Joe Nocera — not usually one of my favorites. But his latest piece is a must read; or at least it will be for future Americans who wonder just how it is that their once remarkably placid society became so horribly riven:

On Friday, the law firm of Steven J. Baum threw a Halloween party. The firm, which is located near Buffalo, is what is commonly referred to as a “foreclosure mill” firm, meaning it represents banks and mortgage servicers as they attempt to foreclose on homeowners and evict them from their homes. Steven J. Baum is, in fact, the largest such firm in New York; it represents virtually all the giant mortgage lenders, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

The party is the firm’s big annual bash. Employees wear Halloween costumes to the office, where they party until around noon, and then return to work, still in costume. I can’t tell you how people dressed for this year’s party, but I can tell you about last year’s.

That’s because a former employee of Steven J. Baum recently sent me snapshots of last year’s party. In an e-mail, she said that she wanted me to see them because they showed an appalling lack of compassion toward the homeowners — invariably poor and down on their luck — that the Baum firm had brought foreclosure proceedings against.

When we spoke later, she added that the snapshots are an accurate representation of the firm’s mind-set. “There is this really cavalier attitude,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that people are going to lose their homes.” Nor does the firm try to help people get mortgage modifications; the pressure, always, is to foreclose. I told her I wanted to post the photos on The Times’s Web site so that readers could see them. She agreed, but asked to remain anonymous because she said she fears retaliation…

My source told me that not every Baum department used the party to make fun of the troubled homeowners they made their living suing. But some clearly did. The adjective she’d used when she sent them to me — “appalling” — struck me as exactly right.

One imagines this to be the consequence of the hideous lies and rationalizations these people have to tell themselves in order to get up and go to work every day — that every single person on Steven J. Baum’s chopping block is deserving, that the reason they’re soon to find themselves parked in a noble friend’s basement (or worse) is because they’re lazy, stupid, undeserving; they’re bad. Once you buy that lie, it must not seem callous, heartless, or at all inhuman to poke fun at the miserable wretches whose misery you sustain your bank account. You work damn hard, after all. You are the 53%.

This blog done moved! I’ve now the honor and privilege to be a participant at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, where this blog has now found itself a nice little home.

Hope you follow and join me at the new digs – http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/eliasisquith/

Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb general accused of war crimes including masterminding the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, has been captured in Serbia after more than 15 years as one of the world’s most wanted fugitives.

President Boris Tadic of Serbia announced the arrest in Belgrade on Thursday, giving few details.

Serbian news reports said that Mr. Mladic had been living under the name of Milorad Komadic and that he was captured in the small farming town of Lazarevo in Vojvodina, the Serbian province north of Belgrade, after authorities received a tip that the man known as Komadic resembled Mr. Mladic and had identification documents with that name. Witnesses said he was not wearing a beard or any disguise, and had aged considerably, appearing older and thinner than the stout self-assured professional soldier who had last been seen in public in 2006.

[...]

According to B92, the independent Serb broadcasting company, residents in Lazarevo said they were unaware that Mr. Mladic was living among them, but had spotted police early Thursday morning at a house reportedly belonging to Mr. Mladic’s relatives. Serbian analysts said Lazarevo had had a large population of Bosnian Serbs dating back to World War II , some of whom would have been sympathetic to Mr. Mladic or regarded him as a patriot. They said Mr. Mladic lived in the village for the past two months.

The massacre at Srebrenica was the worst ethnically motivated mass murder on the Continent since World War II.

President Tadic said that Mr. Mladic would be turned over to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. “Extradition is happening,” he said. “This is the end of the search for Mladic. It’s not the end of the search for all those who helped Mladic and others to hide and whether people from the government were involved.”

I don’t know an especially large amount about the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, which are enormously opaque and complicated — even for the nominal experts. So I can’t tell you much about what this means for Serbia or Bosnia or the area in general in the near future.

The article linked above says that the arrest should be seen as a major symbolic event for many Europeans, equivalent to what the killing of bin Laden meant to many Americans. More prosaically, the arrest of Mladic — and the previous arrest of his superior, Kardazic — may signal to the EU that Serbia is truly coming to terms with its ugly recent past, something it’s been accused of avoiding, and is thus ready to join the union.

Like bin Laden, and as was true for Karadzic, it appears that Mladic hid in plain sight. Though it’s heartening to see the increased frequency with which war criminals are being sought by and delivered to organs of international human rights law, I think it tells us something — this hiding in plain sight — about how far the discipline still has to go towards being truly accepted by the global community. What’s more, when one examines the circumstances of Mladic’s arrest, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that old-fashioned cold, hard realpolitik had much to do with this apprehension than any fealty to human rights,

Serge Brammertz, the chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, was expected to release a report in the next few days saying that Serbia was not cooperating with the international effort to apprehend Mr. Mladic. Such a report would have further complicated Serbia’s attempt to become an official candidate for membership in the European Union. The Netherlands, whose peacekeepers were overrun by Mr. Mladic’s troops at Srebrenica, has said that it would veto Serbia’s candidacy if Mr. Mladic remained at large.

Ms. Smajlovic said that the fact that Ms. Ashton was in Serbia for meetings on Thursday would “lead to suspicion that the arrest was timed to honor her and also to underline Serbia now has high expectations of rapid E.U. integration.”

ln this regard, then, Mladic’s story is not unlike Gaddafi’s in that both men were unfortunate enough to not only be wanted by those with a real interest in international human rights law, but were also either loathed or deemed expendable by less idealistic politicians: in Gaddafi’s case, the Arab League’s willingness to seek outside help signaled just how deeply hated he was by other despots in the region; for Mladic, nothing he could provide in continued freedom was comparable to the economic benefits of EU membership.

Still, I imagine that despots prone to indiscriminate bloodletting are taking notice of not only this arrest but the recent indictment of Gaddafi and his top two advisers; and I don’t think this is empty rhetoric,

“After nearly two decades on the run, justice has finally caught up with the man who personified the brutality of the Balkan wars,” said Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch. “His arrest today is a clear message to accused like Omar al-Bashir and potential accused like Muammar al-Qaddafi that justice never forgets.”

At the very least, in those instances wherein justice and expedience can work together, the international community will indeed remember.

I was thinking of this infamous video when I came across the latest column from the New York Times’ David Leonhardt (who might be my favorite MSM pundit working today). One response I heard from some people was something along the lines of, “How could someone who got into UCLA be so stupid?” Generally, my response would be something along the lines of, “Because elite colleges have little to nothing to do with merit and are basically just feeder-systems for the upper-classes.”

According to Leonhardt and those he’s spoken with, even though I had no real data to back up my claim and was kind of just being grumpy, I was right.

The last four presidents of the United States each attended a highly selective college. All nine Supreme Court justices did, too, as did the chief executives of General Electric (Dartmouth), Goldman Sachs (Harvard), Wal-Mart (Georgia Tech), Exxon Mobil (Texas) and Google (Michigan).

Like it or not, these colleges have outsize influence on American society. So their admissions policies don’t matter just to high school seniors; they’re a matter of national interest.

[...]

For all of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse, their student bodies remained shockingly affluent. At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.

[...]

The truth is that many of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all, research has shown. Incredibly, only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores. Several years ago, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, and two other researchers found that top colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-income students, despite claims to the contrary. Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage. But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. It’s pretty hard to call that meritocracy.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney heaped praise on House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, the architect of the GOP Medicare plan.

“I worship the ground that Paul Ryan walks on,” Cheney said, according to the Houston Chronicle.

This is kind of like having Dominique Strauss-Kahn call you a great feminist, or Richard Nixon (another of Cheney’s heroes) a straight-shooter.

You’d think that a man who, at this point, can see the light at the end of the tunnel a little more clearly than most of the rest of us, might want to occupy his time doing something perhaps a bit more noble and substantive than lauding a DOA policy founded upon the principles of that great moral thinker, Ayn Rand.

But then again you’d probably also think that torturing people — some to death — is wrong. And that’s why you ain’t Dick Cheney.

(via)

Former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) demanded cuts in Social Security Wednesday while lashing out at Republican strategist Grover Norquist, the AARP, “the cat food commission cats” and “sharpshooters” at The Huffington Post. [...]

“The AARP, I mean, come come,” Simpson said to an audience of Washington insiders. “If you can’t understand that when I was a freshman at the University of Wyoming, there were 17 people paying into the system and one taking out, and today there are three people paying into the system and one taking out — if you can’t understand that it was never set up as a retirement program, it was an income supplement which became a retirement, if you can’t understand it was never structured to handle disability insurance, it couldn’t exist with that burden on it. If you can’t understand it didn’t take care of kids at 22 going to college, we can’t make it.”

Simpson went on to reference a recent interview with Huffington Post reporter Ryan Grim, who presented Simpson with evidence that one of the statistics he deployed in his Social Security arguments was misleading.

“Now the great sharpshooters are out there and the cat food commission cats and all those guys using these distorted figures,” Simpson told the crowd. “And I always say, look, if you torture statistics long enough, eventually they’ll confess.” In truth, Social Security was indeed established as a retirement program. [...]

“I was talking about the guy who called me and went through this exercise of sharpshooting,” Simpson told HuffPost. “And if he can’t understand a couple or three things then there’s no help. Forget all the crap he’s going through and know that if you — if 17 people were paying into this system in 1950 and one taking out, today there are three paying in and one taking out. I’d like you to refute that.”

The ratio Simpson referred to is grossly misleading. According to the Social Security Administration, in 1950, 16.5 people paid into the program for every beneficiary. But that number was only high because the program’s architects realized that there had been a baby boom, and Social Security would need more funding in the future. [...]

Simpson also insisted again to HuffPost that upon Social Security’s implementation, “the average age of mortality was 63.”

When HuffPost suggested that this statistic was misleading due to the higher childhood mortality rate, Simpson responded, “I know all the stuff [Ryan Grim] goes through. Its like gymnastics! Yes and we’ve done distributional analysis. Ask him if he knows what that is! Ask the wizard if he knows what distributional analysis is! We did that. And then ask him what we did for the seniors, for the older old and the people who are in poverty. Ask the wizard all that and then get back to me.”

He then shouted, “I’m through!” and walked away.

Talk about making John McCain look calm and lucid.

In response, Digby writes,

I think that many people believed that George W. Bush and Sarah Palin were members of a new breed of conservative politicians who were mean as snakes, dumb as posts and spoke gibberish instead of English. Not true.

[...]

Finally, please, someone tell Simpson to pipe down and take his nitro glycerin before he has a heart attack from all the gibberish.

I’m on the other side on this. I think we should give Simpson ever more opportunities to make his “case” before the public — as long as a “sharpshooter” punk kid reporter is around to respond.

The case in favor of dismantling the key American policy of the 20th century has always been remarkably weak and founded upon distortions, so who better than Alan Simpson to represent it in as many high-profile locales as possible? If more sentient righties like Pete Peterson or [insert your libertarian hotshot of choice here] don’t step in soon, Simpson may end up getting us that single-payer health care system we’ve been hoping for!

Brad DeLong points us to Macro Advisers, which has now downgraded its estimates for second-quarter growth. As Brad says, these estimates now suggest that we have now gone through a year and a half of “recovery” that has failed to make any progress toward closing the gap between what the economy should be producing and what it’s actually producing.

And nobody in power cares!

Just to clarify for those not especially familiar with Krugman’s recent work:by “third depression,” he means,

As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

Neither the Long Depression of the 19th century nor the Great Depression of the 20th was an era of nonstop decline — on the contrary, both included periods when the economy grew. But these episodes of improvement were never enough to undo the damage from the initial slump, and were followed by relapses.

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression. It will probably look more like the Long Depression than the much more severe Great Depression. But the cost — to the world economy and, above all, to the millions of lives blighted by the absence of jobs — will nonetheless be immense.

In the column quoted above, Krugman writes that this third depression, if it comes to pass, will be born from a “failure of policy.”

That’s true, to a significant degree. As Steve Benen wrote yesterday,we know what the problem is and how to solve, yet no one with the means to do anything is willing or able to make it happen,

The recovery is fragile and weak — and apparently getting weaker. The European debt crisis is once again growing more serious. The U.S. unemployment rate is 9%. Under sane circumstances, one would expect American policymakers to respond to developments like these with a renewed focus on improving the economy, giving it a much-needed boost.

But thanks to the 2010 midterms, a dysfunctional political system, and a stunted discourse, the current circumstances are anything but sane.

Republicans have responded to the weak economy by declaring, “Austerity for everyone!” The GOP is convinced we’ll all be better off after they’ve taken money out of the economy, made unemployment worse, and pursued a monetary policy that makes it harder for the world to buy American products. Democratswould like to respond to the weak economy with an ambitious economic agenda, but they don’t bother because they know it wouldn’t pass.

The best — the very best — we can hope for is a president who’ll stop Republicans from making matters much worse, and maybe a reluctant Federal Reserve that might choose to play a more constructive role. But really, that’s it. The White House can’t act without Congress, and Congress doesn’t want to act at all. We’re left to simply hope the economy continues to improve on its own.

[...]

It doesn’t have to be this way, and we know what we should do. The country needs the wisdom and courage to do the right thing, but as of today, with the recovery faltering, the right thing isn’t even on the negotiating table

But I don’t think Krugman’s going far enough when he attributes the third depression, if indeed we’re in it, to failed policy. If only it were just that. Sadly, I think people may look back at this period in history and deem it largely the consequence of a profound failure of American democracy. To a degree not unprecedented, but until recently out of the norm, our politics is entirely driven by the desires and concerns of a very small number of the country’s hyper-wealthy.

In a situation where unemployment is around nine percent (and real unemployment, factoring in those who are either underemployed or have entirely given up looking for work, hovers around a far more Great Depression-like twenty percent) we are currently spending our time discussing cuts for those few programs that keep millions of peoples’ heads above-water. And rather worry about a generation of un- and underemployed people who will grow angry, bitter and distrustful of our society’s leaders and institutions, our elites preoccupy themselves with night-terrors over the prospects of a currently unforeseeable spike in inflation devastating the relative worth of their considerable wealth.

Needless to say, this is not the formula for the maintenance of a healthy, cohesive, peaceful and prosperous society. And if we don’t end up addressing the human misery that’s always the defining feature of such prolonged periods of economic dysfunction, it will be increasingly difficult for the comparatively small number of us who haven’t suffered dearly in this period to argue to those whom have that this is a system worth saving.

August 28, 1996 CHICAGO – Sen. Bob Kerrey smells an odor coming from the Republican and Democratic stands on entitlements.

“It’s one of the cruelest things we do, when we say, Republicans or Democrats, `Oh, we can wait and reform Social Security later,’ ” the Nebraska Democrat said.

Mr. Kerrey says that without reform, entitlements will claim 100 percent of the Treasury in 2012.

“This is not caused by liberals, not caused by conservatives, but by a simple demographic fact,” Mr. Kerrey warned at a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council.

“We [will have] converted the federal government into an ATM machine.”

I’m continually struck by how unchallenged by our media is the chicken little doomsaying by “fiscal conservatives” as to the deficit.

Politicians and businessmen and other wealthy individuals can traipse around like a bunch of white, geriatric and male Cassandras with crocodile tears, warning of impending doom and full-scale misery. But they’re almost never pushed to speak in specific terms as to how and when the end will come, and when they are, they’re allowed to slide by with bizarre and paranoid vagaries about bondsmen with vendettas and glib reminders of empire’s fallibility.

It’s no different from peak-oil fear-mongering — except it’s far less scientific or rationally expressed. And yet it dominates our political conversation as if this were all well beyond needing to be proven. If you didn’t know any better, you might think it was as if the interests of the wealthy had cruelly come to be defined as all that really matters.

Romney’s problem is similar to Obama’s: he doesn’t play well with downscale voters. He comes off as the manager who fired them, or who cut their wages—the “Richie Rich” know-it-all. Obama’s demerits with these voters are different, but a general election race between the two would leave a large number of those voters up for grabs.

I would imagine that we’ll see more of this in the next decade or so as our politics becomes ever more dominated by the narrow interests of a hyper-wealthy and numerically minuscule elite. As Larry Bartels’ recent book, Unequal Democracy (click here to read the Preface for free) makes clear, our politicians already pay far, far more attention to the concerns and desires of their wealthiest donors than the rest of the electorate. With the consequences of a generation of growing inequality being felt most acutely today, it’s little wonder that the top-tier candidates of either party are becoming those best suited to woo our Galtian overlords.

(via)

According to a set of new surveys by Public Policy Polling, voters would punish President Obama for backing cuts in either Medicare or changes to the Social Security program.

Polling done in Ohio, Missouri, Minnesota and Montana shows significant resistance to cuts in benefits in these swing states. 58% of Ohio voters said they were less likely to vote for President Obama if he backed or signed cuts to Medicare, and 53% said they were less likely to vote for him if he altered the retirement age. Similar results were obtained in the other three states.

This should be compelling enough data to convince the White House and Congressional Democrats that they’re much better off talking about austerity and belt-tightening and fiscal conservatism and all such other Frank Luntz-y newspeak nonsense than they are actually implementing such policies.

Even if voters say they want to reduce spending, it’s become a well-known truth that when faced with specific choices on what to cut, voters determine they’d rather not cut anything at all. The fetishization of governmental thriftiness on the part of the electorate stems from a profound misunderstanding of macroeconomics mixed with an understandable but unscientific sense that the government wastes a lot of money.

And, it has to be said, racial politics certainly comes into play, too, with a depressingly large number of respondents seeming to believe that the reason the economy is in the tank is because of young bucks and welfare queens buying Cadillacs and t-bone steaks.

So, by all means, let Democrats engage in time-wasting and unnecessary negotiations over a “grand bargain” with a GOP that will nix any and all proposals that raise taxes on our Galtian overlords by one dime. What’s the harm in looking like you’re engaging in a good faith effort — especially when you know the other side is not, and will inevitably sabotage the deal well before it reaches the President’s desk.

But if the White House actually signs off on any of these wildly unpopular changes, then they’ll be as much a victim of the DC pundit bubble as Rep. Paul Ryan and the rest of his Republican brethren. And just look at how that’s turned out.

I’ve never been either a hardcore blank slater or a hardcore biological determinist, but there’s no question that I have a pretty healthy belief in the power of genes and biology. [...] [T]his belief tends to be associated with conservatives more than liberals, but that’s really very odd. After all, it’s pretty easy to fool ourselves into dismissing the benefits of being raised in a rich, stable culture and assuming that everything we’ve accomplished has actually been the result of hard work and personal rectitude. But what if you believe, say, that (a) IQ has a strong biological component and (b) high IQ is really important for getting ahead in the world? If you believe this and also happen to be blessed with a high IQ, how can you possibly convince yourself that this is anything other than the blind luck of the genetic lottery?

[...] [T]o the extent that you really do believe that cognitive abilities are (a) important, and (b) strongly biologically determined, shouldn’t you also believe that the poor are more unlucky than anything else, and haven’t done anything to deserve hunger, lousy housing, poor medical care, or crappy educations? If genetic luck plays a big role in making us who we are, then support for income redistribution from the rich to the poor is almost a logical necessity for anyone with a moral sense more highly developed than a five-year-old’s.

I’m more than a little surprised that Drum finds his views to be so heterodox on this issue. Without engaging in too much rhetorical hyperbole, I’d just say that the darker corners of the Progressive movement of the early 20th century offer ample evidence as to the dangers of embracing the kind of scientism Drum’s advocating here.

I understand how he believes that “anyone with a moral sense more highly developed than a five-year-old’s” is compelled to support a robust welfare state in response to biological determinism’s impact on persistent inequality. But I don’t think he’s being creative enough in imagining the many ways human beings can convince themselves that something they don’t want to do for amoral reasons is really undergirded by ethical concerns.

If people don’t want to use their income to hold up the “unlucky” ones among us, it won’t be hard at all for a politician to start presenting to them arguments thinly cloaked in ethical language but at heart focused towards this essential selfishness. After all, some people are born shorter than others. And there’s ample evidence that being tall will be much better for someone’s potential earning power — among sundry other social benefits — than being short. This is manifestly unfair; no one can be blamed for their height.

But do we spend public monies towards establishing a society without egregious height disparities? No. (Perhaps some public health initiatives will have impact in that regard, but not solely or explicitly so.) We all chalk this up to an unfortunate but essentially blameless fact of the universe, and we keep on keepin’ on.

An argument founded upon some kind of essentialist superiority of the wealthy to the less unfortunate is going to fall sooner or later to the same kind of argument as mine about height. It might seem an absurd and immoral leap, but it’ll be made and rather quickly at that.

You can learn a lot about someone when you force them to make choices, eliminating the natural tendency of individuals to take the path of least resistance and please everyone. If I have four cats and I tell you I love them all equally, that doesn’t tell you much. If the house is on fire and I can only save one of them, you’re about to find out which one I actually love the most. In flush times our elected officials will gladly appease us – doing so is good politics and the path of least resistance. If the money is there to pay for everyone’s wants (see: 1950-1970), why not just pay for it all? When reality demands selectivity, we quickly discover what and who really matter.

Our elites are slowly discovering that they need to touch one of the untouchables: raising taxes, cutting the Dept. of Defense, or cutting SS/Medicare. Faced with three politically unappealing choices, it’s quite revealing to see which one people like Paul Ryan and Obama’s catfood commission decided to bite the bullet and endorse.

Britain is also blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.

But the plusses outweigh the minuses. The big newspapers still set the agenda, not cable TV or talk radio. If the quintessential American pol is standing in his sandbox screaming affirmations to members of his own tribe, the quintessential British pol is standing across a table arguing face to face with his opponents.

British leaders and pundits know their counterparts better. They are less likely to get away with distortions and factual howlers. They are less likely to believe the other party is homogenously evil. They are more likely to learn from a wide range of people. When they do hate, their hatreds are more likely to be personal and less likely to take on the tenor of a holy war.

Since Brooks is a neocon — and since a foundational principle of neoconservatism is a hyper-elitist contempt, in varying degrees, for anyone not deemed to be a member of the philosopher-king class — it’s hardly surprising that Bobo would get a thrill up his leg upon immersion into Britain’s enduring aristocracy.

But you’d think (unless you’d followed his work and thus knew better) that the man would have enough self-awareness to conceal this fact even a bit.

Fortunately for his more mean-spirited critics, like yours truly, self-awareness is not and has never been David Brooks’ specialty. He can do vapid platitudes that work in service of exalting the powerful regardless of what they do. And he can obfuscate and warmonger. And absolutely no one is better able to translate the intellectual depth and rigor of a college dorm room post-bong session colloquium to the page.

But self-awareness? Not so much.

And so as a moth to a flame or as a bullet to a fish in a barrel comes Glenn Greenwald — a dedicated Bobo hater — to fisk this most recent drivel from Every Liberal’s Favorite Conservative,

It has long been the supreme fantasy of establishment guardians in general, and David Brooks in particular, that American politics would be dominated by an incestuous, culturally homogeneous, superior elite “who live in [Washington] and who have often known each other since prep school.” And while these establishment guardians love to endlessly masquerade as spokespeople for the Ordinary American, what they most loathe is the interference by the dirty rabble in what should be their exclusive, harmonious club of political stewardship, where conflicts are amicably resolved by ladies and gentlemen of the highest breeding without any messy public conflict.

Even if you don’t derive as much satisfaction in belittling Bobo as I do (a real pity, if so), here’s why his pro-aristocrat agenda matters,

[W]hat Brooks so envies about British political culture — a small, incestuous, aristocratic, homogenized group of trans-ideological elites harmoniously resolving their differences — is exactly what already drives American policy and politics. And that is what establishment spokespeople like Brooks always mean when they yearn for “bipartisanship“: wise old men getting together in secret and reaching agreements that exclude democratic debate and render irrelevant genuine differences among the citizenry.

(Photo via driftglass)

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) scolded the senator for opposing the House GOP budget from Rep. Paul Ryan.

An Illinois Republican on Monday said Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) should be “ashamed of himself” for opposing Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget plan.

“Respectfully, Scott Brown ought to be ashamed of himself,” Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) told Neil Cavuto on the Fox Business Network. “This is the defining moment of this generation. We have got to be bold. We know these entitlements have to be reformed to be saved. He knows that.”

Walsh added that any Republican opposed to the plan was motivated by “political reasons.”

Walsh is a new member who rode into the House by trumpeting his intimate connection to the local Tea Party “movement.” That is to say, the dude is pure wingnut.

But I’ll be interested to see if Walsh either walks this back or is publicly chastised by a Republican leadership that knows you don’t win governing majorities by alienating representatives in ideologically hostile states. My gut tells me no, because Speaker Boehner’s the dog being wagged by the Tea Party caucus tail.

But you gotta think Sen. Snowe and Sen. Collins are watching this with trepidation.

At least that’s what Jonathan Zasloff believes. He calls the operating ideology of the Republican party today “Gingrichism,” and attributes the recent ostracizing Newt’s experienced among many of his Republican peers to a case of shame-based self-denial,

The modern Republican Party is to a great extent, Gingrich’s party. Not because of the man himself, but rather because of “Gingrichism” — his philosophy of how to conduct politics.

The essential nature of Gingrich’s insurgency in the House and his conduct as Speaker was the destruction of the informal institutions of American governance. By “informal institutions,” I mean those habits and customs outside of formal, written law that make democracy work. Some things are simply not done; everyone agrees to resist the temptation for political advantage in order to make the system work.

Gingrichism is the philosophy that all means short of illegality are fair game in the struggle for political power. He came to the fore in the House minority by personal attacks on other members’ patriotism; he stirred up the Republican base with the argument that the Democrats were not merely wrong, but evil and a threat to the Republic. [...] Gingrich broke institutions not by accident, but on purpose.

And if we examine the most malignant trends of the Republican Party over the last 15 years, many (although not all) of them represent this pattern of destroying institutions — and, importantly, any sense of impartiality, good faith, or nonpartisanship — for the purpose of achieving political power. [...]

When Gingrich accused Obama of trying to bring about a secular-socialist coup in cahoots with Muslim extremists, he wasn’t parroting the Tea Party; he was parroting himself from 1994. It was the Tea Party that stole his rhetoric, not the other way around.

And that is why, in my view, we cannot ignore Gingrich even if his campaign is doomed to fail. His campaign, with all of its narcissism, mendacity, intellectual incoherence, and duplicity is the Republican Party in its purest, least adulterated form. By looking at Gingrich we are not avoiding how the Republicans will choose their issues, or even their candidate: we are looking at their methods, ideology, goals, and tactics in their ultimate nature.

In many regards, I think Zasloff offers a compelling argument. Before getting too into the weeds, though, I’d also like to point out a recent post by driftglass. While driftglass doesn’t give Newt quite the same level of primacy as Zasloff, the gist is the same,

Gingrich, Murdoch, Ailes, Limbaugh, Rove and all the rest [define] the Real Conservative Movement: throwing the full, dreadful power of mass media production and endless, mindless repetition behind the Southern Strategy to create an immersive, all-encompassing alternate Conservative Universe from whence truth, logic, facts, causality and history have been forever banished.

For the sake of grabbing and holding power, the Right gleefully scorched the Earth, destroyed any possibility of civil public discourse, and taught an entire generation of Republican political grifters that virtually any level of fraud, hypocrisy and treason could be forgiven, forgotten, and even reversed [...]

Over the frantic warnings of those who knew better, scum like Gingrich kicked the locks off the gates of Hell because though he could control what that would com roaring out and that he could ride it into the White House.

But as any child who has ever seen “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” knows when fools play with primal forces, the mindless monsters they unleash quickly run out of their control. And as Newt is learning, the specific Monster that he, Murdoch, Ailes, Limbaugh, Rove and all the rest conspired to set loose to blitzkrieg American democracy has now come for His due.

All right — let’s start with where I think these guys are right.

For one thing, there’s no doubt that the insane rhetoric of the right-wing over the past couple of years is not nearly as unheard of or unprecedented as you may have been led to believe. And it’s absolutely the case that it was Newt, more than any other single politician of his generation, who decided to shamelessly go where no American politician of his stature had as of late gone before. Just look at a few of these choice quotes, compiled recently by Mother Jones,

1984 Gingrich takes advantage of the arrival of C-Span to deliver scathing condemnations of his colleagues. He accuses Democrats of appeasement and distributing “communist propaganda,” and threatens to press charges against them for writing a letter to Nicaraguan dictator Daniel Ortega. House Speaker Tip O’Neill calls it “the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”

1984 Gingrich touts a study being compiled by conservative House Republicans, noting it “will argue that it is time to stop challenging or seeming to challenge the patriotism of Democrats and liberals. Enough historical evidence exists.”

1987 Gingrich takes to the House floor to decry…pretty much everything about the Democratic-run House: “After the first five months of this Congress, I must report to my fellow citizens that this 100th Congress may be the most irresponsible, destructive, corrupt, and unrepresentative Congress of the modern era… In future weeks, I will make a series of speeches outlining the threats of corruption, of communism, and of the left-wing machine which runs the House.”

1989 “These people are sick,” he says of congressional Democrats. “They are so consumed by their own power, by a Mussolini-like ego, that their willingness to run over normal human beings and to destroy honest institutions is unending.” He also warns that unless the Democrats are stopped, “we may literally see our freedom decay and decline.”

It goes on and on and on, like some hideous political version of a Family Guy episode or a stand-up routine from Carlos Mencia. A kind of stupefyingly cynical and willfully insane compendium of pompous demagoguery.

But while I wouldn’t deny Newt’s special role in degrading our politics, I’d question the implied Great Man theory of history in the above posts. Both acknowledge that Newt was hardly the only or last one to engage in this kind of dirtier-than-dirt politics, but isn’t the fact that it not only worked, but has endured for decades now cause to wonder if, perhaps, he was simply the first guy to fill an inevitable niche?

Let’s imagine there is no Newt, for example, but that his underling/successors, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay still exist. Does anyone with even a passing familiarity with the work of those two Reps. during their time in the House truly believe that, in a Newtless universe, they’d act any differently than they did? Do we really believe that Sarah Palin would somehow appear in an even only slightly less noxious form if Newt hadn’t spearheaded the “revolution” of 1994 while braying like a particularly self-confident member of the John Birch Society all the while?

My point is that I think larger forces are to blame for the recent marked shift in American political mores. And driftglass mentioned the most potent and responsible larger force: the Southern Strategy. The enormous (and enduring) consequences of the destruction of the Jim Crow system of the South — much more than Newt Gingrich’s seeming sociopathy — helps explain the rising viciousness and intractability of our politics.

Before, when the two parties were ideologically and regionally diverse, agreements, compromises and standards could be had and maintained. Each party held large blocs hostile to significant planks of its own agenda, whether they’d admit it or not. Thus, going along to get along became an utter necessity to get anything done.

But we’re not living in that world anymore. Instead, we’ve got a Republican party that is overwhelmingly composed of Southern legislators, with a political culture consequently dominated by the Dixie ethos. Gingrich, remember, is a man from Georgia. And while the GOP is more and more rigidly uniform, its extremism has forced any and all uninterested in resuscitating the South’s lost cause to come together in the Democratic party, which is not so much a coherent group as a collection of Not-Republicans.

The result is a GOP that has a level of party discipline perhaps unprecedented in American political history. One that, not coincidentally, happens to more or less align with the worldview and interests of an especially reactionary branch of Southern populism. Newt Gingrich is undoubtedly a major historical figure in that he became and remains the face of this movement’s true ascendancy. But let’s not make the mistake of giving Newt as much credit as he thinks he’d deserve. If it hadn’t been him, it would’ve been someone else. There were plenty of angry rich white guys in the South during the 1980s and 1990s; and there are plenty still today.

Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a 5-to-4 decision that broke along ideological lines, described a prison system that failed to deliver minimal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health problems and produced “needless suffering and death.”

I don’t understand why the article says the vote was split along ideological lines since Kennedy is a rather orthodox libertarian; but I suppose when compared to the medieval fire-breathing of Justice Antonin Scalia, Kennedy looks like a damned hippie,

Justice Scalia focused mostly on what he said was the problem of courts overstepping their constitutional authority and institutional expertise in issuing “structural injunctions” in “institutional-reform litigation” rather than addressing legal violations one by one.

He added that the prisoners receiving inadequate care were not necessarily the ones who would be released early.

“Most of them will not be prisoners with medical conditions or severe mental illness,” Justice Scalia wrote, “and many will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.”

That last graph speaks for itself (although it doesn’t speak so much as it raves and gurgles and froths at the mouth while implementing some profoundly weird, and vaguely homoerotic, imagery), so I wanted to focus briefly on the sophistry of Scalia’s second argument, that the injunction isn’t worth doing since those prisoners most vulnerable and maltreated were unlikely to be released.

Granting that Scalia’s implied knowledge of prisoner release standards is legitimate, this point still seems to me to be profoundly lacking. If I understand Scalia correctly, it’s almost as if he’s arguing that a mentally ill person crammed into a three-man cell alongside five other men would not have his life improved when his number of roommates is reduced from five to two. It’s such a patently ridiculous argument, I’m tempted to think I’ve either misunderstood it or the author of this piece has misrepresented it.

Bizarre and flimsy as Scalia’s histrionics may be, at least they’re of value as entertainment. Justices Alito and Roberts, on the other hand, hand in a fittingly dull dissent, arguing that, like the inmates at Guantanamo who are too dangerous to even think of granting Constitutional rights, the entire prison population of California represents a mortal threat to the State so vast as to reduce overwhelming evidence of rank mistreatment and disorder to mere “anecdotal evidence,”

In a second dissent, Justice Alito, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., addressed what he said would be the inevitable impact of the majority decision on public safety in California.

He summarized the decision this way: “The three-judge court ordered the premature release of approximately 46,000 criminals — the equivalent of three Army divisions.”

Justice Alito acknowledged that “particular prisoners received shockingly deficient medical care.” But, he added, “such anecdotal evidence cannot be given undue weight” in light of the sheer size of California’s prison system, which was at its height “larger than that of many medium-sized cities” like Bridgeport, Conn., Eugene, Ore., and Savannah, Ga.

“I fear that today’s decision, like prior prisoner release orders, will lead to a grim roster of victims,” Justice Alito wrote. “I hope that I am wrong. In a few years, we will see.”

I can just see Alito grabbing Kennedy by the hand, staring gravely into his eyes and intoning, “Their lives are in your hands, dude.“

On a more serious note, despite whatever Alito’s hand-wringing may cause the uninformed to assume, the ruling has various strictures and guidelines to ensure that those prisoners released are of the least dangerous variety.

Unfounded fear-mongering aside, the fact is that the conditions in California’s prisons are not only abhorrent but also yet another clear negative consequence of our nation’s continued reliance on an insane drug policy and a culture of punishment (rather than rehabilitation) as a first option. And while California is especially bad, it’s hardly alone. Across the country, states are buckling under the financial weight of overcrowded prison systems continually being forced to cram more and more individuals into inadequate cells and insufficiently furnished buildings.

The fact that Alito is forced to essentially ask us to pay no attention to the dehumanizing and shameful conditions behind the curtain — rather than offer a truly-felt argument against the conditions being cruel and unusual punishment — tells us much about not only the clear Constitutional violations embodied throughout California’s prison system, but the relative weight Alito, and other irrationally fear-driven men and women like him, put into our civil rights.

I’ve had so many conversations with American and Israeli hardliners who say essentially, why give up this land as long as the Palestinians won’t do this or that thing? Such folly. As though the settlements of the West Bank were a thing of great value as opposed to a lethal threat. Like you insist on keeping the knife in your belly as opposed to removing it at the first opportunity because someone else you’re negotiating with won’t do what you want.

So my initial instinct was to just ignore former Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s official announcement of his intention to win the Presidential election in 2012 and, through this cold-shouldering spite, so devastate Pawlenty personally, emotionally that no future candidate would dare make the same mistake again for fear of my considerable ire.

But instead of that I’m just going to direct you towards this from Dave Weigel today on how Pawlenty’s being so utterly dull and predictable is not a hindrance but in fact perhaps his greatest asset,

Every couple of days, there is a boomlet for another Republican savior. Every boomlet comes with a sub rosa message from Republican pundits :Please, please, give us someone besides Pawlenty.

This is seriously unfair to Pawlenty, but you can understand what his party’s thinking. If prospective candidates were universities, and the Republican primary voter were a high-school senior applying to college, then Pawlenty would be the safety school. A bland, solid Midwestern land-grant university. The problem with a safety school, of course, is that no one’s in a hurry to RSVP “yes” to it. David Frum, who occasionally predicts that Pawlenty will win the nomination,puts it another way: “Predicting Pawlenty feels like reaching the wrong answer on a math exam. You do the calculation and you arrive at the answer, Pawlenty. You think: That can’t be right.”

[...]

Pawlenty has an acute sense of how this may play out. Like he says, the people who “are dramatically more entertaining” can’t win the election. Pawlenty earns a fraction of the media attention Donald Trump got, or Palin gets. That’s because he doesn’t blunder into as many stupid stories as they do, and the public doesn’t dislike him as much. He’s generic at a time when the only candidate who outpolls Obama is “Generic Republican.”

The whole piece is good, but this was my favorite part. I think the analogy — Pawlenty as safety school — is great. If I could extend it, I imagine that by the time the primary really gets rolling in earnest, it will not at all be out of the question that most observers will see the President’s election as a fait accompli. In that context, another candidate than Pawlenty not only becomes a “reach” but one that even if the student were to be accepted, would almost certainly require the amassing of considerable debt. For a degree in theater tech. Hard to say that’s worth it.

One minor quibble, though, is the idea that Pawlenty’s genericness will be an asset in the general election. Yes, “Generic Republican” outpolls Obama, but I would imagine that’s more a consequence of Generic Republican being equivalent to Someone Else in most voters’ minds, rather than Republican policies — devoid of a human vessel — being especially popular.

The was the New York Times piece which revealed Ailes as a perhaps textbook paranoiac, ever-vigilant for the next assault on his person from Al Qaeda assassins.

And then there was the Esquire piece which not only gave us further anecdotes of deranged paranoia, but showed Ailes to be a hypocrite, laughably devoid of self-awareness, who rails against Manhattan elites conspiring against him at the same time he eats in the city’s most exclusive hot-spots and plots his next broadside against the rest of his Big Media cohort. The same piece that underlined the extent to which Roger Ailes is Fox News — and vice versa. How he is one with its knuckle-dragging id, its dark and unwieldy mix of terror and rage, sex and discipline, hostility and victimology. A man seemingly completely driven by his insecurities,

But your Esquire correspondent couldn’t help but also notice Mr. Ailes’s conflation of love and fear, because it’s one of the polarities that defines him and everything he has ever done. Victory and defeat. Weakness and strength. Love and fear. They are familiar to any viewer of Fox News [...] familiar to his many friends and many enemies. They are his stuff, or the inevitable consequences of his stuff, and he can’t help but see life in terms of them. He’s an old dad. He was fifty-nine when his son was born. He has never loved anyone the way he loves his son, but he fears that his love has made him weak in a way he has never been; has made him soft in a way he has never been; has made him vulnerable in a way he has devoted his entire life to rising above. He even uses those words when describing his domestic and paternal happiness: “I have a weakness now. I have a soft spot.”

And then we had my personal favorite, the article from Gawker which — you guessed it — contained anecdotes of Ailes’ paranoia almost too comical, outlandish and over the top to be believed. Like the time Ailes went to war with three no-name staffers he had hired to run a few small town newspapers stationed near his upstate home (which he had purchased so as to eliminate their being a threat, of course),

[I]n late March, Ailes confronted the three staffers and accused them of badmouthing him and [his wife] Elizabeth during their lunch breaks. Small towns being what they are, Lindsley, Haley, and Panny frequently drove several miles north of the News and Recorder’s Cold Spring, N.Y., office to privately have lunch in another town. When Ailes accused them, he knew which restaurant they frequented, leading the three to believe that Ailes wasn’t merely bluffing and that he’d actually had them followed.

After Lindsley quit for good, things got weirder. He was driving to a deli in Cold Spring for lunch earlier this month when he noticed a black Lincoln Navigator that seemed to be following him, according to several sources familiar with the incident. Lindsley drove aimlessly for a while to make sure he was being followed, and the Navigator stayed on him. Then he got a look at the driver, who was a News Corporation security staffer that Lindsley happened to know socially. Lindsley continued on his way and later called the driver to ask if he was following him. The answer was yes, at Ailes’ direction.

These were all good pieces, and not just because they were no doubt embarrassing to Ailes (though I won’t deny that being most of the fun). They were good because they pulled back the curtain on a man with disproportionate influence on America’s politics, and did so without fealty to the preferred narrative of him or his associates.

If by this point you’re thinking, Aren’t these the most elementary tenets of journalism? ; what’s the big deal?, then allow me to point you towards the latest entrant into the cottage industry of Roger Ailes exposés, New York magazine’s recent profile of the goings on at Fox News during the time since last year’s Congressional election.

The piece in New York, titled “The Elephant in the Green Room” and by Gabriel Sherman, is hardly a puff-piece. But far more than is the case with its predecessors, this latest article on Ailes is willing to present the man and his company in the light deemed least unflattering. Take for example the way Sherman describes Ailes himself,

Ailes is the most successful executive in television by a wide margin, and he has been so for more than a decade. He is also, in a sense, the head of the Republican Party, having employed five prospective presidential candidates and done perhaps more than anyone to alter the balance of power in the national media in favor of the Republicans. “Because of his political work”—Ailes was a media strategist for Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush—“he understood there was an audience,” Ed Rollins, the veteran GOP consultant, told me. “He knew there were a couple million conservatives who were a potential audience, and he built Fox to reach them.”

For most of his tenure, the roles of network chief and GOP kingmaker have been in perfect synergy. Ailes’s network has dominated the cable news race for most of the past decade, and for much of that time, Fox News attracted more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined. Throughout the George W. Bush years, the network’s patriotic cheerleading helped to marginalize the Democrats. And President Obama—he of the terrorist fist bump and uncertain ancestry and socialist leanings—turned out to be just as good for ratings, while galvanizing a conservative army that crushed the Democrats in the 2010 midterms. This double-barreled success is a testament to Ailes’s ferocious competitive streak. “Roger just likes to win,” former McCain adviser and longtime Ailes friend Charlie Black told me. “He’s very competitive in any game he’s in.”

So it must have been disturbing to Ailes when the wheels started to come off Fox’s presidential-circus caravan. (Coincidentally or not, this happened more or less when Donald Trump jumped on: “They like me on the network,” Trump told me. “I get ratings.”) The problem wasn’t that ratings had been slipping that much—Beck’s show declined by 30 percent from record highs, but the ratings were still nearly double those from before he joined the network. It was that, with an actual presidential election on the horizon, the Fox candidates’ poll numbers remain dismally low (Sarah Palin is polling 12 percent; Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, 10 percent and 2 percent, respectively). Ailes’s candidates-in-­waiting were coming up small. And, for all his programming genius, he was more interested in a real narrative than a television narrative—he wanted to elect a president. All he had to do was watch Fox’s May 5 debate in South Carolina to see what a mess the field was—a mess partly created by the loudmouths he’d given airtime to and a tea party he’d nurtured.

No one could reasonably argue that Ailes is, by almost any standard, an enormously successful man. But — and I hope this doesn’t sound petty or resentful — is Ailes’ recognizing an enormous market un-catered to and providing them with exactly what they want in exactly the way they want it really evidence of genius? As one interviewee in the Esquire piece alludes, it doesn’t necessarily take a once-in-a-lifetime mind to determine that pairing pretty blondes and “Regular Joe”-looking guys with salacious headlines, race-baiting and anger-mongering stories is going to return dividends. If the enormous success of Glenn Beck’s show on Fox is proof of genius, then each edition of the National Enquirer should be looked upon with no less reverence than Joyce’s Ulysses.

More annoying than confusing cunning, relentlessness and a dollop of shamelessness with genius is Sherman’s propensity to buy what Ailes and his friends were selling — that Fox News is now shifting back to the center, that Glenn Beck’s imminent departure is a harbinger of the station’s return to the far right after a two-year dalliance in the fevered swamps of conspiracy theorists and crypto-fascists,

For Ailes, Tucson was a turning point, suggesting an end to the silly season that had lasted most of Obama’s term as president and that Ailes had promoted and profited from. While Sean Hannity and other Fox pundits continue to hammer away at Obama, Ailes is hedging his bets. The network is pushing to make news anchor Bret Baier a bigger star. Shepard Smith’s newscast has flashes of outright liberalism. And last month, Ailes encouraged Bill O’Reilly—who seemed to be fading at the height of Beck’s power but now has been recast as the right’s reasonable man, Jon Stewart’s comic foil—to shoot down the “birther” conspiracy and other assorted right-wing myths that have dogged Obama since his election. “Fox gave the tea party the oxygen to prosper,” Chris Ruddy, the CEO of the conservative magazine Newsmax, told me. “Politically, it was brilliant. There were so many disaffected people after the Bush years. Now I sense a slight movement in a new direction. Roger has a long track record. It’s like the book Blink. He’s just got it. We’re going into an election period, and he doesn’t want Fox to be seen as a front of the Republican Party.”

For this construct to make any sense, one would have to assume or accept Bret Baier’s representing a left-leaning voice — thus the bet hedging. But it takes a little less than five minutes on the google for anyone of sufficient curiosity to determine that contrary to the implication of Sherman’s piece (and unlike Shep Smith, who had generally reasonable and occasionally progressive long before the Tea Party backlash), Baier is really another hard right Fox News bro,

The conservative blogosphere is abuzz over the Bret Baier’s contentious interview Wednesday withPresident Obama. Of course, Baier’s repeated interruptions and confrontational tone should come as no surprise. After all, the Fox News hatchet man established his partisan bona fides two years ago in an exclusive interview with President Bush titled, “George W. Bush: Fighting to the Finish.” And in that lovefest which Fox News deemed a “historic documentary” (and which is available from Amazon.com for $19.95), Baier compared Bush to Abraham Lincoln.

Mercifully, you don’t waste your money or your time listening to a fawning Bret Baier toss George W. Bush softball questions or lay rhetorical rose pedals as his feet during that 2008 hagiography. After his “unflinching, fair and balanced interview with the 43rd president,” Baier explained how Bush “was inspired by the writings and deeds of Abraham Lincoln”:

“We talked a lot about President Lincoln. And there’s going to be a lot of people out there who watch this hour and say, is he trying to equate himself with Lincoln?

I tell you what – he thinks about Lincoln and the tough times that he had during the Civil War. 600,000 dead. The country essentially hated him when he was leaving office.

“And the President reflects on that. This is a President who is really reflecting on his place in history.”

That Lincoln didn’t “leave office” but was instead assassinated just one month after his second inaugural is one of the more humorous errors produced by Fox News in its ongoing efforts to rewrite history on behalf of President Bush and the Republican Party.

And as to Bill O’Reilly’s being “the right’s reasonable man,” I’ll just say that it’s because of things like this that I loathe seeing Jon Stewart engage in “debate” with Fox News’ former number 1 property, as if Stewart had the authority to stand as a proxy for the community of reason and welcome a new member into the flock.

But what nagged at me the most as I read this readable and entertaining but essentially puffed-up piece of gossip was this bit quoted earlier and bolded by yours truly,

So it must have been disturbing to Ailes when the wheels started to come off Fox’s presidential-circus caravan. (Coincidentally or not, this happened more or less when Donald Trump jumped on: “They like me on the network,” Trump told me. “I get ratings.”)

For anyone with a faulty memory, I’ll remind you that Trump’s remarkably brief and disastrous moment in the political journalism spotlight was kick-started by his appearances on Fox’s morning franchise, “Fox and Friends,” where the Donald used the given platform to further mainstream birther nonsense. And when Trump wasn’t talking birth certificates, Fox was sure to have someone else on to do it for him. How do we square the post-Tucson turn to the center story Ailes et al is pushing and Sherman is accepting with the fact that the moment at which Fox probably reached peak crazy (an assumption, of course) and at which the GOP field of contenders was at its most embarrassing came well after Rep. Giffords was shot in the head?

This article seems to me to be an unfortunate case of a journalist having a great story in mind and attempting to make the facts work in service of the narrative, rather than the other way around. Some people might point out the piece’s most blaring headline — the revelation of Ailes’ suddenly low estimation of Sarah Palin’s intelligence — but even trumpeting that morsel does more to service Ailes’ goal of slightly regaining whatever credibility there is to be had through the Fox News brand.

It seemed odd at first to me, Ailes’ countenancing another long piece on his lightning rod network — the last two certainly didn’t go too well from his perspective. And truthfully he may not have wanted the New York piece to run — he’s never quoted on-record. But friends and confidantes are, and call me paranoid, but I don’t think a man of his experience and power doesn’t control whether or not his buddies talk to a journalist.

But now I think I’ve a better handle on just why Ailes decided to go another round. Whether Sherman knows it or not, the article she’s produced stands as yet another testament to the man’s “genius.”

“In any transition that seeks to bring new proposals to current problems in order to build a better future, care must be taken that those currently in need not be left to suffer,” Dolan wrote. “I appreciate your assurance that your budget would be attentive to such considerations and would protect those at risk in the processes and programs of such a transition. While appreciating these assurances, our duty as pastors will motivate our close attention to the manner in which they become a reality.”

*Or is it?

Here’s The Economist, putting forth (rather uncritically) the reigning conventional wisdom — or perhaps wishful thinking — in Republican circles as to how the party will keep electoral-suicide candidates like Gov. Palin or Rep. Bachmann from winning the party’s nomination,

[A]s Charlie Cook, a political analyst, points out, winning the nomination requires prodigious fundraising and some measure of backing from the party’s powerbrokers. Unlike the Democrats, he argues, the Republicans have never nominated an outsider. It is easier to raise money from the businessmen and suburbanites that populate the party’s moderate wing than from the poorer, rural voters who tend to back more populist candidates. Mr Huckabee, for instance, only managed to raise $16m during his 2008 campaign, whereas Mr Cook suspects that the winning candidate will end up spending $100m-150m in the primaries. Only Mrs Bachmann and Mrs Palin have the fund-raising prowess to make a strong run, but they are probably still too fire-breathing to prevail.

There are not enough votes on the religious right to secure the nomination, so the successful candidate will have to appeal to less doctrinaire voters too. Mr Cook says the tea party’s influence seems to have peaked. Most of the establishment Republicans it helped to upset in primaries in 2010 were the victims of low turnouts and peculiar circumstances unlikely to be repeated in the presidential campaign. Claims of the Republican establishment’s demise have been exaggerated.

First off, if Cook did indeed claim that the GOP has “never” nominated an outsider, he’s wrong. Sure, it’s only happened once in modern history, and it was nearly a half-century ago — but it happened nonetheless. The nominee was Senator Barry Goldwater, who slew the front-running (and quite liberal) Gov. Rockefeller and secured his party’s nomination in an unprecedented grass-roots campaign that many have pointed to as modern conservatism’s birthing moment.

He also lost. Badly. So it’s understandable that Republicans might not be too eager to relive the moment.

But other than the historical record, I don’t find any particularly compelling argument that says an “outsider” like Palin or Bachmann simply couldn’t end up smiling at the podium in Tampa next summer. With a GOP electorate as wingnutty as the current one and with many of the more legitimate contenders bowing out in advance (see: Daniels, Mitch, Huckabee, Mike and Bush, Jeb) the 2012 primary will be defined by not only a thin field, but a thin field beholden more than usual to the party’s more, shall we say, eccentric members.

So with the more “serious” candidates bowing out, the main question becomes whether or not any of the more wild-eyed contenders could raise enough money to keep the crazy train rolling past Iowa. Generally, the fun and the funds run out for the also-rans rather quickly after Iowa and New Hampshire; but with big money candidate Mitt Romney lugging the weight not only of his Mormonism, his previous pro-choice beliefs and his thinly veiled relative sanity but, most damningly, his support and passage as Governor of Massachusetts of “Romneycare,” a Romney nomination is a profoundly debatable certainty.

And that leaves the door open, if only a crack, for anyone who can woo those voters most likely to recoil from Romney while simultaneously maintaining the requisite cash flow. As of this writing, there’s really only one potential candidate out there who fits the bill. And on this blog, she goes by the simply handle of Bachmentum.

John Nichols of The Nation is reading the same tea leaves as yours truly, surveying a decimated field with the specter of Michele looming overhead. He’s perhaps less optimistic about Bachmann’s chances to win the nomination (although I’d only put them at fifteen percent or so), but we agree on why a Bachmann candidacy, while likely to fail, could still be a major event on the road to 2012,

No, she will not be the nominee. The GOP establishment is still muscular enough to prevent political train wrecks of an epic nature.

But Bachmann can run, raise remarkable amounts of money and still seek her congressional seat – Minnesota has one of the latest filing deadlines in the country, coming months after the race for the Republican nod is settled for a much-duller, much whiter-haired, much whiter guy like former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman or a late-starter like Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels or New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

And she can do something else.

She can steer the GOP debates in exactly the direction President Obama and his reelection campaigners hope it will head – toward the Tea Party fringe, with its passion for economic and social extremes that gets cheers from the end-timers who pack Iowa caucuses but scares the wits out of just about everyone else.

And that’s the real reason a Bachmann candidacy should scare the wits out of GOP big whigs — because Michele Bachmann doesn’t have to actually win the nomination to have a successful candidacy. As long as she sticks around long enough to force Romney to weigh in on whether or not the President is a Kenyan socialist thug gangster BLACKITY BLACK BLACK, she ensures the primary remains sufficiently Real Conservative.

But of course, the real winner in all this is the President.

The answer is that I will not be a candidate. What could have been a complicated decision was in the end very simple: on matters affecting us all, our family constitution gives a veto to the women’s caucus, and there is no override provision. Simply put, I find myself caught between two duties. I love my country; I love my family more.

Their error is in believing that this constitutes an important threat to Israel’s security. During the first quarter-century of Israel’s existence, the prospect of a massed conventional military invasion constituted the greatest threat to its existence. That’s no longer true. The greatest dangers today are the combination of demographic and political threats posed by the growing relative size of the Arab population west of the Jordan river, terrorism, and the loss of legitimacy posed by a continuing occupation and counter-terrorism policy in the West Bank and Gaza. Those dangers all dwarf the potential that armored columns of Arab armies will cut Israel in half. The tragedy is that huge swaths of the Israeli right and its sympathizers (both Jewish and Gentile) have failed to grasp this, and have placed it in danger of succumbing to the mortal new threat while guarding against the antiquated one.

I apologize for being such a sucky blogger this week. It’s my graduation week; commencement’s tomorrow. I don’t want to write any checks my blog can’t cash, but I imagine things will return to normal on Monday when I’ve moved into my temporary haunt.

Matt Yglesias on the Administration’s Israeli-Palestinian policy of wishful thinking,

[I]t seems to me that the Obama administration keeps answering the wrong question. They keep telling us what they want the Israeli government to do. And what they want it to do, basically, is have different preferences. But the question for Obama isn’t what Israeli policy should be, it’s what should American policy be.

Jason Stearns recently hada piece up at Foreign Policy about (among other things) the enduring humanitarian crisis in Congo and how, only now, after more than a decade of bloodshed, is it starting to crack into the popular American consciousness. In trying to explain just why it is that Americans today are interested in Congo when they’d been apathetic or unaware for so long previously, Stearns cites the efficacy of a good old fashioned populist-minded PR campaign,

But the violence in eastern Congo is sadly not new. So why this sudden flurry of attention? The novelty is the grassroots mobilization around the issue in the United States. For years, the sheer complexity of the conflict — more than 50 different Congolese armed groups have seen the light of day in the past decade, fighting for a host of reasons — has been the bane of reporters and activists alike. How can you make someone care about a conflict you can’t explain? In 2006, even the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof attempted to justify why he wasn’t writing much about the Congo: “I grant that the suffering is greater in Congo. But our compass is also moved by human evil, and that is greater in Darfur.” Good guys vs. bad guys make for an easier story. It has always been difficult to reduce the Congolese conflict to such simple binaries.

But the needle began moving back toward Congo in 2007, when John Prendergast founded the Enough Project. Prendergast, a former National Security Council director, felt stymied by the limitations of his work with the International Crisis Group (which aimed to influence high-level policymakers). “I knew that unless Americans started putting pressure on their elected officials, nothing was going to change,” he told me. And in order to rally those grassroots, his new organization had to boil the conflicts in Africa — starting with Sudan and now including the Congo and Uganda — down to a more simple narrative and focus on the naked suffering. Instead of trying to explain the convoluted politics of the conflict, Enough Project focused on two themes: sexual violence and conflict minerals. Weaving these two together, they explained the conflict in a more readily digestible fashion, at the same time linking it to American consumers and their use of electronics containing Congolese tin, tungsten, and tantalum. They crafted slogans like, “Don’t want your cell phone to fuel war in the Congo? Tell Obama!”

I think this is fascinating for a few reasons.

For one thing, it’s somewhat shocking that it took so long for someone to understand that Americans, on the whole, only understand the world through binary, Manichean frameworks. I would say this is to some degree a generally human inclination; but it would be hard to argue that the American propensity to see everything in black and white terms is more exaggerated today than most of its counterparts elsewhere. The luxury of empire, I suppose.

Anyway — yes, obviously, advocates were seriously wasting their time before they decided to break the Congo situation down into a more easily digestible dichotomy of good and evil. Predictably — and understandably — however, some Congo experts and those who have already long-devoted their careers to the region and its pathologies have been less enthusiastic about treating the atrocities there as chapters in a kind of NC-17 rated “Star Wars,”

Some are cynical about these efforts. [...] They argue that this kind of knee-jerk mobilization leads to the dumbing-down of issues, dangerous simplification, and the confusion of what is important with what is glamorous. And there is indeed a danger that a simplistic understanding of the conflict will lead to simplistic policies.

After airing this line of thinking, Stearns makes his preferences known when he writes, “But there is no doubt that these grassroots endeavors — Tweeting, Facebooking, and online petitioning — have succeeded where more academic efforts have failed for decades: bringing the Congo to D.C.’s attention. The grassroots campaigners, while perhaps not very Congo-savvy, tend to be much more politically astute than their critics allow.” I agree. Indeed, part of political astuteness is sometimes — not always, but certainly sometimes — understanding that you can’t turn everyone on the street into an amateur expert on your topic.

People are busy, very busy, and despite our best efforts, the truth is that we all suffer from a finite supply of not only expendable time and physical energy, but emotional stamina, too. One of the paradoxical consequences of the coming of the human rights era is that while the language and semiotics of the human rights discourse is more mainstream than ever before, the number of organizations and issues clamoring for our attention and advocacy is similarly myriad. Whether we know it or not, we pick and choose our issues — at times humanitarian organizing can even begin to feel like a bizarre form of status signaling — and are less likely to want to dive into the weeds and suss out a situation that experts say from the get-go is incredibly complicated and without a clear good or bad side.

It’s a kind of laziness, yes, but it’s also simply human. And it has to be acknowledged and accounted for.

So, to my mind, the work of John Prendergast and his fellow-travelers in broadening the appeal of advocating for the people of Congo is clearly worth it, despite the undeniable drawbacks of what Stearns calls “dumbing down” the issue. But just to underline that these drawbacks are real, Stearns points out how one policy response that’s come about in the wake of the Congo issue’s “breaking” has been reflective of how a ham-handed approach may be useful in terms of PR, but can by the same token lead to very imperfect policy,

In an ideal world, here is how international pressure would work: The global minerals trade is highly integrated, so a demand shock from the United States — the largest consumer of electronics — would have serious repercussions in the Congo. Congolese business associations, unable to shift their product, would start to panic and put pressure on President Kabila to demilitarize mining areas and begin certifying non-conflict minerals. At the same time, the government would get more serious about pushing rebel groups out of mining areas as well.

The real world is a bit messier. The first part of the equation has worked: As of April 1, U.S.-based companies are boycotting minerals from the Congo, saying they cannot distinguish “clean” from “conflict” minerals. Following suit, the Malaysia Smelting Corporation, the largest smelter of Congolese tin, is considering halting new purchases, and exports from the Congolese trade hubs of Goma and Bukavu are grinding to a halt. The problem is that the Congolese government has not yet reacted. It appears that it is more important for Kabila to placate his commanders — many of whom are former rebels — than to promote trade.

Also, even if the government demilitarizes the trade routes, someone will need to certify that the minerals are clean. At the moment, the trade routes — from the thousands of pick-and-shovel pits to the border crossing — are mired in a fog of corrupt bureaucracy, with no reliable way of telling where which sack of tin comes from and whether it was taxed by someone with an AK-47.

Further, Stearns wisely points out how the consequences of flawed policy can be much worse than a simple waste of Congressional time or money — sometimes the wrong policy can set back the movement entire,

This is where the U.S. government in particular has failed. It is not enough just to legislate from on high and expect the situation to right itself. The Congo supplies less than 5 percent of tin and around 20 percent of tantalum to the world market, and without encouragement companies might shy away from the reputational hazards the Congolese trade brings with it. A sustained boycott of U.S. companies could put tens of thousands of miners out of work and push some of the trade toward India or China, where businesses care much less about social responsibility.

Acknowledging all of that, though, anyone who is interested in human rights and global policy has to accept the unpalatable fact that you won’t always know what the consequences of your ideas will be. The road to Hell, etc., etc. But while for some that means we’re best off doing nothing at all, those who have struggled with these questions and, at least for the time being, determined themselves to be unable to stand idly by will have to simply understand that this is a messy business, and that passing merely one law, or organizing merely one successful campaign, is almost certainly never going to be enough. As Stearns notes, the road that got Congo to its present state was unbelievably winding, confusing and idiosyncratic. It’s quite unlikely the exit route will be anything else.

What I don’t understand is why the party elites have so little enthusiasm for Tim Pawlenty, who seems like an adequate nominee — lacking any special political skills, but not burdened by any prominent weaknesses, either. I haven’t really dug into Pawlenty’s record, so I don’t know if the Republican ennui toward him is based on a real weakness or simply an unrealistic desire to be swept off their feet. If that white knight fails to ride in — or if he rides in and falls on his face — I expect them to reconcile themselves to the generic former Republican governor from Minnesota.

I’ve been thinking for a while that former Gov. Pawlenty was going to win the GOP nomination by virtue of being the least-worst option, so I’m sympathetic to Chait’s confusion on this point. But I’ve also found myself more and more thinking my earlier confidence in Pawlenty’s inevitable victory was a case of my being too clever by half.

Because while it’s not at all too late for Pawlenty to make his move — recall that even later than this point in the 2008 GOP primary, McCain was considered dead-in-the-water — I think it’s necessary to conclude from Pawlenty’s continued stagnation in the polls that the guy may just not be an especially talented politician. The fact that he failed to distinguish himself in a debate featuring Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Gary Johnson is hardly encouraging for those hoping to ride the Pawmentum. A good behind-the-scenes game can only get you so far if you wilt in the limelight, after all.

So with such a paltry field, and with the prospect of Rep. Bachmann swooping in and playing the roll of spoiler in Iowa that’s not unprecedented in GOP primary history (and thus, for a time, becoming the face of the GOP), it’s fair to wonder if the Republican elites’ continued reticence to embrace Pawlenty is a sign that the guy just doesn’t have what it takes. If Pawlenty were a truly talented pol then why would there remain such a clamor for a possible Mitch Daniels run? I mean, really: how boring and uninspiring do you have to be in order to make Mitch Daniels seem thrilling by comparison?

Chait has been consistently and stridently of the opinion that Mitt Romney’s previous support of healthcare reform in MA which mirrors that passed by the Democrats in 2010 renders him a non-started in the GOP primary, but absent a real move by Pawlenty, I’m not sure this is the case. I think there’s fair reason to believe that Romney’s apostasy (though it wasn’t at the time) as MA Governor is surmountable. Certainly there’s more room for him to maneuver within than was the case with McCain’s heterodoxy on immigration reform.

A time is going to come when GOP elites concede that Mitch Daniels is this cycle’s Fred Thompson — much more appealing in theory than in practice, and without a base of support outside the Village commentariat — and they’ll need to rally around someone to thwart a Palin, Bachmann or maybe even Cain nomination. As dull, plastic and problematic a nominee as he is, it appears from today’s vantage that Romney’s better able to get GOP voters mildly interested (if not exicted) than Pawlenty. Barring Pawnelty’s ground-game in Iowa and New Hampshire being far better than anyone currently expects, I wouldn’t count Romney out just yet.

As a rule, political parties — especially ones that rely on a radical, hysterical base to win elections — do not get adrenaline boosts from bland wonks.