Brooks and Herbert

Mr. Cohen is off today.  Bobo is being even worse than usual.  In a revolting piece of crap called “Nation Building Works” he actually has the unmitigated gall to gurgle that though Iraq’s achievements remain fragile and incomplete, its progress must be acknowledged.  The thing is unspeakable.  Mr. Herbert, in “We Owe the Troops an Exit,” says there is no silver lining to the war in Afghanistan, and its toll — in dollars and in lives — is growing.  Here’s Bobo’s appalling piece of shit:

The U.S. venture into Iraq was a war, but it was also a nation-building exercise. America has spent $53 billion trying to reconstruct Iraq, the largest development effort since the Marshall Plan.

So how’s it working out?

On the economic front, there are signs of progress. It’s hard to know what role the scattershot American development projects have played, but this year Iraq will have the 12th-fastest-growing economy in the world, and it is expected to grow at a 7 percent annual clip for the next several years.

“Iraq has made substantial progress since 2003,” the International Monetary Fund reports. Inflation is reasonably stable. A budget surplus is expected by 2012. Unemployment, though still 15 percent, is down from stratospheric levels.

Oil production is back around prewar levels, and there are some who say Iraq may be able to rival Saudi production. That’s probably unrealistic, but Iraq will have a healthy oil economy, for better and for worse.

Living standards are also improving. According to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index, the authoritative compendium of data on this subject, 833,000 Iraqis had phones before the invasion. Now more than 1.3 million have landlines and some 20 million have cellphones. Before the invasion, 4,500 Iraqis had Internet service. Now, more than 1.7 million do.

In the most recent Gallup poll, 69 percent of Iraqis rated their personal finances positively, up from 36 percent in March 2007. Baghdad residents say the markets are vibrant again, with new electronics, clothing and even liquor stores.

Basic services are better, but still bad. Electricity production is up by 40 percent over pre-invasion levels, but because there are so many more air-conditioners and other appliances, widespread power failures still occur.

In February 2009, 45 percent of Iraqis said they had access to trash removal services, which is woeful, though up from 18 percent the year before. Forty-two percent were served by a fire department, up from 23 percent.

About half the U.S. money has been spent building up Iraqi security forces, and here, too, the trends are positive. Violence is down 90 percent from pre-surge days. There are now more than 400,000 Iraqi police officers and 200,000 Iraqi soldiers, with operational performance improving gradually. According to an ABC News/BBC poll last year, nearly three-quarters of Iraqis had a positive view of the army and the police, including, for the first time, a majority of Sunnis.

Politically, the basic structure is sound, and a series of impressive laws have been passed. But these gains are imperiled by the current stalemate at the top.

Iraq ranks fourth in the Middle East on the Index of Political Freedom from The Economist’s Intelligence Unit — behind Israel, Lebanon and Morocco, but ahead of Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and Tunisia. Nearly two-thirds of Iraqis say they want a democracy, while only 19 percent want an Islamic state.

In short, there has been substantial progress on the things development efforts can touch most directly: economic growth, basic security, and political and legal institutions. After the disaster of the first few years, nation building, much derided, has been a success. When President Obama speaks to the country on Iraq, he’ll be able to point to a large national project that has contributed to measurable, positive results.

Of course, to be honest, he’ll also have to say how fragile and incomplete this success is. Iraqi material conditions are better, but the Iraqi mind has not caught up with the Iraqi opportunity.

There is still very little social trust. Iraq is the fourth-most-corrupt nation on earth, according to Transparency International’s rating system. The role of women remains surprisingly circumscribed. Iraqi politicians clearly find it very hard to compromise (though they may be no worse than American politicians in this regard).

Human capital is lagging. Most doctors left Iraq after the invasion, and it is hard to staff health clinics. The engineers left too, so American-built plants lie dormant because there is no one with the skills to run them. Schools are suffering because of a lack of teachers.

Ryan Crocker, the former ambassador, recently wrote an article in The National Interest noting that fear still pervades Iraq. Ethnic animosities are in abeyance, but they are not gone. Guns have been put in closets, but not destroyed.

If he is honest, Obama will have to balance pride with caution. He’ll have to acknowledge that the gains the U.S. is enabling may vanish if the U.S. military withdraws entirely next year. He’ll have to acknowledge that bottom-up social change requires time and patience. He’ll have to heed the advice of serious Iraq hands like Crocker, Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings and Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, and shelve plans to withdraw completely.

Such a move may rob him of a campaign talking point. But it will safeguard an American accomplishment that has been too hard won.

Cripes.  I have to go and take a shower…  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

At least 14 American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan over the past few days.

We learned on Saturday that our so-called partner in this forlorn war, Hamid Karzai, fired a top prosecutor who had insisted on, gasp, fighting the corruption that runs like a crippling disease through his country.

Time magazine tells us that stressed-out, depressed and despondent soldiers are seeking help for their mental difficulties at a rate that is overwhelming the capacity of available professionals. What we are doing to these troops who have been serving tour after tour in Afghanistan and Iraq is unconscionable.

Time described the mental-health issue as “the U.S. Army’s third front,” with the reporter, Mark Thompson, writing: “While its combat troops fight two wars, its mental-health professionals are waging a battle to save soldiers’ sanity when they come back, one that will cost billions long after combat ends in Baghdad and Kabul.”

In addition to the terrible physical toll, the ultimate economic costs of these two wars, as the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have pointed out, will run to more than $3 trillion.

I get a headache when I hear supporters of this endless warfare complaining about the federal budget deficits. They’re like arsonists complaining about the smell of smoke in the neighborhood.

There is no silver lining to this nearly decade-old war in Afghanistan. Poll after poll has shown that it no longer has the support of most Americans. And yet we fight on, feeding troops into the meat-grinder year after tragic year — to what end?

“Clearly, the final chapters of this particular endeavor are very much yet to be written,” said Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, during a BBC interview over the weekend. He sounded as if those chapters would not be written any time soon.

In a reference to President Obama’s assertion that U.S. troops would begin to withdraw from Afghanistan next July, General Petraeus told the interviewer: “That’s a date when a process begins, nothing more, nothing less. It’s not the date when the American forces begin an exodus and look for the exit and the light to turn off on the way out of the room.”

A lot of Americans who had listened to the president thought it was, in fact, a date when the American forces would begin an exodus. The general seems to have heard something quite different.

In truth, it’s not at all clear how President Obama really feels about the awesome responsibilities involved in waging war, and that’s a problem. The Times’s Peter Baker wrote a compelling and in many ways troubling article recently about the steep learning curve that Mr. Obama, with no previous military background, has had to negotiate as a wartime commander in chief.

Quoting an unnamed adviser to the president, Mr. Baker wrote that Mr. Obama sees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as “problems that need managing” while he pursues his mission of transforming the nation. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking on the record, said, “He’s got a very full plate of very big issues, and I think he does not want to create the impression that he’s so preoccupied with these two wars that he’s not addressing the domestic issues that are uppermost in people’s minds.”

Wars are not problems that need managing, which suggests that they will always be with us. They are catastrophes that need to be brought to an end as quickly as possible. Wars consume lives by the thousands (in Iraq, by the scores of thousands) and sometimes, as in World War II, by the millions. The goal when fighting any war should be peace, not a permanent simmer of nonstop maiming and killing. Wars are meant to be won — if they have to be fought at all — not endlessly looked after.

One of the reasons we’re in this state of nonstop warfare is the fact that so few Americans have had any personal stake in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no draft and no direct financial hardship resulting from the wars. So we keep shipping other people’s children off to combat as if they were some sort of commodity, like coal or wheat, with no real regard for the terrible price so many have to pay, physically and psychologically.

Not only is this tragic, it is profoundly disrespectful. These are real men and women, courageous and mostly uncomplaining human beings, that we are sending into the war zones, and we owe them our most careful attention. Above all, we owe them an end to two wars that have gone on much too long.

I can guaran-damn-tee you that if we still had a draft this would not be happening.  If the “haves” had to face the possibility of sending their children into the meat grinder this would have ended years ago.

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

Oh, boy.  The Pasty Little Putz has a new crush.  In “Mr. Beck Goes to Washington” he fizzes that Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally on the Washington Mall was long on piety and patriotism, but not on politics.  He was there, and it was teh awesome!  Prof. Krugman seems mired in the Slough of Despond.  In “It’s Witch-Hunt Season” he says in a repeat from the 1990s, the Republicans appear bent on ugliness and paralysis.  Here’s the Putz:

Entering this weekend, I was convinced that Glenn Beck’s star was about to go into eclipse.

Just as Michael Moore, amid Democratic disarray, became the unlikely face of liberal opposition to George W. Bush, the mercurial, weepy, demagogic Beck has spent the last 18 months filling the void left by the institutional collapse of the Republican Party. And just as Moore’s influence diminished as the Democrats came roaring back, it seemed plausible that Beck would matter less and less as the midterms and then the 2012 election re-empowered actual Republican politicians.

But after spending my Saturday at Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally on the Washington Mall, I’m beginning to think that I underestimated the man.

The Fox News host had promised that the rally, billed as a celebration of American values, would be an explicitly apolitical event. And so it came to pass: save for an occasional “Don’t Tread On Me,” banner, the crowded Mall was nearly free of political signs and T-shirt slogans, and there was barely a whisper of the crusade against liberalism that consumes most of Beck’s on-air hours.

Instead, Beck served up something considerably stranger. This was a tent revival crossed with a pep rally intertwined with a history lecture married to a U.S.O. telethon — and that was just in the first hour.

There was piety — endless piety, as speaker after speaker demanded that Americans rededicate themselves to God. There was patriotism: fund- raising for children of slain Special Forces vets, paeans to military heroism (delivered by Sarah Palin, among others), encomiums to the founding fathers. There was an awards ceremony on the theme of “Faith, Hope and Charity,” in which community-service prizes were handed out to a black minister, a Mormon businessman and the St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols. And since this was (as you may have heard) the anniversary of the “I Have a Dream” speech, there was a long tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

There was enough material, in other words, to justify almost any interpretation of the event. A Beck admirer could spin “Restoring Honor” as proof that left-wing fears about the Tea Partiers are overblown: free of rancor, racism or populist resentment, the atmosphere at the rally resembled that of a church picnic or a high school football game. But a suspicious liberal could retort that all the God-and-Christ talk and military tributes were proof enough that a sinister Christian nationalism lurked beneath the surface. (I’m sure The New York Review of Books has already commissioned an essay on that theme.)

Similarly, one could call the rally a gross affront to the memory of King, who presumably wouldn’t have cared much for Beck’s right-wing politics. But one could also call the day a strange, unlooked-for fulfillment of King’s prophecies: 47 years after the “I Have a Dream” speech, here were tens of thousands of white conservatives roaring their approval of its author.

To this rally-goer, though, the most striking thing about “Restoring Honor” was the way the pageant effortlessly tapped into the same rich vein of identity politics that has given us figures as diverse as Palin and Howard Dean, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — but did so, somehow, without advancing any explicitly political agenda.

Now more than ever, Americans love leaders who seem to validate their way of life. This spirit of self-affirmation was at work in evangelicals’ enduring support for Bush, in the enthusiasm for the Dean campaign among the young, secular and tech-savvy, and now in the devotion that Palin inspires among socially conservative women. The Obama campaign raised it to an art form, convincing voters that by merely supporting his candidacy, they were proving themselves cosmopolitan and young-at-heart, multicultural and hip.

In a sense, Beck’s “Restoring Honor” was like an Obama rally through the looking glass. It was a long festival of affirmation for middle-class white Christians — square, earnest, patriotic and religious. If a speaker had suddenly burst out with an Obama-esque “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” the message would have fit right in.

But whereas Obama wouldn’t have been Obama if he weren’t running for president, Beck’s packed, three-hour jamboree was floated entirely on patriotism and piety, with no “get thee to a voting booth” message. It blessed a particular way of life without burdening that blessing with the compromises of a campaign, or the disillusioning work of governance.

For a weekend, at least, Beck proved that he can conjure the thrill of a culture war without the costs of combat, and the solidarity of identity politics without any actual politics. If his influence outlasts the current election cycle, this will be the secret of his success.

Gawd.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.

Now it’s happening again — except that this time it’s even worse. Let’s turn the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: “Imam Hussein Obama,” he recently declared, is “probably the best anti-American president we’ve ever had.”

To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk like this, bear in mind that he’s an utterly mainstream figure within the Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.

So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to America?

Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the current political craziness. What we learned from the Clinton years is that a significant number of Americans just don’t consider government by liberals — even very moderate liberals — legitimate. Mr. Obama’s election would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact that he isn’t, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.

By the way, I’m not talking about the rage of the excluded and the dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer’s new article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits. In the 1990s, Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably the insinuation that Hillary Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince Foster. Now, as we’ve just seen, he’s doing his best to insinuate that Mr. Obama is a Muslim. Again, though, there’s an extra level of craziness this time around: Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame compared with Glenn Beck.

And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.

To take a prime example: the hysteria over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan almost makes one long for the days when former President George W. Bush tried to soothe religious hatred, declaring Islam a religion of peace. There were good reasons for his position: there are a billion Muslims in the world, and America can’t afford to make all of them its enemies.

But here’s the thing: Mr. Bush is still around, as are many of his former officials. Where are the statements, from the former president or those in his inner circle, preaching tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria? On this issue, as on many others, the G.O.P. establishment is offering a nearly uniform profile in cowardice.

So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” — several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.

It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.

If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.

Kristof and Rich

MoDo and The Moustache of Wisdom are off today, so it’s shaping up to be a very good day.  Mr. Kristof, in “Obama’s Failure in Sudan,” says President Obama inherited a peace in Sudan that could soon turn into the world’s bloodiest war.  Mr. Rich addresses “The Billionares Bankrolling the Tea Party” and says the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch have self-interested agendas that go well beyond the interests of those who carry their banners.  No shit…  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

When President Obama was seeking the White House, he criticized Republicans for not doing enough on Darfur and insisted that he would make Sudan a priority.

“What we have done has not been enough,” he told me in a 2006 interview when I was guest host for a “Charlie Rose” segment on Sudan. He added that Washington needed “a sustained diplomatic effort to put pressure on Sudan.”

Yet these days, Mr. Obama is presiding over an incoherent, contradictory and apparently failing Sudan policy. There is a growing risk that Sudan will be the site of the world’s bloodiest war in 2011, and perhaps a new round of genocide as well. This isn’t America’s fault, but neither are we using all of our leverage to avert it.

Granted, Mr. Obama has a multitude of other priorities. Granted, Sudan is a mess with no perfect solutions. Nobody expects Mr. Obama to devote much time to Sudan. But the problem isn’t that the administration is too busy to devise a policy toward Sudan but that it has a half-dozen policies, mostly at cross-purposes.

As first reported by Foreign Policy, competing recommendations on Sudan are on Mr. Obama’s desk, reflecting dissent within the administration. One recommendation, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama’s envoy for Sudan, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, apparently focuses on continued carrots and engagement. The other, calling for a tougher approach, comes from the American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, who has by far the longest experience dealing with Sudan.

Some 68 organizations have sent a joint letter to Mr. Obama, calling on him to work more energetically to prevent another round of war in Sudan. But so far he has been unengaged, and his administration has been less successful than the last Bush administration in getting Sudan to alter its behavior.

The upshot: Sudan’s on-and-off north-south civil war could resume soon. How bad could it be? Well, the last iteration of that war lasted about 20 years and killed some two million people. Mr. Obama’s former head of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, warned this year that the place facing the greatest risk of genocide or mass killing is southern Sudan.

Regular readers know I was not a fan of President George W. Bush. But one of his signal accomplishments, against all odds, was a 2005 peace agreement that ended the last round of that war. That agreement provided for a referendum next January in which southern Sudan can choose secession.

Southern Sudanese are expected to vote overwhelmingly to secede. But the region has most of the nation’s oil, and the north is determined not to lose the oil wells driving the nation’s economy.

The Obama administration has tried a carrots-rather-than-sticks approach to Sudan, and it has been right to engage Khartoum. It restored the issuance of American visas in Sudan, and at first this engagement led to some successes. For example, some aid groups that had been expelled from Darfur were allowed to return in a different form. And for a time, Darfur became calmer.

But in recent months Sudan has been hardening its positions, perhaps because it sees that it pays no price for misbehavior (and also because it sees that there are limits to the rewards it will receive for improved behavior). Sudan has cracked down on dissidents and journalists, steamrolled over an election, and for the last few weeks has restricted humanitarian access to Kalma, a huge camp of Darfuris. It has also curbed the ability of United Nations peacekeepers to protect themselves or others.

Most ominously, Sudan’s government has been stalling in preparations for the referendum in the south, and it may have been channeling weapons to disgruntled factions there. No one expects restraint from President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who is facing charges of genocide from the International Criminal Court.

For all his faults, President Bush inherited a war in Sudan and managed to turn it into peace. Mr. Obama inherited a peace that could turn into the world’s bloodiest war next year.

The Obama administration has just dispatched a talented former ambassador, Princeton Lyman, to lead a team on the ground in Sudan. That’s useful, but Washington could do much more. It could support United Nations peacekeepers, and it could work at the highest level with China, Britain, Egypt and others to avoid a new war. A useful step would be to put Vice President Joseph Biden in charge for at least the next six months.

The United Nations General Assembly also needs to take up Sudan when it meets next month. That will be the last chance for high-level involvement before the referendum.

There are plenty of bogus reasons for criticizing Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, but this is a legitimate one. And in a place like Sudan, American diplomatic malpractice could lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Now here’s Mr. Rich:

Another weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

And Obama? So far, sadly, this question answers itself.

Collins, Blow and Herbert

Today we’re celebrating the stupid and offensive.  Ms. Collins, in “Mr. Simpson Has a Cow,” says this week, a colorful former senator zipped off an angry e-mail on Social Security benefits and well-endowed dairy animals.  Mr. Blow and Mr. Herbert are both addressing different stupidity and offensiveness.  In “I Had a Nightmare” Mr. Blow says Glenn Beck is the anti-King.  Mr. Herbert says “America Is Better Than This,” and that Glenn Beck is a small man with a mean message wandering into the precincts of giants.  Here’s Ms. Collins:

What are we to make of Alan Simpson, the co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit reduction commission, who recently referred to Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits”?

Personally, I would love for us to have a national cow with that sort of milk-giving capacity. But Simpson, who gets very impatient with people who want to preserve current Social Security benefits, did not mean it as a compliment. Now, his remark is getting a lot of attention, and that is only partly because the rest of the news has been so depressing that Bristol Palin’s rumored agreement to compete on “Dancing With the Stars” was a high point of the week.

Simpson, 78, is a former Republican senator known for his outspokenness — he once called the American Association of Retired Persons “the greedy geezers of America.” In appointing him co-chairman of the president’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, the White House broke an important political rule, which is to keep away from anyone who considers himself a colorful old codger.

Colorful codgers can be a welcome diversion in mediocre situation comedies, but you do not want one to be the public face of your deficit reduction commission. He might do something crazy, like e-mailing an activist for older American women, to accuse her of “babbling into the vapors,” then make disparaging remarks about well-endowed dairy animals and conclude with: “Call when you get honest work!”

Simpson was responding to a Huffington Post article by Ashley Carson, the executive director of the Older Women’s League. In it, Carson criticized Simpson’s support for reducing Social Security benefits. She also slammed his “record of sexism” and “his constant bashing of seniors.”

Carson’s post had been published in April. So besides writing an e-mail that confirmed all of her worst charges, Simpson was also choosing to get involved in a fight whose expiration date had long since kicked in. Perhaps he was in a bad mood because his son had just lost a gubernatorial primary to the grandson of another former United States senator. To make matters worse, the younger Simpson came in fourth, behind people who were not even direct descendants of major state politicians.

After his e-mail rant was made public, Simpson apologized in his colorful old codger way. (“Over the last 40 years I have had my size 15 feet in my mouth a time or two.”) But that did not stop the demands that he resign or be fired.

So far, Obama is sticking with his deficit-reduction co-chairman. He picked Simpson for the job because he is a Republican willing to talk about Social Security tax increases, a breed rarer than the ivory-billed woodpecker. The administration was obviously hoping that the commission would come up with a bipartisan plan that would combine a rise in payroll taxes with a modest reduction in benefits. The system is supposed to run out of money in 2037, and if we could fix it now, the pain would be much more modest than if Congress waited until, say, January of 2038.

This is so totally contrary to the current culture of Washington that it seems sort of touching that anybody might imagine it can happen. However, there is too much negativity in the world these days. I hereby offer a two-part proposal for fixing Social Security:

MORE ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS Immigration in general is a Social Security plus, since new arrivals tend to be young, and likely to contribute to the retirement system through payroll taxes for a long time before they start collecting. But illegal immigrants never get to collect at all. Their money only goes one way, toward benefits for the rest of us. Arizona retirees, tear down your walls.

TAX LONGER LIVES Some experts, including people in the administration, believe that Congress should raise the age at which people can retire on full Social Security benefits, which is currently 66 and will rise to 67 for younger workers. Personally, I will be happy to rally around this idea the very second that the White House announces there is a large pool of job opportunities for unemployed 60-year-olds that are going begging.

The theory behind raising the retirement age is that people are living longer these days. However, the Americans who do all this extra living tend to be wealthier than the ones who expire before they can cash their first pension check. Right now, only the first $106,800 in annual income is taxed for Social Security. Get rid of the cap, and you will be making the folks who are causing most of the problem pay for the solution.

Finally, we could make a rule that it is unacceptable for people who are collecting large government pensions to make fun of retirees who want to keep Social Security benefits the way they are. Particularly if they try to be colorful about it.

Buy stock in Purina.  Lotta folks gonna eat a lot of cat food if this crap continues…  Here’s Mr. Blow:

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was already dead when I was born, and yet I idolized him the way most children idolized athletes and pop stars. I had the poster and the T-shirt, I knew the speeches and the places he’d marched.

He was smart and brave, steadfast and unmovable. He was a man consumed by conviction and possessed by the magnificent radiance of the earnestly humble. He was an eloquent speaker and a beautiful writer. He cared more about justice and equality than fame or fortune. He was a beacon of light in a world beset by darkness.

That’s why the nightmarish idea of Glenn Beck (who has called President Obama a racist and compared Obama’s America to “The Planet of the Apes”) holding a “Restoring Honor” rally on the 47th anniversary of — and on the same site as — King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, so incensed me.

Glenn Beck is the anti-King.

(I find it curious that many of the same people who object so strenuously to the Islamic cultural center proposed for Lower Manhattan, many on the grounds that it is inappropriate and disrespectful, are virtually silent on the impropriety and disrespect inherent in Beck’s giving a speech on the anniversary of King’s address.)

But Beck seems bent on appropriating the civil rights movement. In April, he read his audience the civil rights movement’s commitment card and then said, “Looks to me like the next phase of the 9/12 Project.” (9/12 is a “nonpolitical movement” started by Beck last year to “protect the greatest nation ever created.”) And Beck has said of this rally, “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the civil rights movement.” Reclaim? From whom?

Beck wants to swaddle his movement in the cloth of the civil rights movement, a cloth soaked in the blood and tears of the innocent and oppressed, a cloth his divisiveness and self-aggrandizing threatens to defile.

In fact, to even insinuate that the president’s policies are in any way equivalent to the brutality of the Jim Crow South at the time of the civil rights movement is the highest order of insult, particularly to those who lived and suffered through it, as well as to those who live with its legacy. If Beck truly thinks these movements are comparable, I have some pictures of “strange fruit” I’d like for him to see.

And yet, I’ve come to the conclusion that anger is the wrong reaction to Beck’s rally in Washington. Anger provides too low a return on investment. It consumes a tremendous amount of energy, but yields little progress. Instead, we should each take this opportunity to listen to the “I Have a Dream” speech once more, paying particular attention to how the echoes of yesterday’s struggles reverberate in our present struggles, and to recommit ourselves to the nobility of righteous pursuits.

We should use Glenn’s nightmare to reconnect with Martin’s dream.

Now here’s Mr. Herbert:

America is better than Glenn Beck. For all of his celebrity, Mr. Beck is an ignorant, divisive, pathetic figure. On the anniversary of the great 1963 March on Washington he will stand in the shadows of giants — Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Who do you think is more representative of this nation?

Consider a brief sampling of their rhetoric.

Lincoln: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

King: “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter.”

Beck: “I think the president is a racist.”

Washington was on edge on the morning of Aug. 28, 1963. The day was sunny and very warm and Negroes, as we were called in those days, were coming into town by the tens of thousands. The sale of liquor was banned. Troops stood by to restore order if matters got out of control. President John F. Kennedy waited anxiously in the White House to see how the day would unfold.

It unfolded splendidly. The crowd for the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” grew to some 250,000. Nearly a quarter of the marchers were white. They gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where they were enthralled by the singing of Mahalia Jackson and Joan Baez. The march was all about inclusion and the day seemed to swell with an extraordinary sense of camaraderie and good feeling.

The climax, of course, was Dr. King’s transcendent “I Have a Dream” speech. Jerald Podair, a professor of American studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, has called Aug. 28, 1963, “the most important single day in civil rights history.” This is the historical legacy that Glenn Beck, a small man with a mean message, has chosen to tread upon with his cynical rally on Saturday at that very same Lincoln Memorial.

Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation. He seems oblivious to the real danger of his execrable behavior. He famously described President Obama as a man “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

He is an integral part of the vicious effort by the Tea Party and other elements of the right wing to portray Mr. Obama as somehow alien, a strange figure who is separate and apart from — outside of — ordinary American life. As the watchdog group Media Matters for America has noted, Beck said of the president, “He chose to use the name, Barack, for a reason, to identify not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify, with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?”

Facts and reality mean nothing to Beck. And there is no road too low for him to slither upon. The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that in a twist on the civil rights movement, Beck said on the air that he “wouldn’t be surprised if in our lifetime dogs and fire hoses are released or opened on us. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of us get a billy club to the head. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of us go to jail — just like Martin Luther King did — on trumped-up charges. Tough times are coming.”

He makes you want to take a shower.

In Beck’s view, President Obama is driven by a desire to settle “old racial scores” and his ultimate goal is “reparations” for black Americans. Abe Lincoln and Dr. King could only look on aghast at this clown.

Beck has been advertising his rally as nonpolitical, but its main speaker is Sarah Palin. She had her own low moment recently as a racial provocateur, publicly voicing her support for Laura Schlessinger, radio’s “Dr. Laura,” who went out of her way to humiliate a black caller by continuously using the n-word to make a point, even after the caller had made it clear that she was offended.

Palin’s advice to Schlessinger: “Don’t retreat — reload.”

There is a great deal of hatred and bigotry in this country, but it does not define the country. The daily experience of most Americans is not a bitter experience and for all of our problems we are in a much better place on these matters than we were a half century ago.

But I worry about the potential for violence that grows out of unrestrained, hostile bombast. We’ve seen it so often. A little more than two weeks after the 1963 March on Washington, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan and four young black girls were killed. And three months after the march, Jack Kennedy was assassinated.

My sincere advice to Beck, Palin and their followers is chill, baby, chill.

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo thinks we should treat the economy like a naughty child.  Really.  In “The Parent Model” he gurgles that we should raise the economy the way you raise a child — instill good values and create a secure climate.  He gets cut to ribbons in the comments on this POS.  Prof. Krugman says “This Is Not a Recovery.”  He point out that policy makers keep telling us the economy is continuing to recover. Unfortunately, that’s not true, and they should be doing everything to change that fact.  Here’s Bobo:

During the first half of this year, German and American political leaders engaged in an epic debate. American leaders argued that the economic crisis was so bad, governments should borrow billions to stimulate growth. German leaders argued that a little short-term stimulus was sensible, but anything more was near-sighted. What was needed was not more debt, but measures to balance budgets and restore confidence.

The debate got pointed. American economists accused German policy makers of risking a long depression. The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, countered, “Governments should not become addicted to borrowing as a quick fix to stimulate demand.”

The two countries followed different policy paths. According to Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, the Americans borrowed an amount equal to 6 percent of G.D.P. in an attempt to stimulate growth. The Germans spent about 1.5 percent of G.D.P. on their stimulus.

This divergence created a natural experiment. Who was right?

The early returns suggest the Germans were. The American stimulus package was supposed to create a “summer of recovery,” according to Obama administration officials. Job growth was supposed to be surging at up to 500,000 a month. Instead, the U.S. economy is scuffling along.

The German economy, on the other hand, is growing at a sizzling (and obviously unsustainable) 9 percent annual rate. Unemployment in Germany has come down to pre-crisis levels.

Results from one quarter do not settle the stimulus/austerity debate. Many other factors are in play. For example, Germany is surging, in part, because America is borrowing. Essentially, we Americans borrowed from our kids, spent some of that money on German machinery, and ended up employing German workers.

But the results do underline one essential truth: Stimulus size is not the key factor in determining how quickly a country emerges from recession. The U.S. tried big, but is emerging slowly. The Germans tried small, and are recovering nicely.

The economy can’t be played like a piano — press a fiscal key here and the right job creation notes come out over there. Instead, economic management is more like parenting. If you instill good values and create a secure climate then, through some mysterious process you will never understand, things will probably end well.

The crucial issue is getting the fundamentals right. The Germans are doing better because during the past decade, they took care of their fundamentals and the Americans didn’t.

The situation can be expressed this way: German policy makers inherited a certain consensus-based economic model. That model has advantages. It fosters gradual innovation (of the sort useful in metallurgy). It also has disadvantages. It sometimes leads to rigidity and high unemployment.

Over the past few years, the Germans have built on their advantages. They effectively support basic research and worker training. They have also taken brave measures to minimize their disadvantages. As an editorial from the superb online think tank e21 reminds us, the Germans have recently reduced labor market regulation, increased wage flexibility and taken strong measures to balance budgets.

In the U.S., policy makers inherited a different economic model, one that also has certain advantages. It fosters disruptive innovation (of the sort useful in Silicon Valley). It also has certain disadvantages — a penchant for over-consumption and short term thinking.

In the past decade, American policy makers have done little to maximize their model’s natural advantages or address its problems. Indeed, they’ve only made the short-term thinking problem worse, with monetary, fiscal and home-ownership policies encouraging even more borrowing and consumption.

Nations rise and fall on the intertwined strength of their cultures and governing institutions. Despite all the normal shortcomings, German governing institutions have functioned reasonably well, ushering in painful but necessary reforms. The U.S. has a phenomenally creative culture, but right now it’s an institutional weakling.

If you look around the world today, you see that a two-class system is coming into being. Some countries are undertaking fundamental reforms. In those places, weaknesses have been exposed. Orthodoxies have been shattered. New coalitions have formed.

This is happening in Britain, where a center-right government is reining in a government that had spun out of control. It’s also true in Sweden and other consensus-based countries, where there is so much emphasis on consistent, long-range thinking.

In other countries, political division frustrates long-range thinking. The emphasis is on fixing things for next month or next quarter. The U.S., unfortunately, is struggling to get out of Group 2.

So tiresome, so predictable…  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

What will Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, say in his big speech Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyo.? Will he hint at new steps to boost the economy? Stay tuned.

But we can safely predict what he and other officials will say about where we are right now: that the economy is continuing to recover, albeit more slowly than they would like. Unfortunately, that’s not true: this isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters. And policy makers should be doing everything they can to change that fact.

The small sliver of truth in claims of continuing recovery is the fact that G.D.P. is still rising: we’re not in a classic recession, in which everything goes down. But so what?

The important question is whether growth is fast enough to bring down sky-high unemployment. We need about 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment from rising, and much faster growth to bring it significantly down. Yet growth is currently running somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, with a good chance that it will slow even further in the months ahead. Will the economy actually enter a double dip, with G.D.P. shrinking? Who cares? If unemployment rises for the rest of this year, which seems likely, it won’t matter whether the G.D.P. numbers are slightly positive or slightly negative.

All of this is obvious. Yet policy makers are in denial.

After its last monetary policy meeting, the Fed released a statement declaring that it “anticipates a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization” — Fedspeak for falling unemployment. Nothing in the data supports that kind of optimism. Meanwhile, Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, says that “we’re on the road to recovery.” No, we aren’t.

Why are people who know better sugar-coating economic reality? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that it’s all about evading responsibility.

In the case of the Fed, admitting that the economy isn’t recovering would put the institution under pressure to do more. And so far, at least, the Fed seems more afraid of the possible loss of face if it tries to help the economy and fails than it is of the costs to the American people if it does nothing, and settles for a recovery that isn’t.

In the case of the Obama administration, officials seem loath to admit that the original stimulus was too small. True, it was enough to limit the depth of the slump — a recent analysis by the Congressional Budget Office says unemployment would probably be well into double digits now without the stimulus — but it wasn’t big enough to bring unemployment down significantly.

Now, it’s arguable that even in early 2009, when President Obama was at the peak of his popularity, he couldn’t have gotten a bigger plan through the Senate. And he certainly couldn’t pass a supplemental stimulus now. So officials could, with considerable justification, place the onus for the non-recovery on Republican obstructionism. But they’ve chosen, instead, to draw smiley faces on a grim picture, convincing nobody. And the likely result in November — big gains for the obstructionists — will paralyze policy for years to come.

So what should officials be doing, aside from telling the truth about the economy?

The Fed has a number of options. It can buy more long-term and private debt; it can push down long-term interest rates by announcing its intention to keep short-term rates low; it can raise its medium-term target for inflation, making it less attractive for businesses to simply sit on their cash. Nobody can be sure how well these measures would work, but it’s better to try something that might not work than to make excuses while workers suffer.

The administration has less freedom of action, since it can’t get legislation past the Republican blockade. But it still has options. It can revamp its deeply unsuccessful attempt to aid troubled homeowners. It can use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored lenders, to engineer mortgage refinancing that puts money in the hands of American families — yes, Republicans will howl, but they’re doing that anyway. It can finally get serious about confronting China over its currency manipulation: how many times do the Chinese have to promise to change their policies, then renege, before the administration decides that it’s time to act?

Which of these options should policy makers pursue? If I had my way, all of them.

I know what some players both at the Fed and in the administration will say: they’ll warn about the risks of doing anything unconventional. But we’ve already seen the consequences of playing it safe, and waiting for recovery to happen all by itself: it’s landed us in what looks increasingly like a permanent state of stagnation and high unemployment. It’s time to admit that what we have now isn’t a recovery, and do whatever we can to change that situation.

Solo Collins

Mr. Kristof is off today, and Ms. Collins details “The Trends of August.”  During this silly season she’s got a good idea — maybe the citizenry should demand a Voter Bill of Rights. Article Five: more cat stories in political campaigns.  Great idea!  Dogs drool, cats rule.  Here she is:

Since this is possibly the most depressing August in the history of summer, I feel compelled to point out a brighter side of the news.

In Arizona on Tuesday, Republican voters totally rejected the Congressional candidacy of State Senator Pamela Gorman (“conservative Christian and a pretty fair shot”), whose TV ad showed her firing a machine gun at an undisclosed target. Only about 5,000 people in the district thought sending Pamela Gorman to Washington would be a good plan. And it was 110 degrees that day, so a number of those might have been hallucinating.

The winner of this primary was Ben Quayle, son of Dan and Marilyn, whose campaign was flagging until his parents each sent out e-mail blasts urging people to vote for their son. That put him over the top with a whopping 14,266 votes.

Quayle may have been the beneficiary of a notable trend in this week’s elections: victories by people whose mothers helped them campaign. Rick Scott, the rich-guy gubernatorial candidate in Florida, won a surprise upset after he sent his mother to represent him in the final debate. Clearly, the voters were thinking that being forced to listen to another debate would be bad, that mothers were good, and therefore Scott deserved to be the Republican nominee for governor.

We do not pay much attention to races for governor in any state other than our own. But it’s going to be hard to resist watching to see if Florida wants to put its fate in the hands of a guy who looks like Lex Luthor and once ran a company that admitted defrauding the government of $1.7 billion. It’s right up there with the machine-gun woman.

The big trend among Republicans is voting out the incumbent, even if said incumbent is a Republican. In their primaries, the Democrats tend to go for the status quo. This makes sense, since the Republicans are looking for a way to show they’re angry, angry, angry while the Democrats are too terrified of the Republicans to do anything but hunker down.

In response, the Republican establishment is in identity denial. John Boehner is vowing that if his party wins a majority in the House, he will run things differently than either Nancy Pelosi or her Republican predecessor, the evil dictator John Boehner. And of course, Senator John McCain just notched up a triumph in Arizona, running against Senator John McCain.

The Democrats aren’t much better — unless you think it’s a good plan for Robin Carnahan, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Missouri, to be calling her opponent “the very worst of Washington” for supporting the same financial services bailout that President Obama and most of the Democrats in Congress backed. Really, the way these people are fleeing their parties, you’d almost think neither side has any clue of what to do to resuscitate the economy.

Instead of running as part of a group with a shared ideology and agenda, candidates run biography ads that stress their sterling character. A deprived childhood is always good. Kendrick Meek, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Florida, ran as the son of a struggling single mother even though his particular single mother was also the local congresswoman. And did you know John Boehner used to mop the floor of his dad’s bar when he was 11?

This stuff is completely useless for the voters, since party affiliation is actually the only reliable indicator of how a candidate will behave in office. TV ads about prior achievements and moral integrity will tell you virtually nothing about what someone will do once they’re elected. I speak from experience, as a person who voted for Eliot Spitzer for governor.

And of course we have the general nasty-tone trend, as evidenced by the way Republicans desperate for an applause line grab onto the “mosque at ground zero.” This kind of thing gets worst in August when, absent a good hurricane, the media has very little to talk about. I blame the failure of celebrities to melt down when we need them most. If only Al and Tipper Gore were getting divorced because Tipper fell in love with Tiger Woods. Or if the woman who got caught putting a cat in a garbage can had been American. Really, anything about cats is good.

Maybe the citizenry should demand a Voter Bill of Rights.

Article One: Freedom from being forced to choose between two dreadful candidates when the temperature is higher than 90 degrees.

Article Two: Candidates cannot talk about their childhood beyond attesting that they had one.

Article Three: Candidates are required to list all the really serious issue disagreements they have with their party. If they reach six, they should find a different ticket.

Article Four: Less talking about mosques.

Article Five: More cat stories.

Friedman, solo

MoDo is off, so life is looking better today.  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Steal This Movie, Too,” says public education needs rescuing, and that the superheroes are already showing the way.  Here he is:

While Washington is consumed with whether our president is secretly a Muslim, or born abroad, possibly in outer space, I’d like to talk about some good news. But to see it, you have to stand on your head.

You have to look at America from the bottom up, not from the top (Washington) down. And what you’ll see from down there is that there is a movement stirring in this country around education. From the explosion of new charter schools to the new teachers’ union contract in D.C., which will richly reward public school teachers who get their students to improve faster and weed out those who don’t, Americans are finally taking their education crisis seriously. If you don’t want to stand on your head, then just go to a theater near you after Sept. 24 and watch the new documentary “Waiting for Superman.” You’ll see just what I’m talking about.

Directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also directed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” “Waiting for Superman” takes its name from an opening interview with the remarkable Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone. HCZ has used a comprehensive strategy, including a prenatal Baby College, social service programs and longer days at its charter schools to forge a new highway to the future for one of New York’s bleakest neighborhoods.

Canada’s point is that the only way to fix our schools is not with a Superman or a super-theory. No, it’s with supermen and superwomen pushing super-hard to assemble what we know works: better-trained teachers working with the best methods under the best principals supported by more involved parents.

“One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me Superman did not exist,” Canada says in the film. “I read comic books and I just loved ’em …’cause even in the depths of the ghetto you just thought, ‘He’s coming, I just don’t know when, because he always shows up and he saves all the good people.’ ”

Then when he was in fourth or fifth grade, he asked, “Ma, do you think Superman is actually [real]?” She told him the truth: “ ‘Superman is not real.’ I was like: ‘He’s not? What do you mean he’s not?’ ‘No, he’s not real.’ And she thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real. And I was crying because there was no one … coming with enough power to save us.”

“Waiting for Superman” follows five kids and their parents who aspire to obtain a decent public education but have to enter a bingo-like lottery to get into a good charter school, because their home schools are miserable failures.

Guggenheim kicks off the film explaining that he was all for sending kids to their local public schools until “it was time to choose a school for my own children, and then reality set in. My feelings about public education didn’t matter as much as my fear of sending them to a failing school. And so every morning, betraying the ideals I thought I lived by, I drive past three public schools as I take my kids to a private school. But I’m lucky. I have a choice. Other families pin their hopes to a bouncing ball, a hand pulling a card from a box or a computer that generates numbers in random sequence. Because when there’s a great public school there aren’t enough spaces, and so we do what’s fair. We place our children and their future in the hands of luck.”

It is intolerable that in America today a bouncing bingo ball should determine a kid’s educational future, especially when there are plenty of schools that work and even more that are getting better. This movie is about the people trying to change that. The film’s core thesis is that for too long our public school system was built to serve adults, not kids. For too long we underpaid and undervalued our teachers and compensated them instead by giving them union perks. Over decades, though, those perks accumulated to prevent reform in too many districts. The best ones are now reforming, and the worst are facing challenges from charters.

Although the movie makes the claim that the key to student achievement is putting a great teacher in every classroom, and it is critical of the teachers’ unions and supportive of charters, it challenges all the adults who run our schools — teachers, union leaders, principals, parents, school boards, charter-founders, politicians — with one question: Are you putting kids and their education first?

Because we know what works, and it’s not a miracle cure. It is the whatever-it-takes-tenacity of the Geoffrey Canadas; it is the no-excuses-seriousness of the KIPP school (Knowledge is Power Program) founders; it is the lead-follow-or-get-out-of-the-way ferocity of the Washington and New York City school chancellors, Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein.

And it is the quiet heroism of millions of public and charter school teachers and parents who do put kids first by implementing the best ideas, and in so doing make their schools just a little bit better and more accountable every day — so no Americans ever again have to play life bingo with their kids, or pray to be rescued by Superman.

Brooks and Herbert

In “A Case of Mental Courage” Bobo babbles that the novelist Fanny Burney stared pain in the face, teaching a lesson in character we would do well to recover.  It’s typical Bobo crap.  Mr. Herbert, in “A Hero Named Bobby,” says the death of Bobby Thomson triggers memories from a lifetime ago.  Here’s Bobo:

In 1811, the popular novelist Fanny Burney learned she had breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy without anesthesia. She lay down on an old mattress, and a piece of thin linen was placed over her face, allowing her to make out the movements of the surgeons above her.

“I felt the instrument — describing a curve — cutting against the grain, if I may so say, while the flesh resisted in a manner so forcible as to oppose & tire the hand of the operator who was forced to change from the right to the left,” she wrote later.

“I began a scream that lasted intermittingly during the whole time of the incision — & I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still.” The surgeon removed most of the breast but then had to go in a few more times to complete the work: “I then felt the Knife rackling against the breast bone — scraping it! This performed while I yet remained in utterly speechless torture.”

The operation was ghastly, but Burney’s real heroism came later. She could have simply put the horror behind her, but instead she resolved to write down everything that had happened. This proved horrifically painful. “Not for days, not for weeks, but for months I could not speak of this terrible business without nearly again going through it!” Six months after the operation she finally began to write her account.

It took her three months to put down a few thousand words. She suffered headaches as she picked up her pen and began remembering. “I dare not revise, nor read, the recollection is still so painful,” she confessed. But she did complete it. She seems to have regarded the exercise as a sort of mental boot camp — an arduous but necessary ordeal if she hoped to be a person of character and courage.

Burney’s struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts.

She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.

In the mental sphere, this meant conquering mental laziness with arduous and sometimes numbingly boring lessons. It meant conquering frivolity by sitting through earnest sermons and speeches. It meant conquering self- approval by staring straight at what was painful.

This emphasis on mental character lasted for a time, but it has abated. There’s less talk of sin and frailty these days. Capitalism has also undermined this ethos. In the media competition for eyeballs, everyone is rewarded for producing enjoyable and affirming content. Output is measured by ratings and page views, so much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.

In this atmosphere, we’re all less conscious of our severe mental shortcomings and less inclined to be skeptical of our own opinions. Occasionally you surf around the Web and find someone who takes mental limitations seriously. For example, Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway once gave a speech called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” He and others list our natural weaknesses: We have confirmation bias; we pick out evidence that supports our views. We are cognitive misers; we try to think as little as possible. We are herd thinkers and conform our perceptions to fit in with the group.

But, in general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.

The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so. Many liberals would never ask themselves why they were so wrong about the surge in Iraq while George Bush was so right. The question is too uncomfortable.

There’s a seller’s market in ideologies that gives people a chance to feel victimized. There’s a rigidity to political debate. Issues like tax cuts and the size of government, which should be shaped by circumstances (often it’s good to cut taxes; sometimes it’s necessary to raise them), are now treated as inflexible tests of tribal purity.

To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate. A few people I interview do this regularly (in fact, Larry Summers is one). But it is rare. The rigors of combat discourage it.

Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.

And of course Bobo’s columns regularly indicate rigorous self-examination…  (Just kidding…)  Here’s Mr. Herbert:

I was surprised — but probably shouldn’t have been — that so many people had never heard of Bobby Thomson, who died at his home in Savannah, Ga., last week at the age of 86.

Thomson was among a small handful of public figures whose names have resonated most strongly with me through nearly my entire life. I was fresh out of kindergarten when he hit the most famous home run in history — the “shot heard round the world” that deeply traumatized the Brooklyn Dodgers and their fans and propelled the New York Giants into the 1951 World Series against the Yankees.

My dad, Chester Herbert (who was only in his 20s at the time), had an upholstery shop on Central Avenue in East Orange, N.J., and I was in the back of the shop with a cast of characters straight out of Damon Runyon. My mother’s name was Adelaide, and there were assorted craftsmen and hangers-on with names like Moe and Brownie and Earl Love and my beloved Uncle Breeze.

We were listening to the game on the radio. Nearly everyone was rooting for the Giants. But things looked beyond bleak when Thomson came to bat in the bottom of the ninth in the third and deciding game of a playoff series to determine who would win the National League pennant. There was one out and two runners were on base, and the archrival Dodgers were ahead, 4-2.

When Thomson hit the home run to suddenly and shockingly end both the game and the series, an astonishing celebration erupted in the back of the shop. My father hugged my mother, and they were jumping up and down. Then he picked me up and asked if I realized what had just happened. I didn’t, really — but according to family lore I started yelling, “We won! We won!”

My dad clipped all the newspaper accounts of Thomson’s feat and kept them for many years. I don’t know how many times we read them together when I was in first and second grade, and of course we had no idea that I would end up writing for three of the papers.

That magical moment of pure, unadulterated joy was the beginning of my love for the game of baseball. It seemed only appropriate that a player named Bobby, which is what everyone called me at the time, was the hero. Why not? I would hit imaginary homers in the park and race around the bases screaming, “The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”

My parents explained the game to me, and I became obsessed with the players on that team, not just Thomson but guys like Sal Maglie, known as “The Barber,” and Monte Irvin and Whitey Lockman and a 20-year-old rookie who was on deck when Thomson hit the homer, Willie Mays.

There was an outfielder on that team named Hank Thompson. Bobby Thomson was white and Hank Thompson was black. I asked my father if they were brothers. He laughed and said: “No. You know how you can tell they’re not brothers?”

I said I didn’t. He said, “Hank Thompson spells his last name t-h-o-m-p-s-o-n. Bobby Thomson doesn’t have a ‘p’ in his last name. If they were brothers they would spell their names the same.”

It was years before I realized what a terrific thing that was to say to a kid.

I interviewed Willie Mays several years ago, and he told me a sweet story about him and Joe DiMaggio in that 1951 World Series, which the Giants lost to the Yankees, four games to two. “I never told this to anybody,” said Mays, “but Joe hit a home run in the Polo Grounds in that series, and I knew that was his last year, so I was happy for him even though I was playing against him. So what I did was, I started clapping. And you just didn’t do that in New York. But there I was standing in the outfield for the Giants clapping for Joe as he’s rounding the bases.”

As Mays and I shot the breeze about his early days with the Giants, he wistfully said, “Those were good times, man.”

They were great times for a kid growing up in New Jersey. The afternoons moved more slowly, and the summers seemed to last a little longer. You could hit a home run in your imagination every time you came up to the plate.

My Uncle Breeze is still around, still working. He fell in love with photography and takes photos at weddings and birthday parties in South Jersey. But nearly everyone else from the back of the shop is gone. I’d give anything — anything at all — to see them again just one more time.

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz has now decided to hold forth on sports.  In “What Roger Clemens Wants” he gurgles that what the juxtaposition of Bobby Thomson’s death and Roger Clemens’s indictment says about the way we judge our sports heroes.  The golden age that he rhapsodizes about, what with the Dodgers and the Giants and Monroe and Sinatra, was all happening over 20 years before the little jackass was born.  I doubt he’s ever even seen film of Don Larsen’s perfect game.  Asshole.  Prof. Krugman, in “Now That’s Rich,” says Republicans and conservative Democrats are eager to give hundreds of billions of dollars to the 120,000 richest people in America.  Here’s the Putz:

Bobby Thomson died last week, and Roger Clemens was indicted. No juxtaposition could better capture the way we used to feel about our sports heroes, and the way we feel about them now.

Clemens is just one of the many baseball superstars credibly accused of using performance-enhancing drugs. But the Red Sox-turned-Yankee ace has achieved a particular infamy because he keeps obdurately denying it — to fans, to reporters and finally (and fatefully) to a Congressional committee. Other athletes have apologized, beaten their breasts and tried to move on. But not Clemens. A mercenary figure during his career, in retirement the pitching great has become an icon of celebrity entitlement and public dishonesty: part LeBron James, part Richard Nixon.

If Clemens embodies baseball’s decline into sordidness and scandal, Thomson’s death is a reminder of the height from which it’s fallen. “The shot heard round the world,” his pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants in the autumn of 1951, stands as the crowning glory of baseball’s golden age.

All the romance of a bygone American era hovered around that day. It was the Dodgers and the Giants, the New York of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, the American century at its peak. And then there was the contest itself, thrilling and improbable and perfect. “The art of fiction is dead,” Red Smith’s famous account began. “Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.”

That was sports at its best, surely. A day for honorable ballplayers, not corrupt multimillionaires. A day untainted by cheating or dishonesty. A game reduced to a pitcher, a batter and a single pitch — and the crackle of a radio man shouting “the Giants win the pennant!”

Except that cheating did taint Thomson’s famous shot. For decades, it was rumored that the Giants’ amazing 1951 stretch run — they made up a 13-game deficit to force the playoff with the Dodgers — had been abetted by a sign-stealing system devised by their manager, Leo Durocher. Finally, the truth leaked out: For the last 10 weeks of the season, and throughout the showdown with the Dodgers, the Giants used a centerfield telescope and a complex system of signals to tell their batters what pitch was coming next.

In Joshua Prager’s book on that pennant race, “The Echoing Green,” he asks an aging Thomson — the kindest, most modest man imaginable, by all accounts — about the sign-stealing and his immortal three-run blast. The conversations that follow are agonizing. Did he look for the signal on that pitch? “I’d have to say no more than yes,” Thomson says. Then: “I don’t like to think of something taking away from it.” Then, in a later discussion: “It would take a little away from me in my mind if I felt I got help on that pitch.” Then, finally: “My answer is no.”

And a coda: “I was always proud of that swing.”

Somewhere, waiting for his day in court, Roger Clemens is probably telling himself similar things. Whatever the truth about the drugs he took or didn’t take, he wants to believe — and wants us to believe — that all his achievements, all his wins and strikeouts, belong to him and not to any secret advantage he obtained.

Thomson was caught up in a team-wide escapade, whereas Clemens’s drug-related decisions were his and his alone. But when we think about the outcast pitcher — and about the whole steroids scandal — we should keep their parallel stories in mind, and perhaps judge modern athletes more leniently.

Not because the steroids scandal wasn’t distinctively ugly, and distinctively devastating. But it’s part of a pattern that runs back through all of baseball’s past — through the amphetamines that veterans pressed on younger players, the spitballs pitchers boasted about throwing, and every other edge that athletes turned to in duress.

What’s more, we know so little, even now, about who used steroids, and how often, and how it shaped the game. And for every Clemens or Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire being held up for public flagellation, there’s doubtless a future Hall of Famer — or a scrappy, beloved “gamer” — whose drug use is still as secret as the 1951 Giants’ sign-stealing used to be.

What Roger Clemens wants — what he’s recklessly pursued, to the point where he’s facing perjury charges and possibly jail — is what Bobby Thomson enjoyed. He wants to be judged on what happened on the field, where pitches are thrown and swings are taken, and everything else fades into irrelevance.

We know too much to give him that. But though he hasn’t asked for it, maybe we also know enough about baseball history to give him our forgiveness.

For what it’s worth, the little Putz does get taken to the woodshed in the comments on that piece of shit.  Here’s Prof. Krugman:

We need to pinch pennies these days. Don’t you know we have a budget deficit? For months that has been the word from Republicans and conservative Democrats, who have rejected every suggestion that we do more to avoid deep cuts in public services and help the ailing economy.

But these same politicians are eager to cut checks averaging $3 million each to the richest 120,000 people in the country.

What — you haven’t heard about this proposal? Actually, you have: I’m talking about demands that we make all of the Bush tax cuts, not just those for the middle class, permanent.

Some background: Back in 2001, when the first set of Bush tax cuts was rammed through Congress, the legislation was written with a peculiar provision — namely, that the whole thing would expire, with tax rates reverting to 2000 levels, on the last day of 2010.

Why the cutoff date? In part, it was used to disguise the fiscal irresponsibility of the tax cuts: lopping off that last year reduced the headline cost of the cuts, because such costs are normally calculated over a 10-year period. It also allowed the Bush administration to pass the tax cuts using reconciliation — yes, the same procedure that Republicans denounced when it was used to enact health reform — while sidestepping rules designed to prevent the use of that procedure to increase long-run budget deficits.

Obviously, the idea was to go back at a later date and make those tax cuts permanent. But things didn’t go according to plan. And now the witching hour is upon us.

So what’s the choice now? The Obama administration wants to preserve those parts of the original tax cuts that mainly benefit the middle class — which is an expensive proposition in its own right — but to let those provisions benefiting only people with very high incomes expire on schedule. Republicans, with support from some conservative Democrats, want to keep the whole thing.

And there’s a real chance that Republicans will get what they want. That’s a demonstration, if anyone needed one, that our political culture has become not just dysfunctional but deeply corrupt.

What’s at stake here? According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, making all of the Bush tax cuts permanent, as opposed to following the Obama proposal, would cost the federal government $680 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. For the sake of comparison, it took months of hard negotiations to get Congressional approval for a mere $26 billion in desperately needed aid to state and local governments.

And where would this $680 billion go? Nearly all of it would go to the richest 1 percent of Americans, people with incomes of more than $500,000 a year. But that’s the least of it: the policy center’s estimates say that the majority of the tax cuts would go to the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. Take a group of 1,000 randomly selected Americans, and pick the one with the highest income; he’s going to get the majority of that group’s tax break. And the average tax break for those lucky few — the poorest members of the group have annual incomes of more than $2 million, and the average member makes more than $7 million a year — would be $3 million over the course of the next decade.

How can this kind of giveaway be justified at a time when politicians claim to care about budget deficits? Well, history is repeating itself. The original campaign for the Bush tax cuts relied on deception and dishonesty. In fact, my first suspicions that we were being misled into invading Iraq were based on the resemblance between the campaign for war and the campaign for tax cuts the previous year. And sure enough, that same trademark deception and dishonesty is being deployed on behalf of tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

So, for example, we’re told that it’s all about helping small business; but only a tiny fraction of small-business owners would receive any tax break at all. And how many small-business owners do you know making several million a year?

Or we’re told that it’s about helping the economy recover. But it’s hard to think of a less cost-effective way to help the economy than giving money to people who already have plenty, and aren’t likely to spend a windfall.

No, this has nothing to do with sound economic policy. Instead, as I said, it’s about a dysfunctional and corrupt political culture, in which Congress won’t take action to revive the economy, pleads poverty when it comes to protecting the jobs of schoolteachers and firefighters, but declares cost no object when it comes to sparing the already wealthy even the slightest financial inconvenience.

So far, the Obama administration is standing firm against this outrage. Let’s hope that it prevails in its fight. Otherwise, it will be hard not to lose all faith in America’s future.

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Rich

MoDo has noticed that we’re “Going Mad in Herds,” and has a question:  Obama and Islam: How can America know so little about this president?  Possibly, just possibly, because Teh MSM “reports” on “controversies” like the not-ground-zero-not-mosque and in the bargain manages to misinterpret what the president says?  The Moustache of Wisdom, in “Surprise, Surprise, Surprise,” says the Islamic world needs its own Nelson Mandelas to step forward.  Mr. Kristof, in “Taking Bin Ladin’s Side,” says opposition to the proposed Islamic center near ground zero is one topic on which Sarah Palin and Osama bin Laden apparently agree.  Mr. Rich, in “How Fox Betrayed Petraeus,” says the rage over the “ground zero mosque” is not motivated by a serious desire to protect America, but by a desire for an election-season payoff.  No shit?  Ya think?  Here’s MoDo:

At the Bunch of Grapes bookstore on Martha’s Vineyard, the sojourning President Obama bought a few books, including “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. It was for his daughter, but it may have also conjured a sweet memory for the beleaguered president. Only a couple of years ago, when he was campaigning, Obama inspired comparisons with the noble lawyer Atticus Finch.

Now, after flipping about on some hot-button issues, most recently the plan for an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero, he’s more likely to be painted by disillusioned supporters as Atticus Flinch.

The bookstore gave the president a copy of “Freedom,” a new novel by Jonathan Franzen about a dysfunctional family in America. This is apt, since Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America — a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age.

The country is having some weird mass nervous breakdown, with the right spreading fear and disinformation that is amplified by the poisonous echo chamber that is the modern media environment.

The dispute over the Islamic center has tripped some deep national lunacy. The unbottled anger and suspicion concerning ground zero show that many Americans haven’t flushed the trauma of 9/11 out of their systems — making them easy prey for fearmongers.

Many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.

It is a prejudice stoked by Rush Limbaugh, who mocks “Imam Obama” as “America’s first Muslim president,” and by the evangelist Franklin Graham, who bizarrely told CNN’s John King: “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father, like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother.”

Graham added: “The teaching of Islam is to hate the Jew, to hate the Christian, to kill them. Their goal is world domination.”

A poll last week by the Pew Research Center tracked a strange spike in the number of Americans who believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Obama is a Muslim. And even the ones who don’t think he’s a Muslim don’t necessarily believe he’s a Christian.

The percentage of Americans who now believe that our Christian president is a Muslim has risen to 18 percent. It was 12 percent when Obama ran for president and 11 percent after his inauguration.

Just as some Americans once feared that John Fitzgerald Kennedy (who was a Catholic) would build a tunnel to Rome, now some fear that Barack Hussein Obama (whose name sounds scary) will build a tunnel to Mecca.

In “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” a history of such national follies as England’s South Sea Bubble and Holland’s Tulip Frenzy, the Scottish historian Charles Mackay observed: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

He also concluded that people are more prone to believe the “Wondrously False” than the “Wondrously True.”

“Of all the offspring of time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder’s welcome,” Mackay wrote, adding that “a misdirected zeal in matters of religion” befogs the truth most grievously.

You can have an opinion on the New York mosque, for or against. But there aren’t two sides to the question of whether Obama is a Muslim.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

How can a man who has written two best-selling memoirs and been on TV so much that some Democrats worried he was overexposed be getting less known and more misunderstood by the day?

The president who is always talking about wanting to be perfectly clear is ever more opaque. The One, who owes his presidency to the intense feeling he stirred up, turns out to be a practical guy who can’t deal with intense feeling.

He ran as a man apart — Joe Biden was enlisted to folksy him up — and now he must deal with the fact that many see him as a man apart.

Too lofty to pay heed to the daily bump and grind of politics, Obama has failed to present himself as someone with the common touch. And to the extent that people don’t know him or don’t get him, he becomes easier to demonize.

Obama is the victim of the elevated expectations he so skillfully created in 2008.

He came as a redeemer and then — tied up in W.’s Gordian knots, dragged down by an economy leeched by wars and Wall Street charlatans — didn’t redeem. And nothing bums out a nation that blows with the wind like a self-appointed messiah who disappoints.

If we’re not the ones we’ve been waiting for, who are we?

You, MoDo?  You’re a waste of pixels.  Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

I just saw the movie “Invictus” — the story of how Nelson Mandela, in his first term as president of South Africa, enlists the country’s famed rugby team, the Springboks, on a mission to win the 1995 Rugby World Cup and, through that, to start the healing of that apartheid-torn land. The almost all-white Springboks had been a symbol of white domination, and blacks routinely rooted against them. When the post-apartheid, black-led South African sports committee moved to change the team’s name and colors, President Mandela stopped them. He explained that part of making whites feel at home in a black-led South Africa was not uprooting all their cherished symbols. “That is selfish thinking,” Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, says in the movie. “It does not serve the nation.” Then speaking of South Africa’s whites, Mandela adds, “We have to surprise them with restraint and generosity.”

I love that line: “We have to surprise them.” I was watching the movie on an airplane and scribbled that line down on my napkin because it summarizes what is missing today in so many places: leaders who surprise us by rising above their histories, their constituencies, their pollsters, their circumstances — and just do the right things for their countries.

I tried to recall the last time a leader of importance surprised me on the upside by doing something positive, courageous and against the popular will of his country or party. I can think of a few: Yitzhak Rabin in signing onto the Oslo peace process. Anwar Sadat in going to Jerusalem. And, of course, Mandela in the way he led South Africa.

But these are such exceptions. Look at Iraq today. Five months after its first truly open, broad-based election, in which all the major communities voted, the political elite there cannot rise above Shiite or Sunni identities and reach out to the other side so as to produce a national unity government that could carry Iraq into the future. True, democracy takes a long time to grow, especially in a soil bloodied by a murderous dictator for 30 years. Nevertheless, up to now, Iraq’s new leaders have surprised us only on the downside.

Will they ever surprise us the other way? Should we care now that we’re leaving? Yes, because the roots of 9/11 are an intra-Muslim fight, which America, as an ally of one faction, got pulled into. There are at least three different intra-Muslim wars raging today. One is between the Sunni far right and the Sunni far-far right in Saudi Arabia. This was the war between Osama bin Laden (the far-far right) and the Saudi ruling family (the far right). It is a war between those who think women shouldn’t drive and those who think they shouldn’t even leave the house. Bin Laden attacked us because we prop up his Saudi rivals — which we do to get their oil.

In Iraq, you have the pure Sunni- versus-Shiite struggle. And in Pakistan, you have the fundamentalist Sunnis versus everyone else: Shiites, Ahmadis and Sufis. You will notice that in each of these civil wars, barely a week goes by without one Muslim faction blowing up another faction’s mosque or gathering of innocents — like Tuesday’s bombing in Baghdad, at the opening of Ramadan, which killed 61 people.

In short: the key struggle with Islam is not inter-communal, and certainly not between Americans and Muslims. It is intra-communal and going on across the Muslim world. The reason the Iraq war was, is and will remain important is that it created the first chance for Arab Sunnis and Shiites to do something they have never done in modern history: surprise us and freely write their own social contract for how to live together and share power and resources. If they could do that, in the heart of the Arab world, and actually begin to ease the intra-communal struggle within Islam, it would be a huge example for others. It would mean that any Arab country could be a democracy and not have to be held together by an iron fist from above.

But it will be impossible without Iraqi Shiite and Sunni Mandelas ready to let the future bury the past. As one of Mandela’s guards, watching the new president engage with South African whites, asks in the movie, “How do you spend 30 years in a tiny cell and come out ready to forgive the people who put you there?” It takes a very special leader.

This is also why the issue of the mosque and community center near the site of 9/11 is a sideshow. The truly important question “is not can the different Muslim sects live with Americans in harmony, but can they live with each other in harmony,” said Stephen P. Cohen, an expert on interfaith relations and author of “Beyond America’s Grasp: a Century of Failed Diplomacy in the Middle East.”

Indeed, the big problem is not those Muslims building mosques in America, it is those Muslims blowing up mosques in the Middle East. And the answer to them is not an interfaith dialogue in America. It is an intrafaith dialogue — so sorely missing — in the Muslim world. Our surge in Iraq will never bear fruit without a political surge by Arabs and Muslims to heal intracommunal divides. It would be great if President Obama surprised everyone and gave another speech in Cairo — or Baghdad — saying that.

Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

Is there any doubt about Osama bin Laden’s position on the not-at-ground-zero mosque?

Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents. He fears Muslim clerics who can cite the Koran to denounce terrorism.

It’s striking that many American Republicans share with Al Qaeda the view that the West and the Islamic world are caught inevitably in a “clash of civilizations.” Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who recruits jihadis from his lair in Yemen, tells the world’s English-speaking Muslims that America is at war against Islam. You can bet that Mr. Awlaki will use the opposition to the community center and mosque to try to recruit more terrorists.

In short, the proposed community center is not just an issue on which Sarah Palin and Osama bin Laden agree. It is also one in which opponents of the center are playing into the hands of Al Qaeda.

These opponents seem to be afflicted by two fundamental misconceptions.

The first is that a huge mosque would rise on hallowed land at ground zero. In fact, the building would be something like a YMCA, and two blocks away and apparently out of view from ground zero. This is a dense neighborhood packed with shops, bars, liquor stores — not to mention the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club and the Pussycat Lounge (which says that it arranges lap dances in a private room, presumably to celebrate the sanctity of the neighborhood).

Why do so many Republicans find strip clubs appropriate for the ground zero neighborhood but object to a house of worship? Are lap dances more sanctified than an earnest effort to promote peace?

And this is an earnest effort. I know Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife, Daisy Khan — the figures behind the Islamic community center — and they are the real thing. Because I have written often about Arab atrocities in Darfur and about the abuse of women in Islamic countries, some Muslim leaders are wary of me. But Imam Feisal and Ms. Khan are open-minded and have been strong advocates for women within Islam.

The second misconception underlying this debate is that Islam is an inherently war-like religion that drives believers to terrorism. Sure, the Islamic world is disproportionately turbulent, and mullahs sometimes cite the Koran to incite murder. But don’t forget that the worst brutality in the Middle East has often been committed by more secular rulers, like Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad. And the mastermind of the 1970 Palestinian airline hijackings, George Habash, was a Christian.

Remember also that historically, some of the most shocking brutality in the region was justified by the Bible, not the Koran. Crusaders massacred so many men, women and children in parts of Jerusalem that a Christian chronicler, Fulcher of Chartres, described an area ankle-deep in blood. While burning Jews alive, the crusaders sang, “Christ, We Adore Thee.”

My hunch is that the violence in the Islamic world has less to do with the Koran or Islam than with culture, youth bulges in the population, and the marginalization of women. In Pakistan, I know a young woman whose brothers want to kill her for honor — but her family is Christian, not Muslim.

Precisely because Palestinian violence has roots outside of Islam, Israel originally supported the rise of Hamas in Gaza. Israeli officials thought that if Gazans became more religious, they would spend their time praying rather than firing guns.

President George W. Bush was statesmanlike after 9/11 in reaching out to Muslims and speaking of Islam as a religion of peace. Now many Republicans have abandoned that posture and are cynically turning the Islamic center into a nationwide issue in hopes of votes. It is mind-boggling that so many Republicans are prepared to bolster the Al Qaeda narrative, and undermine the brave forces within Islam pushing for moderation.

Some Republicans say that it is not a matter of religious tolerance but of sensitivity to the feelings of relatives to those killed at ground zero. Hmm. They’re just like the Saudi officials who ban churches, and even confiscate Bibles, out of sensitivity to local feelings.

On my last trip to Saudi Arabia, I brought in a Bible to see what would happen (alas, the customs officer searched only my laptop bag). Memo to Ms. Palin: Should we learn from the Saudis and protect ground zero by banning the Koran from Lower Manhattan?

For much of American history, demagogues have manipulated irrational fears toward people of minority religious beliefs, particularly Catholics and Jews. Many Americans once honestly thought that Catholics could not be true Americans because they bore supreme loyalty to the Vatican.

Today’s crusaders against the Islamic community center are promoting a similar paranoid intolerance, and one day we will be ashamed of it.

We already are ashamed of it, at least rational people are.  Her’s Mr. Rich:

The “ground zero mosque,” as you may well know by now, is not at ground zero. It’s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room. It’s not going to determine President Obama’s political future or the elections of 2010 or 2012. Still, the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan — on the “hallowed ground” of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen’s Club — will prove eventful all the same. And the consequences will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24/7 over the parameters of tolerance, religious freedom, and the real estate gospel of location, location, location.

Here’s what’s been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the “ground zero mosque” just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

You’d think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan “surge” would not act against their own professed interests. But they couldn’t stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country. The ginned-up rage over the “ground zero mosque” was not motivated by a serious desire to protect America from the real threat of terrorists lurking at home and abroad — a threat this furor has in all likelihood exacerbated — but by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy’s evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the “ground zero mosque” from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on “The O’Reilly Factor,” interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project’s organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she said. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

As well Ingraham might. Rauf is no terrorist. He has been repeatedly sent on speaking tours by the Bush and Obama State Departments alike to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, at the Manhattan synagogue B’nai Jeshurun. Pearl’s father was in attendance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Christians and Jews. Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi-use community center, an unabashed imitator of the venerable (and Jewish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its potential to spawn yet another coveted, impossible-to-get-into Manhattan private preschool.

In the five months after The Times’s initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham’s benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper’s inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X’s illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the “radical Islamists” behind the “ground zero mosque” were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

These patriots have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon. Their sudden concern for ground zero is suspect to those of us who actually live in New York. All but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9/11 responders just last month. Though many of these ground-zero watchdogs partied at the 2004 G.O.P. convention in New York exploiting 9/11, none of them protested that a fellow Republican, the former New York governor George Pataki, so bollixed up the management of the World Trade Center site that nine years on it still lacks any finished buildings, let alone a permanent memorial.

The Fox patron saint Sarah Palin calls Park51 a “stab in the heart” of Americans who “still have that lingering pain from 9/11.” But her only previous engagement with the 9/11 site was when she used it as a political backdrop for taking her first questions from reporters nearly a month after being named to the G.O.P. ticket. (She was so eager to grab her ground zero photo op that she defied John McCain’s just-announced “suspension” of their campaign.) Her disingenuous piety has been topped only by Bernie Kerik, who smuggled a Twitter message out of prison to register his rage at the ground zero desecration. As my colleague Clyde Haberman reminded us, such was Kerik’s previous reverence for the burial ground of 9/11 that he appropriated an apartment overlooking the site (and designated for recovery workers) for an extramarital affair.

At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch’s News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified “reports” that Park51 has “money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas.” As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week’s revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $70 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.

Were McCain in the White House, Fox and friends would have kept ignoring Park51. But it’s an irresistible target in our current election year because it revives the most insidious anti-Obama narrative of the many Fox promoted in the previous election year: Obama the closet Muslim and secret madrassa alumnus. In the much discussed latest Pew poll, a record number of Americans (nearing 20 percent) said that our Christian president practices Islam. And they do not see that as a good thing. Existing or proposed American mosques hundreds and even thousands of miles from ground zero, from Tennessee to Wisconsin to California, are now under siege.

After 9/11, President Bush praised Islam as a religion of peace and asked for tolerance for Muslims not necessarily because he was a humanitarian or knew much about Islam but because national security demanded it. An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda’s recruitment spiel. This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden’s “next video script has just written itself,” as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it — but not just for that reason. America’s Muslim partners, those our troops are fighting and dying for, are collateral damage. If the cleric behind Park51 — a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven’s sake — is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?

In the latest CNN poll, American opposition is at an all-time high to both the ostensibly concluded war in Iraq (69 percent) and the endless one in Afghanistan (62 percent). Now, when the very same politicians and pundits who urge infinite patience for Afghanistan slime Muslims as Nazis, they will have to explain that they are not talking about Hamid Karzai or his corrupt narco-thug government or the questionably loyal Afghan armed forces our own forces are asked to entrust with their lives. The hawks will have to make the case that American troops should make the ultimate sacrifice to build a Nazi — Afghan, I mean — nation and that economically depressed taxpayers should keep paying for it. Good luck with that.

Poor General Petraeus. Over the last week he has been ubiquitous in the major newspapers and on television as he pursues a publicity tour to pitch the war he’s inherited. But have you heard any buzz about what he had to say? Any debate? Any anything? No one was listening and no one cared. Everyone was too busy yelling about the mosque.

It’s poignant, really. Even as America’s most venerable soldier returned from the front to valiantly assume the role of Willy Loman, the product he was selling was being discredited and discontinued by his own self-proclaimed allies at home.