Penultimate Penn

The best response to anything Mark Penn says is probably just always to assume the opposite of whatever he recommends is the right thing to do, the opposite of whatever he sees is the right thing to pay attention to, given his actual track record of failure, tone-deafness, ever-rightward skewing "centrism," capitulationist "bipartisanship" and selling out of Democratic constituencies and politics.

A recent example that has -- for whatever reason -- attracted rather a lot of attention is his concern trolling about Obama's calls to raise taxes the least little bit on the richest of the rich to respond to the incredibly widespread suffering and despair and disaster of America's ongoing unemployment crisis.

Of course, all the polls are on Obama's side on this proposal. And no wonder: everybody knows that the only people who are not suffering right now are the ones who created and profited from the crisis from which everybody else is suffering. That they should pay some price for what the did, that they should pay some fair share in the struggle to get us out of that mess is the minutest imaginable demand of common sense and common decency.

Penn warns, however, that this move will alienate upper class whites and fracture the Democratic coalition and lose Obama the election, saying that "[t]he people who vote on taxes are the people who pay them."

Set aside for the moment the pesky reality that Obama's Republican opponents are all proposing flat taxes and tax simplification schemes and entitlement reform Trojan Horses that impose flabbergasting new tax burdens on the majority of Americans, it seems that Penn's advice would apply far more to Obama's competition than to him, but somehow this doesn't figure into his analysis...

Set aside, too, the fact that even if it is true that the minuscule minority who are being asked to pay a bit more in taxes to save the whole world from catastrophe decide they won't support Obama anymore because of this, again by Penn's own logic, this proposal would lose Obama the support only of a minuscule minority, not a majority nor even a sizable minority...

Set aside, as well, the fact that even those who are taxed a bit more will also benefit (indeed, benefit proportionally more) from a world that doesn't completely collapse economically and become utterly suffused with social unrest and is completely dysfunctional across every institutional layer, and so those who feel so outraged at being asked to contribute a fair share to saving the world of which they are actually a part that they won't vote for the candidate asking this of them, chances are they are so deranged and so stupid and so evil that Democrats should be proud that they don't want anything to do with our Party -- and anyway how many of these assholes aren't voting for Republicans already anyway, honestly?

Set aside even the question of just what it even means logically and ethically as a proposition absolutely and fearfully to reject any suggestion of ever asking anybody to pay more taxes for actually indispensable government functions... set aside pondering what idea of politics a political party that is afraid to ask anybody to pay for what it is seeking office to preside over can possibly coherently have in mind... set aside that this quandary of a party dedicated at one and the same time to holding office while refusing the very concept of holding office honorably or legitimately defines today's Movement Republicanism but is rejected by any Democrat worthy of the name.

No, let us simply ask Mark Penn himself, as one of the few people in the country whose personal fortune makes him somebody who would be asked to contribute a bit more in taxes in order to save the country to which he owes so much, if he himself would not vote for the candidate of his Party because of this enormously popular righteous common sense demand.

Which is it, Mark?

Are you announcing your personal intention to betray the candidate of your own party, to vote for the further looting and lawlessness of anti-civilizational Republicans just so you can have a few more dollar bills in your pocket for a few extra days before everything goes to hell? Why should any Democrat give you the time of day if you declare your indifference to Democratic ideas and even literal candidates?

And if you aren't going to vote against your own Party and your own country for such selfish short-sighted reasons, then isn't your argument self-refuting? Don't you demonstrate that the upper class white segment of the Democratic coalition, such as it is, will not necessarily fragment at all when asked to do what is obviously the right thing? Why should any Democrat give a second's notice to fluttery concerns of yours that fail even to apply as they presumably should to their own author?

Taxes are the price we pay to live in a fairer more consensual more sustainable society, and there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. America is through with lies to the contrary and the liars who tell them to get filthy rich at everybody's expense. It is the job of Democrats to explain that simple idea to each new generation and to implement it ever better in their politics to the benefit of us all.

Mark Penn's declaration of an intention to bite the hand that feeds him or his self-refuting hand-wringing (you decide which it is) should be the next to last thing anybody ever hears from him -- right before his admission of being wrong about everything so that nobody should pay him any more attention from here on out than any other clown with a megaphone or his admission that he has always been a functional traitor to the democratic ideals of the Democratic Party so that nobody should pay him any more attention from here on out than any other snake in the grass.