so i've been reading some things.

and why have i chosen to headline this post with a totally badass previously not seen photo from Empire Strikes Back? Yeah, like someone needs a reason to do that.

The Tea Party

So...I know the dialogue on this is pretty uninteresting. But I did read a few pretty interesting articles that, while not addressing the Tea Party per se (a narrative that is kind of played out) deals with the importance of the ascension of the Tea Party:

Sean Wilentz of the New Yorker kicks things off by rehashing the ol' "history repeats itself" with specific reference to the Tea Party and how it owes its roots directly to the John Birch Society and a man named Willard Skousen, whose ideologies revolved around surprising tenets such as equating the Ivy League with the Illuminati (I wish.) The piece also touches on Glenn Beck's carrying forward of Skousen's paranoid interpretations of the politicians of his day. Perhaps more interesting, however, is his description of William Buckley's efforts to recenter the Republican party (pretty sad when you have to look to a McCarthyist to be the GOP flagbearer, but still). Wilentz depicts Ronald Reagan's shrewd ability to consolidate Buckley's pragmatic conservatism into Republican victories, a step forward for the GOP that was ignored during the Gingrich "Contract for America" resurgence in 1994 and positively obliterated by the Tea Party surge in 2010.

Matt Taibbi, to my great joy, takes advantage of the greater leeway he is offered by Rolling Stone. "Let me get this straight," he says to David, a Tea Party tax protestor. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?" Of course, I love that gonzo journalism stuff, but the real good stuff is in Taibbi's detailing of the Tea Party, and its mascot Rand Paul's roots as an unrecognizable perversion of Ron Paul's libertarian rallies in 2008. Ultimately, Taibbi offers us a chilling reminder that the co-opting, subjugation, and assimilation of taxpayer fury into corporate sponsored gridlock is the essence of our modern political system:

The bad news is that the Tea Party's political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day. That's the reality; the rest of this is just noise. It's just that it's a lot of noise, and there's no telling when it's ever going to end.

Finally, Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair talks about the challenge that John Boehner, a somewhat pragmatic dealmaker in his old days who sold his soul to the Tea Party early on, will face. Purdum notes that Boehner may be one of the few remaining hopes for Republican pragmatists sure to be overwhelmed by a sea of incoming partisan fury:

Boehner is, in the end, a most unlikely candidate to lead any kind of revolution. He is a traditionalist, and an institutionalist, and, Lord knows, he is anything but a fresh face. He is the captive of forces more powerful than himself, and he has evidenced a form of Stockholm syndrome, which his captors may or may not find convincing. The pitiful reality of contemporary Washington is that institutional perspective is in such short supply that anyone with even a smidgen of it might pass for having qualities of statesmanship. If John Boehner is a statesman, he’s one who starts from an unenviable position: neither the leader his party may really want nor the kind his country most needs.

Obama and Pals

I think this piece by Tim Dickinson may be the most important, however. In it, he tells us all to get off of our enormously high horse, and realized that our president has made almost unfathomably large pieces of legislative progress in his first 2 years:

But if the passions of Obama's base have been deflated by the compromises he made to secure historic gains like the Recovery Act, health care reform and Wall Street regulation, that gloom cannot obscure the essential point: This president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 20 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. "When you look at what will last in history," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, "Obama has more notches on the presidential belt." In fact, when the history of this administration is written, Obama's opening act is likely to be judged as more impressive than any president's — Democrat or Republican — since the mid-1960s. "If you're looking at the first-two-year legislative record," says Ornstein, "you really don't have any rivals since Lyndon Johnson — and that includes Ronald Reagan."

It is, rather, the talking points war that has been lost by the Obama administration. In some ways, I think of them as these kind of insular policy nerds, who have always just made the best available decision and figured people would come around to realize the value of their pragmatism. Unfortunately, they overlooked the fact that modern consumers don't simply value sensationalism over rationalism; they actually invert the two and elevate people who have either barely, or not even, graduated from college, to the level of pundits.

Malcolm Gladwell describes one such ambitious accomplishment/failed narrative: the auto bailout. He describes the fairly impressive turnound of GM, something that was news to me (I guess I'm victimized by the news cycle as much as anyone else). This is all couched within a story about the power struggle between Steven Rattner, the private equity maven hired to oversee the auto bailout, and Rick Wagoner, the villainized former CEO of GM who flew his chartered jet to Washington to ask for taxpayer money, yet is more responsible for GM's turnaround than Rattner.

Honestly, the piece on Sean Parker was pretty lame, so I'll end by saying that you absolutely have to check out 'Abstract City,' Cristoph Niemann's blog on the New York Times. Some of his stuff, including his visual chronicle of a trip overseas and his Lego interpretation of New York, are transcendent.

Back to science next time!