p.m. carpenter's commentary

THIS PAGE HAS MOVED

2005-04-06T13:35:00.000-05:00

This site has moved HERE.

I apologize for the recent problems this site has experienced. I trust this move will resolve those problems. Thank you, and remember to bookmark the NEW site, which, as I said, is HERE.

Yours,
P.M. Carpenter

2005-04-05T13:54:00.000-05:00

Judges need to be intimidated – Tom DeLay, 1998

There’s a tendency among American media consumers and the hype-pushers who feed them to see news in the news. The case of Tom DeLay vs. the courts is a perfect example.

Depending on their political leanings, commentators, editorial boards and professional cable-network shouters have been heaping praise or condemnation on Mr. DeLay’s indisputably curious interpretation of the constitutional separation of powers. The spark for all this instant-messaging rhetoric, of course, was the legal controversy surrounding Terri Schiavo’s final days.

As the New York Times has just editorialized, “The low point” – or, I should inject, the high point if you happen to admire Sugarland’s contribution to representative democracy – “in the politicking over Terri Schiavo came last week when the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, threatened the judges who ruled in her case. Saying they had ‘thumbed their nose at Congress and the president,’ Mr. DeLay announced that ‘the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.’”

So far, so good, but then came the implication that had it not been for Terri Schiavo, the courts would have remained secure in their independence and free from the Texas congressman’s unconstitutional scheming and meddling. Again, I quote the Times: “Mr. DeLay's ominous statements were a calculated part of a growing assault on the judiciary. Through public attacks, proposed legislation and even the threat of impeachment, ideologues are trying to bully judges into following their political line.”

The fault line of that last sentence lies in what the meaning of “are,” are. For right-wing ideologues have engaged in bullying the judiciary for decades. Indeed, when DeLay was still spraying bugs for a living, the New Right – that 1970s “new conservative” movement stemming from Barry Goldwater’s quixotic, hard-right foray into presidential politics -- was growing in popularity with fundamentalist reactionaries because of its politically apoplectic denunciations of Supreme Court rulings on such hot social buttons as school prayer and abortion.

The right’s demagoguery on “liberal-judicial activism” paid off in no small way; by 1995 its political machine of little Tom DeLays was ruling the people’s House. Three years later the machine had cranked up the liberal-activism hysteria to the point that it finally met with opposition.

This, from the (Ohio) Columbus Dispatch, June 14, 1998: "Last week, a bipartisan group of former elected officials, law-school deans and constitutional scholars said they would begin speaking out against political assaults on courts and judges. Citizens for Independent Courts includes liberal Democrats such as former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, and conservative Republicans such as former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming…. Attacks include passage by the House of Representatives of legislation that would limit the power of federal judges to order prisoner releases in response to unconstitutional conditions in state prisons and jails."

Here’s the kicker. In the same article, the Hammer himself felt emboldened enough to go public with the right’s inner intent: "House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas, who has called for increased use of impeachment of federal judges, said, 'judges need to be intimidated.'"

That was seven years ago, long before Mrs. Schiavo gave Mr. DeLay an excuse to intimidate judges and long before editorial boards became acutely alarmed.

And here’s the bigger kicker, though I would discourage anyone from getting too carried away with this because of dramatically differing historical and cultural circumstances. Still, there’s a lesson here in lapsed vigilance that’s worth noting….

Only well after a little Austrian with a funny mustache had gained ruthless power did thoughtful people begin asking how they could have known what was coming, how they could have predicted it, how they could have anticipated and guarded against its madness. The odd part of that exercise? The little Austrian had spelled out all his intentions in a book -- in 1925.

He had hidden nothing. It was in the record all along. It wasn’t news.

2005-04-03T11:13:00.000-05:00

The Anarchy of Losers

Two recent news stories about the well-known ethical perversities of Republican warlords Rick Santorum and Tom DeLay have, when read together, only served to highlight the tactical perversities of Democratic – pardon the liberty – leadership.

In a nutshell, one piece focused on party chairman Howard Dean’s assault on Santorum’s duplicity and curious residential maneuverings, while the other reviewed DeLay’s bubbling-over pot of political troubles – some, criminal in nature – and reported that the congressman has begun “a counterattack designed to shore up his backing in the Republican House caucus and among social conservatives.” Now there’s news.

But buried toward the bottom of each piece was a brief statement on how the Democratic Party intends to proceed in capitalizing on Republican woes. And here – again, when read side by side – is the disturbing and all-too familiar part.

Now remember that Howard Dean is the party chairman, and as such is supposed to be the national voice of its political focus and overall strategy. Accordingly, Mr. Dean said “Democrats need ‘message discipline.’ He said they should for the present forgo the satisfaction of attacking House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's ethics problems … and focus on attacking Bush's plan to create private Social Security accounts…. ‘We're on a roll with Social Security,’ Dean said. ‘We need to focus on this, and we need to keep the focus on it.’”

Fair enough, but then naturally enough came this in the DeLay story: “Democrats are promising to quickly bring up ethical questions surrounding DeLay when Congress returns to work Monday.”

Good grief. Does anyone from Democratic HQ ever call the in-country troops, and if so, do those troops ever heed the call? How in God’s name can a party chairman be out on the stumps declaring the urgency of “message discipline” and declaring no less the precise message – only to have his party’s lieutenants huddling off-message?

The political reality is, either tactic – the message discipline of Social Security all day, every day, or DeLay-roasting all day, every day – likely would advance the party’s position and throw the GOP on the hapless defensive if used with exclusivity. If the right has proven nothing else in its sordid ascendancy, it has proven that most supreme utility of all artful propaganda – the benefit of staying on message.

When President Bill Clinton, for example, suggested the radically preposterous idea that perhaps all Americans deserve health care, the right launched into a message-disciplined assault on sanity that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud. An uninformed public was barraged with endless right-wing diatribes about socialist medicine, health care by bureaucracy and loss of personal choice; and subjected all day, every day to that witless couple, Harry and Louise, making critical health-care decisions by sound bites. A rational concept was put to the torch and dead before it hit the congressional floor.

And of course I need not remind you of the right’s masterful discipline leading up to and throughout the Clinton-impeachment farce. A president went down, as the recipient of such, merely because the opposition would not be deterred. There were, believe it or not, other newsworthy events in the nation and around the globe during those dark days, but you never would have known it to hear the Republican Party. Its message was, instead, presidential high crimes and misdemeanors all day, every day, and nothing but.

The world stood by and marveled at its oldest democracy making a perfect fool of itself, yet the right came out on top. It derailed Clinton’s second term and manipulated the invented “character issue” into a retaking of the White House. From a purely strategic and student-of-propaganda point of view, the right’s contrivances were a thing of beauty.

And what did the Democratic leadership learn from its political pounding? What insights did it glean from the opposition’s winning ways?

Predictably, “nothing and none” are the answers. As the party chairman begs for message discipline, his party at large behaves with all the discipline of an ill-managed daycare center.

Good grief.

2005-04-01T13:09:00.000-06:00

The politically correct presidential commission’s findings on Bush II’s Iraq scam would, in a sane democracy, embarrass its authors. But of course that sentiment contains its own contradiction.

The report said “the analysts who worked the Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.”

This prompted the Los Angeles Times to respond that investigators “must have missed the intelligence agents who told [us] on several prewar occasions that they thought their product was being politicized and that they were pushed to provide evidence to support the Bush administration's claims that Iraq was a threat.”

Mr. Bush stood the post-election report on its head by saying its suggested reforms would help insure against the real danger of “underestimating a threat.”

In short, “Shove it.”

Like me, you have probably given up hoping this administration might, just once, admit error, express contrition, or behave maturely. So be it. But that, unfortunately, leaves all our hopes in the hands of the gutless, strategically addled Democratic Party.

Canada, anyone?

2005-04-01T06:00:00.000-06:00

*****
We’re safe, now that the Justice Department has nailed Bill Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, for removing classified material from the National Archives.
The cost of this crime? – possibly an inadvertent one? A $10,000 fine. The loss of his security clearance for three years. A rap sheet making him “unemployable in government” for some time.
And the cost for “imperiling national security,” which GOP warlords had charged Mr. Berger with?
Priceless.
It must be. For let us count the number of folks prosecuted – or at minimum reprimanded – among the current administration’s inept bunch of menacing bureaucrats who ignored 3-alarm memos about the impending catastrophe of 9/11; reduced America’s standing in the world to isolated mulch; endangered the homeland by creating an Iraqi terrorist factory; allowed a mass-murdering lunatic to stay on the loose; strained the armed forces to the danger point; and tossed the Constitution in the White House fireplace.
Zero.
You just can’t put a price on some things.
But at least we’re safe from Sandy Berger.

2005-03-31T07:58:00.000-06:00

Now that former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” is a bona fide member of the conservative elite, he can dance the Hypocrisy Rag at will.

Mr. Scarborough has used his last several programs trashing Florida state and local authorities and blessing federal intervention in the Schiavo case. Compare that to this Christian Science Monitor story of 1995:

[Congressman] Scarborough has joined with about 40 of his classmates to form a group called ‘The New Federalists.’ They meet early in the morning three times a week to discuss plans to … return power to state and local government….

Although most GOP freshman signed on to the Contract during the campaign, and many received support from House Speaker Newt Gingrich's political-action committee, Scarborough claims his class is driven more by the Constitution than the House GOP manifesto.

They say they are driven by the 10th Amendment, which holds that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved for states or the citizens themselves.

An Open Letter to the Honorable Tom DeLay

2005-03-30T09:57:00.000-06:00

Dear Tom:

Now that even the Social Darwinists on the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board have hung you out to dry, I’m warming up to you. Anyone the WSJ doesn’t like, I am compelled to reevaluate. It’s one of those “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” things, but I don’t need to explain hardball and strange bedfellows to you, of all people.

There are, however, deeper reasons underlying my hope for your salvageable hide. First of all, with Newt out huckstering books, with W. impaled by his own party’s 22nd Amendment, and with the Senate’s Doctor Bill back on his medication, whom would we on the left have left to so enjoyably skewer?

No, I need you, we all need you, Tom. We need your blue-ribbon hypocrisy, your cynical snarl, your attack-dog whimsy and perfectly coifed hair -- which, sadly, should you land in the Big House would likely get mussed as you’re being savagely gang-raped by white supremacist, Neo-Nazi fans of yours. Boys will be boys.

And there’s the obvious reason to support your continued presence: Texas and the other 49 states’ constituencies of the fundamentalist boobeoisie deserve a voice like yours in the United States House of Representatives. It may be only one of 435, but it’s a rock-solid paradigm of opportunism for future students of sleaze to study.

Last, and of more urgency, I’m hoping this letter of support will prompt you to throw some advertising money my way. I have reserved space on this page for your reelection campaign or third-party endorsements. We know you, Tom, and we know that one call from you and the Scaife Foundations would be showering me with more cash than the FDIC could insure. They’ll never miss it, and you and George could add one more statistic to your “ownership-society” count. It is, as they say, a win-win proposition, Tom.

With thanks for your thanks, I am,

Yours,
P.M.

Ah, the freedom of unemployment

2005-03-30T06:07:00.000-06:00

In the New York Times this morning, former Republican senator and token U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Danforth editorializes on the "wrong direction" that his party's "current fixation on a religious agenda" has taken.

If you've not the time to read it, here's his synposis that says it all: "As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around."

With W's approval rating headed south and Tom DeLay headed to the woodshed, perhaps more of the party's moderates will feel the freedom not of unemployment, but of conscience.

Let us pray.

Let’s not have any backsliding, folks

2005-03-29T11:05:00.000-06:00

This piece from the Boston Globe gives the reader some idea of how the Voltaires of yesteryear must have felt as they struggled with pen against ancient ignorance and self-satisfied intolerance -- and worse, how little so many have advanced since.

Try not to be gripped by the horrifying thought that the family interviewed here speaks and thinks for the majority of Americans. It can then be amusing to count the subjects’ apostasies and see that those very lapses would, in the eyes of even more condemnatory fanatics, damn the entire family to eternal flames.

The purity of any revolution -- such as the one Christian evangelicals believe they're spearheading -- is never quite achieved, hence it knows no limits.

The Lawlessness of Unintended Consequences

2005-03-27T09:47:00.000-06:00

The right’s depraved indifference to the fiscal health of Social Security and its criminal recklessness in the passing of Terri Schiavo were self-inflicted one-two punches that have put the GOP on the ropes.

The first concrete evidence of this was last week’s Gallup poll showing that President Bush’s approval rating had fallen a precipitous seven points in as many days. He took his biggest hit from churchgoers, conservatives and men.

What’s more, revealed the poll, the percentage of those willing to identify themselves as Republicans slipped from 35 to 32, while Democratic identification more than inched upward, 32 to 37.

In explaining this developing sea change, political number-cruncher Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report said, “You have to wonder if people didn’t feel that the president and Congress couldn’t be spending their time working on Social Security and other problems.”

Of course their numbers slipped precisely because the president and Congress were “working on Social Security and other problems,” but we understand the gist of Mr. Cook’s pondering: The good-ol’ boys were out to lunch when it came to discerning the authentic, everyday anxieties harbored by the at-large public, and the disillusioned public let the first pollster to call know it.

That much is undoubtedly true. What may be just as true is that a growing majority has simply had enough – that it is undergoing some sort of dittohead-dot-com explosion as politically transformational as the dot-com-bubble burst was economically.

It could be, perhaps, that the right’s twin attributes of intellectual dystrophy and ethical bankruptcy, whose pronounced symptomatology of bullying, obfuscating and propagandizing has littered America’s landscape for years, had been taking their toll on the public all along. It could be that the Social Security scam and Schiavo fiasco were merely revelatory shock therapies to a public increasingly plagued by political-Zeitgeist exhaustion.

I think a reasonably informed argument can be made on this – the past – and it’s a comforting one: The swaggering right finally overreached once too often.

What is less comforting, however, is the near-mathematical certainty that the right won’t take its licks lying down. Unlike most bullies, who overcompensate for their sense of powerlessness through mere bluster, and, accordingly, fold on the first display of resistance, the right is genuinely bold, fearless and powerful.

It has reason to be. It holds the power. And the informed history of the right’s exercise of power indicates a response to immense corrective pressures not through compromise or temperance, but like a cornered animal.

That’s the worry that tempers my delight at radical conservatism’s predicament. We don’t know precisely how it will respond or that response’s precise level of severity, but that a puerile, in-your-face and wholly out-of-bounds counterattack will indeed come is a pretty safe bet.

After all, the right hasn’t been shy about wielding extraconstitutional power whenever it suits. The Founding Fathers, for example, expressly forbad bills of attainder – a constitutional prohibition giddily ignored (for what they believed was political gain) by both Congress and Mr. Bush in the Schiavo case.

And there was, well before the anticonstitutional enshrinement of torturing criminal suspects, the supreme unconstitutionality of 2000 that put Mr. Bush in power to begin with – an instance of perverted jurisprudence which Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has summarized on behalf of a wide-ranging intellectual community as “‘lawless,’ ‘illegitimate,’ ‘unprincipled,’ ‘partisan,’ ‘fraudulent,’ ‘disingenuous,’ and motivated by improper considerations.”

That the right is willing to abuse, ignore, or twist the law for its own happy entrenchment is empirically clear. What is yet unclear is not if, but how, the right will go about storming its critics and re-shoring its base.

This opinion, I’m afraid, is more than some Hofstadteresque paranoid style of American politics or an advanced case of political heebie-jeebies and battle fatigue. There are simply too many signposts of history that point otherwise. So strap on your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Republicans Gone Wild

2005-03-26T11:56:00.000-06:00

There is now no better, or more accurate, way to say it: The Republican Party has gone nuts – absolutely, certifiably, sycophantically nuts.

It went officially bananas upon declaring, in the small hours of Monday morning, a national emergency in the sad yet exhaustively adjudicated case of Terri Schiavo. That much was obvious when the party chucked its last vestiges of states-rights principles and respect for separation of powers into the anything-for-the-religious-right pot of electoral gold.

Republicans’ blatant whoring at the altar of slaughtered ideals and political opportunism was so conspicuous as to make its examination here only tiresomely redundant. So let’s not bother.

What we should bother ourselves with, however, is the truly bothersome and, it seems, growing emotional instability of these congressional Republicans, which any rational onlooker might characterize as this: folks on the verge – thus we are on the verge, given that they are in charge – of a political nervous breakdown; the result of too much heady success from too much groveling to too many narrow interests.

The stress of so much power coupled with insatiable ambition is showing.

One of their own, Representative Donald Manzullo of Illinois, inched close to party self-diagnosis when he opined, "I have been here 13 years and I have never seen anything like this before." And that’s coming from a man who’s lived through the manufactured government-shutdown hysteria, the manufactured impeachment hysteria, the manufactured Iraq hysteria and all the other manufactured hysterias to which we as a nation have been subjected since the Grand Old Party began its studied re-ascendancy.

And looking back, one can see that its ascendancy was in no small part due to its study of orchestrated hysteria. The skies have regularly fallen and Democracy put at grave risk because Hillary misplaced a file or Bill got his jollies or John tossed a medal or the you-know-who elite banned Christmas or ... you take your pick. You can set your watch by the GOP barraging us with some newly revealed, outrageous liberal escapade – each and every one manufactured to distract from the less than publishable goal of unfettered political power.

We’re not to notice as the ruling party deepens a grotesquely mounting national debt in its pursuit of assassinating social programs, or as it finances a class-warfaring plutocracy to sustain a graft-driven political machine, or promotes the fantasy of a democratically reforming Middle East to justify a fraudulent invasion. To notice is only to buy into the vast liberal media’s propagandistic ways.

We are, however, expected to salute when the ruling party, positively dripping with selflessness, snaps into action over an exceedingly personal, private and local legal matter. (Naturally we should disregard its own memorandum as to what "a great political issue" it is. See above: liberal media.)

We are expected to salute because the scam has worked for the charlatans so many times before. But this time the great majority of Americans – 70 percent according to an ABC News poll – noticed what was not intended to be noticed: the naked hypocrisy, the sheer opportunism, the downright shabby spectacle of it all.

The scene from Sunday-night, Monday-morning’s House floor "debate" was reminiscent of Fredric March as Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan) on the witness stand in "Inherit the Wind" – a bunch of imbecilic blowhards puffing with feigned moralistic fervor, all of it devoted to buying favoritism on the cheap with torch-burning zealots. The only difference was, Matthew Harrison Brady actually believed in what he was selling.

Just to balance out the farce with drama was Barney Frank as Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow), asking, in effect, as Henry Drummond did: "What, are you guys nuts?"

Yep.

Notwithstanding the satisfaction that comes from seeing reprobates get what they deserve in the form of a disapproving public, is there not something almost sad about watching today’s GOP, a party with a long and noble tradition, make such a fool of itself?

Naw.

Not after what it’s put us through.

* * *

This column originally appeared on BuzzFlash.com, March 23, 2005.

pmcarpenter@buzzflash.com