On Czars and Unicorns

Over the last few weeks, I've been fascinated (in a sick sort of way) by the GOP's escalating war on "czars."  What began as an especially dumb (even by his standards) Glenn Beck crusade has now reached the point where GOP legislators are introducing anti-czar legislation and GOP presidential hopefuls like Mitt Romney feel the need to include the talking point in their speeches.  

The reason this particular GOP meme has so fascinated me is that I thought I was beyond the capacity to be shocked by the dishonesty and stupidity of GOP talking points. After all, this is the same party that just recently decided to embrace Sarah Palin's "death panel" attack. But that attack, while despicable and deeply dishonest, was at least tied to reality in the slimmest of senses, i.e., it was a mischaracterization of an actual legislative provision. It also had the benefit of being intelligible.  Though crazy, it was at least easy to follow.  Creating a panel of bureaucrats charged with euthanizing old people and turning them into Soylent Green would indeed be a bad idea.   

The "czar" attack, though, is fundamentally different. It is not only dishonest and hypocritical but unintelligible and incoherent. Though certainly less significant in the grand scheme of things than other GOP attack memes, this one is, quite possibly, the stupidest, most intellectually embarassing political attack in the history of politics. If there is a theoretical level of Absolute Stupid in politics, a point at which our political discourse freezes because it cannot possibly get any dumber, this "czars" meme is getting perilously close to it.

For starters, it's not clear to me that those leveling this attack even understand what they are saying. Take for example Mitt Romney's comment:

When government is trying to take over health care, buying car companies, bailing out banks, and giving half the White House staff the title of czar – we have every good reason to be alarmed and to speak our mind!

Let's put aside for the moment the fact that Romney supported the bailouts and that the health care reforms being proposed are patterned after the bill he negotiated and signed in Massachusetts (this is Mitt Romney after all; you expect consistency?). Romney's reference to Obama's use of czars is typical of the kind of attacks leveled by Republicans recently. He's clearly just ticking through a checklist of wingnut buzzwords, things that he believes will have some special meaning to his intended audience of Glenn Beck watching GOP primary voters. It's kind of like someone who makes an inside joke that he doesn't really get because he thinks others will think it's funny. The problem is, I think the whole GOP establishment is like this. I don't think any of them actually understand what the criticism of "czars" is really about. They just know that their base is worked up about "czars" and so they're dutifully repeating that word as often as possible.

And it's not hard to understand why they're confused. As near as I can tell, Glenn Beck seems to have become fixated on "czars" because the word is Russian-sounding and he needed to come up with a word that started with "c" to save face after railing against Obama's burgeoning "Oligarhy" on national television. I kid, of course, but the truth is really not any less stupid.

As anyone who knows anything about Washington knows, the term "czar" is not an actual title, but a shorthand term used (primarily by the media) to describe various advisory positions with long bureaucratic sounding official titles. The term has been in use for decades and has been used just as much by Republicans and Republican presidents as by the current administration. As others have already pointed out repeatedly, the Bush administration was quite fond of such positions, appointing a record number of them (more than the Obama administration has). Moreover, these positions carry with them far less power than the name implies; they are generally just advisory positions, positions with much less power than your average cabinet secretary or deputy cabinet secretary. The notion that there is anything undemocratic or troubling about the use of such advisers is bizarre and clearly of very recent vintage.

But because the word "czar" is of Russian origin, Glenn Beck has apparently made it his mission in life to save America from them. Like a lobotomized Joe McCarthy, Beck rants about "communists" and "czars" in the same breath, something that no doubt makes both Lenin and the Romanovs spin in their tombs (I wonder if Beck realizes that Lenin himself was the original czar-hater?).

I also wonder what Beck will do when he realizes that President Obama is protected by a Gestapo-like cadre of plain-clothed agents known as the "Secret Service" (or shall we call them the "SS" for short?) I mean, what is this, Nazi Germany? Let me give you five words: Mustard (on hamburgers?!?), Empathy, NEA, ACORN, Secret Service. What's that spell? That's right, folks; it spells MENASS, as in MENASS to society. That's what Obama is, folks...

What's sad is that Beck and the GOP make parody hard. As dumb as the preceding paragraph is, it's really not any dumber than what Beck and the GOP are actually saying. This is what our political discourse has become.