Quote of the day: And then all of this happened

It turns out that what has held together American government is less the elaborate rules hammered out by the guys in the wigs in 1789 than a series of social norms that have begun to disintegrate. Senate filibusters were supposed to be rare, until they became routine. They weren’t supposed to be applied to judicial nominations, then they were. The Senate majority would never dream of changing the rules to limit the filibuster; the minority party would never plan to withhold all support from the president even before he took office; it would never threaten to default on the debt to extort concessions from the president. And then all of this happened.

- Jonathan Chait, taking time out from his many other responsibilities to personally depress the living daylights out of me.

Chait's New Yorker piece from which this is excerpted is going on the p3 Reading List, at right.

Reading: Garry Wills reviews E. J. Dionne's history of modern conservatism

Dionne (and Wills) pursue a question on everyone's mind: How did the modern conservative movement – which is the only thing left inside the hollow shell that only a few years ago was the national Republican Party – become the thing we see today? They cover some familiar ground, and recognize some interesting historical patterns.

For my money, here's the answer in a nutshell (although Wills quickly points out that Dionne draws a different conclusion from the same evidence):

The truth is that conservatives are right to feel that their own moderates are sell-outs. To be (even moderately) a moderate is to leave the Republican Party—to be what Buckley called an immoral Middle-of-the-Roader. To accept Enlightenment values—reason, facts, science, open-mindedness, tolerance, secularity, modernity—is to lower one’s guard against evils like evolution, concern about global warming, human equality across racial and sexual and religious lines—things Republicans have opposed for years and will not let their own members sell out to. They rightly intuit that there is only one Enlightenment party in America, and the Republicans are not it. That is why they have to oppose in every underhanded way they can the influence of younger people who are open to gays, to same-sex marriage, to feminism.

This is the conclusion I come to from a reading of Dionne’s account of Republicans across the half-century story he tells.

Wills' review of Dionne's Why the Right Went Wrong: Conservatism—from Goldwater to the Tea Party and Beyond is going on the Readings list in the sidebar.

Quote of the day: Delusional

What I would argue is key to this situation — and, in particular, key to understanding how the conventional wisdom on Trump/McCain went so wrong — is the reality that a lot of people are, in effect, members of a delusional cult that is impervious to logic and evidence, and has lost touch with reality.

I am, of course, talking about pundits who prize themselves for their centrism.

- Paul Krugman, reflecting on Donald Trump's rise in the polls after taking his shot at former POW Senator John McCain, when the best and brightest all predicted it was the beginning of the end for Trump.

It's a shrewd argument, and the article is going on the p3 Readings list.

(Via Driftglass.)

Reading: Quid pro quo? Really?

I've finished Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, and if I thought the Nixonian beginning depressed and angered me (and it did), it got worse once the rise of Reagan was spelled out. 

(Ford, the actual sitting president between the two, comes off as a hapless fellow who would tack whatever direction the prevailing wind required, with little success. Perlstein uses the trope "damned if he does, damned if he doesn't" more than once to describe Ford's luckless efforts to navigate between the Charybdis of Watergate, Nixon's pardon, a continuing Soviet menace, and a tanking economy, on one side, and the Scilla of Reagan's telegenic refusal to admit that there was one single problem in America that optimism – plus a major rightward slant on the economy and foreign policy – couldn't fix, on the other.)

Perlstein's take on Reagan, and his attractiveness, is simple – like Reagan himself: He learned early in his not-terribly-happy childhood to recast his troubles as optimistic, heroic, counterfactual adventures – with himself as the hero, always mindful of how he looked to the crowd. Most of us recall his misrememberings of the iffy rescue stories from his years a lifeguard, or his stories while president of his Army career or the details of who died where in the WWII European Theater. But Perlstein documents a good number more of them, and they form a disturbing pattern.

Here's just one, from his days as the president of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1950s.

One month later he [Reagan, then president of the SAG] would deliver something else: A legal document, signed by him in his capacity as union president, granting MCA exclusive right to ignore a crucial Screen Actors Guild rule: a ban on agencies producing TV shows. It was a conflict of interest, because agents had the obligation to get their clients paid as much as possible, and producers had an interest in having them paid the least. But Lew Wasserman saw television as his next gold mine, and he wanted in.

There were 1,126 times more televisions in American homes than had been in 1942. Studio bosses feared the infernal machines like the plague (for a time Jack Warner banned them as set dressing in Warner Bros. Films). Hollywood actors came to fear them, too. "Thousands of hours of entertainment must be available to the television public," the Saturday Evening Post reported early in 1952, "and any guess as to where it will come from is as good as another." TV production was almost exclusively done in New York, live, instead of Los Angeles, where shows were shot on film. If TV shows were filmed, producers worried that actors would demand payment every time a show was rerun – what was known as a "reuse" payment; producers adamantly refused to even entertain the idea of reuse payments. In Los Angeles, these were perilous times: If actors held the line and continued to demand them, and movies continued to lose market share to TV, Hollywood as an institution might shrivel at an alarming rate.

Within this matrix, Wasserman spied a bonanza business opportunity.

He set up a TV production subsidiary in Los Angeles called Review – this was, on its face, against SAG rules. Wasserman, however, convinced his favorite client to sell the SAG on the idea of granting MCA a "blanket waiver" of that rule. Wasserman and his lawyer Laurence Beilenson sold the idea to Jack Dales by arguing that the acting game in Los Angeles would die without it – that TV production would stay in New York. But the argument didn't really make sense. For if letting one agency have a blanket waiver, as a monopoly, might open the floodgates to Hollywood TV production, wouldn't help Los Angeles all the more to let all agencies enjoy the same right?

It made more sense when you considered the sweetener MCA added to the deal: a secret quid pro quo. Revue would give SAG what the studios adamantly refused to grant: reuse fees.How secret was that part of the deal? It may have even been kept from Reagan, who seemed quite in earnest when, asked at a 1962 hearing on MCA's alleged monopoly power, said there was no quid pro quo. At that, a letter from Beilenson to Wasserman recollecting the secret terms – that Revue was willing to sign a contract giving the guild members reuse fees when no one else was willing to do so – was read out. Reagan was asked the question again. He replied, guilelessly, "It's quite conceivable then if he says it in this letter." By that time, Review was so gigantic that MCA had a direct hand in 45 percent of all network shows.

Maybe Reagan didn't know the deal was dirty. Maybe he just convinced himself of his friend and benefactor's incorruptible character. As usual, in those he believed innocent, innocence was all his eyes saw. It was his gift.

As a side bar, and something of a giggle, here's Reagan putting his thang down, street cred-wise, at the 1980 debate against Jimmy Carter and John Anderson:

But, if we're talking about how much we think about the working people and so forth, I'm the only fellow who ever ran for this job who was six times President of his own union and still has a lifetime membership in that union.

Reagan, who went from a Roosevelt Democrat to a studio stooge within a decade, sold out his SAG union while he still carried their card in his wallet, and once he was elected president he fed the union movement – famously starting with the air traffic controllers, after which his supporters showed their irony-free gratitude by naming an airport after him – into the shredder. And the unions believed him. They believed him. Go fig.

In any case, here's the lovable, avuncular, doddering old Dutch in 1987, near the end of his second term in the Oval Office, as the Iran Contra scandal was blowing up somewhere near his face. You'll see the pattern:

"A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not."

His heart and his best intentions. Yeah. It's all of a piece. Remember that the next time you read someone celebrating the Age of Reagan, with that whole City-on-a-Hill Morning-in-America fantasy. What Reagan himself – and his loyalists a generation later – always liked most about him was his ability to have no clue about the shifty business happening right under his nose, let alone what he'd been party to in the past. He was the plucky hero, no matter what.

No wonder most people outside his inner circle couldn't tell simply by watching when Reagan's Alzheimer's finally set in.

Quote of the day: Giants and such

Matt Bai has a piece in the New York Times Magazine that fills in the last missing detail about the tectonic shift in American political journalism, from the analysis of Policy and Great Men to the back-alley chasing after markers of "character," and the event during a fateful week in 1988 that locked that shift in place, apparently forever: The decision by the Miami Herald to cover presidential candidate Gary Hart's womanizing as "news," rather than to ignore it, for better or worse, as most political reporting had done with such private information since the days of FDR.

When giants like [presidential historian Theodore] White came up through the news business in the postwar years, the surest path to success was to gain the trust of politicians and infiltrate their world. Proximity to power and the information and insight derived from having it was the currency of the trade. [...]

If Nixon’s resignation created the character culture in American politics, then Hart’s undoing marked the moment when political reporters ceased to care about almost anything else. By the 1990s, the cardinal objective of all political journalism had shifted from a focus on agendas to a focus on narrow notions of character, from illuminating worldviews to exposing falsehoods. If post-Hart political journalism had a motto, it would be: “We know you’re a fraud somehow. Our job is to prove it.”

Bai's sense of history gets a little iffy, the farther he goes back in time; when I read his early-on claim that Nixon's fall from grace was "more personal than political, a result of instability and pettiness rather than ideology," I was able to guess his age within fifteen months, as confirmed by Google.

Much of his reminiscence is built on Richard Ben Cramer's definitive account of the 1988 presidential campaign, What It Takes: The Way to the White House. But Bai has uncovered – if not the smoking gun, certainly a shell casing with the finger prints on it – that establishes the exact moment when political journalism remade itself in such an unlovely way, to such an extent that an unqualified goof like George W. Bush could make his way into the White House only twelve years later.

But I'm awarding the final word – and QOTD status – to Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog, for his rejoinder (in a piece about the gun lobby and the disapproval felt by the editorial board of The Arizona Star about that whole facts-have-a-liberal-bias thing) to Bai's claim about "post-Hart journalism."

No, "the cardinal objective of all political journalism" is not to reveal politicians' character flaws. The cardinal objective of all (or at least most) political journalism is to define the political center on any issue, usually with the assistance of entrenched conservative political interests. That's what's going on here. The GOP wants to frame the response to this ad so the public ignores the message and is outraged at the attack on a Republican candidate. And the press is all too happy to help the GOP do the framing.

Reading: Notes on the banality of "tyranny"

Charlie Pierce plants one deep in the bleachers this morning, reviewing the care and circumspection with which the signers of the Declaration of Independence thought through their use of the word "tyrant" to describe the obviously-tyrannical George III – and comparing that with yesterday's morally feckless, intellectually sloppy, and politically expedient party-line vote by House Republicans to sue President Obama for alleged offenses against the Constitution, offenses which, if true, ought to require them as a matter of law and conscience (!) to begin impeachment hearings by tiffin tomorrow.

I haven't yet located the full text of the resolution authorizing the House GOP's Impeachment Lite lawsuit, but we can safely assume that, when I do, the words "we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" will be nowhere in evidence.

Pierce's essay, "Words Matter," is going in the p3 Readings list.

Impeachment? Paste this in your hat

For the next time someone tells you that all this "impeachment" talk is really a reverse-psych instigated by the Obama White House, cynically trying to wrong-foot the gullible but innocent Republicans in and out of Congress for political and fund-raising gain (but I repeat myself).

You probably knew some or most of this, but here it is, all in one place. Follow David Weigel's links at the site:

On Tuesday, after the conference meeting, Speaker John Boehner told reporters that “impeachment” was “a scam started by the Democrats at the White House.”

It wasn’t. If impeachment is a scam, it was started on the right, early in the Obama presidency. Some of its early adherents believed in it; some thought they were merely responding to the passions of constituents; some, obviously, wanted to raise money. At the start of this summer, the conservative book-publishing industry churned out two new tomes about why Republicans needed to start an impeachment conversation, to stop pretending that it was crazy to accuse the president of high crimes and realize that it was consistent with the rest of the party’s arguments. Republicans mostly refused to listen.

Then, on July 8 of this year, came Sarah Palin. Her PAC (this is important—see above, re: fundraising) placed an op-ed at Breitbart.com, announcing that the time had come for the I-word. For inexplicable reasons, Palin can still shift a news cycle; in a lucky synchronicity, the Senate campaign of Iowa Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley chose July 8 to release a tape of his opponent calling for impeachment.

Nothing will stop a movement quite like the other party noticing it. “Should Obama be impeached?” had been a slam-dunk kook-spotting question for years.

Like the House GOP's Impeachment Lite lawsuit against Obama, officially launched today, the only cause for delay was the tedious business of deciding what he would be found guilty of.

Fun fact: Former Georgia Republican Congressman Bob Barr, who was starting the paperwork calling for Bill Clinton's impeachment in 1997, making him first out of the gate by months, hoped to stage a political comeback this year – perhaps sensing that the time was right for someone with his impeach-for-whatever-reason street cred – but he got his ass whupped in the GOP primary by Tea Party candidate Barry Loudermilk. Sorry, Mr. Barr; but there'll be no resting on your laurels. The new GOP slogan is Who have you impeached for us lately?


Weigel's Salon article about the frantic efforts by Republican leadership to distance themselves from all the talk – but not the underlying intent – of Tea-Party fueled impeachment fantasies, is going on the p3 Readings list.

"The hosts will have only a few months of discomfort and inconvenience, though of course their careers must be set aside for a time."

As a salute to the five men on the Supreme Court who decided this week that corporations (which are persons) could make unilateral decisions to interfere with their female employees' access to insurance-covered contraception, at least partly on the mistaken grounds that all contraceptives work by aborting the tiny little blastocysts (which are also persons) inside those female employees (who, as it turns out, are apparently not really persons themselves), p3 proudly reminds our readers of this excerpt from Sheri Tepper's great science fiction adventure satire The Fresco.

Have fun.

Double quote of the day: Now I know why Scotty died young

These two pieces turned up in my reading list this morning. I believe what both of these people have to say.

Perhaps that means I have what  that F. Scott Fitzgerald  would consider a first-rate intelligence, so I suppose I should feel sort of good about that. But to believe both of these things at 9 in the morning . . . now I guess I can understand why Fitzgerald was hammered by noon most days.

First:

Self-government must be an educational enterprise, with lessons learned over and over again, and that is what Elizabeth Warren is about these days. She is still teaching. She teaches because she has learned, and she has learned because she teaches. The great teachers are the ones who remain students at heart, who keep learning from their students, and from the world around them, and from their own drive to know even more about even more things, and who then are able to transmit that knowledge—and more important, the drive to know more—to their students.

Charlie Pierce

Elizabeth Warren Is the Teacher

And then:

No doubt, the Internet and cable television have allowed various political and corporate interests to spread disinformation on a scale that was not possible before, but to have it believed requires a badly educated population unaccustomed to verifying things they are being told. Where else on earth would a president who rescued big banks from bankruptcy with taxpayers’ money and allowed the rest of us to lose $12 trillion in investment, retirement, and home values be called a socialist?

Charles Simic

Age of Ignorance

The quotes only capture the direction of the two pieces; you should read them both – they're going to the p3 Reading list, just in case. But you should also consider whether you'll need a big dose of your self-medication of choice at your elbow when you're through.

Just sayin'.

Quote of the day: Lumbering

Here is another difference between the Progressive Era and the present: in those days, journalists revealed publicly what insiders knew privately, and readers were naïve enough—or serious enough about the responsibilities of citizenship—to be outraged by the revelations. If the reining in of capitalist excess depends on this kind of relationship between the press and the public, our second Gilded Age may last much longer than the first.

- Jackson Lears, reviewing The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Doris Kearns Goodwin's utterly predictable, centrist-safe, and beltway-insidery history of the progressive movement in the first Gilded Age, a book which he describes as "a lumbering production" and a "thoroughly mediocre book."

Progressivism has had its problems, then and now. With friends like Goodwin, does it need enemies?

Lears' review goes on the p3 Readings list.

Quote of the day: On knowing

Ronald Reagan used to like to say that “the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” Let’s repurpose Reagan; it will spare the reviewer the incivility of accusing From of being either stupid or a liar.

- Rick Perlstein, in a passage that nicely captures the tone and substance of his review of Democratic Leadership Council tool Al From's new book in praise of "New Democrats."

Perlstein's remark also offers the first useful alternative to a meme whose increasing presence has bothered me for some time: When a political figure (generally of the wingnut variety, although From proves this is by no means necessary) says something outrageous (about reproductive rights, about climate change, about bigotry, about whatever), too often commentators respond by saying they can't tell whether the speaker is really badly informed or is really intellectually dishonest – in short, whether they're stupid or a liar. In a great many cases, the answer is clear as a buttonhook in the well water: they've obviously said what they said because they're stupid, or because they're a liar, and they should be called out on it then and there, with no shilly-shallying. The "are they a liar or are they an idiot? I just can't tell!" commonplace creates a doubt the benefit of which they do not deserve.

Occasionally, of course, you'll stumble on someone who's both an idiot and a liar but that's less common,  and appropriate exceptions to the rule can safely be made.

Perlstein's discussion of the From book and the history of Democrats like From (and Bill Clinton) who believe that the rightward drift of the Democratic Party has been a feature, not a bug, is well worth reading on its own merits, too, so it's going on the p3 Readings list.

Readings: The cult of shareholder satisfaction

Steven Pearlstein, at WaPo's Wonkblog, confirms a long-held conviction of mine: Most bad ideas started out in life as the remedy for a bad idea:

In the recent history of management ideas, few have had a more profound — or pernicious — effect than the one that says corporations should be run in a manner that “maximizes shareholder value.”

Indeed, you could argue that much of what Americans perceive to be wrong with the economy these days — the slow growth and rising inequality; the recurring scandals; the wild swings from boom to bust; the inadequate investment in R&D, worker training and public goods — has its roots in this ideology.

The funny thing is that this supposed imperative to “maximize” a company’s share price has no foundation in history or in law. Nor is there any empirical evidence that it makes the economy or the society better off. What began in the 1970s and ’80s as a useful corrective to self-satisfied managerial mediocrity has become a corrupting, self-interested dogma peddled by finance professors, money managers and over-compensated corporate executives.

Our new p3 motto

This blog has a new motto:

May the First Amendment always triumph over the Second.

As a corollary^* to that:

The proper response to free speech you don't like is more free speech.

And as a corollary to that:

If the only way your ideas can get any traction is by shutting down public discussion of any alternative, then your ideas probably aren't very good.

The inspiration to share this formulation with you was a a Charlie Pierce post this morning, cataloging the various enterprising efforts by Republican state legislators from a very-predictable region of the country to ban discussion of things they don't like, such as gun control, or the notion of sustainability in energy policy.

Nota bene: Not shut down gun control or sustainable energy policy, but even the public discussion of those topics.   

(It goes beyond the reach of Pierce's news round-up today, but we could also add evolution, LGBT rights, and women's right to control their own bodies to the list of topics that conservatives have tried, by hook or by crook, to outlaw from public discussion -- and in the case of women's reproductive health, even from private discussion between a woman and her physician).

Pierce also generously traces the you-aren't-allowed-to-talk-about-this impulse back some 176 years in American political discourse, and the results generally confirm our point: The ideas that need this kind of anti-First Amendment (we may as well say anti-American) protection tend to be the ones that are on the losing side of history to begin with.

Pierce's post goes on the Readings list.


^* Yes, yes. Strictly speaking, theorems (not mottoes) have corollaries. A less-dedicated supporter of the First Amendment might say, "Shut up." But precisely because of this corollary, I say instead, "Go start your own blog." See how I did that right there?

The final (not really) p3 Readings list

Not actually final. Not even remotely finally, actually. The p3 Readings feature will continue same as always, here on the main page when the mood strikes, with all of the oldies archived via the Readings link on the New and Improved p3 List at the right. It's all a part of the gradual roll-out of the 8th anniversary p3 blog site update.

As I've added new Readings, I usually kept a few favorites on the old front-page list, and bumped some off. So this isn't an exhaustive catalogue; it's more like a Greatest Hits compilation.

Hit the Readings link to browse the whole collection. Meanwhile:

Charles Pierce, The America Paul Ryan Forgot: A Vision of Freedom, by Way of Free Government, by Way of the Morrill Act, (added 8/17/2012.)

Kevin Baker, ”The Outsourced Party.” (added 3/26/2012)

Charles Pierce, "Social Security in Perspective, Part III," (added 1/5/2012)

William Grieder (interview), "Social Security in Perspective, Part III," (added 3/30/11)

Mark Lilla, "Tea Party Jacobins," added 5/11/10

Bob Somerby/Daily Howler, Don't ask. (added 4/20/10)

Billmon, Spock with a Beard: The Sequel, added 3/26/10.

Charles P. Pierce, The Era of Big Government Is Over And Marcus Stephens Is Dead, added 12/24/09

Bob Somerby, THEY TRY HARDER! The GOP has “messaged” our keisters off. Does our wondrous side really care?, added 9/11/09

Jamison Foser, "How the Media Made This Summer's Political Insanity Inevitable", added 8/21/09

Paul Waldman, "Health Care Reform Villains," added 6/23/09

Daniel Gross, Paper Money, added 4/2/09

Cullen Murphy, Todd S. Purdum, and Philippe Sands, "Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House", added 12/30/08

Molly Ivins, "Bill of Wrongs" added 9/21/08

Paul Krugman, "Know-Nothing Politics," added 8/8/08

Bill Moyers, "Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?" added 7/12/08

Charles P. Pierce, "The Cynic and Senator Obama," added 5/18/08

James Wolcott, "Beware of White Men Bearing Gifts" added 3/13/08

Digby, "Bipartisan Zombies," posted 12/31/07

Charles P. Peirce, "Greetings from Idiot America", added 6/10/07

Rick Perlstein, "'I Didn't Like Nixon Until Watergate': The Conservative Movement Now" added 12/6/05

Reading: The Cynic and the President

While you're waiting for the polls to close (I'll be watching returns from my office beginning at 5pm PT), here's a taste of ”The Cynic and President Obama,” the follow-up to Charles Pierce's 2008 Esquire article “The Cynic and Senator Obama.”

The cynic doesn't believe that history is an arc, bending inexorably in any particular direction or another. An arc is a geometric figure tightly circumscribed by mathematical formulae. For the cynic, history is a river, wilder than most, with eddies and whirlpools and backwaters, and an original course to which it always seeks to return. What the cynic has learned over the past twelve years is the truth in Faulkner's observation that the past is never dead, it is not even past.

Nothing ever sinks in the river for good. Everything is thrown to the surface again. He believes that the river churns up the muck from the bottom and brings it to the surface. He believes we can get caught in backwaters so obscure that they no longer appear on modern maps. The cynic also believes that the river can run clear and fresh and soft. But not often. Most of the time, it seeks its original course, and occasionally, despite all the levees and dams and locks we apply to it in order to govern ourselves, it overwhelms them all and floods our pale attempts at civilizing ourselves. That, the cynic thinks, is what happened during the eight years prior to the election of the current president. Not even the sturdiest structures held fast when fear and reckless jingoism sent history back to its original course — which, in case anyone has forgotten, was not democracy. Four years earlier, the cynic wondered if the president was the man to count the cost, whether he could make the country see the wreckage for what the wreckage truly was--the abandonment of the protections of self-government and the flood tide of history that had washed the remnants of that protection away.

"The Cynic and President Obama" is going on the p3 Readings list. (Note that the links to recent readings in the sidebar will soon go away as part of the long-overdue p3 site redesign, but all readings -- going back to 2005 -- will always be available through the Readings link on the p3 List at right.)

Reading: Policy matters/policy doesn't matter

Over the weekend, Lance Manion tweeted:

When and why did "myth" become a synonym for bald-faced lie?

In a great long-form post at The Vagabond Scholar, Batocchio doesn't spend much time on the “when,” but has a pretty convincing answer for the “why” part:

Among honest, sane, reasonably intelligent and well-informed adults, the following are taken as givens:

1. Neither major party is entirely pure or entirely corrupt. You can find despicable and honorable people in both parties.

2. There is an inherent level of bullshit in politics. All politicians lie to some degree.

Naturally, the same crowd also holds that:

3. Nevertheless – actually, because of this – it's very important to take a closer look at politicians, parties, and their policies, and try to make an informed, comparative, qualitative judgment. Responsible citizenship and basic voting depends on it. Policy matters.

Strangely, most Beltway political commentators will endorse #1 and #2, but reject #3. The same media figures who sagely inform the public that politicians lie, as if this a revelation... will also refuse to fact-check their political guests. Instead of #3, they tend to hold the following views:

A. Wisdom lies precisely between the parties. One side cannot be significantly better/more correct than the other. It's impossible that one side can be overwhelmingly better!

B. It is rude to call out liars, or not invite them back after they lie.

C. Giving both parties a fair hearing necessitates judging that both arguments have equal merit.

D. Anyone saying harsh things about conservatives/Republicans clearly is closed-minded, hyper-partisan and not a Serious Person, regardless of the evidence.

All of this also entails:

E. Policy doesn't matter.

So, within a hot-house political media culture that values civility more than honesty, the  refusal to call a lie a lie comes from a corruption of the same common-sense views of language and politics that most thoughtful people share, and it's that very resemblance to common sense that makes the pattern harder and harder spot, let alone to shake.

Batocchio's full piece, “Civil Both-Sides Bipartisans,” explores the difference between honesty and civility, and between accuracy and politeness. It's going onto the p3 Readings list.

(Note that the links to recent readings in the sidebar will soon go away as part of the long-overdue p3 site redesign, but all readings will remain available through the Readings link on the p3 List at right.)

Reading: The most delicious sci-fi plot twist since “'To Serve Man”

If you followed the RNC convention and platform-construction last week, you may find this funny as hell.

Or you may not.

The departure point of Sherri Tepper's "The Fresco,” a story that might be described as science-fiction with a healthy dose of satire, is that our space exploration has drawn the attention of other worlds who are organized to maintain peace. Through a human selected as their sole emmisary to our planet, the representatives of this organization of other worlds invite us to join them and share in their knowledge and development. (We can decline the offer, but the alternative isn't pretty, and it hinges on the fact that this organization isn't the only one Out There whose notice we've attracted.)

In order to make sure that Earth abides by the rules of this confederation, their representatives leave behind “monitors” called Inkliti, specialized life-forms designed to enforce peaceful behavior on our part.

There is one possible wrinkle in the plan, though, as one of the representatives explains in the following message to their chosen emmisary; but they're confident they've worked out an elegant solution:

The question of resources brings me to a delicate point. Because our need was immediate, we brought back with us the only Inkleozese monitors who were available at the time. Virtually all of them are in that state of parturition that will soon require a host animal. There are no quodm, geplis, nadervaks on Earth. The most suitable creatures will be male persons, as their hormones are more easily adjustable to the needs of the growing Inkliti.

Under usual circumstances, the Inkleozese would refuse to leave their planet at such a time. Only our elucidation of the pro-life feelings of many men in positions of power convinced them they could find hosts on Earth without offending the free will of its inhabitants. Obviously, the hosts will have to be persons who espouse the pure pro-life position which does not allow reproductive choice even in the case of rape. Not that these gentlemen would consider it a rape, but we all know what the media do with any events related to sexuality.

While the Inkleozese might be offended by the anti-woman bigotry underlying much pro-life dogma, we have not seen fit to discuss with them the psychological minutia of the situation. They would be outraged, or worse, if a host animal refused the implantation of an Inklit egg, but since implantation is always done with the host in a euphoric state, we know the gentlemen will not refuse. We have, therefore, selected hosts for the Inkleozese on the basis of their publicly stated receptivity to preborn life.

Among those chosen are your legislators who have repeatedly asserted an unequivocal antichoice position. We have also added to the list a number of TV and radio preachers and commentators who have been rigorously pro-life. Once the immediate need is taken care of, we will explain the matter as seems necessary. Everyone will be told that the hosts are pregnant with babies of an intelligent life form which it would be a grave ethical error to remove. Though the impregnation has or will be done without the hosts' individual permission, in a legal sense we may infer their position from the stand which they have taken upon the issue of rape. Each man on our list has gone record as refusing to allow choice to women who have been raped, pointing out that the infant is innocent and must therefore take precedence. The Inkleozese could not ask for a better statement of their own belief.

In any case, the implantations will only be a temporary inconvenience for the hosts. They will most likely survive the pregnancy and emergence experience without lasting harm, just as most of your women do. The hosts will have only a few months of discomfort and inconvenience, though of course their careers must be set aside for a time. Inasmuch as they have frequently decried the shallowness of women who attempted to avoid pregnancy for mere career convenience, however, we are assured of their understanding.

Sheri S. Tepper,

The Fresco (2002)

(Hat-tip to James the Elder, who sent me The Fresco shortly after it first came out.)

Readings: Pierce on the half-forgotten notion of commonwealth

p3 favorite Charlie Pierce makes a pilgrimage to the home of one of the most quintessentially American public policies, and shakes his head in sorrow at the “I built it myself!” chatterboxes who, a century and a half later, still subscribe to the opinion that it must have been a mistake.

[S]peaking in the Strafford Town Hall, which has been in continuous use as a public meeting space since 1809, Dr. Clement Price made the point that the Morrill Act was in keeping with what he called "the revolutionary age" in which it was signed. He listed it along with the Emancipation Act, the Homestead Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act as that age writ large in public policy, and he noted that none of them would have been possible had the Southern states not seceded and taken their insular vision of what the country meant with them.

Pierce's article is joining the rest of the Readings list in the sidebar.

Reading: The outsourced party

In today's NYTimes, Kevin Baker has a real head-smacker of an argument -- the kind that, even though all the pieces of the puzzle have been sitting in plain sight for a few years (in some cases, a few decades), you don't see it until someone slides those pieces around. See? This fits here, and this fits here. . . .

Baker's ironic point is this: The Republican Party, for decades the staunch defender of industry outsourcing as a way to cut costs, weaken labor, and avoid taxes and regulations, without regard to how damaging its effects might be on the country as a whole, has become “the outsourced party,” turning the development of ideas, the screening of candidates, and the mobilization of voters over to entities it now discovers it can no longer quite control.

The Republican effort to rally every conceivable outside entity to the party’s cause was wildly successful. Again and again over the years, conservative policy institutes have armed the party’s candidates with intellectual arguments, while the conservative media barrage has blasted a way through to high office for even the most lackluster Republican nominees.

Yet increasingly this meant that the Republican Party was outsourcing both body and soul. Both what the party believed in and its ability to do the heavy lifting necessary to win elections was handed over to outside interests — outside interests that did not necessarily share the party’s goals or have any stake in ameliorating its tactics.

This has become suddenly and painfully evident this year. Party leaders may not have liked Rush Limbaugh’s disgusting attacks on a Georgetown law student — calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” for advocating that insurance companies provide affordable birth control — but what does he care?

If the Republicans lose the election, it will most likely mean all the more angry conservatives tuning in and driving up the ratings for Rush and his fellow radio ranters.

Ideas? There are think tanks now. Agenda-setting? FOX News handles that. Candidate grooming and vetting? Endless sponsored reality-show debates serve that function now. Legislative muscle? K Street lobbyists get paid for that. Mobilizing voters? Talk radio. Campaign funding? A handful of single-issue billionaires can each keep their own preferred candidate in the race, no matter how long past the sell-by date. And no one in the old GOP establishment quite knows how to get the genie back into the bottle, even if they dared try.

Thanks to their inventiveness, Republicans have stumbled into the brave new world of American politics. From primaries to photo ops, from direct mail to voter suppression laws, the Republican party has almost always been the real innovator in electoral politics, usually leaving their slower brother, the Democrats, in the dust for at least a campaign season or two.

Now they’ve achieved the political equivalent of shuttering that foul old steel mill and shipping the hard work off for others to do while they dabble in these fascinating new derivatives. Now their candidates and their ideas are seen as so many junk bonds, and they don’t seem to have the wherewithal to make the party over from within.

Note that Baker's choice of terms is particularly apt. As Will Bunch points out, this is but the logical extension of allowing entertainment to blend with, and finally drown, our politics and news as a form of discourse.

Baker didn't mention the late 20th Century media critic Neil Postman, but this is exactly the world that Postman predicted and feared in "Amusing Ourselves to Death," that entertainment -- and entertainment values -- would eventually overwhelm politics. The 2012 GOP race has been the epitome of this -- interest in the race soared when the candidates help weekly TV debates that were frighteningly like a reality show, and that interest has plunged now that the "reality show" is over. And life or death issues like a possible military action in Iran are discussed the way a talk radio host would discuss them.

And a Rush Limbaugh really does get the last laugh -- he stays in the radio while the rest of us amuse ourselves to death.

The hook that Postman uses to launch his book is this riddle: Why has America spent over half a century fearing that the brutal oppression of Orwell's “Nineteen Eighty-Four” would come to pass here, when it should have been obvious that Huxley's “Brave New World” -- a parody and retort to the optimism of the utopian novelists of his time, in which Huxley imagined a world of infantilized, materialist, overmedicated narcissists -- struck so much nearer to the realities of our age?

Baker's article is going on the Readings list at the right.

(Extended) Quote of the Day: Grieder's four facts

William Grieder lists four facts the press refuses to report about Social Security:

Opponents of Social Security are deliberately confusing Social Security with Medicare; they are distorting reality. There are simple facts that should be reported: 1) Social Security never contributed a dime to the deficit; 2) Social Security softened the impact of the Reagan deficits by building up a surplus; 3) the federal government borrowed the money and spent it on other things; 4) the federal government has to pay this money back because it really belongs to the working people who paid their FICA deductions every pay day. The elites in both parties know the day is approaching when the federal government has to come up with the trillions it borrowed from the workers. That is the crisis the politicians don’t want to deal with, so they create a phony argument that slyly blames working people for their problem. That’s the propaganda they want the public to believe.

(Emphasis added. H/t to Batocchio's characteristically thorough post on the topic. The full CJR interview with Grieder is going in the long-neglected p3 Readings list.)