The Toxicity of Demagoguery

Even apart from the violence and threats of violence at McCain/Palin rallies, the vandalism at offices of the demonized ACORN, the eliminationist rhetoric spewing from the puke-holes of Limbaugh, Hannity, et. al., we must all say again and again and again that the ugliness of the politics of the last forty years, particularly the last twenty, has real consequences.

Very real consequences.

My parents won't come visit me here in New York City because a spread-the-wealth communist/islamo-fascist/terrorist-loving/elitist celebrity/muslim "fake" christian/inner-city Chicago Harvard-educated thug like Obama will be our next president and they can't bear to visit me in such an "anti-American" part of America where so many people can and do support such a person. The subtext? Such a "negro" person who will "bring back all those problems from back then, after they had been getting so much better these last few years." That is a direct quote.

I wish I was kidding.

When I asked my mother if she thought I was a traitor, she said (after a very long pause) that she thought I was "misguided." Maybe sometime after January 20th, she said, but they were depressed about all of it and scared about what was going to happen when "that person" took office. They probably couldn't bring themselves to visit me even then, and maybe not ever again.

So, in order to garner votes, in addition to all their other crimes, the Republican Party is also guilty of destroying my relationship with my parents.

Sorry for the online therapy session, folks, but politics isn't the mere game the Karl Roves of this world take it to be.

Thusly, I quote driftglass at length to describe what has happened to my parents:

The last lie a junkie tells himself isn't "I’m not an addict."

The last lie a junkie tells himself is "My being a addict doesn't matter."

And in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.

Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.

Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.

And they hated him for it.

Why?

Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?

That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:

“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”

Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.

It is the lie the hagged-out Cokie Roberts pushes week after week after week on “This Week…”

It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.

It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests.

Because these people and thousands more like them are not journalists or “pundits” or expert who offer facts or interpretation or a philosophical framework for illuminating and contextualizing the events of the world.

They are pushers, selling that last, nihilistic lie to the junkies on the Right who will pay any price and cut any throat to escape the fact that they are personally and specifically responsible for the destruction of the country they claimed to love in the name of a God they claim to believe in.

Which is why November 4th is so much more than an election.

November 4th is an Intervention, because the junkie-pusher spiral of the Republican rank-and-file and their leaders has finally hit bottom: we need to heal this country or lose it, and arguing -- "reasoning" -- with wingnuts and their enabling shills and hacks is as pointless as trying to reason with addicts and dealers.

The only way this country is going to be saved is by taking it away from them, school board by school board, city council by city council, congressional district by congressional district, state by state, election by election until they are driven back into the political sewers from whence they came.

My parents are hate junkies and, like any junkie, if you can't save them you have to be willing to cut them out of your life. This has been a long time coming. I didn't name this blog Expatriate Thoughts in a fit of pique. I meant it then and I mean it now.

Another victim of George W. Bush's America.

I am an expatriate.

McCain = Asshole...

...first name not withstanding.

(via the Oxdown Gazette)

Joe McCain (John's brother) called 9-1-1 because he was stuck in traffic. No kidding. And when the operator called him back to tell him not to use emergency services to lodge complaints about traffic but got his voicemail, the asshole called the operator back to bitch about being scolded.

I'm usually not one to hold the behavior of siblings and other relatives against anyone (those of you who know my family will understand why), and especially when it comes to politicians and other celebrities, being that people get weird around money, fame, power and privilege. Family members will begin to think they own a piece of said person, that reflected glory gives them some special status.

This is, of course, bullshit but the victims of it can't be held responsible for the stupidity of uninvited hangers-on.

Nevertheless... heh-heh

Conservatism's creed, simplified

From driftglass:

1. “The common good” is an evil delusion
2. Looking out for "the least of these" is a Socialist plot.
3. Looking out for Number One is next to Godliness.
4. And therefore the rules of courtesy, reciprocity, tolerance and prudence are strictly for suckers.

Coming up for air...

So much has happened. Sorry for the long, looooong pause between posts. Work has started to overwhelm my schedule. No relief in sight, at least for another month+, but I wanted to take the time to make the following observations:

Regarding New Orleans and Hurricane Gustav:

New Orleans is in a geological bowl. Recall that after Karina the water needed to be pumped out because it will never, ever drain on its own. New Orleans is several feet below sea level and that will never get any better since it doesn't rest on "land" as we in the rest of the country understand it. The whole city essentially sits on water-saturated river mud of varying densities and a building will slowly sink under its own weight on that kind of surface, so it only gets worse over time.

Making things worse still is that the Gulf of Mexico is also a gigantic geologic bowl into which the Mississippi River has been pouring sediment for millions of years and thus is itself sinking into the Earth's crust, pulling down the edges of the Gulf with it. Texas has slip faults as far inland as Austin as a result. So the bedrock on which the mud NOLA is sinking into is also itself sinking.

And, third, the Army Corps of Engineers has, since WW2, diked and dammed and leveed the shit out of the river to control flooding, which has had two major negative results: 1.) the protective fresh-water swamps around the city, which soak up storm energy and act as a natural buffer between the salt-water Gulf and the fresh-water inland lakes and streams, are not being replenished with the silt from the Mississippi's once annual floods and thus are eroding at an ever accelerating rate as salt-water from the Gulf kills the fresh-water ecology that maintains the swamp and 2.) the River is dumping silt and sediment farther out into the Gulf than it has ever in geologic history which means it is not replenishing the deep-sea mud "shelf" that shores up the Louisiana coast-line, which also accelerates the erosion process.

As bad as this scenario seems, all of the above assumes everything will simply continue as it always has. If you also factor in Global Climate Change and the accompanying rise in sea level plus the increasing intensity of storms as a result of a warmer ocean, New Orleans doesn't have a prayer. Katrina wasn't The Big One. Katrina was the shot across the bow. It is not a matter of if New Orleans will ever get a direct hit from a Category 5, it is simply a matter of when.

Sadly, I think this jewel of our civic firmament should be abandoned. It was always more of a frontier outpost akin to something on the banks of the Congo or the Amazon than to a proper city anyway - a commercial enterprise that once served a specific economic purpose and now survives simply because it has survived up to now.

Regarding McCain, Gustav & Palin:

I think, as much as it pains me to say it, that McCain and the Rethuglicans are in the right to modify their convention plans. Their reasons for doing it, however, are suspect and deplorable. One, they are doing to it neutralize the baggage the entire GOP establishment carries from the aftermath of Katrina - no "Heckuva job, Brownie" moments this time around. Two, we all know that W will once again allow McSame to step in, act all bossy (like he did a few weeks ago during the Russia/Georgia dust-up) and more or less appear to rubes and nitwits who constitute the bulk of the GOP voting bloc to already be running things as part of that appear-to-be-winning-by-acting-like-a-winner strategy. Also, this is akin in their minds to the idea from any dictatorship (and we know W and the Rethugli-goons do love them some dictatorishness) where the party and the government are seperate, but nevertheless function as one. Think of the Communists in Soviet Russia or the Nazis in WW2 Germany. The government in both cases (and anywhere a country suffers under one-party rule) was kept separate from the party for appearances sake, but was still completely subservient to the dictates of the party.

We're not fully a dictatorship yet in this country, but the police state tactics currently underway in Minnesota (h/t Mr. the Broadway Carl) are in keeping with our slide into fascism. I was in NYC in 2004 for the GOP convention and I remember how much the NYPD, already something of a violent occupying force in this city on a good day, turned into full-riot-gear and machine-guns-and-dogs enforcement mode. This devolution will only accelerate as the actual mechanisms of government and law enforcement are increasingly populated by like-minded people who gleefully and proudly cleave ever tighter to an ever more authoritarian political party. The US Attorney scandal is part of this same seizing of the reigns of power, a politicization of the actual structures of law-enforcement, wherein political opponents are jailed simply for dissent in the name of law & order (Siegelman anyone?), just like a third-world banana republic (which I think they want to turn this country into anyway). This is the country we've become thanks to the thugs, goons, know-nothings and nitwits who constitute America's modern Republican Party

We should henceforce call them Banana Republicans.

In that way, McCain isn't so much a "maverick" really. On the contrary, he's a natural to now take the helm at the GOP. The GOP has been on a relentless march to authoritarian power since the racist Dixiecrats bolted the Democratic party for friendlier territory in Nixonland. One of the weapons in their arsenal during this march has been our collective national memory of the Vietnam War, which they have labored hard to re-shape in the intervening decades, building up a Dolchstoßlegende mythology around it - we could have won, "if only...".

Finally, after all this time, they get a Vietnam vet at the head of their ticket. Not only that, but in fact they get one of the ones who actually believes we could have won that immoral imperial occupation were it not for all the pointy-headed liberals and bleeding-heart war doves and dirty fucking hippies and Jane Fonda, just as the polarizing power of "the Vietnam experience" - when used as a red, white & blue code word to condemn all the purported excesses of the 1960's in the cultural battles of the last four decades - has finally started to fade. Sad, really, and sad that Vietnam vets are getting too old to even seek the job anymore. Just got one in under the wire, I suppose.

Whatever.

Vietnam has been the GOP's cudgel to beat the Democrats into meek submission for 40 fucking years. In so doing, they have successfully shifted the center of gravity in American politics oh-so-slowly to the right, ever more militaristic, authoritarian and plutocratic, to the point that even though our military budget is larger than all the other nations on the planet combined, nobody deemed "serious" in either party would even consider raising the slightest objection to that kind of spending on the machinery of death - if only on fiscal grounds, much less moral. The Dems have let it happen, sure, but the cultural turmoil of the 1960's that so upset the Establishment and the good (white) people of Main Street America and sent the whole herd flailing and fainting into the greasy hands of Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun in the 1980's simply don't matter anymore. The Boomers are dying off and the college campus battles they carried from their youth all the way into retirement are finally dying off with them. It is a new century and the GOP's bullying and beating of anyone to the left of Pinochet stops right here, right now, laid at Johm McSame's mangled feet with a toe-tag marked "I was a POW."

If anyone had any doubt about this dawning of a new age, Obama's speech last week should have sufficed to awaken them. More on that in a moment.

In the meantime, I will make the following prediction: Sarah Palin will drop out before the election. She will get him through the convention, shore up his Dominionist credentials with the drooling Jesus freaks, score him a few free points with the PUMA's on the other side of the aisle, then she will cite family concerns, drop out and go away. The Man Called Petraeus will retire from the Army and join the ticket with McCain sometime in early October. That will be the October Surprise, 2008-style.

Regarding The Speech, Barack Obama and What It All Means:

What can I say that hasn't already been said? Electric. Intergalactic. Dazzling. Wish I'd been there.

It is the most amazing political speech I have ever seen and will likely ever see, even if I live to be 103 (a lady in my building died this weekend at the age of 103, so that number sorta jumped out at me). The tone of the speech generally conveyed the idea that this Democrat is not going to take it from those guys anymore.

I loved it.

I dearly wish he could become our next president, but I don't think the plutocrats will let him have it. America has a way of robbing us of those who really give us sincere hope and no one has lifted our hopes like this since the men cut down by assassin's bullets during those hated 1960's. Remember, Stalin once said that it is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes. This one will be "close" in "key" districts in "key" states, but will ultimately, somehow, magically break for McCain. If it starts to look like Florida 2000 again, Obama will be persuaded (like I'm certain Kerry was in 2004) to bow out gracefully or else. Obama seems tough enough to test the "or else" which I fear will not be pretty.

I hope I'm wrong, but eight years of this criminal enterprise known as the "Bush Administration" has kept a lid on so many putrid kettles of K-Street fish that a government run by an opposition party intent on shining a light on every cockroach in Washington can simply never be allowed to happen. Ever. Too much money at stake, to say nothing of jail time.

But even if all that doesn't happen and the McCain/Petraeus ticket is somehow allowed to lose, the Cheney Administration will likely launch a war with Iran sometime in December or early January, just to make sure that either the Obama Administration is hamstrung by a national emergency from its first day in office or to construct a pretext for suspending the results of the election until the emergency has passed - sort of like those guys in Gitmo held until the war is over, except that we've declared war on an idea "terrorism" and not a state or government who can surrender, ergo: endless war. Sorry, Abdulluh.

Hell, even if they do manage to steal it for McCain/Petraeus, Cheney will still probably launch a war with Iran to keep McCain toeing the party line (for there is nothing like a fresh, shiny new war to keep the press jingoistic and the public stoked, dude), McCain will cite age-related health reasons early in 2009 and resign and we'll have General Petraeus as our Commander in Chief before next summer. I expect him to deliver his first address as C-in-C in full general's regalia so that we can finally end this charade that we are a free country and the Pentagon can assume it's regularly scheduled take-over of our government.

Regarding that Big Picture:

Which brings me to where I think we are now. We are at the end of history, or at least so many over-lapping sine waves of historical ontology all converging down into one huge conclusion that it will seem like the end of history. The battles of the 1960's are ended, yes, and the wave that crested with the Reagan Revolution and broke on shore with the Bush EPIC FAIL has mercifully receded to reveal the form of that skinny kid from Chicago. But what kind of country is Obama going to lead (if he is allowed to take office)? A country so exhausted that it cannot revive one of it's major cities nor extricate itself from an intractable resource war half a planet away. We have the smell of death about us, like the British did when the Zulus kicked their ass 100 years ago. When Roosevelt took office, despite the Depression, he took the reigns of a nation still rich in natural and intellectual and human and economic resources that only needed to be nudged into motion again. Granted, it took a war (and the widespread implementation of an oil-based economy) to fully revive the American economy, but there was something there to be revived. What about now? We are saturated with pollution and exhausted of spirit with crashing natural stocks of fish and game, forests that are dying of thirst and burning up due to climate change, a crumbling national infrastructure starved of funding for decades due to an ideological fetish for privatization. Where would a President Obama find the means to rejuvenate a country so bereft of resources on a dying planet?

But yet another subsiding wave of history is what driftglass recently called "The Negrological Constant." Our struggle with racism is far from over - to wit, a clearly qualified, energetic, charismatic young man like Barack Obama is nevertheless neck-in-neck with a gaffe-prone fuddy-duddy who can't even keep his own opinions straight from week to week, much less actual facts and still the pundits are positively mystified that Obama can't close the deal. Whatever could it be, I wonder? What could possibly make some people think twice about voting for someone like Barack Hussein Obama? You know, someone smart and funny and, uh, smart? What is it? What IS it? I dunno. It's a mystery. Must be Obama's fault, somehow. I'm just not sure what it could be.

At any rate, the fact that a black man has finally risen to the candidacy of a major political party says a lot about the continuing power of the racist meme as it wends its way through our collective national consciousness because it took so damned long to actually happen. Were it not for the fucking Electoral College, lo these many years, I don't think politicians would have been as able or as prone or as eager to play the race card to appeal to the rubes and crackers and redneck fuckwits in the third-world shit-hole known as the American South and we could have possibly seen a black man at the top of a ticket sooner than a century and a half after we fought a war to free his ancestors.

Possibly. But maybe not.

We have been amid the last gasp of that way of politicking since the Dixiecrats stampeded to the Party of Nixon. Viewed as the lancing of a boil, we have lived the expulsion of the puss and disease in the form of forty years of coded hate speech that has kept a dying GOP in power as they collapse into a minor regional party centered in the South. Well, you gotta dance with them's what brung ya. The fact that the best the GOP could do this time is Candidate John McCain (and the twittering chorus of disbelief in the ranks at his ascension) says a lot about how shallow their bench is these days. As a party, they represent the end of an era of history that began when the Virginia colonists traded with a Dutch ship for the first African slaves in America in 1619 and ought to have ended when Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but in fact can only be said to have ended once "right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." A President Obama could one day be seen as just such an historical marker.

Another wave of history is the End of Oil, which drove America's post-WW2 prosperity. But I have argued before that the End of Oil also represents the end of the western dominance of the world. That era began when the first explorers left Europe 600 years ago and began to colonize the world, and specifically the New World, in the name of Christian civilization - which was always and without exception merely an ecumenical pretext for robbing the locals blind. European prosperity - the glamour of Paris, the industrial might of Britain, the soaring beauty of Spanish cathedrals, the refined culture of the Dutch and the Italians and the Germans, et al, was financed by and can be traced directly to the literally tens of thousands of shiploads of gold stolen from the Americas. All those sailing ships shooting at each other in the pirate movies the kids are all watching these days were fighting over stolen gold. America paid for the Europe we so admire today.

So much of our history is embroiled in that Grand Crime. America itself was founded in the genocidal middle of it, which I think blinds us to our place in it. We began as a commercial proposition - the fancy words and high-falutin' philosophy got added later. From the legacy of slavery to rampant corporatism to the echoes of Manifest Destiny we hear in the rhetoric of America as Global Policeman, we are the product of our national DNA. We were born in a whirl of racism, violence and abject greed (with a facade of brittle piety to make it all the more cloying), have never really stopped, and every time we've tried to be honest and come to grips with our origins in some kind of nationwide reckoning, we've usually erupted into a violent cultural spasm that has on more than one occasion devolved into an open shooting war.

In his own way, for better or worse, Obama represents the end of that longer era as well, at least some manner of sea change. Whatever's on the other side, I hope we can get there in one piece.

I'll be on again, off again for a while but I hope I've given you something to talk and think about. Please feel free to comment. In fact, I'm not proud - I'm begging you to comment.

Seeing Will Be Believing

So, I see that the cretinous bastards who run the Democratic Party in Washington have started to wake up to the fact that Joe LIE-berman is a Quisling P.O.S.. The best part is the word "may" : Democrats May Kick Out Joe Lieberman If He Addresses The Republican National Convention

Ahh, well, Mr. Reid - better late than never. If it happens at all. I will believe that you have a pair when you actually kick the SOB out of your caucaus and strip him of his committee assignments, which you should have done two years ago when the hard-working people on the ground for your Party in Connecticut did not see fit to return him to Washington. I guess they were just too stupid or naive or unsophisticated to understand that Joe-nertia deserved to be there, even if the mechanisms of democracy failed to do so in a real-world exercise. I guess we should have been more grateful to our ruling class for protecting the natural order of things.

Which brings us to the heart of the mattter when it comes to right-wing versus left-wing politics. Left-wing politics is always difficult and an awkward fit with the trappings of power precisely because The Left - what makes it "Left-wing" and not "Right-wing" or anything else - is the opposition to entrenched power. When left-wingers lose their way, they become "Limousine Liberals" or corrupt union bosses or, in our current political climate, the bloated, Renfield-esque capitulators of the current Democratic establishment in Washington.

Because right-wing politics is a natural fit with the trappings of power precisely because what makes right-wing "Right-Wing" is the impulse to protect and extend privilege and power. In a democracy, by itself a radical notion (the horror! the riff-raff having a say in how I spend my money? Never!), such a point of view is hard to market beyond its natural adherents, so they have to gussy it up in guns, flags, country music and - when necessary - racial politics in order to build large enough coalitions to win elections. Although, in all fairness, once they win (or act like they won) a sufficient number of elections, they can simply obliterate the legal mechanisms that impede their urge to gut that pesky democratic process and finally stop acting like the opinions of the masses actually matter.

This is the late-stage republic we find ourselves in now. When Rome was in a similar spot a few years back, some cat named Julius something-or-other rolled into town and clarified that whole "will-of-the-people" thing. Get ready for a similar naked power-grab in the wake of some as-of-yet unseen crisis. They used the last one (tall buildings + airplanes) to maneuver into place all the legal materiel needed to obliterate all those annoying limitations on power so that next time they will be able to completely sweep away this creaky, rotted ediface we like to call "American democracy."

And if you ever had any doubt about where the Democratic Party, the supposed "Party of the People," stands on this whole thing, that should have been clear in the wake of the 2006 realignment election. The Connecticut Democratic Party said to the national party in Washington "We don't really care anymore for the fellow who has represented us up to now, so we're going to try to send someone new" to which the national party said "OK, but we really like the guy you've been sending us up to now" and we saw a really clear break within the party over the status of Joe LIE-berman. Some senators came out publicly in support of the state party's choice to submit a different name for consideration, but most others came out in defense of Holy Joe's claim to the seat and, in the ensuing confusion with a lot of help from Rethuglican friends, he was able to rally and return to Washington - this time with a chip on his shoulder and not only with an axe to grind, but the will and unique position (in an evenly divided senate) to do it. And to do it good and hard.

Of course, Harry Reid cried poverty over and over again when the left-wing of his party - the base of power in his party BTW - cried foul. "We need the votes" he'd say, or "He votes with us 99% of the time." How's that workin' out, Harry? It seems to me that the passing of the new FISA legislation should put to rest any notion that the Democrats in Washington learned anything from the 2006 election. They are so locked into the Bi-Party mentality that they think a rejection of the opposing party is automatically a victory for their Party qua Party, and not for what their party represents as an opposition party - in this case the rule of law, free and fair elections, freedom from the burgeoning police state and rampant militarism - in other words, anti-fascism. Instead, the bloated capitulators in Washington took the 2006 landslide election as a validation of their claim to the reigns of power, this time helpfully enhanced and value-added by a power-mad GOP, with a special mention for the corpulent visage of a leering Darth Cheney. I'm pessimistic about the lessons they'll learn should Obama survive the march to the White House.

Because what I find most irksome about this news about the idea that some Democrats are upset about Pal Joey perhaps speaking at the GOP convention is that - once again - we who were right all along and were continually dismissed with any number of smirking tsk-tsk condescending pats on the head don't get credit for being right. We are instead hated for it. Surely, we should get some props for being right about George W. Bush way back in 1999 or the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. Every bad thing we said was going to happen did happen and yet, and yet...

So, here we sit, watching the Dems yet again tying themselves in knots over whether or not "Rape Gurney" Joe should be kicked to the curb when the GOP has never had to worry about such things because their internal party discipline precludes ever having to ask the question. He should have been kicked out long, long ago. Maybe this time, they actually do something.

Or maybe they'll just issue another even more sternly worded letter.

Phil Gramm Lives!

This worm has finally crawled out from the dank underbelly of the private sector rock for which he's always had a stiffy, even when he was getting every stage of his education and subsequent career paid for by the public. I've had the great pleasure of hating this S.O.B. for most of my adult life because he was my Senator in Washington from the time I became aware of such a thing as politics at around 14 until I left the great state of Texas in 1996.

Make no mistake, this man is as disingenuously sleazy as disingenuously sleazy gets, and all with a gooey smile and squinty Georgia drawl - for he was only the Senator from Texas because he had a job at Texas A&M when he decided to enter politics. His entire reputation and career as an economist and then a politician was essentially an audition for the corporate lobbyist job he's had since leaving the U.S. Senate in 2002, his creed a shrill, mythological fantasy variation on the tired old libertarian retread of deregulation and complete lack of government oversight as the silver bullet for whatever economic woes beset any civilization anywhere, throughout time.

Or something like that. Who really know with these people. Their "theories" are not intended to actually illuminate or explain anything; they only exist as a faux-expertise patina to cover whatever sleazy thing they originally wanted to do in the first place, which is more often than not reinforce existing inequities and wealth-generating power structures. Kinda like the way their revolving set of names for creationism are just shitty, dim-bulb attempts to prove a pre-determined set of beliefs.

I'll leave the Bill of Indictment to the late, great (and terribly missed) Molly Ivins:

Gramm, the great crusader against government spending, has spent his entire life on the government tit. He was born at a military hospital, raised on his father's Army pay, went to private school at Georgia Military Academy on military insurance after his father died, paid for his college tuition with same, got a National Defense Fellowship to graduate school, taught at a state-supported school, and made generous use of his Senate expense account

In other words, from the time he was born in 1942 until he retired from the U.S. Senate 60 years later, his entire existence - from birth until practically retirement age - was owed to public institutions, financing & monies. He's been really busy since slithering out of office, though. From Christy Hardin Smith at FireDogLake:

Phil Gramm has taken McCain's "Charlie Black Sweet Talk Expressway bus" to Lobbying Town all the way to the bank...literally.

Gramm only stopped lobbying for international banking giant UBS officially on April 18, 2008, well after McCain clinched the GOP nod -- but also well after Gramm had written and shaped the McCain campaign's banking policies in response to the subprime mortgage crisis...in which UBS is also embroiled, and for whom Gramm continues to be employed as a UBS vice chairman regarding investment banking. Yes, you read that correctly.

Who is UBS, exactly, that they have now restricted their international banking staff from traveling to the US during their pending SEC investigation? And why are they in legal trouble for allegedly running a tax-evasion arm out of their US branch? Josh has some background, including this link on McCain's speech on banking policy fully a month before Gramm quit lobbying for UBS. Funny how that speech calls for banking folks to decide how to handle things amongst themselves rather than tightening regulation -- wonder whose idea that was? Things that make you go "hmmmmm," indeed. Hilzoy has a good thumbnail sketch.

Why on earth would John McCain think this man was remotely appropriate to be his economic adviser? Because McCain knows nothing about economics. And just like his "pick a winner" foreign policy hodge podge, it's all about who might have a "reputation" among his pals who...quite coincidentally, I'm sure...also happen to be lobbyists for the very same industries would help to shape policy in a McCain Administration.

And Keith used the Good Mister Gramm to take this whack at the Senator from Arizona last night:



Rethugli-bots simply can't help themselves, the poor dears. Corrupt to the core.

Important Question

Is Obama a Muslim?

...Pass it on...


UPDATE:
Not enough info?

Try here.

Now, pass that on...

(h/t Broadway Carl, via Dr. Biobrain)

Grand Old (Confederate) Party

Digby has an extended post that revisits a theme she's hammered for a very long time, that the Rethugli-bots really are exactly the bunch of racists they so hysterically deny being whenever confronted with examples of their dog-whistle language. If challenged, they usually call it a "joke" and then make it the fault of the uptight, overly-sensitive, listener for being offended.

They've been successfully running for office with cultural reinforcement via this technique from their dependable stable of right-wing shock-jocks and blathering bobblehead "pundits" for a very long time, but always couching it in issues that allow them to use coded language like "welfare reform" (stick it to the darkies) or "immigration reform" (stick it to the furr'ners) or "family values" (stick it to the queers - or uppity wimminfolk - you choose) or "strong defense" (stick it to the prissy girly-men over-educated egghead Lib'ruhls who all think they're better than Real Americans who know how to kick ass in war and always win - BOO-YA! - unless those pussies afraid of a stand-up fight make America lose just for spite).

Since the Ruling Class - and make no mistake we have a Ruling Class in America - is like all Ruling Classes across the world throughout history, they are deeply, fully, deathly afraid of the dirty, unwashed masses. Their fear is expressed in the platform of their pet-party, the GOP, to build election-winning coalitions (which they'd bypass if they could, since elections - and specifically democracies - are so messy and unpredictable and thus bad for business and, more importantly, accumulated wealth). The problem is, though, that those platform planks have all been, in some way, more or less reduceable to fear and loathing of "The Other" - to which the over-whelmingly white Rethugli-bot membership, from the violent & virulent racism of your average Dixie-goon to the latent racial mistrust of the nervous, TV-news-addicted suburban soccer mom, is all-too-eager to subscribe.

Well, digby takes a good extended look at the changing political landscape and has this to say:

The Republicans have flogged this idea that they are the party of the salt of the earth Real America for quite a while. But what they have been working toward, really, for quite some time is to be the party of the Old Confederacy with just a tiny reach beyond it with the right candidate and the right circumstances. The problem, you see, is that this mythical Real America is actually a country filled with all those undesirable identities to which they see themselves in opposition. In fact, these undesirables, from gays to uppity women to Hispanics to Asians to the ultimate interlopers, the African Americans who came over to "our" country against their will (long before "we" did) comprise a majority. So even if they Republicans manage to make this election a referendum on the "Real Americans" vs "The Other," which is all they can do, they can't win that way anymore. The Real Americans are outnumbered by the rest of us. The takeover is complete.

I really hope she's right. Please go read the whole thing. And follow the links, too. It's well worth it.

Village Idiots Like Beer

So, just for grins, I followed the link at the bottom of the quote from my previous post.  

What an artifact from a strange and distant time it seems to my eyes now. What a strange world that was, when such minor, insignificant and distracting things could somehow be passed off as a legitimate addition to the public discourse.

Unlike now.

Mission Accomplished, Part Five

2 Points of Business:


ONE: Today is May Day. I will overcome my usual aversion to things red (strangely arising only in the last seven years or so) to celebrate in the traditional color of Labor and The Left. I am a union man and many people fought and died for me to have the living standard I enjoy, even if it has been and continues to be under attack. If the Rethugli-bots had their way, I'd be working for a couple hundred a week (paid in a steeply weakened currency, too, BTW), before taxes, and have no benefits whatsoever. In other words, I'd be working off-Broadway. Been there, done that. I like it here much, much better.


TWO: Today is also the five year anniversary of Mission Accomplished. This text is also in red to symbolize the blood on the hands of George W. Bush and Richard "The Big Dick" Cheney. It is to the Democrat's everlasting shame that they didn't hang that fucking banner around his neck and re-run that fucking picture of Kommander Kod-piece over and over and over again. A failure of nerve, I say. The man is a buffoon, an embarrassment and an utter, complete, epic failure. The saddest part of the whole bloody mess is that he is too fucking stupid to have sufficient inner life to undergo any personal examination that may result in some degree of personal anguish. He will return to Crawford to clear brush all goddamned day, secure in the knowledge that he did right and good, when he should be in an orange jumpsuit in The Hague on trial for war crimes (along with a raft of other people: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc...). Anything less than the whole lot of them imprisoned for life - perhaps in a place not unlike Gitmo - for crimes against humanity at the VERY least is a moral failure on the part of the American people. With two stolen elections and no public outcry to go on, I'm fully prepared to be disappointed.

Wright shouldn't matter

I was going to write a post about the whole Jeremiah Wright torpedo-ing Barack Obama thing that has the inter-webs lit up like a christmas tree for the last few days, but then I read John Cole and he pretty much said what I was going to say:

Maybe it is because I am totally and unrepentantly in the tank for Obama, but I just can’t get worked up over what his pastor said. Maybe it is because I am not religious, and I am used to religious people saying things that sound crazy. Or maybe I just refuse to spend any more time and energy getting worked up over and denouncing, distancing, and rejecting the wrong people- people who really don’t matter in the big scheme of things. If you have a memo from Jeremiah Wright to John Yoo showing how we should become a rogue nation, let me know. If you have pictures of Jeremiah Wright voting against the GI Bill, send it to me. If you have evidence of Jeremiah Wright training junior soldiers on the finer aspects of stacking and torturing naked Iraqi captives, pass them on.

Until then, I just can’t seem to get all worked up about the crazy scary black preacher that Obama has to “throw under the bus.”

So, yeah. Whatever. And fuck all the rest of them (the media, the wingers, those nervous-nellie liberal Democrats, various bloggers - hell, for that matter, even you, if Reverend Wright makes you a little uneasy) for getting all judgmental and sanctimonious about the somewhat unhinged rantings but nevertheless highly entertaining ravings of a man who has faithfully served his community for three decades, helping the poor, ministering to his flock and generally acting like, well, what all those titular X-tians out there claim a Christian should.

You know, walking the walk.

So if he's a little off his rocker, I frankly don't have a problem with it. I think religion is stupid anyway and we've all got kooky people in our lives who we love and cherish nevertheless so it's a whole lot of so what. If Johm McSame and the whole rest of the Rethugli-bot goon squad all get a pass on Hagee (and Robertson and Falwell and Randall Terry and ...), then Wright isn't too far wrong when he claims that the recent events have been an attack on the black church. I think his essential meaning has been willfully mis-represented. From what I've seen on tee-vee and online, some seem to have been spinning his claim to mean the people attacking him were attacking the notion of black faith as different from or less-than white faith and then pretending to be shocked by that straw man.

I think that is disingenuous. Nobody, except for the most virulent racists in the GOP, thinks that the way black people choose to internalize their god is deficient when compared to the way white people do it. The claim hardly makes sense, except to a bigot or a Nazi.

I think Wright is correct because the black church is being attacked for being a source of organization and strength in the black community. In some places and in many ways, it is the only institution wholly their own. I don't see that, apart from my contempt for religiosity in general, as bad in any way whatsoever. The Limousine Liberals in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party can't have a block of voters with their own leadership, now can they? Like the netroots, they want our money and our votes and otherwise we are to STFU do as we are told. I told a friend of mine yesterday the same thing - in this instance, the black church and the blogs are in the same boat. We are a constituent block of the Democratic coalition and by golly, we just refuse to behave ourselves.

Sure. Because lockstep obedience in the GOP has served this nation and the world so very well. Habeas Corpus, anyone?

I know, I know. Louis Farrakhan. Booga-booga-booga! Whatever. Like I said, Wright is a loud-mouth kook who happens to admire another even larger-scale and anti-semitic loud-mouth kook, which I see simply as one powerful black man with a professional admiration for another powerful black man, however hateful and weird. Ma and Pa Peoria will of course get creeped out by all of it, but they still somehow also think he's a secret Muslim, in a Manchurian Candidate kind of way, and they also intentionally voted for George W. Bush twice because they think he's a good Christian man. And Reverend Wright is weird for thinking the US Gov't created AIDS to destroy the black community?

I will grant a few minor points. I think Wright is a tad bitter about Obama's success and doesn't want to be one of the ones left behind as this extraordinary person ascends the ladder of success. I also think he has enjoyed the spotlight and is trying to extend his 15 minutes. I also think he is drummning up publicity for a possible book. And I don't think any of it is particularly bad. Or, at least it doesn't have to be.

The fainting couches and clutched pearls aside, this whole kerfuffle is only a little bit about Obama and his loopy pastor. It is a whole lot about finding a way to torpedo a rising star and potentially very powerful black politician the likes of which this country has never seen because we in America are very much not post-racial. If the bobbleheads squeezing cable news talk-time out of this silliness didn't hang some crazy, America-hating Negro preacher around his neck, they, and the cackling GOP oppo-research gremlins who feed the Serious Journalists their "scoops," would together run some other fruit-loop up the flagpole who has some tenuous connection to the junior Senator from Illinois (who once may or may not have said or wrote some strange or offensive things) and thus find some other way prove Obama hates the troops.

Remember Glenn Greenwald's Five Steps to A Republican Presidency:

What is notable here is not so much the specific petty attacks, but rather the method by which they are disseminated and then entrenched as conventional wisdom among our Really Smart Political Insiders and Serious Journalists. This is the endlessly repeated process that occurred here:

STEP 1 A new Drudge-dependent gossip (Ben Smith) at a new substance-free political rag (The Politico)--or some rightwing talkradio host (Rush Limbaugh) or some credibility-bereft right-wing blogger (a Michelle Malkin)--seizes on some petty, manufactured incident to fuel clichéd caricatures of Democratic candidates.

STEP 2 The old right-wing gossip (Drudge) employs his old, substance-free political rag (The Drudge Report) to amplify the inane caricatures.

STEP 3 National media outlets, such as AP and CNN, whose world is ruled by Drudge, take note of and begin "analyzing" the "political implications" of the gossip, thus transforming it into "news stories."

STEP 4 Our Serious Beltway Journalists and Political Analysts--in the Haircut Case, Tim Russert and Brian Williams and Adam Nagourney and the very serious and smart Substantive Journalists at The New Republic--mindlessly repeat all of it, thereby solidifying it as transparent conventional wisdom.

STEP 5 When called upon to justify their endless reporting over such petty and pointless Drudge-generated matters, these "journalists" cite Steps 1-4 as "proof" that "the people" care about these stories, even though the "evidence" consists of nothing other than their own flocklike chirping.

Repeat steps 1-5 until the Republican is elected.

And that's why the Rethugli-bots will always get a pass on all their hate-spewing weirdos. Which is why we have to push back. Now. And hard. If we don't, they will continue to be able to beat us this way.

The last time America had a black leader anywhere close to Barack Hussein Obama's charisma, grace, stature and eloquence, white forces of racist hate dispatched him from a hotel in Memphis and black American leadership spent the next four decades in the wilderness. Four decades. Four decades of GOP ascendancy on the wings of Dixie-cratic bigotry coinciding with four decades of mockery and cartooning of any black political leader above the caliber of municipal dog-catcher have not been by accident.

Note that black athletes and entertainers are A-OK as role models, as long as they are fundamentally non-threatening, defined as "not too prone, either overtly nor implicitly, to asking really, really hard questions of white folks or demanding answers about the history race and class in America." You know, Bill Cosby and Magic Johnson instead of Immortal Technique and Alan Iverson.

Note also how if any members of the previous white-culture-approved categories of black prominence should try to get too political, they are mocked and cartooned, or dismissed as angry (as though black anger is somehow an ahistorical mystery). Recall how that "trouble-maker" MLK may have scared the white folk mightily, but Malcolm X scared 'em more.

And as the Rethugli-goon Revolution's agenda has failed on every single count except to enrich the old-money country club set who footed the bill for the whole party to begin with, racism is the only thing they have left to run on. On cue, Democrats offer them a black man. And don't worry, Hillary comes with her own built-in set of hate-buttons the Reich-wing puppet-masters will be pushing if she should filch the nomination. But Obama, by simple virtue of the color of his skin and his funny-sounding name, offers a ready-made smear template. It's like an old family recipe the Dixie-crats perfected generations ago they can now dust off and offer to the world. Like a bully who runs home to mama when someone finally hits back, this modern-day, ever more racist but disintegrating GOP is resurrecting the central tenant of Nixon's odious realignment "Southern" strategy: get white voters afraid of black anger. If Obama is not particularly angry, so what? He's heard of angry black people. He's met angry black people. He knows angry black people. He's even friends with some angry black people. How can the voting public (meaning "White Voting Public") not be certain that Barack Hussein Obama, too, isn't one of those angry black people who don't love America? Or Jesus?

Jeremiah Wright is just the kind of reminder White America needs that a deep pool of righteous black anger lies out there, latent, untapped and powerful. The slick operatives of the GOP have no qualms about using that truth to tap the white lizard brain. They can't help it. It's in the GOP's DNA. It really was too much to hope, I suppose, that we could have had a black man in a run for the White House without it coming down to race.

This is going to get very ugly.

Chilling Out

I think Hillary Rodham Clinton is politically radioactive and always has been. I don't think it is all entirely her fault, nor her husband's, but the fact remains that for a complex cocktail of reasons, she is a lightening rod for large swaths of the voting public and though the vastly greater part of their hatred for her is stupidly irrational, misogynistic, bigoted and unevolved, it is not entirely without some basis. She demeanor is off-putting. From anything except a red state street-cred building perspective, her voting record in the Senate hovers somewhere between mixed and shameful. She and her husband together may make for a rockstar pair when allowed to be the unchallenged king and queen of the Democratic prom, but their survival mechanisms are truly ugly to behold when they have to defend their status.

As one of her constituents - a constituent who has voted for her twice, mind you - I still see her as a coldly calculating political operative who is incapable of having an honest emotion, other than a raw thirst for power. Up to now, that's been fine. I knew what she and Bubba were up to when they selected New York for their post-White House life. I've just been glad she wasn't on the other team and as far as bringing it home for New York, apart from larger more statesman-like concerns, she has represented The Empire State just fine.

But she does have some very steep negatives.

In other words, I kinda, sorta buy into a diluted, de-fanged version of the Washington-insider/Rethugli-bot/Rush Limpblob caricature of her as a the type of person to cold-bloodedly murder Vince Foster and then cover it up. No, I don't actually think she's a murderer or any of the other inhuman things the Reich-wing blowhards accuse her of (without actually believing it themselves - it's just to tap the lizard brains of the rubes and shit-kickers), but I do think she's a coldly calculating manipulator, just as is her husband, if slightly less skilled. As is, frankly, any politician who is any good. Including Obama.

In the face of an unrelenting assault from the right, and the inevitable and equally relentless capitulation on the part of the Dems, for the last several, well, decades, the Clintons may have been imperfect warriors, but they were our warriors. I was not a fan of Bill Clinton's, but I would never admit to anyone from across the aisle that I didn't like him or his wife, because then it would seem like we agreed that he deserved what was happening to him. My reasons for not liking Bill Clinton were precisely the 180º opposite of theirs. They hated him because he was not enough like them - too smart, too cultured and right about Vietnam and Civil Rights; for me he was too much one of them - too quick to appease the hell-hounds of The Right, to sell out his left-wing and otherwise affect a good ol' boy persona in an attempt to keep the haters from hating him too terribly much. In other words, a phony, a suck-up and a striver. But he and his wife were the best we had in a difficult situation.

Until, that is - amid a deepening BushCo dystopian winter - a broken and defeated Al Gore emerged, phoenix-like, from the shadow of the Clintons to cleave to Howard Dean and become something almost more than human at the same time that the inter-webs resurrected a moribund progressive movement by way of a hivemind army of bloggers and activists. Something new was emerging and this flawed man and his equally flawed wife, who had been the storm wall The Left needed as a bulwark against the hurricane of eliminationist, single-party-state Reich-wing power that reached landfall during his administration, began to appear as surviving relics from another, darker era. Impeachment had been the hammer blow which expended the hurricane's energy. That the two of them remained standing amid such fury is worthy of mine and everyone else's respect, but the world has changed and Hillary has not.

In many ways, the very character traits that allowed the Clintons to weather Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" storm, traits baked into the very porcelain of their political shells by decades in Arkansas politics, are exactly not what America and the Democrats need now - traits that manifest as DLC/centrist/"third-way" triangulation. Survival tactics of the abused, not a vision with an actual corresponding strategy. Hillary, like her husband, is a reflexive dinosaur, a relic from another era when cackling neanderthal Dixiecrats and unreconstructed Nixonite operatives colluded with their pearl-clutching financiers in the hippie-hating Old Money crowd to remake the stodgy GOP in their image while the Dems for the first time in their 150-year history were forced to learn how to hold on to power without a Southern Wing. Hence, they developed a fetish for drawlin' white southerners.

It has been a steep and painful 40-year learning curve for everyone involved, including the electorate. The object portion of the lesson for them has yet to truly endeth, BTW, as the repercussions for decades of believing GOP hype are just now starting to make themselves felt. As the economy craters and our infrastructure crumbles and the oil runs out and the planet heats up, those lessons will echo down for generations to come. At any rate, despite the fact that he had the second-best progressive bona fides in the Democratic field (and I supported him for it), the era of the white male with a Southern drawl as the only viable Democratic candidate ended ironically when John Edwards exited stage left.

Which is why I only partially agree with Lance Mannion when he writes:

Obama was traveling inside a protective shield made up of the Beltway Insiders' Clinton-hatred. As is becoming clear, once she's out of the way, that shield will be powered down. Obama will be just the Democrat running for President and if there's anybody the Insiders' loathe and despise nearly as much as they loathe and despise the Clintons it's any Democrat who runs for President.

The longer the primary campaign has gone on the more lessons Obama has had to learn about what it's going to be like in the fall.

---It's infuriating the Beltway Insiders.

They have been rooting from the beginning to see Clinton humiliated. Way back when, when the show was just getting started and they were declaring that her nomination was inevitable, they were consoling themselves with the hope that Rudy Giuliani would mop up the floor with her in November. Then they saw that Obama had a chance to give them what they wanted a lot sooner, with the bonus of giving them another Democrat whose humiliation in November they could root for and aid and abet.

They've wanted nothing more than to be able to laugh at her in defeat and declare that it proof that the country had rejected...Bill Clinton, at long last.

It's always been about Whitewater.

Yes, Lance, that's true. And yes, I am somewhat guilty of being too invested in the whole thing to be truly objective about who should or should shouldn't leave the race. I follow it every day. The only ones really suffering from "Clinton-fatigue" are the Washington insiders who have always hated Hillary and the political junkies who follow this stuff every single day. But Ma & Pa Peoria don't know and don't care. For them and the average Democrat in "fly-over country," the race has been invigorating and a real-life, real-time extension of Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy. For the first time in most of their political careers, and especially in the entire lives of the young and enthusiastic who are the life-blood of any campaign's ground game, what they think matters and someone in power cares to learn what that is.

I don't think it is Pollyana-ish to think that all of this could actually be good for the party. Washington insiders are the ones who always proclaim - no matter what "it" is - that "it" is good for Republicans and bad for Democrats; heads the GOP wins, tails the Democrats lose. The media have become a self-policing spin-zone for Rethugli-bot talking points. That comfortable bubble is being invaded by history (reality having a well-known liberal bias) and even if Obama may not be as progressive as I and many of my fellow-travellers on The Left would like, he is so much more the Man of the Moment than his opponent - who is burdened by baggage not entirely of her making, but for which she nevertheless liable.

Digby, as per usual, boils all this down pretty nicely and puts it into historical perspective:

I maintain my belief that this campaign is being driven by seismic forces in the political firmament that transcend personality. This isn't 1972 or 1984 or even 1988, no matter what people say. The Democrats aren't running against Republican incumbents or even a popular Republican predecessor. The economy is rapidly deteriorating. We are in the midst of a moneypit, quagmire overseas and there actually are terrorists out there who require attention. Oh --- and the US is now considered to be a force for evil in the world due to the fact that we kidnap people off the streets of foreign countries, torture them and keep them in prison without trials or any hope of being set free. Oh, and we invade countries based on lies.

We are in a hell of a mess and the country knows exactly who is responsible for it. They will logically vote accordingly. But with the economy now a huge part of the equation, I don't think political reform is the best campaign theme for Democrats. It's early enough for him to pivot off reform and put some meat on the bones of the Hope and Change message. But he should do it soon. The Democratic candidate can ride to victory on a tsunami, but he or she still needs to stay with the wave.

All of which is to say, I think this whole nomination fight has been a tough one because it had to be. We are fighting for the soul of the party and we are fighting for the life of our beleaguered nation. Such transitions are never pretty or clean or bloodless. Nor should they be. If they were easy, they wouldn't be powerful enough to actually change things for the better (I'm looking at you, you starry-eyed Reagan-Revolutionaries).

Bottom line: I am resentful that I find myself once again via a vis the Clintons with a political opinion that superficially resembles one held by my mortal enemies in the Reich-wing. I don't really hate Hillary Clinton, I just think her time has passed. My fear that she is damaging the party could very well be just so much Chicken-Little-ism, but I grant that I could be just buying the hype.

Time will tell.

Now that's writing

Driftglass is a blogger I frequented several years ago, but stopped for one reason or another, in that way you check a certain blog multiple times a day for a few weeks or months until they start a line of topics you aren't interested in, or they reveal some sort of ugly thing about themselves or their beliefs or you simply disagree with something they write. Sometimes, they stop posting for a period of time and you move on in the interim. Other times, you just find yourself reading them less and less until one day you realize you haven't been there for several months and stop going altogether. I don't remember why I stopped reading driftglass, but I checked back over there today for the first time in a couple of years.

Glad I did.

Boy howdy am I glad I did.

I wish I could write as succinct a deconstruction of right-wing blow-hards as this beautiful piece of word craft decimates and then obliterates William "The Bloody" Kristol:

It’s not that Kristol is a bad writer, but that he is a painfully bad writer. A painfully bad writer with his own little cabin “of clay and wattles made” smack in the middle of the NYT.

[...]

The problem with Kristol is that what he genuinely believes is both execrable and ossified to the point that he has becomes a self-parody: a bile dispenser with a permanent, death’s-head-rictus grin lacquered to the front of his skull.

He’s a fascist -- out-and-out -- in a country that fought a World War to eradicate the diseased, degenerate ideology that is at the dead, dark heart of NeoConservatism. Kristol is a True Believer in something truly evil...

[...]

And so like the entire Right Wing Noise Machine, outside of some cold, lumpy, boiler-plate pabulum about “Luvin Murrica!” the bulk of Kristol’s words are always devoted to lashing acidly out.

With him – as with the rest of the the Noise Machine – it is all-attacking-all-the-time. And in that world, a piece of oratory or page of writing is judged not by how well it advances an argument or cogently and persuasively is debates policy, but instead is measured almost exclusively by how much it offends, irritates and mocks the Dirty Fucking Hippies.

It is hatespeech-as-genre; a genre in which Kristol is so saturated that he cannot go more than a paragraph or two without reflexively trying to shiv a Liberal somewhichway. Kristol and his ilk remind me of nothing so much as a German National Socialist from, say, 1931; so steeped in hateful ideology that they literally cannot resist slipping “…and because of the Dirty Jews” into every argument.

Kristol’s writing fails in its first duty because he shows us nothing.

He risks nothing.

He illuminates nothing.

Instead he has built himself a toasty little sniper's nest on the roof of the New York Times and merrily pot-shots anything to the left of Mussolini.

If I were immortal and had unlimited word processing resources, I could type for 2000 years and not produce anything half as incisive as just those few, terse and searing lines.

So, driftglass, welcome back to my regular readership and just on the strength of the posts currently on the front page of your blog, I'm placing you in my blog corral.

That should reliably increase readership over there by at least two to two and a half people.

Priorities

In a follow-up to my last post, wherein I ponder the stupidity (maybe "gullibility" is a more accurate word to use) of your average conservative, GOP, Reich-wing voter by way of Charlton Heston as NRA President, I once again have to admire the deftness of Glenn-zilla. In his post from Saturday, he rips apart the corporate media for always playing along with GOP narratives about personality-driven politics, never using their journalistic training to separate the wheat from the chaff and otherwise constantly on their knees, slobbering on the knob of Rethuglican power. He doesn't actually use those metaphors, but that's kinda his overall point.

For the Reich-wing, you see, an appearance of authority abetted by a pliant media is sufficient to merit its granting. Which is why actors who exude an aire of authority do so well in their firmament. It doesn't matter how phony their front may be, if they seem like they are regular dudes, then a sycophantic press corpse gleefully plays along. Fred Thompson - his entire adult life lived as either a Hollywood actor or Washington lobbyist (with a brief stint as Congressman, elected presumably on the comforting believability of his furrowed brow and prominent jowls) - as a regular 'Mer-kuhn from Tennessee?

Puh-leeze.

So, Glenn rips 'em a new one. I love this man, in a totally straight kind of way. Here's yet another reason why:

One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can't possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.

By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that's how McCain's rustic "Sedona cabin" -- i.e., his sprawling compound -- came to be).

It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it's this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections.

McCain is an asshole. That should be the personality-driven narrative that's out there, but the GOP base is always willing to forgive the serial philanderers in their high command because of Digby's Law (my name for her salient observations about the tribal mentality that dominates American, and particularly Rethugli-bot, politics). Also known as: IOKIYAAR.