Category Archives: The Nation

Fast and Furious and Very Confusing

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Some of my readers have evinced an interest in this Fast and Furious thing that is causing such a stir in Washington. Seeking to learn more about it, I started reading the results of a six-month investigation into the case by Fortune magazine. It left me more or less as confused as I was before.

An excerpt:

As political pressure has mounted, ATF and Justice Department officials have reversed themselves. After initially supporting Group VII agents and denying the allegations, they have since agreed that the ATF purposefully chose not to interdict guns it lawfully could have seized. Holder testified in December that “the use of this misguided tactic is inexcusable, and it must never happen again.”

There’s the rub.

Quite simply, there’s a fundamental misconception at the heart of the Fast and Furious scandal. Nobody disputes that suspected straw purchasers under surveillance by the ATF repeatedly bought guns that eventually fell into criminal hands. Issa and others charge that the ATF intentionally allowed guns to walk as an operational tactic. But five law-enforcement agents directly involved in Fast and Furious tell Fortune that the ATF had no such tactic. They insist they never purposefully allowed guns to be illegally trafficked. Just the opposite: They say they seized weapons whenever they could but were hamstrung by prosecutors and weak laws, which stymied them at every turn.

Indeed, a six-month Fortune investigation reveals that the public case alleging that Voth and his colleagues walked guns is replete with distortions, errors, partial truths, and even some outright lies. Fortune reviewed more than 2,000 pages of confidential ATF documents and interviewed 39 people, including seven law-enforcement agents with direct knowledge of the case. Several, including Voth, are speaking out for the first time.

How Fast and Furious reached the headlines is a strange and unsettling saga, one that reveals a lot about politics and media today. It’s a story that starts with a grudge, specifically Dodson’s anger at Voth. After the terrible murder of agent Terry, Dodson made complaints that were then amplified, first by right-wing bloggers, then by CBS. Rep. Issa and other politicians then seized those elements to score points against the Obama administration, which, for its part, has capitulated in an apparent effort to avoid a rhetorical battle over gun control in the run-up to the presidential election. (A Justice Department spokesperson denies this and asserts that the department is not drawing conclusions until the inspector general’s report is submitted.)

“Republican senators are whipping up the country into a psychotic frenzy with these reports that are patently false,” says Linda Wallace, a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigation unit who was assigned to the Fast and Furious team (and recently retired from the IRS). A self-described gun-rights supporter, Wallace has not been criticized by Issa’s committee.

The ATF’s accusers seem untroubled by evidence that the policy they have pilloried didn’t actually exist. “It gets back to something basic for me,” says Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). “Terry was murdered, and guns from this operation were found at his murder site.” A spokesman for Issa denies that politics has played a role in the congressman’s actions and says “multiple individuals across the Justice Department’s component agencies share responsibility for the failure that occurred in Operation Fast and Furious.” Issa’s spokesman asserts that even if ATF agents followed prosecutors’ directives, “the practice is nonetheless gun walking.” Attorneys for Dodson declined to comment on the record…

A bit further down, I find a description of the thing that has confused me the most about this case, and all the GOP indignation over it:

Irony abounds when it comes to the Fast and Furious scandal. But the ultimate irony is this: Republicans who support the National Rifle Association and its attempts to weaken gun laws are lambasting ATF agents for not seizing enough weapons—ones that, in this case, prosecutors deemed to be legal…

Yeah, but you’re not what I had in mind, Gary

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WARNING! THE ABOVE VIDEO IS EXTREMELY LOUD! So if you want to see it, turn your volume way down first…

Just before routinely deleting another release from Libertarian Gary Johnson, I glanced at the content:

June 25, 2012, Santa Fe, N.M. – In a new video, “The Vote for Freedom is Never Wasted,” Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson has words for Democrats and Republicans who are worried his candidacy will take votes away from Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

“I say, ‘Good,'” states Johnson in the video. The former two-term governor of New Mexico continues, “They deserve to lose your vote. Take as many votes as possible away from the people in both parties keeping us in a state of perpetual war, increasing unsustainable debt, record joblessness, and a bipartisan economic death wish ruining America for 330,000,000 of us.
“You have stated you want a third choice, and now you have one in me.”

Yeah. OK. Here’s the thing, Gary…

When I complain about the choices I have, it’s really not much help to offer me a much, much worse third option. I mean, by your logic, I should be happy for the chance to vote Nazi, or Communist, because it would be a third way.

The only thing worse than the two parties we have is pretty much every party that has emerged to challenge them in this country. Look at the biggest of the pygmy parties — the Libertarian. It takes the worst thing about the main two parties and takes it to a greater extreme. OK, the second-worst thing.

The second-worst thing about the Democratic and Republican parties is their drive toward ideological purity, as opposed to sensible, pragmatic approaches to policy. (What’s the worst thing? The worst thing is party solidarity — or whatever you want to call the phenomenon whereby a member of Party A greets the stupidest thing a fellow member of Party A says as wisdom, while dismissing as foolishness the wisest thing that a member of Party B says.)

Just because something is an alternative doesn’t mean it’s a good one. Not by a long shot. And in this country, the “alternatives” are generally just plain awful.

My very life is thine, my liege! But $3? I dunno…

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POTUS and I are so close, he knows he can ask me for anything. Even three whole dollars.

The leader of my country, the most powerful man in the world, needs my help! Right now! Time to mount my steed and prepare to lay down my life for the sake of God, country, the girl next door, and Mom’s incomparable apple pie!

Brad —

If you’re with me, then I need you right now.

We’re just days away from the mid-year fundraising deadline — this is the biggest test yet of our commitment to win in 2012. We can’t fall short on this one.

Donate $3 or more right now to elect a Democratic majority in Congress.

Thanks,

Barack

Schwinngg! goeth my sword as I withdraw it, and…

…wait a sec….

Three dollars? That’s what this is about? Three dollars? What kind of cheapskate country is this when our supreme leader himself sends up the Bat Signal to get my attention, and all he wants is three lousy semolians?

I mean, if he wanted a sawbuck, would he land Marine One on my lawn and approach my front door on his knees?

Of course, you’ve guessed by now that this message is not actually from Barack Obama, but from the anonymous dccc@dccc.org, and this is another one of a certain type of political fund-raising message that is more about getting me (or, if I were some other person perhaps, keeping me) in the habit of giving. In other words, it’s not about the money, it’s about conditioning. Sort of like all those begging emails Joe Wilson sent out asking people to give him money to help defeat the existential threat of Phil Black in the primary earlier this month. It’s not that he needs the money; he just needs you to keep giving.

Yet another of democracies more bizarre aspects.

Court strikes down parts of Ariz. immigration law

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As I run out of here to go to Rotary, I toss this up for discussion:

Court rejects parts of Arizona immigration law

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected much of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, but upheld other provisions, giving a partial victory to the Obama administration.

The court ruled that Arizona cannot make it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to carry identification that says whether they are in the United States legally; cannot make it a crime for undocumented immigrants to apply for a job; and cannot arrest someone based solely on the suspicion that the person is in this country illegally.

However, the court let stand the part of the law that requires police to check the immigration status of anyone they detain, if there is “reasonable suspicion” that the person is unlawfully in the United States. Even there, though, the justices said the provision could be subject to additional legal challenges. The court said it was “improper” for the federal government to block the provision before state courts have a chance to interpret it and without determining whether it conflicts with federal immigration law in practice….

The court also said the biggie — a ruling on Obamacare — is coming up Thursday…

Conviction speaks to core issue in sex abuse cases

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Every national MSM site is currently leading with this story:

PHILADELPHIA — Msgr. William J. Lynn, a former archbishop’s aide, was found guilty Friday of endangering children, becoming the first senior official of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States to be convicted of covering up child sexual abuses by priests under his supervision.

The 12-member jury acquitted Monsignor Lynn, of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, on a conspiracy charge and a second count of endangerment after a three-month trial that prosecutors and victims rights groups called a milestone in the sexual abuse scandals that have shaken the Catholic church….

There’s a good reason for that, and it’s not that the MSM is picking on the Church.

A lot of people think the problem is that Catholic priests tend to sexually abuse kids. That’s not the case. They are, if anything, less likely to do so than men in the aggregate.

The problem is that, in the rare (but not nearly rare enough) cases when it does happen, the Church on the whole has not — or at least, did not for far too long — respond effectively to prevent abusers from committing their horrific crimes again.

And that’s what this case addresses. That’s what makes it a “milestone,” as the NYT put it.

Do you really think Obama’s that much ahead?

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I don’t. And even if he is, it’s a long way until the election. But I’m curious what y’all think of the Bloomberg survey everybody’s talking about:

Barack Obama has opened a significant lead over Mitt Romney in a Bloomberg National Poll that reflects the presumed Republican nominee’s weaknesses more than the president’s strengths.

Obama leads Romney 53 percent to 40 percent among likely voters, even as the public gives him low marks on handling the economy and the deficit, and six in 10 say the nation is headed down the wrong track, according to the poll conducted June 15- 18.

The survey shows Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, has yet to repair the damage done to his image during the Republican primary. Thirty-nine percent of Americans view him favorably, about the same as when he announced his presidential candidacy last June, while 48 percent see him unfavorably — a 17-percentage point jump during a nomination fight dominated by attacks ads. A majority of likely voters, 55 percent, view him as more out of touch with average Americans compared with 36 percent who say the president is more out of touch.

I haven’t seen anything happen out there that suggests we’ve moved away from our dead-heat impasse in American politics. But maybe it looks different from outside SC…

The worst thing that my generation of journalists did to America

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In advance of the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, Kathleen Parker wrote a column about the harm that Nixon did to the American spirit. The part of the column that spoke most to me, though, was this:

Not incidentally, Watergate also created something else of significance — the celebrity journalist and a generation of wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins. Those of us who found our way to newsrooms all wanted the big story, if not necessarily the movie with attendant fame and fortune. What most realized rather quickly was that journalism was more like laying bricks than leaping tall buildings. Deep Throat was just a disgusting porn flick, and The Big Story was more likely a city council debate over tax millage rates.

We couldn’t all be Woodwards and Bernsteins, it turned out, but the presumption of corruption and government as the enemy was a pervasive, defining force in newsrooms across the nation. And this force in turn helped shape a relentless cynicism that persists today even as it morphs into something else.

It has been my belief for some time that the adversarial relationship toward government — the gotcha approach — that characterized this generation of journalists did two things to tear down this republic:

  1. It fed the corrosive distrust and even hatred of government that that has come to characterize so much of our politics. There has been, ever since the 1770s, a strong anti-government strain in this country’s character. But after Watergate, journalists did all they could to pour gasoline on that smoldering wariness. From Ronald Reagan to the Tea Party (and on the Naderite left), it became increasingly respectable to think of government as inherently a bad thing. Since the media were saturated with stories of bad politicians and bureaucrats, readers and viewers came to believe that all who served in government were like that, which was very far from true. The process was complete when it became common for Americans to defend the wrongdoing of the pols they liked by saying, “They all do that.” Which they don’t.
  2. Government actually DID get worse, because increasingly good candidates refused to run for office. Normal, well-intentioned people simply will not subject themselves or their families to the perpetual third degree, a state of being in which a large portion of the world never trusts them, perpetually accuses them, and magnifies their flaws (which we all have) to an absurd degree.

What happened was a matter of degree. It has always been a legitimate part of the journalist’s job in this country to hold government accountable. It is an essential function of the Fourth Estate. And perpetual skepticism, captured in the adage “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” — was a legendary feature of the journalistic character long before 1972.

But it’s also a part of a journalist’s job to provide perspective. If it’s unusual for a politician to be a crook, and you give the public the impression that all politicians are crooks, you haven’t done your job, because you’ve presented a false picture to the reader.

At this point my colleagues will protest (as I often have myself), We’re in the news business. If it’s unusual for a politician to be a crook, then when I find a politician who IS a crook, it’s my job to report that. It is not my job to report on the 99 percent of pols who are NOT crooks, because they are not unusual, and therefore not news.

True. And even back when newspapers had a lot of space and people to fill it, resources were finite. You were pretty much out of room after you had reported on the news; you didn’t have space for the vast majority of information that was not news.

And it was ever thus. Newspaper exposes always fed a certain amount of cynicism among the public.

But as I said, it’s a matter of degree. Healthy skepticism took a slight, nasty turn after Watergate. From being a healthy part of the American character, it became a situation in which Americans thought their government was so bad, that the attitude itself was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Look at South Carolina. Today, hating government is generally considered a prerequisite for getting elected to office. And once elected, those candidates go about showing just how bad government can be.

We can blame Nixon. But the journalists who were inspired by Woodward and Bernstein played their role.

Actually, Wawa IS pretty amazing

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Let’s set aside for a moment whether Mitt Romney was having a “Bush at the checkout” moment of cluelessness, or celebrating technology that denies jobs to the working class, or any of that stuff.

The bottom line for me is that Wawas are pretty amazing.

Have you ever been to one? I have, in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. It is unlike any other Interstate exit/convenience store/gas station/fast food experience I’ve ever had. I wish I could have taken my late father-in-law to one. Since he was in the convenience-store business in Memphis, he would have fully appreciated it.

It’s a sort of Alice’s Restaurant “you can get anything you want” experience, laid out in an attractive and accessible manner.

The last time I stopped at one, the manager told me that Wawa was about to open some stores in South Carolina. Has anyone seen one down here yet? (If so, they’re not included on this store locator, which indicates they are only to be found in DE. MD, NJ, PA and VA.)

‘Waterloo’ DeMint: President Obama deserves ‘slap in the face’

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In his never-ending quest to chase civility right out of our politics, Jim ‘Waterloo’ DeMint has now contributed the following:

“If the court throws it out, I think it’s a well-deserved slap in the face to the president and the Congress to make us think that what we’re here for is to honor our oath of office, which is the pledge to defend the Constitution, which limits what we can do,” DeMint said.

I realize that you can’t tell from that what the issue is. You might reasonably infer that Mr. Obama is trying to declare himself king or something, with that hyperbolic nonsense about honoring the oath of office and defending the Constitution. But these people talk like this; it doesn’t have to make sense.

No, the administration’s great sin here, the imagined flouting of the Constitution, is trying to address the inexcusable farce of the way we pay for health care in this country.

You know what? I think I’m going to become a straight-ticket voter. I’m going to vote against anyone who advocates Conan the Barbarian politics. You know what I mean: The sort of politics that holds that the greatest things in life are:

To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.

Of Graham, taxes, Norquist and unicorns

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I was a bit out of the loop last week, and missed this:

As a conservative Republican, Lindsey Graham has never had a problem promising not to raise taxes.  Like almost every other Republican member of Congress, he has signed the anti-tax pledge put forth by Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform.

But now Graham says the debt crisis is so severe that the tax pledge — which says no tax loopholes can be eliminated unless every dollar raised by closing  loopholes goes to tax cuts — has got to go.

“When you eliminate a deduction, it’s okay with me to use some of that money to get us out of debt. That’s where I disagree with the pledge,” said Graham…

Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. But it sent Grover Norquist into orbit, ranting about unicorns:

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, is none too pleased.

“This was a brain fart, not a real idea,” he told me in a phone conversation just now. “It doesn’t scare me. I think what he was doing was answering a hypothetical question to show how hypothetically open-minded he was about something.”…

He said the Senator was making the same mistake Ronald Reagan made in 1982 and George H.W. Bush did in 1990: believing congressional Democrats who promise a ratio of spending cuts to tax increases, in this case four-to-one.

“Pinocchio was told by the fox and cat that this would be” a good idea, Norquist said. He lampooned Graham for being disconnected from the reality of fiscal negotiations, comparing him to his three-year-old daughter.

“It’s like having that conversation about what color unicorn you like, while in the back of your mind you know there’s no such thing. ‘Grover, why don’t you like green ones?’ But there aren’t any ones! I have a three year old who says this a lot. She has green unicorns, but we don’t need them in the Senate.”…

I’m not sure exactly what he means, but he seems to be saying that presuming to actually deliberate with the other member of the Congress who, although of a different party, were elected just as legitimately to that body as Graham was (you know, as the Framers of the Constitution envisioned), is as fantastic and ridiculous as the existence of unicorns.

Is that how you read it?

There is the world envisioned by the Framers, and then that envisioned by Grover Norquist. In the latter, all elected representatives do exactly what Grover Norquist tells them to do. I prefer the former.

A bad idea (electing judges) gets worse in NC

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The popular election of judges has always been a terrible idea. But now, thanks to Citizens United, it’s worse:

The North Carolina Judicial Coalition is a new tax-exempt organization, known as a super PAC, supported by wealthy conservative Republicans who are determined to make this year’s race for a seat on the North Carolina Supreme Court ideological and expensive.

This kind of influence in judicial elections is a direct result of the Citizens United decision, which allows corporations and unions to make unlimited so-called independent expenditures in campaigns. In adissent in that case, Justice John Paul Stevens predicted that such spending would overwhelm state court races, which would be especially harmful since judges must not only be independent but be seen to be independent as well. North Carolina is proving him right…

The North Carolina Judicial Coalition was set up to re-elect state Justice Paul Newby, who has opposed adoptions by same-sex couples and disallowed a lawsuit challenging alleged predatory lending. He gives conservatives a 4-to-3 advantage over liberals on the State Supreme Court and is being challenged by the more liberal state appellate judge, Sam Ervin IV, a grandson of the senator and son of a federal appeals judge…

Go read the whole editorial. Yep, it was always a bad idea — nothing like picking justices on the basis of Kulturkampf issues — but now it’s expensive, too.

Torture memo guy marvels at Obama’s ruthlessness

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Looking at Foreign Policy‘s recommendation of a book titled “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” I’m reminded of something I read in the WSJ this morning.

It was an op-ed piece by John Yoo. You know, the Torture Memos guy.

It says in part:

The administration has made little secret of its near-total reliance on drone operations to fight the war on terror. The ironies abound. Candidate Obama campaigned on narrowing presidential wartime power, closing Guantanamo Bay, trying terrorists in civilian courts, ending enhanced interrogation, and moving away from a wartime approach to terrorism toward a criminal-justice approach. Mr. Obama has avoided these vexing detention issues simply by depriving terrorists of all of their rights—by killing them…

This is kind of like Luca Brasi saying that Michael’s even tougher than the old Don. He should know.

Of course, he goes on to criticize, likening Obama’s personal selection of enemies to kill to LBJ’s micromanagement of bombing targets in Vietnam. He also accuses the administration of politically motivated intelligence leaks way worse than those laid at Scooter Libby’s feet.

So he didn’t mean it in a nice way.

Jeb lightly tips hat to Obama, seeks return favor

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Not to be outdone by Bill Clinton in the civility department, Jeb Bush has offered some light praise for President Obama:

The brother of the Mr. Obama’s predecessor noted that Mr. Obama had chosen the head of the Chicago public school system, Arne Duncan, as his education secretary and they had worked to focus more on school children and less on the adults running the schools.

“Any time an elected official in the world we’re in today that appears so dysfunctional challenges a core constituency not of their opponent but of their own political base, I think we should pause and give them credit,” Bush said.

The comments came after Rose pointed to comments Bush had made in April praising Duncan and saying the Obama administration had done “a pretty good job” on education policy…

The former politician, who flatly ruled out a run as Mitt Romney’s running mate in the interview, noted that he now has the luxury of being able to say what he thinks and is not constrained by political ambitions.

“I don’t have to play the game of being 100,000 percent against President Obama. I got a long list of things that I think he’s done wrong. And I, with civility and respect, I will point those out if I’m asked. But on the things that I think he’s done a good job on, I– I’m not gonna just say, ‘no, no,’ ” Bush said…

In his case, though, he’d like to see the compliment returned:

“I think it would help him politically. For example, when he was gracious at the unveiling of the portrait, you know, there’s no way not to be gracious I guess in that kind of setting,” Bush said, referring to a recent ceremony at the White House to unveil the official portrait of former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush.

“But it helps,” he said, calling it “just a small acknowledgement that the guy that, you know, that you replaced isn’t the source of every problem that– and– and the excuse of why you’re not being successful I think would help him politically.”…

Actually, I think it would, too — among people like me. But he has to worry about his base.

Unfortunately, to those who are not retired from politics, the other side is the devil these days, and one is never allowed to give the devil his due.

Recall is never a good idea

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I didn’t agree with everything that E.J. Dionne said in his column about the failed Wisconsin recall effort, but I was pleased to read this part:

Perhaps the most significant exit poll finding was this one: Only about a quarter of those who went to the polls Tuesday said that a recall was appropriate for any reason. Roughly six in 10 said a recall should be used only in the case of official misconduct. And another tenth thought a recall was never appropriate. Most voters, in other words, rejected the very premise of the election in which they were casting ballots. This proved to be a hurdle too high for Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D), Walker’s opponent.

Voters should have to live with their bad decisions until the next election, to allow for some order in government — and to lessen the already toxic atmosphere of the perpetual campaign.

If an official does something really heinous, there’s impeachment. But this “make us mad and we’ll have another election” stuff is inimical to our system of representative democracy.

E.J.’s column was about what left and right should learn from Wisconsin. He suggests, although doesn’t say  it overtly, that it would be wrong to think the left has a losing proposition with its support for public employee unions.

But it does. I found this piece, also in the WashPost today, more to the point:

“Anybody, anybody would have been better than Scott Walker,” said Gregory J. Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents workers in more than a dozen federal agencies. Junemann commutes weekly to Washington from Milwaukee, where his union member wife is a public school employee.

Like many political observers, Junemann can point to the tremendous funding advantage Walker had over Barrett, but the union leader isn’t satisfied with that as an excuse for the mayor’s defeat.

“The people of Wisconsin said that the attack by Scott Walker and his allies on public employes and their unions was acceptable,” Junemann said. “That’s what they said with their votes. This puts us in a very uphill battle for November.”

Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, has a different spin: “I do not believe the results of the Wisconsin election demonstrate strong support for anti-employee policies.” Instead, “the broader long-term message,” she said, is “working men and women, and their unions, will not stand idly by while reactionary forces attempt to roll back hard-won rights.”

They might not stand idly by, but they also might lose.

They got a union just for SERGEANTS? Really?

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When I saw this headline at the Chicago Sun-Times site — “Ex-head of Chicago police sergeants union sentenced to 12 years in prison” — I thought what any ol’ Southern boy would think:

They got so many unions up there, they got a special one just for sergeants?

Apparently so.

Which means that those other parts of the country are… really different… from down here. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

As I’ve said before, I don’t hold with public employee unions. Public employees work for the people, not some separate private entity. That means they serve themselves as well as their friends and neighbors. Given that special relationship, there’s something really twisted about employer and employed being on opposite sides of a bargaining table. We should be able to rely on their being on the same side.

Fortunately, that’s one thing (one of the few) that I don’t have to worry about in South Carolina. We ain’t got none o’ that.

Unfortunately, we do get some of the negative effects of public employee unions here, with none of the dubious benefits. For instance… you know all that money that flows into our state from people trying to elect legislators who will undermine public education? They are to a great extent motivated by their animus toward “teacher unions.” Well, we don’t have any of those here, which is why it’s bitterly ironic that we should be a battleground for that issue (thanks in large part to Mark Sanford — his being governor persuaded those interests that South Carolina was fertile ground for their movement). The SCEA is a professional association, not a collective bargaining unit.

Today in the WSJ, there was yet another screed against teacher unions — which of course has no application to South Carolina. Sadly, too few in our state understand that, based on how many times I hear public education critics in our state moan about how the “teacher unions” stand in the way of improving education here. (I actually heard it from the lips of a Rotary speaker recently.)

Anyway, these are the things I’m thinking about as voters in Wisconsin decide whether to recall their governor over a battle about public employee unions. A fight in which we do not have a dog.

Inglis on why the tribe turned against him

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Kathryn brings my attention to this interview piece with Bob Inglis on Salon.

Bob Inglis is a guy for whom I’ve always had a lot of respect — ever since he got elected to Congress in the early 90s as a fiscal (and cultural) conservative, and then voted against highway money for his own district. This was back when nobody did this. “Conservatives” like Strom Thurmond had always talked a good game, but brought home the bacon. Inglis was a trailblazer.

To listen to Bob Inglis talk is to respect him, just as he respects others — something that sets him apart.

Inglis has always been deeply conservative, and deeply committed to his principles. But the know-nothings of his party unceremoniously dumped him in the last election, basically — as near as I can tell — for not being as angry as they were.

Anyway, this is an interesting passage:

Inglis remembers campaigning door-to-door and encountering hostility for the first time.

“I’m wondering, ‘Why is this happening?’” he said. “And what I came around to is that what happens is the tribe selects you to go to Washington. You believe with the tribe, you agree with them, and you go to Washington as their representative.

“Then you get there and you mingle with these other tribes, and you come to understand their point of view – not agree with it, but understand it. So when that view is presented, you don’t have the same sort of shocked reaction that some of the tribe members at home have to hearing that view.”

He recalled getting to know John Lewis, the civil rights icon and Democratic congressman from Georgia.

“He is an incredible American,” Inglis said. “I just disagree with him on this budget thing. But back at the tribe, at the tribal meeting, it’s like, ‘He’s some kind of Communist, that John Lewis. He’s not an American.’ No! He’s an incredible American. He’s one of our heroes.

“But the tribe doesn’t see that. The tribe sees you as sort of getting too cozy with John. And then they start to doubt you, because of this betrayal response. We are hard-wired to respond very violently – as I understand it, the brain really responds to betrayal. It’s one of the strongest human emotions.”…

Inglis, a conservative Republican to his core, speaks here to a very UnParty sensibility. You have your principles and you stand up for them. But that doesn’t mean you delegitimize those with whom you disagree. If you do that, the deliberative process upon which our system of government is built collapses.

Bob understands that. Too few who still hold office do.

Hoping Obama won’t really run this way

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Maybe y’all have time to read this piece by John Heilemann in New York Magazine. I don’t, not today. If you do, please get back and tell me that things don’t really look as dark as they do at the beginning:

The contours of that contest are now plain to see—indeed, they have been for some time. Back in November, Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin, two fellows at the Center for American Progress, identified the prevailing dynamics: The presidential race would boil down to “demographics versus economics.” That the latter favor Mitt Romney is incontestable. From high unemployment and stagnant incomes to tepid GDP growth and a still-pervasive sense of anxiety bordering on pessimism in the body politic, every salient variable undermines the prospects of the incumbent. The subject line of an e-mail from the Romney press shop that hit my in-box last week summed up the challenger’s framing of the election concisely and precisely: “What’s This Campaign Going to Be About? The Obama Economy.”

The president begs to differ. In 2008, the junior senator from Illinois won in a landslide by fashioning a potent “coalition of the ascendant,” as Teixeira and Halpin call it, in which the components were minorities (especially Latinos), socially liberal college-educated whites (especially women), and young voters. This time around, Obama will seek to do the same thing again, only more so. The growth of those segments of the electorate and the president’s strength with them have his team brimming with confidence that ­demographics will trump economics in November—and in the process create a template for Democratic dominance at the presidential level for years to come…

Y’all know how I feel about Identity Politics. I want leaders who want to lead all of us, not this or that arbitrarily selected subset. Obama, to me, is the guy who inspired a victorious crowd in Columbia to chant, on the night of the 2008 South Carolina primary, “Race doesn’t matter!” Amen, said I. The atmosphere that night — when voters rejected the continued partisan strife that the Clinton campaign seemed to offer — was one in which we put our divisions behind us, and work toward building a better country together, as one people.

And if there’s anything more distressing in my book than Identity Politics, it’s Kulturkampf. Those couple of paragraphs are enough to push me toward political despair on that count. The next two grafs are worse:

But if the Obama 2012 strategy in this regard is all about the amplification of 2008, in terms of message it will represent a striking deviation. Though the Obamans certainly hit John McCain hard four years ago—running more negative ads than any campaign in history—what they intend to do to Romney is more savage. They will pummel him for being a vulture-vampire capitalist at Bain Capital. They will pound him for being a miserable failure as the governor of Massachusetts. They will mash him for being a water-carrier for Paul Ryan’s Social Darwinist fiscal program. They will maul him for being a combination of Jerry Falwell, Joe Arpaio, and John Galt on a range of issues that strike deep chords with the Obama coalition. “We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president,’ ” Plouffe explains. “Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.”

The Obama effort at disqualifying Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of revanchism. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,” says a top Obama strategist. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young, or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This [f*@#ing] guy is gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been part of that.’ ”

Yeah, that’s all we need. A campaign that sees itself as an army of indignant minorities, feminists, gays and young people up against a coalition of self-interested white males, Ayn Randers, birthers and nativists, with both sides convinced that it is at war with the other. And each subset being motivated not by what’s good for the country, but by what it sees as advantageous to itself as a group.

So much for the United States.

All that’s left to me at this point is to hope the campaign plays out differently from the way this writer envisions it.

Then, suddenly, the economy got worse faster than you can say ‘Polish death camp’

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This hasn’t been a good week for Mr. Obama. First there was the “Polish death camp” thing that wouldn’t go away. (Hey, I understood what he meant, didn’t you? But just try explaining it to the Poles…)

Today, there’s this:

Worst U.S. Job Data in a Year Signals Stalling Recovery

A dismal job market report Friday gave a resounding confirmation to fears that the United States recovery has markedly slowed, reflecting mounting evidence of a global slowdown.

The report, which showed the smallest net job growth in a year and an unemployment rate moving in the wrong direction, was a political game-changer that bodes ill for President Obama as he faces re-election.

It provided traction for his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, at a time when politicians have been deeply divided over the most effective way to strengthen the economy. And it put increased pressure on the Federal Reserve to take further action to stimulate growth.

The United States economy gained a net 69,000 jobs in May, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate rose to 8.2 percent from 8.1 in April, largely because more people began looking for work. And there was more unexpected bad news: job gains that had been reported in March and April were revised downward…

Yow. Now the president knows how John McCain felt when the economy got shot out from under him. OK, not that bad. But still not good.

What do y’all think? Is it a blip, or a negative trend? Because I remain convinced that the health of the economy depends in large part on what y’all — all 300 million or so of y’all — think about it. Yeah, there are some things we can’t help, like the Euro mess, but largely we have the ability to stimulate the economy by ourselves. Hey, that sounds kind of dirty, doesn’t it? Well, that’s not how I meant it. Or maybe I did. Talking about money stuff makes my mind wander…

Sympathy for the Devil: Clinton defends Romney

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I liked learning about this today:

Bill Clinton predicted Thursday that President Obama will win reelection this fall “by five or six points,” but the former president’s half-full look at the general election contest was overshadowed by his somewhat unexpected praise of Mitt Romney’s “sterling business career” as chief executive of Bain Capital.

“I don’t think that we ought to get into the position where we say ‘This is bad work. This is good work,'” Clinton said of the private equity industry during an interview on CNN, later adding that Romney’s time in both the private and public sector leaves no doubt he’d be capable of performing the “essential functions of the office.”…

Good for Bill. It’s nice to see someone depart from the SOP tactic of demonizing everything about the opposition.

You don’t have to think private equity managers — or, say, community organizers — are inherently a bad thing to prefer the other candidate.

As Republicans do to the president, too many Democrats want to portray their opponent as the devil. I appreciate Bill Clinton taking the time to run against that grain.

‘Hindsight’ has nothing to do with it

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Kathryn calls my attention to a piece at Salon written by a former Edwards campaign worker, which says in part:

It’s become customary in politically obsessed circles for observers to preen about how they knew that Edwards was bad news all along. His lawyerly ways! His sentimental stories about growing up working class! His hair! How could his silly supporters not see him for the philandering phony he so clearly was?

Of course, a quick perusal of the John Edwards of 2007 demonstrates that this sort of hindsight owes more to revisionist wishful thinking than a correct assessment of the evidence at the time….

Sorry, Amanda. You’ve got that wrong. There were no halcyon days when Edwards was great. Certain not in 2007. Here’s what I wrote about him then.

But you’ve pegged what I’ve thought going back to the 2004 campaign: “How could his silly supporters not see him for the philandering phony he so clearly was?” How, indeed? I used to wonder at it, and worry over it a good bit.

And I may agree with her that his trial was a waste of time and money. Justice was done with regard to John Edwards some time back. All the nation needs to know is that he’ll never hold high public office again, and that’s assured.

The piece ends:

Even those who’ll never be able to forgive Edwards for nearly destroying his legacy should be grateful for the good sense shown by the jury today. Let’s hope the Justice Department takes their lead and lets this one go.

What legacy?