I Guess I'm All-Wright Now

From BAGNewsNotes:

Presented by Bill Moyers during his extended interview with the Reverend earlier this week, the photo shows six-year veteran and Naval cardiopulmonary technician, Jeremiah Wright (beyond the I.V. stand), monitoring President Johnson's heart as he recovers from gall bladder surgery at Bethesda.

March of the Charlatans

Tin-Foil Hat time again, folks.

As all of you know, I just love me some big, juicy conspiracy theory. I think it must have something to do with being born and raised in the cradle of modern American conspiracy theory: Dallas, Texas - November '63 and grassy knolls and magic bullets and all of that - so, as I see it, rich & powerful white men pretty much invade, assassinate, blow up and destroy at will under the guise of what we normally call "politics." They rig elections, intimidate voters and generally undermine the opposition as often and as maliciously as any common thug or tyrant in any third-world banana-republic backwater. Money and global influence just make their actions seem less like outright crimes against decency and humanity and more like, a-hem, respectable official government policy.

But they still don't want the wrong people voting, that's for sure. Or having actual input into the process.

So, despite my paranoid mindset, I can actually be correct enough to sometimes have someone respectable say the same thing, but with proof and all that fancy, journalistic stuff, and man, I just love it when I'm smart enough to anticipate the more nuanced and articulate points of someone smarter and more gifted with the language.

Sara Robinson is one of those people. She is a sometimes contributor to the brilliant and incisive "big picture" blog Orcinus, as well as writing for the Campaign for America's Future. This week she takes on the Jeremiah Wright non-story story.

She explains it all to you, about why the media just won't let this one go - basically because they are under orders from on high to destroy a respected and vocal critic of the "Word of Life" prosperity gospel charlatans. You know who these people are, those transparently crooked Chri$tian operators who, by way of preaching that "God helps those who help themselves," makes it the fault of the poor for being that way and wealth becomes its own proof of virtue.

Thus, by their solipsistic logic, the private jets and exotic golf trips and luxury cars of the church leaders become evidence of fealty to God's Good Word (paid for with the accumulated tithes from desperate widows on fixed incomes, BTW) and something to strive for, while if you're poor it's your fault for not believing hard enough in Jesus. It's a gospel tailor-made for the "I've Got Mine" ethos of Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun's modern Church of the GOP. Government attempts to help the poor interfere with God's Will. Wealth proves God's Love.

Among the denizens of this rapacious, sleazy milieu, Jeremiah Wright is not a popular man.

Wright has been a visible and articulate critic of the GOP's new pet theology over the years -- one of a noisy clutch of ministers who've made no bones about the mischief inherent in this new theology. He's also a respected and insightful proponent of black liberation theology, holding (Martin Luther) King's torch high in the face of unscrupulous preachers who think they're helping poor people by cajoling them to vote away their safety net and toss their government checks in the offering plate.

Beyond that: unlike the vast majority of these ministers, most of whom attended small Bible colleges of dubious accreditation (if they attended seminary at all), Wright has degrees from Howard University and the University of Chicago Theological Seminary. It's gotta go down hard that he's a black man who is far better-educated than they are, and can argue circles around them about the Bible or anything else. Take it as a whole picture, and it's not hard to see that Wright is very sharp thorn in these people's sides. As long as he and his friends are out there, their 30-year investment in the whole Word of Life movement is at risk. Obama's candidacy put him in the spotlight, and thus magnified the threat. So now he has very powerful enemies on the religious and political right.

Yet, the media - with all the depth and subtlety one can portray in a five-second sound-bite - get to depict this educated and articulate man as some kind of buffoon, a dancing clown hardly above the level of a minstrel show, thereby undermining his dangerous message by killing the messenger. Rod Parsley, John Hagee and their fellow band of thieves are truly enjoying watching their long-time critic be dismantled. Hence:

turning Wright into a national demon was a two-fer. They could not only tank the Democrats' front-runner; they'd also take down a serious and persuasive theologian who's been calling them out hard on one of their longest-running and most successful efforts to sell the conservative worldview to the very people who stand to be most harmed by it.

So, Wright is correct when he says that an attack on him is an attack on the black church. And I was correct for agreeing with him. Although, in all fairness, my assertion was that this whole kerfuffle was an attack on the black church generally as a center of stability and independent power within the Democratic coalition (which frustrates and pisses off the Reich-wing collaborators within the Dems) rather than a coordinated attack from The Right on a threat to their prosperity and power.

I guess it seemed a little too obvious to think it was somehow, once again, related to the Rethugli-bots. Over-compensating for fear of sounding like a broken record, I was just looking in the wrong place. Although, in my defense, wide swaths of the Dems are nevertheless still willing to capitulate to yet another attack from the GOP goon squad, laundered as it is through a compliant media.

Like I said, this one is going to get ugly. These people have had a collective chip on their shoulders about the wimmin-folk and the uppity neeg-ras and the Lib-ruhl "coastal elites" for about, well, the entire history of the republic. Or thereabouts. Every so often, they get the upper hand in politics and the last four decades, they have been ascendant. The old-money GOP has successfully leveraged the anger of the rubes' and shit-kickers' since the Goldwater debacle in '64 into electoral success, which serves their ultimate purpose of undermining anyone who truly threatens their privileged lifestyles as some form of the "dirty fucking hippie," fear and loathing for whom is the only thing that unites the disparate Coalition of Hate in the GOP.

Some within the coalition have been itching for a race war since the 1960's. Some have been itching for a religious war since the 1960's. Some have been itching for a class war since the 1960's.

If all of this race-baiting and ecclesiastical hornet's nest-whacking goes deeply, terribly wrong (as playing with fire usually does), especially as the other looming catastrophes mature into actual news stories as opposed to the end-of-broadcast curiosities they are right now (I'm referring of course to Peak Oil and Climate Change), then they may just get all of those wars. All at once. It could turn into a Lockean war of all-against-all, which is the natural end-point of their asinine "libertarian" philosophy anyway. Until some hayseed nazi arises as a strong-man dictator to put a stop to all the violence, kind of like, well, any other thug or tyrant in any other third-world banana-republic backwater.

And if he's a good, Christian thug, then he'll get to have Blackwater as his private, Christian shadow army, shadow navy and shadow air-force - and secret police - all the better for keeping order.

But, then again, maybe it will all magically work itself out for the better.

Somehow.

Empire Strikes Barack

Someone has way too much free time. It is kinda clever, except the part where Michelle Obama stands in for Princess Leah.

Ewww.

Anyway, enjoy (via Balloon Juice):

d r i f t g l a s s is super-talented!

This post from driftglass is just Ah-mazing. Go read it.

Now.

Then tell me that resistance to Obama from within our own supposedly inclusive Democratic Party isn't fundamentally racist.

Go ahead and read it. I'll wait.

Mission Accomplished, Part Five

2 Points of Business:


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


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

Wright shouldn't matter

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

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

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

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

You know, walking the walk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repeat steps 1-5 until the Republican is elected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is going to get very ugly.

Chilling Out

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

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

But she does have some very steep negatives.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---It's infuriating the Beltway Insiders.

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

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

It's always been about Whitewater.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time will tell.

Damn

55% - 45%, Clinton.

Hillary is still in it. The result is not unexpected, but I still was too depressed last night to even watch the coverage, fantasizing as I was of an Obama blow-out, so I went to bed.

I want her to go away.

Now that's writing

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

Glad I did.

Boy howdy am I glad I did.

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

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

[...]

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

He risks nothing.

He illuminates nothing.

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

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

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

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

Rachel Maddow RAWKS

She don't take shit off nobody.

Joe Scarborough is MSNBC's Bill O'Reilly in that they have the same schtick. Both are transparently neo-con sympathizing Rethugli-bots, but they both maintain that they are somehow independent-minded tough-guys just calling 'em as they sees 'em... It just so happens that Joe, like Bill, always seems to land his calls on the side of the GOP. Kind of like those detestable Gang of 14 fence-sitters ("Spooky" Spectre, "Huckleberry" Graham, "Maverick" McCain, "Joe-nertia" LIE-berman) who always make a bunch of noise about having misgivings and grave concerns or whatever about some matter at hand and who make loud proclamations of their independent-mindedness and how they're not going to just go along to get along... and then they reliably vote to give president Cheney whatever he wanted in the first place. Joe's like that, too, (sans actual voting power) but he's just a grossly over-paid bobblehead who always sides with authoritarian overreach.

Well, guess what, Joe? That makes you a Rethugli-bot. And Rachel Maddow? She is one of those Fightin' Dems I've been longing for since, well, since I left Texas to get away from the very culture that stole the White House and have been trying to institute One Party Rule since the 1960's.

Rachel (and I met her once - briefly - so I can call her by her first name, right?) is most certainly accomplished in her own right. I have been listening to her radio show for years and was a fan long before Keith Olbermann brought her into his orbit, but I must say a huge thank you to Keith for using his celebrity to protect the incubation period of her television career long enough for her have the juice to smack down Joe Scarborough hard enough to make him walk off set without getting herself summarily fired.

Oh, did I give something away? Watch this video and listen for the mic rustling at 2:47, which had to be Joe storming off set:



Sweet, right?

I just love seeing Joe's beady little eyes go cold as he realizes he's getting called out. I love even more the s-l-o-w-a-n-d-s-t-e-a-d-y way he pedantically attempts to explain to Rachel what misapprehends to be his position, as though she's retarded. All the while, you can see his blood pressure rising.

Sweet, right?

Fact-Averse & Irony-Immune 2.0

"You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts."
– Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

So it seems a blogger named Psycheout, a primary contributor to the blog I reference in my previous post - the awesomely delusional Blogs4Brownback (yeah, I'm mentioning you by name with a hyperlink so your Google Alert will go off, Psycheout) - took umbrage to some aspect of my previous post and called me an elitist snob.

And while it is exciting to have my readership expanded by almost 10% with the addition of Mr. Psycheout, the more exciting part is finally having a reader whose name I don't know and whose phone number I don't have. When you know all of your readers personally (my readership consists of my sister, my best friend from college, three co-workers - two of whom are also neighbors - and my wife) it isn't so much blogging as just being one step removed from broadcast emailing. So, I hope Mr. Psycheout can become a regular reader so that he may help me stay at least one pair of eyes above what I consider to be the minimum threshold of what can actually be called a "blog." The above characterization assumes he has has two eyes and not one. Or three. And that he's a, well, he.

But, to the matter at hand... I guess I'm guilty as charged. I am an elitist snob. We heliocentrists are well-known for thinking we're smarter than people who disagree with us. Something about facts and scientific proof and global fucking consensus for three millenia. Now, to be fair, he may have been just kidding. In fact, the whole web site could just be one huge joke on all of us tightly wound, humorless lub'ruhl types who just want to sternly scowl at anything fun. In fact, the whole website reads like sophomoric attempt at a Colbert-ish spoof of right-wing lunacy, incorporating everything from every tin-foil hat conspiracy theory about the Clintons ever to spew like diarrhea from the mind and mouth of every right-wing radio mini-Hitler (complete with insulting nicknames downloaded directly from Limbaugh's ass into their synapse-deficient brains) to the whole "Barack Obama is a madrassa-trained Muslim and nevermind his Christian minister Jeremiah Wright" to every single persecution-meets-inferiority-complex driven fruit-loop conspiracy theory about the non-white, non-Christian, non-hayseeds who appararently run the world (who are out to get all those hard-working white Christian males who don't live on the coasts) that has ever floated through the collective fever-dream imaginations of the whole of the right blogosphere. If they were good at mocking all of those things, it would be funny.

But it isn't funny. Not even a little bit. Devoid of humor, in toto. Irony-immune, as it were. Which makes me think I'm smarter than these doofuses, not because I disagree with their opinions (although I do) but because they have completely hare-brained, fact-free reasoning to guide them to those opinions. So, yeah, I'm a heliocentric elitist who looks down at these morons.

You getting all of this, Psycheout? That little gnawing suspicion of inferiority that ties your stomach in knots and keeps you awake at night and resentful of all you see around you...

...It's justified.

I can understand why you are... (how should I say it?) ...bitter. If you think we are making fun of you, having a hearty laugh at your expense, we are.

So yeah, I think I'm smarter. I think I'm smarter than someone who would, without the merest hint of irony, write this:

Condi Rice, probably the best Secretary of State ever, is seriously considering injecting new life into the McCain candidacy

And I'm definitely more perceptive than a person who would write this:

We’ve pointed out before that Barack Obama is likely a closet communist and a gay homosexual crackhead, and now Senate colleague Joe Lieberman even admits that he’s unsure whether the boy Senator is a Marxist. Frankly, I don’t blame him. Who can tell?

And I'm far less a gullible and sycophantic dimwit than any person who would so much as think, much less actually write, this:

The liberal defeatocrats and America hating loons are constantly trying to embarrass our fine leaders. Whether it’s cutting up President Bush’s speeches to make it sound like he’s misspeaking or blowing all out of proportion a minor misstatement. They have also cruelly attacked Vice President Cheney, claiming that he was trying to divide up Iraq and steal its oil, a nutty conspiracy theory to be sure, and made up an incident out of whole cloth, claiming that he said a bad word on the Senate floor, when he simply wished Senator Leaky Leahy the best of luck even after being provoked by the man. “Good luck, yourself,” said the amiable Vice President with a broad smile on his rugged face. For the record, Vice President Cheney would never lie, drink, smoke or gamble. And he would absolutely never curse. He is a very moral man.

Cheney? Moral? Amiable? Truthful?

Moral?

Uh-huh. So, OK. Moving on...

And I'm infinitely more persipacious, not to mention astute, insightful, observant and adroit (Gawd, I love Synonym.com) than a person who would write this:

I support the Bible, and I don’t want my children learning about Heliocentrism in school. I think this doctrine encourages atheism, Darwinism, and anti-Americanism. I don’t want my tax dollars going to finance this kind of false science. It’s complete rot, and I hope that those of us who come to realize this can ultimately prevail against its propogation amongst OUR children with the money from OUR salaries.

And behind the link for the above quote, BTW, you will find a post from a brainiac named Sisyphus who is evidently the founder of B4B (as they call themselves) with the eponymous slogan from the T-shirt that drove my previous blog entry. You really should go read the whole post because if it were actually witty or funny, it could be a clever impersonation of some deranged right-wing loon, but it isn't funny or witty.

At all.

In fact, he is deadly serious and it is kind of sickening. These people are seriously fucked in the head. Their slogan should be Holocaust denying flat-earthers for Jesus (and Sam Brownback). I can only presume they and their fellow-travellers are representative of Brownback's following, which makes his departure from the presidential race a real relief, though a sadness over comedy gold un-mined does linger. It just makes me morose for the state of health-care in America that these people can't afford the medications they need to lead normal lives, nevermind the irony of a deep-seated hostility to the very government programs which could help them.

And the comments section is a real hoot. A couple of smart folks dove in and tried to argue with those idiots, but as the old saying goes "Never argue with an idiot. Most people won't be able to tell the difference." Let me sum all up comments by saying that they conclude that believing that the earth orbits the sun means you hate America. I'm not kidding. Comment number 28. Wow.

So, having touched my toe into the toxic sewer of right-wing blogistan, I'm pretty sure I don't want to go back there any time soon, for hic sunt dracones.

So, if you're actually reading this, Psycheout, you win. I'm not going back to your site because you've got me beat. I concede. I'm frightened to the core of my being. I quake in the presence of your mighty intellect and how deeply it could damage my Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing mind.

In fact, I'm going to stop writing this post right now so I can go invite over my Wiccan friends to watch some gay porn with me while we snort cocaine off pictures of Dale Earnhardt with rolled up pages from the Book of Job (we like to save Genesis, Corinthians and especially Psalms for cleaning up after a really messy crap) while we all sit around, sipping cups of warm virgin blood, talking about how much we hate the troops and Amerika and anything that's good or moral. Like Jerry Falwell. Later, after they leave for France, I'll wile away a couple more hours fantasizing about a really nasty porno-style three-way between me, Hillary and Obama. Once satisfied with the depth of my own depravity, I'll finally be able to relax enough to concentrate on my nefarious plan for global conquest via a rigorous regimen of rejecting Christ as my personal savior, pissing on pictures of Ronald Reagan, and burning every American flag I can find - for which the Jews pay me really well, let me tell you what, because I'm able to tithe so fucking much money to Nation of Islam, Planned Parenthood and National Organization for Women while simultaneously maintaining both my ACLU and my Jane Fonda fan-club memberships. Then I'll call Barbra Streisand to tell her all about it.

I guess I should be more grateful to America for giving me such opportunities. You really have opened my eyes, Psycheout.

Salam Alechem, my bruh-thuh.

Fact-Averse & Irony-Immune

Light posting this past week. Busy, busy, busy so it will be light posting for the next few weeks as well.

In the meantime, though, I submit the following as definitive proof that anyone who would intentionally bill themselves as a "conservative" should thus be automatically disqualified from any participation in the public sphere (from Blogs for Brownback - h/t to John Cole):

Now, I could think that they were just being clever and proudly playing to cultural stereotype in the same way a fans of gangsta rap or Larry the Cable Guy, but generally speaking anyone dumb enough to support Sam Brownback for any public office above the level of municipal dog catcher is frankly too stupid to breathe, much less have any sort of knack for edgy, ironic humor.  

Remember, these people are fact-averse and irony-immune.  Thus, I think they actually mean it here.

And yet they have the unmitigated gaul to be offended that we coastal elites look down on them.  Bloody hell.  If you don't think the earth is round and orbits the sun, to say nothing of the immutable FACT of evolution, then you deserve to be sneered at, you moron.

Submitted Without Comment

Priorities

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

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

Puh-leeze.

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

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

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

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

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

I guess we can take his gun now

Charlton Heston died yesterday. I like him as an actor and he does have some great cinematic moments to his credit: Ben-Hur, The Agony & The Ecstasy, Ten Commandments, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, Omega Man...

But how could any decent-minded person not hate him forever for this little gem:



Delivered at an NRA convention in Denver less than a month after the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado (itself a suburb of Denver) in the spring of 1999, that speech - or a Hollywood actor like Heston even being in a position to deliver that speech - once again proves to me that conservatives are stupid. Why else would the rare conservative actor (and they are almost exclusively male and white, BTW) very nearly always rise to prominence within the right-wing? Heston, Reagan, Thompson and Schwarzenegger... mediocre actors who, because they are famous and also out-spoken about being unevolved, earn enough conservative street cred to become GOP demi-gods. Or in Reagan's case, actually replacing the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity.

I suppose it has something to do with the conservative mindset, top-down and hierarchical as it is, that it is sufficient for someone to appear authoritative to be given authority.

Whatever. Heston is dead. At least he left us with some classic lines. Besides "Damn, dirty ape" my favorite is this one:

UPDATE:
I agree with Shakes about this. I should have been more generous above about how much I actually like Heston as an actor. As she so eloquently puts it:

He was an epic film star with an epic personality, and I loved to hate him as much as I hated to love him.

UPDATE #2:
I also want to be clear that I thought of the title of this post last night around 12:30 am, long before I read Jeff Fecke's title, and saw his YouTube clip. But Shakesville gets about a thousand to ten-thousand times the traffic as this blog (readership of three - it's official!) so in a joke-credit derby, I would certainly lose.

Besides, Fecke is always funnier than me anyway, so - I concede.

One Man Come

40 years ago today, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot with a rifle fired by James Earl Ray.

I want to forget this sad, sad day in anticipation of the event wherein Obama would give his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention 45 years to the day after MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech. That will make for a much better anniversary.

Wow.

Maybe you've heard of it, but U2 once wrote a song about it.

One man come in the name of love
One man come and go
One man come here to justify
One man to overthrow
In the name of love!
One man in the name of love
In the name of love!
What more? In the name of love!

One man caught on a barbed wire fence
One man he resists
One man washed on an empty beach
One man betrayed with a kiss

In the name of love!
What more in the name of love?
In the name of love!
What more? In the name of love!

...nobody like you...there's nobody like you...

Mmm...mmm...mmm...
Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

In the name of love!
What more in the name of love?
In the name of love!
What more in the name of love?
In the name of love!
What more in the name of love...

A Turning Tide

The wheels of justice turn slowly, sometimes so slow as to seem like they don't move at all, but they do in fact turn.

Don Siegelman is a free man, again walking the street, breathing free air.

He isn't completely in the clear on the bribery charges, as his case still needs to be heard on appeal, but now at least he can appeal because the corrupt, Banana-Republi-thug judge Mark Everett Fuller (who, since the summer of 2006, has been holding-up the release into the public record of the transcript from his trial - which prevents him from even filing for appeal) finally had his decision overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.

It was, naturally, a Karl Rove hit job and I think this might just be the one that brings down the Dark Sith Lord. But whether it does or not, America is just a little less of a banana republic that jails opposition party members on trumped-up charges than we were a couple of days ago.

Considering how bleak these last seven years have been for the rule of law and a just society, this is a welcome ray of sunshine. I'd like to think that this might be the beginning in a long string of chickens coming home to roost for the thugs, thieves and theocrats in the GOP. Whether a reckoning comes to pass or not, at least this man now has a reason to smile:

Religion is Stupid

Especially in Wisconsin.

I can't say why, but for some reason the same sane, reasonable Nordic stock of the great state of Wisconsin - the very same people who reliably send Russ Feingold back to the Senate every six years - has produced the two religious-themed stories I read today (completely independent of each other, mind you) that have spurred this post. Of course, these same people unleashed Joe McCarthy on the world, but unlike the numb-nuts in North Carolina who continually inflicted the rest of us in America with the odious Jesse Helms (or Oklahoma & James Inhofe or Mississippi & Trent Lott or South Carolina & Strom Thurmond... you see my point), McCarthy was never rewarded for his loathsome behavior. The next election cycle, he became unemployed and died of alcoholism shortly thereafter.

I'm getting off my point here. My point is that I didn't know that either of these stories were out of Wisconsin when I started this post, much less both of them, until I checked the dateline of each. Which made me wonder what the fuck is going on in the Great White North, land of beer, brats and bowlin' (ya, hey 'dere)

The first is yet another story about some judgmental fuck-head abusing the power of his position to impose his beliefs on some other helpless person. Abuse of power is at its worst when the person being abused is otherwise utterly powerless - which is why an abusive boss may be bad, but not the worst because you can always quit, while before a teacher or a cop or a judge the abusee has no choice but to submit.

And when you add the blockheaded, impenetrable irrationality of religion to the mix, this pharmacist is a worthless piece of slimy shit who isn't qualified to work as a shelf stocker on the midnight shift at a Wal-Mart Super Center. He's a devout Roman-Catholic working as a substitute pharmacist when a young woman sought to get her birth-control prescription filled. He "advised the woman of his objection to the use of contraception and refused to fill the prescription or tell her how or where she could get it refilled." Long story short, it grew into a court case and he just lost. Fucker. He deserved it.

Oh, and he's whining about it now being hard for him to get a job as a pharmacist. Good. Fucker. He deserves it. If he has objections to to use of legal prescriptions, then he shouldn't be working as a pharmacist because it isn't up to him to have an opinion about the service he's providing. Shut the fuck up and do your fucking job, or go do something else. Like apply for a job a Wal-Mart.

Fucker.

But then, this one is even worse. Also in Wisconsin, two parents allowed their child to die of diabetes, instead choosing to pray as their 11-year-old daughter died for want of insulin. She wasted away for a month, eventually dying of diabetic ketoacidosis - a horrible way to go involving vomiting, blindness, extreme thirst and weight loss, coma and (finally) death. It is easily treatable with over-the-counter insulin.

They are fucking stupid and fucking deserve to fucking go to fucking jail.

Fuckers.

God damn Religion is Stupid.

H.L. Mencken:

Mencken's Creed

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty...

I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.

I believe in the complete freedom of thought and speech...

I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run.

I believe in the reality of progress.

I - But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply.

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than be ignorant

sense of threatened tribalism

I saw the title of this post as a phrase this morning at Glenn Greewald's digs over at Salon.com. I agree with his assessment that there is "no better phrase to describe the animating feature of the modern Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction." Period. Over at my old site, I have called it the "Dixie Stench" because the particular flavor of crypto-racist, persecution-complexed Christo-fascism that has fused itself so thoroughly to the very DNA of the GOP (the political arm of the modern conservative movement), is a direct descendant of the violently racist political culture of the post-confederate south. This is the long-term fallout from Nixon's odious "Southern Strategy" wherein the knuckledragging, mouth-breathing bigots of Old Dixie were told, while still seething about a full decade of federal intervention in their "traditional" way of life, that they had friends in the (former) Party of Lincoln. Of course, this seduction and pandering on the part of the GOP didn't become overt until the 1980 campaign when Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun deliberately used the phrase "states' rights" in Philadelphia, Mississippi as a dog-whistle signal to the southern racists - a scant sixteen years after three Civil Rights workers had died there while trying to overcome the awful legacy that jingoistic political formulation circumscribes.

Which brings me to Bill Clinton.

Make no mistake, when a white, southern man stands in front of a crowd of white people in a place as rigidly old-fashioned as a VFW hall in a state that was among the first to secede and last to rejoin the Union, and says, in his best Arkansas drawl, this (bold face mine)...

"I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country,
[...]
And people could actually ask themselves who is right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics."

...it means exactly what you would think it means if you were as ungenerous as possible in interpreting it. Doubt me? Watch the video.



As Bob Cesca says over at his place "you can see his sly little smile as he says "other stuff"." Also note that he uses the phrase OUR politics, a very loaded phrase when uttered by a white southerner to other white southerners about a black person. Bill Clinton knows that. He is playing directly to the sense of threatened tribalism.

Now, I've had fights with my family. All of you know this about me. During the entire Clinton presidency, but particularly in the fall of 2000, I had screaming fights over politics in the living room of my parent's house where things were said that have over time come to erode and ultimately diminish our relationship. One of those fights involved pointing out to my father, who grew up dirt poor in West Texas, got himself college-educated, into the middle class and married with two successful children despite the class-based limitations of his upbringing, that Bill Clinton is the embodiment of the American Dream - a brilliant and intellectually curious kid who grew up dirt-poor without a father in a two-room shack in Arkansas became President of the United States and would lead the country during an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity - the essence of the class-blind, meritocratic American ideal. Mister Smith in Washington and all of that. George W. Bush is the embodiment of the un-American Dream - a dimwitted and incurious spoiled brat who used his family name and connections to avoid any adult responsibilities or consequences for his actions, amass an unearned fortune and achieve the White House (again unearned - twice) where he lead the country into a waking nightmare of squandered blood and treasure in wars of personal vanity to the financial benefit of his cohorts and financed on the backs of the poor - the essence of the very worst of Old Europe's aristocracy. We had a revolution over just those sorts of things, if I recall, but I have never been able to convince my father of any of this. To him, Dubya is a good ol' boy from West Texas, just like him. And Bill Clinton is a Lib'ruhl.

And he buys it because Dubya and the slick GOP operatives who manufactured his good ol' boy image understand how to tap into that very tribal ideal, about which Digby has been writing for years and which is finally getting enough intellectual currency out in the lefty inter-webs to catch on with a leading light like Glenn Greenwald.

Bill Clinton, being the bright guy that he is, understands all of this - whether overtly or intuitively I cannot say - and he used that notion of the "threatened tribalism" in that speech he gave to tap into that part of the GOP lizard brain against a fellow Democrat who happens to be dark-skinned, for the benefit of his wife. That act (amid all his and his wife's other attacks on Obama) reveals the true nature of the political climate in Washington - that we actually have three major political classes in America, but only two formal "Party" representations to encompass them: the Ruling Class, the Bureaucratic Class and Labor.

1. The Ruling Class is self-explanatory - either a group of entitled individuals either with inherited wealth who cast a longing eye to the old aristocracy of Europe and resent democracy, or with "earned" wealth and a wildly inflated sense of their own potency as rockstar C.E.O.'s or captains of industry or Nietzschean supermen. They have most of the money but are at a steep numerical disadvantage in a democracy. In Britain they would be called the Tories. In America, the GOP is their party.
   
   
2. Labor means more than just labor unions. It is what used to be meant by blue collar, working class and working poor. It also includes immigrants and service industry wage slaves. They may have numerical advantage in a democracy, but little money or time to be involved in politics, a hole once filled by Big Labor but now exploited by the other classes. The Renfields from the Bureaucratic Class, along with their collaborators from Labor, have been able to break up this group along racial and tribal lines in a very successful, multi-generational divide-and-conquer campaign most saliently detailed in "What's the Matter With Kansas." The Democrats should be their party but they have been successfully sub-divided along mostly racial lines between D's & R's.
   
   
3. The Bureaucratic Class is most often mis-identified as the "swing voters" or middle class. In an earlier day, they would have been known as "The Merchant Class" or the bourgeoisie. These people range from office-tower cubicle drones to temp workers to the Creative Class to small business entrepreneurs to school teachers and college professors to government office clerks to middle management in industry across the United States. They are the cogs-and-gears of the vast machinery of our economy, the million little pieces that allow the whole system to operate. They are its greatest beneficiaries, and to some greater or lesser small extent, complicit in its crimes. They can be Dems or Rethugs, depending on how they self-identify - which is itself a function of biography, perceived social mobility and various historical socio-regional influences. It is also the most fluid and permeable group. New members of the Ruling Class almost exclusively derive from this group while old members of the Ruling Class arrive (though they usually stop) here when in social decline. Fresh blood from Labor arrives here occasionally but usually very tenuously (a long trip up and a short trip back down) and rarely move beyond. Especially under Rethugli-bot rule, people drop out of this group far more frequently than they join it. Under the programs of the New Deal, this group flourished to unprecedented levels, and since Saint Ronnie, they have been in steep decline - which should make them the natural allies of the Democrats, except that it doesn't for reasons that have been examined ad nauseum across the inter-tubes for almost a decade now.

Which brings me to another point I have made off and on the last couple of years. I have argued, as have others, that the choice between the two parties is not like a choice between a red car and a blue car, or the red team and the blue team. The neat labels of liberal and conservative or Left and Right are not descriptive enough for the complex world we live in. What we are talking about is such a fundamental difference in belief about Life and how to live it, about the nature of Truth and how it is obtained, about how society should be structured and who should benefit from its products, about who should live and who should die, that to reduce party affiliation to one's stance on whether the boys should be allowed to kiss each other is the height of distraction politics.

But over the last 40 years, the Renfields have waged a very successful PR campaign in the form of a ginned-up "culture war" (in order to disguise a class war already fought and won by the other side) that grew out of Southern racial animosity and cross-regional resentments, then spread across the country along racial and class lines, resulting in a world where my formulation of the GOP as a coalition comprised of "The Stupid, The Deluded and The Corrupt" is the dominant party of the land. If we only evaluate our politics as Left or Right, the triptych doesn't make any sense. But if we can see it as class-based, then from Labor comes those too stupid to know the GOP is fucking them over (I should say "ignorant" but "stupid" scans better), while the Bureaucrats provide those too deluded to understand they are not part of the Ruling Class and the Ruling Class itself almost entirely provides those too ethically and morally compromised to give a shit about anything except enjoying the fruits of their own corruption. We are ruled by a group of people who resent accountability and are largely detached from reality or the consequences of their actions. Reality does have a well-known liberal bias.

So, along comes William Jefferson Clinton, that rare animal who has been able to successfully leave Labor for the Ruling Class. His impeachment witch-hunt was both a punishment meted out by the Ruling Class for forgetting his place and an induction ceremony of sorts - a test and rite of passage - which he obviously passed as we now see him and Poppy Bush hangin' out around the golf course.

As a full-fledged member of the Ruling Class, he has clearly forgotten his roots as fully as my father, and I believe that he and his wife now see themselves as having so successfully leveraged the apparatus of the Democratic ""brand" over the last several decades to their own personal political advantage as to now be synonymous with "Democrat." Bill and Hillary Clinton really do think of the Democratic Party as their own personal route to respectability within the rarified air of the Halls of American Power, except that rather than making their fortune in oil or timber or, say, collaboration with Adolph Hitler and the Nazis (I'm looking at you, Prescott Bush) - a fortune made in exploitation of some commodity - they've made their social and political fortune as a kind of political service provider to the Ruling Class by re-engineering the Party of the Left and delivering unto the Ruling Class a pliant, apologetic, capitulatory Blue Team - for the kinder, gentler aristocrat. Why else do you think Hillary has been siding with McCain? She sees herself as part of the same social class. As the reigning queen of the Blue Team, she genuinely, honestly thinks it is quite simply her turn and Obama is just an upstart who should wait in fucking line, make his bones and pay his goddamned dues. That's why she saw no irony whatsoever in magnanimously offering him the veep position a few weeks ago, despite being hopelessly behind by every measurable indicator. "L'Democrats, c'est moi," indeed.

Going even further, Bill resents the hell out of this new guy who is challenging his wife's bid for immortality because not only does he see himself as the first in a long line of future rulers (along which his wife would be the next natural step until Chelsea can make a go at it - ad infinitum), at a personal level this slender, handsome, charismatic rising star is a challenge to Bill's legendary virility, his status as "The Big Dog" and de facto leader of the Democratic Party, the very source of his power and respectability. While a Hillary administration would obviously deepen and strengthen his primacy as the Greatest Living Democrat (possibly all the way into immortality), an Obama presidency would signal the end of it and his reversion to (by way of his wife's failed presidential bid) just another Democrat with a vague presidential history - just another Carter or Kerry. He wants to enjoy his time at the top unsullied by a natural rival. The fact that the brewing conflict between the two is taking on racial overtones is incidental, I think, because for Bill it is simply about having the biggest dick in the party. The fact that Al Gore has found his own path to a parallel super-celebrity he can dismiss as merely the social striving of a nerd who never was quite as cool as him, but the easy charm and sex appeal of Barack Obama is harder to attack because it is a direct threat to the underpinnings of his manhood, a real and present danger to his perceived and, frankly, deliberately engineered social standing in the social galaxy of the Ruling Super Class.

Which is why he is pulling out all the stops and triangulating like hell, just like he did fifteen years ago along class lines, this time along racial ones. As a poor boy from rural Arkansas, the lower reaches of the Labor Class, he has fought and dug and scratched his way to the top, to membership in the Ruling Class, and he now intends to pull up the ladder behind him.

We can't let him or his wife win this one. This is bigger than the both of them. I leave the final words to Frank Schaeffer at Huffington Post:

Obama offers civility in the midst of a drunken national bar fight. Obama speaks in complete sentences, well-turned paragraphs, offers thoughts with intellectual depth, nuance, humility and compassion.

[...]

By providence or blind luck, we are being given a second chance. In Obama our founders appear once again stepping from the mists of time to offer a wayward great, great grandchild an opportunity for redemption.

[...]

If we squander this undeserved reprieve and choose business-as-usual, if we don't elevate ourselves out of our self-made mire, we will step into a future of steep and steady decline and war without end. It won't matter if you are right or left. It won't matter if the Republicans or the Democratic Party wins. We will all lose.