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Another Blow to the Myth of the Nonpartisan Tea Party

They’re in the tank for Sarah Palin:

Yes, apparently — everything Palin does, no matter how amateurish it looks, is apparently further proof of her folksy wisdom, not her dangerous incompetence and lack of polish. To paraphrase Lucille Bluth, apparently we’re giving out medals for being forgetful, now.

By the way, did you catch “privacy” at 1:00? Then how does one reconcile the tea party groups’ utter hostility to, among other things, gay rights? Privacy unless it’s icky?

Faux Bipartisanship?

On the Daily Beast, Reihan Salam explains that the time for bipartisanship is over. The bolded take-away:

Instead of lecturing Republican legislators, President Obama has to start knocking Democratic heads and gear up for passing more legislation through reconciliation, leaving his Republican rivals sputtering with ineffectual rage.

Andrew Sullivan, though, takes from the article a point on the illusive nature of Obama’s brand of bipartisanship:

[W]hen the president claims that the Senate health-care bill he still hopes to salvage includes many Republican ideas, he’s stretching. Republicans wanted interstate competition for insurance policies, allowing New Yorkers to buy South Dakota policies that have fewer expensive mandates. The bill allows states to form interstate compacts, allowing New York to decide that New Yorkers can buy policies from certain other states—almost certainly other states with similarly stiff regulations. Just as the Harlem Globetrotters always choose to play the hapless Washington Generals, this isn’t a real competition: It has the form of a Republican idea, but not the substance. [. . . .] 

There is something condescending about this faux bipartisanship. It fools no one but the gullible or the deliberately obtuse, and it obscures a real and legitimate debate.

An emphasis on whether Obama’s bipartisanship is genuine, however, misses the larger argument. It may in fact be correct that Obama only provides the appearance of compromise, but Reihan’s larger point, that the President should at this point abandon bipartisanship, overwhelms such petty distinctions, because Republicans wouldn’t care either way. The notion that nuanced policy analysis matters to our honorable friends opposite finds no support whatsoever in the record. If Republicans actually wanted a debate on the merits, we could fault Obama for providing a shell of bipartisanship. But at no point have Congressional Republicans even sought the appearance, much less the actuality, of a policy debate. At all points, they’ve fought this issue at the existential level — Regulation is socialism, Spending is bad (when Democrats do it), government-made care decisions will kill Trig, etc. To ask whether or not we’ve been bipartisan enough requires that we first embrace the fiction that it would’ve or could now change something. That I cannot do.

Cheney Acknowledges a Patriotism He Once Rejected

In its never-ending task to glorify all things Republican, and transform politics into page-six tabloid fodder, Politico offered over the weekend an examination of “Why Dick Cheney Attacks [President Obama],” with predictable analysis. The Republican narrative is reported as fact, with pushback occurring only late in the article, as what “critics say”: Cheney’s just a concerned citizen, who stepped out of retirement to sound the alarm about Obama’s “dangerous” policies:

Cheney associates say he abandoned plans for a sedate post-Bush administration retirement of fly-fishing and memoir writing because he is genuinely concerned that Obama is a weak leader who is responding to political pressures in modifying war and terror policies that Cheney himself was instrumental in crafting.

Truly, a modern Cincinnatus.

The premise is flawed. Obama’s actually doing pretty well on the national security front, rolling up part of the Taliban’s operation and, by all accounts, successfully leveraging the criminal justice system to gain useful intelligence.

But even if the facts are against him, if Cheney “attacks” out of true concern, good for him. Politics should be full of people, on both sides, who feel compelled to speak their mind candidly when they believe the public needs counsel — rather than, as appears to be the case for some, running away. Civil dissent is the patriot’s greatest duty.

What should strike us as ironic, though, is that Cheney flatly rejected this form of patriotism while in office. One example among thousands:

In the sharpest White House attack yet on critics of the Iraq war, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Wednesday that accusations the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify the war were a “dishonest and reprehensible” political ploy.

Cheney called Democrats “opportunists” who were peddling “cynical and pernicious falsehoods” to gain political advantage while U.S. soldiers died in Iraq.

We can accept that Cheney’s distaste for Obama is genuinely felt. But as a threshold issue, we must also accept that such feelings can be properly expressed during wartime, against the President, without the expression alone incurring accusations of unpatriotic hatemongering.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

By all accounts, this country’s partisan rancor — much of it needless, and premised on false ideas about each others’ identities — is set to get worse, before it gets better. This President’s Day, both sides should consider these words, written for a time more difficult still:

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

We’ve emerged from worse, to come to a still stronger consensus.

I Am For the LAW, Cousin. Is There Another Side?

On March 5, 1770, a line of British soldiers fired into a crowd of Boston citizens, killing five. The British commander, one Captain Preston, was promptly charged with murder, but he, and Tory loyalists, argued that it was self defense — the crowd, vastly outnumbering the British soldiers, taunted, provoked, and first assaulted them. An unpopular case, to be sure. When no-one would defend Preston’s men, John Adams stepped forward. One account, referencing Adams’ closing:

He was resolved that that pure and elevated cause [of liberty] should not be soiled and debased by an act of individual injustice. He undertook the defence, supported by his younger but distinguished associate Josiah Quincy, and far from flattering the angry passions around him, he called upon the jury in their presence to be “deaf, deaf as adders to the clamors of the populace,” and they were so. To their honor a jury drawn from the excited people of Boston acquitted the prisoner, and to their equal honor that very populace, instead of resenting the language and conduct of his advocate, loaded him immediately with additional proofs of their confidence.

These are the stories we tell each other about who we are as a people — that, oppressed by a tyrant and beset by his soldiers, still we would not strike an unjust blow. Even to our enemies we extended the dignity of the law.

Is Adams’ example untimely? Do we, in nominal service to patriotism, extol the shell of his example, and forget the substance? Something to consider, perhaps, when we talk about what rights alleged terrorists “deserve.”

They got a trial.

Issue Framing

We can laugh at a recent poll showing fewer Americans support equality for “homosexuals” than support the same for “gay men and lesbians,” but first, we should acknowledge its deeper meaning: framing matters, in a very serious way.

On this site, I’ve always referred to gay Americans as just that — and sometimes as “gay men and women” — because the alternative, as proved by this poll, connotes a clinical quality that affords an emotional distance, making gays easier to demonize or forget. In worse hands, the term “homosexuals” can even be made to sound pathological. When advocating for equality, we must make clear that this is about our fellow citizens, human beings possessing equal dignity, and deserving equal treatment. It’s about our friends and family members, not some unnamed other.

We should take this lesson farther, too. We’re lately losing purchase on the national security issue, as conservatives frame Obama’s decision to try some terrorists in civilian courts as an attempt to “forget” that we’re at war. Some have even taken to counting the number of times Obama uses the words “war” and “terror,” as if the words have some talismanic quality against evil.

It’s time to fight back. The conservative position rests on an assumption that the starting point is an absence of rights — we brutalize our enemies, because they’re our enemies. Why would we not?

No. In a representative democracy, the starting point is the rule of law. In dire circumstances, we decide whether to deviate from that norm — not whether to live up to it. What we should be asking is this: why is the Republican Party going to let the threat of terrorism alter our way of life? If we can’t try a detainee due to prior extralegal acts, or because he was captured on and has never left the battlefield, that’s one question. When, however, the only distinction is what crime the defendant is charged with, that’s another entirely. Military tribunals are quick and easy, because that’s what summary justice looks like. But Americans have never taken the easy way out. This should not be a hard issue to win.

Against the Great Weight of Authority, and of History: Gingrich on Terror

There’s an old saying among litigators:

If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.

Not the best of advice — but it does have the virtue of explaining Newt Gingrich’s latest arguments on national security. Two days ago, Gingrich took to the Daily Show to argue against extending any rights to terror detainees. To exculpate Bush’s conduct on the same, Gingrich had to distinguish between Richard Reid (dealt with as a criminal under Bush), and Abdulmutallab (to be dealt with as a criminal under Obama).  He promptly got his facts wrong — not once, but twice — and, as on other areas, simply threw Bush under the bus.

Good! But Gingrich’s larger argument, that terrorists should be dealt with in a military framework at all times, ignores the fact that civil detention is not in a zero-sum relationship with larger counterterror goals , and glosses over an entire jurisprudence that doesn’t truly offer a President many options. Terrorists can be detained as combatants or as criminals, but one way or another, they’re going to get to a federal court. Obama’s decision to try Abdulmutallab in federal court, along with other lower-risk detainees, simply acknowledges this fact, and attempts to more fully validate the rule of law, and the simpler constitutional rules associated with criminal trials, whenever possible. This shouldn’t be controversial — especially from a limited government perspective. A worldview that won’t trust the government with money, but argues for unlimited trust on matters related to human dignity, goes awry at a fundamental level.

We should reject as false, as well, the idea that human dignity only attaches to our citizens. America was emphatically not built for the comfort of Americans alone. The Founders intended this country as nothing less than a complete restructuring of the relationship between sovereign and governed, with America as an experiment for the world to emulate. It serves this purpose to play by our own rules whenever possible.

Which leads, again, to the point that neither facts nor law support the conclusion that we must offer our enemies less legal protections than President Obama would now offer them. We must conclude that Gingrich is either unaware of the relevant facts, or that he regards limitations on civil rights as their own good. I don’t know which is worse.

John McCain’s Old Habit

At the best of times, John McCain is a good man — even a great one. But the sad truth is that much of the moral fiber that makes him great, and distinguishes him from the vast swath of his party, seems to come and go with the political cycle. An example.

After winning the nomination in 2008, McCain took a bold step, and eliminated the phrase “Democrat Party” from his party’s platform. By way of background, this shortening of the Democratic Party’s name, designed to emphasize the harsh “rat” sound and otherwise convey disrespect, has a long history in the Republican’s vocabulary of derision. Regular use dates at least to Joe McCarthy, but it was the 1996 Republican Party, and George W. Bush, who re-injected the term into modern discourse. Restoring to his Democratic opponents the respect of using their own name, then, was an extraordinary, if subtle, act of political courage, and a sign of the true class of which John McCain is capable.

You can probably see where this is going. From an e-mail to supporters:

My Friend,
The 2010 election offers all Americans – and especially Republicans – a critical choice. We can fight for the principles we believe in, or watch as Barack Obama and the Democrat-controlled Congress take our nation down a costly, destructive path.

McCain’s use of the term is half-hearted — he recants of it later (“Inconceivably the Obama White House and Democratic Congressional leaders…“) — but it’s a sure sign of how tough things must be in Arizona. The last time we saw McCain slip into hyper-negative mode was February of ’08, as the general election campaign kicked off and McCan began to face (scurrilous) allegations of impropriety with campaign staff. Palin would later carry this torch for McCain.

Democrat Party. Socialism. “Liberal fascism.” Death panels. ObamaCare. ObamaCrats. “Hopey changey.” This rhetoric, par for the course from senior almost GOP policymakers, amounts to a slur on the political process, and proof that the GOP continues to win by pandering to the lowest common denominator. McCain used to be better than that, intermittently, sometimes.

Deficits and Prosperity

We should have very serious questions about the bona fides of those people who’ve suddenly discovered the budget deficit, endowed it with a fierce urgency, and claimed that their anger knows no party. As they say, virtue never tested is no virtue at all.

We should also question their messaging. If you want to make the argument that the deficit will “defeat a great nation,” and that the solution is balancing the budget NOW, the place to do it may not be Times Square:

Click to enlarge; the poster in the upper right.

First, Times Square probably isn’t the demographic for this sort of campaign. From the gaudy lights to the piles of tourists assembled even on a cold February afternoon, it’s plain Times Square suffers from neither the recession, nor the immediate effects of our admittedly increasing national debt. And, if there’s a place that proves leveraging and government action work, even in the face of short-term deficits, it’s Times Square, brought out of the gutter in the 1980s by Mayor Koch, who brokered long-term no-tax deals with national chains to attract business to 42nd Street, in the hopes of displacing what had become a small red light district. Now you have to go as far as Eighth Avenue if you want porn — ah, progress!

Smart economics takes time, and it can’t be explained on a billboard. Despite what it says on Sarah Palin’s hand, decreasing the deficit isn’t a matter of cutting spending, and calling it a day. It is past time to talk about the deficit, but a serious discussion starts by severing the mental link between checkbook math, and finance writ large.

An Opportunity We Might Want to Miss

Who says the GOP doesn’t have ideas? To answer President Obama’s budget proposal, Paul Ryan (R-WI) gives us a package that smacks of necromancy or despair (I can’t tell which): Social Security privatization. It’s back — combined with deep cuts to Medicare, and every other entitlement program under the sun. Thankfully, in a sign that the leftward move we felt last year endures at least partially, Republicans can’t run away fast enough.

Of course, there’s no reason we should let them. Forcing a floor vote, which congressional Democrats intend to do, will either further radicalize the GOP or, if managed correctly by our side, force deep splits between the party’s base and its (sadly) swelling independent ranks. How to “manage” the debate is the question. Given the state of political discourse in this country, Democrats would be well within their rights to use the specter of privatization to match the GOP’s irresponsible, paranoid fever pitch. Privatization would work a fundamental departure from the status quo, in a way that even the most “radical” of our tepid health care reform proposals would not. And recall that the final iteration of Palin’s “death panel” lie involved the allegation that — wait for it — government bureaucrats would cut Medicare,  thus denying care to seniors and hastening their demise. If we accept the premise that when the government makes coverage decisions, it’s rationing, but it’s somehow not when private firms do the same, then a Republican caucus debating the near-elimination of Medicare approximates some kind of Death Appellate Panel, sitting en banc. Hey, I may lack Palin’s flair for naming, but at least this isn’t a Facebook note.

Should congressional Democrats seize on this issue, we can expect that they will not, in fact, attempt to strike the paranoid, near-psychotic tone that’s characterized the GOP response to healthcare reform. That’s for the better. In the past year, we’ve managed to squander the most solid majority we’ve had in decades, but for their victory, the GOP has paid a steep moral price, and surrendered any claim to true patriotism. Translating our moral victory into an actual one will be tough work, but joining the Republican race to the bottom is emphatically not the way to do it.