The following two paragraphs in E.J. Dionne's "Profiles in Courage" piece this morning caught my eye.  Dionne was praising some freshman Democrats from districts Obama lost who had the cojones to vote for the cap and trade bill despite the certainty that they'd face Republican attack ads for doing soj. 

Still, for many potentially vulnerable Democrats who backed the bill, there will be short-run political pain. Perriello and Markey were among 14 House members targeted by the National Republican Congressional Committee for their votes. In Perriello's case, a tough television ad predicts huge increases in electricity prices.

Perriello is philosophical about the assault, though he says he's surprised that Republicans are "using information they know is fundamentally wrong." He plans to use the July 4th weekend in his district to talk about the urgency of energy independence and the potential for renewable-energy jobs. Perriello's fate will be a test of just how new our politics have become.

He's "surprised that Republicans are 'using information they know is fundementally wrong'"?  I don't think he's surprised that they're lying.  He's clearly been in politics long enough to know that that's a "because their lips are moving" thing.  No, evidently, he's looking at it from a professional politician's standpoint and thinks putting out ads that make scary predictions that they have to know will be proven ridiculously wrong later is evidence of surprising political ineptitude.

He may be right.  One of the tracks my needle keeps getting stuck in (yeah, there's a metaphor guarenteed to blow past a lot of the twenty-somethings) is that the Republicans don't seem to be institutionally capable of understanding the extent to which the ground has shifted beneath them.  They spent twenty or thirty years working with a model of the electorate that assumed that the attractiveness of a talking point to a majority of the voters was inversely proportional to its stupidity.  They got good results from that model for decades and they're really having trouble letting go of it just because it failed them in two elections in a row. 

Which is why I expect they'll keep harping on this same point, no matter how ridiculously wrong they're proven later.  They believe it will work because they still fondly recall the days when the majority of the poor, working class and middle class voters in enough states to give them 270+ electoral votes were convinced, absolutely, inalterably convinced that Bill Clinton Raised Their Taxes! 

I remember those days well.  The belief that Bill Clinton Raised My Taxes! was one of the most important factors that kept North Carolina bright red from 1994 until 2006.  It was amazing to behold when you ran up against it with someone you considered a friend or a friendly acquaintance.  Some co-worker would go off on Bill and you'd ask them, "why are you so mad?" and invariably they'd spit back: "because Bill Clinton Raised My Taxes!"  At that point, my legal training and my inner adolescent redneck boy's love of experimentin' would take over I'd have to cross examine them a bit, just by way of psychological field test.  "Really?" I'd say,  "did your withholding go up?"  "When did that happen?"  "How much was it?"  Like that.   

Once, I got a coworker so incensed by this line of questioning that she dug out a direct deposit stub from three years earlier, compared it to a recent one, and triumphantly showed me that her withholding had, in fact, gone up.  (Yeah, she was so mad, she didn't even mind showing me how much she made.)  I then pointed out that her base salary had gone up and I convinced her do the math.  She did it, saw that the numbers on her marginal tax rate were basically the same, did the math on her state witholding, saw that they were the same and then did the math on her FICA.  All the same except for a little movement on the right side of the decimal point that even she didn't quibble over. 

She did the math and it didn't change a thing.  Despite the evidence right there in front of her, despite the fact that she did the math herself, she still knew with absolute certainty that Bill Clinton Raised Her Taxes! 

And yes, I know that, at his initiative, Congress did bump up the gasoline tax at the same time it added a new top marginal rate for people who made much more than this lady (and I) did.  I even conceded that to her.  "Yes," I said, "Congress bumped up the price of gas a few cents, but that's not what you're talking about is it?"  "No, dammit!" she said.  "I don't know what's going on with these numbers, but I know He Raised My Taxes!" 

I swear I'm not making this up.  She wasn't dumb.  Not a bit of it.  But this is the Bible Belt, she went to a Baptist school and her certainty that Bill Clinton Raised Her Taxes was of a piece with her certainty that Jesus rose from the tomb and the creation story of Genesis was literally true.  I'd be willing to bet she believes it to this day. 

That's what the Republicans are counting on.  These ads, and this talking point, will never stop.  No objective evidence will make them stop.  They're going to scream from the mountaintops and from the steeples and pulpits that B. Hussein Obama Raised Your Electricity Bill and they really believe that people will buy it even when their power bills don't spike. Better still, they think that from now on, any increases that would have occurred regardless of whether htis bill passes will now be blamed on Obama. 

And why not?  It worked before.  I wish I was totally confident they're wrong.  But I have some nagging doubts because, see, there's this lady I know who is still, to this day, absolutely, positively certain that Bill Clinton Raised Her Taxes.

Two politically motivated shootings by right wing extremists in two weeks.  One man's dead and another is gravely injured. 

What's happening is as plain as the as the nose on your face and as subtle as a whack on the head with a 2x4.  We've been watching it come together since last summer. 

We saw a carload of methed-up white supremicists who'd loaded up their scoped, high powered rifles and headed to Denver with the intent to kill Obama dismissed as "no credible threat," just a bunch of mixed up, drug addled boys who weren't really capable of putting together a seriously dangerous plot, according to the Bush-appointed U.S. Attorney.   (Yet somehow these drug-addled fellows, who practically had to be led to their targets on a leash by an FBI informant, are the most dangeriest, scariest terrorists since 9/11.  Hmmm, what's different about these two groups of would-be killers  that accounts for that?  Nope, nothing's coming to me.  Anyone want to help me out here? ' Cause I'm drawing a blank.)

In the weeks that followed, we were treated to the ugliness that kept flaring up into threats and violence at Sarah Palin's rallies.  Violence, and more violence, vandalism and threats of violence at presidential campaign rallies, not in Zimbabwe or some former Soviet republic.  All just dismissed as the misguided acts of a few hotheads. 

Then we had Jim Adkisson, a guy who, fueled by a steady diet of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Mike Savage, was moved to go on shooting spree in a Unitarian church in Knoxville last July because, according to the cop who interviewed him "of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets."  Adkisson also apparently told the investigating officer that since "he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office." 

Next we had multiple killer-rapist Keith Luke of Brockton, Mass, who carved a swastika into his head to dress up for his arraignment.  Luke, it seems, had a little plan to kill as many non-whites and Jews as possible before the police took him out.  (Which, of course, they didn't.).  

In April, Pittsburg resident and budding young white supremicist Richard Poplawski, prepared an ambush for the police officers whom, he was sure, would soon be acting on Obama's secret plan to take his guns away.  He killed three of them and wounded three more. You may recall a bit of blogtroversy over the relative derth of reporting on the guy's extreme right associations and beliefs.   

And now, two more murders in two weeks. 

And, oddly missing from all the stories in the traditional media coverage of the ongoing outbreak of right wing lunatic kill-sprees is any discussion of the other crimes.  Each is treated as sui generis, just one lone nut cooking off, nothing to see here move along. 

So my question is this.  How many more murderous rampages by enraged rightists--whether executed or merely in the planning stage--are we going to have to endure before the traditional media is willing to acknowledge and address the obvious?  How many people are going to die, and how highly placed will the victims have to be, before someone connects the dots and starts calling out the ever more violent, hateful and apocalyptic rhetoric of the likes of Coulter, Malkin, O'Reilly, Hannity and Savage as bearing some responsibility for creating this climate of insanity? 

As acidly pointed out yesterday by This Modern World, in the fever delerium that conservatives call "reality" these days, people are endlessly, dangerously suceptable to video games, popular music and situation comedies, but completely unaffected by those who actually purport to be trying to affect their opinions.  Are we going to have to wait until one of these loons gets his hands on some fertilzer and fuel oil and takes out hundreds the MSM says "enough is enough" to jolly ol' Rushbo, the dramatic Beck, and the little black dress clad Coulter rather than calling them "great guests" and "entertainers" and "always provocative?"  

I just watched the video of Shep  Smith Josh linked to in which Shep decried  the steady flood of hateful and insane ravings they get in the email.  Somehow, they managed to be anguished without once even implicitly noting that their station--the station of Hannity, Beck, Bill-O, the morning show twits and dozens of anger-mongering spokesmodels--might in any way be implicated creating the super-saturated solution in which the prophetic visions that drive the killers to kll  crystalize. 

And therein lies the problem.  At some level, every one of them, from John Boehner to Rupert Murdoch to Rush Limbaugh to Billy Jim Goober in his un-airconditioned manufactured home/arsenal in the Dixie Twilight Trailer Park believes that race means something more than a slight variance in the genes that control melanin production.  They think that that something is inextricably linked to "Americanism." Obama personifies and crystalizes their anxiety over the browning of America that's been growing among them for thirty years.  For the rich ones, their horror is magnified by the idea that he wants to bump their taxes up a few points and put some modest curbs on the unfettered rapacity they fought so hard to claw back from the New Deal reforms. 

Fearing taxes and regulation, they eagerly whipped up the more open racial hostility and anxiety of their poorer brethern.  They saw it as a handy tool with which to rally the poor whites to the noble cause of unfettered rapacity. But the truth is that the old rich guys are themselves as suceptable to the forces they have unleashed--they're like O'Brian and the Inner Party members at the start of "1984;" unable to resist the power of the Two Minutes Hate, even though they themselves designed it solely as an outlet for the Outer Party member's hostility for them.  In the same way, the richest, most urbane and most cynical of the conservative elite are themselves powerless to resist the the fear they peddle. 

And that, I fear, is what will keep the MSM from ever coming to grips, connecting the dots and exerting the social pressure necceary to get them to dial down down the ever more toxic rhetoric from the right.  At least not until the body count gets a lot higher or the targets become more powerful. 

I pray to god I'm wrong.   

I had this whole other post I'd been working on for a few days about how much I have come to dread judicial confirmations and how the increasing toxic dysfunctionality of the had become instituitonalized.  The well-heeled wingnuts have set up all these little P.R. campaigns disguised as think tanks with benignly deceptive names--"Center for Justice," "Judicial Confirmation Goodness Association," "Totally Not Some Rabid Oppo Weasels and One Loutish Flack Pretending to be a Serious Think Tank" whose sole purpose is to pump poison into our discourse, with the eager cooperation of the cable nets. 

For a while, everything was going as I, and they, had expected.  Pre-announcment message coordination conference calls ensured that everyone blasted out the same talking points.  The short list dossiers were dusted off and fine tuned while the front people yakked up the generic denunciations and then an agreed upon attack specific to the nominee was launched based on positively Orwellian misrepresentions of the nominees opinions, the role of the courts, and the characterization of straghtforward applications of precedent to facts as "judicial activism." And, of course, the mass mailing of fund raising letters threatening the imminent end of all that is good and decent unless the recipient digs in to their pocket right now--which are, of course, the whole point of the carefully choreographed danse macabre that Supreme Court confirmations have degenerated into--went out right on schedule. 

And then, right before our bemused eyes, the weirdest thing happened.  Almost every man in their ensesmble cast went off scipt and started ad libbing an entirely different performance than the one they had planned.   

Initially, they had all seemingly agreed that Obama's choice of Sotomayor was politically brilliant because it put the Republicans in a position where they had to tread very carefully on questions of ethnicity and gender. But by the end of the week, that was all they could talk about and they could only talk about it in the most loutish, inflammatory, fashion possible. 

It started with a weird remark here and there there, oddly little discordant deviations the agreed upon attack on "Obama's lawless empathy standard" which was supposed to oh-so-subtly and covertly whip up the incipient Bubba-fear that is the right's new financial mainstay. But it was like they couldn't help themselves.  Suddenly, it looked very much like that the white men who were supposed to be cynically stoking a silly fear among less well educated and socially advanced white males were themselves gripped by that fear.  It was as if the image of our African-American president appointing a woman of Puerto Rican discent to the nation's highest court had lanced some carbuncle of hysterical fear deep in their souls and the festering pus came exploding out of them and onto the T.V. screens. 

"He didn't seem to really want to talk theory in the classes," said onetime student David Franklin, now a law professor at DePaul University. "He wanted to talk about what worked and what the real-world testing of those theories had yielded."

For Obama, "the Supreme Court is a part of his life in a way that the typical person just doesn't understand," said Douglas Baird, a friend and University of Chicago law professor. And yet the president, according to his associates, does not look to the high court as a source of seismic shifts.

Politics and legislation are the main engines of social change in Obama's view, said University of Chicago law professor David Strauss, "and the courts . . . should be practical, common-sense, working around the edges. We shouldn't be looking to the courts for salvation."

Please help.   I require the assistance of someone who is at least as competent a Latin grammerian as the surly centurion portrayed by John Cleese in "LIfe of Brian."  Knowing this place as I do, I have no doubt that there are some. 

See, today, while reading the post on Russ Feingold's letter to Obama, I identified what I believe to be the central problem in the way what passes for discourse in our country works.  And because every argumentative pattern needs a convenient label, and all labels sounds more impressive when translated into Latin, I need the help of a reasonably competent Latin grammarian. 

The problem I am trying to label is a pervasive and pernicious form of reductionism, reductio ad pugnum I want to call it, assuming that's the right case.  Reduction to conflict. the reduction of morally and factually complex issues to simplistic manichean dichotomies. 

Feingold wrote Obama an intelligent, thoughful letter putting him on notice that he's disturbed by the notion that some of the Guantanamo detainees could be deemed subject to indefinite detention without trial.   He uses the words "likely unconstitutional," but he also notes the reasons why that, even if it is constitutional and otherwise passes legal muster, the idea is conceptually disturbing and potentially dangerous to all we hold dear as a nation. 

Feingold's letter frames the debate in exactly the way I think it should be framed.  He questions the legality but also acknowledges the inherent limitations of questioning the constitutionality of a bill that hasn't even been drafted yet.  More importantly, to me at least, Feingold recognizes the immense moral and practical complexity of the problem and at least implicitly acknowledges that that there is no answer to the problem of what to do with these people that can fully disperse that murky grey complexity. And yet, the headline of the story here is "Feingold To Obama: Preventive Detention Is Unconstitutional" [emphasis added], 

When I was in my twenties, I was filled with the intense actinic light of moral and factual certainty about most everything except whether there was a God.  I dimly understood from observation and inference that as I got older, the painful clarity of that certainty would be obscured by a miasmic accumulation of experiences in choosing between bad and worse, between indispensible expedience and immutable principle.  Those experiences come in many variations: times we chose to do what seemed good, and found it caused great harm. Situations where we did the right thing for the wrong reason and the wrong thing for the right reason.   And even then, in my twenties, I was slowly learning the importance of picking my fights and I understood, even then, that over time, all those fights left unfought would exact a toll. 

So it goes.  We get precious few chances in life to choose between unquestioned good and unalloyed evil.  By the time middle age hits, we've seen some things that were  entirely black, but hardly any that were unsullied white.  After a certain point, we find ourselves feeling grateful for the rare occaisions when we can tell which of the two evils we must choose between is actually the lesser rather than having to guess.  And, most intolorably of all, all too often, choosing the path that seems most rightous often entails paying a personal price.  We find that it is well that virture is its own reward because, most of the time, that's the only reward you'll get for being virtuous.

That same experiences, however, teach us to approach brightline moral certainties with caution because it turns out that the future--at least as we experience it--is a stochastic process.  But we also learn that unquestioning acceptance of moral complexity is in itself morally hazardous.  That constant awareness of moral complexity imposed upon most of us by our life experience can easily enable a complacent moral paralysis in the face of true evil. 

So it was, for example, with slavery.  In "The Road to Disunion,Vol. I," a book I've slowly been working my way through between "fun" books, William Freehling suggests that what, to us seems to have been a false perception of moral complexity was one of the major factors behind the continuation of slavery in the border and middle south between 1787 and abut 1850.  Outside the Deep South "black belt," it was widely recognized by southern elites that slavery was wrong and should, somehow, be gotten rid of.  However, the problem of how to do it seemed, to them, to be intractable.  In his twenties, Thomas Jefferson proclaimed on behalf of a new nation that that all men were self-evidently created equal.  As an old man, weighed down by the financial pressures self-inflicted through a lifetime of almost manic overspending, he found himself paralyzed by the seeming moral and factual complexity of the problem and, in the end, manumitted only two of his slaves in his will. 

Accordinging to Freehling, Jefferson and his middle/border south cohorts were transfixed by a comforting fantasy that some perfect set of circumstances could eventually be brought into being that would enable them to get rid of the institution without unpleasant consequences like impoverishing slave owners, or harming the state economy or, *shudder*, having free black neighbors.  All that could happen, they thought, if only damnyankee agitators could be stopped from interferring.  Northern moral pressure, besides being considered hypocritical, was seen as one of the main barriers to the implementation of a program of gradual emancipation (which, in practice was understood to mean the setting of a deadline by which slaves had to be sold south on pain of uncompensated emancipation.)  As long as northerners interferred, those perfect conditions could never come into being and thus, sadly, slavery would continue in the border and middle south.

That perception of complexity seems ludicrous to us today because it rested on the assumption that blacks were morally and intellectually inferior to whites.  Strip that ridiculous assumption away and the appearance of moral complexity vanishes with it.  At least, so it seems to us today, five generations removed from the slaughter at Gettysburg and with our brilliant African Amercan president, brilliant African American first lady and adorable African American first family.  The paralysis of southerners in the early 1800s is a warning to us today--one of many from history--that in the face of real evil, you can choose to hide in that fog of moral complexity but you can't hide from the price.

So yeah, I understand the danger of self-induced analysis paralysis in the face of false complexity.  Fabricating moral complexity is an easy, and oft-used means for the avoidance of hard, but morally imperative, choices. 

But at least as dangerous, and, I think more dangerous at this time and places, is the urge to reduce truly morally and factually complex situations to facile manichean dichotomies. 

The reduction of moral complexity to manichean dichotomy is the the key means by which tyrants, fanatics and charlatans throughout the ages have mobilizing the masses for evil. False dichotomies provide the justification for wars of agression, the fuel for atrocities and are prime motivator of terrorists. "With us or against us."  "We lost the war because we were stabbed in the back."  "They are evil and brutal and subhuman and deserve to be disempowered, interned or killed, and we are good and pure and humane and deserve to rule."  

And even when it is not being used to justify murder, false manicheanism is corrosive to the civic health of a democracy.  As Judge Learned Hand semi-famously put it in 1944, "the spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right." Often, one of the main objectives of those who trade in manicheanism is the dehumanization the enemy, the reduction of opponents to caricatures so as to forestall all consideration of even the possibility of common ground or compromise.  Regardless of intent, this is invariably the effect if you buy into it. 

People at the opposing ends of the political spectrum are not immune to the soothing parylasis of perceived complexity and people in the mushy middle are not unsusceptable to a good false dichotomy.  Orwell's disgust with pretty much everyone else in the European leftist intelligencia of the 30s was due to the way it numbed itself to the reality of a leftist regime based on forced labor and mass murder with an anesthetic cloud of false moral complexity.  As to the middle and false dichotomies--hell, I'm in the mushy middle of the Democratic Party and I may well be spinning one right now. 

Still, as a general rule, however wide the political spectrum in a given country, manichean dichotomies are the natural intellectual home of people at the tail ends of the spectrum while appreciation for moral and factual complexity is the natrual baseline for centrists. (Real centrists, I mean, not the motley assemblage of buffoons,cowards and ideologues in the wrong party who get called "centrists" in America these days). 

And therein lies the problem with civic discourse in America today--the primary fora for our discourse, the traditional media, the blogs and talk radio, abhor moral and factual complexity the way nature abhors a vacuum.  The narrative format adopted by our traditional media over the last thirty years demands conflict.  Conflict simplifies the story and makes it much more dramatic.  Conflict sells commercials.  Conflict between black hats and white hads is entertaining.  Hell, conflict between guys in grey hats is entertaining.  It is easier to consume, tastier and more sensually gratifying.  Simplistic conflict is Cheetos for the brain. 

Thus, every story and every issue is subjected to the process of reductio ad pugnum before it is served up for consumption.  And let's face it: most of the time, political blogs and blog commenters, if anything, make the problem worse.

At other times and other places, a little reductio ad pugnum has been, or would have been, imminently healthy.  The reason I think this is a problem here and now is that the process of reductio ad pugnum empowers and enables ideological dogmatism and right now, that dogmatism is eating away the foundations of democracy. 

In fairness, it started on the right.  Reductio ad pugnum is the pony in Ann Coulter's endless one-trick pony show.  Everything is simple and obvious, the world is full of simple moral choices and those who oppose the choices we favor are ipso facto either evil or fools or both.  Rightwing talk radio depends on this stuff.  The Republican Party is now entirely given over to this kind of thinking and relentlessly purges anyone who whines about complexity with totalitarian zeal. It has turned us into a two party democracy where only one party can be trusted with power because the other has become completely deranged.  That's not healthy.  And if the derangement spreads to both parties, it's probably fatal.      

The Republicans, with their long embrace of anti-intellectualism, had long been--at least since the Dixiecrat defection--the natural home to those most susceptable to the allure of reductio ad pugnum. That created a media market for content that feeds into the reductionist mindset and that market almost completely swallowed up the entire traditional media during the '90s  Now, almost every policy discussion is reduced by the traditional media to a story about a clear choices with ineluctable and easily predictable consequences and bloggers and blog commenters on the left and radio blowhards on the right imbue that faux clear and easy choice with the attributtes of a moral imperative. 

This post has gone a longer way down the road to Rambleville than I intended, so let me bring it to an abrubt and graceless transtion to my concluding point.  

What to do with the fraction of Gitmo detainees who are untriable--either because they committed no crime or because Cheney's torture program made them unconvictable in any trial that wouldn't be a sick joke--is not the moral or factually easy issue that those on the left--or the right, for that matter--want it to be.  The presumed illegality of indefinite detention is not as self-evident as those on the left want it to be.  Under international law, nations at war--including this one--have in the past, and now may detain prisoners of war and even civilian enemy aliens, for the duration of hostilities solely for the purpose of preemptively incapacitating them.  During World War II, we detained thousands of German and Italian citizens for the duration--i.e. indefinitely--for no other reason than that a hearing conducted under wartime conditions found that they posed a potential risk to security. 

And no, the potential legality does not make the matter less troubling or more morally simple.  In that very same war, we illegally and disgracefully detained damn near every single person of Japanese descent in the western United States, including tens of thousands of American citizens, without a hearing for reasons that were undeniably racist.   We did so under color of the same provisions of international law that permitted us detain German and Italian citizens despite the fact that international law conferred no right to detain U.S. citizens living on U.S. soil contrary to our own Constitution. 

The danger to liberty, and to our own values, of allowing any "preventive  detention" under claim of war power is clear from our own history--both in World War II and under Bush.  No matter how much one might trust this president--and obviously some of us trust him more than others--what the next one or the one after that might do with the precedent is frightening, not least because of what the one before him did with it. 

But that doesn't make this issue either morally or legally simple either.  Let us not pretend that these guys are, and must be, entirely harmless because our ideology or personal convictions tell us they must be released.   If you advocate simply letting them go in order to vindicate our values and feel morally clean, will you still feel morally clean if one of them is behind a truck bomb that kill hundreds in Karachi or throws acid in the face of little girls in Afghanistan for the crime of going to school?   If we keep them imprisoned until they die of old age, will I feel clean because we forestalled the hypothetical possibility that one of them might be the one who smuggles a Pakistani nuke into New York City? 

The situation is as it is and, in the absence of the ability to change the past or predict the future, there is no right answer nor is it clear which course of action is least bad.  Merely contemplating the moral and factual mess we are in with these men makes me literally feel nauseous.  It makes me thank God that I'm not the one who has to make the decision and I pity the man who does have to make it just as I pity those trapped in the situation, no matter how much they may (or may not) hate me. 

But that nausea is reality and I'm too old to try to soothe it away with some false moral certainty. 

Over the last several days, as I've watched the MSM resume its fawning mancrush over the awesome manliness that is Dick Cheney, I, like many of you, I'm sure, have been fighting off that once familiar urge to spit on the TV.  As Greg pointed out today, after yet another vicious attack by Cheney upon Obama was met with a mild jibe by the Robert Gibb, good ol' Chip Reid once again stepped up to defend poor, innocent, defensless Dick against Gibb's unprovoked bullying.  The way the Villagers get all gooshy over Cheney gives one a chilling insight into how utterly infantile and banal they have become.  Cheney was all about power, you see, unlimited, unconstrained, anger and fear fueled power. " Oh, he was oh so bad, but after all, isn't power what its all about?  Yes, we know he's bad but we just can't say away!" 

So its really not surprising that none of them have been able to still their racing pulses and compose themselves long enough to tell people the bleeding obvious truth about why Deadeye Dick's suddenly decided he needs another fifteen minutes of fame after eight years of open disdain for the limelight. 

As has been noted by many, Cheney famously never gave a rat's ass what anyone thought about him before now.  On the contrary, throughout his eight years as de facto chief of the secret police, he sneered -- well, okay, he sneers at everything.  But he took a perverse, one might even say perverted, pleasure in his abysmally low approval ratings.  One imagines Lavrenti Beria similarly relishing his unpopularity as evidence of how widely he is feared which, in turn, is proof that his is not a banal little brutish toad but is, instead, powerful and feared.  So it clearly was with Cheney.  He never gave a damn what anyone thought, took pleasure, even, in the disapproval, as in the case of his famous sneering "so?" when confronted with the fact that 2/3 of Americans thought the Iraq War wasn't worth fighting.

Now, however, he seems almost frantic in his urgent need to make people understand, to sympathize, to agree and, to stop hating the very sight of his brutal mug. Jumping from  podium to podium, explainging, warning, and, inevitably, snarling and making implied threats. 

So why does he care what people think of him now?  Why this sudden craving for approval and vindication?  And why is is daughter suddenly out there frantically trying to assist him?

Well its not because he's worried about his "legacy" and place in history as some of the MSM fawners insist. In his own twisted, narcissistic mind, he's convinced that he did the right thing, saved us from another attack and that he'll be vindicated.  It's certainly not that he thinks there's a snowball's chance in hell he can convince the country to go back to a policy that even Bush recoiled from during his second term. 

No.  The truth is clear to anyone who cares to look at it.  A lot it has been been put out there, a piece at a time, in the papers and on the blogs and, occaisionally, even on the teevee.  The reason he's out now, trying to rally support is because it is becoming increasingly obvious that he was, in fact, the mastermind and the man at the top of the whole foul exercise in institutionalised degeneracy.  He was the guy giving the orders.  He was the guy keeping track. 

And the reasons he was doing it are even uglier than we thought.  Sure, it seems evident that the policy was, at some level, driven by some deeply rooted megalomanical sickness that caused him to derive intense pleasure from knowing he could have people brutalized at will.  (One wonders how many of those now-destroyed tapes he watched.)   But that's just me and its justly dismissable as unprovable pop-psychology. No, I'm talking about two demonstrable reasons for the program.  The first is finally getting some media scrutiny--he wanted people tortured because he wanted to generate "evidence" to support the Al Qaeda-Saddam linkage and the WMD fantasy that he'd used to justify the war. 

The second reason for the torture program, however, is one whose terrible significance is being missed by the blogs and the MSM alike and may even be worse.

Liz and Dick (okay--just had an 'eeeyouu" moment) keep talking, while the MSM dutifully reverts to its proper role as stenographers, about how torturing Abu Zubaida, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Khalid Sheik Mohammed generated a great deal of actionable intelligence that disrupted terrorist plots in the making.  All the people who actually seem to know what they're talking about, however, say that all it generated were false leads, and that there's no evidence any terror attacks were disrupted due to torture-generated intelligence. We also know that the serial waterboarding  ended in 2004 after the breaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal finally made them believe there could be consequences.

Here's my point--when I put their false claims that actionable intelligence of imminent attacks was generated by the torture up next to the that the torture program ended in 2004, I can't help but notice that there was another signature event of the first Bush term that ended at about the same time.  I'm speaking, of course, of the frenetically shifting color coded threat scale that moved from yellow to red to orange to red to yellow to red again whenever Rove needed the media to change the subject.  (Some of you might recall Rep. Jim McDermott a psychiatrist in Fareinheit 911 charging that this was part of a deliberate campaign to make people feel crazy and, thus, dependent on the Bush heros to keep them safe.)  That nonsense finally stopped in 2004 when they pulled one--my recollection is that it was some Red Alert but only around the NYSE" ploy that was so obviously a political subject change that even the tame Village press went "oh come on!" 

So yeah, putting two and two together, it is hard to avoid the conjecture that, in addition to trying to force them to say there was an AQ-Iraq connection, they were torturing these guys because they generated the fuel for those sonorous warning of an imminent attack from John Ashcroft or Tom Ridge that always happened just in time to knock any bad news for Bush off the front page.  They were torturing these people, in short, to generate fear and fake news that would affect the 2002 and 2004 electoral campaigns.   And I think Cheney didn't give a damn whether it was true as long as they got their color change on schedule. 

But now, suddenly, all that's coming out--why he was torturing these guys and the fact that he was, in fact, the head fiend--not, Junior.  And there he sat in his private bunker, without that blanket pardon he'd always expected he'd get on the way out the door and suddenly people were saying scary things like "accountability," and "investigations" and worst of all, "prosecutions."  

And, just like that, it occurs to him that "guy actually responsible" + "most unviversally reviled and loathed political figure in the land" = "an orange jumpsuit and using cigarettes for currency."  Of course all the other skells are going to throw him under the train if the U.S. Attorney comes knocking.  He was, in fact, in charge and everybody hates him anyway.   

Its just that simple.  Cheney is not worried about his legacy and he has no illusions that he can change the administration's policy.  He's just worried about his own sorry ass, pure and simple, and what might happen to it if he ends up in some federal correctional facility. If he can just muddy the water and get his popularity raging higher than some other poor schmucks who was following his orders, maybe they'll throw one of them under the train when the accountability moment arrives rather than Dick.     

Today, my representative rendered Nancy Pelosi speechless. 

The other day, on our regular Michelle Bachmann Freakshow Thread, I said, with complete, yet not necessarily evident, sincerity that I didn't understand why everyone thought she was such a freak.  I said that Bachmann was, in fact, the perfect modern Republican, a woman who had so fully internalized the GOP's post-modern anti-intellectualism and anti-objectivism, that she had become one of the party's leading orators. 

I really meant it.  One of the reasons I meant it was that I am "represented" by Virginia Foxx.

Last summer, I wrote a fundraising plea for her opponent, Roy Carter. 

Coach Carter is running against Rep. Virginia Foxx here in North Carolina's Fifth District. Most of you have probably never heard of Foxx before because, by and large, she stays out of the national limelight and this District is supposedly so gerrymandered that she's deemed unshakable by the party bigwigs. Foxx succeeded the comparatively benign Richard Burr when he took over John Edwards' Senate seat in '04.

The Fifth District being what it is, the whole '04 race essentially boiled down to a runoff in the Republican primary between her and Vernon Robinson--who some of you may have heard of. Essentially, it was a race to see which of them was the worst, knuckle-dragging, rabble-rousing, hatemongering, acid-spewing, xenophobic, homophobic, Cristofascistic, Bushloving, warmongering monster. Foxx won that competition hands down, which was no mean feat against Vernon Robinson.

Since then, she has proven it wasn't just campaign rhetoric. She has distinguished herself by her 100% support for each and every little thing George W. Bush wants, other than immigration reform, for being one of the worst abusers of the Congressional franking privilege, and for amassing a ridiculously bloated warchest of contributions from the vilest people and PACs in the nation, which she uses to support and buy influence with other Republican members of Congress. She is a steadfast supporter of endless war in Iraq. She was one of eleven to vote against Katrina relief in September, '05 and one of 31 to vote against extension of the Voting Rights Act. She never saw an pro-environment bill she was for or an environmental atrocity she would not actively advocate. In April, 2006, she conducted a "field hearing" here in the district called Gangs, Fraud and Sexual Predators: Struggling with the Consequences of Illegal Immigration. No,really, that's what she called it.

Yeah, our Ginny's a real peach. And, worse, she's quiet and unsplashy and she's accumulating favors, all of which makes her twice as dangerous as some of the cartoonish buffoons who are being targeted by the DCCC and the DNC.

Whenever I make fun of the Republican Party's more high-profile assclowns like Bachmann, DeMint or, hell, practically anybody Oklahoma sends to Congress, I do it knowing that my own district has been sending this evil old battleaxe who's as bad as any of them and worse than most of them, Bachmann included, to Congress since 2004.

Coach Carter got beaten pretty handily.  Foxx has won all of her races pretty handily.  It's that kind of District, is NC-05.  But here's the thing.  Given that she always has a ginormous money  advantage, that there's never a really well-known Democrat running against her, that  the DCCC does bupkis here, and that most people consider whoever is running against her to be a sacrificial lamb, she never seems to do quite as well as she's supposed to. 

It was 59%-41% in 2004, a big year for Republicans here, certainly.  Her opponent was Jim Harrell, a dentist from ruralish Surry County (where Andy Griffith came from) and scion of a local political family active in Surry County politics but, frankly, little known outside that county.  In 2006, her opponent was Roger Sharpe. I'll let you check out his Wikipedia profile yourself.  She won that one 57-43. In 2008, she beat Roy Carter 58%-42%.  In every case, she had millions and her opponents had spare change they found under seat cushions. 

The Democrats have our General Assembly under pretty good control.  I'd like to think the Fifth's boundaries might show a little judicious adjustment in 2010, though possibly this will one where they'll try to pack as many Republicans as possible to minimize the number of seats they can get. 

Regardless, my gut says she's vulnerable.  If we can get a candidate with some recognition, existing organization and a little clout and fund him or her adequately, I really think we can send her back to whatever cave ceiling she used to hang from before she went to DC. 

Please, folks, take this opportunity, this moment when she has emerged from her usual abode in the shadows and gotten her fifeen minuts this year, and make a little note to keep an eye on her.  If she gets a serious challenger next year, please consider digging into your pockets for whoever runs against her.  You'll do a service to your country and, not that it means much, allow me to contemplate writing a letter to my representative without a derisive snort.  The normally unobtrusive ones like her are, in many ways, a lot more dangerous than the camera-whore twits like Bachmann. 

Being a Republican today is like being a character in a Disney animated film--it means believing in magical things.

Being a Republican means believing that Pat Toomey and the teabaggers represent the mainstream of American opinion, the stormfront of a new wave of political awareness that will soon sweep your party back into power.

 Being a Republican means believing that cutting taxes increases revenue, even after thirty years of doing it.

Being a Republican means believing that science is a big liberal plot to corrupt the youth of our great nation and steal money from the pockets of honest, hardworking rich people.

Being a Republican means believing that you lost the last two elections to more liberal candidates because your candidates weren't conservative enough.

 Being a Republican means believing that teenagers today will have less sex than they did when you were a teenager if you just spend enough money telling them abstinenance is good.

 Being a Republican means being an indefatagible and ceaseless fighter for less government intrusion into the day to day lives of ordinary citizens. Unless you're a terrorist. Or you talk to terrorists. Or you talk to people who might talk to people overseas. Or you want to marry someone of your own sex. Or you want to use recreational drugs other than alcohol or tobacco. Or you want to watch pornography or buy a sex toy. Or you you want to gamble online instead of hitting a casino or a track. Or you want to have the option to have an abortion, or avoid the necessity to have to consider having an abortion by using morning after contraception. Or, any contraception, any, because if you're not married, we've already taught you not to do it. Or you want to be allowed to die if you fall into a persistant vegatative state.  Or you want to be secure in you persons, house, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. 

 Being a Republican means believing that television shows and war movies are valid bases for policy making.

Being a Republican means believing that the the entire collapse of the global financial system in 2008 was caused by a law banning redlining that was passed when Jimmy Carter was president.

Beiing a Republican means believing that all those people who got trapped in the King Dome during Katrina would have been fine if they'd just had the presence of mind to grab a couple of thousand in cash, toss some bottled water into their SUVs, and drive to their summer homes in the mountains. 

Being a Republican means believing that the only problems that can't be solved by military force are the ones that can be solved by tax cuts.

Being a Republican means my facts are just as good as your facts, buster and if I believe that the world was created in seven days six thousand years ago, there was no big bang, fossils are God's little jokes, Saddam was behind 9/11 and had WMDs, we'd be better off if the Social Security funds were invested in the stock market, and carbon dioxide is as transparent to infrared radiation as it is to visible light, that's just as valid as whatever it is that you think. 

Its a wonderful magical world they live in. 

Back before the election, during the primaries and the pre-primary positioning period, one of my frequent comment themes and arguments was that if you read his book and listened to what he was saying, the post-partisanship Obama was talking about not about the "bi-partisan" utopia of David Broder's fever dreams in which "the center" is defined as Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.  Instead, I argued, it was about peeling away the remaining sane people who self-identified as Republicans or Republican leanders--who I estimated to be about 20-25% of the total--and getting them onboard to at least conditionally agreeing that we needed to try something else. The pitch was "I am for what works, not what some stale ideology says must be done." 

My point (which, rightly or wrongly, I felt was also Obama's point) was that, at the time, the country was stuck in a 48% vs. 48% rut where we were constantly fighting over only a tiny sliver of the electorate.  If we were going to accomplish anything, I said, we had to peel that remaining vestige of sane people away from the GOP.  To that end, I frequently, to the point of being annoying, admonished my fellow Democrats that these people existed, that they were finding the growing insanity of their fellow Republicans increasingly difficult to ignore and they they could be persuaded to cross over to our side of the barbed wire if we would refrain from giving them the impression we were going to spit big green loogies in their faces as soon as they were in range.   

It says, perhaps, something about how far we've come that I percieved this as a real problem at the time yet now I have to make an effort to remember why I thought it was a problem. 

Anyway, if peeling those people away was Obama's mission, he's accomplished it.   Dig into the numbers of this Gallup poll.  Note that about a quarter of self-identified Republicans say Obama is doing a good or excellent job and that a surprising 35% of them are at least giving him a grudging "just okay."   So congratulations Mr. President, you've managed to assemble just the kind of public coaltion necessary to do the big things you wanted to do. 

There's just one problem. 

In late 2007 and early 2008, I thought the crazyhead wing of the party was already long since off its meds and that their unmedicated craziness is what was going to drive the sane 25% away.  I mean, c'mon, Dick Cheney?  Rudy Guiliani? Tom Tancredo?  This was the mainstream of the party.  How could it get worse? 

My bad. 

I totally failed to grasp that the high-level radioactive lunacy radiating off the party in early 2008 is what the crazy people were like when they were on their meds.  I failed to understand that that 25% I was coveting were the ones who'd been handing out the little cups and making sure the inmates weren't just hiding the pills under their tongues.  Now those poor loons are locked up in that dank 19th century asylum with no light and and no one to talk to but each other. 

Seriously, the still accelerating mental and emotional breakdown of the GOP was a foreseeable yet unforeseen consequence of a Democratic president whose  approval ratings were in the high sixties.  Unforeseen by me, anyway.  So yeah, Obama is directly responsible for the growing derangement of the Republican Party.  Not in any journalistic ha-ha "Obama Derangement Syndrome" sense, but literally and directly.  He deliberately went after the support of a bunch of people who were the last remaining restraining force on the extremists and he stripped them away.  One wonders if he or his advisors really understood that doing so might inflict a mortal wound on their party. 

Sometimes a reply to a comment grows so far beyond the boundaries of the thread in which it was born that it needs to leave home and make a life for itself over in the user blog.  This is one of them. 

The story was this one:

 [Excerpt:]

Looks like we may soon be learning more about the preferential treatment major banks may have enjoyed in the wake of the AIG bailout.

Last week, we noted Rep. Spencer Bachus's efforts to bring to light the issue of smaller U.S. banks that are allegedly being stiffed on their loans to an AIG subsidiary even as major CDS counterparties (some of them foreign banks) were paid off in full. Bachus is the ranking member on the House Financial Services committee, and he aired his concerns at a hearing and in letters he sent to both Geithner and Barney Frank, the committee chairman.

After we reported this, the Wall Street Journal dug up a couple examples of just this issue, one of which occurred in Bachus' district.

My comment was as follows:

What a bunch of demogogic ka-ka.

The nationality of the counter-parties has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than trying to attach a nice jingoistic stench to a story that's about whether parties to entirely different classes of contracts are being treated differently.

The guys in the story are real estate developers who entered into partnership agreements with an AIG affiliate to develop shopping centers. Contractual disputes over payments and capital contributions in those kinds of deals, especially when the economy goes south, are a dime a dozen. Whether AIG has a valid basis for witholding payment under those agreements--e.g. occurance of an event of default or failure of a condition specified in the agreement--is unknown and there's nothing in anything I've seen that precludes the possibility.

Apples and oranges.

Show me an American credit default swap counterparty who's getting the shaft while a foreign company in the exact same kind of contract is getting paid, and I may work up some jingoistic outrage. Otherwise, its just cheap Lou Dobbs hackery.

The reply that made me reailze I had failed miserably in conveying my point said:

I'm sure glad that "formerly known as NC Steve" knows the details of these issues when no one else in the country, except perhaps the perpetrators, do.

Perhaps I'm just a conspiracy nutcase. But it certainly seems to me, taking everything into consideration, that the Wall Street types, both in and out of the Administration, are far far more concerned with the financial well-being of the people they go skiing with than they are with the well-being of the people who grow and process our food, make whatever we still make in this country, take care of ourselves, our children, our parents, etc.

I am a solid Obama supporter, but this policy of rewarding the greedsters who have torn down our economy while paying little regard to the needs of the 320 million other Americans is NOT a lack-of-change I want to believe in.

And here's what I apparently failed to cogently convey the first time.

Without getting into whether I agree or disagree with the viewpoint of the reply, my point, and my only point, was that the issue of nationality was a typical politician red herring.

I don't know much about these transactions.  I said that.  No one else does either, however and I tried to point that out too. 

What I did do, however, was read the links.  And based upon both the TPM and WSJ stories in the links, it appears that the guys doing the complaining are commercial real estate developers who partnered--not borrowed from, partnered with--with AIG and are upset because, for unspecified reasons, AIG stopped pouring more cash into their projects. 

If AIG was treating companies it parterned with in foreign real development projects, or foreigners with whom it partnered for American real estate development deals, differently from the way it treats Americans with whom it partnered in American real estate deals, I'd concede cause for nationalistic outrage.  If AIG treated foreign-counter parties to credit default swaps differently from the way it treats American counter-parties to credit default swaps, I'd concede cause for nationalistic outrage. 

However, the only real question in this matter is whether it is fair for very differently situated creditors to be treated very differently by AIG.  Period.  One can fairly debate that question, though fair debate would require a lot more detail than has been released.  Based on what has been disclosed, however, nationality has absolutely nothing to do with this story.  

Personally, I don't feel like my financial or emotional stake in the financial well-being of commerial real estate developers is any greater, or any smaller, than my emotional and financial stake in the well-being of the counter parties to AIG's credit default swap agreements.  To the extent that the banks who lent to these developments are getting less than 100% of what they are owed in cash, I would want to know whether they are also getting title to collateral--e.g. the property being developed--to know whether they were really getting a raw deal.  But all three classes of investors played a big part in creating the mess we're in now.  The developers, the banks that generated the loans that were being sold and packaged in collateralized debt obligations and the insurers like AIG who, for a price, created the illusion that risk could be properly asessed without knowing anything about the quality of the underlying loans.  So even though AIG was apparently involved in both ends of the mess, I have a hard time working up a lot of outrage over differential treatment between the other two classes. 

And Baucus knows that if the matter were framed in those terms, the media and public indifference would be more general.  That's why he, being a Republican, injected the word "foreign" into the debate.  Of course he did.  it's what he knows and It's all they got.  It's all they've had for years, now.  And for his part, Barney Frank knows that standing in front of the jingoism train at a time of great public fear and anger is the job allotted by the Constitution to senators and the president, not representatives. 

So yeah, I admit I don't give a hoot in hell whether an LLC set up to replace trees with strip malls fails or whether the banks that funded them--and who at least had every opportunity to properly evaluate the risk--get stiffed.  However, it bothers me a lot when politicians, knowing it to be completely irrelevant, drag nationality into a dispute in order to drum up outrage among people who are already angry and scared.  It is the worst, most dangerous, most destructive kind of demogoguery, the only kind of demogoguery that can bring down the Republic. 

We are afraid, and with good reason.  And we are angry because anger and fear are opposite sides of the same marred coin.  However, we all have very recent experience of what can happen when politicians are allowed to cynically exploit fear and anger.  This isn't ancient history, it's not tales of Father Coughlin and Huey Long or stories of campfire mutterings about dictatorship among the Army of the Potomac's officer corp.  It's history we all lived through.   

We watched it unfold over the course of five years.  We saw the Republic taken to the very brink of tyranny before the people began clawing the country back from the fearmongers in what I truly believe may have been a last-chance election for democracy. 

As I've indicated a time or ten, I am not a fan of either fear or anger as decision-making tools.  But if we can't stop ourselves from being scared or afraid, and evolution has ensured that we usually cannot, we at least need to hang on to enough presence of mind to remember that those emotions make us vulnerable to illogical arguments.  And, in particular, I would hope that what happened in this country from 2001 to 2006 has at least taught us that times when we are scared and afraid are when we have to be most careful about letting politicians exploit our emotions for their own ends.  Just as in 2001, the Republicans, and perhaps even a few Democrats, have agendas of their own that do not necessarily coincide with remedying our real problems.  It is foolish and dangerous to let them harness our very real fear and anger to  their ends by mouthing jingoistic semantic nullities calculated to provoke knee-jerk reflexive responses. 

Last night, I actually made the mistake of thinking the Village MSM was getting better.  What fooled me was that they are asking tougher questions of Obama than they ever asked Junior. Turns out, I missed the point badly.  Reading the transcript, I saw what I'd missed listening with half an ear, while I worked on something else.  The "tougher" questions are just them showing how fully a part of the now-extinct age of Republican policy dominance they became.  The Villagers are just naturally going to be more hostile with a Democrat because he's doing things wrong by their lights.  The content itself is still just as banal as ever it was under Bush. 

Now, having read the transcript, I'm wondering if it will ever occur to any of the major news outlets that "the weakening power of the big news orgs" is directly attributable to the ever-increasing banality of their content.  They really remind me of restaurants that lose business by cutting quality and then react to the reduced traffic by cutting quality some more, reducing portions and raising prices. 

Zogby's pathetic outliers not withstanding, Obama is popular, even with people who voted against him, because he talks to people like they're adults.  You just get a sense that he has "integrity" in the literal sense, i.e. that his public and private faces are integral, basically the same.  This just baffles and infuriates the Villagers.  It frustrates them to no end because the one thing thought they really shared with the politicians is having utterly separate and distinct public and private personas that routinely say, and indicate they think, utterly different things. 

Here they are performing the ritual correctly, in the time-honored (i.e. twenty year old) fashion.  They put on their false faces, appear at the appointed time and place and then dutifully ask President's false face the expected questions necessary to elicit the expected false face answers.  And, instead, he goes and blurts our the "real" answers right there in front of everyone, the answers that they think they only their private faces should get from the politician's private face, off the record, on deep background, and preferably while sipping free drinks and eating free hors d'ouvres as some socialite's townhouse. It simply isn't how things are done.  It's not cricket.  It is absolutely infuriating.   Where are the Broder-soothing platitudes?  And where are the leaks?  Why is the flow of authorized leaks telling us what we're really supposed to be telling the peons is "really" going on so constricted?  And why won't he come to our club for an evening of off-the-record schmoozing and entertain us with insidery jokes? 

It must be a trick, and we don't like it. 

And, you know, maybe it really is a trick.  Maybe Obama has brilliantly fashioned a fiendishly clever false face for the public that perfectly reflects the audience's beliefs about what his private face must be like and, in fact, he's totally different in private.  And maybe he's succeeded in hiding that real private face from the press, or at least in charming the press into hding it from themselves, such that they never give us any hint that there are differences between public and private persona.  After all, it can be done.  John McCain did it for years.  Indeed, at some level I suspect that it really is true because I don't know how anyone could truly "be themselves" with the Villagers. 

Regardless, however, the effect of what he does at these things is to crystalize the public's growing disdain for the ever-growing banality of the "content" spewed out by Big Media.  It causes people watching these things to roll their eyes and .say "Jesus, what a bunch of assclowns!  Why won't you just ask an intelligent question about something that matters to me instead of either trying to force him to reduce complex issues to a facile anecdote or simplistic platitude or, worse, playing your silly Beltway Tim Russert 'gotcha' game?  He is talking to me like an adult.  Why can't you guys do that too?"

I have no data other than anecdotes, but I really think that that's a widespread, growing, view.  I think people started feeling that way about the MSM's treatement of Dubya and that the mirror Obama holds up to their ass-clownery has only accelerated the trend and, so, demand for the product drops. 

And, because the people running things are no longer even capable of distinguishing between entertainment and journalism, Big Media continues to draw the wrong conclusions and go in the exact opposite direction necessary to draw the customers back.  First, they replaced the head chefs who started the restaurants with MBAs who replaced meat and vegatables with empty carbs and processed meat treats, and when people got bored with that, they added lots of sugar.  Now that people are finally getting sick of sugar and empty calories, their response is to cut costs by replacing the sugar with high fructose corn sweetner. 

Obama is showing them a potential path back from the brink of financial ruin.  Act like adults and treat the audience like adults.  Acknowledge and embrace complexity.  Give it a try, MSM.  It may require replacing the asshats with real journalists, if you can find some, somewhere, but people may be ready for it, for a while at least, for a while.  And, hell, what do you have to lose? 

Here's what I know, or at least what I think I know.  Not what I suspect, nor what I hope, which are two other, somewhat longer, lists. 

1.  I'm not smart enough, prescient enough or sufficiently educated in ecomomics to know if this will work, do nothing or make things worse.  

2.  People who are obstensibly smart enough and sufficiently educated in economics to know if this will work, do nothing or make things worse disagree vociferously--which is, after all the only way anyone is allowed to disagree anymore. 

3.  If people who are smart enough and sufficiently educated disagree, that indicates that they don't really know themselves whether if it will work, do nothing or make things, nor do they know if any of the other things being suggested will work, do nothing or make things worse. 

4.  The idology and emotional state of people arguing about this has a lot do do with their opinion on whether it will work, do nothing or make things worse and nothing at all to do with whether it will, in fact, work, do nothing or make things worse. 

5.  It sounds plausible to me, if, and only if, the the price now being offered for the assets is less than the stream of income would indicate they should be worth. 

6.  If the housing market has, in fact, bottomed out, as today's surprise stats seem to indicate, these assets probably are undervalued.  If today's stats are a dead cat bounce (a metaphor my cats want you to know they strongly object to, incidentally), then whether they're undervalued is still an open question.  If the housing market takes another dive, the taxpayers get screwed under this plan. 

7.  That screwing is a contingent possibility, not a foregone conclusion. 

8.  Doing something more drastic, as many are insisting we absolutely must do, has a non-zero chance of setting off a second panic that will push us into an actual depression.  They may be right, they may be catastrophically wrong and they don't know which.   

9.  Some people appear to believe that we don't really need banks, credit or insurance to have a functional economy. 

10.  Others appear to think it would be better to do without banks, credit or insurance for a while than to take a chance that one of the evildoers escapes financial punishment for his/her misdeeds.  Many of the people talking this way are Republicans. 

11.  This is what we're doing.  Regardless of whether we think it can work, we'd damn well better hope it does.

12. Anyone who thinks that the success of this--or any other--turnaround plan doesn't depend as much on psychology  and perception as the objective economic data hasn't been paying attention for the last several months.  That being true, there will be a window of time, sometime between the date of implementation and the date we have sufficient data to determine whether the thing is a working, where continued carping and naysaying by prominent figures in the world of politics and economics will become little more than an act of willful malicous social vandalism. 

This is what the Republican Party has become. 

They offer discrete pieces of legislation on the basis of insane rumors. They propose fixes for complex problems that are completely unmoored from clearly inevitable consequences.  They propose sweeping policy solutions  based upon counter-factual revisionist history, imaginary narratives and works of fiction.

During the Bush years, the anti-intellectualism that used to just be a talking point for them became so deeply imbedded in the party's catechism that anything that smacks of empiricism is acknowledged by them only for the limited purpose of heaping vitriolic derision upon it. They live in a self-constructed alternative reality composed of dubious anecdote, hysterical and paranoid rumors, prejudice, outright fiction, and magical thinking.

The systemic GOP reality impairment is now so complete that, beyond not being able to distinguish fact from fantasy, they respond to people who talk about objective reality the way sane people respond to the ramblings of a schizophrenic in the subway. Any Republican who ever-so-gently suggests that they have to start dealing with objective reality if they are going to recover as a party is subjected to the kind of hysteria once associated with Cotton Mather and Joe McCarthy.

Even the ones who do have some inkling that a reconnection with reality is critical to the party's survival, people like David Frum, Gingrich and David Brooks, are capable of engaging reality only to the extent that it does not require them to reevaluate musty Reaganite "truths" dictated by their dogma. The result is a bizarre kaleidoscopic mishmash of sane statements about the causes of the sorry state of the GOP followed by more reality-impaired kooky-talk when they discuss prescriptions for the problem.

It is increasingly easy to envision future historians (with apologies for the self-indulgent link) drawing a straight line for the party from Reagan, to Bush-Rove-Cheney to the ash heap of history. It is exceedingly difficult to see a day when the mainstream of their party's thinking isn't grounded in abnormal psychology.

 This is not necessarily about the rank and file of the party. This is about the elites, the officeholders, the activists and the people doing what passes for the big picture thinking in the party, and those in the base who are hoplessly in thrall to them. There are still many sane people in the general population who identify themselves as Republicans. There are many more who would likely recover their own sanity if they could break out of their co-dependant relationships with the crazy people. Nor is it about ideology. This is not about being of one ideology and arrogantly insisting that all who disagree with us are not sane. Mere social or economic conservatism does not make one insane.

However, the times are simply too dire for us to continue indulging ourselves in the luxury of avoiding the hard truth about what the GOP as an organization has become. We are so used to them always being there, often in power, always in opposition to us, that the degeneration has been easy to overlook. We have observed it and often commented on even as we overlooked--failed to face it and its consequences head on-- not least because what has happened to them is so disconcerting, so upsetting and with consequences and implications that are so terrible to contemplate that avoidance and denial is a natural response. It's like the denial that happens when a family member slowly slips into madness or senility.

We cannot put it off any longer.  We as a society, have to come to grips with the fact that, as an organization, the Republican Party is simply insane.  Not in the metaphorical sense.  Not in the pejorative, "isn't it fun to call the other side names" sense.  In the literal sense, definition number 1 of the adjective "insane" in the dictionary.  They are insane and, yet, they are still treated by the MSM as if they were, and deserved to be, the dominant policy voice in nation and the world.  They still get more face time on the Sunday shows than the Democrats.  Their most fatuous vaporings are regularly treated as worthy of serious while almost banally conventional policy proposals, like increasing government spending in response to a catastrophic drop in aggregate demand, are treated with near incredulity. 

Today, Andrew Alexander, the WaPo's brand new ombudsman took on Will's instantly infamous global warming denial column.  Now Alexander is a big improvement over Deborah Howell.  (Despite his prior involvement in the story, somehow, I didn't really get that Howell had been replaced until today.)  In his column, Alexander distinguished between what he did before--pass on Fred Hiatt's horsedookie about the many layers of fact checking that WaPo editorials are subjected to--and what he was supposed to do as an ombudsman--check the facts and make a call.  At least he got that, which is more than Debbie ever would have done--and then he did the craziest thing.  He read Will's putative sources and, amazingly, came to the conclusion that George either misunderstood or willfully misrepresentated them and that there were any number of points at which it should have been obvious to Fred's "fact checkers" that they needed to call an expert.  (Although, evidently, the idea that an expert might be needed in all cases involving the interpretation of complex scientific studies was too big a leap for him.) 

Of course, we didn't get this without the obligatory MSM whine about how dirty fucking hippies were bombarding the WaPo in an "orchestrated" campaign or emails and letters, many (pass me my smelling salts) using the exact same words.

Still, he administered a mild, ineffectual, spanking to George, which was good. Was was bad, however, was his failure to identify the fundemental problem with both the column and the supposed fact-checking: both adhered to the the conservative theory of citation.  In Conservative Lorld, if you state a proposition and footnote it and the footnote identifies a publication, then the propostion is valid because you have a  source.  In Conservative Land, however, whether that publication actually supports the proposition for which it is cited is irrelevant.  The only relevant thing is that a source was cited: it is the citation that makes it true, not the content of the source.   

Ann Coulter's entire career is built on this little trick.  It is symptomatic of the post-modern intellectual nihilism that has pushed both conservatism and the United States to the brink of disaster.  And its exactly what both Will, Will's assistant and Fred Hiatt's purported fact checkers work was based upon.  It is a sad comment on the state of journalism that the ombudsman of the second most important paper in America failed to even notice it. 

Instead, he had to go and ruin whatever good he'd done by saying this in his penultimate graph:

There is a disturbing if-you-don't-agree-with-me-you're-an-idiot tone to much of the global warming debate. Thoughtful discourse is noticeably absent in the current dispute. But that's where The Post could have helped, and can in the future.

And that's the part where I grabbed a double handful of my own hair and went "gaaaahhhh!"  

I do not understand why this is so hard for people who call themselves journalists to understand.  I really don't.  I'd love for someone to explain it to me. 

The Earth is round and revolves around the sun along with the other planets,  There is no room for "debate" about that.  If you, instead, believe that the Earth is flat and heavenly bodies are attached to crystalline spheres, some revolving in little epicycles as they move with their spheres, then you are, in fact, an idiot.

Regardless of whether you acknowledge the Copernican and Newtonian theories or whether you still cling to the Ptolomaic order, If you believe that the future can be predicted by studying heavenly bodies, you are an idiot.  There is no room for debate about that. 

If you do not agree with me that combustion is the result of rapid oxidation and, instead, believe that burning is the result of the release of a mysterious "fifth element" called "phlogiston," you are an idiot.  No debate.  Ditto evolution. Ditto the theory that the speed of light is constant. 

All scientific truth is conditional and subject to change, but scientific truths are not subject to "debate" by laymen.  It's not about what you "believe."  The results of a dial-in instant poll on the germ theory of disease are quite irrelevant to the cause of illness.  That's not how it works.  If you think otherwise, well, you're an idiot.   The "beliefs" of some guy on a barstool or of an oil executive who's worried about carbon caps are, quite literally, utterly irrelevant. And, for that matter, so are the "beliefs" of a handful of more or less credentialed kooks and whores who are paid to have different opinions.  Even if I have a Ph.D in chemistry and a full professorship at Liberty University, there is no "debate" even though I insist that the phlogiston theory of burning has not been disproved. 

In lay terms, scientific truth is debatable if, and only if, there are significant observed data, or reproducible experimental results, that cannot possibly be explained by the prevailing theory.   However, only other experts get to have a piece of that debate.   Whether the Higgs bosun really exists is open to debate, but if you think George Will's opinion on this topic, or  "thoughtful discourse" by people with no training in quantum physics, is meaningful and needful, well, you are an idiot.   

The same principle applies to history and policy. 

 If you want to argue that we should let the economy collapse and recover on its own, rather than expand government spending and try to stop it, that's a legitimately debatable point.  It's an argument about competing norms rather than one about facts.  However, if you choose to bolster your argument by contending that the New Deal made the Depression worse, or, claiming that the fundementals of our economy are sound, then you are an either lying to yourself, and therefore an idiot, or lying to me and therefore unworthy of being heard. 

If you want to argue that the economic cost of doing anything about global warming is so high that we should just run the risk that the most dire outcomes within the range of outcomes predicted by our current models will occur, that's a legitimate debate.  I will question your common sense, and maybe your motives, but I will not say you' are not entitled to make the argument, if only because the argument will sharpen our understanding of our options.  However, if you want to say we shouldn't risk doing anything because you don't believe anything bad is going to happen, well, you're an idiot.  There is no debate, no reason to listen to you and, in particular, no reason to print your "side" in the paper so that the readers can make up their own minds.  None.  

I really don't get what's so hard about that for them.   

I'm trying to maintain an even keel about the stimulus bill.  I'm trying to do that notwithstanding this hair-raising graphic from Rep. Pelosi's office and acompanying note from Swampland.  Based upon what I'm hearing from Reid, Pelosi and Obama, I'm more than half convinced that ultimately the Nelson-Collins foolishness is not going to make it into the final bill and that the MSM (and blogger) fixation upon that process is misguided. 

Nonetheless, could somebody please explain to me why the guy who is apparently the stupidest goddamn person in the entire Senate Democratic Causus is now apparently more important than the President and the rest of Congress combined? 

It's like Nelson sat down and said "hoooo-weeee!  This here stim-a-lus bill is just too big!  If it gets too big it might actually work!  Reckon I better sit down with my staff and cut out all the parts that are most stimulative!" 

I mean, jesus screaming christ in a threee piece suit, "I think it will be below 800 [billion]. For me it's not symbolism, it's an economic matter. At some point it's just too big." Are you fucking kidding me?  So he wants to cut  food stamps, state revenue stabilization, NASA, Eduction,  school improvements and hiring more cops???  Did this buffoon actually ask his staff to identify the parts that were most likely to create jobs or reduce further deterioration and say "yeah, that's there's what we need to cut." 

I'd honestly prefer no bill to one with these cuts.  If these cuts stand, all we are doing is spending a huge amount of money for no result--which is, of course, exactly the failure the Republicans are trying to engineer and there's Dumbass Ben, obligingly helping them along.  It boggles the mind and beggars the imagination.   

Is it really possible for any Democractic senator to be so utterly, abysmally ignorant of even the most elementary tenants of macroeconomics?  And if it is possible, how is it that that guy, the one who's apparently the stupidest goddamn Democrat in the Senate, gets to basically rewrite the bill singlehandedly? 

For Christ's sake people, call your Senator and tell them to say no to this madness, especially if your Senator is one of these idiots, call them and tell them to stop.