The Commentariat -- December 26

There's nobody out there, except for Sarah Palin, who can absolutely dominate the stage, and she can't stand on the intellectual stage with Obama. -- Juan Williams, on the Republican presidential field

Trading Places. Nicole Winfield of the AP: "Lasagna, veal and cake were on the menu Sunday as Pope Benedict XVI invited about 250 poor people to join him for a post-Christmas lunch and denounced as "absurd" new attacks on the faithful around the globe.... Last year, Benedict traveled to a Rome soup kitchen to join the poor for lunch after Christmas. This year he wanted to invite them to his home...." ...

... CW: I'm highlighting this report only because it reminded me of the Saturnalia, a popular Roman winter festival that helped early Roman Christians decide the winter solstice was a convenient time to place Jesus' birth. During the Saturnalia, masters & slaves switched roles, & masters waited on slaves at meals. Nice to see the pope adopting aspects of pre-Christian rituals.

History Lesson. Judy Dempsey of the New York Times: "In 2005, protests against ... whitewashed obituaries caused the German foreign minister and Green Party leader, Joschka Fischer, to commission a study of the [German Foreign] Ministry’s past. The result, a thick tome called 'Das Amt und die Vergangenheit,' or 'The Ministry and the Past,' was published this autumn. It became a best seller, shocking a public used to looking up at its diplomats as gentlemen who would never dirty their hands."

Future-Watch. Suzanne Gamboa of the AP: "The end of the year means a turnover of House control from Democratic to Republican and, with it, Congress' approach to immigration. In a matter of weeks, Congress will go from trying to help young, illegal immigrants become legal to debating whether children born to parents who are in the country illegally should continue to enjoy automatic U.S. citizenship."

Robert Pear of the New York Times: "When a proposal to encourage end-of-life planning touched off a political storm over 'death panels,' Democrats dropped it from legislation to overhaul the health care system. But the Obama administration will achieve the same goal by regulation, starting Jan. 1. Under the new policy, outlined in a Medicare regulation, the government will pay doctors who advise patients on options for end-of-life care, which may include advance directives to forgo aggressive life-sustaining treatment."

Carol Leonnig & T. W. Farnam of the Washington Post: "Numerous times this year, members of Congress have held fundraisers and collected big checks while they are taking critical steps to write new laws, despite warnings that such actions could create ethics problems. The campaign donations often came from contributors with major stakes riding on the lawmakers' actions." The reporters cite Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.) & Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and some House members from both parties.

Ginger Thompson & Scott Shane of the New York Times: "The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables. In far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks..., offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments." ...

... New York Times Editors: the Federal Reserve allows banks to choose what entities with whom they'll do business. Major U.S. banks are refusing to process transactions intended for WikiLeaks, even though the group has not even been accused of a crime. The editors write that the Fed should not permit banks to unilaterally make such decisions.

David Barstow (who is not the David Barstow in the film below), et al., of the New York Times: the BP Gulf oil disaster "was a disaster with two distinct parts — first a blowout, then the destruction of the [Deepwater] Horizon. The second part, which killed 11 people and injured dozens, has escaped intense scrutiny, as if it were an inevitable casualty of the blowout. It was not.... The Deepwater Horizon should have weathered this blowout.... Crew members died and suffered terrible injuries because every one of the Horizon’s defenses failed on April 20." Related video & graphics.

Derek Kravitz of the Washington Post on the TSA's body scanners: "... many security experts say the machines are expensive window dressing meant to put the traveling public at ease.

Kate Pickert of Time on how the healthcare law, which the Senate passed last Christmas Eve, sunk the Democrats.

The Government We Deserve

Frank Rich, in noting the passing of amateur filmmaker Robbins Barstow, writes a Requiem for the American Dream. Barstow's New York Times obituary is here. And here is Barstow's home movie, "Disneyland Dream":

The Constant Weader Comments:

Thank you, Frank, for once again laying out the big picture and putting our newfound smallness in historical perspective. The fact is that we Americans are busy making ourselves small. Who killed the Disneyland dream? We did.

The main problem is that we have become a small-minded, selfish people. Instead of pulling together for progress, we have all becomes members of narrow special interest groups: greedy geezers, anti-choice, pro-choice, immigration reformers, border defenders, gay rights advocates, defenders of "traditional" marriage, militarists, corporatists, unions, anti-unionists, corn farmers, environmentalists, mountain-top strippers, loggers, home-schoolers, religious fundamentalists, non-theists, "real" Americans, intelligentsia. We are now defined by niche greed.

None of us wants to pay for anybody else's niche. Too bad if you're poor. Sorry you're sick. Out of work? Losing your job? Want better schools? Well, those aren't MY problems.

The tax-reduction mantra, and the tax-cut law the President so proudly rammed through Congress, are symptomatic of a great American pathology. Any half-sensible person can see that tax cuts are a sure path to the defeat of the American dream. In the halcyon days of the 1950s, when the Barstow family believed (with good reason) that anything was possible, federal tax rates were nearly twice what they are now, although they were decidedly more progressive; that is, the rich paid a larger share. And the rich were not as rich. Income inequality was exponentially smaller than it is today. The Barstows' dreams were not delusional; they were possible. Not any more.

In the last election, we voted out the only hope for a better American future. Admittedly, it was mostly hope, and not a lot of change. The cartoonist Darrin Bell perhaps put it best: "We're angry nothing's changed so we vote for those who've spent two years blocking change. Is America the only country that votes sarcastically?" Bell asks.

CLICK CARTOON TO SEE LARGER IMAGE.We have a President and Congress who revel in & depend upon the status quo. I don't care what they say they believe in; I've been watching what they do. Not much. We have a large percentage of the populace who likes it that way, too. Every social or public program that doesn't directly benefit ME is "socialism." Like the politicians, the American people say they want change, but the change many want is to return, not to the hopeful 1950s, but to the oppressive 1780s. These voters are not merely catatonic; they are regressive.

Because of the intense interest over the past two years in a Congress that was proposing grand things but doing almost nothing to change the status quo, Americans saw Washington -- and the Max Baucus/Mitch McConnell Senate in particular -- for what it is: a body that is broken, a legislative body that purposely does not legislate.

Now we are about to watch a new Congress that will be even more dysfunctional. However the Senate tinkers with the filibuster rules, it still won't do much. Besides, with a small Democratic majority in the upper chamber and a solid Republican majority in the House, it would be foolhearty to expect any progress. At all.

We are doomed by the choices we have made. Congress is abominable. The President is either a fool or a charlatan. But we narrow-minded, greedy, shortsighted citizens got the government most of us deserve.

The Commentariat -- December 25

Virginia O'Hanlon, 1890s. New York Times photo.Manny Fernandez of the New York Times: the descendants of Virginia O'Hanlon, who wrote to the New York Sun in 1897, asking if there was a Santa Claus, "have quietly become ambassadors of the Christmas spirit, crossing the country to appear at events honoring her, and reading the letter and the response to children in schools and to their own children at home." Here's O'Hanlon's letter, and the famous response, printed in the Sun, and later attributed to newsman Francis P. Church.

One of the New Yorker's most popular articles of the year was "What Did Jesus Do?" by Adam Gopnik. I linked to this story earlier, & my recollection is that Gopnik gets it mostly right in this review of recent literature. If you want the title question answered, however, you will be disappointed.

Perry Bacon of the Washington Post: "... while the president will be working while he is on vacation, it's not a 'working vacation.' Administration aides emphasized that the president wanted real down time after an intense two-month period after Election Day, and Obama started his 11-day trip with several hours of golf Thursday. He spent much of Friday afternoon at the beach with his daughters, Sasha and Malia."

Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times: "Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, who befriended President Obama’s parents when they were university students here, has been in office for less than three weeks. But he is so incensed over 'birthers' — the conspiracy theorists who assert that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and was thus not eligible to become president — that he is seeking ways to change state policy to allow him to release additional proof that the president was born in Honolulu in 1961."

A Realistic Christmas Story. Alison Leigh Cowan of the New York Times: "... for patients in state-run mental hospitals [in New York] — people too ill to live on their own and too poor to pay for their care — the state can drain court-awarded damages, effectively deducting the cost of their stays in the very hospitals that failed or abused them."