If you want to read an article that combines
schadenfreude, back-stabbing, disloyalty, pitifulness and pettiness in the most pleasing way
imaginable then by all means READ THIS
ARTICLE!

It’s about the bum’s rush Texas Republicans are giving to departing
Republican Senator Phil Gramm (“Texas
Republicans want Gramm out, Hispanic In.“) As David Plotz makes clear
in this article,
Gramm is pretty far down the list of people who deserve sympathy for
anything. But this comes pretty close.

The story goes like this … Gramm’s departure creates several
opportunities and potential pitfalls for Republicans. The most obvious
opportunity is to hold the seat with an Hispanic Republican – thus
validating and augmenting the president’s efforts to create a more
Hispanic-friendly GOP. On the downside, Republicans could a) lose yet
another Senate seat and b) thoroughly embarrass the president by having an
Hispanic Democrat elected in 2002 from Bush’s home state.

So Texas Republicans want Gramm to resign and allow Gov. Rick Perry (an
unelected Governor, mind you) to appoint Rep. Henry Bonilla to replace
him, thus giving Bonilla a running start in his effort to win a full term
next November.

The Dallas Morning News correctly
notes that this would avoid “a potentially brutal and costly
Republican primary.” But it would be more accurate, though admittedly
impolitic, to say that such a primary could be brutal, costly and
thoroughly discredit the notion that the Texas Republican party is built
upon a happy marriage of Hispanics and post-segregationist freaks. But,
you know, if they want to use the shorthand, that’s cool by me.

Anyway, what’s really striking about this situation is just how
publicly a handful of relative upstarts within the Texas GOP (Bush, Perry,
Bonilla) is telling
Gramm to get the hell of out of town. President Bush met with Perry at the
White House on Wednesday to discuss ways to get Gramm to resign and at
least one Texas Republican media consultant with close ties to Bush has
publicly told Gramm to pack it in.

Coming from a sitting president of Gramm’s own party the message Bush
is sending to the too-slowly departing senior Senator comes through pretty
clearly as:  GET THE *#$& OUT!   Go! Be Gone! LEAVE!
Enough with you! Go Away forever! NEVER COME BACK!!!

Meanwhile the shoving from Perry has become almost obscene, leading to
exchanges such as this one in today’s
Houston Chronicle:

Gov. Rick Perry said Friday that U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm,
despite repeated denials from the senator’s office, is still considering
resigning so that Perry could appoint a successor and avoid a Republican
brawl over the plum political seat.

“Senator Gramm is still going through a thought process of whether or
not he would resign early. So I don’t think there’s been any change,”
Perry told reporters.

There certainly wasn’t any change in Gramm spokesman Larry Neal’s
response.

“Senator Gramm is not going through a thought process about
resignation. He has no intention of resigning,” Neal said.

Ouch!!!

Compassionate Conservatism was always, rightly, taken as a finger in
the eye of gloomy, nasty Republicans like Phil Gramm. But you’ve gotta
figure Gramm would like a little more compassion right about now.

Jacob Weisberg has an excellent
article in Slate unpacking the unfolding anomaly of Democrats as the
party of fiscal discipline and Republicans as the party of scroungers and
deficiteers.

But there’s one point he doesn’t bring up; and it’s one that, as far as
I can see, hasn’t been mentioned much during the budget debate at all.

It’s true that Democrats historically have been the party unafraid of
modest deficit spending while Republicans were the ones who worshipped at
the altar of the balanced budget. But the present-day turnaround on fiscal
policy isn’t the only one that has taken place.

Unlike what we know today, the Democrats also used to be the party with
its strongest roots in the country’s hinterlands — the Mountain states,
the Prairie states and the South. Conversely the Republicans were the
party of the Northeast, the industrial Midwest, and social-capital rich
states like Wisconsin.

(The classic example of this change comes in a comparison of last year’s
election map and the map of the
1896 election. Bryan, the Democrat, won virtually all the Bush states.
And McKinley, the Republican, won pretty much all the Gore states. More
recently, when Harry Truman won his upset
victory over Tom Dewey in 1948 the one region in which he was pretty
much shut out was the Northeast, the region which is now the Democratic
heartland. If you’ve got a moment you can see the trend over the course of
the century in this helpful list of
election maps.)

The party of the Northeast and Upper Midwest has historically tended to
be the one favoring more disciplined fiscal policy while it’s the party
with its base in the South and the West which has preferred more
loosey-goosey financing.

In this current article
in the New Republic Robert Reich argues that Democrats got on the
fiscal discipline bandwagon by way of incidental or opportunistic
political calculations by Bill Clinton during the late 1990s (perhaps even
because of Monica). But I suspect this is something more fundamental, and
tied to the parties’ changing geographical bases.

I have to admit this new
article by Charles Babington in the Washington Post sorta
pisses me off. The article (“Tax
Cut Plan Filled With Dubious Spending Predictions“) gives a bracingly
frank run down of all the false premises, implausible assumptions,
dishonest budget scoring gimmicks, and simple lies that went into making
the Bush budget appear (to the very credulous, mind you) to add up.

Here’s one brief passage from the article:

Why did congressional and White House negotiators adopt
these spending projections? Because without them, there was virtually no
way they could come up with numbers suggesting the nation could afford
to forego $1.35 trillion in revenue over 11 years.

The legislation is more political creature than fiscal plan. It
originated in George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. He called for
a $1.6 trillion tax cut, which the Senate eventually whittled to $1.35
trillion. Once they agreed on the targeted amount, negotiators juggled
projections and assumptions ­ several of them quite implausible ­ until
the numbers fit.

The problem is that there’s nothing in
Babington’s article that wasn’t completely obvious six months ago when the
Budget was being debated. So why wait till now to spill the beans?

I fear the answer is that during the actual debate the (foolish, to my
mind) canons of newspaper journalism (i.e., presenting both sides of the
argument) mandated that both sides’ arguments be presented with equal
merit, even though one was more or less false on its face.

Now that the whole thing has fallen apart after only a few months it’s
okay to state the obvious.

Great journalism.

Here’s some news that should buoy Democrats and send a
chill through Republicans’ spines.

According to this newly-released
ABCNews-Washington Post poll, 57% of Americans support trimming the
Bush tax cut to keep the budget in balance. Two-thirds oppose using
across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending to keep the budget numbers
in line. And a staggering 92% oppose using Social Security funds to pay
for other programs — precisely what the administration is now trying to
argue it is alright to do.

A close look at the poll’s methodology reveals that the measure isn’t
of likely voters or even registered voters, but merely adults. And that
should effect a slight Democratic tilt. But the overall results are
sufficiently decisive that this is just a footnote.

What does it mean? That the president and his party are in a lot of
trouble. And Democrats would seem to be taking exactly the right approach
by forcing the president to take the first stab at solving the problem he
created. As we noted here a little more
than two weeks ago, this debate may seem like a jumble of numbers. But
it’s actually all about values, responsibility and trust – which is
precisely the sort of debate Democrats should want to be having with this
president.

The favored White House strategy is to tell the Democrats that
they should come up with their own way to solve the problem. But
this is a tack Democrats should welcome because the rejoinder is
elementary: This is the responsibility
era. Don’t pass the buck. Don’t blame everyone else. Take
responsibility.

Nothing real to report beyond the obvious, horrifying
tragedy unfolding on your TV screen or computer monitor. My immediate
observations from DC have been posted
here at Salon.com toward the bottom of the page.

TPM, of course, is normally all about arguments among us, among
Americans. But all of that falls deep into the background now. And my
support, and I’m sure yours too, is with our president, our armed
services, and all of those struggling mightily to save those who can still
be saved.

I’m not accustomed to watching George W. Bush give a
speech and hoping he hits it out of the park. But that was certainly my
feeling last night as the president addressed the nation about yesterday’s
bombing. And on balance I’d say he came through with flying colors.

And for all his faults — and, yes, he certainly has them — you can’t
have watched Rudy Giuliani over the last 36 hours without thinking that in
many important ways he has been a truly great Mayor of New York —
something many Dems like myself have long thought. And certainly moments
of stress and tragedy, which require steel and grit, are his best
moments.

And it’s been pleasing to see how many Republicans and Democrats — all
of them as nearly as I can tell — have focused only on the requirements
of the moment, and resisted every opportunity to push even peripheral
partisan advantages.

Regrettably, though, there seem to be at least a few examples of the
cheapest, most craven opportunism. In this
column in National Review Online, Larry Kudlow says that rising
to the challenge of the moment will cost of “hundreds of billions of
dollars” in new defense expenditures.

That may be debatable but certainly the impulse is legitimate and
understandable. And you can even cut Kudlow some slack for the cheap shot
implied by his charge that “terrorist invasion of the U.S. mainland
underscores the urgent need to rebuild the defense and national security
structure that has slowly but steadily eroded in recent years.”

This is after all a man with the vision and integrity of a
double-breasted suit.

But, according to Kudlow, this tragedy also means busting the lockbox,
ditching debt reduction, and having another round of massive tax
cuts!

Phony lockboxes must be thrown out the window. Unnecessary
obsessions over debt retirement must be driven away. Now is the time for
aggressive fiscal and monetary stimulus to promote growth and finance
freedom. Substantial tax cuts on individuals, businesses, capital
investment, and equipment depreciation should be immediately put into
place … Steps to promote energy production must be taken
aggressively.

In other words, the only patriotic response to
this horror is to enact the complete Bush legislative agenda!

What a shameless gambit.

David Horowitz trots out some similar
crap. (“It’s time for those on the political left to rethink their
alliances with anti-American radicals at home and abroad.“) But he’s
unworthy of mention; beneath contempt.

I’ve gotten a few critical letters calling me out for
praising our president too fulsomely, or rather too reflexively in the
last post, particularly when I said he “came through with flying colors”
in his Tuesday night address to the nation.

There’s probably something to this. It’s probably more honest to say, simply, that he didn’t disappoint.
And that’s really no mean thing.

In any case, in moments like this (if one can use that phrase) I try to
adopt what I call the Clinton rule. If Bill Clinton were being attacked in
such and such a way would I think it was fair? I find this an instructive
rule in cases, for instance, like the time it took for President Bush to
make his way back to Washington.

The White House’s cryptic (but conspicuously open) announcement
that the White House and Air Force One were targeted seemed like a pretty
transparent effort to knock down criticism of how long the president staid
outside DC.

On the other, give the guy a *$#@%& break.

I mean, I’m sure whatever thinking went into keeping the president
hopping around the country wasn’t something that started with him or Karl
Rove, but rather the Secret Service and the military. But if this were
Clinton in this situation, I think I’d consider this sort of criticism
crass overkill. And it’s seems the same to me in this case.

Coming up next: if this is ‘war’, what could this require from us, and
what must it require of us? And perhaps most importantly, how
should our response differ — not quantitatively but qualitatively
— from earlier retaliations to terrorist attacks?

As it happens, when this horror began I had been
doing reporting for a piece about Osama bin Laden for a couple months. A
bit of this went into an article
I wrote about bin Laden in Salon.com this afternoon. The following,
though, is a combination of information from a number of sources I spoke
with today and just thinking the matter through myself.

It’s been commonly stated over the last forty-eight hours that the twin
attacks on the the WTC and the Pentagon were of sufficient sophistication
that they necessarily required state support or the backing of a large and
extremely sophisticated terrorist organization.

But is this really true? Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying there
aren’t state sponsors of terrorism or that one wasn’t involved in this
tragedy. But was it necessary? I’m not so sure.

What was really needed. As nearly as I can figure, that would be …

a) perhaps a dozen people with the ability to fly a
commercial jetliner

b) some crude and easily obtainable weapons

c) detailed schedules and flight plans of commercial airlines

d) $500,000 or $1,000,000 to pay for miscellaneous expenses primarily
including housing and board for a few dozen individuals

e) sophisticated organizational skills to coordinate the activities
of a few dozen people while presumably keeping many of them unaware of
the activities of the others

Of course, one could easily
argue that the real issue is what superintending authority could bring all
these people together. That’s an extremely good question. And the point of
bringing this up is not to exonerate anyone, of course. But I think it’s
worth noting that at least from what we’ve heard what was really needed
here was not so much complex infrastructure, facilities, or resources as
several knowledgeable, experienced individuals and lots and lots of time.

This TPM post will likely be more undirected or
unfocused than usual. Let me try to get out a few thoughts, though.

First are the video feeds (now wall-to-wall on the cable nets) of these
family members with hastily pasted together xeroxes
of their loved ones — a picture, a name, a few vital measurements —
straining to get these images in front of TV cameras to spread the word —
and always with the word “missing.”

I must say this was more than I could take. I don’t mean that this as
the accustomed phrase or as a euphemism. I mean it was more than I could
take. Partly out of personal concern and also because I now have to write
about this awfulness, I have like many of you been watching this coverage
almost non-stop since Tuesday morning. But these images were too much. I
found myself repeatedly, literally, lurching to grab my remote control and
turning the television off.

What is it about these images? I guess it’s the pure desperation of
these people. And their human and terribly understandable unwillingness to
come to fully recognize that desperation. It’s their denial. There is just
something (and I mean this in the most sympathetic sense of the
word) pitiful about them, for those of us who are at least insulated
from immediate personal loss in this case can immediately recognize that
these people are “missing” only in the most grave and technical sense.
They’re dead. They’re all dead.

Certainly there will be a few miraculous stories with grieving families
who find a relative is one of the few John or Jane Does in a New York
hospital. But only a very, very few.

And it’s this denial, this desperation that just makes this stuff so
unbearable because it is a pain beyond grieving. When you see families in
full grief you have the sense that they have at least passed a first
threshold, and in some unfathomable sense their grief has begun to find
its way into graspable proportions. But these family members with these
pictures have … well it’s just too much to describe. Hope against hope,
at a certain point, becomes too searingly painful to watch, because the
disconnect between the glimmer of hope and the inevitable grief is just
too dissonant. And the presence of false hope just makes the true
hopelessness more difficult to defeat or overcome.

For us, the rest of us, all these pictures just bring the awfulness of
this to life in a way that goes completely beyond the numbers. And there
are so, so many. They overwhelm you in the watching.

I thought I’d be less fatigued than it turns out I am. So the rest will
come later this morning. Next up, the international reaction. And a few
comments from politicians that make you wonder.

With the horror and trauma unfolding in our midst it may seem too trivial or crass to venture some media criticism. But allow me this. Huge events often bring new reporters or commentators to the fore. In this case, I think it’s an anchor: CNN’s Aaron Brown.

Brown’s not a new face. He’s been around for a couple decades and mainly at ABC as far as I know. He recently got hired by CNN and he was the first person on the air for the network within minutes of the original WTC attack.

(This may make it seem like I’m sort of Aaron Brown watcher. But actually I just got this info from this page. When I saw him on Tuesday morning I only had the vaguest sense of ever having seen the guy before.)

In any case, he’s just really, really good. In his TV manner he has an ingenuousness that feels, well … quite genuine and elicits or explicates new information that more stuffy or programmed questioners and anchors would never arrive at. He’s got this way of thinking aloud on air which, for me at least, really works.

In short, he rocks.

Many highbrow news commentators cultivate a rep for insight, wisdom and perspective but actually put out a product you might call ‘insightfulism’ – not insight, but a stylized way of talking about the obvious so that it seems penetrating, a way of packaging decent points with oblique language so that they seem like grand pronouncements.

Come to think of it, I think Brown’s got one of these characters as a new colleague. But let’s not go there.

The point is that CNN made a dynamite pick when they hired Brown.