Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

People are complicated. Love is not.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

A dilettante blog from the great progressive state of West Virginia.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Republicans do not pay their debts.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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Old Folks Boogie

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Most folks realize that we are all heading for our second taste of non-existence at a constant rate of one day per day (don’t give me none of those event horizon/Protoss portal/twins paradoxical time bending maundering, either  you denizens of  ‘con and SciFi channel) .

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What’s more — and I’ll admit this may be the fifty-something me talking, so feel free to challenge this presumption in the comments — I’m guessing that most of us recognize certain rewards that accrue as we successfully complete each circuit ’round the sun.  Losses too, of course, and more of them as the decades past (I’d love to reacquaint myself with my knees of twenty years ago, and certain summers, and the people now gone always and most of all).

But I wouldn’t want to give up what I’ve learned, the stuff I now know how to do, the way I come at the world with enough understanding to help me act each day with at least a bit more capacity than I had in my happy, high energy, dumb 20s (or 40s).  What’s more I value evidence of that kind of accumulated judgment in folks who seek to lead me and my country (and world).  I don’t think I’m entirely alone in this.*

Which is why I read this in today’s NYT with such…well…

Glee.

Jonathan Martin’s piece on the GOP’s emerging strategy for dealing with the presumptive Hilary Clinton juggernaut is in fact a masterpiece of subtle knife work. 

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Ignore the Backseat Drivers

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At a recent closed-door event (where remarks were recorded, of course), Bill Clinton reportedly said President Obama risks looking like a “wuss” and a “fool” for staying on the sidelines in Syria. John McCain, who never met a war he didn’t want to mong (H/T Jim, Foolish Literalist), angrily attended that same event and angrily agreed with Clinton’s assessment. McCain has been angrily emitting angry noises about Obama’s reluctance to open up a third conflict for months now.

To his credit, Obama has ignored the backseat drivers so far. Here’s Booman, via commenter lamh36:

Bill Clinton is correct when he says that you can’t let opinion polls be your guide to foreign policy. But when he compares the situation in Syria to the situation he faced in Kosovo, he’s making one of the stupidest statements that I have ever heard from him…

First of all, the idea that the United States can “cause” a calamity in Syria is ridiculous. It is already a calamity, and it’s not because of our inaction. And the idea that all we need to do to fix the calamity and solve the refugee problem is to “drop a few bombs” is beyond idiotic.

For Clinton to appear with John McCain and make comments like this is a perfect vindication of my total opposition to his wife’s candidacy for president. We cannot afford more leadership from people who think about American power in this way. Obama has already overruled the advice of Hillary Clinton, the Joints Chiefs of Staff, then Director of the CIA David Petraeus, and then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, and kept us out of the conflict in Syria. Now he has the former president intimating that he’s a wuss and a fool.

This is what we gained when we won the presidency for Obama. A cool head.

But even as you read this, CNN and other media outlets are designing slick new logo packages for reports on the next conflict, the occasion being the news that the White House has said Syria crossed a “red line” by using chemical weapons. The drumbeat is getting a bit louder.

I don’t claim to understand all the facts and implications in the Syria situation, although obviously it’s a tragedy, and innocent people, including children, are being harmed and killed. That sucks.

But should we really be shoveling weapons to the people who are opposing Assad, as McCain has angrily urged? Is it a good idea to send RPGs to the heart-eater guy and take sides in a conflict between factions aligned with Hezbollah on one side and al Qaeda on the other? Can’t we continue to provide humanitarian assistance and otherwise stay the fuck out of it?

According to another account of Clinton’s remarks, he made an additional astoundingly wrongheaded comparison:

He compared Syria with Afghanistan when that country was fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s. American help to the Afghans at that time yielded great benefits for the U.S. in the eyes of the Afghan people. Unfortunately, the U.S. didn’t follow up by supporting Afghanistan and Americans shouldn’t think interventions are quick or easy, he said.

Does anyone remember how that turned out? Sweet Fancy Moses, I thought if any former president understood blowback, it would be Bill Clinton. Keep ignoring the backseat drivers, Mr. President.

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Not Quite Getting It…Or the Perils of Village Life

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I usually think well of Garance Franke-Ruta’s work over at The Atlantic, so what follows isn’t so much a “pox-upon-her-house” screed as it is a cautionary tale.

Vice President Joe Biden came to my patch yesterday,  MIT, to play his familiar role as consoler-in-chief at the memorial service for Sean Collier, the MIT police officer murdered last week.

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His speech was vintage Joe, powerful, direct, colored by emotion expressed bluntly, clearly, without (seeming)* artifice.  It was aimed carefully — if you actually listened —  towards at least two audiences: not just the sea of police and students spread out before him, but also the Republican party, and the American people beyond.

That’s what Franke-Ruta missed as she chased a tired meme.  Hers is the artless Joe, who genuinely, if perhaps a little embarassingly, is all raw heat, no reflection — the administration’s “id” as her headline would have it.  The comparison to be drawn is obvious, and Franke-Ruta does so in her first sentence:  Joe’s the man with real-people responses, which  his boss, the President is too cool (read, not quite human) to deliver.  From there, her analysis dives even deeper into conventional wisdom:

Today’s example was Biden unleashing a stream of wholly warranted invective at the Boston Marathon bombers. Speaking at memorial services for slain M.I.T. police officer Sean Collier, he called bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev “two twisted, perverted, cowardly knock-off jihadis.”…

Some asserted he was insensitively diminishing the attack by calling the attackers “knock-off.” But there was no question that in repeatedly calling the suspects “perverted jihadis,” Biden was once again taking on his designated role as senior administration official who gets to sling it.

Fortunately, Franke-Ruta posted a video of part of Biden’s speech, so her readers could check her exegesis.  Listen, and you’ll certainly hear Biden excoriate the Tsarnaevs.  But the guts of his argument are to be found in what Biden said next, about the right — and wrong — ways to respond to the acts of terrorists, hard core or mere knock-offs:

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Chechen Little

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As more information comes to light about the Beantown Bombers, it becomes increasingly clear that Uncle Ruslan was right all along: The brothers were / are a pair of not-too-bright losers. Mother Jones offers a list of odd and stupid things the Boom-Boom Bros did that directly resulted in their death and/or capture. These items include leaving their carjacked hostage alone in the vehicle while they went into a convenience store for Red Bull and then failing to toss their escaped victim’s mobile phone, enabling the cops to track their every move.

They’re murderers, sure, but sophisticated terror kingpins? Please. And yet the very lawmakers who most frequently have to pause to wring the accumulated ball-sweat out of their much-humped personal copies of the US Constitution are now ready to torch that document because of the supposed existential threat posed by clowns like the Boom-Boom Bros.

Senator Lindsey Graham, perpetually trying to butch up sufficiently to head off a possible tea party primary challenge, took to the Senate floor yesterday to baldly declare a thought-crime and ethnic-caste standard that would eliminate due process for certain American citizens:

“Here’s what we’re suggesting, that the surviving suspect — due to the ties that these two have to radical Islamic thought and the ties to Chechnya, one of most radical countries in the world — that the president declare preliminarily that the evidence suggests that this man should be treated as an enemy combatant.”

The “we” in that first clause includes Senator John McCain, the Hanoi Hilton survivor who is apparently transformed into a squealing candy ass at the sight of a teenage jihadi-wannabe’s wispy moustache. Senator Kelly Ayotte rounds out the new neocon triumvirate in lieu of the departed Joe Lieberman. She’s an improvement over her predecessor only in that her mouth isn’t bracketed by alarming skin-pleats and she doesn’t have a mewling voice that tempts listeners to drive chopsticks through their own eardrums to escape its range. But on foreign policy, she’s pretty much Joe in a dress.

In the interest of civility, let’s assume that these three and their fellow Republicans aren’t corrupt, cynical hucksters who are attempting to transform the blood of innocent people into political gain. So they must be cowards instead, sniveling, bed-wetting chicken-shits who are ready to toss our national experiment with free speech and equality before the law into the toilet and hide under the nearest rock — and not before the very real and powerful threats arrayed against it from within and without, but before a pair of moronic clowns like the Boom-Booms. Some “Daddy Party.”

[X-posted at Rumproast]

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“Vietnam Syndrome”: Tell Me Again Why This Would Be A Bad Thing?

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You know, probably the main reason me and a lot of other people now old enough for AARP were “prematurely anti-Shock’n’Awe” is that we remembered what happened when America decided to get involved in an (unwinnable) war with a distant (much less powerful) nation for vague Realpolitickal excuses. I googled ‘Vietnam Syndrome”; the second entry was the Urban Dictionary:

A view held largely by American conservatives that the “loss” of the Vietnam War has created an American public biased against any type of American military conflict.

They argue that bad memories of the Vietnam War (scandals, protests, riots, images of killed/wounded soldiers and civilians, etc.) have caused the American people to distrust any type of war at all. As a result, it is argued, any attempt by the United States to engage in a military conflict will be viewed by the American people as “another Vietnam.”

The third entry was Marvin Kalb at the Brookings Institute, just this January:

It had never really left—what was widely referred to as the “Vietnam syndrome”–but it has now returned unmistakably, certain to exercise a major influence on American foreign policy during President Barack Obama’s second term in office. It is the belief, born of brutal experience during the Vietnam War, that never again will the United States gradually tiptoe into questionable wars without a clearcut objective, overwhelming military force, an endgame strategy and, most important, the support of Congress and the American people. In today’s world of terrorist threat and guerrilla war, the Vietnam syndrome means, if nothing else, a fundamental reluctance to commit American military power anywhere in the world, unless it is absolutely necessary to protect the national interests of the country. The Vietnam syndrome is a giant step away from hard-edged policies, such as President George W. Bush’s adventurous plunge into Iraq in 2003, and toward softer-edged policies, such as President Obama has pursued in his measured anti-Qaddafi approach to the Libyan revolution and his careful, arms-length-away attitude to the complicated mess in Syria….

Why the flying fuck would this be a bad idea? Because not throwing American lives away, not destroying foreign nations and distant people, not wasting trillions of dollars desperately needed for more productive uses, not being willing to “pick up some crappy little country and throw it against a wall just to prove we’re serious” will threaten Michael Ledeen’s self-perceived manliness?

Could we just pass a law guaranteeing every neocon a free lifetime supply of boner pills, and spend the remaining two trillion dollars on rebuilding stuff (here at home, and in the rest of the world) rather than breaking more shit?
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Will No One Rid Me Of This Vexatious Solon?

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I’m guessing that most of those who read this blog will already have heard about John McCain’s latest descent into former decency:

Constituents at a town hall hosted by Sen. John McCain Wednesday in Phoenix cheered after the Arizona Republican told the mother of an Aurora, Colo. shooting victim that an assault weapons ban could not get through Congress.

“My 24-year-old son, Alex, was murdered in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.,” Caren Teves said. “These assault rifles allow the shooter to fire many rounds without having to reload. These weapons to do not belong on our streets.”

“I can tell you right now you need some straight talk. That assault weapons ban will not pass the Congress of the United States,” McCain responded. The video, posted Thursday by Phoenix’s KTVK, showed the line drawing applause and cheers from the crowd.

YMMV, but from where I stand, it takes a special sort of person to tell the mother of a murdered child that they need “straight talk.”  And by “special” I mean…

…you know what I mean.

He’s got the self-righteous condescension act down, certainly.  I have no doubt that Ms. Teves has an abundance of experience of blunt reality, but John McCain still found it in him to set her straight. That’s impressive — albeit in a wholly unimpressive frame.

So far, we’re on familiar territory. John McCain is no maverick, never has been.

Study_of_Wild_Horses-Albert_Bierstadt

 

But for all that I didn’t catch the next level of wretchedness in this encounter until dinner time, when I told my son about it.  He listened, and then asked a question so obvious that I’m still wondering why it didn’t occur to me first:

Would McCain, my twelve year old wondered, would he have told a man that he needed some straight talk about his murdered son, and the implications of that death?

Who can say?  It’s a counterfactual, meant to stimulate thought, not to secure a certain answer.

But damn, that’s an instructive question.

Certainly I hadn’t at first quite heard the gender condescension.  If McCain’s questioner had been a burly guy with muscles and facial hair, would he have so blithly offered “straight talk?”

Maybe.  But I can’t convince myself that the president-of-the-Sunday-morning-shows would have let fly quite so readily.

In any event, my takeaway from this (besides that I am, as usual,  proud of my son) is it sure took guts for John McCain to bully Caren Teves to make a few points at a town hall, didn’t it?  In that context, ISTM that the defining quality of all those few, unhappy few members of the GOP’s should-know-better faction  (and yes, I’m looking at you, Lindsay Graham, et al.)… is that core property of the sane-ish rump of the national party is cowardice.

It’s ugly as hell to watch, but I am comforted that these are the markers of an institution far along its ride on the oblivion express.  I share John’s weariness at having to whack the same damn moles day after day — but I am increasingly confident that it hurts them more than it hurts us.

And with that — it’s time to return to the last of the wine to wash down an excellent (and on-sale) rib-eye.

Image:  Alfred Bierstadt, Study of Wild Horses, before 1902

 

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Hagel

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James Fallows is digging deep on the Hagel hearings, trying to figure out why Hagel did kind of a crap job. I have to say I’m not surprised because Hagel has always seemed, for want of a better word, dumb. By “dumb” I guess I mean mainly “inarticulate”, but it goes farther than just being bad with words. He has a hard time coming up with quick replies to arguments, he generally has the puzzled/scared look of someone who’s out of their depth, and he plows through his memorized or written talking points in the deadened, rote manner of someone reading a text that’s essentially foreign to them.

That may sound harsh, but I don’t mean it to be, because I think Hagel is dumb (inarticulate) but not stupid (blind in the face of obvious evidence), and he’s certainly no coward. He made a lot of money by jumping into cell phones at just the right time, and, after making a mistake with Iraq, he had the guts and insight to change his mind. He’s not a reflexive warmonger like Grandpa McCain, and he seems to have pretty good interpersonal skills (at least there are no “asshole Hagel” stories that I’ve heard). He’s just not quick on his feet and apparently all the studying he did had no good effect when it came time to face the Armed Services Committee.

It doesn’t take a genius to be a good politician, in fact, being too smart (or, really, thinking that you’re really smart) is probably not a great qualification for a job that includes a lot of boring repetition, gladhanding and ass-in-chair meeting time. And, obviously, if I were as dumb as Hagel, maybe I’d be a multi-millionaire ex-Senator instead of a shitty blogger. Still, there’s no need to go into the weeds to find a reason that Hagel fell flat during those hearings: whatever his strengths, a modern-day Cicero he ain’t.

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