Just when you thought The Donald had set the standard for political craziness, Young Johnny McCranky opens his trap

Young Johnny McCranky reminds us that when it comes to the political crazy, nobody can outdo him.

by Ken

In a DailyKos post, "Abbreviated pundit roundup: Trump's poll numbers take a huge dive," Georgia Logothetis brings together a broad range of sources sounding alarms about the stink bomb that is the Trump presidential campaign, including this from the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, from a column today called "The challenges in covering Trump's relentless assault on the truth":

In 2016’s race to the bottom, Donald Trump is going to find out if you can become president when two-thirds of Americans don’t like you — and a majority can’t stand you. [...]

Trump is setting modern records for political toxicity — at least for a major-party candidate this far out from an election. Seventy percent of Americans surveyed in an ABC News/Washington Post poll out this week had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, up 10 points over the past month. The poll showed Trump’s favorable rating cratering at 29 percent, down from 37 percent last month.

I think it's worth backing up to the beginning of this Gene Robinson column:

Donald Trump must be the biggest liar in the history of American politics, and that’s saying something.

Trump lies the way other people breathe. We’re used to politicians who stretch the truth, who waffle or dissemble, who emphasize some facts while omitting others. But I can’t think of any other political figure who so brazenly tells lie after lie, spraying audiences with such a fusillade of untruths that it is almost impossible to keep track. Perhaps he hopes the media and the nation will become numb to his constant lying. We must not.

One reservation: I have to quibble with the notion that The Donald is unique in modern political discourse. Oh, I don't dispupte that his habit of lying is more brazen, more unashamed, and just plain wackier than what we've become used to from the Right, but not more unbroken. As I've been screaming for going on a decade now, the Right has somehow taken unto itself the Right to Lie without reservation or apology, presumably under the justification of access to a Higher Truth. And for me the tipping-point event was the 2008 presidential campaign of Arizona Sen. Young Johnny McCranky, in which the candidate never, to my hearing, uttered a word of truth, and better still, in his attempt to pander to assorted constituencies, staked out multiple positions (two, three, or even more) on virtually every issue which were not only mutually exclusive but stitched together entirely from lies and delusions.

Of course, the scope of his lyingness went mostly uncalled out. And so, despite my jubilation at the Obama victory, signaling an end to the long nightmare of the "Chimpy the Prez" Bush years, I was filled with foreboding considering how close McCranky made the final vote count, given the terrifying imbecility, dishonesty, and delusionality of his campaign. And it didn't take long to see the impact on governing of the Republicans' embrace of total dishonesty. While Obama himself would disappoint in a number of ways, for most everything he did try to do he would be largely thwarted by a Republican Party united on a single tactic: to sink the country in the shithole of its diseased imaginings in the hope of scoring tactical political advantage.

So I was less surprised than I might have been to have Young Johnny jumping into the Orlando swamp blithering -- as DailyKos's Brainwrap put it yesterday -- "something just as, if not even more insane and offensive than Donald Trump," calling President Obama "directly responsible" for the event, "due to [as Washington Post's Mike DeBonis puts it] his failure to combat the rise of the Islamic State terror group." Later the Crankyman claimed to have "misspoken," but I don't doubt that what he blithered was pretty much what he thought, for want of a better word.


ESPECIALLY WORTH NOTING IN GEORGIA L'S POST
IS THIS QUOTE ON GUNS FROM STANLEY McCHRYSTAL

It's from a NYT op-ed piece by the retired general called "Home Should Not Be a War Zone," on the subject of gun laws:

As this national crisis continues to rage, I ask my fellow veterans — patriots who have worn the uniform, who took an oath to protect our Constitution and the Second Amendment, who served this great country — to add your voice to this growing call for change. America needs you.

In my life as a soldier and citizen, I have seen time and time again that inaction has dire consequences. In this case, one consequence of our leaders’ inaction is that felons, domestic abusers and suspected terrorists have easy access to firearms.

Some opponents of closing these gaps in our laws will continue to argue that dangerous people will obtain guns in our country no matter what, and therefore that taking steps to make it harder for them is fruitless. That is both poor logic and poor leadership.

Smartly said, General Stan.

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No More GOP? The Democratic Party Will Welcome You, No Questions Asked

Tuesday morning I woke up at 4am. It was still dark so I reached for the channel changer and switched the TV on. It was Eugene Robinson, one of the only bearable Morning Joe regulars, and he was talking about an opinion piece he had just written for the Washington Post, How Donald Trump Destroyed The Republican Party in 2015. When I came downstairs and turned on my computer, it's the first thing I looked for. His point isn't that the party is actually going to disappear, but that it has been so altered that it will be barely recognizable. (But, then again, anyone bemoaning the loss of the Eisenhower-era GOP can find it as the dominant force inside a Democratic Party that would make Wall Street's own senator, Chuck Schumer, Senate Leader and pick another of their creatures, Hillary Clinton, over Bernie Sanders. The day of the New Dems and Schumercrats is nigh. But that isn't what Robinson was concerned about. Rhetorically, he asked if he was exaggerating when he declared the GOP as we know it on its last legs.

Hardly. I’m not sure it’s possible to exaggerate how the Trump phenomenon has torn the party apart, revealing a chasm between establishment and base that is far too wide to bridge with stale Reagan-era rhetoric. Can you picture the Trump legions meekly falling in line behind Jeb Bush or Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.)? I can’t either.

Trump didn't blow up the part on his own. He had help from a field of presidential contenders that was touted as deep and talented but proved shallow and wanting. Bush raised shock-and-awe money but turns out to lack his father and brother’s skill at performing on the national stage; he seems to want to be crowned, not elected. Rubio is like the teacher’s pet who speaks eloquently in class but doesn’t do his homework. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was slow off the mark, perhaps having been stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge.

Who else would be acceptable to the GOP establishment? Certainly not Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.). Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and Ohio Gov. John Kasich all had their glory days in the last century. Carly Fiorina has never held elective office. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) have come and gone.

At year’s end, the campaign is dominated by three candidates who appeal over the heads of the establishment and straight to the unruly base: Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), who negates the fact that he is a sitting senator by waging all-out war against the party leadership; Ben Carson, a distinguished neurosurgeon who seems increasingly out of his depth; and Trump, the undeniable front-runner.

What Trump has done is call out the establishment on years of dishonest rhetoric. Progressives often asked why so many working-class whites went against their own economic interests by supporting the GOP. The answer is that Republicans appealed to these voters on cultural grounds, subtly exploiting their resentments and fears.

The nation’s demographics are changing, with a rapidly growing Latino population-- and an African American in the White House. Globalization has hollowed out the middle class. The country is vulnerable to terrorism, and there is no way to impose a Pax Americana on today’s multipolar world.

The Republican Party promised-- with nods, winks and dog-whistle toots-- to change all of this and make everything the way it used to be. In practice, however, party leaders were compelled to deal with the world as it actually is. Hence, for example, the establishment view a couple of years ago in favor of comprehensive immigration reform.

Enter Trump, who has the temerity to point out that the party establishment says one thing but does another. He launched his campaign by calling the GOP’s bluff on immigration: If the 11 million people here without documents are really “illegal,” as the party loudly proclaims, then send them home. Other candidates were put in the position of having to explain why, after claiming that President Obama was somehow “soft” on immigration, their position on allowing the undocumented to stay is basically the same.

Similarly, many leading Republicans were careful not to offend the “birthers” who denied Obama’s legitimacy as president. An unabashed birther long before he was a candidate, Trump still refuses to say whether he accepts the proven fact that Obama was born in the United States.

Also, the party has long sought to capitalize on fear of terrorism by haranguing the president for not using the exact phrase “radical Islamic terrorism” (as if semantics could bring peace to Syria). So when, after the attack in San Bernardino, Calif. , Trump called for banning Muslims from entering the country, much of the Republican base was receptive. Other candidates had to backpedal and remind voters that George W. Bush made clear his “war on terror” was not a war against Islam.

Trump has given voice to the ugliness and anger that the party spent years encouraging and exploiting. He let the cat out of the bag, and it’s hungry.

The party might nominate Trump, in which case the establishment will have lost all control. Or party leaders might somehow find a way to defeat him, in which case they will have lost the allegiance of much of the base. In either event, the GOP we once knew is irredeemably a thing of the past.

"Democrats" with more traditional Republican hearts-- Rahm Emanuel, Steve Israel, Chris Van Hollen, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Steny Hoyer, Chuck Schumer, the New Dems, Blue Dogs and whatever the DLC calls itself these days-- will continue welcoming them with open arms, even running them for office as "Democrats." the way they're doing this year with Patrick Murphy and Charlie Crist in Florida, Monica Vernon in Iowa and, among others, Mike Derrick in New York. Alas, the Republican Wing of the Democratic Party is no longer just a wing.

GOP Nomination Fight-- How Do You Keep Track Who The Biggest Freak Or Clown Of The Day Actually Is?

Carly: "Politics is a fact-free zone"

Rand Paul's now infamous rant and meme the other day about Trump being a "clown" who is "unfit" to be president followed a similar screed by Marco Rubio that Trump's campaign was nothing more than a "freak show." Both senators were correct, of course, but either could have been just as easily referring to another self-serving/self-entitled GOP multimillionaire with grand political ambitions: failed business executive and professional victim Carly Fiorina.

Fiorina has rapidly advanced in the polls by presenting herself as someone who will not be bound by anything as mundane as reality or facts in a right-wing jihad against the hated interlopers. People wonder how she could be gaining support when she's obviously a compulsive liar. The problem is that the fact that she's a known to be a compulsive liar is why she's gaining support. That's what Republican primary voters-- raised on the lies and bigotry of Hate Talk Radio and Fox News-- want and expect... and, some would say, deserve.

In the last Republican debate, the topic of secretly recorded Planned Parenthood videos came up, and Fiorina said passionately, “I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking, while someone says ‘We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.'” While it received huge applause, the line was false. The Planned Parenthood videos contain someone describing a similar scene, but not what Fiorina claimed was in them.

Which might not be a big deal-- afterward, Fiorina could have said, “I mixed up something in those videos with things I had seen and heard elsewhere,” and we could still have a reasonable debate about the merits of fetal tissue research. But that’s not what she said. Instead, after practically every single fact-checking enterprise declared her claim false (here’s Politifact; here’s FactCheck.org), her campaign released its own cobbled-together video, using footage not from Planned Parenthood of a fetus kicking on a table, in an attempt to claim that Fiorina was actually telling the truth. Even in their phony video, which includes a photo of a stillborn baby being passed off dishonestly as a photo of an aborted fetus, there isn’t anyone saying, “We have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” This is, as Dahlia Lithwick says, “trying to doctor doctored videotapes and still failing to produce an image that corresponds to Fiorina’s narrative. It’s truthiness elevated to almost cosmic levels.”

But most remarkably, Fiorina continues to insist, no matter who asks her, that she never said anything untrue about the original Planned Parenthood videos. When Chris Wallace asked her on Fox News Sunday last week, “Do you acknowledge what every fact checker has found, that as horrific as that scene is, it was only described on the video by someone who claimed to have seen it?”, she answered, “No, I don’t accept that at all. I’ve seen the footage.” Yesterday she appeared on Meet the Press, and Chuck Todd asked her, “There is no evidence that the scene you described exists. Are you willing now to concede that you exaggerated that scene?” She replied, “No, not at all. That scene absolutely does exist. And that voice saying what I said they were saying, ‘We’re going to keep it alive to harvest its brain’ exists as well.”

There’s no reason why a conservative couldn’t say to her, “Look, I agree with everything you believe about abortion and Planned Parenthood, but you just need to admit you misspoke and move on.” But Fiorina has seemingly decided that the proper strategy is to just keep lying about what is in the end just a detail related to a larger policy issue, no matter how many people point out that she’s lying.

And why not? It’s working. While not long ago her support was too small to measure, she’s now in double-digits in the polls, while other candidates are faltering. The people rallying to support her don’t seem to care. Quite the contrary-- they may be looking at this controversy and concluding that Fiorina is standing up to all those media bullies with their “facts” and their “evidence,” just like Ben Carson is telling it like it is on why the Constitution is for people like us, not people like them.

However this primary race turns out, at the moment more than half the Republican electorate is supporting either 1) a spectacularly xenophobic candidate who wants to round up 11 million people and build a wall around America; 2) a candidate who thinks that we ought to have religious tests for high office; or 3) a candidate who evinces few qualms about lying repeatedly even after her lies have been carefully documented. This is a party with a lot to be proud of.

Brain Beutler also has a problem with Fiorina's compulsive lying and how easily-- eagerly-- right-wing dupes slurp it up. Writing for The New Republic, he compares the loopy Fiorina to C.J. Pearson, the 13-year-old right-wing hoaxer from Georgia whose brazen lies landed him a job as Ted Cruz’s youth-outreach chairman after he was exposed! "[H]ere's what the PR folks are saying: say you lied and apologize to avoid backlash," Pearson wrote in a series of tweets. "But, instead, I choose to stand by my word. While the article will be incriminating, all we have in politics is our word and I stand by it."

Carly Fiorina's mode of deception, and her response to being fact-checked, is nearly identical. The main difference, of course, is that Fiorina is a 61-year-old former corporate executive who’s a top contender to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, while Pearson is still going through puberty. The fact that so many conservatives are lining up to defend her is indicative of the degree to which conservatism has become a movement defined by affective rage and imagined victimization by mainstream forces. This toxic brew contributed to the party's difficulty winning recent national elections. It is already poisoning the party's campaign for the presidency in 2016.

...As more interviewers and moderators interject to debunk Fiorina’s story about a video segment that doesn’t exist, Fiorina’s reputation among conservatives isn’t suffering. Instead, the right’s journalist shit-list is growing longer.

Pearson can be forgiven for expecting the conservative media to rush to his aid, rather than orchestrate his demise. He's coming of age in a movement that often treats reality as subordinate to perception; that will embrace obvious distortions of facts if doing so might move the needle of public opinion, and dissemble and whine, rather than admit error, when the media gets wise. If the stakes were higher-- if Pearson were a 61-year-old presidential candidate instead of a 13-year-old kid-- he would be climbing in the polls today. 

It isn't just Paul Waldman and Brian Beutler noticing this, not by a long shot. That Fiorina is a compulsive liar, perhaps a sociopath, perhaps suffering from severe narcissistic personality disorder, is becoming conventional wisdom, at least outside the circles traveled by low-info Republican primary voters. Gary Legum, at Salon, wrote that her brazen demagoguery puts Trump's to shame and he's sure she's more dangerous than the Trumpy piñata. He seems less concerned with "her strict adherence to right-wing ideology on issues and more concerned with "the affect she’s developing on the campaign trail. Of the top three current candidates-- Fiorina, Trump and Ben Carson-- it is the former HP executive who has emerged with the steely resolve and chest-thumping, unapologetic jingoism so beloved by conservatives."

Her MTP interview was a textbook example of Fiorina’s effectiveness in appealing to the right wing, particularly when she’s in the cross hairs of a mainstream media outlet. (That she was questioned by Chuck Todd, an interviewer so hapless he might as well have been my 2-year-old nephew asking “But why?” after every Fiorina answer, certainly helped.) Asked why she’s sticking to the well-documented fictions she keeps telling about the infamous Planned Parenthood videos, Fiorina smiled like a shark, shook her head, condescended to and talked over Todd, and reiterated with all the assurance of a champion bullshit artist that yes, there is no question that “Planned Parenthood is aborting fetuses alive to harvest their brains and other body parts. That is a fact.”

...[W]here Fiorina’s demagoguery becomes even more dangerous is in its specificity about policy. Compare her talk on foreign policy to those of Trump and Carson. When asked during the debate how she would interact with Vladimir Putin, Fiorina told CNN’s audience,

What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message.

Imagine you are a Russian hard-liner sitting in Moscow watching this debate and hearing the GOP’s third-leading candidate promising a foreign policy aimed at your country that is so muscular, Ronald Reagan’s corpse just got an erection. You’re not thinking that Fiorina sounds more unhinged than General Buck Turgidson or the fact that Barack Obama is also conducting aggressive military exercises in the Baltics and the Sixth Fleet is as big and strong as ever. You’re thinking Comrade Putin will stand strong against this foolishness when Carly Fiorina is in the Oval Office.

And if you are a conservative voter in America, you’re thinking, Carly won’t be a chump like that wimp Obama, who has let Putin walk all over him. That swelling in your chest is a jingoistic pride that you haven’t felt during the long, dark years that the Kenyan Usurper has been destroying America from within.

Compare Fiorina to the boastfulness of Donald Trump, who talks in generalities: I’ll make us great again, I get along with everyone so I’ll get along with the Russians and Chinese, I’m a successful businessman, I’ll make fantastic deals and everyone will be very happy. Trump also promised he would actually talk to Putin instead of ordering the Sixth Fleet into the Turkish Straits practically the moment he takes his hand off the Bible at his Inauguration. Despite all his bluster, Trump at the end of the day wants to be the friendly executive strolling across the construction site and shaking hands with all the hardhat-sporting workers. Fiorina wants to be the one yelling at them to quit staring at her and get back to work.

After all, talking and making friends is also what that community organizer Barack Obama does.

Mild-mannered Eugene Robinson finds Fiorina so filled with anger, rage and theatrically staged righteous indignation that "she can't see straight." She "stands out among the Republican presidential candidates," he wrote yesterday,

not just because she is a woman but also because she has adopted a strategy of breathing fire. She presents herself as mad about everything, and she never gives an inch on anything she says, no matter how demonstrably untrue. Unhappily for our democracy, this approach has vaulted her into the upper tier of the multitudinous GOP field... Is she really, truly so filled with rage? Probably not. When she ran unsuccessfully against Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in 2010, she was a moderate, pro-business Republican. That erstwhile profile would get her nowhere in this year’s presidential race, however, when everyone is scrambling to get to the right of everyone else and “moderate” is a dirty word. One has to wonder if the showy posture of ultraconservative anger isn’t the biggest lie of all.

Ben Bradlee "made you understand that journalism was not a career but a mission" (Eugene Robinson)

Maybe you could resist a pitch like this, from this morning's Washington Post "Today's Headlines" e-mail, but I couldn't. (If you're tempted, you'll find Gene Robinson's column here.)

by Ken

If you've been living in this world and reading for any length of time, and you see that so-and-so has written about such-and-such, you learn some tricks of mental triage for what you will and won't devote precious, irrecoverable time to. In my own case, for example, I would need one heckuva reason to venture beyond the headline of anything George Will or Davy Brooks has written -- in fact, the greater my interest in the subject, the less likely I am to subject myself to what intellectual hooligans like that have to say.

And I was hardly overflowing with eagerness last week when longtime Washington Post top editor Ben Bradlee died. I generally admired the job he did, and on Wednesday I had my say here, though my focus was less on the job he did than on what sort of job he might have done if he had been faced with the kind of economic distress now facing the newspaper business rather than riding high in an era of fairly free spending of Mrs. Graham's money. But I had the feeling that I mostly knew what I needed to know about Ben B, and I had no intention of wallowing in the flood of Bradlee-ana that was obviously about to come.

Oh, a couple of New Yorker people I respect had their say, and I experienced momentary temptations. I think it was one of them who was touted as venturing that for once the cinematic rendering of a real-life character -- referring to Jason Robards Jr.'s rendering of Bradlee in All the President's Men -- was less dramatic than the real-life character. Still, I didn't bite.

Then this morning the Washington Post pitched a Eugene Robinson column at me -- the pitch I've reproduced above, and this I couldn't resist. Gene Robinson is someone who has carved out a career for which I have sky-high respect, and considering his longtime ties to the Post, and he thinks there's a "whole story" about Ben Bradlee that I ought to hear, then I'm going to hear it.

And I was amply rewarded, notably by this, after Gene has allowed as how "the word 'charisma' doesn't fully describe the effect Ben had on so many of us who worked for him," how "he was brilliant at the theatrical aspects of leadership" (with examples):

But his greatness was no mere performance. He made you understand that journalism was not a career but a mission. He made you feel that how well you did your job was not just important to your own ambitions but had a real impact on society. He demanded more than you thought you could possibly deliver, and you moved heaven and earth not to disappoint him.

To me, given the source, this says something.

AS FOR THAT LUNCH WITH BEN --

The story with which Gene begins the piece will resonate for anyone who has suddenly and unexpectedly found himself in an intimate setting with someone he's in awe of, and for anyone who has tried to eat a really, really terrible roast-beef sandwich.

It was the fall of 1979. The Post, which I considered the greatest newspaper in the world, was considering me for a job covering the District’s new mayor, an interesting character named Marion Barry. I knew that a couple of Post editors were going to take me to lunch. What I didn’t know was that the great Ben Bradlee was coming along.

I ordered what turned out to be the driest roast beef sandwich ever made — we’re talking cardboard and shoe leather — and Ben noticed that I was having trouble choking it down. He waited until I had a big mouthful, then leaned in and said: “City Hall is a tough job, kid. Are you tough?”

My muffled attempt to say yes must have been more amusing than convincing. Somehow, I got the job — and vowed that never again, when eating in Ben’s presence, would I bite off more than I could chew.

"Like every young reporter at The Post," Gene goes on to say, "I was scared to death of him at first." Then he did his first national political story, late in President Jimmy Carter's doomed reelection campaign, about Sen. Edward Kennedy 's "tepid support" for the president. ("I opened with the scene at the end of the Democratic convention, when Carter vainly chased Kennedy around the Madison Square Garden stage in hopes of a 'party unity' embrace.")

The story ran on the front page. That morning, on his way through the newsroom, Ben stopped by and rapped his knuckles on my desk. “Good piece about Teddy, kid,” he said, before strutting away.

That, basically, is why I’ve stayed at The Post for nearly 35 years.

Gulp. Then comes the portion of the piece we've already sampled.

The word “charisma” doesn’t fully describe the effect Ben had on so many of us who worked for him. He was brilliant at the theatrical aspects of leadership — the barrel-chested swagger, the Turnbull & Asser shirts, the blue language and the twinkling eyes — but his greatness was no mere performance. He made you understand that journalism was not a career but a mission. He made you feel that how well you did your job was not just important to your own ambitions but had a real impact on society. He demanded more than you thought you could possibly deliver, and you moved heaven and earth not to disappoint him.

Gene points out that people generally and mistakenly assume "that Ben’s political views were liberal" -- probably "because the president his newspaper exposed as a crook was a Republican, and because the president he considered a close personal friend was a Democrat." But Gene says that Bradlee "was, in fact, the least ideological person I knew." He has "no idea how he voted." Watergate was a huge story, and "a thrilling chase," but "it gave Ben no joy that the president of the United States had so sullied the office."

"THE WHOLE STORY"

Which leads Gene to the Janet Cooke episode. In my piece last week, I noted Robert G. Kaiser's point, in the WaPo Bradlee obit, that Bradlee's "strengths sometimes became weaknesses," as a prelude to noting: "The editor who could inspire his troops to do some of the best journalism ever published in America also fell for an artful hoax by a young reporter." Of Bradlee's loyalty to his staff, Gene writes:

The one thing Ben didn’t question — until it was too late — was his assumption that every journalist who came to work at The Post automatically shared his belief in the sanctity of the newspaper’s columns. For all his vaunted skepticism, it never occurred to him that a reporter would make up a story out of whole cloth and allow it to be published.

But that, of course, is what Janet Cooke did.

Gene was the paper's city hall reporter, and it fell to him to "grill" city officials from the mayor on down "about why they were unable to find 'Jimmy,' the 8-year-old heroin addict whose plight Cooke so vividly described." Of course Jimmy couldn't be found because he didn't exist.

When the hoax was revealed — and Cooke’s Pulitzer Prize was returned — everyone at the paper was devastated.

Ben’s response was to open himself and his newsroom to unprecedented scrutiny, giving the paper’s ombudsman free rein to report and tell the story of how the “Jimmy” travesty occurred. Cooke’s flakiness had been evident to some editors and reporters, but Ben and other editors were dazzled by her made-up résumé — Vassar and the Sorbonne — and paid no attention to the skeptics.

"Why mention the low point of Ben Bradlee’s life and career," Gene asks, "in a loving remembrance of a great journalist, a great American and a great friend?"

Because that’s the way Ben taught me, and that’s what he would have insisted on. No fear. No favor. The whole story, kid.

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Dana Milbank notches a threefer of phony apologies -- from NJ Guv KrispyKreme, ex-VA Guv "Handsome Bob" McD, and -- wait for it -- Glenn Beck!

Say it ain't so, Glenn B! Did you really "ma[k]e an awful lot of mistakes" that "help[ed] tear the country apart"?

"Chris Christie is terribly sorry that his staff lied to him about things they did without his knowledge, and he feels remorse that the partisan media are targeting him with a witch hunt.

"Bob McDonnell is really sorry that an overzealous federal prosecutor is going after him for doing perfectly legal things.

"And Glenn Beck feels just awful that people were so 'fragile' that they allowed his rhetoric to tear the country apart. . . .

"Christie's problem is the fault of MSNBC; McDonnell's problem is the fault of the U.S. attorney; and the damage Beck caused is the fault of the people who listened to him -- and besides, he says, he didn't have a choice."

-- Dana Milbank, in his Washington Post column
posted today, "Apologize, then blame someone else"

by Ken

It still drives me nuts that the minions of the Right-Wing Noise Machine continue to praise NJ Governor KrispyKreme for "taking responsibility" for Bridgegate, usually with pointed contrast to a certain president of the United States and an incident in North Africa. Let me say again that we can begin a discussion of what happened in North African as soon as Republicans take responsibility for their role in underfunding U.S. embassy security and for taking no interest in previous incidences of U.S. embassy violence. The discussion is apt to be short, since at that point they will all presumbaly have blown their own tiny brains out in remorse.

Of course the governor "accepted responsibility" only in the narrowest, most technical sense: that all those people implicated by the e-mails in the scheme to close the George Washington Bridge to traffic coming from the Fort Lee

It also drives me nuts that the infotainment noozers continue to intone that the issue in NJ is whether Governor KrispyKreme can survive the Bridgegate kerfuffle, without pointing out that Bridgegate only exploded because (a) in this particular case a few dogged reporters knew where to look for the incriminating e-mails that, incredibly, they were able to shake loose, and (b) his close political and personal cronies were stupid enough to leave that e-mail trail -- perhaps thinking that just because they were "smart" enough to use personal rather than government e-mail accounts, they were safe from discovery. (I'm assuming, by the way, that this is legal in New Jersey, as many things seem to be. Unlike with federal officials, who legally aren't allowed to conduct government business by e-mail other than the government variety. You'll recall that this is the law that Bush regime officials violated at will, apparently in accordance with the legal doctrine of Who's Gonna Stop Us, Huh? Huh?)

I assume that this is the "abject stupidity" with which Governor KrispyKreme dismissed the Bridgegate goof-up. (Well, that and perhaps that the scheme didn't include any mechanism for making sure that the Dems and Dem-symps being punished knew they were being punished.) He might have made the point clearer if he had offered us the corresponding paper and e-trail of, say, five or ten KrispyKreme administration vendettas of which he's especially proud -- the ones that were executed the smart way.

To get back to this epidemic of phony-baloney apologies covered by Dana Milbank in his new Washington Post column, he begins the column: "I am sorry." [New paragraph] "I am sorry that so many people have been making insincere apologies. I hasten to add that I am not to blame for these terrible apologies, but I regret them deeply, all the same."

This epidemic of lying and finger-pointing, says Dana, "brings to mind George W. Bush's long-ago vow to change a culture that says "if it feels good, do it; if you've got a problem, blame somebody else.' " (Dana hastens to add, "That didn't happen, I regret to say.")


(1) NJ GUV KRIS KRISPYKREME (aka "NJ FATS")

In the matter of the governor's sorriness, I think it's worth recalling, as washingtonpost.com's "lighter side of politics" blogger Alexandra Petri pointed out after his marathon press conference, what he really professed to be was sad. Oh, the business of taking responsibility did come up once, briefly, but that was in the context of his 16,000 references to how sad he was. Sad isn't at all the same thing as sorry and isn't even in the same discussion syllabus as responsible. On the contrary, there seems surely a powerful suggestion that someone as sad as the governor told us he was had been wronged by somebody else, somebody who should be sorry and owed him not just an apology but a taking-responsibility-for.

"Christie at least began," says Dana, "with a nominal acceptance of responsibility." (Note: links onsite.)

Even as he pleaded innocence in the bridge scandal -- "I'm telling you: I had nothing to do with this" -- he acknowledged that, at least in the technical sense of being New Jersey's chief executive, "I'm ultimately responsible." But this changed on Jan. 18, when his office issued a statement saying the mushrooming scandal was the fault of the liberal media.

"MSNBC is a partisan network that has been openly hostile to Governor Christie and almost gleeful in their efforts attacking him," the statement said. It also said the burgeoning accusations of intimidation by Christie's administration mean "partisan politics are at play here."

(2) VA GUV "HANDSOME BOB" McDONNELL and MRS. "HB"

"Ultimately," Dana notes, "the scale of the Christie administration's wrongdoing will be sorted out by a federal prosecutor. But, as [Virginia ex-Gov. Bob] McDonnell made clear on Tuesday, a federal prosecutor is just another person who can be blamed for one's own transgressions."

The former Virginia governor, indicted along with his wife in a corruption scandal involving gifts from businessman Jonnie R. Williams, issued a statement saying he would "prevail against this unjust overreach of the federal government." Said McDonnell: "I deeply regret accepting legal gifts and loans from Mr. Williams, all of which have been repaid with interest." He then went on television to say "I did nothing illegal for Mr. Williams in exchange for what I believe was his personal friendship and his generosity."

Uh-huh. The "generosity" included a shopping spree for the first lady at Oscar de la Renta ($10,999), Louis Vuitton ($5,685), and Bergdorf Goodman ($2,604), a $50,000 loan without documentation, $15,000 for his daughter's wedding, the use of a vacation home and Ferrari, the Rolex inscribed "71st Governor of Virginia," the hot-tub cover, the deck staining, a Cape Cod vacation, yacht charter and golf outings. By total coincidence, the benefactor allegedly got help with state scientific researchers and support at various company events -- including a product launch at the governor's mansion.

But McDonnell, who gallantly rejected a plea deal that would have spared his wife, blames the feds.

I should note some welcome pushback against Handsome Bob's self-declaration of purity and his determination not to plead out when he and the lovely Mrs. Handsome Bob have done nothing illegal. In Handsome Bob's handsome head, the federal prosecutors' tortured legal reasoning would make normal political interchange illegal. The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, for one, isn't buying it. "It’s worth rereading the indictment of McDonnell and his rapacious wife, Maureen," says Ruth (in her column "In Virginia, not politics as usual"), and "wallowing in the sordidness of a scheme that, as portrayed by prosecutors, went far beyond back-scratching as usual. Even in the context of Virginia’s lax-beyond-belief gift rules, the McDonnells’ conduct crossed the line from undeniably scummy to arguably criminal."

Nor is the Post's Eugene Robinson thrilled (in his column "It takes two to tango") with what he calls "the Dragon Lady Thesis -- the scenario that McDonnell, previously known as a man of courtliness and rectitude, was led unwittingly down the path to perdition by his flashier, more status-conscious spouse," despite the former Virginia First Lady's seeming credentials for the role.

It was Bob McDonnell, according to the indictment, who had a follow-up discussion with [businessman Jonnie] Williams to finalize arrangements for that $50,000 loan -- no paperwork, just a promise to repay with interest. It was Bob McDonnell who allegedly asked Williams for subsequent loans of $50,000 and $20,000. It was Bob McDonnell who allegedly took his sons golfing at Williams's private club -- and charged Williams's account for merchandise in the pro shop worth hundreds of dollars.

You’re broke, your spouse comes home with armloads of designer dresses and shoes, and you don’t freak out? You’re governor of Virginia, your wife asks a businessman for $50,000 and you don’t go ballistic?

Nobody’s as stupid as Bob McDonnell pretends to be.

(3) "THIS BRINGS US TO BECK," SAYS DANA

Lord knows we've had plenty of opportunity to chat about the phony-baloniness of Governors KrispyKreme and McDonnell. However, the mea culpa of dirtbag extraordinaire Glenn Beck is brand-new, and it's an eye-popper. In fact, my whole head is reeling.

"On Tuesday night," notes Dana, our Glenn "went on his former network and told Megyn Kelly that, before Fox News dropped him in 2011, 'I made an awful lot of mistakes. . . . I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart.' " (This last link is to a post on the website "GLENN BECK: The Fusion of Enlightenement and Entertainment" poignantly titled "Glenn poignantly reflects on his time at Fox News with Megyn Kelly." Hold on to your hankies, ladies and germs.) So our Glenn thinks he may have "played a role, unfortunately, in helping tear the country apart"! Says Dana:

Ya think? The nightly Nazi metaphors, the routine race-baiting and sponsorship of conspiracy theories and apocalyptic visions that, it appears, drove some to desperate violence? But hold on: Beck said the real trouble was that he "didn't realize how really fragile the people were. I thought we were kind of a little more in it together." In a follow-up interview on his online network, the Blaze, he further absolved himself, asserting that "there's no way that I could have done it any different than I did."

Beck is nothing if not adaptable. He was a ponytail-wearing liberal before he saw a commercial opening in conservative talk radio. Now that an improving economy has cast doubt on his end-times visions, he's recasting himself again. This week, he unveiled a new mission statement for the Blaze: "We tell stories of love and courage where the good guys win." He devoted a radio show this week to "three classic Frank Sinatra songs you need to hear."

And now we're supposed to believe he's genuine?

I'm sorry.

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Who Are The Koch Brothers? And Can We Stop Them From Buying Up The Rest Of The American Government?

The video above is compelling... and scary. In short, it points to a domestic fascist movement poised to take over the United States. What it doesn't say is that the Democratic Party is too compromised and too conflicted to stand up and fight effectively to protect the interests of the 99%. Some Democrats-- your Rahm Emanuels, Harold Fords, Max Baucuses, Ben Nelsons, Blue Dogs-- are allied with the Republicans against us. Others will fight along side us-- real progressives like Raul Grijalva, Keith Ellison, John Conyers, the Blue America candidates, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkely-- but most, from Obama to the garden variety careerists in the House and Senate will follow... whichever side looks like its winning.

Eugene Robinson highlighted a study this week that helps explain why an unfunded ragtag outfit like OccupyWallStreet is winning.

The hard-right conservatives who dominate the Republican Party claim to despise the redistribution of wealth, but secretly they love it-- as long as the process involves depriving the poor and middle class to benefit the rich, not the other way around.

That is precisely what has been happening, as a jaw-dropping new report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office demonstrates. Three decades of trickle-down economic theory, see-no-evil deregulation and tax-cutting fervor have led to massive redistribution. Another word for what’s been happening might be theft.

The gist of the CBO study, titled “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” is that while we’ve become wealthier overall, these new riches have largely bypassed many Americans and instead flowed mostly to the affluent. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but I don’t remember voting to turn the United States into a nation starkly divided between haves and have-nots. Yet that’s where we’ve been led.

...This is not what Republicans want you to think of when you hear the word redistribution. You’re supposed to imagine the evil masterminds as Bolsheviks, not bankers. You’re supposed to envision the lazy free-riders who benefit from redistribution as the “poor,” and the industrious job-creators who get robbed as the “wealthy”-- not the other way around.

If Americans were to realize they’ve been the victims of Republican-style redistribution-- stealing from the poor to give to the rich-- the whole political atmosphere might change. I believe that’s one reason why the Occupy Wall Street protests have struck such a nerve. The far-right and its media mouthpieces have worked themselves into a frenzy trying to disregard, dismiss or discredit the demonstrations. Thus far, fortunately, all this effort has been to no avail.

Funny the Democratic Party hasn't pushed that revelation. Or is it? As many as half the Democrats in the House and an even greater percentage in the Senate would be hung from the same lamp posts as the Republicans. Which explains why so many people were so happy on Friday when The Nation finally emancipated Gordon Lafer's much discussed article, Why Occupy Wall Street Has Left Washington Behind, from behind the subscription-only barrier. DWT regulars will want to read the whole piece (at the link). Here's something to wet your appetite:

Public discussion of the Wall Street protests has focused on the movement’s indictment of the economic elite, but Occupy Wall Street marks an equally profound critique of the country’s political system. As the weeks tick by, the protests at Zuccotti Park and across the nation are driving home this profound realization: this is a fight that can’t be won by voting. The crisis that most fundamentally shapes our lives cannot be solved through the legislative process. This is not because the agenda is unpopular-- 54 percent of Americans support OWS, with only 23 percent opposed-- but because the system is corrupted beyond repair. This slowly dawning realization is both invigorating-- an invitation to engage in the kind of bold, blue-sky strategic thinking that leftists have not entertained for decades-- and disturbing, a harbinger of just how nasty the future may get.

...The movement comes at a time of economic crisis and unparalleled cynicism about government, particularly in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Congress’s approval rating--13 percent [since Lafer wrote this now fallen to 9%]-- is the lowest ever recorded.

The protests are also in large part a response to the disappointments of the Obama administration. Indeed, almost every policy demand that OWS might possibly voice has already been proposed, debated and defeated-- at a time when Democrats controlled all branches of government. Members of Congress considered but declined to enact proposals to impose a tax on Wall Street transactions; to limit executive compensation; to fund a mass WPA-style jobs program; to allow bankruptcy judges to mark underwater mortgages to market; to make it easier for Americans to form unions and bargain for better wages; to eliminate tax benefits for companies that transfer our jobs overseas; and to forswear any more NAFTA-style trade treaties. The OWS refusal to articulate policy demands reflects the conviction that any remedies that fit the scale of the problem are impossible to pass-- not only in the current Congress but in any Congress we can realistically imagine... [I]f the Republicans are cheerleaders for the 1 percent, most Democrats are quiet collaborationists. I met some very dedicated and hard-working people in Congress. But ultimately the Democrats are too beholden to big money. In last year’s Congressional elections, more than two-thirds of all campaign contributions came from one-quarter of 1 percent of the population. Even Democratic candidates got ten times as much money from corporations as they did from labor unions. There is simply no chance that the little people will triumph over big business in this process.

...The OWS moment seems to reflect a recognition that we [are] being ruled by a system that, whatever its other virtues may be, is powerless to solve the most important problems plaguing the country.

Lafer writes that the OWS Movement "is Shays’ Rebellion without the guns." But it's the other side-- the side that will protect the interests of the 1% who have the guns... and the will to use them. Until Lafer and those who think like him-- a growing number of people on the Left-- are willing to give up their own lives for real, reform is still a better option, at least in my opinion, than revolution. That's why Blue America is buying radio and TV spots and billboards and urging people to contribute to righteous candidates for the House and Senate rather than stockpiling ammunition. But... watch the video again, if you dare.

Climate-change deniers have never cared about "truth"; they merely demand the right to vilify honest people with their lies and delusions

Washingtonpost.com has a wonderful slide show up of 14 Tom Toles cartoons "about the environment and global warming."


"'Global warming is real,' [Berkeley physicist Richard] Muller wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

"Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today,
"The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate"

by Ken

As I write (a little after 3pm ET) there are 2358 comments on Washingtonpost.com responding to Gene Robinson's column today, "The scientific finding that settles the climate-change debate." Believe me, I didn't venture deep into the muck. Here are just a couple of treasures I mined near the surface:

SteveSJ: Talk about clueless. Your article is clueless and missleading the public. But what's new?

For those who want the truth; [LINK OMITTED ON THE GROUND THAT IT'S PSYCHOTIC BULLSHIT AIMED AT DESTROYING LIFE ON EARTH -- Ed.]

Benson: Hey, Gene-Van-Winkle. Time to wake up and address our biggest current problem: unemployment.

Global Warming has long ago faded as the most important issue of the day.

While we're correcting the record, we should point out that Muller was never a global warming skeptic. He just acknowledged that the skeptics made some good points about problems with the data, which he set out to address.

Of course these sad souls are too far gone to have any idea, not just how wrong, but how dangerously wrong, they are.

There's no way of knowing whether "Benson," for example, it's terminal stupidity or pathologically dishonest to imagine that "we should point out that Muller was never a global warming skeptic" is an answer to Gene Robinson's characterization of "respected physicist" Richard Muller "an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own."

Even now Muller begins his October 21 WSJ piece "The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism"): "Are you a global warming skeptic? There are plenty of good reasons why you might be." However, his conclusion, after two years of research by his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project, is:

When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

More serious, though, is Benson's delusional notion that we get to put climate disaster on the back burner while we worry about joblessness. It's a reminder that to these people, none of these "issues" are real -- it's all make-believe stuff through which they can vent the products of their diseased non-thought processes for the purpose of . . . well, you've got me. I don't know what they think the purpose of lying their putrid guts out is. I might guess that reality is just too overwhelming and, you know, real for them to cope with. What I do know, though, is that vicious, at-the-top-of-their-lungs flight from reality has become a way of life among a large (and growing) sector of the country.

In his WSJ piece Muller lays out once again why he and his colleagues thought "there are plenty of good reasons why you might be" a global-warming skeptic, except that it turns out that, well, no, there aren't. A WSJ editor has helpfully provided a blurb for the piece: "There were good reasons for doubt, until now."

So all those "reasons" were "good reasons for doubt"; they just happen to be wrong. This includes essentially all the individuals, groups, and organizations that have been routinely vilified by the Psychopathic Liars of the Right. Robinson points out, for example: "Muller’s figures also conform with the estimates of those British and American researchers whose catty e-mails were the basis for the alleged “Climategate” scandal, which was never a scandal in the first place." But of course that round of character assassination was never about the "truth"; these people have an apparently pathological loathing for the truth.

Robinson writes:

Muller and his colleagues examined five times as many temperature readings as did other researchers -- a total of 1.6 billion records -- and now have put that merged database online. The results have not yet been subjected to peer review, so technically they are still preliminary. But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

Not so, I predict, with the blowhards such as Perry, Cain and Bachmann, who, out of ignorance or perceived self-interest, are willing to play politics with the Earth’s future. They may concede that warming is taking place, but they call it a natural phenomenon and deny that human activity is the cause.

It is true that Muller made no attempt to ascertain “how much of the warming is due to humans.” Still, the Berkeley group’s work should help lead all but the dimmest policymakers to the overwhelmingly probable answer.

We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions -- the burning of fossil fuels by humans -- as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.

Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real.

It is the know-nothing politicians -- not scientists -- who are committing an unforgivable fraud.

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You have to give the Far Right credit for knowing how to milk an economic meltdown and a phony baloney "debt crisis"

"America is simply not set up to handle one political party that bases its political organizing on an alternate reality and the raw power of propaganda. The U.S. government, and our public debates, are organized around the idea that there’s some measure of good faith in both parties, some common basis on which to make decisions. 


"I do not think most Republicans realize this is how their party operates -- but the more cynical high-level operatives certainly do."

-- Matt Stoller, in a Politico op-ed, "GOP's 'alternate universe'"

by Ken

It's another nice piece our friend Matt Stoller has written for Politico, neatly tracing the history of the Right's calculated separation from reality. There won't be much there that's unfamiliar to DWT readers, but Matt does a fine job of setting out the grim reality and sounding the alarm for the consequences, and more important, this piece wasn't written for DWT readers. How often are Politico readers confronted with the reality of the Right's now-completed leap off the cliff of reality?

For sure this wasn't what our great democratic visionaries, Jefferson and Madison, had in mind. All of their theorizing assumed an educated electorate, in touch with reality and capable of processing it, as opposed to a nation of patiently bred dimwits being led by the nose by opportunistic predators and thugs. But you have to give those predators and thugs credit -- they've done masterful job of training and manipulating their lost legions.

I trust we don't need -- here, at least -- to reestablish the cynical fraudulence of the "debt crisis." The combination of the economic meltdown has provided the billionaire predators and the ideological crackpots (not that the categories are mutually exclusive) of the Far Right with cover for a transformation of the country into their private creamland.

SO SONNY JOHN BOEHNER MANAGED TO RAM HIS
DEBT-REDUCTION PLAN THROUGH HIS OWN PARTY

After the major embarrassment of not being able to get his own crazies to back his crackpot atrocity of a "plan," crazed it up and cracked enough heads to get it past the House. Of course the Senate has already tabled it, and there was never any chance of its becoming law. However, it's now officially the "other side" baseline for any compromise -- for example, against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's plan, which instead of being an atrocity is merely an abomination. Seriously, flash back a year and imagine how seriously Harry's plan would have been taken, especially if it had been proposed by a Republican.

But flash back another couple of years, and as Ian Welsh reminds us:

Predicted August 2nd 2008

20) A huge push to gut entitlements in 2009, no matter who is president. Even if the US quickly pulls out of Iraq, the deficit will be totally out of control, and hundreds of billions will be needed for bailouts. A rapid consensus will form that rather than increasing taxes significantly on the rich, or slashing expenses like the military R&D and equipment appropriations budget, that the real problem is people retiring at 65, poor people getting Medicaid and old folks who aren’t destitute receiving Medicare.

On January 4th, 2009, I wrote:

I think I got this one wrong, given the consensus forming for a large stimulus (assuming the Republicans don’t kill it). We’ll see, but I’ve tentatively marked it wrong.

Between the president's one-hand-tied-behind-his-back approach to fighting the depression, the Republicans' tireless efforts to keep it going, and the rise of the radical centrists, it simply took an extra election cycle for Ian's scenario to play out.

CAN GENE ROBINSON NOT KNOW THAT "PROGRESSIVE"

ISN'T SYNOMOUS WITH "DEMOCRATIC"? REALLY?

In terms of selling the "deficit-reduction" package of lies and delusions to the eager-to-be-hoodwinked public, the Right has benefited, as Gene Robinson ventured in his Washington post column "Why progressives need a Big Idea":

Momentum is on [the Republicans'] side, even though they control just one wing of the Capitol -- and even though they advocate measures that most Americans reject.

Conservatives are on a winning streak because they have a Big Idea that serves as an animating, motivating, unifying force. It happens to be a very bad idea, but it’s better than nothing -- which, sadly, is what progressives have.

The simplistic Big Idea that defines today’s Republican Party is that taxes are always too high and government spending is always wasteful. Therefore, both taxes and spending need to be reduced.
Conservatives are on a winning streak because they have a Big Idea that serves as an animating, motivating, unifying force. It happens to be a very bad idea, but it’s better than nothing -- which, sadly, is what progressives have.

The simplistic Big Idea that defines today’s Republican Party is that taxes are always too high and government spending is always wasteful. Therefore, both taxes and spending need to be reduced. . . .

[T]he essence of the far right’s Big Idea fits neatly on a bumper sticker: Cut taxes, cut spending. It’s a simple, powerful message that connects with everyday experience. Who hasn’t encountered an example of government waste and inefficiency? Who enjoys paying taxes?

I can think of no greater threat to our nation’s prospects than the GOP’s policy-by-anecdote crusade against government.

And Gene goes on to list some of the obvious ways in which the U.S. "is falling behind other nations in infrastructure, education and health-care indicators such as infant mortality and life expectancy," and on to issues like inequality of income distribution and energy research and planning.

The only problem I have with the column is that when Gene talks about "the progressive response," he doesn't mean what we mean by "progressive," he means Democratic, and goodness knows, the only group that's less progressive than congressional Democrats is congressional Republicans. I find this kind of shocking from Gene Robinson, who should know better. Nobody has worked harder than the president to make sure that progressive voice are never heard; as we know now, he considers true progressives far more dangerous than far-right-wingers.

But then, as people like Ian Welsh have been pointing out since before President Obama took office, the even larger danger than his actual policies, bad as they may be, is the discredit their failure will bring upon the progressive brand, even though there's nothing progressive about them. In fairness, there are an awful lot of people out there using the "progressive" label to market a radical centrist agenda. We've already had the word "liberal" shredded by the propagandists of the Right; faux progressives may have done the same to "progressive" on their own.

ABOUT THAT SCHEDULING NOTE I PROMISED

When I shoved tonight's "Ring Lardner Tonight" piece ahead to 6pm PT -- on the ground that it was already ready to go, and having gotten home with about 30 seconds to spare to be able to make the switch -- I promised an explanatory note. But you don't want to hear about my day (and why I got home with 30 seconds to spare to make the switch), and I've lost interest in talking about it. You've got troubles of your own.

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Oh no, make it stop! The 2012 campaign is under way!

Yes, it's 2008 GOP presidential hopeful-turned-2012 presidential hopeful "Minister Mike" Huckabee, trying his darnedest to figure out whether he's for or against cap-and-trade. Let's see, if it's a day with the letter "d" in it . . .

by Ken

Let's not misunderestimate, as Republicans like to say, how grim these next two years are going to be, with both Republicans and right-wing "centrist" Dems running as hard right in the face of the perceived national mood as their stumpy little legs will take them. We need to remember that President Obama isn't just a born capitulator when it comes to negotitation, although all the available evidence indicates that he is. A good portion of what he's "capitulating" to is stuff that in his heart of hearts he wants to see done anyway. He's just willing to carry it however much farther he has to in the face of those howling Teabaggers and other right-wingers he can feel gaining on him.

So with people like "Sunny John" Boehner and Eric "A Disgrace to the Jews" Cantor and Darrell "OK, I'm a Crook, but What of It?" Issa and a bunch of other committee-chairng hooligans occupying positions of actual governmental power, thereby amplifying their already wildly disproportional access to the infotainment noozemedia, not to mention Senate Minority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell commanding every obstructlier troops of obstruction, and an economy still in hell and a war with no end in sight, and so on and so on, it's not going to be pretty. Still, there are already indications aplenty that the New Order isn't going to be the ideological juggernaut it was cracked up to be -- mostly by those very same infotainment noozemedia, come to think of it.

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson has (I dare say) some fun with the already-evident fractures in his column today, "Why so frightened, GOP?"

[D]uring the lame-duck session, it seemed to dawn on GOP leaders that they begin the new Congress burdened with great expectations -- but lacking commensurate power. It's going to be a challenge for Republicans just to maintain party unity, much less to enact the kind of conservative agenda they promised to their enthusiastic, impatient voters.

Robinson points to the possibility of increased defections from the formerly lockstep Senate GOP minority -- "there could be as many as 11 Republicans who might defect and vote with the Democrats, depending on the issue." He concludes: "The new Senate will be considerably more Republican than the old Senate, but whether it's more conservative remains to be seen."

Whereas the very fact that "the new House will be decidedly more conservative than the old House" may actually be "the problem." Can Speaker-apparent Boehner really handle his new Teabagging cohorts?

Republicans face what, for them, is an unpleasant but inescapable reality. Ideologically, most Americans describe themselves as moderate or conservative; but when it comes to getting assistance from the government, most Americans are moderate or liberal. Look at health care, the issue that won the election for the GOP. According to polls, voters clearly favor the benefits that Obama's reforms will provide. All they really oppose is the insurance mandate that makes those benefits possible.

The idea of small, limited government may be appealing, but this is a big, complicated country. As some Republicans already know, and others soon will learn.

MEANWHILE THE PUTATIVE GOP PRESIDENTIAL
CAMPAIGNS HIT SOME ROUGH PATCHES OF ROAD

As a report by the AP's Charles Babington is headlined in today's Post: "GOP hopefuls find some issues a hazard early on." So we've got:

* South Dakota Sen. John Thune (you mean to tell me this doodybag is a 2012 GOP presidential hopeful?!) has been caught making a precipitously quick conversion from compulsive earmarker to a scourge of earmarks -- er, "explaining" that "I support those projects, but I don't support this bill, nor do I support the process by which this bill was put together."

* Our old pal Willard Romney is caught joining in the right-wing jihad against the Obama health care package and its infamous "individual mandate" when that mandate is essentially identical to the one he incorporated into the health care reform he oversaw as governor of Massachusetts.

* Outgoing Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been caught telling whoppers about labor unions, which he could only back up with reference to a passel of lies upchucked by Veronique de Rugy a "senior research fellow" at George Mason University (which, it shouldn't be forgotten, has been permanently tainted by gobbling up those Koch Brothers millions; to quote the title of a post I wrote in October, "It's important that everyone associated with George Mason U. suffer the stigma of the Koch Bros.' Mercatus Center") on, as I live and breathe, Andrew Breitbart's website! Is there anyone in that chain of stupidities with a brain capable of even recognizing truth?

* Former Arkansas Gov. "Minister Mike" Huckabee, who this month claimed, with regard to cap-and-trade: "I never did support and never would support it, period," the only small, itty-bitty problem is that --

at an October 2007 meeting of the Global Warming and Energy Solutions Conference in New Hampshire, Huckabee said: "I also support cap and trade of carbon emissions. And I was disappointed that the Senate rejected a carbon-counting system to measure the sources of emissions, because that would have been the first and the most important step toward implementing true cap and trade."

In his post-facto weaseling he managed to drag the Chinese into his own poor-quality lying: Voluntary cap-and-trade, it appears, is OK, "but I was clear that we could not force U.S. businesses to do what their Chinese counterparts refused to."

* That sad hack Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour of course had his seemingly inevitable momentum toward 2012, er, sidetracked with his serially embarrassing blithering in defense of racial segregation.

Ha ha ha, see the bozos run. But that brings us to the true horror underlying all of these stories: Hide the children and the silverware, the 2012 campaign is upon us.

May God have mercy on our souls.

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Are all those "fiscal conservatives" descending on Washington prepared to take a hard look at what we get for our "national security" spending?

Except that the numbers have no doubt gotten a lot bigger, and there's a new president shoveling greenbacks into the maw of the military beast, couldn't this 2004 Monte Wolverton cartoon have been drawn today?

"What's almost revolutionary is the notion that if we're ever to get this nation back on sound economic footing, we have to cut what Dwight Eisenhower called the 'military-industrial complex' down to size."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today,

"Trimming a bloated defense budget"

by Ken

Let's say you saw the following listings in a washingtonpost.com e-newsletter of the day's WaPo opinion pieces. Imagine that it's preceded and followed by links to the latest deep thinking of, say, Richard Cohen, Anne Applebaum, Dana Milbank, and (shudder) Marc Thiessen. Would your suspicions be aroused?

Michael Gerson
Trimming a bloated defense budget
Why are we spending so much, while our allies are spending so little?

Michael Gerson
Oklahoma's faith-baiting initiative
America will lose Muslim allies if it treats Islam as the enemy.

I have to imagine that the compiler of the e-newsletter was so disoriented by the real Michael Gerson column being on the whole quite sensible that he or she jumped the tracks and started seeing Michael Gerson columns everywhere. The real MG column is the one on "Oklahoma's faith-baiting initiative," in which he characterizes the Oklahoma constitutional amendment that bars use of Islamic law, sharia, in deliberations by state courts as "a novel use of American law -- not to actually address a public problem but to taunt a religious minority." He argues that "it does little good to assume that the most radical position in the debate on sharia is the most authentic, then single it out for criticism. What strategy could be more favorable to radicalism, which thrives by feeding a conflict of civilizations?" Worth a read.

By process of elimination, then, it becomes even more unlikely that Michael G is making a case for serious cuts in defense spending. It turns out that this Michael Gerson is actually our friend Gene Robinson. And what he's endorsing is one of the recommendations made in the draft proposal offered by the co-chairs of the president's deficit-reduction commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson: to slash defense spending along with everything else. The co-chairs, he notes --

identify $100 billion in defense cuts that could be made in 2015. That would be too little and too late, but what's almost revolutionary is the notion that if we're ever to get this nation back on sound economic footing, we have to cut what Dwight Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" down to size.

The United States accounts for 46.5 percent of the world's total defense spending, according to a widely accepted recent estimate. The next-biggest spender is China, which has undertaken an immense buildup to become a military as well as economic superpower - yet accounts for just 6.6 percent of the world's total.

And while the debt-ridden U.S. government shells out for nearly half of all global defense expenditures, our most loyal, stalwart, shoulder-to-shoulder allies - Britain and France - pitch in just 3.8 percent and 4.2 percent, respectively, of the world total. Somebody's getting a free ride, and we're getting stuck with the bill.

Bowles and Simpson properly classify defense spending as discretionary, meaning we are able to make choices. This should be axiomatic. But it has been Republican Party orthodoxy to inveigh against "big government" and its out-of-control spending while blithely ignoring the nearly $700 billion we're lavishing annually on the Pentagon, as if every penny were somehow preordained and inviolate.

Now it's hard to imagine a pair of hard-core Village imperialists like Bowles and Simpson actually getting even this right, and while I don't claim any expertise in defense budget matters, my suspicion that they will be looking mostly in the wrong places fits with this from Gene Robinson:

The debt panel chairmen's proposed defense cuts, meant to be "illustrative," include civilian and noncombat pay freezes, a 15 percent cut in procurement, shrinking or eliminating some foreign bases, and $28 billion in "overhead" savings that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has already pledged. But Bowles and Simpson don't state the obvious, which is that a much more effective way to cut defense costs would be to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The newly ascendant budget hawks were strangely silent while Chimpy the Prez was dumping those hundreds of billions of dollars down the ratholes of Afghanistan and Iraq without even putting them in the budget. (It would probably be ungracious to suggest that those budget hawks and their cronies were among the rats fattening up on that cascading loot.) At least Obama the socialist has insisted on some kind of official accounting for that plunder.

Given the certain wrath to be expected from right-wing demagogues at any challenge to the ruinously expensive spending that can have the label of "national security" slapped on it, it remains to be seen whether there is any will among our pols to act on the reality that a significant portion of the many trillions of dollars thus spent doesn't make us any more secure, and indeed in the case of much of what's gone on in Iraq (Robinson notes that " the cost of George W. Bush's epic misadventure has fallen to 'only' an estimated $51 billion in 2011") and is still going on in Afghanistan ("by contrast, the price tag for Obama's expanded war in Afghanistan has nearly doubled since Bush's last year in office") makes us less secure by mobilizing opposition to our presence.

Given the kind of money at stake here, we would be foolish to underestimate the opposition to be expected to any attempt to make a serious dent in our defense spending. Maybe all those uncompromising fiscal conservatives coming to Washington in the wake of 11/2 will demand to know what we're getting for all that money spent. I wouldn't hold my breath, but you never know.

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Michael Gerson tells anti-Muslim Christians: "Freedom of religious worship and expression is essential to human dignity"

Okay, we can have a little more fun with the not-on-Ground Zero not-a-mosque, but this is as far as today's fun goes, because, believe it or not, Michael Gerson has a serious, dare I say eloquent argument to make.

"[T]he purpose of social influence for Christians is not to favor their own faith; it is to serve a view of universal rights and dignity taught by their faith. It is not to advance their own creed; it is to apply that creed in pursuit of the common good. This is what turns religion into a positive social force -- a determination to defend everyone's dignity."

--Michael Gerson, in his WaPo column today, "In mosque

controversies, some Christians undermine their own faith"

by Ken

It's hardly an original observation that the fundamentalists of most religions have more in common with one another than they do with the rest of the population. Sometimes they join in unholy alliance, the way the crackpots of American Christianity and Judiasm have found each other. Sometimes they face off in implacable hatred. Sometimes it seems like a determination made via coin toss.

UH-OH, THE RIGHT-WING JEWISH
LOONS ARE AT IT AGAIN

They're out there blaring that the administration's modest championing of a new round of Middle East peace negotiations will cause Jewish voters to rise in righteous wrath against Democrats in November. Jim Gerstein, of Gerstein/Agne Strategic Communications, has a terrific reality-check piece in Politico ("Here we go again") which concludes: "As Israelis and Palestinians sit down for direct talks, we can be sure that some Jewish hawks will attack President Obama for hurting Israel and some journalists will write about the Jewish threat to punish Obama. And once again, they will both be out of touch with Jewish voters."

I know that Michael Gerson, for all his hard-right ideology, has a streak of genuinely compassionate faith. He often has to engage in fairly wild contortions to keep it from interfering with that hard-right ideology, which makes him for some hard-right-wingers on the squooshy-hard side. Which is why I don't think he's going to get far with the appeal to reason and good faith he sounds in his column today, "In mosque controversies, some Christians undermine their own faith." He's talking to people who have been encouraged by savage apostles of ignorance and hatred -- people very close to Mr. Gerson, and often, I'm sorry to say, including Mr. Gerson -- to curse reason and reality and give heed to their most wildly delusional imaginings.

Still, I have to give Mr. G credit for making the effort.

"A church in Florida," he notes, "is poised to commemorate an act of violence committed in the name of Islam, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with an act of stupidity committed in the name of Christianity, the public burning of the Koran."

This threatened libricide proves little more than the existence of a few attention-seeking crackpots in a continental country -- the natural resource that makes cable news possible. But the Manhattan mosque controversy has exposed a broader, conservative Christian suspicion of mosques and Muslims. Protests against the construction of mosques in California, Tennessee and Wisconsin have often included Christian pastors. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group, recently wrote: "Permits should not be granted to build even one more mosque in the United States of America, let alone the monstrosity planned for Ground Zero. This is for one simple reason: Each Islamic mosque is dedicated to the overthrow of the American government."

Mr. G understands that he has to tread carefully here. Whether he believes it or not -- and it may well be that he doesn't -- he's not going to be caught saying that Christian fundamentalists are crackpots. So he finds his own way of insinuating that certain people could argue that it contains a certain strain of crackpottery. He lays it off on (who else?) the liberals, on (to be specific) the God-forsaking New York Times!

The Christian fundamentalist view of Islam bears a striking resemblance to the New York Times' view of Christian fundamentalism -- a simplistic emphasis on the worst elements of a complex religious tradition. Both create a caricature, then assert that the Constitution is under assault by an army of straw men.

Perhaps because he's standing on a solid foundation of liberal-bashing, he feels free to make some breathtakingly knowing observations about Islamic belief which you don't expect ever to hear from an archpundit of even the Squooshy-Hard Right.

The debates within Islam on the nature and application of sharia law, for example, are at least as complex as the debates among Christian theologians on the nature of social justice. And the political application of Islam differs so greatly -- from Saudi Arabia to Mali to Morocco to Bosnia to Tanzania to Detroit -- that it defies easy summary.

Many Christian fundamentalists seem oblivious to the similarity of their own legal and cultural peril. In portions of America -- say San Francisco or Vermont -- conservative Christians are sometimes also viewed as suspicious, illiberal outsiders. Their opinions on gender roles, homosexuality and public morality are viewed as an attack on constitutional values -- much as fundamentalists view the threat from Islam.

I don't count myself as an admirer of Mr. G, whose role putting words in the mouth of G. W. Bush made him one of the country's foremost evangelists for a reign of violent ignorance, fear, and hatred. But the following makes me understand better why he has a corps of apologists. This is outstanding stuff.

"Christian fundamentalists who undermine religious liberty in order to target Muslims are playing a game of intolerance roulett," he writes."That First Amendment might come in handy someday."

But the problem runs deeper than an inability to calculate self-interest. This Christian attitude toward Islam represents a distortion of Christianity itself.

Every religious tradition has two competing visions. First, religion may be a source of tribal identity. This was the norm for centuries in Western history. The Christian church jostled for social power along with other interests, pursuing a tribal agenda at the expense of Jews, heretics at home and Muslims abroad. The goal was to see Christian theological beliefs publicly recognized and favored. This remains a temptation in the United States and a problem in much of the world, where the appeal of the tribe remains strong.

But Christianity, as an Abrahamic faith, sets out another vision -- an assertion of human worth and dignity that transcends tribe and nation. Christianity has accommodated this belief in slow, halting, often hypocritical stages -- a history that should leave Christians tolerant of the slow, halting, hypocritical progress of other traditions. The implications of this shift within Christianity, however, are profound. In light of this belief, the purpose of social influence for Christians is not to favor their own faith; it is to serve a view of universal rights and dignity taught by their faith. It is not to advance their own creed; it is to apply that creed in pursuit of the common good. This is what turns religion into a positive social force -- a determination to defend everyone's dignity.

Freedom of religious worship and expression is essential to human dignity -- which makes blocking the construction of a mosque for religious reasons a violation of Christian belief. And laws preventing the building of churches in Mecca or Riyadh do not make this principle less important here.

Religious tribalism -- dividing the children of light from the children of darkness -- is a problem in many traditions. But a reaction in kind from conservative Christians would manage to undermine their interests and their convictions at the same time.

This seems to me remarkable thinking and writing by any standard. It's too bad that the people it's aimed at have been so steadfastly conditioned by their demagogic mind-controllers against any inclination or even ability to receive it.


MEANWHILE, GENE ROBINSON VIEWS AN ELECTORATE
CONDITIONED BY PUNDITS TO EXPECT QUICK FIXES

"In the punditry business, it's considered bad form to question the essential wisdom of the American people. But at this point, it's impossible to ignore the obvious: The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats. . . .
"They're in the market for quick and easy solutions that won't hurt a bit. It's easy to blame politicians for selling a bunch of snake oil. But the truth is that all they're doing is offering what the public wants to buy."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column

today, "The spoiled-brat American electorate"

Gene is careful to explain that he isn't making partisan argument. "The refusal of Americans to look seriously at the nation's situation -- and its prospects -- is an equal-opportunity scourge." It bit Republicans in 2006 and 2008, and will likely bite Democrats this year. ("By 2012, it will probably be the GOP's turn to get slapped around again.")

The nation demands the impossible: quick, painless solutions to long-term, structural problems. While they're running for office, politicians of both parties encourage this kind of magical thinking. When they get into office, they're forced to try to explain that things aren't quite so simple -- that restructuring our economy, renewing the nation's increasingly rickety infrastructure, reforming an unsustainable system of entitlements, redefining America's position in the world and all the other massive challenges that face the country are going to require years of effort. But the American people don't want to hear any of this. They want somebody to make it all better. Now.

The president, he writes, " can point to any number of occasions on which he has told Americans that getting our nation back on track is a long-range project." But his campaign stump exhortation, Gene reminds us was to "go change the world," not "Let's go change the world slowly and incrementally, waiting years before we see the fruits of our labor."

And one thing he really hasn't done is frame the hard work that lies ahead as a national crusade that will require a degree of sacrifice from every one of us. It's obvious, for example, that the solution to our economic woes is not just to reinflate the housing bubble. New foundations have to be laid for a 21st-century economy.

He mentions "weaning the nation off its dependence on fossil fuels" (meaning an oil-price increase), having the richest Americans pay higher taxes (because they have so much larger a share of the nation's wealth, and revenue will be needed just to maintain, forget about improving, the infrastructure needed for economic growth), "fixing Social Security for future generations," improving schools, "charting a reasonable path on immigration," and notes,

None of this is what the American people want to hear. They're in the market for quick and easy solutions that won't hurt a bit. It's easy to blame politicians for selling a bunch of snake oil. But the truth is that all they're doing is offering what the public wants to buy.

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