Henry Waxman is taking the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee away from John Dingell, and the leftie blogosphere is happy. Greg Sargent and Eric Kleefeld are calling it a “Big Win For Liberals.” Matt Yglesias says, “Let the experimentation with socialism begin.” Heh.
Monthly Archives: November 2008
The God Gap, Revisited
For the past few years we’ve been subjected to Amy Sullivan’s admonitions about the Democratic Party’s “God Gap” and how liberals need to learn to talk about religion as glibly as conservatives do.
Well, look who’s got a God problem now. Kathleen Parker writes in today’s Washington Post —
As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.
Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.
I’m bathing in holy water as I type.
To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.
Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.
“Intelligentsia” being party elites, at the heart of which are “professional conservatives [who] are lifelong Washingtonians who live comfortably as organization heads, lobbyists and publicists,” per David Brooks. This group is neither more nor less Christian than any other random segment of America, and if put on the spot to talk publicly about religion I doubt they’d be any more successful than was Howard Dean.
Parker gets better —
Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows.
Is she saying that evangelicals are “lowbrows”? And how do we spell “elitist”? K-A-T-H-L-E-E-N P-A-R-K-E-R?
In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.
Here’s the deal, ‘pubbies: Howard Dean was right.
That’s last one’s going to infuriate movement conservatives more than dissing God.
Ronald Reagan found a way to speak to white evangelical voters that touched their deeply ingrained and tangled narratives about religion, patriotism and race at a time when Bible Belt culture was being exported nationwide via Christian television programming. The Republican Party and a new generation of evangelical media stars like Pat Robertson forged a mutually beneficial alliance that was less about God than it was about money and secular power. And it worked for them for a while, at least in large parts of the country (although not the Northeast).
George Bush caught on to the same trick and was able to keep the alliance going. But the times do change, and most of the nation figured out what a clown Bush is. I also think the Terri Shiavo episode clarified the religion matter, so to speak, for a lot of people.
Social-Christian conservatives might argue that it’s their party, too, and maybe it was the neocons who really screwed the pooch. Or the small-government, deregulation uber alles conservatives who wore out their welcome. And I say there’s plenty of blame to go around.
Pass the popcorn. And tell Amy Sullivan to find a new issue.
The Hole Gets Deeper, the Faithful Keep Digging
I don’t know that the Right has entirely given up their “it’s still a center-right nation” argument, but lately another talking point is elbowing its way to the center of the rightie attention span. The new argument is that it was the Republican Party that voters rejected, not conservatism.
E.J. Dionne has a slightly different take on this. He notes that McCain picked a right-wing running mate and ran a classically “conservative” campaign against Obama. Yet he got clobbered on election day. Dionne continues,
Note that I have been using the word “conservative,” not “Republican.” This is because the Republican Party is now wholly owned by the conservative movement. The new Democratic majority is built in part on voters who once thought of themselves as moderate Republicans but have abandoned the party in large numbers.
In other words, voters rejected the Republican Party because of the extreme conservatism it has come to represent.
Dionne goes on to say that the GOP is splitting between the “ideological” conservatives and the “dispositional” conservatives.
The ideological conservatives hold to a faith linking small government and tax-cutting to extreme social conservatism. That mix is increasingly incoherent and out of step with an electorate that is more diverse and more suburban than ever. Ideological conservatives talk obsessively about returning to the glory days of Ronald Reagan and sometimes drop Sarah Palin’s name as a talisman.
Dispositional conservatives have leanings and affections but not an ideology. They have had enough with rigid litmus tests, free-market bromides irrelevant to the current economic downturn and anti-government rhetoric that bears no relationship to the large government that conservatives would inevitably preside over if they took power again.
Dionne says, and I agree, that the dispositionals will win out eventually, but not right away. In the short term, the ideologicals will still be in control and calling the shots. The GOP hasn’t yet stopped digging the hole it’s in.
Shifting gears just a bit — a few days ago, Dionne wrote another column in which he expressed hope that the Obama administration will help the nation find common ground on abortion.
“There surely is some common ground,” Obama declared toward the end of the third presidential debate.
He argued that “those who believe in choice and those who are opposed to abortion can come together and say, ‘We should try to prevent unintended pregnancies by providing appropriate education to our youth, communicating that sexuality is sacred and that they should not be engaged in cavalier activity, and providing options for adoption, and helping single mothers if they want to choose to keep the baby.’ ” Obama added: “Nobody’s pro-abortion.”
To which I said, yeah, right. Wake me up when it happens. There have been several attempts to create a “common ground” movement going back to the 1980s, and every time it is attempted it quickly falls apart. Essentially, someone on the pro-choice side makes the same speech Obama made in the third debate. And then the anti-choice side proclaims it doesn’t negotiate with baby-killers. End of attempt.
But today I read at Washingtonpost.com that some on the anti-reproductive rights side are waving a white flag and expressing a willingness to talk. Jacqueline L. Salmon writes,
Frustrated by the failure to overturn Roe v. Wade, a growing number of antiabortion pastors, conservative academics and activists are setting aside efforts to outlaw abortion and instead are focusing on building social programs and developing other assistance for pregnant women to reduce the number of abortions.
Some of the activists are actually working with abortion rights advocates to push for legislation in Congress that would provide pregnant women with health care, child care and money for education — services that could encourage them to continue their pregnancies.
The day after the election I explained why I believe abortion is done as a national issue. That doesn’t mean we won’t still be hearing about it on a national level, and in some regions of the country it still has some clout. But the last election revealed that opposition to abortion has no power whatsoever to swing a national election. If anything, I believe their rigid anti-reproduction rights position cost the GOP quite a bit.
The hard core of the anti-reproduction rights movement is unmoved, of course.
“It’s a sellout, as far as we are concerned,” said Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League. “We don’t think it’s really genuine. You don’t have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions.”
Tons of data collected around the world over many years reveal that there is one sure way to reduce abortion — increase the use of contraception. From Alan Guttmacher:
Publicly funded family planning clinic services already enable U.S. women to prevent 1.4 million unintended pregnancies each year, an estimated 600,000 of which would end in abortion. Without these services, the annual number of unintended pregnancies and abortions would be nearly 50% higher. Among many other benefits, family planning clinic services also save $4.3 billion in public funds each year.
The irony is that Planned Parenthood may very well prevent more abortions than all of the anti-choice organizations combined.
Anyway, whether pregnancy assistance programs will make any measurable difference in abortion rates remains to be seen, but as long as they aren’t coercive, hey — give it a try.
Update: See Steve Benen.
Endangered Species
It occurs to me that the Big Three automakers and the Republican Party have a lot in common. Essentially, both institutions have been run by a cadre of the shortsighted and insulated who believed they had all the answers and didn’t have to change with the times.
Jonathan Martin writes at The Politico that the GOP is split between the Old Guard, who thinks the past two elections were just a speed bump, no course correction needed; and the new guys, who are scared stiff and want an overhaul.
Haley Barbour, definitely an Old Guard type, had some interesting things to say.
Barbour, speaking on a panel session at the Republican Governor’s Association meeting in Miami devoted to sifting through this year’s electoral destruction, recalled serving as executive director of his state party in the aftermath of President Nixon’s resignation, when Democrats elected 49 “Watergate Babies†to the House in 1974.
It got so bad, Barbour recalled, that there was a task force set up to consider whether Republicans should change their name.
It’s true that the GOP took a beating in the 1974 midterms, post-Watergate. In 1976 the Dems took back the White House, but in an election much closer than the one we just had. In 1976 the Dems gained only one seat in the House, and although some Senate seats changed from one party to the other, the balance in the Senate remained the same as before.
So, for the Republicans, 2006 and 2008 put together were worse than 1974 and 1976 put together.
And the Republican brand wasn’t nearly as damaged after Watergate as it is now, IMO. Because during the Watergate crisis we all saw Republicans who kept their heads, acknowledged that Nixon was off the wall, and put aside partisanship for the good of the country.
Sure, the Republican Party protected Nixon for a while, until it became obvious he really had abused the power of his office and that the facts were going to come out sooner or later. But then most Republicans did something you hardly ever see Republicans doing today — the honorable thing. Millions of Americans watched at least part of the Watergate hearings on television, and those Americans saw Republicans in the Senate and House asking tough questions of the administration. There was not the solid wall of spin, lies, smears and double-talk the GOP puts up around its own today.
If anything, the 1974 and 1976 elections were an artificial boost for the Dems. The Dem Party was still hemorrhaging white voters because of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Watergate created a unique circumstance that only temporarily slowed the ascendancy of Republicans.
Today’s Old Guard Republicans think that their recent losses came about because of unique circumstances. If we stay the course, basically keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll come out of this OK, they say. Jonathan Martin continues,
As for this year, Barbour argued there was a way to defeat Obama—by rendering him unacceptable to American voters.
“And the McCain campaign did not choose to try to make that argument,†he observed.
Somebody explain to me what other argument the McCain campaign did choose to make. I must have missed it.
RNC Chairman Mike Duncan, who has worked at the highest levels of Kentucky and national Republican politics for decades, expressed optimism about the GOP’s prospects for the 2010 mid-term elections, suggesting the GOP losses this year were a result of a toxic stew very much unique to the cycle.
“The mood of the country is what was bad in this campaign,†Duncan said in an interview at the governor’s meeting. “It was 90-10 wrong track, you had the war, we had the economy going south on us, we had the third-term curse, all those things.â€
What it was not, he insisted—offering post-election polling that showed voters still supported right-leaning positions, just not McCain, to make his case—was a rejection of the party’s conservative philosophy.
“If you look at the American electorate, and where they stand and what they believe—we’re in good shape.â€
I keep reading just the opposite is true; that nearly every demographic and opinion trend is moving away from the GOP. See also Billmon, “Tomorrow Belongs to We.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is in the Young Upstart GOP faction.
“We cannot be a majority governing party when we essentially cannot compete in the northeast; we are losing our ability to compete in the Great Lakes states, we cannot compete on the west coast,†Pawlenty argued, also citing similar problems in the mid-Atlantic and interior west. “Similarly, we cannot compete and prevail as a majority governing party when we have a significant deficit as we do with woman, where we have a large deficit with Hispanics, where we have a large deficit with African-American voters, where we have a large deficit with people of modest incomes.†…
… Later, talking to reporters, Pawlenty put it more plainly: “The Republican Party is going to need more than just a comb-over.â€
Comb-over. Heh. But according to Martin, even the Young Upstarts aren’t calling for an ideological shift. They just think the party ought to actually address real problems. Expect the 2012 election to be held in a tar pit.
The Deadly Democrats
David Ignatius’s column today explains jihadists’ reactions to the Obama election.
Before the election, the radical Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradhawi even issued a fatwa supporting John McCain: “Personally, I would prefer for the Republican candidate, McCain, to be elected. This is because I prefer the obvious enemy who does not hypocritically [conceal] his hostility toward you . . . to the enemy who wears a mask [of friendliness].”
Obama makes the jihadists nervous because he is an appealing new face whose ascension undermines the belief that Islam and the West are locked in an inescapable clash of civilizations. “The Democrats kill you slowly without you noticing it. . . . They are like a snake whose touch is not felt until its poison enters your body,” observes Qaradhawi.
Maybe the “like a snake” line was published before, but I didn’t see it. Although even I think Qaradhawi gives the Dems too much credit, it paints an interesting picture: The Dems are cunning and subtle; Republicans are hotheaded fools who react with their emotions instead of their brains.
The real danger of Islamic terrorism, which the war hawk Right is too foolish to see, is not what they can do to us. It’s what they can provoke us into doing to ourselves.
“Even in the Arab world, Obama is very popular,” explains Jean-Pierre Filiu, a French scholar of Islam. “The global jihadists leaned toward McCain because they hoped the confrontation would get worse.”
Four more years of Bush was just what they wanted, and they didn’t get it. On the other hand, the financial crisis is cheering them considerably. Part of Osama bin Laden’s original plan was to lure us into an expensive war in the Middle East that would topple our economy, remember.
Filiu says that among radical Muslims, there is a growing belief that we are entering an apocalyptic “Battle of the End of Time” foretold in a famous saying of the prophet Muhammad. This hadith predicted that the climax would come in the land known as Khorasan, which today includes Afghanistan, the tribal areas of Pakistan and parts of Iran. Filiu has gathered evidence of this Muslim eschatology in a new book called “L’Apocalypse dans l’Islam,” which will be published soon in English.
Maybe they and the extremist Christian fundies can build an apocalyptic theme park where they can act out their fantasies without killing the rest of us.
Unrelated, but a good read: Tod Lindberg, “The Center-Right Nation Exits Stage Left.” And Frank Rich is a hoot today.
Speaking of Meatheads
President Bush’s recent speech on “The Surest Path Back to Prosperity” — the magical free markets, of course — amounts to some of the best stand-up comedy I’ve seen in a long time.
But look — meathead corporate executives, meet nerds — long-time net neutrality advocates are preparing to take the telecoms in hand. It’s good to win elections.
Auto Bailout
There appears to be general agreement across the political spectrum that the Big Three automakers are going bankrupt because their CEOs have made many really, really bad choices over the years. Joseph Romm has an article at Salon about this. Here is just a bit:
When I was at the Department of Energy in the 1990s, we partnered with G.M., Ford and Chrysler to speed the technological development of hybrid gasoline-electric cars, given that increased fuel efficiency and advanced hybrids vehicles were (and remain) clearly the best hope for cutting vehicle greenhouse gas emissions and ending our oil addiction. This partnership was an informal deal between the Clinton administration and the car companies. We did not pursue fuel economy standards and the car companies promised to develop a triple-efficiency car (80 miles per gallon) by 2004.
In one of the major blunders in automotive history, G.M. and Ford and Chyrsler walked away from hybrids as soon as they could when the Bush administration came in — and after taxpayers had spent over $1 billion on the program. Ironically, the main result of our government-industry partnership (which had excluded foreign automakers) was to motivate the Japanese car companies to develop and introduce their own hybrids.
Detroit also spent millions of dollars lobbying against increased fuel economy standards — “suicidally lobbying against its own inescapable future,” as Romm puts it. Of course, the Big Three were encouraged to fight fuel economy standards by the Right, which for years has crusaded against CAFE standards as an example of socialism
What I want to know is, if the Free Market is so all-fired miraculous, how did such a pack of meatheads rise to the top of the auto industry?
(Actually, I know the answer to that, and I think anyone who has ever spent much time in big corporations does, also. Most corporations don’t reward competence as much as they reward aggression. Every corporate big shot I have ever met has been an alpha-on-steroids type who cannot live with himself unless he’s led three frontal assaults, so to speak, before breakfast. Those of us who don’t have testosterone running out of our ears don’t have a chance to climb very high on the corporate ladder, no matter how good and how smart we are.
I figure this phenomenon is some vestigial social behavior left over from our early cave dwelling ancestors. We’re wired to defer to the big guy who presents himself as the biggest badass in the tribe. See also Matt Yglesias, “Confidence Men.”)
Where was I? Oh, yes … a lot of right-wingers now are blaming unions for the auto industry’s problems. If those greedy workers didn’t insist on being paid a living wage and decent health benefits, the saying goes, everything would be hunky dory. I don’t think unions are above criticism, but frankly, without them we’d have a sickly and underpaid workforce. And if paychecks are so squeezed no one has disposable income, who’s going to buy stuff?
The damnfool CEOs can’t add two and two together to make four half the time. They are idiot savants, of a sort. They know how to game the system for their own benefit, but the world outside of their narrow self-interests is a blur to them. They can’t see past the next quarterly earnings reports.
If the CEOs weren’t such meatheads, for the past twenty years they would have been at the forefront of getting national health care, to get health insurance costs off their backs. Why haven’t they done that? Because they are meatheads.
That said — I understand that allowing the Big Three automakers to fail would set off a chain reaction of job losses that could lead to as many as three million people losing their jobs.
So what are we going to do?
Josh Marshall argues that letting the auto industry fail is nuts. See also Fester, Publius, and even a couple of guys at Bloomberg. For a lot of reasons explained in the articles linked, if the big automakers went bankrupt they probably could not just reorganize and come back, leaner and meaner. And the loss of the auto industry would have a catastrophic ripple effect on our already wounded economy.
On the other side of the fence are conservatives and “free market” economists who would rather let the Big Three go under than allow any government interference with the Free Market. These are the same people who for years have fought CAFE standards and national health care. In other words, they helped create the problem. Enough said.
There are lots of opinions out there about what should be done. I personally would insist that anyone who has served on the boards of directors or as a CEO for more than a year should be told to go away. No golden parachutes, no bonuses. They can keep the stuff they’ve got, which I’m sure is plenty to tide them over. If they think they have more to offer the auto industry they can damn well get in line and apply for whatever’s available. At the very least, they should have no authority whatsoever on how the money the government gives them is used.
Will workers have to take pay cuts and lose benefits? I keep hearing that it must be so. I’d like to see some provision made for pensions and health insurance, at least. Maybe this is where we start building a real national health care policy.
The auto makers must be forced to face reality and prepare to be competitive in the post-internal combustion engine world. Grants, loans, whatever, lots of strings, performance benchmarks, no excuses.
What’s Happening Now
I’ve been bogged down in Japan (don’t ask) and am just now catching up on today’s news.
There is buzz that Senator Clinton might be named secretary of state. Whatever.
More evidence is emerging that Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman’s corruption conviction was bogus, and that Siegelman in fact is the victim of a political purge. Unlike the first item, above, this is actually significant.
In today’s column, David Brooks writes, in effect, that industry bailouts by Republicans are sensible and necessary, but bailouts by Democrats will put us on the road to “progressive corporatism, a merger of corporate and federal power that will inevitably stifle competition, empower corporate and federal bureaucrats and protect entrenched interests.” Whatever.
Regarding the auto-industry bailout, Brooks actually makes a good point that throwing money at the auto industry is just rewarding incompetence. Absolutely true. I want to go into more detail on this when I have time. For now, I just want to point out that it was mostly the Right that fought to protect the auto industry from having to adopt more fuel-efficient standards. It’s been the Right standing between the nation and universal health care. “Single payer” may or may not be the best way to go with health care, but it would be great for the auto industry.
For another POV, see Naomi Klein.
Jokes Writing Themselves
It’s dark humor, but it’s still humor — first, the headlines:
- 85,000 homes lost to foreclosure in October
- Bailout Lacks Oversight Despite Billions Pledged
- Hard Times, But Big Wall Street Bonuses
- U.S. Jobless Claims Reach Seven-Year High of 516,000
Now, here’s the punch line:
Like, something bad might happen if we do?
Update: Here’s another punch line:
You don’t even need the set-up for that one.
Pardons and Prosecutions
Mark Benjamin writes in Salon that Dubya might issue a blanket pardon for anyone in his administration involved in torture. Meanwhile, advisors to Barack Obama are pushing for a nonpartisan commission to investigate torture in the Bush Administration.
It is said (nothing is official) that the plan is to do painstaking investigation of torture before coming to any conclusions about prosecution. As much as we’d all like to see Dick and Dubya in stocks asap, that’s probably sensible.
But then there’s the blanket pardon thing. Benjamin writes,
Constitutional scholars say a pardon of this kind would be an unprecedented move — the prospective pardon of not just individuals but entire categories of people, perhaps numbering in the thousands, for carrying out the president’s orders , which the White House has argued all along were legal.
Those scholars agree, however, that Article II of the Constitution gives Bush much latitude: There is no authority that can stop the president from doing so if he wishes, and there is no outside check or balance to revisit such a decision, however controversial it may be. “The president can do with pardoning power whatever he wants,” explained University of Wisconsin Law School professor Stanley Kutler. “It is complete and plenary unto itself.”
To complicate matters further, Charlie Savage writes for the New York Times that there is precedent for former presidents to continue to keep matters in their administrations secret. The precedent was set by Harry Truman —
When a Congressional committee subpoenaed Harry S. Truman in 1953, nearly a year after he left office, he made a startling claim: Even though he was no longer president, the Constitution still empowered him to block subpoenas.
“If the doctrine of separation of powers and the independence of the presidency is to have any validity at all, it must be equally applicable to a president after his term of office has expired,†Truman wrote to the committee.
Congress backed down, establishing a precedent suggesting that former presidents wield lingering powers to keep matters from their administration secret. Now, as Congressional Democrats prepare to move forward with investigations of the Bush administration, they wonder whether that claim may be invoked again.
In the years that followed, the precedent has been cited twice — by presidents Nixon and Reagan.
Savage again:
Topics of open investigations include the harsh interrogation of detainees, the prosecution of former Gov. Don Siegelman of Alabama, secret legal memorandums from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and the role of the former White House aides Karl Rove and Harriet E. Miers in the firing of federal prosecutors.
This could take some time.
Speaking of pardons — the Dems seem to be moving toward pardoning Joe Lieberman for his reprehensible behavior during the recent election. I suspect the primary reason for this is mathematics — without a 60-vote majority, the Dems need every possible warm body in Congress on their side. I understand this, even though I don’t especially like it.
I just wish Tweety and the other bobbleheads would stop saying that Lieberman campaigned for McCain on “principle.” There was nothing “principled” about helping the Right spread poison. I don’t know what Lieberman’s problem is, beyond harboring the Godzilla of egos, but an excess of principle doesn’t seem to be holding him back much.
That said, I pretty much agree with Glenn Greenwald when he says —
It is worth remembering that the Democrats who are going to exert dominant political control are the same ones who have provoked so much scorn — rightfully so — over the last several years, and particularly since 2006. This is the same Democratic Party leadership which funded the Iraq War without conditions (and voted to authorize it in the first place); massively expanded the President’s warrantless eavesdropping powers; immunized lawbreaking telecoms; enacted the Patriot Act and then renewed it with virtually no changes; didn’t even bother to mount a filibuster to stop the Military Commissions Act; refrained from pursuing any meaningful investigations of Bush lawbreaking; confirmed every last extremist Bush nominee, from Michael McConnell to Michael Mukasey; acquiesced to even the worst and most lawless Bush policies when they were briefed on them; and on and on and on. None of that has changed. That is still who they are.
It is who they are, which is why we have to stay active and keep pushing for change, or there will be no change.
At the same time, keep in mind that anyone who claims to know what President Obama will or won’t do once he is in office is an idiot. We’ve had one such person in the comments already, and of course Obama haters who pose as liberals — you know who they are — are already writing off his administration.
It’s fair to say that anything one hears in the news now about what the Obama Administration will or will not do on any issue is speculation, including the investigations mentioned at the top of this post. People who are in a position to actually know anything aren’t talking — well, except maybe for Rahm Emanuel. This is standard behavior for a presidential transition. The President-elect should not be running a shadow government while someone else still is president, whether we like him or not.
Reporters are picking up hints and clues and speculation and writing about them as if they were official pronouncements from the President-Elect’s office, and the usual jerks are using these speculations to bash Obama before he’s even taken office. Oh, and if you tell them to get a grip on reality, you must be part of a cult.
I’m all in favor of criticizing Obama or any other politician when criticism is due. However, relentless bashing of anyone for something he hasn’t done and may not even be thinking of doing says more about the basher than the bashee.
Update: While I’m at it, Dear Lambert —
Obama’s fans labored so hard to elect somebody when they didn’t know what he was going to do. The real reason they have to wait, I hazard, is that since they established no policy standards for him in their own minds, they have nothing to hold him accountable for.
Lambert, dear, electing “somebody when they didn’t know what he was going to do” is what Americans have done for every single presidential campaign since Washington. One never really knows what they will do until they do it. This would have been equally true if Hillary Clinton were the president-elect and not Obama. One of the reasons some of us were skeptical of Hillary Clinton during the primaries is that her actual record of accomplishment doesn’t exactly match her claims and promises.
The Obama campaign had exhaustive policy proposals on the campaign web site, so it’s not as if we didn’t know what he proposed. And if he betrays our trust, especially on matters like health care and Iraq, many of us will be bitterly disappointed and will criticize him copiously. However, bashing Obama for things he hasn’t yet done, hasn’t had a chance to do, and has not expressed any intention of doing (see above about what’s appearing in the news), is what we call “pathological.” Get help.