Month: November 2010

Fergawdsakes

by digby

This is just sad:

Today in outrageous new benchmarks for bipartisanship, Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) says she’d be more likely to vote to ratify the START Treaty if former Presidents, George W. Bush and George H.W. Bush were to speak out in support of it.

“It would be wonderful if President [George H.W.] Bush would come out for the treaty. That would be so powerful and definitely help,” Collins told the Washington Post.

The article goes on to point out the virtually the entire foreign policy staffs of the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II presidencies have already come out in favor of the treaty. They even dragged in Kissinger.

I’m afraid that Senator Collins just doesn’t understand the problem she has: those guys are no longer relevant, and not just because they are old and out of office. They are irrelevant because they are not Tea Partiers, whose sole mission in the short term is to defeat the Muslim, commie menace in the White House and in the long term — well, it’s not worth thinking about.

It does not matter what Bush thinks. Indeed, if he did come out in favor of it, it would probably doom it forever. The new GOP is a whole different animal — and Susan Collins’ friend and colleague Olympia Snowe is one of its intended victims in 2012 too.(Remember this?) Reanimating GOP zombies isn’t going to help her. They don’t scare the Tea Party and neither does she.

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Wikileak Fall Out

by digby

There’s a lot of chatter, for obvious reasons, about the Wikileaks document dump and whether or not it’s a dangerous and despicable act. My personal feeling is that any allegedly democratic government that is so hubristic that it will lie blatantly to the entire world in order to invade a country it has long wanted to invade probably needs a self-correcting mechanism. There are times when it’s necessary that the powerful be shown that there are checks on its behavior, particularly when the systems normally designed to do that are breaking down. Now is one of those times.

I also think that all the sturm und drang about leaks is fairly bizarre considering that the technology to transfer large amounts of secret information has been out there for some time and has shown its capability in many facets of our lives already. Privacy and secrecy are very abstract concepts in this age. I would have expected the government to have anticipated this kind of document transfer in advance and guarded against it.

As for the substance of the revelations, I don’t know what the results will be. But in the world of diplomacy, embarrassment is meaningful and I’m not sure that it’s a bad thing for all these people to be embarrassed right now. Puncturing a certain kind of self-importance — especially national self-importance — may be the most worthwhile thing they do. A little humility is long overdue.

Update: I highly recommend this thoughtful essay on the topic by Walter Shapiro.

All this brings to mind the enduring wisdom of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the last intellectual to serve in the Senate (four terms from New York) and the only public official to serve in the Cabinet or sub-Cabinet of four successive administrations (from JFK to Jerry Ford). Moynihan, who was U.N. ambassador and envoy to India, was long obsessed with the folly of excessive government secrecy. As Moynihan put it in a 1990 memorandum written right after the Berlin Wall came down with no warning from the CIA, “The central and enduring problem of the security system is that … the secrets are frequently wrong.”

Moynihan’s correspondence has been collected in a new book titled “A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary,” edited by my friend Steve Weisman. Moynihan took pains in his final 2000 letter to his constituents in New York to stress, “As I close out near on to a half century of government and politics, the great fear that I have is the enveloping culture of government secrecy and the corresponding distrust of government that follows. Since the end of the Cold War – which, incidentally, all those secret agencies quite missed … the secret side of government just keeps growing.”

These words were written a year before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

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Mr Lee Goes To Washington

by digby

A lot of people, including yours truly, have been discussing the Christian Reconstructionist underpinnings of the Tea Party for the past few months. Today, Jeffrey Rosen looks at a different theocratic influence which emanates from the Mormon branch. And highly influential it is since it forms the basis for “Professor” Glenn Beck’s daily multi-hour demagogic crusade.

Rosen doesn’t go into Beck’s muddled blathering but rather looks at the man who took down a very conservative incumbent Senator of his own party — Utah’s Mike Lee. He’s one of the “intellectual” engines of the Tea Party — and he’s a far right religions extremist:

Of the newly elected Tea Party senators, Mike Lee, a 39-year-old Republican from Utah, has the most impeccable establishment legal credentials: the son of Rex Lee, a solicitor general under President Reagan, he attended law school at Brigham Young and later clerked for Samuel Alito on the U.S. Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court. But on the campaign trail, especially during his heated primary battle with the three-term Republican incumbent Bob Bennett, Lee offered glimpses of a truly radical vision of the U.S. Constitution, one that sees the document as divinely inspired and views much of what the federal government currently does as unconstitutional.

[…]

Like the Tea Party movement itself, Lee’s constitutional vision may appear to be an incohesive mixture of libertarianism and social conservatism, of opposition to federal power and support for tearing down the wall of separation between church and state. In fact, however, it represents an exotic but, in its own way, coherent idea of the Constitution, one that is consistent with certain familiar strains of legal conservatism and constitutional scholarship but at the same time is genuinely eccentric and extreme. Much of the Tea Party movement’s more-strident rhetoric, seen in light of this constitutional vision, may be best understood not as scattershot right-wing hostility to government but as a comprehensive, if startling, worldview about the proper roles of government and faith in American life.

Many of the positions Lee outlined on the campaign trail appear to be inspired by the constitutional guru of the Tea Party movement, W. Cleon Skousen, whose 1981 book, “The 5,000-Year Leap,” argued that the founding fathers rejected collectivist “European” philosophies and instead derived their divinely inspired principles of limited government from fifth-century Anglo-Saxon chieftains, who in turn modeled themselves on the Biblical tribes of ancient Israel. Skousen, a Mormon who died in 2006 at 92, was for years dismissed by many mainstream conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr., as a conspiracy-mongering extremist; he was also eventually criticized by the Mormon Church. A vocal supporter of the John Birch Society, Skousen argued that a dynastic cabal, including international bankers like the Rockefellers and J. P. Morgan, conspired to manipulate both Communism and Fascism to promote a one-world government.

Skousen’s vision of the Constitution was no less extreme. Starting more than 60 years ago with his first book, “Prophecy and Modern Times,” he wrote several volumes about the providential view of the U.S. Constitution set out in Mormon scripture, which sees the Constitution as divinely inspired and on the verge of destruction and the Mormon Church as its salvation. Skousen saw limited government as not only an ethnic idea, rooted in the Anglo-Saxons, but also as a Christian one, embodied in the idea of unalienable rights and duties that derive from God, and he insisted that the founders’ “religious precepts turned out to be the heart and soul of the entire American political philosophy.”

This tracks with the other Theocrat/Libertarian alliances that we’ve discussed in recent weeks. And although one could easily see a sectarian battle breaking out in the United States of Gilead at some point, right now the fact that the Mormons and Christian fundamentalists have different prophets probably doesn’t mean much. They are on the same track:

While Paul’s anti-Fed crusade is widely thought of as economic libertarianism, the roots of this combat lie in a theocratic reading of the Bible, arising out of the nexus between Paul (and now his son, Senator-elect Rand Paul), Howard Phillips and his Constitution Party, and Gary North and the Christian Reconstructionists.

For decades, the elder Paul, Phillips, and North have shared the libertarian economic philosophy of the Austrian School, which advocates a strict free market approach to an economy they portray in terms of individual choices and agreements rather than systemic forces. With respect to the Federal Reserve System in particular, they have argued against its fractional reserve banking, and its manipulation of interest rates to control economic ups and downs.

North, the architect of Christian Reconstructionist economic theory, and controversial libertarian economist Lew Rockwell both worked on Ron Paul’s congressional staff in the late 1970s. That collaboration continues today, even after reports during the 2008 presidential campaign that Rockwell had ghostwritten racist and anti-gay statements in Ron Paul’s conspiracy-minded newsletter in the 1980s and ’90s. They continue to collaborate through the Ludwig von Mises Institute, founded by Rockwell and the anti-“statist,” anti-New Deal economist Murray Rothbard, who believed Joseph McCarthy was “the most smeared man in American politics” in the 20th century.

Their work is also found at LewRockwell.com, where North currently writes, often in support of Paul. In promoting their libertarian economic views, Rothbard and Rockwell have, according to the libertarian Reason magazine, “championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist ‘paleoconservatives.’”

While each of these figures comes to the table from different places, they come together in agreement on Rothbard’s anti-statism, which dovetails with North’s views. For North, the Bible limits the legitimate functions of civil government to punishing “evildoers” and providing for defense. Reconstructionist theocracy, based on the Reconstructionists’ reading of the Bible, gives coercive authority to families and churches to organize other aspects of life. In this view—one that also meshes with Tea Party rhetoric—the Fed’s control of monetary policy is a prime example of federal government “tyranny.”

North argues that the Federal Reserve is unbiblical because it usurps power not legitimately held by civil government (because God didn’t grant it) and it promotes inflation, which he says is nothing more than theft from those who are not in debt in favor of those who are.

Mike Lee is a US Senator who also happens to be a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. And he’s a Theocrat. A real one. I suppose there would be no need to be alarmed if he were just some outlier. After all, this stuff has existed on the fringe of American politics for a long time and a super right wing Mormon from Utah isn’t exactly unprecedented. But now the good word is being spread far and wide on right wing media and a whole horde of politicians steeped in this theocratic view are coming to Washington in the guise of small government libertarians. It merits keeping an eye on at least.

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Structural Problem

by digby

If anyone’s wondering why the administration hasn’t been able to get on message about jobs and unemployment, it might be because they just don’t know what the hell they are doing. This rather breathtaking post by Mark Thoma discusses the extremely disconcerting fact that the Obama administration can’t communicate, not because they are bad communicators but because they can’t decide what the problem is that they have to fix:

The administration needed to be out there pushing for employment policies, doing everything it could to signal to people that it was on their side, not the side of corporations and big banks. That requires that you figure out that you have a cyclical unemployment problem before the election is all but over, and that you begin pushing for solutions in public forums. That push needs to start at the very top with Obama, and it needs to be reinforced every single day by other administration officials. One mention by Obama in a Saturday address to the nation doesn’t get the job done. I understand that Congress may not have supported additional policy to try to stimulate employment, but the fight would have been worth it no matter the outcome, and with the administration actually leading rather than accepting defeat before the game has been played, the outcome may not have been as preordained as the administration seems to believe:

Obama could learn from Bush, by Richard Wolffe, Commentary, LA Times: The day before his party’s shellacking in this month’s elections, President Obama sat down with his economic team to examine the single most important issue for voters across the country: jobs.

But the question on the agenda was not how to accelerate the recovery or target job creation… The president had called the meeting to grapple with what he and his propeller-head economists have been debating for some time: the wonkish question of whether today’s high unemployment rate is structural or cyclical. …

Two years into this presidency, and many months into a sluggish recovery, may be a little late to try to agree on the root cause of today’s high unemployment.

This lack of agreement on economic fundamentals is a primary factor behind one of this White House’s most obvious failures: communications. As one senior Obama advisor told me the day after the disastrous midterms: “It was hard to find a single economic message when the economic team couldn’t agree on a single economic policy.” …

However, a new economic team will not resolve the communications problems… In fact, the president has been frustrated by his communications strategy for most of the last year. … Obama told me six months ago that poor communications had hampered his ability to execute his policies, and that was after several months of internal reviews.

Oy vey. Brad DeLong says that while they may have disagreed, there was nobody in the administration who didn’t at least think anything was better than nothing (except for Peter Orszag, whose deficit fetish rules his world) and suspects that the meeting has been mischaracterized. Perhaps that’s true, but then it still leaves unresolved the question of why the administration can’t seem to get its act together on jobs.

Krugman says:

What I want to know is, who was arguing for structural? I find it hard to think of anyone I know in the administration’s economic team who would make that case, who would deny that the bulk of the rise in unemployment since 2007 is cyclical. And as I and others have been trying to point out, none of the signatures of structural unemployment are visible: there are no large groups of workers with rising wages, there are no large parts of the labor force at full employment, there are no full-employment states aside from Nebraska and the Dakotas, inflation is falling, not rising. More generally, I can’t think of any Democratic-leaning economists who think the problem is largely structural. Yet someone who has Obama’s ear must think otherwise. No wonder we’re in such trouble. Obama must gravitate instinctively to people who give him bad economic advice, and who almost surely don’t share the values he was elected to promote. That’s what I’d call a structural problem.

No kidding.

I have to laugh at this bit in the Richard Wolfe piece though which, coming from Obama’s designated scribe is just amazingly unreflective. He claims that Bush won reelection six years ago because of his disciplined message and “undisciplined” opponent and proclaims:

The lesson of 2004 is that the president cannot be an empty vessel for hope, no matter how big or small his own hopeful base. And if he doesn’t fill the vessel with his own story of how and why he delivered on hope, then his opponents will fill it for him. …

You don’t say?

Why this is supposed to be the lesson of 2004 I don’t know. I think the lesson is of a little bit more recent vintage than that.

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News Hole

by digby

Today proves one thing about the media. When there’s a natural disaster or a sex scandal, you turn on the TV. When there’s real news unfolding, you go online.

Here’s what I mean. Right now we have three extremely interesting stories unfolding. The first is that Ireland is on the brink of civil rebellion over the IMF imposed pain and suffering to bail out bankers. Again. The second is the North and South Korea are on the verge of war. The third is the Wikileaks revelations of diplomatic cables which are rife with fascinating tid-bits and interesting details.

You would think that all news organizations would be all over these stories. Instead CNN is re-running the same stupid story about how to deal with your credit card bills. MSNBC is doing “Death in the Hamptons.”

The Sunday morning shows are have never been about breaking news so I won’t pick on them. (Meet the Press did do a segment with Richard Engle about North Korea and Wikileaks.) But cable news is about breaking news and they’re just missing in action on a pretty good news day. Well, except for FOX, which is doing a six part series called “The Rise, Fall and Future of Conservatism.”

Twitter and the online versions of the papers are on fire today so journalism is still being done today. It’s just not on TV.

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Wikileak Linkies

by digby

For those of you trying to catch up on the reaction to the Wikileaks story,you can read about the key details here from Greg Mitchell, updating frequently. The European perspective from the Guardian, here.

The diplomats are all having a conniption,and perhaps there are details which are damning and dangerous, but on the broader strokes nothing so far strikes me a particularly surprising. (The Arab states are more afraid of Iran than Israel? Uhm yeah.)

Anyway, as they say: developing …

Per Guardian: Here’s the cover of Der Spiegel’s initial take of the story. Some of the captions attached to luminaries on the cover, taken from US embassy cables, include “Avoids risk, rarely creative” (for Angela Merkel) and, more intrguingly still, “Luxuriant blonde nurse” (Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi). The English version of their story is here.

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Useless Metaphors

by digby

Gene Lyons made a good observation the other day about the “government is family” metaphor that describes the absurdity of it in a useful way:

“The American people are ahead of their government and their politicians on this,” King said. “Because, Ali, you know this, over the past two or three years every family in America has had to make incredibly difficult choices and do things they didn’t want to do. And so they look at Washington and they say why won’t you do things that you don’t want to do, why don’t you … do something about this and be grown-ups?”

Yes, it’s perfectly obvious. The thing to do is cut government spending, reduce demand, put more people out of work. Prosperity will come roaring back.

Look, Obama asked for this. “Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions,” he said, announcing the Bowles-Simpson commission during his 2010 State of the Union. “The federal government should do the same.”

Because the U.S. government is just like your family. And your family can’t run deficits, can it? Apart from mortgages, auto and education loans, credit cards, stuff like that. Not to mention that it’s the government that actually creates and maintains the money supply. Otherwise, yeah, your family’s exactly the same as the Social Security Administration, the Pentagon, the National Institutes of Health, all those. So get out and build some highways: pay as you go

My head explodes every time I hear any of them use this stupid family metaphor. And it isn’t just Obama using it. As everyone here is aware, there’s a whole school of thought on the left about the dueling metaphors of government as family, with the Right allegedly preferring the “strict father” model and the Left preferring the “nurturing parent” (actually “indulgent Mommy”, although the proponents of this metaphor will never admit that’s what it is.)

It’s dumb. America isn’t a family and managing a national economy isn’t like managing a family budget. It isn’t like a business either (the second most common stupid metaphor.) The government has a completely different set of responsibilities than other human organizing entities, and democratic government is designed to completely upend the authoritarian model of family, church and business and put the “kids” in charge. Forgetting that is what gets us into trouble.

It would be very helpful to people’s understanding of how their world works if they understood the differences between our various organizational models instead of conflating them. It’s confusing rather than enlightening.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Can you see the real me?

By Dennis Hartley

Marwencol: This is good therapy. No, seriously.

From whence it follows, that one thing cannot have two beginnings of existence, nor two things one beginning; it being impossible for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant, in the very same place; or one or the same thing in different places.

-John Locke, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

I’m dating myself here, but when I was 10 years old, I was obsessed with G.I. Joes. My best friend George and I would spend hours staging little dramas with the dolls for our amusement. It’s probably a good thing that we did this solely for our own amusement, because a casual observer might conclude that these two kids were a little weird. We very rarely dressed our G.I. Joes “correctly”. We never fantasized standard combat scenarios; we in fact created our own individual super-hero avatars, by mixing and matching uniforms and accoutrements from the four branches of military service to create unique entities. I was Mar-navy Man, George was Air-Army Man. We were so into our characters that, in addition to acting out, we created our own series of meticulously hand-made comic books, so we could document our adventures. OK, I guess I was a weird kid.

Normally, this little childhood anecdote doesn’t pop up in everyday conversation; nor have I ever felt compelled to share it with readers over the course of 200+ weekly posts I have written (and as a pick-up line, I think we can safely say that it is right out). However, as I watched Jeff Malmberg’s extraordinary documentary, Marwencol, (which plays like a mash-up of Memento, Lars and the Real Girl, and Pecker) those memories came flooding back, and I consequently found myself empathizing with the film’s subject, Mark Hogancamp, in emotionally resonant ways I could never have predicted.

Hogancamp’s unique journey was one borne of tragedy. In 2000, he was at death’s door, following a brutal beating by five men outside a bar in Kingston, N.Y. His situation was touch and go for the first week or so (the first 9 of his 40 days in the hospital were spent in a coma), but he eventually recovered enough from his physical injuries to become somewhat self-sufficient again. Unfortunately, however, the brain damage he sustained from the attack was permanent; as a result, he had virtually no memories of his life prior to the incident. Photos and home movies indicate that he was happily married at one time, to a woman who he, in essence, only “knows” from her pictures (I can’t even fathom how strange of a head space that would put someone in). People “tell” him that he was fond of the bottle; interestingly he now has no craving for alcohol whatsoever, post-trauma. On this aspect of his former life, he does have some tangible documentation-in his own handwriting. He shows the filmmaker piles of notebooks, which he refers to as his “drunk journals”. These diaries fascinate him, yet still fail to trigger any cognizance of personal identity. Also, there are reams of fantasy artwork that he had produced before the attack; and it’s all quite good, actually, in a Neal Adams/Frank Frazetta kind of vein. However, none of these clues can prepare the viewer for a tour of a little “town” called Marwencol.

Now, the Mark Hogancamp, that is to say, the corporeal being that we perceive to be “Mark Hogancamp” may exist and “live” in Kingston, N.Y., but as far as Mark himself is concerned, he actually lives in “Marwencol”. And Marwencol actually does “exist” (there are thousands of photographs to prove that it does). That being said, you’re not going to find Marwencol on Google Earth, because the entire town is located within the confines of Mark’s back yard. It’s a stunningly realistic 1/6 scale WW 2-era town, populated by G.I. Joes and Barbies. With infinite patience and laser-like focus, Mark constructed his town over a period of years, with every nook and cranny painstakingly detailed. This is not a hobby; it is on-going therapy (a luxury that he could not afford). Every doll has a back story; many are alter-egos of his friends and neighbors (including himself). Although the period detail is captured to a tee, Mark takes liberties with his storylines. For example, there are “good” and “bad” German soldiers (the “town Germans” get along fine with the American G.I.s, and the “SS” are the “bad” Germans). Even Mark’s assailants have alter-egos (SS, of course) who have faced the firing squad once or twice.

The story gets curiouser and curiouser, especially once a local professional photographer sort of stumbles onto Mark’s unique flair with a camera (he had been photo-documenting “daily life” in Marwencol for some time) and he is “discovered” by the New York art world (leaving Mark cautiously flattered, and more than a bit puzzled). There are even more surprises in store, as the many layers of this remarkable individual are very deliberately peeled away by the filmmaker (judge not a book by its cover, my friends). This aspect of the story strongly recalls Jessica Yu’s 2004 documentary, In the Realms of the Unreal, about artist Henry Darger, an elderly recluse who in point of fact had no clue that he was an “artist” up to his dying day. Like Hogancamp, he had a “second life” spent completely immersed in his own fantasy world; the main difference being that his “Marwencol” (if you will) was a mythic, Tolkien-like construct, dutifully annotated and rendered in art and prose, and discovered by others only after his death, when over 300 paintings and a lavishly illustrated 15,000 page novel were found in his cramped apartment. However (Monday morning psychological quarterbacking aside) what drove Darger (a nondescript janitor by day) into his rich alternate reality, remains a mystery.

Although the film has a discomfiting, want-to-look-away-but-you-can’t Grey Gardens vibe at the outset, it’s more than yet another “portrait of a quirky eccentric”. It’s a journey into the very essence of what defines human identity and the consciousness of “self”. It also demonstrates that the idea of reinventing oneself is not just an elective luxury, exclusive to the creative class. For some persevering souls, it is a means of survival.

Previous posts with related themes:

Synecdoche, N.Y.
Where the Wild Things Are

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Tea Party Priorities

by digby

The Tea Party agenda was ostensibly about economic issues, but that was always a dicey proposition. It was necessary for the far right to downplay their essential social conservatism during the election cycle in order to pretend to be something other than they were. But all the people who follow the far right closely knew that their “libertarianism” was a beard for their real concerns — which are the same as they ever were.

Here’s how it’s playing out in the states:

Incoming GOP governors and legislative leaders across the nation insist they intend to focus initially on fiscal measures to spur the economy, cut spending and address state budget problems.
[…]

But the pressure to go further, as soon as possible, is only slightly below the surface in states where conservatives’ top social goals have been foiled for years by Democratic vetoes and legislative obstacles.

The tension is particularly visible in Kansas, where the victory by Gov.-elect Sam Brownback, a strong opponent of abortion and gay marriage, has created strong expectations among evangelical supporters.

A similar scenario is taking shape in strongly conservative Oklahoma, where a Republican governor will replace a Democrat, and to a lesser extent in Michigan, Wisconsin and several other states.

It all depends on the meaning of the word “conservative” you see. A whole lot of these Tea Party conservatives are defined by social conservatism, law and order, war, xenophobia and more than a little racial resentment. There are gun advocates who care about the second amendment and some Militia types who are concerned about black helicopters and all these strains mesh together into the rightwing stew. But since the commies (other than Obama) went away, the economic side of the equation has been reduced to a vague belief that government is making it impossible for them to be rich because it’s giving all their money to the undeserving. It’s not well thought out beyond putting the concerns all humans have about their security and prosperity into an amorphous package of “small government.”

It’s the culture war issues that really motivate them and they are not in a mood to wait any longer for results. They want action and if the standard bearers don’t give it to them, they’ll find someone who will:

Brownback’s economy-first approach in Kansas has put him in the rare position of disappointing conservative allies.

Rep. Owen Donohoe, a Republican from the Kansas City-area suburb of Shawnee, sent colleagues an e-mail saying Brownback’s legislative agenda “may not be as conservative as we wish.”

I didn’t know it was possible to be any more conservative than Sam Brownback, but apparently it is.

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Chia Obama

by digby

@Dave Weigel tweeted this today with a simple “Oh my God”. I also missed this when it came out in 2009 (and was quickly pulled from the shelves:)

I used to make fun of Bush kitsch, but this far exceeds anything I’ve ever seen. In fact, it’s so out there, I’m tempted to think that this guy had something to do with it:

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