Afterthoughts from the inauguration

That's the back of 88-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens as he swore in Vice President Biden, accompanied by his wife Jill, their daughter Ashley, and his sons Hunter and Beau.

by Ken

It was, apparently, a good event to watch on TV, though I'm sure the people who were there will carry special memories of their own. Here are some fairly random things that linger in memory from the day.

SENATOR KENNEDY

It was great to see Sen. Ted Kennedy there, in apparently good spirits, fedora and all -- and this notwithstanding his having to be removed from the luncheon by stretcher following a seizure, which is apparently characteristic of his condition. (His condition was later reported to be stable.)

Who would have thought that the most lightly regarded of the Kennedy men would turn out to make the most enduring public contribution?

JUSTICE STEVENS

I mentioned the Rev. Joseph Lowery's rousing benediction yesterday. The other procedural highlight for me: the swearing in of Vice President Biden by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who turns 89 in April.

Justice Stevens's tenacious endurance as the Court was being transformed into a rubber stamp for the rich and powerful has made him one of my personal heroes. He gave every indication of being as alert physically and mentally as everyone has been saying he is, so he seems ready for at least one more Court term. Thanks to his tenacity in outlasting Chimpy the Decider, he can now make his decision about continued service based entirely on personal considerations, and also worry less about what happens if circumstances take the decision out of his hands.

It's worth remembering that Justice Stevens was appointed by Gerald Ford (at the recommendation of Attorney General Edward Levi). If this makes him the most enduring legacy of the Ford administration, it's not a bad one.

OAF OF OFFICE
(not original, but I can't resist using it)

Justice Stevens certainly seemed more alert than Chief Justice John Roberts. The chief justice's conspicuous screw-up with the presidential oath seemed to me revealing of both participants' character. The president-elect came prepared. He had clearly taken the trouble to memorize the oath, whereas the chief justice couldn't be bothered, but then the president-elect froze when the chief justice got it wrong. To his credit, he didn't simply utter the oath correctly from memory; he was, after all, supposed to be repeating after Chief Justice Roberts. And he did eventually decide that that's what he should do. Of course by the time he made his adjustment, the chief justice had corrected himself, so they still weren't quite in sync.

Nevertheless, all the words got said -- including the controversial "so help me God" that's not included in the constitutionally prescribed oath but that regrettably seems to have become standard. (One assumes the chief justice didn't spring this on the president-elect without prior consultation.)

MEANWHILE IN WINGNUTTIA,
I: HE'S NOT REALLY PRESIDENT!

Pursuant to the burbled oath: The wingnut hordes promptly went berserk with the joyous news that President Obama is not therefore legally president! Oh, that crafty Chief Justice Roberts!

Oh, for Pete's sake! At this level of imbecility and insanity, these people should really exercise their imagined Second Amendment rights and buy lots and lots of guns and point them at their itty-bitty brains and just keep shooting -- for a better America.

UPDATE: Fox Noise's Chris Wallace won himself Keith Olbermann's Worst Person in the World citation tonight for taking up this very argument. Of course, strictly speaking, Fox Noise isn't "outside" Wingnuttia -- it's more like the professional arm of the howling loons. Still, if it lies in that Twilight Zone between formal Wingnuttia and and the mainstream infotainment-news media (see below), it does represent a wider scope than I was originally reporting.

MEANWHILE IN WINGNUTTIA,
II: INAUGURAL $$$$$ BULLSHIT

Not just the wingnuts but shamefully large segments of the infotainment-news media have been abuzz with factually bogus stories about the cost of the Obama inauguration -- most preposterously claiming it cost "nearly four times as much" as the second George W. Bush inauguration.

Aside from the conveniently forgotten fact that both W. inaugurations were heavy-breathing pay-to-play operations, where the massive fund-raising, with every attempt made to keep donors' identities secret, was just part of the ritual of business-as-usual under the Bush regime, whereby any dollar that didn't stink with corruption was considered a dollar wasted, or that the Obama inauguration accommodated vastly larger numbers of people, the Bush spending figures are conveniently purged of by far the largest component of the inaugural budget, security, which can easily count for three-quarters of the total tab. Media Matters' Eric Boehlert waded into the muck to try to bring some sense to this hodgepodge of real and imaginary numbers (left unexamined by lazy "reporters"), not to mention numbers that can't be compared directly.

It's reassuring to know that to the knee-jerk propagandists of the infotainment-news media, it's still the case that no lie is too outrageous or excessive if it serves the interests of the Extreme Right.

INAUGURAL MESS

While it's obviously true that yesterday's ceremonies accommodated numbers of people heretofore unimagined for an inauguration, this is not to say that, however much it cost, those people were accommodated adequately.

I'm hearing countless stories of official cluelessness and even chaos, stories of people with tickets being unable to figure out or find out where they were supposed to go, and if they found where they were supposed to go, then being left in limbo for hours, in many cases not to be admitted at all. Arrangements for organizing and moving the hordes seem to have been largely ineffective or simply absent. In at least one section, it appears that large numbers of people whose tickets weren't even checked were admitted ahead of patiently queued ticket-holders.

The size of the crowd would have made the situation hard to manage under the best circumstances, but the breakdown in planning, staffing, and execution seems to have been widespread. There are a lot of directions in which to point fingers (I'm hearing that the heaviest burden may lie with Senator Feinstein's joint congressional committee in charge of the inauguration), but surely most -- if not all -- of them eventually come back to Team Obama.

Is anyone else concerned by this series of staff breakdowns we seem to be seeing, despite the vaunted efficiency of the Obama operation? I still spend odd moments trying to figure out how the Pastor Rick Warren brouhaha was brought about. Even if you admit the sinister theory that people on the team thought it might be helpful in courting right-wing and specifically evangelical support to be seen treating its leftish and specifically LGBT supporters so badly, I just can't believe they're happy with the kind of uproar his invitation to deliver the inaugural invocation aroused. At the same time, how could they have not expected the kind of uproar they got?

Again with the debacle of the surgical exclusion of Bishop Gene Robinson from the "business" portion of Sunday's pre-inaugural concert -- i.e., the portion that was (a) attended by the Obama and Biden families and (b) televised: Even if we accept the Presidential Inauguration Committee's insistence that this was not its plan, how could there have been people at any level of the PIC too dense to understand the significance of the "error in executing the plan" which was built into the final event schedule? And possibly worse, why did nobody anywhere in the organization take the most cursory look at the final schedule and see the problem?

SPEAKING OF PASTOR RICK

I thought Pastor Rick's invocation was fine, starting from the premise that we allow the heavy religious overlay in these proceedings. At the same time, if Pastor Rick were a different sort of person, he might have made a point of saying something to rebut the ugly image of him which has been spread so wide -- based on his own words and actions.

MUSICAL MISHMOSH

It was a nice gesture, having the presidential swearing-in preceded by a brief "serious" musical offering played by the rainbow quartet of violinist Itzhak Perlman, clarinetist Anthony McGill, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and pianist Gabriela Montero, and it's impossible not to admire their hardiness in performing -- not at all bundled up -- under those weather conditions. The actual offering, John Williams' Air and Simple Gifts, was concocted for the occasion. So-called "occasional" music doesn't have the happiest history, and this didn't impress me as a happy specimen.

Maybe some people found the "air" appealing. I was relieved when it gave way to the celebrated Shaker song "Simple Gifts." Probably the song is best known in the arrangements by Aaron Copland: the piano and orchestral versions of the song itself included among his Old American Songs, and its incorporation in the final section of his ballet Appalachian Spring. "'Tis the gift to be simple," the song starts, and Copland's renderings displayed that gift. The clutter Williams piled on showed that it's a far from universal gift, and I fear served to confirm the suspicion of the many people to whom this was a rare exposure to vaguely "classical" music that it's annoying claptrap.

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