Tuesday, February 28, 2012

When Chickenhawks Compare Battle Scars



This entire post by Andrew Sullivan is completely hilarious:

Where Have The Sane Conservatives Been These Past Few Years?

David Brooks asks the question. PM Carpenter answers:
They were lounging in their cloakrooms' soft-leather, wingback chairs, breezing their eyes across conservative columns that dwelled, for example, on socioeconomic functions of "happiness," rather than conservative columns that relentlessly smashed the emergency glass and frantically rang the alarm bell: Has this party gone fucking nuts -- or what?
The Brooks record is a little more complicated than that. But Bartlett and I started early. Frum was expelled from AEI for telling the truth.

Bwahahaha!

Well, drinks all around gentlemen!  Heroes all!

After all, in only took until George W. Bush's 2nd Term ("Dubya II:  Clusterfuck Harder") for it to begin to sink in on our Mr. Sullivan that the Right had gone completely mad (and who reacted to the bad news by seamlessly shifting away from demonizing his betters on the Left to insisting that all the bad people he had formerly sided with doing all of those bad things he had formerly endorsed were simply not "real" Conservatives.)

Then Mr. Sullivan lets David Brooks' long, long record of cowardice and mendacity off with a "complicated", because the Tory-careerist-suck-up-reflex is hardwired into Mr. Sullivan's head.

And then there is Mr. Sullivan's "Daily Beast" masthead buddy, David Frum.  David Frum, who stooged for scumbags and fascists long after it was perfectly clear who and what they were.  David Frum, who had to be pried out from behind his desk and thrown through AEI'a screen door to get him off the wingnut welfare teat, and who has been trying to burrow back into the GOP's good graces ever since.


Heroes all!


Finally -- as is true with every single column of this type -- Mr. Sullivan's self-congratulatory roll of honor comes without the slightest acknowledgement that the Left has been right about this stuff for decades [or, as one wag put it, "Repeating as epiphany stuff thoughtful liberals have been saying for the last 30 years"])

One of the technical terms for Liberals I remember from way back in the days when Messrs. Sullivan, Frum and Brooks were getting paid big money to napalm us for insufficient patriotism and disloyalty was "Murrica-hating, Commie surrender monkeys".

The technical term for us today remains "invisible".

This massive omission is one of the many inconvenient facts about Conservatism that Mr. Sullivan appears to be completely incapable of facing.

Why not email him at "The Daily Beast" at "andrew@thedailybeast.com" and ask him why?


(Brad DeLong asks the same question-that-dare-not-speak-its-name here)

Monday, February 27, 2012

Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Lent


QUEENBOBO_SM
to stop sniffing glue. 

It turns out I decided to take a Lenten break from vivisecting the odious Mr. Brooks just in time for him to drop a column in which he finally snaps and calls out his Republican Party as "everything but a child of God", as the saying goes.

The Possum Republicans

...
In the 1960s and ’70s, the fight was between conservatives and moderates. Conservatives trounced the moderates and have driven them from the party. These days the fight is between the protesters and the professionals. The grass-roots protesters in the Tea Party and elsewhere have certain policy ideas, but they are not that different from the Republicans in the “establishment.” 
The big difference is that the protesters don’t believe in governance. They have zero tolerance for the compromises needed to get legislation passed. They don’t believe in trimming and coalition building. For them, politics is more about earning respect and making a statement than it is about enacting legislation. It’s grievance politics, identity politics.
... 
But where have these party leaders been over the past five years, when all the forces that distort the G.O.P. were metastasizing? Where were they during the rise of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck? Where were they when Arizona passed its beyond-the-fringe immigration law? Where were they in the summer of 2011 when the House Republicans rejected even the possibility of budget compromise? They were lying low, hoping the unpleasantness would pass.
... 
Without real opposition, the wingers go from strength to strength. Under their influence, we’ve had a primary campaign that isn’t really an argument about issues. It’s a series of heresy trials in which each of the candidates accuse the others of tribal impurity.
...

Sure, it's shot through with Brooks' trademark mendacities and omissions and, sure, two weeks from now Mr. Brooks will recant, redact, reverse or otherwise equivocate his way out from the corner into which he has painted himself, but it was quite a thing to see, especially considering that only a few, short years ago the same David Brooks was penning Third Party fan fiction about an imaginary "McCain-Lieberman Party" which would solve to every one of America's vexing problems, because both sides were oh so equally mean and unreasonable (old-school Brooksophiles Brooksologists will immediately notice the absence of words like "Bush", "Cheney" and "Iraq from Mr. Brooks' bill of particulars):


The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.

The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for civility than for venom.

On policy grounds, too, the McCain-Lieberman Party is distinct. On foreign policy, it agrees with Tony Blair (who could not win a Democratic primary in the U.S. today): The civilized world faces an arc of Islamic extremism that was not caused by American overreaction, and that will only get stronger if America withdraws.

On fiscal policy, the McCain-Lieberman Party sees a Republican Party that will not raise taxes and a Democratic Party that will not cut benefits, and understands that to avoid bankruptcy the country must do both.

On globalization, the McCain-Lieberman Party believes that free trade reduces poverty but that government must invest in human capital so people can compete. It believes in comprehensive immigration reform.

The McCain-Lieberman Party sees Democrats in the grip of teachers’ unions and Republicans who let corporations write environmental rules. It sees two parties that depend on the culture war for internal cohesion and that make abortion a litmus test.

It sees two traditions immobilized to trench warfare. 

...

(A goodly number of Mr. Brooks' commenters all want to know the same thing: Where the Hell have you been these last 5, 10, 20, 40 years?  The short answer is that during those years Mr. Brooks was making his fortune toadying for the forces which he now decries and writing endless 800-word glops of Centrist drivel and bad Third Party Porn.   The longer answer is that Mr. Brooks' has used his Toadie Years to amass enough clout that no one in the rest of the media would dare to ask him that question.

Meanwhile, commentors at the Washington Monthly are thanking God that someone has finally found the courage to tell the truth about David Brooks!)

Still Not Getting It




Andrew Sullivan reacts to my post here without acknowledging it:

Santorum Exposes The Real Republican Party

This has long been the theocon argument; it was the crux of what I identified as the core Republican problem in "The Conservative Soul". It is not social conservatism, as lazy pundits call it. It is a radical theocratically-based attack on modern liberal democracy; and on modernity as a whole. It would conserve nothing.

Wrong, wrong, ludicrously wrong.

The worlds's most famous gay, Catholic, Tory Conservative absolutely will not accept the simple fact that the American Conservative movement to which he has lent so much of his time and talent has, in fact, been working tirelessly for centuries to "conserve" and promote a set of values, traditions and institutions which have deep and powerful American roots.  It is a social order...

...based on the conservation of the absolute hegemony of straight, white fundamentalist Christian men within a social hierarchy based on the supremacy of the white race. 
...which has been ordained by Almighty God and is therefor beyond debate. 
...which believes it has been under relentless attack by the forces of Satan and his secular Liberal Marxist elite minions, who are to blame for every problem in American society. 
...which Conservatives believe must be conserved and restored at all costs lest we risk the wrath of God.

To preserve these "traditional institutions", Conservatives have been at war with the larger American culture for centuries.

Mr. Sullivan appears to be is completely incapable of facing this simple fact.

Why not email him at "The Daily Beast" at "andrew@thedailybeast.com" and ask him why?


The Best Five Minutes on TeeVee*



this weekend.

Conservatives are emotionally and psychologically (and, in several cases, professionally) incapable of facing what they proudly said and did just a few, short years ago. They're cowards, scared to death that someday someone is going to hold them publicly accountable for all of the silly shit they have been talking for the last 30 years, which is why they pay goons on Fox News and Hate Radio a fortune to tell them that they don't even need to try; that their bigotry is patriotic and their ignorance is heroic.

They are equally emotionally and psychologically incapable of reconciling their own words and deeds during the Bush Administration ("Any word spoken against the Dear Leader in a time of war is treason!") with their own words and deeds during the Clinton Administration ("Impeach the murdering Socialist rapist!") and the Obama Administration ("Impeach the Kenyan Marxist usurper!").

However, as profoundly morally retarded and intellectually lobotomized as they are, they are also protected from on high by the Lords of Darkness.

No one on network television will say anything like Chris Hayes said here. They would, in fact, be fired if they even tried.

And no one inside the GOP money machine will stop handing multi-million-dollar checks to lunatics.

Which means that nothing will change and we will continue to slide downhill until the amount of pain inflicted on anyone abetting Republican lies is consistently made too high for collaborators to bear."


*(Many thanks to "TD" for combing the stupid mistakes out of my original post. I make my share of dumb typos, but at the moment I'm still quite dopey from effects of the move, the long drive, my cold-which-mutated-into-something-else, the meds, and 10 other things which all arrived at once...so curse you, Barack Obama!.)

All You Need is Ignorance and Confidence



and the success is sure.

-- Mark Twain

I would walk out of the office of any doctor who tried to take my temperature with a blood pressure cuff.

I would fire a carpenter who was trying to drive finishing nails with a beer bottle.

Which is why it amazes me that some of America's most famous and well-regarded Conservative public intellectuals are still so profoundly clueless about American Conservatism.

For example, Andrew Sullivan:

Santorum's Base Consists mostly of Christianists:

What I find somewhat infuriating in the language of the linked poll is the notion that wanting to recriminalize all abortion in every state and end all civil unions/marriages for gay couples is somehow "conservative." It would be radically opposed to the state of affairs that has existed in this country for decades. Opposing marriage equality can be called many things, but "socially conservative" is simply not one of them. 

Now that 30 years of escalating failure has poisoned their brand, you hear this claptrap everywhere.

From Sarah Palin to Andrew Sullivan, it is the lamentation of every Conservative with a megaphone and financial stake in the Right: that all those other clowns out there who keep pretending to be Conservatives are all wrong.

For example, Dubya was a Conservative, re-elected and celebrated ...right up until the consequences of his stupid, criminal, treasonous policies started cutting into the profits of the carnival barkers of the Right.  Then, almost overnight, all mention of George W. Bush -- the Greatest Fucking Hero in History -- ceased and Dubya became just another UnConservative to be denounced by Republican Party base voters from behind illiterate signs and beneath sassy, tri-corner hats. It was mass political self-lobotomy on a scale that was genuinely shocking to find anywhere outside of "1984", and would have failed instantly and been laughed into the ash heap of marketing history had it not been abetted every step of the way by the greatest act of mass-journalistic malpractice since the Iraq war.

This is, at its core, the most damning critique of the Reasonable Conservative or the Centrist Neoconservative or Gay Tory Catholic Conservative or whatever other group has recently been perp-walked to the door of American Conservatism: that despite the overwhelming evidence that they have been wrong for most of their adult lives, they continue to maintain that this is all just a merry mix-up, and once the real Conservatives take over and start running the show, everything will sort itself out.

But the Real American Conservatives are already here, Mr. Sullivan, and always have been.  They were here long before you were born -- before your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were born.  They were here before you chose to make a living by lending your time and talent to their depraved cause.  They were here before it began to dimly dawn on you that American Right is run by scumbags and monsters (a fact that Liberals have been trying to get through your thick head for 30 years.) They were here when their madness finally bucked you off their gravy train and onto the next gravy train.  They were here when you took up your new career -- whining that they had gotten Conservatism all wrong.

And they will be here long after you and I shuffle off our respective mortal coils.

So since it is painfully obvious that Mr. Sullivan does not understand American Conservatism at all, I will explain his movement to him slowly and clearly -- as one would do with a small child -- by momentarily setting aside transient, "shiny object" issues and distractors (like contraception or Barack Obama's birth certificate) and instead simply focusing on the basic definition of what the word "conservatism" actually means.

From Wikipedia:
Conservatism (Latin: conservare, "to preserve")[1] is a political and social philosophy that promotes the maintenance of traditional institutions and supports at the most, minimal and gradual change in society.

So any discussion about "Whither Conservatism?" or debate about real Conservatives vs. fake Conservatives is meaningless without first addressing this question:  What exactly are the "traditional institutions" and ways of life its adherents trying to maintain and defend?

Again, the answer for American Conservatives is both incredibly obvious and well-documented, and so painfully embarrassing to its elite defenders that they lie constantly to avoid accidentally mentioning it:
  • American Conservatism is dedicated to the preservation of the absolute hegemony of straight, white fundamentalist Christian men within a social hierarchy based on the supremacy of the white race.

  • This social hierarchy is ordained by Almighty God and therefor beyond debate.

  • Every problem American society faces is caused by some deviation from this divine social hierarchy and can only be corrected by the restoration of this divine social hierarchy.

To preserve these "traditional institutions" and ways of life,  American Conservatism's adherents have waged one hot war against the government of the United States and several cold ones.  They have attempted to seceded from the country.  They have closed down school systems.  They have fled cities.  They have embraced domestic terrorism.  They have murdered and legislated and prayed with equal fervor and righteousness.  They have formed new political parties and taken over old ones. They have spent centuries -- centuries! -- doing the the most basic work of Conservatism:  fighting the encroachment of change with every ounce of their strength.

They have taken on new allies and issues (state-sponsored homophobia, radical deregulation, Creationism, etc.) and subsumed others with more genteel, dog-whistley language when it suited their larger purposes, but at core they have always been nothing more or less than variations of the true believers that Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens described in is March 21, 1861 "Cornerstone Speech" in Savannah, Georgia:

Cornerstone Speech

...
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. 
The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.
...


Just behind their carefully sculpted public masks -- behind every screed against Big Gummint and the Sekrit Marxism of the Kenyan Usurper --  this remains the fundamental vision of the world which American Conservatives fight to conserve and promulgate:  out of Conservatism's original cradle, cultural abominations from George Wallace to Ronald Reagan to Sarah Palin just keep a'slouching; out of its original foundry has come most of the structural ironwork for virtually act of thocratic meddling, fiscal recklessness and foreign policy insanity.  This is why any analysis predicated on the assumption that they learn any moral lessons from their mistakes is absurd -- because Conservatives don't "learn" in that sense at all.  Because any such learning would involve an admission of previous error, which no movement that claims its mandate from Almighty God can afford to do.  Instead, Conservatives survive, regroup, re-calibrate, purge their ranks, double down on the crazy and just come charging right on back, louder, angrier, stupider and more committed than before.

This has been their way for centuries, and they have only ever slowed down or backed off when forced to by a judge's gavel or a Union Army bayonet. 

Facing this ugly reality is personally humiliating and professionally dangerous for people like Mr. Sullivan, which is why despite exhorting other's to "stop silencing people and keep debating them", the one subject which Mr. Sullivan is far too cowardly to debate is, ironically, the one subject on which he is supposed to be an expert:  the history and trajectory of American Conservatism.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

I Don't Know Who Has The Tougher Job




















The tech guy responsible for constantly tweaking Mitt Romney's voice synthesizer software so that what he is actually thinking --
 "Your arboreal growths differ from those on my homeworld of Plutopia." 


 "I like the fact that my vehicles were assembled by carbon-based meatbags from this municipal area."
-- comes out of his mouth sounding vaguely human...

...or the consultant charged with stopping Rick Santorum from coming out publicly in favor of burning witches and heretics on the Washington Mall.

This Is Me

Linking to Digby, who is linking to Charlie Pierce, who is talking about Kenneth Stern
To the tenther power

by digby

The great Charles Pierce (whose Esquire blog is the best new blog of the last few years, as you might expect) points out that the wingnut fringe isn't fringe anymore:

In 1996, Kenneth Stern wrote a terrific book called A Force Upon The Plain, about the rise of the militia movement in America, particularly in the west. At one point in the book, Stern quotes a militia-connected Colorado state senator named Charlie Duke, who tells a gathering of "patriots" in Indianapolis, that members of Congress "don't seem to know what the Tenth Amendment is about." Duke, Stern reports, also was the driving force behind non-binding "Tenth Amendment Resolutions" in 15 states. These resolutions, writes Stern, "exalted states rights over the laws of the federal government." Recall now that, in 1994, this was the thinking of a guy who also believed that the federal government was implanting microchips into American infants.

...

Friday, February 24, 2012

Professional Left Podcast #116

ProfessionalLeft


“In these days of widespread illiteracy, functional illiteracy... anything that keeps people stupid is a felony.”

 ― Harlan Ellison





Links:
  • L

  • Coming soon: Blog again theocracy -- Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.


Da' money goes here:



Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Moving Day

It has been a busy few weeks and I have been a terrible correspondent so my apologies for that.

Today I am in the Big City to load up a truck with some of the heavy stuff, finish off some repairs, coordinate with some people, continue my Quest of Gainful Employment, etc.

To get back at me the Big City has:

  • Torn up and all-but blocked off my street to make various, long-overdue repairs
  • Had my internet provider visit an outage upon me this morning which blew a couple of holes in my schedule.
  • Visited a cold-like thing upon me which isn't bad except for the feeling that my sinuses have been filled with spackle and that someone secretly slipped me Richard Nixon's sweat glands during the night.
So to all the many kind souls who have recently either sent a contribution and/or opined about your's truly doing a book, I will be replying in-kind as soon as I am able.

Also too, the last few times I tried to drop a comment at Charlie Pierce's place I got this.


















Tried all the usual stuff (cache clearing, coming in from a different IP, shoving goat entrails into the USB ports) and 1) nothing works, 2)  no one else seems to be having this problem.

Curse you Barack Obama!






Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Clout and the King's Horseman


David Brooks...now in gist form.
Once upon a time in 1957 things were pretty sweet and "groupy" even though creative people felt stifled and discrimination was kinda bad.
Then some stuff happened.  Some 1960s stuff. 
Now things are great for people with "fast flexible and diverse networks" who can use that "social capital to create their own worlds".

On the other hand, things really suck for people who don't have access to those "fast flexible and diverse networks", especially poor people who don't have all of that social capital to draw on.

Somebody should really do something about that.

The End
Congratulations; you have now consumed the entire gist of Mr. Brooks' 02/21/12 column

No surprise that Mr. Brooks conspicuously omits from his 800-word contribution to the English language any mention of the fact that it was the triumph of the pillars of the Right -- radically anti-government Conservatism and Capitalism -- which caused most of ruin which he now bemoans, but there is nothing new here.  Nothing that Richard Sennett wasn't reporting on long ago (via my post on the World Economic Forum ["Privilege has its Memberships"] here is what sociologist Richard Sennett had this to say about how the New Ruling Class views us little, shire-folk:)
The dizzy life of Davos man 

Yet I had an epiphany of sorts in Davos, listening to the rulers of the flexible realm. "We" is also a dangerous pronoun to them. They dwell comfortably in entrepreneurial disorder, but fear organised confrontation. They of course fear the resurgence of unions, but become acutely and personally uncomfortable, fidgeting or breaking eye contact or retreating into taking notes, if forced to discuss the people who, in their jargon, are "left behind." They know that the great majority of those who toil in the flexible regime are left behind, and of course they regret it. But the flexibility they celebrate does not give, it cannot give, any guidance for the conduct of an ordinary life. The new masters have rejected careers in the old English sense of the word, as pathways along which people can travel; durable and sustained paths of action are foreign territories.
or that Adam Curtis wasn't building documentaries around

 


 a decade ago.

Of course, in Chicago we have a less delicate word for a system which guarantees the success of the few through fast flexible and diverse networks and unlimited "social capital".

We call it "Clout".



"Clout" in Chicagospeak means influence, pull, insiderhood.  It mean when the rain falls you do not get wet.  When mud splashes, it does not get on you.  It means the answer to the question "Who's your clout?" defines where you stand in the power structure.

The world of "Clout" exists in a completely different and non-intersecting orbit with both the idea of a social safety net -- that society should be sufficiently ordered so as to protect the those without access to vast reserves of "social capital" from the brutal whims of entrepreneurial disorder -- and the idea of merit and ability.  Not that there aren't meritorious and able people in the Clout Universe --  the lords and ladies of clout have need of an artisan class of talented individuals and are willing to reward that talent.  Nor that socially minded insiders don't take on good causes on behalf of the less fortunate.  No, the real test for whether or not you are within clout's event horizon --
"In layman's terms [event horizon] is defined as "the point of no return" i.e. the point at which the gravitational pull becomes so great as to make escape impossible."

 --  the moment when clout reveals itself most nakedly -- is what happens when the chips are down.  When there is not enough to go around and the lords and ladies of clout actually have to decide who gets in the lifeboat and who does not.

That is the moment when it becomes painfully clear whether or not the exertions of every other force in the professional world pale in comparison with the power of clout. 

Of course, when the power of clout quietly asserts itself behind the opaque walls of government and business its effects can only be inferentially quantified: like figuring out the size and orbit of hypothetical planets in distant solar systems by the effects of those planets on their suns. 

But in other occupations where the work product is very public and therefor very measurable, the perturbations caused by clout bright and clear.  

Especially in a profession where so many competent, capable professionals are being kicked to the curb while the fortunes of a few blithering idiots with an assload of "social capital" keep inexplicably rising.

Say, for example, in the 

area


of

political


"journalism".
.


In other words:
1. There is a Club.
2. You are not in it.

This. Is. Not. A. Uterus.





















Also, women's breasts are not cheeseburgers.

 Apparently there has been some confusion.

 Bishop Lori and the Parable of the Kosher Deli

Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport Connecticut testified before the US House Committee of Oversight and Government Reform on the matter of the HHS mandate and its calamitous consequences for religious liberty this morning and gave one of the most unique and incisive testimonies seen in Washington D.C. in a long time. Bishop Lori, instead of speaking outright on the matter of the state forcing Catholic institutions including Catholic colleges to cover sterilization procedures and contraceptives including abortfacients, told a parable about a kosher deli and a ham sandwich. Here’s Bishop Lori’s testimony as submitted to the Committee:

For my testimony today, I would like to tell a story. Let’s call it, “The Parable of the Kosher Deli.” Once upon a time, a new law is proposed, so that any business that serves food must serve pork. There is a narrow exception for kosher catering halls attached to synagogues, since they serve mostly members of that synagogue, but kosher delicatessens are still subject to the mandate.

The Orthodox Jewish community—whose members run kosher delis and many other restaurants and grocers besides—expresses its outrage at the new government mandate. And they are joined by others who have no problem eating pork—not just the many Jews who eat pork, but people of all faiths—because these others recognize the threat to the principle of religious liberty. They recognize as well the practical impact of the damage to that principle. They know that, if the mandate stands, they might be the next ones forced—under threat of severe government sanction—to violate their most deeply held beliefs, especially their unpopular beliefs. Meanwhile, those who support the mandate respond, “But pork is good for you. It is, after all, the other white meat.” Other supporters add, “So many Jews eat pork, and those who don’t should just get with the times.” Still others say, “Those Orthodox are just trying to impose their beliefs on everyone else.”

But in our hypothetical, those arguments fail in the public debate, because people widely recognize the following. First, although people may reasonably debate whether pork is good for you, that’s not the question posed by the nationwide pork mandate. 
... 


It goes on like that, and the Rude One has nicely shaved that hock into delicious, NSFW canapes here so I will only add this.

 First, I want to emphasize in the strongest possible terms how much I am in favor of the GOP running on a platform comparing a woman's uterus to a ham sandwich.

 Second -- and again, I want to make sure I am absolutely clear about this -- I want to underscore in bright, unambiguous language how completely awesome it would be for the GOP to continue to insist on  the  primacy of Bronze Age dietary restrictions and cosmology in all discussions about science generally and women's health specifically.

 Or as the late Steve Gilliard used to say, when your enemies are drowning

 throw them anvils.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Sunday Morning Comin' Down



"Wonklash":  The headache caused by whipping back and forth between the tiny, feisty Island of the Sane where smart people engage passionately on subjects as diverse as Basel II, the GOP plan to demolish social security and Loving v. Virginia....

...and the rest of the Sunday Morning dreckbag parade: a place where "serious" means George Will being rolled out of cold storage once a week to wax nostalgic about Calvin Coolidge and clowns like John McCain making their 11,765,215th "Exclusive!" appearance to say all the awful, stale, stupid things that are the wallpaper for every Villager discussion of politics and culture.

Compared with the efforts of Melissa Harris-Perry and Chris Hayes, the rest of the Mouse Circus feels like it should either be run in sepia tones, interspersed with MovieTone News updates about Marshall Tito...or from a towering pulpit luridly lit by torches and flanked by brownshirts.

I spent  a chunk of this Sunday (and Saturday) watching grownups talking about serious things.  During the commercials, I flicked over to "Meet the Press" long enough to watch things like the horrible David Gregory giving GOP tool Ed Gillespie another "Meet the Press" reacharound.

Wonklash.

Friday, February 17, 2012

You Gotta Admit


I played this stinking Party like a harp from Hell.

From Business Week:
Gingrich Name-Drops Business Idea Touted by Super-PAC Supporter February 17, 2012, 6:39 AM EST

Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- As he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich has become a de facto spokesman for Lean Six Sigma, a business management concept pioneered by a Dallas entrepreneur who has spent more than $200,000 of his own money to promote the former House speaker’s candidacy.

Gingrich has uttered the term “Lean Six Sigma” at least 28 times since August in campaign appearances, debates and media interviews, a review of transcripts and news accounts shows. At the same time, Mike George, the investor who has written six books on Lean Six Sigma, paid for mailings, handouts and automated phone calls backing Gingrich in the Iowa caucuses and South Carolina primary last month.

George’s financial support comes through a political action committee, Strong America Now, which he created and solely funds. The dynamic illustrates a new way for wealthy individuals to leverage the high visibility of a presidential election as a public-relations tool for a specific company, product or message.

“This goes beyond the concern about coordination, and smack dab into the concern of having a mutually profitable business relationship between a super-PAC and a presidential candidate,” said Craig Holman, a lobbyist with Public Citizen in Washington, a group that advocates for tighter regulation of political donations. “There’s Gingrich out there selling Mike George’s book while Mike George helps to promote Gingrich’s candidacy. That’s kind of amazing.”
...
The purity of Newt's absolutely naked larceny and his certainty that the GOP is just plain too fucking stupid to ever catch on to his endless grifting is something to behold.

Professional Left Podcast #115

ProfessionalLeft
“Now, I know all you folks are the right kinda parents.
I'm gonna be perfectly frank.
Would ya like to know what kinda conversation goes
On while they're loafin' around that Hall?
They're tryin' out Bevo, tryin' out cubebs,
Tryin' out Tailor Mades like Cigarette Feends!
And braggin' all about
How they're gonna cover up a tell-tale breath with Sen-Sen.
One fine night, they leave the pool hall,
Headin' for the dance at the Arm'ry!
Libertine men and Scarlet women!
And Rag-time, shameless music
That'll grab your son and your daughter
With the arms of a jungle animal instinct!
Mass-staria!
Friends, the idle brain is the devil's playground!"
-- Excerpt from President Santorum's Inaugural Address






Links:


Da' money goes here:



Anyone Who Has Spent Five Minutes



at "The Daily Beast" is familiar with the Andrew Sullivan EZ Aggregation Blogger Template.

Header: Six words + optional question mark

Post Variation 1: proper name + verb + Copy/Paste

Post Variation 2: proper name + verb + Copy/Paste + "but" + different proper name + different verb + Copy/Paste.

Recent samples
Courting The Asian Vote, Ctd
Larison argues that Ambinder's post...
Jonathan Zasloff piles on...
The GOP's Worst-Case Scenario
Jonathan Bernstein imagines...
Sean Trende revisits...
How Should We Deal With Addiction?
William Bennett claims...
Neill Franklin and Katharine Celentano counter...
Obama's Data Operation
Sasha Issenberg reports...
The Anti-Libertarian
Philip Klein worries...
John Samples made the libertarian case...
Campaigning Against Goliath
Pareene examines...
Chait lists...
Romney's Absurd China Op-Ed
Ackerman rolls his eyes...
Drezner focuses...
Why Did Santorum Get Shellacked In 2006?
Byron York clarifies...
Larison revisits...
And so forth.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this ongoing experiment in doing the absolute barest minimum possible short of running "Rock On", "Open Thread" and "More Open Thread" posts around the clock.  It is a very efficient, mechanical substitute for actual writing: one which will probably be undercut sooner or later by some minor improvement to the Google News Alert algorithm and with which I goofed around for awhile before getting bored with running a mechanical "One side says one thing/ One side says something else" post generator --


Breaking: Chris says that Scott says that Sarah
 
may or may not be up to something. 
Erik notes that Tom, Dave, Another Chris, Mark, Mary Lu, and the Same Scott all have different opinions about what Sarah may-or-may-not be up to, some of which agree or disagree to some degree with others, and some of which are based on speculation about what Mitt, Bill and Mike might have been up to on somewhat similar previous occasions.


-- just for the sake of seeing how much effort it actually takes.

(Note: it is incredibly easy.)

However it does get kind of amusing when Mr. Sullivan aggregates other aggregators in a cascading concatenation of aggregation, such as here:

What Happened To The Tea Party?

Larison grapples...

[Chris] Littleton says...

Paul Bedard reports...

For this year’s election, said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots [says]...


It can also be somewhat confusing since almost every post of this variety is couched as a question and yet Mr. Sullivan clearly isn't much interested in the answer.

Still, just this one time let me provide one anyway.

"What happened To The Tea Party"?

Easy.

There is no Tea Party.

There is no Tea Party.

There.  Is.  No.  Tea.  Party.

Libertine Men and Scarlet Women!





















You Know What's Both Sad and Funny?


When a political party has lied, defrauded and bludgeoned their way into such a self-inflicted, brain-damaged stupor that not only has every one of its core ideas blown up into spectacular, public failures...but its desperate attempts to distract the public from the spectacular and public failure of of its core ideas have themselves becoming spectacular and public failures.

 Which can only mean one thing: A summer full of

Flag Burning amendments, English-only education "debates", medicinal wine from a teaspoon, beer from a bottle, Libertine men! Scarlet women! Ragtime! and whatever else the GOP can dredge up from the very bottom of the Conservative Culture War sewer.

Behind Closed Doors



 The GOP was ALWAYS Carl Fucking Paladino.

Secret horse porn connoisseurs who scream "JESUS!" at the tops of their lungs in public to hide their own depravities and hatred of women.

Bitter old white male businessmen who believe it is their God given right to treat everyone under them like ass rags or contestants in the office tit parade.

Limbaugh fans and Fox viewers who seethe with frustration that the fucking Liberals have screwed up John Wayne's America so badly that they are no longer permitted to just the beat the living shit out of brown people, gays, immigrants and whoever else is irritating them today because, hey, I'm Carl Fucking Paladino over here!

Thursday, February 16, 2012

God Bless



Crackpot wingnut billionaires.

Because they just don't care.

Now you know why RNC chair Reince Priebus always has the squirmy, uncomfortable look of a man who brutally crapped his pants an hour ago and still hasn't yet found a way to get behind a closed door and clean himself up.  Now you know why, before Priebus, the GOP hired an incompetent House Negro and a self-loathing gay man to front for them.  Because you have to have a superhuman capacity for ass-kissing and gag-reflex-suppression to beg for money from a CHUD like Foster Freiss.

But now the wealthy CHUDs who have been bankrolling the GOP for years are are leaving the sewers, stepping over their PR flaks and pressing their, big, oozy, bigots brains directly against the teevee camera lens without intermediation.

Because crackpot wingnut billionaires just don't fucking care.

And why should they?

They play at politics as if it were the dog track or penny-a-point pinochle, and whether or not the mope they're stakehorsing this time around wins, at the end of the day they're still going to go home wealthier than you or I can possibly imagine.  And now, to the horror of their wranglers, these full-body moral lepers -- from the Kochs to Freiss to Sheldon Adelson -- are stumbling into the broad daylight wearing only pasties and g-strings.  Now they are using the force of their riches to bankroll the Loud Public Blabbing of all the loathsome lies and casual bigotries that are the Mother tongue of the Party of God, but which the Republican brain caste and most the the Villager Media have spent a generation trying to cover up.

Because crackpot wingnut billionaires -- who are used to shooting their mouths off to room's full of toadies and lickspittles who will agree with any batshit nonsense that comes out of their boss' pie hole -- just don't fucking care.

God bless 'em.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

How Much Better Would We Be




If the average citizen struggled with big questions like this?

The Prodigal Bain





















(From the "Future failed Willard Romney campaign slogan" file.)

There should be a bible story about two brothers: Willard and Detroit.

One brother stayed on the farm his father had built, working hard and dutifully tending the fields even as the soil grew thin, many crops were lost and hard times came and kicked his ass over and over again

The other brother went off to Wall Street and made a fortune buying up other people's farms, firing the farmers and selling the equipment and seed corn to China for a handsome profit.

Then one day a planet-engulfing shitstorm that came roaring out of Wall Street.  It destroyed homes and jobs by the millions.  It leveled entire states and brought whole countries to their knees. And in the middle of the howling maelstrom, Detroit -- the son who had stayed with the family farm  -- found that his hard work could no longer outpace his bad luck.  Without help the family farm was doomed and so in his hour of greatest need, he called up to the high place atop the mountain of cash on which his brother -- Willard -- lived and ask for his brother's aid.

After hearing his brother's pleas, Willard wrote a long letter to the New York Times explaining why his loser brother should fuck off and die.  And that would have been the end for Detroit had his farm not been saved at the last minute by a half-Kenyan, half-Samaritan community organizer.

A year later, Willard came down from his mountain of money long enough to visit his brother's now-prosperous farm and tell him -- with a completely straight face -- that Detroit should help Willard defeat the half-Kenyan, half-Samaritan community organizer because the half-Kenyan, half-Samaritan community organizer secretly hated farms and wanted to destroy them.

The moral of the story?

The only one clueless enough not to understand why everyone hates Willard is Willard.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

From the Annals of Useless Polling:

From "The Atlantic":
Even with the president’s approval rating showing signs of life and the Republicans busily bashing themselves over the head — “one is a practicing polygamist and he’s not even the Mormon,” retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor recently quipped about her party’s two frontrunners — America continues to track right, according to polling data released by the Gallup Organization last week.  
Americans at this political moment are significantly more likely to identify as conservative than as liberal: conservatives outnumber liberals by nearly two to one. Forty percent identify as conservative, 36 percent as moderate, and 21 percent liberal.
Define "conservative" -- using a Reagan wig and pair of Confederate flag clown pants big enough to fit everyone from David Frum and David Brooks to Rush Limbaugh, Tom Tancredo and Jefferson Davis -- and then get back to me.  Because when it comes to the actual history of Conservatism in America -- issue by issue, ideological pillar by ideological pillar -- the Movement and the Party both stand in the shadow of one of the longest, most ruinous and most publicly humiliating series of failures, reversals and repudiations in American history.

From Salon:
The right’s lost causes

From the culture war to foreign policy, conservatives have been defeated on every front

American conservatives are deranged by anger — and why shouldn’t they be? For decades, they have been losing on multiple fronts. From the culture war to the welfare state to foreign policy, conservative initiatives have been rejected by the American people and repudiated by public policy. At most they have won a few battles while losing the war.

Consider what Pat Buchanan and other social conservatives called “the culture war” in the 1980s (after Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church in 19th-century Imperial Germany). Even with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade is in no danger of being overruled. The most that conservatives can do is back state-level initiatives like forcing pregnant women to view sonograms of fetuses — initiatives that are soon slapped down by the federal courts.

Gay rights? Since the 1970s and 1980s, when Miss America winner Anita Bryant led a nationwide crusade against gays and lesbians, public attitudes and public policies have been revolutionized. ...
... 
Even as they have witnessed the collapse of their efforts to roll back the liberalization of laws governing sex and censorship, American conservatives have met defeat in their efforts to dismantle the middle-class welfare state created by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. ...

To make matters worse, from a conservative perspective, the lawmakers whom the right elected to shrink the welfare state have steadily expanded it. Republicans as well as conservatives supported the expansion of the earned income tax credit, a subsidy to poor workers, and the child tax credit, a European-style childcare subsidy championed by Newt Gingrich, among others.
...

In foreign policy, the neoconservative right appeared for a time to have prevailed. Beginning with the Clinton administration’s war in Kosovo, many neoliberal Democrats joined Republican hawks in celebrating global U.S. military hegemony and “liberal interventionism.” But the Bush administration overreached after 9/11 when it invaded Iraq shortly after it invaded Afghanistan. The costs of those two debacles quickly soured the public on “the war on terror.”
...

This is not to say that conservatives have not won some lesser victories in the last generation. But in most cases they did so only because centrist and liberal Democrats themselves were divided on the subject. ...

Don’t hold your breath waiting for liberals to admit that they are winning most of their battles... But the right isn’t going to repeal the great accomplishments of liberalism and remake America on the basis of sexual repression and censorship, free-market radicalism and American empire. Conservatives tried to do that and failed. No matter who wins this year, the right won’t get a second chance.
And yet, has 40 years of staggering from one pulverizing failure to another dented the Conservative's invincibly Dunning-Krugerian sense of their own brilliance and superiority?

Not in the slightest.

In fact you could say that the single defining characteristic that binds all Conservatives together -- the  Reagan wig and Confederate flag clown pants big enough fit both Andrew Sullivan and Sarah Palin -- is their truly otherworldly ability to implacably ignore objective reality when it conflicts with whatever silly-ass nonsense they are lying about this week.

Which leads us right back to the the only clear conclusion I can suss out of this data: a powerful correlation between people who strongly self-identify as "conservative" and people who are "pig-ignorant" and "fundamentalist".

A correlation with which I can take no issue.


You Might Think That David Brooks

saying stupid thing about work, culture, politics and manufacturing would be a gift to a writer like me who focuses on work, culture, politics, occasionally on manufacturing and often on Mr. Brooks.

Another whole column devoted to pretending the complete failure of every Conservative policy for the last 30 years has nothing to do with our problems today?

Another column lecturing the poor and hectoring imaginary Liberals and their imaginary inability to be as insightful and sensitive about values and morals as Our Mr. Brooks?
The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975.
See, I didn't realize we were having a "public debate": I thought one side had just gone completely bugfuck, and the other, sensible, rational side was being aggressively ignored by the liars and hucksters in the middle in fvor of another fatuous lecture on Centrism.

Anyway, that is how the opening coda of my little essay was to have read, but the truth is, having fiddled with it on and off for a few hours, I tossed it in the trash just after watching Chris Matthews slobbering over Andrew Sullivan's  "Brilliant!  Brilliant!  Just brilliant!" pronouncements regarding women's reproductive issues (because who better to opine about about women and birth control that America's leading gay Catholic Tory?).

Because deconstructing the silly, destructive nonsense or people like Mr. Brooks today -- no matter how well told or insightful or interleaved with tasty facts my finished product might have been -- seemed as pointless as standing in my back yard firing toy arrows at the Moon.


Monday, February 13, 2012

This is Not Merely True


It is as grotesquely and self-evidently true as the rabid dog padding down the middle of the dusty road in "To Kill A Mockingbird".



But it's not.

From Krugman:
...
How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!


My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.


Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.


The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.
...
So glaringly obvious that it should be merely the stipulated starting point for all political and cultural discussion in America, and yet the overwhelming majority of our media not only denies that the dog is rabid, it denies the dog even exists.

The psychotic implosion of the GOP is the biggest political story of our generation.

And our political press not only actively refuses to cover it, but punishes anyone who tries to force or trick or seduce them into doing so.

That is beyond failure.

That is the definition of conspiracy.
...

Maybe If We Gave The GOP Six More Months?


It turned out all that Tom Friedman needed to get him to notice the fact that the GOP has lost its damn mind was for reality to punch him in the face...

...over and over again...

...long past time when, if it was a fight, the ref would have called it.

...
The party has let itself become the captive of conflicting ideological bases: anti-abortion advocates, anti-immigration activists, social conservatives worried about the sanctity of marriage, libertarians who want to shrink government, and anti-tax advocates who want to drown government in a bathtub. 
Sorry, but you can’t address the great challenges America faces today with that incoherent mix of hardened positions. I’ve argued that maybe we need a third party to break open our political system. But that’s a long shot. What we definitely and urgently need is a second party — a coherent Republican opposition that is offering constructive conservative proposals on the key issues and is ready for strategic compromises to advance its interests and those of the country.
...
If this progression of fiercely defended obtuseness followed by mangled, grudging awareness being pried out of Mr. Friedman's stiff, clutching fingers (without, of course, the slightest acknowledgement that the Left has been right all along [or, as one wag put it, "Repeating as epiphany stuff thoughtful liberals have been saying for the last 30 years"]) seems familiar, that's because it is.  It exactly parallels Mr. Friedman's spectacular failure on subject Iraq, and also parallels the overall career arcs of the likes of David Brooks, David Frum and Andrew Sullivan:

So how now Tom Friedman has spectacularly and publicly shit the bed on the two most important stories in recent American history -- the war in Iraq and the catastrophic devolution of the GOP into a mob of imbeciles, bigots and anti-science Leviticans -- what do you suppose will happen to his career and reputation as a journalist and



Pulitzer Prize committee macher?

Well, if you are late to the party and still cling to the Capraesque belief that success in American journalism is based on merit, you could be forgive for believing that Mr. Friedman's career would now be in tatters.  That he would have to Lord Jim it on some obscure local paper until he had lost his sloppy, incompetent work habits and had learned to write a fucking sentence without sounding like he was trying to write greeting card verse while his brain was dying of oxygen starvation.    After which he would return, rehabilitated and chastened at begin such and fucking inept goof for so long.

But if you have followed the news for more than ten minutes you will know that nothing like that will happen to Mr. Friedman.

In fact, nothing at all will happen to him.

This column is just a ship in a bottle.  An oddity, which his fellow goof will politely ignore, and when the wind shifts slightly and the stink of CPAC madness is less fresh in his nostrels, Mr. Friedman will re-reverse himself and go right back to writing horrible columns about Centrism and "Both Sides Doing It"-ism.

And when that happens -- when Mr. Friedman goes back to lying about Centrism -- no one but a few crazy, Liberal bloggers will say a fucking word about it because like Messers Brooks, Frum, Gregory, Halperin, Sullivan, etc ad nauseum, Mr. Friedman is a member of The Club.

And America's Confederacy of Journalistic Dunces

protects their own.









Sunday, February 12, 2012

I Assume Tina Brown Was Compelled


























To turn over the job of explicating the many cultural and religious ley-lines that intersect at the reproductive rights of American women to her favorite Gay Catholic Tory blogger because neither Cardinal Richelieu nor Jessica Rabbit were available.

Somewhere, the ghost of Mike Royko

just threw a little ectoplasm up in his mouth.