White Christmas

THAT most wonderful time of the year, when you're reminded, once again, that the renewed hope one finds in the promise of increasing sunlight is balanced by the sheer number of blind racist idiots out there, and the recognition that you share a closer genetic link to some of them than you're really comfortable with.

I think I've mentioned before that my Poor Wife and I used to play a game with family gatherings and racism. It had a single rule: you had to look at the other the minute somebody made some wholly gratuitous racial remark, and the object was to be the first to get there.

I suppose we started playing about twenty-five years ago, and the great attraction of the thing was that it wasn't a game we'd invented, rather, it was one that developed organically and was then codified. If either of us was of a more scientific bent it might have involved plotting Cracker Comments over Time, or versus Phases of the Moon or corollated with Bill O'Reilly career highlights, but we're Arty, so it was just another excuse to sigh knowingly. And if there's a sort of Oprahesque smugness about the thing, it's a mistake to think we imagined the issue was limited to our parents' generation, that Brokaw-limned bunch that fought the Nazis and the integration of public schools. It's just that they were a lot more likely to make unguarded comments, seeing as how they saw no reason to be guarded in the first place, so that back when more of them were alive you might spear a line drive from any corner of the room. It kept you on your toes.

As they grew less ambulatory, or even stopped being animated, the game grew less exciting. If our dwindling number of elders didn't understand the need to couch their racism in more acceptably up-to-date terms, still the process which fed them ammunition--Brokaw's nightly Songs of Encumbered Speech, for example--did. So eventually racism was replaced by crypto-racism, the way skinny ties give way to wide ones, the way Movement "Conservatism" replaced the klavern, and the acceptable locus for the expression of racial opprobrium, at the family dinner table or on the local "news", became public education.

This was around the time my wife returned to teaching, and got a job in an urban district. For a couple years the game was suspended because she became a sort of human batting cage, and it took us a while to catch on. She'd be asked some innocuous, chit-chatty sort of question about how the school year was going, then be prodded about classroom troubles, and she'd answer innocently enough about some fight, or a miscreant caught pulling fire alarms, and be met with, "Were they black?" So she just started avoiding telling those stories. (Like any good game there are some worthy off-field anecdotes. It was around this time that we moved from a half-gentrified area of downtown to one which was more of a raw canvas, which caused her father to offer to foot the cost of a Rottweiler, and culminated in a visit from her baby brother [now in his early 40s] who spent the entire time surreptitiously looking out the front window to see if the darkies were stealing his hubcaps.)

There probably were some points scored in the past few years, but the game was as dull as a denial from Mark McGuire's lawyers until the Indianapolis Public Schools Dress Code brought some new, if unwelcome, vitality last year. The promise that forcing them into Best Buys vestments was going to turn those ghetto punks into fine young scholars thrilled our family members the same way it thrilled local teevee "news" producers, in the same way "Bomb Mecca" sounds like a reasonable course of action to people who imagine their tiniest synaptic event counterbalances the 5.9736×1024 KG mass of the earth. School uniforms, of course, are an idea so appealing to the authoritarian mind that they've had the opportunity to have been proven meaningless time and again over the course of the last couple decades, but this time the intended victims were as Black! as the headlines the IPS superintendent hoped to generate. The latter part of the program was a success.

Now, let me point out here that between the two families precisely one person--my Poor Wife--was actually affected by this. No one else pays anything beyond state and federal taxes to support IPS (and every other school in the state or nation), no one works inside the city limits, no one lives anywhere where they're likely to catch a glimpse of Dangerously Low-Riding Ghetto Pants. Except on white kids. But it was almost universally hailed as the solution to Domestic Unrest.

SO this Christmas morning we spend an hour with the remains of my mother, then head over to my sister's for breakfast, or, as I like to call it, "breakfast", and the plates haven't all been cleared yet when we have the first score of the day, or what would have been if I could have turned my head while seething, when my sister's mother-in-law starts in about how some teacher or neighbor or second cousin of hers had said something about all the IPS students who get free school lunches but wear designer clothes (see I'm White and I Don't Have a Teevee That Big)! And I have to admit, dear reader, that I sort of exploded about it before catching myself, not that I didn't believe she deserved a punch on her 78-year-old snout, regardless, but because I don't want to be the source of disharmony in someone else's home, and it sure would be nice if everyone else felt and acted the same.

And by now you will have noted that what was such a great idea last year is now the source of a new complaint--the Coloreds are dressin' all uppity! It just fucking does not matter. I thought I made a reasonable save by mentioning that a lot of the students were also wearing clothing that had been provided (with much fanfare) on the grounds that they couldn't afford a complete change of wardrobe at the whim of that same heroic administration which was so highly praised the Yuletide previous. It was not a response to her comments--they didn't deserve a response, just an expletive--but an opportunity for someone else to take over the conversation, which allowed me to object to dress codes in general and not the unspoken underlying urge to see all black people in stripes.

So then it was on to my cousin Jane's place, to see the rest of my father's family, where we are treated to a) the tale of all the trouble they're havin' at the school where my cousin Pammy teaches, Redacted High, in the formerly all-white hillbilly enclave of Deletedville south of town, and how this is all the fault of the IPS students who are there illegally because they lied about where they lived in order to escape the New IPS Dress Code ("Weren't never a speck o' trouble in Cracker Township til these undesirables showed up.") and b) the rather ironically amusing sight of one of my third cousins, home from his first semester at college, pimp-rollin' his way through the living room with his jeans buckled at the knee.


You don't visit us often enough! someone is sure to tell us at every family get-together.

Seasonal-Appropriate Wishes Event

I hope you all will take a moment to remember, through tenth eggnog or seventh Xanax, that somewhere tonight in some icy outpost a cold, lonely, homesick young man or woman is keeping a watchful eye on greedy, wasteful, hubristic, thieving bureaucratic motherfuckers on your behalf. And that, unlike the people we defend ourselves from with guns, these mofos really are capable of taking our freedoms overnight.

Whether you chose to celebrate or ignore the quadrant-shifting sun/earth relationship, to accept wild postulations of Ice Kings or happy elves, dance naked round the fire, or quietly hope for undeserved salvation, may you get your wish, may the gifts you give others delight and fit properly, and may you yourself receive just what you need and no more. May your opponents wise up, your screenplay be greenlighted, and your teeth be their whitest. May the year to come be better than the last. And Lord help us all.

And may the women and men of our Armed Forces, scattered across the globe, come home and get laid. Amen.

How I Spent My Autumn Hallucination

MoDo, "Savior or Saboteur?" December 23

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

FRIENDS, just for the record, I've heard more convincing denials from fucking smack addicts, okay? And I mean no disrespect to Junkie-Americans by that.

Maureen Dowd has perpetrated just under thirty columns since returning from vacation or rehab September 25th. What say we take a little survey, with a special focus on her brave, Cold Turkey kick?

Since that time she's written ten (10) columns that didn't mention Hillary. She writes three a week. So three times a month she's found some other topic. This means that if you were a MoDo column, and you weren't about Hillary Clinton, you'd have the same statistical relationship to all other MoDo columns that someone who thinks George W. Bush is doing an excellent job has to the population at large. Or, put another way: if you had a part-time, on-call, minimum-wage job, and you were called in as often as Dowd writes a column without an appearance from Hillzilla, you would have starved to death sometime around Thanksgiving.

We might also note here that there cannot possibly be any pressure on her to write more often about Hillary, so that 30% may include some padding. Which, now that we think about it, would explain some of those other columns.

Like to see how the equation would look hanging over the sofa? Okay, since September Fred Thompson (1 column) has participated in his first Republican debate, and has gone from The Next Reagan to The Current Reagan. Rudy Giuliani (2 columns, one concerning how he'd handle Hillary, aka The Debate Dominatrix) has gone from +10 to dead even nationally. The last column she wrote about either of them was on October 17. Mitt Romney's held and lost leads, sparred with Giuliani, and gone negative on Huckabee. He got a column on The Speech. John McCain, recently removed from life support, got to share a column with Joe "Talks Too Much At Congressional Hearings on the War" Biden and Gen. David Petraeus. This ties him with Cécilia Sarkozy. (While we're here we may as well note that the October 10 column entitled "Bomb Bomb Iran" concerned the position, not of the man who made the line famous, but of a Democratic Senator from New York.) Mike Huckabee. the biggest story of the campaign so far, has risen from nothing to front-runner while remaining stuck on Nothing in Dowdland, or exactly one column less than she's dedicated to pretending she's Clarence Thomas.

How 'bout over the mantle? Five columns total concerning Iraq, two of which were really about Cheney, including one of her patented faux-interview fantasias in which Tim Russert asks the Vice President pointed, sarcastic questions. Just so we wouldn't miss that it was fiction.

Care for some Clenis™, a sweet jab of the old mainline Maureen had sworn off before being forced to hit back up? Eight, counting today's, not counting the repeated suggestions that Hillary overinflates her experience as First Wife. Since Rudy's mid-speech cell phone act "almost made Bill and Hillary seem like a model of normalcy" on September 23, we've had "Bill and Monica" (Oct. 21), Halloween's Hillary as the "one who acts French, overlooking her husband's peccadilloes", Girlfriend “play[ing] the Fury with Bill’s cupcakes during the campaign” (I'm assuming; I'm not exactly 100% sure what that is supposed to mean) and "playing the victim after Monica" on November 4, "Bill's galpals" on November 21, and the fantasy version of Barack "Senator Smooth Jazz" Obama zinging Hill with "White House intern" and "stain" remarks exactly seven (7) days ago. Wow, too bad she was dragged back into that marital psychodrama against her will, huh? She'd almost made it to the front gate of the clinic this time.

Let's move on to Iraq, which is an important enough issue to have sparked nearly half as many columns this fall as were dedicated exclusively to Senator Clinton. Then one looks closer. Two columns on Dick Cheney. Two on WMDs. One on Condi Rice. One on Doug Feith. Doug Fucking Feith! The woman gets 800 words in the New York Times three times a week, and apparently the last time she bothered to look at what's happening in Iraq was sometime in early 2005.

In case you've forgotten, with the single exception of crazy camp-follower Ron Paul, every candidate, present and former, for the Republican presidential nomination publicly supports our current level of operations in Iraq, excepting those who propose to expand it. Out of the subset of these which MoDo has bothered to write about in the past four months, only one--John McCain--has had more ink devoted to his position than his hairdo. Perhaps coincidentally, Senator McCain is the only one whose Iraq position could be reasonably understood from having scanned the headlines two years ago.

Still, somehow, it is Ms Clinton's vote for the Iraq War resolution and for Lieberman-Kyl which have brought the country to the precipice. Republican white guys, being, like all white guys, some degree or other of fake cowboy, are permitted to track horseshit into the house without reproach.

Just for fun, let's roll the credits over a montage of autumnal MoDo moments:

(On Lieberman-Kyl): “Barack Obama would have voted no if he had voted.”

(On Hillary): “she’s the only one in Congress [Dick Cheney] can easily persuade anymore”

“an estrogen equation”

"Sometimes when Hillary takes heat, she gets paranoid and controlling"

“the sort of belittling treatment that she sometimes dished out to her husband and his male aides at the White House”

"It’s almost as if she’s offering herself to Clinton supporters as the solution to the problem of the 22nd Amendment."

“She is a control freak”

"Bill is a narcissist"

“In The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan lays out what he sees as Obama’s 'indispensable' capacity to move the country past baby-boom feuds and the world past sectarian and racial divides”

“my mom and another Catholic girlfriend actually had Southern Protestants ask them to lift up their hair so they could see the mark of the devil or the horns”

(Al Gore): "waxy orange makeup." "bloated fat guy".

"Wouldn’t sticks and carrots — cultural fluency, smart psychology and Reaganesque dialogue — be a better way to bring the Iranians around than sticks and stones?"

All over a shot of the Pulitzer medal, slowly dissolving. Literally, I mean.

Ho Ho Horseshit

Tom Coyne, AP: Notre Dame astrophysicist has theories on star of Bethlehem." December 20

LOOK, if NORAD wants to spend taxpayer dollars tracking Santa every year, I say fine. Gives the Boys something to do in the years between North Korean missle tests. I'm not too worried whether your kid's school permits green and red napkins or calls it "Christmas break". I don't think a creche belongs on the courthouse lawn, but I'd be willing to overlook it if wasn't a stupid ratings ploy designed to rally a bunch of obnoxious hypocrites.

So I think my real point here is this: if there is a God, He surely intended His editors to have more brains than His geese, sufficient to recognize the difference between hard science, soft or "feature" science, Holiday fluff, and self-promoting bullshit, and while the rules might be relaxed in a spirit of fun, that shouldn't extend to the point of slack-jawed credulity.

As a theoretical astrophysicist, Grant Mathews had hoped the answer would be spectacular -- something like a supernova. But two years of research have led him to a more ordinary conclusion. The heavenly sign around the time of the birth of Jesus Christ was likely an unusual alignment of planets, the sun and the moon.

No, it "likely" wasn't.

The star, though, has long been immortalized in Christmas songs, plays and movies. Astronomers, theologians and historians for hundreds of years have been trying to determine exactly which star might have inspired the biblical writing.

In reality, theologians solved it over a century ago. It's just that editors don't like the answer.

The Gospel of Matthew indicates Jesus was born in Bethlehem when Herod was king. Roman historian Flavius Josephus wrote that Herod died after an eclipse of the moon before the Passover. Mathews said among the possibilities are 6 B.C., 5 B.C., 1 B.C. or 1 A.D. The star could have appeared up to two years before the wise men arrived in Jerusalem, he said.

Mathews believes that means the Christmas star could have appeared anywhere from 8 to 4 B.C.

Look, Doc, I'm sorry, but the Nativity story is a steaming pile of fiction, concocted decades after the death of Jesus, if any, by people who knew nothing about his birth but felt the urge to tell the tale and shaped it for their intended audience. Jesus winds up in Bethlehem (Matthew just drops him there; Luke pulls the "worldwide census" groaner) strictly to "fulfill" prophecy that had nothing to do with him, the better to wow Matthew's Jewish audience. Luke wrote a little later, when the Christian cult had begun focusing its membership drives on Gentiles, i.e. the Roman poor. He may in part have copied directly from Matthew; both used Mark as a source, the Synoptic Gospels being something like the Fiji Wedge of my college days, when frat boys aligned themselves to look over each others' shoulders on test day, the vertex of the angle being the one guy who studied.

(By the way, just as a little sample of how this pot-au-feu is concocted, that "The star could have appeared up to two years before the wise men arrived in Jerusalem..." has nothing to do with anything except the internal consistency of the Matthew tale. We have no knowledge of The Wise Men beyond their being from The East, nor anything of their methodology. They might have taken twenty years to make the trip, or finish their calculations, for that matter; they might have fortuitously been attending a Magi convention at the Bethlehem Marriot.)

The scholarship here is not obscure, and there's really nothing to oppose it save the doctrinal insistence that everything in the Bible must be literally true, a position even more head-meets-wall obtuse than usual when it comes to justifying Matthew and Luke on the Nativity. (One December I'd like to see that cute lil' feature come across the AP wire.) So what begins by saying "Herod died between 6 B.C. and 1 A.D." (the earlier dates are generally accepted) almost immediately runs into serious problems. Only Matthew tells the Star tale, and Matthew simply gives Herod as referent, but Luke, stuck with his census story, links it (clumsily) to a Judean census that took place in 6-7 A.D. So when we set off to use "science" to prop up Matthew we must first reject Luke out of hand, something which might suggest the whole operation should have been filed where it belongs before we wasted any more time on it.

Mathews believes the Christmas star is most likely an alignment of planets. He said there are three likely times for this:
--Feb. 20, 6 B.C., when Mars, Jupiter and Saturn aligned in the constellation Pisces.
--April 17, 6 B.C., when the sun, Jupiter, the moon and Saturn aligned in the constellation Aries while Venus and Mars were in neighboring constellations.
--June 17, 2 B.C., when Jupiter and Venus were closely aligned in Leo.
Mathews believes the April 17, 6 B.C., alignment is the most likely candidate. It makes sense because he believes the wise men were Zoroastrian astrologers who would have recognized the planetary alignment in Aries as a sign a powerful leader was born.

Good thing they had grounds for further evaluation, or those Zoroastrian astrologers would have spent all their time on the road.

Look, for one, this isn't Biblical. The Magi (who are remarkably adept with Jewish scripture for Zoroastrians, by the way) see the star of the king of the Jews and come to Jerusalem, but when Herod sends them off to find Jesus they do so by physically following the star, which hovers over his location. The first could be an astrological calculation, assuming one is okay with a Biblical commendation of astrology, but what end of the telescope do you grab to find the second? It's no natural phenomenon, it's a portent from God, and once you admit that into your story you've pretty much blown any justification for all that computer time at NASA. Aside from the book deal, I mean.

And for another, I don't know about you, but I read The Old Farmer's Almanac every year, and there's some celestial must-see event every time, yet somehow none of them warned Christians about George W. Bush.

This is nothing new. I remember reading about the Star in an anthology I got for my eighth birthday (and which, IIRC, lighted on that supernova Matthews rejects as Bad News). We've been able to theoretically reverse the paths of the planets since the 17th century, and we've always had the evidence of Chinese astronomers to fall back on. If there was some highly suggestive cosmological event during the reign of Herod the Great I think you can trust you'd have heard about it from your grandparents, and dollars to doughnuts it'd figure in 98% of the History Channel's programming over the next five days. Regardless of the violence it did to scripture, or history, or archeology. It's a dry well, Doc. Aside from the book deal, I mean.

Again, Christmas fluff is one thing, the suggestion that there's some evidence-free yet scientific-y basis for a belief that some hard facts cling to a fictional account is quite another. And this time, when we get to the seventeen-paragraphs-later disclaimer, it doesn't even disclaim much. Instead, we get a fuzzy, we-just-need-that-last-piece-of-evidence routine:

Mathews concedes, though, that any of the other events could have been the famed star. Unless a document is discovered that allows historians to more accurately estimate exactly when Jesus was born, it will be impossible to say what caused the light with absolute certainty, Mathews said.
"I think it would take more of a historical reference more than an astrophysics," he said. "There are plenty of strong opinions out there. I think this is as good as you can do for now."

You're just being modest, Doc. I'm sure we can do a lot better.

Look, I've Got Presents To Wrap

• And Why Are There Nuts in my Nut Log? "Why I'm For Paul," by John Derbyshire.

• Oh, So He's the Guy. Robert Novak, Washington Post: "When Mike Huckabee went to Houston on Tuesday to raise funds for his fast-rising, money-starved presidential candidacy, a luncheon for the ordained Baptist minister was arranged by evangelical Christians. On hand was Judge Paul Pressler, a hero to Southern Baptist Convention reformers. But he was a nonpaying guest who supports Fred Thompson for president."

• But Isn't That His Campaign Slogan? Raymond Hernandez and Christopher Drew, New York Times: "Obama's Vote in Illinois Was Often Just 'Present.' "

• So Is A Slime Trail, If You're A Snail. Michael Ledeen, NRO: "This is a Continued Sign of Progress."

• It's Like A Guy Who Makes His Living Selling Horse's Hooves and Pig Rectums Wishing They'd Ban Hot Dogs. Jonah Goldberg: "The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the prospect that Bill — and his cult of personality — will go down with the ship, too."

Maybe I'll Just Move The Whole Blog To Roy's Comments

I WAS all set to write about how the dumping of Emeril Lagasse would have been the greatest piece of church-bell-ringing news the Republic had received since Vicksburg, if only it had occurred before the invention of videotape, when Chad's repsonse (to this ) yanked me back to less pleasant matters.

I have to admit, though, for something that will most likely have results that will horrify me, the Republican in-fighting for the 2008 race is the most fascinating and downright exciting US political competition I've seen in my meager twenty-eight years.

It's actually longer than th...oh, wait, I forgot; before we zoom out for a moment it's Shorter Kathryn Jean Lopez on Mike Huckabee:

What Peggy Noonan said, but with extra bitters.

So...why is the Republican race so fascinating that it threatens to actually spill over into the American consciousness, if any?

1. The elephant in the room. On second thought, time and incompetence may have passed that metaphor by; alongside the massive Iraq bull there's a regular flock* of slightly smaller ones, and Republicans, at long last, find themselves trapped by the trick they've been playing on Democrats for Chad's entire lifespan, namely, the idea that speaking reasonably to Republican constituencies is political suicide. (Witness the attempt to manufacture outrage at Huckabee's "bunker mentality" comment, which was really little more than a bland observation.)

I don't buy that, and I've never bought it. Bush's approval ratings may have found their natural bottom in the 30s after testing Nixon's depths, but sheesh, that's a long way down, and how much of that support is soft? A lot of Republicans would sooner admit that Jesus was a hippie. Recognizing Bush's failure is the same thing as recognizing their own, and that's expressly forbidden by the contract. I'm not recommending telling a churchbasement** of Iowans that Reagan was a racist, but I think there's a level where the whole patriotism=war support thing breaks down.

But of the major Republican candidates, plus Fred Thompson, only Huckabee didn't immediately paint himself into that corner. Which brings us to:

2. The Starsky & Hutch Factor, aka Old Skul Campaigning, aka Billick Takes the Tie in Regulation. That is to say, the distinction between what campaigns are trying to accomplish and what might amount to something approaching Good Government. The modern political campaign didn't begin with Kennedy in 1960 or the Selling of his opponent eight years later; those are Teevee Age precursors. The modern campaign began in Iowa 32 years ago, and both parties have been trying to defeat Jimmy Carter ever since. From early campaigning (his brilliant recognition that the meaningless Iowa caucuses could mean something in the meta- sense) to pop culture ops (Playboy) to gotcha! moments (Ford, Poland) every non-incumbent campaign sinced has traced directly to Mr. Peanut.

Yes, generals are always fighting the last war, and football coaches always play not to lose, and campaign masterminds would never advise anything as ridiculous as taking a position on the merits and announcing that position to crowds that haven't passed through a metal detector. What actual primary contests we've had since '76 have been about alignment, not issues, and our Presidential campaigns since have been about selecting the most congenial beer swiller or avoiding the guy who wore the funny hat. So the supposed hard-core constituency of the Republican party hasn't been asked to think an issue through, let alone change it's collective mind, in so long that the very existence of that mind should be called into question.

But then Giuliani had no choice but to run as Mr. Nineleven, John (I Warned About The War, Really) McCain doubled down in 2004, thinking that was the safest path, and Mitt wouldn't risk rocking any swiftboats with a strategy of going from Zero to Top Spender in 4.85 seconds. And Fred Thompson, well, what would you try to do with him if you could, and why would you even try?

Add to that the crazy competing calculations: Giuliani banking that a national lead in the polls would overcome losing actual votes, Romney believing, conversely, that money and six Iowa farmers would overcome his single-digit excitement, and Fred Thompson imagining that to most Americans "lumber" is an action verb. And McCain getting old enough that he couldn't tell shampoo from guano.

Huckabee, on the other hand, occupied that I'm Sorta Carter But Less Idealistic, Like, Or Perhaps Crazier, Or Both niche (Anderson, Perot, Perot, Nader, McCain 2000) where that Pottery Barn foreign policy was presumed safe. Now that he's moved up enough to hire Mike Shanahan Ed Rollins, I guess we'll see, but if Ol' Ed grabs anything other than the Reagan playbook I personally stand to lose five large.

And again, I don't buy it. Why th' fuck would you be afraid of sounding crazy to the American public? Look what they watch on television. Look what they eat. Hell, look who they think can cook. And speaking of:

3. Reagan. I don't mean it this way, but it seems a good time to mention, again, Peggy Noonan and that plaintive "Could Ronald Reagan even run in today's Republican primary?" And rather than "Was he conspicuously religious enough without being, y'know, all insistent about it or something?" let's ask what the Great Deficit Cutter would have managed to run on? Republican debt? Reforming Republican incompetence? Reforming Republican criminality? C'mon, Ronald Reagan was as much a prisoner of "Ronald Reagan" as anyone.

You'll recall that The Field fell all over itself making with the Reagan comparisons early, and in this we can't really criticize the strategy much, since Reagan by now is a much more competent leader than he was pre-mortem, But when the stress came the Reagan coalition split like a teenaged swain whose girlfriend's parents just drove up. And that happened in 2005.


________________

* Acceptable: Edward Topsell, Historie of All Foure-Footed Beastes. (1607). He uses "herd" as well, in the same paragraph.

**Not a collective noun, but should be.

Just Wow.

Kia, at Roy's.

Is Huckabee's Popularity An Early Warning That People Like Him?

John Dickerson, "Too Funny to be President? Huckabee's a Joker. That's a problem." December 17

BEFORE I forget, almost lost in the excitement of yesterday's premier of Joementum II: First as a Farce, Then as a Slightly Different Farce, was the welcome return of Tom Ridge, the man who put the Department of Homeland Security on such a solid footing before skedaddling leaving public service after twenty-two years in order to profit off the connections he'd made in the final eighteen months. What better on-stage complement for the Senate's sniggeringly superior AV Club members than the only Republican of any stature who was too incompetent to get an initial job in the Bush administration?

I later learned that Lieberman had explained his endorsement of someone "across the aisle" by saying no Democrat had asked him. Which certainly has the ring of truth, but let's stop for a moment to consider the implication, which is that Lieberman thought his endorsement was worth something. The late Norman Mailer once said something about the World's Heavyweight Champion arising each morning with the somewhat unsettling knowledge that he was possibly the toughest man in the world; McCain shares with Lieberman the existential purgatory of knowing that, but for the other, he might be the sorriest-assed egotist in the United States Senate.

But then none of this heaps scorn on Mike Huckabee or his supporters, and so fails to advance the current agenda. John Dickerson, who may be the toughest questioner in American journalism, just as someone must be the best archer in NASCAR, frets that the Huckster just might be too funny, in the ha-ha sense, to be Commander-in-Chief:

Mike Huckabee is occasionally funny, but he is always the funny guy. "If you think that Medicare is expensive now, wait until 10,000 aging hippies a day find out they can get free drugs," he said in one GOP debate. "I may not have any foreign policy experience," he told Don Imus, "but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night."

Hear us, O Lord, and smite the man who dares mock Thy Hippies in a Republican debate. Who dares be unserious on Imus! Give us the man of gravitas, Lord, who will shackle the Bitch of Gotham, who will chain the Dog of Chelsea, and who will Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran. Seriously, I kid the Faithful, but they're our most important supporters. So long as they remain Faithful, if you know what I mean. Speaking of which, the other day Hillary Rodham Clinton walked into a lesbian bar, and...

There is a limit, though, which the Udall examples thunderously show, to how many jokes a candidate can tell before voters think he's not serious.

Yeah. Mo Udall, Thunder of the Desert, Template of the modern American presidential campaign. Funny how the memory plays tricks. I supported Udall in '76, and I can't for the life of me remember when he led a single state before it didn't matter anymore. Makes a welcome break from all those Huckabee=Dean stories, though. Big Mo does remind us that one may campaign for President while Mormon without making a major speech about it, and while exhibiting a genuine sense of humor. If only he'd had nicer hair...

The attacks work on several levels. They suggest Huckabee is too light for the job and also that he makes jokes because he's hiding something. Behind every quip is a troubling reality on taxes, immigration, or his criminal justice record in Arkansas, the subject of Romney's brand-new ad. The strategy seeks to transform Huckabee's best asset into a liability.

Troubling reality? Because, in the first two instances, Huckabee has been something other than staunchly unreasonable like his peers pretend to be? Wouldn't Troubling Reality make a fitting name for the Romney campaign bus? Or Giuliani's bio?

Look, it may well be that the people who control the Republican party will brook no tax increase under any circumstances or admit any sympathy or concern for illegals nor their children. But when did that become part of the membership pledge, and why is public opposition "troubling"? As I understand it, they have no problem (yet) with white people voting in the Republican primaries, and god knows there aren't enough black people to worry about. Why don't we let the voters decide what's "troubling"? And if Hurtlin' Mitt Romney or any other candidate would like the Republican nomination to turn on Mike Huckabee's record of pardons, let 'em do so, their own closets being so notably spic-and-span.

Hucakabee also can't joke his way past inexperience, and he has a problem with his party in this regard on the subject of national security and foreign affairs. His lack of any background is dangerous in a commander in chief, say critics, and worse, if he becomes the nominee, Republicans will give away what has been their national security trump card since the Cold War and especially after the attacks of Sept. 11.

Don't look now, but the last seven years have actually reduced this to "Republicans think Republicans hold the national security trump card". And polling indicates that Republicans already plan on voting Republican.

Given this sobering worry, Huckabee may have given his opponents an opening this Sunday with his article in Foreign Affairs, in which he criticized George Bush for having an "arrogant bunker mentality." He also described international relations in terms of the school playground (America is the stingy straight-A student and therefore despised). Not a joke, exactly, but a metaphor that's on the juvenile side.

Sure, the Grand Old Mature Metaphor Party.

Bosh. Here's what Huckabee wrote:

The United States, as the world's only superpower, is less vulnerable to military defeat. But it is more vulnerable to the animosity of other countries. Much like a top high school student, if it is modest about its abilities and achievements, if it is generous in helping others, it is loved. But if it attempts to dominate others, it is despised.

Once again you'll have to forgive my memory, because I could swear that when Ronald Reagan said something like this it was hailed as a master course in Communications, and that when Fred Dumbo Thompson lovingly puts that sort of thang in his Dear Ol' Biscuit-Bakin' Mama's mouth it's "folksy". Juvenile? Okay. Shockingly misemploying the third-person neuter pronoun in place of the masculine? To some cranky blogger, maybe. Unserious? Only in that it--along with the "bunker mentality" line--is too mild a rebuke to the Republican foreign policy disaster his fellow candidates try desperately to ignore.

I have no brief for Mike Huckabee. Quite the contrary. I just think the impulse to Gore the national political process is a lot bigger threat, and its fingerprints are all over the anti-Huckabee crusade, which has offered up the objections of the Republican economic elite under the guise of "increased scrutiny of a front-runner". Is Huckabee really a worse candidate than his fellows?

Oh, For God's Sake

Peggy Noonan, The Pulpit and the Potemkin Village: Would Reagan survive in today's GOP? And is Mrs. Clinton in for a fall this winter?" December 14

YOU'LL recall that when the second Bush administration solved the great "Stupidity or Cupidity?" debate for us, in favor of the former, we cautioned against the premature burial of the latter. And, sure enough, it has picked itself up off the mat, dusted itself off, and begun hurling entire Ronald Reagan commemorative silver coin sets at Mike Huckabee, and not with the intention of bankrolling him, either, but because it's the only weapon they have left.

We're not changing our stance; this sort of thing is still in the service of Institutional(ized) Idiocy, for which we offer the incontrovertible argument that they let Peggy Noonan chime in!

Yes, Peggy Noonan, who's made a second career out of combining hagiography and delirium tremens, thinks Mike Huckabee is too religious-seeming to be the Republican nominee.

Yes, this is the exact same Peggy Noonan--assuming we can postulate something constant at her core, an admitted philosophical and psychological leap--who last week, seven (7) days ago, just a sennight past, drooled over Mitt Romney's reinventing himself as a Quasi-Mormon. The same Peggy Noonan who saw a miraculous cross in the 9/11 wreckage and heard the beat of angels' wings and cosmic dolphin squeaks in the rescue of Elian Gonzalez, (and excused their, well, drowning out his mother's last words).

Which is the way God's PR always seems to work. The Big Guy hogs the credit but shucks the blame, a sweet proposition until you consider who He has to let do His talking for Him in exchange. Consider the following head-spinners:

Christian conservatives have been rising, most recently, for 30 years in national politics, since they helped elect Jimmy Carter.

and, regarding You Know Who:

Not a regular churchgoer, said he experienced God riding his horse at the ranch, divorced, relaxed about the faiths of his friends and aides, or about its absence. He was a believing Christian, but he spent his adulthood in relativist Hollywood...

Of course Peggy is a Republican, a theologically-tolerant Catholic (so she told us last week), and almost preternaturally dense, so we might charitably excuse her apparent ignorance of Carl McIntyre, Billy James Hargis, or David Noebel (the acclaimed author of Communism, Hypnotism, and The Beatles), who had more to do with Goldwater's defeat than the victory of the cloven-hoofed Trilateralist Carter. Still, one might think she'd run across Bob Jones, Sr. somewhere, and I think we can bank on a certain familiarity with Fr. John McLaughlin, SJ, once known as "Nixon's Favorite Jesuit", though we don't remember there being a whole lot of competition. At any rate, the suggestion that Carter, who in the '76 campaign surfed a small, journalist-wind-aided wave of Born Again Christianity that he did not create, owed his election, or some percentage of it, to a nascent Conservative Christian movement is about as absurd as suggesting that Ronald Reagan (whose personal relgious indifference suddenly comes to Light!) somehow didn't. If Republican voters in 2008 are more likely to excuse religious extremism in a candidate than they would in their next-door neighbor, where d'ya suppose that might have come from? In the long run maybe Reagan would have been better off talking to his horse.

This is the space Movement "Conservatism" has occupied for thirty years now, and which, contrary to high-school Physics and plain common sense, continues to provide the sort of vitality that rubber forehead prosthetics have brought to cable-network sci-fi serials. In both cases the reason is the same: a small but dedicated and easily-satisfied audience; the distinction is that producers of space operas rarely if ever display open contempt for their audience. The full-on war on Huckabee by the already piss-frightened "economic conservatives" might manage to deny him the nomination (something he might have managed all by himself, anyway), but it's not going to attract Christianist voters to The Annointed One.

That is, to the extent that Huckabee's surge represents the sort of simple-minded fundamentalist tail-wagging people such as Peggy Noonan--the same people who two scant electoral cycles ago were telling the rest of us how unfair and odious that sort of anti-religious bias was--now tell us it does. I'm not convinced. I think he represents the Ross Perot inclination in Presidential politics, as combined with the possibility of actually winning a major-party nomination. Granted that On Your Sleeve Religion treads the line between issues and personal competence, still, Huckabee gives every indication of being both the guy who says it like he sees it, and someone with a better-than-even chance of being more-or-less sane. I'm not a Republican primary voter, but if I were those are better odds than I'd give Giuliani. And while I think Huckabee is full of shit, that's an evaluation of his positions; with Romney it's a personality profile.

Thirty years. Thirty years of the Cult of Reagan growing to ever more absurd proportions, often, as here, from a shape-shifting necessity to camouflage its real legacy. You can't really argue we slipped off the rails to the Left in that time. Is it still Morning in America, or do things look worse to "conservatives" in almost every respect, aside from tax cuts and a Courtful of ideological cretins? There's no more signal fact than St. Ronnie campaigning on the evils of the National Debt for sixteen years before nearly quadrupling it in eight, but we could add eliminating the Department of Education vs. using it to effect the elimination of urban public schools improved mandatory test scores, principled opposition to nation building vs. taking on the Hoover Dam of nation-building schemes, criticism of Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina vs. demands for patriotic silence while troops are in the field in Iraq, a President who is "not above the law" vs. one who is a law unto himself, and use of the filibuster vs. nuking the filibuster vs. using the filibuster again. These are not just broken campaign promises or evolving perspectives, and they're not peripheral matters where Partisanship meets Poker. They're the result of a willingness to say whatever a particular situation required in pursuit of temporal political gain, regardless of the consequences to the nation. And those are just the blatant dichotomies left in my poor memory pan, before we get to violating the principles we all mostly agree are Good Things, like the sanctity of the ballot and the Bill of Rights, honesty in public officials, public procurement, care of our citizens in time of need, and, first and foremost, the best possible protection for our men and women in harm's way and the best possible care thereafter.

And which, we might add, have fuck-all to do with the Religious Right, which may well have supported a lot of that stuff but has mostly bankrolled candidates, slimed Democrats, and seen its agenda get the short shrift (in no small part because its leaders played footsie under the boardroom table). Assuming they're polling for Huckabee now just because he's one of their own, so what? It's gratuitous to assume that Religious Right voters are as well served by Romney simply because his line of God patter matches his conversion to their social agenda. Chalk it up to unbound Reagan-Myth hubris, if you like; I'd point out that this is the same party which slimed John Kerry and Jack Murtha when it was expedient, and which has portrayed timid little centrist Democrats as raging Bolshies for decades. And after thirty years of battling over the Plejullejunce, and Cecil B. DeMille's prop Ten Commandments, and school prayer, and creationism, and six years after backing George W. Bush faith-based stem-cell decision, the power boys suddenly find the Fundies a bunch of Stone-Age entrail readers unfit for sufferage. What a surprise.

Back (Crisis!) Home (Crisis!) Again (Snow Emergency!)

WHEN last we larked through the Hoosier State, you and I, a giant makeshift "Teabag", commissioned, sewn together from old sheets, stuffed with property tax statements and ceremoniously lowered towards the Indianapolis Water Company Canal as the cameras looked on by--if standard surveys are to be trusted--a group of irate citizens, 87% of whom could not have identified the reigning monarch at the time of the original Boston Tea Party if you spotted them K-i-n-g G-e-o-r and g, had successfully removed popular, two-term Demopublican Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson and replaced him with a guy who had found out he was running only that morning. This, despite the fact that Peterson's only responsibility for the property tax Crisis! was shepherding a county option tax designed to avert a looming long-term actual crisis in police pensions, and despite the fact that the vote returned to power a Republican mayor/City-County Council combination whose last salient fiscal accomplishment was appointing a crony-and-kickback specialist Library Board so incompetent it approved a $145 million-dollar building project without hiring a construction manager, leading to a thrifty sub-contractor replacing the standard concrete-and-rebar formula with a less-expensive wet-sand-with-nails-stuck-in-it mix, resulting in a three-year delay, lawsuits thick as a DQ Blizzard™, and a $50 mil cost overrun that we know of. All of which wound up--wait for it--on the property tax bills of all those protestors.

Democracy simply does not work! The rare local news viewer with an attention span of more than 30 seconds and a partisanship level below Rabid could only stand by and watch as the wholly-predictable political process turned The Great Tax Revolt of Ought Seven into a golden opportunity to fleece people in exciting new ways while removing those services which won't be missed until after the next election. Oh, he might smirk as Mayor-elect Incognito decided sometime between Election Night and his first tentative Whack-a-Mole public appearances that those Property Taxes he'd campaigned on eliminating might on second thought be somewhat useful after all, and he could only yell at the screen as a succession of semi-skilled teleprompter readers intoned about The Governor's Plan to solve the Crisis! just prior to the whole thing being allowed to creep back in the closet with a lifetime's collection of other stupid impulse purchases. Somehow, between last summer's insistent coverage and the end of leaf raking the whole thing had been subsumed (as brave Indiana blogger Doug Masson has pointed out) under the rubric "Reform" when it is, in fact, a Restructuring of taxes that pay for vital services away from certain types of property tax onto (mostly) the statewide sales tax. The expedient of returning the inventory tax whose elimination served the same function in the Crisis! that the underwater portion of that iceberg did to the Titanic is, judging by the coverage, that rare idea which is untranslatable into English. The full-on proponents of Property Tax Elimination, known a brief season ago as Angry Citizen Voters were returned to their place as Unreasonable Cranks, even though 30% of Legislators seem to agree. As always, the reader is invited to propose any real-life antecedents which did not result in the immediate family filing commitment papers. Personally, I'm fresh out.

This, of course, is just a quick fly-by. The resultant swell of excitement among the august members of The World's Third Worst State Legislature™ will be familiar to anyone who owns an unspayed cat. Their first impulse was to split the solution into ten separate bills, on the off-chance that some of those Tax Revolters might actually continue paying attention through next November. Their second was to begin amending the state Constitution like, well, as if it were the Constitution of the State of Feline Estrus (the latest being a proposed amendment to prohibit taxing church property, even though we don't). This is Indiana. The legislative silly season always resembles a cross between Full Metal Kansas and the political sentiments available on your average West Texas jukebox, but still. Why th' fuck would any sane person give them ammunition? It is impossible to believe that voting-age tax protesters could have been completely unaware of what they were unleashing.

And this week marked the release of the Governor's Blue Ribbon Panel recommendations, which (as Doug points out) was not charged with solving the problem, but with finding ways to "reform" local governments which were, at most, a quarter of the problem. The Panel comprised state Supreme Court Chief Justice Randy Shepard, who will now spend a considerable portion of the rest of his public life being asked to recuse himself, and former Governor Joe Kernan, best known as the man who managed to lose the governorship to that guy from the Leprechaun movies. Space does not permit us to go into their findings in great detail. Let's just say my own expectations were met. Lowered, even.

All this couldn't come at a worse time for local news, which would prefer to allot its two hours/channel day to shopping tips (in the Spirit of the Season and with due consideration to the anti-news sentiments of its news-viewing audience, Channel 8, which was the only channel with a daily Iraq report, has now eliminated it in favor of having the guy who used to do it try to sneak it in ten minutes later while mumbling). They've certainly tried all the usual tricks--every theoretical Precipitation Event for the last six weeks has been pre-tallied as Possible Flurries! when in fact it's snowed exactly once, and at some point even notoriously environment-adverse Hoosiers are going to catch on. But a couple weeks ago there appeared on local radar an event even more portentious and viewer-distracting.

Hannah Montana came to town.

I mean, "she" apparently came to town, judging by the fact that the collective tongue of our local teleprompter-readers was so far up her Disney-manufactured fundament for a fortnight you could see only the soles of their shoes, which I believe is a quote from Alec Guinness. The artificial hoopla was like a combined Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and a Super Bowl halftime show starring someone they'd managed to reanimate the corpse of literally, rather than figuratively, this time. How badly do you need a job? And these are flipping adults, for want of a better term, and even if they didn't realize that this 14th Incarnation of Elvis according to the sacred rolls of White Suburban Girls Aged 13 to 13-and-one-quarter has about as much chance of lasting until they get their learner's permits as George Bush does of being inducted into the Orator Hall of Fame, they might cast a casual glance at the crapola they read every friggin night about Incarnation #13 (Lindsay Lohan) and #11 (Britney Spears) and note how they're gettin' along. At least they might act like they realize she's a fictional character and there's, for want of a better term, an actress underneath, and one who does not deserve the same fate, no matter what she's done or who her Daddy is. They sit there night after night jabbering about the effect of violent video games, single-parent households, or sagging blue jeans on Today's Youth, and yet never give a moment's thought to the psychic damage festering in the cesspit of blind consumerism. Nothing against this particular flavor of the month, mind you; I just think some balance would be nice. If instead of cosseted suburban consumerettes it were fifteen-year-old African American boys swooning over Miss Montana they'd be reporting on the latest Congressional investigation.


One positive note in all this: I have resolved that for the rest of my life I will vote for anyone whose position is, "We're too stupid to solve problems. Let's tread water and hope something floats by."

Ghost Dance

THAT National Review Romney endorsement: Oh, Mildred! as a certain cartoon rabbit used to say. Apparently they're now one stock-option leverage maneuver from turning into the National Lampoon, except instead of teen smut comedies some bright boy entrepreneur would be plastering NatRev over a string of "conservative" ocean cruises with Jonah and JLo.

Which reminds me; here's Jonah the other day:

Irving Kristol has cited the fight over Utah’s statehood as a quintessential expression of how America practices theological pluralism while insisting on moral conformity.

Which, first of all, I don't quite get the point of (which is okay; neither did Jonah). We forced Utah to Constitutionally forbid polygamy, which is what the big tsmisis was about, you should pardon the expression; that would seem to attack "theological pluralism" at least as much as moral heterodoxy, not to mention the fact that the issue of Utah or Utah-esque statehood involved a lot of just plain ol' anti-Mormonism over and above their reproductive proclivities. But after giving the matter some thought, I decided holy fuck, Irving Kristol is still alive. Maybe this is some way explains the attraction for Mitt Romney: both operations are run by superannuated prophets and desicated saints.

Anyway, NatRev endorses Mitt on the eve of his destruction, potentially, in Iowa. which was supposed to kick off the Mitt the Frontrunner campaign to counterbalance his running neck-and-neck with the Fred Thompson Juggernaut nationally, despite having outspent the entire field twice over. He's got a big lead in New Hampshire, but a win there will be discounted and a late Huckamania! surge could taint it, plus there won't be weeks to bask in its glow this time. Romney has to have expected that he'd sweep the two, then make his "If you squint hard enough I'm the only Christian with a chance to win" speech, and at least hurt Rudy among the Christianists. Now he's trailing another religious whacko, and this one's not afraid to say it. If Huckamania doesn't peter out, if lack of money and organization don't do him in, Romney's toast.

(I have to give Huckabee provisional points for his response to the Jesus=Satan flap, for saying he'd try to do better next time, plus he really hadn't gotten the hang of everything he says being amplified. Of course, if he had a staff maybe he would have expected to get Connie Chung'd*, and then he had to go on to gripe about "dumpster diving", which is another way of saying "people looking into my record.")

That NatRev piece spells out the sad state of mental deterioration that comes from locking yourself in a sealed box for several decades.

But [Giuliani] and Mike Huckabee would pull apart the coalition from opposite ends: Giuliani alienating the social conservatives, and Huckabee the economic (and foreign-policy) conservatives. A Republican party that abandoned either limited government or moral standards would be much diminished in the service it could give the country.

[Ed. note: shouldn't that be "lip" service there?]

Imagine, O you Democrats, the luxury of rejecting every candidate who didn't measure up to your every notion of sound social policy or your economic (and foreign-policy) outlook! Personally, I'd be left with George McGovern, and he's not running. Now shift your focus from the peripheral and try to imagine the Infinite Fireball of Hubris that existed twenty-five years ago if the Cosmic Conservative Microwave Background Radiation (CCMBR) can still boil water. Try to imagine what the Universe would look like today if, back then, they'd applied these standards to the divorced, church-avoiding, out-of-wedlock fornicator Ronald Wilson Reagan and his professed admiration for FDR.

Giuliani's out because of abortion and homo nups? Fair enough, but let's hear the end of "Democrats censored Bob Casey" once and for all. Huckabee's too populist? Okey-dokey. This time let's see the End All Social Programs plank get backed up with some paperwork, and you people go back to being the party of permanent-minority 19th century crankiness. You have somehow managed to define the "conservative" "wing" of the party as a pose while simultaneously (and stealthily) rejecting George W. Bush for being a conservative poseur. This is how Christian theologians came to spend several centuries arguing whether Adam and Eve had innies or outies. I'd like to say it is not how we elect a President, but what the hell do I know?


* In the flap that followed his "Rape: lie back and enjoy it" remarks, Bobby Knight said that while Chung "swore like a sailor" during the interview, her bad language was edited out while his own was left in and bleeped.

Wow--Did The Icy Skeletal Hand Of Death Just Give You A Neck Massage, Too, Or Am I Imagining Things?