The poll results, released Tuesday show that 55 percent of respondents think that failing to raise the debt ceiling would be “a real and serious problem,” while only 18 percent said it would not be. This contrasts starkly to results gleaned from a Gallup survey in May, in which 47 percent of people said they would want Congress to vote against raising the debt ceiling.

Meanwhile, support for President Obama’s proposal for lowering the deficit significantly trumps that for Republican proposals: 58 percent of NBC/WSJ poll respondents said they preferred Obama’s suggestions to lower the federal deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years by cutting federal spending, raising tax revenue from the wealthy and reducing some Medicare spending. Contrastingly, only just over a third prefer the House Republican proposal to reduce the deficit by $2.5 trillion over 10 years through cutting spending alone and not raising additional revenues.

The report, titled “From Hired Guns to Hired Hands: ‘Reverse Revolvers’ in the 111th and 112th Congresses,” is available in full here and has a number of noteworthy takeaways:

• 60 former lobbyists worked in critically important staff positions in the 111th Congress, 128 former lobbyists can be found working in the same positions in the 112th Congress.
• The House Energy and Commerce and the House Financial Services committees have the highest cumulative number of former lobbyists employed by their members. The lobbyists of certain companies may be highly desirable to members of Congress serving on committees that handle legislation of concern to these companies. AT&T alone has six former lobbyists who at one point lobbied on behalf of AT&T and now work for senators or representatives sitting on the Senate or House committees related to energy and commerce.
• 50 former finance sector lobbyists work in the 112th Congress, as do 44 former telecommunications sector lobbyists and 40 former healthcare industry lobbyists. Meanwhile, only seven former labor lobbyists occupy these congressional staffer positions.
• Certain companies — particularly telecommunications, healthcare and defense contracting firms — are well-represented in the portfolios of former lobbyists now working on Capitol Hill. CRP notes a particular example involving Lockheed Martin. “Charles Kinney, currently working for Sen. Joe Manchin (D- W.Va.), lobbied on behalf of Lockheed in 2004… Now, Kinney is deputy chief of staff and general counsel for Manchin, who currently sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, as well as the Senate Budget Committee” reads the report. [Update: a representative from Manchin's office informs us that Kinney stopped working for Manchin in May. He was still staffer for the senator at the time of CRP's research]

What does this all mean? As CRP is careful to note, there are numerous reasons why lobbyists might take congressional staffer jobs. “For some people,” the report states, “working in government is exciting, fulfilling work, where the psychic rewards make up for the smaller paycheck. In other cases, people may have lost lobbying jobs due to the poor economy and find the Hill to be a place where their expertise and skills are highly valued.” However, the K Street/Congress revolving door could well spin into concerning territory, as the report concludes:

It may, plausibly, be the case that these individuals are able to keep the wishes of their former clients separate from the wishes of the constituents their bosses represent. But it may also be the case that these former lobbyists are now in the position to exercise considerable sway over everything from policy outcomes to government contract decisions and anti-trust decisions. Particularly where the issues are complicated and do not drive significant constituent interest, former clients of ex-lobbyists now working in Congress could be well placed to reap the rewards of enhanced access and deeper connections into government’s legislative branch.

 

The Washington City Paper noticed a bombshell buried at the bottom of a New York Times piece:

Even before the Qatari investors became involved, Hines and Archstone determined that leasing to banks would not help them create lively shopping streets, Mr. Alsup said. But as it happened, their hesitancy on bank branches meshed with the policies of their financial partners, who adhere to the restrictions of Shariah, or Islamic law, including the ban on collecting interest. Restaurants will be able to serve liquor, but retailers whose primary business involves selling alcohol will not be allowed, Mr. Alsup said.

That’s right: Shariah law, a stone’s throw from the U.S. Capitol. I am assuming the Times just neglected to mention that in addition to banning bars from the complex, all women will be required to wear the niqab, and obviously all infidels will be murdered, while shopping at the Apple store or whatever ends up there. And no dancing!

What’s astounding is that as far as I can see, Matt Drudge hasn’t picked this up. Pamela Geller hasn’t written a lengthy screed about it. Robert Spencer has not weighed in. No one at the Corner has mocked liberals for mocking the threat of creeping Shariah. Get on it, guys! SHARIAH LAW HAS BEEN IMPOSED IN WASHINGTON!

Yes, you’ve guessed it: It’s not a fairy tale, or at least not completely. It’s the United States — an older America that, despite a decidedly checkered and often imperial past, was nevertheless proud of its reluctance to fight, but steadfast in its commitment to win once it decided that battle was the course of action. Even then, this America remained resolute in its reluctance to embrace a military ethos or bow down before military gods, committed as it was to civilian primacy and the avoidance of a large standing army.

Paradoxically, the last vestiges of this America could still be seen some 50 years ago under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a retired five-star general, who tried with varying degrees of success to limit defense spending, and who famously warned in his farewell address in 1961 of the dangers of a surging “military-industrial complex.”

And leaping forward almost four decades, here’s another paradox for you: prior to September 11, 2001, what many leading pundits and commentators fretted most about was an alleged widening gap between American civilians and their now all-volunteer military. In 1997, Wall Street Journal Pentagon correspondent Tom Ricks typically worried about an all-volunteer military that saw civilians as privileged and flabby, increasingly considered itself a breed apart, and held the public it served in contempt.

Concerned as well was Richard Kohn, former chief historian of the U.S. Air Force. In a special lecture to Air Force Academy cadets in 1999 on “the erosion of civilian control of the military in the United States today,” Kohn worried about a military that openly disrespected President Bill Clinton, its commander-in-chief, even as it meddled in areas like policy-making for which it was not suited and from which it had been excluded by the Constitution.

How times have changed. In the post-9/11 world, a far more insidious problem confronts us. That gap, if it ever existed, is no more. Instead, at the highest levels, what’s civilian and what’s military are increasingly difficult to tell apart as the two spheres blur and blend. Today, civilian control of the military is largely a principle without a meaning, while inside Washington’s Beltway, even with a scorecard it’s hard to tell the players apart.

In the process, the military has gained a kind of unspoken and distinctly un-American primacy. Put another way, after a decade-long budgetary feeding frenzy, the Pentagon has soared, while an eclipsed Department of State, all those civilian diplomats, has been left to eke out a living on budgetary scraps or, as in Iraq today, arm and militarize itself. State, in other words, has become a remora clinging to the predatory shark that is the Department of Defense.

Large and small, symbolic or otherwise, signs of this civil-military blending (with the military significantly running the show) can be found almost anywhere you look. Civilian presidents regularly appear in military flight gear or jackets, as George W. Bush famously did before his “Mission Accomplished” speech on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln in 2003 and as President Obama did on a visit to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010. Military leaders are now regularly put in charge of previously civilian intelligence agencies, as in the case of General David Petraeus, now nominated to leave the Afghan battlefield and become director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Civilian agencies now militarize themselves and wage war (as the CIA has done or is doing in various drone wars in the Greater Middle East, often in conjunction with the military). America’s part-time citizen-soldiers have morphed into full-time warriors and warfighters, if not the equivalent of foreign legionnaires. America’s civilian embassies continue to morph into so many militarized fortresses protected by armed mercenaries. And above all, among policy arguments in Washington, whether you’re a civilian official or a military one, the choices are increasingly between militarized alternatives — say, counterinsurgency versus counterterror — with that most civilian of all options, peace, not even on that “table” where officials eternally claim that all options are placed.

At the same time, a new civic religion at whose heart is military-worship implores us to “support our troops” (without any concomitant call to uphold our laws and our Constitution). And even as ordinary Americans express serious doubts about the wisdom and cost of an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan — 64 percent of Americans don’t believe the Afghan war is worth fighting, and 73 percent would prefer sizable withdrawals of U.S. troops this summer, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll — the Pentagon continues to prepare for a future of “two, three, many Afghanistans,” as Michael Klare, defense correspondent for the Nation magazine, noted in April 2010.

Clearly, if we’re not careful, the civilian and military will become the Washington equivalent of Siamese twins, co-joined at the head and, however bitter their internecine arguments, sharing the same underlying militarized thought processes.

Militarism Run Rampant

To separate such twins is a dicey thing, medically speaking, and no less so politically when the lines between civilian and military authority are being so rapidly erased. Make no mistake, as President Obama is wont to say, the impact of this erasure has been devastating.

It’s both sensible and logical to argue that our president and elected representatives must serve as a check on the military establishment, rather than issuing blank checks to them. It’s both sensible and logical to argue that all wars, as required by the Constitution, must have a Congressional declaration before American troops and treasure are committed. It’s both sensible and logical to argue that, as good as our military is, it ultimately can’t win someone else’s civil war (Iraq) or nation-build in a place where the concept of “nation” is little more than notional (Afghanistan).

Sensible and logical, yes, but such arguments have been made — and roundly ignored. They aren’t given the time of day among serious policy types in Washington, where to question the efficacy and legitimacy of the forces and tactics being used is simply not acceptable. Sharing one brain and one ethos means being incapable of grasping one’s own militarized rigidity or truly recognizing the perils that have been unleashed on this nation.

There’s a word for this disease, even if after all these years it remains remarkably foreign to American ears: militarism. When Americans think of that word, they tend to conjure up images of fanatical jackbooted Nazis or suicidal Japanese kamikazes, and so the concept seems eminently dismissible. But militarism also describes a situation in which a country’s civil society and political culture are permeated to the point of dominance by military attitudes and values — an undeniable fact of life, I would argue, in America today.

Militarists see war as productive, as offering solutions rather than posing problems. They see it as heroic. (President Bush famously waxed poetic about the “exciting” and “romantic” nature of fighting in Afghanistan.) When wars are romanticized as action-packed tests of a nation’s warriors, cuts to war spending are naturally seen as perfidiously unpatriotic — as kneecapping those same heroes. Hence our ever-growing “defense” budgets, even as a sledgehammer of a national debt hobbles America’s economic vitality and social security.

The end result of this militaristic mindset is a garrison state, constantly girding itself for national security crises, real or perceived, as in the last decade’s open-ended and frantic “war on terror.”

A singular danger of such a mindset, as pointed out by Laurence Radway in a telling article on “militarism” in the “International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,” is that militarists, unable to select means appropriate to true defense needs, end up jeopardizing the very national security they say they’re seeking to safeguard. By exaggerating threats, defining all responses to those threats in military terms, dismissing dissenters as weak and deluded (even when they prove right), and being incapable of questioning their principles, they repeat the same mistakes again and again.

Until Americans turn away from militarism and learn again how to “support our Constitution” more than our troops (and don’t worry: those troops swear an oath to that very Constitution), until we return to a broader vision of national security that deemphasizes a garrison mentality, we will continue to wound, perhaps mortally, a once great republic.

And that’s no fairy tale, it’s a fact.