Streams Of Consciousness, Dec. 5

McConnell Says Obama Has Already Raised The White Flag And Will Allow Minority Republicans To Set National Priorities And Policy

Senate Minority Leader Miss McConnell was the big guest on Meet the Press this morning. Having blocked middle class tax breaks for the middle class-- even when craven Democrats allowed that to be defined as anyone making up to a million dollars-- this weekend, Miss was feeling his oats. "I think it’s pretty clear now taxes are not going up on anybody in the middle of this recession. We’re discussing how long we should maintain current tax rates... I and my members feel that the American People feel strongly that taxes shouldn’t go up. I know our colleagues on the other side don’t see it that way. But look, all of-- all of Republicans in the Senate and a significant number of Democrats feel the same way. It isn’t going to happen... [T]his argument is over."

And he feels like Obama is coming around smartly to the way the elites want things run. "We’ve had more conversations in the last two weeks than we’ve had in the last two years. And I think that’s a good sign. A growing awareness that the power’s-- gonna be more symmetrical in the next-- Congress. And I’m optimistic we’ll be able to come together." Miss wants a permanent, budget destroying (a goal), extension of tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires but his idea of a "compromise" is getting Obama to sign on to one that will expire just in time for another election so that Republicans can claim they stand for "tax cuts for all Americans." Obama is buying into this from some closet queen who never got more than 953,816 votes in his life-- and, obviously only from a segment of Kentucky voters-- while Obama was elected by 66,882,230 Americans.

He wants to be a two-term President. I want him to be a one-term President. The American People have put us both in charge for two more years. And we need to have a relationship with each other and see what we can do working together.

And in return for billions of dollars in tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans, the Republicans will agree to tossing a few scraps to working families with unemployed members. This way they're won't be anything unseemly, like dead children and whatnot this winter.

Band Of Broders

You don't want to get on Matt Taibbi's bad side if you can help it. Somehow I don't think that even in his best days-- when he wound up on Nixon's Enemies List-- David S. Broder would have ever quite measured up to this generation's Lester Bangs. And mixing him up with Matt Bai... well, only David Gergen could have come up with something like that. But I'm damn glad he did-- since it gave Taibbi cause to go after a whole set of social parasites weilding Bai as the club:

Bai is one of those guys-- there are hundreds of them in this business-- who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning "centrist" pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing "unrealistic" liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it's like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry. First step: graduate Harvard or Columbia, buy some clothes at Urban Outfitters, shore up your socially liberal cred by marching in a gay rights rally or something, then get a job at some place like the American Prospect. Then once you're in, spend a few years writing wonky editorials gently chiding Jane Fonda liberals for failing to grasp the obvious wisdom of the WTC or whatever Bob Rubin/Pete Peterson Foundation deficit-reduction horseshit the Democratic Party chiefs happen to be pimping at the time. Once you've got that down, you just sit tight and wait for the New York Times or the Washington Post to call. It won't be long.
 
Bai is the poster child of those guys. So naturally Gergen must have been shocked to see, well, Matt Bai screaming kill-the-rich brickbats at him over coffee and pastries. A few of us that afternoon had a laugh imagining that somewhere, at that very moment, David Gergen was telling someone what an asshole Matt Bai is. I wonder if anyone's filled him in on the mistake yet.

That isn't really what Taibbi's post was about today. It was really about elites who think robbing Social Security a second time to pay for the continuation of the obscene Bush tax cuts...

... well, that's "demanding fealty to the one" and "brooking no dissent" and lacking "thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas."

On the other hand, approving those Social Security cuts and green-lighting the continuation of those insane tax breaks-- tax breaks that were extremely radical even by Republican standards when Bush originally passed them amid two preposterously expensive war effort -- well, that's being "pragmatic" and seeing "all dogma " as "anachronistic."
 
Here's what this all comes down to, dogma or no dogma: who is going to pay for a) the Bush tax cuts b) the bank bailouts and c) the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? If you want to get there by making janitors and pipe-fitters wait until they're 69 to retire, raise your hand. If you want to get there by making Jamie Dimon rent out his 900-foot rooftop terrace in Chicago two nights a year, raise your hand.
 
The really infuriating thing? Bai has it backwards. The real consensus, i.e. the consensus of actual human beings, outside Washington, overwhelmingly backs the idea of not fucking with Social Security benefits and ending the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000. In fact, only 26% of Americans support extending the cuts for everybody.
 
So when Bai talks about "bipartisanship" and suggests that extending the Bush cuts is a move to the center, what he's talking about is the Washington consensus.
 
In some very vague way I suppose it could be argued that Barack Obama crawling into bed with John Boehner represents "post-partisanship," but if you want to talk about building actual political bridges, the only meaningful way to achieve that is through the union of voters on the left who want to end the Bush tax cuts, and the voters on the right who want to end the Bush tax cuts. Unite the elderly Democrats who want to hold on to their Social Security Benefits and the elderly Republicans who want the same thing. That's bipartisanship, but not in the way these Silk Road types like it.

King County Leading The Way For Grassroots Democrats Nationally

One of my buds in Congress got out of a Democratic caucus meeting one evening last fall and called me completely depressed and exasperated. He predicted at the time that the Democrats would lose dozens of House seats, more than anyone was expecting at the time, because the politicians in the congressional delegation no longer even knew how to ask voters to support them. The party, he was sure, has become more and more hollowed out as the career politicians in Washington lose touch with their bases. That's why last month we didn't only see freshmen's seats and open seats falling to the Republicans but also the seats of powerful Members with decades of seniority, like John Spratt (SC), Earl Pomeroy (SD), Solomon Ortiz (TX), Chet Edwards (TX), Paul Kanjorski (PA), Lincoln Davis (TN), Bob Etheridge (NC), and Gene Taylor (MS)-- that's 163 years of combined seniority there. Local party machinery is rusted and moribund, real campaigning given over to slick but incompetent and expensive TV ad makers. And he said the leadership was determined to make the DCCC worse-- much, much, much worse-- not better. He got me as depressed as he was.

I finally snapped out of it today when I read this post from one of the new members of the King County Democratic Party leadership team. King County (Seattle) is one of the largest and most Democratic counties in America. Population-wise, it's the fourteenth or fifteenth largest county in America-- and it's certainly the reason Patty Murray is still in the United States Senate, and the reason Chris Gregoire is Washington's governor. It's crucial that King County, and other urban counties like it across America, be home to a strong, democratic organization if Democrats are to have a chance to recover from the Obama/Blue Dog disaster. And as of yesterday, this is one County Democratic Committee that has moved confidently into the future.

Admittedly, the Democratic Party is not yet as democratic as it should be. Many Americans equivocate the Democratic Party with the current crop of Democratic officeholders in our nation's capital — including President Obama, who is sometimes referred to as the leader of the party, by virtue of his office. But the real leaders of the party are the hundreds of thousands of Democratic precinct committee officers and precinct captains across this country. They deserve a party leadership that is accountable to them and the Democratic voters they represent.

What needs to happen for the Democratic Party to become more democratic is this: The movement must become the establishment, while remaining the movement. I know that sounds confusing, so I'll put it another way: We have to crash the gate (as Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong said) and displace the establishment without becoming corrupted ourselves. We have to remain true to what we stand for, no matter what. Power entails responsibility.

I believe everyone who was elected this morning is committed to building a democratic Democratic Party. I am proud to be serving as King County's new Second Vice Chair alongside fellow NPI boardmember Steve Zemke, who has succeeded Suzie Sheary as the next chair, and the many other talented and enthusiastic officers who were elected or reelected.

Addicts Never Tell The Truth To Their Pushers

And Thomas Friedman may miss most of the big stuff on a very regular basis, but he sure got that one right. Arabs hate Persians... but they hate their own feudal brutal dictators-- and us-- even more.

While the Saudis are urging us to take out Iran’s nuclear capability, we learn from the cables that private Saudi donors today still constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide-- not to mention the fundamentalist mosques, charities and schools that spawn the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan. So basically our oil payments are cycled through Saudi Arabia and end up funding the very militants whom our soldiers are fighting. But don’t think we don’t have allies. ... The [wikileaks] cables tell us about Ahmed Zia Massoud, an Afghan vice president from 2004 to 2009, who now owns a palatial home in Dubai, where, according to one cable, he was caught by customs officials carrying $52 million in unexplained cash. It seems from these cables that the U.S. often has to pay leaders in Pakistan and Afghanistan to be two-faced-- otherwise they would just be one-faced and against the U.S. in both public and private.

...Yes, these are our allies-- people whose values we do not and never will share. “O.K.,” our Saudi, Gulf, Afghan and Pakistani allies tell us, “we may not be perfect, but the guys who would replace us would be much worse. The Taliban and Al Qaeda are one-faced. They say what they mean in public and private: They hate America.”

That’s true, but if we are stuck supporting bad regimes because only worse would follow, why can’t we do anything to make them reform? That brings us to the sobering message in so many of these cables: America lacks leverage. America lacks leverage in the Middle East because we are addicted to oil. We are the addicts and they are the pushers, and addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.

When we import $28 billion a month in oil, we can’t say to the Saudis: “We know the guys who would come after you would be much worse, but why do we have to choose between your misrule and corruption and their brutality and intolerance?” We’re just stuck supporting a regime that, sure, fights Al Qaeda at home, but uses our money to fund a religious ideology, schools, mosques and books that ensure that Al Qaeda will always have a rich pool of recruits in Saudi Arabia and abroad. We also lack leverage with the Chinese on North Korea, or with regard to the value of China’s currency, because we’re addicted to their credit.

Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home. But our politics never connects the two.

John Bolton Telling Brits Who The Real Enemy Is-- Barack Obama

What passes for conventional wisdom in GOP Establishment circles is that any Republican can beat Obama in 2012 except maybe Palin (more on that tomorrow)-- and Louisiana quack Bobby Jindal says Palin absolutely could win. But if you write Jindal off as just some southern hack pol with a lot of bucktoothed rednecks whose votes he'll need to be reelected governor, bucktoothed rednecks who will be interested in seeing who Palin endorses in that race next year, then you still have conventional wisdom claiming only Palin is inept and ridiculous enough to not be able to take out Obama, who even liberals want to see out of the White House as soon as possible. But what about, what about... what about self-declared possible candidate John Bolton? Is he too beneath contempt for the Republican Establishment to consider? Today he penned a "Comment Is Free" column for the Guardian over in England. His premise is that Obama is more a threat than wikileaks.

More troubling than WikiLeaks' latest revelation of US secrets, however, is the Obama administration's weak, wrong-headed and erratic response. Unfortunately, the administration has acted consistently with its demonstrated unwillingness to assert and defend US interests across a wide range of threats, such as Iran and North Korea, which, ironically, the leaked cables amply document.

Palin is too lazy and undisciplined and is making too much loot to really run but Bolton is someone Obama could beat too. They should talk him up more.

"Authenticity" is the best description I can come up with for the voice of Russell Baker, now applied to the NYT's Jayson Blair scandal

This first volume of memoirs was followed

by the equally remarkable The Good Times.

"The newsroom [Gerald] Boyd inherited was, he judged, a fair sample of white upper-middle-class America, mostly liberal on social issues and quick to endorse racial equality in principle. In practice, however, he found many slow to abandon the uptown white's view that affirmative action was an unjust imposition on the innocent progeny of an older generation's oppressing classes."

-- Russell Baker, in "A Bad Morning at The New York Times,"

in the April 29 New York Review of Books

by Ken

I acknowledge the likelihood that my responses are exclusively my own, but just as I was, and remain, depressed by the blinkered pomposities of Ross "The Evaluator" Douthat, I stil feel a bit of a tingle at David S. Broder's recollection the other day ofi his days as a young D.C. reporter in the '60s, when "this city was full of people who did their jobs not only with skill and energy but also with unquestioned integrity. We didn't think much about it then, so commonplace was it," and never mind that Grandpappy Dave made kind of a muck-up of his attempted tribute to his three fallen colleague-heroes.

I'm not pretending that the '60s were a golden age in either journalism or civics, but there's something there that rings true, something that has changed distinctly for the worse.

In my non-appreciation of the Douthat prescription for the salvation of CNN,* I noted my frosty response to his standing column title, "Evaluations," which strikes me as unbearably (and I do mean unbearably -- I can't bear it, and don't plan to try) pompous and misguided. I suggested that "evaluation" is a function best left to people with a verifiable process for evaluating, like the folks at Consumer Reports or America's Test Kitchen. "Observations," I suggested, would be a less pretentious moniker. (I trusted it would be understood that I think "observing" would be a much more productive use of a columnist's space than "evaluating.") Which led to the observation that Russell Baker's standing column title was "Observer."

Of course Russell Baker would have understood that. It's not that way back when Russell Bakers were a commonplace, overflowing the newsrooms of America, or that nobody today has that kind of stored-up wisdom and authority. Still, back then it seemed less remarkable, and now it seems utterly astonishing -- increasingly hard to find in the bosom of the Infotainment News Media. The names I would put forward today would probably be nearly all bloggers.

Meanwhile, damned if Russell Baker doesn't seem to continue getting even wiser in retirement. His voice has become even more, um, authentic. I don't know how to say it any better, but it really does seem to me an issue of authenticity.

I am relieved to find that reports of Baker's retirement from his periodic forays into book-reviewing for The New York Review of Books have proved overstated. It's one of those that has set me off this evening, a review of former NYT Managing Editor Gerald Boyd's posthumously published My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at the New York Times." Characteristically, Baker plunges right in:

Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother. Childhood was work and study, study and work, and though they do not always guarantee success, for Gerald Boyd they did just what movies, books, and professional moralizers said they would do, probably because his widowed grandmother contributed a lot of wisdom, love, and iron to the self-making; and in his early fifties Gerald Boyd became managing editor of The New York Times. This was the second most important job in the newsroom of one of the world's better newspapers. He was the first black ever to reach such a dazzling position in the Times hierarchy, and the gaudiest job of all-- the executive editorship-- seemed within his reach almost until the very moment he was fired.

I really didn't want to quote that large a block of text, but show me a point at which it would have been possible to break off. In that paragraph I see an astonishing ability to synthesize information and understanding, and it's done in such a way that it comes out in an easy, even, modest, and irresistible flow, without a wasted word, never calling attention to how much you would have to know just to imagine a paragraph like that, and then how much craft you would need to write it. The end product, seemingly (and almost certainly only seemingly) effortless, is a voice that is purest Russell Baker. And I still can't come up with a better description for that voice than "authentic."

Any thought that the writer might have painted himself into a corner with such a dazzling paragraph is dispelled by Baker's second graf, picking up immediately from the abrupt introduction of the subject of Boyd's firing:

The firing occurred in the spring of 2003 in a bizarre seizure of office politics, and, as such things will, it left Boyd anything but well disposed toward his former employer and colleagues. He has written a good book filled with ill feeling toward the Times, many of its editors, and a variety of colleagues who turned against him under pressure or simply because they wanted him to fail and be damned. Written during the three years between his firing and his death from cancer in 2006, the book is now published posthumously with the help of his wife, Robin Stone.

Already I think we know more about this book than we normally expect to find out in a book review, and Baker is just warming up. We know that race is going to be an important subject here. "Times folk," Baker writes, "especially of the management class, will not be delighted by his account of their awkward struggle with the race problem or Boyd's suggestion that bigotry was one of the causes of his downfall."

However, he quickly adds, "There were other causes."

and when all are combined, they present a picture of a runaway newsroom that left the paper's top editorial caste-- and even its owners-- suddenly powerless to control events. In the plainest possible terms, what happened in the newsroom was a successful workers' uprising against the bosses, in which the workers won and the bosses were humiliated.

What may strike the reader as oddest of all about the several curiosities of this rebellion is that it had almost nothing to do with the paper's editorial policy or its news coverage. When it was over, the Times 's news management had changed hands, but the paper went right on being the same New York Times it had been before. What had happened was not a revolution of ideas, but only a great gale of office politics about matters of negligible interest and no conceivable concern to inhabitants of the world outside the Times building.

The precipitating event, of course, was the Jayson Blair scandal, which makes it easy to understand how the racial ugliness found its way into the mix. But the racial ugliness was only one of a number of sources of tension on the part of the highly privileged newsroom staff, which had acquired a status that would have been unimaginable a couple of decades earlier:

Boyd's newsroom was the home office of a journalistic elite class -- college-educated, the sort of people who could chat comfortably with Supreme Court justices, Wall Street finaglers, prime ministers, opera singers, archbishops, sheikhs, crooks, cops, grave robbers, and even an occasional scientist. Bron in the age of American mastery and comfort that followed World War II, they had large ideals and small experience of hardship or need, and, being quite a bit spoiled, they expected to be listened to with more respect than was accorded the working-stiff hotshots who populated newsrooms in the pre-Kennedy years.

That staff was rising against an increasingly embattled management, represented by controversial Executive Editor Howell Raines and the man who put him in that job, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. ("The 'diversity' issue was always the ugly subtext to the dull narrative about a management failure at the Times. 'Diversity' is not a subject for light amusement in America. It is a subject that Americans take to the Supreme Court.")

I'm not here to preempt the story, either in Russell Baker's telling or of course in Gerald Boyd's. If you're interested, I trust you'll go to the source(s). I just want to suggest that the story is filled with lessons most of us probably wouldn't otherwise be aware exist, let alone understand.

Example: In RB's view, the Blair affair was both more important than the public understands ("people unaware of the Times's passion for the integrity of its news columns" don't realize what an almost unimaginable betrayal this episode represented) and less important ("it is hard to find the slightest evidence that Blair's plagiarism or fictions affected anyone's life but his own and his editors'").

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*The Douthat prescription for the salvation of CNN is more debates, but not just any kind -- he wants the good kind, the kind that are "more substantive" than anything on MSNBC or Fox News, which he considers equivalent. As in the supposed glory years of CNN's Crossfire, or -- the great model to which our Ross apparently thrills -- the William S. Buckley-Gore Vidal debates. Does anyone can recall anything of substance exchanged between Buckley and Vidal? By contrast, I'm confident that anyone who remembers anything about them remembers what salable theater they were. Which recalls the lament from Jon Stewart to the Crossfire gang which set our Ross in motion on the subject: "You're doing theater when you should be doing debate." Hmm.

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David Broder remembers three heroes of his (just maybe not all that well)

In this 1964 photo from the Udall Archives, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall (1920-2010, left) and Arizona Rep. Mo Udall (1922-1998, right) are seen with their uncle Jesse Udall (1893-1980), a justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, as the boys' father, Levi Udall (1891-1960), had been. (Just for the record, current New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall is Stewart's son and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall is Mo's son.)

by Ken

Is it possible that David S. Broder isn't dead after all, but has just been enjoying a leisurely retirement these last 20 or 30 years since the famous Broder Monkeys took over the writing of his columns? Today's outing, remembering three longtime D.C.-insider friends who died recently, reminds us that he isn't a total idiot, or at least wasn't born that way.

When I was a young reporter in the 1960s, this city was full of people who did their jobs not only with skill and energy but also with unquestioned integrity. We didn't think much about it then, so commonplace was it, but when three of those people died almost simultaneously last month, I remembered how vital their example was.

He does seem right on the verge of saying, "Whereas nowadays this city is full of lazy, superficial, brain-locked blowhards like what I've turned into."

We've already talked about the first of the trio, Jerald terHorst, who resigned after 30 days as President Gerald Ford's press secretary in response to the pardon of Richard Nixon. The Broder Man adds a certain fuzzy warmth to the memory. "Back then," he says, "and for long years afterward, Jerry terHorst was one of my closest friends in Washington." We do learn that terHorst and their colleagues George Kentera and Richard Dudman were "dogged, devoted reporters," and it might have been nice to have an anecdote that illustrates this, rather than:

Four of us who worked for afternoon dailies in Detroit, St. Louis, Newark and Washington with Sunday editions got together with a crazy scheme. We wanted to do joint interviews with important newsmakers that would run in our Sunday papers and scoop "Meet the Press" and the other Sunday morning TV shows.

It never worked, and eventually we gave up the idea.

Well, okay . . .

The second departed friend is Texan reporter-turned-political aide Liz Carpenter, who went to work for Lyndon Johnson when he was nominated for the vice presidency in 1960 and continued working variously for Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson. In LBJ's White House, we learn, "Her smarts and irrepressible sense of humor survived the tumultuous years of his presidency." Again it might have been nice to have an anecdote illustrating those smarts and that sense of humor at work, perhaps instead of what seems to me a distinctly odd tribute:

She fought chauvinism in the Washington press corps and the wider world, and she treated aging with the same scorn she showed male jerks. In the last Carpenter speech I heard, she said she had just come across an envelope from the Alzheimer's Association and thought to herself, "I'm getting to the point I ought to send them something. So I opened the envelope and read, 'Thank you for your contribution.' "

Um, yes . . . er, say what?

Finally there's former Arizona Congressman and then Labor Secretary Stewart Udall. The Broder Man tells us that his younger brother Mo, who succeeded him in the Arizona House seat, 'is one of my all-time favorite politicians," and a lot of us -- even those of us who didn't know him -- think of Mo Udall as something of a hero. If the Broder Man has nothing more to say about what made Mo one of his favorite pols, well, it's big brother Stew he's writing about.

I don't think any of us is apt to quarrel with the idea that Stewart Udall, after "challenging the conservative Democratic establishment of Arizona to deliver the 1960 convention delegation to John F. Kennedy," "went on to become one of the best interior secretaries ever." Again, instead of another lame "last time I saw him" anecdote, something that gives us an inkling what made him a superior interior secretary might have been appropriate, rather than the incredibly lame "his achievements include national parks and public lands across the nation." I mean what about those "national parks and public lands across the nation"? Every interior secretary deals with them, after all, including the Republican secretaries who work so hard to shrink, exploit, and befoul them.

But what really shocks me is the characterization of Stewart Udall as "a precursor of today's 'Blue Dogs,'" apparently because he "made his reputation in the House of Representatives by standing up to huge pressure from the Teamsters and other unions and fighting for passage of labor legislation in the late 1950s." I assume what he means is anti-labor legislation (I guess in the walled Village of which the Broder Man has become one of the dribblingest elders, it's pretty much the same thing; it's pretty much inconceivable that respectable people might wish to support the interests of working people), but really now, is there anyone else who remembers Stew Udall as an anti-labor ConservaDem? (Hey, didn't we just have him "challenging the conservative Democratic establishment of Arizona"?)

Now if the Broder Man, by virtue of his friendship with the man, has actual knowledge that he regarded the Blue Dogs as anything other than a festering parasite on the body politic, he would be performing a service of sorts by sharing that with us. Because on the record, it's hard to think of any pol of the second half of the 20th century whose career stands in sharper opposition to everything the Blue Dogs stand for. I don't think I'm being overly touchy in suggesting that in the absence of supporting evidence, this "tribute" to his late friend is more like a slur, even a libel.

Hmm, I seem to recall that we set out to give the Broder Man his modest due for a column that for once wasn't the blithering of an inbred Village tribal chieftain. Something seems to have gone awry along the way. Maybe it had something to do with reading more carefully what he actually wrote?

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The dope on the dope: Princess Sarah not only isn't a Lincoln, she isn't even a Ford

"It’s not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America’s freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, [Newt] Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare -- and, in 1995, went so far as to shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those cuts. . . .

"No, what’s truly mind-boggling is this: Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare’s rising costs, they are, themselves, seeking to dismantle the whole program."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today,

"Republicans and Medicare"

by Ken

I suppose everybody has signed up for all those "newsletters" washingtonpost.com offers free, synopsizing the site's latest news and opinion offerings (and whatever else you may be interested in). And I'm happy to have them. My attention is called to all sorts of stuff I might well miss otherwise.

The only thing is that lately there seem to be more and more of these bulletins aimed at keeping me informed what the most popular stories and opinion pieces are. Presumably this is designed to protect me from the embarrassment of revealing myself to be out of touch with what real folks care about in the paper when I venture out into polite society. Please!

It deepens from annoying to downright depressing, though, when they're celebrating sludge like David S. Broder (or, more properly, the Broder Monkeys who've been writing his stuff the last 20 or 30 years) earnestly informing us how Sarah Palin's message could just be a winner for her, or some such swill. Not that I don't entertain dark fantasies of the sort myself, but the thought of getting the ultimate Village-insider take on a phenomenon that, whatever else it is, is aimed squarely at the imperial Village shuttered behind those Beltway walls, well, that's just too much.

Another piece that has been at the top of the WaPo hit list is the cackling of some right-wing hyena about how us leftists think we know everything but he's here to show one and all how wrong we are. I didn't have to read that one either to know that this guy's full of doody, a cynical opportunist preying on the ignorance so many Americans have chosen as their way of life, aided and exhorted by the colluded forces of darkness around them, starting with the fortresses of mind-controlling Crap Christianity.

I don't suppose there's any point in saying it over and over, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. I'm not saying that Princess Sarah is stupid, or that the people who stupidly admire her are stupid. What they are is ignorant. The difference is simple. It's not that their brains are incapable of taking in and processing real-world information, but that they have shut their brains off and cut themselves off from actual information, choosing instead to be force-fed a diet of lies and delusions by cynical manipulators who know how to plug into their bedrock prejudices. And the various cults of the Right keep getting better and better at enslaving their charges in their ignorance. (Hey, it's not as if we've put much effort into maintaining a competent public education system that might counter the forces of ignorance.)

You keep looking at it and wondering, "How can it get any worse?" and every day brings a new answer. Just today Paul Krugman is registering astonishment that Republicans have -- against all odds and all vestiges of reality -- made a winning issue out of "protecting" Medicare, when in fact they are are targeting their crusade to destroy it.

The cult of ignorance is hardly a brand-new invention in public affairs. I think back to the presidency of Jerry Ford, when -- at an embarrassingl advanced age -- I had to have that distinction between stupidity and ignorance explained to me. But at least I had a good explainer: then political correspondent (and now distinguished political historian and commentator, nationally syndicated columnist and author of many fine books) Richard Reeves, who believed strongly that the distinction was crucial to understanding Ford, who was the subject of his very first book, A Ford, Not a Lincoln. (Can you make out the book's subtitle, by the way? Or Why There Are no Leaders in Washington. This was in 1975.)

The man wasn't stupid, Reeves insisted. He just didn't want to be burdened with any more than he absolutely needed to know to get through the day.

Even as president, our Jerry insisted (as I recall the details) that any memo that came to him requiring a presidential decision -- in other words, the basic modus operandi of government -- be no more than a page and present no more than two options, with an implicit understanding (or could it have been explicit?) that it would be clear which option was "correct." This was as much as he wanted to know about "issues," as much as he was prepared to take in. And at that, as the lovely Mike Keefe cartoon above suggests, it's more reality than, say, Princess Sarah appears prepared to take in.

And it seems to me that Jerry Ford in his years in Congress, and in particular his time as House minority leader, has to have had a basic familiarity with the workings of government and the urgencies pressing on it that's positively professorial by comparison with (again to pick a random example) Princess Sarah. She has chosen to live her life free of any intellectual clutter more demanding than some easy-to-grasp ultra-right religious wackadoodlery and a store of folksy "wisdom" that's almost all mindless gibberish.

Now the Broder Monkeys want to tell us that she could yet be a contender? Well, I guess it takes news awhile to penetrate the Beltway ramparts.

(Note: I'm assuming the Broder Monkeys weren't suggesting it's a good thing that Princess Sarah could be a contender. Now that would be something I really don't want to know.)



SHAMELESS PROMOTION DEPT.: COMING UP
IN TONIGHT'S SUNDAY CLASSICS PREVIEW

This week's Sunday Classics composer is Edvard Grieg, and if I do say so myself, I'm darned pleased with tonight's preview, which posts at 9pm PT. (That's midnight ET for those of you who haven't gotten the hang of this time-zone thing yet.) [Oops: I managed to confuse myself over the post times. Oh well. Sorry about that.]

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It feels creepy agreeing with Richard Cohen, but I agree with him about "The missing Obama"

Plus: At the WaPo, a pundit is born!

I've often suspected that at least some of Richard Cohen's Washington Post columns are written by the Broder monkeys -- the 500 monkeys at computer keyboards who bang out the columns printed under David S. Broder's byline -- in their spare time.

by Ken

Say, have you been keeping track of this great America's Next Great Pundit Contest the Washington Post has been running? I noted the announcement back in the day, and even spent whole seconds contemplating entering, but quickly gave up the idea when I accepted that they were serious about wanting a "pundit" as opposed to an insightful and incisive columnist. (Much emphasis was given to performance on video, which I guess is thought to be central to the pundocratic life.) I didn't pay any further attention until yesterday, when I happened to notice that they were already down to two finalists. Wow, head to head!

So, skipping over all the rest of the contest proceedings, I read one of those final entries, "The Palin take on health-care costs," and was so appalled, I couldn't bear to read the other. I guess the guy thought he was being "cool" and comical and casual. It just seemed to me garbled, ignorant, and backward -- truly revolting. I thought it would have been embarrassing in a high school newspaper. After that, I didn't have the heart, or rather the stomach, to read the other final entry.

When I went to get a link for that column, I discovered that there was no need for me to have read the second piece; the one I had read, by one Kevin Huffman ("I'm a Teach for America executive and a former lawyer and first-grade teacher. An Ohio native, I live in Washington and find the city puzzling, amusing and amazing" -- isn't that just charming? bleahhh!), was the winner!

By "pundit," of course, what the Post means is somebody who'll throw out a heap of opinions that sound slightly offbeat but always reinforce good old mainstream orthodoxy -- a true Village voice. The paper's opinion pages already have quite a lot of these. I would have thought the last thing America needed was another one.

But then, the Old Pundits can't go on forever. As we already know, David S. Broder hasn't written a column in years, possibly decades, that chore having been turned over to the Broder monkeys (see photo above), the 500 monkeys at computer keyboards who bang out the columns printed under the Broder byline. And I've often suspected that at least some of Richard Cohen's columns are written by the Broder monkeys in their spare time.

But every now and again Richard Cohen rouses himself from punditry and writes an actual column. Of course the subject matter will tend to the bleedingly obvious. (In the technical literature, this is commonly referred to as Maureen Dowd Syndrome.) Nevertheless, sometimes even obvious points need to be made repeatedly in order for, well, the point to be made.

The missing Obama

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 24, 2009

In my set, I am known as the guy who always had some reservations about Barack Obama. Sure, I supported him in the primaries against Hillary Clinton and I voted for him, with both glee and enthusiasm, especially after John McCain uttered the most shocking words in American politics -- "Sarah Palin." But I had such qualms about Obama that I even disparaged his famous speech on race, which almost everyone else thought was just about the greatest ever given on the subject. I just reread it -- and I was a bit chastened (I was too severe), but mostly I was saddened. Where is the man who once gave that speech?

The speech, delivered in Philadelphia in March 2008, was compelled by the rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who had been Obama's pastor and spiritual adviser. Wright, a man of a certain age with the emotional scar tissue that comes from a life in a harshly racist society, had let loose his anger -- and it had been caught on tape and YouTubed around the world. A sermon that had a context and an appreciative audience looked like sheer demagoguery and madness on the small screen. Obama had to kiss off Wright.

He did so with style and with dignity. But more than that, to reread the speech is to be impressed once again with the fluidity of Obama's mind -- his logic, his reasoning and his immense writing talent, which made a great impression on the impressionable people in my profession.

But to reread the speech is also to come face to face with an Obama of keen moral clarity. Here was a man who knew why he was running for president and knew, also precisely, what he personified. He could talk to America as a black man and a white man -- having lived in both worlds. He could -- and he did -- explain to America what it is like to have been a black man of Wright's age and what it is like even now to be a black man of any age.

Somehow, though, that moral clarity has dissipated. The Obama who was leading a movement of professed political purity is the very same person who as president would not meet with the Dalai Lama, lest he annoy the very sensitive Chinese. He is the same man who bowed to the emperor of Japan when, in my estimation, the president of the United States should bow to no man. He is the same president who in China played the mannequin for the Chinese government, appearing at stage-managed news conferences and events -- and having his remarks sometimes censored. When I saw him in that picture alone on the Great Wall, he seemed to be thinking, "What the hell am I doing here?" If so, it was a good question.

The Barack Obama of that Philadelphia speech would not have let his attorney general, Eric Holder, announce the new policy for trying Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other Sept. 11 defendants in criminal court, as if this were a mere departmental issue and not one of momentous policy. And the Barack Obama of the speech would have enunciated a principle of law and not an ad hoc system in which some alleged terrorists are tried in civilian courts and some before military tribunals. What is the principle in that: What works, works? Try putting that one on the Liberty Bell.

Of course, there's a difference between campaigning and governing. There is no reality to campaigning. You want Guantanamo closed, you say you'll close it. You want to close it as president, and all of a sudden it becomes a political crisis that costs you your White House counsel, an experienced and principled man named Gregory Craig. Governing is hard.

But governing has to be informed by moral clarity, by the sense that we always know the president's interior life -- his bottom lines. Obama's political career has been too brief for us to know his bottom lines by votes cast in any legislative body or decisions made as an administrator. He had little record but lots of rhetoric -- much of it morally stirring and beautifully written.

As president, though, he has tried so hard to be the un-George Bush that the former president's overweening moralism -- his insistence on seeing things as either black or white -- has become an Obama gray. Human rights in general has been treated as if it's a Republican idea. Obama should reread his Philadelphia speech. He'll find a good man there.

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Social Security To Be Sacrificed On The Alter Of Preserving Tax Cuts For The Wealthy?

Broderism writ large

David Broder, execrable "dean" of the painfully hackish Inside-the-Beltway press corps, and always a cheerleader for every bad idea that has ever come down the pike-- especially lower taxes for the rich and pointless wars in far-off places-- has the top story for tomorrow's talking heads to obsess over on TV: a specious claim that the nation-- he means The Village-- is now ready for the Republican Party's biggest goals since the 1930s: gutting Social Security and Medicare. The nation is ready to destroy the two most popular government programs to guarantee that the top 1% of wealth holders become even richer? Sure, just ask a gaggle of conservative, backward politicians whose careers are financed by those same wealthy folks they're trying to help out by destroying the middle class-- Judd Gregg (R-NH), Ken Conrad (D-ND), Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Jim Cooper (Blue Dog-TN). And Steny Hoyer (D-MD).

Conrad and Gregg have proposed attacking that larger problem by creating a bipartisan commission to examine the big entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- where savings must be found, and the tax systems that support them.

To Broder, Hoyer is "courageous" because he stabbed Nancy Pelosi-- a defender of the middle class-- in the back and joined with the fiscal conservatives to put Social Security on the table. To Broder all of these scourges of the middle class are heroes. It would never cross his mind that the root solution to the problems he writes about is campaign finance laws that end the universal, bipartisan corruption that leads to ultimate power over our democracy-for-sale by the wealthiest whose congressional shills are at their beck and call. We expect that from the Republican Party; that, after all, is their entire raison d'être. But what a betrayal to the values of grassroots Democrats who still believe in a Democratic Party that extols the virtues of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, to watch reactionary Democrats-- Blue Dogs like Cooper as well as the Evan Bayh anti-Obama Bloc in the Senate-- morph into de facto Republicans!

More and more individual Democrats and Republicans are expressing a readiness for such an effort. In response to Hoyer's speech, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who traveled the country last year with John McCain, told my Washington Post colleague, Lori Montgomery, "I think we can get double-digit Republican support for a reasonable compromise."

As if to confirm his words, Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio and independent Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut introduced an entitlement commission bill of their own last week. Voinovich told me that he thinks "the prospects for action on the issue are very, very good, because the feeling is growing that we can't sustain the path we're on."

No wonder Broder put everything he had on electing John McCain! Maybe he doesn't realize that McCain only won in the most backward parts of the country, the Old Confederacy (minus forward-looking North Carolina, Virginia and Florida), the Mormon West and a few of the less populated Midwestern states where people get their political information from Hate Talk Radio. In any case, President Obama is determined to carry out his own program, not, amazingly, McCain's and Broder's. Guaranteeing more tax cuts for the wealthy isn't what the American people had in mind when they rejected McCain, rejected congressional Republicans and rejected the ideas espoused by Broder and his "courageous" sell-outs. Obama wants to push through health care reform and energy reform, but to Broder these ideas pail in comparison to cementing in place a plutocratic version of Democracy that harkens back to pre-Revolutionary France.

And Americans? I think we'd rather see the president and Congress working on reining in the banksters and the angry, self-entitled rich people who would prefer to see the rest of us eating pet food than give up an increasingly regressive tax system that favors the wealthy at the expense of the middle class, or even their off shore tax havens, their outrageously low estate tax rates, their rip-off schemes that impoverish almost every middle class kid going to college, their thousands of little tricks that enshrine usury as the accepted business practice of this country-- while paying lip service to Jesus Christ's message, the very same Jesus Christ who talked an awful lot about the plight of the poor but never mentioned anything about opposing gays or spreading bigotry or empowering capital. One can only hope that David Broder's song to faux courageousness is the death rattle of the dominance of society's pariah class, the ones all his repulsive punditry has always been aimed at pleasing.

One thing all baseball fans can agree on: The Bow-Tied Buffoon is bad for the game

What, no bow tie? Well, George will always be Our Buffoon.

by Ken

Call this the lead entry for today in my personal "Stories I'll Be Damned If I'll Ever Read" file.

By way of background, you probably also get those Washington Post e-newsletters with links to various categories of splendiferous content in the day's newspaper. Some days there's one for "Opinions" -- or even, on some truly special days, three of them (apparently identical) lurking in the in-box.

The top listing today is an E. J. Dionne Jr. column, "The Real Pelosi," blurbed as: "She's not a San Francisco liberal imposing her agenda on our pragmatic new president." I bet by the end of the day I'll read that one.

But then comes:

George Will
Baseball's Judicial Branch
Umpiring remains a necessary, demanding and
unappreciated craft.

[The underlining of course corresponds to a link in the original. The thing is, I don't link to George Will. It's a philosophical thing, on account of my philosophy being I hate his stinking guts. It's maybe a religious thing also -- yeah, that's right, a religious thing, especially on the first day of Passover.]

Of course, the bow-tied buffoon's passion for baseball is one of his most obnoxious pomposities, especially for those of us who happen to have a passion for baseball. (As Lord knows we all know, our George is a Cubs fan. This seems to me reason enough to hate the Cubs, with apologies to Cubs fan Scott Simon of NPR and Cubs manager Sweet Lou Piniella. Sorry, guys, but you understand, it's this philosophico-religious thing I have.) Really, now! "Baseball's Judicial Branch"? "Umpiring remains a necessary, demanding and unappreciated craft"? As Cathy would say, "Ack!"

Which suggests one possible practical application. I don't mean to make light of the affliction of bulimia, but might it not be at least a trifle more hygienic if bulimics were encouraged to march off to the toilet bowl clutching "Baseball's Judicial Branch" to read? I mean, as opposed to sticking their fingers down their throat to induce vomiting? Wouldn't this be at least a minor health upgrade?

[If you need a better, more "serious" reason for loathing our George than the fact that his lying carcass is made entirely of toxic waste, or that beneath his mask of genteel, paternalistic Beltway insiderism he may be the most dishonest parasite in the parasitic infotainment journalism biz, then consider the furor that has been brewing since February, even within the Post, about the scum-sucking little doodyhead's crusade of lies and obfuscations about global warming. My guy A Siegel has been on the case, and reports today on "Washington Post's Willfully Civil War" on his Get Energy Smart! NOW!!! blog.]

POSTSCRIPT

Right below "Baseball's Judicial Branch" in the WaPo "Opinions" roundup -- yes, all three times -- is the following:

David Broder
Yannigans of Summer
Recommended reading for lovers of the language of
baseball.

Ohmygosh.

The thing about baseball cliches is that by and large they're true. There is no hoarier baseball adage than: "It's a long season." And getting longer by the day.

[Sorry, I don't link to Dean Broder either, except when I'm making fun of what he's written. For that, however, I first have to read what he's written, which is plainly out of the question here. Okay, I've found reading the dean pretty much out of the question for years now.]

POST-POSTSCRIPT

On the way to posting this, I stopped to read the Dionne column on Nancy Pelosi (here's the link again) and her politically pragmatic approach to the House speakership. It's good.

Not that I'm surprised. I'm just saying.

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DWT exclusive! Now it can be told: David S. Broder has been mounted and stuffed for decades. You won't believe who's writing "his" columns!

McCranky -- a reformer in the mold of T.R., says David S.

"So, at 72 and with a history of cancer, how could McCain choose a vice presidential nominee who has, let's face it, zero experience in foreign affairs? Being the nominal commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard doesn't count, unless you think Vladimir Putin is about to order an invasion across the Bering Strait.

"At a time when the nation also confronts enormous challenges at home, Palin has, um, slightly more than zero experience in domestic affairs. The reason most people move to Alaska is that it's different from the rest of the country. Salmon fishing and snowmobile racing are not front-page news in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Florida."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today, The Cynicism Express

"Palin is, if anything, less qualified for the vice presidency (and the presidency) than [Harriet] Miers was for the [Supreme C]ourt. But there is one big difference: Palin passes all the right-wing litmus tests, which means she is unlikely to suffer Miers's fate. . . .

"That only a handful of conservatives have so far expressed doubts about Palin demonstrates that ideology is what drove them during the Miers fight, and drives them still. Miers's lack of experience was, for many conservatives, a convenient rationale for opposing someone they worried might become another David Souter. Palin's lack of experience is irrelevant because she is right -- actually, quite far right -- on the conservatives' issues."

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in his Washinton Post column yesterday, Northern Underexposure

"How Palin Could Help"

-- title of the column attributed to "David S. Broder" in yesterday's Washington Post

by Ken
EXCLUSIVE TO DOWN WITH TYRANNY

To the extent that the media do their job, there is one basic take on the choice of Governor Who??? to be Young Johnny McCranky's running mate, and that is that the Crankyman has chosen to take a flying leap into history as a laughingstock, as the least-fit-to-serve candidate ever to make it onto the presidential ballots of all the states in the history of the republic, including minor as well as major party nutsos.

Really, now, while there are hundreds if not thousands of questions to be asked, and the number balloons every day, and many of those questions are pretty darned important, it all boils down to one question, really:

How would anyone in his or her right mind DARE to vote for a McCranky-Who??? ticket?

This is after all, a presidential candidate who appears on a host of medical grounds to be at death's door, or on some of his feebler days to have slipped inside the door for a quick liedown. And the person he has chosen to step in for him is someone who, apart from being a babe of sorts, has no qualifications of any kind for the presidency except loudly proclaimed commitment to a few ultra-right-wing (in particular Christian Right) talking points. She doesn't even qualify as an "ultra-right-winger," since on most of the issues confronting the president of the U.S. -- including the whole realm of foreign policy, but hardly limited to that -- she has, as far as we can tell, no views at all.

But the Crankyman was desperate, and knew he needed to roll the dice. So he apparently gambled that, since he couldn't have his buddy Holy Joe Lieberman at his side, he'd go the other way: to a complete stranger, known only for (a) being a former beauty near-queen (hey, people like good-looking people) and (b) espousing a few Hard Right crazinesses that might solidify his support among the crazies and stoopids who make up the Republican Base, whose trust he is incredibly still trying to win at this late date.

And so as we scan yesterday and today's op-ed pages in the hometown newspaper of Our Nation's Village, that tiny enclave that sometimes seems to exist in the mind and nowhere else (unless it's Our Nation's Lobbyists' money-shoveling operations), we find sensible people like Eugene Robinson and E. J. Dionne Jr. writing sensibly, and even the likes of Richard Cohen sort of getting it. And then there's "David S. Broder" [left], taking the side of, well the crazies and the stoopids, the people our Johnny is forging into a coalition he dares to dream will propel him into the White House.

Which is why it seems to me long past time to rip the cover off the charade. People, there is no David S. Broder.

Oh, there once was a David S. He was a harmless drone who churned out dull but inoffensive platitudes about American politics.

David S.'s most famous innovation, of course, was his cherished Field Trips into the Real America -- for the purpose of communing with his belly button. He was rarely given proper credit for his courage in undertaking these field trips, which carried with them the risk of running into Real People, who might actually say Real Stuff.

Of course our David S. was tough enough for that. He had been to zoos, after all, and so had experience observing native fauna in their not-quite-natural habitat. Sometimes he would, in flagrant violation of the posted warnings not to feed the animals, toss them the odd peanut.

What's more, it's not as if David S. was at risk of hearing something from those natives that might disturb the stone-engraved "wisdom" drawn from all that belly-button watching. After all, the last time he was known to have listened to anyone who wasn't a certified elder of his Village-by-the-Potomac was sometime in the early 1970s when his mother reproached him for not calling more often and he shot back, "Jeez Louise, Ma, I'm due at Sally Quinn's. Her cook is trying a new recipe for Quiche Villageoise."

What's more, encountering these rough Real Persons in the wild (as it were), in their luncheonettes and bars, relieved him of the lurking fear that one of those ruffians might someday show up at his very own Village doorstep with a view toward actually setting foot inside! (Oh, the horror!)

So yes, there once was a David S., but surely it has been obvious that he no longer exists, and surely hasn't for decades. Although it appears impossible to ascertain when exactly David S. moved on to the Great Punditorium in the Beyond, there really isn't room for doubt that he has passed.

"Are you going to tell me," said Milton S. Tumblewit, professor emeritus of punditology at the Outside the Village University School of Journalism, "that these last several decades' worth of mindlessly repetitive and predictable pseudo-'centrist' drivel were written by an actual living, breathing human being?"

Many of those who were once close to David S. acknowledge that the Master, as he liked to be called, is no longer with them. One longtime intimate, who was granted anonymity on account of he's a really famous Village columnist who lacks the common sense or decency or simple shame to be mortified by this remembrance, nevertheless recalls:

I remember once I went into a phase where I became really preoccupied with finding the True Political Center -- not some close approximation, but the real, exact center. I knew as long as I was even millimeters away from True Center, I couldn't give my readers the real American punditry they deserve. So my desk filled up with protractors and compasses and T-squares and slide rules and stuff.

Until one day David S. (he liked to be called"David S." -- either that or 'Master') said to me in that special authoritative way he had, where you knew he was telling you God's Own Truth, he said, 'You don't need all that fancy paraphernalia, boychik. If you want to find the Real Center, just keep moving right until you feel your head spinning like a hula hoop on crack.'

I love to tell that story at Village soirees. I swear every time I tell it it brings a tear to Ben Bradlee's eye."

There is, it should be noted, a dissenting school, which acknowledges that the writing of David S.'s columns passed into other hands at some point, probably in the '70s, but insists that he didn't die.

THE REVISIONIST THEORY: DAVID S., CHANTEUSE

Instead he is said to have let his hair and nails grow, and after several seasons of summer stock rolled out his one-man show, Mary Martin, Mary Martin, in which he attempted to recapture the spirit of America's favorite singing gamine. Adherents of this theory point out that David S. had already achieved great acclaim playing two of the beloved Mary's most famous roles with the Village Light Opera Company (admission by invitation only): the title role of Peter Pan and the irrepressible young governess Maria in The Sound of Music, where he was especially admired for his yodeling in the song "The Lonely Goatherd."

Upon his passing, the real David S. was mounted and stuffed, and an amazing number of people appear to have been fooled. The result bears an uncanny likeness to Phineas T. Bluster of the old Howdy Doody show. How then, you ask, has the Washington Post continued to publish a never-ending stream of mindless blather under the David S. byline?

A now-retired but formerly highly placed source at the paper agreed to spill the beans to Down With Tyranny, on condition of anonymity ("I wouldn't dare show my face at Sally's house," he -- or she -- said).

A lot of people think we just had that crap written by an intern, maybe one who had once had to retype several of his columns when the spam filter on our e-mail system deleted them. Or more likely a succession of interns, on the theory that no one person could keep churning out that dim-witted crap.

The truth is actually more exotic.

You've probably heard of the theory that a whole bunch of monkeys -- you know, a really, really lot of them -- put at typewriters would eventually type the works of Shakespeare. This is usually thought of as a mere theoretical comment on randomness. It's not well known that a project to test the theory was actually funded in the late '60s and early '70s by the National Endowment for the Humanities, using 500 monkeys working on early IBM PCs (and not as is sometimes maliciously reported, PC Jr.'s).

In fact, the project achieved some surprising successes. Most notably, two of the simians in collaboration produced a version of Julius Caesar that was surprisingly similar to the one we know, at least up to the point where the stabbed Caesar turns to his erstwhile friend Brutus and says, "Et tu, Bongo?" At this point the whole thing deteriorated quickly into farce, in the form of scampering, howling antics that closely resembled a routine once done by a pair of trained chimpanzees named Biffy and Miffy on The Ed Sullivan Show. Or at least that was the claim advanced by Biffy and Miffy's trainer, Col. Beeson M. Mifflin, in legal papers that were filed as a prelude to a possible lawsuit.

Some people claim that the threatened lawsuit spelled doom for the Simian Shakespeare project. In fact, it was shut down when the late Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) [right], alarmed by reports of the project's successes, succeeded in cutting off funding, insisting: "It's bad enough that filth was written once. We're certainly not going to having it written again on the taxpayers' dime, and especially not by a bunch of monkeys who are no smarter than me!"

With the monkeys thrown out of work, and re-employment prospects bleak (the Sullivan show was off the air by then), we at the Post knew we could probably get them to work cheap. What we weren't prepared for was how quickly and how successfully some of the monkeys -- the more pedantic ones, it has to b said, who were usually derided by their more creative peers -- developed a remarkable imitation of David S.'s "voice." When the first "Broder" book written entirely by the monkeys was published and several Washington reviewers declared, "Rejoice, Real Americans! The Master has never been in more iconic form," we ordered extra bananas for all of the team.

And so here we are, in September 2008, and yesterday we had E. J. Dionne writing:

By all rights, there should be a revolt at this week's (now-delayed) Republican convention against John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate -- for the same reasons so many Republicans opposed President Bush's selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court.

And today Eugene Robinson noting:

Has anyone noticed that Sarah Palin's central claim to political fame is a fraud? She represents herself as a fiscal conservative who abhors pork-barrel projects and said no thanks to the "Bridge to Nowhere" -- a $398 million span that would have linked Ketchikan, Alaska, to its airport across the Tongass Narrows. But as mayor of Wasilla (pop. 9,780), she hired a Washington lobbyist to bring home the bacon. And as a candidate for governor just two years ago, she supported both the Ketchikan bridge and the congressional earmark that would have paid most of its cost.

But then there was David S., or rather the David S. Monkey Collective, writing "How Palin Could Help."

By picking Palin, McCain has strengthened his reputation not as an ideologue, not as a partisan, but as a reformer -- ready to shake up Washington as his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, once did. My guess is that cleansing Washington of its poisonous partisanship, its wasteful spending and its incompetence will become McCain's major theme.

Now, this is -- and I wish there were a more polite way of saying it -- so fucking stupid, in every particular, that if it had been written by an actual pundit, you'd have to say it would be a simple act of human kindness to take him out to the meadow and put him out of his misery.

Of course we know who really wrote it. And I for one refuse to attempt to engage a bunch of monkeys in political dialogue. It's likely to be more stimulating and productive than dialoguing with, say, the Crazies and Stoopids for McCranky. Still, there are limits.

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Special Christmas DWT News Quiz: Is it possible that, without knowing it, Mitt Romney didn't actually entirely lie?

"I saw the Patriots win the World Series--excuse me, the Super Bowl."
--former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, ripped out of context (it's actually even sillier in context, as you'll see)

Now it appears that then-Michigan Gov. George Romney actually did make what is described as a "surprise" appearance at a civil rights march with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Grosse Pointe. The Politico has reported finding two witnesses to such an event, in 1963.

Fortunately for Willard "Mitt" Romney's reputation as someone who wouldn't tell the truth if his life depended on it, this doesn't really undiscredit his lie about seeing his father march with Dr. King in his Richie Rich hometown.

I admit it strikes me as intriguing that Mitt has chosen to resurrect a fable that made sense when he was peddling himself in liberal Massachusetts. But now, when he's pandering his butt off to the right-wing GOP base as the man who put the "big" in "bigot"?

The party I feel bad for here is Mitt's dad. George Romney was a pretty decent guy--an authentically moderate Republican who indeed had a commitment to civil rights, of a sort that would get him drummed out of the party today.

You'd think that Mitt has enough experience by now being caught in lies that he would hve developed better skills at covering over it. Maybe the fault lies with the docile press that up to now really hasn't held him to account for his nonstop whoppers. Meanwhile, what exactly has Mitt been saying about his peculiar story? Better to ask: What hasn't he been saying?

And that in fact is the question for our special Christmas Day DWT News Quiz:

Which of the following things did Mitt Romney NOT say about seeing his father march with Martin Luther King Jr.? (Thanks to Sam Stein and his timeline on Huffington Post the other day.)

(a) "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

(b) "Actually, I have two dads, in the sense of 'having,' and they used to play pinochle together, Martin Luther King Jr. and, you know, my other dad George, at our house in Grosse Pointe, and they both liked Sousa marches, my two dads, and sometimes when Dr. King was at the house they would go out in the streets and march around while humming 'The Stars and Stripes Forever,' and they let me watch. Many's the time that me and David Broder and Stephen Hess would just stand out on the porch with binoculars watching them."

(c) "I speak in the sense of I saw my dad become president of American Motors. I wasn't actually there when he became president of American Motors, but I saw him in the figurative sense of he marched with Martin Luther King."

(d) "My brother also remembers him marching with Martin Luther King, and so in that sense I saw him march with Martin Luther King."

(e) "You know, I'm an English literature major as well. When we say, 'I saw the Patriots win the World Series,' it doesn't necessarily mean you were there--excuse me, the Super Bowl. I saw my dad become president of American Motors. Did that mean you were there for the ceremony? No, it's a figure of speech."

(f) "If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of in the sense I've described. It's a figure of speech and very familiar, and it's very common. And I saw my dad march with Martin Luther King. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great effort."

(g) "The point we were making was that the issue of Mormonism had to do with its civil rights record. Did he walk with Martin Luther King? Today, I have no idea."


THE ANSWERS

Yes indeed, our Mitt said nearly all of these things--all, in fact, but (b) and (g), and (b) is just silly, unworthy of appearing in a serious News Quiz.

Come to think of it, (g) is kind of silly too but is relevant because it was said by an actual person, Stephen Hess, now Senior Fellow Emeritus, Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He was explaining recently what he and now-legendary pundit David S. Broder might have meant when they wrote, in their 1967 book The Republican Establishment: The Present and Future of the GOP that George Romney "has marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb of Detroit." It doesn't appear that either of them could, or can, source the story. Very likely it was just some story they heard--and repeated.

And on that note, Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all.

If you look up "irony" in the dictionary, you will find a picture of . . . well, of WHOM? Yes, ladies and germs, it's another famous DWT News Quiz!

Kudos to Steve Benen for nailing this one on his Carpetbagger Report ("Juan Williams defines 'journalist'").

Steve notes that NPR's Juan Williams--a former Fox Noise "analyst," you may recall--had a powerfully negative response to Newsweek's announcement that Markos Moulitsas, creator of Daily Kos, will be contributing commentary on the 2008 presidential election to both the magazine and its website (naturally he'll be "balanced" by a rabidly conservative voice to be named later):

[T]he fact is that he’s not a journalist in terms of someone who knows how to do reporting, someone who reflects balance in what he portrays. To the contrary, he engages in the kind of hyperbole and extreme statements that’s represented by that crass and, I think, offensive statement he made about those dead people.

But you know what? I think that’s just what’s going on in journalism. I think that, you know, there’s more and more opinion, less and less people who know how to do the job. All you’ve got to do is shout, say something on the blog that offends and attacks the other side, and suddenly, you have the credentials, and you’re said to be a journalist. I think it’s a great lie.

Now, this is pretty dopey in its own right, and Steve picks it apart well, but only after pausing to relish the irony of it all. Said irony has to do with the circumstances in which "Scoop" Williams made these remarks. And that, to me, has "news quiz" written all over it. So let's make this an impromptu DWT "Nerds in the News" Quiz:

To whom and where did Juan Williams deliver this manifesto on journalism?

(a) To Bill Moyers [right] in an interview on his PBS Moyers Report

(b) To CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, who was in Washington for a pot-luck supper at David Broder's house

(c) To Sean Hannity in an interview on Fox Noise

(d) To Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, as the justice was autographing a copy of his vitriolic new tell-little-of-consequence memoir, Confronting the Future, at the pot-luck supper at David Broder's house

(e) To FEMA Acting Deputy Administrator Harvey Johnson [left], the guy who had that supposed "press conference" where the softball-lobbing questioners were all FEMA employees, whom he addressed by their first names [hey, did you see Al Kamen's hilarious recap of this priceless imbroglio in yesterday's Washington Post "In the Loop" column?]

(f) To former New York Times diplomatic affairs correspondent Judy Miller, his charades partner at the pot-luck supper at David Broder's house, after they lost a round to the team of syndicated columnist Robert Novak and former vice presidential enforcer Irving "Lewis" Libby



AND THE ANSWER IS . . .

Of course, it's the loudest and dumbest mouth in the whole of the Right-Wing Noise Machine:

Sean "Nuclear-Waste Mouth" Hannity!


SCORING

If you picked (c), you have a perfect score of 100.

However, if you picked (b), (d), or (f), you're alarmingly out of the loop--the Beltway loop, that is. "A pot-luck supper at David Broder's house"? Come on, puh-leeze! What ever would Sally Quinn say about that?

You're going to need to read a few hundred Broder columns in quick succession. Don't try this on an empty stomach, though--or on a full one either, come to think of it.


BREAKING NEWS--NEWSWEEK NAMES MARKOS'S RIGHT-WING COMMENTATING COUNTERPART, AND IT IS . . .

Howard Kurtz has the story.

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