I’m frequently surprised by this ahistoricality, or this lack of sense of political history, even from sources that seem  like they should have it who nonetheless betray themselves in a need to make a political pot shot.  This shot from 1948, to the prominent crooks and liars blog, fails where the blog generally shows they don’t have to fail.

The obvious difference between the Republican Party of 1948 and the Republican Party of 2009 is the absence of the lunatic fringe then, which today appears to be driving away all those sane and moderate voices that would otherwise aid in the healing process and perhaps steer the party in a constructive direction.

Like Newt Gingrich singing the praises of George McGovern in order to suggest that unlike Barack Obama, he was decent and pro-American.  The one that keeps getting me?   Turn on Thom Hartmann and you’ll invariably come to the line, as per the repetitive nature of talk radio, about Republicans needing to force the party back to Dwight D Eisenhower’s Republican Party.  This woud be all good and wll, except that in crucial ways, the party was never Dwight D Eisenhower’s.  “I’m not going to discuss personalities” was Eisenhower’s line whenever a figure of the media propped up a question about Joseph McCarthy — who was, in 1952, probably the most popular figure within the Republican Party.  Take a good look at the party platform for that year. 

Maybe we were all insane in 1950, hanging onto the seat of our pants forcing a bleached white culture against the backgrop of Nuclear Annihlation, trying to assemble where the hell the Societ Union found the wherewithall to drop an H-Bomb, and who allowed Stalin to take control of half of Europe.  I’m jumping around and swarthing together a few years into the future with the 1948 Dewey date there, but we can’t describe an “absence of the lunatic fringe” when arguably the Republican Party was all but made up of such things — busily equating Roosevelt and Truman’s New and Fair Deals with Soviet Communism, and having to swallow Thomas Dewey in the manner they had to swallow the candidacy of Willkie.  Joseph McCarthy himself backed the presidential boomlet of Douglas MacCarthur, wearily fired by Truman in a “Profiles in Courage” moment.  The “We elected the wrong General” thought would remain extent for the next half century, and still today I can find you someone saying that.

This article in the American Prospect does a better job of tying post New Deal right-wing ideology and tying to to today’s, though I view it as a bit too straightened into a neat little box.  

Today, we have the “tea-parties”.  A good poll of where that audience stands would show them as pointed to the politicians of Sarah Palin and Ron Paul — two different politicians described here and abouts as “Jacksonian” and “Jeffersonian”, to which you can roll your eyes and mutter “Yeah, whatever.”  There are other politicians like that worth a glancing look — Texas Governor Rick Perry, who I suppose might be “Calhournian”?   Throw in Glenn Beck, and I have no idea how to go about Vinn Diagramming their supporters.  Ron Paul’s crowd is taking to heckling Lindsey Graham and pushing primary challengers in Connecticut and Kentucky — it’s a discordant splinter of the Republican Party.  Sarah Palin, meanwhile, has just endorsed the third party candidacy of Doug Hoffman.  Palin threatened to do this when she formed “SarahPac”, and I’m guessing she may be in the market for a Southern Democratic state legislative candidate to throw her support for to argure a weird sort of “cross-partisanship”.  But this strikes me as sort of interesting, because it suggests vague  rumblings for political party breakdown, what with a Republican Party garnering 20 percent of the electorate, a Democratic Congress with low low approval ratings themselves, and a Democratic President playing a bit too much footsy with marginal Republican Senators.

To which I have the question — how many Sarah Palins and Ron Pauls would it take for a Congressional breakdown like that following the 1854 Congressional Elections?

The 1854 election was the beginning of the end for both the Democratic and Whig Parties. Party lines were very blurred and a minority government was formed. Democrats lost a huge number of seats in the North due to the impending slavery crisis, but remained the largest party in the House. The American Party (commonly known as the “Know-Nothings”), a faction based on the fears of immigration and Catholicism which had won several seats in previous elections, became the second largest group. The large influx of immigrants from Catholic Ireland, escaping the potato famine, and from Catholic Southern Germany, departing due to political and economic instability, shocked many American Protestants and allowed the American Party to grow. The Whigs, divided over the issue of slavery, lost several seats and began to disintegrate. Meanwhile, the newly-formed Republican Party, which was anti-slavery and pro-industry, quickly became a force in the North. In the end, the Democrats and a large number of American Party representatives allied to become the largest faction, although they still did not hold a majority.

That took the two dominant parties not getting anything done, and becoming politically thought of as merely doling out patronage to themselves, ignoring the vital issues of the day and hemming and hawing about the future of Slavery.  The best we can do in the past several decades (post 1968 and the Wallacites) to disrupt two-partyand baffled the currents of 2 political party harmony is to insert Ross Perot into a presidential election.

An old story from the Summer, and there’s nothing particularly new here.  But something about this has brought increased news-worthy relevance.

Diners at a restaurant in Prosser were startled Monday when a furry marmot wandered through the front door and settled into a corner.
That was no surprise to city Administrator Charlie Bush, who says the big rodents have long been a problem in the central Washington wine town.

And so the residents of Prosser, Washington continue their marmot problems.  It’s a long time problem, and here I go back to that news story which, for some reason or other, “went viral” a few years ago about the Marmots attacking an area manufactured home community — er trailer park — which was the biggest news story to hit South Central Washington since the area started giving the nation’s canivores spongiform encephalopathy.

In 2006 and 2007, (following the Mobile Park Attacks) the city paid $5,700 over two years to hire trappers to thin the population. But last year, the City Council ran short of money and decided to get out of the marmot-control business.

Budgetary resources are stretched thin enough that the Marmots will continue to have the lay of the land.  Theoretically, money might be tapped from the Stimulus Funds for the purpose of marmot removal, but apparently there are greater priorities for critter troubles a ways upstream.

In late September, a helicopter hovered 50 feet above the Hanford nuclear reservation, methodically hunting almost 16 square miles for radioactive poop that critters with a taste for salt spread.

Going about 80 mph, the helicopter used detection equipment attached to its sides to map out each piece with GPS coordinates.

Between the helicopter survey and the GPS coordinates, the radioactive scat can be found and removed in days rather than the months that would have been needed for people search for the poop on the ground, said Dee Millikin, spokeswoman for CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. That company is responsible for much of the environmental cleanup of central Hanford. […]

Nevada-based National Security Technologies did the helicopter survey for $300,000 in federal stimulus money sent to Hanford.

A bit more is found here.   One important distinction: the process described here was the surveying in the process for the actual clean-up.   All in all, a news story which would appear at the end of the local news broadcasts and not the beginning, where the Giant Marmot attacks would tend to go.  Though, for attitudes, I have to wonder about this:

Posted by Bob_Allen at 10/8/09 8:12 a.m.
The “environmental” whacks never tire of spending another ton of our tax money on useless crapola.

Why must we waste our money on such frivulous things as clearing out nuclear rabbit poop?  What will those environmental whackos think of next?

An interesting thing going on in today’s comic strip section of the newspaper.

Yes.  Why don’t you be like this elderly couple and contemplate “volunteer”ing.

The Luann storyline makes it explicit.  The Barack Obama Administration has put the comic strip industry at work to promote this “Thousand Point of Light” concept of “Volunteer”ing.  It’s like a new WPA from out of the old Roosevelt administration, wrapped up in George Herbert Walker Bush’s plead toward Service.

Ah, but The Wizard of Id goes off script in exposing Obama’s “Volunteer” Fraud for what it is.

Next week, be sure to tune to the comic strip page and read about how much you need to get vaccinated.  Will The Wizard of Id be the lone voice of dissent again?

Richard “The Dick” Cheney won the “Keeper of the Flame Award” at a conflab of officials from the previous administration.  Apparently, Cheney is currently huddled over a dying fire, blowing at it fervously in a desperate bid of keeping it from being extinguished.   The Dickster then lobbed attacks of the weakness of Barack Obama — the New Carter.

That’s where the previous installment of what represented the Republican Party is heading — largely restricted to foreign policy, as I don’t imagine Cheney cares all that much about domestic policy affairs.  Neither did Richard “The Dick” Nixon, come to think of it.  The current installment of the Republican Party, meanwhile…

We just saw a Republican Senator from Tennessee raise his q-rating by accusing Obama of having an “Enemy’s List” and employing the tactics of Richard Nixon, for Obama’s run of the mill politicking against political opposition.  Overall, this is simply a matter of the Perpetual Silly Season — it is hard to take such a thing seriously.  Obama, Senator Lamar! Alexander points out, is out to marginalize the National Chamber of Commerce.  That is the way these things work, of course — in much the same way Dick Cheney “marginalized” President Barack Obama.

For what it is worth, the first time I noticed the claim that Obama was compiling an “Enemy’s List” was a story from the Alex Jones website (one of them) reporting on a British tabloid story claiming that former President Bill, Clinton had met with Obama, shown him the way things work in these Big Leagues, and thus Obama started drawing up his list to run down one by one.  From Alex Jones’s point of view, the proof that this was true was the inclusion of Alex Jones on that list, which is interesting because I would take that as proof of the inaccuracy of such a list.  Funny enough, American tabloids have been plastering Obama next to Glenn Beck, which I take to be a demographic alignment between the audience of Tier 2 tabloids and the audience of Fox News.

There is one thing about Lamar! Alexander’s voice speaking up that I can’t help but remark about.  It seems that every time we hear about a Republican politicians in the Senate making noise in a new partisan line of attack (meaning the two Senators of Maine are excluded), you look up at the tv screen or down at the computer screen or newspaper, and see the geography of where he sits.  “Republican Southern Senator” is a redundant phrase, except for Chuck Grassley of Iowa.

I think 2010 will see Republicans satuate the South even more, jabbing out a few “Conservative Democratic” Members of Congress in marginal seats moreso than up North which would then be more likely to recede in 2012, spurring the further regional imbalance of the political party.   It’s also instructive to look at the Senate Class of 2004, which saw several Democratic Southerners retiring and being replaced by new Republicans, and a couple of Republicans replacing retiring Republicans, and see that they’re mostly pretty safe.

The question becomes: Name the next Republican US Senator to play this type of partisan game, and name the state he  (more likely than “she”) comes from.

One note about Lamar! Alexander and my placement of an exclamation mark after his first name: this was a campaign sign he waved about in his political campaigns: 2002 Senate bid, 2000 presidential bid, probably his 1996 bid.  Political bids are a sort of cult of personality, and the politicians get wrapped up in declaring their name in such manners as putting exclamation marks after their first name.  See also Jeb! Bush.

In the wake of a ninja running around with nunchunks out to get Joseph Lieberman…

Giant Ball things chased after Arlen Specter.  While Lieberman didn’t think much of the ninja, Specter thought the ball things were “fun.  interesting.  Sporting.”

I hazard to guess theydidn’t much affect Arlen Specter beyond that.  I suppose we could all tap into this type of Political Activism, chase about politicians in various bubble things, put it onto youtube, and it’d all dissolve from any issue or cause advanced into a giant mess of dadaism.

Arlen Specter is maybe the most vulnerable Democratic Senator coming up in 2010.  But it’s not the most vulnerable Democratic Senate seat.  Arlen Specter numbers are all screwy and softening in the primary match-up with Joe Sestak, and faltering against the Republican nominee Pat Toomey — the theory that would hold him as more electable is faltering.

So it is that Joseph Biden came out to pitch Arlen Specter to the Democratic crowds in Pennsylvania.  Joseph Biden was supposedly instrumental in convincing Specter to switch parties in the first place, the subject of long-winded Amtrak ride conversations, with Specter amenable to political reality of falling in the Republican primary — Biden talking and talking and talking apparently pushed Specter over the edge.

To hear Joseph Biden tell it, Specter voted with the Maine Republican Senators (I don’t recall — was it both Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe or was it just Olympia Snowe?), after teaming up with Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson for this task, and — with the magic of trimming out some hundreds of billions of dollars and upping some tax cuts — crafted through that bill that saved us from entering a gloomy Great Depression.

Interesting enough, I heard the same in an interview with Specter earlier.  And also interesting enough, he was far more chilly and sanguine at the time of passing the bill than he is now.  But that is pretty predictable — one rejoinder of having to move from away from his past . 

Always notice that Barack Obama speaks about creating or saving x number of jobs.   Indeed, most economists agree, even though it ends up being a bit unprovable of jobs lost versus jobs otherwise lost.  The affect, with the economists theoretically most favorable to Obama thinking that Stimulus Bill was watered down, has October 9’s Congressional Insiders Poll by the National Journal with Democrats counting Yes 44 percent No 51 percent Depends (volunteered) 5 percent, and Republicans counting Yes 7 percent No 89 percent Depends (volunteered) 5 percent.  Interesting responses, if you want to look to the National Journal.

The “jobs otherwise lost” doesn’t really sit all that well.  What we have is an argument that we avoided the Worst Economy since the Great Depression and steered us to the safe ground of the Worst Economy since the early 1980s.  Is that a message that works well for you?

Similarly, the Budget Deficit is some 400 billion dollars less than was forecasted.  Which is great, I guess?  That still leaves a whopper of a deficit, and one heck of a number to throw around on a campaign trail.

So, there’s that “Eat your Vegetables” item about these unpleasantries.  Doesn’t always go down well, as the elder knows with brocolli.  (Unrelated, but kind of amusing nonetheless.)

In a year, Biden and Rendall will probably have to be campaigning for Joe Sestack.  What started as a whisper, with only a Ned Lamont or two, backing will give way to Arlen Specter losing a primary race he would have lost anyway in the other party.  Then he’ll move on to his stint as Lobbyist (unless he retires completely) at K Street — where the giant balls should be continuing to bounce after him — it is as much a part of the perma-government as the Senate and the Specters of the world, after all.