I think it is time again to discuss Chuck Hagel. I’ve been reasonably positive about Obama’s nomination of Hagel for Secretary of Defense. My main problem is just that I don’t like the optics of it: Republican presidents always have Republicans at this post, but this will be Obama’s second of three who are Republicans. As Michael J.W. Stickings has asked, “Is no Democrat good enough?”

Unfortunately, I’m afraid that is the wrong question. The Secretary of Defense is nominated by the president you have, not the president you wish you had. This is who Obama is: a man dedicated to seeming more reasonable than anyone else. It is actually, one of his least admirable qualities. It speaks of a man who cares more about appearances than accomplishments. But I don’t doubt that this is who he is. From the start I thought he was a man with very centrist beliefs. If it were 40 years ago, he would certainly be a Republican.

By far, the best argument that I’ve heard in favor of Hagel comes from committed discontent Eric Alterman, Hooray for Hagel. I am in agreement with him. There is nothing that makes me want Hagel confirmed as much as the neoconservative push against him. The idea that Hagel will not be a lackey of Israel and won’t push for war with Iran makes him perhaps more compelling than most Democrats.

Alterman’s case is summed up well at the end:

What he’s getting at here is that the United States is a very pro-Israel country. But the neocons take this to another level—a level that is actually bad for Israel. And it is certainly not what American Jews, much less Americans generally, want.

So I say let’s go. It would have been nice if Obama had picked someone else, but he didn’t. And it is likely that Hagel is more liberal than any Democrat that Obama would have nominated. As Secretary of Defense, Hagel could do much good. So “Hooray for Hagel,” indeed.

There was a flurry of writing on Friday about David Brooks’ column, The Next Four Years. Jonathan Chait sums up the column well, David Brooks Now Totally Pathological. And Ezra Klein asks, Is the Republican Party Obama’s fault? Answer: no, but a lot of Republicans want to think so.

They are both referring to the second half of Brooks’ column where he speculates about what Democrats are really thinking. You see, they are going to propose modest bills like Hurricane Sandy relief. The Republicans will respond as wackos—but not because they really are wackos. That’s what makes the Democratic plan so cunning: by proposing reasonable policies they are making the Republicans seem unreasonable just because the Republicans are devoted to unreasonable policies. I swear, I am not exaggerating; he gives no reason at all for why the Republicans must act crazy; I guess we are supposed to think it is a Pavlovian response: Republicans just can’t help it.

He continues on. The Democratic Party will push “wedge issues.” Wedge issues like—Wait for it!—President Bush’s comprehensive immigration reform. The other one that Brooks mentions is gun law reform like requiring universe background checks. Traditionally, a wedge issue is one that greatly divides people. You know, things like abortion. These two issues don’t even divide the Republicans. The only thing they divide is the Republican elite from the rest of the nation. Man oh man, are those Democrats cunning!

Of course, the New York Times has editorial standards. So Brooks can’t come out and say that Democrats are thinking or saying these things. Instead, he piles on the weasel words:

I’ve highlighted the weasel words. If you take them out, you’re left with: I’m making this up. But check out that first sentence. It contradicts his whole argument! He claims that the Democrats are not going to do anything big. They are going to do little things and this will make the Republicans look bad because they are even against the smallest reforms. Brooks can’t have it both ways, but he does try.

Look back at Obama’s first term. He did everything to get the Republicans to compromise and they would not yield one inch. Okay, Brooks claims that was because these were big proposals that the Republicans hated. Except that when McCain was running for president they didn’t hate the exact healthcare bill that Obama passed. But okay, politics is politics. What exactly makes Brooks think proposing little incremental bills will cause the Republicans to act any differently. Anyway, isn’t requiring universal background checks on gun purchases an incremental reform? I mean, 60% of all gun purchases get background checks now. All universal background checks requires is closing one loophole.

So Brooks is doing nothing more than following a long tradition of conservative writing that involves pretending that liberals say or think something and then complaining about it. But I actually find the first part of his column even more offensive. It is here that he talks around what he really believes. He claims, “I am an earnest, good-government type.” But he also says, “Polarization is too deep. Special interests are too strong.” What “special interests” could he be talking about? Certainly not the rich who managed to keep the Estate Tax hobbled. Certainly not military companies that get billions in government contracts. No, he’s thinking more along the lines of the labor unions and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and, you know, that evil AARP.

He also calls the Fiscal Cliff deal a “fiasco.” I’m none too happy with that deal, but I don’t see how it was a fiasco. Brooks thinks it was one because it didn’t end in gutting Social Security and Medicare. But I think Brooks should cheer up: Obama seems determined to do just that.

As with all “reasonable” Republicans, I don’t understand why Brooks is a Republican if he really holds the opinions he implies. And that’s why I think he is anything but reasonable. But if you dig down deep into his work, what you find is a guy that is mostly a social liberal. It is on economic issues that he is conservative. This is due to an embarrassing debate he had as a young man with Milton Friedman. According to Brooks, he was a liberal then. But Friedman managed to shoot down all of his arguments. This says much more about Brooks’ intellectual skills than it says about anything else. And so he’s left being a media lackey for conservative ideas that he understands no better than liberal ideas he long ago repudiated.

Afterword

It is possible that by providing these easy votes for Republicans, the Democratic Party is doing them a favor. It allows the more reasonable Republicans to vote sensibly. Hopefully, these politicians would be rewarded by the public with re-election while the unreasonable ones would lose. Brooks does not consider this.

I noticed something very troubling about the reporting on Aaron Swartz’s suicide. Among his friends and supporters, there was little understanding of depression. The great Lawrence Lessig was on Democracy Now! to talk about Swartz on Monday. He presented more or less a hagiography. But he also said, “Aaron was depressed. He was rationally depressed.” I don’t mean to attack Lessig who was clearly very close to Swartz and very upset about his death. But Lessig doesn’t understand depression. As Swartz wrote, “Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason, and it doesn’t go for any either.”

On the other side are comments like those of Matt Yglesias, a big Swartz booster, who said, “People commit suicide because they suffer from depression, which he did, not because they’re being railroaded by the U.S. Attorney, which he was.” That’s not right either. It’s too convenient. Most people who suffer from depression never take their own lives.

I don’t pretend to know what Aaron Swartz was thinking and feeling. But I do have a lot of experience with depression. Indeed it does come and go for no apparent reason. But it is best to think of it like the weather: it is unpredictable, but there are both internal and external forces that affect it. I doubt those forces go so far as Lessig would have it. It seems unlikely that Swartz killed himself because he was disappointed in humanity. But a years long fight with an unyielding and impersonal government bureaucracy was certainly forcing Startz’s mood swings toward depression.

The main thing here is that there is a tipping point. Depression is characterized by the feeling of hopelessness: you could do this or that but what is the point? I know that even at my lowest, I retain at least the intellectual notion that things can be better. That is enough to continue on—slog through to a brighter time that might lie ahead. And I think that is what keeps us all going. But circumstances can push us too far down, and that is when depression becomes life threatening.

Yglesias’ claim that Swartz did not kill himself because he was being railroaded by the U.S. Attorney is partly right. I feel pretty sure when he killed himself, Swartz wasn’t doing it just because of the legal injustice he was enduring. But I have no doubt whatsoever that it colored how Swartz saw the universe. And that means the justice system is culpable in his death. (And it is the whole system and not just people like Carmen Ortiz.)

Of course, nothing will change. The same thing will happen again and again, just not very often to such a high profile victim.

This is probably only the first video I’m going to embed from this evening’s The Last Word. This is an outrage, of course.

While making dinner, I was watching The Rachel Maddow Show. A commercial came on for the film Zero Dark Thirty, which readers of this site will know is a torture apologia and what looks like a typical Hollywood action film. It has also been attacked by three Senators as being “grossly inaccurate.”

The commercial had scenes from the movie with periodic quotes from all the idiot critics who are heaping praise on the film. I thought: what if instead, we had quotes from the knowledgeable political commentators who have attacked the the film. So I did it, and here it is:

I’m more proud of this than any of the videos I have done, which doesn’t say that much. But this came out exactly the way I envisioned. If you like it, give me a thumbs up over on YouTube. If you don’t like it, fuck off!

Francis: What’s your zip code?

Andrea: I don’t know. I have to look it up.

Francis: Just give me a zip code near you!

Andrea: Of course know my own zip code!

Francis: [Pause to think] Fuck you.

Eric Cantor would like you to know that he isn’t giving up. It is just that they can’t solve all the country’s budget problems in one month. But four months? No problem! And you know that he’s serious: he included the new Republican catch phrase, “No budget, no pay.” I’ve got shivers.

For those of you not up on that stuff (And why would you be given all the news about Algeria?), the Republicans came out of their retreat with a great new idea: let’s raise the Debt Ceiling for a little while—three months. They claim that they are only doing this so that they can have time to fix the budget, but this is bullshit. I’m sure there are two factions here. The more reasonable Republicans think this is a way of easing into their inevitable loss. The other Republicans think this is a way to put off the confrontation until the optics are better.

The House leadership is making a big deal of the fact that they have passed a budget but the Senate has not. Of course, the House budget was just Ryan’s plan with all its magic asterisks. But note that this is no longer a fight with the President. The House leadership seem to have decided that it can’t be won. Why they think they are going to do better with the Senate, I do not know.

Greg Sargent argues that the Debt Ceiling is now dead and that the House Republicans have moved on to the upcoming budget vote to use as leverage. He even quotes a GOP aide who said that the House “may need a shutdown [of the government] just to get it out of their system.” That’s certainly true. I do think we will see a government shutdown, but that isn’t that bad as long as it doesn’t last long. And it is another opportunity for the Republicans to make themselves look bad.

I think there is another thing going on here. By pushing the Debt Ceiling back a couple of months, the Republicans put themselves in a position to use whatever deal they strike with the Democrats over the sequester as a reason to claim victory and raise the Debt Ceiling for a longer time period. But make no mistake, even though this is great news, the Republicans remain as big a problem as ever. There really is a drag on our economy, but it isn’t regulation; it is the Republican Party.

Afterword

The title of this article is a reference to an article I wrote yesterday, Republican Hostage Plans Going, Going…

Hammers. Knives. Cars. Rope. Poison. All of those things, in the hands of a crazy person, can certainly kill people. Twenty small children in a matter of seconds? No. But an automatic weapon in the hands of a crazy person, most definitely.

Basically you just need to calm the fuck down. Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, Fox News, and your own paranoid delusions are not benchmarks of reality. You know the government has drones right? They don’t need to take your guns, they can just blow up your whole goddamn house. If you want to keep your outrageous weapons for your “protection” then keep them locked up. Unless you’re a crazy person with a key to the gun safe, then don’t have guns in your house. Or at the very least, stop breeding. You never know when your child might find your protection is his funeral.

I’ve written before about the Social Security Paradox. This is the claim of supposed budget hawks that Social Security benefit cuts may be necessary in the future so we must cut future Social Security benefits now. If that sentence sounded kind of circular and meaningless, that’s the point: it’s a paradox!

In Paul Krugman’s column today, he deals with this issue a little, The Dwindling Deficit. I’m afraid he’s he a bit more pithy than I am, “So the plan is to avoid cuts in future benefits by committing right now to … cuts in future benefits. Huh?” Huh, indeed! But he goes on to give the Very Serious Position its due:

I like his counter argument. However, I think that he’s giving the other side too much credit. In fact, I’ve never heard the argument put that way. Instead, these entitlement cutters always take it as a given that smaller Social Security checks are a good thing in themselves. The only argument I ever hear is totally disingenuous, “If we don’t make cuts now, the program will go bankrupt!” This is not true at all. If we do nothing, Social Security will be able to pay 80% of promised benefits in perpetuity. This includes rising wages, so even in real dollars future retirees will be better off with 80% of promised benefits.

So don’t accept what all the Very Serious People say. In almost all cases, what the Very Serious People know—Just know!—is false.

Update (18 January 2013 11:31 am)

Krugman has a blog post this morning that gets more to the core of what I’m talking about. Here’s an extended, but edited, version:

I am very happy with John Mackey. You may have heard that the Whole Foods CEO said that he was wrong when he said that Obamacare was socialistic; he meant to say that it is more fascistic. And here’s the thing: he’s right! And do you know why it is we’re stuck with a fascistic healthcare insurance system rather than a socialistic one? Because of assholes like Mackey.

Get below the surface of fascism—its violence and racism—and you are left with crony capitalism. This is one of the reasons that I call the Republican Party proto-fascistic: they want to destroy the socialistic aspects of our government as it is applied to individuals. But they are all for corporate socialism! (There are other reasons I call them proto-fascistic, of course; like the fact that they are a racist party that governs through fear.)

So I don’t think we should get all mad at John Mackey for calling Obamacare fascistic. He should be praised for being slightly better informed than most libertarian fucktards. But if I owned stock in Whole Foods Market, I’d be very mad Mackey. The main reason is that saying such things are not good for business. They are provocative without being useful. Keep your politics out of your business—especially when a lot of your customers disagree with your politics.

But there is another reason a stock owner might be mad about Mackey. Until recently, I always assumed that Whole Foods employees were payed like Costco employees. But now I know (and I’m sure I’m not alone), that they are paid only a bit more than minimum wage to start and generally don’t get much in terms of benefits. So I’ve decided to stop shopping there.

I’m not a big fan of Whole Foods anyway. But it is super convenient for me. In order to shop at the local organic grocery store, I have to go way out of my way. But I’ll do it now. This only takes a couple hundred dollars a year away from Whole Foods. But this money should have been going to the local store anyway. So it’s a lose/win: the bad company loses and the good company wins.

So thank you, John Mackey! If it weren’t for your libertarian ranting, I would be continuing to give money to your evil enterprise.

This 7 second video shows how to create a pony tail with no fuss. It wouldn’t surprise me if some American high tech or pharmaceutical company already has the patent. So watch the video now before our corporate overlords force it to be taken down.

Come to think of it, I’m surprised no company has yet tried to patent words. “I’m sorry: you just used an article; that’s be five cents!”