Month: March 2006

Joe Klein Jumps The Shark

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Just Shoot Me
Joe Klein jumps the shark.By Charles P. Pierce
Web Exclusive: 02.24.06

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So, I had a bit of free time at the end of a long couple of days, and I’m floating around the Web, and I come upon this little masterpiece from the man who wrote a book about Woody Guthrie that damned near ruined Bruce Springsteen’s music for all of us. Look down there, Joe. See it? Way down there below where you’re at right now?

That’s the shark.

I despair often of my Beltway brethren. Most of the time, I feel it’s time to march most of them out of Washington forcibly and intern them in a work camp and re-education center somewhere in the northern Smoky Mountains.

But that’s just me.

Occasionally, however, one comes upon such a perfect fractal symptom of the overall contagion that it seems more than worth it to start building rude huts and stocking farm implements for the eventual inmate population. Peggy Noonan and her magic dolphins were one such pustulating example a few years back. Howard Fineman on Bush’s comfort in denim and ermine, or whatever the hell he was talking about, was another. And now we have this.

Sweet mother Mary, Dick Cheney performing for Brit Hume and GUYS IN VIETNAM? An aging corporate carnivore downing beers and stalking farm-raised game, and some poor young guy drafted out of Butcher Holler and dropped into a jungle kill zone? Dick Cheney, as a boomer, learning the lessons of An Loc on the killing fields of some plutocrat’s toy wilderness? And being sadder and wiser for the experience? And Bob Kerrey, who’s said enough flaky stuff in his day to take a job with Kellogg’s, chiming in with some look-there’s-a-unicorn psychedelia about how this may make Cheney “have a better sense” of what he’s asked other people’s children to endure? What kind of mushrooms do they serve in the dining hall at The New School anyway?

All Your Dumb Are Belong To Us

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Brad Delong on Peggy Noonan’s About-Face  

  

Peggy Noonan Realizes She Has Conned Herself–and Says That She Wouldn’t Have Voted for Bush If She’d Known Who He Was

She looks at Bush fiscal policy and joins the Ancient, Occult, and Hermetic Order of the shrill, saying that if she’d known who George W. Bush really was she wouldn’t have voted for him:

OpinionJournal – Peggy Noonan: Hey, Big Spender Should we have known that President Bush would bust the budget?: Thursday, March 16, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST: This week’s column is a question, a brief one addressed with honest curiosity to Republicans. It is: When George W. Bush first came on the scene in 2000, did you understand him to be a liberal in terms of spending?

The question has been on my mind since the summer of 2005 when, at a gathering of conservatives, the question of Mr. Bush and big spending was raised…. Everyone murmured about… how the president “spends like a drunken sailor except the sailor spends his own money.” And then someone, a smart young journalist, said, (I paraphrase), But we always knew what Bush was. He told us when he ran as a compassionate conservative. This left me rubbing my brow in confusion. Is that what Mr. Bush meant by compassionate conservatism?

That’s not what I understood him to mean. If I’d thought he was a big-spending Rockefeller Republican…. I wouldn’t have voted for him…. I didn’t understand Mr. Bush’s grand passion to be cutting spending…. But he did present himself as a conservative… conservatism is hostile, for reasons ranging from the abstract and philosophical to the concrete and practical, to high spending and high taxing….

How did this happen? In the years after 9/11 I looked at Mr. Bush’s big budgets, and his expansion of entitlements, and assumed he was sacrificing fiscal prudence–interesting that that’s the word people used to spoof his father–in order to build and maintain, however tenuously, a feeling of national unity. I assumed he wanted to lessen bipartisan tensions when America was wading into the new world of modern terrorism. I thought: This may be right and it may be wrong, but I understand it…. Mr. Bush will never have to run again, and he is in a position to come forward and make the case, even if only rhetorically, to slow and cut spending. He has not. And there’s no sign he will….

Mr. President:

Did you ever hold conservative notions and assumptions on the issue of spending? If so, did you abandon them after the trauma of 9/11? For what reasons, exactly? Did you intend to revert to conservative thinking on spending at some point? Do you still? Were you always a liberal on spending? Were you, or are you, frankly baffled that conservatives assumed you were a conservative on spending? Did you feel they misunderstood you? Did you allow or encourage them to misunderstand you?

What are the implications for our country if spending levels continue to grow at their current pace?

What are the implications for the Republican party if it continues to cede one of the pillars on which it stood?

Did compassionate conservatism always mean big spending?

Now Peggy Noonan and the rest of the plastic Republican chattering teeth did not think back in 2000 that Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” meant that he was a spender, they thought it meant that he was a liar–and that they were in on the con. The Bush budget strategy, they thought at the time, had four components:

  1. Highball estimates of future budget surpluses in order to make it look like there’s more room for tax cuts than there was.
  2. Lowball the costs of the tax cuts by telling people that the AMT will be repealed when you calculate the magnitude of their tax cut and yet keeping the AMT in effect when calculating the revenue cost of the tax cut.
  3. Call yourself a “compassionate conservative” to convince voters you don’t want to make elderly emphysema patients front the money for their oxygen cylinders.
  4. Then, when deficits reemerge, say: “Oh. What a surprise. We have to cut way back on federal services and programs after all.”

That’s the David Stockman quadrille. They thought Bush was lying to everybody else–that, as Andrew Sullivan liked to put it:

Some… get steamed because Bush has obscured this figure or claimed his tax cut will cost less than it actually will, or because he is using Medicare surplus money today that will be needed tomorrow and beyond…. [T]hey miss the deeper point… Bush has to obfuscate his real goals of reducing spending with the smoke screen of ‘compassionate conservatism’…. B.S. is necessary for any vaguely successful retrenchment of government power in an insatiable entitlement state…. I just hope the smoke doesn’t clear before the spenders get their hands on our wallets again.

Now they are surprised–and shrill–to learn that George W. Bush was lying to them too.

Meteor Blades’s diary

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I’m clueless as to how many of those could qualify as political. Not to mention how many of those would call themselves progressive or politically left. Nor how many frequently have something worth reading, something original, inspiring, revelatory or investigatory. Thousands, for sure.

For someone as obsessed as me, it’s maddening. Speed-reading can only get you so far. But it’s simultaneously wonderful. For an antique journalist and Op-Ed junkie like myself, what could be more liberating than this plethora?

Liberating and essential. We’ve got Guckertgate, Plamegate, Torturegate, Coingate and Spygate. We’ve got corruption and incompetence and unconstitutionality spread from sea to shining sea. We’ve got a foreign policy that makes Manifest Destiny look altruistic. With mercenaries, propagandists and lily-livered chicken-hearts dominating the megamedia, how could we have put so many pieces together without the blogs?

Not that a few good journalists haven’t alerted us to a smidgen of what’s going on. But, until recently, supine has been the usual position in which we’ve found our supposedly watchdog media. Worse still in the opinion sections. Worst of all on television. Anyone who has wanted something other than the same old talking points, something more than the same shy obeisance to an Administration out of control, something even close to a reading between the lines, has turned to blogs.

On the Op-Ed pages of the old Los Angeles Herald Examiner, I used to buy maybe 50 “citizen” pieces a year and fill the rest with the same, publisher-approved, mostly sad collection of syndicated columnists that the rest of America’s newspapers published. At the Los Angeles Times, we maybe managed to get 250 citizen pieces onto the Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion pages each year, and filled the rest with syndicated writers.

For 11 years before it was absorbed by Tribune Media Services, I contributed to this narrow little world of pre-packaged opinion as editor at the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, where a staff of salespeople worked to cram 21 political columnists – including Cal Thomas, Arianna Huffington, Robert Reno, Henry Kissinger, Jesse Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Bill Press and Armstrong Williams – into as many of the nation’s 1,500 daily newspapers as possible. Foreign sales were big, too.

Three major syndicates and a handful of minor ones still run their own stables of political columnists. Ultimately, with 125 or so syndicated columnists available, about 10 dominate the dead-tree media. Right or left, they’re treated like commodities. Check out the TMS page. You need a liberal or a libertarian on your Op-Ed? Just click on the mini-window.

You can depend on almost every one of these columnists never to break the formula. Never too long. Never too colorful. Definitely nothing to upset the brand. They’re sold as a conservative, they’d damn sure better stay one, or they’ll wind up pissing off client editors the way Huffington did when she started making her move from right to left. Predictability is essential.

Which is why I love political blogs. Unpredictable. Fresh. Unique. The standard Op-Ed is 700 words per entry. If it suits a blogger, s/he’ll write 7,000 words. Or 70, plus a link to somebody’s else’s 7,000 words. Or a 7-word caption on a picture . Or just the picture with a comment thread so you can write your own caption. Rant, rave, rumination, reminiscence, reflection, review, rehash, research, reverie, revolt – there are simply no limits to form or style or substance. The political blogger can create a smackdown that is pure poetry, as well as exposés, dot-connections or raw speculation. S/he can write a diatribe or a dissertation. Or serve as focal point for activism. Nobody can tell the blogger what to say, what conclusions to draw. No editor is on the phone suggesting the latest effort be toned down or started over. Of course, this free-for-all means some wild-ass nonsense gets posted. And a few typos.

It also means an abundance so rich that if you’re at all like me, you can’t even keep up with the names of all the new progressive blogs, much less their substance. Happily, each year at this time, the folks over at Wampum help us all out by hosting the Koufax Awards.