Y'know, Senator, I Think That Was Proven In The Great 'What If Superman Had Fought For The Nazis?' Thought Experiment.

Matt Bai, "The McCain Doctrines." May 18

IN keeping with yesterday's theme ("US History: It Looks A Lot Better If You Squint") we bring you John McCain, War College graduate, on a little thing called Vietnam.

In his book, Chuck Hagel writes of listening to declassified tapes from the mid-1960s in which Lyndon Johnson admitted to advisers that Vietnam probably couldn’t be won but rued that withdrawal would make him the first American president to lose a war. “I wish someone had told me when I was sitting on a burning tank in a Vietnamese rice paddy that I was fighting for a lost cause just to save a president’s legacy,” Hagel observes acidly.

In my own defense, Chuck, I was eleven at the time, but I'm pretty sure the people who were trying to tell you the war was a sham wish you had listened.

Although McCain was held and tortured for the same cause, he never saw the situation the way Hagel did. In his view, the American effort began to turn around with the promotion in 1968 of Gen. Creighton Abrams, who adopted the tactics favored by counterinsurgency experts like Fall. Abrams pulled back the search-and-destroy teams and instead focused on winning the “hearts and minds” of South Vietnamese villagers. His goal was to encourage the South Vietnamese military to take over their own defense — the process that came to be known as “Vietnamization.” McCain maintains that Abrams’s strategy was working, but it was undercut by the fact that, by that point, the American public had already rendered its verdict, and the drawdown of troops continued until the war’s chaotic end.

Okay, first, discussing Vietnam is like painting the Forth Bridge, except it's not that once you get done the paint's peeling at the other end, it's that once you're in the middle the area you just covered is resplattered with bullshit. Yes, indeed, Johnson knew the Vietnam war could never be won. It doesn't require listening to declassified secret LBJ tapes to figure this out. All it takes is looking at the history, specifically the Eisenhower administration's renege on the '56 elections. We were propping up a decrepit mandarin system run by a fey and almost unimaginably corrupt minority. We knew the majority of Vietnamese didn't want them, and looked upon them as quislings, but that didn't fit the Cold War narrative.

Who's to blame? Well, I can't say I'd be sorry to learn that LBJ will be farting live briquettes onto the Devil's hibachi for all eternity. But was he supposed to be the meat course at the Who Lost China II buffet, over a war he'd inherited? This, it seems to me, simply returns the question to the starting end of the bridge. By 1965 Americans had listened to twenty years of International Communist Conspiracy. They got it from the government, they got it from newspapers and radio and teevee, they got it from the punditry. They sincerely believed it. They'd already fought one large-scale war because of it. And like Korea, Vietnam would become "unpopular" in the sense that Americans watched other Americans bleed and die while their leaders dawdled and lied to them; like Korea it never became "unpopular" in the sense of the mission being rejected by a great majority of the voting public. Pace Senator McCain, pace the rest of the rewriters of Vietnam history--it's been a growth industry for thirty years--the war wasn't "lost" when the public turned against it (at the urging of Uncle Walter Cronkite). It was, like Iraq forty years later, only "winnable" under the rosiest of rosy scenarios, and those hopes had been dashed almost immediately. The public debate over Vietnam was always between those who saw this truth (a minority, if a vocal one) and the marshaled forces of perpetual fear (whose marshals, in them days, at least had the threat of global thermonuclear war as a trump card).

We may well ask, as we sit in on our burning Humvee, why Chuck Hagel sent us here for a war he had doubts about all along, but didn't express until it was politically expedient to do so. John McCain was the only US Senator publicly critical of the Iraq war effort in its early weeks. And Matt Bai reminds us that it was Senator McCain who introduced a bill calling for immediate withdrawal of US troops from Somalia after Blackhawk Down. The problem with modern American political life is there's not enough pox to go 'round.

As for Creighton Abrams--a capable leader, and a great combat commander--it should be noted that his "Vietnamization", Nixon's "Vietnamization", was properly Vietnamization III, (not counting the long-gone hope of the ever-lovable French for jaunissement); both Kennedy and Johnson had begun with the same plans. By 1968 Abrams had no choice, not to mention the fact that Westmoreland had failed, spectacularly, with the every-increasing troop levels and WWII tactics approach. If Abrams is today given credit for what, in the mouths of people like McCain, winds up sounding suspiciously like The Surge, we might also note that he, unlike they, understood that Tet was a strategic defeat, not a manufactured one, and that the ultimate outcome of the war was no longer in our hands.

The lesson McCain and other conservatives took away from this version of history is that America was driven from Vietnam principally because the voters, discouraged by dire reports from a skeptical media, lost their will. McCain has said in the past that he felt the war could have been won had the right strategy been followed sooner. When I met with McCain last month for a far-ranging conversation about Vietnam and Iraq, I asked him whether he still felt this was the case. “These are all hypotheticals,” he replied. “But I think that if we had employed the strategy that Creighton Abrams put into effect when he relieved General Westmoreland” — that is, if the Abrams strategy had been used years earlier — “then at least the casualties would have been dramatically different.”

I'm sorry, is that an answer? Whose hypothetical was it, anyway? Vietnam would have been "dramatically different" if we'd let Curtis LeMay nuke the fuck out of it, too. Is that an argument?

Bonus Matt Bai History Lesson:

The parallels between Vietnam and Iraq can be too readily overstated. The very nature of the wars is markedly different, for better or worse; Vietnam was a Communist uprising against an autocratic government, while Iraq represents a multiparty, ethnic conflict more similar to that of the Balkans. The casualties, to this point, aren’t nearly analogous, either. The United States lost some 58,000 soldiers in Vietnam, compared with a death toll, after five years in Iraq, of about 4,000.

Yes, yes, all those people claiming that Iraq is a war against Communist aggression are now properly put in their place, just as the early "Beware another jungle war in Iraq" doomsayers were. This, Matt, would seem to be more along the lines of "a description of the people we invaded and lost to" than a distinction in the nature of the conflicts. As for the KIA, I don't do this very often, but...sigh. It's not a freakin' scorecard, for one. It doesn't ever seem to occur to people who use it that way how fucking insulting that is. Two, Vietnam casualties occurred over an eleven year period, though most were suffered between 1965 and 1971. We had as many as 530,000 troops in Vietnam at one time. Iraq probably peaked around 160,000, a level we exceeded in Vietnam in 1965 and kept through 1972. As a percentage of total deployments, the fatality rate in Vietnam was 0.7%. In Iraq it is 0.5%. And that's with truly remarkable improvements in battlefield care, and that's with an enemy which can focus only on infantry troops; we're not losing helicopter pilots or jets to enemy action. And above all, this is in a war which has been conducted, from the first, with one eye to bolstering public opinion, including keeping casualties out of view (but not down, necessarily, if that meant spending on sufficient armor in Humvees or transports, or the best in personal armor).  This sort of nonsense was being dispelled in the early days of the war, Matt. See Phil Carter in 2004, for example.

Don't Bother To Look

Matt Bai, "The McCain Doctrines." May 18

The problem with these narratives is that neither reflects the context of the time. As two former national security officials in the Clinton administration, Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier, explain compellingly in “America Between the Wars,” a book to be published next month, the period between the cold war and the war on terror — the 90s, roughly speaking — was a decade when foreign-policy thinkers across the ideological spectrum were groping about in darkness, trying to feel out the limits of American power and to balance the twin risks of action and inaction. During that time, the United States bounced from one unforeseen crisis to another, undertaking a military intervention every 18 months, on average — a staggering pace compared with that of the years that came before.

Vietnam 1960-75
Cuba 1961
Laos 1962
Cuba 1962
Iraq 1963
Panama 1964
Indonesia 1965
Dominican Republic 1965-66
Guatemala 1966-67
Cambodia 1969-75
Oman 1970
Laos 1971-73
Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Reservation 1973
Chile 1973
Angola 1976-92
Iran 1980
Libya 1981
El Salvador 1981-92
Nicaragua 1981-90
Lebanon 1982-84
Grenada 1983-89
Honduras 1983-89
Iran 1984
Libya 1986
Bolivia 1986
Iran 1987-88
Philippines 1989
Panama 1989
Iraq 1990-91
Kuwait 1992
Somalia 1992-94
Yugoslavia 1992-94
Bosnia 1993-
Haiti 1994
Sudan 1998
Afghanistan 1998
Iraq 1998
Yugoslavia 1999
Macedonia 2001
Afghanistan 2001-
Yemen 2002
Philippines 2002-
Columbia 2003-
Iraq 2003-
Haiti 2004-05
Pakistan 2005-
Somalia 2007

Unless "the years that came before" means specifically the Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Cat Dancing

Bill Kristol, "McCain Exceptionalism." May 19

IF you're old enough, like I know I am, you can remember, roughly, the point at which Quaker Oats became a health food, as sold by Wilfred Brimley, professional oldster. What was interesting about this is that in the decades leading up to it Quaker Oats couldn't have cared less about your health; they'd have sold you Sugar-Frosted Asbestos Flakes, or Frooty Tar N' Nicotine Breakfast Squares if there'd been a profit in it, and you, and I, and everyone in the Quaker Oats boardroom, and possibly even Wilfred Brimley knew it. But then one day there's a JAMA article which probably did no more than announce the results of a small study suggesting that college students in NW Saskatchewan had fewer heart-valve defects if they reported eating oatmeal their whole lives, and the next day Quaker Oats is the multi-national holding behemoth that's good for you.

Before that oatmeal had been the fraternity hazing of breakfast foods. It was a hot cereal for cold weather, generally viewed as something for adults to inflict on children because they'd been inflicted in turn, designed to "stick to the ribs", if it didn't congeal somewhat earlier, and the only gustatory attraction came from adding edible things--or raisins--to it, as a reward for eating it.

(I like oatmeal, and raisins, m'self, but I remember as a child this being greeted, even by my mother, with a disbelief bordering on suspicion, as though I'd expressed a preference for turnips, or horsemeat.)

All right, so Quaker (now a fine family member of the health merchants at Pepsi-Frito Lay) Oats' conversion to health consciousness may not be particularly earth-shaking, or even particularly villainous; no doubt breakfast food providers around the globe are more self-interested than not. But it's the ease with which the Speeding Locomotive of American Public Opinion can be switched onto a siding while everyone pretends to be none the wiser that's so remarkable.

Or so I was thinking, anyway, while pondering Bill Kristol. When he turned up at the Times a few months back, Left Blogtopia, no so much drunk with power as sugar-buzzed off power's snack tray, erupted. But in the event the man has proven to be little more than David Brooks minus fifteen IQ points. And those are points Brooks cannot afford to give. Here's Mr. Neocon, Neocon Royalty, Second-Generation Neoconnage, given the keys to the Holiest of Wholly Librul Media, and he can't even be bothered to re-write the GOP talking points they hand him.

Who does he imagine he's writing to? Or, put another way, to whom does he imagine he's writing? Where's the fucking red meat with the melted butter chaser? Sure, sure, flaccid is a compliment to his prose style, but now it's shorn of its neo-Bircherite themes, the only thing that made Kristol even remotely worth paying attention to, like you'd keep an eye on the quiet loner across the street.  At the Times Kristol has somehow become David Brooks without the coy, which apparently resides somewhere in those additional fifteen points.

Yeah, I know, I know: every last sentence the man's uttered in his public career has been proven to be complete bullshit, thanks in no small part to his Doppelgänger in the White House. Why should that stop him? It was bullshit when he uttered it, and he knew that as well as anybody. Bullshit is the fucking growing medium Movement "Conservatism" has thrived on for thirty years. And it used to be a source of pride, in that sort of cocktail-party-cum-boardroom entre nous sense of theirs. Now Kristol tries to write like he's David F. Broder reheating last week's CW. It seems curious.

In fact, Republican hopes of denying Democrats complete control of the federal government for the next couple of years may rest on the promise of “McCain exceptionalism.”

Oh, Silly Billy! You'll (seemingly) always have the Court!

What sort of self-respecting hack recipient of affirmative action for well-born idiots says such a thing? When people began expressing their glee at the upcoming GOP meltdown, is this what they imagined? Bill Kristol, forced "reluctantly" to semi-endorse John McCain (despite the fact that McCain's done nothing but pander to party elites for months)? You'd think a calculating professional lunatic would at least be able to stage a competent-looking meltdown, wouldn't you?

We're reminded of the great Alstair Sim in Kind Hearts and Coronets; the real monarchists sent their idiot offspring into the clergy, where they could do damage only one day a week, or at table. Their American cousins roam loose. The election of Ronald Reagan served, to them, what an innocent wave to a crowd from a semi-starlet might do to the potential stalker in the middle of it who imagines it was aimed directly at him. We've played Fantasyland for three decades since. (This ought, by the way, to be a warning about New Voters riding to the rescue; it is very difficult to understand the hidden clockwork of such matters when the time frame exceeds your own.) It was led by a bunch of elitists waving the banner of Anti-elitism; by appeals to patriotism from people who sacrificed nothing but their country's treasury (for their own gain); by convincing the Little People they spoke for them, via phone from the private jet; and with the assistance of Men of the Gospel who knew all the prohibitions of Leviticus, and agreed with some, but drew a blank at Mammon. That it came apart around the Schiavo case, where the financial elites were shocked, shocked! to learn they shared a party with anti-freedom riders.  It smelled like duckshit then, and in rearview it looks like a last desperate attempt to salvage the brand from the disaster that is the George W. Bush they'd just elected. Brooks would start writing about how their were actually fifteen or more varieties of "conservative", and how the literate ones nearly came to blows every weekend over Burke and cosmopolitans. Funny how we'd never heard about 'em before. Funny how "conservatives" had just finished going ape over the knowledge.

Kristol doesn't mean any of this, of course--he's like the man who remember's his son's birthday at the last minute, and the promised baseball glove, and gets to the sporting goods place five minutes before closing to find they're out of everything but girls' softball gloves. And they're pink. There's plenty of time for recriminations later. For now he just ties a bow around Honest John. But if he really wants to whine about the future of the party, he might consider leaving it.

Wait, George Bush Just Tried To Score Political Points By Quoting A Politician Who Said Something Stupid?

"Hitler's influence is waning so fast that the Government is no longer afraid of the growth of the Nazi movement."

William C. Bullitt, future US ambassador to the Soviet Union and France, 1932

"Believe me, Germany is unable to wage war."

David Lloyd George, 1934

"Though Germany is tremendously stronger in 'armored' divisions, Poland's superior cavalry is ideally suited to the terrain of Eastern Europe."

Maj. George Fielding Eliot, The Ramparts We Watch,  May 1939

"The modern German theory of victory by Blitzkrieg (lightning war) is untried and, in the opinion of many experts, unsound."

Time June 1939

"By compelling Germany to sign a non-aggression pact, the Soviet Union has tremendously limited the direction of Nazi war aims."

Daily Worker editorial, August 1939

"Japan will never join the Axis."

General Douglas MacArthur, September 1940


"Bring it on."

George W. Bush, July 2003

TO begin, assuming William Edgar Borah really said if he'd just been able to talk to that Hitler fellah the little unpleasantness over Poland could have been avoided (and we have no reason to doubt anything Charles Krauthammer would say three times), it makes him guilty of naiveté, not genocide; as above, he's in good company when it comes to boat missing, not to mention that any American ought, we say ought to be aware of how pervasive Isolationism was in his own country even as another war in Europe looked inevitable.

I suppose de-grandeurizing "our" victory in WWI, to the extent of recognizing the profound effects of that Grand Folly and the worthless--less than--deaths of millions (compounded by a flu pandemic that killed twice that number) on the people lucky enough to live through it is out of the question, certainly on the Right. And admitting that, had Austria-Hungary or Serbia actually negotiated with The Enemy the whole thing would have been avoided, including the conditions that led to the rise of Nazism, would no doubt trigger a massive breakout of hives. Still, we might note that it's a fucking stupid thing to say on its face.

This we imagine as the best political response, rather than outrage about the Most Disliked President in History spewing shit about domestic political opponents before a foreign audience: the man's full of it. The idea that an Anglo-French declaration of war over the Sudetenland would have "stopped" Hitler is sci-fi stuff. What happened after war actually was declared? Sitzkrieg. Britain had no matériel; French military doctrine called, basically, for sitting behind the Maginot Line. (Criticize 'em all you like, but they'd stopped the Germans in 1914, and their failure in 1940 was due to complacency, not Appeasement; then ask yourself who th' fuck we are to be questioning anyone else's military doctrine at this point.) The US Congress passed the Neutrality Act of 1939 (which, to be sure, amounted to taking sides, but it may be distinguished from transporting non-existent armies around the globe in order to prevent the Holocaust.)

What all these appeals to Chamberlain's, or Borah's, public failures to foresee events clearly proves is that it's possible to view events more clearly (if not always more accurately) after they have occurred. It's a bit curious that the same administration that now misses that point was so eager to use it in the wake of "Bin-Laden Determined To Attack US". Ain't it?

How many times does it need to be pointed out that current fucking events (Iraq), the favorite recent historical era of the Right (the Cold War), as well as any reasonable analysis of the "appeasement" of Hitler show these idiots to be wrong, wrong, and wrong? It's blind fucking militarism as the solution to any problem that fails, disastrously, time and time again.

If You Need Me, I'll Be In The Storm Cellar.

David Brooks, "Obama Admires Bush." May 16

OKAY, first:  that's George Herbert Walker Bush, and if you'd like to take a moment to scream about deceptive headlines, I'll wait.

Second, George Herbert Walker Bush? What, the Reagan comment wasn't enough for this guy? What's next? Nixon went to China? Herbert Hoover really had us on the right track? Roger B. Taney was misunderstood?  

Thirdly, fourthly, and fifthly, as the Bush Obama doesn't admire would say...well, okay, I don't think I have three more points. I just wanted to say that, having endured Bush the Dumber saying "fourthly" the other day, on The Daily Show, where they thought the gag was that he'd opened with  something like "There are three things to keep in mind..." whereas I just really, really hate the construction, and I don't care who accepts it, OED, it still sounds idiotic. Does one say, "Seven comes fourthly in the list of Primes?" No, one does not.

All right, then, lastly, don't mind me. I've decided to increase my caffeine intake, just as an exercise in health contrarianism, and it's making me a little jumpy. I'm sure I'll get used to it. In the meantime, I don't really hold this particularly bit of stupidity against Senator Obama, because the overt stupidity is being manufactured to get him, and because, given the electorate they have to work with, it's possible to defend practically anything a politician says as just something he has to say to get elected, just as it's possible to defend almost anything that outrages the general sensibility of the American voter as most likely true. (This is not to say I do not welcome the inevitable explanation from Progressives, as I'm curious to know if He Didn't Really Mean It again, or if Iraq War I is now the touchstone of acceptable US foreign policy. )

No, I'd rather look at Brooks, who is in full passive-aggressive simper mode here, with the Special Republican Talking Points you're not supposed to be able to see without the Secret Decoder Ring, because Brooks is, you know, reasonable.

Who's supposed to be falling for this stuff? Once in a while I run into someone who says, "Oh, I used to like Brooks," or "his book was pretty funny," just as I occasionally see where someone confesses he liked Lieks' earlier, funnier carpet samples. But the question is, "how long could it have taken you to get over it?" and the corollary, "Why's he still there?" Or, as chuckling said the other day about the late Jane Galt: Yea, but what's her publisher's excuse?

Shouldn't the Times require something like a yearly road-worthiness test of its columnists? Shouldn't Brooks have to demonstrate the metaphorical ability to parallel park? Can't we check his emissions?

Hezbollah, Lebanon, Obama, negotiations, blah blah blah. Is it too much, really, to ask that Brooks act like he remembers who's President, let alone what sort of fluffing the man used to receive for his Codpiece Diplomacy, from the likes of, say, David Brooks? It's the final fucking months, Allah akbar, of Commander Negotiation Is Appeasement, not the first hopeful moments of sunshine after the smoking hulk of Jimmy Appeasement Carter's Disastrous Reign. So how's that No Negotiations thing workin' out?

Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform? Does he really believe that Hezbollah is a normal social welfare agency seeking more government services for its followers? Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy? What “Lebanese consensus” can Hezbollah possibly be a part of?
If Obama believes all this, he’s not just a Jimmy Carter-style liberal. He’s off in Noam Chomskyland.

Let us try to be reasonable and open-minded about this. In the seventy years since the end of WWII spurred the Second Great Awakening of innate American empire lust, and the Truman administration strong-armed the creation of the State of Israel, there are, arguendo, three American contributions to its continued existence: massive foreign and military aid, the possible transfer of nuclear technology (so far), and the Camp David Accords, which ended the state of war between Israel and her largest enemy and fractured pan-Arabism. See if you can name the American President who pulled that one off. [Bonus question: how many battalions did he use?]

Let us further state that the difference between Stark Raving Chomskyism and the alternatives is that SRC hasn't yet failed in practice.

We might, while we're at it, note the accomplishments of two of our most activist post-war Presidents in terms of using military force to accomplish US aims: both Eisenhower and Reagan invaded Lebanon. Ike's even went pretty well, assuming you're a fan of propping up Christian control of Muslims agitated by the final act of the old Anglo-French imperialism. Reagan, well, not so good. And we'll add we're back talking about Lebanon, again, for the second time in the Codpiece administration.

As for Senator Obama, we're in full agreement here. There was absolutely nothing else the Bush I administration could have done in response to Kuwaiti slant-drilling unprovoked aggression by Saddam Hussein, a man the Reagan/Bush administration had repeatedly tried to rein in. And no one can argue that, after the US and Coalition forces invaded, there was not a single occurrence of the horrific use of incubator babies for bayonet practice.

Sucks, Dunnit?

Sandra Day O'Connor, demanding the Senate take action 

to speed Alzheimer's research and help caregivers.

NOBODY has to tell us how devastating dementia is. Nobody has to tell us what caregivers go through. We're lucky enough that there's enough money for mom to live comfortably, receive professional care, and be kept active. We're lucky they were reasonable about it when she took to stuffing washcloths in drains and flooding the place. We bear up. Like you do. Nobody has to tell us the value of anyone with a public forum bringing attention to dementia (and not just Alzheimer's).

What someone might explain to me is what, exactly, Sandra Day O'Connor imagined was going to happen to millions of Americans with all sorts of desperate, life-altering needs which are best addressed by governmental action when she voted to disenfranchise voters in Florida and install a Republican troika in Washington. A new era of compassionate conservatism?

A Little Darker, Please.

Our present toaster, like so many gadgets, is more of a subscription to appliance world

R. Porrofatto

THESE two  articles in the Sunday Times caught my attention. In the former, the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit, the Briggs Stadium of my extreme youth, where Al Kaline and Norm Cash and Harvey Kuenn played a child's game instead of working summers, where for a while Rocky Bridges enjoyed watching ball games and kept a wad in one cheek that made him look like Dizzy Gillespie with Bell's palsy, is being fully or partially demolished (which being the point of the article) for free, in exchange for the salvage rights; in the latter, the rise of thoroughbred fatalities is linked to a Win the Glamorous Races At Age Three Or You're Cat Food mentality that may be weakening the breed.

[Waymon Guillebeaux, a vice president of the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation] also turned a measured eye to the present and said that remaining structural pieces are valuable. They are from the first half of the 20th century. “The steel is the highest of the high grades,” he said. “Steel was cheap then.”

Adding that all metal prices had “gone through the roof,” Rottach said the demolition would be a green project with about 85 percent of the materials recycled.

Now, the only thing I know about economics is that Milton Friedman won a Nobel for it by the simple expedient of using the word "freedom" at least twice per paragraph, thereby giving birth to both the Sisyphean School and a generation of David Brooks columns.  

See, I can't understand why 85%  of the materials in every project known to man wouldn't be recycled.  When did it ever make sense to just throw shit in a hole and put a match to it?  How is it that stewardship has never entered into the equation, except as the anti-capitalist agenda of Dirty Hippie, Inc. ?

Here, again, I'm not insisting common sense should necessarily trump statistical investigation, and I'm not saying the degradability of product quality over time, or increased scarcity, hence cost, is strictly attributable to unchecked avarice and its avatars and professional touts. I'm saying we ought to be able to make a fucking toaster that works as well as they did forty years ago, and the fact that we do not is enough evidence to grab these fuckers by the wrist before they turn over another card, search 'em for the gaff, and ride 'em out of town on a rail, suitably tarred and feathered.

It's more than possible, it's likely I'm an idiot, but, then, I'm pretty sure that when the Reagan administration simultaneously oversaw (if I may use the term) the mass consolidation of the meat-packing industry and simply upgraded every slice of cow in the country ("Everyone under sixteen years of age is now...sixteen years of age," and, after all, why quibble about Grades when you aren't really going to inspect anything anyway?) it was not in consideration of some new technology that turned gristle into filet, but one that turned the public's gold into its own. Freely, as they note in the econ biz.

More Songs Strangled Cries About Politics and Food

AS some of you know, every so often I'm struck by the inexplicable desire to turn on cable news, and, y'know, just watch it for some reason. Obviously not for the news, of course. This used to happen to me with fast food, too. Once a year or so I'd be driving somewhere and suddenly duck into Burger Abomination, not because I was particularly hungry, usually, and if so not because I imagined I'd find food there, but because it sounded good. Almost impossible to explain, and certainly impossible to justify in the forty-eight hours following the consumption of a Double with Cheese, Petri Dish of Death Germs, and fries.

As I recall it that didn't last beyond my twenties, and I can't even think of the last time I ate out of a bag. Perhaps the coming of cable replaced it with more intellectual pursuits. That is, very slightly more intellectual.

This morning I climbed on the exercise bike, having placed the remote control on the book holder dealie, because it slides out of the cup holder. It didn't occur to me when I bought the thing to check if the more expensive model had a cigarette lighter, too. And something simply came over me, and without even checking Turner Classics I went right for the McRib Sandwich of cable news, Morning Joe. And I lasted, I kid you not, twenty seconds.

(We spoke yesterday about my Poor Wife's--in fact her entire clan's--maddening fastidio-queasy approach to foodstuffs. The McRib, which has become some sort of seasonal product, like eggnog or lemongrass ale, is the ne plus ultra of gag inducement at our place. This may explain her near-psychopathic channel surfing, now that I think of it--just a glimpse of those slaughterhouse floor sweepings injection molded to look as though it came from a slightly more expensive portion of the animal, then coyly hidden behind some food additive chemist's molecular duplication of the cheapest store-brand barbecue sauce you could find, in the Third World, will put her off her feed for seventy-two hours, minimum. This is, of course, completely understandable, but medical science is at a loss to explain how the entire process can take place faster than the autonomic nervous system is capable of responding even under optimal laboratory conditions.)

It was Tweety. Okay, first, it was a clip of Hillary Clinton and, quite frankly, it's highly unlikely I will sit through anything anymore which involves teevee "talent" talking about either Democratic candidate, or what's left of their race. But for cryin' out fucking loud, why is Chris Matthews on in the morning too? He's got his own show, which, as I understand it, the American public has rather resoundingly declared it will watch for precisely as long as it takes to find fresh AA batteries and get the remote to work again. At one point he had two shows, which apparently gave twice as many people the opportunity to see what a despicable slimewad he is. But he's still Joe's "guest" in the morning. This is, of course, an extension of the hiring of carnival talker ("barker" is incorrect) Barbara Walters to anchor an evening news program, an event which explains everything that has gone wrong since, everywhere in the world, and which is still so raw in my memory it's painful to type. Bob-wah begat Tom Brokaw, whose own stint in the previously-respectable morning "news" game proved that, for The Greatest Generation, it took a man to solidify the acceptability of reading the news with a speech impediment. It's Brokaw who established the practice of anchors turning up on the morning froth-fests to act as "experts", meaning that, unlike the professional blabbermouths who actually hosted those things, he knew which hemisphere Nicaragua was in without being cued. It might have been Dan Rather, actually, but CBS held on to the hard-news-in-the-morning format longer than the others (RIP Hughes Rudd), and anyway, Danny was more like that uncle of yours who came back from the war a little funny in the head. Brokaw was the guy who not only tried to sell you the Extended Warranty you'd already said no to, but did so in a way that let you know he'd be thrilled to death if you'd waste $99.95 so long as it made him look like a complete toad to the Higher Ups.

But I digress. Tweety, over the Clinton clip, says something to the effect that she'd "calculated" she could get by the Democratic primaries with her Iraq War vote and get the nomination "by entitlement, or whatever", before mov...

That was all I could take.

This reminds me that last week's commenters were kind enough to act as though I'd swung a corked bat at both Obama and Clinton supporters, which might have been the just thing to do, but isn't the thing I did, nor, really something I'd ever done. And I spent part of my weekend wondering why that was.

So here, as chronologically as I can relay it without doing any actual work, Why I'm Not As Irritated (In Print) By Clinton Supporters:

1) I'd already rejected the candidacy of Senators Clinton, Edwards, and Dodd after the Iraq War authorization. This meant that, throughout 2007 she appeared to me as Another Democrat I Had No Interest In Voting For Although I'd Vote Against Her Opponent, making her the seventh such, or something like that. The bad news with Hillary was already discounted.

2) Senator Obama, on the other hand, once he started to distinguish himself from the pack, proved far too wedded to a campaign image (end partisanship!) which didn't seem to make sense. You're a student of politics, you're a South Side activist, and you think partisanship is our greatest obstacle? Either tell me how you came by this, or I have to assume it's the result of the image-making that's gone on since 2004.

3) And don't get me wrong; I don't object to image-making, and what if I did? It's the system, although the still-untapped potential of the astonishing Perot vote in '92, which was, what? 17%?--say what you will about the man, even when he was flat-out nuts he sounded like a man trying to be honest and reasonable--seems to me, as time goes on, less like a lost opportunity and more like a political consultant's idea of how to make more political consultants. But Senator Obama ran with this about as gleefully as Tom Brokaw runs with another idea to separate seniors and their money.

4) The Halloween Gang-Tackle and the Lukewarm Response By Clinton Opponents. You know what's great? Elizabeth Edwards excoriating our pathetic Press in the Times. Y'know what would have been greater? If he husband hadn't seen fit to collude with Tim Russert and Brian Williams for the crime of out-polling him.

5) Premature Coronation Week and the Damned Racists crying jag. Is Brooklyn Still In The League? I thought there was nothing worse than excessive celebration by a front-runner, until I witness the deflating loss in New Hampshire being explained as The Bradley Effect by that bunch on MSNBC, who looked like it was the only thing that kept them from hanging themselves en masse. And more's the pity.

6) This, then, would be the beginning of my Tripartite Obama Problem. The eruption of Obamist bloggers I read into what, frankly, struck me as bat-shit Klintoon Khronicles craziness; the Dog Staring At A Ceiling Fan campaign the Senator has run ever since, including Those Reagan Remarks; and the fact that as frontrunner, both his campaign and his campaign supporters should have shown some recognition that sunrise and sunset are regular occurrences they've been familiar with for some time. The front-runner is going to need those votes after the dust settles! Why was that so hard to recognize?

7) In this you may detect a double standard--mine--and you're partly correct. I'd rank Senator Clinton as Just Another Centrist Democrat who happens to be particularly good on national health care. I expected her to say things to get elected. It astonished me to see her get criticized for the simple act of declaring that she thought she'd make a better candidate. I don't deny Senator Obama the same right, but it'd be nice if your political persona, and your published positions, decrying partisanship were matched by a little post-partisan behavior. Unless "blaming old people, women, and racists for not voting for you" is the new post-partisanship.

8) Alternately, if you're a lifelong partisan and an Obama supporter, then you ought to acknowledge the distinction.


9) Of the dozen or so bloggers I try to read everyday, and the dozen or so more I try to get to, some went full-tilt Obamanation in January and never looked back. There weren't that many declared Clinton supporters--Tom Watson is the only one I can recall--and people such as Lance, who may've stated a slight preference, were thoughtful, respectful, and apparently cognizant of the figures on morning sunrises. On the other hand, three blogs I read regularly went insane, and generally not for Obama as against anything Hillary Clinton had ever touched. This is, after all, my movie. Coulda found Clintonistas who angered me as much, yes. As it turned out, though, I'd largely have had to seek them out.

10) I generally do not reply to other people's commenters, and I genuinely try to avoid the truly egregious. But the rolling yahooglianism of "Get out of the way, Old White Woman!" is, simply, beyond the pale. The prospect of sharing a party with you this November fills me with McRib.

re: Inspire® 2-slice model 6328

James B. S. Riley
Global Powders & Notions, LLC
General Delivery
Indianapolis, IN
May 12, 2008


Mr. John Oster, deceased,
Founder
The Oster Manufacturing Company
acquired by Sunbeam Products,
which was bought out by
Allegheny International, Inc., before
the division was cited, along with
its accounting firm which, not surprisingly, was
Arthur Andersen, LLC, now owned by
four limited liability corporations called
Omega Management I through IV,
for accounting fraud and
filed for bankruptcy, only to reemerge
one year later as the privately owned
American Household, Inc. (AHI)
which was purchased by
Jarden Corporation (NYSE: JAH), the former
Alltrista Corporation, which began as the
spin-off of its canning business by the Ball Corporation
Rye, N.Y.

Dear Mr. Oster:

I like toast. In this, as I'm sure you're aware, or would be if you were still alive, I am far from alone; it's a staple of breakfast tables in much of the civilized world. Toward this end I, again like millions of others, employ a toaster, or device which toasts bread automatically on both sides at once. I enjoy its convenience, and, if I may indulge in the personal for a moment, the aroma of toasting bread and the satisfying pop of the finished product, which frequently startles, but in a good way. I like mine with butter (or, more accurately, partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil spread the color of cabbage butterflies); for an occasional treat I'll add some apricot preserves.

I don't know when I first became a fan of toast. As an infant I was fed digestive biscuits, which might serve as a sort of gateway to toast enjoyment; I suppose your marketing department could answer that. I do remember that the toaster was a prominent feature of my family's breakfast table, which, let us clearly understand each other here, was also the lunch and dinner table--we were not one of your fancy breakfast-nook-owning families--but Mother would put the toaster back in the cabinet after the morning meal.

Now, here's the peculiar thing about that, the late Mr. Oster: we must have had that same toaster for at least a decade. If you could remember things at this stage, I'm sure you'd remember that such objects take on a sort of totemic power for young children, being, at the same time, a kind of magical amulet and a provider of warmth and comfort. I can, in fact, close my eyes and still smell the warm brown bakelite of the handles and knobs, with their clearly marked numerical progression, and recall how the Art Deco-ish bulge of its chrome body offered literally hours of enjoyment once I discovered it would distort faces most comically, like a household funhouse mirror. And the redorange glow of its elements was mesmerizing, presaging a lifelong fascination with various forms of flammability, something I would eventually turn into a career of sorts. So I remember it clearly, and it was the only toaster I would know until the late 70s ushered in the craze for throwing perfectly good equipment in a landfill, during which time it made toast.

You may have seen where I'm going with this, Mr. Oster; I'm not quite clear how perceptive people in your situation are. Last fall I replaced my previous toaster, which, at a mere five years of age, had lost a portion of its electrical function. (Here I might explain that in the American economy of the 21st century it is both cheaper and faster to replace the entire apparatus than to contrive with ten cents' worth of wire to repair it.) So I cranked up the flivver, bounced my way to my local retailler, and bought a sleek and shiny replacement. As you may have guessed, or not, an Oster.

Now, sir, like you, I imagine, I find myself living a portion of my life in a century for which I was not prepared, though I imagine the dazzling rate of increasing complexity seemed to you like progress. I get home with this product and spend ten minutes reading the instructions. For toast. I mean, sir, I don't generally swear around the deceased, in case they're not partial to it, but what th' fuck? The thing has a setting for bagels, which is fine in a politically-correct sort of way, but there's also a WARM and a FROZEN button which I can't for the life of me figure why anyone would need. And the dial is a marvel of illegibility. There's no marking on the knob itself, which apparently would have demoralized the design staff no end. Instead it has a small ridge between two beveled sections which serves as a marker supposing one has sensitive enough fingers (and, I might point out, small enough to still read the numbers underneath while fondling it). The scale runs from 1 through 7, with dots in between offering what frankly must be termed the illusion of decimal increments of control. In the actual event numbers 1-4, and their fractional handmaidens, do nothing beyond getting the bread slightly warm, which, while it may be some user's cup of tea, does not actually qualify as "toast", and would seem to raise the question about what that WARM switch is doing there.

All of this in fact, sir, I would have learned to live with without too much bother as, in fact, I had until recently, when the thing began to develop a mind of its own, which, although I haven't checked yet, probably signals the warranty has expired. This may have begun when my Poor Wife, who is a notoriously fickle, sensitive, and, well, no need beating around the bush, half-insane eater, as is the rest of her family (at least she doesn't vomit nearly as much as her baby brother, who can be set off by someone trimming the broccoli too long) decided to have some toast one morning instead of whatever godawful coffeeshop provender she usually indulges (a sensitive eater who readily consumes feedlot-quality comestibles prepared by people who were in prison as recently as last week!). She, you might have been able to guess, favors toast in which the color of the bread remains unchanged, and in pursuit of this started fiddling with the dial which, of course, I didn't discover until the next morning, when my own toast popped up so quickly I thought I'd failed to completely engage the switch. And, of course, since what markings there are are in Hipster Design Braille it took another exercise in warming bread to figure out the problem. As I say, I haven't checked the warranty; perhaps "changing the dial once set" voids it.

So this weekend I planned on fixing club sandwiches for lunch. This means, for two of us, six total slices of toast which I generally toast lightly in consideration of my wife's preferences and avoidance of keeping them all straight during assembly. Six total slices of toast, one unchanged setting, yielding four different visual results, including one piece which looked on one side as though it had gotten a suntan through a picket fence. You may compare, sir, that old chrome model of my youth, which, rescued by some landfill archaeologist, is probably available on eBay as we speak, listed as "works great!"

I write to you, Mr. Oster, not because I cannot contact the company online, or because I imagine that you still have some pull there, but because it is your name on the thing ("Oster: The Quality Goes In Before The Name Of Some Guy Who Died Thirty Years Before His Company Ever Made A Toaster Goes On") and I feel this makes us partners in grievance. And I was wondering if it's true that the dead can shoot laser beams out of their eyes, or cause people to stab themselves with their own letter openers, or raise maps of painful boils, anything the people responsible for this thing deserve? A simple haunting, if that's the one interaction you're permitted, would be satisfactory. I remain, sir, yours in spirit.

Sincerely,


James B. S. Riley

JBSR: dc

Friday Cat Blogging

Slightly Evil Larry™  is not unaccustomed 

to finding himself on a pedestal.

These Foolish Things (Remind Me Of You)

ON my last raid on Half-Price Books I picked up John Keegan's one-volume The First World War which I successfully dug down to a couple days ago and began reading.  (Keegan is easy to distinguish from the American Kagan tribe; he's the one who writes non-fiction.)

On 4 October an advance guard of the Royal Naval Division, which had landed at Dunkirk on 19 September and had meanwhile roamed western Belgium, arrived in Antwerp by train.  In its wake appeared the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, thirsting for action and glory.

Which is what makes the real Churchill easy to distinguish from the one the Right used to pretend (ah, nostalgia!) was inhabiting the White House:  the object of their respective thirsts.*

________

* The Churchill of the American Right is himself a pretend Churchill in many respects, but that's a post for a day when my gutters aren't clogged with maple droppings.

 

Sure, Everybody Wants To Party, But When It Comes Time To Help Clean Up They're Too Hungover.

I can't tell you how heartwarming it's been for a withered misanthrope to watch as millennial waves of fresh young Democrats adopted "old white woman" as a favored pejorative.

--Doghouse Riley

LEG pain: intermittent. Still bad at night, but mostly manageable with Alleve; kneeling in the garden possible, though I look like a crippled bug trying to get down there, and the pain upon attempting to rise again may be described as "blinding". I actually had this conversation with the orthopedist:

RILEY: The thing I can't do is kneel down.

DOC: Try not to do that.

There goes my conversion to Catholicism, especially under the current regime.

They switched me from Vicodin to Tramadol, which is the methadone of low-rent opioids. Listen, you fucks, I was abusing stuff ten times this strong when you were still cramming for your SATs! I tried to explain. And I got a script for Celebrex®, a medication which, to judge from the packaging of the samples I was given, can only be described as enthusiastic, as you would be too, if you were a Pfizer rep. Celebrex® restricts the user to Tylenol™ for other pain-relief needs, which is like telling me that in case of a splitting headache I can take two pieces of candy corn every four hours.

So Spring is here in extremis, and there are crows nesting in the big pine out back, and flickers and downy woodpeckers in front, and the garden looks as good as it ever will, especially considering that the gardener moves like The Human Torso in Freaks. And my Poor Wife is counting the two weeks to school's end, and her students are already gone, spiritually. There are many things to be said about the anti-unionist forces allied against the teaching profession, but among the most incisive is that anyone who bitches about how much vacation time teachers get has never taught the last two weeks of a school year.

And the carnival left town, which caused me to reflect on the fact that after a full month of unexpected (and somewhat undeserved) national campaigning Hoosiers seem to have come out the other side no more intelligent than before.

How much money do we spend on these things, again?

There was one, surprising exception--Governor Mitch "The Mighty Atom" Daniels, who ran unopposed, is still running campaign ads! And they're new, or else I would have suspected a) a scheduling glitch or b) typical power-structure collusion. And the goddam thing looks like a cross between a super-hero flick trailer and a sports aid drink campaign:

Lord, their internal polling must be even worse than what the Racist Star reported.

This may, or may not, have been why I got up this morning, but then catching up with yesterday's news has become something of a habit at this point, and I was shocked, shocked! to discover certain Obama supporters beginning to ask Democrats to move past Hillary, beginning, not surprisingly, with Hillary supporters, a concern which roughly doubled the usual number of comments to which "lying old bag" was appended, and which engendered my reply above. Soar high, Young Democrat! I think this idea of talking like a Republican, except about your own party, shows enormous potential in managing to lose a gimme national election in new and exciting ways.

That's not what I predict, and, Lord knows, however much I dislike both Democratic candidates, John McCain doesn't even register on the same scale. But the simple fact that this stuff can't be turned off owes, not to an anonymous rabble, but to a partisan campaign driven, Kos-like, by the desire to Just Win.

If that has a point I'll climb on board, but if it does someone has to explain it to me. Common sense and conventional wisdom both say it's a Democratic year; standard functional intelligence says you don't take anything for granted, especially once an election becomes binary. It's perhaps a shocking revelation, but middle-class or working-class Middle Americans don't really give a shit what bloggers think, and, as such, if the New Breed imagines it can win elections without them I say go for it. You can always blame your loss on their bigoted ignorance.

I used to discount this "divided Democrat" business, but I've been forced to give it another look. The sad thing to me is that none of it needed to happen; the Big Whoop of the campaign is that Obama did not receive his coronet in New Hampshire. The race ran absolutely true to form thereafter.  But his supporters--let's be fair, huh?--went apeshit.  Clinton slagging, in the long run, hurt the Obama campaign by drawing the line even more starkly. Before New Hampshire Senator Obama had a minor problem with genuine racists, one that it would have been hard for them to create much trouble about in an open forum. Afterwards he had a problem with his supporters calling all non-supporters racists. It's this fissure through which Jeremiah Wright pokes his head. In March, Senator Obama responds with a "masterful speech on race"; by late April he's being battered on the same issue by people like Brooks and Noonan who'd had no opening before. You may try if you wish to convince me that the portrayal of Clinton supporters as backwards, toothless, cousin-marryin' racists did not turn this into a major fault.

History walks backwards, like a crab; each generation learns that backwards, too. The practice of noticing things right after they fall on your head is time-honored, and none too smart.