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.