American Patrol

As amusing as the discovery of the Republican National Committee finance leadership meeting PowerPoint has been for the last couple of days, there’s really nothing about it that could be considered surprising. RNC fundraisers hold those who would donate to their party in complete contempt—well hell, who doesn’t? They seek to exploit fear to attain their ends—well, duh, they’re Republicans. They openly trade access for large donations, that is, peddle influence—yup, sounds like politics to me.

So, no, the contents of the presentation weren’t so surprising. What did surprise me was my reaction to it, specifically to the question “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate?” While its hardly a shock that the nexus of commerce and politics—what they used to refer to as “corruption” back when I was a lad—is more or less complete at this juncture, I had never really spent much time thinking of politics in terms of salesmanship before.

Salesmanship, the thing that sits a steak hungry nation down to a big, heaping plate of sizzle, changes everything. Suddenly, Republicans aren’t lying, really-- they’re being positive and confident about their product. That product is suddenly equivalent to a copper bracelet for arthritis pain or a ”natural male enhancement capsule” or a time share condo or a miracle absorbent cloth.


Mind you, confidence is the word from which we derive “con game,” sizzle isn’t particularly nutritious, and none of that shit works especially well. But sympathy for suckers is misplaced. In the sexist and anachronistic words of W.C. Fields, you can’t cheat an honest man. If this stuff is selling like gangbusters, the hucksters doing the selling are only half the story.

Happy news for Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel yesterday in the form of a Washington Post article (one of a series of recent hagiographies) offering the theory that if only the President listened more to this “force of political reason,” he’d be having an easier time of it politically. Emanuel, it is said, is largely ignored in favor of cultish Obamaists like Jarrett and Axelrod, but nonetheless bravely catches flak for the White House as a whole.

Heady stuff, to be sure, though Emanuel himself is said to be embarrassed by the attention (gosh, all that and humble too) and trying to avoid escalating internal conflicts. Sad, then, that I have to point out that these attempts to cast Emanuel not as a problem but as an unheeded solution come off as fairly typical products of Beltway mainstream media, larded with such choice cuts from the centrism’s greatest hits collection such as “going for the perfect at the expense of the plausible,” utterly dismissive of Progressives and the progressive agenda, and possessed of a fairly high horse shit content.

For starters, exactly what Obama initiative thus far introduced to Congress has constituted “the perfect”? The diluted stimulus package? The health care reform package that omitted even the slightest mention of the benefits of a single payer plan? In truth, just about everything that has made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to the hill seems to have been designed with an eye towards politics over policy, a distinction made in the Post yesterday by Ezra Klein as a handy means of introducing a bit of reality into the discussion, and has seemed to have Emanuel's fingerprints all over it.

Klein doesn't quite take it far enough, however. While Klein points out that health care reform would have passed long since were it not for the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, he fails to point out the degree to which that election exemplified ineptitude in the White House political operation-- Emanuel's bailiwick and supposed area of expertise.

While Emanuel was brought into the Administration as an experienced political hand with a unique understanding of Congress, his experience consists of time among the madly triangulating Vichy Democrats of the Clinton White House and his years as a northern Blue Dog in the House. Thus it is completely lost on him that a rather large portion of the decline in Obama's political capital has occurred not on the right, where Emanuel's political operation has been aiming its pitches, but on the left, among the people the Chief of Staff has characterized as "fucking retards." Emanuel is of a generation of Democrats who came of age in the Reagan/Bush hegemony and has been trained, Pavlov-style, to bark wildly at liberals and to assume the position and pucker up whenever a bell goes off in the conservative echo chamber. In this way, Obama's supposed pit bull has shown himself to be a very good doggie indeed, and this latest collection of media biscuits proves the point nicely.

I’ve always tried to avoid the habit of talking to the television screen as if the people on it could actually hear you, a habit that both my father and grandmother indulged in incessantly, and were roundly teased for, when I was growing up. I was thus somewhat surprised this morning to find myself yelling “Who could possibly give a shit?” and “You dumb son of a bitch, what the hell are you thinking?” at David Shuster this morning.

I usually watch the MSNBC and CNN morning news over breakfast, flipping from one to the other to avoid the incessant commercials, and was doing so this morning when I saw the aforementioned Shuster end an otherwise productive interview with former DNC Chair Howard Dean by asking him what his advice would be to Tiger Woods. “Goddamn,” I thought. “What the hell?” I wouldn’t have been more flabbergasted if he’d asked Dr. Dean “If you could be any kind of animal, what animal would you be?”

Deciding to fortify my somewhat shaken brain with another cup of coffee and a Pall Mall on the porch, I returned to the television just in time to hear Shuster conclude his interview with his next guest with the same question. I then made like Dad and Granny for the next several minutes.

Both MSNBC and CNN proceeded to spend what bits of the rest of the morning not taken up with Tiger Woods’ fourteen minute apology to one and all with analysis of same. As usual when I’m watching TV news, I was much less interested in the questions they were considering than on the one they weren’t, which was this: What exactly makes any of this any of our goddamn business, much less a major news story? Role model, my ass—Tiger Woods is a personable if fallible young man who is very good at playing what I consider to be a particularly silly game. If, like John Ensign and Mark Sanford, he had made his career criticizing and attempting to legislate the morality of others, I might actually see the point of bringing up his personal life. Instead, he makes his living hitting a little white ball with a collection of sticks, and I really don’t. In a country in crisis that is fairly brimming with under reported news stories, I marvel at the amount of time and attention wasted on it.

And yes, I know that my recent media kick is starting to resemble Fish shooting at a barrel, and is bringing me dangerously close to qualifying for my own old school KGO award, but jeez, people….

"Evan Bayh has decided to retire. He said he wants to spend more time scolding his family for moving too far to the left."
-- Ezra Klein, Washington Post 2/15/10

Senator Evan Bayh (Vichy D-IN) resigned suddenly yesterday, provoking a rain of bullshit that has resulted in visibility zero conditions in the political media. Bayh, who is probably the most conservative Democrat currently serving in the Senate, is characterized as a "moderate" and a "centrist" who is leaving because of his frustrations with Senate partisanship, giving the dual examples of the seven Senate Republicans who voted against the deficit commission and Harry Reid's scuttling of the bipartisan Baucus/Grassley jobs bill. Democrats, per the media, are stunned, and Republicans looking forward to taking his seat in the fall.

No time, of course, with all this news breaking to wonder whether or not the deficit commission and Baucus/Grassley bill are anything like an appropriate response to the current economic situation, or to wonder how exactly anyone will be able to tell the difference if a genuine Republican took Bayh's place, or to delve any deeper into the origins of Senate gridlock in the Republican strategy of reflexively voting against any and all Democratic initiatives. One typical attempt this morning: MSNBC's Contessa Brewer interviewing Senator Judd Gregg on the topic with nary a mention of his authorship of a widely circulated memo explaining in detail the tactics Senate Republicans could use to obstruct and delay health care reform.

Why bother with facts when you can further narratives? The Horse Race narrative (are Obama and the Dems in trouble?), the antipartisanship narrative (how dare those Democrats try to govern?), and the centrist meme (how bad can things be if a "moderate" like Bayh is bailing out?) are being ram-fed in joyous anticipation of the high drama and boffo ratings of "stunning upsets" in November. Self fulfilling prophecies anyone?

Perfected at last-- news that actually makes you stupider as you watch.

"But if logic wouldn't work
Neither would a magic wand..."
-- Phoebe Snow

Old friendships can pay off in big ways, as I was reminded of again last Thursday when one of my oldest dropped me a line that managed to sum up neatly some of the things that had been rattling around my brain lately. The Turk, who claims to be apolitical but sometimes can't seem to help himself, sent me a Bernie Sanders video and the following: "Suddenly the GOP are all anti-deficit again. Our whole political discourse, if it can be called that, seems to revolve around amnesia. Everything would be so different if the media and its consumers remembered basic stuff dating back as far as, oh let's say three years."

And selah. Notably lacking from the current discussion of the opposition's macroeconomically idiotic anti-deficit mania is the fact ("stupid things," per conservative icon Ronald Reagan) that deficit increases over the last thirty years have occurred preponderantly under Republican administrations, and that they've been in all cases whoppers. The Republicans have practiced a tax cut and spend anyway philosophy as a cornerstone of their something for nothing electoral strategy and their revised standard Clap For Tinkerbell economics.

Selah as well to the media reference. When it is considered news that Senator X said something, but not news that his utterance was stone cold chapter and verse counterfactual, reason itself goes begging.

"It's going to be a great year for Republicans," said David Brooks on this Sunday's Press the Meat, and if he's right, a lot of the reason for it is right there.

My advice to young people has always been this-- if you meet someone, even someone who seems otherwise attractive, whose favorite author is J.D. Salinger or Ayn Rand, leave that person's presence with all possible speed, screaming optional. Salinger's death at the age of 91 Wednesday does nothing to change this.

While his work as a narrative stylist is somewhat interesting before the subject matter drives this reader off the page, Salinger's celebration of stunted adolescence, particularly in the excruciating The Catcher In The Rye, has been a woeful cultural influence, contributing to, among other imitations and homages, Mark David Chapman, the twee quality that makes Wes Anderson's movies so difficult to watch, the movie "Purple Haze", and, arguably, the smug, entitled something for nothing ethos at the heart of modern conservatism (Dennis Miller's son's name? Why, Holden, of course).

Salinger, apparently, wrote what he knew, managing to spend his entire later career at the writerly equivalent playing the piano "in the goddamn closet", allegedly producing reams of material that he considered too precious to be put out into the nasty, phony world and parlaying his status as a recluse into a cult following that probably wouldn't have survived continued publication.

Some of this later work is likely to be released by his estate. Keep your eyes peeled for people who are excited by this prospect, and avoid those people.

UPDATE: I was talking with the lovely Em last night, who told me that when she was in high school she had avoided reading The Catcher In The Rye because it was popular and because it was expected of her, and hadn't read it to this day. Never having read it, she missed the irony inherent in her attitude towards it, but organic irony is the best kind.

Watch politics for long enough, and the writing on the wall gets exceedingly easy to read. I came up from making breakfast for my sons on Sunday morning to find my youngest channel surfing past one of the Sunday morning network meme-fests, and in that mere snippet caught a sufficient whiff of doom to last me the rest of the day. David Gergen, whose experience in Republican Administrations and as a consultant to the Vichy Democrats of the Clinton White House makes him a walking, talking symbol of the beltway ideal of centrist bipartisanship, managed to get one sentence off before being cut off on the way up to the Cartoon Network, to the effect that the President needs to concentrate on "jobs and the deficit."

Great, I though, politics by oxymoron-- all the President needs to do is bring down unemployment while reducing spending in an economy that is currently relying on stimulative Federal spending for what little growth its achieving. Piece of cake.

My first reaction to the Brown election last week was "if they try to triangulate to this sucker, we are well and truly doomed," and less than a week later, we well and truly are. In the run up to the State of the Union address tomorrow, it has been announced that the central elements of the President's economic agenda will be middle class tax cuts and a domestic spending freeze that excludes the Pentagon, the State Department, and any other cuts that might set the Republicans off. Engraved invitations for a recessionary double dip are presumably on order.

Stay tuned...

"... That is, we knew ye,
But I would have to say, hardly..."
-- Jackie Rogers Jr. (Martin Short), SCTV

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse..."
-- Bruce Springsteen

The voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts last night gave Barack Obama a rather interesting present in commemoration of this, the first anniversary of his inauguration. Happy Anniversary, Mister President: I hope you like suck…

The upset victory of the Republican candidate in the Massachusetts special election is, as commemorative gifts go, oddly fitting. Martha Coakley, the losing Democrat, was considered a shoe-in going in to this race, largely for reasons of sentiment and “history” (this is, after all, the fabled Kennedy Seat), and campaigned accordingly, taking a nice long vacation in the Caribbean over the holidays and committing gaffe after gaffe due to simple inattention. By the time her campaign woke up to the fact that they were about to have their asses handed to them and sought White House coat tails, it was far too late to make a difference. In the end, Democrats tried to make the race less a vote on Coakley (who had already lost it) than a referendum on the continuation of the Obama agenda in Congress.

The results speak for themselves, and make for an interesting summation of the first year of the Obama Presidency. The sixty vote super majority, which a vote for Coakley would supposedly have protected, has for all practical purposes been nothing but an empty numerical boast (paging Senators Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu, Lincoln, and company), and the health care reform effort, which the election of Scott Brown supposedly dooms, emerged from the Senate a compromised botch that failed to address the real needs of real citizens. Sentiment and history—the President’s personal popularity, his status as the first African-American President, his effort to “win one for Teddy” by passing “historic” health reform—have been a lot of what this Presidency has been about so far. It hasn’t worked very well for him, either.

A couple of propositions to ponder seriously as we enter the new year:

1) The Republican Party's contribution to every political debate for the last year or more has consisted of equal parts zilch, nada, bupkis, and kvetch, leavened with constant and abiding bad faith, and that is unlikely to change. As such, the Republican Party is, despite their continued presence in the media, for all intents and purposes irrelevant to the current political debate.

2) Given proposition 1 above, the main impediment to the progressive agenda is not the Republican Party-- it is the Democrats.

Those who accept the propositions above (and I'm far too old to believe that includes everyone) might wish to entertain the ensuing modest proposal: that this should be the year that progressives undertake and act upon an honest, comprehensive examination of their relationship with the Democratic Party on the grounds that if such a relationship were happening between, for instance, a couple in the apartment upstairs, the cops would have been called long since.

As abusive relationships go, this has been a doozy. The left has for generations provided the Democratic Party with its activist base. It has also for the last thirty years at least provided them with the first bargaining chips off the stack in negotiation after negotiation. On issue after issue, progressive interests and nominees have been sold down the river in the name of compromise and bipartisanship, often to no good end.

They have done so in the full expectation of continued progressive support, and have for the most part received it. The last time that expectation was questioned, during Ralph Nader’s 2000 run for President, resulted in howls of protest from the Gore campaign and the Party establishment that resound to this day and a sort of post-Nader guilt on the left that has impeded any further attempts to break away from the Party. (By the way, those who have spent the last decade warming themselves on daydreams of the never-was Gore Administration are cordially invited to the following cringe: January 20th as the first anniversary of the inauguration of President Joe Lieberman.)

The assumption at the time was that it was the responsibility of progressive voters to deliver their votes to the Democrats, rather than the Democrats’ responsibility to actually be deserving of that support. It is an assumption that continues, and one progressives should question, especially in light of the last year.

The health care reform effort, while only the most recent example of the skewed relationship between the Democrats and the left, is nonetheless an excellent one—progressive ideas such as single payer (still the best means of controlling costs and providing universal coverage) were compromised from the get-go, with those compromises themselves eroded into nothing over time, not to win the support of Republicans, but to ensure the support of Democrats. Other examples abound: the expansion of the Afghanistan action, the President's refusal to hold the past Administration accountable for unlawful conduct and the subsequent embrace of that same unlawful conduct by his own Administration, the "economic rescue" that enriched entrenched business interests at taxpayer expense. The next year is likely to bring more: compromises on global warming policy, fiscal policy, and the still unfinished health care bill are all likely to begin with the wholesale rejection of progressive principles and end with a series of half-measures, band-aids, and excuses, all devised by the Democratic Caucuses and White House without a shred of substantive Republican input.

Through it all, the Democrats will solicit progressive campaign funding, volunteer hours, votes, advocacy support and, inevitably, continued forbearance. Maybe this time, they shouldn't get it.

This is obviously much easier said than done. The progressive left is hardly a monolithic entity, atomized as it has been by years of single issue and identity politics, and I truly have no answer to the age old question of where else progressives can be applied. I do, however, know this: with the Republicans devoid of any real political content beyond reflexive ideology and reactive opposition, and with the Tea Party movement splintering them electorally, a threatened defection, or even resignation, on the left from the Democratic Party could conceivably reshape the corporatized, status quotidian two party system that has presided over our national decline for the better.

To paraphrase Harry Truman, maybe before we get hit on the head this next time we should think long and hard about who's hitting us. The enemies of our enemies are not only not necessarily our friends; they lately seem to have gotten pretty cozy with our enemies.

"It's. . .
Colder than the nipple on the witch's tit!
Colder than a bucket of penguin shit!
Colder than the hairs of a polar bear's ass!
Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!"
-- Thomas Pynchon,Gravity's Rainbow

Warning in advance-- I am likely to be in a shitty mood for the next little while. Luckily, I will be joined in this by many of my fellow Minnesotans. While everyone over the age of six is familiar with that let down feeling at the end of the holidays, here in the Precious Land of the Ever So Special January 2nd hits like an anvil pitched off a cliff and bounces around alarmingly until at least late March. It's not the end of the world, but you can definitely see it from here-- the snows of our coveted white Christmas compacted into glacial bits of road filth and frozen slush, no sanctioned celebrations on tap until Valentine's Day (Martin Luther King Day being, for most people, one of those weird Monday holidays that has as much to do with Dr. King and civil rights as Labor Day has to do with the working class), which tends to piss off as many people as it pleases, and the cozy feeling of being indoors away from the arctic air masses starting to show the first signs of congealing into terminal cabin fever.

Looking on the bright side under such conditions is both difficult and tedious, especially in a state culture that celebrates Lent without Mardi Gras, but strive we must. There are good things about a Minneapolis winter-- hockey, a number of good curry houses and Szechuan restaurants, Phillips Sno Shoe Grog, an excuse to share body heat if such an excuse is needed. The trick is to get to those good things without spending too much time outdoors. Should we live so long (four months? five?), we will eventually emerge into that day when the last of the ice melts and the lilacs start to bloom. In the meantime, you'll forgive us if we seem a little testy-- we're not unfeeling, just a bit numb at the extremities.

The Republicans are scared yet again. The unsuccessful attempt by a London educated, Al Qaeda trained young Nigerian to detonate a crotchload of plastic explosives on a Northwest Airlines flight landing in Detroit on Christmas day has dominated news coverage for the last week, largely because it has been seized on by conservative politicians and commentators keen on bringing back the War on Terror as an issue for the 2010 midterms and (with al Qaeda’s implicit cooperation—it will take more attacks to keep this going) the 2012 Presidential race, and threatens to dominate political debate and the legislative agenda for at least the first part of the coming year. While Janet Napolitano’s assertion that “the system worked” in the attempted Northwest Flight 253 attack was flatfooted and clumsy, the fact remains that, whether because of the valiant effort of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s fellow passengers, his own incompetence, or the gimcrack nature of his underpants and syringe bomb, there was no explosion and no harm came to the flight, its passengers, or the airport facility. Unfortunately for us, no political hay can be made from a counting of blessings and a sigh of relief that the attack was unsuccessful.

In point of fact, little political hay can be from this situation at all without a sort of white knuckled, adrenalized suspension of the sense of perspective that the Republicans have been advocating since Christmas Day. Historical perspective, of course, absolutely must go—whether the system worked or not, it is a system that was largely designed and implemented by the previous administration, who embarrassingly enough seem to have released the main leaders of the conspiracy from custody. For all the use of the word “unprecedented” in Republican talking points over the last week, the Richard Reid shoe bomb incident back in 2001 provides an apt basis for comparison, and turns to solid horseshit just about every criticism made thus far concerning the Administration’s reaction to the incident: that reaction, to the extent that it wasn’t triangulated to blunt right wing criticism, was both more prompt and more thoughtful than the Bush Administration’s after Reid. In essence, conservatives have chosen to criticize the President for not making a bigger deal of this, for not going on immediate high alert and issuing statements before the facts were in, for not responding with posturing and tough talk and “enhanced interrogation” and other grand displays of pointless activity. The danger, it seems, is that the Administration, and by extension the American people, just aren’t acting scared enough in the face of The Enemy.

Again, it should be pointed out that The Enemy failed every bit as badly as the system did, and a response commensurate to such a bungled attack probably shouldn’t include military high alerts and declarations of new war fronts. The Obama Administration’s decision to treat the attack as a criminal matter is neither unprecedented nor historically unsuccessful, and if left at that, would probably address the incident and its implications fairly completely.

It is, unfortunately, very unlikely to be left at that, and some of the postures and pointless activities the right has been exhorting for have already begun. We have already seen an attempt to respond to the incident with a new level of airline security theater, including new guidelines about passenger behavior that have already been rejected as unweildy and a call for more stringent use of both watch lists, scanner technologies, and searches that will probably turn out to be both outrageously expensive and an immense pain in the ass for the flying public. The time and attention of both the Congress and the Executive Branch are likely to be taken up with hearings, investigations, and attempted fixes on this issue for some time to come, conveniently distracting it from a long list of domestic priorities the right would rather not have to address. And the disruption of our society and our government, the implied aim of all terrorist attacks successful or not, will, as usual, be accomplished far more by the fearmongering of the candy ass opposition than by, in this case, the hapless young African with the burnt genitals.

Worse, the fantasy that there is such a thing as complete safety and that it is the government’s job to pursue and provide it for us will be perpetuated, to the detriment of dozens of other displaced priorities. A country that might have used the historical marker of a change in decade for a reasoned assessment of its situation will likely be spending the next little while with its leaders on an extended visit to the Neighborhood of Make Believe. Happy bloody New Year indeed.

***
While we’re handing out New Year’s greetings, here, belatedly, is mine to you. Thanks to all of you who have read and commented on this blog over the last year, and special big wet ones to those few of you who followed me here from other locations and other media. I’m especially grateful to all of you because despite the many strides that have been made in information technology in the last decade, a Google search of “EC Fish” will still get you thousands of entries about seafood and aquaculture in the European Community before the first mention of me. Thus your presence on this page is the result either of a happy accident, and bless those, or a concerted effort, and bless you. I hope that you can spend the year having fun with people you love, because in the final analysis, there’s hardly anything else worth having. Hang in there, y'all, and stay tuned...