When I said this, first back in September after McSame & Moose-a-lini started slinging mud at Obama and then again in the wake of the embarrassing Rick Warren debacle, I felt I was distilling down a certain zeitgeist that had been taking hold across Left Blogistan for some time:
Why am I and my fellow progressives, liberals & Democrats expected to take the high road every single time? Why is the onus on us to make nice and maintain civility while the other side gets to wreck and rob the place with impunity, spewing hate and flinging poo like a monkey? Why are we supposed to just sit there and take it? It is almost as though they know these people are over-grown children and, like children, we grown-ups are required to be patient and tolerant while they go through some adult version of the terrible twos, except sustained and culture-wide.
Then, just today I read this at Group News Blog, again regarding the "wisdom" of Mr. Warren's selection (bold-face mine):
Warren panders not just to queer-hating but woman-hating, class exploitation, child abuse, apocalyptic nihilism, and white supremacy. Within a few years, he will be brought down by some seamy scandal (probably related to gay sex) and his brief validation on an international stage will be revealed for the sick joke it is.
In the meantime, however, he and his ilk operate from the developmental level of five-year-olds and talking about "tolerance" has no real meaning to them. If your five-year-old throws a screaming fit because she wants more cookies, you can sit her down and have a long talk with her about nutritional balance, but if you then give her one more cookie for participating, she will take away from that the lesson "if I throw a fit, I can get more cookies". Somebody has to be the grown-up with these people. They are not a majority, they are not even that powerful, it's all a house of cards. I want a President who will move in the other direction, away from giving them more room in our public discourse.
And then I read this at Crooks and Liars, not about Rick Warren but about the notion of bi-partisanship with the GOP in general, of which Warren is only a mis-represented and misunderstood facet (again, boldface mine):
I find it hilarious that after all of the petty partisanship of the last eight years that somehow it's incumbent upon the Democrats to be the grown-ups in Washington and reach across the aisle. Where was all the talk in the media circles of bipartisanship for the last eight years? Is it that the media knows that Republicans aren't mature enough to do so? And where, in all their history, have the Republicans shown themselves to be able to do anything for the good of the country instead of their party...?
Can we stop pretending these WATB's are serious people? On purpose and by design, they have no understanding of the demands of public policy or the laws of physics or basic facts of history or science or any complex theory of any kind. I know we are supposedly a representative democracy, but they demand a level of public validation that is far out of proportion to their percentage of the population and that validation, quite frankly, is Manichean in its desired totality. Anything short of fascist adulation and ring-kissing of their leaders bundled with unquestioned submission of any hint of any and all dissenting views is characterized as an attack on their personhood, a chip-on-the-shoulder, persecution-complexed worldview that is corrosive to healthy discourse in civil society. They should be marginalized for the good of the country, but Obama seems to buy into their self-serving hype as fully as the Washington Villagers.
I guess I can't let this Rick Warren thing go. Sue me.
So, I hadn't realized this, but via a Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, I learn that we've spent most of our history without an invocation nor a benediction. FDR added both at his inauguration in 1933 and, sadly, they've been part of the program ever since.
This factoid makes me even angrier than I was before.
While I grant that Obama is elected to be the president of all the people, not just the people who voted for him - something the current occupant just never got through his thick skull - I still say Rick Warren is quite simply a bridge too far. I have read a lot in the last few days about this issue, both pro and con, and I still come down where I was before: Rick Warren is the wrong choice, a walking, talking insult to the spirit of inclusion Obama has spent so much time and energy creating.
I hate quoting myself, but I must raise a question I asked back in September in the wake of the McCain campaign's mud-slinging: why are we always the ones who must suck it up?
Why am I and my fellow progressives, liberals & Democrats expected to take the high road every single time? Why is the onus on us to make nice and maintain civility while the other side gets to wreck and rob the place with impunity, spewing hate and flinging poo like a monkey? Why are we supposed to just sit there and take it? It is almost as though they know these people are over-grown children and, like children, we grown-ups are required to be patient and tolerant while they go through some adult version of the terrible twos, except sustained and culture-wide.
So, once again, The Left is expected to sit down, shut up and take one for the team, to just be grateful for the fucking-over not being worse than it otherwise would have been. The emotional retards on the other end of the spectrum once again have to be pandered-to, because they will otherwise get their widdle feelers hurt and take their toys home to pout. I just don't recall seeing a reciprocal show of respect when the other side stole the last two elections. I just remember a lot of crowing and chest-thumping about "mandates."
I find the inclusion of Rick Warren to be sickening because the most favorable spin I can put on it is to think that maybe he wants to insure the largest possible audience for the launching of his bold new direction in government and putting Warren at the beginning of the program is the least odious way to get and keep the eyes and ears of a large group of people who would otherwise range from the curiously skeptical to the overtly hostile. Warren, with his genial demeanor and Hawaiian shirts, projects an approachable warmth (however manufactured and shallow it may be) that his predecessors Robertson and Falwell lack and maybe that is a factor for Obama as well, though I must say that even with all of that in mind I still don't think this is what we who worked his campaign and gave him money had in mind.
The intolerant learn nothing when tolerated; for them it just means the suckers on the other side didn't have the guts to let their hate win the day.
Because I think the thing all the Obama defenders lose sight of amid this whole brouhaha is that we've been here before. Democrats have been sucking up to the Reich-Wing since Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun slithered into Washington on a tide of racial fear-mongering and cultural resentment. It has never, ever, provided any long-term benefit for the Democrats except to encourage the poo-flinging monkeys to fling even more poo. "Triangulating Bill" Clinton tried and tried and tried to accomodate a burgeoning and ascendant Political Right, in fact he was the finest Republican president we ever had, and all he ever got was impeached for his efforts.
I think some of this has to do with the old saw about a liberal being someone who won't take his own side in an argument. As liberals, we think surely some common ground can be found on any issue since we generally try to see other sides of arguments. Righties think god is on their side and the devil is in any opposition. In such a formulation, how can we ever find the middle? We can't because there isn't one. As Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday:
Ultimately, the reason politics is unavoidably "divisive" is because people have really divergent and irreconcilable views on passion-provoking controversies. That's what politics is. It's what it always has been. At some point, Obama either will or won't repeal DOMA and don't-ask-don't-tell; he either will or won't rescind Bush's anti-abortion regulations and appoint new Supreme Court Justices likely to re-affirm Roe; he either will or won't close Gitmo; he either will or won't withdraw from Iraq; he either will or won't investigate Bush war crimes; he either will or won't deliver on his promises to unions, etc. People feel very strongly -- and very differently -- about those issues.
And besides, at the end of the day, being an unapologetic atheist, I have to agree with (...a-hem...) Christopher Hitchens when he writes:
As Barack Obama is gradually learning, his job is to be the president of all Americans at all times. If he likes, he can oppose the idea of marriage for Americans who are homosexual. That's a policy question on which people may and will disagree. However, the man he has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation is a relentless clerical businessman who raises money on the proposition that certain Americans—non-Christians, the wrong kind of Christians, homosexuals, nonbelievers—are of less worth and littler virtue than his own lovely flock of redeemed and salvaged and paid-up donors.
This quite simply cannot stand.
[...]
A president may by all means use his office to gain re-election, to shore up his existing base, or to attract a new one. But the day of his inauguration is not one of the days on which he should be doing that. It is an event that belongs principally to the voters and to their descendants, who are called to see that a long tradition of peaceful transition is cheerfully upheld, even in those years when the outcome is disputed.
So, Obama promises us a new politics. With the Rick Warren selection, Obama reveals himself as an epic genius with a secret plan so grand no mere mortal can guess it, or else he is either more of a cynical operator than we thought or more gullible and stupid than he seems.
I'm not sure I like any of those options. I know, I know, he's still the far better option and he's going to give us what we want on Iraq, Gitmo, minority rights, energy policy, environmental policy, labor policy, and he projects competence and tolerance while single-handedly changing the image America projects to the world, blah-blah-blah, but right now, I'm angry and I choose to stay that way until he gives me a reason not to be.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
UPDATE: From the marvelously poisonous pen of Jillian over at Sadly, No:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been completely nauseated by the Sensible Liberal. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Left’s greatest stumbling block is not the Republican party or the Freepers of the world, but the moderate Democrat, who is more devoted to “winning” than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension, often called “inclusion” or “getting along”, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who says “I agree with the goal you seek, but I also understand the point of view of people who think you are little more than crazed pedophiles”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s full citizenship; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the fag to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
He should be arrested, tried and convicted of war crimes, then sent to prison for the rest of his unholy life. He dared the incoming administration to do just that a couple of days ago. I don't think anything will come of it and he will live happily ever after.
Got it from fivethirtyeight.com and, considering how cock-eyed our electoral system is as a result of the Electoral College, it looks like a doozy.
Indiana? Toss-up?
Nevada? Blue?
Montana, North Dakota & Georgia, soft on McCain?
I hope this is true. It will depress my father beyond measure and will potentially cause my mother to lock herself in the basement (if they had basements in Texas) in quivering, FOX-induced fear of the rampaging brown hordes that will surely be roaming the streets with unchecked impunity in B. Hussein's America looking for soft, white female faces to carve letters into.
Well, I must get my marching orders from Hussein HQ, so I'm heading down there tomorrow. So much defiling to do, I need clarification where to start.
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.
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.
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.
Matt Taibbi is truly a journalistic rock star. He is a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson who is angry and sharp-witted and can basically out-argue pretty much anyone.
Here's the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.
And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she's a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed middle-American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-size bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the Sizzlin' Picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else's, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because the image on TV reminds him of the mean, brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.
Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she's a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.
[...]
[Sarah Palin] appeared to be completely without shame and utterly full of shit, awing a room full of hardened reporters with her sickly sweet line about the high-school-flame-turned-hubby who, "five children later" is "still my guy." It was like watching Gidget address the Reichstag.
[...]
Barack Obama might be every bit as much a slick piece of imageering as Sarah Palin. The difference is in what the image represents. The Obama image represents tolerance, intelligence, education, patience with the notion of compromise and negotiation, and a willingness to stare ugly facts right in the face, all qualities we're actually going to need in government if we're going to get out of this huge mess we're in.
Here's what Sarah Palin represents: being a fat fucking pig who pins "Country First" buttons on his man titties and chants "U-S-A! U-S-A!" at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.
M.T.: What a surprise that you mention Franklin Raines. Do you even know how a CDS works? Can you explain your conception of how these derivatives work? Because I get the feeling you don’t understand. Or do you actually think that it was a few tiny homeowner defaults that sank gigantic companies like AIG and Lehman and Bear Stearns? Explain to me how these default swaps work, I’m interested to hear. Because what we’re talking about here is the difference between one homeowner defaulting and forty, four hundred, four thousand traders betting back and forth on the viability of his loan. Which do you think has a bigger effect on the economy?
B.Y.: Are you suggesting that critics of Fannie and Freddie are talking about the default of a single homeowner?
M.T.: No. That is what you call a figure of speech. I’m saying that you’re talking about individual homeowners defaulting. But these massive companies aren’t going under because of individual homeowner defaults. They’re going under because of the myriad derivatives trades that go on in connection with each piece of debt, whether it be a homeowner loan or a corporate bond. I’m still waiting to hear what your idea is of how these trades work. I’m guessing you’ve never even heard of them.
I mean really. You honestly think a company like AIG tanks because a bunch of minorities couldn’t pay off their mortgages?
B.Y.: When you refer to “Phil Gramm’s Commodities Future Modernization Act,” are you referring to S.3283, co-sponsored by Gramm, along with Senators Tom Harkin and Tim Johnson?
M.T.: In point of fact I’m talking about the 262-page amendment Gramm tacked on to that bill that deregulated the trade of credit default swaps.
Tick tick tick. Hilarious sitting here while you frantically search the Internet to learn about the cause of the financial crisis — in the middle of a live chat interview.
B.Y.: Look, you can keep trying to make this a specifically partisan and specifically Gramm-McCain thing, but it simply isn’t. We’ve gone on for fifteen minutes longer than scheduled, and that’s enough. Thanks.
M.T.: Thanks. Note, folks, that the esteemed representative of the New Republic has no idea what the hell a credit default swap is. But he sure knows what a minority homeowner looks like.
B.Y.: It’s National Review.
Because they are all stupid.
They have no core principles or ideas beyond easily regurgitated catch-phrases and when pressed for actual facts, they inevitably choke because they cannot summon any answers more intricate than the GOP-HQ-issued talking points. So, I can easily say to our dear friend Byron York, nice try but...
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was done, the article says, to protect Senator McBush, who was speaking at the convention. I guess the Secret Service decided that sorting out the people who would kill people from those who wouldn't in a room full of gun nuts is harder than just making sure anyone who wanted to would have to try just a little bit harder.
I have not liked Chris Matthews for a long time. I think he's one of the poster-children for the corroded state of our professionally compromised, ethically corrupt, navel-gazing media class. He's a loud-mouth with a national media platform where other empty-headed loudmouths get to spout ill-informed opinions.
But every once in a while, he does something to remind everyone that he is actually smart. Like this complete, utter, total and unapologetic atomization of the distinctly non-comedic right-wing shoutmeister Kevin James (h/t Broadway Carl):
Gawd, Reich-wingers are stupid. Watch this bit from Jon Stewart regarding the recent West Virginia blowout of a black candidate, especially the lady at the end who is "sick of Hussein" - just the kind of braindead political insight that gave us the modern day GOP. If the guy above is part of the GOP command structure, these loser below are its footsoldiers. And we've been losing elections to them? How?
Keep going, West Virginia. You morons deserve the squalor within which you live your miserable, backward lives.
