We'll always have a national dark side. But some signal needs to be sent, at least for a while, that this sort of filth, his character assassination and appeals to race hatred is not an effective life raft for desperate opportunists looking to save themselves by degrading this country. A McCain defeat would go some way to accomplishing that.
Senator Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens is found guilty.
It is obvious to anyone that this is both good news for John McCain and it is non-controversial that it is a liberal conspiracy to embarrass him via Sarah Palin because she is also from Alaska.
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.
This is no longer just the whimpering of a few disaffected ex-hippies and assorted leftist student groups. The country is disintegrating after 40 years of Rethuglican "leadership" and the foot-soldiers who enabled and reinforced the Nixon/Reagan/Bush I & II regime are reverting to type as the failure of all their most-cherished tropes and assorted other lies bespeaks their own personal failure and it makes them angry and prone to seek a scapegoat. Like Germany in the 1920's & 1930's. McSneer and Moose-a-lini are doing everything they can to solidify the racist, persecution-complexed middle of American society. Note that I didn't characterize it as "underbelly" or some such. It isn't. This putrescent hatred is interwoven in the very fabric our national character. It is the legacy of a nation built on genocide and human chattel slavery.
I'm not sure what they think will come of it, but the way I see it, McCain is a rich, grumpy, entitled old man who doesn't understand why the world won't just give him what he wants by dint of his gender, skin color, pedigree and resume and if he has to dip his widdle-footsie into the stinking, sulphurous, seething pool of evil that bubbles in the heart of the political right, then so be it, it can't possibly stain him because so doing furthers his ambitions and thus must be for the greater good; not the greater god of all Americans, mind you, but the greater good of the good Americans, the pro-Americans, his friends & family & business partners. His denials of the actual ugliness of his campaign's behavior stem, I think, from his pathological inability to see the wrongness of the underlying worldview that drives the behavior. In other words, the rabble who advocate violence are only doing so in the name of defending John McCain's America. As another senator from Arizona said at the beginning of the Right's nightmarish march to political hegemony (just before going down in defeat to the last Democrat to preside over a national consensus):
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"
Which, in light of how utterly without principle or scruple they've conducted their political affairs since reads now like marching orders for a movement. Rethuglicans have seen every action through that lens and John McCain is no different, which is why the souring tone of his rallies doesn't phase him and the preposterousness of his distortions of fact and outright lies simply don't compute for him. His moral compass is broken, his internal ethical radar calibrated to different priorities.
Sarah Palin lies on the other side of McCain's cynical political calculations. She is a dimwit and a demagogue, but she is not a leader, good or bad. She is just another slack-jawed, Kool-Aid drinking rabble who got herself fast-tracked up the ranks through sheer pluck, luck and a total absence of core principle. If she were smarter, she'd be like Karl Rove - a collaborating member of the proletariat who knows his place on the food chain and instead assists the plantation masters in keeping the other slaves in line to earn favors, priviledges and access. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is too stupid to know that she isn't one of them, but rather is the type of manipulative social-climber who takes any apparent lack of social status as merely a failure of perception to be remedied by MILF-y charm, will to power or a well-timed shivving. She is the shiny new face of the same old blood-thirsty, Dixie-anchored rump of an electoral coalition McCain's approaching defeat will reveal.
By "Dixie-anchored" however, I don't mean geographically, although that will be true as well. The Solid South will remain so, even if the city-fied transplants from DC and other dins of iniquity further up the Eastern Seaboard make Virginia and North Carolina swing back and forth over the next few election cycles. No, I mean the mindset and values of The South, the mythical south of the redneck NASCAR "Lost Cause" Sunbelt sprawling cookie-cutter suburb & mega-church popular imagination. THAT South, the one that gets weepy when Lee Greenwood sings "Proud to be an American," is nationwide. And the policies of the ruling class over the last 40 years - enacted through the vigorous machinations of their pet political party, the GOP - have made their lives immeasureably worse through regressive taxation, crony capitalism, a self-justifying military-industrial war-making complex , industrial sell-off, rigging of the financial system and a relentless culture war. These are the ways that a greedy, pernicious ruling class maintains its power not just in America, kiddies, but everywhere in the world. They create a politics, through violence or bribery or both, that will eventually come to resemble the political Right in any country anywhere at any time in history for they are all the same in their fundmental desire to protect power & priviledge and supress the masses for fun & profit. Sometimes this is called monarchy, sometimes a dictatorship or a banana republic or a fascist state, sometimes it is "The People's Republic of..." and the plutocrats mouth communal doctrines of the "for thee not for me" variety, but the desire to constrict, restrict and suppress is an impulse of the political right.
Billmon, who vanished for a few years before re-surfacing recently back over at Daily Kos, wrote about the American variety of this eternal theme on his now-defunct blog (hence - no link):
If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology), libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government. . . .
Rapid social changes often produce cultural reaction, which in turn spawns angry political movements. Post Civil War industrialization and financial colonization produced the Populists -- both good (Mother Jones) and bad (Tom Watson and Pitchfork Ben Tilman). The waves of 19th and early 20th century immigration spurred the rise of the Know Nothings and the modern Klu Klux Klan. The New Deal and the civil rights era incited the John Birch Society and Goldwater conservatism. And now the blowback effects of globalization (what conservative ideologues sneeringly deride as "multiculturalism") coupled with the patriotic and xenophobic passions unleashed by the war against Al Qaeda, have turbocharged the traditionalists into declaring something close to all-out war on the modernists -- as symbolized, at the moment, by the traitorous New York Times. . . .
The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style -- as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it -- but that increasingly doesn't exist in American society as a whole. The reality (and this brings me to my second point) is that there are not two cultural camps in America but three: the traditionalists, the modernists, and those in the middle, who may be pulled in one direction or another by their ethnic backgrounds, religious faiths, personal life histories or any or all of a thousand other factors.
A running topic on his blog was the Spanish Civil War, which he persuasively argued was a strong analog to the type of war we're going to have when our Civil War 2 breaks out. The Spanish Civil War was a brutal affair that pitted neighbor against neighbor, neighborhood against neighborhood. It was not a matter of armies blue and gray (or is it blue and red?) ranging against each other across open fields. It was fought with meat cleavers and clubs in alleyways and in the streets. The Nazis helped out with planes and guns, which gave us "Guernica", but that conventional 20th Century-style warfare was the exception. The rest of the war was vicious and rife with atrocities.
I think this time in our history is comparable to the years leading up to our previous civil war in the hostile balkanization of the political camps. Back then, it was about slavery. BTW, never let anyone argue that our Civil War was ever about anything else but whether or not we would be a nation that allowed the ownership of human beings. Anyone who does argue thusly is a southern apologist merely muddying the waters to dilute their own reflected regional culpability.
So, I think we are barreling toward a civil war, something like the Spanish Civil War, a war lacking in front lines, where neighborhoods fielded partisan gang armies against the gang armies other neighborhoods, where neighbors hacked their next-door neighbors to death, where not even churches could offer safe harbor against murderous mobs. I fear for this country because predominant regional political differences as expressed by congressional representation belie deeper cultural differences that have more to do with religious affiliation, level of education and line of work and union affiliation and exist everywhere all at once apart from larger political culture. I am thinking, for instance, of true-blue Austin, an island of education and cultural sophistication in deep-red Texas, a sea of menacingly willful ignorance, hostility to cultural diversity and easy violence. I am also thinking of the fact that the police force in this bright blue city (to say nothing of the firefighters, or even blue-collar union members in general - the number of IATSE stagehands who LOVE George W. Bush is both sickening and shocking - and the entire Borough of Staten Island) are a bright shade of scarlet because red-ness & blue-ness is not an expression of regional difference, but rather of deep-seated cultural impulse. Police in general, NYPD in particular, are always on the side of authoritarianism. As metaphive once pointed out to me - for the police the whole civilian population is divided into two groups: perps and sheep. For police it is not about "protecting and serving" but rather maintaining order first and protecting property second, and serving people only insofar as it reinforces the first two items.
When the shit hits the fan, in Austin I would fear for the safety of the community that has grown up around the University at the hands of an armed and culturally resentful wider population with a collective chip on its shoulder - the animosity between Texas A&M and UT-Austin is only good-natured to a point. In New York, the police are also armed and deeply sympathetic to the racist, violent, and culturally resentful impulses normally attributed to the dark side of Jeff Foxworthy's America. Up to this point, NYPD and their blue-collar fellow-travellers have reached a kind of truce with the liberal forces that dominate this city, but unleashed by widespread social unrest, who knows what kinds of ugliness could ensue.
That is why I argue that the next Civil War, as murky as the lines of our previous war of brother against brother were, won't be even as well-defined as that one.
And, sadly, the fascists won in Spain. They were never defeated and Franco died in his bed of Parkinson's on November 20, 1975. If Obama wins this one, I fear an epic outbreak along all the traditional social and cultural and class lines in this country that could escalate, spurred on by rhetoric from the hate-spewers on talk radio, into a gradually-escalating civil conflict. Their side doesn't view any Democratic administration as a legitimate governing body. Add to that the racial component brought on by Obama's skin color, intensified by the cultural bigotry of his odd-sounding name, amid an economic crisis and a deeply unpopular war abroad, and you have the Ruling Class' Frankenstein's monster going off the rails in a likely violent national social upheaval.
I fear for the health of the candidate and that of our nation.
Get used to it and, for gawdssake, please leave the national stage now. Your sneering, angry old-man visage makes me cringe on sight. I can't imagine looking at that wrinkled, yellowed-teeth crypt-keeper face of yours for four years. By the look of the polls, I'm not the only one. I don't know how I'm going to make it until November 5th. OK, I know the election is on the 4th, but I'm going to have to see his picture (presumably in some kind of a red frame) on my Tee-Vee next to (delightfully!) low percentages for the entirety of that night, until some news anchor finally calls it for Barack Obama and McSnarl's campaign is finally euthanized. After that, or at least until after his concession speech, I won't have to look at Angry McMavericki-ness anymore.
And that will be a good day. Even if his scorched-earth campaign will leave in its wake a rage-filled and highly-motivated (to say nothing of ARMED) rump of a voting bloc with a persecution complex that could and likely will remain a threat not just to Obama's effective governance in the form of a rejection of his legitimacy (due to party affiliation or regional identity or educational level or race - specifics don't matter anyway, 'cuz he's just plain different - I mean LOOK at him!) but in fact to his physical person in the form of some crazed, racist loner out there - it only takes one and a gun - nursing a life-long grudge now ginned-up to red-line levels by Moose-a-lini's accusations of him being weird, strange, foreign, a traitor, in cahoots with our stated enemies in the most important and significant threat to civilization in the history of all human conflict called the War on Terra.
OK, so I have to say something about this. First, Broadway Carl has a wonderful post up right now that pretty neatly echoes my feelings about Obama's emergence as a viable candidate and what that has meant to me, so go read it and - may I say across the deafening roar of the inter-web "conversation" - hear, hear!
No, really, go read his post before continuing here. Go ahead. I'll wait.
OK, so now that you've read it, I have feelings about this:
What I see in his eyes is defeat. I see a man who has been not been sober in while, drunk on ambition and rage or doped up on Ambien (who knows?), finally seeing with his own eyes the horror he has wrought and knowing that he can do nothing about it.
Maybe he understands now and feels bad. Right now, I don't think so because I think he's got ambition and part of me even hangs this on his Barbie wife. Her money has paid for his political career and I have no doubt that they have had more than one conversation that went something like "What the fuck have I been paying for all these years!? I have underwritten all your crappy campaigns for all these years and godammit I want me a president!"
Or words to that effect.
I don't mean to deflect blame from Mavericky McMaximum-Maverick-ossity. He's a douche. Not as big a douche as The Quisling from Connecticut, but close. Barbie-doll McCain and how she got to be Ms. McMaverick is proof enough of that, but I think he does have shreds of decency in him, they've just been swamped by his Macbethian ambition to the point of irrelevance.
After the election, though...
When Congress is out of session and he is at one of his houses with a pissed-off Cindy and no one is calling him and he has hours and days to putter around the house and review his life, thinking back on flight school and Hanoi and the Keating Five and the South Carolina GOP primary in 2000 and all those ugly rallies he whipped up to solidify his base as some kind of revenge for what happened to him there... so many thoughts... so many regrets...
Especially if something should now happen to Obama. How could such an outcome not be blamed directly on the toxic sewer of the rhetoric of the last few weeks of his campaign, a stretch that has begun to resemble nothing so much as a political rally in Bavaria circa 1924 or 25?
How else to describe it? John McCain sold his soul. We know it. We've all known it for quite a while. His friends and loved ones know it, too, but I think they are too in love with his status and how it reflects on them to tell him, if any of them have even admitted it to themselves. He definitely hasn't admitted to himself yet.
But he will.
And that will be a dark, dark day in a lifetime of dark days for John Sidney McCain, who has so proudly held his honor as his greatest treasure to know that he sold even that. Maybe such a day will come, but then maybe he will simply slide into senility without ever having admitted to himself how very, terribly wrong he has been.
The man in that video will someday be able to admit it, perhaps even out loud and to other people if not just to himself, but such a man is having an ever harder time swimming out of the mental sewer of drugs, senility and bad advice in which he is now adrift.
It is a scary time in America and The Maverick is to blame if things get any scarier. If he were a true man of principle, wouldn't be here.
In recklessly stoking the fires of bigotry and hatred to near-maelstrom temperatures and then refusing to carry the torch himself, John McCain has surrendered legitimate political responsibility for their anger and yielded the floor to those whose rage now has no champion. In goading them on, planting seeds of doubt and sewing acres of hate while bravely promising to take the good fight to Obama’s door, McCain played to a Base -- and baseless -- fear for which he himself was the conquering Hero, a role he has no trouble imagining for himself. But this gutless little man, finding his own house burning after feckless arsonists in his employ set the Obama barn ablaze, has found he cannot stand the heat; with no lawful political means to control the burn, this is a fire that may spread without sense or sensibility, feeding on its own hot futility.
If those cowardly masses that saw a strong and righteous John McCain as the sole arbiter of their rage now find him a paper tiger frightened by his own swaggering shadow, they may appoint themselves Heroes in this contrived battle between Right and Wrong, Blue and Red, Black and White. A vigilante, after all, acts out of the perception that The System has failed, its leaders too cowardly or corrupt to take up the sword. They say politics abhors a vacuum. But this may be a fire that burns hottest when starved of McCain’s hot, fetid air.
I've been using that phrase to describe the membership of the GOP for years. In the video seen below, I think we see examples of all three (and they overlap, sometimes completely). The scrawny blonde low-rent Coulter-geist you'll see is almost worthy of a fourth category: the functionally retarded. The jokes would write themselves, except these people are rightly, truly scary.
They are dim-witted, mean and largely armed. I am afraid for Renegade. With the tone of the rhetoric coming out of the McSmiegel/Moose with Lipstick ticket deteriorating almost hourly as The Ring slips from his grasp, their gatherings are beginning to resemble a Nuremburg rally.
John Sidney McCain is a racist. He is a rich, white, entitled, contemptuous racist who can't believe that he has to go through the motions of acting like Barack Obama is somehow his equal as a candidate, much less sharing a stage with a black man who is actually beating him in the polls.
As the Pig With Lipstick might put it: "Gollygeewillakers, what has the world come to?"
First, McSnarl said this last night at the debate:
Which gave us this less than 24 hours after he'd said it (goddamn I love me some inter-webs):
Which I think is awesome for incorporating in a mocking & humorous way the Freudian racist gaffe of a stupid, bumbling, short-tempered, muddle-headed old man who doesn't know or understand how the world around him has passed him by, only dimly comprehending (as a barnyard animal dimly comprehends a change in the weather) that for some reason the world is refusing to conform to his will and that as a result he isn't getting what he wants RIGHT NOW and GODDAMMIT HE WAS A P.O.W. (haven't you heard?) and that uppity n*gger is not showing proper respect for the white man!
Or, as the Rude Pundit put it after Grandpa McSimpson refused to make eye-contact with Obama during the last debate:
John McCain looked like nothing so much as a plantation owner just after the end of the Civil War forced to have a conversation with one of his freed slaves. There's no way he was gonna look that nigger in the eye and allow him to think they're equals. Used to be you could lynch a darkie for addressing a white man by his first name. Now, they think they can talk to you like they're humans.
Refusing eye-contact? How about refusing a handshake! (h/t Broadway Carl)
The bailout, which is SOOOO last week I know, is (as Mr. Sideshow wrote a couple of weeks ago), long before Hank "The Donald Rumsfeld of Economics" Paulson's "Give-Me-All-The-Money-And-Don't-Fucking-Ask-Me-Any-Questions-Or-The-Economy-Gets-It" three-page plan was scuttled in The House - the People's Chamber - by the "Tru-Believers" in the Rethugli-bot coalition (before being rescued by The Senate - The Plutocrat's Chamber) because - weaned on the poison milk of the Reagan Revolution as they are - they never understood that all that free-market rhetoric was just so much malarky spread by the Ruling Class to get their signature pet policies package-dealt with all those the Culture War rostrums that get the shrieking wingnut brigades nice and agitated for the end result of election victories that translate via Abramoff and Delay and the like into more money in the pockets of the Monied Class. The poor dears, those useful tools, willing pawns in a game they are too stupid or stubborn to understand (h/t to Lance Mannion):
One final, monstrous smash-and-grab raid on the treasury before they leave office
That about sums up the entire Bush Administration, don't it? W has been the very culmination of that vaunted "Reagan Revolution." He is the distilled essence of all that is ugly, greedy, simplistic, violent and mendacious in the entire intellectual (if that's even an appropriate word for this willfully ignorant bunch of hate-spewing know-nothings) underpinnings of the modern GOP.
We can all see that now as Grandpa McSimpson gets snarling and ugly at the uppity n*gger who dares challenge his white priviledge, as he sics Ms. Spunky McBeauty-Queen on him like some racist Alabama cop in a black & white newsreel from 1965 would sic a German Shephard on a black man who didn't know his place, but this time with lipstick. Sarah Palin is a racist. And the crowds who attend her speeches are, too.
In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."
Because McCain was never radical enough for the fruitloops who run the GOP, he has been kept away from the heavy machinery. Only now, after the entire Rethugli-goon ascendancy of the last 30 years has been revealed to be the massive power and money grab that it was way back when Nixon Went A-Courtin' the racists in Old Dixieland, when the press let Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun's senile brain just make shit up and they smiled and called it cute, when all our Defenders of the First Amendment marched lockstep into the panty-sniffing abyss to tsk-tsk about dalliances as the cackling wingnut gremlins of the rightwing impeached a lawfully elected and popular president of the opposing party just for spite and then pivoted 180º to poo-poo the so-called howling moonbat liberals and other assorted Dirty Fucking Hippies who didn't think that maybe launcing headlong into a land war in the Heart of Arabia for the sake of cheap oil - while lead by a shifltless moron the shitkickers in fly-over country wanted to have a beer with - was necessarily the wisest and (as that shiftless moron's corrupt daddy would sputter) "prudent" action to take in the wake of an attack by men who had arisen from the educated middle class of a different country who was ostensibly one of our allies and whose iron-fisted ruling family is a well-known and well-documented friend to the entire clan of that aforementioned shiftless moron who would lead that kamikaze charge.
Only now, after Junior has wrecked the whole machine, run it aground, burned up the pistons and ripped out the radio (in case he can hock it on his way back to Crawford), have they let McSnarl have the keys.
No time for a really decent post, but I want to highlight two things. One, I think digby gets it exactly right when she argues that "Conservatism Is A Luxury":
When things are going well, people have the luxury of being able to argue over lipsticks on blowjobs and whether a blastocyst has more rights than a stem cell. When they aren't, they don't want the blastocyst and lipstick people in charge.
Why would they? Essentially Republicans are entertainers. When times are good, they bring you fun homegrown culture wars and violent foreign shooting wars. (Let's go shopping!.) People barely pay attention and when they can't help watching, as with the impeachment or 9/11, it's turned into a media porn spectacle: Shock And Awe starring Jenna Jameson. It's very cathartic.
But they don't actually govern the country because they don't believe in government (at least for anything but helping them wage their wars for profit and skimming from the taxpayers.) So, when people's lives actually start to become affected by their malfeasance, it's only natural that they get serious. They may just get serious now.
The absence of such compliments to McCain is refreshing, and conveys a real confidence from Obama. Back when Obama was prefacing all of his attacks on Obama with a statement on how much he deeply respects John McCain's service to America, frankly it made what he said afterward sound like he was walking on eggshells. Honestly, apart from repeating McCain's message, and apart from irritating many of his own supporters, paying tribute to John McCain before attacking him just made the criticisms that followed sound weak and wimpy. These attacks, by contrast, sound confident, on message, and sharp. [snip]
I like Democrats when they talk like this. Makes me proud. Wish I would see this side of them more often.
"If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
from the Bhagavad Gita quoted by Robert Oppenheimer at "Trinity," site of the first atom bomb test Alamogordo, New Mexico July 16, 1945
Sarah Palin scares the shit out of me. She is the distilled perfection of everything that is wicked, sanctimonious, self-righteous, venal, condescending, venomous, ugly and cruel in the American character, as refined by the post-Nixon crime syndicate known as the Grand Old Party. All wrapped in a curvy, buxom package with a winning smile that makes her inner-ugly all the more harrowing to recognize.
For the bulk of the Rethugli-bot Party, it will always be the 1960's and no matter how much they use "The Vietnam Experience" as an umbrella code-word for all the turmoil of that decade (so they don't have to openly bitch about the Civil Right Movement - which is actually what has kept them pissed-off all these years), the truth is that they are simply authoritarians at heart. The ultimate goal of that authoritarianism varies from the cornpone Christo-Nazis of the Dominionist Movement to the hyper-macho corporatist gangstahs of Wall Street to the draft-dodging Old Money cowards in the Ivy League ranks of the neo-cons to the woman-hating frat-dudes across Middle America to the Confederate battle-flag waving red-neck hillbilly race-warriors of Old Dixie, but they can stand united in their HATE of the Dirty Fucking Hippie. It has been the glue that has held the GOP together since the waning days of Nixon's criminal enterprise and because the Rethuglicans have over these forty years grown more and more powerful without ever fulfilling the deepest desires of any of the above-mentioned groups, not even at the pinnacle of their power with Newt and Delay and the Impeachment (and vindictive humiliation) of a President (for a blowjob), the Coalition of Hate has been unraveling ever since. McCain inherits the final tattered remnants of this once-mighty Orc Army and has found in Sarah Palin an Uruk-Hai to unite them in their hatred for one last time, for one last, desperate lunge at power before the whole lumpy group finally disintegrates into bickering factions with their own unique, Balkanized puddles of hatred to nurse.
They are Hate Junkies and Sarah Palin is just the Tony Montana to give them the main-line red-meat they so desperately crave.
She is not the political light-weight many took her to be only a week ago. She is a pit viper. She is a one-woman wrecking crew and she will destroy all she touches because the Rethugli-goons would rather blow up the world than see the dirty fucking hippies get anything except beaten back, beaten down and beaten to death.
You cannot negotiate with someone who wants you dead.
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
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.
One - the GOP is so embarrassed by W that they want him to stay away from the convention. I hope this trend continues into his post-presidency across all his social arrangements. Perhaps universal shunning will have to replace the orange jumpsuit and shackles I normally wish to see set upon Fibby McLiesAlot and his entire putrid administration in their post-White House years. For a man who thinks history will vindicate him after he has met his maker in some kind of Harry Truman-esque rehabilitation of his legacy and reputation - and until his dying day protected from any sort of punishment by a power-worshipping political culture long since curdled by fallout from the Nixon years coupled to the insidious power of the Bush Crime Family - unreturned phonecalls and an empty datebook will have to suffice as punishment for the aging, dull-witted, frat-rat man-child who will soon shuffle off the stage of history. I rather like the idea of him white-haired and doddering around his Texas ranch, hollering at Laura, muttering to himself about how he beat his daddy by not only getting elected twice but by taking down Saddam Hussein to boot and wondering - sometimes aloud to Laura or to whichever sycophant Rethugli-doofus came by to lick his boots that day and sometimes to no one in particular as he clears brush in the blazing Texas sun - why no one comes calling to get his perspective on things.
As Oscar Wilde once wrote - the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. And, as an ex-girlfriend once said to me - the opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.
When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
The Preamble to Our Constitution:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Or, if you like, let the Muppets keep you patriotic:
All of which, to me, adds up to "Fuck You, Dick Cheney, Dubya and Johm McSame - this is my country and you can't have it, anymore."
At any rate, Happy 4th. Safe travels, all of you, and if you're reading this blog - go away and enjoy the holiday!
Infrequent blogging recently (very busy now with more to come) but this tidbit from driftglass analyzing the collective Village freak-out over Wes Clarke's perfectly reasonable comment on Johm McSame's willingness to use his ex-POW-status as mighty shield against any manner of questioning of any kind ever for all time until the end of history (authoritarianism is just such a knee-jerk impulse for all those droves of Rethugli-bot sheep that McBush is a natural - why do they hate him so?) was too intergalacticly awesome to go un-noted:
For seven years, the cowards, crazies and chickenhawks of the GOP have carried out their crimes and betrayals by scampering behind a series of blinds. Like insurgents caching weapons in a mosque and then crying “Infidel!” at anyone who tries to drive them out, the Republican Party set up their filthy, fascist sniper’s nest inside the death and terror of 9/11 and used the shadow of that tragedy to shield their treason from public view.
[...]
...at long last, they are starting to find Senator McSame attractive: the thrilling prospect that his years as a POW will offer the GOP one, last safe-house into which they can crawl and from which they can operate their despicable enterprises in relative safety for a just little bit longer.
Writing that sharp and darkly poetic makes me wonder why I even bother blogging when just reading driftglass first will save a click or two. Please, just go read the whole thing.
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.
