Robert Kagan, Brookings et al: Do The Word "Effete" Come To Mind

Mr. Kagan Tells Us How The World Ought to Be

The New York Times tells us  Robert Kagan has spoken. And we should listen, because, well, Mr. Kagan's father was a professor of ancient Greece at Cornell, and his brother was a professor at West Point and his wife is a career diplomat, and Robert himself holds degrees from Harvard and Yale and has briefed a congressional delegation at Davos and he is at the Brookings Institution and he writes articles with snappy titles like, "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire."  
And his father, Donald, calling President Obama's remarks at West Point, "pathetic" also said of the President:  "We should not underestimate the possibility of extraordinary ignorance."

So there you have it: a family anointed by the New York Times as "cerebral" and ultimate sophisticates,  is compromised of sons and relations who are superior in understanding, depth and breadth of knowledge to mere presidents and soldiers.

It might be noted all the Kagans urged a "muscular" American military response to the problem of Iraq and now urge us to again use our military muscle there to...well, it's not exactly clear to do what, but surely to get some boots on the ground and to flex some muscles.  We should get in the fight and show those Islamic fundamentalists,  who want to draw new map of the Middle East down lines with Sunnis on one side and Shiites on the other,  just who exactly is in charge over there.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Times is an article by the former Private Bradley Manning, now Chelsea Manning (having decided he is now a woman), which outlines in some detail exactly how the Army censored and created the war news it thought was fit to print, and how most of it was a lie. Ms. Manning may have her problems, but clarity of expression is not one of them.

All this, Mr. Kagan's know it all pose and Pvt. Manning's reality check,  reminds anyone who has seen "Full Metal Jacket" of the meeting of the "Stars and Stripes" newspaper meeting in Vietnam, where the captain in charge of managing the news lays down the law about what can and cannot be said, and how the world ought to be seen, how it ought to be, how it damn well would be if only we believed in the power and the glory of the United States and its military.  The general idea is "When we have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow," but of course, you can never say that.

Editorial Session: How the War Ought to Be, Most Rickie Tick 

So there we have it, once again, a country where we have freedom of speech and open access to information, but in this land where all animals are equal some animals are more equal than others because they have access to microphones, widely distributed newspapers, institutions which fly them to Davos and give them offices on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC,  because they come from such good families and because they went to Harvard and express themselves forcefully in nifty, quotable phrases. 

And you think back on the gulf between what we saw in the room filled with word people in Full Metal Jacket and what we saw in the field, and  you realize, there is actually a real world out there which operates by rules of its own and it does not care what the smart boys from the good schools say, or how the Brookings people want the world to be. The guys with the guns who are living on a little rice and rat meat have a logic of their own. And the real power in the world flows from the barrels of their guns. 

Eric Cantor Defeat: Making It Up As We Go Along

David Brat, Republican

Sergeant at Arms, Republican caucus

Eric Cantor loses his seat in Congress to a Tea Party professor of economics at Randolph Macon college and suddenly it's a movement. All the pundits had been saying, just a week ago, the Tea Party was history because Mitch McConnell and others had beaten back their Tea Party challengers and now mainstream, establishment Republicans did not have to worry but could turn their attentions to beating Democrats and not have to move so far to the right.
Now all that talk is forgotten. 
Such is the short memory of TV punditry.

Will Brat Serve His Constituents Well?

What is forgotten in all this is Eric Cantor is just one of 435 members of the House. 
Apparently, Mr. Cantor did not pay close attention to the House of Cards.  He did not remember that his people are a proud people and that humility is their source of pride. Humble yourself before them and they will do anything for you. 
Mr. Cantor was not humble enough.



Of course, there is always the question: Who would really want to represent this constituency?   King of Knaves.  Champion of half wits.  They sent him to Congress to vote against raising the debt ceiling, to vote against government and he became government.  Well, good riddance. 

Don't Forget Where The Capital of The Confederacy Was

There are candidates out there who are not humble, who nevertheless win. Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona is anything but humble. He struts about with his guards, dressing prisoners (some of whom have not yet even been tried or convicted of anything) in pink and stripes and parading them through the streets to humiliate them.  He has a tank which he has painted with flames, to show how tough he is. He has never been defeated for re election. His people love him. 

Republican Assault Vehicle 

So, okay, one Right wing congressman has been defeated for not being right wing enough.
 Must be the end of the Republic. 

Scott Brown: How the Money Speaks

Mr. Brown's Company: There's no light on upstairs. 

How does a Cosmopolitan sexiest-man-alive cash in on fame? Well, it helps to have a truck.
Once you have a truck, you can win a Senate seat, especially if you are running against Martha Coakley.
And once you have been a Republican U.S. Senator from a New England state, you can attract money from the Koch brothers and friends of Carl Rove. You can use that money to run for U.S. Senate from New Hampshire, or you can simply keep the money and buy a much bigger house in Rye.
But who actually gives you the money and how is that money cleansed of taint?

Well, you can be named to the board of directors of a start up company, Global Digital Solutions, Inc.,  which once made hair spray and shampoo. 
You can see right away why'd they would want advice from Scott Brown. 
(I bet you thought of a data or software company when you heard that "Digital" part of the name, but obviously that had to do with fingers running through scalps and hair follicles...)until the company, which owns no patents or manufacturing facilities, re imagined itself as a data company, and then, most recently a firearms manufacturer. 

Guns! That should play well in New Hampshire. (Did you know in New Hampshire there are only 6 roads you cannot shoot across, if you are hunting on one side of the road and you see a moose on the other side?  One of them is Route 95, another is and Route 101 is another, and Rte. 93.  I forget the others, but, for the most part, if you have a gun and you see a moose standing on the other side of the road, go for it. New Hampshire has got your back. You can hunt in the "Urban Forest" in Portsmouth, by Route 1, as long as you fire your gun more than 100 yards from the road. Think about that next time you drive past the McDonald's, across the street, on your way into town.)

GDSI "does not have significant operations at the point, " Mr. Brown's mouthpiece said this weekend.  In fact, the company has only 4 employees, $270 thousand in cash and nearly $20 million in losses. It does have a "virtual address" in a very fancy building in Florida, but there is no GDSI listed in the lobby directory and a secretary at the address listed on the website says, "They're not here. It's by appointment only." Which leaves the matter in doubt. You can make an appointment, but they are not at home. 
     I read about this once, in Catch-22, where you could make an appointment to see Major Major Major, but only for times when he was not in the office.
    Not to worry, this company which has lost $20 million dollars,  gave Scott Brown $1.3 million worth of its stock when he agreed to become an "adviser" or a member of its board of directors. 
    Ah, a board of directors, the place where money from sources like, say, the Koch brothers, can be funneled to worthy citizens who have advice to give about hair spray or firearms.
    Remember that final scene in Animal Farm, where the animals, who have fomented a revolution and suffered through the iterations of a more just society on the farm look through the window at the pigs feasting with the human beings and they look from face to face and they cannot tell the pigs from the people?
    Well, that's where we are with Mr. Brown, now. He was once a man of the people, having been sexually abused by a camp counselor, arrested for shop lifting, shuffled back and forth among a slew of step fathers and broken homes, but somehow going to law school, joining the National Guard and serving heroically for 10 days in Afghanistan, and now he is risen from that Cinderella childhood in pursuit of the great American dream,  to a position of leadership, sitting on the boards of fancy companies like GDSI, and when he sits on a board of directors,  you can look from Koch brother to Koch brother, from Senator to business scion, and not be able to tell one from another.

And what about this phantom, this Parallax View company, which has a virtual address and website and a board of directors but no physical office, no products and only the vaguest description of a business plan?
When reached for comment, Mr. Brown said only, "I have a truck. A very big truck."

And a gun rack, too. 

The Undeserving Poor

You are no crawfish. I know a lobster when I see one. You are trying to pass for crawfish!

This morning, on Marketplace (NPR) they told the story of the British decision to spend money on a sewer system for the city of London in the reign of Queen Victoria. The advent of the flush toilet meant that the Thames River filled with human excrement, filling London with malodorous fumes and precipitating outbreaks of deadly cholera infections. 

Yet, the British parliament refused to appropriate funds for a sewer system which would alleviate the problem. The Tories argued that the poor, whose water was tainted, were poor as a result of moral turpitude, endemic immorality and defects of character and they held spending public funds, derived from taxes of the affluent, was simply supporting the depravity of the lower classes, who, in effect, deserved their suffering and discomfort.

Ultimately, Parliament, which is hard by the Thames, was so overwhelmed by the stench, they voted through the funds. Only once the nostrils of the rich were enough offended, did the infrastructure get funded. 

Does any of this sound familiar?

  

Benghazi: Kimberly Meuse Has the Last Word

Kimberly Meuse: Artist, Analyst, Citizen

Read it into the Congressional Record.  Read it on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Recite it whole whenever Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly or Mitch McConnell or the Koch brothers surrogates utter the word, "Benghazi."  Kimberly Meuse has so thoroughly demolished the whole absurd Right Wing blow hard narrative about the Benghazi debacle it is amazing nobody has done what she has done sooner.

An artist in Portsmouth, N.H. has somehow done what all the yammering would be pundits have failed to do: She simply places the deaths of an ambassador and other Americans in historical context and along the way she shames (if it were possible for Republicans to fee shame) Kelly Ayotte for her pandering the the worst excesses of the Republican conspiracy.

Read the Portsmouth Herald's letters to the editor for May 14, 2014, and there it is, all laid out.

Starting with the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beruit which killed 16, and moving on to the bombing, just 6 months later,  of the U.S. marine compound in Beruit early in the Reagan administration, with the deaths of 241 Americans, Ms. Meuse recalls how very differently a Democratic Speaker of the House responded, with a single, thoughtful, bipartisan effort to analyze what went wrong and to prevent another disaster. After the first attack, the Congressional investigators laid down plans to protect foreign missions from similar attacks, but the Reagan administration failed to implement them in time to prevent the second attack on the marines or a third attack in which the CIA station chief in Beruit was kidnapped and yet another attack killed more Americans. When President Reagan was asked how he could have allowed the subsequent attacks to occur without implementing any of the safeguards and walls of protection the Congressional committee had recommended, he famously shrugged and replied, "Anyone who's ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would." 

Ms. Meuse remarks, "Imagine the Republican response today if President Obama made this quote. Would Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., have declared  Reagan's words 'didn't pass the laugh test?'"

Along the way, Meuse builds the case that in the Democratic response to the deaths of Americans in Lebanon was the clear intention to avoid scoring political points but to honor the deaths of those who served by trying to ensure no more of their colleagues would suffer the same fate, while in the Republican response, years later, all that counts is politics and point scoring.  Buried in Senator Ayotte's indignation is the plain fact that the Republicans in Congress have gutted protection for our foreign service officers overseas by cutting funds through sequestration. For Republicans, money is more important than the lives of American foreign service officers. 

But, then again, in the eyes of the Tea Party Republican Congress, foreign service officers are just part of the problem, because they are part of government. 
And you know, as Reagan chanted so often:  Government is not the solution. Government is the problem."

When government is run by Republicans, the Mad Dog must agree this is true.

Joseph Welch: "Senator, At long last,  have you left no sense of decency?"

Al Franken: Best Hope for the Ninety Nine Percent

Mad Dog never thought Al Franken was all that funny. He could make you laugh, and some of his Saturday Night Characters were droll enough--the correspondent who carried his own satellite dish on his back into the field, but was always groaning in pain under its weight, the self esteem guru whose refrain, spoken into a mirror, "You're good enough, and dog gone it, people like you"--were funny one time, but they often got beaten into the ground. 

His radio talk show, launched to counter Rush Limbaugh fell flat. He simply could not contain his rage and he was reduced to calling Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly big fat idiots, which, while true, was not funny.

But, as a Senator, he has restrained his rage and consciously striven to be not comic, and hearing him on NPR this morning, talking about the efforts of Comcast, Verizon and other big corporations to carve out a "fast lane" of internet traffic, leaving the hoi polloi to wallow in a slow lane, Mad Dog felt a certain hope rising.

This is a man who has grown. With Barney Frank gone, Franken might actually fill that gap. And that is a big gap to fill.

When Democrats are inviting speakers to spot light, Franken should be the go to guy, and he would hold his own with Chris Christie, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and all the rest of that sorry lot. 

Mad Dog continues to yearn for an answer to right wing talk radio, beyond Jon Stewart and Colbert (RIP).  He still thinks a puppet lampoon a la "Spitting Image" would be ideal for the internet and he thinks a radio show should be carefully crafted to galvanize progressive opinion.

But, for now, in the absence of an embrace from the Democratic party for his schemes to shape public opinion, without funding or support from Mr. Soros, or the MacArthur foundation, Mad Dog will simply hope Mr. Franken can provide some relief.

News Flash: The Supreme Court--Just Politicos in Fine Black Robes

How many years has it been that Mad Dog has claimed the Supreme Court of the United States is simply a political organism dressed up to look impartial and cleaving to the arcane body of work called "The Law?"

But, of course, Mad Dog has had to admit he is simply a humble citizen, untrained in law, unversed in history, and voicing an opinion based only on what he can find on the internet, which includes the opinions of the court for every year, on every case. 

Now, however, we have experts, professors of law, professors who "study the court" quoted in today's New York Times, saying, in those tempered academic tones, essentially just that.

Mad Dog's argument has been simple: If it is possible for someone untrained in the law  to read a single paragraph summary of any case before the court and to predict with greater than 90% accuracy how the court will divide on the case  then one must conclude the court is not being guided by different interpretations of the law,  but by the very measuring stick used to predict the outcome with such unfailing accuracy. If you can say, well, this case basically pits the interests of the rich or the powerful or the authority against the claims or interests of the underclass, the poor or the weak and Justices Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Roberts will vote for the ruling class in every case, then one must accept that  is what guides the four horsemen of this conservative apocalypse.  Let us always vote establishment.  

So, if it's a schoolboy holding up a derisive poster, thumbing his nose at the principal of his school when she tries to force students to support the "Olympic movement," or if it's the case of a rich corporation trying to claim the right of free speech as an individual, even though there may be stockholders of that corporation who disagree with that speech made in their name, or if it's a law passed by a predominantly black city (Washington, DC) to oppose the authority of the  powerful National Rifle Association and claim that the 2nd Amendment does not guarantee an individual the right to a gun but only guarantees guns to members of a well organize militia--if in any and all these cases you have only to identify who is in power and who is not, to know who this court will embrace, then law has nothing to do with it.

We really should allow each President to appoint one new justice each year of his presidency; and we should allow only the mostly recently appointed  nine to vote.  Then we'd have recognized what the court really is--just another political animal in Washington, which should be at least indirectly controlled by the electorate, to reflect the will of the people.