As if on cue, amid my re-watching of Ken Burns' "The Civil War,"Salon.com runs a piece today about how the Southerners in the Senate are selling out the country to foreign automakers for the sake of sticking it to the north and that such behavior had been SOP for Southern politicians throughout the 20th Century. Motivations vary, but the result is always the same:
In the early 20th century, the Southern states were the first to adopt conscious statewide economic development policies, which then as now meant poaching industries from New England and the Midwest where wages and public spending and regulation were greater. That's how the South took the textile industry from New England, before losing it to lower-wage Asia. Now with the help of Nissan, Toyota, and BMW, the South is trying to replace Detroit as the center of U.S. automobile production, using low wages, anti-union laws, and low taxes to benefit from the outsourcing of industry from societies more advanced than the South, like Japan and Germany. The economic Axis is collaborating with the neo-Confederates against their common opponent -- the American Union. If they succeed, the losers will be not only non-Southern regions in the U.S., but the majority of Southerners of all races, whose interest in decent wages, good education, and adequate public services have almost always been sacrificed to the greed of the well-connected few by Southern statehouse gangs.
The past is present. Once severed from The Union, the unruly confederate states couldn't short-term sacrifice for the long-term greater good long enough to gel into a coherent nation and would have thus lost the civil war sooner had the men in gray not been so ferociously committed to "The Cause," whatever that actually is. And so, now, today their descendants continue to fight those meddling Yankees by gladly selling out the greater good of the nation (for which they believe they have the greater claim to patriotism, backed by God himself) for the strictly small-time and narrowly local economic gain of their region or state. More more to the point, for the strictly small-time and narrowly local gain of the few people at the top of the economic and social ladder of their region or state while the rest of the population sees ever lower wages and standard of living.
It is no wonder why they hate unions so much. Organized labor gives the workers a voice when the "Culture" of The South has trained their ruling class that everyone who is not one of them are to be exploited and sold-off once no longer useful. Once a plantation culture, always a plantation culture. All the little people need to just sit down, STFU and be grateful for the scraps massa lets drop from his table.
This is no way to run a modern industrial country or even a political party, but then that's Today's GOP: yesterday's Democratic Party.
Again, Michael Lind:
"A house divided against itself cannot stand." At each of the defining crises in American history, a major expansion of federal authority was necessary to overcome a division between North and South that threatened the future of the U.S. as a democratic, middle-class nation. The division between slave and free states was overcome by the defeat of the Confederacy and the Reconstruction amendments that abolished slavery and established national citizenship for the first time. During the New Deal era, the enormous gap between the agrarian South and West and the industrial Northeast was overcome by federal programs like rural electrification and highway building, federal regulation, and federal social insurance.
Today the division is no longer between slave and free states, or agrarian and industrial states, but between two models of industrial society -- the Northern model, based on adequate public service funding and taxation and unionization, and the Southern model, based on low-tax, low-service government and low-wage, non-unionized, easily exploited labor.
Reconstruction, however imperfect, was about re-stitching the slave and free states back into a whole nation and was largely successful despite later social lapses, best embodied in the rise of the KKK. Much of the policy of FDR's New Deal was about bringing the South's infrastructure into the 20th Century, material improvements that paid dividends in the post WW2 economy. The Civil Rights era was about forcing their social norms and standards to adhere to 20th Century standards, for the sake of the country. The two latter forced-improvements culminated in the sleek, shiny New South of the 1980's & 1990's, for the world would not have paid such economic attention to the poor, ignorant, violent backwater the South would have otherwise been without the continual intervention of the Civil War's victors and their descendants in the affairs of the region.
So, Michael Lind cogently argues for a new Reconstruction to keep the rest of the country from becoming a low-wage sewer like the South:
The Southern conservatives of the GOP are not irrational when they denounce the very idea of a national economic strategy as "socialism" or "industrial policy" while each of their states pursues its own "socialist industrial policy" within its state borders. They are being strategic. They understand their interests, as they define them. A U.S. economic development strategy would make it more difficult for individual state governments and their crony capitalist allies to engage in the beggar-thy-neighbor policies that the Southern elites have specialized in for nearly a century. And a national economic development system would thwart the ultimate goal of the extreme right in America -- the leveling down of the entire U.S. to the South's inhumane and primitive standards.
So, from now on, when someone from the other side of the aisle bemoans the state of discourse in this country, whining about how crude and mean all those lefties have made politics with their foul-mouthed attacks on the president or when one of them finds some nameless commenter (or pseudonym'd partisan blogger - natch) on DailyKos or FDL has used objectionable and disrespectful language to talk about the opposition, please feel free to point to the same kind of ugly name-calling by an elected official of the man the loyal opposition has selected as their candidate (and who will likely be the next president of the United States) by none other than House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio regarding the voting record of Barack Obama (from the Miami Student, via FDL):
"Now, listen, I've voted 'present' two or three times in my entire 25-year political career, where there might have been a conflict of interest and I didn't feel like I should vote," Boehner said. "In Congress, we have a red button, a green button and a yellow button, alright. Green means 'yes,' red means 'no,' and yellow means you're a chicken shit. And the last thing we need in the White House, in the oval office, behind that big desk, is some chicken who wants to push this yellow button."
Note that one of the definitions at the top of this post includes the word "cowardly," which for my money perfectly describes this:
Wow. For a guy who loves to talk tough, he sure gets weepy easily enough. I don't remember any of their pretend tough guys in the Regan-era action movies (Red Dawn, Rambo, Missing in Action, etc...) that form the entire basis of their policy world-view ever crying like that. Chickenshit is a strong word that shouldn't be bandied about by someone who is still so unhinged at the prospect of all those scary brown people out there in the world possibly attacking his local shopping mall, or some other such perceived local "soft target," i.e target for Homeland Security boondoggle dollars to buy Republican votes. As far as I can tell, Sarah Palin's anti-American parts of America are where the bulk of the 3000 people Boehner weeps over actually died (and -- depending on how Pennsylvania goes this election -- arguably all of the 2,998 who died that day), so wasn't it a good thing that such a large swath was cut through the America-haters? I'm just trying to keep up with their logic. It's so hard, sometimes.
Jebus, September 11 really made the other side collectively lose their freaking minds. They are a timid, fearful, blustering and morally weak people. The events of that day confirmed all their worst pre-conceptions about the world, which have in turn been well-manipulated into electoral success by the Svengalis in the GOP High Command. Until now, when one of those scary brown people will be their next duly-elected president, which is why they are losing it.
Sickening or just plain sad, I'm not entirely certain. What a bunch of nincompoops. Tristero over at Hullabaloo gives a better voice than I ever could to the sentiment I feel about this whole ugly business and what is to be done about it (bold face mine):
We want the extreme right and their agenda out of our national politics, driven back to the margins of American discourse where it belongs. Maybe someone out there truly yearns for a less nasty politics, but not me, not now. Not with extremists who call me "traitor," who have listed my friends as some of the 100 most dangerous people in America or placed them on terrorist watch lists, and who, from their seat as a US Representative pronounce a candidate for the American presidency a chicken shit.
Since I'm sure our resident rightwing friends will take what I just said out of context, let's be clear. I am not saying that a robust, vibrant, and bipartisan effort on serious issues will remain ipso facto impossible or is necessarily undesirable. Nor am I saying that Democrats and only Democrats always have the "right" answer to a problem - clearly they don't. I am saying, however, that it is absolutely impossible with the Republican party as it is now, and in its forseeable paleolithic palinized future, for Democrats to work together productively with the extremists at the top of (and throughout) the party except on the most circumscribed of issues. To get anything serious done, they will have to be fought. And that will not be pretty. I see no reason for Dems to back down and plenty of reasons to respond tit for tat, with interest.
You cannot "work with" the extreme right, but you can defeat them. Obama's tactic appears to be to ignore them and isolate them from the atrophied remnants of the "moderate" Republicans, which he will encourage. Fair enough, that's part of a strategy, but it's not sufficient. To defeat Bushism and other trends of the American extreme right will take, as it always has, concentrated . sustained, and effective resistance in addition to Obama's "divide and conquer" tactics. It requires us to denounce scoundrels like DeLay and humiliate buffoons like Boehner as well as a consistent, persistent, hounding of the media to do their job to expose these people for what they are.
These are incompetent frauds driven by a dangerously belligerent ideology grounded not in American values, but only sheer ignorance and fear. There is no reason to show them respect or kindness. They simply must be pushed away from the corridors of power, left to mutter in their plush think tanks and at their gun shows 'bout how Obama is using hypnosis, how the beginning of the end was fluoridated water, and how gay marriage is the only human factor that causes global warming.
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.
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.
So, the main reason these motherfuckers aren't funny is that their entire reason for being is to behave like the cackling Gremlins from the eponymous films of the early 80's. They seem to exist only to smash and destroy and belittle and otherwise gleefully wreck the whole notion of civility. It's much more fun, I suppose, to act like a poo-flinging monkey than a grown-up who understands that sometimes people will disagree, and that's OK. Their only real joy in life comes from acting like a bully against whoever they decide to gang up on. The usual target is a liberal, since in their pinched, dessicated world "liberal" is tantamount to "wimp", "pussy" or "weakling." Malicious offense is fun for the whole family.
Glenn McCoy's cartoon here is just simply not funny. At all. I ran across it at Slate.com's Cagle Cartoons, far from the first unfunny "conservative" cartoon I saw, just the final one that pissed me off enough to knock together a blog post. This POS cartoon perfectly illustrates the winger mindset crystallized by Atrios when he wrote this:
It's long been the case that what really gets the Republican base excited is anything that pisses off liberals. There are genuine policy differences, of course, but to get an audience of Republicans on their feet and cheering you need to mention something, no matter how pointless, which pisses of liberals. It's the glue that keeps them together.
'Nuff said.
UPDATE: Last night, I threw together the above post in a wicked fuckin' hurry, so I wasn't able to be as thorough as I wanted to be in my analysis of the "humor" in the above cartoon. First, I want to include this cartoon from October 2003, penned by the much funnier, more incisive and defiantly liberal Tom Tomorrow (he has his own blog, too!), which our buddy Glenn McCoy shamelessly ripped-off:
Anybody see a difference?
I'll give you a hint, it has to do with the items misidentified as provocations. In the McCoy cartoon, his Wingnut Warrior Hero lists three things which are, in order: a regurgitation of discredited White House propaganda, a non-sequiter and a sleazy mischaracterization of a crucial progressive issue which has no bearing on a liberal's feelings about Sarah Palin and thus amounts to a red-herring. This comes, of course, from the manufactured outrage people, of late "lipstick on a pig" fame, so why should anyone be surprised?
On the other hand, look at the items on the Tom Tomorrow list of provocations. They seem quaint, looking back on them now. Everyone at the time made fun of us, said we were traitors and chicken-littles and alarmists and rancorous partisans. Yet, nothing in the second cartoon is anything except true, however dated. The reeling, shambling horror show this country has become at the hands of these incompetent, hate-filled criminals is as heart-breaking as it is unsurprising. The GOP is run by a bunch of thugs, goons and gangsters and the ranks are filled out by mental & emotional children who are either too stupid to understand the ontological ramifications of temporal reality (actions have consequences - life ain't a physics-free cartoon nor is it the ethically & morally malleable world of your average Hollywood action flick) or they are too corrupt to care.
Either way, fuck 'em, because I'm tired of being lectured by fatuous TV gasbags and haughty print news demi-gods about how I'm supposed to be tolerant of them and their views, even as they call me a traitor (and much, much worse) and imply that my candidate for president is a pedophile. 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.
Well, we've been tolerant and patient all the way into the sewer. You ever had a friend over who brought his poorly disciplined kids? You sit around your own house trying to have a civil conversation while they run around the place screaming and throwing things and wiping their grimy hands on your furniture and generally behaving like something out of Lord of the Flies, or maybe some kind of feral primate, and the parents just grin and act like they are the cutest thing in the world.
In fact, here is the American political system as surmised in one scene from "Raising Arizona":
This is the America we live in now. America 2.0, if you will. Secret prisons where "Enemies of America" get locked up. Evidently we're reaching back to the practices of the British Empire to get our way in the world. Hell, the sun didn't set on the British Empire for two hundred years, so they must have been doing something worth studying. The Royal Navy used ships as floating prisons, and it seems, now, we do too. As the guy in the video says, if you can't bring them to the prison, bring the prison to them. And in international waters, to boot, so no laws to worry about.
Go Navy!
Which is why it should surprise no one that Obama is choosing to avoid Muslims. America is corroding into a decrepit and sinister police state (see: "FISA Bill", "House of Representatives" "2008") while huge swaths of our body politic see that transformation as a comforting elevation in their personal security - they don't break any laws, so what do they have to worry about?
When the puppet masters decide to demonize the brown people for electoral gain, they tap the lizard brain fear-response of these crispy white people living in blissful racial isolation by pointing to the dark-skinned scary people who talk funny or speak furrin' in them-there coastal cities and over there in furrin' countries-n-shit. Someone like Obama, dark-skinned and all - with a funny-sounding name, to boot - probably thinks that appearing in any way whatsoever within hailing distance of a mosque or someone wearing a headscarf will be the kind of image the PR-spin-meisters at FOX Noise will run with ad nauseum, possibly causing him to lose some votes. Of course, anyone who would believe anything they see or hear on FOX wouldn't vote for Obama anyway, but that's beside the point because you can't present yourself as an agent of change if you actually aren't.
John Cole is pissed about it over at Balloon Juice. And frankly, it pisses me off, too. He's flat wrong. Middle name "Hussein" or not, Barack Obama needs to change policy on this one no matter how much hay the other side might make out of some insinuating juxtoposition of images, or it's just one more example of a Democrat asking a portion of his constituency to quietly bide their time for just a little bit longer while they do Real Work that we, the common people, couldn't possibly understand (see: "FISA Bill", "House of Representatives" "2008"). I won't defend the Obama campaign on this one.
Because, well, can he really be THAT afraid of a pinhead like Bill Orally? I really enjoyed this takedown of Mr. Loofah:
I haven't posted in a while - starting a new show can really soak up all your free time - but I have to post the following, moved as I am to the act of contributing money not once but twice today.
Contribution Number One: I threw a few bucks to the Obama campaign here - because of this:
Barack Obama is remaking American politics, truly, deeply and (hopefully) for all time. He isn't taking public money for the general election, because he can quickly raise piles of money in small amounts from a huge swath of the American public - which is why he can make the map look like this:
It's bad enough watching the likes of Steny Hoyer, Rahm Emanuel and a disturbingly disoriented Nancy Pelosi eviscerate the Fourth Amendment, exempt their largest corporate contributors from the rule of law, and endorse the most radical aspects of the Bush lawbreaking regime. But it's downright pathetic to see them try to depict their behavior as some sort of bipartisan "compromise" whereby they won meaningful concessions:
"When they saw that we were unified in sending that bill rather than falling for their scare tactics, I think it sent them a message," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "So our leverage was increased because of our Democratic unity in both cases.
Not even the media establishment and the GOP can refrain from mocking this pretense they're trying to peddle. What's amazing is that they're actually as devoid of dignity as they are integrity.
As I noted yesterday, the GOP couldn't even wait for the ink to dry on this "compromise" before publicly -- and accurately -- boasting that they not only got everything they want, but got even more than they dreamed they would get.To The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau, GOP House Whip Roy Blunt derided the telecom amnesty provision as nothing more than a "formality" which would inevitably lead to the immediate and automatic dismissal of all lawsuits against the telecoms, while Sen. Kit Bond taunted the Democrats for giving away even more than they had to in order to get a deal: "I think the White House got a better deal than they even had hoped to get."
Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi's lap dog, has worked hard these last few weeks to try and pass this bill. I called my representative's office in Washington, Charlie Rangel, last night and urged him to vote against this bill. Happily, he did. To check and see how your representative voted, go to this link.
It pisses me off that it has passed today, 293-129. Thanks, Nancy "Off-The-Table" Pelosi. And Steny, too. Who both voted for it. Despite their spin to the contrary, this is not a compromise, it is a capitulation that gives the president everything he wants. I just don't understand why the Dems have been so eager to bend over and take this one up the ass from a record-settingly unpopular president. Every few months or so, they'd keep putting this bill out there and we (until today) kept defeating it. This time, they got it through with a convoluted set of procedural rules. Again, thanks, Nancy "New-Sheriff-In-Town" Pelosi.
Their eagerness, I suppose, on the one hand comes from the same impulse that has kept them from impeaching George and Barbara's idiot son despite his manifest crimes against the Constitution and common human decency. Somehow, that urge also makes them want to give him whatever he wants in a Quisling-Renfield sort of way. I call it Democratic Battered Wife Syndrome, their fear of an out-of-control Rethugli-bot Party makes them collaborators in their own degradation. That, and I'm sure not a few of them are complicit in the crimes of the telecoms and they hope that this immunity will either put off the retribution for their wrong-doing until they can get out of office or thwart it altogether. Either way, they need to be out of work, up to and including Pelosi and Hoyer. THE 4th AMENDMENT: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
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.
Digby has an extended post that revisits a theme she's hammered for a very long time, that the Rethugli-bots really are exactly the bunch of racists they so hysterically deny being whenever confronted with examples of their dog-whistle language. If challenged, they usually call it a "joke" and then make it the fault of the uptight, overly-sensitive, listener for being offended.
They've been successfully running for office with cultural reinforcement via this technique from their dependable stable of right-wing shock-jocks and blathering bobblehead "pundits" for a very long time, but always couching it in issues that allow them to use coded language like "welfare reform" (stick it to the darkies) or "immigration reform" (stick it to the furr'ners) or "family values" (stick it to the queers - or uppity wimminfolk - you choose) or "strong defense" (stick it to the prissy girly-men over-educated egghead Lib'ruhls who all think they're better than Real Americans who know how to kick ass in war and always win - BOO-YA! - unless those pussies afraid of a stand-up fight make America lose just for spite).
Since the Ruling Class - and make no mistake we have a Ruling Class in America - is like all Ruling Classes across the world throughout history, they are deeply, fully, deathly afraid of the dirty, unwashed masses. Their fear is expressed in the platform of their pet-party, the GOP, to build election-winning coalitions (which they'd bypass if they could, since elections - and specifically democracies - are so messy and unpredictable and thus bad for business and, more importantly, accumulated wealth). The problem is, though, that those platform planks have all been, in some way, more or less reduceable to fear and loathing of "The Other" - to which the over-whelmingly white Rethugli-bot membership, from the violent & virulent racism of your average Dixie-goon to the latent racial mistrust of the nervous, TV-news-addicted suburban soccer mom, is all-too-eager to subscribe.
Well, digby takes a good extended look at the changing political landscape and has this to say:
The Republicans have flogged this idea that they are the party of the salt of the earth Real America for quite a while. But what they have been working toward, really, for quite some time is to be the party of the Old Confederacy with just a tiny reach beyond it with the right candidate and the right circumstances. The problem, you see, is that this mythical Real America is actually a country filled with all those undesirable identities to which they see themselves in opposition. In fact, these undesirables, from gays to uppity women to Hispanics to Asians to the ultimate interlopers, the African Americans who came over to "our" country against their will (long before "we" did) comprise a majority. So even if they Republicans manage to make this election a referendum on the "Real Americans" vs "The Other," which is all they can do, they can't win that way anymore. The Real Americans are outnumbered by the rest of us. The takeover is complete.
I really hope she's right. Please go read the whole thing. And follow the links, too. It's well worth it.
It has been a few days due to a family situation (of which I'm pretty sure most of you are aware) that required me to fly to a state in the deep, deep south - the poorest, most backward one of all, but which nevertheless somehow has an enviable literary heritage (wink & nudge). The whole experience was like a re-fresher course on why I got as far away from that part of the country as my English-only ass could get, sin el pasaporte.
I will be writing more about what I saw down there (both on the ground & from the airplane) vis a vis Peak Oil, but as for today I want to direct everyone's attention to driftglass who is absolutely on fire in this post from a few days ago that echoes what I and my friends have been lamenting for some time - but much more eloquently - the stranglehold the "Dixie" mindset has on American politics. In the wake of the HRC blowouts in W.Va and Kentucky, all the bobbleheads (including this guy at HuffPost - a Princeton professor) have been yammering away in a thoroughly clinical manner about how vast swaths of the electorate won't vote for a black man and that the Dems need to somehow contend with that.
Racism trumps misogyny afterall, I suppose.
But at no point do they condemn these people for their willful provincial ignorance. Instead, in the collective mind of the village poobahs in D.C., these people become romanticized and elevated as Real 'Murricans, despite the fact that their ideological forefathers wanted to leave this country and we fought a war to prevent them from doing it.
Why do they get a pass?
Why do they get to claim the mantle of patriot?
They lost the Civil War and even more than that, they deserved to lose. And they have been an impediment to progress in this country since DAY ONE. From the earliest days of the republic, even before we were a republic, we've had to accommodate them, their soul-destroying 'peculiar institution' and all the toxic, corrosive cultural tendencies attending it, as well as the resulting inferiority complex and massive chip on their collective shoulder which drives the majority of their politics.
Why do the rest of us have to put up with all this shit?
...I am done conceding one more fucking millimeter to the great- great-grandbastards of an ideology that should have been universally denounced two generations ago and then unceremoniously sealed like Chernobyl under a million tons of concrete.
Instead, far from repudiating ignorance and racism -- burying them at the crossroads with a stake through their rotting hearts -- for as long as I have been alive they have been the Republican’s cash crops; their carefully cultivated political opium poppies.
So rather than denouncing the mutant offspring of our nation's Original Sin, they hire professional race-baiting gunslingers like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove to dog-whistle its shambling electoral corpse back up from unquiet graves in unholy ground every two years with magic conjure words like “Southern Pride”, "Confederate flag” and “state’s rights”.
[...]
But so long as the hunger for their votes means they're pandered to instead of punished...so long as they are allowed to rage unchecked and unchallenged like a disease through our body politic -- decade after exhausting decade -- warping our national debates, demanding that their atavistic values be accommodated...I say fuck ‘em.
Without the guns of the Union Army, the Confederacy would never have fallen. And without the massed might of the federal government, the courts, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens putting their necks on the line, Jim Crow would never have been smashed.
[...]
I have absolutely no reason to believe that, having endured proudly intact century after century, our surviving enclaves of American bigotry will ever “softly and suddenly vanish away” without the aid of a fleet of cultural and political bulldozers.
Anger is a great motivator. Man, driftglass can write. So could Abraham Lincoln (from his Cooper Union Address, New York, New York, February 27, 1860):
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them.
Only the rest of the United States looking like Dixie in word, thought, action, deed and spirit will make them go away. And not even then, because they're so insular and mistrustful because of the ugly, lingering side-effects of the cognitive dissonance of a culture of slaves and slave-owners in a "free" country that they can never seem to get away from the persecution complex that lies at the heart of their brand of politics.
OK, so they haven't actually done this yet, but they might. John Conyers has issued subpoenas for Karl "Dark Sith Lord" Rove to testify before Congress, which he has repeatedly refused, in the Don Siegelman case. I haven't written a whole lot about it, even though I carry a Don Siegelman banner on my sidebar, but I think this is one of the pivotal conflicts before us in this country right now.
It is not exaggerating to say that Don Siegleman was sent to jail for being a popular member of the opposing party. The particulars of his case you can read here, but not only was his election victory fraudulently stolen in the middle of the night (after it had been called in his favor) with a surge of votes from one precinct, these same operators (at the behest of Rove) trumped up a bribery charge and sent him to jail.
'Cuz they like to twist the knife after they stick it in.
Now, I've argued for a long time that the so-called "New South" is little better than a third-world shithole pretending to be part of the modern world, a failing only masked in the popular imagination by the fact that they speak English. The brand of politics practiced down there is mostly akin to the kind one finds in a corrupt banana republic - complete with violence-prone paramilitary shock troops to enforce the political doctrines of the ruling class on the general populace - the Klan, in case I hadn't been obvious enough. The fact that they're jailing the opposition party is just a natural evolution of a system of (mis)rule they've been perfecting since before the Civil War.
Just off the House floor today, the Crypt overheard House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers tell two other people: “We’re closing in on Rove. Someone’s got to kick his ass.” Asked a few minutes later for a more official explanation, Conyers told us that Rove has a week to appear before his committee. If he doesn’t, said Conyers, “We’ll do what any self-respecting committee would do. We’d hold him in contempt. Either that or go and have him arrested.”
[…] Yesterday, in somewhat more diplomatic language, Conyers refused Rove’s offer to testify in writing.
Well, it seems the MSM is finally catching on as well. Catherine Crier talking to Dan Abrams on "The Verdict." (Also via C&L):
I’m a big rule of law (fan), this has nothing to do with politics for me, it is respecting the rule of law, regardless of Democrat or Republican, and at this point in time if they don’t show back bone then there are not three branches of government in this country.
We moonbats in the looney left have been trying to tell the numbskulls in the press for a long time that these people are dangerous. I just hope they haven't caught on too late.
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.
Frankly, her "victory" is sickening for a great many reasons, not the least of which was having to hear her fingers-on-a-chalkboard voice claim 2, 209 delegates to clinch - which is the goalpost-moving number her campaign has been peddling because it includes the otherwise uncontested but nevertheless completely disqualified Florida and Michigan delegations. The greater reason is the on-the-ground ugliness behind the lop-sided numbers. She won because the mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers just couldn't bring themselves to vote for a (whispering now) nig-ra.
To which I say to the good people of West Virginia (except for you John Cole, because you rock!): Fuck You.
You deserve to stay stuck in the 19th Century. Besides, we all know you're going vote en masse for Johm McSame in the fall anyway, so we don't really need your vote. It's shit like tonight that makes the rest of the country (especially all us coastal elites) take such glee in depicting you like this:
I will come back to the Peak Oil issue I raised a couple of posts ago, but in the meantime this post from the very wonky and always incisive Matt Stoller over at the (decreasingly so, but nevertheless staunchly) pro-Clinton Open Left just nailed down into words what for me has been up to now that je ne sais quoi that has drawn me inextricably to the Obama campaign.
It's the feeling of change, real change. Big change. Of difference. Of finally being on the winning team. For a dumb 'ol boy from Texas who grew up watching the horrific, inexorable march of the cornpone Nazis grow from a few angry, sanctimonious, Christo-fascist bigots in backwoods rural Texas spread like a cancer to infect first the governing apparatus of the state and eventually the whole country. As I have said many times, I left Texas because it is the kind of place that actually elected George W. Bush - on purpose. Twice.
So, for truly the first time in my entire life, I am seeing the vast, nationwide cultural wave of xenophobia and willful, mean-spirited, Dixie-fied ignorance that - after college in West Texas - chased me first to the true-blue heart of Texas (Austin, yawl) then on to New York City, before the cackling gremlins in the Reich-wing's high command with their army of flying monkeys usurped the United States government, the people's government, in a bloodless coup. Since then, they have blown up the world, grinning all the way to their secret swiss bank accounts.
And all along, the most galling, frustrating thing for creative-class types like me and, well, everyone I know, was that we knew - KNEW - we were smarter, harder-working, more clever and overall just plain better at organizing shit in a dynamic and interactive way than the lock-step goobers we faced every election cycle. Which is why we all retreated onto the inter-webs. The hive-mind of the blogosphere was where we could and would organize, find our voice and our power again.
Barack Obama understands that. It is unfortunate for Hillary Clinton that she and her husband, as I wrote a few posts back, are relics from another age. Prior to Obama's emergence, Hillary was salable mostly because she was an only slightly prickly reminder of better days, those indian summer salad days of Clintonian dot-com-&-SUV's-on-cheap-gas prosperity, before the onset of this dystopian winter of BushCo.
We can appreciate what Bill & Hillary did for us back then, but Obama makes us now see them both, and her specifically, for what they truly are: the compromised remnants of the-best-we-could-have-hoped-for as the hurricane of right-wing Dixie-fied hatred (30 years in the making) finally make landfall on the shores of decent society.
Obama has successfully remade the Democratic Party already, and shown that old partisan Washington politics is over if you are a Democrat. Can he do that with Republicans? By stripping power, money and responsibility from outside groups and opponents, Obama is increasing his control of the party apparatus. He is also, however, putting everything on his own shoulders. When the Swift Boaters come back, and they will, it's all on Obama and his movement to hit back. He's betting that he can strip power from their base just as he stripped power from the old Washington way of doing politics within the Democratic Party.
I do not doubt that he can do this during the general election. McCain is such a weak candidate, and the Republicans are in such disarray, that a solid White House victory, 5-7 Senate seats, and 40-50 seats in the House are clearly possible. House Republicans are especially mean right now; insiders tell me they are going to cause problems with the war funding tactics just because they are so depressed from losing in Louisiana and Illinois. They have no money for the House and the Senate, and a depressed base. I'm curious about Obama's governing philosophy, as that is where the Republicans are going to make their stand in 2009. Without traditional outside groups (and he doesn't want them involved, witness his lobbyist ban in his new administration), Obama is going to be relying on the emergent networks that come from his campaign to buttress his priorities, but since we don't actually know what they are, it's hard to figure out what his governing strategy will be.
As Mike Lux wrote earlier, it's time to get ready for Obama as the nominee. I would amplify this and point out that it's time to get ready for a party that is being taken apart and rebuilt as the Obama movement. It's incredibly refreshing, in a sense, for politics to be completely reimagined on top of the internet and with a strong focus on leadership development, volunteers, and outside of DC leadership disdainful of partisanship and the give and take of politics-as-usual. It's also displacing the anti-Bush arguments of the last eight years and the political dynamic it fostered on the left.
There's certainly a danger here of relying on projected numbers instead of traditional power bases, though I don't think he'll be abandoning groups like unions and black churches, nor will any progressive movement structures abandon him. But I really think that the Obama campaign is reacting to this demonization campaign from the right by saying "OK, I'll find voters in so many nooks and crannies and make you work in so many states that you won't have a chance to make this narrative work." His response is not necessarily building a progressive electorate; that would be accomplished by plugging into the nascent progressive structures that already exist. Obama appears to want to build an electorate aligned with Obama's principles and values, and fostering greater participation in politics as a means to move the country forward and break the current polarization. Some Democrats would play on the same playing field and try to win it; Obama's building an entirely new field, one where these narratives and negative ads and the need to tailor the entire general election to 10 independent voters in the middle of Ohio won't matter anymore.
I can't say if it will totally work, but that looks to be the strategy. We've been tantalized with these kinds of efforts before; it's actually a very traditional belief that increased turnout is good for Democrats.
I think all of this is exactly right. You should go read the whole thing, but for now I will end with this quote (also from Stoller's post) before returning to this issue tomorrow in discussion of Peak Oil:
I've been in the wilderness all my political life, as have most of us. The Clintonistas haven't, and they know what it's like to be part of the inside crew. We have a leader, and he's not a partisan and he can now end fractious intraparty fights with a word and/or a nod. His opinion really matters in a way that even Nancy Pelosi's just did not. He has control of the party apparatus, the grassroots, the money, and the messaging environment. He is also, and this is fundamental, someone that millions of people believe in as a moral force.
That is why Clinton is fighting so damned hard. She and her husband's entire political legacy is at stake. Obama is about to re-make the entire Democratic Party in his image, as Bill did fifteen years ago. He very well could re-make the entire political system before he's through, like Saint Ronnie did thirty years ago. Whether that is good or bad I leave to time and history to decide. Either way, he is a very different creature in very fundamental ways because he has harnassed new technologies and modes of thinking into a movement. None of this would be possible were it not for Howard Dean's campaign four years ago and more recently his 50 State Strategy. As The Great Orange Satan says: Barack Obama is Howard Dean 2.0
As if on cue, amid my re-watching of Ken Burns' "The Civil War," Salon.com runs a piece today about how the Southerners in the Senate are selling out the country to foreign automakers for the sake of sticking it to the north and that such behavior had been SOP for Southern politicians throughout the 20th Century. Motivations vary, but the result is always the same:
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Barack Obama understands that. It is unfortunate for Hillary Clinton that she and her husband, as I wrote a few posts back, are relics from another age. Prior to Obama's emergence, Hillary was salable mostly because she was an only slightly prickly reminder of better days, those indian summer salad days of Clintonian dot-com-&-SUV's-on-cheap-gas prosperity, before the onset of this dystopian winter of BushCo.
