Dowd, Cohen, Friedman, Kristof and Bruni

It’s a busy day today, so let’s get started.  MoDo, in “Tempest in a Tea Party,” has a question:  How do you follow the leader when there is none to be found?  Mr. Cohen, who’s in Chipping Norton, England also has a question in “All ‘Chippy’ Between Friends:”  A lucrative satellite TV station for a favorable press? British democracy does its worst.  The Moustache of Wisdom has had an attack of nostalgia.  In “Bring Back Poppy” he gurgles that George H.W. Bush, who may be our most underrated president, believed in the kind of balanced conservatism that is lacking in today’s politics.  Shit.  As long as we’re at it, let’s bring back Richard Milhouse Effing Nixon, who was to the left of the entire miserable crop of inside-the-beltway bastards we have today.  It’s Sunday, so Mr. Kristof seeks to convince us there are “Evangelicals Without Blowhards.”  He insists some televangelists have given evangelical Christians a bad reputation among progressives, but there’s another strain of evangelicals, extraordinary for their generosity and compassion.  All I can say is that they’re very thin on the ground down here in the middle of the Bible belt.  We’re overrun with Talibangelicals, however…  Mr. Bruni addresses “Taxes, and a Dangerous Purity,” and says to Grover Norquist, Washington is an indiscriminate glutton, and extra taxes are like excess calories, sure to bloat the Beast.  As far as I’m concerned if anything is going to be drowned in a bathtub it should be Grover Norquist.  Here’s MoDo:

 So I was chatting with Chris Coons, the new Democratic senator from Delaware who had a rare win over the Tea Party when he beat loony Christine “I’ve Dabbled in Witchcraft but I Am Not a Witch” O’Donnell in the midterms.

Coons is a smart guy who’s alarmed at finding himself in a vicious combat zone that makes “Shark Week” look like a guppy party.

He said he felt as if he were in “an alternative universe.” He wonders if the president, rather than using an analogy about late credit card payments, should explain that failing to raise the debt ceiling is like the nation’s refusing to pay its mortgage. And he glumly noted that there would be a “bouquet of blame” for everyone if Congress and the White House allowed the country to “Titanic.”

“You know,” I told the suffering senator, “there is an easy solution.”

He looked up hopefully.

“Witchcraft,” I beamed. “Too bad we don’t have a senator who knows some spells.”

Ancient incantations and eye of newt — not that Newt — would be the only way to conjure up a less embarrassing group of leaders.

The world is watching in fearful — and sometimes gleeful — fascination as the Tea Party drives a Thunderbird off the cliff with the president and speaker of the House strapped in the back. The Dow is hiding under the bed with a glass of single malt. Can it get more excruciating? Apple has more cash than the U.S. government.

Amid the chilling anarchy, there’s not a single strong leader to be seen — not even a misguided one. All the leaders are followers. You have to wonder if President Obama at some level doesn’t want to lead. Maybe he just wants to be loved.

The citizens of this country tremble at the thought that these are the people governing them. Should we stick our money under our mattresses? It’s not only the economy that gets nourished by confidence; it’s also politics.

The maniacal Tea Party freshmen are trying to burn down the House they were elected to serve in. It turns out they wanted to come inside to get a blueprint of the historic building to sabotage it.

Like gargoyles on the Capitol, the adamantine nihilists are determined to blow up the country’s prestige, their party and even their own re-election chances if that’s what it takes. (Many are worried about primary races with even more dogmatic challengers, which is a truly scary thought.) If they can drag President Obama off his pedestal, even better. They think he looks down on them and sneers at their values.

Democratic lawmakers worry that the Tea Party freshmen have already “neutered” the president, as one told me. They fret that Obama is an inept negotiator. They worry that he should have been out in the country selling a concrete plan, rather than once more kowtowing to Republicans and, as with the stimulus plan, health care and Libya, leading from behind.

As one Democratic senator complained: “The president veers between talking like a peevish professor and a scolding parent.” (Not to mention a jilted lover.) Another moaned: “We are watching him turn into Jimmy Carter right before our eyes.”

Obama’s “We must lift ourselves to a higher place” trope doesn’t work on this rough crowd. If somebody at dinner is about to kill you, you don’t worry about his table manners.

More and more, 2008 looks like the tulip mania.

When Obama came before the cameras Friday to say that “any solution to avoid default must be bipartisan,” many Democrats wish he had just gone all unilateral and taken Bill Clinton’s advice to invoke the 14th Amendment. They yearned to see the president beat the political suicide bombers over the head with the Constitution. Impeaching a constitutional lawyer for saving the economy would be an even more difficult sell than impeaching a rogue for fibbing about a dalliance.

The Gingrich revolution pulled Republicans to the right of the Reagan revolution and the Tea Party revolution pulled Republicans to the right of the Gingrich revolution. The difference, though, is existentially striking: The Reagan and Gingrich forces wanted a leaner government, but they still believed in government.

The sighing, spectral Harry Reid does not look up to the task of taking on the freshman wolfen.

The laconic president emerges from the sidelines periodically to warn about economic default, but we’re already in political default.

Consider what the towel-snapping Tea Party crazies have already accomplished. They’ve changed the entire discussion. They’ve neutralized the White House. They’ve whipped their leadership into submission. They’ve taken taxes and revenues off the table. They’ve withered the stock and bond markets. They’ve made journalists speak to them as though they’re John Calhoun and Alexander Hamilton.

Obama and John Boehner have been completely outplayed by the “hobbits,” as The Wall Street Journal and John McCain called them.

What if this is all a cruel joke on us? What if the people who hate government are good at it and the people who love government are bad at it?

MoDo, sweetie, they’re not good at government.  They’re SUPERB at obstructionism, which is not the same thing.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

It was around this limestone village — “Chippy” to the initiated — that the Cotswolds coterie would gather to run Britain, or at the least the big chunk of it politically susceptible to how TV and tabloids shape the story.

One conspicuous gathering, including the prime minister and Rebekah Brooks, then chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, happened last Christmas just as the game changed in News Corporation’s $14 billion bid for British Sky Broadcasting, a satellite-television cash cow oozing some $1.7 billion in annual profits.

The get-together was at the country retreat of the flame-haired Brooks and her Old Etonian second husband, Charlie Brooks, a horse trainer turned thriller writer and friend of another Old Etonian, David Cameron, who heads the most patrician British cabinet since Macmillan.

Class is alive and well in the United Kingdom. In fact it’s resurgent. You can find $120 Wellington boots and $100 pitchforks in the rolling hills around Chippy.

Unease over class is one reason Cameron was so determined to cultivate a Murdoch tabloid connection to the plebs, so eager to keep meeting Brooks (to the tune of more than one Chequers invitation and six chats in seven months last year), and so blind to the phone-hacking abuses of the Murdoch empire.

The story of Cameron’s first year in office is the story of how desperately News Corporation wanted all of BSkyB and how that warped the judgment of a “toff” prime minister and his cabinet. The whole business reeks, I’d say: a satellite TV service with over 10 million customers for the favorable coverage that brings votes. Cameron insists he never had an “inappropriate conversation.” Still, it’s a cautionary tale — familiar in the United States — of democracy perverted by moneyed inner circles at the nexus of politics and TV.

James Murdoch, who heads News Corporation’s European operations, was also at the Christmas party. He had reason to feel buoyant about the bid for the 61 percent of BSkyB that News Corporation does not own. Vince Cable, the business secretary and cabinet member most hostile to the takeover, had just been stripped by Cameron of his oversight role on the deal.

Shares in BSkyB spiked nearly 2 percent when, on Dec. 21, Cameron sidelined Cable, a Liberal Democrat, and handed the sensitive dossier to a fellow Conservative, Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state for culture, media and sports. Suddenly the deal looked like a shoo-in.

Cable, defying what he has called “strong advice” from inside the government to approve the bid (like all Murdoch’s media-accumulating bids over the past decades), had referred it to Ofcom, the British broadcasting regulator. That was before he was undone by undercover reporters from the conservative Daily Telegraph posing as constituents. They secretly recorded Cable saying, “I have declared war on Mr. Murdoch and I think we are going to win.”

Off with his head! Cable, who also said it was a “legal decision” that could not be “politicized,” was barred from matters Murdoch and only just kept his cabinet job.

Some weeks before Cable’s sidelining, James Murdoch visited another Liberal Democrat member of the cabinet, Chris Huhne, the secretary of state for energy and climate change. The ostensible reason — get this! — was that News Corporation had become the first carbon-neutral global media company. Perhaps the folks over at Fox News Channel who love to trash global warming, laud Big Oil and sabotage attempts to forge a serious U.S. energy policy should take a “fair and balanced” look at their parent company.

Murdoch began by telling Huhne all about News Corporation and environmental sustainability — yada yada — before getting to the crux. It was important that the BSkyB deal go through swiftly. Delay was unacceptable. Referring the bid to a competition commission was unnecessary and would take forever. Huhne listened before explaining the obvious: Not his dossier.

I’d say this encounter gives a fair taste of the tone of the dozens of meetings over the past year between News Corporation honchos and the prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Hunt and other cabinet members. Hey, it was all in the family, Cotswolds Cosa Nostra, whether near Chippy, where Cameron has a house, or not.

The intense hobnobbing-lobbying worked. By July 1, the government was ready to approve the deal. Hunt was on board. A small concession had been wrung from News Corporation — the spinning off of Sky News into a separate listed company — but smooth James Murdoch was close to the big prize, BSkyB and its $1.7 billion a year in pocket change.

Then it all unraveled. Everyone had overlooked one small thing: the law. Oh, yes, that — how quaint that some things in Britain, in theory, aren’t yet up for sale. Murdoch’s big Sunday tabloid was a big illegal phone-hacking operation, ready to hack murdered girls, like Milly Dowler, and the mothers, like Sara Payne, of murdered girls.

It’s beautiful around Chipping Norton, where the Range Rovers purr and their owners have no dirt under their fingernails. But Britain is full of dirt and Cameron’s done his bit for sordidness this past year. He’s not out of the woods yet.

Now here’s the nostalgic Moustache of Wisdom:

Watching today’s Republicans being led around by an extremist Tea Party faction, with no adult supervision, I find my mind drifting back to the late 1980s when I was assigned to cover the administration of George H.W. Bush, who I believe is one of our most underrated presidents. I have long admired the elder Bush for the deftness with which he dealt with the collapse of the Soviet empire. But, in later years, I came to admire him even more for the fact that he believed that math and science were not matters of opinion — a view increasingly rare in today’s G.O.P.

Despite having run on the promise of “Read my lips: No new taxes,” when the deficit started spiraling to dangerous levels under his presidency, Bush agreed to a compromise with Democrats to raise several taxes, along with spending cuts, as part of a 1990 budget deal that helped to pave the way for the prosperity of that decade. It definitely hurt his re-election, but he did it anyway.

George H.W. Bush also believed in science. How many Republicans know that he and his aide Boyden Gray pioneered the use of cap-and-trade to deal — very effectively — with the problem of acid rain produced by power-plant emissions?

In an article, “The Political History of Cap and Trade,” published in Smithsonian Magazine in August 2009, Richard Conniff details how “an unlikely mix of environmentalists and free-market conservatives hammered out the strategy known as cap-and-trade.” As Conniff explained it, “Gray liked the marketplace approach, and even before the Reagan administration expired, he put [Environmental Defense Fund] staffers to work drafting legislation to make it happen. … John Sununu, the White House chief of staff, was furious. He said the cap ‘was going to shut the economy down,’ Boyden Gray recalls. But the in-house debate ‘went very, very fast. We didn’t have time to fool around with it.’ President Bush not only accepted the cap, he overruled his advisers’ recommendation of an eight million-ton cut in annual acid rain emissions in favor of the 10 million-ton cut advocated by environmentalists. … [Today,] the cap-and-trade system continues to let polluters figure out the least expensive way to reduce their acid rain emissions.”

George H.W. Bush also believed that to be a conservative was to act with “prudence,” one of his favorite words and a philosophy he demonstrated in foreign policy by deciding, once he defeated Saddam Hussein in Kuwait, not to follow him to Baghdad.

I find it hard to look at today’s G.O.P. without thinking how far it has drifted from the kind of balanced conservatism the elder Bush brought to politics. Today’s G.O.P. has gone from espousing cap-and-trade to deal with pollution to espousing the notion that all the world’s climate scientists have secretly gotten together and perpetrated a “hoax,” called climate change, in order to expand government — all of this at a time of record heat waves and climate disruptions.

On the economy, the G.O.P. has gone from the magical thinking of Vice President Dick Cheney — who argued that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” and used this argument to help run up the deficit to its current astronomical levels with huge tax cuts — to an anti-tax cult that spurned a “Grand Bargain” with President Obama because it would have not only cut $3 trillion in spending over the next decade but also involved $1 trillion in tax increases. Somehow, the G.O.P. has forgotten that even Ronald Reagan didn’t believe deficits don’t matter and he raised taxes when our fiscal stability demanded it. As for prudence today, well, the willingness to risk a default on America’s financial obligations by refusing to raise the debt ceiling may be many things, but it is not prudent.

Where have all the adults in this party gone? Where is Dick Lugar, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Colin Powell, Hank Paulson and Big Business? Are you telling me that they are ready to fall in line behind Michele Bachmann, Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin? Are these really the pacesetters of modern conservatism?

I wish President Obama had embraced the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan when it was announced last November and then added his own long-term investment plans on top of it and then built a national mandate for this “Grand Bargain” — before we got to this point. But the president has now embraced such a deal, which is important and constructive, though he needs to spell out this Grand Bargain more emphatically, publicly, repeatedly and specifically.

Because it is the only long-term solution — and it is coming. Either the market will impose a Grand Bargain on us in a haphazard way or we can do it rationally by a Democratic and Republican consensus. The president says that he is ready and that his party is behind him. I hope so. But without a Republican Party that returns to the sane conservatism of the likes of George H.W. Bush — which accepts that both spending and tax increases are, reluctantly, needed to fix our budget and maintain social stability — we’re not going to get even a minibargain, let alone a grand one. It is time for a counterrevolution in the G.O.P.

Tommy, regarding the “deftness” Poppy showed over the collapse of the Soviet Union — have you forgotten that he had been head of the CIA?  He was perfectly well aware of how hollow the “Soviet threat” was.  Now here’s Mr. Kristof:

In these polarized times, few words conjure as much distaste in liberal circles as “evangelical Christian.”

That’s partly because evangelicals came to be associated over the last 25 years with blowhard scolds. When the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson discussed on television whether the 9/11 attacks were God’s punishment on feminists, gays and secularists, God should have sued them for defamation.

Earlier, Mr. Falwell opined that AIDS was “God’s judgment on promiscuity.” That kind of religious smugness allowed the AIDS virus to spread and constituted a greater immorality than anything that occurred in gay bathhouses.

Partly because of such self-righteousness, the entire evangelical movement often has been pilloried among progressives as reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and, if anything, immoral.

Yet that casual dismissal is profoundly unfair of the movement as a whole. It reflects a kind of reverse intolerance, sometimes a reverse bigotry, directed at tens of millions of people who have actually become increasingly engaged in issues of global poverty and justice.

This compassionate strain of evangelicalism was powerfully shaped by the Rev. John Stott, a gentle British scholar who had far more impact on Christianity than media stars like Mr. Robertson or Mr. Falwell. Mr. Stott, who died a few days ago at the age of 90, was named one of the globe’s 100 most influential people by Time, and in stature he was sometimes described as the equivalent of the pope among the world’s evangelicals.

Mr. Stott didn’t preach fire and brimstone on a Christian television network. He was a humble scholar whose 50-odd books counseled Christians to emulate the life of Jesus — especially his concern for the poor and oppressed — and confront social ills like racial oppression and environmental pollution.

“Good Samaritans will always be needed to succor those who are assaulted and robbed; yet it would be even better to rid the Jerusalem-Jericho road of brigands,” Mr. Stott wrote in his book “The Cross of Christ.” “Just so Christian philanthropy in terms of relief and aid is necessary, but long-term development is better, and we cannot evade our political responsibility to share in changing the structures that inhibit development. Christians cannot regard with equanimity the injustices that spoil God’s world and demean his creatures.”

Mr. Stott then gave examples of the injustices that Christians should confront: “the traumas of poverty and unemployment,” “the oppression of women,” and in education “the denial of equal opportunity for all.”

For many evangelicals who winced whenever a televangelist made the headlines, Mr. Stott was an intellectual guru and an inspiration. Richard Cizik, president of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, who has worked heroically to combat everything from genocide to climate change, told me: “Against the quackery and anti-intellectualism of our movement, Stott made it possible to say you are ‘evangelical’ and not be apologetic.”

The Rev. Jim Wallis, head of a Christian organization called Sojourners that focuses on social justice, added: “John Stott was the very first important evangelical leader to support our work at Sojourners.”

Mr. Stott, who was a brilliant student at Cambridge, also underscored that faith and intellect needn’t be at odds.

Centuries ago, serious religious study was extraordinarily demanding and rigorous; in contrast, anyone could declare himself a scientist and go in the business of, say, alchemy. These days, it’s the reverse. A Ph.D. in chemistry is a rigorous degree, while a preacher can explain the Bible on television without mastering Hebrew or Greek — or even showing interest in the nuances of the original texts.

Those self-appointed evangelical leaders come across as hypocrites, monetizing Jesus rather than emulating him. Some seem homophobic, and many who claim to be “pro-life” seem little concerned with human life post-uterus. Those are the preachers who won headlines and disdain.

But in reporting on poverty, disease and oppression, I’ve seen so many others. Evangelicals are disproportionately likely to donate 10 percent of their incomes to charities, mostly church-related. More important, go to the front lines, at home or abroad, in the battles against hunger, malaria, prison rape, obstetric fistula, human trafficking or genocide, and some of the bravest people you meet are evangelical Christians (or conservative Catholics, similar in many ways) who truly live their faith.

I’m not particularly religious myself, but I stand in awe of those I’ve seen risking their lives in this way — and it sickens me to see that faith mocked at New York cocktail parties.

Why does all this matter?

Because religious people and secular people alike do fantastic work on humanitarian issues — but they often don’t work together because of mutual suspicions. If we could bridge this “God gulf,” we would make far more progress on the world’s ills.

And that would be, well, a godsend.

Now, last but not least, here’s Mr. Bruni:

What does the face of antitax absolutism look like?

It has a tentative beard, more shadow than shag, like an awkward weigh station on the road from callow to professorial. It wears blunt glasses over narrowed eyes that glint mischievously, and its mouth is rarely still, because there’s no end to the jeremiads pouring forth: about the peril of Obama, the profligacy of Democrats and the paramount importance of opposing all tax increases, even ones that close the loopiest of loopholes.

It belongs to Grover Norquist, and if you hadn’t seen it before, you probably spotted it last week, as he pinged from CNN to MSNBC to Fox, reveling in the solidarity Republicans had shown against any new revenue. The country was lurching toward a possible default, but Norquist was riding high. In between television appointments on Thursday, he met me for breakfast near Times Square.

As he walked in and sat down he was sermonizing. As he got up and left an hour later he was still going strong. He seems to live his whole life in midsentence and takes few detectable breaths, his zeal boundless and his catechism changeless: Washington is an indiscriminate glutton, and extra taxes are like excess calories, sure to bloat the Beast.

When he ordered only an egg white omelet with spinach, I had to wonder: preferred meal or deliberate metaphor?

He’s that consumed. Moments earlier, when he had asked a server about the breakfast options and was directed to a menu right in front of him, he proclaimed, “Oh, it’s written down! Unlike the Gang of Six proposal.” He was against that — it included revenue — and wasn’t about to miss a chance to say so, even this oddly incongruent opportunity.

It’s the group Norquist runs, Americans for Tax Reform, that has been pressing politicians for decades to sign a pledge not to vote for any net tax increase under any circumstances. All but 6 of the 240 Republicans in the House, along with two Democrats, have done so.

Republicans differ on whether that reflects the sway of Norquist, who often vilifies pledge resisters during their primary campaigns, or is simply the temper of these Tea Partying times. Which came first: the Norquist or the egg?

Either way, he has emerged as the most visible mouthpiece and muse of the lower-taxes, less-government troops that have played a major role in the debt crisis. And he provides a handy window into them.

His assessment of Obama was succinct: “The president of the United States is a left-wing ideologue.”

His analysis of the Democratic Party’s values and tactics was unambiguous — and uncomplicated by the deficits racked up under Obama’s predecessor.

“Their game plan has always been spend, spend, spend, then come and ask Republicans to be responsible and raise taxes,” he said.

“Democrats are like a teenage boy on a prom date,” he added, proceeding to act out multiple parts in an imagined conversation, which is one of his favorite things to do. “They keep asking. Maybe she’ll say yes. ‘No! No! No!’ But they have to keep asking. It’s part of their DNA — teenage boys and Democrats.”

Norquist has metaphor mania. The one he hatched to argue that tax increases — as opposed to spending cuts — are a clumsy way to manage budgetary woes yanked the conversation into a hypothetical operating room.

“I’m a surgeon,” he posited. “I’m never going to have a baseball bat in my list of tools, because I don’t think a baseball bat is very useful in taking out a kidney. ‘Oh, it worked for one patient!’ No! I’m not going to use a baseball bat to take out a kidney. It leaves too much blood on the floor.”

In short, tax increases are inelegant instruments, and you can’t let Derek Jeter perform organ excavation. Whether or not it’s covered under Obamacare.

Norquist equated keeping a lid on taxes with separating church and state, casting both as unshakable positions. The Founding Fathers, he added, had no problem with absolutes.

“The Constitution has a list of things that the government’s not allowed to do ever, ever, ever. The government’s not allowed to tell you what church to go to. Ever. Period. It’s just not. So you say, ‘What if God comes down and tells everyone He’s an Episcopalian? Can we do it then?’ No! Not then. Even then we cannot do it. Got it? It’s not allowed. We can’t steal your guns. ‘Well, what if I want to? What if a bad person has a gun?’ No. Uh-uh. No.” His omelet was virtually untouched.

What Democrats want, he said, is “to turn us into Europe, the European welfare state, somewhere between France and Greece. Which is an improvement. When I was in college, the guys I debated wanted to turn us into something between Sweden and East Germany. The left has receded in its demands. Most people on college campuses don’t speak as admiringly as the kids I went to college used to about the Khmer Rouge.”

That college was the same bastion of supposed elitism that gave the president his law degree: Harvard. In the decades after Norquist, now 54, graduated, he became an immensely well-connected player in the conservative establishment, a compatriot of the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and a magnet for corporate support. Businesses like their loopholes.

But they don’t like default, and there was chatter in Washington last week about whether Norquist had done their bidding too well. Were the Boehner-resistant House conservatives Norquist acolytes run amok? Was he having a Dr. Frankenstein moment?

And is his tax-slashing fervor entirely genuine, or is it ramped up, a theatrical means to get attention? That question dogs him as well. He has framed many of the newspaper and magazine articles about him, and displays them in the A.T.R.’s Washington headquarters.

But vanity is too commonplace inside the Beltway to be troubling. What’s alarming about Norquist and the pledge mentality, which has spread to other causes and other points of the political spectrum, is their promotion of the idea that political rigidity is to be prized above all else. That purity is king. Such a theology precludes nimbleness and compromise, which are not only the hallmarks of maturity but also the essence of sane government.

When making the rounds on Capitol Hill last week, I dropped in on Representative Kevin Yoder, a Republican freshman from Kansas. He considers himself a fiscal conservative, but voted in favor of the Boehner bill. And he never did sign Norquist’s pledge.

His reason was as modestly stated as it was unimpeachable. “My responsibility lies to my constituents,” not to Norquist, he said, adding: “I can’t foresee every scenario.” No one can. That’s why it’s best not to paint yourself into a corner, and to leave room even for an Episcopal conversion.

Mr. Norquist, go build your own roads and sewer system, ‘kay?  You hate taxes that much, stay the hell off anything my taxes helped build.  For that matter, put out your own house fire, you wretched asshole.

Blow and Nocera

Ms. Collins is still on book leave.  Mr. Blow, in “My Very Own Captain America,” says racial revisionism is rampant in Hollywood. But the new “Captain America” film made it personal.  Mr. Nocera, in “The Madoff Trustee’s Bad Day,” says in the latest chapter over Bernie Madoff’s heinous Ponzi scheme, a federal judge delivers a big loss to everyone except the banks. What else is new?  Here’s Mr. Blow:

My grandfather spoke to me this week. That would’ve been unremarkable if not for the fact that he died four years ago.

I had ducked into a movie theater to escape the maddening debt-limit debacle. I chose “Captain America: The First Avenger.” Surely that would reset the patriotic optimism.

But as I watched the scenes of a fictitious integrated American Army fighting in Europe at the end of World War II, I became unsettled. Yes, I know that racial revisionism has become so common in film that it’s almost customary, so much so that moviegoers rarely balk or even blink. And even I try not to think too deeply about shallow fare. Escapism by its nature must bend away from reality. But this time I was forced to bend it back. It was personal.

The only black fighting force on the ground in Europe during World War II was the 92nd Infantry Division: the now famous, segregated “Buffalo Soldiers.” My grandfather, Fred D. Rhodes, was one of those soldiers.

The division was activated late in the war, more out of acquiescence to black leaders than the desire of white policy makers in the war department who doubted the battle worthiness of black soldiers. It was considered to be an experiment, one that the writer of the department’s recommendation to re-establish it would later describe as “programmed to fail from the inception.”

For one, as the historian Daniel K. Gibran has documented, the soldiers were placed under the command of a known racist who questioned their “moral attitude toward battle,” “mental toughness” and “trustworthiness,” and who remained a military segregationist until the day he died. In 1959, the commander commented in a study: “It is absurd to contend that the characteristics demonstrated by the Negroes” will not “undermine and deteriorate the white army unit into which the Negro is integrated.”

Yet they did show great toughness and character, including my grandfather. This is how his 1944 Silver Star citation recounts his bravery:

“On 16 November, while proceeding towards the front at night, Sergeant Rhodes’s motorized patrol was advanced upon near a village by a lone enemy soldier. Sergeant Rhodes jumped from the truck and as a group of enemy soldiers suddenly appeared, intent upon capturing the truck and patrol intact, he opened fire from his exposed position on the road. His fire forced the enemy to scatter while the patrol dismounted and took cover with light casualties. Sergeant Rhodes then moved toward a nearby building where, still exposed, his fire on the enemy was responsible for the successful evacuation of the wounded patrol members by newly arrived medical personnel.  Sergeant Rhodes was then hit by enemy shell fragments, but in spite of his wounds he exhausted his own supply of ammunition then, obtaining an enemy automatic weapon, exhausted its supply inflicting three certain casualties on the enemy.  He spent the rest of the night in a nearby field and returned, unaided, to his unit the next afternoon.”

Awesome!

Astonishingly, his and others’ efforts were not fully recognized.

My grandfather’s actions were the first among the Buffalo Soldiers to be recommended for a Distinguished Service Cross, according to surviving records. That recommendation was declined. In fact, only four enlisted soldiers from the 92nd were recommended for the service cross. They were all denied. It was given to just two black members of the unit, both officers, and only one of those officers received it during the war. The other received it nearly four decades after the war was over because of the investigative efforts of another historian.

As the 1997 study “The Exclusion of Black Soldiers from the Medal of Honor in World War II” pointed out, by mid-1947 the U.S. Army had awarded 4,750 Distinguished Service Crosses and only eight, less than 0.2 percent, had gone to black soldiers and not a single black soldier had been recommended for a Medal of Honor. (Roughly 1.2 million blacks served in World War II and about 50,000 were engaged in combat.) Until 1997, World War II was the only American war in which no black soldiers had received a Medal of Honor. President Bill Clinton changed that that year by awarding Medals of Honor to seven of the men who had been awarded the Distinguished Service Crosses, the only ones whose cases were reviewed for the upgrade. Just one of them, Joseph Vernon Baker, a lieutenant in my grandfather’s regiment, was alive to receive it.

Even when this news of the Buffalo Soldiers was making headlines in the ’90s, my grandfather never said a word. There’s no way to know why. Maybe it was the pain of risking his life abroad for a freedom that he couldn’t fully enjoy at home. Maybe it was the misery of languishing in a military hospital for many months and being discharged with a limp that would follow him to the grave. Or maybe it was simply the act of a brave soldier living out the motto of his division: “Deeds Not Words.”

Who knows? But it wasn’t until after he died that I learned of his contributions. My mother came across his discharge papers while sorting through his things and sent me a copy. On a whim, I Googled his name and division, and there he was, staring out at me from a picture I’d never seen and being extolled in books I’d never read. My heart swelled, and my skin went cold. I wanted to tell him how proud I was, but that window had closed.

It illustrates just how quickly things can fade into the fog of history if not vigilantly and accurately kept alive in the telling.

That is why the racial history of this country is not a thing to be toyed with by Hollywood. There are too many bodies at the bottom of that swamp to skim across it with such indifference. Attention must be shown. Respect must be paid.

So as “Captain America” ended and the credits began to roll, I managed a bit of a smile, the kind that turns up on the corners with a tinge of sadness. I smiled not for what I’d seen, but for what had not been shown, knowing that I would commit it to a column so that my grandfather and the many men like him would not be lost to the sanitized vision of America’s darker years.

This is my deed through words, for you, Grandpa. You’ll never be forgotten.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

Jed Rakoff is one of the most respected federal judges in the country, so when he issues an opinion calling one side’s arguments “convoluted,” “conjecture” and “a stretch,” people tend to take notice.

He did so on Thursday, in the matter of Irving H. Picard v. HSBC. Picard, of course, is the bankruptcy trustee in charge of recovering money that he can distribute to the victims of Bernie Madoff’s heinous Ponzi scheme. To this end, Picard has filed something like 1,000 lawsuits, seeking more than $100 billion.

He has sued the feeder funds that funneled money into Madoff’s firm. He has sued people who were close to Madoff and likely knew he was a crook. And he has sued many innocent Madoff investors, who had the misfortune of taking more money out of their accounts than they put in. Although these latter lawsuits have been extremely controversial, “clawing back” money from net winners to create a pot of money for the net losers is something bankruptcy trustees do all the time after a Ponzi scheme is exposed. After all, the gains reaped by the net winners came from money the net losers put in. That’s how Ponzi schemes work.

What trustees don’t generally do, however, is sue big financial institutions like HSBC or JPMorgan Chase on the grounds that they either looked the other way or helped enable the Ponzi schemer. As we discovered during the Enron scandal, the courts frown on “aiding and abetting” suits, even though to a nonlawyer, they can seem more than justified.

And so it was on Thursday: in throwing out Picard’s suit against HSBC — and strongly implying that every other bank the trustee has sued is also likely off the hook — Rakoff may have used sharp language, but he was really just interpreting the law as most judges would. You can’t read his opinion without being impressed with his legal logic — and the difficulty of mounting a successful appeal. You also can’t read it without shaking your head in dismay: Even as innocent Madoff victims are being sued to pay back other innocent Madoff victims, the enabling banks get to walk away. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

In fact, the reason Picard and his top lieutenant, David Sheehan, decided to sue the banks is precisely that the pattern was so familiar. “This is the largest financial fraud ever perpetrated,” Sheehan told me not long ago. “It didn’t happen without enabling. Bernie needed a bank to facilitate what he was doing. When you see what the banks were doing, you realize that Bernie was as much a part of the financial fabric of Wall Street as any collateralized debt obligation.”

During the course of a lengthy investigation, Sheehan became horrified by the evidence of bank complicity. HSBC, for instance, funneled enormous sums of money into Madoff. It served as the custodian to a number of Madoff feeder funds. Yet whenever the bank did due diligence into Madoff’s hedge fund, it ignored numerous red flags suggesting that Madoff was operating a fraud. Various HSBC due-diligence reports actually described Madoff’s returns as “too good to be true.”

JPMorgan Chase, which is also being sued by the trustee — and has also argued that the case should be thrown out of court — was Madoff’s bank. Its bankers saw money coming into the Madoff account and going out again, without ever being invested in the market. They saw evidence of money-laundering. Yet they never uttered a peep. Madoff’s business was too important.

Ultimately, Picard and Sheehan were trying to do something that has been sorely lacking in the aftermath of the financial crisis. They were trying to bring about some justice, using the only weapon at their disposal: litigation. That’s not their job, of course, and that is partly why they were handed such a stinging defeat. But at least they were trying, which is more than you can say for the Justice Department.

There’s one other aspect of Thursday’s decision that I couldn’t help noticing. The net winners, many of them, were nearly giddy over the fact that Picard got his comeuppance so publicly — even though Rakoff’s decision will surely hurt them. Of the $100 billion Picard has sought, at least three-quarters came from lawsuits like the one Rakoff just threw out. Had Picard won those suits, he would likely have had enough to compensate not just the net losers but the net winners. The fact that he lost means that he will continue to press hard for clawback money.

It is easy to understand the net winners’ anger at the trustee. To wake up one day and learn that you’ve been victimized by a financial fraud is painful enough. But to then realize that you are expected to return money that you thought was yours is infuriating. As their fury has grown, however, they have forgotten who the real bad guy is.

It’s not Irving Picard. It’s Bernie Madoff.

 

Krugman, solo

Life is good.  Both Bobo and Mr. Cohen are off today.  Prof. Krugman addresses “The Centrist Cop-Out” and says that placing blame equally on Democrats and Republicans for the stalemate over the debt crisis only encourages more bad behavior.  Here he is:

The facts of the crisis over the debt ceiling aren’t complicated. Republicans have, in effect, taken America hostage, threatening to undermine the economy and disrupt the essential business of government unless they get policy concessions they would never have been able to enact through legislation. And Democrats — who would have been justified in rejecting this extortion altogether — have, in fact, gone a long way toward meeting those Republican demands.

As I said, it’s not complicated. Yet many people in the news media apparently can’t bring themselves to acknowledge this simple reality. News reports portray the parties as equally intransigent; pundits fantasize about some kind of “centrist” uprising, as if the problem was too much partisanship on both sides.

Some of us have long complained about the cult of “balance,” the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts. I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” But would that cult still rule in a situation as stark as the one we now face, in which one party is clearly engaged in blackmail and the other is dickering over the size of the ransom?

The answer, it turns out, is yes. And this is no laughing matter: The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about. As you may know, President Obama initially tried to strike a “Grand Bargain” with Republicans over taxes and spending. To do so, he not only chose not to make an issue of G.O.P. extortion, he offered extraordinary concessions on Democratic priorities: an increase in the age of Medicare eligibility, sharp spending cuts and only small revenue increases. As The Times’s Nate Silver pointed out, Mr. Obama effectively staked out a position that was not only far to the right of the average voter’s preferences, it was if anything a bit to the right of the average Republican voter’s preferences.

But Republicans rejected the deal. So what was the headline on an Associated Press analysis of that breakdown in negotiations? “Obama, Republicans Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric.” A Democratic president who bends over backward to accommodate the other side — or, if you prefer, who leans so far to the right that he’s in danger of falling over — is treated as being just the same as his utterly intransigent opponents. Balance!

Which brings me to those “centrist” fantasies.

Many pundits view taking a position in the middle of the political spectrum as a virtue in itself. I don’t. Wisdom doesn’t necessarily reside in the middle of the road, and I want leaders who do the right thing, not the centrist thing.

But for those who insist that the center is always the place to be, I have an important piece of information: We already have a centrist president. Indeed, Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan administration, argues that Mr. Obama is in practice a moderate conservative.

Mr. Bartlett has a point. The president, as we’ve seen, was willing, even eager, to strike a budget deal that strongly favored conservative priorities. His health reform was very similar to the reform Mitt Romney installed in Massachusetts. Romneycare, in turn, closely followed the outlines of a plan originally proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation. And returning tax rates on high-income Americans to their level during the Roaring Nineties is hardly a socialist proposal.

True, Republicans insist that Mr. Obama is a leftist seeking a government takeover of the economy, but they would, wouldn’t they? The facts, should anyone choose to report them, say otherwise.

So what’s with the buzz about a centrist uprising? As I see it, it’s coming from people who recognize the dysfunctional nature of modern American politics, but refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge the one-sided role of Republican extremists in making our system dysfunctional. And it’s not hard to guess at their motivation. After all, pointing out the obvious truth gets you labeled as a shrill partisan, not just from the right, but from the ranks of self-proclaimed centrists.

But making nebulous calls for centrism, like writing news reports that always place equal blame on both parties, is a big cop-out — a cop-out that only encourages more bad behavior. The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

 

Coates and Bruni

Mr. Kristof is off, and Ms. Collins is still on book leave.  Mr. Coates, in “Obama and His Discontents,” says a look at the politics that surrounded the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation seems more relevant today than ever.  He’s just a tad put out…  Mr. Bruni, in “The Path From Poetry to Drudgery,” says President Obama is having to govern under limits, but he surely yearns to move past them.  Here’s Mr. Coates:

The administration of President Obama has never held much regard for its left flank. Admonished by the vice president to “stop whining,” inveighed against by the president himself for “griping and groaning,” the liberal critics have been generally viewed by the White House as petulant children. “The Professional Left,” former press secretary Robert Gibbs dubbed them, a gang of nettlesome romantics who “ought to be drug-tested,” and would not be happy until “we have Canadian health care and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon.”

Keeping up the theme, the administration recently released a video of Mr. Obama waxing scornfully at the expense of his softheaded allies. The audience was an ideological cross-section of college students, no doubt picked to emphasize Mr. Obama’s ever open mind. The president invoked Abraham Lincoln, noting that the Emancipation Proclamation was a compromise that freed only the slaves in rebel territory. “Can you imagine how The Huffington Post would have reported on that? It would have been blistering. Think about it, ‘Lincoln sells out slaves.’ ”

Rendering the hallowed Proclamation as a seminal act of hippy-punching is understandably attractive to the Very Serious People of Washington. But, in Mr. Obama’s case, it also evinces a narrow politicocentric view of democracy that holds that the first duty of a loyal opposition is to stay on message and fall in line.

In fact, many of Lincoln’s most vociferous critics welcomed the Proclamation. Wendell Phillips, who once derided Lincoln as “the slave-hound of Illinois,” claimed the Proclamation as “the people’s triumph.” Frederick Douglass, who helped wage a primary campaign against the president in 1864 and once charged that Lincoln was “a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred,” hailed the Proclamation as “the greatest event of our nation’s history.”

Douglass was not delusional. With a wave of his pen, Lincoln freed tens of thousands of slaves and opened the Army to blacks, an act that Lincoln himself once derided. “Never before had so large a number of slaves been declared free,” writes historian Eric Foner in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, “The Fiery Trial.”

“The proclamation altered the nature of the Civil War, the relationship of the federal government to slavery, and the course of American history. It liquidated the largest concentration of property in the United States. … Henceforth, freedom would follow the American flag.”

In sum, it’s true that the Proclamation was a compromise. But hailing it merely as such is akin to hailing “Moby-Dick” for being a book — technically correct, if painfully thickwitted.

Likewise, a pedantic focus on the document itself conveniently omits the work of abolitionists and radicals whose tactics, encompassing jailbreaks, treason and shootouts, far outstripped anything ever concocted by MoveOn.org. But Lincoln understood their relationship to the larger cause. “They are nearer to me than the other side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally,” he once said of the Radicals. “They are utterly lawless — the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with — but after all their faces are set Zionward.”

Obama, too, stands atop the work of a coalition of unhandy devils. In the fall of 2002, Chicago’s own professional left organized a rally to oppose the Iraq War and invited Mr. Obama to join them. He accepted, and the first unwitting steps to the White House were taken. It is considerably harder to imagine Mr. Obama’s path through the Democratic primary had he been just another pro-war Democrat insisting that the base activists stop whining.

Mr. Obama, of course, is not an activist but a politician held accountable by a broad national electorate. He is thus charged with the admittedly difficult task of nudging the country forward, even as he reflects it. That mission necessitates appreciating the art of compromise, but not fetishizing it. Mr. Obama need only look to his hero for an object lesson. Parcel to emancipation, Abraham Lincoln, against the howls of radicals and black leaders, pushed for the colonization of blacks in Africa or the Caribbean, as middle ground between full equality and slavery. The scheme ended in embarrassment; Lincoln’s point man was exposed as a con artist who attempted to effectively re-enslave the blacks he was charged with leading. A Congressional investigation soon followed. It was a fiasco — and it was a compromise.

Obama has been much praised for the magnanimity he shows his opposition. But such empathy, unburdened by actual expectations, comes easy. More challenging is the work of coping with those who have the disagreeable habit of taking the president, and his talk of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” seriously. In that business, Obama would do well to understand that while democracy depends on intelligent compromise, it also depends on the ill-tempered gripers and groaners out in the street.

The Party of Lincoln, whatever its present designs, has not forgotten this.

Now here’s Mr. Bruni:

Just three months ago, for at least a little while, everything felt so different. You were triumphant, the audaciously hopeful gambler who had rolled the dice and vanquished Bin Laden, even though some of the experts advising you had put the odds well below 50-50. For showing extraordinary nerve, you were repaid with exceptional luck.

Even three weeks ago, you were in a better place. Unbeknownst to most of the partisan warriors and nearly all of the cynical scribes around town, you and John Boehner had been huddling in the White House, talking trillions, tracing the heady contours of a grand bargain. It was another big bet, but with odds no worse than the last one, or so you calculated. And in Boehner, you believed, you’d found a similarly motivated accomplice with a similarly long-range view. Despite your customary reserve, you experienced the stirrings of a real fondness for him.

Then . . . breakdowns. Standoffs. Near chaos on Capitol Hill. And, now, a piteous basket of pathetic final-hour fixes that could yield a downgrade of the country’s credit rating and aren’t durable solutions: Band-Aids where a tourniquet was once discussed. Even if default is averted, the nation’s mountainous debt will likely remain a source of anguish and acrimony through and even past the 2012 election. Will there ever be any money or oxygen for actually getting stuff done?

That was part of what a grand bargain was supposed to accomplish: not just badly needed fiscal discipline but badly wanted Obama liberation; one emphatic, enduring push past this constipated juncture; a changed discussion before Election Day; enough cutbacks and revenue to permit some spending again down the line. Republicans sensed all of that. It gave them added incentive to stop you, not that they needed much more. They don’t trust you. No matter how reasonable a face you show them, they’re convinced that a raging liberal lies beneath, biding his time.

What a crew they are, tarring you as the Spendthrift-in-Chief, though the fiscal crater in which Washington languishes was dug in enormous measure by an economic slowdown that preceded you and by the tax cuts and military campaigns of their president. You got stuck with the mess. That’s your cinching, suffocating, unjust reality. Your campaign had all the romance of history in the making; your presidency has all the drudgery of a toxic cleanup. You orated your way into janitorial work.

Into a ceaseless, tedious blame game, too. That’s Washington’s default pastime, and it’s a blood sport, which you and Boehner were playing during your rival addresses Monday night, when the battle wasn’t just about the debt ceiling but about images and reputations in the aftermath. On Tuesday and Wednesday, it was the Republicans who looked more incompetent and immature, as Boehner fought to subdue the obstructionists in his ranks, purists who won’t brook even the most picayune compromise, let alone the tiniest tax increase. Some of them don’t fear default. They somehow regard it as a fleeting, instructive purgative.

But if the country winds up there, and even if it doesn’t, it’s hard to see how this embarrassing mess doesn’t taint you. There will be questions about whether you put your marker down at the right time, with enough specificity and force. There will be assertions that you didn’t make a persuasive and coherent enough case to voters.

At least a majority of them still blame your predecessor for the gasping economy. But that can last only so long, and it’s not a refrain you can tote onto the campaign trail, swapping “Yes We Can” for “Not My Fault.” Your fortunes may well be manacled to an unemployment rate that, to your thinking, is more reflective of dynamics beyond your control than of any tinkering you can do. So you watch. You wait. The aloofness observers ascribe to you could just as accurately be described as fatalism.

It has been a challenging few years, and not just politically. Michelle wasn’t as prepared for the airlessness and isolation of “the bubble” as some of the first ladies before her. It’s one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets that she has known happier times. The coming campaign won’t thrill her.

But you’re still catching breaks. Your field of Republican challengers is weak. None have your personal narrative, your symbolic power. Even Americans unsure of you remain invested in you. A second term could be yours.

Would it be much better and freer than the first? With the $4 trillion package that you and Boehner once discussed long gone, will you ever be able to govern during a chapter free of limits, ceilings, boxes, constraints? You got health care reform, and then you got heartache. What you must worry that you’ll never get is a sustained, true chance.

As Mr. Coates pointed out above getting that second term might be very difficult as long as the base keeps getting shat on.  I know that I’ve closed my wallet, small though it may be.

Dowd and Friedman

MoDo is as pissed as the rest of the country (other than those creatures in DC who seem to be having a ball shoving the country over a cliff) about recent events.  In “Not O.K. at the O.K. Corral” she says the final frontier of debt negotiations has left Americans plumb tired of all that government.  MoDo, sweetie, I’m not tired of government.  I’m tired of being governed by morons and ideologues.  The Moustache of Wisdom has had a fever dream.  In “Can’t We Do This Right?” he suggests that while the Republicans and Democrats remain at a stalemate, let’s look at a way to approach the debt problem properly.  I want some of whatever it is that he’s smoking…  Here’s MoDo:

So we’ll never go back to the future?

A group of physicists at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have revealed time travel to be more fiction than science.

They have released a research report proving that a single photon, a unit of light, cannot exceed the speed of light, as time-travel conjurers from H.G. Wells to Rod Serling to Woody Allen had hoped.

The physicists determined for the first time that the photon follows Einstein’s theory that the speed of light is “the traffic law of the universe,” and that nothing can travel faster than light.

So if President Obama is fantasizing about climbing Marty McFly-style into a juiced-up DeLorean and going back to a more civilized, productive era when America wasn’t an over-the-hill deadbeat and when Washington wasn’t a shrieking, destructive, primal, feudal, apocalyptic wasteland of partisan banshees, he’s out of luck. Or science.

For half a century, our trust in government has been falling off a cliff. Some presidential elections have been more about voting against somebody rather than for somebody. There were upticks in faith when Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton delivered prosperity.

But now trust levels are drooping even lower. The public has less faith in Congress than Wall Street, and that’s saying something. Most Americans either feel that government is broken or that the fix is in, so that special interests and a handful of people at the top are the only ones benefiting.

The last century was the American century. But this one will not be, thanks to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who used their boots and spurs to ride roughshod over the globe and American economy. They spent eight years and trillions of dollars either barging into stuff they should have left alone or leaving alone stuff they should have intervened on.

W. accomplished the impossible: He made the Daddy Party less quick-draw. Republicans’ isolationist wing is stronger now because some conservatives and libertarians don’t want to pay to stumble into endless, pointless wars.

Still, if the epic budget battle being waged on the Potomac is our own version of the Harrison Ford-Daniel Craig movie “Cowboys & Aliens” — where our favorite American myths collide — the Republicans will want to be the cowboys.

How else can they continue to paint the president as an aloof, intellectually arrogant, pointy-eared alien?

President Spock, who so sparingly makes emotional connections, felt he had a real one with John Boehner. Chomping Nicorette through the stressful negotiations, Obama actually grew fond of the old-school Republican speaker puffing on cigarettes.

An alien and a cowboy, trying to connect on a fairway rather than a frontier and save America from a credit rating that would be alarmingly comparable to mine.

The Republican “Taliban wing,” as some Democrats dub the rabid Tea Party militants, was determined to break up any budding Obama-Boehner bromance.

Shockingly, the president was left waiting by the phone one day last week while the speaker would not take or return his calls. At some point, Obama, the jilted lover, simply gave up and went to bed.

The White House feels that its foes not only want to stomp on any reasonable compromise; they want to make sure that Obama never has the presidency he dreamed of, one that isn’t about digging out from W.’s intractable messes; one that helps the parties reason together and move into the future.

Obama, after all, is a new entity. He’s not really a Democratic president. Or a Republican one. He’s the first Independent president, creating his own party.

“Obama’s interests are not the same as the Democrats in Congress in terms of what he needs to do for his own agenda, election and legacy,” said one Democratic strategist, who notes that now the president can benefit from an obstructionist Republican House as a foil.

White House officials dryly joke that the president’s “sweet spot” is his ability to alienate his base and infuriate his foes while falling short of his goals.

Republicans, growing more optimistic in the last 90 days that they can make Obama a one-term president, want to use the budget battle to mark him not only as alien, but too weak to run cowboy nation.

You could argue that Obama created his own nightmare by failing to read the class rage of the public and aggressively cut government fat as soon as he came into office. His passivity allowed the Tea Party to rise, fed by fury over Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats stuffing pork into the 2009 stimulus package.

But whatever the criticisms of Obama, it’s Republicans who are overtly playing politics. Even though Obama compromises ridiculously easily, the Republicans are showing no willingness to compromise at all.

There’s only one thing we can predict about the outcome of this high-noon summer showdown: Trust in government will continue to crater.

Here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

There is only one thing worse than Republicans and Democrats failing to agree to lift the debt ceiling, and that is lifting the debt ceiling without a well-thought-out plan and with hasty cuts totaling trillions of dollars over a decade. What business do you know — that is still in business — that would operate this way: making massive long-term cuts, negotiated by exhausted executives, without any strategic plan? It certainly wouldn’t be a business you’d expect to thrive. Maybe you can grow without a plan. But if you cut without a plan, you will almost surely hit an artery or a bone that could really debilitate you. That, I fear, is where we are heading.

Stop for a minute and ask: What would it look like if we were approaching this problem properly?

For starters, two years ago Congress and the Obama administration would have collaborated on a series of hearings under the heading: “What world are we living in?” They would have included a broad range of business, education and technology leaders testifying about what are the major trends and opportunities that are expected to shape the job market for the next decade. Surely, the hyperconnecting of the world, the intensification of globalization and outsourcing, the challenges of energy and climate and the growing automation of the work space that is rapidly increasing productivity with fewer workers all would have figured prominently.

Then we would have put together “The National Commission for 21st Century America,” with this assignment: Given these big trends, what will America need to thrive in this world and how should we adapt our unique formula for success?

Yes, we have developed such a formula over the course of American history, and it is built on five basic pillars: educating the work force up to and beyond whatever technology demands; building the world’s best infrastructure of ports, roads and telecommunications; attracting the world’s most dynamic and high-I.Q. immigrants to enrich our universities and start new businesses; putting together the best regulations to incentivize risk-taking while curbing recklessness (not always perfectly); and funding research to push out the boundaries of science and then let American innovators and venture capitalists pluck off the most promising new ideas for new business.

Only after we had done all that would we then sit down with a blank sheet of paper and say, “O.K., given our current fiscal predicament, where should we cut spending and where must we raise new tax revenues so that we can bring our government back to solvency and, at the same time, reinvigorate our formula for growth and success.”

After all, “we don’t just need a plan for regaining American solvency. We need a plan for maintaining American greatness and sustaining the American dream for another generation,” argues Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert (and co-author with me of a forthcoming book). “Such a plan requires cutting, taxing and spending. It requires cutting because we have made promises to ourselves on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that we cannot keep without reforming each of them.”

But we cannot possibly generate the savings — or the new investments we need in our formula for success — by just taking funds from these social programs and shredding the social safety nets, adds Mandelbaum. “That would trigger a backlash against free-market capitalism. And free-market capitalism is the engine of our growth, and growth is the best way to reduce the deficit.”

That is why we need to raise new tax revenues as well — so we can simultaneously shrink the entitlements programs, but still keep them viable, and generate the funds needed to strengthen all five parts of our growth formula. Anyone who says that either entitlement reform or tax increases are off the table does not have a plan for sustaining American greatness and passing on the American dream to the next generation.

Alas, that is the Tea Party. It is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission. No American politician was more allergic to debt or taxes than Thomas Jefferson, but he also appreciated the need to have the resources to make the Louisiana Purchase and insisted that on his tombstone it be written that he founded the University of Virginia.

Personally, I’ll support anyone with a real plan to cut spending, raise revenues and boost investment in the five pillars of our success — be they Democrats or Republicans. But if neither Republicans nor Democrats can see that we need a hybrid politics today — one that requires cutting, taxing and investing as part of a single nation-building strategy (phased in over time) — then I’ll hope for a third party that does get it and can take us where we need to go.

Tommy, I don’t recall you wringing your hands over raising the debt limit when W was in office and waging 2 wars with no budget.

Brooks, Cohen and Nocera

Now Bobo haz a happy!  In “Congress In the Lead” he crows that after the dream of a Grand Bargain officially died, the Old Guard in Washington has taken the reins and President Obama has faltered.  I guess the “Old Guard” in Washington now takes its marching orders from Rush Limbaugh, else why would have The Tan One vetted his speech with him?  Mr. Cohen, in “Breivik and His Enablers,” says anti-immigrant Islamophobia is an ideology rampant on both sides of the Atlantic.  Mr. Nocera has a question:  “This Is Considered Punishment?”  He says Wells Fargo gets a wrist slap from the Federal Reserve, and the federal government still won’t prosecute financial wrongdoers.  Here’s Bobo:

Some of us like to think big. We thought at the beginning of this debt crisis that it might be possible to reach a Grand Bargain. This deal would make a serious dent in the country’s awful debt problem. It would begin to reform entitlements. It would involve enough revenue to forestall ruinous cuts in domestic programs.

The Grand Bargain would yield obvious political benefits. President Obama would show independents that he could move to the center. Republicans would be able to brag about a big reduction in the size of government.

Alas, the dream of a Grand Bargain died Friday evening for three reasons.

First, it was always going to be difficult to round up the necessary Congressional votes. Republicans didn’t want the tax increases. Democrats didn’t want the entitlement cuts.

Second, the White House negotiating process was inadequate. Neither the president nor the House speaker ever wrote down and released their negotiating positions. Everything was mysterious, shifting and slippery. One day the president was agreeing to an $800 billion revenue increase; the next day he was asking for $400 billion more. Spending cuts that seemed to be part of the package suddenly seemed hollow. Negotiating partners disappeared.

It was phenomenally hard to figure out exactly who was offering what. Democrats in Congress were kept in the dark and were understandably suspicious. It was all a recipe for misunderstandings, hurt feelings and collapse.

Third, the president lost his cool. Obama never should have gone in front of the cameras just minutes after the talks faltered Friday evening. His appearance was suffused with that “I’m the only mature person in Washington” condescension that drives everybody else crazy. Obama lectured the leaders of the House and Senate in the sort of patronizing tone that a junior high principal might use with immature delinquents. He talked about unreturned phone calls and being left at the altar, personalizing the issue like a spurned prom date.

Obama’s Friday appearance had a gigantic unintended consequence. It brought members of Congress together. They decided to take control. The White House is now on the sidelines. Democratic and Republican Congressional leaders are negotiating directly with one another.

The atmosphere has changed. It now seems more likely that we will get a deal. It just won’t be as significant as we Grand Bargainers originally wanted.

John Boehner and Harry Reid will continue to verbally abuse each other. But there’s a script to their taunts. Nobody’s feelings are hurt. The old pros are perfectly capable of exchanging clichéd volleys in the morning and then going off and negotiating with each other in the afternoon.

Furthermore, the negotiating process has changed. On Monday, both Boehner and Reid produced proposals. The main points were written down and available for all to see. Each side not only represented its own views, it sent signals about where future agreements could be found.

Boehner released a plan that involved statutory spending caps with an enforcement mechanism to make sure the cuts are real. Reid released a plan involving bigger long-term spending cuts, with much of the heavy lifting done by a bipartisan select committee. These two carefully coordinated plans are different, but they naturally fit together.

With a little imagination, it’s easy to see how they could be merged to give everybody something. Republicans would get some guaranteed spending reductions. Democrats in swing states could campaign on a nominal multitrillion-dollar debt reduction while protecting entitlements. Republicans wouldn’t have to vote on raising the debt ceiling until after some guaranteed spending cuts. Democrats could count the reduced Iraq and Afghanistan war costs as part of the spending reductions.

It’s not clear if an arrangement would really push the next debt ceiling fight until after the 2012 election, but even that could presumably be fudged, especially if Democrats were willing to give the Republicans broader spending cuts and a balanced-budget amendment vote in the Senate.

On the one hand, there has been an outbreak of sanity since Congress took control. On the other hand, the deal they are working on doesn’t come close to cutting the $4 trillion or so many say would be required to prevent a downgrade of the U.S. debt.

This should be a humbling moment for the White House, and maybe a learning experience. There are other people who have been around Washington a long time. They know how to play this game. As a result of their efforts, we may see some debt reduction but nothing big and transformational. Obama won’t get his centrist election boost. Republicans won’t have to wrestle with tax increases. Democrats won’t have to wrestle with entitlement reform.

The Old Guard wins. Obama’s televised campaign speech Monday night was behind the times. The action has moved to Capitol Hill.

Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from London:

On one level Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian responsible for the biggest massacre by a single gunman in modern times, is just a particularly murderous psychotic loner: the 32-year-old mama’s boy with no contact with his father, obsessed by video games (Dragon Age II) as he preens himself (“There was a relatively hot girl on [sic] the restaurant today checking me out”) and dedicates his time in asexual isolation to the cultivation of hatred and the assembly of a bomb from crushed aspirin and fertilizer.

No doubt, that is how Islamophobic right-wingers in Europe and the United States who share his views but not his methods will seek to portray Breivik.

We’ve seen the movie. When Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords this year in Tuscon, Arizona — after Sarah Palin placed rifle sights over Giffords’ constituency and Giffords herself predicted that “there are consequences to that” — the right went into overdrive to portray Loughner as a schizophrenic loner whose crazed universe owed nothing to those fanning hatred under the slogan of “Take America Back.” (That non-specific taking-back would of course be from Muslims and the likes of the liberal and Jewish Giffords.)

Breivik is no loner. His violence was brewed in a specific European environment that shares characteristics with the specific American environment of Loughner: relative economic decline, a jobless recovery, middle-class anxiety and high levels of immigration serving as the backdrop for racist Islamophobia and use of the spurious specter of a “Muslim takeover” as a wedge political issue to channel frustrations rightward.

In a June 11 entry from his 1,500-page online manifesto, Breivik wrote: “I prayed for the first time in a very long time today. I explained to God that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail.”

Two days later, he tests his homemade bomb: “BOOM! The detonation was successful.”

European Christendom in this context is a mirror image of the idealized caliphate of Osama bin Laden. It is a dream-world cause through which to enlist the masses in apocalyptical warfare against an “infidel” enemy supposedly threatening the territory, morals and culture of an imagined community of devout believers.

This particular Christian Europe — the Continent is overwhelmingly secular for reasons that have nothing to do with a growing Muslim presence — is just as fantastical as a restored 7th-century dominion of the caliph. Bin Laden inveighed against “crusaders.” Breivik attended a 2002 meeting to reconstitute the Knights Templar, a Crusader military order. This is the stuff of video games — except that it kills real teenagers of all faiths.

What has become clear in Oslo and on Utoya Island is that delusional anti-Muslim rightist hatred aimed at “multiculturalist” liberals can be just as dangerous as Al Qaeda’s anti-infidel poison: Breivik alone killed many more people than the four Islamist suicide bombers in the 7/7 London attack of 2005.

Breivik has many ideological fellow travelers on both sides of the Atlantic. Theirs is the poison in which he refined his murderous resentment. The enablers include Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who compared the Koran to “Mein Kampf” on his way to 15.5 percent of the vote in the 2010 election; the surging Marine Le Pen in France, who uses Nazi analogies as she pours scorn on devout Muslims; far-rightist parties in Sweden and Denmark and Britain equating every problem with Muslim immigration; Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Representative Peter King, who have found it politically opportune to target “creeping Shariah in the United States” at a time when the middle name of the president is Hussein; U.S. church pastors using their bully pulpits week after week to say America is a Christian nation under imminent threat from Islam.

Muslims over the past decade have not done enough to denounce those who deformed their religion in the name of jihadist murder. Will the European and U.S. anti-immigrant Islamophobic crowd now denounce what Breivik has done under their ideological banner? I doubt it. We’ll be hearing a lot about what a loner he was.

Huge social problems have accompanied Muslim immigration in Europe in recent decades, much greater than in the more open United States. There is plenty of blame to go around. Immigrants have often faced racism and exclusion. The values of Islam on women, on marriage and on homosexuality, as well as the very vitality of the religion, have grated on a secular Europe. The picture is not uniform — successful integration exists — but it is troubling.

Nothing, however, can excuse the widespread condoning of an anti-Muslim racism once reserved for the Jews of Europe. Not on the weekend when Amy Winehouse, a Jewish girl from East London whose artistry would once have been dismissed by a racist and murderous European right as degenerate “cosmopolitan” trash, died. A good way to remember her is finally to confront the latest iteration of a European bigotry that kills.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

Last Wednesday, nearly lost in the furor over Rupert-gate and the debt ceiling crisis, came the surprising news that the Federal Reserve has issued a cease-and-desist order against a Too-Big-to-Fail bank. The bank was Wells Fargo, which was also fined $85 million and ordered to compensate customers it had unfairly — indeed, illegally — taken advantage of during the subprime bubble.

What made the news surprising, of course, was that the Federal Reserve has rarely, if ever, taken action against a bank for making predatory loans. Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, didn’t believe in regulation and turned a blind eye to subprime abuses. His successor, Ben Bernanke, is not the ideologue that Greenspan is, but, as an institution, the Fed prefers to coddle banks rather than punish them. That the Fed would crack down on Wells Fargo would seem to suggest a long-overdue awakening.

Yet, for anyone still hoping for justice in the wake of the financial crisis, the news was hardly encouraging. First, the Fed did not force Wells Fargo to admit guilt — and even let the company issue a press release blaming its wrongdoing on a “relatively small group.” The $85 million fine was a joke; in just the last quarter, Wells Fargo’s revenues exceeded $20 billion. And compensating borrowers isn’t going to hurt much either. By my calculation, it won’t top $20 million.

Most upsetting of all, the settlement raises the question that just won’t go away: Why can’t the federal government prosecute financial wrongdoers?

I realize that the Federal Reserve can’t bring a criminal case (and, to be fair, there are statutory limits on how big a fine it can levy). But the Justice Department certainly can. Yet ever since it lost an early case against two Bear Stearns fund managers in 2009, it has gone after only the smallest of small fry: individual borrowers, brokers and appraisers who lack the means to do much more than plead guilty.

In March, for instance, I wrote about the sad case of Charlie Engle, the ultra-marathoner, who was convicted of lying on a liar loan — that is, exaggerating his income on a subprime mortgage application — even though the evidence against him was thin. Prosecuted by Neil H. MacBride, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Engle was sentenced to 21 months in prison.

Now compare Engle’s alleged crime to the case the Federal Reserve brought against Wells Fargo Financial, which, until it was shut down last summer, was the subprime subsidiary of Wells Fargo, based in Des Moines. There were several allegations, but the one that caught my eye was that Wells employees “falsified income information on mortgage applications.” In other words, they lied on liar loans! The only difference is that the lying was done by a group of Wells Fargo brokers rather than by some poor sap like Charlie Engle.

What’s more, this practice appears to have been quite widespread — “fostered,” as the Fed puts it, “by Wells Fargo Financial’s incentive compensation and sales quota programs.” Matthew R. Lee, the executive director of Inner City Press/Community on the Move and Fair Finance Watch, spent years bringing Wells’ subprime abuses to the attention of the Federal Reserve. “The way the compensation was designed ensured that abuses would take place,” he says. “It was a predatory system.”

These are exactly the kind of loans — built on illegal practices — that gave us the financial crisis. Brokers working for subprime mortgage companies routinely doctored incomes to hand out subprime loans they knew the borrowers could never repay — and then, after taking their fat fees, shoveled the loans to Wall Street, which bundled them into subprime securities. This was the kindling that lit the inferno of September 2008. So again, I ask: Why is there no criminal investigation into what went on at Wells Fargo Financial?

The person I called for answers was the press secretary to Nicholas A. Klinefeldt, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, which includes Des Moines. A glance at Klinefeldt’s 2011 press releases suggests that he takes the MacBride approach to mortgage fraud: only the little guy has anything to fear. Needless to say, his press secretary knew nothing about the Wells Fargo case and even questioned whether the Southern District of Iowa had jurisdiction.

The next day, he referred me to a Justice Department spokeswoman. I wrote her an e-mail laying out my question as plainly as I could: “I am trying to understand why the mortgage brokers who work at a major bank are getting a pass when they have lied on liar loans,” I said.

That was Friday. On Monday, at 8:30 p.m., a half-hour from press time, the Justice Department sent me a statement claiming that in 2010 “the number of defendants in mortgage fraud cases more than doubled” from 2009.

Not one of those defendants ever worked for Wells Fargo Financial.

 

The Pasty Little Putz and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz is forced to address “A Right-Wing Monster,” and he has a question:  What does the right-wing ideology of the Norwegian man charged with mass murder mean for European politics?  He also reminds us that Al Gore is fat.  Prof. Krugman, in “Messing With Medicare,” says it’s actually good that the “Grand Bargain” is apparently dead, because what President Obama offered to the Republicans was a very bad deal for America.  Here’s The Putz:

For many years, a quiz entitled “Al Gore or the Unabomber?” circulated on conservative Web sites. The quiz juxtaposed passages from the former vice president’s eco-manifesto “Earth in the Balance” with quotes from Theodore Kaczynski’s critiques of industrial civilization and asked the reader to guess which writer was which.

Was it the bearded hermit who hailed “isolated pockets of resistance fighters” for struggling against modern society’s “assault on the earth”? No, that would be the former vice president. Was it Kaczynski, the mathematics Ph.D. turned mad bomber, who complained about the “destructive” impact of bringing a child into “the hugely consumptionist way of life so common in the industrial world”? No, Gore again.

Enterprising left-wing bloggers have already begun to play a similar game with Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian man who apparently justified last week’s mass murder of helpless teenage campers with a 1,500-page “compendium” calling for a right-wing revolution against Europe’s ruling class. Judging by the manifesto’s contents, Breivik has roughly the same relationship to the cultural right that Kaczynski had to certain strains of environmentalism. The darkest aspects of his ideology belong strictly to the neo-fascist fringe. But many of his beliefs and arguments echo the rhetoric of mainstream cultural conservatives, in Europe and America alike.

Despite what the Norwegian authorities suggested over the weekend, those beliefs probably aren’t a form of Christian fundamentalism. Breivik’s writings bear no resemblance to the theology of a Jerry Falwell or an Oral Roberts, and his nominal Christianity (“I guess I’m not an excessively religious man,” he writes at one point) seems to be more of an expression of European identity politics and anti-Islamic chauvinism than any genuine religious fervor.

But it’s fair to call Breivik a right-winger. As Commentary Magazine editor John Podhoretz put it, the Norwegian killer is “exactly the kind of psychotic ideologue of the right so many in this country instantly assumed Jared Loughner, the schizophrenic who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords” to be. His compendium quotes repeatedly from conservative writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and it’s filled with attacks on familiar right-wing targets: Secularism and political correctness; the European Union and the sexual revolution; radical Islam and the academic left.

Indeed, stripped of their context, some of his critiques of multiculturalism and immigration resemble arguments that have been advanced, not just by Europe’s far-right parties, but by mainstream conservative leaders such as David Cameron in Britain, Angela Merkel in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy in France.

This means that last week’s tragedy is also a political opportunity for Europe’s left-of-center politicians, should they choose to respond to Breivik’s rampage the way President Bill Clinton responded to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Timothy McVeigh’s connections to Republican politics were several degrees short of tangential, but Clinton successfully linked the heartland terrorist to talk radio and the government shutdown, implying that McVeigh’s crime was part of a broader story of antigovernment conservatism run amok. Judging by Breivik’s manifesto, the Continent’s left-wing parties won’t have to work nearly that hard to connect the Norwegian’s act of terrorism to Europe’s broader rightward turn.

How should European conservatives react? Not with the pretense that there’s somehow no connection whatsoever between Breivik’s extremism and the broader continental right. While his crimes should be denounced and disowned, their ideological pedigree has to be admitted.

But this doesn’t mean that conservatives need to surrender their convictions. The horror in Norway no more discredits Merkel’s views on Muslim assimilation than Ted Kaczynski’s bombs discredited Al Gore’s views on the dark side of industrialization. On the big picture, Europe’s cultural conservatives are right: Mass immigration really has left the Continent more divided than enriched, Islam and liberal democracy have not yet proven natural bedfellows and the dream of a postnational, postpatriotic European Union governed by a benevolent ruling elite looks more like a folly every day.

For decades, Europe’s governing classes insisted that only racists worried about immigration, only bigots doubted the success of multiculturalism and only fascists cared about national identity. Now that a true far-right radical has perpetrated a terrible atrocity, it will be easy to return to those comforting illusions.

But extremists only grow stronger when a political system pretends that problems don’t exist. Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic have an obligation to acknowledge that Anders Behring Breivik is a distinctively right-wing kind of monster. But they also have an obligation to the realities that this monster’s terrible atrocity threatens to obscure.

Here’s Prof. Krugman:

At the time of writing, President Obama’s hoped-for “Grand Bargain” with Republicans is apparently dead. And I say good riddance. I’m no more eager than other rational people (a category that fails to include many Congressional Republicans) to see what happens if the debt limit isn’t raised. But what the president was offering to the G.O.P., especially on Medicare, was a very bad deal for America.

Specifically, according to many reports, the president offered both means-testing of Medicare benefits and a rise in the age of Medicare eligibility. The first would be bad policy; the second would be terrible policy. And it would almost surely be terrible politics, too.

The crucial thing to remember, when we talk about Medicare, is that our goal isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, defined in terms of some arbitrary number. Our goal should be, instead, to give Americans the health care they need at a price the country can afford. And throwing Americans in their mid-60s off Medicare moves us away from that goal, not toward it.

For Medicare, with all its flaws, works better than private insurance. It has less bureaucracy and, hence, lower administrative costs than private insurers. It has been more successful in controlling costs. While Medicare expenses per beneficiary have soared over the past 40 years, they’ve risen significantly less than private insurance premiums. And since Medicare-type systems in other advanced countries have much lower costs than the uniquely privatized U.S. system, there’s good reason to believe that Medicare reform can do a lot to control costs in the future.

In that case, you may ask, why didn’t the 2010 health care reform simply extend Medicare to cover everyone? The answer, of course, is political realism. Most health reformers I know would have supported Medicare for all if they had considered it politically feasible. But given the power of the insurance lobby and the knee-jerk opposition of many politicians to any expansion of government, they settled for what they thought they could actually get: near-universal coverage through a system of regulation and subsidies.

It is, however, one thing to accept a second-best system insuring those who currently lack coverage. Throwing millions of Americans off Medicare and pushing them into the arms of private insurers is another story.

Also, did I mention that Republicans are doing all they can to undermine health care reform — they even tried to undermine it as part of the debt negotiations — and may eventually succeed? If they do, many of those losing Medicare coverage would find themselves unable to replace it.

So raising the Medicare age is a terrible idea. Means-testing — reducing benefits for wealthier Americans — isn’t equally bad, but it’s still poor policy.

It’s true that Medicare expenses could be reduced by requiring high-income Americans to pay higher premiums, higher co-payments, etc. But why not simply raise taxes on high incomes instead? This would have the great virtue of not adding another layer of bureaucracy by requiring that Medicare establish financial status before paying medical bills.

But, you may say, raising taxes would reduce incentives to work and create wealth. Well, so would means-testing: As conservative economists love to point out in other contexts — for example, when criticizing programs like food stamps — benefits that fall as your income rises in effect raise your marginal tax rate. It doesn’t matter whether the government raises your taxes by $1,000 when your income rises or cuts your benefits by the same amount; either way, it reduces the fraction of your additional earnings that you get to keep.

So what’s the difference between means-testing Medicare and raising taxes? Well, the truly rich would prefer means-testing, since they would end up sacrificing no more than the merely well-off. But everyone else should prefer a tax-based solution.

So why is the president embracing these bad policy ideas? In a forthcoming article in The New York Review of Books, the veteran journalist Elizabeth Drew suggests that members of the White House political team saw the 2010 election as a referendum on government spending and that they believe that cutting spending is the way to win next year.

If so, I would respectfully suggest that they are out of their minds. Remember death panels? The G.O.P.’s most potent political weapon last year — the weapon that caused a large swing in the votes of older Americans — was the claim that Mr. Obama was cutting Medicare. Why give Republicans a chance to do it all over again?

Of course, it’s possible that the reason the president is offering to undermine Medicare is that he genuinely believes that this would be a good idea. And that possibility, I have to say, is what really scares me.

 

Dowd, Friedman, Kristof and Bruni

In “The End of Awe” MoDo writes about the stirring sound of mythologies cracking, on both sides of the Irish Sea.  The Moustache of Wisdom says we should “Make Way for the Radical Center,” and that a third way is on the way for the 2012 presidential campaign. And its convention will be held on the Internet.  And then apparently politics will get all flat, just like the earth…  Mr. Kristof addresses “Republicans, Zealots and Our Security,” and says forget about Iran. These days, the most dangerous threat to national security comes from our own elected officials.  Mr. Bruni, in “Much Ado About Michele,” says Bachmann will likely not win the White House, but, in the meantime, she is manna for the pundits.  Here’s MoDo:

Wednesday found both the British prime minister and the Irish taoiseach passionately addressing their parliaments about the demystified lords of their universes.

Frantically distancing himself from the pope of Fleet Street, David Cameron sardonically assured riled-up lawmakers that he had never seen Rebekah Brooks in her PJs because he had not attended Gordon Brown’s wife’s slumber party at Chequers with Wendi Deng and Elisabeth Murdoch in 2008.

He conceded that he should not have ignored warnings from the palace and elsewhere against bringing a capo from the sulfurous Murdoch gang into his inner circle.

Across the Irish Sea in Dublin, Enda Kenny took on the actual pope, making a blazing speech about the Vatican’s unconscionable behavior in the pedophilia scandal.

After 17 years of revolting revelations, Kenny said the latest report on the Cloyne diocese in County Cork exposed “an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago.”

The report, he said, “excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or ‘managed’ to uphold, instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and ‘reputation.’

“Far from listening to evidence of humiliation and betrayal with St. Benedict’s ‘ear of the heart,’ the Vatican’s reaction was to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. This calculated, withering position being the polar opposite of the radicalism, humility and compassion upon which the Roman church was founded.”

Pulling back the curtain to expose the profane amid the sacred would have been remarkable coming from any leader in one of the many countries scarred by pedophile priests, but from the devoutly Catholic prime minister of a nation whose constitution once enshrined the special position of the church, it was breathtaking.

The Irish were taken aback by the ire of the ordinarily amiable, soft-spoken Kenny, the longest-serving parliamentarian in the land. In his first few months as Taoiseach, the 60-year-old had not given any sign that he could throw such Zeus-style thunderbolts.

But bankrupt and battered Eire, which needed a shot of muscular national pride, was thrilled with his emphatic articulation of their revulsion at the tragedy, and his assertion of Ireland as a sovereign republic not under the thumb of Rome.

“If you look at some of his predecessors, going right back 50 years, they would have been very much of the view that they were Catholics first and politicians second,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, a professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin.

Sounding like he could have been talking about Rupert Murdoch’s fief as well, Ferriter observed: “There has been this very obvious and planned and hugely arrogant policy of obfuscation and deliberate delaying tactics and complete avoidance of responsibility on the part of the Vatican. They were actually treating the sovereign government of Ireland with complete contempt.”

He added: “We’re fed up with hearing about canon law. This is a Republic, it’s about civil law.”

Garry O’Sullivan, the editor of The Irish Catholic, compared the resonance of the speech to the French revolution, without the violence. “The French Republic didn’t kick out the Catholic Church, but they set up a French Catholic Church and kicked out Rome,” he said. “Kenny has tapped into a vein in the Irish psyche, people saying, ‘Well done for standing up to those bloody bishops and the pope.’ It was lancing a boil.”

Like other elites in shaken Ireland, like the multimillionaire bankers and real estate developers, the church elite is rapidly losing clout. “The mighty have fallen from their thrones,” O’Sullivan said.

Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin, who has been frozen out by the Vatican and his fellow Irish bishops for his tender solicitude toward abuse victims, teared up on Irish TV talking about Kenny’s cri de coeur.

What church “cabal” is this in the Vatican or Ireland, he asked, “who try to undermine what is being done, or simply refuse to understand what is being done?”

In Britain and in Ireland, two dictatorial institutions that once dominated with fearsome power are crumbling, brought low by highhanded cultures inured even to crimes against children.

A large part of the strategy of the Vatican and Rupert Murdoch in acquiring power was to create an aura of invincibility, a hallowed mystique. But those mythologies are cracking, and people are no longer afraid to confront these empires’ corrupt practices and vast cover-ups.

It is stirring to watch people who have long been cowed finally speaking up, shedding their fear of the authoritarian men at the top who owed their power to the awe of the people.

Now here’s The Moustache of Wisdom:

Did I mention that I’ve signed a pledge — just like those Republican congressmen who have signed written promises to different political enforcers not to raise taxes or permit same-sex marriage? My pledge is to never vote for anyone stupid enough to sign a pledge — thereby abdicating their governing responsibilities in a period of incredibly rapid change and financial stress. Sorry, I’ve signed it. Nothing more I can do.

If this kind of idiocy by elected officials sends you into a hair-pulling rage and leaves you wishing that we had more options today than our two-party system is putting forward — for instance, a party that would have offered a grand bargain on the deficit two years ago, not on the eve of a Treasury default — not only are you not alone, but help may be on the way.

Thanks to a quiet political start-up that is now ready to show its hand, a viable, centrist, third presidential ticket, elected by an Internet convention, is going to emerge in 2012. I know it sounds gimmicky — an Internet convention — but an impressive group of frustrated Democrats, Republicans and independents, called Americans Elect, is really serious, and they have thought out this process well. In a few days, Americans Elect will formally submit the 1.6 million signatures it has gathered to get on the presidential ballot in California as part of its unfolding national effort to get on the ballots of all 50 states for 2012.

The goal of Americans Elect is to take a presidential nominating process now monopolized by the Republican and Democratic parties, which are beholden to their special interests, and blow it wide open — guaranteeing that a credible third choice, nominated independently, will not only be on the ballot in every state but be able to take part in every presidential debate and challenge both parties from the middle with the best ideas on how deal with the debt, education and jobs.

“Our goal is to open up what has been an anticompetitive process to people in the middle who are unsatisfied with the choices of the two parties,” said Kahlil Byrd, the C.E.O. of Americans Elect, speaking from its swank offices, financed with some serious hedge-fund money, a stone’s throw from the White House.

As the group explains on its Web site, www.americanselect.org: “Americans Elect is the first-ever open nominating process. We’re using the Internet to give every single voter — Democrat, Republican or independent — the power to nominate a presidential ticket in 2012. The people will choose the issues. The people will choose the candidates. And in a secure, online convention next June, the people will make history by putting their choice on the ballot in every state.”

Here is how it will work, explains Elliot Ackerman, an Iraq war veteran with a Silver Star, who serves as the chief operating officer of Americans Elect, and whose father, Peter, a successful investor, has been a prime engine behind the group. First, anyone interested in becoming a delegate goes to the Americans Elect Web site and registers. As part of that process, you will be asked to fill in a questionnaire about your political priorities: education, foreign policy, the economy, etc. This enables Americans Elect to put you in contact with others who share your views so you can discuss them and organize together. Then you will be invited to draft a candidate or support one who has already been drafted and to contribute to the list of questions that anyone running on the Americans Elect platform will have to answer on the site.

“The questions, the priorities, the nominations and the rules will all come from the community, not from two entrenched parties,” said Ackerman.

Any presidential nominee must conform to all the Constitutional requirements, as well as be considered someone of similar stature to our previous presidents. That means no Lady Gaga allowed. Every candidate will have to post in words or video his or her answers to the platform questions produced by the Americans Elect delegates. In April 2012, the candidate pool will be reduced to six through three rounds of voting. The six, assuming they all want to run, will then have to name their running mates. The only rule is that a Democrat must run with a Republican or independent, and a Republican with a Democrat or independent.

“Each presidential candidate has to pick a running mate outside of their party and reaching across the divide of politics,” said Ackerman. In June 2012, the online convention will choose who among the six will run as the Americans Elect candidate — automatically on the ballot in all 50 states. If President Obama wants to run with John Boehner on the Americans Elect platform that would be fine — provided they go through the process. (President Obama should dump the Democrats and run as an independent, which he is, at heart, anyway.)

Write it down: Americans Elect. What Amazon.com did to books, what the blogosphere did to newspapers, what the iPod did to music, what drugstore.com did to pharmacies, Americans Elect plans to do to the two-party duopoly that has dominated American political life — remove the barriers to real competition, flatten the incumbents and let the people in. Watch out.

So, Tommy, where’s the money for the campaigns to elect the folks who flattened those incumbents going to come from, or will we just get a new batch of MOTUs?  Here’s Mr. Kristof:

If China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage.

Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists.

We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength — and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.

House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.

It is not exactly true that this would be our first default. We defaulted in 1790. By some definitions, we defaulted on certain gold obligations in 1933. And in 1979, the United States had trouble managing payouts to some individual investors on time (partly because of a failure of word processing equipment) and thus was in technical default.

Yet even that brief lapse in 1979 raised interest payments in the United States. Terry L. Zivney, a finance professor at Ball State University and co-author of a scholarly paper about the episode, says the 1979 default increased American government borrowing costs by 0.6 of a percentage point indefinitely.

Any deliberate and sustained interruption this year could have a greater impact. We would see higher interest rates on mortgages, car loans, business loans and credit cards.

American government borrowing would also become more expensive. In February, the Congressional Budget Office noted that a 1 percentage point rise in interest rates could add more than $1 trillion to borrowing costs over a decade.

In other words, Republican zeal to lower debts could result in increased interest expenses and higher debts. Their mania to save taxpayers could cost taxpayers. That suggests not governance so much as fanaticism.

More broadly, a default would leave America a global laughingstock. Our “soft power,” our promotion of democracy around the world, and our influence would all take a hit. The spectacle of paralysis in the world’s largest economy is already bewildering to many countries. If there is awe for our military prowess and delight in our movies and music, there is scorn for our political/economic management.

While one danger to national security comes from the risk of default, another comes from overzealous budget cuts — especially in education, at the local, state and national levels. When we cut to the education bone, we’re not preserving our future but undermining it.

It should be a national disgrace that the United States government has eliminated spending for major literacy programs in the last few months, with scarcely a murmur of dissent.

Consider Reading Is Fundamental, a 45-year-old nonprofit program that has cost the federal government only $25 million annually. It’s a public-private partnership with 400,000 volunteers, and it puts books in the hands of low-income children. The program helped four million American children improve their reading skills last year. Now it has lost all federal support.

“They have made a real difference for millions of kids,” Kyle Zimmer, founder of First Book, another literacy program that I’ve admired, said of Reading Is Fundamental. “It is a tremendous loss that their federal support has been cut. We are going to pay for these cuts in education for generations.”

Education programs like these aren’t quick fixes, and the relation between spending and outcomes is uncertain and complex. Nurturing reading skills is a slog rather than a sprint — but without universal literacy we have no hope of spreading opportunity, fighting crime or chipping away at poverty.

“The attack on literacy programs reflects a broader assault on education programs,” said Rosa DeLauro, a Democratic member of Congress from Connecticut. She notes that Republicans want to cut everything from early childhood programs to Pell grants for college students. Republican proposals have singled out some 43 education programs for elimination, but it’s not seen as equally essential to end tax loopholes on hedge fund managers.

So let’s remember not only the national security risks posed by Iran and Al Qaeda. Let’s also focus on the risks, however unintentional, from domestic zealots.

Now here’s Mr. Bruni:

Michele Bachmann is the gift that never stops giving.

One week she’s confusing the Iowa birthplaces of John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy, two men separated by a bit more than two syllables. The next she’s signing a conservative pledge that contains language extolling the family values of slavery. Her library evidently differs from most. It stocks “Uncle Tom’s Little House on the Prairie.”

If she’s not confronting accusations that a church she supported is anti-Catholic, she’s navigating charges that her husband, a counselor, practices a brand of homosexual-to-heterosexual therapy known as “pray away the gay.” I once tried to pray away the gay. But sometimes a houseguest just won’t leave.

The most recent go-round with Bachmann concerned migraines, and what a go-round it has been. The revelation that she battles them led to a second round of stories about whether focusing on that was sexist and then a third round about whether her aides had been too rough with a headache-inquisitive television reporter who pursued her through a parking lot. In ways she means to and ways she doesn’t, Bachmann doesn’t merely occupy the spotlight. She sets up house there, stuffs it with velour sectionals and lays out a lavish buffet, so that legions of comers are comfy and well fed.

And that bounty — of half-baked history, hardcore religious conservatism, hard-line pledges and so much more — has made her the star of the 2012 presidential race so far, a recipient of at least twice the coverage that any of her rivals for the Republican nomination receives.

But whipping up attention isn’t the same as establishing credibility. Vividness doesn’t equal significance. And Bachmann’s profile at this point is wildly out of proportion to her probable fate in the election and the long-term impact on it that she’ll have.

The smart money remains where it has always been: on  Mitt Romney. She still lags leagues behind him in fund-raising, and she finished June with less than a third of the cash on hand that he had. Although her collection pace was brisk, she’ll be playing catch-up for a while and doesn’t have the coziness with big donors that he and others do.

He’s the candidate whom not only Republican leaders but also White House officials strongly expect to see on the ticket. When they make allowances for a twist, they talk not of Bachmann but of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who seems more and more likely to enter the race — and could eat away quickly at her support in particular. Evangelicals worship him.

Sure, Bachmann is positioned to compete strongly in, and very possibly win, the Iowa straw poll in mid-August and the caucus beyond it; South Carolina could be fertile ground for her, too. Yes, a national poll of Republican primary voters that was released early last week gave her a slight edge over Romney. And without question, she has shown more mettle than Sarah Palin, whose breezy ignorance and unfathomable syntax she doesn’t share.

But that’s a bar so low the world’s reigning limbo champ couldn’t shimmy under it, and two polls released later in the week had Romney on top, with Perry in second.

While Bachmann was third in one, she was fifth in the other, behind Palin and (he’s back!) Rudy Giuliani as well. Like Perry, neither of those two has even declared a candidacy.

Here’s what’s certain: as she pursues the nomination, the Republican establishment won’t line up behind her, because they don’t think she has a prayer of broadening her ultraconservative base enough to woo swing voters and topple President Obama. And toppling is what they’re all about.

I talked to a bunch of party operatives and analysts last week, and every one of them said that while Bachmann could well cause the early demise of Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy and complicate Romney’s bid for many months to come, she stands almost no chance of victory. And never did.

So why all the fuss?

She’s a bonanza for the news media, which these days have vast acres of not only cable TV but also cyberspace to fill. She’s manna for pundits, who can talk only so archly about the vanilla vanguard of Romney, Pawlenty and company. When Bachmann stormed into view, she provided a wanted, needed burst of flavor and color. But flavor and color go only so far. A Delaware woman named Christine O’Donnell can fill you in on that, provided she’s not busy with coven duties.

Bachmann has proven a useful pawn for liberals as well, because she conforms to their simplistic nightmare vision of what Republicans are all about and fills them with righteous condescension while sullying the image of the enemy party. As far as they’re concerned, the more chatter about Bachmann, the better, and if she somehow manages to beat Romney, well, that will be best of all: one of the luckiest breaks Obama could ever catch.

Beyond that, her biography and ideology accommodate discussions about an especially broad range of hot-button topics. Gender in politics? There was that whole hullabaloo about the Pawlenty adviser who referred to her “sex appeal.”

Gay marriage? She built her political career on her war against it. The no-compromise attitude of Tea Party purists in the House? She has vowed not to vote to increase the debt ceiling, no matter the circumstances.

She’s like a coat rack with dozens of hooks. You can hang almost anything on her.

So reporters and commentators do, and then they tromp over to the nearby pantry to rummage around there. Bach-mania has become indiscriminate and is now out of hand. For example the gay leaders, television comedians, Twitter-ing entertainment icons (yes, Cher, that’s you) and other Bachmann opponents who have lately taken to sifting her husband’s voice and mannerisms for any supposedly telltale effeminacy should cut it out. They’re trafficking in the sorts of superficial stereotypes they’d excoriate in other contexts.

And the migraine-fixated are putting the cart several time zones ahead of the horse. She’s a long way from her Oval Office physical. Besides, the more phlegmatic guys in the pack aren’t being subjected to such examinations. For all we know, Jon Huntsman has a plantar wart that’s wreaking utter havoc with his stride.

 

Cohen, Blow and Nocera

In “Thoughts of an American Warrior” Mr. Cohen says when it comes to Afghanistan, General Petraeus updates the Powell rule: ‘You own it, you stick with it.”  Great…  Mr. Blow, in “The Great Evil,” says the current political environment and the debt-crisis debate are stranger than science fiction. Remember the 1997 movie “The Fifth Element?”  Mr. Nocera addresses “The Travails of Mrs. Warren,” and says she took all the flak from Congressional Republicans, but the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is now a reality.  Here’s Mr. Cohen, writing from Paris:

When I asked Gen. David H. Petraeus what the biggest U.S. mistake of the past decade has been, he did a Zhou Enlai on the French Revolution number to the effect that it was too early to say. The outgoing commander in Afghanistan and incoming Central Intelligence Agency chief is adept at politics, one reason he’s the object of the sort of political speculation once reserved for Gen. Colin L. Powell, who was the face of the military to most Americans before Petraeus assumed that role later in the post-9/11 era.

Powell adopted the Pottery Barn rule as a cautionary military dogma: “You break it, you own it.” A Petraeus adaptation might be: “You own it, you stick with it.” He reckons he’s seen the movie of what disasters happen when America turns its back on Afghanistan and Pakistan. It’s called “Charlie Wilson’s War.” I’ll get to that in a minute.

But first, on mistakes, Petraeus became more forthcoming. He’s like that: a soldier-scholar with an impish smile who speaks in sinuous patterns that you sometimes have to read forwards and backwards before realizing: Oh, that’s what he means! He’d be with Kierkegaard: Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. Nobody over the past decade has absorbed more setbacks or reflected more on what policy corrections the bad stuff required.

He told me that, as Libya illustrates, the United States is no longer “eager to get all the way in on the ground”; and that “We have long since recognized that the ideal situation in the fight against extremists, against terrorists is first and foremost to provide intelligence to the host nation.” Then, “if they cannot act on it, help them develop the ability to do it for themselves.”

As for “actually doing it ourselves,” that must be a “much more remote option.”

A decade of fighting has slashed the U.S. appetite for war. It eats cash, costs lives and these days there’s never a victory parade. That “much more remote option” struck me as the politic Petraeus version of the Robert Gates Pentagon-exit credo: “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”

A century after World War I, a half-century after Vietnam, a decade of Afghanistan, the United States is at a military turning-point. Think drones not divisions on the ground.

But it is still at war. Petraeus has little time for the easy fixes. Switch from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism? Forget about it. Targeted raids are fine. But on Afghan terrain you also need “clear, hold and build operations” of the kind seen around Kandahar. “The press is seized with the idea there’s an alternative,” he told me. “It’s either counterinsurgency or counterterrorism.” But the reality is: “Counterinsurgency includes counterterrorist operations. You cannot choose between them.”

Let’s think about that. In practice, an Afghan drawdown has begun: 33,000 U.S. troops out in the next 14 months, with a 2014 target for the remaining 68,000. Afghanistan has 8 million-plus kids in school, some bustling cities, burgeoning cellphone coverage, glimmerings of life. Insurgent attacks on NATO forces are down. The country is also heroin central, corruption central, ethnic-rivalry central and, still, illiteracy central. Attacks on civilians are up. Gains are “reversible” and a “resilient” enemy “has sanctuaries outside the country,” as Petraeus put it.

In short, Afghanistan still hangs in the balance. But the American and European appetite for war is exhausted. Counterterrorism is going to be the way forward. Petraeus in reality is arguing for a significant on-the-ground presence for as long as possible — and that means beyond 2014.

He’s right to fight that rearguard action — because of nuclear-sinkhole Pakistan more than Afghanistan. When I asked him if Pakistan finds the Taliban and the Haqqani network are useful to their strategic aims, Petraeus said, “It is unclear to us at this time,” adding that “there have been incidents that we have seen” that were troubling. Still he praised Pakistan’s sacrifice “in their counterinsurgency efforts.”

The truth about Pakistan is: impossible to trust, impossible to ditch. No wonder relations are “in a difficult stage.” As Petraeus noted, they see the Bin Laden killing “as an affront to their national sovereignty:” Poor dears. But yes, “we have to continue to work it,” and that means some boots on the ground and the Bagram and Kandahar bases in Afghanistan. Or Pakistan will do its worst.

Some other Petraeus nuggets: Al Qaeda is “a damaged, tarnished brand.” Bin Laden’s death is “very significant” because he was the “iconic leader” who could bring in cash. Reconciliation talks with the Taliban? “I would not say we are close” and perhaps not “ultimately necessary.” Watch Yemen east of Aden, now a chief Qaeda concern.

Of course I asked about the presidency. The resumé will look good after the C.I.A. No, no, no, said Petraeus. But does he discuss it with Powell? Long pause. “I would never divulge my sources.”

Here’s Mr. Blow:

The current political environment and the debt-crisis debate remind me of the 1997 science-fiction film “The Fifth Element.”

Stick with me. It’s complicated.

In the film, the Great Evil, a giant ball of fire, hurtles toward Earth, intent on destroying it. This thing shows up every so often. It’s annoying.

Anyway, a group of gentle aliens have a weapon that can stop it. It has been used before, and it’s really simple: It uses four stones that represent the four classical elements but a fifth element, the Supreme Being, must activate them.

The gentle aliens promise to return to Earth with their weapon the next time the Great Evil threatens. Sounds good. But on their way back, another group of aliens — simple-minded, warriors called Mangalores who work for an evil, wealthy industrialist — shoot down their ship.

(The industrialist is a vile, twisted character. He sees destruction as a jobs program, and, as it turns out, he doesn’t even like the Mangalores. He says as much: “I don’t like warriors. Too narrow-minded, no subtlety. And worse, they fight for hopeless causes.” He’s just using them. And what does he give them for risking their lives? A box of guns.)

All seems lost. But wait! The stones were not onboard the destroyed ship but were in the care of an opera diva. And the military finds the hand of the fifth element, which scientists use to regenerate a Supreme Being humanoid. It’s a girl! After “birth,” she jumps off a ledge and lands in the flying taxi of an ex-special forces guy whom the government conscripts to get the stones from the diva.

The cabby retrieves the stones, readies the weapon, kisses the girl and she releases the Divine Light. This stops the Great Evil just minutes before it destroys the world.

Whew! So much drama. And it didn’t have to be.

I see two parallels.

First, there is no reason that we should be in this pickle. The debt ceiling has been raised numerous times with a simple vote. But Grover Norquist’s Tea Party pledglings shot that down. And now they can’t agree to a “grand bargain” because of their Faustian pact with big money. We shouldn’t have to wait till the last minute to see the light and prevent cataclysm.

Second, and more broadly, is the degree to which some people, like the Mangalores, allow themselves to be used by those who don’t have their best interest at heart. A report released Friday by the Pew Research Center found that the Republican Party has made tremendous gains in party affiliation among whites since President Obama took office. This would be understandable if the largest gains were among the wealthy, but they weren’t. They were among the poor, the young and less educated — many of the same people who would be adversely affected by G.O.P. policies. (Blacks held relatively steady, and Hispanics fell.)

I guess if people with the money can convince you that destruction is a jobs program, anything is possible.

Now here’s Mr. Nocera:

It’s finally live.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I mean. After 10 months of preparation — hiring staff, creating a management structure, laying out an initial agenda — the bureau officially hit the starting gate on Thursday, a year to the day after the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill was signed into law by President Obama. And, of course, the person who hired most of that staff, created that management structure and laid out that agenda — indeed, the person most responsible for the bureau’s very existence — is departing. This coming week will be Elizabeth Warren’s last at the bureau. So accustomed are we to our nation’s poisoned politics that nobody even thinks this is strange.

“In a world in which the Republicans would have let me have the job, yeah, I would have been glad to have stayed,” she told me earlier this week when I asked if she was disappointed that President Obama had decided, in the end, to nominate Richard Cordray, the former attorney general of Ohio, to be the bureau’s first director. (Cordray was already on the premises; Warren had recruited him to be the bureau’s chief enforcement officer.) “But they made it so clear that was never going to happen.”

Led by Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama — whose descent from respected member of the Senate Banking Committee to partisan political hack has been truly stunning — Senate Republicans had vowed to block Warren from ever being able to run the agency she brought to life.

Still, she is pleased that the president chose Cordray: “Rich will be better than good. He’s smart, and he’s tough. And he probably understands the politics better than I do.”

Naturally, Shelby et al. have now promised to block him as well — ostensibly because the bureau requires “structural changes” to make it more “transparent.” In fact, the only thing that’s transparent is the absurdity of this fig leaf. What the Republicans are trying to do is cripple the new consumer agency before it ever gets the chance to, you know, help consumers. Bankers are their constituency, not consumers.

What has long been striking to anyone following Warren’s travails these past 10 months — ever since the president asked her to set up the bureau — is the disparity between what she’s actually done versus the Republican demonization of her. It is true that as a Harvard law professor, where she raised hell about the “tricks and traps” too often used by the financial services industry to gouge its customers, she used strong, colorful language. It is easy to see why she might make some bankers nervous.

But in setting the new bureau’s priorities, she has mostly stressed the importance of clear disclosure and easy-to-read contracts — so that consumers will be able to understand what they are agreeing to. (It certainly might have helped subprime borrowers avoid a lot of pain had such an agency been in existence during the bubble years.)

“I’ve never been an ideologue,” she told me. “And I thought the best way to deal with that perception was to put our vision out there. The vision is clear. Consumers should be able to tell the price and risk of any credit product before they buy it. We want to mow down the fine print. I thought once that was on the table, and it was clear that we were executing on it, the accusations would go away.”

But they never did go away. In addition to the Senate threats about blocking her nomination, House Republicans regularly brought her before their committees and acted as if this were the second coming of Joe McCarthy. Patrick McHenry, a Republican from North Carolina — Bank of America’s home state — was particularly obnoxious, calling her a liar in one hearing. Republicans would cut off her answers and speak to her in tones ranging from contempt to condescension. The treatment wasn’t just disrespectful. It was ugly. And it never stopped.

“It was like living in an alternate universe,” said Warren. “For 14 hours a day, it was all about getting the agency set up. There was this enormous energy and enthusiasm. And then there was this other stuff.”

As she saw it, her job became, in part, to serve as the punching bag. “I would have all-hands meetings. I would say we’re under attack. My job is to worry about that. Your job is to keep building the agency. I couldn’t stop them from going after me, but I could stop the impact of their efforts.”

As for the hearings themselves, she found herself feeling more discouraged than angry. “So much energy was being wasted on a sideshow that had so little to do with families that are suffering,” she said. “What Richard Shelby says about me doesn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to what people are going through in this country. It was a political sideshow.”

Her last hearing took place a week ago. It was before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which includes McHenry. Its chairman is Darrell Issa, one of the meanest men in Congress. Warren was the only witness.

Though it began with an air of faux civility, its true purpose quickly became clear: to box her around the ears one more time. Issa accused her of “excessively redacting” Freedom of Information requests. McHenry claimed, absurdly, that her “evasive nonanswers” were contributing to the country’s economic woes. Several other Republicans chimed in with accusations of their own: she wanted to abolish payday lending (heaven forbid!); she was hiding how the C.F.P.B. was spending its money; she had “secretly” helped the state attorneys general devise a settlement with the big banks over the robo-signing scandal. (The Republicans have found her involvement in the efforts of the attorneys general — which she did at their request and which was perfectly legal — particularly infuriating. Shelby, for instance, accused her of being involved in a “shakedown” of the banks.)

I happened to watch that hearing on the Web site of the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to openness in government. The foundation had a few bloggers commenting in real time, and lots of financial data scrawling across the screen, much of it culled from Open Secrets, a kindred organization. When Representative McHenry was hectoring Warren, the screen showed that he had received almost $45,000 from Bank of America and another $15,500 from Wells Fargo. Connie Mack, a Florida Republican, had received $68,000 during the last election cycle from the financial services industry. Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, I discovered later, had given a combined $1,957,522 to Republicans in the last election, nearly twice as much as they gave to Democrats. They’ve certainly gotten their money’s worth.

As for Warren, she is being urged by the Democratic Party to run for Scott Brown’s Senate seat in Massachusetts. She’s a long way from deciding whether to do so, and, in any case, she has Harvard Law School to return to in the fall.

Earlier this week, though, she met Warren Buffett for the first time. He took her by the hands and said, “I know a whole lot more bankers than consumers, but they’re the ones who need the help.”

His words made her very happy.

 

Brooks and Krugman

Bobo once again is addressing the same subject on the same day as Prof. Krugman.  You’d think he’d learn…  In “The Grand Bargain Lives!” he lectures us that even though the coming compromise to reduce the federal debt won’t please everyone, we all need to embrace it. The other options are worse.  Prof. Krugman, who actually knows what he’s talking about, addresses “The Lesser Depression” and says even if Washington and Brussels succeed in avoiding immediate financial catastrophe, the deals being made will surely make the broader economic slump worse.  Here’s Bobo, all dressed up as a cheerleader:

Imagine you’re a member of Congress. You have your own preferred way to reduce debt. If you’re a Democrat, it probably involves protecting Medicare and raising taxes. If you’re a Republican, it probably involves cutting spending, reforming Medicare and keeping taxes low.

Your plan is going nowhere. There just aren’t the votes. Meanwhile, the debt ceiling is fast approaching and a national catastrophe could be just weeks away.

At the last minute, two bipartisan approaches heave into view. In the Senate, the “Gang of Six” produces one Grand Bargain. Meanwhile, President Obama and John Boehner, the House speaker, have been quietly working on another. They suddenly seem close to a deal.

There’s a lot you don’t know about these two Grand Bargains. But they probably have the elements that have been part of just about every recent bipartisan debt proposal: some sort of tax reform that lowers overall rates while raising revenue by closing loopholes; cuts in the level of entitlement spending without much fundamental reform; a freeze on domestic discretionary spending. Mostly, there will be vagueness. The specifics of what exactly will be cut and who will be taxed will not be filled in.

You are being asked to support a foggy approach, not a specific plan. You are being asked to do this even though you have no faith in the other party and limited faith in the leadership of your own. You are being asked to risk your political life for an approach that bears little resemblance to what you would ideally prefer.

Do you do this? I think you do.

You do it because all the other options are worse. Doing nothing could lead to default and the end of American economic supremacy. The compromise put together by Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, that’s been floating around is a ploy to evade responsibility. Punting with some small package would spook the markets and reflect dishonor on yourself.

You do it because even though you are unhappy, you see that people on the other end of the political spectrum are also unhappy. If you’re a conservative, you see that some liberals, according to Barbara Mikulski, are “volcanic” with rage at Obama. If you’re a Democrat, you see the Tea Party-types sniping at Boehner and some Republican presidential candidates completely stonewalling a deal. These signs make you feel better.

You do it because while the Grand Bargains won’t solve most of our fiscal problems. They will produce some incremental progress. We won’t fundamentally address the debt until we control health care inflation. But there is no agreement on how to do this, and it’s unrealistic to hold up an incremental deal just because no permanent one is on offer.

Both Grand Bargains produce real fiscal progress. They aim for $3 trillion or $4 trillion in debt reduction. Boehner and Obama have talked about raising the Medicare eligibility age and reducing Social Security benefit increases. The White House is offering big cuts in exchange for some revenue increases, or small cuts in exchange for few or none. The Gang of Six has a less-compelling blend of cuts, but it would repeal the Class Act, a health care Ponzi scheme. It would force committees across Congress to cut spending, and it would introduce an enforcement mechanism if they don’t. Sure there’s chicanery, but compared with any recent real-life budget, from Republican or Democratic administrations, these approaches are models of fiscal rectitude.

You do it because both bargains would boost growth. The tax code really is a travesty and a drag on the country’s economic dynamism. Any serious effort to simplify the code, strip out tax expenditures and reduce rates would have significant positive effects — even if it raised some tax revenues along the way.

You do it because you know the political climate will be worse for a deal in 2013. If you’re a Republican, you know Obama might win re-election, and even if the G.O.P. swept everything, you know your party wouldn’t have the guts to cut entitlements unilaterally (that’s why the cut, cap and balance bill didn’t mention the specific programs that would face the ax). If you’re a Democrat, you know Obama might lose, and, even if he doesn’t, the Senate will likely tilt rightward.

Mostly you do it because you want to live in a country than can govern itself. Over the past few weeks, Washington has seemed dysfunctional. Public disgust has risen to epic levels. Yet through all this, serious people — Barack Obama, John Boehner, the members of the Gang of Six — have soldiered on. They’ve been responsible and brave. If you’re a Democrat, you hate to see domestic cuts. If you’re a Republican, you loathe revenue increases, even little ones.

But this is the next step in the journey toward economic health. Standing still is not an option. Keep your reservations in mind, but let the mission continue.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

These are interesting times — and I mean that in the worst way. Right now we’re looking at not one but two looming crises, either of which could produce a global disaster. In the United States, right-wing fanatics in Congress may block a necessary rise in the debt ceiling, potentially wreaking havoc in world financial markets. Meanwhile, if the plan just agreed to by European heads of state fails to calm markets, we could see falling dominoes all across southern Europe — which would also wreak havoc in world financial markets.

We can only hope that the politicians huddled in Washington and Brussels succeed in averting these threats. But here’s the thing: Even if we manage to avoid immediate catastrophe, the deals being struck on both sides of the Atlantic are almost guaranteed to make the broader economic slump worse.

In fact, policy makers seem determined to perpetuate what I’ve taken to calling the Lesser Depression, the prolonged era of high unemployment that began with the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and continues to this day, more than two years after the recession supposedly ended.

Let’s talk for a moment about why our economies are (still) so depressed.

The great housing bubble of the last decade, which was both an American and a European phenomenon, was accompanied by a huge rise in household debt. When the bubble burst, home construction plunged, and so did consumer spending as debt-burdened families cut back.

Everything might still have been O.K. if other major economic players had stepped up their spending, filling the gap left by the housing plunge and the consumer pullback. But nobody did. In particular, cash-rich corporations see no reason to invest that cash in the face of weak consumer demand.

Nor did governments do much to help. Some governments — those of weaker nations in Europe, and state and local governments here — were actually forced to slash spending in the face of falling revenues. And the modest efforts of stronger governments — including, yes, the Obama stimulus plan — were, at best, barely enough to offset this forced austerity.

So we have depressed economies. What are policy makers proposing to do about it? Less than nothing.

The disappearance of unemployment from elite policy discourse and its replacement by deficit panic has been truly remarkable. It’s not a response to public opinion. In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 53 percent of the public named the economy and jobs as the most important problem we face, while only 7 percent named the deficit. Nor is it a response to market pressure. Interest rates on U.S. debt remain near historic lows.

Yet the conversations in Washington and Brussels are all about spending cuts (and maybe tax increases, I mean revisions). That’s obviously true about the various proposals being floated to resolve the debt-ceiling crisis here. But it’s equally true in Europe.

On Thursday, the “heads of state or government of the euro area and the E.U. institutions” — that mouthful tells you, all by itself, how messy European governance has become — issued their big statement. It wasn’t reassuring.

For one thing, it’s hard to believe that the Rube Goldberg financial engineering the statement proposes can really resolve the Greek crisis, let alone the wider European crisis.

But, even if it does, then what? The statement calls for sharp deficit reductions “in all countries except those under a programme” to take place “by 2013 at the latest.” Since those countries “under a programme” are being forced into drastic fiscal austerity, this amounts to a plan to have all of Europe slash spending at the same time. And there is nothing in the European data suggesting that the private sector will be ready to take up the slack in less than two years.

For those who know their 1930s history, this is all too familiar. If either of the current debt negotiations fails, we could be about to replay 1931, the global banking collapse that made the Great Depression great. But, if the negotiations succeed, we will be set to replay the great mistake of 1937: the premature turn to fiscal contraction that derailed economic recovery and ensured that the Depression would last until World War II finally provided the boost the economy needed.

Did I mention that the European Central Bank — although not, thankfully, the Federal Reserve — seems determined to make things even worse by raising interest rates?

There’s an old quotation, attributed to various people, that always comes to mind when I look at public policy: “You do not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.” Now that lack of wisdom is on full display, as policy elites on both sides of the Atlantic bungle the response to economic trauma, ignoring all the lessons of history. And the Lesser Depression goes on.

Jobs?  Jobs?  We don’t need no stinkin’ jobs…