In these uncertain times, you can always count on congressional Republicans to be consistently devious. Last night’s–or more accurately, this morning’s–votes in the House were a case in point. First, the House GOP leaders rammed through a rules change, known as “martial law,” which basically suspended all the normal rules, including the requirement that Members have 24 hours to read major legislation before voting on it. That paved the way for snap votes on secretly assembled defense appropriations and budget reconciliation bills, in the dawn’s early light. The “defense” bill included Alaska wilderness oil drilling, cleverly linked to a big batch of money for Katrina recovery, not to mention funds for the military itself. And the budget bill, hammered out in closed House-Senate conference committee discussions with zero Democratic input, incorporated most of the House’s obnoxious safety-net cuts, including higher copayments for Medicaid beneficiaries, higher interest rates for people obtaining student loans, and most obnoxious of all, a self-defeating major cut in funds used to collect delinquent child support payments. All this was in a 700-plus-page bill that nobody got to read before it was enacted on a 212-206 vote (every single Democrat voted “no,” joined by a mere 9 Republicans). Adding to the deviousness of this grim night’s work, congressional Republicans had earlier decided to strip out new tax cuts from the budget package, not because they don’t intend to push forward with them in January, but because they want to distract attention from the fact that their brave spending cuts simply pay for a fraction of the revenues they will sacrifice in their mindless and regressive tax cut campaign. The GOPers are also cynically calculating that they can get new dividend and capital gains cuts without the filibuster protection of a reconciliation bill, by linking them to the alternative minimum tax relief that Democrats and Republicans want. (It’s also important to recognize that January 1 will bring two new tax cuts almost exclusively targeted to higher earners, that were enacted back in 2001 but deferred as part of the originally devious Republican strategy of hiding the costs of their fiscal malfeasance). It’s a pretty amazing shell-game, when you think about it, and the ability of Democrats to expose it will be a critical test of whether we can truly hold this dreadful gang accountable next November.

In an earlier post, I made my own dyspeptic attitude towards the alleged “war on Christmas” pretty clear, from a Christian point of view. But now this phony war is escalating into the halls of Congress and the strip-malls of America, with no end in sight other than Christmas Day itself.In one of its periodic exercises in pointless but divisive symbolism, the U.S. House of Representatives has duly passed a resolution defending Christmas from its shadowy detractors, sponsored by a Christian Right pol from my own state of Virginia. Opponents of the measure appropriately raised the rather stark contradiction between this bold stand for Christmas, and the budgetary measures recently passed by the House that defy pretty much everything we understand as the “spirit of Christmas.”But it gets worse: guerrilla bands of protesters in California are now harrassing shoppers at that archetypal red-state institution, Wal-Mart, thanks to the mega-chain’s decision to use “Happy Holidays” as its merchandizing slogan for the season. Cultural Warriors of the Right have already sought to organize boycotts of Sears, Wal-Mart and Target on the same grounds. The Sacramento protests represent a lurch into Direct Action.The AP story on this incident tells you a lot:

About 50 protesters took part in Saturday’s demonstration, organized by religious leaders. Dick Otterstad of the Church of the Divide donned a Santa Claus costume and greeted shoppers with the message: Don’t forget about the meaning of Christmas.”It is insulting that Wal-Mart has chosen to ignore the reason for the season,” Otterstad said. “Taking the word ‘Christmas’ out of the holiday implies there’s something sinful about it. … This is a part of our culture.”

But the protests aren’t much working, either:

[E]ven shoppers who agreed with the protesters weren’t willing to interrupt their quest for holiday deals.”I believe in Christ, and I don’t like the use of ‘xmas’ or the use of ‘happy holidays,”‘ said Steven Van Noy, 39, as he left the store loaded down with packages. “The bottom line is that they had what I needed at Wal-Mart, so I went to Wal-Mart to buy it.”

Now you do have to admire the truth-in-advertising honesty of a protest organizer who represents the “Church of the Divide.” But the shopper who shares the protest’s perspective yet ignores to join it is more representative of even conservative evangelical sentiment. I found it especially interesting that he objects to the use of “Xmas”–an objection I’ve been hearing literally for forty years, dating back to those simpler days when hardly anyone thought godless secular hordes controlled our culture.In fact, the substitution of “X” for Christ is an ancient Christian usage, reflecting the widespread adoption of the Greek letter “Chi” as a symbol for Christ (the “Chi-Rho,” which looks like “XP,” remains an abiding presence in priestly vestments and Christian art.)That significant numbers of conservative Christians don’t understand this simple fact reflects poorly on their leadership, and illustrates the contrived nature of the whole “war on Christmas” demonology.Christians should have better things to worry about during the Feast of the Nativity, also known as Xmas.

Being basically non-vindictive in nature, I didn’t spend much time wallowing in the agony of Republicans in Virginia and elsewhere over the outcome of the Kaine-Kilgore gubernatorial race. The good-government side of me hoped that GOPers nationally would learn the lesson that reflexive right-wing positions like opposing any and all taxes, demonizing immigrants, and demagoguing the death penalty, just don’t work any more.But it looks like Virginia Republicans are determined to ignore the evidence. As the Washington Post has reported in a news item and an editorial, the Commonwealth’s GOP leadership is putting out the word that ol’ Jerry lost because he wasn’t conservative enough. This is, to put it mildly, an odd assessment. Ol’ Jerry was an obdurate member of the anti-tax faction of the state party, a boon companion to the Christian Right, a big-time gun lover, and a guy who played every conservative card in his campaign. I can’t even imagine what GOPers think he should have done, other than maybe changing his name to Attila and refusing to pay his own taxes.The partisan side of me reacts to this strange development by saying to Republicans: Amen, and keep it up. If Jerry Kilgore is not sufficiently conservative for you, then you are living in a strange land and need to get back in touch with Virginia and America.

Today’s stunning Senate repudiation of the Bush administration’s demands for a permanent enactment of expiring provisions of the Patriot Act is a good example of what happens when you overreach with dirty hands. A shorter-term extension of the Patriot Act–even its most controversial provisions–would have probably won easily. But no, the administration had to go for a permanent law, fundamentally affecting U.S. civil liberties to deal with a war on terrorism that is no doubt a long-term threat, but not, we pray, a permanent feature of life. And it didn’t much help the Bushies’ case that the key vote in the Senate coincided with a New York Times report that they’ve been deliberately violating congressional procedures governing surveillance of U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency, on the direct orders of George W. Bush. You know, when you don’t much ever tell the truth, there will be moments of truth when your demands for more and more power over the lives of real people, justified by the presumption that you should be implicitly trusted, just don’t work any more. That’s basically what happened in the Senate today. And it was not simply a setback for Bush and his minions, but also a reflection of a climate in Washington, largely engineered by the White House, in which it’s tough to rationally discuss the proper balance between security and the civil liberties security defends.

Tonight I happened to stumble on a MyDD post by Matt Stoller that tries to grapple with a Zogby poll indicating that a majority of Republican and Democratic voters, and virtually all Independents, support politicians willing to compromise their principles to get things done.Matt writes an eloquent and agonized essay on these findings, but somehow winds up deciding that progressives should ignore them, and in fact, gird up their loins to change the minds of such voters by demonstrating that principles are more important than getting things done.My first impulse after reading this post was to cite Bertolt Brecht’s famous sardonic suggestion to the East German government in a time of turmoil that it “dissolve the people, and elect another.” But that’s probably not fair. Matt’s trying to figure out why Democratic voters in particular, despite all the polarization of the last few years, still support the idea of compromise with the hated partisan enemy.I think this is a matter of placing the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble. Matt’s worried about the willingness of voters to “compromise principles,” and should be focusing on their desire to “get things done,” which in the end, is what politics is all about.”Getting things done” is a yardstick for contemporary politics that’s just as damning to George W. Bush and the Republican Party as all the partisan rhetoric you could hope for about their evil motives–rhetoric I engage in myself all the time.It’s actually very good news that a majority of voters in every category seem inclined to apply that yardstick to their political choices. That’s a competition progressives generally, and Democrats specifically, ought to be able to win. And in fact, using the public sector to “get things done” on the vast array of national challenges that Republicans are ignoring or screwing up is a pretty important matter of principle in itself.

While there’s not really a “war on Christmas” going on in this country, there is a “war on the Christmas spirit” going on in Washington, courtesy of the Republican leadership in Congress and their perverse priorities on budget and tax issues. Check it out in today’s New Dem Dispatch.

Ah, yes, it’s another Christmas season, and another opportunity for elements of the Cultural Right to start up their fatuous whining about the “War on Christmas.” I did a post on this last year which I won’t repeat now. But I must say that I am ashamed of those of my fellow-Christians–surely a small if noisy minority–who purport to be crushed by the burden of equality; offended by the demands of interfaith respect; victimized by the injustice of state neutrality; and oppressed by the tyranny of the naked public square.When you consider the vast march of martyrs through the centuries who have suffered and died for Christ against the real, physical, limb-rending, heretic-burning, death-dealing power of state discrimination, what weak and faithless successors we are if we pretend the Gospel is threatened by “Happy Holidays” cards or Kwanzaa songs or “winter carnivals.” It’s especially absurd to see some conservative Protestants joining this self-pitying display, given the nurturance they have long enjoyed from America’s liberal and pluralistic traditions. Indeed, those among them whose roots are in the Calvinist Reformed tradition seem to have forgotten that the celebration of Christmas itself was illegal in Calvin’s Geneva, John Knox’s Scotland, and even in Puritan New England, and frowned upon by many Presbyterians until well into the twentieth century. So please, if you truly want to “put Christ back into Christmas,” do that in your homes, your churches, and your hearts. But you are missing the “reason for the season” if you continue this uncharitable and altogether un-Christian agitation for the fool’s gold of special privileges and a martyr’s crown you have not earned.

I don’t have a lot to add to the appraisals of Eugene McCarthy–who died this weekend–being offered by others, but do want to riff on a theme suggested by former Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet over at The New Republic‘s site.Kusnet usefully focuses on McCarthy’s real breakthrough moment in national Democratic politics, his fiery nominating speech for Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 convention in Los Angeles. This now-forgotten incident was at the time a very big deal: as Teddy White explained in The Making of the President 1960, the draft-Stevenson movement, underscored by a very noisy demonstration of activists around the convention site, was momentarily a threat to the pre-ordained nomination of John F. Kennedy.But while Kusnet focuses on the temperamental aspects of the tradition that linked Adlai and McCarthy to such later liberal activist heroes as Mo Udall and Bill Bradley–candidates who sometimes conveyed the sense they were too good to actually win–I think there’s a more obvious strain that runs from Stevenson to McCarthy to McGovern to Gary Hart to Paul Tsongas to Howard Dean (and could include Russ Feingold if he emerges as a major candidate in 2008). It’s a tradition of candidates who expanded the Democratic appeal into previously Republican or independent upscale professional territory, but at the risk of losing touch with the old Democratic coalition of working-class and minority voters.For those of you who tend to think this trend began much more recently, it’s sobering to recall that the term “egghead” was first popularized as an anti-intellectual slur against Stevenson supporters in 1952. And each of “Adlai’s children” in later Democratic candidacies drew his signature support from social and economic elites determined to overthrow some aspect of mass culture or politics, from Stevenson’s implicit attacks on the philistinism of Ike’s America, to McCarthy’s ironically detached refusal to play “politics as usual,” to McGovern and Hart’s crystallization of discontent with old-line Democratic “machine” politics, to Tsongas’ mix of social liberalism and economic conservatism, to Dean’s antiwar-fed revolt against the Washington Democratic Establishment.All these candidates struggled, to one degree or another, to attract much support from blue-collar and minority voters, though arguably they might have pulled together a broader coalition if they had actually won the nomination (the one who did, George McGovern, performed credibly among minority voters but lost catastrophically among union households). Before you hit the button to send me a nasty email about lumping Howard Dean together with “Adlai’s Children,” we obviously don’t know how a Dean general election campaign might have fared, though the disproportionately upscale and non-minority nature of his original movement was beyond dispute, and a source of much hand-wringing among Deaniacs at the time.Ironically, it was probably McCarthy’s great rival, Robert F. Kennedy, who offered the best potential fusion of a New Politics appeal that attracted New Class voters, while keeping together the traditional Democratic coalition. After all, RFK’s primary campaign of 1968 did indeed draw a mind-boggling coalition from Wallacites to lunch-bucket ethnics to African-Americans and Latinos. But it’s worth remembering that RFK’s popularity among liberal intellectuals and anti-war professionals was much higher after his assassination than when he was an actual candidate (when he ran for the Senate in 1964, virtually the entire Manhattan liberal intelligentsia endorsed his Republican rival).On purely empirical grounds, Bill Clinton in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000 have been the two nominees who were best able to consolidate upscale support while hanging onto much if hardly all of the old coalition. And Kerry did as well as Gore among highly educated voters, while losing more at the other end of the spectrum.Gene McCarthy, a temperamentally conservative man much more likely to quote Thomas Aquinas than Thomas Jefferson, was hardly the ideal fusion candidate. And a lot’s changed, politically and demographically, since 1968. But the challenge of adding to the coalition without subtracting from it elsewhere remains.

I spent most of the weekend driving around Virginia attending to various chores, and didn’t see or hear any news, so it wasn’t until today, when I was driving my kid, Jack, back to school in Richmond, that I learned that Richard Pryor had died. Jack broke the news to me in a quiet way, knowing how much I adored this man. In fact, Jack bought me a Pryor box set for Christmas last year, after discovering for himself that this icon of the 70s and 80s was a lot funnier than the people that come and go on Comedy Central these days.That was appropriate, since I bought my own father a couple of early Pryor albums–yes, the ones with the n-word in the title, which provided some additional comedy as I struggled to find a way to ask for them from an African-American store clerk–back in the mid-1970s.You want to know how powerfully funny Richard Pryor was? After memorizing these albums, my father, a middle-aged southern white man from a very conservative background, became Richard Pryor for about a year. Everytime I’d see him, we’d go through a complex call-and-response greeting based on some Pryor routine. (And Pryor also supplied the right thing to say for virtually every occasion; if I’d screwed up in some way, my father was likely to lightly rebuke me with the words of Pryor’s wino accosting a Martian: You done landed on Mr. Gilmore’s property!)And to this day, nearly thirty years later, we both know the whole oeuvre by heart. And so does Jack.A lot’s been said, and is being said today, about how Pryor stretched the boundaries of taste in comedy, and in particular, how he confronted the realities and absurdities of race, and that’s very true. Indeed, his routine on the experience of being a black man pulled over by a white traffic cop (Get out of the car; raise yo’ hands, drop yo’ pants, spread yo’ cheeks. A gas station’s been robbed, and you look just like the n—- who done it!) probably provided a lot of white people with their first understanding of racial profiling, and what it’s like to be a permanent suspect in your own country.But Pryor was ultimately not just a “great black comic;” he was simply the funniest man alive, by a large margin. If, like me, you agree with the late Hunter Thompson that “a sense of humor is the only prima facie evidence of sanity,” then Richard Pryor was, for all the foibles in his personal life, one of the sanest men alive, and one who helped keep the rest of us sane as well.May God give him rest, and return to him the joy he gave so many others.

Michelle Cottle over at The New Republic’s site provides a simple but elegant case against the U.S. House of Representatives’ ability, certainly under current management, to police its Members’ ethical practices. She suggests its ethics committee be abolished as toothless and misleading, and I tend to agree.Giving congressional ethics rules the power of law, with criminal sanctions for those abuses that involve the selling of influence and the extortion of bribes, would be a good way to replace the current system. And for policing the less criminal but still important ethics violations, creating an indepedent ethics body for Congress, as Bruce Reed has suggested, is another good idea.But the key point is to understand that what we are experiencing these days is not a sound system being overwhelmed or undermined by egregious behavior, but an inadequate and dysfunctional system being exploited by the wolves who always thrive when the sheep have no real shepherd.