We Won't Get Fooled Again... except this time

That the US Senate would pass a bill I consider an abomination is not really that shocking. But that my allies would be the likes of Rand Paul, Jim DeMint, and Tom Coburn, or that my opposition would include Amy Klobuchar, Sherrod Brown, and Patrick Leahy… that is seriously weird. Of course, I’m also on the same side as Al Franken, Tom Harkin, and Bernie Sanders, and opposed by Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio and Mitch McConnell… and now everything makes sense again. Sort of.

I’m talking, of course, about the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012, with its controversial provision which allows the military to indefinitely detain without trial American terrorism suspects arrested on US soil who could then be shipped to Guantánamo Bay. When this frankly scandalous piece of legislation got the White House imprimatur yesterday—President Obama had been threatening to veto it, but now says he’ll sign it tomorrow—I linked to this article and wrote on the Curmudgeon Central Facebook page, “WHAT??? Is there really a difference between being actively evil and merely capitulating to evil at every opportunity?”

That was unfair. I apologize to the legitimately craven, those who would like to stand up to the Dark Side, but just can’t muster the gumption to do so. On this issue, at least, they have nothing in common with Barack Obama, who is indeed actively evil… or, at the very least, whose vaunted knowledge of constitutional law seems to have a blind spot on that whole habeus corpus thing that has only been the hallmark of English and subsequently American jurisprudence since the 13th century. (I mean, really, you can’t expect the poor lad to keep up with all the new developments, right?)

Okay, before we go any further, it’s time to reiterate that I’m neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar, and to concede that we’re not really talking about habeus corpus, per se, but rather a first cousin of it. Habeus corpus, after all, is a means of securing the release of those illegally detained. This bill provides a means by which an obviously unethical and unconstitutional practice that runs counter to centuries’ worth of legal precedent is rendered “legal.”

My mistake was in believing, perhaps more on faith than on evidence, that the President’s early objections to this legislation were based on civil libertarian concerns. They weren’t. They were, apparently, all about turf wars, making sure that it was the President and not (gasp!) Congress who had the prerogative to violate the civil rights of American citizens. Glenn Greenwald’s piece on Salon.com is more comprehensive than I could be, and includes valuable links to statements by the likes of the ACLU and Human Rights Watch. Here’s a little of HRW executive director Kenneth Roth’s commentary:

By signing this defense spending bill, President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law. In the past, Obama has lauded the importance of being on the right side of history, but today he is definitely on the wrong side….

It is a sad moment when a president who has prided himself on his knowledge of and belief in constitutional principles succumbs to the politics of the moment to sign a bill that poses so great a threat to basic constitutional rights….

President Obama cannot even justify this serious threat to basic rights on the basis of security. The law replaces an effective system of civilian-court prosecutions with a system that has generated the kind of global outrage that would delight recruiters of terrorists.

It’s not often that I quote Rand Paul with approbation, but I can’t find anything to argue with here:

… detaining citizens without a court trial is not American… [if the law passes] the terrorists have won.

We're talking about American citizens who can be taken from the United States and sent to a camp at Guantánamo Bay and held indefinitely. It puts every single citizen American at risk. Really, what security does this indefinite detention of Americans give us? The first and flawed premise, both here and in the badly named Patriot Act, is that our pre-9/11 police powers were insufficient to stop terrorism. This is simply not borne out by the facts.

Of course, there’s also Mark Kirk:

We as Americans have a right to a speedy trial, not indefinite detention. We as Americans have a right to a jury of our peers, which I would argue is ... not enlisted or military personnel sitting in a jury. You cannot search our businesses or place of business or our homes without probable cause under the Bill of Rights. You cannot be deprived of your freedom or your property without due process of law, and that, I would say, is not indefinite detention. I would actually argue that no statute and no Senate and no House can take these rights away from you.

And yes, having essentially articulated the manifold reasons this legislation is unconstitutional, misrepresented and downright scary, Senator Kirk proceeded to vote for it, anyway.

Kirk wasn’t alone. Here’s Dianne Feinstein: “Congress is essentially authorising the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge. We are not a nation that locks up its citizens without charge.” Then she voted for the bill, too.

OK, could we have one big chorus of “W.T.F.”?

Supporters of this bill claim that it merely codifies existing practice (in which case, why do we need it?), and doesn’t extend the tentacles of governmental power. There may, unfortunately, be some truth to this allegation (if so, I assure you that it’s purely coincidental). The notion of constitutional rights became distorted beyond recognition in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the desperate passage of the PATRIOT Act, which managed somehow to be frighteningly repressive and downright silly at the same time. Similar, and further, invasions of personal privacy became central to the legacy of a power-hungry President named Dick Cheney George W. Bush.

Those of us who voted for Mr. Obama in part because of Mr. Bush’s cynical and indeed Machiavellian assertions of executive power to do essentially whatever the hell the President wants have been, are, to say the least, bitterly disappointed. The Obama administration has extended chronologically and in some cases substantively about every Bush-Cheney over-reach. Rep. Jerry Nadler sums this up nicely in his response to the assertion that this bill doesn’t really make substantive changes to civil liberties:

It doesn't codify existing law. It codifies claims of power by the last two administrations that have not been confirmed by [the Supreme Court]—rather terrifying claims of power, claims of the right to put Americans in jail indefinitely without a trial, even in the United States.

Nadler makes an important distinction: what is existing law and what a pair of megalomanical administrations claim it to be are hardly interchangeable concepts.

Tellingly, if Obama had any real principles, he could have asserted them on this issue. In political terms, there was an opportunity here: some 40 Republicans in the House voted against this bill, and another half-dozen in the Senate joined them. On one of the few occasions GOP legislators haven’t been in lock-step, the Obama administration characteristically fumbled the ball. But, as noted above (and with striking clarity by Greenwald), no one in the executive branch seems to have had the slightest inclination to follow the path of civil liberties… not when there is power to be consolidated, at any rate.

Ultimately, it all boils down to the lyrics of the great Who song, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Three years ago, we were all thinking, “Change it had to come. We knew it all along.” Trouble is, the more salient part of the song comes later: “Meet the New Boss. Same as the old boss.” Don’t you hate it when Pete Townshend is right?

Nibbling around the Edges

There’s an intriguing graphic on the New York Times website. It shows, in scale, President Obama’s budget proposal. The bigger the rectangle, the bigger the budget. The chart also gives an indication, by means of color, of whether Mr. Obama is asking for more or less money than last year's budget for each area: green means an increase, red a decrease.

What’s particularly interesting, however, isn’t the graph that first appears on the site. Rather, it’s what happens when you click on the tab that reads “hide mandatory spending.” What happens then is that “spending that is controlled by existing laws and not subject to the annual budget process” is eliminated from consideration. So, for example, the increase in Social Security spending is overwhelmingly mandated: there’s an increase of about $14.5 billion, of which about a half a billion or so, slated to be used for administrative expenses (off-budget!) is discretionary. In other words, about 97% of the increase is prescribed by law. Of the $17 billion increase in Medicare, less than $1 billion is subject to the budget process. And the $63 billion in new interest load just has to be paid.

But even within the realm of what could conceivably be cut, there aren’t a lot of significant declines. There are a handful of programs that are projected to lose 10% or more of their funding: but all of these line items put together generate a total savings of barely over $30 billion, less than half of the increase in interest payments, or roughly equal to the discretionary increases in various areas of military spending (there are also some cuts in specific areas of the military budget, but, significantly, not in personnel, procurement, or O&M).

The most striking thing about the chart that eliminates mandatory spending isn’t that it’s significantly more green than red (although it is), i.e., it represents more areas of increase than of decrease; what’s striking is how much white (mandatory expenditure) space there is. The total budget: $3.69 trillion, up from $3.6 trillion a year ago. That $90 billion increase matches almost exactly with the mandatory increases in interest and social security… and doesn’t count significant mandated hikes in Medicare (the federal contribution to states) and student financial assistance, for example.

The debt and deficit are both huge, and growing. Two numbers a lot of people talk about: the deficit reaching 10% of GDP and the debt reaching 100% of GDP. One number I don’t see a lot: we’re looking at a deficit equal to about 40% of the budget! That means that for every $5 we spend, we collect $3 in taxes. I’m not an economist, but that sure looks to me like an unsustainable pattern. We are looking, after all, at a deficit in the range of $1.5 trillion in this fiscal year.

This means the spiffy new $60 billion budget cut just passed in the House, even if it were to become law (which it won’t, although parts of it might), wouldn’t make a dent in the deficit. That’s not to say that attempts to rein in spending are inherently misguided: predictably, I’m unimpressed with the specific targets of House Republicans’ budget-cutting axe, but a little fiscal restraint wouldn’t be a bad idea. More to the point, the Tea Party proposal, which would have cut an additional $22 billion from the budget, was deemed “irresponsible” by the GOP power base. It would have cut “everything indiscriminately in a heavy-handed way,” quoth Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky. And we can’t have that: Republicans came into power declaring their opposition to federal spending, and they all said that “everything [was] on the table” (Speaker Boehner said so in precisely those words), but of course they didn’t mean their pet projects.

One thinks, for example, of Boehner’s opposition to cutting $450 million for a new engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane. (Here are links to good commentary by Dana Milbank and by Jack Marshall.) The Pentagon declares itself happy with the engine it has, making the cut seem a no-brainer. Half a billion dollars might not be a lot of money compared to the size of the deficit, but it ain’t chicken-feed, either. Yet John “We’re Broke” Boehner opposed the cut. Purely coincidentally, of course, the new engine would be made in Boehner’s little corner of the world. You see, “so be it” commentary about the loss of federal workers’ jobs notwithstanding, the good Speaker really does care about the American worker. Or at least the Southwestern Ohio worker, which is pretty much the same, right? It hardly qualifies as a revelation that Boehner is a hypocritical douchebag, but that knowledge doesn’t get us any closer to a sustainable budget.

What will do so, of course, is a recognition of reality. Protestations from both sides of the aisle notwithstanding, our old friends Waste, Fraud and Abuse are alive and well in most if not all federal agencies. My wife, who is a financial aid director at a community college, for example, sees more than her share of lazy and dishonest people whose “job” it is to attend classes long enough to collect a financial aid check, and then to simply flunk out and start over somewhere else. But Pell Grants and other forms of federal financial assistance per se aren’t the problem; indeed, they’re a central ingredient to a long-term solution. A well-educated workforce is crucial to any hope of a vibrant economy in years to come, and that means we as a nation need to provide a means for our best and brightest young people, not merely our most affluent ones, to attend not merely colleges, but good ones. Closing loopholes without throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, however, takes actual work, actual commitment, and actual thought: neither party seems terribly interested in any of the above.

What this all boils down to, and pay attention because this doesn’t happen very often, is that Rand Paul was right in declaring that the federal government “can cut all of the non-military discretionary spending and not balance the budget.” You read that right. We could cut 100% of non-military discretionary spending and still not balance the budget. And that means next year’s debt payment will be bigger than this year’s, making it even harder to make any progress then. And so on ad infinitum.

I have a friend who is a costume designer. For a long time she had a saying posted outside her office: “Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick two.” The resurgent GOP has to make a similar choice, although I’m not sure they can really have more than one. Their options: maintain military spending, maintain current tax rates, and maintain the slightest hint of integrity in their rhetoric about caring about the deficit. It’s pretty clear, unfortunately, that such real resolve is lacking in the Republican leadership. Getting away with smoke and mirrors in the Reagan and Bush years, when the deficit (and spending) shot up but the rhetoric was always about fiscal responsibility, taught the current GOP all the wrong lessons.

Similarly, the Democrats, having slurped the Kool-Aid that makes them distrust the intelligence of the citizenry, seem far more interested in getting re-elected (by pretending to be Republicans), than in solving problems. There are solutions out there: raising taxes, probably significantly, especially on those can most afford it but ultimately on all of us; drawing down the war in Afghanistan and re-defining the mission of the American military throughout the world; recognizing that federal spending is often, even usually, a good thing, but current deficit levels cannot long be endured.

We’re well on our way to Oz. Here’s hoping we find a heart, a brain, and courage.

Just what you wanted: more election analysis

Amidst the scramble to interpret the results of this week’s elections, a few themes emerge. The Obama administration over-reached. The Republicans’ abiding concern for the deficit resonated. The health-care bill was a political liability. The Tea Party was hugely successful. The only way Democrats can survive is to move to the center. These claims have two principal things in common: 1). they are uttered breathlessly and virtually unanimously by the drones who make up what purports to be the journalistic class in the corporate media, and 2). they’re crap.

The Obama administration, in fact, tried valiantly to deal with the myriad burgeoning disasters left on its plate by Bush the Lesser. But, despite real successes, they utterly failed to accomplish much of the agenda that appeals to the Democratic base, creating the enthusiasm gap we heard so much about this cycle. DADT is still on the books. Guantanamo is still open for business. More troops were sent into Afghanistan than were pulled out of Iraq. Key provisions of the PATRIOT Act were just extended. Executives at bailed-out businesses thanked us for our collective, if involuntary, generosity by pocketing billions of dollars in bonuses: a decent percentage of which found its way back into Republican coffers to help defeat any politician who might even contemplate regulating those industries so that the recent near-calamitous economic mess doesn’t repeat itself. Democrats in general have equivocated on such obvious issues as the Park51 project because otherwise they’d be criticized by the Moron Tabernacle Choir of Beck, Gingrich and Palin. Really?

Republicans’ utter hypocrisy on matters budgetary is manifest. Pick your argument, they’re all true, and any one of them ought to be sufficient to make the point. 1). The only President in a half century to make significant reductions in the national debt as a function of GDP was Bill Clinton; the worst offenders at exploding the deficit: Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. 2). The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the net cost of the Bush administration’s Medicare prescription drug plan will exceed that of the health care bill, the stimulus package, and the bailouts combined. 3). I have yet to see a single Republican willing to say, “Here’s what we need to cut.” Don’t give me “across the board cuts in discretionary spending,” especially if you’re blithely claiming the military budget isn’t at least largely discretionary. 4). And don’t tell me that allowing a slight increase, to the level of a decade ago, in the taxes of the people who can afford it most, decreasing the deficit by nearly three-quarters of a trillion dollars ($700,000,000,000), is some kind of socialist plot.

The health care bill was actually pretty popular until wild misrepresentations of it went unchallenged. Indeed, a plurality of the citizenry weren’t concerned about over-reach; rather, they thought it didn’t go far enough. Journalistic laziness (or worse) went a long way towards allowing right-wing spin to somehow be regarded as the unquestioned narrative line, but the corporate media were abetted by the Democrats. First, they repeatedly capitulated to the minority, getting literally nothing in return, further watering down what had already been a compromise bill. A single-payer plan was never even on the table, for example, although such a system would be the cheapest, most efficient, and generally best possible structure. I say this, by the way, as someone who actually has some experience with such a plan, unlike those who purport to believe fairy tales because doing so is the only way to repay insurance companies and predatory employers for their continued electoral largess. Then, of course, the Dems, with rare exceptions, ran away from, or apologized for, what should have been their signature achievement.

The Tea Party? Give me a damned break. Really, where did a Tea Party candidate pick up a seat for the Republicans? (Because, let’s face it, they may pretend to be separate entities, but the TPers are a wing of the GOP reserved for those who think the likes of Mitch McConnell and David Vitter are too sane.) There was a legitimate chance of the GOP picking up a Senate seat in Delaware until Christine “I am not a witch” O’Donnell got the nomination. Harry Reid richly deserved to be defeated, and taking him down would have been a significant symbolic victory for the GOP, but they nominated about the only Nevada Republican who couldn’t beat Reid. Tea Party candidate Ken Buck lost in Colorado (his unguarded description of the TP faithful as “dumbasses” may have been about the only honest statement of his campaign… and it may have lost him the election). Joe Miller may well lose to Lisa Murkowski… whichever way it goes, the seat stays Republican.

Yes, Rand Paul won. But a pompous racist douchebag who skates along the border between idiocy and insanity is different from outgoing Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning exactly how? Kentucky didn’t elect Rand Paul despite his racist frat boy persona; they elected him because of it. (Perhaps you will recall that Hillary Clinton’s virtually last gasp in the primary season two years ago was a huge win in Kentucky, where she campaigned basically as, well, a racist frat boy.)

Ultimately, the sigh of relief you heard on Thursday was from the mainstream GOP (to the extent that’s not a contradiction in terms). Democrat Patty Murray was finally declared re-elected in Washington, making the next Senate Democratic by a 53-47 margin: in other words, nominating Tea Party morons Angle, Buck and O’Donnell didn’t cost the GOP the Senate. The best they could have done was a tie, with Vice President Biden as the deciding vote. Whereas the Senate has devolved to a place where you need 60 votes to order a cup of coffee, that 50th vote does matter in determining committee chairmanships, for example. There may have been a Tea Party candidate who defeated an incumbent Democrat, or even who flipped a seat in a gubernatorial or senatorial race, but I honestly can’t think of one. The four big Tea Party winners, Paul, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley and Mike Lee, all replaced Republicans. Lee, who defeated incumbent Bob Bennett in a primary for senator from Utah, is hardly an outsider: he’s a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Alito and the son of a Reagan Solicitor General.

Much was made of people who voted for Obama and for Republicans this time around. This claim, unlike those above, at least has some validity. After all, someone had to change a party affiliation somewhere, right? Well, sort of. There are a few real trends in midterm elections: the party in the White House gets punished, pretty much whether the country is in good shape at the time or not; there’s a lower voter turnout, especially among certain demographics: minorities, young people… precisely those groups that tend to trend to the left; and there was an abnormally high number of Democratic retirements—it’s much easier to win an open seat than to depose an incumbent. Indeed, only two incumbent Democratic Senators lost. One, who will be missed, was Russ Feingold. The other, who won’t be, is Blanche Lincoln.

And yet we get the drivel spewed forth by the likes of Evan Bayh, who is in a close race with Lincoln for the coveted title of Democrat I’m Least Unhappy to See Out of Office. Bayh, whose highly-respected father actually stood for something, got his gig through the quasi-nepotistic system of party politics, and hasn’t had anything intelligent to say about literally anything in years. Yet he presumes to tell Democrats how to regain the political momentum: by acting like Republicans, of course. You know, like Blanche Lincoln did. For the record, I said in May, when Arkansas Democrats had an opportunity to nominate an actual Democrat, Bill Halter, “I don’t see Lincoln standing a chance against [John] Boozman; Halter would also be an underdog, but he could at least balance the corporate backing Boozman will receive with labor support.”) Lincoln lost by 21 points (!). Show me another incumbent in the last generation to lose by that much without some kind of personal scandal.

Indeed, the numbers don’t support Bayh’s analysis in the slightest. Of the 34 Democrats who voted against health care reform, for example, only 12 were re-elected: barely one in three. And this is why the best comparison for this election isn’t 1994, when the Republicans swept into power in Congress on the promises of the “Contract with America.” This time, there’s another document, a rather flabby screed called the “Pledge to America.” But literally no one really believes the American people like the Republicans this time around, or even think the Republicans have any ideas: they just don’t like where we are, and the Dems are in charge. The fact that they haven’t been for very long, and that the hole dug by President Bush and his minions was very deep and very wide didn’t really matter. T’row da bums out.

The better analogy would be 2004. The Democrats had a chance to nominate a candidate with ideas—a Howard Dean, for example—but they hated George W. Bush so much they were convinced to go with the “more electable” John Kerry. Kerry proceeded to run one of the most gutless and passionless campaigns in history, offering little in the way of real policy and allowing the slanderous Swift Boat ads to go unanswered. That same kind of intellectual lethargy and unwillingness to actually fight in the political trenches characterized the 2010 campaign, as well.

This year’s election was decided by three things: 1). the daft Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court last January (next time you’re contemplating a vote for President, consider whether your candidate would be stupid enough to nominate a Justice who really thinks unlimited and anonymous corporate—or union—spending on political campaigns is a good idea), 2). Democratic cravenness, 3). branding.

Citizens United, of course, opened the floodgates on tens of millions of dollars spent on attack ads which were seldom as much as accurate, often funded either anonymously or by a handful of ridiculously rich folks who see it in their best interest to invest a few million dollars to buy a politician here or there: much cheaper than actually having to, say, pay for the clean-up of the debacle they caused in the Gulf of Mexico, or make their mines safer, or actually provide benefits for their employees.

It looked for a brief moment that the Democrats might actually figure out that the anonymity of donors to all those cobbled-together consortia of hate speech might be a campaign issue for them, especially when it became clear that the Chamber of Commerce was accepting contributions from foreign sources. The CofC leadership was righteously indignant, of course, that anyone would suspect them of wrong-doing: it would be illegal, they screamed, to do what they were accused of doing… as if that made them innocent. Yes, assholes, it would be illegal. That’s the point. You would be committing multiple felonies if your fancy accountants can’t paper over the fact that you are accepting money from foreign corporations and attempting to influence American elections. Does it really matter if you put it into different budget lines? To me, it makes no practical (as opposed, possibly, to legal) difference if you get a $1 million contribution, and use that money to buy attack ads or if you use it to cover your overhead, freeing up $1 million of money that would have had to be spent on overhead to pay for… wait for it… attack ads. But the corporate media didn’t think there was a story there, and Democrats were obediently silent.

Indeed, the Democrats in general were unwilling to engage in the fray. Sure, there were Republicans—Rick Perry, for example—who cravenly ducked out of debating their opponents. But how many Democrats pointed out that the stimulus plan included the largest middle-class tax cut in history? Or that the allegedly budget-busting health care bill is projected by the CBO to reduce the deficit by over $100 billion over the next decade? How many talked about credit card reform? Or reminded the electorate that much-despised (but necessary) bank bailout happened during the Bush administration? How many pointed out that, despite the shrillness of the right, the allegedly “failed” stimulus is credited by every non-partisan analyst with having prevented a far worse disaster? How many, in other words, ran as Democrats? Instead, the best they could muster was “those guys are even worse than we are.”

But tied in with this failure is the notion of branding. Again, the blame is shared by a listless Democratic party and a slothful and compliant corporate media. How many times did we hear about the “Bush tax cuts,” when the only dispute is whether to extend them to people who make over a quarter of a million dollars a year in taxable income: or, rather, on income over that level (Democrats would extend the Bush tax cuts for the first $250,000 of income). By comparison, how many times did we hear about the Bush bank bailout? Or the Obama tax cut? Now, the bailout may have been necessary and the tax cuts bad policy, but there’s no question that most folks like lower taxes (as long as there are no concomitant cuts in services). [For a brilliant rebuttal to this simplistic position, read this.] And the bank bailout was intensely unpopular. The Republicans knew it was something that had to be done. But, because they knew it was going to pass, anyway, they could cynically vote against it, earning them faux populist points.

Of course, the likes of Rachel Maddow have been pointing most of this out for some time. But she never brought, say, NBC’s Chuck Todd onto her show to ask why he was propagating beltway corporate media conventional wisdom as if it had the slightest bit of legitimacy. Because she has too much loyalty to the organization to expose the news director as an utter idiot, perhaps?

Ultimately, the Democrats deserved, based on what they accomplished in Washington, to remain in power. Based on what they did the campaign trail, however, they richly deserved to be defeated… unless, of course, they were running against Republicans.

The reality is that if voters want Republicans, the GOP are better at providing them than the Democrats are. Gazillions of dollars of sleazy campaign money notwithstanding, the Democrats would have done just fine if they’d stood for something. They didn’t, and while the “hurricane” touted by the right didn’t exactly materialize, it was pretty ugly Tuesday night. So, what are the chances the Dems will take precisely the wrong lesson from Tuesday’s results? About the same as that the sun will come up tomorrow.

Antiphon Is Always Welcome at Our Tea Party

I was discussing Oedipus the King with my freshman-level Play Analysis class the other day, and I wanted to talk about how notions of guilt and innocence were different for the Greeks than for us. Today we have all manner of tests of intentionality; for the Greeks, it pretty much boiled down to one thing: what happened? They weren’t much concerned with motivations or similar psychological analysis. The fact that Oedipus tried valiantly to avoid his prophesied fate only to commit his horrible acts in direct consequence of his attempted circumvention of them may have made Oedipus more sympathetic, but it had precious little to do with his guilt, as far as either the Thebans of the fictive world or the Athenians of the real-world audience were concerned.

There were in fact different punishments for crimes committed intentionally and unintentionally in ancient Greece, but there was no need, for example, to show negligence to convict someone of an accidental crime. Thus, it is all but irrelevant that Oedipus unquestionably believed beyond the proverbial shadow of a doubt that his parents were back in Corinth when he killed his biological father in the world’s first recorded incident of road rage, and subsequently became, literally, a BAMF.

To illustrate the point, I mentioned the events enumerated in the Second Tetralogy of the orator Antiphon. What happened was this: a young athlete was practicing javelin-throwing. A little boy ran out onto the field to collect the javelins just as the young man released his next heave. As luck would have it, the spear penetrated the boy’s ribs, and he died on the spot. No one claimed the death was anything but accidental, or indeed that the young javelin-thrower had failed to take proper precautions. Indeed, all agreed that his throw was well within the boundaries, and that he had done nothing wrong in ethical terms. Still, the boy’s father accused the young man with accidental murder, a charge which carried a penalty of a year or more of exile. (The defense in the case seems to argue that the young man is in jeopardy of a death sentence, but this is a wild exaggeration. Go figure: a lawyer who distorts the truth.)

Here’s where Antiphon enters the picture, as an orator (or, more accurately, logographos, or speechwriter) hired by the defense. (The orator wrote the argument, but it was delivered by someone else, in this case the young man’s father.) He can’t argue that accidents happen, and that, in the absence of negligence, there’s no case. In a society that cared about the notion of pollution, with a stain clinging to anyone who kills, even inadvertently, that argument would go nowhere. So what Antiphon argues instead is that his client is in fact the aggrieved party… after all, he didn’t get to see how far his throw was because that pesky kid got in the way:

because the boy ran under the trajectory of the javelin and placed his body in its path, one of them was prevented from hitting the target, whereas the other was hit because he ran under the javelin…. Since the young man made no mistake, it would not be fair for him to be punished for someone else’s mistake; it is enough for him to bear the consequences of his own mistakes. But the boy was destroyed by his own mistake, and the moment he erred, he also punished himself. Therefore, the killer is punished and the death is not unavenged.

Really, it was damned decent of the young man’s father to allow the boy to escape without further punishment. I mean, interfering with a javelin-thrower’s workout is a serious offense.

I didn’t go into class thinking I was going to talk about Antiphon, but the anecdote came into my head in the middle of the discussion. And then, just as quickly, it was returned to the back of my mind, to that intellectual space that occasionally gets dredged for a pertinent tidbit, but basically is just allowed to simmer on the lowest possible heat. Or so I thought. A couple days later, we got the modern challenger to Antiphon’s title of Most Outrageous Case of Blaming the Victim in Recorded History. You see, that was when it became public knowledge Heritage Foundation consultant, Tea Party doyenne, and wife to a US Supreme Court Justice, Virginia Thomas, proved she’s an even bigger idiot than hubby by leaving a voicemail on the office telephone of now-Brandeis professor Anita Hill. To “[extend] an olive branch to her after all these years,” as she subsequently claimed to a reporter who wondered, in effect, what the hell she thought she was doing? Hardly. No, the actual message included this: “I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.” I suspect I wasn’t the only middle-aged American to do a spit take at that one.

The request that Ms. Hill should be asked to apologize nearly 20 years after the fact for damaging the reputation of a Supreme Court nominee who was confirmed anyway, and who went on to be one of the biggest disasters and, by objective standards, most activist, judges ever to serve on the SCOTUS is, well, nigh onto mind-boggling. More to the point, the preponderance of the evidence, then and now, suggests that Justice Thomas was at best a creep and at worst a felon. [In the interest of political fairness, I note that the same description would apply to Bill Clinton.] Ms. Hill, was, after all, the alleged victim. I’d make a more direct analogy to running under a javelin, but the Freudian implications of such a linkage would send my laptop metaphorically screaming into the night.

At best, Ms. Thomas’s ill-conceived scheme highlighted the inanity if not insanity of the Tea Party hierarchy, not to mention serving as a reminder of the true Astroturf quality of the movement: nothing says “just folks” like the spouse of a Supreme Court Justice, after all. Nor did it do anything to dispel the developing conflict-of-interest allegations about Justice Thomas (and his more-evil-because-less-stupid sidekick, Antonin Scalia) participating in Koch-funded strategy sessions.

But Virginia Thomas’s inter-personal and political clumsiness quickly paled in comparison to another, even more accomplished, practitioner of Blame the Victim. After all, it is conceivable that Ms. Thomas might have a point. The fact that such likelihood is roughly equal to Louis Gohmert’s losing his seat in Congress this week (his only opposition is a Libertarian, as the Democrats are characteristically too cowardly to field a candidate against one of the most embarrassing Representatives in history) doesn’t change the fact that there’s a possibility that Ms. Hill’s accusations were spurious. There is no definitive proof; one could make a case that one’s conclusions on the case might tell us more about the observer than about the evidence. Besides, it is not unreasonable that a wife would take her husband’s side in such a dispute, even if the majority of the population didn’t concur. The whole demanding an apology thing may be a bit much, but spousal loyalty in general is not to be disparaged.

No such possibilities admit themselves in the case of Tim Profitt, the Rand Paul-supporting goon who is caught on tape literally stomping on the head of a defenseless MoveOn.org operative named Lauren Valle. It doesn’t matter what went before. It doesn’t matter whether she instigated the confrontation. It doesn’t matter that, if so, MoveOn.org was simply taking a page from the FreedomWorks bag of tricks, employed a few months ago by that particular Astroturf cabal to disrupt town meetings on health care reform. What matters is what we see on the tape: a young woman wrestled to the ground by one man (without context, we can’t tell, but this part could have been a legitimate attempt at crowd control), and then having her face stepped on, quite intentionally, by another man, causing a concussion.

In any sane universe, there is only one response to this latter action: immediate arrest on battery charges and an equally immediate repudiation of such thuggery by the candidate. Imagine my surprise that neither happened. Mr. Paul distanced himself from Profitt, one of his county organizers, without really condemning his actions:

...there was a bit of a crowd control problem. I don't want anybody, though, to be involved in things that aren't civil. I think this should always be about the issues. And it is an unusual situation to have so many people so passionate on both sides jockeying back and forth. And it wasn't something that I liked or anybody liked about that situation. So I hope in the future it is going to be better.

The Paul campaign (as opposed to the candidate himself) released a statement condemning “violence of any kind,” but (of course) softening the blow by addressing “supporters on all sides.” They were also “relieved to hear that the woman in question was not injured.” A concussion and a sprained shoulder = “not injured” to the Paul campaign. At least they're consistent: nothing else that comes out of that campaign comports to reality; why should this?

And the knuckle-dragging drooler who committed the assault? As far as I can tell, he’s still at large, blaming the police and Ms. Valle, and… wait for it… demanding an apology! How dare the physically restrained Ms. Valle allow her head to interpose itself into the path of Mr. Profitt’s foot? Outrageous!

Antiphon would be so proud.