Character building

As Fred Thompson was drawling a gruesome sketch of McCain's life as a...wait for it...POW, Madame Cura turned to me and asked, "Is that torture?" And I replied, "Not when we do it."

Fredmentum

Feel. It.

“Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement. “I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.”

No. Thank you, Fred.

Alien SUV drivers

While there are one or two GOP presidential candidates who see serious policy implications resulting from global warming, the leading candidates take the helpful stance of indicating that China and India are the problem, not the U.S. So, they'd do pretty much nothing, because, as everyone knows, the U.S. economy is dwarfed by and can't compete with China's and India's. But nothing says "Serious Man," like Hollywood:

Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto. NASA says that the Martian South Pole's ice cap has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter's caught the same cold, because it's warming up too, like Pluto. This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle. Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our solar system have in common. Hmmmm. Solar system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder. Nah, I guess we shouldn't even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There's a consensus. Ask Galileo.
-- Paul Harvey Show, April 13, 2007

Saturday quote of the day

Fred Thompson looks at the performance of the Bush administration's so-called "governin'" and learns a valuable lesson.

[Thompson's] speech touched on the war in Iraq, the economy and federalism, and on a more general theme: “When you look at governmental functions, you see for the first time in our history this clearly: that the government can’t do some basic things that the government is supposed to do.” He mentioned the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Huh?

The Bush administration puts crony hacks in charge of important government functions and when they prove to be utter failures Thompson takes from that government can't do basic things. I know we saw this coming -- the Bush administration has been a lesson in how Republicans destroy government institutions in order to prove that government institutions don't work -- but, still, it's stunning to see it articulated.

Useless idiots

Kevin Drum is shrill.

On a related subject, more here on the Shia takeover of the Iraqi army. It's not exactly news or anything, just further confirmation of the obvious: the eventual fate of Iraq (outside the Kurdish north) is the establishment of a Shia theocracy closely aligned with Iran. As far as I can tell, no one has even a colorable argument that things are moving in any other direction, and equally, no colorable argument that there's anything we can do to stop it. Maliki is using the U.S. military brass as useful idiots to fight his battles for him, and George Bush is his Useful Idiot in Chief.

And don't forget: every single major Republican candidate for president wants to continue our useful idiot role. They're practically duelling each other to see who can be the most fatuously naive about foreign policy. Quite a spectacle, no?

Speaking of making a spectacle of himself, David Broder inhales some of the rich, manly morning breath of Fred Thompson and starts seeing stars.

When Fred Thompson makes his long-delayed entrance into the Republican presidential race, he will not tiptoe quietly. Instead, he will try to shake up the establishment candidates of both parties by depicting a nation in peril from fiscal and security threats -- and prescribing tough cures that he says others shrink from offering.

In a two-hour conversation over coffee at a restaurant near his Virginia headquarters, the former senator from Tennessee said that when he joins the battle next month, he "will take some risks that others are not willing to take, in terms of forcing a dialogue on our entitlement situation, our military situation and what it's going to cost" to ensure the nation's future.

Well, do tell.

After spending most of the past few years on TV's "Law and Order," and starting a new family, with two children under 4, the 65-year-old lawyer says he finds himself motivated for the first time to seek the White House.

I can imagine the campaign looks pretty good to a 65-year old former lobbyist with two kids under four who are constantly getting into his humidor.

"There's no reason for me to run just to be president," he said. "I don't desire the emoluments of the office. I don't want to live a lie and clever my way to the nomination or election. But if you can put your ideas out there -- different, more far-reaching ideas -- that is worth doing."

Emoluments? He better watch those five dollar words when he's campaigning next month in South Carolina. Oh, and Fred, I'm pretty sure you ain't gonna "clever your way" anywhere...unless you mean getting the rubes to fall for the red pick up again. And by "rubes," I mean the Washington press corps.

But lets, Dear Reader, listen to the "far-reaching ideas" The Dean so gushes on about. But first, it wouldn't be a Broder column if there wasn't a "pox on both your houses," moment.

Thompson, like many of the others running, has caught a strong whiff of the public disillusionment with both parties in Washington -- and the partisanship that has infected Congress, helping to speed his own departure from the Senate.

But he says he thinks the public is looking for a different kind of leadership. "I think a president could go to the American people and say, 'Here's what we need to be doing. And I'm willing to go halfway. Now you have to make them [the opposition] go halfway.' "

Ah, yes, Thompson has such a long, detailed history of forming consensus on legislation he crafted in the Senate. What's that, he never crafted any? Whatevah.

The approach Thompson says he's contemplating is one that will step on many sensitive political toes. When he says "we're getting a free ride" fighting a necessary war in Iraq with an undersized military establishment, "wearing out our people and equipment," it sounds like a criticism of the president and the Pentagon.

"A free ride?" And no, it doesn't sound like criticism of the president and the Pentagon, it sounds like a guy who wants to double-down on Iraq. He sounds like all of the GOP candidates (except Ron Paul...Microsoft should create a shortcut for that phrase) in wanting to increase defense spending and continuing to fight Bush's War.

When he says he would have opposed adding the prescription drug benefit to Medicare, "a $17 trillion add-on to a program that's going bankrupt," he is fighting the bipartisan judgment of the last Congress.

"Bipartisan judgment of the last Congress?"

When he says the FBI is perhaps incapable of morphing itself into the smart domestic security agency the country needs, he is attacking another sacred cow.

Um, David, J. Edgar Hoover's been dead a long while. The agency's not quite so fearsome to politicians as it once was.

Thompson repeatedly cites two texts as fueling his concern about the country's future. One is "Government at the Brink," a two-volume report he issued as chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee at the start of the Bush administration in 2001 and handed to the new president's budget director as a checklist of urgent management problems.

The difficulties outlined in federal procurement, personnel, finances and information technology remain, Thompson said, and increasingly "threaten national security."

His second sourcebook contains the scary reports from Comptroller General David Walker, the head of the Government Accountability Office, on the long-term fiscal crisis spawned by the aging of the American population and the runaway costs of health care. Walker labels the current patterns of federal spending "unsustainable" and warns that unless action is taken soon to improve both sides of the government's fiscal ledger -- spending and revenue -- the next generation will suffer.

I can buy that. What's Thompson's "far-reaching idea here?" Health care plan, anyone?

"Nobody in Congress or on either side in the presidential race wants to deal with it," Thompson said. "So we just rock along and try to maintain the status quo. Republicans say keep the tax cuts; Democrats say keep the entitlements. And we become a less unified country in the process, with a tax code that has become an unholy mess, and all we do is tinker around the edges."

Thompson readily concedes that he does not know "where all those chips are going to fall" when he starts challenging members of various interest groups to look beyond their individual agendas and weigh the sacrifices that could ensure a better future for their children.

There, he said it: the children. I don't see a whole lot of sacrifices in repairing Social Security and universal health care. Unless he means sacrificing some of that defense spending we'd otherwise use to invade Iran and to fight that "necessary war" in Iraq. And sacrificing some of the insurance companies' marketing budgets (and paying all those people to deny coverage).

But these issues -- national security and the fiscal crisis of an aging society with runaway heath-care costs -- "are worth a portion of a man's life. If I can't get elected talking that way, I probably don't deserve to be elected."

Thompson says he feels "free to do it" his own way, and that freedom may just be enough to shake up the presidential race.

And with that, Broder was forced to call the Post's IT department.

Let's review the far-reaching ideas:

• Iraq: More, more, more.
• Defense spending: More, more, more.
• Medicare: Entitlements are the problem, not our defense spending that is already nearly double what the rest of the world spends, combined.
• Domestic security: You've seen 24, haven't you? It's not like that stodgy old FBI. On the show, they have flat screen monitors.
• Fiscal responsibility: Let's show some.
• Aging population: Yikes.
• Interest groups: He was a lobbyist, so he's uniquely qualified to tell them to shut the fuck up.
• On campaigning: If I can get elected by talking to David Broder over a couple of Whiskey Sours, then, hell yes!

Next week, Broder sups with Mitt Romney and declares him a Methodist.

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.