Here in the year 2012, Crazy Rick accuses the president of "un-American activities, " and nobody thinks to asks WHAT activities he means?

Horse-race handicapping is apparently fun for some people, but for me it's only entertaining when it's done by Frank Loesser, whose "Fugue for Tinhorns" is served up here by Stubby Kaye (Nicely-Nicely Johnson), Johnny Silver (Benny Southstreet), and Danny Dayton (Rusty Charlie), from the 1955 film version of Guys and Dolls.

"[P]olitical journalism -- unlike war reporting -- long ago stopped being about what is true or important. Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, reporters began covering politics like sports and entertainment. How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers?"

-- George Packer, in his New Yorker blogpost
yesterday, "Un-American Activities"

by Ken

So those damned Iowa caucuses have finally happened, and now all the pundits, sure enough, are in high horse-race-handicapping mode as they ponder the Meaning of It All. And wouldn't you know that the name on all their lips is the very one who's the subject of the George Packer newyorker.com blogpost, "Un-American Activities," that I said yesterday I wanted to talk about today.

The interminable Iowa coverage made a frequent point of how special these caucuses are, being built as they are around serious discussion of issues important to voters, with all that close personal contact with actual candidates and their representatives. The corollary to the above is how, you know, seriously the Iowa caucus voters take those issues. But of course it's all pure, unadulterated bullshit. The "issues" are the now-usual mix of lies, delusions, corruption, and raw insanities.

Which brings us back to George Packer and Rick Santorum, a loathsome pile of filth who should be offered his choice of prison or a mental institution for his lifelong attempt to overthrow not just the American republic but honesty, decency, and sanity. He is, in two words, inexcusable filth, a mark of shame upon the human race. (I guess it should be noted in, er, fairness that Crazy Rick has been proclaimed "a fun candidate" by no less an authority on fun than George F. Will.)

CRAZY RICK HURLS A STUNNING ACCUSATION,
AND NOT A SOUL APPEARS TO NOTICE OR CARE

George (Packer, that is) begins by noting an essentially thrown-away line "in the tenth paragraph of a page A15 Times piece," in which the Crazyman accuses the president of -- are you ready? -- "absolutely un-American activities." Take a moment, here. Absolutely un-American activities. Quite a charge, you might think, when leveled against the president of the United States. And yet, George wonders,

What are they? The article doesn't say. The quote appears without explanation or comment, in an article entitled "Santorum's Challenge: Broaden His Appeal Beyond Evangelical Christians." Nor does the line show up anywhere else on the Web -- apparently no reporter in the mob following the candidates through the last days before the Iowa caucuses thought it worth writing down, and no blogger thought it worth repeating. It was just a throwaway line, a hunk of spoiled red meat tossed at the crowd in a Sioux City coffee shop, no more newsworthy than saying, "It's a great day to be an Iowan!" And the crowd ate it up, applauding lustily.

Then comes one for the You Can't Make This Stuff Up file. As reported by the NYT reporter in question, Jeremy Peters:

A supporter from a nearby town said that he liked Santorum for his avoidance of hyperbole: "Santorum doesn't make crazy statements."

Santorum doesn't make crazy statements, Santorum doesn't make crazy statements, Santorum doesn't make crazy statements. Is this some other "Santorum"? "Steady Melvin" Santorum, maybe? Or maybe a Bizarro World version of our Rick? Yes, a Bizzaro World Rick, being the exact opposite of Real World Rick, would never make crazy statements, would he? Unlike Real World Rick -- has any living soul ever heard him make an un-crazy statement?

SO WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

In Crazy Rick's eye-popping (you'd think) accusation and the (non-)response to it, George finds "several things worth noting." Naturally they're all more fully elaborately in the full piece, but here's the gist:

* "[I]n today's Republican politics, one reliable way to reach beyond the Christian base is by whipping up nationalistic hysteria with language lifted straight from the McCarthy era." You know, like "some old-fashioned traitor-hunting."

* "[T]his kind of gutter rhetoric is so routine in the Republican campaign that it's not worth a political journalist's time to point it out." George notes that when Michele Bachmann suggested in 2008 "that Barack Obama and an unknown number of her colleagues in Congress were anti-America, there was a flurry of criticism." Now the charge directed at the actual president of the United States goes unnoticed. "Certain forms of deterioration," he suggests, "become acceptable by attrition, because critics lose the energy to call them out. Eventually, people even stop remembering that they're wrong."

* "[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn't much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate's mood."

AFTER ALLOWING FOR THE ENTERTAINMENT VALUE
OF HORSE-RACE REPORTING, GEORGE SHIFTS INTO GEAR

[P]olitical journalism -- unlike war reporting -- long ago stopped being about what is true or important. Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, reporters began covering politics like sports and entertainment. How many times and ways can you say that the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism before you lose your viewers and readers? On the other hand, there's an endless appetite for stories about Santorum's effort to reach out beyond his evangelical base, or Gingrich playing the expectations game in Iowa. This stuff is political candy.

The great puzzle of the Republican campaign is that, in an era of unprecedented ideological fervor, the party will almost certainly nominate the candidate who is the blandest, least ideological, and least trusted by conservatives of them all (that would be Mitt Romney -- Jon Huntsman doesn't count as long as he's in the low single digits). The reasons for this are not easy to see, and in some ways they're fluky. Romney, forever stuck at twenty-five per cent, understands his situation acutely, and he's telling anyone in Iowa who will listen that he loves America, prays and reads Scripture (while wishing he did it more), hates illegal immigrants as much as the next guy, and thinks that Obama has destroyed this country at home and abroad. Romney is like an actor who normally does investment commercials and is improbably cast in an ad for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He's doing a credible job playing an intellectual thug, because that's the only way to win the nomination.

It would be a mistake, though, to believe that, long after Iowa, once the horse race is over, and if he's elected, Romney could suddenly flip a switch, clear the air of the toxicity left behind by the Republican field, and return to being a cautious centrist whose most reassuring quality is his lack of principles. His party wouldn't let him; and, after all, how a candidate runs shapes how a President governs. In politics, once a sellout, always a sellout; once a thug, always a thug.

Someone might at least have asked which "un-American
activities" Crazy Rick was accusing the president of.

§

NO SURPRISE, E. J. DIONNE JR. GOES BEYOND HORSE-
RACE HANDICAPPING TO REAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

"I love watching Republicans engage in class warfare." E.J. begins a characteristically lovely, thoughtful WaPo column called "Santorum, Huntsman and the future of conservatism."

They condemn it as a sin when Democrats come within 100 miles of even mentioning the sharp and growing class inequalities in the United States. But when conservatives play the class card, they see it as a high ethical calling involving the defense of good and moral folk against the depredations of a liberal elite.

Blatant hypocrisy is instructive.

It's a characteristically quiet, acute piece, well worth everyone's attention, and especially anyone who thinks of the stuff that comes out of Crazy Rick's piehole, not as delusional ravings, but as "a philosophy (and a theology) that holds his views together." But then, that's E.J. for you -- always willing to see the best in everyone.

It’s a retro philosophy but no less interesting for that. So comparatively speaking, he comes by his class warfare honestly, even if he panders shamelessly on guns and gays and talks about the strait-laced President Obama as if he embodied the moral sensibilities of Woodstock and Gomorrah.

(Um, E.J., "even if"?)

E.J. CONTRASTS CRAZY RICK -- ER, PHILOSOPHER
RICK WITH (NOW DON'T LAUGH!) JON HUNTSMAN

"If the Republicans want to have a genuinely searching debate about the future of their party," E.J. writes, "they’d send Santorum and Huntsman off for the long fight." Huntsman, he says,

is a forceful economic conservative but also resolutely modern. He's a defender of science, a hard-eyed realist on foreign affairs who rejects Santorum's neoconservative moralism, and he speaks the policy language of an upper middle class that likes its politics to focus on deficits and our future competition with China.

Now we get down to some actual, serious issues of political -- and, I'm afraid, religious -- belief.

Santorum is a Catholic of a certain kind, and it's the most important thing about him. He's on one side of a long-standing debate in the church about how to build a decent society. Social-justice Catholics (and I'm one of those) represent an older American tradition. We agree with more conservative Catholics on the family as an essential social building block but see capitalism as in need of regulation and correction if it is to serve the common good and protect the family itself. Many of us -- and here we depart from the church's official teaching -- see gay marriage not as undermining fidelity and commitment but as encouraging them.

By contrast, Santorum is what Republican strategist Steve Wagner years ago called a "social renewal" Catholic. These Catholics see opposition to abortion as a foundational matter and opposition to gay marriage as essential to "protecting" the family. They view the federal government less as a guarantor of social fairness than as "inflicting harm on the nation's moral character," as Wagner has put it.

Huntsman’s core vote, such as it is right now, comes from less intensely religious economic rationalists who do not perceive culture wars as breaking out all over. Santorum reflects the sensibility of the Catholic and evangelical working-class voters whose ballots Republicans have long taken for granted.

The thing is, to some of us those traditional "moral" values E.J. credits Crazy Rick with have precious little to do with morality. (If "the family" is depending for "protection" on raving sociopaths like Crazy Rick, it is deservedly as well as truly doomed.) No, to some of us, Crazy Rick's vicious rantings are merely savage regurgitations of the primitive dicta of an international authoritarian hierarchy of fanatical enforcers of ignorance and hatred.

I guess it's the old to-MAY-to, to-MAH-to thing. (Only seeing as how the damned tomatoes have no taste anyway, I say chuck 'em all at the wacko agent of Satan.)

§

MEANWHILE, EVEN BEFORE HIS IOWA "TRIUMPH,"
CRAZY RICK HAD ICKY RUPERT IN HIS CORNER

Meanwhile John Cassidy, in another New Yorker blogpost, "Six Reasons Why Rupert Murdoch Is Tweeting for Rick Santorum," takes note, first, of the creepy phenomenon of the 80-year-old Rupert taking to Twitter (apparently a subject of much online interest over the New Year's weekend), and more particularly of his enthusiasm for -- you guessed it! -- Crazy Rick.

“Good to see santorum surging in Iowa,” Murdoch wrote on January 1st. “Regardless of policies, all debates showed principles, consistency and humility like no other.” The following day, he followed up with another message: “Can’t resist this tweet, but all Iowans think about Rick Santorum. Only candidate with genuine big vision for country.”

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