Just the Fact Check, Man

Joe Biden just signed the American Rescue Plan, his $1.9 trillion COVID bill, into law today.  I meant to write about this yesterday, but my computer was recalcitrant; but I figure we're in for more of the same pattern that inspired this post, so here I go.

Morning Edition ran a segment about the ARP yesterday, featuring a Republican Representative who denounced the bill in familiar terms.  Host Scott Detrow began by asking Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri:

Appreciate you being here. Let's start with this - the president's overall COVID response is pretty popular so far. This bill is popular according to polls. Why do you think that is?

SMITH: It's because the bill has changed so many times throughout the process that once the American people see everything that's in it, the popularity will not be there. It - as what I've said all along, it's the wrong plan at the wrong time. If this bill was about direct payments to people and putting shots in the arms and vaccines, you would have strong bipartisan support across this Congress, across this country. But less than 9% of the entire spending in this bill actually goes to crushing the virus and helping distribute vaccines and putting shots in arms.

DETROW: And I want to get to some of the details that you would rather see in the bill in a moment...

It doesn't seem that they did get into such details.  Smith had a lot of complaints, which were familiar from other right-wing Congressional Republicans, but they were rather insubstantial.  He kept digressing to matters like California's $10 billion deficit, bipartisanship and the danger of a Green New Deal.  Detrow was a crummy interviewer, like most of NPR's team, and I noticed that he let Smith's statements go unchallenged.  It took NPR, like most corporate media, years to get to the point where they dared to point out Trump's lies and the false conspiracy theories about a stolen election, but having done that, they seem to have exhausted themselves.  I had the impression that Smith was spraying out a smoke screen of GOP talking points.  I kept waiting for Detrow to fact-check him, but no dice.  And fact-checking is part of a reporter's job.  Every sentence Smith uttered should have been scrutinized; but of course, it wasn't

I poked around on social media and the web, but couldn't find anything helpful.  My usual liberal and progressive and leftish sources were focused on the progress the bill was making through Congress: it passed the House on Wednesday and the White House announced that Biden would sign on it Friday.  As it turned out, he did it today, ahead of schedule, which is fine.  But I couldn't find any fact-checks of Republican objections to the bill.  Maybe I missed something, I don't know.  I presume, of course, that Republicans lie about such things, but then I also presume that Democrats lie.

This morning I saw on Twitter that Ro Khanna had scoffed at Republican claims about the ARP, but again, without details, and I wanted details.  The comments on his remarks were almost all cheerleading, of course.  Then someone posted a pie graph of the distribution of money under the bill.   The graphic was sourced to the Congressional Budget Office, but without a link. So, to the search engines.  I found a couple of articles that included the graph, but without a link to the CB for more information.  Here's an example from Common Dreams:

So why can't I find a version of this graph on the mainstream news sites?  Why aren't they analyzing the bill and addressing the Republicans' claims about it?  Scott Detrow, for instance, could hardly have been unprepared for Smith's remarks.  All I've heard on NPR the past few weeks has been horse-race stuff: the filibuster, reconciliation, will Biden reach out to the GOP?  Will John and Mary find true love? Can this marriage be saved? As usual, they waste a lot of time asking what might happen, what we can expect, what the future might bring. This is what the responsible, respectable mainstream news media have to offer.

Today's Facepalm

So all these Democratic anti-Trump memes that have been flooding my newsfeed, which are designed to promulgate fear, anger, and hatred of Trump and his fans, will turn those who view them into social conservatives?  That would seem to follow.  But I doubt it's what the meme-maker meant.  Our fear, righteous anger, and Two Minutes' Hate are different, because we're the good guys, intellectually and morally superior to the Rethuglitards.

I understand the desire to vent -- I do it often.  I don't object to venting in itself.  I object because, having vented, Democratic loyalists don't balance their rage with informed discussion of the political scene or anything else.  So I also see stuff like this link to TV pundit Ted Koppel saying that Donald Trump is "the Recruiter-in-Chief for ISIS."

That's really not fair to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other people already in (and out of) power who don't just advocate violence but actually practice it, killing and maiming and displacing innocent people and thereby causing the blowback we've been seeing for a few decades now. Trump is scum, and no doubt he's helping to recruit for Islamist organizations in his own small way, but he hasn't actually killed anybody or invaded and destabilized a country ... yet. All the others have.  Party loyalists can't admit, even to themselves, that in this respect Trump and the other Republican hawks are just continuing and extending normal bipartisan US foreign policy in the Middle East.

The author of the article on Koppel concludes, "Critical thinking and nuanced reasoning don’t go over too well in Trump Land."  That's true enough, but they're no more popular in Democrat Land, or whatever you want to call it.  I've often pointed out the confusion exhibited by educated people as to what critical thinking is, but here are a couple of positive models.  Deborah Meier, in The Power of Their Ideas (Beacon Press, 2002), sketched the Habits of Mind fostered in the alternative high school she helped found:

They are: the question of evidence, or "How do we know what we know?"; the question of viewpoint, in all its multiplicity, or "Who's speaking?"; the search for connections and patterns, or "What causes what?"; supposition, or "How might things have been different?"; and finally, why any of it matters, or "Who cares?" [50]

In Without Guilt and Justice (Wyden, 1973) the philosopher Walter Kaufmann proposed a canon, "the heart of rationality, the essence of scientific method, and the meaning of intellectual integrity."

Confronted with a proposition, view, belief, hypothesis, conviction -- one's own or another person's -- those with high standards of honesty apply the canon, which commands us to ask seven questions: (1) What does this mean? (2) What speaks for it and (3) against it?  (4) What alternatives are available?  (5) What speaks for and (6) against each?  And (7) what alternatives are most plausible in the light of these considerations?

Now it may be objected that doing all this is rather difficult.  But has it ever been a condition of virtue that it required no great exertion?  On the contrary... [178]

Kaufmann also liked to quote Nietzsche's quip "A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!"

Both Meier and Kaufmann acknowledge that objections may be raised to their canons; that possibility is included in their list of questions, and Kaufmann considered them at some length.  Meier says that the Habits of Thought have never been formulated finally, and have changed somewhat over time.  That's to be expected.  She also says:

There are plenty of liberal-minded citizens who are uncomfortable with Central Park East's stress on open intellectual inquiry and would have us leave young minds free of uncertainties and openness until "later on" when they are "more prepared to face complexity."  First, some argue, "fill the vessel" with neutral information and easily remembered and uplifting stories.  But such compromises will neither satisfy the Right nor prepare our children's minds for "later" [81].

What a coincidence (or maybe not)!  What "some [liberal-minded citizens] argue" is the position of the Right as well.  Critical thinking tomorrow, indoctrination today.  But tomorrow never comes.

It's the spirit of critical openness these writers exhibit that is missing from the liberal and left partisans I'm discussing today, and have discussed before.

Anti Maim

There's nothing wrong with Rubio's boilerplate anti-Obama positioning, but there's nothing especially unique about it, either.

Thus spake (or rather wrote) David Harsanyi for Reason magazine the other day, explaining why he thought Marco Rubio is overrated as a Republican presidential contender.  I'm not a regular reader of Reason, by the way: I came to the post via one by Daniel Larison, in which he also gave Rubio a drubbing.  (Also today from Larison: Chris Christie's recent ridiculous foreign-policy speech, and why so few people take Rick Santorum seriously as a presidential candidate.  Belaboring the obvious, you see.)

Unlike many of the Democrats I know, I'm not rooting for the Republicans to come up with an effective candidate for 2016.  At least, that's how it sounds when they concern-troll over the poor quality of today's Republican presidential hopefuls, in the nearly universal treatment of politics and elections as a horse race, or a WWF match.  An "effective" candidate really means someone who can seduce the corporate media and play them all the way to the end, not someone who thinks about issues and policy.  But then, who cares about issues and policy?  The general belief among political elites and those who work for them is that the voters are stupid, only interested in personalities, and must be fooled into voting for your candidate.  Only the true Gnostics see past the shadows on the cave walls to perceive the Ideal Forms.  And who knows?  That might even be true.  I certainly don't mean to overestimate the sagacity of most voters, but then I don't think much of the elites either, who are nowhere near as smart as they like to think, especially when it comes to personality cults.

The trouble with the Republican candidates, it seems to me (and to other, more knowledgeable observers) is that they appeal only to a very restricted sector of voters, mostly older, white, highly religious, racist, and bellicose.  They can certainly generate excitement among such people, who seem to have the free time to pack the rallies and debate halls on weekdays, and also vote.  But there aren't enough of them to win presidential elections, and without gerrymandering and voter suppression there aren't enough to win elections at other levels.  Hence the GOP's reliance on gerrymandering and voter suppression.  And as candidates that appeal to this demographic start trying to appeal to those outside it, as they must do to win the election, they either make fools of themselves before the outsiders by sounding too wingnut, or disappoint the Republican core (as opposed to base) by sounding too moderate.  That seems to be a large part of what has happened to Rubio, as to his predecessors.

The thing that got me about Harsanyi's comment, quoted at the top of this post, is his claim that there's nothing wrong with reflexive "anti-Obama boilerplate."  Maybe there's nothing wrong with it in campaign speeches, but on the job, in Congress, that mindset brought us, among other wonders, dozens of futile attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, demands for more wars, and two debt-ceiling squabbles, one of which shut down the federal government, with all the bad effects attendant on that adventure.  All of these might have been defensible if they'd really spoken for the majority of citizens, but they didn't.  (One of the signs of the Right's detachment from reality is its fondness for organizing events with ludicrously inflated numbers -- the Million Moms Campaign, Thirty Million Patriots, and the like -- which draw only a few stragglers.)  The reflexive anti-Obama mindset of the Republican party has not just been self-defeating for them (can you see my tears of sympathy?), but very harmful for most of America and much of the rest of the world.

I'm all in favor of harsh criticism of bad policy and bad action.  I have no interest in moderation for its own sake in either tone or content.  But reflexive anti-anything or -anybody boilerplate isn't real extremism; it's just reflex.  A two-year-old yelling "No!" does it as well.  And it's not limited to Republicans: remember the popular line among certain Democrats in 2008, "I'll vote for anybody who's Not Bush" -- even though Bush wasn't running?  A related trope was their fear of a Third Bush Term; alas, that was pretty much what we got.

For all that, I don't want to overstress the anti-Obama thing.  My ambivalent pro-Obama friend posted a meme the other day that began: "When one party can hate one president so much that they're willing to destroy the country, something is very, very wrong."  I'm not trying to minimize the Obama-hatred, but as I commented, the Right wants to destroy the country just for the sake of doing it; look at the agenda of Goldwater and Reagan, and you'll see that it long predates Obama.  Their aim is to strangle the federal government in any area where it might actually promote the general welfare, so that most Americans can be made miserably subservient to ruling elites.  Hating Obama is just an added bonus.

If the Republicans did field a sane, competent presidential candidate, she might get my vote.  But such a person would never get past the primaries, or even to them.  And the Democrats, though their candidates will probably contain their insanity somewhat better, are not going to give us anyone who's any good either.

Single Standard Dept.

Roy Edroso's latest post at alicublog:

Thursday, May 15, 2014

THIS IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.

The guys who continue to worship the most senile President in history want you to think Hillary Clinton is too old and feeble to serve. 

Haw haw haw, those stoopid Rethuglicans!  It occurred to me that this cuts both ways.  The guys (and gals) who made much of Reagan's age back in the day aren't at all concerned about Clinton's age as it might affect her fitness to be President.  She'll be almost exactly the same age in 2016 as Reagan was in 1980.  He was born in 1911, so he was 69 in 1980; she was born in 1947, so she'll be 69 in 2016.  So if Reagan was too old to run, isn't she?  (I noticed during the 2008 campaign that Ralph Nader was older [seventy-four!] than both of them, but no one else, not even those who demonized Nader, seemed to notice or care.)

Reagan was always a flake, so his endless flubs, gaffes, and lies weren't necessarily early warning signals of what turned out to be Alzheimers.  Clinton seems to be more lucid than Reagan was, most of the time, but she's just about as dishonest and evil.  The difference between Reagan's fans and Clinton's fans once again comes down to which party they favor.

Rather an Attack on One's Convictions

I just finished reading Dangerous Convictions: What's Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress (Oxford, 2013) by Tom Allen, former Democratic Representative from Maine from 1997 to 2009.  I found it at the library, it looked like I could learn something from it, so I checked it out.

Having read the book, I'm of at least two minds about it.  It's a reasonably interesting book about Allen's experiences in the House, though I could probably have learned as much or more about the workings of Congress from any number of other books.  But Allen's main reason for writing the book is to bemoan the great partisan divide in our nation's politics, which he sees as a clash of ideological convictions. He puts most of the blame on the Republicans, of course, and with good reason.  He often mentions the question that passed through his mind and those of his Democratic colleagues when listening to their Republican colleagues speak on the floor: "Do these guys believe what they say?"

Many other people have asked that question.  Allen never quite answers it.  I'm not sure it matters all that much.  Allen raises good points about the Republicans' lack of interest in evidence (scientific or economic), their greater focus on individualism than on community, their denial of climate change, and so on.  He cites the usual savants -- Robert Bellah, George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt. (I've been stumbling over Haidt's name a lot lately.  I really would rather not read The Righteous Mind.)  Again, none of this is news to anyone who's been watching the Congressional follies of the past couple of decades, and I don't think Allen has anything new to say about it.  The best point he makes is that the Republicans have no serious and specific alternatives to the Democratic programs they reject and block; when they do get specific, as with Paul Ryan's voucher plan to replace Medicare, it turns out to be an embarrassment that costs them elections.  It's good to be reminded of that.

Allen has no serious or specific suggestions to resolve the political divide he's writing about, either, but that's okay because there's no way you can make someone listen to evidence if they absolutely refuse to.  Dangerous Convictions turned out to be a perfectly reasonable centrist Democratic book, about as intelligent as a partisan can get, and a useful overview of some major issues in American politics since the late 1990s.  Which means that Allen makes some revealing slips along the way.

For example, in recounting 9/11 and its aftermath, Allen says that "After al-Qaeda, the terrorist network in Afghanistan, was identified as the culprit, support for retaliatory action by our government was widespread" (69) and "Tony Blair and George Bush understood that al Qaeda could not have free rein in Afghanistan" (72).  This is not quite false, but when I take into account the fact that Allen never mentions the Taliban, who actually were running Afghanistan at the time, and whom we actually fought with our terrorist allies the Islamist Northern Alliance, something seems off here.  (Recently I saw a commenter at another site say that al-Qaeda blew up the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan in 2001 as an example of their "terrorism."  It was the Taliban who did that, of course, and it was an act of religious vandalism, not terrorism.)

When he gets to Bush's invasion of Iraq, Allen says:

Like most members of Congress, I had no reason at that time to question the possibility that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons.  He had never denied that he did [!], and he had used them in the past [with full US support].  But I did not think that justified an invasion, since that would put U.S. soldiers within range of such weapons. That turned out to be the CIA's position at well.  The administration's terror-inducing speculation about a "mushroom-shaped cloud" appeared to be a fear tactic designed to cut off further discussion.  I had heard no evidence to support the claim that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons.  Moreover, I believed that the administration would have given any hard information about an Iraqi nuclear program to the UN inspection team led by Mohammed el Baradei, and he had indeed reported that there was no evidence of such a program [78].

That Bush (who, Allen laments, "heeded the neocons" on Iraq [82]) was contemplating a war of aggression, doesn't seem to impinge on Allen's thoughts.  That Allen "had no reason at that time to question the possibility that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons," we've heard before.  (Of course there was a possibility that Saddam possessed such weapons; almost anything is possible.  But there was no real probability that he did.)  I wouldn't have thought Allen would be so willing to tell the public how easily members of Congress can be led astray.

For those of us opposed to the policy, there was a craziness to the administration's arguments and actions.  What they were doing was outside the bounds of our political experience.  They were stirring arguments they knew to be false, politicizing matters of war and peace, and above all, paying little attention to what would happen after Saddam's removal [85].

Really?  Lying, politicizing war and peace, and ignoring consequences were outside the bounds of the Democrats' political experience?  Don't you believe it.  Those are typical behavior among politicians of either party who want a war.  Look at the way the Obama administration has been lying about Iran's "nuclear program" all along; look at the way the assault on Libya was handled.  Then, if you need more evidence, look at the Democratic escalation of the US invasion of Vietnam, or Bill Clinton's intervention in Kosovo.  But as I say, this is normal and only to be expected from an intelligent Democratic partisan.

But the flaws in Allen's argument go deeper than these details.  When he discusses the "authoritarianism" he sees as the core of today's Republican mindset, he mentions a 2009 book, Authoritarianism and Polzarization in American Politics by Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler, which 

sheds new light on political view that are heavily influenced by whether people are more or less authoritarian.  Those testing high in authoritarianism have a greater need for order and less tolerance for ambiguity than those scoring low on that scale...

On issues that are "structured by" authoritarianism, people's opinions are correlated significantly with how they score on a scale of more or less authoritarian.  Examples of such issues include (1) racial and ethnic differences; (2) crime, law and order, and civil liberties; (3) ERA/feminism/family structure; and 4) militarism vs. diplomacy.  On these issues authoritarians and their opposites tend to have markedly different views.  On others, like economic, health care, and environmental issues, the differences are not as wide and therefore not "structured by" authoritarianism ...

Hetherington and Weiler make a convincing case that the American electorate has recently "sorted" itself into the two major parties based on cognitive styles reflecting greater or lesser authoritarian tendencies [166-7].

There may be something to this; I haven't read Hetherington and Weiler.  It reminds me of another big study from more than half a century ago, The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno et al., full of tables and statistics and shit, which was widely criticized and I thought didn't have much currency anymore.  But I'm wary of Allen's use of the concept.  Maybe Hetherington and Weiler dealt with this, but it looks to me as though the same person can move around on the authoritarianism scale depending on the issue and whether he or she happens to wield political power at the moment.  Bill Clinton, for example, that big old softy, could sound like Dick Cheney or Dick Nixon when he was crossed:

"We're not inflicting pain on these fuckers," Clinton said, softly at first. "When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers." Then, with his face reddening, his voice rising, and his fist pounding his thigh, he leaned into Tony, as if it was his fault. "I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can't believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks."

Remember Hillary Rodham Clinton's cheerful "We came, we saw, he died," about Qaddafy -- but hundreds, even thousands, of other Libyans also died in that little adventure.  And I'm sure I don't need to detail Barack Obama's willingness to kill troublesome foreigners, silence turbulent whistleblowers, and toss impertinent journalists into cages.  I'll agree that American politics is polarized, and that authoritarianism is a scourge, but remember that the reaction of some elite Democrats as the Republican Party swung right in Reagan's wake was to imitate them.  Gotta win those authoritarian votes!

Or take health care and other social programs.  Allen quotes an exchange that took place on national TV after the Supreme Court declared the Affordable Care Act constitutional:

After the Court upheld the law, Sen. Mitch McConnell was pressed three times by Chris Wallace on Fox News to explain how Republicans proposed to cover the thirty million Americans who would be covered under the ACA. McConnell’s response was, “That’s not the issue.”

WALLACE: You don’t think the thirty million people who are uninsured is an issue?

MCCONNELL: Let me tell you what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to turn the American health-care system into a western European system.

Isn't that interesting?  That was what the Obama administration said about its left critics: that we were mad because Obama wasn’t ready to turn American into the People's Republic of Canuckistan.  Glenn Greenwald has been showing since at least 2008 how Democratic loyalists began attacking dissenters who criticized Obama's policies, especially those Obama carried on from Bush. There's more common ground between the parties, when it comes to kicking the proles into line, than Tom Allen wants to believe.  Not that I blame him.

The same goes for the individualist/communitarian divide, which Allen also discusses at length: the Right is individualist in some areas, mostly economic (which Allen calls "libertarian" with a small l), and communitarian in ways related to their authoritarianism: religion, the military, jingoism.  Liberals and the left are communitarian in some ways, partly on economics and social programs, and strongly individualist on many social issues, like a woman's right to choose.  But it's often a toss-up and a matter of how you choose to look at an issue whether it's individualist or communitarian.  When a young gay kid comes out against the wishes of her family, is that individualist or seeking community?  Are "identity politics" individualist or communitarian?  Civil rights can be framed as individualist, or not.  I'm not sure this is a really productive way of looking at political controversy.  It's sort of like the born gay / lifestyle choice divide: I don't think it has much to do with people's views on whether it's okay to be gay.  Resolving it, or the individual/community binary, would probably just rearrange the furniture a bit, so to speak, without eliminating the political division.

Allen, of course, remains reasonable, conceding the faults of his own side: "We too can be wary of needed financial reforms of key government insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security" (174-5).  How narrow of them!  "Reforms" is the tricky word there.  Democrats have been trying to undermine Social Security at least since Bill Clinton wanted to privatize it but was foiled by the Republican attempt to impeach him.  Barack Obama prefers the death of a thousand tiny cuts, which he also pretends are "reforms," courtesy of his bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission.  Reforms are one things, but first I need to know what Tom Allen considers "reforms."

I Would Prefer Not To, Part 2

Vast Left kindly gave my earlier post a boost on Facebook, though he disagreed with my remarks about Obama's "competence".

IMHO, the competence argument presupposes things about Obama's objectives, or at a minimum tempts us to do so. I suppose one might reasonably imagine Obama sought some sort of braggable closure in the Grand Bargain negotiations, but even that is speculation. And, importantly, what objective did his incompetence cause him to fail at? It's only a failure if you sought a different outcome.

Two things here.  One is that VL evidently missed my reference to the negotiation, not of the deficit deal, but of Obama's 2009 stimulus package.  Maybe I should have put in a link, and I'll add one later, to Obama's own admission that he hadn't done such a good job on that one:

Now in retrospect, I could have told Barack Obama in December of 2009 that if you already have a third of the package as tax cuts, then the Republicans, who traditionally are more comfortable with tax cuts, may just pocket that and attack the other components of the program. And it might have been better for us not to include tax cuts in the original package, let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts, and then say, O.K., you know, we’ll compromise and give you your tax cuts, even though we had already proposed them.

Yesterday VastLeft tweeted "When the job is fucking over the most vulnerable people, the last topic that interests me is competence."  This is mildly alarming; it seems that VL can't grasp anything but the most direct ("Am too! Are not!") argument.  If what I wrote presupposed Obama's competence, it was only hypothetically, for the sake of argument. What I was getting at was not so complex: it was If X, then Y; if not-X, then not-Y: Even if Obama was trying to engineer an economic stimulus that would help the most vulnerable, he did a bad job of it.  He said so himself.  Just as Obama admitted that he did a poor job in his first debate with Mitt Romney.  Is it necessary to be a good debater to be a good President?  Not as far as I'm concerned; but it was still worth noting that he is not a good debater.  (And this is an easy, safe criticism to make, since almost all of his most devoted apologists agreed with it.)  It is, I think, important for a President to be a competent negotiator; it's a significant part of the job.

But it also follows from what I wrote in that post (that the principles you stand up for must be good ones) that it's not enough to be a competent negotiator, one must also be negotiating toward a good end.  If Obama was trying to push through a stimulus deal that would help the majority of Americans, he shouldn't have undermined it by offering tax cuts up front that would undercut its effectiveness.  (If not-X, then not-Y.)  This suggests that improving the economy for the 99% was not his goal, which seems likely, given his record.  This involved the real risk that an underperforming economy would hurt his chances of re-election, but Obama wouldn't have been the first president to run such a risk: Bill Clinton did just that by pushing through NAFTA in 1993, the Democrats lost control of Congress as a result, and Clinton might not have gone on to a second term; like Obama last week, Clinton won his second term by a relatively narrow margin.  Obama's re-election wasn't a foregone conclusion either, and the limping economy worried his partisans. On the other hand the economy was going well for the ultra-rich, with record high profits, but that crucial part of his base was strikingly ungrateful, despite the yeoman service he'd rendered them.  Fortunately for Obama, the Republicans fielded a stellar ticket of fools and bigots -- but even so, the popular vote was a close thing.  The gap between Romney and Obama in the Electoral College was much more dramatic, which is no doubt why those numbers have gotten so much display.  (Not that American Presidents ever need to worry for their well-being when they're turned out of office.)

Now that Obama is in the catbird seat, we'll see him negotiating a Grand Bargain to keep us from going over the Fiscal Cliff.  There's been talk of how good Obama's position is now, compared to 2009 or the debt ceiling battle of 2011.  But by now his goal is pretty clear, a destructive one, so it doesn't matter whether he's a competent negotiator or not.  Whether Boehner or Obama emerges the victor in the Grand Bargaining, most Americans (and most of the world) will lose.  But don't worry: Neither Obama nor his lovely wife nor his beautiful little girls will ever miss a meal, and isn't that what really matters?  What Obama fan wouldn't be happy to go hungry to keep them comfortable?

It's also odd that VL is still hammering away at a point that isn't central to the post he praised so generously; but now I've devoted too much attention to it myself, so on to other matters.  The elections are finally over, and America's best minds can turn their attention to really important subjects: football and basketball.

I Would Prefer Not To

The former (she's still working, I've retired) co-worker who posted this commented, "so true, if our elected officials did this a lot more would get done!"  I see variations on that theme a lot, on Facebook, in the letters to the editors of newspapers, in the comments sections of online newspapers, and in the magnanimous victory speech of His High Mightiness, our newly-elected President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties .  And it makes no sense at all.

I don't dispute that Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have done their best to obstruct President Obama's agenda for the past four year for mainly partisan reasons.  One reason I consider this obvious is that they refused him courtesies they've freely granted to Republican Presidents, like raising the debt ceiling.  Like Democrats who suddenly embraced policies under Obama that they denounced under Bush, they were clearly motivated solely by party hatred.

It should be remembered, however, that bipartisan cooperation brought us the Vietnam War, Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Hyde Amendment, the North American Free Trade Agreement, welfare "reform," the Defense of Marriage Act, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other dismantling of important protective regulations, the invasion of Afghanistan, torture and indefinite detention, the invasion of Iraq, the attack on Libya, drone warfare, No Child Left Behind, the current murderous sanctions against Iraq, and the Bowles-Simpson Commission, and many other wonders.  It looks poised to bring us a further assault on Social Security and Medicare, and more austerity generally (except for the top 1%) in the name of deficit reduction.  I doubt that my co-worker, or the many other people I've seen calling for "working together", would think that all of those were positive developments.  (That's assuming that they know what most of them are, which I also doubt.)

A dozen years ago, the now-late Alexander Cockburn wrote after the defeat of Al Gore:

First a word about gridlock. We like it. No bold initiatives, like privatizing Social Security or shoving through vouchers. No ultra-right-wingers making it onto the Supreme Court. Ah, you protest, but what about the bold plans that a Democratic-controlled Congress and Gore would have pushed through? Relax. There were no such plans. These days gridlock is the best we can hope for.

Alas, this time around there's a good chance that Barack Obama, Harry Reid and John Boehner will sit down and reason together over the deficit, with disastrous results.  Maybe not -- Boehner has hinted that he's still not on board with higher taxes for the rich -- but I expect Obama will be ready to waive that demand if it gets him cuts in Social Security and Medicare.  We'll see.

There are times when refusal to cooperate is a good thing.  I supported the Democratic state legislators in Wisconsin and Indiana who fled their states to try to block destructive Republican initiatives.  Would I support Republicans who did the same thing?  Yes, if (but only if) they were really opposing bad legislation.  It's not enough, as I've said before, to stand by your principles: your principles have to be good ones.  And who decides what are good principles?  I do.  You do.  We all do.  But we don't necessarily agree.

And that's the trouble with JFK's bromide above.  Who could possibly disagree that we should work together for the common good, rising above cheap partisanship for the good of the country and the world?  Has anyone ever disagreed?  Certainly not many.  Most people are sure that their position, their answer, is the right one.  So where do you go from there?  Most people have no idea.  I think that reasoned, informed debate is one tool.  I have learned a lot by watching intelligent, informed, rational opponents articulate their disagreement.  The outcome may not establish the right position or the right answer, but it often establishes that at least one is wrong, and that is a good thing to know.

But a lot of people hate debate.  Like Lady Augusta Bracknell, they dislike arguments, which are always vulgar and often convincing.  Or as too many people have said, "Arguing on the Internet is like competing in the Special Olympics -- even if you win your [sic] still retarded!  LOL LMFAO! ROFL!!!!"  (This canard seems to imply that these people would approve of debate elsewhere than the Internet, but I don't think so; at least, when I've asked them where debate and argument should happen, they don't have an answer.)

And if I have learned one thing from the past election season, it's that an election campaign isn't the right place for a debate either.  Not even the official Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates.  On their own account, Democrats no less than Republicans have no idea what to do when someone disagrees with them about the issues or the positions of the candidates, so they fall back on abuse.

But I've written about that enough in the past several weeks.  The main point is that negotiation isn't about debate, though it may include some along the way.  Nor does it promise "the right answer," perhaps especially in politics.  This is a point that party loyalists will make when their own side is criticized, though they will abandon it when they're criticizing the other party.  And I don't believe it would make any difference at all if party labels were set aside, because in politics other factors are at least as influential as party: money, seniority, the coming elections.  And more than two sides are usually involved.

If two parties sit down to negotiate in good faith, the result will not necessarily be good.  It's like voting: there is no reason to believe that voters will make the "right" choice, but the point is that they have a say (at least in theory) and therefore some accountability, if only to themselves.  In the real world it's likely that both sides are negotiating in bad faith.   It might be quite bad, but principles aren't involved.  I have to keep reminding myself that this applies to negotiations in government.  Remember Barack Obama's failure in bargaining for his stimulus package, where he unilaterally offered tax cuts to the Republicans before they'd even asked for them.  That's a lack of basic competence, which should be borne in mind by those who think of Obama as their mighty shield against the Republicans.  Obama can't even play ordinary chess very well.  In service of his corporate donors and cronies, he knows how to strongarm his fellow Democrats and to a slight degree the Republicans, but that's not chess-playing, that's main force.  Which is also a factor in negotiations.

But still, one thing we should have learned from the past four years is that Obama isn't as smart as he thinks he is.  (Do I think I'm smarter?  I really have no idea.  What I think is that years of hanging around with America's elites has made Obama less smart than he used to be.  In his place I might have made the same mistakes.  But the point is that he made them.  I've noticed that some former high US officials have admitted that they did the wrong thing while in office.  Either they said so explicitly, or did so tacitly by adopting different positions after they were out of office.  And they can't be accused of not knowing what real politics is like (a popular attack on non-politicians when we dare to speak up).  The key question then is how to make those different positions feasible or workable for politicians while they're still in office.  There's much talk of what is "politically possible" and "politically impossible."  The pressures on politicians to get rid of social programs, to cut taxes on the rich while maintaining social programs for them, to wage wars of aggression and terror, are obvious enough.  So what kind of pressure will make them do the opposite?

You can't blame him for doing that, a politician's apologists protest: Look at the pressure he was under.  To me it has long been obvious that the remedy is to put pressure on him (or her) to do something else.  If nothing else, it would remove the excuse.  One could say to the politician in question: you'll be voted out of office whatever you do, so you might as well do what you yourself agree is the right thing.  It might not be the right thing; he might just be telling me what he thinks I want to hear.  But that's not important here: the important thing is to take away the excuse.  Probably he has more excuses up his sleeve, but enough pressure should force him to acknowledge that they are excuses.   And then, to quote the psychoanalyst at the end of Portnoy's Complaint, we may perhaps begin.

Pearls Before Swine

Okay, this is something I just don't get, and it has been a frequent complaint by Democrats.  First, the demand that "our elected officials should be cooperating like this all the time, not just in the face of terrible disasters."  Really?  So Cleage approves of Democratic politicians' willingness to cooperate with George Bush, ratifying his tax cuts for the wealthy and his nomination of some of the vilest people available to important posts, going along with his criminal invasions of other countries, passing on his use of torture and ignoring his contempt for the Constitution?  Really?

Somehow I doubt it.  What I think Cleage means is that Republicans should "cooperate" with President Obama, and maybe with any Democratic President.  Ironically, they have often done so, though usually in the worst cases, like the NDAA.  If Mitt Romney wins the election next week, will Cleage demand that the Democrats work with him as he slashes Social Security and other support programs, invades Iraq, repeals Obamacare, bans abortion, and legalizes polygamy?  Or will Democrats be exempted from the requirement of "cooperation" when a Republican is President?

I suppose the underlying idea is that politicians should "cooperate" to do the right thing and the best thing for the nation and the world.  That sounds really nice, but under the best of circumstances people differ about the best and the right thing to do.  You could make a case that the Republicans should have cooperated more with Obama than they have in fact, because the policies he was trying to implement were mostly Republican policies, and they opposed them simply because he was a Democrat.  Much the same happened when Bill Clinton was President, after all: he was aggressively business-friendly, pushing through the North American Free Trade Agreement, trying (but failing) to pass GATT, and "reforming" the welfare system while nurturing a couple of major market bubbles -- in Internet stocks and housing -- that made lots of money for the rich before they came crashing down.  The Republicans never appreciated how helpful Clinton was to their aims, just as they don't appreciate Obama now.

It is reasonable to call for cooperation on shared goals, but I don't think Cleage really wants to acknowledge that Obama and his opponents share so many important goals, though they certainly do.  Where one side wants one thing and the other wants the opposite, cooperation really isn't the right approach, especially when one side believes that the others side's aims are wrong.  Then it's entirely appropriate to dig in your heels and refuse to budge.  You might still be wrong -- as I've said before, consistency is only a virtue if you're consistent about the right things -- but refusing to cooperate for the right reason, on the right issue, is a virtue.  Surely Cleage, with her background in the Civil Rights Movement, knows that.

It was hypocritical of the Congressional Republicans to refuse to raise the debt ceiling for Obama last year, when they'd done it without complaint for Bush and his predecessors.  They were caught flat-footed when Obama wanted to "intervene" in Libya, because they couldn't very well defend Qaddafi but didn't want their nemesis Obama to look good by shedding Muslim blood while posing as a champion of democracy.  Similar difficulties arose when our good friend Hosni Mubarak experienced some trouble in Egypt: on the one hand, democracy against dictatorship is Good, so Obama should let Mubarak fall; on the other, Mubarak was repressing Muslims, so Obama should support him -- preferably he should do both at once.  Even his violation of the War Powers Act after the Libyan intervention didn't bother them much; why should it?  And so on.  But addressing these points would require pointing out where Obama was wrong, so Cleage and her fellow devotees can't really go there.

Which brings me to my second point.  We have been told indignantly over the past four years that it's foolish to expect idealism or principle to triumph in politics. That's not what politics is about.  At the same time, Obama represents the triumph of idealism and principle.  Anyone who expected Obama to stand by his progressive-sounding promises was naive or a cynic. True Obama supporters, by contrast, are just cynical enough.  They understand the necessity of Realpolitik as Obama practices it.  Politics is a brutal, heartless game, a blood sport, and we should cheer on our star player without being Monday-morning quarterbacks; we can't know what he knows, and we must trust him.  Whatever Barack does is good, by definition.  He knows best, certainly better than we do.  The true believer must hold the two opposing beliefs in mind at once -- Obama is pragmatic, dirtying his hands in our service; Obama is a shining idealist, fighting amoral opponents with the power of true goodness -- unified by faith.  Those who fall away due to lack of faith are anathema; don't even mention those who never had faith to begin with: their god is their stomach, their glory is in their shame, their destiny is destruction.  Obama is great by ascription; there cannot be any valid criticism of him, because by definition he is always right.  He may perhaps disappoint, but even there the fault lies with you for being disappointed.

The trouble with reason and principle, to loyalists like Cleage, is that they are unpredictable: they may lead to unacceptable conclusions.  You might discover that what you wanted to believe is not true after all.  You might end up criticizing or -- horrors! -- condemning someone you revere.  What counts to a loyalist is the conclusion you reach, not the process by which you reach it; the loyalist starts with the conclusion, and works backwards.