American Patrol

You know that frank national conversation about race we’ve been meaning to have? We didn’t have it last week, either. Which, among a great many other shames and pities the week brought us, is a shame and a pity. The full story told by Shirley Sharrod in the once infamous NAACP tape, as corroborated by the white Georgia farm couple she encountered and aided twenty four years ago, was a formative experience for all three, and would have made a dandy place to start. No soap, though. Instead, we were treated to an epic display of the cynicism, dishonesty, willful misunderstanding, and moral cowardice that will prevent us from having such a conversation for some time to come.

Politics in America tends to hit the level of metacriticism without stopping very long at either poetry or prose, and the convoluted story of how we heard Sharrod’s story in the first place presents a much brighter and shinier object for the news media than the story itself ever could. By now you’ve heard it over, under, sideways, and down, so I won’t belabor it further, except to note a few of the more poignant lessons this “teaching moment” has produced that might have gotten lost in the din.

*One of the many, many problems with the vaunted “24 hour news cycle” is the fact that it provides far less than 24 hours worth of news. Instead, we get self-serving analysis, far more repetitions than even Goebbels required to make a truth, endless staring matches with plane crashes, car chases, and the like, and the broad dissemination of utter horseshit like the initial Shirley Sharrod stories. Another is that the media seems so transfixed with the supposedly blistering pace of it all that things like corroboration, fact checking, and plain old reportage have become ballast, discarded at the first sign of things slowing down, leading to the broad dissemination of utter horseshit like the initial Shirley Sharrod stories.

*The fact that the initial Shirley Sharrod stories were utter horseshit didn’t slow things down one bit. Fox News, where even points of internal consistency were ballast discarded many miles ago, pulled a quick and nasty 180, going from demanding Sharrod’s resignation to criticizing the Administration for forcing Sharrod to resign “before all the facts were in.” CNN meanwhile tried to parlay some video of Anderson Cooper posing some baldly obvious questions to Andrew Breitbart into a claim that they were the real journalists in the game despite having ridden the manure spreader for most of the previous day.

*The response of the Rahm Emanuel-led White House political operation-- a/k/a “Pavlov’s White House”--was a work of breathtaking and dangerous ineptitude. In trying to short circuit the situation in a single news cycle for fear of how it would play in the right wing media, they managed to create a story that would dominate coverage for the rest of the week and serve to legitimize the worst of the right wing media.

The entire situation boils down to one inevitable conclusion-- that the governance of this country has to a great degree been given over to the attempts of cowards to placate liars. And that is bad news indeed.

“Time ensured that all modern media, not just print, but radio and television later, would henceforth depend on narrative, aspiring to the condition of immediacy, favoring description and personal stories over analysis, and avoiding excessive resort to abstractions. The magazine’s enormous, enduring influence defined, very clearly, the dilemma of journalistic popularization, posing the question of whether, in making everything wholly accessible, one didn’t end up conveying nothing of importance to harried, impatient readers.”
--Nicholas Fraser, in his review of "The Publisher: Henry Luce and his American Century" by Alan Brinkley, in Harper’s, June 2010

“Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.”
-- Elvis Costello

The main project of Beltway Conventional Wisdom-- an arcane alchemical process that attempts to spin the straw of current events into “The Narrative,” a predictive unified field theory of American politics, or at least into the fool’s gold of self-fulfilling prophecy-- is by its nature a perverse one, roughly akin to trying to make a useful relief map of a pot of boiling water. The sheer level of cognitive dissonance between The Narrative (neatly summed up by CNN’s Candy Crowley as “The Republicans have the wind at their backs” going into the 2010 elections) and the actual news lately has turned the act of Narrative maintenance into a strenuous two handed wank.

Still, Conventional Wisdom abides, laying a thick blanket of silly assumptions over the news to obscure its details and shepherd The Narrative to its dramatic, high ratings generating conclusion in the fall. These assumptions are so ingrained into the public discourse that the main practitioners of the dark art of Narrative husbandry-- the aforementioned Crowley and many of her CNN colleagues, the Washington Post’s David Broder and Chris “The Fix” Cillizza, The New York Times’ David Brooks, and the collection of Sunday Morning Quarterbacks that gather around This Week and Press the Meat-- routinely invoke them without even cursory examination.

Underlying the entire enterprise is the hallowed First Principal of Conventional Wisdom, the Horse Race Assumption, which states that serious political analysis consists solely of responding to every event by posing the question “Is this good/ bad for the Democrats/ Republicans in the upcoming elections?”, and that the answer to that question is always more interesting and newsworthy than the details of actual governing, which are considered boring and “wonky,” and in many cases more interesting and newsworthy than the factual details of the story itself.

The either/or slashes imbedded in the Golden Question tip us off to another underlying principle of Conventional Wisdom, the Binary Assumption. Simply put, this states that there are two sides to every story. Only two. The act of objective journalism, then, consists of having one representative from each side state his or her position and then breaking for commercial. These segments will then be honed down into short sound bites that will be used as supporting material for further stories, with no reference whatsoever to the validity of the arguments presented or the facts of the underlying issue. Any points of view existing outside this bifurcated mainstream are considered extreme and irrelevant to the Golden Question, and are thus summarily ignored. Those who express such viewpoints are spoilers (if they are running for office), crackpots (if they are not), or both (Howard Dean, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, etc.), even if such viewpoints are held by a majority of the country’s citizens.

This morning’s coverage brought up a perfect case in point. A recent poll indicates that fully 62% of Americans surveyed believe that the country is on the wrong track, as opposed to 29% who think its on the right one. This, the Russertian Congregation intoned, was Bad For The Democrats/Good for the Republicans. It may well be, and there may well be an argument to be made in its favor of that position, but none of them bothered to make it. Instead, they invoked the Binary Assumption-- there are only two available “tracks” for the nation, and those who disagree with one must therefore agree with the other.

Which is ridiculous. To me, the real story behind 62% of the country believing the country is on the wrong track is that 62% of the country now qualifies for nomination to a Keen Grasp of the Obvious award. The state of the nation and the course that it is on are clearly, dangerously unsustainable, leading one to question the yearly incomes, alcohol consumption, or psychotropic medication requirements of the 29% who think everything’s skippy. I myself think that the country is on the wrong track. Most of the people I know think the country’s on the wrong track. Anecdotally at least, that is not particularly good news for the Republicans-- an estimable part of that number, while disappointed with the Democrats, would no sooner willingly vote for a Republican than pull their eyeball out with a grapefruit spoon. Apparently I know a lot of extremist crackpots.

Further down the rabbit hole, discussions of the new Washington Post/ABC News poll centered on its finding that 58% of respondents indicated low or no confidence in President Obama and how this was Good for Republicans/Bad for Democrats. This occurred despite the poll’s finding that 72% expressed low or no confidence in Congressional Republicans, a poorer showing than both Obama and Congressional Democrats. Much more interesting to them, and much better for The Narrative, was the finding in the generic Congressional ballot that Republicans were leading 47% to 46%. This was presented not as a statistical dead heat, but as Good News for the Republicans. When the contradiction between that finding and the low confidence numbers for Congressional Republicans was pointed out, no mention was made that by indicating that they had lower confidence in Republicans than Democrats but were nonetheless intending to vote for them fully 19% of the respondents were engaging in definitive Orwellian Doublethink.

“See how angry the voters are?” they cheerfully bellowed instead. “That’s Bad for the Democrats.” And The Narrative ground on.

“You know, Ronald Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.”
-- Dick Cheney

“He steals from the poor
And gives to the rich
Stupid bitch...”
-- Monty Python, “Dennis Moore” theme

One million seven hundred thousand Americans lost their unemployment benefits on the day before the Fourth of July. Another three million two hundred thousand are likely to by the end of the month. Republicans in the Senate have offered many reasons for refusing to support the extension of unemployment benefits to these people, several of which are so morally reprehensible as to deserve posts on their own, but the reason they all seem to agree on is that extending unemployment benefits adds to the deficit, and would have to be paid for with other cuts in spending before they’d agree to them.

Except no cuts in military spending. We’re at war. With Terror. Al Qaida. Osama. Boogah boogah!!!! No cutting any Department of Defense projects whatsoever, even the ones the Department of Defense doesn’t particularly want. Likewise business subsidies. Likewise what many of them refer to as “lawn forcement,” except as it relates to paying cops’ salaries (union members that they are).

And no raising revenues. As every good Republican knows, any attempt to raise government revenue actually decreases government revenue (or, in the original Neanderthal, “Taxes BAD!!”). Even letting the sunset clauses their own party voted in to the Bush tax cuts counts as “raising taxes” and will be placed on the doorstep of the “tax and spend” Democrats like a flaming bag of poo.

Read their lips...Republicans are Serious About Deficits, one of the reasons the exiled Republican hegemony is preparing to make their triumphal blah blah blah... Sound the vuvuzelas...

It’s all a scam, of course, the political equivalent of one of those engine propeller gadgets at the county fair that supposedly gets you 40% better gas milage, all delivered with a smile and a shoeshine, too good to be true because it just plain isn’t. As admirable as Republican fealty to conservative principals might be on some purely abstract level, those principals-- no new taxes, no defense cuts, ongoing war, support for “private sector incentives”-- make any serious attempt at deficit reduction an empirical impossibility and any argument they might make on the subject an empty construct. Contrary to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), ample evidence exists that the Bush tax cuts added to the deficits, and reliable projections indicate they’ll add over three trillion more to it by 2018 if allowed to continue.

It’s an old scam at that, three decade old Reaganite orthodoxy as interpreted by the W Revival (a/k/a “what got us here”), and one that failed spectacularly for both of them, at least on a policy level. Policy was never the point of the exercise, though-- it’s been an open secret, openly acknowledged even by some members of those Administrations, that reduced deficits and balanced budgets (things neither President achieved) were mere Trojan horse selling points for the goal of disempowering government, the better to usher in a market based utopia of unimpeded rich people, with a government that shields them from the inconveniences of accountability and democracy. That actually worked pretty well.

Like many a good scam, this one involves misdirection by emotional appeal. This deficit, we are told, is a burden we are putting on the backs of our children, cue violins. Kindly avert your eyes from the fact that some of those backs might be a little stooped from malnutrition and poor health care caused by cuts Republicans are willing to make. They believe in starving the beast, and don’t give much thought to who else may be starving-- there’s charities for that.

Even if the Republican’s mania for cutting deficits and taxes were a sincere appeal for a policy that actually worked, it would still be macroeconomically idiotic. Shifting money away from the unemployed (who would spend it, stimulating economic activity) and towards the already wealthy (who are likely to save and financialize it, laying the foundations for another economic house of cards) is a deeply recessionary move in an already recessionary economy.

Beltway conventional wisdom tells us that Republican fiscal conservatism in all its counterfactual, value blind, ahistorical glory, will power a Republican “tidal wave” come November. Beltway conventional wisdom thinks we’re idiots. If that tidal wave actually happens, Beltway conventional wisdom is correct in that assumption.

1) A Keen Grasp of the Obvious award to The Honorable Joseph Tauro, US District Judge for the State of Massachusetts, for declaring that two key sections of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional. Tauro cited the law’s clear violation of the equal protection clause and its “offense” to the tenth amendment, stating it encroached on individual states’ long recognized right to establish the definition of marriage under state law.

In so doing, Judge Tauro put himself in prime KGO territory, for the extraconstitutional nature of DOMA has been prima facie since 1996, when my taller-than-me fifteen year old son was a toddler. DOMA existed solely for the purpose of appending the words “except for gay men and lesbians” to whole sheafs of Federal law, obviously establishing unequal treatment, and carved an unsupported gaping exception into the Full Faith and Credit clause for good measure (though Judge Tauro’s rulings did not address that clause specifically). The question of how such a thorough affront to the constitution and simple precedent could be passed, much less sit festering in Federal law for fourteen years, would make a fascinating sociopolitical case study on its own.

2) It will be interesting to see how the far right responds to Judge Tauro’s use of a conservative, tenth amendment based argument-- their favorite song and dance lately on issues from health care reform to stimulus spending to immigration-- in the furtherance of gay rights. Or rather, it would be if the far right in this country, for all their yammering about the constitution, had any real grounding in constitutional law and weren’t in a constant state of unashamed internal contradiction and hypocrisy in the first place.

3) As important a development as Judge Tauro’s rulings represent, it should be noted that this is far from the end of the story on DOMA. Their effect is limited for the moment to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and appeal to the Federal First Circuit and beyond is all but inevitable. The fact that these appeals will be pursued by the Obama Justice Department is bound to lead to some disquiet on the left and criticism of the Administration, and shouldn’t-- the Justice Department is, in theory at least, independent of the President, and is duty bound to defend challenges to Federal law in the same way the system is duty bound to provide a rigorous defense for a red handed serial killer. And while the thought of this case reaching the Roberts Court is a somewhat scary one, it shouldn’t be, either-- Tauro’s ruling is predicated on a lack of any rational basis for the law in the first place, and any successful appeal will have to explicitly establish that the law serves a compelling interest not grounded in mere prejudice. Seeing those particular cards laid out on the table will contribute much to our national discussion of gay/ lesbian rights in particular and on civil rights in general.

It’s a discussion well worth having on as high a level as we can manage, and if at the end of it the Defense of Marriage Act stays dead, then the legal system works just fine and we can get on to one of the many next things we need to address in this country. If it doesn’t, then we have some work to do. Stay tuned...