American Patrol

As a time shifter-- one of those people whose television viewing occurs mostly through digital video recordings made hours or days earlier-- it isn't often that I get to see the exact moment when news coverage shifts into "breaking news" mode. One of these rare occasions occurred Friday night when, about a quarter hour into MSNBC's Countdown With Keith Olbermann (with David "Pimped Out" Shuster filling in for baseball fanatic Olbermann, who was observing the holy All Star break)the program ground to a halt with the announcement of the death of former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite.

This was a worthy story, to be sure-- Cronkite was one of the giants of television news, and for people who remember the 1960s and 1970s was one of the indelible faces of American culture, "Uncle Walter, the most trusted man in America." He was also, however, a serious journalist, and I have to wonder what exactly he would have thought of the event of his death inspiring the sort of hours-long saturation coverage that inevitably forces every other news story off the air. Too often on television, what "breaking news" breaks is the conduit of news to viewer.

In MSNBC's case, the remainder of Countdown and the entirety of the Rachel Maddow Show were devoted to the Cronkite reminiscences from repurposed guest Margaret Carlson, current NBC News anchor Brian Williams, Daniel Schorr, Hugh Downs, Cronkite's CBS successor Dan Rather and former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. Further coverage this weekend has been a virtual meeting of the Anchorperson's Guild, with current CBS anchor Katie Couric (who isn't fit to hold Cronkite's coat, much less sit in his anchor chair) and former short-term CBS co-anchor Connie Chung (check out this if you'd like an excuse to never take her the least bit seriously ever again) joining the above and others with their memories, impressions, and so on of Cronkite and his career. None of which, really, was the least bit informative concerning anything happening in the present day United States, except perhaps the degradation of journalistic standards since Cronkite's retirement in 1981.

While the Cronkite story is far from the sort of news-swallowing sinkhole that characterized coverage of Michael Jackson's death, one still has to wonder if a better tribute to Cronkite's life might have been to report his death succinctly and factually, then get right back to work. Unfortunately, that is no longer the way it is.

One of the most interesting things about the just-completed confirmation hearings for Judge Sonya Sotomayor’s confirmation as Supreme Court Justice is how few people, in the final analysis, actually cared about them. With Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation a foregone conclusion on the part of even the Republican opposition before the hearings had even begun, television viewership for the actual hearings was at 3 a.m. penile enhancement infomercial levels. Those trying to keep up on the hearings by watching the evening news reports were treated to the journalistic equivalent of those “blooper reels” that get included as extras on DVDs, to wit…

"We're going to do that crack cocaine thing that you and I have talked about before."
--Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to Wayne Henderson, President, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, 7/16/09

I had noted, in a previous post on this subject, that Senator Sessions was a cracker-ass bigot who was morally unfit for his office. I neglected to mention that he is also an idiot.

Apart from these moments of “Republicans Say The Darndest Things,” the hearings basically consisted of predictable Democratic soft ball pitches—underhand slo-pitch for you Park League sports fans—and the sound of Republicans playing dead horse percussion on the “Wise Latina” remark and the Ricci case. Ricci himself appeared before the Committee on Thursday, for no apparent reason. The Supreme Court had already reversed the Ricci decision before the hearings started, throwing out the underlying precedents—which most legal experts believed the Appeals Court panel that included Sotomayor had accurately followed—and Ricci’s contribution to the discourse consisted largely of reminding the panel that he was neither an attorney nor a legal expert. His role, as seen by the Republican committee members who had invited him, was to drum up some empathy to be used against the nominee, who in their view was unqualified for the Supreme Court because she might… use empathy in her judgments. His actual role seems to have been as an unwitting symbol of the bad faith with which the Republicans approached both the hearings and the nomination.

Sotomayor’s confirmation by the full Senate—including a number of Republicans who have announced their intention or are otherwise likely to vote for her—will occur before the August recess. The nation will, presumably, survive it.

In his opening remarks for the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings into the confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the US Supreme Court, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) remarked to the Judge that "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you're going to get confirmed." As the hearings thus far have confirmed, those who took Graham's remark to mean that Graham and his fellow Republicans were going to in any way go easy on the nominee need to bone up on their Republican tradecraft. Having admitted that Sotomayor's confirmation will not serve the actual purpose of a hearing, Graham and the other Republican committee members have decided to stage instead a hazing, a trying experience that Sotomayor must get through in order to join the Washington power club. Either that, or they think they might be able to inspire the meltdown of which Graham spoke.

Said meltdown is more likely to be indulged in by the casual observer than by the poised and confident Judge Sotomayor. Those with the interest and ample free time to watch or listen to the actual hearings have thus far been treated to the following exchange ad nauseum:

Republican member: (Reference to “wise Latina” remark.)
Judge Sotomayor: (Offering of context for remark and quotation of similar remarks from Justices O'Connor and Alito)
(Repeat until hearings conclude.)

There have been multiple references to the ironies inherent in the fact that senior Republican Jeff Sessions (R-AL), who was rejected for Federal judgeship by the then-Republican controlled Judiciary Committee for racist remarks back in the '80's is now the ranking Republican on the same committee. Less attention has been paid to the ironies inherent in the paradox of democracy-- that by definition it has to include people, even entire state majorities of people, who are addled enough to think that a cracker ass bigot like Sessions was morally qualified to serve as a United States Senator.

That stiff wind you may have noticed blowing in the direction of the Republican Party these days is the result of a combination of nature’s abhorrence of vacuums and the backdraft caused by the party’s “rising stars” spontaneously combusting like so many metal barrels full of garage rags. It should be noted that the wind is not at their backs. The 2008 elections represented a generational shift in American politics, and the Republican’s contribution to that shift was to represent the generation being shifted from, with the poisonous legacy of the Bush administration and the disastrous presidential candidacy of John McCain discrediting the party’s old line quite thoroughly. Thus, few political parties in history have been as dependent on their up and comers than the Republicans at this particular moment, and few have seen so many of their future leaders go up in flames quite so quickly.

Recent weeks have provided an orgy of Democratic schadenfreude, with Senator John Ensign (R-NV, adultery and abuse of power), Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC, adultery, dishonesty, irresponsibility, and an odd inability to shut the fuck up), Governor and former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin (R-AK, incompetence, ignorance, mental instability, and a similar inability to shut the fuck up) and former Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN, cynicism and electoral failure) all effectively removing themselves from any possible serious consideration for political leadership with as much public embarrassment as possible. Less dramatic but no less fatal have been the political demises of current and former Republican Governors Jeb Bush (R-FL, accident of birth), Bobby Jindal (R-LA, poor presentation skills and overindulgence in political apocrypha), Jon Huntsman Jr. (R-UT(co-option by Obama appointment), Arnold Schwarezenegger (R-CA, foreigner, Hollywood connection, abject failure) and Charlie Crist (R-FL, collaboration and possible “lifestyle issues”).

Even those remaining Republican up and comers who haven’t yet been hit with the whammy stick seem to be teetering. US Representative and Republican House Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) has basically spent this house session showing himself to be a partisan political thug in the Tom DeLay mold. Governor and alleged McCain Vice Presidential short lister Tim Pawlenty (R-MN), whose decision not to seek a third term is more realistically based on the unlikelihood of actually winning it than any run for President in 2012, is about to torch the last of his political capital by unilaterally cutting the state budget after his veto of tax increases forced the issue.

All of the above, and any who would follow in their footsteps, have been further hindered by the fact that the party they seek to lead is flirting with political irrelevance. While not entirely stripped of power—media laziness and Democratic timidity just about assure that they will continue to attract more attention than meritocracy would justify—the central question of what they stand for as a party remains an open one, with the leading voices of the party tending to spout discredited Bush era leftovers, complete balderdash, knee jerk opposition, or a deeply unpopular combination of the three, and the attention of the Tin Foil Hat brigade an oddly sought after commodity. The majority has noticed, and largely rejected them.

While the Republicans are not likely to go the way of the Whigs any time soon—the two (as opposed to multi-) party system is a bad habit in our political culture—given the current state of the party itself, it is hard to say just where the future of the Republicans will lead. As long as “rising star” status in the party continues to be a kiss of death, we’re not likely to have an answer any time soon.

It's the summer protest season, those lazy hazy days when crazies can freely congregate in public places and turn complicated issues into reductionist chants and placard slogans. This weekend marked the public return of the Tea Party Movement, that plucky band of Fox News viewing Republican astroturfers who protest the current government's attempts to raise revenue off of people who make far, far more money than they do by mailing, throwing, and festooning themselves with tea bags, an activity they refer to, in blissful ignorance of the gay slang term for a scrotally based sex act, as "tea bagging." It is a movement that has warmed the desperate hearts of the Republican establishment, leading RNC chairman Michael "Da Man" Steele to declare "change comes in a tea bag."

Unfortunately for Steele and his ilk, what really comes in a tea bag is a small serving of the lowest possible grade of tea, a substance referred to by tea merchants as "dust," which is to leaf tea as meat by-products that make it into generic canned dog food is to beef tenderloin. It is the same relationship the Tea Baggers' views bear to informed commentary on tax policy.

The Baggers, of course, cite as their inspiration the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which, of course, they know next to nothing about. While taxation without representation was a major organizing issue of the American Revolution, the Boston Tea Party largely occurred for the benefit of tea smugglers whose business had been undercut by the Tea Act, which lowered-- that's right, kids, lowered-- the taxes on English tea, making it cheaper than the black market product smuggled from Holland.

This weekend's Tea Party protests were largely ill attended, scantly programmed, and featured the booing of Republican Senator John Cornyn(R-TX)(who was called a traitor), Texas Governor Rick Perry(R), and US Rep Gresham Barrett(R-SC)by the assembled, none of whom offered much more than said boos and grunts of "taxes bad."

In short, the Tea Party movement is laughably tone deaf, ahistorical, simplistic, and dying. All things considered, a perfect symbol for the Republican Party.