Barreling Down the Wrong Trail

    I wonder how historians a few decades from now will view this crazy period we are living in. My guess is that they will regard it as one of those fits of temporary insanity that our country goes through every now and then, sort of collective post -traumatic stress syndrome.
    Although we tend to regard our own era as unique, it is not; our country has lived through many tumultuous periods when the old order was changing and the future was uncertain.
    The post World War I and World War II Red scares, the Great Depression, even the candidacy and election of a Roman Catholic as president, all caused alarms of one degree or another. And that’s just a short list.
    These times shared some common elements: There were those who preached that the sky was falling, those who believed them and panicked, those who saw advantage in the alarm and profited, and those who stood bemused on the sidelines.
    Each time there were prophets who preached that this time was different. The sky really was falling.
    What was different was the prophets themselves.
    The sky was not falling then; it is not falling now.
    The current prophets of doom are Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the Walter Winchell and Father Coughlin of their day. Like Winchell and Coughlin, they will one day be just footnotes in the history book.
    It’s easy to regard the protesters spurred on by people like Beck and Limbaugh (and encouraged by Republicans who seem bent on emulating the Federalist Party of Jefferson’s time) as crazies and racists.
    The so-called 9/12 protests in Washington, D.C., would give some support to that notion. There’s no need to recount all the wild claims and hatefully racist themes of some of the signs some protesters carried.
    And yet, not all of those protesters – perhaps not even a majority of them – are crazies. In fact, they have a lot in common with those who have not taken to the streets. They are angry about the present and uncertain about the future. They know that they have lost ground and don’t see how they are going to make it up. They have seen that there is one set of rules for the powerful people and institutions and another for them.
    They are looking for someone to blame, a scapegoat. That’s happened many times before, too.
    And there are always those to spur the mob on, this time in the personages of Limbaugh and Beck, among others. (Hearing those two try to turn President Obama into a Nazi is more than ludicrous. They have more in common with Hitler themselves. Like him, their ravings become increasingly bizarre as time passes.)
    Of course they are abetted in whipping up anxiety and hate by Republicans, who know that if they can divert attention from everything they did to get the country into this mess, the better chance they have of returning to power.
    These Republicans appear willing to do whatever it takes to win. They are, after all, the inheritors of Lee Atwater’s legacy.
    The Republicans know that there is no evidence to dispute President Obama’s American citizenship. Even the Republican governor of President Obama’s home state of Hawaii has attested that his birth certificate is in order. But they refuse to dismiss that phony issue and encourage the crazies to keep beating the drum.
    They know that none of the health care reform legislation would create “death panels” to pull the plug on grandma, but they have stoked that fear.
    They know that the president’s so-called czars aren’t evil cadres appointed to subvert the constitution. But they hyperventilate trying to scare the socks off the citizenry.
    Consider Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., pandering before the Values Voters Conference. “I’d be just about as happy,” he said, “if more of them (members of Congress) read this a little more,” he said, holding up a copy of the constitution.
    “Nowhere in here can I find the word czar,” he went on. “Washington, D.C., must become a no czar zone.”
    Red meat for the right, certainly, but Rep. Pence either is thick as a brick or he knew he was dissembling.
    As David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, who served in the Justice Department under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, pointed out in a column in The Washington Post, “The White House czars are presidential assistants charged with responsibility for given policy areas. As such, they are among the president's closest advisers. In many respects, they are equivalent to the personal staff of a member of Congress. To subject the qualifications of such assistants to congressional scrutiny – the regular confirmation process – would trench upon the president's inherent right, as the head of an independent and equal branch of the federal government, to seek advice and counsel where he sees fit.”
    They also noted: “Some of the positions many are now criticizing have existed for years. As The Post reported this week: ‘By one count, Bush had 36 czar positions filled by 46 people during his eight years as president.’ “
    Perhaps Rep. Pence and his shocked colleagues (as shocked as Capt. Renault was to discover gambling was going on in Rick’s café in the movie Casablanca) should spend a little more time reading the constitution themselves, especially the separation of power section.
    It’s not just liberals or middle-of-the-roaders who think that the conservative anger at President Obama is misplaced.
    Consider Bruce Bartlett. He is one of the original supply-siders who helped draft the Kemp-Roth tax bill in the 1970s. He was a leading Republican economist in the 1980s and 1990s.
    In a column last month in The Daily Beast, a news and opinion reporting and aggregating web site, he wrote:
    “To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.”
    “Conservatives delude themselves that the Bush tax cuts worked and that the best medicine for America’s economic woes is more tax cuts; at a minimum, any tax increase would be economic poison. They forget that Ronald Reagan worked hard to pass one of the largest tax increases in American history in September 1982, the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, even though the nation was still in a recession that didn’t end until November of that year. Indeed, one could easily argue that the enactment of that legislation was a critical prerequisite to recovery because it led to a decline in interest rates. The same could be said of Clinton’s 1993 tax increase, which many conservatives predicted would cause a recession but led to one of the biggest economic booms in history.
    “Until conservatives once again hold Republicans to the same standard they hold Democrats, they will have no credibility and deserve no respect. They can start building some by admitting to themselves that Bush caused many of the problems they are protesting.”
    Bartlett has a number of other insights. You can read his complete essay
here.
    Watching the protesters in full cry after President Obama, I am reminded of my youth in North Louisiana.
    On many a warm summer night, we would put the coon hounds in the back of the truck and drive out in the country to find a corn field. We would listen as the dogs struck a scent and then went baying after their quarry.
    You could tell whether they were trailing and when they had treed.
    Armadillos were establishing themselves in the area by the mid 1950s, and far too often you could tell that the hounds were chasing an armadillo instead of a raccoon. When they were chasing the wrong animal, you might as well call them in and go home.
    Nobody is going to call the protesters in, but maybe they will figured out they’re on the wrong trail.

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Conservatives -- Or Just Suckers?

    If you have any doubt that state government in Alabama is operated for the benefit of the elected and the connected, look no further that the case of Rep. Sue Schmitz.
    Schmitz, D-Toney, is accused by the feds of accepting a salary from Central Alabama Community College without doing the work to earn it.
    Actually, it’s a second trial for Schmitz. Jurors in her first trial deadlocked. Perhaps they couldn’t decide whether taking a government check without doing much work is really a crime.
    They might have reason to wonder. Prosecuting people for that kind of thing doesn’t seem to be at the top of state law enforcement’s priority list. It’s those picky old feds that insist on trying to change the way we do things in Alabama. In the Schmitz case, federal money was paying her salary, she’s charged with four counts of fraud and four counts of mail fraud.
    (Students of history might recall that it wasn’t state law enforcement that toppled the corrupt Huey Long machine in Louisiana. It was the feds there, too. And it was mail fraud charges that began unraveling the regime).
    Regardless of whether Schmitz actually showed up for work, it is how she got her job that offers an insight into how things work.
    Did she send in her resume? Submit to interviews? Take a competitive exam?
    Not if you believe the testimony of some people who have incentives to tell the truth; she just had powerful friends.
    Consider Seth Hammett’s testimony.
    Hammett, who wields considerable influence as House speaker, said Alabama Education Association executive secretary Paul Hubbert, who is generally regarded as the state’s most influential lobbyist, told him that Schmitz would be coming to see him with a request and that he’d take it as a favor if Hammett honored it.
    Hammett said that at Schmitz’s request he asked the head of the committee over the education budget to include money for the job for her.
    In response to a question from Schmitz’s attorney, Hammett said he had changed his testimony about whether he had asked for money to be added to the budget “upon reflection.” He didn’t say what encouraged that reflection.
    Former two-year college system chancellor Roy Johnson, who is helping the feds while awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to 15 felony counts (cooperating could net him less prison time), testified that both Hubbert and Hammett had asked him to find a job for Schmitz.
    Perhaps I’m being cynical, but I wonder whether we would have heard about any of this if the Community Intensive Training for Youth program where Schmitz was employed were not run with federal money.
    Although Schmitz doesn’t appear to have been a stickler about the procedures by which she got her job, she seems much more concerned about seeing that the rules on firing employees are followed to the letter. Schmitz, who was fired in October 2007, contested the firing on the grounds that the Fair Dismissal Act had not been followed.
    An administrative law judge agreed, ruling that she could not be terminated at will. This week, a Montgomery County circuit judge upheld that ruling and ordered the college to reinstate her with back pay and benefits.
    The college and the CITY program are appealing the order to grant Schmitz back pay.
    Alabamians pride themselves on their conservatism. They hate paying taxes and are proud of it. Even if the two-year college scandal were the only looting of the public purse, there would be reason to think that too much of the taxpayers’ money goes to waste.
    Unfortunately, it’s not the first scandal
It likely won’t be the last, because we Alabamians aren’t really conservatives.
    We’re suckers.
    Year after year we watch the elected take care of themselves and the connected. And then we elect them again, because they assure us they have “conservative Alabama values.”
    Some conservatives. Some values.

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