Joe Conason, still debunking Clinton pseudoscandals

Joe Conason, co-author with Gene Lyons of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000), has addressed two sets of Clinton pseudoscandals. Uranium One is a relatively new entry in the portfolio of Clinton pseudoscandals. The allegation is that Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State was bribed by Russians via the Clinton Foundation into approving the sale of a company named Uranium One to a state-owned Russian company, Rosatom.

Clinton Conason writes in One radioactive smear campaign New York Daily News 11/19/2017:

Neither the House Republicans nor Sessions have yet explained how the Clintons could have controlled the disposition of Uranium One's assets. Nor have they explained how the Uranium One deal, which prohibited the Russians from selling so much as an ounce of uranium ore outside the borders of the United States, could have endangered American national security.

And they have also failed to explain why the entire deal matters anyway, since the portion of U.S. reserves owned by Uranium One represents a tiny fraction of a fraction — a tenth of 1% — of the world's uranium supply, most of which comes from Kazakhstan, Australia and Canada.

He sketches out the claim here:

Through a complex series of business deals, Russia had obtained control of a portion of U.S. uranium reserves, using a Vancouver-based company called Uranium One. Some of the Canadian investors who profited from the sale of Uranium One to Rosatom, the Russian state-owned atomic energy corporation, had given millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

Russia's acquisition of American uranium had been approved by the State Department while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State. And Bill Clinton had received a $500,000 fee for a speech delivered in Moscow at a bank that had some connection with Uranium One.

What weakened that apparently damning story was a single big flaw: Hillary Clinton never had the sole authority to sign off on the sale of Uranium One to the Russians, but held only a single seat on a government panel that included members from nine agencies, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.

What Conason doesn't say, though I think it's important, is that the laws are far too permissive on ways that donors and/or bribers (sometimes there is no difference) can channel money to candidates and campaigns. Payments to a candidates spouse of, say, $500,000 for a single speech - and even the prospect of earning such speaking fees after leaving office - certainly can be used in that way. But it's not at all clear that such a thing occurred in the Uranium One deal, or that the payments to the Clinton Foundation were in any way illegal. It looks like a pure pseudoscandal to me.

But I see this problem in the larger context of the Citizens' United campaign-funding regime, which is an oligarchical system that inevitably creates de facto corruption, even if much of it is de jure legal.

And, of course, our Pod Pundits can never resist a return to the Bill Clinton Penis Hunt of the 1990s. And the Republicans are skilled in playing to that obsession and to the corporate media's posture of trying to provide a Both Sides Do It phony equivalency between the Democratic and Republican parties on all issues.

So it took only a few days after the Roy Moore sex scandals broke for the Republicans to get the media back on the BCPH again. And there are always Democrats feckless enough to play the same game. Conason addresses the Return Of The BCPH in A ‘Reckoning’ For Bill Clinton? Don’t Forget Starr’s $70 Million Probe National Memo 11/17/2017:

Unlike Weinstein, Moore, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, or any of the dozens of powerful men whose misdeeds have provoked a wave of justified fury, Clinton endured a long, painful, and very costly series of official investigations of his alleged sexual misdeeds. Various accounts of his private behavior, whether invented or truthful, filled thousands of hours of national airtime, millions of inches of newsprint, and dozens of books ....

Unlike the Fox News criminals and many other creeps who quietly reached settlements that kept the most lurid details of their behavior under court seal, Clinton’s alleged acts were litigated publicly all the way to the Supreme Court — with attendant coverage that included, among other embarrassments, a debate about the appearance of his penis.

And most important, unlike any of those now in the dock, Clinton underwent a $70-million investigation by a zealous federal inquisitor who had all the powers of the Justice Department, a team of relentless and experienced prosecutors, and the forensic services of the FBI, which he employed in a wide-ranging sex probe that went back decades. That special prosecutor’s name was Kenneth W. Starr. He would be dismayed to learn that his dogged efforts to destroy Clinton have so soon been forgotten.

He also reminds us of the eager but unsuccessful results of Kenneth Starr to validate the claims of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, two favorite icons of the latest BCPH. Which, for the Republicans, will apparently never goes away. I expect them to be harping on it 50 years from now. He also reminds us of the outcome of Paula Jones' charges.

Even after all this time, I still feel stunned when I'm reminded by an article like this how ridiculous the Clinton pseudoscandals lumped under the "Whitewater" rubric really were.

It was the New York Times that vaulted the Whitewater affair into a national issue by its credulous reporting in 1992, which was very competently dissected by Conason and Lyons in The Hunting of the President, and earlier by Lyons in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (1996), and in the documentary film version of The Hunting of the President.

So the NYT at least deserves credit for reporting on the final report of the special counsel in the Whitewater case, headed in its last phase by Robert Ray, Final Report By Prosecutor On Clintons Is Released 03/21/2002

In a final report that ends the Whitewater investigation that sprawled across a range of subjects and vexed President Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton for most of his two terms in the White House, the independent counsel's office said today that there was insufficient evidence to show that either committed any crimes.

Robert W. Ray, the last occupant of the office of independent counsel for Whitewater matters, said in the 2,090-page report that the Clintons' principal business partner in the Whitewater land development scheme in Arkansas, James B. McDougal, had committed several acts of fraud, but that there was no credible evidence that the Clintons either knew of or participated in those acts.

The report concluded the long legal melodrama that resulted in Mr. Clinton's impeachment and sharply split the nation about whether he was the victim of a politically motivated criminal investigation or had truly committed substantial offenses.

The whole underlying pseudoscandal around Whitewater turned out to have been completely bogus.

Gene Lyons: "You know things are crazy when Ann Coulter starts making sense"

That's what he said in Why Gingrich Might Be Good For America National Memo 01/25/2012. The title refers to Gene's calculation on Newt's weakness as a candidate:

I think even the perception that Newt could get under Obama’s skin is badly mistaken. In a presidential debate, the guy sweating and glowering is the guy losing. The sorehead right, however, won’t believe it until they’ve lost the visceral confrontation they so crave.

In that sense, a Gingrich nomination could end up being very good for the country.

But he also looks unsentimentally at Newt's base in South Carolina during that primary:

Judging by the whooping and hollering of the CNN debate audience, the GOP’s neo-Confederate wing wishes for nothing less than an electoral replay of Pickett’s charge—the doomed infantry attack at Gettysburg most historians believe marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. A sizeable proportion of South Carolinians have yearned for a rematch ever since.

And they don’t think they're going to get it with Mitt Romney, a Yankee’s Yankee who goes around babbling passionless truisms like this gem unearthed from his standard stump speech by the National Review’s Mark Steyn:

"I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

My favorite line comes immediately following: "Do what? (That’s Southern for what the hell?)"

Willard Romney clearly looks like a better candidate than Newt in the horse-race sense. Whether or not that's true, that rabid Republican base will almost certainly find themselves just as interested in getting Willard elected as they would be for Newt. Because he's going to be running against the guy they consider to be a Muslim Kenyan Marxist America-hating atheist.

Tags: 2012 election, gene lyons, newt gingrich

Willard-steria from the GOP frontrunner

Gene Lyons catches Willard Romney giving a great example of the level to which today's Republican Party has sunk in Obama's "post-partisan" strategy Salon 02/01/2012:

Mitt Romney has this passage in his stump speech where he all but accuses the president of being a communist.

"President Obama," Romney insists, "believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing — the government."

This when the multimillionaire Wall Street investment banker isn't accusing hecklers of envying his wealth — rarely a successful political tactic, in my experience.

This is one reason I have a hard time thinking of "moderate" and "conservative" wings in today's Christian Republican White People's Party. There just isn't any significant presence in Congress or among the Presidential candidates of anyone who the label "moderate" really fits. Willard may be temperamentally less unsuited for the Oval Office than Newt. But he ain't no moderate.

Tags: 2012 election, gene lyons, mitt romney

Perils of Papa Doc Paul

There's no way Ron "Papa Doc" Paul and his base constituency are going to be part of a political coalition that could be called liberal or progressive. At the same time, thanks to the nature of our media culture right now, the only kind of broad criticisms of US global military strategy and interventions that most people have heard on TV recently are those coming from Papa Doc. For liberal critics of those policies, Papa Doc's framing is a real problem, not only because of his kooky conspiracy theories but because he often couches them in the false-but-mainstream austerity-economics argument that the US is going broke and can't afford more borrowing or deficits.

Gene Lyons takes on Papa Doc and his movement for the second time in two weeks, Digging in Ron Paul's Survival Kit Arkansas Times 01/11/2012:

While he's often cagey about how he expresses it, Ron Paul's whole history as a conspiracy theorist is right out of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" — the 19th century forgery that's kept anti-Semites buzzing for generations. ...

Reader Mel Birge of Portland, Oregon argues that's precisely why Paul makes such a terrible spokesman. Complaining of "sitting in synagogue for the last dozen years listening to pseudo Middle-East experts give the same frantic talk about the danger of Iran nukes and how the US must stop it," he believes such a war "is no way in the United States' interest."

But he also thinks Paul's "anti-semitic paranoia allows AIPAC, the Neocons and their fellow travelers to paint the entire Iran war opposition with the Ron Paul brush. That's the danger of Ron Paul that you should speak of: He snuffs out substantive discussions on Iran. The media feasts on him and the Neocons love it because he's his own straw man."

Charlie Pierce in his look at the state of the Republican Presidential race, We're All in Romney's Great Adventure Together Now Esquire Politics Blog 01/11/2012, writes that we could have Papa Doc as a visible factor in the Presidential election for months to come:

Which leaves us with the fascinating question of Dr. Ron Paul. He finished a decent second last night, crushing the campaign of Jon Huntsman. He is in an odd place. He is not a contender for the nomination in any real sense. However, he can continue to move through the cycle, not seeking conventional success, but piling up delegates pledged only to him. (If the rumors around Manchester on Tuesday night are true, and Paul's campaign has managed to raise $10 million over the past few days, then he can go on forever. That amount of money to his campaign is $100 million to a more conventional one.) This will give him a center of personal power with which Willard, and the rest of the party, will have to find some way to cope. Paul has stubbornly - and shrewdly - refused to state categorically that he will not bolt the party in the general election. He can string the whole business along, talking in his giddy survivalist code about "fiat money," and nobody will be in any position to take him on. He is going to stay on his own hook; in 2008, across the river in Minneapolis, Paul set up his own convention in opposition to the Republican National Convention. He can do whatever mischief he wants from now until the end of the summer, and nobody's in any position to make him stop. That is the only story left, save for the epic Horatio Alger saga of Willard Romney, Boy of the Streets, proud American, and proof positive that, in this great country, any son of an auto millionnaire and former governor of Michigan can grow up almost to be president. [my emphasis]

Papa Doc is a destructive, retrograde influence in American politics, and not solely inside the Republican Party. But progressive critics of the militarism and interventionism of our current foreign policy also have to deal with the reality that, in the 2012 election cycle, the main general criticism of the current approach to foreign policy that many voters will hear - the only one many voters are likely to register - is that coming from Papa Doc.

That doesn't mean we have to pretend that Papa Doc's general perspective is anything other than the Old Right isolationism and Bircher conspiracy-mongering that it is. The core concept of Papa Doc's foreign policy is hyper-nationalism and xenophobia, which is how it fits in with anti-immigrant and pro-segregation parts of Papa Doc's toxic ideology. And it certainly doesn't mean that the motley crew of segregationists, militia types and assorted cranks who make up Papa Doc's core constituency are even potential allies in any meaningful sense of the word for a progressive movement.

But it does mean that we need to pay attention to which parts of Papa Doc's criticisms of foreign policy are resonating with the public, or have the potential to resonate with a larger audience.

Stephen Walt takes a careful look at Papa Doc's effect on the larger national security debate in Why Ron Paul may actually have something right Foreign Policy 01/06/2012:

... [D]espite his bizarre views on the gold standard, climate change, social security, and the like, Paul has put his finger on a number of issues that could resonate broadly with the American people, especially if discussion were not monopolized by think tanks and insiders who are strongly committed to the status quo. Unlike most foreign policy "experts" in both parties, Paul believes the United States is an extraordinarily secure country, with a robust nuclear deterrent, no powerful enemies nearby, and at present no major power rivals of much significance. He instinctively rejects the paranoia and worst-casing that has convinced Americans that we need to roam around the world trying to remake it in our image (a task, by the way, that we're not very good at). He believes that excessive interventionism and other failed policies are a primary cause of anti-Americanism around the world, and that the United States would be more popular and safer if we focused more attention on trade and diplomacy and domestic issues instead of emphasizing military dominance and overseas meddling. He believes that a bloated national security state and a quasi-imperial foreign policy inevitably fosters greater government secrecy and erodes traditional restraints on executive power. And like former president (and five-star general) Dwight D. Eisenhower, he thinks the current military-industrial complex wields excessive influence on our politics and has become a self-perpetuating engine for counter-productive meddling abroad.

These points are all debatable, of course, but Paul is the only person in the race who even wants to discuss them. The rest of the GOP candidates are mostly competing to see who can sound the most eager for war (usually with Iran) or most willing to toss more money at the Pentagon. Barack Obama is a lot more sensible than they are, but as we've learned over the past three-plus years, neither he nor his national security team are interested in making dramatic changes in America's overall grand strategy. Instead, Obama has emerged as a strong proponent of government secrecy, a staunch defender of maintaining U.S. primacy around the world, and as an enthusiastic user of drones, special forces, and other tools of U.S. power. He did eventually wind down the war in Iraq, of course, but it hardly took a strategic genius to figure out that this was the right course.

Tags: gene lyons, radical right, ron paul, stephen walt

Climate denial marches on

Gene Lyons takes on Republican climate denial in his 12/14/2011 column, Why do people still deny climate change? Salon. He summarizes the sad state of the politics of climate change in the US:

In GOP circles, it’s considered sensible to warn against the grave threat of Shariah law being imposed in Oklahoma, but weeks on end of rainless 110 degree afternoons, not so much. Democrats like President Obama appear to have concluded that global warming is like gun control, where reasoned self-interest has little chance against well-organized fanaticism. So why bother?

He links to an October 2010 paper by Clive Hamilton, Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, which discusses the mass basis for climate denialism. Climate denialism hasn't spontaneously arisen from some general conceptual bias, of course. It has been heavily promoted by the energy industry, including the Koch brothers, following on the model used by the tobacco industry for years to constantly dispute the established science and medical knowledge on smoking.

Hamilton notes that the concept of peer review of scientific papers goes back to the British Royal Society: "Since the founding of modern science, matters of fact have been established through the common assent of those qualified to judge under rules laid down in the 17th century by the Royal Society."

He also ends by noting that the global climate change crisis dramatically emphasizes how problematic the sharp distinction people have traditionally drawn between Humanity and Nature is:

Developments in climate science have revealed a natural world so influenced by human activity that the epistemological division between nature and society can no longer be maintained. When global warming triggers feedback effects, such as melting permafrost and declining albedo from ice-melt, will we be seeing nature at work or human intervention? The mingling of the natural and the human has philosophical as well as practical significance, because the “object” has been contaminated by the “subject”.

Climate denial can be understood as a last-ditch attempt to re-impose the Enlightenment’s allocation of humans and Nature to two distinct realms, as if the purification of climate science could render Nature once again natural, as if taking politics out of science can take humans out of Nature. The irony is that it was Enlightenment science itself, in the rules laid down by the Royal Society, that objectified the natural world, putting it on the rack, in Bacon’s grisly metaphor, in order to extract its secrets. We came to believe we could keep Nature at arms-length, but have now discovered, through the exertions of climate science, something pre-moderns took for granted, that Nature is always too close for comfort.

Or, as The X-Files' Fox Mulder put it more colloquially, you should always respect Nature, because Nature has no respect for you!

Tags: gene lyons, global climate change

The Republican vision for American society

Arkansas columnist Gene Lyons nails it How to sabotage a recovery Salon 06/08/2011:

What most [Republican leaders] have in mind is something more like the Deep South of the 1950s - an imagined paradise with comfortable "aristocrats," a timid middle class, and beaten-down peasants at each other's throats.

Many of them probably saw "The Andy Griffith Show" as a documentary.

I would just add, without Social Security.

Tags: gene lyons, republican party

What happens when the deficit deal gets done? How much of Social Security will be left?

Simpson-Bowles policy for seniors: Let them eat catfood!
I've come across several good items warning that we need to watch out for the next budget deals that Obama actually strikes with the Republicans, the one that is probably coming over raising the debt ceiling next month.

The notion that Obama has to negotiate budget deals with the Republicans over the debt ceiling is bogus. It's pure political theater. As Digby has been saying for months, if he negotiates over that it's because he wants to, not because he has to. Republican leaders know there's no choice but to raise the debt ceiling. Lots of the wealthiest Americans, the only constituency they truly care about, would lose serious money if the debt ceiling isn't extended on time. Obama does not have to deal with them over it.

But he's almost certainly going to. Gene Lyons uses sports analogies to discuss the debt limit fight in It's Time to Play Ball Cagle Post 04/14/2011. Gene thinks that Obama's budget deal from last week was a reasonable one for him to make, "the tactical equivalent of an intentional walk in baseball." In his reading, Obama preferred to stage a political confrontation with the Republicans' Ryan plan, proposed by "the Wisconsin Republican with the funeral director's demeanor and the zeal of an Ayn Rand enthusiast." He gives a great short summary of the Ryan proposal: "Reduced to a slogan, Ryan's ballyhooed plan is 'Back to the 19th Century': $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for millionaires and corporations, huge cuts in Social Security, Medicaid and food stamps, while privatizing Medicare."

But Gene is worried about what kind of ugly deals Obama will strike with the Ryan Republicans. He describes it on the explicit assumption that Obama is committed to the Democrats' own platform and campaign themes:

To the degree that it endorses Ryan's schemes, in a sane political climate the GOP would be risking political obsolescence. This was the same party that only a year ago pitched a fit over Sarah Palin’s imaginary "death panels." Now its leading thinker wants to control costs by asking grandma to bargain for cheaper heart surgery?

Standards, however, are anything but rational. The president faces a defining challenge. I often wonder whether Obama has mistaken the U.S. government for the Harvard Law Review, where the emollient balm of his personality persuaded rival factions to reason together.

Ivy League intellectual that he is, I’m afraid he definitely underestimates public ignorance on everything relating to the budget: where the money comes from, where it goes, and what’s at stake in the coming showdown over the U.S. government debt limit. It’s hard for somebody as obsessed with public policy as Obama to grasp how little his countrymen know.

Noting that trying to put the federal government into default is a non-starter even for the Teapartyized Republicans, he worries about Obama's willingness to act on that understanding:

Congress can repeal Medicare and Social Security, but it can't renounce their lawful debts. Ordinarily, an establishment Republican like John Boehner would refrain from even bluffing about the idea, which he dare not follow through.

Obama's seeming passivity, however, has made the GOP reckless.

Batter up. [my emphasis]

Robert Borosage of the Institute for America's Future observes in Obama's Deficits: Progressive Priorities, Conservative Context Huffington Post 04/13/2011 that Obama's Wednesday speech included some excellent statements of Democratic principles and vision of government. But he articulated them in a context in which he accepts the Republican framing and the economically destructive idea that cutting public spending is a good idea when the economy is in a weak recovery and is also in what economists call a "liquidity trap" - big corporate savings but domestic demand to weak to induce them to invest:

But it is worth understanding just how conservative this debate has become -- and how far the president has retreated. The most progressive president since Johnson has now embraced a center-right agenda -- even before entering negotiations with the Republicans.

The president effectively announced the demise of a reborn Keynesian era that has expired before the economy revived. 25 million Americans are in need of full-time work. Home values are still sinking; gas prices are at $4 a gallon and rising. Consumer confidence is plummeting. Europe's growth is slowing. But the federal government will join the states and cities in immediately cutting spending and laying off workers.

With this premature embrace of austerity, mass unemployment may become the new normal. Wages will remain stagnant. The concentration of wealth will grow and the middle class will continue to decline.

The president allowed that he was "sympathetic" to the view that we shouldn't cut spending until the economy is fully recovered. But he embraced the conservative argument that "doing nothing on the deficit is just not an option," because we could do "real damage to the economy" if we don't "begin a process now."

But mass unemployment and stagnant wages represent "real damage to the economy" that is here and now, not speculative. There's no sign of the potential harm that might be caused by deficits in the sometime future. Interest rates are low; America has no trouble financing its debt. The president started down this path prematurely in 2009; now he has forced the pace. [my emphasis]

Focusing on cutting deficits now is just Herbert Hoover economics. No better result can reasonably be expected from it in 2011 than in 1932.

And, from the Center on Budget and Priorities, Robert Greenstein on President Obama's Deficit-Reduction Plan 04/13/2011, another warning on the likely results of Obama-style budget negotiations:

Another significant concern stems from the President’s proposal to limit the annual growth in Medicare costs per beneficiary to the per capita rate of growth in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) plus only 0.5 percentage points and to require automatic cuts in Medicare if this target would otherwise be exceeded. This goal is laudable. But it may be unrealistic. Historically, Medicare costs per beneficiary have risen about 2 percentage points per year faster than GDP growth per capita. The health reform law will launch a series of demonstrations, pilots, and research projects to find effective ways to slow health care cost growth without reducing the quality of care or access to care. But we don’t know yet how much or how quickly we can lower health care cost growth, especially since the principal driver in cost growth is medical advances that improve health and save and prolong lives but add significant costs.

Finally, the President’s plan calls for a mechanism to trigger automatic reductions in programs and tax expenditures if the debt would exceed certain benchmarks (measured as a share of GDP). The goal of stabilizing the debt as a share of GDP is precisely the right one. But all triggers like this that have been designed in the past have suffered from a fatal flaw — they required the deepest budget cuts when the economy was weakest and the smallest cuts when it was strongest — the opposite of what sound economic policy entails. The President’s plan calls for the trigger to "include a mechanism to ensure that it does not exacerbate an economic downturn." No one has succeeded until now in producing a mechanism that meets this test, and it remains unclear whether it can be done. This new proposal bears some similarities to the trigger in the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, which was not successful and which Congress ultimately repealed.

To be sure, the President's plan represents an important step forward in the debate. But it should be recognized that this plan is a rather conservative one, significantly to the right of the Rivlin-Domenici plan. While we worry about some particular elements of the President’s plan, we worry much more that the deficit-reduction process that’s now starting could produce an outcome that is well to the right of the already centrist-to-moderately-conservative Obama proposal, by reducing its relatively modest revenue increases and cutting more deeply into effective programs that are vital to millions of Americans. [my emphasis]

Then there's this: Alexander Bolton, Some Senate Dems willing to consider Social Security reforms The Hill 04/13/11:

Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen.Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who caucuses with the Democrats, are all openly calling for reform, and making it plain that the party is disunited on the issue when a titanic debate over debt is gathering momentum.

The good news is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid continues to be a hardliner on the issue, at least in public:

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) refuses to give an inch on benefit cuts, arguing that the program has not contributed “one penny” to the debt.

There is currently a "Gang of Six" Senators working on a bipartisan budget proposal: Democrats Dick Durbin, Kent Conrad and Mark Warner, along with Republicans Saxby Chambliss, Tom Coburn and Mike Crapo. According to this report by Richard Wolf, 'Gang of Six' hopes to spur bipartisan action on deficit USA Today 04/11/2011.

The Gang of Six approach is based on Obama's commission, which called for a mix of spending cuts and tax increases. Obama never endorsed the plan, and his proposed 2012 budget called for only $1.1 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. But White House press secretary Jay Carney said the president knows much more is required.

That would be the Simpson-Bowles Catfood Commission, whose main focus was how to start the phaseout of Social Security. Wolf follows the now-standard journalistic convention of referring to the "plan" of the Catfood Commission, the actions which it "called for," etc. The Catfood Commission never issued a formal report, because not enough of the members could agree that old people should have to live on catfood. But apparently, since Obama appointed it stacked with Social Security opponents to provide those recommendations, our press corps has just decided to play along and pretend they did. Co-chairs and social Security opponents Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles did issue a plan, which is typically what is referred to by the Commission's plan or report. I guess this just illustrates how phony the whole bipartisan Kabuki with the Catfood Commission really was. It's purpose was to recommend Social Security Phaseout, so it's now Beltway consensus that they recommended that. Even though formally, the Commission didn't recommend anything at all.

Joan McCarter writes in disgust (Durbin, Lieberman, willing to 'take action' on Social Security Daily Kos 04/13/2011):

It's hard to imagine why any Democrat ... finds they are in agreement with Joe Lieberman, whose sole purpose in political life is now to piss on anything remotely progressive or important to the Democratic base, particularly on something as important as Social Security.

She relates "Gang of Six" member Dick Durbin's expressed willingness to include discussions on Social Security in deficit-reduction consideration, even though Social Security doesn't contribute to the federal deficit. In Harry Reid 2010 Netroots Nation convention appearance in Las Vegas, he said that he got Dick Durbin appointed to the Catfood Commission to defend Social Security! But Democratic activists have been particularly skeptical of Durbin since he made this statement, as reported by Obama Tells Debt Commission 'Everything Has to Be on the Table' New York Times 04/27/2010:

Representative Dave Camp of Michigan took pre-emptive aim at a value-added tax, saying, "Washington has borrowed enough from the American people."

But Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Senate Democratic leader, denounced suggestions of an administration VAT plan as the "musings of right-wing cable shows."

He also admonished "bleeding heart liberals" to be open to program reductions to restore fiscal balance. An hour after the commission’s meeting, however, several liberal activists held a conference call with reporters to press for additional spending to create jobs, lower military spending, higher taxes for the wealthy and no cuts in Medicare or Social Security. [my emphasis]

That was Obama a year ago this month, when he still had a solid majority of Democrats in the House. That article is a good reminder of how the Obama White House has always seen the deficit issue and the work of the Catfood Commission. It even contained a hint that if the Commission didn't agree on a report, the White House would pretend they had anyway. In ObamaSpeak, "everything has to be on the table" means Social Security Phaseout:

President Obama told his bipartisan debt commission on Tuesday that "everything has to be on the table," while the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, suggested overhauling the nation’s tax code to raise more revenue. ...

Former Senator Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, the panel's Republican co-chairman, warned the panel, "The extreme right and the extreme left will savage our final product."

That assumes, however, that the commission will agree to one before its Dec. 1 deadline. Expectations are low given the party polarization, especially in an election year.

Still, administration officials have suggested that should the commission reach a deadlock, Mr. Obama could adopt proposals left on the table.

While Fed chairmen typically stick to monetary policy and shy away from advising elected officials about budget policy, Mr. Bernanke's remarks were the latest in his recent string of calls for elected officials to make "hard choices" soon, before debt threatens the economy’s recovery and growth.

"Choices regarding Medicare, Social Security and other spending programs cannot be made in a vacuum but must be combined with decisions about how much revenue the government will raise and how it will raise it," he said. [my emphasis]

Dean Baker's analysis of the Simpson's and Bowles' recommendations remains relevant, unfortunately: The Deficit Commission’s Parallel Universe Boston Review 11/11/2010:

The country in which most people live is experiencing an economic disaster. More than 25 million people are unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work altogether. Tens of millions are now underwater on their mortgages, with millions facing the imminent loss of their homes. Furthermore, there is little prospect that the situation will improve anytime soon.

Many fewer live in the other America, the world of Wall Street and Washington lobbyists. This is where you’ll find former Wyoming Republican Senator Alan Simpson and investment banker-turned-Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, the co-chairs of President Obama’s deficit commission, which on Wednesday outlined its plans for what it calls “fiscal responsibility.” In their world the key fact is that, today, corporate profits are back to their pre-recession peaks. As long as the bonuses on Wall Street are again hitting record highs, the economy must be just fine, so what else is there to do but worry about deficits?

Tags: catfood commission, dean baker, dick durbin, gene lyons, robert borosage, robert greenstein, social security

Two views of Obama's Libya War

Three, actually. The third being Gene Lyons' cautious defense of Obama's action with particular reference to his Republican critics, Obama gambles his presidency Salon 03/30/2011. It's important to remember that this war has many aspects. There is the policy question of whether it's a good idea, which involves both strategic questions (is the current "global domination" strategy a good one?) and tactical ones (does this war make sense in terms of the current strategy?). There are also partisan (and intra-party) political issues, such as whether the various criticisms being directed at the Libya War make sense, and what they say about how other political players would handle this or similar situations.

As Gene writes of the bold Maverick McCain, "Bellicose chatter has simply become a reflex with McCain. If somebody told him global warming could be halted by bombing Antarctica, he'd start believing in it."

The two views of the title are focused on longer-term issues that relate to the Obama Administration's thinking and behavior: Steven Metz, An Obama Doctrine? Or: Why the president's speech reminded me of Donald Rumsfeld. The New Republic 03/28/2011; and, David Bromwich, The CIA, the Libyan Rebellion, and the President Huffington Post 03/31/2011.

Metz sees two key aspects of the amorphous entity that he and other commentators are starting to call the Obama Doctrine as expressed in Monday's Libya (non-)War speech. First is:

...the belief that the net effect of the Arab Spring is positive—that the operations of history are taking the Middle East toward better governance, greater respect for human rights, and, presumably, increased security and stability.

The second relates to the striking tone of restraint in how Obama describes the Libya War, which seems to daily become more of a contrast to its actual conduct:

The flipside of this view is the second, implicit theme in Obama's speech, which is that if the United States embraces the Arab Spring too tightly and attempts to dominate it, the results would be negative, perhaps even disastrous. Better to tolerate some things that the United States might not prefer than to attempt top control the revolution.

I've been impressed with David Bromwich's close observations of Obama. In this piece, he's engaging in some informed speculation that the United States and Britain may have been playing a bigger role all along in the Libyan uprising than we've been thinking. He observes:

President Obama, who had traveled far already from his origins when he reinstituted military tribunals and defended the treatment of Bradley Manning, is now seen to have cast his lot with a long history of secret wars and overthrows and kinetic military operations extending back to Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Vietnam in 1963, and Nicaragua in 1984.

However well-founded his speculation leading up to that may be (or not) - he's stretching when he tries to guess at what Tom Friedman is not telling us - his observations on Obama's concept of his foreign policy, so far as it can be determined from observation of Obama and what's in the public record, are worth considering. This seems fair enough, addressing the Obama's weird dancing around calling this a war:

Many things President Obama said on Monday were wishful. The affirmation that NATO "has taken command" was wishful. So, too, was the picture of the United States "for generations" as a unique force for justice and courageous sacrifice, in a world otherwise populated by the tyrannous, the craven, the selfish, and the weak. Many other things Obama said were half true: the suggestion for example that the consideration at the front of his mind when he gave his speech was the safety of American jets and American ships far beyond the reach of Libyan gunnery. But we have now, in this baffling administration, passed out of the twilight of ambiguity. We have entered the land of lies. It is a region where many comments add up to no comment, and where every partial truth must be parsed for legalistic reservations folded into fugitive turns of grammar.

This one is also well-founded, addressing the arrogance of power that is a chronic problem for US foreign policy:

Delusions of grandeur, which have always been the lower layer of President Obama's wishful commandments, were made more perilous in this case by delusions of convenience. The president likes things clean. But there is nothing clean about what we are doing in Libya.

In his opening paragraphs, Bromwich falls into the lingo of mindreading, when he tells us how Obama understands things "in his mind." But careless phrasing aside, it does address something important about how Obama sees the power of his own rhetoric:

One of Barack Obama's first acts as president was to say that Guantanamo must go. It did not go. Soon after, he said that the Israeli settlements must go. They expanded. Obama made his peace in the end with Guantanamo and the Israeli settlements. He restarted the military tribunals at Guantanamo -- a feature of the Bush-Cheney constitution which he once had explicitly deplored -- and recently went out of his way to defend the Guantanamo-like abuse (compulsory nakedness and sleep deprivation) inflicted on an American prisoner, Bradley Manning, in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico. One had come to think of "X must go" assertions by Obama as speculative prefaces to a non-existent work. His words, in his mind, are actions. When he speaks them once or twice, he has done what he was put here to do. If the existing powers defy his wishes, he embraces the powers and continues on his way.

The Egyptian protest of January and February saw a new siege of wishful commandments and reversals by the president. He told Mubarak to go. Then he told him to stay a while. Mubarak said he would stay, but after a time, he went, and in the mind of Obama, it appears, there was a relation of cause and effect between his initial request and the final result. He was consequently emboldened. [my emphasis]

I would suggest that the foreign and domestic versions of this could be understood in distinct ways. Lies and deceit are understood on all sides to be standard operating procedure in foreign affairs, along with spying and various other habits that would be considered disreptable in daily life. The American national security establishment tends to have a very elevated estimation of the power of the United States to direct events in other countries. So it's not surprising that a President would easily acquire an inflated sense of the power of his own words in foreign affairs - although the failure of his words to affect Israeli settlement policy that Bromwich mentions should give Obama cause for reflection on that score.

It seems to me that the domestic version may be a clue that Obama is operating on an notion that Nixon followed, which is that liberals were much easier to pacify with symbolism and rhetoric than conservatives are. Obama held fast to his campaign promise to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Other promises like closing Guantanamo, not so much.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich, gene lyons, libya war, mccain, steven metz

Gene Lyons on the merchants of hate

Gene Lyons weighs in with his view on Sarah Palin's callous take on the Tucson assassination attack earlier this month in Profiting from political road rage Salon 01/19/2011

My theory: Ever since Rush Limbaugh adapted the techniques of drive-time sports radio to politics -- the loudmouth hyperbole, the fake omniscience, the mute button -- the mass-marketing of outrage to people stuck in freeway traffic with blood-pressure levels already approaching the blowout range has coarsened public discourse to the level of road rage.

You want "blood libel"?

Limbaugh, last week: "What (accused assassin) Mr. Loughner knows is that he has the full support of a major political party ... The Democrat party is attempting to find anybody but him to blame. He knows if he plays his cards right, he's just a victim ... plus a local sheriff doing everything that they can to make sure he's not convicted of murder -- but something lesser."

If you believe that, you'll believe anything.

Tags: domestic terrorism, gene lyons, radical right, rush limbaugh, terrorism

More on that tax deal

Gene Lyons is always worth reading. Even when he's landing off-base, as he is in these two Salon columns defending the Obama-Republican tax deal: Tax cut deal: Obama bought himself precious time 12/08/2010 and Victory, compromise and hurt feelings 12/15/2010.

He concludes the second column with, "we get to have this fight all over again in 2012. You want to win it? Get to work." It doesn't seem to occur to him that the drive to get Obama to fight like a Democrat is exactly the kind of work that will have to be done, not just two years from now when the billionaires' tax subsidy is set to expire, but also a year from now when the proposed payroll tax "holiday" is set to expire.



And the result is not going to be good if Obama keeps up his same mode of negotiating with the Republicans, as spoofed by Zina Saunders in the animated cartoon The Season for Giving (In) Mother Jones 12/14/2010, in which Obama sings to the tune of "Let It Snow":

The Republicans are frightful
Though I try to be politeful
They never, never, never give an inch
So I'll always give up in a clinch.

They show no signs of stopping
That's why I keep flip flopping
They never, never, never compromise
So I cave and I know that's no surprise.

So this intra-Party fight is only one in a series to come. The alternative would be for the Democrats in Congress to just go to a meeting of CEO's a couple of times a year to get their instructions and just follow them without complaint.

Tags: barack obama, gene lyons, obama administration

Gene Lyons on the continuing decay of American journalism

I quote Gene Lyons all the time because he understands the major dysfunction of our national media so well:

With precious few exceptions, big-time journalism has literally become a subdivision of the entertainment industry. Cable TV networks in particular treat national politics as an ongoing melodrama whose protagonists -- Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Sarah Palin -- are basically celebrities, symbolic figures to be loved or hated by millions according to how they are caricatured. Reality retreats as fantasy advances.

Conservatives lead the way. It's no small development that several presidential candidates -- Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, etc. -- are now employed by Fox News. Nor that Palin's getting paid a million bucks an episode by TLC for what amount to half-hour campaign commercials. It's a fundamental change in the relationship between journalism and power. [my emphasis]

These sorts of changes don't happen from one day to the next. They accumulate over time. The philosopher Hegel called that process the transformation of quantity into quality. Which may sound exotic, but it isn't really. One person getting sick is an illness; many people getting sick with the same disease at the same time is an epidemic.

That quote is from Who will smack down all the lies? Salon 11/17/2010. Gene Lyons himself realized earlier than anyone else I know of who went to print in a national publication just what a disastrous turn the national media had taken in 1992 with the New York Times' flogging of the Whitewater pseudoscandal. Things have continued to deteriorate since then.

One of the most professionally decadent practices of present-day US journalism is the Goldilocks Syndrome. Gene gives an example of it in Ted Koppel's recent and much-noted lament about the rise of partisan journalism:

One can definitely take issue with the false equivalence Koppel draws between Olbermann and Fox luminaries. Compared to the conservative network's overt political activism, Olbermann's contributions to Democratic candidates, while improper, don't amount to much. Also, for all his grandiosity, MSNBC's resident blowhard doesn't actually make things up -- the most fundamental distinction in journalism.

A realist, Koppel is surely correct to say there's "not much of a chance that 21st-century journalism will be adapted to conform with the old rules." However, with all due respect -- and a viewer [an English-only one anyway!] seeking international news apart from natural disasters and terror strikes is pretty much limited to BBC World News America, where Koppel's a contributing analyst -- his seemingly reflexive need to position himself as the mean between two extremes demonstrates precisely how "mainstream" thinking fails.

Sometimes, see, Goldilocks can't find the porridge that's just right. Sometimes, when two sources tell very different stories, the truth doesn't lie somewhere between them. Often, somebody's lying. Over the past couple of decades, moreover, America's vaunted mainstream media has found itself hornswoggled by one big falsehood after another. [my emphasis]

Tags: establishment press, gene lyons, mainstream media, mainstream press

The GOP wrecker strategy

My regular weekly plug for Gene Lyons' column, this one The GOP cage-match strategy Salon 03/03/10. Gene Lyons knows Radical Republicans:

In the midst of the worst financial crisis since the Depression, the GOP has chosen to paralyze government in the hope of blaming the Obama White House and Democratic Congress for getting nothing done. It's a brazen strategy that depends upon news-media complicity and widespread public ignorance for success. Only 26 percent in a recent Pew survey, it's worth reemphasizing, know how many Senate votes are needed to end a filibuster.

To justify themselves, some Republicans have tiptoed perilously close to the lunatic fringe. Several, including newly elected Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, made sympathetic noises after a lone demento flew an airplane into an IRS office in Austin, Texas, killing himself and a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran who worked there.

The madman's big gripe was that the agency denied his effort to evade taxes by declaring himself a religion. [my emphasis]

Tags: gene lyons,
radical right, republican party

What Gene says

Gene Lyons in Countering the GOP noise machine Salon 01/20/10:

[M]y view is that many of Obama's political problems stem from a broader Democratic inability to counter the infernal GOP noise machine -- a failure now two decades old. Republican rejectionism ought to have been clear to the White House from the moment they voted unanimously against the economic stimulus -- cynically betting that recovery would come too late for the 2010 elections. They cannot be won over, only defeated.

Tags: gene lyons, obama administration

Afghanistan "Surge" (2)

Gene Lyons is a bit more optimistic about the prospects of Obama's plans in the Afghanistan War than I am. But that's partially because he assumes that Obama is looking for an exit strategy. But Gene emphasizes that the whole Afghanistan Surge is based on a shaky faith in the triumphalist interpretation of the 2007 "surge" in Iraq:

Petraeus, of course, conceived and executed the vaunted 2007 "surge" in Iraq that's touted as the Bush administration's greatest (perhaps only) success in that misbegotten war. While the strategy's ultimate success won't be known until U.S. combat forces actually leave Iraq, it's seemingly made an orderly withdrawal possible, which appears to be all Obama hopes for in Afghanistan -- an interval of relative stability enabling the Karzai government to get its act together.

Or not, which is where things could get tricky. Reportedly, Gen. Petraeus cautioned Obama to think of the current Afghan government as essentially "a crime syndicate." That is, a hierarchical, semi-conspiratorial organization based on tribal and familial loyalties rather than abstract ideals of patriotism or public service -- basically the only way Afghan society has ever run, and realistically the only way it's going to function after Americans leave. ...

The success of Obama's plan further hinges on Pakistan's ability to confront jihadist elements on its side of the border. Essentially, the president is like a poker player trying to draw to an inside straight, gambling that his troop buildup can buy enough time to bribe Taliban fighters motivated by dislike of foreign invaders more than jihad into changing sides, another Afghan tradition.

It's definitely a long shot. The hopeful part of Obama's policy, however, resides precisely in the calculated ambiguity of the July 2011 date.

And Gene Lyon's view is very much on the optimistic edge of a realist view of the prospects.

Tags: afghanistan war, gene lyons

It shouldn't have come to this

I'm holding off on doing a post on the need for inner emigration for progressive Democrats. But depending on how the health care reform comes out, I could be there in a couple of weeks. Maybe less.

Joe Conason states the problem well in Healthcare didn't have to go this way Salon 09/04/09:

The essence of President Obama’s problem can be found in an anonymous quote, attributed to a White House official, that appeared on the front page of the New York Times last Wednesday. “It’s so important to get a deal,” confided the unnamed aide, that the president “will do almost anything it takes to get one.” Such desperate confessions of politics as usual, which have appeared in dozens of such remarks in the press over the past several months, not only serve the president poorly but damage the fresh brand that he brought to Washington after his triumphant election last year. They are the residue of an ill-conceived strategy that has left Obama politically vulnerable, attenuated his connection with loyal progressives, and blurred his most important message. [my emphasis]

We're on the verge of seeing an historic opportunity to initiate a new era of progressive ascendancy flushed down the drain. Not by Republicans or FOX News or Hate Radio, though they've all played a part, but by a Democratic Party that refuses to go to the mat for the most important needs of its supporters. It may be down to the Progressive Caucus and their willingness to vote down an inadequate health-care bill. Unless they force Obama to choose between a good health care reform package and no health care reform package, a critical moment may be permanently lost. This isn't about "the perfect being the enemy of the good". It's about a critical strategic decision about America's health care system that is likely to be with us for decades.

As Conason writes:

Nowhere has this fundamental mistake been more visible than in the effort to reform healthcare. From more than six decades of struggle over the question of universal coverage and cost control, the Obama team must have known that they would face enormous opposition. They should also have known, from the ugly mood of the Republican campaign during the final weeks of the election and the partisan history of the past 15 years, that chances for bipartisan agreement were minimal. And they ought to have realized that the energy of the progressive movement, expressed in their own campaign, could become their most formidable weapon in that battle. ...

But this president surrendered that powerful weapon when he chose aides who prefer lobbyists to activists and adopted a strategy that ranks bipartisan agreement above policy substance. The telltale remark came from still another anonymous aide who boasted recently that the White House would welcome a "confrontation" with Democratic liberals over healthcare because it would "show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done."

Obama has a chance, based on what we can see of our current situation right now, to be a positive and transformative President. Or he has a chance to win limpid compliments from our media priests of High Broderism for fighting against the core of his own Party, and spend the rest of his three-to-seven years as President fighting an essentially conservative battle to stave off the worst damage from a Republican Party that is already intimidating cowardly and irresponsible local school officials into requiring students have a parental permission slip to hear a saccharine speech by Obama about the importance of education.

That would be a tragic waste for Obama. It would be a devastating defeat for the people of the country.

Gene Lyons, Conason's co-author on The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000) addressed the same problem in his Salon column of 09/03/09, A cake knife is useless in a gunfight:

If President Obama expects Congress to pass a healthcare reform bill worth signing, he'd better grasp that "bipartisanship" is a means, not an end. After eight years of cheering themselves hoarse over one catastrophic Bush blunder after another, Republicans will start dealing with reality only when they're afraid not to. Right now, it's their talk-radio/Fox News-hypnotized base that's got GOP congressmen running scared.

On healthcare reform, Obama has mainly his own high-minded fecklessness to blame. To alter the cliché, he hasn't just brought a knife to a gunfight, he's brought a cake knife.

Tags: gene lyons, joe conason, health care reform

Gene Lyons takes a look at the Big Picture

Filipe II de Habsburgo: at least he didn't try to invade Afghanistan

Gene Lyons understands broad contexts in American politics as well as nitty-gritty reporting. But he uses commendable caution in minimizing his flights into grand historical generalizations. He makes an exception, though, in They're Obama's wars now Salon 05/14/09:

On TV chat shows, national security thinkers wax portentous at the dire prospect of the Taliban gaining control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. In sober moments, most admit that this is as unlikely as white supremacist militias overrunning the Pentagon, but it definitely makes for exciting melodrama.

And TV melodrama is how America governs itself. Within the Washington establishment, it's well-nigh treasonous to point out that we're talking here about the absolute end of the earth. That the United States hasn't got the manpower, resources or political will to control territory Pakistan's own government can't tame, and that the habit of treating the entire planet as a huge game of Risk is leaving the United States as overextended militarily and financially as the Spanish Empire in 1588 -- the year its Armada was destroyed off the coast of Ireland.

I'll have to declare myself agnostic on the likelihood of Obama finding himself in the position of Philip II (Filipe II de Habsburgo). But he's right in pointing out the risks.

Despite the headline on the article, Lyons isn't trashing Obama over the Iraq and AfPak Wars, though he clearly thinks escalation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a bad idea. He recognizes that Bush and Cheney left the country and the current administration with two awful problems in those wars. On the AfPak escalation, he writes that Obama seems "to be heeding a sports proverb: Always change a losing game".

Tags: afghanistan war, afpak war, gene lyons, pakistan

A tale of three columns

Gene Lyons was the first person to my knowledge who got into print with a documented account of how the Establishment press had gone off a cliff with the Whitewater scandal beginning in 1992. It was in his reporting for Harper's, later distilled into his book 2007 Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater (1996). Others had been highly critical of aspects of the American media before, Robert Perry of ConsortiumNews.com not least among them. But Lyons laid out vividly how supposedly sophisticated journalists from the New York Times and other major "quality" news organizations let themselves be led around by the nose by a small bunch of lying Arkansas segregationist sleaze-mongers.

It is still an astounding story. And our "quality" press still seems to be in freefall. Getting a solid investigative story not burdened down by questionable grants of anonymity or warped pre-scripted assumptions is becoming so rare that it seems almost a miracle when it still occasionally happens.

In Keep on whining, Republicans Salon 05/07/09, Gene takes a look at the Republicans' non-stop set of hissy-fits since President Obama took office. And manages to come up with some memorable prose in the process:

Every time you turn on the television, some Republican is ranting like the kind of barstool know-it-all who gives booze a bad name.

Or:

The average American could no more concisely define "socialism" than explain the infield fly rule in Sanskrit. But if Rush Limbaugh calls Obama a socialist, maybe [they think] a socialist's not such a terrible thing to be.

I seriously doubt it will happen. But it would be ironic if the Republicans' mindless babble about Obama's "socialism" actually did make the word more respectable in American politics, where now it is pretty much a synonym for "bad".

Despite his cynical framing of it, Gene is making an important point here. The Republican noise machine has been attacking Obama has being a socialist, a Communist, a fascist and even a Nazi as though there was effectively no difference among those concepts. And that's pretty sad. After decades of idolizing the Good War (Second World War), you might hope that virtually every American literate enough to follow Glenn Beck's train of thought (and actual literacy is probably more of a hindrance than a help there) would be able to make elementary distinctions like that.

Every time I hear that socialistcommiefasconazi business from the Republicans, I wonder how someone who can't make those elementary distinctions could process the history of Germany in the 20th century. What would they make of 1918, when democratic revolution meant the Kaiser abdicating so that the military dictatorship could install a Socialist government which then fought back a Communist revolution with the aid of democracy-hating militarists who eventually became key supporters of the Nazis who then brutally suppressed the Communists and Socialists?

The answer is, you couldn't process it coherently with such a bizarre set of assumptions. No wonder so many people think that runaway inflation in 1924 was what made Hitler's percentage of the vote shoot up suddenly - in 1930, long after that episode of inflation had been overcome and the Great Depression had set in.

Gene Lyons' column was the good one among the three I have in mind. The other two are from the Grey Lady, the New York Times, still nostalgically called "the paper of record". And, despite all its painfully evident quality problems, the Times is still widely considered the flagship of American print journalism.

The culprits are Maureen Dowd (big suprise there!) and Gail Collins, longtime editor of the Times editorial page 2001-2007, meaning that she presided over some of the worst atrocities on that paper's editorial pages.

MoDo lives for stories about politics-and-sex and for opportunities to go postal over someone acting outside of MoDo's own narrow conceptions of what proper gender roles are. So in A Complicated Question 05/06/08 (online date), she takes on Elizabeth Edwards' sad tell-all campaign about her husband John's now-famous affair. And, of course, MoDo can't write about such a thing without bringing up Monica, which she dutifully does. But despite his stereotypical male indiscretion, MoDo's gender-nut mind can't let go of her obsessions about his insufficient virility (by MoDo's insane standards): "The Edwardses reminded me of the Quayles — smooth, pretty boys married to tough, smart women they’d met at law school."

Collins also writes about sex in Bristol Palin's New Gig 05/06/08 (online date). The best thing you can say about her column is that the word "Monica" doesn't appear in it. There's nothing inherently bad in writing about Bristol Palin. But her column is pretty much on the tabloid-gossip level. Plus, she manages to gratuitously trash Britney Spears in the fourth paragraph.

If there's any substance worth discussing about the fact that Bristol Palin is out promoting abstinence for teenagers, it would be the kind of "scarlet letter" aspect to it, which goes right by the great Gail Collins. Sarah Palin is one of the leading spokespeople now for a Christian Right movement, and in her case more specifically for the Third Wave Pentecostal movement, which promotes authoritarian notions of family (and not just family!) and opposes sex outside of marriage. In practice, the notion of sending a pregnant teenager off to "live with her sister" for few months to have the baby and put it up for adoption and pretend it never happened isn't so popular any more even among fundamentalists. And, faced with the reality of a baby coming into the world with a teenaged mother, both of whom will need lots of support, even devout fundamentalists often choose love and family over woman-hating moralism.

But Bristol going around as a public advocate for abstinence looks uncomfortably like a public shaming to me. And Collins essentially gives that aspect of it a green light: "Her mom ought to know by now that the only way to protect your family from becoming tabloid fodder is to make it clear to the media that the kids are absolutely, totally off limits." Notice she seems to think it's only the tabloids who would report sensationally about the families of public figures. In other words: Collins is declaring Bristol Palin fair game for "quality" journalists like herself to use her as "fodder" along with the tabloids.

But, if you ask yourself, how did we ever end up in Iraq? How did a blatantly criminal torture program go on for years at the orders of the President? How could a failure like the federal response to Katrina happen? A significant part of how that stuff happened is that people like MoDo and Collins saw to it that a large part of the valuable journalistic real estate of the New York Times editorial pages was taken up with drivel, reported at levels often inferior to the tabloids. And with MoDo's endless trashing of Democrats for their awful, scary, contemptible failures to fit her own warped and narrow vision of what Real Men and Proper Women should be like.

They are the cream of a crop of an industry that's dying. Or, better put, because they are industry's cream of the crop, their industry is dying.

The Times must have thought their opinion pages were under-sexed lately. In yet another column for the May 7 edition, Nicholas Kristof writes about under-age prostitutes in Girls on Our Streets. The fact that the Oldest Profession is still practiced and involves terrible exploitation of women and young girls is scarcely new. But at least Kristof's column was on a public-policy issue. Kinda-sorta. He opens it with a thinly-sourced salacious tale about a policeman and a 14-year-old prostitute.

So I guess that makes this a tale of four columns.

Tags: establishment press, gene lyons, maureen dowd

Gene Lyons on the Dark Lord of torture

After years of going to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Web site for Gene Lyons' weekly column, which just recently started appearing on Thursday rather than Wednesday, it appears that Salon is now regularly picking up his column in syndication. Which is good, not least because their fonts are more readable than the ones the Democrat-Gazette uses.

In Cheney's painful war for torture 04/30/09, he asks:

Having stampeded his ill-informed predecessor into a series of catastrophic blunders, it appears that Dick Cheney has declared open bureaucratic war -- the only kind he's ever known how to fight -- upon President Barack Obama. After decades of bullying the CIA and other intelligence agencies to affirm his crackpot worldviews, he's trying to pull the same routine on the White House to redeem his own shattered reputation. Or is it something more sinister?

Since in my mind "sinister" and "Cheney" have pretty much become synonyms, that would be easy enough to believe.

But Gene's got Cheney's number:

Perennially wrong, but never in doubt, Cheney and his circle first pooh-poohed the al-Qaida terrorist threat, then panicked after 9/11 -- quickly magnifying a band of stateless fanatics with an appetite for mass murder into yet another existential threat to the nation's survival.

He also takes a thoroughly deserves poke at The Dean Of All The Pundits:

The FBI, believing the orders [to torture] illegal, actually withdrew from the investigation -- a development conveniently overlooked by establishment Beltway pundits now bleating like sheep that despite their shamefulness, the "memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places ... by the proper officials."

That's the Washington Post's mincing arbiter of propriety David Broder. God forbid we should criminalize decisions made by insiders; better to junk the Constitution than create awkwardness at Washington dinner parties.

And, dadgummit, from his perch down there in Arkansas, Gene Lyons seems to be able to see the nose in front of his face when it comes to criminal torture:

Prosecuting career CIA agents while Cheney does guest shots with Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh accusing Obama of weakening America's defenses, all but openly hoping for a successful terror strike with the potential to restore his faction to power, would be a grave moral and political error.

This isn't a fight Obama has wanted, but Cheney's making it one he cannot avoid. Nothing short of a full-scale investigation can cauterize this wound.

I don't want to misrepresent his preferences here. A "full-scale investigation" doesn't necessarily mean criminal prosecutions. But enforcement of the law and the relevant treaties requires the Justice Department to do a "full-scale investigation" and then prosecute the perpetrators.

Tags: accountability for torture, gene lyons, torture

Go South, Republicans!

Gene Lyons shares his view of the Southernization (in the most reactionary sense) of today's Republican Party:

Just once I'd like to see one of these Confederate Republicans acknowledge how much more their states receive from the Treasury than they pay in taxes. (For Louisiana, it's $1.45 for every dollar paid; for Mississippi, $1.77, etc.) But then what's a little hypocrisy among free lunch conservatives? Jindal also mocked an (imaginary) $8 billion earmark for a high-speed railway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Then he turned right around and solicited funding for a Baton Rouge-New Orleans line.

Back before free-lunch hypocrisy became gospel, Louisiana had a social structure like Guatemala's-low taxes on the wealthy, a beaten-down middle class and sprawling poverty. Economically, GOP doctrine consists of ignoring the obvious. Show me a low-tax, "pro-business" paradise like the Deep South before World War II, and I'll show you poverty, disease, illiteracy and stagnant opportunity.

Alternatively, try finding a wealthy country anywhere on earth with the economic policies the Jindals, Limbaughs and Huckabees recommend. They simply don't exist. Hence, the current nearhysteria on the right. We haven't seen its like since the 1960s, when many white Southerners panicked over the prospect of racial integration, the John Birch Society flourished, and billboards depicting "Martin Luther King at a Communist training school" lined rural highways. [my emphasis]

This is not just snark. The real-world model for the Ayn Randish, Limbaughist dystopia that is now the Republican vision for the United States is the segregationist governments of the post-Reconstruction Deep South.

The highlighted passage reminds us how its anything but "anti-South" to be concerned about Southern reactionaries like Louisiana's Bobby-the-Exorcist Jindal, Arkansas' Mike Huckabee (lately of FOX News) and Mississippi's Haley Barbour. No one stands to benefit more from Obama's recovery policies and long-term health and economic-development plans. It's a point that the Democrats need to keep pounding by pointing out the positive effects of those programs in the South and keep it constantly in front of the voters that the Barbours and the Jindals actually oppose those beneficial programs.

Tags: gene lyons, us south

Gene Lyons on the Gitmo shutdown

The former Web home of the columns of the star columnist of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Gene Lyons, (nwanews.com/adj) now appears to no longer have them. I normally check it every Wednesday for Gene's column.

The Democrat-Gazette has another Web site. But that has his columns behind subscription. I think that counts as "unclear on the concept" of Internet marketing. But they didn't consult me.

So now it looks like I'll be going to The Cagle Post to read Gene's columns. His 01/28/09 column is In Closing Gitmo, We Start Winning Back The Moral High Ground:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates long has advocated closing Guantanamo. As President Barack Obama signed the executive order last week, he was surrounded by 16 retired admirals and generals who'd urged the action. Major Gen. Paul Eaton, who has a son on duty in the Middle East, told the New Yorker's Jane Mayer that "torture is the tool of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough. It's also perhaps the greatest recruiting tool that the terrorists have."

This last point can't be stressed enough. By turning tyrant and bully, placing itself outside and above the Geneva Conventions, which outlaw cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, the Bush administration forfeited the moral high ground, no doubt creating a hundred Islamic extremists for every one incarcerated at Guantanamo.

Incapable of admitting error, the previous administration preferred sophomoric debates about the existence of evil and the brutality of war. So it should surprise nobody that some Republicans appeared to see closing Guantanamo as a chance to plant a partisan time bomb under the Obama White House. [my emphasis]

What? No bipartisanship?!?

That partisan time bomb being the notion that the scary, scary brown-skinned turrists are gone git us if we close down the Bush Gulag. He goes through several reasons why that's a bogus pitch. Including:

... the United States and other civilized countries have been trying and convicting genuine terrorists in courts of law for a generation. They're incarcerated in maximum-security prisons all over the civilized world. This isn't a vampire movie, where armies of superhuman foes march impervious to harm. A strong, confident nation can defeat Al Qaeda without shaming itself. [my emphasis]

That's Gene Lyons for this week. And The Cagle Post has a more reader-friendly Web site than nwanews.com/adj anyway.

Tags: gene lyons, torture