American Patrol

"No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master."
-- Hunter S Thompson

"The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic."
-- ibid, 11/20/2000

Considering the number of economic, political, and existential catastrophes we are facing down in the present day, it seems an inordinate amount of time, energy, and ink are being devoted to Sarah Palin. “… (A) ttention,” sayeth Frank Rich in the New York Times, “must be paid,” describing her as “far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama.”

Rich’s emphasis on branding is acute. Palin, and what, God help us, might be described as Palinism, has as much or more to do with consumer appeal as it does with civic concern. Palin neatly straddles the media info-tainment divide, and speculation on her plans for the future is neatly divided between those positing her as a talk show host and those who think she’ll run for President in 2012. This latter group is further subdivided between Democrats, who respond to the possibility by laughing and shouting “Bring it on”, and the hard right fringe, who lately respond to it by standing outside chain bookstores and chanting “Sa-Rah! Sa-Rah! Sa-Rah!”

I obviously identify much more with the first group than the second, but both groups make me uneasy. While I haven’t been above having a laugh at Caribou Barbie’s expense, and am frankly salivating at the prospect of writing about such a campaign, I’m a grizzled old fart--face it, I’ve had to-- and one of the lessons I’ve learned in the grizzling process is that just because something’s absurd doesn’t mean it won’t happen, particularly in American politics. The reason for this truism, of course, is the existence of the second group, who are completely and utterly out of their tiny little minds and thus both unpredictable and scary as hell.

There has been a vogue of late in left and center-left political commentary warning against exactly this kind of laughter. Those who follow Palin and other bits of walking chuckle-bait like Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the Fox News and Tea Party crowds, we are told, are representing a deep and powerful populist rage and thus must be taken seriously. While I can see the point of these arguments, to me they beg the question “How do we do that, exactly?” What objective standards can we even apply to a group of people who celebrate abject ignorance as an expression of anti-elitism, who mistake their hatreds and prejudices for “good common sense”, who reject informed debate in favor of chanted slogans and shout-downs, and who take as their vanguard and standard-bearer a woman who has been thoroughly documented as a liar, a quitter, a proud ignoramus, a shameless opportunist, and a petty, vindictive public whiner? Take them seriously, hell— how can we even talk to them?

The good news is that we probably don’t have to. The Palin “movement” is a first class example of the Bright Shiny Object school of newsworthiness, and has already been granted attention and influence to a degree that is wildly out of proportion to its actual size. While some populist rage is certainly justified in this day and age, and could have its uses-- the recent strange bedfellows collaboration between Representatives Ron Paul (R-TX) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) to mandate an audit of the Federal Reserve springs to mind, and seems to offer a possible collaboration of left and right that has nothing to do with the milquetoast center-- the red faced, spittle flecked variety can probably be safely removed from most political calculations without throwing the result off too badly.

It is completely true, as some commentators have pointed out, that Palin and her followers aren’t going away any time soon, and more is the pity. Perhaps enough of them will chose to ignore the elitist advice of those highfalutin’ medical doctors that they'll simply pass from the scene of natural causes.

"If we glance at the pages of history, we will find that laws, which surely are, or ought to be, compacts of free men, have been, for the most part, a mere tool for the passions of some.”
--Cesare Beccaria

"I don't care about the Constitution."
--Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, 11/17/09

The Republicans are scared again. Last week's announcement by the Justice Department that five of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks would be tried in Federal District Court in New York City has inspired a torrent of hysterical protest from the right. "...(Extremely dangerous," said House minority leader John Boehner (R-OH), further speculating that an actual trial for the five could result in their release on the sort of "legal technicality" that used to get Charles Bronson, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the like packing their pistols and hitting the vigilante trail in the movies. "Political correctness run amok," said Rep. John "Prop Baby" Shadegg (R-AZ), in the course of since apologized for remarks asking how New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who had said that New Yorkers were not afraid of hosting terror trials) would feel if his daughter were kidnapped by terrorists. "An unnecessary risk," said former New York Mayor and self-styled terrorism expert Rudy Giuliani, further accusing the Administration of returning to a "pre-9/11" mindset. The trial will be “an intelligence bonanza for Al Qaeda…Prosecutors…forced to reveal …the methods and sources,” says former Bush Administration attorney and torture enabler John Yoo in the Wall Street Journal, despite a long record of terrorism cases tried with no such jeopardy occurring. It will give “the terrorists a forum from which to spout their propaganda,” says Annemarie McAvoy of Fox News, whose knowledge of courtroom protocol obviously stems from Law and Order reruns.

Why the fuss? Because terrorists, apparently, are possessed of malevolent magical powers, capable of presenting a clear and present danger to the populace at large even when held in high-security Federal custody. They are far more dangerous than, say, Charles Manson, Tim McVeigh, or the scores of high security violent inmates currently or formerly held in Federal custody nationwide. The mere possibility of the presence of these men, and other Guantanamo detainees, on US soil has had right wing commentators and politicians publicly wetting themselves for months.

Ridiculous? Absolutely. So what’s the real reason? Hard to say, but a various factors certainly come into play. First, a salient feature of the post-9/11 mindset advocated by Giuliani and others here seems to be a complete and utter lack of faith in our nation’s public institutions and the Constitution of the United States. 9/11 itself happened, this mindset implies, because we weren’t good enough to stop it— we made ourselves sitting ducks due to our devotion to such now outmoded concepts as due process, habeas corpus, and the Bill of Rights. Then Everything Changed. The Constitution and multiple international agreements suddenly became, to quote former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, “quaint.” It was completely necessary to abandon them lest we be killed in our beds by Evil Magic Muslims, and, incidentally, completely necessary to give broad extraconstitutional powers to the Executive.

Ridiculous? Yeah. 9/11 was hardly the first terrorist attack in the history of the world, and no other government, including our own before 2001, saw the complete abandonment of the basic tenets of their legal system as necessary to national survival. It was the government's response, not the attack itself, which was unprecedented, and the government, not the terrorists, who did damage to civil liberties and the rule of law—to what we poor naïve pre-9/11 mindset types think of as the American Way of Life.

The most likely reason? Politics. It should be noted that the objections to this trial are being raised by a minority opposition whose battle plan has been to gainsay every statement and action of the current Administration without regard to common sense or common weal. The exploitation of threats of violence for political purposes—that is to say, terrorism (look it up)—has been a feature of the Republican playbook since Nixon ’68, and there is an obvious hope here that enough fear mongering in this case will revive terrorism as an issue and drive enough members of a frightened populace back into the Republican fold to mitigate their current bid for electoral insignificance.

Ridiculous? I wish it was. The reason scaring people has been part of the Republican electoral agenda for so long is that it has worked time and time again. To consider falling for this kind of cynical manipulation as a feature of some kind of “pre-Obama mindset” is to grossly overestimate an electorate that ratified George W. Bush’s appointment as President in 2004.

For those of us who were in the game back in the '90's, especially on the progressive side, the presence of Bill Clinton in any situation brings with it a distinct whiff of poo and the feeling that one should count one's fingers post hand shake. Thus the former President's presence at a closed door Senate Democratic Caucus luncheon yesterday for a "pep talk" on health care both highlights some of the problems of the process so far and casts a rather smelly pall over the reform effort's future.

While Clinton's presence at the luncheon was speculated to be a prod to those centrist Democratic Senators who have yet to commit to allowing the bill to proceed (two of whom, Blanche Lincoln and Mark Prior, are fellow Arkansans), Clinton's remarks to the caucus seemed aimed instead at those Senators on the left whose support might be compromised by an unacceptable, anti-progressive finished product. His message-- don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, something is better than nothing, we can always fix it later, and so on-- was a '90's golden oldie, and brought into sharp relief the way this reform effort has already been affected by the Clinton legacy of needless triangulation as passed down through former Clinton aide/current Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The game is simple-- sell out your ideals, early and cheap, to an opposition who will not support you regardless of what you do, for the sake of “centrism” and compromise-- and in Clinton's day resulted in an Administration record that furthered the cause of Republican conservatism better than a second Bush 41 term could have done.

In the wake of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment to the House bill, the odds that the Senate version might include some truly odious and unacceptable content have increased dramatically, and the notion that Senators should simply hold their noses and vote affirmative for the good of the party, constituents and principles be damned, is a repugnant one. Nothing, Clinton is saying, is more important than this bill—not civil rights, not economic justice, not universal coverage, not the lives of the people who, unless the conference committee bill is a vast improvement over just about everything we’ve seen out of congress so far on this issue, are bound to fall through its fairly wide cracks. Nothing. The future is at stake.

I call bullshit. By declaring any health care reform bill an acceptable health care reform bill, sight unseen, Clinton is basically letting a rather large cat out of the bag. At this stage in the process, the health care reform bill is about many things—presidential prestige, political capital, the Administration’s remaining legislative agenda, the Democratic Party’s chances in 2010. It might not, however, be about universal, affordable health care any longer. Worse, after the Senate’s round of amendments and deal-making, it might prove to be a grab bag of provisions designed to increase profits for the insurance industry and medical/industrial complex and a Trojan horse full of anti-progressive bows to the “moderates”—in other words, a bill for which no amount of nose holding could justify an affirmative vote.

Clinton is reported to have said that health care reform is not so much a moral obligation as an economic imperative. It is both, but the former President’s statement gives us a fine opportunity to call further bullshit on those who have couched their objections to the bill in economic terms as regards cost. Neither the House bill nor any proposal in the Senate has much to offer in the way of adequate cost control. The one proposal that would offer guaranteed cost control—a universal single payer system that would share risk over a universal risk pool, minimizing cost per participant, and eliminate the advertising and administrative costs, not to mention plain old profiteering, of the current system—has been off the table from the get-go, triangulated out of existence reportedly thanks to the influence of Emanuel. Its consolation prize, half-a-loaf little brother, the public option, may or may not make it to the final bill. All of this suggests that cost is not really the issue, and that the people going on about it would prefer that we didn’t look too closely.

Former President Clinton’s pep talk to the Senate Democratic Caucus may or may not prove helpful to the passage of the health care reform bill, and that bill may or may not address our health care issues as a nation. One thing the bill and the former President’s involvement in it have done for certain, though, is raise the strong possibility that the Obama Administration and the Clinton Administration may have more in common than just a few staff members—which by rights should scare the living shit out of us all.

A Keen Grasp of the Obvious Award to Representative Anh "Joseph" Cao (R-LA), not for his status as the lone Republican vote in favor of the House health care reform bill, but for his explanation of that vote. Speaking of his “constitutional duty,” Cao stated “I had to make a decision of conscience based on the needs of the people in my district…I felt that last night’s decision was the right decision for my district, even though it was not the popular decision for my party.” That district, in a poor part of Louisiana still recovering from Hurricane Katrina, features both a high rate of unemployment and a large number of underinsured. While there is little else to get warm and runny about in Representative Cao’s background– he is hardly a progressive legislator, and there is ample evidence that his “constitutional duty” would have fallen by the wayside were it not for the inclusion of the odious Stupak Amendment in the final package—his citation of the basic tenets of representative democracy is a rare enough thing to merit special mention, particularly in a party that figuratively fails Civics 101 on a daily basis and counts it as a point of pride.

I will let that party’s reaction to Cao’s “defection,” best exemplified by the right wing blogosphere’s racially tinged references to “Representative Mao” (hey, same epicanthic fold, same communist ideology, right?), stand on its own as a better indictment of their party and their politics than I could ever come up with.

I usually consider it a good thing when the news runs ahead of the artificial news cycle, and this weekend was certainly a good example of that. From the traditional Friday late afternoon “take out the trash” point, this weekend’s news kept right on going. Unfortunately, I was in no position to go with it. I went to bed Saturday night with the knowledge that the House had passed a health care reform package and that there were probably ongoing developments in the Fort Hood shooting and the Tuesday off-off-year elections, and with the vague intention of waking up for the Sunday shows, and, thanks to a cold I’ve been fighting off and the aftereffects of a relaxing and restorative Saturday night pork ribs and beer feed with the family of my good friend Stem Nasty, woke up at eleven o’clock having missed the Sunday morning quarterbacking completely.

No great loss, probably—the Sunday shows really have more to do with the predilections, pretenses, and contractual obligations of their participants than they do with reality, anyway. Just a heads up that I’m limiting my comments to what any major dude with half a heart and half an hour to read the news blogs would tell you, to wit…

Half a cheer should go up for the House passage of a health care reform—a historical development to be sure—but any further enthusiasm should be tempered both by the reform package’s contents and the unlikelihood that some of that content will survive the reconciliation process with the yet to be passed Senate version. As pleased as I am to see, for example, the insurance anti-trust exemption addressed in the House package, the package as a whole seems to be watered down to the point where courage of conviction on the part of the House Progressive Caucus should have sunk it utterly, and is likely to face further watering in the needlessly titrative process of reconciliation—certain members of the Administration still want the test paper to turn purple, while the Senate leadership wants it a light enough blue to pass cloture.

Regardless of what the House package eventually does for health care reform, its passage certainly squelched some of the remaining jockeying for bragging rights after Tuesday’s elections. While I can’t put it past some member of the Republican Party or its propaganda wing to complain of the gross under representation of Republican Governors-elect in the legislative process, Tuesday’s results in the context of Saturday’s House vote provide little cause for GOP celebration. Both Democratic Representatives elected Tuesday voted in the affirmative—damn lucky thing, too, as the final tally for was only two votes above the needed 218. Defeat of health care reform was one of the few things both the Republican establishment and the yahoo upstarts who squared off against them in the New York 23rd agreed upon, and the combined efforts of both, with the support of the usual suspects in media and Michelle Bachman’s tea party house callers, didn’t rise to the point of relevance. Whether the party itself can in its current state of schism is anyone’s guess.

The weekend also saw near-constant updates of the Fort Hood shootings story, many of which were simply corrections of misinformation delivered early in a joint military/media snafu. More misinformation can be expected. The shooter was a practicing Muslim as well as a psychiatrist involved in the treatment of post-traumatic stress of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, and was about to be posted to a war zone himself, meaning any number of hobby horses, from anti-Islamic to anti-war and several stripes in between, can be ridden off this one incident.

Anyone opportunistic enough to try to score political points off the random acts of an irrational man (paging Senator Lieberman) is welcome to try, and probably couldn’t be prevented from it anyway. We should resolve one thing about this situation here and now, however—that anyone advocating extreme action on behalf of the “Fort Hood victims” the way they did on behalf of “the victims of 9/11” be treated with a deaf ear and the contempt they so richly deserve. The aftermath of this situation could become as dangerous as the shootings themselves. If we can keep the kitsch to a minimum on this one, we might just get through it without additional damage.

The health care reform debate, such as its been, has been dominating the national political attention span all year, a vast bonfire of burning political capital that has essentially sucked the oxygen out of the national atmosphere. For all the ink, band width, and air time the debate has taken up, however, precious little attention has been paid to one of the key elements of this process. Buried under the painstakingly detailed parliamentary analysis, CBO audits, and the mountain of plan old bullshit that has been piled on this particular issue is one sharp and painful fact-- regardless of its outcome, the health care reform effort represents a miscarriage of small-d democracy on a par with the 2000 Presidential election.

Hose away the crap, and you're left with this: a strong majority of the citizens of the United States support health care reform with a robust and accessible public option, and a working majority of their representatives in both the House and Senate are prepared to vote for exactly that. In a functioning representative democracy, that would be the end of the story. In the United States of America circa 2009, it is a seemingly minor consideration. Instead, from the very start, this effort has been marred by the Administration’s attempts at bipartisanship (itself a profoundly anti-democratic notion) and the Congressional leadership’s desire to make sure everyone’s ass has plenty of coverage. Instead of a genuine and effective reform, we are expected to cheer-lead a watered down collection of compromises and hope against hope that even that isn’t blocked by the whims of a Senator or two.

This is ridiculous on its face. Yes, the Senate bill has to survive a filibuster, but for all the energy being expended in the direction of getting a sixty vote supermajority on cloture it may come as something of a shock that no one has actually filibustered the bill yet—in fact, the damn thing hasn’t even been introduced—and that the “assumed filibuster” standard introduced by Harry Reid and company when they regained the Senate majority is in no way a necessary or traditional means of handling the filibuster right, constituting a sort of automatic conservatising machine in Senate deliberations. Reinstitution of the old fashioned filibuster, with participating Senators reading home state telephone books aloud until the wee small hours of the morning, would change the face of this effort immediately and profoundly.

So would a renewed understanding of the whole idea of representation. As much derision as conservative Republicans have earned for their quixotic efforts in the New York 23rd (see, got it right this time) District Congressional race this last Tuesday, the take away for progressives should not be that a further submission to Democratic Party discipline is necessary for the furtherance of the progressive agenda in 2010. Instead, it should be a deeper commitment to the idea that our elected officials are elected to represent the will of the people electing them. Those representatives who fail to live by this standard should rightly be considered fair game for intraparty opposition efforts. The health care fight has given us a ready hit list of Democratic Senators and House members who have ignored the stated will of their constituencies in favor of campaign contributors and bipartisan niceties. We should not be afraid to use it come primary season. Unless and until the current Congressional majority proves to be an effective means of transmitting the will of the people into law, its maintenance needs to be a secondary consideration to the notion of establishing a majority that can.

Perhaps the main liability of the American political culture is its preference for big stories over small details. This morning provides a good case in point, as the audible track of the American political conversation-- the one engaged in exclusively by media figures and partisan hired guns-- tries to grease, pound, and twist the results of yesterday's off year elections to make them fit the predetermined Conventional Wisdom horse race narrative.

Were the '09 elections a referendum on Obama? The short and obvious answer is "No,” which is damn handy, as it’s also the correct one. While Republicans took governorships in both New Jersey and Virginia, they lost Congressional special elections in both New York and California, and even a cursory look at the exit polling in the gubernatorial races indicates that the "Obama Factor" was a minor consideration for voters in both states. Instead, voters seem to have responded (or failed to respond) to the individual candidates and the statewide issues covered in their campaigns.

This was particularly true in New Jersey, where fully 60% of voters in the exit polling stated that their opinion of Obama-- which, when separately questioned, was in line with his national ratings-- had nothing whatsoever to do with their vote in the gubernatorial election. Those with dogs in the fight are welcome to derive what bragging rights they can from the 19%/19% dead tie between voters casting ballots in favor of or opposition to the President-- as they'd say in Jersey, I've got your referendum right there. Virginians denied the Obama factor by a margin of 56%, with slightly more of the minority who acknowledged it voting in opposition to the President than in favor.

While a plurality of voters in both states cited jobs and the economy as their main concern— again, this was a particular factor in New Jersey, where the unemployment rate is 9.8% and the state economy is a corrupt and expensive mess that incumbent Democrat John Corzine has largely failed to address, much less resolve—a larger factor in the defeat of the candidates was probably the candidates themselves. The aforementioned Corzine entered the race a deeply unpopular figure, with approval ratings in the 30s, and his attempt to offset his negatives by throwing a chunk of his vast, Wall Street-derived personal wealth at the race became a negative itself. Virginia candidate Creigh Deeds, whose demeanor and speaking style often seemed to suggest chronic nitrous oxide abuse, ran a classic Southern Democratic “Me Too” style campaign, taking Republican Lite positions on a host of issues, and, like most Democrats running such a campaign, ultimately losing to the real Republican. How the defeat of a Democratic candidate who as good as ran against his own President’s positions could be considered a referendum on that President is a question best handled by the non-reality-based community. Believe me, they’re trying.

If we accept the premise that last night’s results represent some kind of long term electoral boon for the Republicans, are we referring to the actual party establishment or the stalwart cadre (including, among others, Sarah Palin, Tim “Horn Of” Pawlenty, George Pataki , Fred Thompson, and Rick “A Frothy Mixture of Fecal Matter and Lube” Santorum) who stood up for their conservative principals by handing the safe Republican seat in the New York 26th23rd Congressional District to the Democrats? What was that a referendum on, exactly? And how can we get them to do it again next year?

UPDATE: Screwed up the number of the NY district, corrected, apologies, send coffee and aspirins...