially if worried about war and security.

Well, I think we're all glad that's over with, especially at a time when the same people who who peddled the story for so many years now are the ones at risk of being eaten by it find the country in such dire straits. What's the other theory?

“This will be in a way a kind of test of where the values of the electorate stand,” said the historian Alan Brinkley of Columbia University . “There are not too many positions in America that Giuliani’s messy personal life would obstruct. But the presidency might still be one of them.”

"Anything that involves making change" might be another.

The most damaging aspect of Andrew Giuliani’s remarks could come down to his surely unintended role as a town crier. He clued the rest of the country into what has long been common knowledge back home — how the former mayor treated his second wife, Ms. Hanover. In a performance that astonished even jaded New Yorkers, Mr. Giuliani declared his intention to divorce her at a news conference, catching Ms. Hanover unawares.

On the other hand, after eight years of Bush administration news conferences, this may come to be seen as refreshingly ethical. After all, you decide.

Current Events Lab

Ben Evans, "Gingrich had affair during Clinton probe." AP, March 8

"The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards."

So What Did We Learn? That Gingrich's campaign, sorry, potential campaign staff learned that somebody had this. Can't be a Democrat--who would possibly care at this point? I'm lookin' at you, Mitt.

Alternately, maybe Dobson asks all his interviewees about their extramarital histories. I can't say, personally, since the only one I watch is his Pre-Oscar telecast.

Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.

So What Did We Learn? That even after all these years, shorn of his ability to speak gobbledegook or racist codewords to the Sons of the Confederacy CPAC, Newt Gingrich could not successfully argue that rain falls down.

"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."

So What Did We Learn? One, that there's still no USDA limit on the amount of partially-hydrogenated sludge you can add to a wire story. Two, that God still permits people to lie to Jim Dobson without bursting into flames.

How long do you suppose Newt has been practicing that one? "Got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting judge." I've seen weasels that couldn't weasel that good. What Clinton did (god I'm tired of defending that man's penis, however many admirable qualities it has) was make a false statement in an affidavit ("in front of a sitting judge"--as I understand it, few of them actually chose to stand--implies that Clinton committed perjury on the witness stand, which he did not) in a case which was later dismissed. Clinton later--after the impeachment--pleaded guilty to contempt of court. Which is not a felony. In a matter that would not have been pursued in 99.999% of already mooted cases. Despite the practiced parsing Newt still oversteps, since he couldn't avoid saying "committed a felony" despite that "got in trouble for..." Clinton stood accused of a possible felony, the act he at least tacitly admitted to could have resulted in a felony charge, but he certainly did not "commit a felony" which was then pursued by the sad but duty-bound Gingrich.

And no, Mr. Evans, the statement could not "refer to" the impeachment charges, where "felony" is not even a part of the vocabulary, and where there are no federal judges, seated, standing, or leaning against a wall, just a Supreme Court Justice. Who is, by law, required to dress like an Oxford don in a Pink Floyd movie. This has nothing to do with anything, by the way; I just like reminding people. Gingrich was pulling a fast one. You stood aside and held the door open for him as he escaped.

Widely considered a mastermind of the Republican revolution that swept Congress in the 1994 elections, Gingrich remains wildly popular among many conservatives. He has repeatedly placed near the top of Republican presidential polls recently, even though he has not formed a campaign.

So What Did We Learn? That absent USDA guidelines you may find yourself chewing mouthfuls of pure sludge, unfiltered. "Wildly popular among many conservatives"? What the fug is that supposed to mean? If we're going to quote the empirical evidence. let's, I dunno, quote it. Last I saw (couple weeks ago; I'm not gonna look up Primary horserace figures any more often than that, not one-year out) Newt Gingrich was running neck-and-neck with Mitt Romney. This despite the fact that Newt has twenty years of name recognition, some of it not involving adultery and dying wives, whereas 78% of likely voters think Mitt was "that hot shortstop phenom in the Texas league last year". This is in a race where there aren't any Wildly Popular Among Conservative names at the top. The Gingrich constituency is that segment of the Coulter Party which believes the 2006 results show that the GOP has not been sufficiently mendacious.

"There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them," he said in the interview. "I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I'm ... not proud of." Gingrich's congressional career ended in 1998 when he abruptly resigned from Congress after poor showings from Republicans in elections and after being reprimanded by the House ethics panel over charges that he used tax-exempt funding to advance his political goals.

So What Did We Learn? That "got in trouble for committing a felony" is not in the AP stylebook. And God's problem is that He'll listen to anybody.

Somewhere Norman Mailer, writing about prizefighting, notes the ego demands on the Heavyweight champion include that he must walk around knowing that he, quite possibly, is the Baddest Man on the planet. Does the same existential strobelight flash in Newt's skull? Is there some greater weight in lifting the head off the pillow in the morning when you know it's possible that you're the Lyin-est Scumbag to ever run for office?