I think my point is made

From this very wonderful account of the current protests:

4) The Park Police are, in fact, monitoring the memorial, but it's mostly to keep the protesters (protesting its closure) under control. The Park Police are not being paid for this (even though protesters chanted "You work for us"), because they've been furloughed. Thanks largely to the intractable Ted Cruz.

What's On My Bookshelf

These are the books that are in process above my desk.

Moro East
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents
Mourad: New Moroccan
Moonwalking With Einstein
MotherSongs
Enduring Ties: A fine, thoughtful and very personal collection of poems about family.
A Reading of Proust by Wallace Fowlie
Ceasar: A Sketch by Froude
Horace Walpole's Memoires of George III
Queen of Darkness, a book of Poems
Remembrance of Things Past Volume 1
Playing With Pictures by Siegel
Marcel Proust, George Painter's Biography, Volume 1
Writing With Scissors by Garvey

What's in process on your shelf? And how many books do you juggle?

Block That Metaphor

Oh, I think the Fascist Octopus has sung its Swan Song, don't you?

First you call the President everything under the sun up to and including traitor, closet homosexual, drug addict, communist, Al Quaeda mole, occult muslim, lazy, stupid, and malovelent and then you bleat this:

But the 58-year-old Graham wasn’t through venting yet. “You can blame us [Republicans], we’ve overplayed our hand, that’s for damn sure,” Graham said. “But their response, where the president and [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid] basically shutting everybody out, and when you try to negotiate, they keep changing the terms of the deal … it’s very frustrating.”

What we have here is a failure to communicate--a Lakoffian confusion of types of negotiation and types of games.  Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By argued, among other things, that the metaphors we use to explain things to ourselves and others come to rule us. What may start as a soft form, merely a way of speaking, can end up bounding our imagination and creating hard paths down which we are forced to walk.  The entire Republican strategy--a combination of Mutually Assured Destruction, poker, hostage taking, assault and battery, basketball with fouls and sharp elbows, Nullification, Secession, White Power, and sheer dripping, spiteful, End Times hysteria is a set of mixed metaphors that is driving its proponents to political suicide. And they will go down pointing the gun at their own head and wailing that its murder.

Apparently Senator Aunt Pitty Pat  thought that they were just engaged in a friendly game of poker and they merely "overplayed their hand."  Of course in poker when you bluff and overplay your hand your opponent is not obliged to negotiate back the pot and let you off of the money you just ante'd up, nor is he obligated to courteously fold just to help you save face with your backers.  But it takes some special brand of chutzpah amounting to stupidity to think that you can simultaneously run a kidnapping/hostage scenario, complete with sending back fingers and toes and letting the family hear the hostage's screams, and then complain of the rude behavior of the hostage negotiators when they don't complement you on your humanity and just hand over the money.

The whole thing is reminding me of the Dunning-Kruger experiment which, coincidentally, I was reading about yesterday. Up until now I had Dunning-Kruger confused with something fictional having to do with the The Office.  I also thought, dimly, it might be that experiment on Blade Runner about empathy.  Much to my surprise the psychological syndrome is real and it had its origins in this fascinating, real life event:

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY,
SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork.  So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news.

At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington...

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight.  What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.  The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest.  There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money.  Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.  “But I wore the juice,” he said.  Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

This case spurred Dunning-Kruger to begin doing their famous experiments showing that sometimes people are too stupid, or too ill informed about the process or technique they are using, to know that they are bound to screw it up.  The experiments resulted in the following set of proposals:

 for a given skill, incompetent people will:
1) tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2) fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3) fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;

This is the only thing that makes sense of the current situation and the kinds of things the Republicans are saying both publicly and privately.  The entire party, so called centrists and far right extremists, are simply too stupid to grasp the nature of the political enterprise.  Rocketing between metaphors they thought they were going to play both poker and commit a terroristic act of hostage taking and they are truly shocked to discover you don't always win either game when you come up against a better player. Not only that--their conviction that it is a game in the first place prevents them from grasping that their actions have long term consequences and harms that don't get reset with the start of the next round or the next game cycle.  What kind of game they think they are playing is equally confused--if you lose at poker and get cleaned out you can't go back to the table. While if you lose at Basketball, until the end of the series at any rate, you can go back and play the next game. If you lose at hostage taking you end up with a dead hostage and with any luck the police bust down the door and shoot you, in turn. There isn't a reset button on that kind of scenario, either.

  To complete the round up of mixed metahpors: they brought a knife to a gun fight and now are dropping it and backing away sobbing for Daddy to come and rescue them.  Unfortunately for them Daddy Obama left the building after the second election made it clear to him that he couldn't coddle the children anymore. 

OMG! Krugman likes me...he really likes me...

Great Googly Moogly,  a link from Krugman on my tipping post--Krugman! the man I send imaginary flowers to every time he sets screed to pixels.

Dignity, Always...Dignity!

LGM calls it contrarianism and Balloon Juice just makes fun of it but its worse than that--its some faux liberal middle brow "More In Sorrow Than In Anger" Daddy fixation.

Kinsley via LGM and Balloon Juice:

President Obama should give in. Yes, He should speak to the nation and say,

“I cannot in good conscience put you and this country through the traumatic consequences of a default. The Republicans apparently don’t feel that way. They don’t care whether veterans and seniors get the benefits they have earned. They don’t care whether they destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, which has never before defaulted on its debts and made the dollar the world’s safest currency. They don’t care if their irresponsibility drives us into a new recession or worse. They don’t even seem to care if the families of soldiers dying in defense of our freedom in Afghanistan and Iraq get a proper opportunity to grieve and honor them.

“The sad truth is that if you don’t care about any of that, it gives you tremendous power over those who do. Perhaps unfortunately, I do care. And I believe the stakes are too high to let this become a testosterone contest. So I have sent a letter to Speaker Bohner, saying that I will agree to a year’s postponement of the Affordable Care Act, if he will agree to a rise in the debt limit that is at least big enough to spare us another episode like this for a year."

Just as not caring about the good of the country gives strength to the Republicans, not caring about how he looks would give strength to Obama. You win the game of chicken by refusing to play. 

The significant thing to me about the Kinsley Argument is that it is based on a very deep seated distaste for real conflict, for getting down in the mud and punching back, and, essentially, for the rough and tumble of politics.  Kinsley's goals are not for the Democrats to pursue any particular agenda, not for people to actually get health care--his stated goal, Alternate Universe Obama's stated goal, is merely to gain "strength" and rising above "caring how he looks" is the way to do it. Alternate Obama is playing to shame the Republicans into better behavior so, to an extent, Kinsley does think there is something to be gained in the contest but his real focus is not on the actual conflict but on Obama's status as a President, as someone who important observers may misunderstand or even judge weak and ineffective, unmasculine and powerless but whose real power is found in the negation of expectations and in long term gains in popularity or public opinion.   Absurdly Kinsley argues that "you win the game of chicken by refusing to play."  But its not a game. Its actually real life. Some people drive off the cliff. Some people get driven over.  Standing on the sidelines watching the other guy drive over your companions is not a viable option.

But in Kinsely's mind The Alternate Universe Obama should be above such messy realities as (for example) actually pursuing the policies he advocates. He should be as disgusted as Kinsley is with all this kiddie infighting and he should withdraw from the game, given in, and let the kiddies fight it out and suffer the “natural consequences” of their acts. He’s a parody of liberal parenting where you try to reason with the kids for a while but your main objective is not losing dignity or moral authority by descending to their level. You don’t argue with the kids, and you don’t punish them by taking away their toys, you let them suffer through their bad decisions and let outsiders (teachers, DUI tickets, bad consequences) “teach them a lesson.”

But politics isn’t some kind of game egos and life lessons and, in fact, there’s just as much bizarre ego gratification in the Alternate Universe Obama withdrawing from the contest and giving up (he’s above this sort of thing) as there is in Boehner and the Tea Party insisting on “getting something” for their trouble. Politics and the ACA is about helping real people to really live better, safer, healthier lives. 40 million of them. That is a literally immeasurable benefit on a massive human scale. The people freaking out about one child on one cancer trial are simply unable to scale up to the level of what the Republicans want to deny 40 MILLION PEOPLE. Kinsley’s tin pot, paper Obama, simply reflects the fact that Kinsley is one of those people whose imagination and morality and guts are not up to the task of being President and taking on responsibility for 300 million people. Because that is what matters and that is what Obama is fighting for. Not the approval or disapproval of journalists calling him “weak” or “strong.”

This Is What We Are All Afraid Of

The last Lost Cause has been strangling us since 1865. I think this is some kind of Freudian Slip.

Via TPM

Party leaders interviewed said the tea party's demands to defund the health care law -- and the House leadership's willingness to follow suit -- were distracting from what they said is the GOP's best strategy to recover from its 2012 losses: a focus on reducing long-term spending. They said defunding the health care law would not achieve that goal because the money was already flowing to the law.
"At the end of the day, you're fighting legislation that's already passed," said former South Carolina Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson, describing the fight to defund the health care law as a lost cause.

Is Now A Good Time For A Reprise Of Blazing Saddles?

This point has been mooted around the internet so its not new. Not at all.  The Republicans know they have to raise the Debt Ceiling because their real paymasters have told them so, in no uncertain terms.  But apparently they are still going to use it to score political points and to try to negotiate the destruction of our remaining social safety net--to force Obama and the Dems to do the dirty work of cutting Social Security and Medicare (as well, presumably, of forcing Medicaid back to pre-Obamacare numbers). If they are working from the usual stylebook they will also demand the privatization of the entire Department of Education and the defunding of the EPA among other things.

There's nothing to stop them from continuing to attach these demands to the Debt Ceiling hike--even if it is extended 6 weeks or whatever they think they are going to do. Especially if they refuse to open the government. In fact SteveM wonders whether they don't intend to try to run the government on a continuing partial shutdown basis in which they fund only the parts that make the most impact on white middle class voters while keeping the rest shut down.  I think they will certainly try to do this: call it a Continuing Republican Resolution. We fund only the pretty parts of government and let the rest die on the vine. They have formed the intention of defunding Obamacare and now they realize they can defund/refuse to fund anything they want. So this will be the new normal going forward.

So now would be the time, I think, for the Nuclear Jiu Jitsu move of all time. Obama and the Dems are already refusing to reopen negotiations until the government shutdown is ended and a clean CR is on the books. I think they have to go farther--not only should there be a clean CR with no preconditions for negotiations afterwards but Obama and the Dems have to refuse to raise the debt ceiling at all unless its clean and good until the next congress. Thats right: no money for you bankers and Koch brothers.  If Obama doesn't take the hostage back, even if that involves holding himself hostage like the Sheriff in Blazing Saddles, we are probably doomed. There is nothing to stop Boehner and the Republicans from continuing on this downward path and although they can lose some more public approbation that won't affect anything. Ultimately they will continue to hold hostages until they destroy something. Its true that if they can point to Obama as the cause of the ultimate death of the economy that will be bad for the Dems--but they are going to do that anyway, regardless. That, too, is in their nature. They will pull the pin on the grenade and wail "look what you made me do."

Two can play at brinksmanship. I think Obama and the dems have been patient long enough. And its not working. We are looking at a situation of that is more akin to Nixon's Mutually Assured Destruction scenario than it is a regular negotiating situation. And we must act accordingly.