Unstated assumptions

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It would be helpful for purposes of coherence for the author to explain the unstated assumptions of this post and this one:

President Obama is "going to Congress" about Syria exclusively as an exercise in political theater. I'm old enough to remember his inspirational, New-Deal-type State of the Union message back in January, in which he made a lot of pretty noises about his intention to act on the wealth gap, climate change, and so on. His speech was to thank all the progressive-leaning suckers (including me) who voted for him in hopes that he would repay us by being a more liberal-minded president than Mitt Romney. For more than 4 years now, however, he has been consolidating a terrifying surveillance state into a permanent feature of our democracy. He has done nothing to keep banks from literally stealing houses and possessions from victims of financial racketeering (because "these cases are very complicated"). He has exercised no meaningful political muscle on behalf of basic liberal causes such as reproductive rights, voting rights, or card-check legislation to give union organizers a fair shake.

President North Star knows that the Congress will authorize any action against Syria that he likes. And he also "knows," as expressed by anonymous administration sources via authorized leaks, that he doesn't need congressional approval as long as Secretary Kerry can rattle off half a dozen justifications for military strikes in the style of former Ubergruppenfuehrer Powell.

Some time ago, US policy and media elites determined that The State need not be bothered by the collective opinion of its citizens in matters of military aggression.

The best-case scenario sucks anus

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Ever since liberals discovered that President North Star isn't too damn proactive about being liberal---maybe around the time of his stimulus initiative---there's been an annoying denial meme. There are several flavors.

One varietal is that Obama is "naive" about bipartisanship and the good faith that supposedly validates it. This idea is based on the premise that "he doesn't understand that he's dealing with maniacs."

A related variant is that Obama has been a tactical blunderer, always pre-negotiating his policy proposals with himself in order to present a reasonable centrist position that everyone should be able to agree upon without rancor. His losing tactics are the consequence of his belief in the good faith of the "maniacs."

One other variation of the denial meme is that President North Star would really do this or that progressive thing, as we all wish he would, if only it were possible in the "present political climate." Unfortunately, the situation forces him to aim low.

As I say, all of these ideas are forms of denial by people grieving a betrayal of their expectations.

Obama is not naive about the politicians who are deranged by the fact that he's a (two-term) presidential usurper---he's the Jackie Fucking Robinson of major league politicians, and even had to deal with the indignities of racist campaign tactics from Hillary Rodham B. Anthony Sojourner Truth Isis Clinton and her loathsome taxidermied pachyderm dick of a campaign manager, Mark Penn. So, no, if he's betraying the expectations of liberals, it is not because he's naive about his political enemies.

Obama is also not tactically incompetent at politics. His mastery of retail politics is obvious, considering those three certain things he had to overcome in order to be elected to his present office---he's black, he has a Muslim-sounding name, and he's a Democrat in a bombastically conservative "post-911" political ecology. His approval ratings have soared the more he speaks like a progressive. Destroying the right-wing ideologues, rubes, and crypto-Confederates in Congress should be simplicity for a youthful, media-savvy Harvard-educated constitutional lawyer with considerable rhetorical skill.

And finally, no, Obama is not constrained by the "politics of the possible." (Refer to the previous two paragraphs.) He knows how to lead and he knows how to go over the head of Congress to the American public.

To borrow a phrase, I think these denial memes amount to "the soft bigotry of low expectations" by liberal Obama partisans. Here's what I think is the truth: President North Star is pursuing the exact policies he is looking for and, to a large extent, achieving them. Obama is arguably no more liberal than either Clinton---willing to embrace corporatism, globalism, and Reaganomics while surrendering the concepts of public goods and services, meaningful progressive taxation, and government as the necessary protector of American human rights.

As pertains to the sequester, but also to the longer political game over the next 4 years, I'm bummed to agree with Heather Digby Parton:

Look, he's never been straight with the American people about this, I don't care what anyone says. He never admits that he's put cuts to Social Security on the table, ( and even hardcore deficit hawks like Alice Rivlin admit that Chained-CPI is a cut.) He never says upfront that he's been willing to raise the eligibility age for Medicare. He always says he's willing to make "tough choices" and will do things "his own party won't like." He never comes right out and says what her means about "entitlement" cuts.

President North Star has already conceded on fundamentals. His fans will consider it a victory if we "only" have to settle for raising the Social Security and Medicare eligibility ages, and indexing their benefits to the chained CPI.

Here's our partisan ecology today: Democrats are Republicans; Republicans are Confederates; the Tea Party is the Brownshirts; and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the Democrats.

Sheltering in place

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I'm going to close the clamshell in a few minutes. I should probably stay offline until tomorrow, but I may check before I retire for the evening.

About the only thing I feel like saying right now is about what Gurlitzer said in a comment about the Mingus song posted below. So I'm delegating the bulk of tonight's writing chore to her (i.e., I'm plagiarizing her work):

Fuck the GOP and their just plain criminal behavior. And fuck the justice dept. for not doing anything about it. And fuck the corporate media who say no tax returns, Mitt? Well shucks, that's just fine with us. And while we know you are lying about everything, it's not our place to call you on it.

And Husted in Ohio now changes the rules on provisional ballots as just the latest in a string of attempts to curtail the vote. And no one will call it for what it is, blatant cheating. AND WE LET THEM ALL GET AWAY WITH IT.

And by the way, Watergate never really ended. These bastards will still do anything to win. 

Before I turned off the radio half an hour ago I heard an NPR news reader announce that his network projects a win for Bernie Sanders, an "independent" senator representing New Hampshire (he's a Socialist). I also heard two NPR newsgirls --- honestly, that's how they were behaving --- all giddy about the silly Republican county Supervisor of Elections in Florida who "accidentally" activated a voter turnout robocall a day late, possibly misleading some people to think they could vote on Wednesday. "Even ex-governor Charlie Crist's wife got a call!" one of them tittered. They were just tickled pink.

None of the accounts of election ratfucking in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (especially Philadelphia) seemed to be making it in any detail to NPR --- the general impression given by them is that other than a few hiccups everything is going fairly well, or something. So all the news about this I'm seeing comes from new media, basically, and Esquire online. All of those sources are well known to be skewed by liberal bias, so their reports can't be true. Phew! (Sorry about the lazy sourcing for the above; I want to get offline asap.)

I fear that there's a nontrivial probability that unsubtle attempts to steal the election have now moved from the planning to the execution stage, and that I will wake up tomorrow morning to a spectacle of drama where there should be a clear winner... and in which the corporate media give an Oscar performance of dumb-all-over. If that happens, it is feasible that we might not be looking merely at another 2000 in Florida or 2004 in Ohio (yes, it happened): a constitutional crisis could loom... one much bigger than the Sandra Day O'Connor Y2K junta.

Saturday Evening Prayer Meeting

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First, read this. Read it all, including this.

Then, listen to this:



...while reading the following (provided by YouTube uploader Charles Van Driel, whomever he may be):

"Original Faubus Fables" performed by Charles Mingus. Taken from the 1960 "Charles Mingus presents Charles Mingus" record. Composed by Charles Mingus.

It was written as a direct protest against Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 sent out the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American teenagers. This composition was also released a year earlier on the "Mingus Ah Um" record as "Fables Of Faubus" but only instrumental as record company Columbia refused the lyrics.

Lyrics:
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who's ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won't permit integrated schools.

Then he's a fool! Boo! Nazi Fascist supremists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Name me a handful that's ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.
Faubus, Rockefeller, Eisenhower
Why are they so sick and ridiculous?

Two, four, six, eight:
They brainwash and teach you hate.
H-E-L-L-O, Hello.

Charity toward all and malice toward none, my foot. In 5 years all we will have on the national political stage is Republicans and dissidents.

Original Faubus Fables, Charles Mingus (1960, from "Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus," Candid CCD 79005), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Odd: gas prices have fallen

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I almost failed to notice that a gallon of gasoline costs about $0.50 less than it did here at the end of March. I guess this price decline didn't rise to my awareness because I haven't heard Republican congressmen and centrist pundits gabbing nonstop on NPR about how President Obama has done such an extraordinary job in this connection.

How to ratfuck your dead sister's memory

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I feel like throwing in my several cents about what the reactionaries at Susan G. Komen For The Cure did to their "brand" this week.

It doesn't surprise me to see that the mastermind behind this Komen policy coup was Ari Fleischer, the Bush administration's filthy little PR homunculus.

We all know that nobody squeals more pathetically than a bully when the intended victim punches back, and nobody becomes so undignified in fear as the bully when he feels outnumbered. So it's as inevitable as the four laws of thermodynamics that the flagship publication of right-wing bullies calls public reaction to the Komen affair "gangsterism."

One of the fun things about today's reactionary mouthpieces is that they project their own motives and tactics onto their critics. This is a psychological malfunction called "telling on yourself." Really: it's gangsterism for the public to be revolted by a raw, uncalled-for assault on Planned Parenthood by a powerful political lobby using a Disney-esque nonprofit juggernaut ("the cure" is their intellectual property if not their mission) and to take their money elsewhere. Many of us, upon learning "that anti-abortion rights activists have been pressuring Komen for years to end their relationship with Planned Parenthood," would be tempted to think of that as gangsterism... except then Ari Fleischer would refer to us as jack-booted thugs.

In addition to the obvious, I think it's worth remembering that the Komen foundation was established in honor of Susan Goodman Komen, who contracted and died of breast cancer as a young woman in the 1970s. The organization was founded by Susan's sister Nancy Goodman Brinker

who believed that Susan's outcome might have been better if patients knew more about cancer and its treatment, promised her sister that she would do everything she could to end breast cancer.

Or, perhaps, almost everything. Every little thing that's possible on the Komen CEO's (2010) salary of $459,406. Way to go, Ms Brinker.

I don't know what she is like in real life, but Ms Brinker certainly resembles a leering, plastic monster in this official State Department photo from 2007. (Oops---gangsterism!)

Cute SOTU comment by Guardian correspondent

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Richard Adams at The Guardian said this near the SOTU:

10.02pm: So it feels like a rather non-partisan speech – although Republicans may disagree, we'll find that out later – and Obama is now moving into his healer-in-chief mode.

Non-partisan my foot! Mr. Adams does not seem to have the immersive cultural context necessary to hear the liberal dog whistles and pure Republican-punching hilarity. And, incidentally, I'm not complaining about that.

For starters, Obama's citing of GOP diety Abe Lincoln is not a healing gesture toward Republicans---it's an eye-gouging thumb cuz, see, modern Republicans hate Lincoln. Also, too, because Obama would not have been on the podium without the good offices of Republican progenitor Honest Abe. Which is why modern Republicans hate Lincoln.

Obama's invocation of Seal Team 6 as a model for partisan teamwork restates in no uncertain terms that he---not Dick Cheney and his inquisitors---bagged OBL. And also that Republicans who try to ratfuck the teamwork are unpatriotic. The President started with this and he ended with it. So, snap, you America-haters!

Then there was Obama's shout-out of the guy laid off from a furniture factory now working for a new-energy company that used to (guess what?) build yachts! And the speech was chock full of goodies like those, which people who voted for him have been waiting 3 years to hear. I'm sure a lotta GOPpers are fuming, hitting the Jack and tranks right about now (the speech just ended).

Jesus God! Someone on NPR just said this was Obama's "most Clintonian speech" so far! The radio is still on, and the NPR commentary has become so vapid, condescending, and ignorant (a winning combination!) that I'm killing it and going for a refill on the booze and pills.

Would you like some fresh-ground strychnine on your salad, Sir or Madame?

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You probably know that former pizza mogul Herman Cain has a tax-reform plan he calls 9-9-9, a triple-decker version of a federal flat-tax program affecting personal income, purchases, and salaries payed by employers. He claims it will make the administration of taxation dirt simple while reducing everyone's tax burden.

Paul Krugman's blog links to a Tax Policy Center analysis of Cain's 9-9-9 proposal with respect to its impact on US taxpayers. Anyone who learned about regressive taxation in school can correctly guess the results.

A middle income household making between about $64,000 and $110,000 would get hit with an average tax increase of about $4,300, lowering its after-tax income by more than 6 percent and increasing its average federal tax rate (including income, payroll, estate and its share of the corporate income tax) from 18.8 percent to 23.7 percent. By contrast, a taxpayer in the top 0.1% (who makes more than $2.7 million) would enjoy an average tax cut of nearly$1.4 million, increasing his after-tax income by nearly 27 percent. His average effective tax rate would be cut almost in half to 17.9 percent. In Cain’s world, a typical household making more than $2.7 million would pay a smaller share of its income in federal taxes than one making less than $18,000.

So give it up for our GOP executive superhero of the week and his outstanding Plan 9-9-9 From Outer Space! Or at least do that if you wish to carpet-bomb the economy with kryptonite and dull your hunger pangs by eating lead paint chips.

By the way, the Tax Policy Center is no hippie commune; it's a joint project of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. I don't know anything about the latter, but Brookings is a right-leaning think tank that is about as Establishment as you can get.

Occupy Uganda

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Here's another noodle-scratcher from the Obama administration. Last Wednesday,

the U.S. deployed combat troops to central Africa to serve as advisers to regional forces battling the Lord’s Resistance Army.

[...]

A total of 100 combat-equipped troops will eventually be deployed, with the rest being dispatched in the next month, according to the letter. “However, although the U.S. forces are combat-equipped, they will only be providing information, advice, and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense,” Obama writes.

Yes, advisers only; won't engage the adversary unless absolutely necessary. Check. As Rocket J. Squirrel used to say, "That voice. Where have I heard that voice?"

The announcement was masterfully delayed until Friday afternoon, which is the part of the weekly news cycle where authorities typically bury the release of negative or controversial news. Yet the announcement of other important "foreign policy" news---a positive development in the eyes of most people, I'd think---was also obscured by its timing:

The U.S. is abandoning plans to keep U.S. troops in Iraq past a year-end withdrawal deadline, The Associated Press has learned. The decision to pull out fully by January will effectively end more than eight years of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war, despite ongoing concerns about its security forces and the potential for instability.

Just in time for deployment to... where? Uganda? Iran? Cardassia Prime?

Seriously, has someone just discovered huge new deposits of mineral wealth in Uganda?

Brazen and bizarre, indeed!

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It looks like the movers and shakers may be coming around to the RubberCrutch view of the absurd hype the Justice and State departments applied to the arrest of some Iranian-American guy who allegedly was involved in a cunning plot to exterminate the Saudi ambassador to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Reuters reports via TPM (anonymous sources, admittedly, and possibly Obama opponents with a political axe to grind)  that "officials" have

questioned the wisdom of the White House strategy in using the affair to rapidly push for tougher sanctions on Tehran, increasing regional tensions.

"A lot of people basically feel really suspicious about this," one official said, questioning the White House's motivation "in ratcheting this thing up so quickly."

Exactly my point. That, and the remarkable similarity of the initial journalistic language and perspective on the event, which gave strong evidence that corporate media and blogs were largely working from on set of administration-spoonfed talking points. "Pack journalism" isn't really news in itself, and it was pretty much considered the norm (with disgust) even back when I was studying the trade in the late 1980s. But this particular example seemed unusually blatant given the strikingly uniform vocabulary and attitude about the story.

Again, to be clear and with due respect to nuance, I am not dismissing the probability that there was some kind of plot in the works, nor am I jumping to any conclusions about how serious the plot may have been (even though we have strong indications that the suspects may fall into the category of "bumbling amateurs"). My points are that Obama officials handled the release of this information with noteworthy incompetence given the foreign policy implications of prematurely boiling up a potful of turds with Iran; and that the initial media coverage serves as a clear example of journalistic malpractice.

Brazen administration, bizarre media coverage. But why? I don't buy suggestions that it was intended to be a distraction from the rotten economy or an election-year stunt... because (1) no competent strategist could seriously believe that it could provide a convincing distraction, and (2) it's not an election year! The timing of the thing just makes no sense considering how high of a profile the news was given. Any alternate concepts out there?

The Brazen and the Bizarre (Part 2)

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It may be that this alleged perp isn't even "fast and furious," let alone "brazen and bizarre":

"He's no mastermind," David Tomscha, who once owned a used car lot with Arbabsiar, told the Associated Press. "I can't imagine him thinking up a plan like that. I mean, he didn't seem all that political. He was more of a businessman."

"His socks would not match," Tom Hosseini, his former college roommate, told the New York Times. "He was always losing his keys and his cellphone. He was not capable of carrying out this plan."

Friends told the Times that Arbabsiar smoked marijuana and drank alcohol freely and had a string of businesses, "selling horses, ice cream, used cars and gyro sandwiches," leaving a "trail of liens, business-related lawsuits and angry creditors" in his wake.

Gary Sick, a former member of the US National Security Council and an expert on Iran and the Middle East, thinks the story as presented may sound farfetched (as opposed to brazen):

Iran has never conducted — or apparently even attempted — an assassination or a bombing inside the US. And it is difficult to believe that they would rely on a non-Islamic criminal gang to carry out this most sensitive of all possible missions. In this instance, they allegedly relied on at least one amateur and a Mexican criminal drug gang that is known to be riddled with both Mexican and US intelligence agents.

Whatever else may be Iran’s failings, they are not noted for utter disregard of the most basic intelligence tradecraft, e.g. discussing an ultra-covert operation on an open international line between Iran and the US. Yet that is what happened here.

Perhaps this operation is just as it appears. But at a minimum both the public and the Congress should demand more detailed evidence before taking any rash or irreversible action.

Yes: let's have more detailed evidence, please, before we make with the bombs and stuff. Now, I don't really think the government's announcement of the alleged Iranian plot was designed to provide Eric Holder a reprieve from his problems with Darrel Issa's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (Issa is a troublemaker with plenty of outstanding questions about his own pees and queues, anyway.) But can you blame Republicans if they try to paint the announcement as Obama-administration trickery? If this plot had been announced while the President was still named Bush-Cheney, what would be your gut reaction to it?

Smells like somebody is wagging a dog

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If there’s one thing that the poodle media agree on today, it’s that the alleged Iranian/druglord plot to kill a Saudi ambassador in Washington is "brazen." Brazen and bizarre, in fact! Why, did you know that one of the alleged malefactors even showed a gross disregard for innocent human life by dismissing the significance of “collateral damage” resulting from blowing up the ambassador’s favorite DC eatery? Brazen! Even Hillary Clinton thinks so:

"This plot, very fortunately disrupted by the excellent work of our law enforcement and intelligence professionals, was a flagrant violation of international and U.S. law, and a dangerous escalation of the Iranian government's long-standing use of political violence and sponsorship of terrorism.... This kind of reckless act undermines international norms and the international system," she said.

"Iran must be held accountable for its actions....We will work closely with our international partners to increase Iran's isolation and the pressure on its government, and we call upon other nations to join us in condemning this threat to international peace and security." 

As Frazier Thomas used to say, "Hold the phone!" The fact that this episode rises only to the level of an allegation is important aside from any due process considerations for the accused. Here's our Secretary of State making a thinly veiled threat that reasonable people might understand to be the overture to another "coalition of the willing" cattle call. That's what I call brazen and bizarre, actually, over-reactionwise. Does this administration have a "Persian Fall" in mind? Is it an attempt to sow more discord within the fractious Iranian government? A Justice Department dog-and-pony show to distract Republicans and the media from the Fast And Furious cockup?

Holder said the two alleged plotters had not yet acquired explosives but had arranged for nearly $100,000 to be wired to a New York bank account in the name of the hired hit man as a down payment. The proposed hit man was actually an informant working for U.S. law enforcement.

What in the world are "Iranian-backed emissaries," by the way? The US has no diplomatic relations with Iran. Did he mean to say "guys hired by someone in Iran"?

So all day I was reading about and hearing about this brazen and bizarre "terror" plot, with media personalities from BoingBoing to the "mothership" oldies network declaring with pre-rehearsed incredulity that it sounded like something straight out of a "spy thriller." Yes, it does, doesn't it? I wonder where all our media mouthpieces got their talking points this morning.

Just to be clear: good for the FBI and DEA if they stopped a terrorism plot in the early stages. And yes, we should be concerned if Iranian officials were in fact financing a plot of the nature reported. But is it really any more brazen and bizarre than, say, an airline passenger with a smoldering bomb in his underpants? Or that day when a bunch of Saudi nationals hijacked and crashed some passenger jets in America? Or a State Department employee gunning down two men in the streets of Lahore, Pakistan? Just asking (don't want to drone on and on about it).

Meanwhile, under the radar

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I saw this post by David Dayen linked to Heather Digby Parton's Hullaballo blog. It illustrates the other major crime of professional malpractice committed by the corporation-directed media that provide most of what most Americans accept in good faith as news.

The gist of it is that Republican lawmakers are being confronted at their August "town hall meetings" by ordinary people who are firmly demanding to know why legislators (John McCain, for example) believe that reducing taxes on corporations or wealthy people will help the economy in the absence of evidence. But there's not a peep about it on CNN, Fox, or NPR. Dayen's point is that last summer the media were all eyes and ears as "tea partiers" disrupted these town hall meetings last August, even brandishing or carrying concealed weapons in some cases. And why not? I leave this question as an exercise for the reader.

Dayen highlights examples published in the hometown press of conservative strongholds such as North Dakota, Tucson, Wilkes-Barre, PA, and Lincoln, NE. Dayen also claims that someone has compiled more than 100 such stories from around the nation, but unfortunately he doesn't provide a link to document that. But that's what the New York Times and the CNN national news desks are for, I'd think. Not a peep, though.

To me, the interesting thing is that these appear to be examples of everyday people who, without any help from the national media or national political leaders of either party are piecing together the story for themselves... the story being that the conventional wisdom we're being force-fed about deficits, debt ceilings, and "job-creating" rich people may be starting to wear thin.

In front of our noses

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This Krugman blog post highlights a virtually unreported detail about the past week of financial-world turmoil on the heels of the S&P downgrade of US debt:

A week ago, before the S&P downgrade, the interest rate on US 10-year bonds was 2.56 percent. As I write this, it’s 2.24 percent, with the yield on inflation-protected bonds actually negative.

You would think this would amount to strong evidence that the downgrade totally failed to shake confidence in US debt.

Yet people who listen to radio and TV reporting tell me that most stories attribute the stock plunge to the downgrade, and are telling listeners that the case for immediate spending cuts has gotten even stronger.

Get it? This is how the corporate narrative works. The Situationists figured it out more than 40 years ago:

[They] argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life.

Their term for the narrative and its associated creations and fabrications was The Spectacle. Sounds correct to me.

Be that as it may, I call it criminal malpractice by the news media. Ordinary people who consider themselves to be very well informed because they follow the "nice" media CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, The New York Times, and NPR are being deliberately misled. I call it deliberate deception because I know what a fucking news editor is really supposed to do for a paycheck.

One might think that our very own President North Star would have been hammering this point home for the past day or two, or maybe that he'll get around to it next week. But in order to do that, he would have to be a leader of sorts, with a few guts inside his skin. Where have you gone, Huey Long? Our nation turns its longing eyes to you. Goo goo goo joob.

Won't need to search in Pakistan this time

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So Vice President Biden made news today by telling House Democrats today that the teabaggers have "acted like terrorists" during the debt ceiling standoff. President North Star will probably give him a scolding for saying so, but what he really should be doing is setting up a secure conference call with SEAL Team 6. Maybe a nice black-helicopter tour of the Potomac for a few properly selected chiefs of think tanks and cable news operations would be just the thing to lower the temperature in the glistening swamp on a hill. JK LULZ!!!

Meanwhile,at the bottom of the TPM piece linked above, we learn that Republican National Committee (RNC) chair "Reince Priebus" has "tweeted" that VP Biden has "more than crossed a line today when he called fiscal conservatives 'terrorists'. I demand an apology." Haha! I hope Biden gives "Priebus" an apology by way of his posterior annular ring.

By the way, I never make fun of a person's name, but I'll make an exception here. What the fuck kind of name is "Reince Priebus" supposed to be? I mean, really? And I'll add to that rhetorical question the amusing discovery made awhile back by some unnamed wag: if you remove all the vowels from his name, you're left with RNC PR BS. If that's not evidence that witty time travelers from the future have modified our current timeline, then I'm a monkey's uncle and so are you.

Stockholm, DC

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Paul Krugman, paraphrasing Jonathan Chait in The New Republic (and himself on many other occasions), boils the so-called deficit crisis into its irreducible essence:

As Chait says, the first thing you need to understand is that modern Republicans don’t care about deficits. They only pretend to care when they believe that deficit hawkery can be used to dismantle social programs; as soon as the conversation turns to taxes, or anything else that would require them and their friends to make even the smallest sacrifice, deficits don’t matter at all.

In the Stockholm Syndrome world of Washington, DC, and the corporate media that sustain America's political withdrawal from consensual reality, this kind of talk from a liberal is condemned as "partisan bickering" or "uncivil."

Putting that childish, dishonest perspective aside for later discussion, preferably on someone else's blog, I simply suggest that a skeptical reader simply  at the evidence that has been right in front our our noses from the moment we learned about Grover Norquist's quest to drown the federal government in the bathtub. Use Occam's razor. Is there a simpler, more direct statement that explains the state of our political discourse today?

The S&P coup

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I want to add a little to my previous post on S&P's implicit threat to blackmail the federal government into adopting a specific piece of legislation (i.e., $4 trillion spending reduction over the next 10 years).

Paul Krugman seems a little skeptical that an S&P downgrade of US debt would be huge deal because, basically, bond traders already know that ratings agencies don't know what they're doing:

The point is that when S&P or Moody’s speaks, that’s not the voice of “the market”. It’s just some guys with an agenda, and a very poor track record. And we have no idea how much effect their actions will have.

I don't doubt that. But to me the important point is not so much what financial traders do with an S&P intervention of this nature, but what the media and politicians will do with it. A ratings agency downgrade of US debt will be presented as something like scientific evidence that we need to finish drowning the federal government in the bathtub now! now! now! It's hard for me to see how our disinformation economy could get any worse---how it could further accelerate America's decline. But my intuition tells me we haven't reached terminal velocity yet. We'll be even closer when the press, the Congress, and the President anoint Wall Street as the new fourth branch of government.

Fourth branch, Third World

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I think that Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, like the few other reports I've seen about the Standard and Poors threat to downgrade US debt to Third World status, just misses the point.

Yes, insane Republican ideology and The Conceder In Chief have done a swell job creating an existential economic threat by tying approval of the debt ceiling to the politics of government spending and taxation. This is the "Worst. Congress. Ever." Blah blah blah.

In journalism lingo, there's a "buried lede" in Klein's piece:

And having upset S&P, appeasing them might not be so simple. Beers repeatedly emphasized that he wasn’t just looking for a number. He was looking for something “credible.” And credible, in his view, was something that both parties had embraced. After all, he argued, deficit-reduction plans have to be continuously implemented over a decade or more, and if there’s not “buy-in from both parties,” there’s no reason to believe that the plan will survive the inevitable changes in political control.

On the one hand, the S&P view is a reasonable analysis. But on the other, sinister hand:

You might ask whether all this matters. S&P got the financial crisis almost entirely wrong — in fact, their analytical errors, alongside those of other agencies, substantially contributed to it — so why should we listen to them now?

But the question isn’t whether S&P should be listened to. It’s whether the market will listen to them.

Yes, that's right. The once-respectable financial rating agency, which is as tarnished by the 2008 economic implosion as any Wall Street investment bank, has made federal legislative politics an evaluative criterion for assessing the full faith and credit of the US government and the debt it issues.

And as a small digression, it's probably worth inserting here that there really is no deficit crisis. The deficit is high-ish in relation to conventional yardsticks, but interest rates are so low (near zero as applicable to government borrowing, in fact), that there is no problem servicing this debt... unless the ceiling isn't raised promptly. The "deficit crisis" is an invention of right-wing politicians, corporate media, and as a johnny-come-lately, President North Star.

But back to the libretto: There is nothing benign whatsoever about what S&P is up to here. They aren't trying to serve as a voice of reason: they're emphatically inserting itself into the political fray with the power of a fourth branch of government, but one outside of federal checks and balances. "You motherfuckers attend to the 'deficit crisis' ," S&P seems to be saying, "or else we'll sic The Market on you." With "you," of course, meaning both politicians and voters. It is an aggressive, unconscionable lobbying assault on behalf of The Corporation---a protection racket that the federal government must now subscribe to with an initial payment of $4 trillion extracted from middle-class taxpayers, the poor, and the elderly. If they pull this off, there will be no end to the racket until we're all living in sheet metal shacks on dirt lots.

The S&P threat gives every politician in Washington enough cover, or terror, to cave in to the demands of the Republican legislative caucus and The Conceder in Chief for "the good of the nation." Once this smelly, syphilitic Wall Street camel has its nose all the way into the tent, S&P might conceivably become as powerful as the Federal Reserve in dictating the grim economic future of America. No accountability; just the perpetual threat to shit everybody else's nest if some warty bankers and corporate chieftains don't like the drift of public policy.

Now, this

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Today I read about a lot of celebrity Republican politicians---both of today and yesteryear---praising President Obama for "wisely" following the lead of George W. Bush's antiterrorism strategy in order to bag OBL.

Steve Benen of Washington Monthly has, in response, provided a nice collection of linked articles documenting the lack of concern Bush and ultraconservative personalities publicly displayed about OBL's whereabouts and significance dating back to March 2002. (!)

For a "bonus level," Benen throws in a link to a 17 April 2002 Washington Post story about bin Laden slipping through Tora Bora to Pakistan in December 2001 thanks (reportedly) to strategic cockups by Bush's Afghanistan operations chief, General "Tommy" Franks. I leave it to the reader to assess any potential relation between the 2001 Tora Bora failure and Bush's cavalier attitude toward OBL in 2002.

So, no: if you are among those who think the world is better off without Osama bin Laden, you owe precisely zero thanks to George Walker Bush for the terrorist's demise.

Silly me

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My firm prediction that the government would be shut down for between 5 and 7 days, not published here but explicitly stated to friends, was based on my certainty that Republicans needed a face-saving play to keep the tea bag caucus on board with Boehner. My guess was that this would come in the form of a short-term shutdown to satisfy the 'baggers, followed by an appeal to higher authority, such as reopening the government to restore "market confidence." Then we'd get a GOP declaration of victory, and their own well founded faith in having the history rewritten by party propagandists and broadcast on Fox.

Well, I believe I got the "face-saving" aspect correct. But I truly did not predict that it would be Harry Reid and Obama who would give Boehner his political cover, and also several extra billion in cuts to sweeten the deal. Silly me.