Buying Bad Ideas

There are a lot of expressions for bad ideas, like shooting one’s self in the foot. A bad idea is simply one that does not work. The problem is that from time to time, both as ourselves and as a people, we do not recognize a bad idea when we encounter it. The danger comes when for whatever reason -- ignorance, stubbornness or hubris – we stick with a bad idea to our detriment. Unfortunately, bad ideas tend to compound themselves. We have been suffering from that effect.

Consider the candidacy of the former governor of Alaska for Vice President. At the outset it is with some reluctance that I acknowledge a grudging gratitude to Sarah Palin. Until she appeared on television as if a human bridge to nowhere, nothing compelled me to engage in a political debate that I considered both cyclical and one-sided. The cyclical part was the fact that the country was due to change political leadership after an eight year Republican run, which is something that the country does. The one-sided part was the fact that the Democratic Party had emerged from a climactic contest between two compelling and competent Senate candidates, one of whom destined to become a historic first as President of the United States.

An oblivious Palin seemed to take herself seriously, saying stupid things and celebrating such stupidity. It offended me. I minded and began saying so. I minded that Palin did not speak any American language I would expect to hear from a competent executive. It was not alright, folksy or cute. But I underestimated the “moose-hunting rube,” as columnist Charles Krauthammer referred to her in the National Review.

Palin reminded me of one of the most vapid students in my high school graduating class who was the vice president of student body and vice president of at least a half-a-dozen high school clubs. The girl had a mid-double-digit IQ and passable looks. She would have been rather doltish except that she knew how to glom. She would stick to and campaign for the more popular students, thereby elevating her status in the high school social pool. She was a person who was never troubled by an original thought, just like Sarah Palin. The difference is that the high school girl understood the limitations that make bliss of ignorance. Palin did not.

Palin wowed conservatives like the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol and Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, who told the New York Observer that Palin was “a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc.” Soon after, Palin brought self-aggrandizement to a new level as she energized the baseness of the Republican base – people who use racial epithets in private when they explain that they just don’t like blacks. She appealed to people of limited educational backgrounds as she championed anti-intellectualism with a wink and a nod. She became a darling of Fox News, the moral equivalent of a grocery store tabloid for people who do not read and who feel threatened by people who do.

People at Republican rallies began to shell out big bucks to hear her cheerlead and Palin noticed.

The Republican Party’s self-inflicted loss in 2008 is due as much to its selection of Sarah Palin for Vice President as the country’s guts being full of the Bush Presidency. A 2008 New York Times editorial said of her choice for VP, “It was either an act of incredible cynicism or appallingly bad judgment.” It was a bad idea. But having proved to be such a draw, the crowd pleasing Palin glommed on to the burgeoning Tea Party – another bad idea – and became an influential force.

With Palin on the payroll, Fox News aggressively promoted negativity and hostility, specifically towards the newly elected president. The Tea Party appeared to resuscitate the out-of-power GOP in the mid-term elections. Republicans believed it was important to take control of congress’ lower chamber more so than Democrats and they did, kind of. Reciting an edited version of the US Constitution, the GOP majority of the 112^th Congress had no idea that it had been infected by such a polarizing group. Its anti-government/anti-tax/anti-Obama negativity proved to sell to an electorate suffering from a deep, GOP induced repression.

However, the new Speaker of the House soon discovered that he only controlled a majority of the new Republican plurality. The Tea Party faction held it hostage. Compromise was futile. Government shutdowns and default threats became normal operating procedures.

As a result this bad idea, Gallup reported in September, “Majorities of Democrats (65%) and Republicans (92%) are dissatisfied with the nation's governance.” At present, “Congressional job approval remains at 13% in November, identical to October and tying the all-time Gallup low on this measure. The 2011 average is on track to be the lowest annual rating of Congress in Gallup's history.” What an accomplishment that is.

We are being bullied by the rhetoric of Tea Party acolytes in the Republican Party into thinking that the United States is not a prosperous country, despite evidence to the contrary. We are being coerced into thinking that taxation is too high, even though it is at its lowest point in 60 years. We are being fed a line that our economic policy needs to be austere and rife with cuts. Such contentious conjectures are bad ideas.

There are better ones. For example, here is what President Lyndon Johnson said in his January 28, 1965 message to Congress.

"The task of economic policy is to create a prosperous America. The unfinished task of prosperous Americans is to build a Great Society. Our accomplishments have been many; these tasks remain unfinished:

- to achieve full employment without inflation;

- to restore external equilibrium and defend the dollar;

- to enhance the efficiency and flexibility of our private and public economies;

- to widen the benefits of prosperity;

- to improve the quality of American life."

Palin and her gibberish have been replaced by other people every bit as unqualified for high public office as she who similarly say stupid things. Negativity and attack ads directed at the incumbent president remains the top Republican theme. Fox News is a beneficiary of the advertising revenue but the country is not. I am not convinced that the electorate will buy into more such negativity as a winning proposition as it did in 2010. It isn’t a winner. In its celebrated ignorance, it asks us to buy some more of a bad idea.

Originally published as Buying Bad Ideas on Blogcritics.

Enough Already

There are a couple of things being popularized about which I must say, “Enough is enough, already.” First is the “center-right nation” assertion that the conservative pundits proclaim the United States of America is, although they mostly condense the country to “America.” Come to think of it, that’s about as ignorant as Sarah Palin’s confusion that Africa is a country. But, I’ll get to that. The second “enough is enough” is the commentary about the color of the president-elects skin by United States citizens in the press.

My stove pipe black Lincoln top hat is tipped to my hero Charles Krauthammer who is good at making word coins. The first time I read the word coin “center-right” was in his second endorsement of John McCain in the Post (10/31) “McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him.” May I suggest that as good as the concept is, the country (not the continent) proved to be “center-left” and just in time.

Let me tell you anecdote to explain why “enough is enough” on the president-elects’ “suntanned” ethnicity, as Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi recently quipped.

“Mac, put on your class A’s and get over to the post chapel to raise the PAO flag,” barked my boss at the Army Public Affairs Office. The occasion was the first celebration of the newly minted “Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day” at the Hunter Army Airfield, in Savannah, GA. Standing beside me, the other white person in the standing room only throng, my Commanding General, John Galvin, asked me what I thought about the holiday.

“Sir,” I said, “it’s a great day for the country for two reasons. First, it celebrates the life of a great American citizen and patriot. Second, it pisses off the bigots.” The General laughed in agreement. I feel the same about the election results. It is just that I am becoming weary of the abundance of commentary on the issue of ethnicity which we should now overcome.

The “quintessential center-right country” was the last safe haven for bigotry of any ethnicity, as opposed to color. Our presidential election overwhelmingly repudiated that bigotry and, in so doing, moved the country quintessentially center-left. I am proud to be a part of that move. Call me "Center Lefty."

Hail to the New Chief

In the Roosevelt Room of the White House, the horseback heroic Teddy Roosevelt portrait has been hanging over the fireplace since January 2001. As Michael Gerson wrote in his 11/05 Washington Post column, in January 2009, the portrait of “Franklin Roosevelt will be moved back to that place of honor.” The good news for WaPo’s Gerson and Krauthammer and NY Times William Kristol is that they no longer have to defend an incompetent Republican administration. Instead they can indulge in sniping at a competent Democratic administration.

Actually, Gerson’s sniping has already begun. “And as the result of a financial panic that unfairly undermined all Republicans, Obama has stumbled into the most dangerous kind of victory,” he wrote. “Unfairly” and “stumbled” indeed. What part of the United States becoming “the first majority-white democracy on this planet to anoint a black person as a national leader,” as noted by the NYU educator Jonathan Zimmerman did Michael miss? In his op-ed piece A Victory for America, and the World, Zimmerman wrote, “Consider that the United States did not abolish slavery until 1865. The British Empire beat us by a half-century, outlawing the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1834.”

The conservative pundits have their work cut out for them. It falls on them to articulate what the Republican Party is all about and that will take some time. The country repudiated it and its base of bigotry at the polls. That should be good news. As Republican Congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona put it, “The party is finally untethered from the ill-fitting and unworkable big-government conservatism that defined the Bush Administration.”

Let me offer a clue to the Republicans as they figure out who they are. I would like to think that the election’s repudiation precludes any candidacy for Sarah Palin, who actually thinks she has a roll in the GOP on the national stage. Ignorance is not bliss, it is dangerous. One would think that an endorsement by Alaska’s felonious Senator Ted Stevens would be sufficient to disqualify her from any part of a GOP rehabilitation. Maybe it works in Alaska, but Palin’s stuff does not play in the lower 48 except to bigots.

Let me call on the Obama-Biden administration not to pardon Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney for the “deception and criminality,” Mr. Gerson dismisses as “lunatic theories.” Both W and Cheney deserve a place in history – in a penitentiary. Let us all look forward to the changing of the portraits in the Roosevelt Room.

Rubes, Parapets, Lions and Lambs

I was incorrect when I wrote that Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post was “an author of the Bush Doctrine” (Putting Descartes Before Horace). In his September 13 column he wrote “I was the first to use the term.” (June 4, 2001, Weekly Standard) He also wrote “Yes, Sarah Palin didn't know what it is,” after referring to Palin as “the moose-hunting rube.” It’s good to be quoted, even if the term “Bush Doctrine” is incorrect (I looked up doctrine). Krauthammer is correct about Palin (I looked up rube).

In addition to being a Pulitzer Prize winner and an MD, he provides commentary for Fox News and is one of the most articulate conservative writers of our time. I like to read Krauthammer’s Post column because I can philosophically disagree with his well wrought prose and agree with his observations at the same time. For example, “The vice president's only constitutional duty of any significance is to become president at a moment's notice. Palin is not ready.” (September 5)

I agree. However, if he is correct, then how can he endorse John McCain’s presidential bid, which he does not once but twice? In the first endorsement (October 24) the good doctor wrote “. . . I'll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory.” It’s a nice turn of phrase. The contradiction is that his endorsement of McCain also endorses the most inexperienced vice presidential nominee in memory.

“Today's economic crisis,” he wrote, “like every other in our history, will in time pass. But the barbarians will still be at the gates. Whom do you want on the parapet?” I can just about guarantee you the answer is not the “moose hunting rube.”

By the way his rhetorical answer to the parapet question is “I'm for the guy who can tell the lion from the lamb.” I must agree. There is little worse in this world than barbarian lions and lambs.

I can also agree that “the current economic crisis demands extraordinary measures.” In Krauthammer’s October 31 second McCain endorsement, he continued “an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will find irresistible the temptation to use the tools inherited -- $700 billion of largely uncontrolled spending -- as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake the American economy and social compact.”

Other than the omission of Joe Biden’s name, I could not agree more. I certainly hope Krauthammer is indeed correct. That is exactly what the nation needs. So does the Republican party.

Putting Descartes Before Horace

It serves a poor purpose to only read the writing of people with whom one agrees. It surprises me when I agree with such media elites (not being one of them myself, yet) as William Kristol in the NY Times or Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. They tend to stick up for the tired conservative rhetoric of the GOP especially since they have written a lot of it – Krauthammer as an author of the Bush Doctrine, for instance.

Kristol, for his part in his October 20 NY Times column, says “Conservatives’ hearts have always beaten a little faster when they read Horace’s famous line: “Odi profanum vulgus et arceo.” “I hate the ignorant crowd and I keep them at a distance.” I agree with him about the Conservatives.

He concludes “At least McCain and Palin have had the good sense to embrace” Joe the Plumber. “I join them in taking my stand with” him — “in defiance of Horace the Poet.” Never mind the fact the Joe has at least given a press conference, unlike some people in the media elite’s sights.

The problem is that Kristol and Krauthammer are the last gasps of a losing cause. That cause is being shown the door not so much for its failed policies, but for deception in the purpose of amassing power. May Liberal hearts beat when I quote Rene Descartes. “It is only prudent never to place complete confidence in that by which we have even once been deceived.”