Rick Perlstein | The Nation
What to Make of the Droning on Drones From the Right?
Rand Paul. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst.)
I haven’t been tuning in, myself, but I’m told that in recent days Fox News has been going all-in praising Senator Rand Paul’s droning drone filibuster holding up John Brennan’s confirmation as CIA chief, with several Fox contributors fiercely attacking Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham for taking on the young libertarian lion—or, if you prefer, for taking Barack Obama’s side. That raises interesting questions. As I observed in my Nation dispatch from last year’s Republican convention (“The GOP Throws a Tampa Tantrum”; hats off to your clever Nation editors for that awesome headline!), “Rand Paul got some of the biggest applause of his speech for saying something this party isn’t supposed to support at all: ‘Republicans must acknowledge that not every dollar spent on the military is necessary or well spent.’” And that “John McCain and Condoleezza Rice sounded like schoolmarms lecturing indifferent students when they tried to make the case that what neoconservatives used to call the ‘freedom agenda’ was being betrayed by Barack Obama.” Does all this mean the ancient (and even, sometimes, honorable) tradition of Republican “isolationism” (the word being more than a little bit of an epithet; its advocates prefer “non-interventionism”) is making a comeback? Or, alternately, did it never really go away at the conservative grassroots, save for those distracting moments when the commander-in-chief is a conservative Republican hero like in those heady first few years of W’s Iraq War? Or is all this just another opportunity for Obama-bashing, and as such a perfect example of the intellectual contentlessness and bottomless cynicism of that favorite Republican activity? (As I put it in the piece on the convention, “What they really love—shown by the way McCain and Condi were able to win back their audience by taking cheap shots at Obama—are enemies. And within their authoritarian mindset [as George Orwell taught us with his talk about Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania], enemies are fungible.”)
Reading Bob Woodward
Bob Woodward discusses the White House “threat” with Sean Hannity on Fox News.
This business with Bob Woodward—the White House’s Gene Sperling told him he might “regret” making a certain claim blaming Obama for the sequester debacle; Woodward told Politico he heard that as a veiled threat; conservatives crowed that all this proved Obama has lapped even Richard Nixon as a political thug; then the actual full exchange with Sperling, when it came forth, made it painfully obvious that the offending words were about as threatening as a light misting rain on a warm summer night—reveal most of what you need to know about Bob Woodward’s usefulness these days as a guide to how Washington works. That is to say, he is utterly useless in explaining how Washington works. But he is almost uniquely useful as an object lesson in displaying how Washington works—especially its elite punditry division.
Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: Reckless Spending Cuts
A traffic sign is seen near the US Capitol in Washington March 1, 2013. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
So: the “sequester.” That too-clever-by-half notion, born of last year’s debt ceiling negotiations out of the White House’s presumption that, when faced with the horror of heedless, profligate, across-the-board budget cuts to all manner of popular government programs, the Republicans’ “fever would break”—remember that?—and the Loyal Opposition would somehow come to agree to a reasonable, “balanced” deficit reduction package. It all seemed so cut and dried in those palmy days, just a few months ago: who could possibly imagine a major American political party could possibly let such madness actually go into effect?
(Son of) Constitutional Roadblock to Efforts to Fix Federal Elections
Voters in California. States could legally take back the power to appoint electors without a popular vote at any time. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes.)
Three weeks ago I held forth in thunder on the subject of voting: “The President and Congress have little or no constitutional authority upon which” to fix America’s broken voting system, I wrote. “It is one of the best kept secrets in our political life: There is no federal right to vote…I’d be glad to be corrected, but as best I can tell, that means that technically, in almost every case, a state can make it as hard as it wants for its citizens to vote, and there’s practically nothing DC can do about it.”
Rahm on the Ropes
Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel at a press conference in December to voice support for stricter gun laws. (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast.)
Back last year when I was columnizing for the Rolling Stone website, I started explaining to the rest of the country what Rahm Emanuel’s tenure as mayor of Chicago felt like on the ground here in my hometown—and not, say, from the rarified altitude of national mainstream publications who treated the half-baked, potentially self-dealing ideas he rammed through a Kremlin-like City Council as if emanations from some sort of public policy Nirvana; unquestioningly took the mayor at his word even in his most pie-in-the-sky, pot-of-gold-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow pronouncements; and fawned over him as some sort of new-breed reformer because, well—he tells them he is some sort of new-breed reformer. I called that “Rahmpraganda.” Its most sublime practitioner proved to be Jonathan Alter, who gushed in The Atlantic: “Sitting in his cavernous office on the fifth floor of City Hall, Rahm lowers his outstretched empty palms, then raises them above his waist. ‘If you have your hands above the table you can’t deal from the bottom of the deck.’ ”
Politics and Oscar Night
Ben Affleck presents the Oscar for best documentary to Malik Bendjoullel for Searching for Sugar Man. (Reuters/Mario Anzuoni.)
Some people had been predicting a political Oscar night. “This year’s Oscar race has been politicized to an unusual degree,” The Washington Post said the day before the ceremony, citing Kathryn Bigelow’s being denied, or snubbed, for a Best Director nomination following Senators McCain, Feinstein and Levin’s angry protestations that Zero Dark Thirty falsified the role of torture in catching Osama bin Laden; and all that silly talk of Lincoln as a useful parable for the imperative of bipartisan compromise, and also the fact that the Washington debut of Argo was held at the Canadian embassy—a bit of a reach, really, to call that political. The Post didn’t mention the real potential for political fireworks last night came in the documentary feature category. Two films, The Gatekeepers and 5 Broken Cameras, held up Israel’s policies in occupied Palestine to critique. Last week, the Palestinian co-director of Cameras was detained with his family at LAX and threatened with deportation even as he waved his Oscar invitation in front of border agents to prove his right to be in the country. That story was publicized by Michael Moore—and it was hard not to imagine that should one of these pictures win, a moment might materialize like the one in 2003, when Moore used the occasion of his victory for Bowling for Columbine to light into George W. Bush’s hide. “We live in the time where we have ficticious election results that elect a fictitious president,” he said. “We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.”
Moderate Republican Mugged By Reality
Sam Kleiner was disillusioned fellow campus Republicans refused to support GOP moderate Mark Kirk, above. (Reuters/Frank Polich.)
Last month I introduced you to Alex, a young University of Chicago grad, a certain sort of modern-day social type: libertarian-until-graduation. A “LUG,” if you will. One possessed of an impassioned trust that free markets are always real, and always right; that government intervention was always an imposition by illegitimate force, and always wrong; and someone who believed that if workers didn’t like what the market was telling them at one job, well, they could always quit and find another. He was drenched in an ivory-tower college conservatism that dissolved at the first touch of real-world employment.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Fortieth President!
Ronald Reagan at a rally in 1984. (Photo courtesy of the Everett Collection.)
I missed a friend’s birthday a couple of weeks ago. February 6 was the 102nd anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth. I’ve been spending a lot of time with the old fellow, as some of you know, working on a book, and I really should make amends. Because he astonishes me. A man as myopic as what you’ll be seeing below really deserves some sort of recognition. He really, really does.
Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: A Coming Preschool Backlash?
Barack Obama poses for a photo with second graders in 2009. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais.)
It was one of the most cheering propositions in the president’s State of the Union Address: “Tonight, I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every single child in America.”
Nothing New Under the Wingnut Sun: 'Textbook Wars'
Toni Morrison’s book Beloved recently sparked a curriculum controversy in Virgina. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens.)
Last week The Washington Post reported on a school board vote in Fairfax County, Virginia, over whether to consider removing a book from the curriculum. A mother named Laura Murphy told of how her son encountered Beloved, by Toni Morrison, in his senior high school English class. “It was disgusting and gross,” he said. “It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it.” It was only one mother complaining, but that was enough: Soon, a vote was slated to consider whether to review the book’s inclusion in the curriculum. Complaints were fielded about plots points involving bestiality and gang rape—and the novel’s dramatic apex, when the escaped slave murders her 2-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured. Uncomfortable, yes, but the director of the American Library Association said discomfort was the whole point: “It’s a painful part of the African-American history in parts of this country. A lot of parents understandable want to protect their children from that…. However, we strongly advise people to read the book as a whole before they make their judgment.” The English department at the boy’s school chimed in with an eloquent public letter (“reading and studying books that expose us, imaginatively and safely, to that trouble steels our souls to pull us through out own hard time and leads us to a greater empathy for the plight of our fellow human beings”). The mom, meanwhile, assured the world she was “not some crazy book burner,” just someone concerned that “new policies be adopted to give parents more control over what their children read in the classrooms.”
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