Someone Corrects David Brooks So I Don't Have To

David Brooks wants poor people to adhere to the social mores of the elite he rallies behind as a matter of course. If only the poor would behave like the rich, everything would be all right.

This kind of talk from Brooks brings out my daggers, but I don't have to lift a finger this week. Other folks abound that will do the work. My fave is this article in The Week by Jeff Spross. I liked that he took on fellow Brooks travelers Ross Douthat and Charles Murray at the same time.

Key here is that if we take money and jobs away from a class of Americans -- say, the working poor and the middle class -- we shouldn't be surprised if their lives go to shit. Spross makes all the right connections. Kudos.

Another slap to Brooks' notions comes from Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig of the New Republic. She gets it, and the last line states it best (I've placed it in bold):

Morality should teach us how to live a good life. But to impose the easy virtue of the well-to-do on the poor is to request the most stressed and vulnerable members of society to display impossible moral heroism. To abstain from relationships, sex, and childbirth until financially secure enough to raise a child without assistance would mean, for many, a life of celibacy; to pour limited resources into education in order to score a respectable job would mean failing to make rent. If the problems plaguing poor communities persist after poverty is drastically reduced, that would seem an appropriate time to pursue the matter of a better "moral vocabulary," as Brooks calls it—and even then, the participation of low-income communities would be essential. But before that conversation can happen, the obvious solution to the “chaos” Brooks observes among poor communities is to reduce poverty, and let its moral quandaries resolve on their own.

Thought experiment: Figure out how to square the contradiction that conservatives -- who in the Brooks-Murray-Douthat world hold truest to their lofty values -- are the ones who could give a damn about climate change, petroleum-based pollution, death, injury and destruction from wars, and all the mayhem that results from our burgeoning culture of guns, death penalty, and law-and-order mentality with the values the poor are supposed to emulate. Neat trick if you can do it.

Square all that and plug it into you round hole, Brooks.

Soldiers lining up for jobs after following the conservatives' advice to be good patriots.

Update. Meant to include a link to this article on how sticking to American values while the world  falls apart around you hasn't served the people of Appalachia who have nowhere to go, with nothing left but to leave the homes they grew up in and believed in. I guess this world doesn't count for much to moralizing bastards like Brooks.

#47SenatorsFail: The Iranian Response!

I don't always like William Saletan's stuff in Slate -- he goes way too far in his contrarian mode, turning sometimes into a reactionary -- but he nailed it with this "letter" from the Iranian Council of Guardians' in response to the Tom Cotton debacle. Read it for a monster giggle.

Puts the #47SenatorsFail in perspective.

GOP Senators Iran Letter: A Form of Government Shutdown?

Here's what a great country does: Let a first-time senator craft a treasonous
letter to a foreign country during critical negotiations. Then have the vast
majority of GOP senators -- and 2016 GOP contenders -- sign on.

(Updated below!)

The uproar over Tom Cotton's nefarious letter has boiled over into a kind of government shutdown. Foreign countries wonder who's in charge of the chicken coop. Boneheads from Arkansas, majority leaders from Kentucky, or the president of the U.S., AKA Leader of the Free World?

Note in the growing number of comments in the above linked WaPo article that 99% are disgusted by the Senate majority's action. And this in a major newspaper whose comment flow usually runs tea-partyish. Sheesh.

It's tantamount to a government shutdown and just as embarrassing for the party that allowed it. What are they thinking if not just one more attempt to prevent Barack Obama from being effective, effective on behalf of the American people?

Horrifying, yet in a startling development, it appears the GOP tactic is backfiring in an unexpected way. And, adding fuel to the growing fire, it turns out that an elite cadre of GOP/pro-Israeli donors are anti-Iran-deal allies. Eeeck.

More reaction here, here, here, and here. Excerpt from McClatchy:

But Congress has perhaps never so openly disrespected the president on a foreign stage as now. Or intervened more actively to disrupt an international negotiation.
Like the Federalists of 1814, today’s Republican leaders are wading into deep, swift waters.

Whatever happened to the Federalist Party? When Madison’s negotiators forged a peace treaty with Britain, and General Andrew Jackson defeated British troops in the epic Battle of New Orleans a week later, delegates to the Hartford Convention looked like fools and traitors.

The nation’s first political party died swiftly. Reviled by the patriotic electorate, the Federalists never again won the Oval Office. The United States had a one-party system for the next two decades, until the Whig Party arose in 1833.

Modern Republicans have a much longer history than the Federalists. Cotton’s party is made of a sterner fabric than the party of Washington.

But the junior senator from Arkansas ought to beware. The American people have never cottoned to treason — or the implication of it.

Yikes.

The Ayatollah Khamenei waves to his many fans in the GOP caucus.

Update. National funny bone Charles P. Pierce of Esquire unloads on Tom Cotton here, here, and here. Let the healing begin!

The Degrading of America: GOP's Iran Ploy Blows Up in Their Faces

Oh, I wish was in the mind of Cotton...!

(Updated below)

The absurd ploy by the Tom-Cotton-led GOP -- who lets first-term junior senators from Arkansas take the lead on something this gargantuan? -- is blowing up. Not only has the "open letter" to "the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran" been rejected as farcical by Iran's American-educated foreign minister, but it also is gets low marks from journalists across the spectrum, even the Wall St. Journal.

Read Fred Kaplan's take in Slate:

The letter—which encourages Iran’s leaders to dismiss the ongoing nuclear talks with the United States and five other nations—is as brazen, gratuitous, and plainly stupid an act as any committed by the Senate in recent times, and that says a lot. It may also be illegal.

The banalities begin with the greeting: “An Open Letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” By custom, a serious letter to foreign leaders would address them by name. Who is it that the senators are seeking to influence: the supreme leader, the Parliament, the Revolutionary Guards? Clearly none of the above, otherwise it wouldn’t be an open letter. Nor, if this were a serious attempt of some sort, would Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (who was among the missive’s signatories) leave the task of organizing it to the likes of Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, an otherwise unknown freshman. As usual, the Republicans’ goal is simple: to embarrass and undermine President Barack Obama.

The idiocies begin with the first sentence: “It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system.”

First, I’m curious: How has this come to their attention? Second, the letter writers reveal that they don’t understand our constitutional system either. They point out to the Iranians, in the tone of a teacher addressing third-graders, that treaties must be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate, agreements need majority approval by both houses of Congress, and executive agreements can be overturned by Obama’s successor “with the stroke of a pen.”

Cotton and the signatories are wrong on so many levels it isn't funny. I mean it would be funny if the letter weren't so against America's self-interests.

NPR points out today that this egregious act of near-treason is clearly coupled with House Speaker John Boehner's unprecedented invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress against any agreement with the Iranians just last week.

Not to be outdone, NBC expressed shock about the letter as well.

Even GOP Congressman Peter King of New York didn't feel good about it.

It's one of the lowest blows I've ever seen issued by a politician or politicians in my lifetime, although I admit to living -- as a young boy more into spiders and snakes than politics -- through the McCarthy era. McCarthy would be proud of this Republican bunch.

Joesph McCarthy, left, with Roy Cohn: Tom Cotton would fit in nicely.

Update. Plum Line's Greg Sargent has a nice summary of the mostly cold reactions to the GOPer letter to Iran, noting that the key backfire may be that enough Dems can't no longer be corralled into any veto-proof vote to scuttle the deal. That's a pretty big fail indeed.

The Degrading of America: The GOP Takes Politics "Beyond the Water's Edge"

"What do you mean, 'Did we think about this before we wrote the letter?'"

In response to the NY Times' report of the GOP open letter to the Iranian government -- in which the esteemed 47 Republican senators schooled the Iranian government on constitutional matters and how they, or future GOP presidents, might renege on any Obama agreement on Iran's nuclear program -- the Iranian foreign minister simply schooled them back

A good summation of the extraordinary event, by which the Republican Party decided to violate the longstanding, fundamental practice that "politics stops at the water's edge," is to be found among the comments to the aforementioned Times' report:

“In our view, this letter has no legal value and is mostly a propaganda ploy,” Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, said in a written statement. “It is very interesting that while negotiations are still in progress and while no agreement has been reached, some political pressure groups are so afraid even of the prospect of an agreement that they resort to unconventional methods, unprecedented in diplomatic history.”

One is hard pressed to read a better analysis of this strange act by the GOP. What it does better than any outraged screams of "Treason!" or "Sedition!" is how simply and calmly dismissive it is, pointing out the immaturity, ignorance, and ineptness for office this party demonstrates on an almost daily basis. The GOP schooled as if they were naughty schoolboys. This isn't treason. It's just embarrassing! A once great nation reduced to this.

Well said. The degradation of America continues, almost hourly. Uh, no hyperbole.

Veep Joe Biden, president of the Senate, chimes in, and, boy, is he (rightfully) pissed.

The Degrading of America: Media Outlets Are Bogged Down by False (Trumped-Up) Narratives While Real Reporting Goes Wanting

Edward Snowden must want to come home, Right? Do his 30
years and get right with this stuff, get it behind him. Right.

(Updated below)

Our distrust of the media is likely nothing new. Still, in my lifetime, I've been provided many reasons to respect and trust the media (think Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow), but that's been waning in recent years. Now, for instance, I watch the network evening news not to be informed but to see A) how badly they succeed in choosing what's relevant, B) what's missing or inaccurate in what they're reporting, and C) what slant, however preposterous, they choose to take in their reporting.

Yes, I also watch it because network news still has some quality reporters covering key stories. But I'm regularly disappointed by shoddy work on irrelevant stories, which often gobbles up much of the 22 minutes per show. 

Case in point: Hillary Clinton's private email server was illegal. Wait, no, it isn't illegal, it's just against the rules. Uh, wait, it wasn't against the rules then, but it is now, several years later. None of that matters because what's really important is that it reinforces our feeling that the Clintons are above the law. Wait, they're not above the law, but we in the media are obsessed with them and how well they've done, and they don't kowtow to us, so... They must be doing something wrong even though we don't know what's in the emails, probably nothing, but still, it's unseemly. That's a perfect word for the media, unseemly. It's a word that, oh, I don't know, David Brooks would use. By the way, in a month or two only a few crazed congressmen and Rush Limbaugh will give a shit.

But to a more profound example. Glenn Greenwald flags a recent effort by the American media to paint Edward Snowden as really, really wanting to come home. He doesn't because he believes he can't get a fair trial, full stop:

His primary rationale for this argument has long been that under the Espionage Act, the 1917 statute under which he has been charged, he would be barred by U.S. courts from even raising his key defense: that the information he revealed to journalists should never have been concealed in the first place and he was thus justified in disclosing it to journalists. In other words, when U.S. political and media figures say Snowden should “man up,” come home and argue to a court that he did nothing wrong, they are deceiving the public, since they have made certain that whistleblowers charged with “espionage” are legally barred from even raising that defense.

Seems pretty clear to me. Remember, Glenn Greenwald, before he chose to report on egregious acts against whistleblowers, was a constitutional lawyer, so his reporting carries a bit more weight than, say, Chuck Todd.

Read the rest of Greenwald's article. It's a study in media's desire to create and run with narratives they like and they want to control, right up to the point at which it's clearly bullshit, when, hopefully, another story has been formed for the press corps to follow. It's a pretty dismal undertaking staying informed, at least if you limit yourself to traditional news networks and newspapers.

Take your news cautiously, with a good amount of cross-checking. You may get a decent version of the truth.

One final example of how this degrades America: Donald Trump is considering a run in 2016!

How is that news?? Because Politico thinks so. Sheesh.

Note. I didn't mention Fox News or the Wall Street Journal in this piece because they're a case study all to themselves. They're not sloppy, self-serving journalists. They're out-and-out propagandists. There is a difference.

Update. Here's a classic example of the media's obsession with "the Clintons just don't do it right" by Josh Voorhees in Slate. There's no there there, just as I described in my above paragraph on the "scandal." It's full of buzzwords and phrases like "skirted the law." She didn't break the law, she skirted it. Colin Powell while Secretary of State under W. did the same thing, but it's different. Jeb Bush went so far while governor as to set up his own email server, but it's different because Hillary!

Update to the Update. Okay, now this is just silly. I found another Josh Voorhees article in Slate three days before the one I linked to above in which he questions whether Hillary Clinton broke the law when she set up and used her own private email account while in office. He couldn't find any law at all or anyone else who had found one either. Then he proceeds to explain how she probably didn't break any rules either. He goes as far as to say that she at least broke the "spirit of the law." How? By being Hillary? Well, probably. Let him explain it:

Here’s what I can say: Clinton’s penchant for private email would indeed run afoul of the current law on the books—but likely not the rules that were in place while she served as President Obama’s secretary of state between 2009 and 2013. Under a law passed this past November, a government official can use private email accounts to conduct government business—but only if that official copies or forwards the email to his or her government account within 20 days. Violating that law can result in disciplinary action but carries with it no criminal penalties. But Clinton’s private emailing occurred well before that law went into effect. According to the National Archives, the official definition of what constitutes a federal record did not “clearly include electronic records” until Obama signed the 2014 law, which represented “the first change to the definition of a Federal record” since the Federal Records Act was passed in 1950. Similarly, it wasn’t until August 2013—six months after Clinton had left office—that the National Archives and Records Administration issued guidance making it clear that email records of some senior officials are permanent federal records.

Clinton’s camp, as you might expect, maintains its boss did nothing wrong. “Both the letter and spirit of the rules permitted State Department officials to use non-government email, as long as appropriate records were preserved," Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told the Associated Press.

While Merrill appears to be correct on the first count, the case for the second—the spirit of the law—is less than convincing. At best, Clinton failed to go the extra mile to make sure her emails were part of the official record; at worst, she intentionally sought out a legal gray area from which to do her business.

Like I said, just silly. Josh Voorhees wrote an article with apparent due diligence proving Clinton violated no laws or even rules, then three days later wrote another one that claims she's "wrong."

She didn't break any law, she just "sought out a legal gray area," which, likely, isn't true, either. What she did do was secure her communications the way Colin Powell and Jeb Bush did before new laws took effect. Maureen Dowd should weigh in on this. She's good at demonizing the Clintons. I'd look for a link for you, but I don't have the stomach for it just now. Josh Voorhees was a more than adequate stand-in for Mo. Slate must not be good enough for Josh. He's Politico-bound!

In the end, we have the anatomy of two scandals wrapped in an enigma. The email scandal couldn't really exist without something to find in the emails, which is provided by the Benghazi scandal. Benghazi depends on a false narrative, just as the email scandal is based on a false narrative. Meanwhile, actual policy considerations for an improving path forward for America goes wanting. Good job, media!

Hands up, don't shoot!

The Degrading of America

America, 2015: still the greatest nation the world has ever known?

I have a problem with America. It's odd because I had a problem with America in 1967, too. The year before, I was a 17-year-old going off to college touting the party line -- "Vietnam is the cost of fighting communism, a tough job but somebody's got to do it" -- and by the next June I was solidly against the war, as were most of the San Francisco Bay Area college students around me.

Those of us who lived through those years of cultural upheaval spent the next ten years in an alternate USA, as we fought against wars, "pigs," and The Establishment. I was so dead-set against becoming "the man" that I forewent law school and became a musician instead.

And like a lot of counter-cultural warriors, I eventually found my way back into the mainstream and settled into a semblance of a middle-class life. I remain profoundly changed by those early years, but it cannot be stated loudly enough that I was always and still am an American, in spite of those ubiquitous "America: Love It or Leave It" bumper stickers that conservatives sported to relay their contempt for those against the war.

Born a couple years after the end of World War II, I was witness to the great growth and development of the world's greatest middle class, and my family was a classic example. I came out of a highly educated household that built itself up through education without the help of an affluent background. I watched my mother and father build a decent life driven by ordinary American energy and ordinary imaginations. We were supposed to get educated, find good jobs, buy a decent house, and settle down into a life of decency and normalcy. We were given opportunity and were expected to do well by it. And in spite of my counter-cultural detour, I essentially did just that.

I may have taken a more entrepreneurial path to build my American life, but so have many. I don't think that explains or underwrites my current views of America, except that my disappointment in the current state of America isn't based on an obsession that "America sucks hard" but rather based on how much I believed in the American model. I lived the development of that American model, so as that typical or atypical baby boomer who didn't squander the legacy of the "Greatest Generation" but rather build a decent, respectable life, I am perfectly positioned to critique the America that I find today.

I take no joy in witnessing a widespread degrading of the country I came to identify with so completely. I'm terrifically pained by what I see happening.

I've laid the foundation of an extended discussion on the state of America, and I'll break here and finish over a series of posts. But I'll preview it just a bit: Yes, I'm going to make the claim that what has driven the degradation of America has been, so far, a rather successful conservative movement that has crafted a popular narrative, which is a smokescreen for a set of goals that favor the rich and powerful at the expense of the rubes who are somehow convinced that the pols they put into office have their best interests at heart.

That conservative narrative isn't true, and we're beginning to see how the actual policy goals touted by conservatives have been slowly and methodically undermining the very country and people they purport to love. It's shocking and disgusting.

A final point: It's often repeated that we get the government we want, but that's a lie. We get the government we're deceived into believing we want. That our government is not what we think it is or not doing what we think we asked them to do is the great crime of our time. Let's look at it over the next several posts.

Note. From my point of view, it's clear the liberal-progressive side of the political spectrum has had no choice but to ally itself with the Democratic Party, in spite of the fact that the Dems are only marginally more in favor of policy prescriptions progressive prefer. But I'll take the protection of the social safety net that the Dems marginally stand for over the Armageddon that conservatives seem almost preternaturally obsessed with ushering in.

No hyperbole there, by the way.

These people just need to buck up and take personal responsibility.