Eat The Press

Torture thrillist Marc Thiessen's book tour brought him to the set of "The Daily Show" last night, where he was basically eaten alive by Jon Stewart in a contentious interview that ended with Thiessen being the first guest in memory to actually whine about the way the interview went.

Thiessen's arguments were nothing new if you've been reading his recent spate of op-eds, and much of Stewart's pushback probably sounded familiar if you've read my own. Thiessen's basic argument is that you should consider the lawyers who represent detainees to be "al Qaeda lawyers," regardless if the detainees are innocent or guilty or if the truth reveals a lack of connection to al Qaeda. His response to the proud tradition of providing vigorous defense to unsympathetic defendants -- in the manner established by John Adams -- is to indulge in what Matt Yglesias calls "an epic hair-splitting gambit." And he continued to do the same hair-splitting in his insistence that the Gitmo detainees have not been "accused" of anything, so the attorneys who represent them are not performing a Constitutional duty -- rather, they are traitors.

Along the way, Thiessen also slammed interrogator Ali Soufan, who has long insisted that the torture regime that fortifies Thiessen's precious bodily fluids was not effective at gathering intelligence. Thiessen maintained that it was Soufan's techniques that failed.

Stewart objected to the notion that a perfect safety could be achieved, and criticized Thiessen for presenting selective evidence and pretending to know the "equation" by which America can be made safe.

Eventually, the interview wound down to the end of its televised segment, and Stewart averred that they were running out of time and that the full, unexpurgated interview would air online. Apparently, Thiessen isn't much of a new media fan, because he began to get all piss and moan about not getting to speak.

If you discount all the instances where Stewart and Thiessen talk over each other or "banter," you'll see that Thiessen got to speak for about four minutes and forty seconds out of this eleven and a half minute-long clip. So, that's the measure of just how shabbily Thiessen (who frankly has only about two minutes worth of thought rattling around his dome at any given time) was treated. Stewart, of course, apologized, with a measure of sincerity and snark, the balance of which I'll let viewers judge.

Anyway, we'll do our best to make sure that all of the interview gets seen by everyone.

PART ONE:

PART TWO:

Hey, Marc Thiessen is still pretending that enhanced interrogation techniques thwarted an attack on the Library Tower. This has been so widely debunked and discredited by now that it's astounding he continues to make the claim.

Here's Timothy Noah in Slate:

How could Sheikh Mohammed's water-boarded confession have prevented the Library Tower attack if the Bush administration "broke up" that attack during the previous year? It couldn't, of course. Conceivably the Bush administration, or at least parts of the Bush administration, didn't realize until Sheikh Mohammed confessed under torture that it had already broken up a plot to blow up the Library Tower about which it knew nothing. Stranger things have happened. But the plot was already a dead letter. If foiling the Library Tower plot was the reason to water-board Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, then that water-boarding was more than cruel and unjust. It was a waste of water.

PART THREE;

Thiessen doesn't believe that the Army Field Manual is effective in handling high-value detainees, and that current interrogators abrogate its guidelines all the time. His contention is that the Field Manual bars interrogators from "threatening a detainee in any way." As Spencer Ackerman points out, Thiessen has a misunderstanding of this matter:

Thiessen objects to the use of the non-torture techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation against the highest-value detainees because the manual is "on the Internet" and terrorists can train against it. That's just a flat-out misunderstanding of the field manual in particular and the interrogations process itself. The field manual does not and never has required only the use of those techniques it lists, but it proscribes physical and psychological abuse. That's why people like Abdulmutallab can, say, have their parents' opprobrium be used against them, a technique not explicitly listed in the field manual but still legally and morally kosher -- and proven to be effective.

Jon Stewart: "I would be confortable with us doing to any detainee what I would be comfortable with other countries doing to our guys." In case you've ever wondered what a "moral compass" looks like, there you go.

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Remember way back when President Obama told people that it was maybe a good idea for them to turn off the teevees and disconnect themselves from the idiot ramblings of the political press, a rough beast with a bottomless hunger for antic narratives and useless gossip?

Maybe Obama should have asked his two top advisers to stop feeding the beast themselves, to spare all of us some grief.

Rahm Emanuel! Suddenly, he is Ground Zero for so much media crapulence. Suddenly, he is the protagonist of the most fevered "who's up/who's down" narratives. Slowly, and then all at once, the media has become filled with the tales of Rahm's agonies and ecstasies. Good lord, even Eric Massa is cashing in on the zeitgeist, casting Emanuel as a bit player in his ongoing operatic nonsense. And the best part is that he gets the nude scene! This raises many questions, not the least of which is: does Rahm perceive his ability to persuade to be related to his nudity?

And, uhm, David Axelrod? What is going on with him? The New York Times says that nobody "has taken the perceived failings of the administration more personally or shown the strain as plainly as" him. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are out of work. They'll let David Axelrod know when they have the time to tend to the hard strain of soft perception.

So much attention has been given to these two men, and the problems that come from being so powerful and influential and yet not in possession of the ability to bend reality itself to their notions, that one may wonder to oneself: "What is the point?" The answer is: there is no point! The only valuable thing to notice here is that all this mishegas rather elegantly demonstrates that this is really the only sort of story the the political press is good at writing: palace intrigue and dangerous liaisons, starring Rahm Emanuel's intimidating wang in a shower.

And the beast, it is ever so bent on wretched excess! The Washington Post managed to fap themselves so vigorously with this non-news that it all got to be too, too much for David Broder! That right there suggests that this whole conversation has entered the Undiscovered Country.

Then came Peter Baker's exegesis on the matter, which severely tested both my "too long, didn't read" and "Surely there are a hundred better things that I could be doing with my life" policies. In it, Baker poses the question: "Did Obama make a mistake by disregarding his top adviser's counsel? Or was it Emanuel who failed to execute the president's strategy? Was it both, or perhaps neither?" A single paragraph from Alex Pareene is all you need to read to establish the same level of understanding on Rahm Emanuel that Baker has:

So. Rahm was hoping to have a lot more victories now than he does, but lots of bad stuff happened, and sometimes the President listens to people other than Rahm. These facts ended up in the newspaper, which was embarrassing for Rahm, because he doesn't like to be portrayed as losing things and also it made his boss look bad. But the most important thing is that Rahm gets a lot of shit from both liberals and conservatives.

The only thing I'd add to that is that it's pretty clear that Obama has nothing but contempt for the Beltway media culture. He works very hard to subvert it. And so, the White House Press Corps has spent the bulk of the past year bitching and moaning about it, while presenting the perplexing argument that Obama is simultaneously overexposed and media-averse.

Meanwhile, Rahm Emanuel is a titanically rich man with Problems That Are Real To Him, which may or may not include the lack of basic gymnasium etiquette. But Rahm, unlike Obama, is right at home inside the Beltway, a princeling sired to prominence by the very media culture that Obama seems to abhor. And so The Problems That Are Real To Rahm Emanuel are like catnip for the political press, and Emanuel -- Mr. Anonymous Senior White House Official -- knows just how to get his message out.

And what happens when this message starts getting out? From there, that gives rise to the endless array of articles that suggest that the White House's "message is muddled."

Mark Halperin, reliably, took up this matter in an article that suggested that Obama "was making the same mistakes as Bush." His article contained this sentence, among others:

From its earliest days, Obama's White House has failed to put in place the necessary procedures and personnel to move strong, serious ideas along the conveyor belt from the minds of wonky experts cloistered in the Old Executive Office Building chambers to the President's lips as he introduces new initiatives at dramatic public events.

I have yet to find anyone who can explain what this sentence is even intended to convey. I gather that this is about message-muddling! If I'm being charitable, I'd suggest that Halperin is conveying this idea with some sort of post-modern form of meta-writing. But really, I think that Halperin is just a terrible writer, who should shy away from metaphors entirely.

We also have George Packer and Mark Leibovich, piling on, and all of that drives up the agonies of David Axelrod. Why hasn't he enabled the White House to communicate its vision with the American people? Why hasn't he done more to set the agenda? Why has he allowed the "narrative" to be "lost?"

Enough! Here's some real talk, from Brendan Nyhan:

In short, this entire genre of political coverage is useless. If/when the economy picks up, Obama's speeches will start "connecting" and everyone will marvel at how effective the White House political team has become.

Yes, and at that point, Rahm Emanuel will get a whole slew of new stories placed that describe how he contributed to the change of fortune, while David Axelrod will have to explain why the press isn't giving him as much credit. And they will never stop feeding the Beast: not now, not ever! The press will treat it all as one more bend in the exciting horse race, their studied indifference to the way policies actually affect the lives of actual Americans intact. Welcome to Washington, DC. Everyone's right and nobody's sorry, that's the start and the end of the story.

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I see that radio talker Rush Limbaugh is indulging in one of his patented tantrums, telling listeners that he'll leave the United States if health care reform passes.

I don't know. I'll just tell you this, if this passes and it's five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented -- I am leaving the country. I'll go to Costa Rica.

I'm sure there are a lot of people whose motivation to pass health care reform just doubled. But, really, there's no need for Limbaugh to go anywhere. If he likes the Costa Rican health care system so much, he should advocate for its implementation. Of course, he'd be advocating for the implementation of government-run, universal health care:

Costa Rica has universal health care, one of the best health systems in Latin America. As always with nationalized health care, expect red tape and long waits, but the quality of Costa Rica's health care is excellent. Private health care is also available, very affordable, and high quality. Many doctors speak English and have received training in Europe, Canada, or the U.S. There are three large, private hospitals that most expatriates use: CIMA hospital in Escazú, Clinica Biblica in San José, and Clinica Católica in San José-Guadalupe.

Statistics from the World Health Organization frequently place Costa Rica in the top country rankings in the world for long life expectancy, often even ahead of Great Britain and the United States, even though the per-capita income of Costa Ricans is about one-tenth that of the U.S. and the U.K. Arguably, one reason for this is the slower pace of living in Costa Rica. And, of course, the healthy, fresh, non-preservative-laden foods found there, and the welcoming tropical climate. Costa Rica just seems to be a healthy place to live.

A ThinkProgress commenter adds:

The Costa Rican healthcare system is rated very highly on an international level, and the country's citizens enjoy the health and life expectancy equal to that of more developed nations. These accolades come courtesy of strong, universal health insurance and excellent public and private hospitals.

Costa Rica's public health insurance system, commonly known as the Caja, is available country-wide to all citizens and legal residents. There are ten major public hospitals - four in San Jose, including the Children's Hospital - affiliated with the Caja. For non-emergencies and everyday medical care, small clinics, known as EBAIS (pronounced ay-vy-ice), are located in almost every community.

Apropos of nothing, it also seems that Costa Rica's "legal and government-regulated" sex trade is recession-proof.

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Michael A. Fletcher and Dana Hedgpeth have a piece up on unemployment benefits in today's Washington Post that is a classic example of a piece that strives so hard to achieve balance that it actually sacrifices credibility.

In this case, the reporters shift from a straight explanation of the current conditions that have led countless Americans to seek unemployment insurance, to a wack-ass fantasia in which current economic conditions are actually a figment of the imagination and that the real problem is that too many Americans are living it up on the dole!

To wit:

Millions of Americans have been forced to rely on unemployment payments for extended periods as the nation struggles through its longest period of high joblessness in a generation, and critics are taking aim, saying that the Depression-era program created as a temporary bridge for laid-off workers is turning into an expensive entitlement.

We see here the attempt to lay two ideas alongside each other. One is that "millions of Americans" are "forced to rely" on unemployment insurance. The other is that no one is being "forced to rely" on anything. Rather, they are enjoying the benefits of "an expensive entitlement." The problem here is that only one of these premises is objectively true -- the former. The other is presented as a competing, interesting point of view. But the only thing interesting about the latter point of view is that it's very wrong.

And the reporters have actually done actual reporting that attests to this!

Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Center, says there's a good reason people are out of work for so long. There are six unemployed Americans for every available job, he said.

"The primary reason people are out of work so long is a lack of jobs," Stettner said.

It seems to me that in order to prove that people are foregoing job searches to live off unemployment insurance, there would first have to be jobs available to seek out in the first place. But there aren't! Nevertheless, the reporters choose to breathe life into a line of argument that they should be asphyxiating:

But complaints that extending unemployment payments discourages job-seeking have begun to bubble into the political debate. Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) recently single-handedly held up the latest extension, a bill to keep unemployment benefits in place for 30 more days, saying Congress should find other cuts to cover its $10 billion price tag.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) did not join Bunning's effort, but he defended his colleague's point of view. Kyl told the Senate he questioned why anyone would see unemployment benefits as helpful to the economy, or to the job market.

"If anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work," Kyl said. "I am sure most of them would like work and probably have tried to seek it, but you can't argue it is a job enhancer."

In the first place, the only reason that these "complaints" are "bubbl[ing] into the public debate" is because reporters are doing the bubbling without applying any amount of critical thought to whether they belong there in the first place. Courtesy of our own Ryan Grim, here's what such critical thought looks like:

Unemployment benefits are generally so small that much of it is often used to pay for COBRA health insurance, even when subsidized. The size of the benefits does not generally cover the cost of living and it would be hard to find a single person who would prefer unemployment to having a job so that they could get subsidized COBRA.

The big lie of this article is the suggestion that "critics are taking aim." Those "critics" are Jon Kyl and a "labor economist" from the Heritage Foundation who very tepidly cosigns Kyl's position but who nevertheless allows that, "it is appropriate and natural for Congress to extend the time limit of unemployment insurance with the job market as bad as it is." That's a dearth of both "critics" and "aim."

But, more to the point, who's arguing that unemployment insurance is a job enhancer? Well, per Grim, they are out there, and unlike Kyl, they actually make a lick of sense:

[Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus] added that Kyl's economic argument was flawed, as well. Unemployment benefits do create jobs because the recipients cycle the money through the economy. He cited a Congressional Budget Office analysis that said the Gross Domestic Product grew $1.90 for every dollar the federal government paid out...

Kyl could also consult economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "[Unemployment insurance] puts money into people's pockets and they spend almost all of it. That creates jobs," he said.

Also? One thing that unemployment insurance does enhance, greatly, is the ability of people who cannot find work (no matter how hard they try -- because there aren't enough jobs being created) is to not, subsequently, starve to death.

Additionally, the reporters are just incorrect when they suggest that Kyl "defended his colleague's point of view" by questioning "why anyone would see unemployment benefits as helpful to the economy." In fact, Bunning never raised such questions. His melodramatic hold-ups were exclusively related to holding the lives of thousands of Americans hostage so that he could make a fleeting point about fiscal discipline. The contention that unemployment insurance provides a disincentive to job seekers is Kyl's contention alone.

Anyway, obviously millions of Americans should be faulted for not working much harder to find jobs that do not exist.

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Marc Thiessen's latest defamatory shot at American legal traditions begins with something of a thought exercise -- which I imagine is intended to not be read as the disingenuous piffle that it is:

Would most Americans want to know if the Justice Department had hired a bunch of mob lawyers and put them in charge of mob cases? Or a group of drug cartel lawyers and put them in charge of drug cases? Would they want their elected representatives to find out who these lawyers were, which mob bosses and drug lords they had worked for, and what roles they were now playing at the Justice Department? Of course they would -- and rightly so.

Well, it seems to me that if you wanted the Justice Department to bring down the mob or a drug cartel, the insight of a lawyer familiar with such networks would be rather invaluable. And, sure, I suppose I would take a dim view of any lawyer who financially benefits from working within a criminal syndicate. But surely no one is making the stupid argument that al Qaeda has lawyers on retainer, right?

Yet Attorney General Eric Holder hired former al-Qaeda lawyers to serve in the Justice Department and resisted providing Congress this basic information.

But are they "al-Qaeda lawyers?" As luck would have it, I know an attorney who has represented detainees: Brent Mickum, of Hollingsworth LLP. So I asked him directly. His reponse: "That's ridiculous. First and foremost, I am an American. I am a member of two state bars in good standing. I have never had a bar grievance filed against me or been the subject of disciplinary action. I have been a criminal defense attorney and have served as a DoJ prosecutor."

And Mickum has secured the release of three individuals from Gitmo: Martin Mubanga, Bisher al Rawi and Jamil el-Banna. None of them had anything whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda, it's really impossible to call him an "al-Qaeda lawyer." Bisher al Rawi, in fact, was an MI-5 informant, operating against al Qaeda. Mickum is currently one of the defense attorneys working on behalf of Abu Zubaydah. The centerpiece of Zubaydah's defense is that he, too, had nothing to do with al Qaeda, and in fact refused to work with al Qaeda. And in the current government filing in Zubaydah's case, no one is contending otherwise.

"I would turn the question back on Thiessen," Mickum says. "What do you say to the attorneys whose clients were found innocent? Are they still al-Qaeda lawyers? For every KSM, there are scores of other prisoners against whom there is no evidence of terrorism. If there is no evidence against them, why should we be maligned for trying to vindicate these people and return them to their families."

Mickum adds: "Let me give you a very recent example: Recently Pakistan announced it had captured American citizen Adam Gadahn of Riverside, an alleged spokesman and top propagandist for the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Yesterday, Pakistani intelligence officials announced they had the wrong man. Under the Bush Administration, had this suspect been in American custody, he would have been whisked away to a Black Site, tortured, determined to be the wrong person, and then transferred to GITMO to languish indefinitely. And if I took up his defense, arguing mistaken identity, I would, according to Thiessen, be deemed an al Qaeda supporter. I would also point out that if Thiessen and Liz Cheney had their way, as an al Qaida supporter, I would be a candidate for arrest and indefinite detention without charge. That may be Thiessen's and Cheney's view of the justice system in the US, but it's not mine."

But it's an easy thing to point out that the zealous defense of innocent parties is laudable. What about those mob lawyers? What about the attorneys who will make up Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's defense team? What value does our nation derive from the defense of the disreputable? As it turns out, we get plenty of value. Let me pass the mic to Julian Sanchez:

Charles Katz really was involved in illegal gambling, but it's his case that established a Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless wiretaps. Klansman Clarence Brandenburg really was advocating "revengeance" against Jews and African Americans (though in the latter case I'm paraphrasing)--but I owe him my right to express radical political views as long as I'm not directly inciting violence. Crucial Fourth Amendment cases protecting the sanctity of the home involved cocaine smuggling rings, marijuana growers, and thieves.

Many of them were, to put it mildly, unsympathetic characters whose "values" I would not want to be "shared" by high-ranking attorneys in the Justice Department. Fortunately, competent attorneys argued both sides of those cases, not because of their personal feelings about the defendants, but because the legal questions at the hearts of those cases had larger implications for the kind of country we're going to live in. And our constitutional order works, when it does, because the Court is directed to the full range of core issues involved by thoughtful advocates who present them forcefully and clearly.

The elegant way our criminal justice system runs as a self-sustaining engine of our larger societal values is apparently lost on Thiessen, who presents an argument so shockingly anti-American that I had to read it several times in order to believe that someone published it:

Some defenders say al-Qaeda lawyers are simply following a great American tradition, in which everyone gets a lawyer and their day in court. Not so, says Andy McCarthy, the former assistant U.S. attorney who put Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik," behind bars for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. "We need to be clear about what the American tradition is," McCarthy told me. "The Sixth Amendment guarantees the accused -- that means somebody who has been indicted or otherwise charged with a crime -- a right to counsel. But that right only exists if you are accused, which means you are someone who the government has brought into the civilian criminal justice system." The habeas lawyers were not doing their constitutional duty to defend unpopular criminal defendants. They were using the federal courts as a tool to undermine our military's ability to keep dangerous enemy combatants off the battlefield in a time of war.

This is just the semantic version of reductio ad absurdum. Clearly, if you find yourself detained at Gitmo, you've been accused of something! And the distinction between the "civilian criminal justice system" and the alternative -- military tribunals -- is irrelevant because defendants in military tribunals are also entitled to a vigorous defense. But the habeas lawyers were doing their Constitutional duty. That's why they are called "HABEAS LAWYERS." In standing up for the rights of habeas corpus, they are acting on my behalf -- indeed, on behalf of all Americans. They are using the federal courts as a tool to undermine the idea that I can be picked up off the street, declared an enemy combatant and thrown in a hole in perpetuity.

There's also the thorny and inconvenient fact that many detainees, such as the aforementioned Martin Mubanga, Bisher al Rawi and Jamil el-Banna were not "dangerous enemy combatants" and did not return to a "battlefield" but rather, returned to their lives and families. All because they received vigorous defense. Is there any discernible benefit to national security at keeping such individuals locked up? The Supreme Court would likely take a dim view of that premise, seeing as how they ruled in Boumediene v. Bush that detainees have the right to be defended, by lawyers.

Of course, the logical basis for the case I'm making here is so unassailable that Liz Cheney plumb forgot that she's supposed to disagree with it! Instead, we get this remarkable bit of Newspeak:

AMY HOLMES: Liz, good morning. So you released a fairly provocative ad, I have to say. And you ask the question "whose values" [does] Eric Holder share? In your view, whose values does he share?

CHENEY: Well, what the ad does -- and actually it doesn't question anybody's loyalty. What the ad does is it says that there are nine lawyers in the Justice Department who used to represent al Qaeda terrorists and the Attorney General will only tell us who two of them are and we want the American people to have the right to know who the others are.

In other words, just because Keep America Safe is suggesting that the character of these lawyers could be impugned doesn't mean they are actually doing any impugning. I guess the ad they paid for is actually a fantastic simulation of the way someone could impugn their character.

It doesn't seem logical -- at least as long as you are wondering how on earth they think they can succeed at undoing a Supreme Court case or preventing these detainees from receiving a vigorous defense in accordance with American legal traditions. One is forced to consider what people like Thiessen and Cheney are up to.

First, remove the focus from the attorneys and put it on the defendants themselves. It seems to me that what Thiessen is attempting to do here is to enforce the notion that these Gitmo detainees are part of an "untouchable" class of defendants, that to insist that they receive a defense at all is in itself treasonous.

Of course, when these detainees actually start getting defended, you start to learn that there are Martin Mubangas and Bisher al Rawis in their ranks, and you start to wonder how it came to pass that such people ended up there in the first place. As Thiessen's primary role as an op-ed contributor for the Washington Post is to mount a P.R. campaign for the Bush administration, it's the sort of contention you can expect him to make, time and again. (You'll note that what Thiessen's piece is really all about is an elaborate defense of Bush's house torturers.)

Beyond that, it's important to remember that the motivations behind smearing these Justice Department lawyers are nothing but political. Eugene Robinson very ably points this out in a competing op-ed in the Post, today:

But maligning is apparently the whole point of the exercise. The smear campaign by Cheney, et al., has nothing to do with keeping America safe. It can only be an attempt to inflict political damage on the Obama administration by portraying the Justice Department as somehow "soft" on terrorism. Even by Washington's low standards, this is unbelievably dishonest and dishonorable.

In short, Thiessen and Cheney really do not give a tinned shit about influencing national security policy for the better. Their only concerns are electoral. That their attack on these Department of Justice lawyers is so outlandish is a testament to just how unsalable their ideas really are.

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No discussion of the media's ongoing battle to understand basic seventh-grade civics would be complete without enjoying Jonathan Chait's post in which he basically loses his mind over Mike Allen's inability to grasp what Democratic lawmakers are doing.

The big issue with reconciliation is that there seems to be this widespread idea that Health Care Reform -- the capital letter concept in toto -- is going to be entirely enacted through budget reconciliation. Suffice it to say, this cannot be done and that is precisely why no one is proposing to do it. However, it's become handy for health care reform opponents to suggest that this is what is occurring, when it isn't. In fact, the Senate has already passed a health care reform bill. This was a big story!

Nevertheless, a lot of ersatz political experts have decided to collectively play stupid on the subject, depicting a perfectly common parliamentary procedure as some sort of nefarious maneuver. To do so, they have to pretend to not understand that the Senate has already passed a health care bill. One senator, Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) has been repeating himself until he's blue in the face in an attempt to get people to understand the reconciliation process:

Reconciliation is not being considered for passing comprehensive health-care reform. Major health-care reform legislation passed the Senate without reconciliation on Christmas Eve. If the House now passes that legislation, it can go immediately to President Obama's desk to be signed into law. What the president and others have suggested is that, after the House acts, reconciliation could then be used to pass a much smaller "fixer" bill to allow for modifications to the comprehensive bill that will have passed under regular order.

And yet, here's Mike Allen:

When Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) made this confusing argument last week on "Face the Nation," we weren't sure he was being deliberately disingenuous. It was, in fact, spin. Now, he's made the same case in a similarly obtuse WashPost op-ed, "Reconciliation is not an option for health-care reform." Don't misread it: It's an Alice-in-Wonderland argument FOR the use of reconciliation as part of the recipe for getting comprehensive health reform to the president's desk.

So, naturally, Chait is all Frustrated, Incorporated over this, and he lets Allen know in a piece appropriately titled, "Jesus Christ, Mike Allen, Reconciliation Is NOT THAT COMPLICATED."

Confusing? Obtuse? Does Conrad need to stop by Politico's offices with a picture book and some finger puppets? I understand perfectly well how intelligent people who don't follow this debate closely might not catch on to the distinction. But this is what Mike Allen does all day -- and, as I understand it, much of the night and the wee hours of the morning as well. How can anybody still not understand this?

Last week, I had a similar reaction watching this video of Chris Matthews utterly making a fool of himself in front of Representative Alan Grayson (D-Fla.).

WATCH:

You'll note that at about the three-minute mark, Grayson begins to explain to Matthews the fact that the Senate has already passed a health care bill, but Matthews is so certain that he's right about this that he just keeps interrupting Grayson, over and over.

Matthews, in the above clip, goes on to make it clear that he thinks the whole notion of a single senator agreeing to pursue budget reconciliation is just crazy. Over the weekend, when Mark Begich became the 50th Senator to sign on to using reconciliation to add enhancements to the ALREADY PASSED SENATE HEALTH CARE REFORM BILL (and, presuming that Vice President Joe Biden is on board with his own agenda, that's the ball game, right there), believe you me, I thought about Chris Matthews, and what an idiot he turned out to be on this matter.

Chait asks, "So, what the hell is going on here?" I think that what is going on here is that a lot of political journalists just love to pointlessly mystify the political process. By doing so in this case, it creates the illusion that the whole matter of budget reconciliation is one more horse race between two interesting points of view. But one of those points of view is only interesting because it is colossally incorrect!

RELATED:
Jesus Christ, Mike Allen, Reconciliation Is NOT THAT COMPLICATED [The New Republic]

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST
Let's Flashback To That Time Chris Matthews Was Crazy Wrong About Parliamentary Procedure

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The dedicated mercenaries of Blackwater or "Xe" or whatever they're calling themselves now sure seem to get up to the sort of war-zone antics that I doubt I could get away with at my workplace, such as drunkenly shooting people and stealing weapons under the guise of cartoon characters.

And yet, they persist and succeed in the government contracting racket, to the point that they are still in the running to get "a billion dollar contract to train the Afghan police".

All of this seems crazy, but as Spencer Ackerman details in the Washington Independent, the problem is "a confusing, unaccountable and systemic problem in how the government delivers security contracts".

Any action from Holder would represent perhaps the only chance to stop Blackwater from receiving any additional government contracts. Several CSTC-A officers and Pentagon officials said that good-government contract rules prevent them from banning Blackwater. Specifically, an obscure contracting rule known as Federal Acquisition Regulation 9.406-2 prevents an acquisition official for banning a company from being awarded a contract unless the company has been formally "debarred" from eligibility -- something that has never happened in Blackwater's case. However, several criteria for debarment appear to apply to Blackwater, including "commission of fraud," "theft," "falsification or destruction of records, making false statements," "a history of failure to perform, or of unsatisfactory performance of, one or more contracts," and "violations of the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988."

Of course, recent history suggests that if you want lawmakers to take swift action in scuttling a government contractor down to the bone, the trick is to catch them in the act of aiding and abetting prostitution, which is something that Blackwater has never been accused of -- oh, sorry, I forgot: they have.

RELATED:
Systemic Failures May Give Blackwater Another Afghanistan Contract [The Washington Independent]

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Over the weekend, the New York Times published online a great infographic, documenting the history of budget reconciliation back to 1981. It definitely cuts through a lot of the bullroar we've heard lately about a parliamentary procedure that's actually common and non-controversial.

As you can see for yourself, budget reconciliation has shepherded all sorts of legislation into existence: big bills, small bills, partisan bills, non-partisan bills. And, as I've already noted, reconciliation has been used to create substantial government programs as well.

The Times's conclusion? Pretty basic, really:

The history is clear: While the use of reconciliation in this case -- amending a bill that has already passed the Senate via cloture -- is new, it is compatible with the law, Senate rules and the framers' intent.

It's worth pointing out of course that overwrought concern over the budget reconciliation process is a new development in the political life of this country. Jamison Foser took a look back over the way the budget reconciliation process was covered by the media during the drive to pass the 2003 Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act and discovered that the media pretty much didn't cover it at all:

The Senate reconciliation vote occurred on May 23, 2003. In the month of May, only one New York Times article so much as mentioned the use of reconciliation for the tax cuts -- a May 13, 2003, article that devoted a few paragraphs to wrangling over whether Senate Republicans could assign the bill number they wanted (S.2) to a bill approved via reconciliation. The Times also used the word "reconciliation" in a May 9, 2003, editorial, but gave no indication whatsoever of what it meant.

And that's more attention than most news outlets gave to the use of reconciliation that month. The Washington Post didn't run a single article, column, editorial, or letter to the editor that used the words "reconciliation" and "senate." Not one. USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press were similarly silent.

Cable news didn't care, either. CNN ran a quote by Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley about the substance of the tax cuts in which he used the word "reconciliation" in passing -- but that was it. Fox News aired two interviews in which Republican members of Congress referred to the reconciliation process in order to explain why the tax cuts would be temporary, but neither they nor the reporters interviewing them treated reconciliation as a controversial tactic.

And ABC, CBS, NBC? Nothing, nothing, nothing.

The bottom line is that budget reconciliation has only become "controversial" because opponents of health care reform deemed it so and made a lot of noise about it, this creating the sort of shiny, twinkling light that attracts the media and compels them to lose their minds completely. The pendulum of power over time tends to shift, and so one day the GOP will find itself needing to advance legislation through the reconciliation process, and we'll never hear about the "controversial" budget reconciliation process again.

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Is Representative Eric Massa a "salty old sailor," or is he a sci-fi loving dork? These are the questions being raised today after he provided an explanation for the "sexual harassment" charge that cropped up in the wake of his retirement. The incident in question occurred at a wedding party, at which Massa danced with the bride and one of the bridesmaids. Afterwards, Massa was cooling his heels with some of his staff. Per Roll Call, here's how he explained the incident that's garnered so much attention:

"One of them looked at me and as they would do after, I don't know, 15 gin and tonics, and goodness only knows how many bottles of champagne, a staff member made an intonation to me that maybe I should be chasing after the bridesmaid and his points were clear and his words were far more colorful than that. And I grabbed the staff member sitting next to me and said, 'Well, what I really ought to be doing is fracking you.' And then [I] tossled the guy's hair and left, went to my room, because I knew the party was getting to a point where it wasn't right for me to be there. Now was that inappropriate of me? Absolutely. Am I guilty? Yes."

To my mind, there's no way in the world that Massa didn't just simply use the word "fucking" -- but the pop-cultural nexus between politics and science fiction being as strong as it is (see UPDATE, below), there's no reason not to enjoy it.

Many have already made note of the way the rebooted "Battlestar Galactica" stoked a revival of the f-word variant. I object to the notion, however, that the popular show about Cylons and the enduring universal mysticism of various Bob Dylan songs invented the term. First off, as someone whose mother forbade the use of "salty old sailorisms" in the house, "frack" (along with "frick" and "frig") were semi-acceptable variants that did not get me in as much trouble.

Additionally, the latter-day "Battlestar Galactica", in championing the near-constant use of the word "frack," did so as a shout-out to the original series, created by Glen Larson:

It was Larson who first used the faux curse word "frak" in the original "Battlestar Galactica." The word was mostly overlooked back in the '70s series but is working its way into popular vocabulary as SciFi's modern update winds down production.

"All joking aside, say what you will about what you might call the lowbrow nature of many of his shows, he did something truly amazing and subversive, up there with what Steven Bochco gets credit for, with 'frak,"' Goldberg said.

There's no question what the word stands for and it's used gleefully, as many as 20 times in some episodes.

"And he was saying it 30 years ago in the original goofy, god-awful 'Battlestar Galactica,"' said [Lee] Goldberg, a television writer and novelist whose credits include "Monk" and "Diagnosis Murder."

Larson says that "it may have been the great George Carlin" who got him thinking about vulgar variants. In addition to "frack," Larson employed the word "feldergarb" in the original series, which was meant to be a "family friendly" sci-fi lark. It's important to note that the rebooted series eventually settled on the spelling "frak," because it was important to the writers that the word be a "four-letter" word.

"Fracking" also refers to "hydraulic fracturing," a technique by which natural gas is extracted from the earth by "injecting a million gallons or more of water and chemicals deep underground." The process was apparently "pioneered" by Halliburton, so, if you want to say that Halliburton "fracked up the entire planet," that is technically accurate.

Of course, when it comes to ornate science-fiction swearing, no show did it better than Joss Whedon's "Firefly", whose renegade libertarian space cowboys freely deployed a massive amount of pidgin Chinese phrases in their daily lives. Most "Firefly" viewers probably had no idea that the characters were saying things like "you stupid, inbred sack of meat" or "the explosive diarrhea of an elephant" or "baboon's ass-crack" or "Holy testicle Tuesday" until the Internet helped them understand.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that another of Massa's phrases -- "Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil's spawn" -- was originally said on "Firefly". Even if it wasn't, it would surely sound pretty awesome spoken aloud, in angry Chinese.

UPDATE: Over at GQ, Ana Marie Cox has provided a Venn Diagram explaining how the nexus between all the various pop-cultural forces that are at work in Washington, DC are interlinked with one another.

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Here's Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), pretending that the Founding Fathers did things that they did not do -- except in Judd Gregg's mind.

Why did they choose that bill called reconciliation to do this? Or why will they? Because under the Senate rules, anything that comes across the floor of the Senate requires 60 votes to pass. It's called the filibuster. That's the way the Senate was structured. The Senate was structured to be the place where bills which rushed through the House because they have a lot of rules that limit debate and allow people to pass bills quickly, but they don't have any rule in the House called the filibuster which allows people to slow things down.

The Founding Fathers realized when they structured this they wanted checks and balances. They didn't want things rushed through. They saw the parliamentary system. They knew it didn't work. So they set up the place, as George Washington described it, where you take the hot coffee out of the cup and you pour it into the saucer and you let it cool a little bit and you let people look at it and make sure it's done correctly. That's why we have the 60-vote situation over here in the Senate to require that things get full consideration.

But, as Matt Yglesias points out, this is all wrong: "It's true that the Founding Fathers wanted checks and balances, but this is why we have bicameralism and presidential veto power. Those are the checks. The filibuster rule is not in the Constitution."

Once again, I'll play the Look What I Can Find On The Google In Under A Minute game:

In the House of Representatives, the filibuster (the right to unlimited debate) was used until 1842, when a permanent rule limited the duration of debate. The disappearing quorum was a tactic used by the minority until an 1890 rule eliminated it. As the membership of the House grew much larger than the Senate, the House has acted earlier to control floor debate and the delay and blocking of floor votes.

In 1789, the first U.S. Senate adopted rules allowing the Senate "to move the previous question," ending debate and proceeding to a vote. Aaron Burr argued that the motion regarding the previous question was redundant, had only been exercised once in the preceding four years, and should be eliminated. In 1806, the Senate agreed, recodifying its rules, and thus the potential for a filibuster sprang into being. Because the Senate created no alternative mechanism for terminating debate, the filibuster became an option for delay and blocking of floor votes.

The filibuster remained a solely theoretical option until the late 1830s. The first Senate filibuster occurred in 1837.

Pay special attention to that first paragraph. The Senate could not have been "structured to be the place" where bills that were rushed through the House got slowed down, because the rules which sped things up in the House didn't exist until 1842. Not only is Gregg just wrong about when and how the filibuster came about, his entire premise about the relationship of the House and Senate and cups and saucers and how the Founding Fathers set everything up is, as they say, bullshit.

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In today's Washington Post, Anne Kornblut and Peter Finn provide readers with the long-form speculation that the Obama administration is close to reversing its decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court and will instead recommend that the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind be prosecuted in a military tribunal.

Good news for fans of timidity and ineffective quasi-judicial grab-ass. Bad news for fans of the rule of law -- as well as everyone who's taken pains to point out to President Barack Obama that compromising with his fear-mongering political opponents isn't gaining him anything.

But it's the vain pursuit of some across-the-aisle "atta boy" that's fueling this decision:

Top Obama advisers have been negotiating with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) -- a vocal critic of trying the Sept. 11 suspects in civilian court -- in pursuit of a deal that would secure his help in closing Guantanamo. Graham has sought the creation a legal framework that would spell out how the government would detain and try future captives, but an administration official warned that a "grand bargain" is not likely in the immediate future. The official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the talks with Graham have been mostly about "limited issues" involving the Mohammed trial and the future of Guantanamo.

I can't even begin to fathom where anyone got the idea that Lindsey Graham was some sort of vote-marshaling force. As a test case, let's consider the fact that Graham's influence wasn't sufficient to talk his two BFFs -- Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) -- out of introducing the Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2010, which would bar anyone deemed an "enemy combatant" from participating in the legal system.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an Air Force Reserves Judge Advocate General, told Fox he usually "understands what John and Joe are trying to do," but he added, "I just don't feel comfortable with it. There is a role for the civilian courts to play."

But nobody listens to Lindsey Graham, other than the Obama White House, which is apparently not clued in to the fact that nobody listens to Lindsey Graham.

One could write a thousand words about where this places the White House, in terms of the poor decision it seems poised to make, but these 98 from Spencer Ackerman will do quite nicely:

The Cheneyite right has spent the last couple days accusing members of the Justice Department of being al-Qaeda sympathizers for the crime of lawyering in the tradition of John Adams. This will only intensify if Obama backs down on KSM. It will not stop. Here is a test case for the administration: both the politics and the substance of the situation favor continuing with the KSM criminal trial; backing down will create a cascading effect in which the GOP knows it can obstruct Obama and it can bend him, but Obama will simply not fight for his priorities.

Or, if you prefer the version that will fit on a T-shirt: "His compromises earn him no good will. He is being, simply, punked."

The only thing I'd add is that it's fair to see all of this as a battle between White House legal advisers and White House political advisers. And the White House political advisers clearly aren't worth a good goddamn.

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On the matter of "Don't Ask Don't Tell," Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) once promised that he would listen to "leaders in the military," telling people that the "day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, Senator, we ought to change the policy, then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it." But when those military leaders came to him and told him it was time to change the policy, McCain retreated from his previous pledge, because it turns out he gets to pick and choose which military leaders he gets to heed.

And in this case, McCain has chosen the signatories of a letter signed by "over a thousand retired and flag general officers," among other folks. But, as noted by Amanada Terkel, that letter turns out to be something of an exercise in ghost whispering:

...a new Servicemembers United report obtained in advance by DC Agenda severely undermines the legitimacy of this letter. Some of the problems:

- The average age of the officers is 74. The "oldest living signer is 98, and several signers died in the time since the document was published." Servicemembers United Executive Director Alex Nicholson added that only "a small fraction of these officers have even served in the military during the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' period, much less in the 21st century military," so it's hard to believe that they "know how accepting and tolerant 18- and 21-year-olds are today."

- "At least one signer, Gen. Louis Menetrey, was deceased when the letter was published and didn't sign the document himself. According to a footnote on the letter, his wife signed the document for him after his death using power of attorney -- six years after Alzheimer's disease robbed him of the ability to communicate."

Additionally, there's the little problem of those living signatories who "never agreed" to sign the letter, as well as a handful who have some remarkably backward views on the world in which we live, such as this guy.

Anyway, for his next trick, John McCain will produce an 1876 letter from General George Armstrong Custer that reads, "No, no, don't worry, I can totally take these guys!"

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CJR's Ryan Chittum posts this great video of CNBC anchor-droids just straight up losing their minds the moment Janet Tavakoli, president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, dares to suggest that predatory lending ever existed on the Planet Earth.

Tavakoli even moderates her comment, telling the other CNBC boxes that there is "plenty of blame to go around" in the housing crisis, but no matter! As soon as she reports that people "were preyed upon," Larry Kudlow and Melissa Francis just go nuts, pretending as if the entire lending industry was not "set up to be more profitable when loans fail." And check out Tavakoli's blog, in which she brilliantly dissects the absurdity of her co-panelists' arguments on the show.

WATCH:

Chittum goes to Francis's back catalog and makes a hilarious pull:

Francis used to be on Little House on the Prairie and I wondered if that moralizing show had any lessons on banking for us. Sure enough, this from Episode 43:

Charles approaches the banker for a loan so he can buy a "new" set of dishes for Caroline. The banker declines because Charles does not have the collateral to back up the loan, so Charles goes to work for the woman who is selling the dishes and trades his labor for the china.

Lesson: Taking on debt for a want is almost never a good idea. The banker asks if this loan is for a need or a want. When Charles is forced to admit that here (sic) merely wants the dishes, the banker tells him that borrowing money for non-necessities is not a good idea and that he's doing Charles a favor by declining the loan.

Needless to say, this is the antithesis of what lending was like in the bubble.... Presumably, Francis thinks Angelo Mozilo's Countrywide settled a predatory-lending lawsuit against it for $8.7 billion because it just wanted to get on with business, not because it actually preyed on consumers.

Clinic time. Let's all peep this November 4, 2009 article from our own Arthur Delaney, entitled, "This Loan Is An Example Of What Went Wrong In America".

Last December, Virginia Naill learned that the monthly mortgage payment for her three-bedroom home on Ordinary Road in tiny Mineral, Va., would jump by hundreds of dollars.

"I started crying," she said, "'Oh no, what did I do?'"

In 2006, it turned out, she'd unwittingly gotten herself into an adjustable-rate mortgage with a two-year teaser rate. As a result, in December, the interest rate shot up from 7.5 percent to just over 10.1 percent, and the monthly payment on her $280,000 loan went from $1,800 to more than $2,300. She and her husband didn't know how they were going to pay it.

Naill, 50, thought she'd refinanced into a fixed-rate mortgage. Back in 2006, that's what she'd told the broker she wanted.

But she signed the documents that were put in front of her, and what she got was a case study in irresponsible lending -- a debt trap that even the broker has admitted was based on a fraudulent application.

Emphasis mine, because, puh-leez -- the predators will attest to the predation, when you finally drag the truth out of them.

Barry Ritholtz, who originally flagged this CNBC segment over at The Big Picture, comments: "It's a contest to demonstrate who knows the least about lending and legal fraud." Too right! At one point, Kudlow yammers that, "As far as I know, there's a government resolution authority -- A GOVERNMENT RESOLUTION AUTHORITY -- funded by four trillion dollars in the House bill." He just doesn't know what he is talking about!

During floor debate in December, Rep. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) railed against a "a permanent, TARP-like bailout authority." Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.) said, "For the first time in history, Congress is authorizing perpetual bailout authority." Said Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), "Rather than ending the bailouts, this legislation institutionalizes them." And so on.

But it's just not true. The bill does set up a large fund, but the money is to be used to take big banks apart if necessary, not keep them propped up.

The bill gives the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation new authority to dismantle failed financial institutions that pose a systemic risk to the rest of the system, a process that would be paid for with a $150 billion "dissolution fund." The money would come from fees paid by those companies that are so large that their uncontrolled failure could tank the economy. The bill requires any taxpayer money to be paid back to the Treasury before creditors see a dime. It requires unsecured creditors to take a loss, and the FDIC is required to ensure board members and management "responsible for the failed condition of the covered financial company [are] removed."

The bill does allow the dissolution fund to borrow up to $150 billion from the Treasury, and more if it can get congressional approval. So taxpayer money could be used -- but to wind down a failed institution, not bail it out.

The "$4 trillion" Kudlow is referring to is the cap on lending by the Federal Reserve in the event of a "liquidity crisis." That's a big number, to be sure, and it's perfectly fair to fear that it's setting up another "Too Big To Fail" bailout. However, FUN FACT: the Fed has never had a cap on this sort of lending before.

We need some education! And, hey, if you watch the video, you'll catch Rick Santelli suggesting that people should be forced to take financial literacy classes! This lot would be prime candidates for such a program, obviously. Still, I'm curious as to how these financial literacy classes will be paid for and implemented (as Chittum remarks, Santelli's solution is "odd for an Ayn Rand fan").

Know what, though? This is all beside the point -- the entire lending industry is based on exploiting financial illiteracy to maximize profits. And, as Delaney's example shows, when a little bit of financial literacy enters the discussion, the lenders lie, cheat, deceive, obfuscate, inveigle, and swindle.

Read Arthur's article! There's your financial literacy class, for free! And cross your fingers that CNBC will revert to being the Canadian National Broadcaster Of Curling.

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
"This Loan Is An Example Of What Went Wrong In America"
The Myth Of The 'Permanent Bailout Fund'

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Yesterday, Politico's Ben Smith published a story about a RNC fundraising presentation that broadly outlined the RNC's plan to raise funds through appeals based primarily in deranged fearmongering over conspiracy theories about creeping, Obama-driven "socialist" tyranny. (And also, through the sale of of "tchochkes," raising the specter that this fearmongering will soon consume Etsy.)

The revelation, which got wide play, put the RNC on the defensive, with Smith reporting that the organization "reacted with alarm" and immediately sought to put RNC Chair Michael Steele at arm's length from the presentation. Per Smith:

"The document was used for a fundraising presentation Chairman Steele did not attend, nor had he seen the document," RNC Communications Director Doug Heye said in an email. "Fundraising documents are often controversial.

"Obviously, the Chairman disagrees with the language and finds the use of such imagery to be unacceptable. It will not be used by the Republican National Committee - in any capacity - in the future," Heye said.

But as embarrassing as this whole episode has been for the RNC, consider how all the people who provided quotes for a story in Politico two days before -- entitled, "Conservatives target their own fringe" -- must feel:

After months of struggling to harness the energy of newly engaged tea party activists, the conservative establishment -- with critical midterm congressional elections on the horizon -- is taking aim for the first time at the movement's extremist elements.

Here's former American Majority president Ned Ryun:

"I don't believe we should be giving [extremists] a platform or empowering them to do anything based off their conspiracy theories," said Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, "because they give the left ammunition to try to define the tea party movement as crazy and fringy."

RedState's Erick Erickson:

The attempt "to clean up our own house," as Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog RedState, puts it, is necessary "because traditional press outlets have decided to spotlight these fringe elements that get attracted to the movement, and focus on them as if they're a large part of this tea party movement. And I don't think they are."

And, from a Washington Post editorial quoted in the article, here's former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson:

But the birthers and Birchers, militias and nativists, racists and conspiracy theorists do exist. Some, having waited decades in deserved obscurity, hope to ride a populist movement like remoras. But there are others, new to political engagement, who have found paranoia and anger intoxicating. They watch Glenn Beck rail against the omnipresent threat of Saul Alinsky, read Ayn Rand's elevation of egotism and contempt for the weak, listen to Ron Paul attacking the Federal Reserve cabal, and suddenly their resentments become ordered into a theory. Such theories, in politics, can act like a drug, causing addiction, euphoria and psychedelic departures from reality.

Such sentiments are all for the good, and we've seen similar efforts to disentangle the larger conservative establishment from the lunatic, conspiracy-minded fringe -- see David Frum and John Henke, who took on WorldNetDaily over its trafficking in paranoid nonsense. At the time, the RNC had not severed ties with WorldNetDaily, and this fundraising presentation demonstrates that -- far from distancing itself from its fringe -- the conservative establishment is perfectly content co-opting its brand of paranoid nuttery to raise money.

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Here's something fun you can do with the YouTube Time Machine today! You can go back to January 23rd of this year and watch MSNBC's Chris Matthews being hysterically wrong about the Democrats' strategy to use budget reconciliation to pass health care reform!

In an extended argument with Representative Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), Matthews has himself a jolly good time misunderstanding some basic legislative history and being bizarrely apoplectic in his insistence that health care reform could get done at all. One of the extant issues here is that Matthews operates under the assumption that the road ahead consists of passing the entire health care reform bill through budget reconciliation.

In fact, what is planned is for the House to pass the current Senate bill and send it to the president's desk for his signature, after legislators have secured promises that the Senate will take up specific "fixes" to the bill in the budget reconciliation process.

WATCH:

At about three minutes in, Grayson tries to explain this to Matthews, but Matthews is already on to the next spasm, insisting that programs cannot be created through reconciliation. Grayson doesn't have an answer at the ready, but Matthews is wrong, all the same: the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, passed through reconciliation, created a program called the State Children's Health Insurance Program and a program called Medicare Advantage. (This, and other factoids Matthews should have had at the ready, are included in annotations of the above video.)

The Federal Direct Loan program of 1993, was also created through budget reconciliation. Facts!

What's particularly amazing is that Matthews is just so dead certain that he's right in his insistence that no U.S. Senator is going to dare use the reconciliation process. "You want to bet?" he asks Grayson. Grayson should have taken the bet, because Matthews's predictions are 100% incorrect, and based more in his fundamental, faddish belief that Grayson is just some Avatar of "netroots talk."

Grayson gives him adequate warning! "You are wrong. This is something that we talk about in our leadership, in our caucus meetings every week!" Matthews insists that his own dusty memories of knocking around the halls of power decades ago provide him with an up-to-the-minute insight that's somehow better informed than a guy who is having ongoing meetings with the Democratic Congressional leadership. And so for all Matthews' talk that Grayson is "pandering to the netroots," what's more evident is that Matthews is pandering to establishment delusions, and the voices that skitter around like palsied banshees inside his dome.

Grayson gets one thing wrong -- Congress did not pull off passing the bill within 30 days of his "Hardball" hit. But here we are all the same, with Democrats poised to do the very thing Matthews says they'll never even consider. Matthews should basically go on the air tonight and tell his viewers that he was hopelessly, idiotically wrong. And if you ever find yourself being offered a wager by Chris Matthews, bet the house!

UPDATE: Our own Ryan Grim caught up with Representative Grayson, and asked about the January tete-a-tete with Matthews. Grayson said: "Somebody timed it and found that he never let me speak for more than four seconds without interrupting me. Well, look, I understand his point: I'm a member of Congress and he reads words from a teleprompter. So who's more likely to know about congressional procedure? When it [the reconciliation effort] actually does happen maybe he'll have something of his own to say."

As far as Matthews offering to bet Grayson goes, Grayson recalled Matthews wagering as something "like a 7 year old would say."

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