Photo by judhudson via Flickr

This morning, the New York Times reported that “Republican leaders are circulating a resolution listing 10 positions Republican candidates should support to demonstrate that they ‘espouse conservative principles and public policies’ that are in opposition to ‘Obama’s socialist agenda.’” What’s more, reported Adam Nagourney, anyone found to be in disagreement with anymore than two of these principles “would be penalized by being denied party funds or the party endorsement.”

Now why, exactly, would any self-respecting intransigent apparatchik want to be associated with a colleague who could pass their purity test by a margin of only 80 percent?

‘Cause Ronald Reagan said so, of course.

Quoth Nagourney: “The resolution invokes Ronald Reagan, and noted that Mr. Reagan had said the Republican Party should be devoted to conservative principles but also be open to diverse views. President Reagan believed, the resolution notes, ‘that someone who agreed with him 8 out of 10 times was his friend, not his opponent.’” In other words, these principles are the Ten Commandments according to the Gipper — except that, in these tough times, eight, apparently, is enough.

So here you go, young conservatives (again, courtesy of Nagourney and the Times). Remember, you can only ignore two:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run health care;

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership.

None of the items on the list is surprising in itself, but the intent here did catch us more than a little off guard. After all, Chairman Mao sent his red guards against any citizen deemed to have suspect or wavering beliefs.  Josef Stalin engaged in regular violent purgings designed to purify the so-deigned disbelieving sections of his communist party. More recently, the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has engaged in a wave of purifying executions, which, when viewed in context with this past summer’s civil unrest, can be seen as a sort of come-to-god-moment for any stray opposition members. The Saudis still execute homosexuals in what looks like an attempt to keep the race pure; in ancient Israel, the punishment for improper speech was isolation, etc., etc.

So, looked at historically, this brand-new G.O.P. purity effort could be seen as nothing out of the ordinary for a strong central power looking to consolidate its interests — but that’s something that should be completely anathema to any true Republican.

Of course the real issue for Republicans may just be who to worship. There may not be any specific mention on the purity list about the need to be Christian, but everybody knows you’ve got to be one to get anywhere in the party. But, at the same time, you also have to be a devout Reaganist. The G.O.P. has become the servant of two masters, the follower of two different sets of 10 commandments. You don’t just have to say you support the Reagan approach to Republican policy, you have to believe in the man himself.

After all, his off-the-cuff comments are now being sanctified and hammered into stone tablets, just like hundreds of religious figures before him; his aside hath become dogma. But it’s a wishy-washy kind of dogma, one that goes easy on sinners and fallen acolytes. What can one say about an ideology that allows even its would-be apostles to subvert its ideology 20% of the time?

And that begs the question: Why have a purity test at all? Why not just let anyone in? Sure, Jesus said, “blessed are the meek” and “blessed are the poor,” but didn’t he also say that “the meek aren’t necessarily blessed given such circumstances that  the legitimacy of one’s meekness has been called into question and public opinion finds that peacemakers and the pure at heart are more in favor currently and should therefore be granted easier access to blessedness, vis a vis those who hunger and thirst after righteousness or are weeping, who, it has been decided by this committee, are no longer eligible to receive blessings”?

4000 years ago, Moses came down from Sinai with 10 Commandments, and now the Republicans have come up with 10 of their own. Only difference is, Moses expected you to follow all of his, whereas the GOP is fine with 80%.

Maybe it’s time for a new spin on the old spiritual: “If it’s good enough for Reagan, then it’s good enough for me.”

Elephant

This Week in Republican In-Fighting

- At a Tea Party rally in Phoenix, Arizona, organized by an anti-illegal-immigrant group called American Citizens United, a scuffle broke out between organizers and two members of the National Socialist Movement. Apparently, one of the organizers became enraged when the Neo-Nazis unfurled an Adolf Hitler flag after being told that displays of racism weren’t welcome. But, Nazis will be Nazis, and so the man with the flag, JT Ready, responded to the protester’s concerns by shoving him to the ground.

- The conservative Club for Growth announced their endorsement of former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio over Gov. Charlie Crist in next year’s Florida Senate race. Crist, once considered by many to be the future of the Republican party (not to mention a potential running mate for John McCain in 2008) has come under fire by conservative groups for his support of Barack Obama’s stimulus plan and his recent backpedaling of that support. Rubio, who hates taxes, Castro, and socialized medicine, is now considered by many on the far right to be the future of the Republican Party.

- Venerable three-term Utah senator and conservative Robert F. Bennett announced that, despite his staunch opposition to higher taxes, bigger government, and financial regulations, and despite the fact that he has supported precisely none of President Obama’s initiatives, he has already had to spend $500,000 and air TV ads (after airing none in 2004) to fend off primary challenges from hard-line conservatives. The Club for Growth has come out against Bennett, criticizing him for his support of the 2008 Wall Street bailout and for daring to communicate with Democrats about health care reform. The also don’t like that he has criticized their use of the word “socialism” as a “buzzword” and a distraction.

- South Carolina Republican Representative Bob Inglis told the Greenville News that the old-school Reagan coalition (of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and moderate Democrats) is now “running on fumes” and faces extinction in the face of anti-incumbent pressure from hard-liners and Tea Party agitators. Claiming that these hard-liners are indifferent to abortion and other social issues and would let people without health insurance “die on the steps of the hospital” to make a point about the dangers of socialized medicine, Inglis called on the man from Galilee to draw the distinction between this new breed of conservative ideologues and the breed of conservative ideologues he favors: “I’m thinking there was a guy named Jesus who had some things to say about these kinds of concepts,” he said. “And I don’t want to live in a society that lets a few test cases die on the steps of the hospital.” Inglis is facing a primary challenge from no fewer than three members of his party.

- Finally, Sarah Palin’s biography, Going Rogue: An American Life, was released today and has already being touted as little more than a settling of scores with John McCain’s campaign team, primarily chief strategist Steve Schmidt. She characterizes the campaign as defeatist and poorly managed and Schmidt as an vindictive bully. In response, members of the McCain team have called the book a “fiction” and have reiterated claims that Palin was woefully unqualified for the nomination and refused to prepare for her interview with Katie Couric. Jumping into the fray, conservative columnist David Brooks called Palin “a joke” and said, “I mean, I just can’t take her seriously. We have got serious problems in the country. Barack Obama is trying to handle a war. We just had a guy elected Virginia governor who is probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell: Pretty serious guy, pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination … believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters are just not going to elect a talk show host.”

Tune in next week.

On sale now, one day only

The Berlin Wall arrived in suburban Maryland in a small velvety bag of deeply hued burgundy pulled tightly shut with a golden drawstring.

At an upscale department store in late 1989, hundreds of these bags carrying bits of the Communist Bloc were shipped in and arranged as part of a makeshift display that was nothing more than a sturdy table with some cheap polyester fabric draped over it. The store employees had placed the display on the table next to a lower-level entrance to the young men’s department because they didn’t know where else in the store they should sell the Berlin Wall. Maybe the second-floor jewelry displays, or the furnishings department. Perhaps the cosmetics counter.

Weeks before, I must have seen images of the wall being smashed with hammers and covered in the beer and champagne of celebration. I probably listened to newscasters intoning serious words with self-aware importance. But all I can remember clearly is receiving my first lesson in geo-politics and capitalism in the form of a chip of concrete in a fancy bag — all of the ideological differences of Cold War existence compressed into that quarter-sized chunk in my 13-year-old hand.

“A commodity is at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing,” Karl Marx observed, “but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” Standing at the cash register at the mall, holding that bag in my hand, I got a lesson in commodity fetishism long before I read Marx. As the outer reaches of the evil empire were being busted up at its borders, we went to department stores and bought them, or traces of them — the apparent death masks of authoritarian communism. I started to get a sense of how the ideality of history could be transformed into the materiality of the commodity. “Metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” frozen in concrete, historical forces captured in a small bag. Although it must have been hard for many East Germans to imagine, entrepreneurs would turn anything into a trinket at the mall. And we would buy it.

When I left the store and returned home, I placed my bit of Berlin Wall in the top drawer – my own private vault – next to other things that I thought were important but didn’t yet fully understand. It sat next to stacks and stacks of brightly colored swim team ribbons, which I seemed to win for every single race I ever entered, regardless of how well I did. Blue, red, and white were the first three places, of course, but then the color spectrum broke-up in unexpected ways: green, yellow, gold, violet, maroon. How did violet come to symbolize seventh place? And weren’t there only six lanes in most of the pools we swam in?

To the right of the ribbons and the burgundy bag was my baseball card collection, or rather, the cream of my collection — only the rookie cards and the hard-to-find ones with printing errors. I kept my lesser cards in shoeboxes stacked in the closet, but the right side of my top drawer was reserved for the cards that the price guides told me were the valuable ones. I could never really grasp why they were so valuable, but still I kept them organized and preserved in special plastic sheets inside of a hard protective binder. I had a Wade Boggs rookie card because I’d tricked one of my third grade classmates into believing that he’d rather have a ninth-season Dave Winfield. As a kid, I spent hours daydreaming about the value of my mint condition Wade Boggs rookie. After hearing that a single Honus Wagner card from the beginning of the century had recently sold at a higher price than most mansions, I was convinced that Wade Boggs and my other rookies would pay for my first house. I was too young and unsophisticated to know that I had gotten into the market at the height of the great 1980s baseball card bubble and that I was doing my part to inflate it.

Tucked behind the cards was a nice wristwatch that my parents had bought me to wear on special occasions. When my mother first gave it to me (not on my birthday, not on Christmas, not for any minor holiday) I recognized it for what it was: a sign that I was expected to dress-up and look like a respectable middle-class kid every once in a while. Before the wall fell, the watch could have probably bought me a small motorcycle in East Germany, but I took it for granted and didn’t think it was much of a gift. It was just another object to store in my dresser — expensive perhaps, but not truly valued.

The smallest item, but the most resonant and mysterious in my mind, was the combat ribbon my father had won for service in Vietnam. It was a piece of metal covered in colored fabric that you would slide onto a thin metal bar and pin on your uniform, a one-inch representation of warfare. Why I wanted it was as mysterious to me as its meaning or purpose, although I had a vague sense that it offered up some difference between my father’s experience and my life of suburban comfort. It held some remnant of an earlier, more violent phase of the Cold War.

It was still years before I would understand the importance of competition and reward in a capitalist society, the ways that unreasonable enthusiasm could lead to inflated market prices, the relationship between personal appearance and class identity in a “classless” society, or how fears of communism and the theory of containment led young American soldiers into Southeast Asia. But my piece of the Berlin Wall helped me gain perspective on the other curious items in my Cold War cabinet of wonders. As the seriousness of life under authoritarian communism was being dissolved by the fleeting desires of the marketplace, the metaphysical subtleties and ideological niceties of the objects in my drawer became clearer — they stood out in relief against the newly shifting background.

The disparate items in my dresser remained held together in their awkward relationship — only slowly revealing their order and unity — until finally they were pulled apart again. I cleaned out my childhood room definitively soon after graduating college. After two days of marathon sorting, throwing-away, donating, and boxing, I finally moved out of my parent’s house for good. A few of the boxes made their way to my new apartment in Brooklyn. I think my piece of the Berlin Wall is packed away in one of the boxes in the attic.

Photo by Mr. Frego

What is to be done with Joe Lieberman?

By coming out last week against Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care plan, and saying he would join a Republican filibuster to keep the bill from coming to a vote, the Independent senator from Connecticut finally dropped all pretense of Democratic loyalty. Which should come as a surprise to exactly no one who is familiar with Lieberman’s hypocritical, sanctimonious Lewinsky-era attacks on Bill Clinton (and “the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations”); his hawkish approach to national security and the war in Iraq; his indifference to the wishes of Democratic voters in his state in 2006 after they chose Ned Lamont in the primary; and his support last fall of John McCain in the presidential election.

So what should the Democrats do with him?

Well, if Democrats were like Republicans, Lieberman would be hanging in the public square already. If Democrats were like Republicans, he would be riding the back bench of the Senate Chambers Janitorial-Services Subcommittee. If Democrats were like Republicans, Joe Lieberman would be Dede Scozzafava, the moderate Upstate New York Republican House candidate who, late last week, was outed as being ideologically impure by the mob of right-wing scaremongers (including Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, and Malkin) and promptly thrown under the bus. After which the bus was set on fire.

Judging by today’s left-wing editorials, that’s exactly what many want to happen to Lieberman as well.

But here’s the problem: The thing that makes the Democratic Party so well-equipped to deal with rapidly changing national demographics and place itself in a position to profit off of them electorally – that being its big-tent, ideologically wishy-washy, take-all-comers, ad hoc approach to governance – is the very thing that makes it unable to handle heresy when it threatens to derail party priorities, like health care. Sure, Lieberman is a traitor. Sure, he’s a hypocrite who once tried to pass a bill that would have gotten rid of the filibuster and who is now threatening to use the filibuster to subvert the will of his constituents. And sure, he is the senator from Connecticut, which is the insurance capital of the world, and therefore any philosophical arguments he can make against a government-run insurance option are tainted to the point of absurdity. But Democrats just aren’t cut out for cutting out the hearts of those who defy them. For months, the Democrats have been held hostage by members of their own party who 20 years ago would have been called Republicans but who were hand-picked by the Democratic leadership to help them retake Congress in 2006. The Faustian bargain Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer made back then was simple: We will once again be in power … but there will be no “we.” The Democrats have no heresy because they have no ideology. Which is exactly the reason they’re in control of Congress.

So what should Democrats do with Mr. Lieberman? Probably nothing. As much as left-wingers would love to see him dropped down a well by Obama and Emanuel and other party leaders, deep down every Democrat knows that it’s not going to happen. That it’s not in their party’s nature. That it’s best to just take Lieberman aside and quietly give him what he wants in order to get health care passed. That the best way to keep their party in power is to continue making its platform as big and malleable as possible and to continue driving Republicans to make theirs even smaller and firmer.

Ideology is a cold bedfellow. Especially on election day.

Photo by astorg via Flickr

For those of you who may have missed the New Yorker article that shined a respected national spotlight on it. Or the coverage of the political shenanigans spawned by its faults. Or any of the articles about the increasing mess it seems to be making for current Texas Governor Rick Perry and his bid for a third term.

Okay: So, for those of you who have placed yourselves on something of a domestic U.S. news embargo over the past few weeks, NPR offered a nice summation of the Cameron Todd Willingham case this past Wednesday. Willingham, as most of you will remember, is the guy who was put to death in the nation’s busiest death chamber after years of innocence claims and despite some actual proof, which some argue was of the variety that might have lead to an eventual exoneration. In the wake of all of this, death penalty opponents find themselves in the morbidly awkward sort of position usually reserved for the beatifiers of assassinated heads of state and their subsequently idolized ilk: Robbed of a chance to see the full-realization of their subject’s potential (in Willingham’s case, his theoretical exoneration), they are forced to salvage what they can from death. For anti-death-penalty crusaders, Willingham’s execution might (despite Dahlia Lithwick’s Slate-published assertion that the Constitution offers no comfort for properly convicted innocent death row inmates) be just the sort of test case that they’ve been waiting for — something that could be pointed to in court as evidence that innocent people fall victim to the U.S. death penalty. When they find that case — and if it results in a second nationwide ban on capital punishment — things could get ugly in Texas.

NPR’s John Burnett, the reporter who authored that summation of the Willingham case mentioned above, was spot-on when he called the death penalty “sacrosanct” in the mind of Texans. Here, as Burnett pointed out, “upwards of 70 percent of the population support[s] it” and “[n]o serious candidate from either party runs against it.” There are, of course, the color-coded-state explanations of this fact — that Texas is a state with a decidedly conservative bent, and that in such states, support for the death penalty is stronger than it is elsewhere. But there seems to be further reason that Burnett used a synonym for inviolable when describing this state’s attraction (addiction?) to execution, and these have something more to do with identity than any sort of ideology.

As any politically aware citizen of the United States — and, on two occasions, the world — can tell you, Texans like their elected officials to be of the folksy variety: Lyndon Johnson gave visiting dignitaries tours of his ranch from the backseat of his Lincoln Continental convertible, Ann Richards rode her Harley around Austin, Dubya’s entire public persona was based on what was presented as a simple, black-and-white worldview. Almost every public official sports some kind of cowboy gear, no matter the amount of time that they spend behind a desk. These are all acts of homage — a very public kow-towing to the Gus McCrea/Woodrow Call character-ideal that lives inside of so many Texans — and, in return for them, Great Staters (and, on two occasions, game U.S. citizens) offer-up a whole variety of public offices.

The trouble here is that, as part of their cultivated cowboy image, latter-day Austin-bound Virginians can’t part with the folksy judicial elegance offered by capital punishment. With it, a guilty party is dispatched — granted, not as quickly as some cowboys might otherwise have liked, but dispatched, nonetheless — in ideal fashion; justice wears the white hat we’d like it to, and the bad guy is forced to submit to its will. It’s a simple treatment for the plague of extreme crime, one not adequately addressed by the here-relative complexities of the prison system. It’s not quite kill ‘em all, but it’s close. And as long as the cowboy remains the figure most ideally suited for public office in Texas, it’ll stay that way.

Which is why Willingham — and any future would-be exoner-ite — never had a chance. And it’s why secession is more likely to find its way into the state of Texas’ agenda than a moratorium on (let alone, the outlawing of) executions.

New-media maven

Three years out from an election is a perfectly reasonable time to start polling, right?

After all, if sports writers can argue about which NBA stars should be representing team USA in the 2012 summer Olympics (Brian Scalabrine?) and commentators can claim the 2010 World Cup as a valid topic of conversation while broadcasting from the 2006 World Cup and climatologists can bicker about the lifespans of glaciers and the endangered species that live on them, then surely political pundits and pollsters can have their fun speculating about which Republican is going to take on Barack Obama in the next presidential bout.

Just as I wrote a few weeks ago about the love of the sports fan waiting until the off-season to truly blossom, so too does the life of the political junkie find its greatest joy in the speculative irrelevance of the electoral off-year. When polls have no consequences and editorials have no weight and theorizing is so much crystal-ball gazing, the punditocracy, both professional and kitchen-table-based, can really feel free to let their minds and their mouths run wild, free from the philosophical tethers of, you know, reality.

Take, for example, a poll released this past Friday by Rasmussen: It’s not about health care or the war in Afghanistan or the economy or job performance on Capitol Hill. No. This poll looks at who the favorite is, as of October 2009, to win the 2012 Republican presidential nomination (which comes with a tiara, the keys to a brand-new Toyota Tacoma, and the thrill of taking on the Barack Obama political machine in the next general election).

According to the poll, as of Friday, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is the preferred candidate of 29% of Republicans nationwide, followed by Mitt Romney (24%), Sarah Palin (18%), Newt Gingrich (14%), and Tim Pawlenty (4%).

It goes on: “Romney leads all prospects among voters who attend church once a month or less. Huckabee leads among more frequent churchgoers. Huckabee holds a huge lead among Evangelical Christians with Palin in second and Romney a distant third. Huckabee and Romney are essentially even among other Protestants while Romney has the edge among Catholics.

“Romney leads among Republicans earning more than $75,000 a year while Huckabee leads among those who earn less.”

Now, as much as I love this kind of ultra-specific poll-modeling – “While Palin has a slight edge over Huckabee in the all-important Jewish Moderate-Conservatives Who Don’t Eat Cake on Wednesdays demographic, Gingrich is doing surprisingly well with Anorexics Below the Poverty Line Who Think Organized Religion Is the Cause of All the World’s Problems But Who Feel a Deep Spiritual Connection to the Universe and All Living Things in It” – it’s hard not to shake the feeling that the results, printed more than two years out from the first primary, are the very definition of an institutional absurdity.

But in America 2009, absurdity in the defense of relevance is no vice. In our rapidly evolving media environment, ridiculousness is expected and accepted. But what cannot be accepted — what can not be tolerated, what can not be justified — is the sense that a company that bases its reputation on up-to-the-minute analysis is out of touch with the proper tools needed to cull information for that analysis. These days, the only sin in America is not being tuned in. And something about the old-school Rasmussen polling model – “You sir, who will you be voting for?” – smacks of rotting antiquity.

Take Chris Cillizza’s piece in The Washington Post today about the status of the Sarah Palin political identity on Facebook. It may seem like so much new-media fluff to stodgy old guys still married to old-school notions of political relevance, but it also might just prove to be more telling of the status of the Republican political landscape than any 10 Rasmussen polls could ever hope to be. There, Cillizza writes, “As of press time, Palin’s Facebook site had nearly 930,000 supporters … By way of comparison, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R) has 82,000 Facebook supporters while former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) has 121,000.”

That paragraph right there should be enough to have Huckabee and Romney shaking with fear. If Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign proved anything (as if this point really needed to be proven), it’s that you can’t view new media, especially social-networking, as some sort of cute adjunct to an otherwise traditionally managed campaign. A candidate’s approach to the Internet says everything about that candidate’s understanding of the times we’re living in and the voters who are living in them.

For all her faults, Palin is smart enough to know that having a million friends/fans on Facebook is like having a marketing/information-dissemination army on your side, ready with the click of a mouse to do your bidding. Facebook may have proven to us once and for all that the insignificant particulars of human lives are sources of fascination — both as writers and readers, both as exhibitionists and voyeurs — but perhaps more fascinating (and more important for politicians looking to get out the vote) is that it has shown people to be happy pro bono public-relations advocates for whatever cause, event, band, person, puppy video they deem worthwhile. People love being in the know, Facebook has shown us, and they love letting other people know they’re in the know. And the best way to let other people you’re in the know, and that you knew before they did, is to be the one sending that person what it is they don’t know about but you do.

Cillizza talks about Palin using Facebook to do an “end-run” around the mainstream media and talk directly to her supporters, both actual and potential. Which is true. But it’s more than that: Facebook allows Palin (just like Obama, who knew a little something about being written off by mainstream-media folks and needing to find new unfiltered ways of gaining momentum) to do an end-run around the mainstream PR/marketing/political advertising bureaucracy, putting aside traditional notions of pay-for-play access and huge media blitzes. Instead, all she has to do is throw up the occasional post about her support of Glen Beck, her distaste for Washington insiders, or (most famously) her belief that Obamacare will sentence the elderly to death, and – bang! – she’s got a million people ready, willing, even desirous to spread that message around the world.

In other words, Facebook has not only exposed us as advertisers for ourselves; it’s turned us all into volunteer sandwich-board wearers for others.

So if I were Mike Huckabee, I’d take cold comfort in that 28 when comparing it to Palin’s 930,000. One is just a number on a piece of paper taken three years — and a million media cycles — out from the next presidential election. The other represents virtual bodies on the virtual ground, ready to go to war for their favorite former governor from Alaska.

Especially when going to war means never having to leave your house or even change out of your pajamas.

Photo by uncorneredmarket via Flickr

Air Force crews unleashed eight years ago on the then-Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan kept with the proud air bombardment-tradition of scrawling colorful taunts on the shells of deliverable military hardware. If, in the time that’s elapsed since those first air strikes, some clever chief has figured out a way to turn the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau into a pithy, bomb-appropriate one-liner, we hear at Unfit have yet to hear about it — and that makes us kind of sad: Fact is, lost in all of the 9/11-revenge rhetoric that spawned the initial popular support for the United States’ first effort against Al Qaeda and its allies (not to mention, about a billion snappy chalk messages), what quickly became the real reason for the country’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan sits, awaiting deeper critical and popular light. (Or at least some kind of shell-side acknowledgment.)

Here’s the thing: Nation-building is, to the U.S. government — and many of their NATO counterparts — a noble pursuit. So, gifted with the military and economic prowess afforded to so many of the western-descended powers,  the argument goes that such might should be spent in the effort to establish democratic institutions. The trouble comes when democracy doesn’t make for a good fit. Then, in the instance that majority rule is ill-fitted for or unwanted by the political entity that it is being visited upon, shit gets ugly. This begs the question: Is it in the best interests of the western powers to try and force a place into voting submission?

General Stanley McChrystal would say it is. On October 1, he spoke to, as the New York Times reported, “an audience of military specialists at London’s Institute for Strategic Studies.” There, he laid out his argument for broad U.S. involvement in Afghanistan based on the concept of stability. According to the Times, he told his audience that “[a] strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.” Here, thanks to his repeated calls for a larger force, and his lobbying against a truncated, counter-terrorism-centered campaign, we can guess that he means for stable to be synonymous with democratic.

The trouble with Afghanistan (among other places) is that NATO-force-backed visions of a unified, democratic nation rising from the ashes of a theocratic dictatorship whose toppling was followed by eight years of war is nothing more than an educated assumption. Which is to say that, just because the United States thinks it knows what’s best for the region — a notion based solely on ideals that just don’t fit in some places — doesn’t necessarily mean that it does. Sure, the western forces currently in Afghanistan have deposed what looked, to their eyes, like an unholy example of  backward ideology forced upon a tortured populace. And, having done so, they’ve managed to install a friendly, nominal (at least) democracy. But the reality is that the thing may not be tenable outside the limits of Kabul (or, indeed, even within the city itself) — and the last legitimate government to have any sort of function, nationwide, was the very one that had been deposed in the name of what McChrystal terms “stability.”

And, as if that weren’t enough, the U.S. and its allies are so invested in the success of this particular project that, when faced with evidence of widespread voter fraud by the executive, Hamid Karzai, who owes his post to their support, it took them almost two months to face that fact. Worse, a high-ranking U.N. diplomat was forced out after he accused his organization of engaging in a cover-up of the mess in order to keep Karzai in power. The western-style Afghani democracy is, apparently, so important that it warrants its own neglect.

Of course, the argument could be made that this latest development is more about securing a friendly nation in the heart of an increasingly unfriendly region than it is about securing democracy for that nation’s people. And this may be true. Still, thanks to the history of the character of the United States’ imperial ambitions, the two things are virtually inseparable. So even if we can’t come up with a nifty, Rousseau-inspired insult to chalk on the side of various rounds of munitions, for better or worse (in this case, most likely, the latter — for all parties) the true force behind our efforts in Afghanistan descends from his ideas: force the people to be free, it would appear, at all costs.

Image by Damien Baldino via Flickr

In his New York Times Op-Ed piece this morning, regular contributor Paul Krugman is perhaps overly eager in his quickness to assign to the entire Republican Party the “emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.” There, though he may be generally correct in using that characterization to describe the reactionary response of a handful of media blowhards to the city of Chicago’s loss of the 2016 Olympics (a loss for Obama is a win for Rush!), he ignores what looks to be the central internal issue for the G.O.P in advance of the 2010 mid-terms and, worse, in so doing, commits a classic U.S. lefty (if there really is such a thing) sin: underestimating the capability and draw of the conservative movement.

Krugman seems to have missed Lindsay Graham’s on-going take-down of Glen Beck. As the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reported on Sunday, Graham, in an appearance on Fox News Sunday “didn’t mince words or, for that matter, duck the question when he was asked why he said Beck was ‘aligned with cynicism’ at a conference earlier in the week.” Nope. Instead, he continued his attack, implying that the teary-eyed Fox News anchor was a backward-looking malcontent who “doesn’t represent the Republican Party.” What’s more is that this came on the heels of a Politico report (perhaps also overlooked by Krugman) that detailed the attempts of aging Senator and Obama-’08-shellac-ee John McCain “to reshape the Republican Party in his own center-right image.” “Those familiar with McCain’s thinking,” writers contributor Alex Isenstadt, “say he has expressed serious concern about the direction of the party and is actively seeking out and supporting candidates who can broaden the party’s reach. In McCain’s case, that means backing conservative pragmatists and moderates.”

Let’s take a minute to put all of this together. Graham, a key McCain ‘08 lieutenant, and McCain, a veteran conservative — who, let’s remember, is that, despite any of his claims to maverickness — are taking steps to tell the voters that, as loud, ugly, and (therefore) fun to look at and listen to as the Becks, Limbaughs, and Savages of the world are, they are not a part of the Republican establishment — and so their hyped-for-the-public overreactions can’t be assigned to the greater Republican party. In fact, it’s fair to say that a good portion of the elephant clan seems so nauseated by the appearance of such a possible characterization, they are getting ready to do battle to make their less-angry vision of the G.O.P the dominant race of the red-stater.

Which is to say that, superficially at least, Krugman has committed only a sin of the semantically debatable variety. And that would be a whatever if it wasn’t for the fact that, by failing to understand the complexity of the issue — read: making the character of the over-dramatic attention whore the target of his attack — he attempts to marginalize something that, if the U.S. left were a cohesive, strategically-capable group (you know, something that might even resemble a political force), would not be so easily dismissed. Why, Krugman should have asked himself, do the rightist media personalities so cater to the emotional, angry side of the voting populace? And better yet, why is that segment of the population so angry — particularly so at a party that is such a non-threat that it hasn’t been able to seat a capable executive since 1968?

But instead, Krugman settled for the easy, unprobing approach — the one that succeeds in only engaging the most superficial attributes, and therefore a quick dismissal, of a very complex and very capable organization. The trouble for the Democrats is that, in doing so, he joins a long list of underestimating political hacks, who, in their failure to completely understand the opposition are almost assuredly setting themselves up for another quick loss of power. In this light, Krugman’s mischaracterization goes far beyond something that might be debated at a cafe, at least if the Dems ever want to achieve true post-partisanship.

Man with a plan?

I remember reading an interview with Kevin Smith back in 1997 in which the trench-coat-wearing writer/director/Miramax poster boy admitted that his third film, Chasing Amy, which was getting a lot of positive critical attention at the time, was actually intended to be his second. Figuring there was bound to be backlash against him after the enormous success of his first, no-budget feature, Clerks, Smith decided that, rather than let a film he felt was actually worth something get unfairly torn apart by jealousy and bad press, better to send out a sacrificial lamb to take the hit – in this case, a movie he didn’t care too much about and that no one would ever mistake for a good film that had gotten a bad rap.

And hence Mallrats.

Well, with apologies to anyone who takes politics and high-minded social criticism seriously, I have come to the conclusion that President Obama is taking a similar tack with the public health care option.

I figure it this way: Obama had to know when he got elected that whatever goodwill he enjoyed during his first few months in office would eventually dry up. He and his advisors were sharp enough to realize that his high early poll numbers were soft and that, in our overheated political climate, eventually the Republican Party would figure out a way to go on the attack and knock him back down to Earth.

They also knew that the relative ease Obama had experienced in passing the financial bail-out bill in February was a honeymoon victory resulting from those high poll numbers and a desperate economic environment in which any strong action would be looked on positively by an American public driven to disbelief by Bush’s detachment.

They also knew that when it came time for the president to call his second big play, the Republicans would waiting in the tall grass for him.

So rather than put health care reform on the table straight and risk getting into an ugly dog-fight over issues he thought were vital (like lower premiums and guaranteed coverage), Obama put the public option out into the world as a sacrifice, a big piece of Democratic red-meat, with a slight tang of socialism, that he knew would drive the Right crazy and give them something to focus their vitriol on.

Then, just when things seemed to be getting irretrievably dark (like, say, early September, after a full month of town hall nonsense), Obama put the word out that he was willing to reach across the aisle. By doing this, he suddenly appeared munificent and bi-partisan in an environment of extreme ideological toxicity, willing to do whatever it took to get a bill passed. Now any Republicans who continued screaming and shouting about the danger the president’s health care plan posed to America’s social fabric would come off looking petty: They would be representatives of the “party of no,” disagreeing just to be disagreeable in a time when insurance premiums kept rising, more and more Americans were losing their coverage, and the economy was sinking deeper into the tank.

My friend Eliot Tretter, doctor of geography and apparent closet boxing fan, calls this approach the “rope-a-dope”: Obama lays back during the summer and lets the Right Wing have their effigy-burning, name-calling, Hitler-referencing fun, and then, just when it looks like the Democrats are getting their heads handed to them, he swoops in with a compromise only a mindless ideologue could truly hate. Suddenly health-care reform looks alive again, naysaying Republicans no longer look like the principled opposition party but a bunch of intransigent cranks, and the president comes off looking like a bipartisan rationalist.

So now what? Now that you’ve given a couple of speeches and gone on all the Sunday news programs and Late Night With David Letterman and told the American people what your plan is really all about?

Now you have to get some version of health care reform passed (not a perfect bill, of course, but one that speaks to the issues you find most pressing), finding common ground among Democrats both left and centrist while leaving Republicans out in the wilderness, now both blindly contrarian and powerless.

Then you sit back and let people get used to the good that can come from government involvement in the health care industry – the reduced premiums, the fixed prices, the guaranteed coverage. Never underestimate the American public’s capacity to change its ideological tune when it experiences firsthand the benefits of a policy they were once skeptical of.

Remember, when social security was being debated in the 1930s, opponents swore up and down that anyone supporting it was a socialist. Same with Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. And now look: Social Security has become the great untouchable in American politics (just ask George Bush and the Republicans about the virtues of privatization); meanwhile Medicare – that shining example of government-run “socialized” medicine – is so sacred that even right-wing town hall crazies carry signs demanding the government stay out of it (and without a hint of irony, too).

(Medicaid, of course, is slightly less sacred to Americans because it benefits only the poor, and if there’s one thing the Right is good at, it’s screaming about the need for a national Christian morality while totally missing the point of Christianity.)

If this all happens, then you’ve built up enough political capital and public goodwill that maybe the voters will trust you and your party enough to keep you in power come 2010 and 2012, whether because of the good you did or the nothing the other side did. And then – after you’ve been re-elected and after you’ve established yourself and after the American people have grown accustomed to the idea of government involvement in health care and seen what it can do for them – then you spring the public option on them. Because by that point you will have softened them up to the idea. It’s a perfect demonstration of the old adage that politics is the art of the possible, achieved in increments.

If this is all true, if Obama really is “rope-a-doping,” and if he manages to pull it off, then he very well may be a political genius, a thinking-man’s leader so patient he’s willing to bide his time (through one of the darker, more intellectually demeaning months in American history, no less) and suffer all kinds of indignities in order to get what he feels is best for the country. But if it’s not true, then Obama is stuck in neutral, a man both without a cause and without a plan. A moral and political lightweight.

And if that’s the case, then Eliot Tretter Ph.D. and I are the only political geniuses around. Us and the Republicans. And God help this country if that proves to be true.

Setting for a national crisis

As you read this, there is a writer somewhere in America deleting an essay about how best to improve our education system while maintaining federal solvency; a journalist has tucked an editorial that solves the problem of Palestinian sovereignity into a desk drawer; and yet another collection of rhyming couplets about genocide in Darfur, the consequences of global warming, and the dangers of adjustable rate mortgages goes unread, exposing more innocent people around the world to violence, privation, and long, confusing telephone conversations with bank representatives.

I know this to be true because that writer is me, that desk drawer is mine, and I rhymed those couplets myself.

Count me as one more victim of America’s health care crisis.

We’ve all heard the horror stories from the front lines of our national insurance debate: citizens who woke up one morning to find their premiums had been raised during the night, patients who learned that their coverage had been terminated because of a disease some insurance company decided was too costly to fight, good Americans who discovered that no insurance company would cover them because of a pre-existing condition, family members struggling to pay rising stacks of medical bills.

But there is a group of Americans whose stories have gone untold, whose struggles we never hear about. They are the silent victims of the health care crisis. I’m talking about writers. And now is the time to speak up for them.

Since that first crazy old lady stood up in that town hall meeting in early August to declare that President Obama wasn’t a real American, writers like me have had to spend all our time writing about health care, shelving other, equally important pieces in the name of satisfying the editorial desires of an uncharacteristically focused American public. We’ve written stories about White House political tactics, right-wing demagogues and their followers, the weak knees of the Democratic party, the strong knees of the Republican party, the conservative approach to civil disobedience, and on and on and on. Process stories, political stories, personal stories, op-eds, satires, single-panel cartoons: You name it; we’ve written it. When we wanted to write about gay marriage, we were told to write about health care. When we wanted to examine inconsistencies in the president’s position on enhanced interrogation techniques, we were told to write about health care. Every idea we’ve had over the last two months has been swallowed whole.

Writers are the unseen, unheard victims of the American health care disaster. True, we might not have cancer or AIDS or even diabetes, we may not be bankrupt or homeless, but we do know what it’s like to sit at a computer for hours at a time trying to come up with new ways of making fun of people who believe death panels really exist. And it’s starting to take a toll. Every day, reports come in of yet another political writer somewhere who is seriously considering giving up journalism altogether and going back to school. Is that really what this country needs right now? More graduate students?

Of course not.

Please help us: Call your congressman or senator today and tell them you want health care reform passed so that our journalists can get back to writing about congressional sex scandals and you can get back to reading about the season finale of True Blood.

Your writers will thank you for it.