Being silly

Um, no.

For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana. It was fun. I have some fond memories of us all being silly together. I think those moments of uninhibited frolic deepened our friendships.  

"Uninhibited frolic?"  I can only imagine what that was like.

In legalizing weed, citizens of Colorado are, indeed, enhancing individual freedom. But they are also nurturing a moral ecology in which it is a bit harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be. 

Yes, here's how our government is subtly encouraging us to be the sort of person most of us want to be.

The 60s -- the most important thing to not happen to David Brooks

I knew when I saw Brooks's by-line under this...

The Wal-Mart Hippies

...and in which he writes...

But the similarities are more striking than the differences. To start with, the Tea Partiers have adopted the tactics of the New Left. They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor. This mimicry is no accident. Dick Armey, one of the spokesmen for the Tea Party movement, recently praised the methods of Saul Alinsky, the leading tactician of the New Left.

...that sooner or later Mr. D.H. Riley would have a riposte for the ages. I was not disappointed.

Okay, one: if there was some way to put Dick Armey, Dick Cheney, and Phil Gramm in a cage and determine who was the biggest lying shitbag, preferably involving the death of the other two, who would you bet on? How would anybody handicap that? Two: I keep hoping someone with the rights to the Alinsky estate will pull a Graceland™, and start suing every goddam wingnut who mentions him for copyright infringement. Seems like poetic justice.

But mostly this: that "extreme statements designed to shock". This is how the "moderate" Republican chooses to portray the ill- negatively-informed gun-tottin' chuckleheads who've overrun his party after they spent twenty years as sure votes and credulous consumers. They're performance artists, is what. It's like guerilla theatre, except in place of Left wing politics you have utter cluelessness, marching orders taken from disingenuous loons on th' teevee, and a belief that Barack Obama is the Kenyan Hitler. Seems like a reasonable comparison.

Reasonable indeed. One group was demonstrating against a war escalated by a Democratic president (one who'd passed major civil rights and Great Society legislation) -- a war in which they could be drafted for and eventually killed. The other against Keynsian counter-cyclical economic theories that they've never heard of or understand, and a new found demand for fiscal responsibility after complacently sitting in their self-made veal pens during eight years of budgetary time bombs of two wars they didn't mind and two tax cuts -- all of which were pretty much just for the hell of it. One in response to nightly scenes on the news of napalm, burning villages, and indiscriminant death. The other in response to the nightly breakdowns of Glenn Beck., in all his Lonesome Rhodes genius. And a president that doesn't look like them.

No, the tea partiers are not the flip side of "The Hippies" or "The New Left." They're the flip side of the "Good Ol' Party of Racists and Government oppression is ok as long as I'm not the one being 'oppressed,' aka, taxed or regulated." They're the Birchers. They're who establishment Republicans fear will draw back the curtain on the Party of Things that Must Not Be Said Except in the Privacy of the Country Club Locker Room. They're the reason the Republicans ever controlled all three branches of government for eight years -- they're the base and they have been for 40 years. Brooks, like Buckley before him, are embarrassed by these crazy relatives, but they're their relatives nonetheless.

Brooks: Amuse me

Two columnists. One paper.

Krugman:

So what did we learn from the summit? What I took away was the arrogance that the success of things like the death-panel smear has obviously engendered in Republican politicians. At this point they obviously believe that they can blandly make utterly misleading assertions, saying things that can be easily refuted, and pay no price. And they may well be right.

But Democrats can have the last laugh. All they have to do — and they have the power to do it — is finish the job, and enact health reform.

Brooks:

Fourth, you got to see how confident Republicans are. Obama’s compromise offer is one the Republicans can happily refuse. In their eyes, he is saying: If you don’t make some concessions now, I’m going to punch myself in the face. If you don’t embrace parts of my bill, I will waste the next three months trying to push an unpopular measure through an ugly reconciliation process that will probably lead to failure anyway.

While the writers don't write their own headlines, in this case, their columns' respective headlines says it all. For Krugman, it really is about "Afflicting the Afflicted." And for Brooks, it's always, always about the show -- "Not as dull as Expected."

I really never appreciated quite how cynical Brooks is. He doesn't seem to have much appreciation for all those Applebee diners he claims to understand so well. Republicans looked pretty good! The bill is going to die! And while he claims that Republicans have a lot of great ideas -- exchanges, market place solutions, etc. -- he doesn't seem to understand what's driving up the cost of health care in this country, and he doesn't care to try. And he's either not been paying attention or he doesn't really care, that, as the president said, much of what Coburn had to say -- who did in fact know what he was talking about -- were valid and addressed in the Senate bill.

And while Brooks claims to understand that the health system is a mess, he sides with Republicans' obstructionism because...well, just because.

Somerby blames "the media" and, most acidly, Maddow, for the stupidity of our discourse and the stunning arrogance of Republican leadership. I'd say the blame falls more squarely on our "serious, thought leaders" like Brooks (not to mention Friedman, Rose, Hiatt, et. al.).

Wish harder

David Brooks offers no suggestions for political reform in Afghanistan, no ideas on how many troops would be needed to protect aid workers, no thoughts on who we are actually fighting there, but he does offer a key insight: Obama may be a sophisticated thinker but he lacks the "tenacity" to "be a war president" and "win in Afghanistan."

No, that's not "shorter David Brooks."

For the past few days I have tried to do what journalists are supposed to do.

I’ve called around to several of the smartest military experts I know to get their views on these controversies. I called retired officers, analysts who have written books about counterinsurgency warfare, people who have spent years in Afghanistan. I tried to get them to talk about the strategic choices facing the president. To my surprise, I found them largely uninterested.

Most of them have no doubt that the president is conducting an intelligent policy review. They have no doubt that he will come up with some plausible troop level.

They are not worried about his policy choices. Their concerns are more fundamental. They are worried about his determination.

These people, who follow the war for a living, who spend their days in military circles both here and in Afghanistan, have no idea if President Obama is committed to this effort. They have no idea if he is willing to stick by his decisions, explain the war to the American people and persevere through good times and bad.

I'm thrilled he's doing what "journalists are supposed to do," by that I guess he means attributing anonymous quotes to "experts" known as "they." And like many "journalists" during our current endless war, the "experts" he speaks to "follow the war for a living," meaning they rely on constant war to make a living. Well played, sir.

Obama's "determination" won't do anything to overcome the lack of a coherent strategy for ending what Matthew Hoh, in his resignation letter, calls a 35 year civil war, nor will it overcome the lack of legitimacy of the country's political leadership.

Ah, but back to Brooks as he tells us how "winnable" the war would be if only Obama would squeeze his eyes shut and wish harder.

Finally, they do not understand the president’s fundamental read on the situation. Most of them, like most people who have spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, believe this war is winnable. They do not think it will be easy or quick. But they do have a bedrock conviction that the Taliban can be stymied and that the governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan can be strengthened. But they do not know if Obama shares this gut conviction or possesses any gut conviction on this subject at all.

The experts I spoke with describe a vacuum at the heart of the war effort — a determination vacuum. And if these experts do not know the state of President Obama’s resolve, neither do the Afghan villagers. They are now hedging their bets, refusing to inform on Taliban force movements because they are aware that these Taliban fighters would be their masters if the U.S. withdraws. Nor does President Hamid Karzai know. He’s cutting deals with the Afghan warlords he would need if NATO leaves his country.

Nor do the Pakistanis or the Iranians or the Russians know. They are maintaining ties with the Taliban elements that would represent their interests in the event of a U.S. withdrawal.

No mention of China? Cambodia? Laos?

Shit, the Karzai government is not the only one who's been cutting deals with the warlords, the U.S. has been doing it since October 2001. Your mileage may vary.

So I guess the president’s most important meeting is not the one with the Joint Chiefs and the cabinet secretaries. It’s the one with the mirror, in which he looks for some firm conviction about whether Afghanistan is worthy of his full and unshakable commitment. If the president cannot find that core conviction, we should get out now. It would be shameful to deploy more troops only to withdraw them later. If he does find that conviction, then he should let us know, and fill the vacuum that is eroding the chances of success.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal has said that counterinsurgency is “an argument to win the support of the people.” But it’s not an argument won through sophisticated analysis. It’s an argument won through the display of raw determination.

For chrissakes, the U.S. has displayed "raw determination" just in my lifetime in more benighted countries than I can count on two hands. Usually it comes in the form of an overwhelming military presence, predator drones, hellfire missiles, and "stress positions."

Our eight years of "tenacity" in Afghanistan has made the U.S. military the ideological underpinning of the Pashtun "insurgency." Writes Hoh, who resigned as Senior Civilian Representative in Zabul Province,

Eight years into war, no nation has ever known a more dedicated, well trained, experienced and disciplined military as the U.S. Armed Forces. I do not believe any military force has evern been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the U.S. military has received in Afghanistan. The tactical proficiency and performance of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines is unmatched and unquestioned. However, this is not the European or Pacific theaters of World War II,but rather is a war for which our leaders, uniformed, civilian and elected, have inadequately prepared and resourced our men and women. Our forces, devoted and faithful, have been committed to conflict in an indefinite and unplanned manner that has become a cavalier, politically expedient and Pollyannish misadventure. Similarly, the United States has a dedicated cadre of civilians, both U.S. government emplooyees and contractors, who believe in and sacrifice for their mission, but have been ineffectually trained and led with guidance and intent shaped more by the political climate in Washington, D.C. than in Afghan cities, villages, mountains and valleys.

I hope Obama thinks about that as he looks in the mirror, not a contemplation of his own manly "determination" and "tenacity." We had seven years of that self-admiration and Brooks cheered on that "War President" even as he took our focus off of Afghanistan to level Iraq in The Great Hunt for old chemical weapons. Brooks cheered him on right up until it was no longer possible to cheer and be considered sane in polite company.

David Brooks, concern troll

As is the case so often, I got nothing so just read Dean Baker.

Being John McCain

Shorter David Brooks:

I loved the mavericky stuff, but the Karl Rove shit works a whole lot better.

And does David Brooks know what "ne'er do wells" means?

Meanwhile, in another example of why the Times op-ed section is becoming so barren I expect to see tumbleweed blow across it in the morning, there's this (in the wood pulp version; haven't been able to find online):

Correction

In some editions of his column on Monday about the presidential forum at Saddleback Churck in California, William Kristol said that there seemed to be no basis for charges that John McCain was not in a "cone of silence" during Barack Obama's interview with the Rev. Rick Warren, and could there have heard questions posed forst to Senator Obama. Senator McCain was in a motorcade for part of Senator Obama's interview. A statement from his campaign said that the "never heard or saw any of Senator Obama's appearance."

They report. You decide.

Dr. Feelgood

Alex Rodriguez had gone 55 at-bats without a HR, a fact much noted by the knights of the keyboard in this town, but he just pulled #53, for his 151st RBI -- a grand slam to put the Yankees ahead 5-0.

Can Kai Igawa, on the mound because Roger Clemens's 45 year-old hamstring is hurting, pitch well enough so that what the Tigers and Mariners do tonight won't matter?

In May and well into June this team looked like it was swimming in sludge. Many, myself included, thought that they were done -- no kind of realistic comeback would pull them past seven teams to take the wild card (let alone pull within two of the Red Sox, who are winning right now) -- it must feel real good in that dugout down in Florida right now.

Oh, and David Brooks clinched another Most Wanker Pundit (MWP) award. Glenn Greenwald explains.

UPDATE: Wrong -- the Sox are tied with the A's (why the A's are forced to come East the last week of the season is beyond me), 1-1.

The Mets...I feel for their fans (despite their annoying cockiness back in the Spring)...they can't bail water out of the boat fast enough and are losing again to the Nationals. Detroit just scored to take a 1-0 lead against the Twinkies. And Kei Igawa just pitched out of a bases loaded, 2 out jam.

UPDATE: Oh, shit. Leave for a few moments to watch "The War (really pretty good, but it's still war porn)" and I come back to find the Devil'd eggs scored six in the sixth. The Yankees would tie, but...the majik number remains at one.

David Brooks eats lies for breakfast

And then regurgitates them for me while I eat my cornflakes. It's a nice racket.

This, incidentally, helps explain why I'm spending so much time on the Brooks article from earlier today. The median reader doesn't actually have the time, inclination, or resources to personally fact check and footnote every article they read. So they tend to use certain heuristics to help them navigate the media sphere -- chief among them trusting that authors operating out of established media outlets are being basically truthful. Conversely, they can rely on the aggregate disreputation of an outlet -- the reason I don't read or critique the Wall Street Journal editorial page is that most everyone I can reach already knows it's a stew of lies and disinformation.

But Brooks is different. He's a respected writer, perched on the world's most respected op-ed page, and making his argument through frequent references to established and credible outlets like the CBO and the Brookings Institution. It's a rare reader indeed who wouldn't trust that product. But that product is not trustworthy. Nor, for that matter, are some of his past columns on economics, which misleadingly invoked trusted and even liberal sources to add illusory credibility to conservative, controversial pronouncements. So you actually need to create an instinctive skepticism in readers as to his economic arguments -- enough so that if something sounds wrong, they'll check to see whether it is in fact incorrect, rather than just believing the air of credibility Brooks so artfully produces.

And, yes, I agree with Ezra and Duncan on this -- David Brooks is not an economist. He was given the numbers he quotes in his column to help him tell his tale of how all this populist talk about the rich getting richer and everyone else not so much is just crazy talk.

More here. And here. And here.

Back to basics? No, back to bullshit.

Oh, fer chrissakes (Time$elect, thank goodness).

What Thompson’s campaign represents, then, is a return to basics. It’s not primarily engaged in the issues that have dominated recent G.O.P. politics. Thompson is campaigning to restore America’s constitutional soul. He’s going back to Madison and Jefferson and the decentralized federalism of the founders, at least as channeled through Goldwater. As Thompson himself said while running for Senate, “America’s government is bringing America down, and the only thing that can change that is a return to the basics.”

Thompson thus becomes one pole in the debate now roiling the G.O.P. Nobody is running as the continuation of Bush. The big question now is: should the party go back to the basics or should it jump forward and transform itself into something new? Thompson articulates the back-to-basics view in its purest form. Newt Gingrich articulates the transformational view in its purest form. The other candidates are a mishmash in between.

Gawd, David Brooks is a hack. With the prominent exception of Ron Paul, every single GOP candidate is running as the continuation of Bush. Not one has condemned, let alone proposed rolling back the administration's "Unitary Executive" notions of presidential power. Besides Paul, not one has suggested that the war in Iraq was an incredibly stupid idea. Nary a one has suggested that we should not conduct ourselves Imperially. And, most tellingly, of the leading GOP candidates, only John McCain has differentiated himself from this bunch of "I had other priorities" during the Vietnam War "tough guys," in denouncing the use of torture to extract information from "the terraists."

The base of the GOP still loves George W. Bush and approves of all "9/11 changed everything" he does. If David Brooks doesn't understand that he's a moron.

But I think he knows that very well.

We learned in 2000 that the Republican party and their mouthpieces are just cynical enough to nominate a drooling fool if they thought he could convey the right "folksy" image Amuricans just looooove and install into office their very own sock puppet. Nevermind that you could wade through the guy's deepest thoughts and not get your ankles wet. And we also learned they would steal an election to put their fool into office. I know that's hard to believe, but it happened.

Well, here we go again.

But that's all to be expected. What is so amazingly depraved in Brooks' column is this: he has spent the past six years applauding an administration that has turned the U.S. Constitution into a relic of a "quaint" past, a pathetic document that cannot effectively address the challenges we face when scary brown people -- who hate us for our freedoms, dontcha know -- might destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with nothing more than a blowtorch and a virgin-filled dream. But now, as that administration crashes and burns, polling at a giddy 28% approval rating, it's back to Goldwatery "basics." Bullshit. Fred Thompson is going "back to basics" because he Doesn't. Have. A. Single. Idea. of how to govern this country. Much like the sociopath in the office currently who turned this country over to Richard Cheney and his band of merry torturers and serial deficit creators while he went mountain biking.

And the really cool thing is, just like the packaging of George W. Bush in 1999 when he was positioned as the congenial frat boy you'd like to have a beer with (not like that boring ol' brainiac, Gore) rather than a failed businessman who relied on his father's connections, Thompson's non-achieving background is papered over and he is instead the guy he plays on the damned teevee. As Greenwald limns:

Here is Thompson's biography -- his own official, endorsed version. He's been a government lawyer, an actor and a Senator. Though Thompson does not mention it, he also has been -- for two decades -- what a 1996 profile in The Washington Monthly described as "a high-paid Washington lobbyist for both foreign and domestic interests." This folksy, down-home, regular guy has spent his entire adult life as a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, except when he was an actor in Hollywood.

And -- like the vast, vast majority of Republican "tough guys" who play-act the role so arousingly for our media stars, from Rudy Giuliani to Newt Gingrich -- Thompson has no military service despite having been of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War (Thompson turned 20 in 1962, Gingrich in 1963, Giuliani in 1964). He was active in Republican politics as early as the mid-1960s, which means he almost certainly supported the war in which he did not fight.

So what exactly, in Fineman's eyes, makes Thompson such a "tough guy"? Fineman clone Mark Halperin, in a fawning piece in Time last week -- hailing Thompson's "magnetism" and praising him as "poised and compelling" and exuding "bold self-confidence" -- provides the answer:

Even before his Law & Order depiction of district attorney Arthur Branch, Thompson nearly always played variations on the same character -- a straight-talking, tough-minded, wise Southerner -- basically a version of what his supporters say is his true political self.

And he is often cast as a person in power -- a military official, the White House chief of staff, the head of the CIA, a Senator or even the President of the U.S. It could be called the Cary Grant approach to politics. As the legendary actor once explained his own style and success, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person."

The only thing that makes Thompson a "tough guy" is that he pretends to be one; he play-acts as one. There is nothing real about it. But in the same way that George Bush's ranch and fighter pilot costumes (along with his war advocacy) sent media stars swooning over his masculinity and "toughness," the Howard Finemans and Mark Halperins, along with the Bush followers in need of a new authoritarian Leader, are so intensely hungry for this faux masculine power that the illusion, the absurd play-acting, is infinitely more valuable to them than any reality, than any genuine attributes of "toughness."

Ah, but for Republicans, it's the posturing that matters.

Oh, and that thing about Thompson not running as a continuation of Bush, Greenwald continues,

Marvel at this quote from Thompson, from CNN on March 1, 2003, when he was urging the invasion of Iraq:

Can we afford to appease Saddam, kick the can down the road? Thank goodness we have a president with the courage to protect our country. And when people ask what has Saddam done to us, I ask, what had the 9/11 hijackers done to us -- before 9/11?

That is quite an incredible mentality, and it has applicability for all sorts of situations. One can easily extend it:

THOMPSON: I think we should invade and bomb Uruguay.

QUESTION: What has Uruguay done to us?

THOMPSON: When people ask what has Uruguay done to us, I ask, what had the 9/11 hijackers done to us -- before 9/11?

That mindset can be described by many adjectives, but "tough" is not one of them. "Toughness" can be demonstrated by actually fighting in a war. "Toughness" is demonstrated when a political candidate tells people what they do not want to hear. "Toughness" is not demonstrated by sending other people to war. But people like Fineman (i.e., media purveyors of Beltway conventional wisdom) reflexively, and incoherently, equate blind militarism and warmongering with "toughness" even though it is anything but.

This is what Thompson said last month when interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News:

WALLACE: What would you do now in Iraq?

THOMPSON: I would do essentially what the president's doing.

Outside of the dwindling band of dead-ender neocons and other assorted Bush followers, the only people who mistake that sort of mindset -- " I would do essentially what the president's doing" -- with "toughness" are Beltway pundits who continue to promote the view that the more wars one urges, the more militarism one embraces, the "tougher" one is. Conversely, the more one wants to avert sending fellow citizens into war, the "weaker" or "softer" one is, or -- to use Fineman's post-debate formulation -- the less "masculine" one is.

I know I don't need to tell you, Dear Readers, that we are in for it once again. All the players from the 2000 election and the run-up to the Iraq War are back at it. It's going to take a great deal of effort to keep them from bullshitting this country into making another terrible mistake, perhaps with another shotgun wedding presided over by an Alito Court.