The Politics Blog

Over at the intersection of Legacy Boulevard and Otherwise Unemployable Way, we have an interesting explanation of what a "banana republic" is. And by "interesting," I mean "utterly disconnected from historical or lexicographical reality."

A banana republic is a third-world country in which few people do much of anything productive, and most people depend on government welfare, while the government is basically a machinery for extracting economic wealth from the few who actually produce it, while the state slides deeper and faster into debt that nobody believes it can pay back, and the president does basically whatever he wants regardless of what the law or the constitution say, and generally abuses his powers for political advantage in a corrupt fashion.

This may well be parody...

(Big h/t to TNC at The Atlantic)

Holy mother of god.

Listen to the whole thing and remember that this all happened to American citizens at the instigation of their own government, and that the policies put in place that made this horror possible, while put in place by a Republican legacy bungler, have been continued by a former professor of constitutional law.

And, over the weekend, there were more revelations about the all-too-human, error-prone heroes of our intelligence community.

N.S.A. officials declined to say how many Americans have been caught up in the effort, including people involved in no wrongdoing. The documents do not describe what has resulted from the scrutiny, which links phone numbers and e-mails in a "contact chain" tied directly or indirectly to a person or organization overseas that is of foreign intelligence interest. The new disclosures add to the growing body of knowledge in recent months about the N.S.A.'s access to and use of private information concerning Americans, prompting lawmakers in Washington to call for reining in the agency and President Obama to order an examination of its surveillance policies. Almost everything about the agency's operations is hidden, and the decision to revise the limits concerning Americans was made in secret, without review by the nation's intelligence court or any public debate.

But, of course, all of this is OK because we all knew it was going on anyway, right? And because Glenn Greenwald is a dick.

In 2008, it seemed to me, that the biggest problem with Hillary Clinton's campaign for president -- at least the biggest problem that was not wearing Mark Penn's underwear -- was that it was cumbersome and entirely predictable and that, therefore, when confronted by a wild-card like the Obama campaign, the Clinton effort continually found itself, as the tennis coaches say, wrong-footed. The Clinton campaign seemed conventional in an era in which all the old conventions became instantly obsolete In addition, there was a tangible sense of entitlement that hung on the Clinton campaign until it was washed away in a tsunami of public flop sweat. Because of all of this, from the start, the Clinton campaign seemed to be playing the whole campaign not to lose. These are lessons that were learned the hard way.

Or not.

After approaching well over a hundred people, only two persons who had ever dealt with Mrs. Clinton would agree to an on-camera interview, and I suspected that even they would back out.  

This is craven, and politically tone-deaf. Hillary Clinton had a real chance to develop a populist persona here. She could have distanced herself from a couple of the worst policy mistakes of her husband's presidency, which are explained in detail by Charles Ferguson in the essay to which I have linked. I'd have invited Ferguson in, made him tea, and told him how much I loved Inside Job, his brilliant documentary on the looting of the world economy, and maybe bad-mouthed Larry Summers a little, just for the pure hell of it. I'd have sat for 10 hours on interviews, and I'd have answered any question he had. If I had to be critical of the previous President Clinton, well, that's the way it goes. What I wouldn't have done is stonewalled the project. That's Hillary '08 all over again. No risk. Make no mistakes, until you start making them all the time.

Door's open, I think.

In lieu of helping to govern the nation, Rep. Mike "Mike" Pompeo has decided to be clever.

"I'm going to try to enroll tomorrow morning, Oct. 1," Pompeo vowed. "I wish everyone [signing up for ObamaCare] good luck... "This president has already delayed big pieces of the Affordable Care Act for his friends, for big business, his cronies," Pompeo said. "All we're asking is to delay other pieces, like the individual mandate that will affect low income people in Kansas. Delay it for a year."

If anything about the prion disease currently affecting the denizens of the monkeyhouse can be said to be remotely funny, it's that we get people like Tailgunner Ted Cruz claiming to be the defenders of small business and the working man in the labor unions. Or here, with Mike "Mike" Pompeo, looking out for the "low-income people in Kansas." 

What's that you ask?

How did Mike "Mike" Pompeo vote a couple of weeks ago when the House decided we should cut $4 billion a year from the food-stamp program? There are, after all, nearly 320,000 "low-income people in Kansas" who depend on the SNAP program.

You're kidding, right?

(And, in addition, Kansas, behind good Catholic Governor Sam Brownback, didn't wait for the federal government to start knuckling hungry children.)

But Mike "Mike" Pompeo is going to make sure that the freedom of low-income Kansans is not restrained by their being able to buy health-insurance.

These are not serious people. Not one of them.

Apparently, entirely avoidable human misery be damned, the fun never stops for pundit mole people with steady jobs and good health-care.

If I may suggest...

Molly Ball of The Atlantic is a very good political reporter. (For example, she's exactly right about the pipe dream that wrecking the economy will wring the crazee out of the Republican House.) The only advantage I have is that I'm a lot older than she is, and I've seen enough to know that her piece over the weekend about the intellectual decline of the Heritage Foundation is a little thin on historical memory. To be sure, ever since Jim DeMint took over, Heritage has been less obviously about "ideas" -- and we'll get to those in a minute -- and more about raw, nihilistic wingnut politics. Ball is right about that. However, I also see in Ball's piece an example of what I believe to be an ahistorical effort at the moment to divorce the current conservative gotterdammerung from the historical continuum that made it inevitable. In short, there is absolutely nothing going on in conservative Washington right now that cannot be traced back to Reaganism, and to the forces behind its rise, of which Heritage was an important part...

In which we award today's King Canute Award to that famous pillar of Jell-O, Susan Collins of Maine, useless walking pile of abject irrelevance.

"I voted against Obamacare and have repeatedly voted to repeal, reform, and replace it, but I disagree with the strategy of linking Obamacare with the continuing functioning of government-a strategy that cannot possibly work.  Instead, I urge the President and congressional leaders to sit down immediately and negotiate at least a stopgap funding measure to avoid a disruption in many vital programs on which our citizens rely. I also call on the President to resume the budget discussions he had been having with those of us attempting to forge a long-term fiscal plan to address our unsustainable $17 trillion debt without resorting to constant brinkmanship and the threat of a government shutdown."  

Translation from the original weaselspeak: I voted against this thing so crazy people wouldn't primary me, but the crazy people are running things down here anyway, and I would still like to play the part of "moderate Republican" for a little while longer. See? I'm still talking about The Deficit! Please leave me alone.

And even besides that, can you think of a single person not named Elizabeth Warren that the monkeyhouse is less likely to listen to than Susan Collins? At least, if you're going to be a senator from Maine, which most of the people in the House believe to be a part of Communist Canada, you should bump it with a trumpet. Collins's colleague, Angus King, The Mustache Of Outrage, shows the way it's done.

"That's a scandal - those people are guilty of murder in my opinion," King told Salon on Friday. "Some of those people they persuade are going to end up dying because they don't have health insurance. For people who do that to other people in the name of some obscure political ideology is one of the grossest violations of our humanity I can think of. This absolutely drives me crazy."

I think Angus shouldn't wait on one leg for that invitation to the Third Way holiday party.

Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what John Philip Sousa would have come up with had he composed The Washington Post Sucks.

Before we get to what we can only call a Very Special Episode of our weekly feature concerning what got said on the teevee, let us pause to commend the New York Times for yesterday's Very Special Headline.

"Warren Is Now The Hot Ticket On The Far Left."

Yes, the Senior Senator, who wants to put back in place financial regulations that were in place for nearly 70 years, somehow represented the "Far Left." Miraculously, the headline was changed this morning. So, in a spasm of charity, I am willing to stipulate that the NYT was only being really dumb for eight hours at a stretch. Nice work, gang.

Now, there was a lot of fine, high-quality gobshitery on display yesterday. The line to the woodshed was particularly long. For example, Paul Krugman mentioned to Bill (Wrong) Kristol that the latter was running his gob out of "policy ignorance." And Senator Aqua Buddha got crossways with former Assyrian diplomatic correspondent Bob Schieffer and came out in what my gran' would have called the ha'penny place...