October 2013 Archives

Dear America,

I've noticed something interesting, if not sinister about the debacles that get hung around Democrats' necks these days.  Most present of course is the tapping of Chancellor Merkel's phone by the NSA.  President Obama is being required by the world to defend that invasion of high-profile privacy, but it didn't start with this administration.  The tapping--not just the collection of "metadata" but the tapping--of Merkel's phone started ten years ago...when George W. Bush was president, and for that matter, the whole congress was.  Yet now The President is forced to try to save the American face because George W. Bush is no longer president, and it is Obama's face that is hence being blemished.  Of course all of this FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) stuff started decades ago, but it has gradually been enhanced as a framework for American intelligence activities, and especially those of the National Security Agency, until that augmentation of potentially dangerous spy-power culminated in the "Patriot Act," which is the name under which the Republican congress foisted it on the American people.  (They are the best at demagoguery...after all, who could oppose patriotism.)  The point is that the excesses indulged in by our intelligence "community" are now coming to light and Edward Snowden is looking more and more like what he wants to be: a whistle blower.  All the while, a Democratic president is being required to justify and disavow something that Republicans did, and President Obama is taking a beating on this one.

And you may remember Solyndra, the solar innovation company that asked for a $500 million loan from the federal government under another Bush program intended to fund such technologies.  The Bush administration created the program and received...and initially reviewed...the company's loan application, but admittedly took no action because the application needed more development.  The Obama administration sought to expedite the process of approving the loan and it went through during a period in which Republicans were beating the energy drum, complaining that government regulations were preventing production of more energy in this country, and thus leading to inordinate reliance on foreign oil.  But when the loan failed and the company went under leaving the federal government with a $500 million loss and private investors with twice that in losses, the Republicans claimed that the act of expediting the loan was cronyism, and Mitt Romney along with his cronies tried to hang corruption on President Obama during his reelection campaign.

Then, there's the XL Pipeline that is supposed to bring dirty Canadian oil-sand oil down to our Gulf of Mexico for processing into gasoline, which can then be exported to other countries to the tune of the 100 million gallons a day now being exported.  It will create thousands of new jobs, the Republicans say, but it will risk pollution of a very intractable kind from leaks like all pipelines suffer from time to time.  So, the administration is opposing the plan for the most part and taking heat for it, but though it is the Republicans idea to push it through...at least until now it has been...who will take the blame the first time that one of those leaks causes people to be evacuated from their homes while their land is cleaned up.  I see a pattern in all this.

When the Patriot Act was passed, there were members of congress who expressed reservations, but they were all cowed by the name of the act if nothing else.  Yet, civil rights has always been a Democratic issue, and the time to raise them was when the Patriot Act was proposed.  You could almost feel the general popular trepidation over it, but the conservative impetus that had brought Bush and the Republicans into control of both the presidency and both houses of congress prevailed...and here we are, listening to Angela Merkel's phone calls, not to mention those of the president of Brazil and who knows how many other world leaders, and the Democrats are being forced to answer for it.  They should have stood up when it counted: at the beginning.  But even if they had, they couldn't have prevented the acts of the Republican majority; the result is the current furor that Democrats have to deal with.  In the Solyndra case, the administration yielded to pressure to diminish the effects of regulation, and the result was approval of a loan that perhaps shouldn't have been approved, and perhaps wouldn't have been if the Democrats hadn't developed a fear of being branded big-government advocates.  The fact is that regulation may impose burdens, but for the most part, there is a good reason for doing so when regulations are enacted.  That is government's job...to protect us by reigning in those who would play fast and loose.  Fear of regulation is nothing but a bugaboo for the most part, but the Democrats have failed to make that point, and that's why they got Solyndra hung around their collective neck.

Now, there's the pending XL pipeline, and the Democrats have the chance to review their tendency to yield when Republicans point their gnarly fingers accusingly.  Of course, if the pipeline isn't approved there will never be any evidence that is was the wrong thing, but our mid-west will be a whole lot cleaner for it.  On the other hand, if it is approved, those fingers will point at the Democrats...at the Democratic president in charge at the time...and they will have to answer for the pollution instead of for preventing the pipeline in the first place.  Maybe it's time the Democrats stopped playing Republican politics and tried just doing the right thing as they see it.  It seems to have worked with regard to shutting down the government.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Most of the Tea Party members, those in congress in particular, are wild eyed reactionaries, and while they are a menace, it is easy to recognize them, and thus easy to see them coming when they have a new tactic on their collective mind.  Ted Cruz is a bombastic Texan with an obvious kind of self-serving patter.  You know what he is going to say before he says it, and the only thing that ever changes about his speeches is the specific order of the words and phrases he uses.  He has his legion, but because he is so obvious, the fact that he is out of touch with the majority of the American electorate insulates us all from the harm he might otherwise do.  The same is the case for lesser acolytes of the Tea Party cause like Michelle Bachman.  She is nothing but a sloganeer and a mindless shill for what she thinks is Americanism, and like Cruz, she is preaching to a choir comprising only a minority of American voters.  Everyone rational in this country is turned off by such politicians, and that renders them only minimally threatening to those of us who believe that progressivism is the proper course.  For the most part--almost entirely in fact--the Tea Party movement is made up of that political type: hyperbolic, demagogical, and overtly intellectually dishonest.  But there is one exception of note to that stereotype in a position of prominence in the Tea Party movement, and that is Raul Labrador.  If your grown daughter brought him home for dinner, you might well say to her afterward that he was a nice guy and worthy of becoming your son-in-law.  He seems calm, level headed, fair minded and temperate.  But in Labrador's case, it's all a ruse.

Now that the government shut down is over, conservatives are up to their usual tricks, finding fault with the Obama administration and the Democrats wherever they can contrive it, and frankly, sometimes it doesn't take much effort to find those faults.  The health care exchanges aren't working so well here at the start of the operation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and frankly, it is my least favorite health care alternative too...except for the free-market "system" we have had until now.  It has flaws and inequities built into it, but at least it does something about the nearly fifty million Americans who have not been able to afford health care in the past.  The Affordable Care Act makes health care...well...affordable for tens of millions for whom it wasn't affordable before The Act was passed.  In other words, it's better than the nothing that conservatives are offering.  But Labrador thinks that abolition of the ACA--Obamacare as he and his ilk pejoratively call it--is a moral crusade, and his benign manner can almost make one forget his monomania on the subject.  Raul Labrador is the stealth wacko in the Tea Party, and that makes him dangerous.  To be specific, I recently heard him say, with uncharacteristic vituperation in his words, that he wasn't willing to negotiate with The President after what he did during the government shut down because Mr. Obama was trying to destroy the Republican Party.  His claim was that President Obama didn't deal with the disloyal opposition fairly.  But if you examine the past month during which this crisis was manufactured and prolonged by the Tea Party minority within the Republican Party, it will be obvious that President Obama did nothing at all.  He simply said that he wouldn't do anything as long as the conservatives kept the government closed and threatened not to increase the debt ceiling when it became necessary.  He said he would talk to them about anything, but not while the country's financial well-being was being held hostage.

On the other hand, during that time Labrador appeared more than once on Sunday mornings to state his position.  On Meet the Press, for example, he said that a compromise that he would accept in lieu of defunding Obamacare, which was the original conservatives' quid pro quo for reopening the government, was delaying its implementation for one year.  But then he was confronted, and he admitted his intentions, specifically to use that year to work toward repeal of the law: not toward reforming it but toward repealing it.  So, Labrador's idea of a compromise was for his collaborators to be given another year to work against the reform of health care in America that took a century to accomplish even in its current, deficient iteration.  He thought a compromise would be for him and his fellow recalcitrants to get the first installment of what they wanted, but that isn't compromise; it's capitulation and President Obama had made it clear that there was no possibility that he would consider any facilitation of an attempt to repeal or nullify a law that had been passed by a majority in congress, endorsed with an electoral mandate and validated by the Supreme Court.  Now, since Labrador didn't get what he wanted, he is characterizing that denial as unfair, and he is vitriolic about it.  It seems not to matter to him that the majority of his party had reservations about what he wanted and how he was willing to get it, nor is he deterred in his indignation by the fact that even the public among whom he had some sympathizers at the outset had repudiated his Tea Party's strategy roundly.  He has gone from the seeming voice of reason to a foot stomping, petulant adolescent berating his father because he won't give him the car keys as long as he insists on driving too fast and drinking while he does it.  And all the while, Labrador keeps his tone level and projects a kind of rationality, even though it is only a façade.  That's what makes him dangerous.  He looks like a normal guy...but he is actually one of them.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The world...at least the financial world...is breathing a collective sigh of relief now that a deal has been struck between the hard right and the rest of us on the subject of government operation and service of its debt, but how long will it last.  This seems to me to be just one more chapter in a never ending saga of political manipulation and disingenuousness.  After all, the real purpose of the Republicans' most recent tactic was pursuit of an overall strategy intended to reverse eighty years of socio-political progress toward an egalitarian society.  The progressives want a country in which everyone has a modicum of comfort and the conservatives want a society in which they can have everything and let those less fortunate swing.  That is their goal, and they will persist in pursuing it until the end of American history, and then they will find another country on which to inflict their creed.  The reason for their persistence and ardor is bifurcated.  On the one hand, they want everything for themselves, but that begs the question, what are you going to do with everything when you get it.  The holy grail of conservatism seems to be having so much that you cannot possibly use it all, but why.  The answer is the other half of their motivation: to prevent anyone else from having anything.  I know that sounds like a petulant, jejune oversimplification...more like a child's jibe than a worldview, but it seems apt to me.  It is predation for predation's sake that motivates conservatives, and now there is proof.

This whole fixation on "Obamacare" demonstrates both principles that drive conservatism.  The Affordable Care Act is just the pragmatic version of what the people of this country--and most of the rest of the developed world really--want for themselves.  In fact, even in the most recent period of conservative political hegemony, the period during which George W. Bush was elected to The Presidency twice and at least for the first part of those two terms the two branches of congress were Republican too, more than 60% of the American people wanted a single payer health care system.  Yet, during that period of Republican political dominance, nothing was done to advance the decades old crusade among liberals for universal health care.  The fact is that the Republicans...conservatives in particular...didn't want it, but they were savvy enough to come to the American people with enough other specious ideas to prevail.  They claimed to hold certain things sacred, and Americans bought American Exceptionalism, the Evangelical Right, moral absolutism and the like, never questioning how so much sketchy behavior in congress could be the product of people holding those values, and never asking why protecting the health of all of the American people was a bad idea.  And then came 2006 and the Democratic congresses that followed, culminating in 2010 with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which the Republicans quickly dubbed Obamacare as if it were "Seward's Folly," now better known as Alaska, you know, where ten percent of our domestic oil production still comes from.  And in a deliberate, concerted way they defamed the law that was the only pragmatic option for an administration that really wanted that single payer system that the American people had been wanting...at least since 1992 with the election of Bill Clinton.  In fact it was then that the idea for Obamacare was hatched...by Republicans trying to prevent Clinton's commission on the subject from overseeing the creation of a single payer system in the United States.  With canards and exaggerations like "death panels" they defamed their very own idea when it became the Obamacare alternative to what everyone really wanted because they really don't want anything in the way of universal healthcare.  How else can you explain the history of the idea.  But what is their motivation.

It's money.  They want to preserve the money machine that is the pharmaceuticals industry, the medical profession, and ironically, the drinking at the federal, tax-payer funded trough by both.  Medicare puts enormous amounts of money--hundreds of billions of dollars both directly and indirectly--into their pockets and those of the insurance industry, which wins either way.  A government regulated system puts a damper on that cash flow, and that is the real objection to Obamacare, and to the greater concept of a single payer system of healthcare.  If it's public it's controlled, and that's not where the money is.  So in the final analysis, it all comes down to a simple question for the self-proclaimed moralists of the conservative movement: WWJD as they say.  What would Jesus do?

First, let me concede that I have only a secular idea.  To me, Jesus is not a religious, but a historical figure, which doesn't diminish his role in my life, by the way.  Christ is as much an example to me as He is to anyone who worships him mindlessly.  The Judeo-Christian ideal is a positive thing, and even for those of us who are agnostic...or even atheistic...the pull of that ideal as a social normative is powerful and unquestionably noble.  So, while I am not among the faithful, I am a christian none the less, and in my estimation I am the better for it.  But what about the Koch brothers?  Are they christians, or are they just Christians?  I think the answer is in their quest to abolish what conservatives pejoratively call "Obamacare."  In my opinion, the issue of universal health care in whatever form is the watershed for morality in this country, and in that respect, I'm glad that I'm not a conservative Republican.  If they're right and there is this sentient being in heaven overseeing all we do, they are going to have to answer to him one day...all of them.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Now that the most recent manufactured government crisis has come to an end, it is time for some post-mortem observations.  The first is one that has been made many times in all kinds of circumstances: no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.  Somehow, even John Boehner has come out of his unseemly failed attempt to coerce a conservative turn out of our political system relatively unscathed.  Polls show that he hasn't gained anything, but he isn't the object of abject national scorn either.  It seemed while he was jumping from horse to horse in mid stream that he could not help but lose the support of the Tea Party constituency within his party caucus, and the moderates could not have been pleased with the damage being done to them in the name of Boehner's courtship of the right-most fringe among the Republicans.  Yet, his admission that he and his collaborators fought what he characterized as "a good fight" but they didn't win--thus rendering this entire exercise nothing more than a power grab by a national minority gone wrong in which Boehner lent his power of office to the ill-conceived, disingenuous effort--seems to be a victory of sorts snatched from what seemed nothing better than a shabby political game all the way through.  That admission, given with a sort of wink and a smirk that acknowledged its petty inspiration, was not the confession of failure that it seemed.  Rather, it was Boehner slapping the American people on the back saying, "thats was a good one, wasn't it?"  It should have been a mea culpa, but instead it was the leader of the conservative ploy claiming that he was only kidding all along, which served him well in that if he had allowed everyone to believe that he really believed that using the shutdown of the government and the threat of allowing the treasury to breach the debt ceiling and default could work, he would have demonstrated himself to be an idiot rather than a cynic.  Cynicism is the conservative way, but they really don't like being called idiots.

So, Boehner comes out of all this smelling...well, not like a rose, but not like the other thing either.  And Mitch McConnell looks like the sage voice of reason, the grayer head that prevailed, and just in time to reclaim his seat in The Senate in 2014; Boehner's folly has been a godsend for Mitch McConnell.  Meanwhile, Ted Cruz, who was the school yard bully responsible for egging on the conservatives in the Tea Party for so long that they managed to do damage to our economy with their doomed-from-the-start effort, is more popular than ever with the Tea Party, and the Tea Party controls politics in his home state of Texas where politicians like Cruz and Louie Gohmert--who says such stupid things that I can't believe that even he believes them--hail from, and are in fact the paradigm for success in Texas politics.  We should have let them secede when we had the chance.  Concomitantly, President Obama comes out of all this looking less avuncular than didactic, and his public standing, quite to the contrary of being enhanced by his loyalty to his principles with just the right touch of flexibility at the end, seems to have been diminished in spite of his leadership of the successful effort to drive the minority barbarians from the gates of democracy by majority rule.  Whether it's just the form of the questions asked in the polls or the true sentiment of those polled, this outcome feels very Wonderland-ish.  I made wry reference to the Red Queen once before over the past two or three weeks, but I feel her actual presence now.  There are mad hatters running roughshod over our democracy, and it looks in the end like they will be permitted to continue to do so.  With so few congressional seats being really competitive--you have to remember that Gohmert has been elected to his seat in congress four times--what hope do we have that a rational government will emerge from our next electoral season, and frankly, I'm staying out of Texas.  Between Governor Rick Perry and these other two, anything could happen down there, and I don't want to be there when it does.

In the final analysis, I don't think that the Republicans won anything with this most recent bout of petulance, but I don't think that they lost as much as they should have.  The next round of the game will be played in January and February when the current continuing resolution to fund daily government operations expires and the debt ceiling will next be breached respectively.  My thinking over the past few weeks has been that this time, the Republicans should learn a lesson from this misadventure as the American electorate is going to chasten them once and for all, but they timed it just right.  The voters will have forgotten the small scale misery that conservatives wreaked upon them just a few months earlier come January, and they can pull this again with a relatively fresh start ten months before the next mid-term election.  That's more than enough time to outlast the American electoral attention span.  But we'll see.  Like Boehner, all we liberals can do is fight the good fight and hope for the best.  The problem is that if we don't win, we get what conservatives deserve, and that won't do anybody any good.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Last week, John Boehner made a putative "good faith offer" to President Obama; the Republicans will pass a six week extension of the debt ceiling--not a clean continuing resolution (CR) though--if The President will sit down with Republicans to discuss the issues they want to discuss...it was just that vague, this good faith offer.  President Obama apparently told them that he had to see what they passed before he would agree, and the Republicans went silently back to their cars to go back to The House to work on a bill to send him.  But as to that, there are two things that must be born in mind.  First, Boehner always said in his private meetings with his caucus that he will never let the country default on its debts for failure to increase the debt ceiling.  Thus, this good faith offer is just Boehner saying out loud what he has already whispered to his cohorts in the past.  He knows that neither he nor his party can run the risk of causing the catastrophe predicted if default occurs because the debt ceiling is not raised, and so the reality is that he is offering nothing to President Obama and the Democrats that he wasn't intending to give anyway.  So much for good faith.

But second, despite Boehner's ostensible abandonment of defunding Obamacare as a raison d'être, most of those who have manned the Tea Party and ultra-conservative guns over the past several weeks have done no such thing.  To put it concisely, it will be something of a miracle if Boehner can produce a "clean" debt ceiling extension in the House of Representatives, and that failure will be just one more shovel full out of the hole he and his political kith have already dug for themselves, but there's more.  It is common knowledge that he could have called any of the four "clean CR's" passed in The Senate to the floor for a vote, and it would have passed, such is the consternation among the members of the Republican Party generally about the harm to the cause of Republicanism that is being done with voters.  But what came out yesterday was that it didn't have to be Boehner who called the Senate-passed CR's for a vote.  At the eleventh hour...literally...before funding for government operations ran out, the Republicans called a late night session of The House and passed a rules change that made it possible for Eric Cantor, Boehner's second in command within his party, to call the Senate CR bills to the floor for a vote...and it also prevented anyone but Cantor or his designee from doing so.  Before this special change, the rule stated that when there was an impasse on funding, anyone could call a CR for a vote, but when the acting speaker presiding over the chamber at the time was confronted with this rule change yesterday, he admitted that the reason was that the Republicans wanted to go to the conference committee that The Senate had been asking for since the first Senate CR was passed months ago.  But the real reason was that if a conference were pending, they couldn't be blamed for intransigency...as if no one would notice that it was only their obduracy that was preventing the funding of the government, regardless of what form it took.

But a week has passed and there has been a collegiality redux in The Senate, specifically between Mitch McConnell, the redoubtable conservative troll and Harry Reid, the Democratic troll with the dresser right next to McConnell's under the bridge.  As the two vie for the title of Mr. Nice Guy in this situation, it begins to seem more and more like McConnell is the good cop and Boehner the bad.  The Senate has already passed what the Democrats want, with Republican acquiescence, so there really isn't anything to be gained for the Democrats in these high level negotiations.  Boehner has always said he would capitulate on the issue of raising the debt level, and that is what has been added to the negotiations in The Senate...discussion of a foregone conclusion.  The Senate CR was already a done deal, and now The House will at best pass a short term one, which is what they want anyway so that they can try this trick again in 2014...an election year.  

So claims of good faith to the contrary, the Republicans are running the same game they have run every year since 2010, but they get a little smoother at it each time.  That's why the Democrats have to be careful.  When there's a snake in the grass, you always have to be careful where you step, or you can't let the camel put his nose in the tent, or if you give them an inch...you know what I mean.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I think often now about what American politics has become.  There used to be heroic figures...perhaps Bunyanesque would be a better adjective...who prowled the halls of congress and periodically ascended to the presidency.  They controlled their spheres of influence with a kind of personal gravitas that was more potent even than charisma.  JFK had charisma, and even his memory lingers though there is some doubt that he really achieved much in his three years in the White House.  But LBJ had gravitas.  I have read accounts of meetings he had with senators and congressmen who were resisting his initiatives, such as The Great Society program that he wanted to create.  It was a vision he had about this country that went to the substance of who we are rather than what we seem to be.  It wasn't about American Exceptionalism, which is just a euphemism for what used to be called chauvinism, and it wasn't a political conceit meant to be the manifestation of a personal legacy to which Johnson would then be able to point in the aftermath of his presidency.  It was aspirational, and not for Johnson, but for Johnson's nation, which I truly believe he loved.  He had the misfortune to be handed an unpopular war by his fallen predecessor, who in turn had received it in its nascency from his predecessor, but by the time Johnson was saddled with Vietnam, it was the historic event that made the word quagmire a matter of common parlance.  That war overshadowed his domestic accomplishments and was emblematic of Johnson's tenure as president for years after his death, but he changed the United States in the same way as Franklin D. Roosevelt did, though much of what he did was subsequently mismanaged and doomed to a demise caused by its ossification in a petty-partisan ethos that became ever more so. Even today the efforts to change what Johnson did with welfare for example are failures because no one has actually come up with a better idea for how to raise the poor out of their poverty, which was a noble goal then and is still noble.

Then of course there was FDR himself, and the legacy he left in the form of Social Security far overshadows the mistakes he made in managing the reemergence of our economy from The Depression for example, which he eventually did manage to accomplish with his persistence and fortitude.  But like Kennedy, and unlike Johnson who succeeded despite a lack of it, Roosevelt's charisma carried the day, and in the end, the opposing party had no choice but to bend to his will because he made his will the popular will by the mere force of his personality.  The cogency of Keynesian theory would not have been enough, as it hasn't been this time around, and while I voted for President Obama twice, he's no FDR...and no Lyndon Johnson either for that matter with his afternoon mini-events putting citizens in favor of Obamcare on display in the Rose Garden in lieu of excoriating speeches after dinner when everyone has his television on.  Then, there were Speakers of The House who left their marks in Washington.  They all have their offices now in a building named for Sam Rayburn, who was a legend before he was dead.  And Everett Dirkson was another, his gravelly voice often the one that carried the weight necessary to get things done.  Then there was Tip O'Neil, who gets mentioned often in the context of Boehner's government shutdown as if it is the same thing as when Tip did it.  He was a Boston pol first, but an arch master of politics because of it in a time when first a Southern Baptist milquetoast, Jimmy Carter, allowed the country to persist in a decline because he was abstemious and lusted only in his heart, and then when an arch demagogue, Ronald Reagan, succeeded Carter and had the ear of the American People...at least in the beginning of his administration.  Whether he was right or wrong, presidents listened when O'Neill spoke.  And Bill Clinton could have been one of those Bunyans of American politics too if he hadn't been so concupiscent and misguided in some of his policies, such as liberating the financial industry from the only safeguard against the avarice and predation that is at its core by signing the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.  And his acquiescence in the dismantling of some of Johnson's Great Society mechanism in the form of what goes by the name of "welfare reform" was nothing but a license for those who never cared about the poor to make it still harder for them during already hard times.  We have had these struggles over extending federal unemployment benefits for example only because welfare is no longer available to carry people through protracted periods like this one in which there just are not jobs to get...at least none worth getting.

No, the good old days are gone, and what we have today is Ted Cruz and John Boehner in lieu of people whose political footfalls shook the nation.  They are two men whose only goals are self-aggrandizement and political ascent whether they deserve it or not rather than service to the cause of further perfecting American society.  Cruz is just a clever fool who I think genuinely doesn't know it when he is lying.  But Boehner is craven and greedy for the limelight, and he knows what he is doing unlike Cruz who is basically a neophyte when it comes to national politics.  While Cruz may not know what he does, but Boehner knows full well.  The awful part of it is that both of them are what passes for great men today, and no one seems to be disturbed by that.  Both will be reelected, and Boehner may even get another term as Speaker of The House, though I doubt it.  Even the Republicans must know that they can do better.  And what's worst about all this is that we American voters have allowed this to be our fate.  It is disheartening because the decline in the quality of American politicians has resulted in an elevation of political maneuvering to the status of good governance, taking primacy over the political virtues we used to extol as a people.  The filibusterer gets the congratulations of his party and the denial of the right to vote yea or nay on legislation by parliamentary manipulation is exalted as astute politicking.  Form has taken over substance, and it is going to be terribly difficult to overcome that kind of moral and ethical decay because majority rule no longer seems to mean anything.  If we ever had a democracy, we don't have one anymore.  Mind you, none of those great men who are now so sorely missed was always right.  O'Neill did shut down the government more than once during the Carter administration for example over the issue of abortion, a subject on which he was ambivalent, but in the end as conservative as John Boehner is about Obamacare and the national debt.  Johnson escalated our commitment to the Vietnam War, all in a futile effort to save what turned out to be a disappointing indigenous political establishment in that country, and Clinton's contretemps are the Washington equivalents of Hollywood legends.  They made big mistakes because they tried to do big things.  Boehner's mistakes are petty, and what that says about him is just as unmistakable.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I watched President Obama speak to the employees of FEMA yesterday during one of those press events he seems to prefer over speeches to the American people at night when everyone is home.  During his informal remarks, The President said, among other things, that he was willing to talk to the Republicans about anything, but that he wouldn't do so under the duress of a government shut-down for failure to pass a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government's operations, or the threat of default on the debt of the United States posed by refusal to raise the debt ceiling either...a fair description of the next manufactured crisis threatened under veil by the Republicans.  Wolf Blitzer of CNN was reporting on Mr. Obama's remarks and in the gratuitous and perfunctory analysis that ineluctably ensued, he asked one of his "political experts" whether The President had evinced new flexibility on the issue of negotiations with his opposition when he said he would discuss anything.  The question puzzled me because I myself have seen footage of The President saying exactly that...that he would discuss anything, but not with a figurative gun to his head...on more than one occasion, often in fact.  So the offer to discuss budget and spending issues was anything but new, and the refusal to do so under duress wasn't new either.  It made me suspect that Blitzer is a closet conservative...or even a Tea Party sympathizer...and that suspicion was augmented when Wolf subsequently commented that President Obama should sit down with Speaker Boehner and "talk and talk."  It was a very Tea Party kind of comment...refusing to acknowledge that such conversations hadn't yielded anything in the past when Boehner has pulled these tactics out of his bag, because compromise isn't what he is after.

In fact, it all sounded like the comments of one Texas congresswoman (you know Texas...the state that Ted Cruz is from) during an interview with CNBC's Chuck Todd a day or two earlier.  She insisted that The Senate had passed a budget but refused to negotiate with The House, and Todd asked her how she could say that when it was The House Republicans who refused to appoint a conference delegation to negotiate with The Senate's conference delegation.  That's the way the two houses of our legislature iron out their differences; they send conflicting bills on the same subject to "conference" for reconciliation.  Todd is a Washington reporter, and a veteran at that.  He knows the history of these events, and for that matter, anyone who pays attention to national politics knows that he is correct about the course of events on the budgets that were passed by the two houses.  In fact, House Republicans seemed to know that they had set a petard by which they were about to be hoist when around midnight just before the government shutdown they named a committee to participate in the reconciliation conference...a bit too late to save their claim of sincerity, I would say.  But when she responded to Todd's observation, she simply said that it wasn't so...the Senate refused to negotiate because their budget included things that she and her party didn't like, though even Time Magazine said that the Republicans had sabotaged (their word, not mine) the budget process. At that point Todd politely terminated the interview with an expression on his face suggesting what I think is the obvious.  The Tea Party can claim to be all-American, but in reality it isn't the American Tea Party.  It is the Mad Hatter's, and I think that even Speaker Boehner has come to that conclusion now.

Within the past day or two, Boehner was interviewed by Dan Harris of ABC News, and The Speaker said that his party was no longer insisting on defunding Obamacare--a rider attached to each of the four CR's previously submitted to, and rejected by, The Senate, including gray headed Republicans.  Now, their demand for passing a CR was just that the Democrats make concessions--he used the word negotiate--over the same issues that have been being discussed for the past six years...over the past thirty for that matter: how much debt is too much, and what are our moral obligations as a nation.  Specifically, he conditioned a CR on entitlement reform and deficit reduction further than what has been mandated by the "sequester," another Republican gift to the nation in the context of refusing to increase the debt ceiling.  (That issue arises in about a week now, incidentally.)  I can almost hear the Red Queen yelling, "Off with their heads!"  Perhaps what is most surprising about all this is that John Boehner didn't call Newt Gingrich when his strategy for keeping his speakership began to crumble...or even earlier when those same gray heads that had sent clean CR's to The House, and even the gray heads in The House, all of whom have been through this before in 1995, 1996 and 2012, kept telling him that it was a really bad idea.  Newt would probably have told Boehner from his current house in the political tulles that you can call blackmail what you want, but everyone knows it when he sees it...including the American people.  But Boehner apparently preferred to wait until his advisors apparently pointed out that his and the Party's figurative nose had grown so long that everyone could see it.  That's why in the last day or two, he finally chose a prudent course and said that sane negotiations were alright with him, though he still isn't going to allow a vote regarding a "clean CR."  The question is, is it too late for him.  It reminds me of the old Bob Dylan lyric.  "When will they ever learn...when will they ever learn."

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I don't understand why John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, is being characterized as nothing worse than the victim of the recalcitrant members of his own party in this matter of the government shutdown caused by the refusal of The House to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running at current funding levels.  Boehner's House has sent four continuing resolutions to The Senate for approval, but all of them have included provisions for "defunding Obamacare"--the ultimate poison pill in political terms--the members of The House knowing full well that President Obama and the Democrats will never agree to doing so.  Just for the sake of clarity, these efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare, are effectively attempts at overriding the vote of the full congress and the signature of The president on the law, as well as reversing the affirmation of the constitutionality of the ACA by the Supreme Court.  But more importantly, they are attempts to do so with only a minority of the votes in only one house of our bicameral legislature against the express will of the majority of the other house--The Senate--and The President, as well as more than half the American voting public, which is unwilling to insist on defunding the law if it means shutting down the government.  And who is making all this possible?  Not the Tea Party as commonly claimed.  It's John Boehner.

By reports coming from several sources, and statements of at least one individual Republican Representative in The House that I have heard first hand, there are enough Republicans in The House in favor of what is called a "clean continuing resolution" to pass one by voting in concert with the Democratic minority if Speaker Boehner would allow a vote on any of the four continuing resolutions sent to The House by The Senate.  But Boehner, while insisting that the Democrats are at fault for shutting down the government because they refuse to negotiate, refuses to let his Republican caucus end the shutdown by voting, even though the projections are that such a resolution would pass by a huge majority in The House.  That's how many Republicans want to get out from under the cloud of obstructionism that Boehner's strategy represents.  And the reason for Boehner's intransigence is the recalcitrance of about thirty members of his party who proudly wear the mantle of the Tea Party.  But the way in which those Tea Party members control The Speaker is that at any time, a member of The House can ask for what is essentially a vote of no confidence in The Speaker and a new election within The House must then take place.  And if Boehner wants to retain his speakership, he has to have more than half of those Tea Party members in order to get the votes of a majority of the 435 House members; he would not likely get the half of those Tea Partyers if he allowed them to be defeated in their reactionary quest to eliminate the ACA...Obamacare to them in particular.  Hence, Boehner is enabling about 30 zealots, whose goals have already been repudiated by both the electorate and the rest of the government, to shut down the entire system, just so that he can remain speaker.  In other words, our government is shut down because the Speaker of the House is politically ambitious and values his own office above the fate of the nation that he swore to serve when he was elected to The House in the first place.  It is one man's political ambition that is the obstacle to sanity in the governance of our country, and I believe that people are beginning to realize that.

It has been the case that members of congress, Republicans in particular, have been excusing Boehner for--or at least explaining away--his inability to get a clean continuing resolution out of The House by blaming that disloyal fifth column within his party, but the Tea Party are a small minority of the votes Boehner needs to serve the nation's interests best.  By allowing the vote to reopen the government however, Boehner might lose his leadership role.  He might be broadly extolled for his self-sacrifice, but that doesn't seem to matter much to him.  On the other hand, by refusing to let democracy take its course, so to speak, he is demonstrating a craven self-interest, and everyone knows it, and that doesn't seem to matter to him either.  Contrary to what seem to be his proclivities, I believe that if Boehner wants to preserve his reputation as a politician...assuming that he has one worth saving...his only option is to give up his speakership in the hope that enough people will respect him for it to give the Speakership back to him.  But he seems to be single-minded about holding on with both hands in what I think is a futile attempt to retain what he only barely managed to hold onto after the 2012 elections.  And while it is true that an act of selflessness on his part might result in a historic first--a minority party speaker--that might be a better way to go down in history than the path that he is on now.  It's simple.  Boehner can be recorded in the annals of the House of Representatives as a man with political courage and integrity in his regard for democratic process, or as a political poltroon whose selfish pride did great harm to the nation that he professes to love.  Some of the articles you will read in the next day or two, and more and more of what will be written before this crisis is over, will make all these points, and at some juncture, Boehner is bound to read some of them and understand the cogency of those points they are trying to make, but he still mightn't do the right thing.  In my opinion, he isn't much of a Speaker.  This is a nation of laws, not men, but even if it weren't so, Boehner doesn't seem to be much of a man either.

Your friend,

Mike.

Dear America,

Today is the first day of Breast Cancer Awareness month.  On the early morning shows there are women singing sad songs and reports on prevention and survival, mammograms and Angelina Jolie, but I'm not seeing much about politics or the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the role it will play in making both prevention and treatment available to tens of millions more women...women who would otherwise die earlier and more alone if The ACA hadn't been passed.  It's political awareness that both women and men need, not more ardent commiseration over the tragic consequences of cancer for all of us, and the biases of the electorate as a whole are largely the reason that you see more bemoaning of breast cancer's toll on women than discussion in layman's terms of the ACA, "Obamacare" as it is better known.

In a recent CNBC poll, Americans oppose defunding Obamacare by a plurality of 44% to 38%, the rest of the sample being undecided, and the opposition to defunding grows to 59% when you throw in a government shutdown as the means of achieving that Tea Party cause célèbre.  In another CNBC poll, 46% of Americans were found to oppose "Obamacare."  Fortunately, only 37% oppose the Affordable Care Act.  At the same time, 30% didn't even know what the ACA was while only 12% didn't know what Obamacare was.  Apparently Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein were wrong.  There really is something in a name.  That Americans would allow the cancer carnage we now suffer out of political inclination is even worse than their willingness to do so out of ignorance, but neither is a commendation of the quality of American democracy.  Maybe Hamilton was right and we do need a body like The Senate to protect us from mob sentiment.  In fact, that seems to be a parallel phenomenon in this case.  The Senate has twice sent to the House of Representatives a "continuing resolution," that is a bill to refund government at current levels for a period of time, and twice The House has sent it back to The Senate with a rider on it defunding all or part of the ACA.  The plurality of Americans don't want defunding and want it even less if it comes at the cost of shutting down the government, which failure to pass a continuing resolution will cause, but the Tea Party inspired Republican majority in The House doesn't care, though they insist that the majority of Americans are on their side.  That is the voice of The Mob, and only The Senate stands between the plurality of us and them.

What I'm saying, as I often do, is that we should all remember this come the next elections in 2014.  The conservative Republican minority in this country, especially the reactionary fringe of it that calls itself The Tea Party, doesn't really have democracy in mind.  They want what they want, and they are willing to impose it on the rest of us on the premise that they know better than the majority does, and certainly better than the plurality does.  But the alternative to the ACA is nothing because they propose nothing to replace it upon defunding it, and that is because they are more concerned with the "role of government" in our lives than they are about how many of us survive disease.  They are willing to put a budgetary price on healthcare...not the military, but healthcare...and thus ration it so that only those above the first or second rung on our economic ladder can afford it; it is the ultimate form of social Darwinism...let the least of us die.  Remember that when you vote.

Your friend,

Mike