If You Make A Dog Politically Relevant For A Month He Won't Turn Around And Bite You.

Headline, Indianapolis Racist Star online:

Clinton's Chances Dwindling

AFTER a month of being told how exciting it was to finally be involved in the political process, Hoosiers wake up the next morning and are told their votes didn't actually mean squat, but it sure was fun pretendin', wasn't it?

Best moment: when some wise-ass local reporter--I came in in the middle, or else I'd buy him lunch--asked some of these newly-politically-energized Hoosier voters to name the two Democratic candidates for governor. Guiltiest pleasure: Dan Burton renominated; nothing but being caught with two live boys or dead hookers, or the most fiendish redistricting in US history come 2010, can now prevent the day when Burton is found dead in his office, with his pants on backwards, an indelible, full-denture smile on his face, and a fire blazing in the fireplace being fed documents by a half-dozen aides.

There's added joy in Burton's victory in that Republicans throughout the state are done with him, all except for his constituency. A few weeks ago Professional Republican shill Racist Star political columnist Matt Tully wrote a piece critical of Burton, then wrote one about the "response" to his column by printing nothing but favorable comments. Enjoy the millstone, Indiana Republicans! It's a bit showy for daytime, but it sure does fit you well.

Biggest disappointment: Republicans in my own district nominate smarmy proven loser and legislative timecard cheat Jon Elrod over Cat Ping. Cat Ping! is defeated. I'll never understand Republicans.

It's Because You Don't Know.

I EAT out maybe four times a year, generally family occasions where someone else has simultaneously made the reservation and assured that I'll have a miserable meal in unspeakable surroundings. Still this is about four times as often as I read the Cool Kids--I don't even follow links there anymore--and roughly twice the pleasure. The last time I found myself anywhere near them--can't for the life of me think why--Ezra was excoriating Parker Brothers for their harassment of the Scrabble™ pirates at Scrabulous, seeming for all the world to be completely and blissfully unaware of the requirements of holding a trademark I imagined everyone learned by grade 6 (Kleenex™, cellophane, Coke™, trampoline), not to mention the peculiar notions about economic ethics and the behavior of behemoth corporations. I've stopped reading more than one blog because someone said "as Matt points out..." more than twice.

But hey, live and let live. Yglesias and Klein are at least readable, if one foregoes one's devotion to English, and as for McArdle, there's always Roy to read her.

I got there late. Seems the Cool Kids got all hot and bothered by the condescending tone of this Times piece on chain restaurants, though where it is they found the condescension I'm still not clear. It's all handled well by Roy's commenters, who point out, among other things, that the article in question didn't sneer, and wasn't even as critical as it might be, that both the reverse snobbery and the reverse classism [ 1) all snooty New Yorkers are from Peoria 2) chain restaurants are therefore their national cuisine 3) therefore their dislike of chains is simple pretension] is bogus, and, somewhat surprisingly to me, that the delicacies at Olive Garden are one variety of corporately-distributed frozen Boil-In-Bag grub or another.

(Let me explain: maybe I shouldn't find that all that surprising; it's just that it flies in the face of common sense as well as culinary wisdom. Pasta is ages-old fast food. You could cook all the pasta you needed for the weekend Thursday afternoon--excepting the really tiny stuff like capellini, which takes one minute to cook from dry--and drop it in boiling water to reheat when needed. No compromise in quality. Why freeze? The people who run these Concepts will tell you it's quality control and chain-wide uniformity of product, which is bullshit; it's the ability to short labor costs and rampant employee turnover.)

Before we move on to Ezra, honorable mention to Susan of Texas, for this response to "Why would anybody read the Atlantic's columnists?"

When you ignore them they multiply, like little supply-side rats.

So, as to Ezra (because I have no idea why anyone would have me-too'd the piece, unless they're just always doing this). He thinks the Times went too damn far, even if he feels their pain:

I'm pretty much your consummate coastal elite (I biked back from the farmer's market today with a baguette and artisan cheese fastened to my rack)

Y'see, the thing is, Ezra, behaving like a caricature might make you a caricature, or even a paragon of caricature-ness, but it does not make you any more elite than anyone else who reads the same fucking magazines and espouses the same carefully selected "tastes". That comment is twice as condescending as anything in the Times piece, which merely occasionally disdained a group of corporate operators who deserve occasional disdain. You and your cohort grew up in an atmosphere of celebrity chefs and cooking networks and Bon Appétit, and so you imagine that, having inhaled enough culture dust, you're all officially gourmands by now, able and accredited to denounce fusty food snobbery in the name of the Little People.

Pah. It's painless expertise, and unearned (later, seeking an adjectival gotcha to substitute for any evidence supporting his thesis--these folks really ought to learn to keep their opinions about grammar wars and Middle East ground combat to themselves--Ezra will ask, "Can a batter really be 'insipid'?" And rather than point out that "insipid" can mean "lacking vitality or imagination" as well as flavor, we will stick to the subject and note that even batters lacking distinct flavoring agents [beer, brandy] may be designed specifically for meat, fish, vegetables, or fruit, and of varying viscosities, and as such may be horribly misused--obscuring, say, the delicate flavor of seafood, as Ms Cook reported). Palates are born, not made; still, their training is more arduous than cycling to the market. It's possible there are a few out there worth listening to which are attached to people still in their early twenties (the adult palate generally surfaces around age 25; before then you are clamoring for the sweet gooeyness of Not Poison and the, yes, insipid richness of Mother's milk. Afterwards you will long simply for the container) but if so they belong to people raised in the restaurant business or the wealthiest homes, not to everyone who buys Swiss truffles. None of them, I daresay, is yours. Had you dedicated yourself to connoisseurship these would be the early days of your learning to distinguish St. Julien from St. Estèphe, or Nahe from Rheingau, and your tongue would be too busy for any half-assed lecturing.

Take It Back

DON'T get me wrong; the carnival's got to come to your town every so often, and it's gonna be loud and Hair Metal-y, and the rides will be of questionable maintenance, and the games will all be fixed. Under the circumstances it might just as well be democracy, since it probably treats the animals a little better.

But Indiana is no place for this sort of thing. Indiana is a place where other people's enthusiasms are always unfortunate.

Last night one of the screen readers for the local CBS affiliate tossed to some veteran CBS streetwalker so he could inform us that this was the first time in forty years Hoosier votes in a Presidential primary would actually count. Apparently he was just there to check our math, since that's been the point of every other sentence uttered on local news for the past month. Or maybe he was using his Hypno-vision to try to convince Hoosiers it made sense.

If so I'm immune. "You're a veteran CBS newsman, whoever you are, and I'm trying to recall one example of anyone at the Tiffany Net in the last forty years complaining that Indiana wasn't involved enough in the process," I told him, but he didn't seem to get it. "Indiana suddenly matters? Indiana's been a reliable Republican state for those same forty years (which is every other every-other-sentence we've heard the last four weeks). Is there a Republican race still going on? I must've missed it. There are two nominal Democrats nominally left in the race, and as I understand it (if you'll forgive my natural disinterest in other people's enthusiasms, or in Government By The People Who Pay Attention To Such Things) a substantial win in Indiana could, potentially, make the other one cry. Also, if I recall correctly, Iowa and New Hampshire got to choose from among twelve or sixteen Democrats, and we're supposed to be excited about two. Indiana has a statewide inferiority complex, but it's not about Iowa or New Hampshire. This is like getting excited because you're the fourteenth caller and you get to father Madonna's next child.

Leave us recall that the Indiana Voter was already discounted by the Times weeks ago; after six PM tonight no one is going to be analyzing what Hoosiers have to say to the nation, because the answer is Could we get some more breadsticks when you have a minute? We're not selecting a Democratic nominee, we're getting a chance to register which candidate's skid marks we dislike the least.

There's a simple fix to all this, an easy way to make the major party primaries equally accessible to all, and to make the votes of every American count toward the selection of our next President.

Do me a favor and don't look for it.

Next Week: Smith & Wesson Debate Handgun Violence

What: "How to See This Mission Accomplished".


Where: Times Sunday Opinion back page

Intro:  For the fifth anniversary of President Bush’s declaration of the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq, the Op-Ed page asked nine experts on military affairs to identify a significant challenge facing the American and Iraqi leadership today and to propose one specific step to help overcome that challenge.

The Experts:

L. Paul Bremer III
Anthony Cordesman
Gen. Paul D. Eaton, USA (ret)
Nathaniel Fick, Center for a New American Security
Frederick Kagan
Richard Perle
Danielle Pletka
Kenneth M. Pollack
Anne-Marie Slaughter

Ouch.  Quit It: Slaughter, Huffington Post, March 20:

"Hayden's post and many other commentaries surrounding the fifth anniversary of the invasion are a microcosm of the problem with our Iraq policy as a whole. The debate is still far too much about who was right and who was wrong on the initial invasion and far too little about how, in Obama's formulation, to be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in."

That Aprille With His Shoures Soote

Greenman

shredded LCL

Siberian bugloss

arthritis

Yellow-shafted flicker nest

cyst

I'll Vote In Person, But I'm Seriously Considering Living Here Absentee.*

OUR story so far:

1) Friendless and issueless, Indianapolis Republican mayoral candidate "Lonesome Greg" Ballard attaches himself to the Racist Star's headline writers and makes the city's escalating murder rate his campaign theme. 2) The White People's Property Tax Revolt, LLC., accidentally puts him in the mayor's office. 3) Ballard launches a three-pronged attack on crime: he showily muscles out the Democratic, and democratically-elected, former sheriff who's heading the newly-merged Indianapolis Metro Police Dept.; he appoints a showy committee to demonstrate he's Doing Something, to be headed by former Marion County Prosecutor Scott Newman; and he starts turning up at showy crime-related press ops, jostling current Marion County Prosecutor and former Dan Burton henchman Carl "Facetime" Brizzi for angles.

Now, I have to admit that in the annals of political painting-the-hull-without-scraping-the-barnacles-first this one is remarkably successful, as the Racist Star almost immediately is moved to stop publishing year-to-date crime rate comparisons.

Jump to April 23, when a masked man robs a local bank branch, and in the process shoots Katherin Shuffield, a teller who is pregnant with twins. It's the sort of crime which shocks and outrages a community, unless its mayor and prosecutor turn up on local news to assure the voters they'll hunt the perpetrators down. And it's always nice when they can find the time to make it to dais a couple days later when the arrest of five people is announced with, oh, let's call it fanfare, despite the acknowledgement that none of them was the guy who'd actually robbed the bank and shot Mrs. Shuffield.

Now, first, I'm no criminology expert--I've never even been convicted--but it did seem to me that having five people in on a one-man bank heist would play hell with the overhead. And the whole story gets a mite fuzzy here, because, well, because that's the way the people responsible want it. Apparently acting on a tip, police arrested four men, and the next door neighbor for good measure. The next morning they stopped a guy driving a car matching the description of one that might've been the getaway car. He turns out to have a record and some cocaine. And he gives them the name of the shooter. And by the end of the weekend Metro Police are able to announce the end of a crime spree--two charges of false reporting, plus the coke bust, and the drug paraphernalia/child neglect charges on the neighbor. Neither the mayor nor the prosecutor was on hand for those announcements.

The weekend also brought news that the woman's twins, initially thought to have survived, died of extreme prematurity, while she remained in critical condition.

Which brought Carl Brizzi, who may or may not have once been Danny Burton's chief melon squeezer, back to the spotlight as he demanded that the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™ declare life begins at conception, on the grounds that the man who shot Mrs. Shuffield can only be charged with feticide in the death of her twins, and a Class C felony is barely worth a notch on a hotshot prosecutor's gun.

If convicted he could get as little as two years! scream several dutiful Indiana newspaper columns, as though a case infamous enough to get local politicians fighting for air time might result in a minimum sentence for the guy who gunned down twins. (The presumptive sentence for a Class C felony in Indiana--this is assuming it's all one is charged with--is four years.)

It's an odious crime, to be sure, and anyone with a heart has to feel the loss--meaning we expect our elected legal representatives to be immune--and to hope beyond hope that Mrs. Shuffield survives, whatever that does to Brizzi's conviction rate. But we might look first at what he does not propose to do: raise feticide to a higher class felony, re-formulate the notion of "viability", or call for a ban on, or increased penalties for the use of, semi-automatic handguns like the Tec-9 reportedly used in the shooting. And we might ask, "Why?" Except we know the answer. Rewriting the feticide law--it passed two Republican-controlled Houses in 1999 over the veto of the late Frank O'Bannon--would be messy, arduous, and exacting, and the Indiana State Legislature can only do the first of those. It would expose both the slippery rationale for the law and the serious weaknesses of its enforcement and potential for abuse.

Local teevee coverage was instructive. Brizzi gets his face time, introduced by a warning from the anchor team that his solution "may prove controversial". Why, yes, yes it may. And it may prove cynical and opportunistic, and it might pander to a political constituency the Prosecutor will depend on to fund his further career moves, not that I expect you people to mention those, or investigate anything. Really, we're just thankful you bothered to nod, however briefly.  Both the teleprompter readers and their non-telegenic cousins at the Racist Star saw fit to ask Planned Parenthood of Indiana for comment, just in case somebody in the audience might have missed where all this is supposed to fit in the script.


What we have instead is an episode of 24, where an easily roused rabble imagines recognizing the rights of Blastocyst Americans will put trigger-happy bank robbers in the hellholes where they belong, and leave everyone else alone (excepting the people who intend to move onto abortion providers next). What we don't have is something that'll add one day to the sentence of the perp in question.

That is, of course, assuming we stop holding press conferences and actually find the guy.


__________
*False. I've never voted in an Indiana primary, and I never will so long as one has to declare oneself a member of a major political party.

Underwear Will Be Worn On The Outside, So We Can Check.

(The following didn't post yesterday, due to some blogger problem I was in too big a hurry to notice.   Reposted now as just too damned good to miss.)

I'M wrapping up physical therapy and, with any luck, doctor's visits today, so blogging quantity around here is going to match quality for at least one more day. But I thought I might squeeze in another quick example of how teachers' union are ruining our schools.

Last night Channel 8's Leslie Olsen, who is that wondrous thing, a real reporter working on teevee news, interviewed a couple of teachers from John Marshall Middle School, or, as it is more commonly known, Troubled John Marshall Middle School. Marshall has failed to meet No Child Left Behind guidelines since the moment they were put in place, and, in accordance with consequences of that well-intentioned piece of legislation, is now subject to the whim of the same people who were in charge of seeing to it this didn't happen in the first place. By way of guaranteeing a different result.

Same story, different year. Last year the IPS administration simply decided to tack on another 25 days to the school year. Which they accomplished by fiat. Teachers in those schools didn't even know if the District intended to pay them for working. (This, apparently, is because it didn't intend to, or were going to offer to let teachers draw down their sick days if they wanted to be paid, until disabused of the notion.)   Teachers were told that if they didn't like it they could put in for transfers.

IPS lost an unfair labor practices suit over that affair early this month. So, naturally, they've seen the error of their ways; now they're just pink-slipping the entire staff.

Okay, that's not quite accurate: it's only 90%, and I'm just assuming they gave 'em pink slips, since that's required by state law, not just easily-ignored employment contracts. So they might be judgement-proof this time. There's a first time for everything.

Of course Being Within Your Rights and being smart are two different things. Perhaps teachers are at fault (the two who spoke to Olsen, who are reportedly among the number who won't be forced to transfer--it's being left to the Entrepreneur in Chief Principal--pointed out that the current staff had come together after last year, and that test scores did improve. Just not enough). Are ninety percent of them at fault? Or is it just easier to change 90% of the nametags on the doors than to really do something?

The principal's a good guy: young, enthusiastic, whip-smart. He applied for the job at my Poor Wife's school a couple years ago, when she was on the evaluation committee, and he was her choice (she thinks strings were pulled to send the guy to Marshall). One hopes for the best for all students, and the people who try to improve thngs, but one is eventually left hoping that the Big Idea hucksters behind them fall on their collective ass. I understand that they have little choice--God help the man, especially the African man, who's put in charge of an urban school district in this day and age--but one may cooperate with one's kidnappers without seeming so damned enthusiastic about receiving the opportunity. NCLS is a scam, and it's not accomplished anything beyond churning already roiled waters. It didn't protect John Marshall Middle School from a cooked-up White People's Property Tax Revolt, and it doesn't offer any solution beyond requiring the already-publicity-hungry superintendent to thrash about in search of more publicity. It'd just be nice if he managed to show the people who do the real work some respect, even if he doesn't mean it.

Pinch Me, I'm Dreamin'

HILLARY CLINTON: On second thought, I do have a comment. Jeremiah Wright is entitled to his opinion, like every American. And while there's no one more qualified than I to deplore the systematic trivialization of our political process, let me just add that Jeremiah Wright is one of millions of American voices that are never heard on the evening news unless someone's trying to make political hay out of them, and likewise one of millions of generally unheard Americans we desperately need a President to listen to.

BARACK OBAMA: I've complained publicly about "manufactured issues" dominating our politics. What I've since realized is that manufactured campaigns bring manufactured issues on themselves.

I've run a campaign calling for change, but the change it was designed to bring about was my move from the Senate Office Building to the White House. I've implied that all forward-looking people supported me, and that the old-style thinkers who supported Senator Clinton were part of the reason America is in the shape it's in.

Well, that's simply not the case. It was an electoral calculation. And I say so now not because it has produced a divided electorate--for which I'm truly sorry--and not a clear-cut and early victory for my campaign, but because I was wrong to do so.

Working-class Democrats are the soul of the party and of the country. They're the ones who created the party that stood up for the rights of people of color at the expense of electoral college advantage. They, and the "older voters" I may have denegrated--and to whom I now apologize--face "change" more forthrightly and with more bravery than any other group of Americans--change in economic or social status, in local identity, the outsourcing of jobs and the bias against older workers, deteriorating health, loss of mobility, independence, and a sense of belonging. Change is not the ability to set the clock on the DVD player. It's not the wisdom to choose the best cellphone or WiFi provider. It's the ability to face down whatever life throws at one, provided one is treated as fairly as his fellows. That's the sort of "change" the Democratic party stands for, and the sort of change I'm going to work for from this moment, whether as the next President of the United States, or a Senator from Illinois.

JOHN McCAIN: To be perfectly honest with you, I never liked the coloreds to begin with.

It Ain't The School, It's The Principal Of The Thing

SO my Poor Wife took me out to eat last night, which is a rarity for us, because...oh, wait, I'm sorry, but that just reminded me of last night's News. At some point after the local hairdos decided the godawful US economy was actual news--in their defense they were awfully busy fluffing Tax Protesting Wealthy People most of last year--and presentable news at that (they're not the same thing), we started getting...wait, I forgot that they actually did cover bad economic news last year, viz., the rising cost of the petrol they needed for their suburban Panzers, just as the current round has been sparked by what has or may yet happen to their mortgages. We like to be fair. Anyway, since the point where it has become permissible for people making something between Above Average and Exorbitant salaries for reading at a High School Level While Telegenic to knowingly nod their coifs at the plight of the Typical Working Man we've gotten all sorts of Focus stories, and, frankly, even though I find these more acceptable politically, and epistemologically, than the anti-tax crap, and lots more than the nightly celebrity and electronic gizmo parade, it quickly reduces to the same flavorless gruel. So last night they're talking about the toll a slumping economy is having on local restaurants. And boy was I ever glad my recent surgery wasn't abdominal as David Barris led off with, "Indianapolis is a city known for its great restaurants."

And if you know anything about Indianapolis you didn't get from the New York Times you are no doubt cursing me right now for not warning you about drinking anything before you read that. That is the single most dishonest comment I have ever heard broadcast, and that includes all defenses of George W. Bush's intellect.   And it's only the relative size of the market here that prevents it from bringing down the entire legal edifice surrounding the First Amendment. Indianapolis is absolutely, without question, empirically demonstrably the worst restaurant town of any city with potable water. Honestly, the Chamber of Commerce would have blushed to say that.

And then, as if to prove the point, we discussed the effect of Our Newly Rotten Economy with the manager of The Old Spaghetti Factory™  (Now Offering Pastabilities!).  Which is just one of the many great Indianapolis restaurants that envious other cities have copied.

And the guy says that his business is down, yes, but it'll survive. But he has friends who work in other concepts which have closed down. Other Fucking Concepts! This is why I've spent my life avoiding business people.

What was I going on about? Oh, so we're having a semi-pleasant evening dining on Chinese concepts, and my Poor Wife says she's forgotten to tell me the story about her Principal.

This will dovetail nicely with Roy's discussion of this George Eff Will shite (caution: George Eff Will shite). In comments mere mortal dispenses with the column, and Jay B. dispenses with Will.

Now, my Poor Wife has worked for so many principals in her career that we've lost count, but you can count the good ones on the left hand of a punch-press operator. The current one is not one of them. And she tells me that he's been transferred to another high school for next year, and he's already spending all of his time over there. Not that anyone particularly misses him, or would, unless they're in the habit of checking the office where he spends all his time. This sort of shuffling is common (and indicative of one really big problem with the public schools, one which is caused by George Eff Will, the meddlesomeness of anti-public school rightists and their business model solution for everything.  Or, rather, everything except failing banks.); this will be the third-straight principal of her school with a three-year tenure, and, like the other two, he'll leave a damp chair and the occasional unintentionally humorous email.

What he's taking to the new place is the modern disorder which insists that such people are not administrators, managers, or facilitators, but entrepreneurs. And, as you know, an entrepreneur is a guy who shows he earns his disproportionate recompense by firing some of the people who do the real work and leaving the rest to pick up the slack. And this is, reportedly, exactly what he's done, having already gathered together the staff and told them they'll each need to reapply for the jobs they currently hold, as he's rumored to be about to do with the faculty.

Which, of course, would violate any number of union rules, which is not exactly a new practice for the current administration of Indianapolis Public Schools (which imagined, just last year, that it could simply order teachers in two elementary schools to work all year, without even addressing pay or vacation issues), and which we'll get to in a moment. But first, who is it among the rabidly anti-unionists out there who imagines this is a good idea? It can't be anyone who's ever actually worked for a living, unless you want to count Jack Welch. It's a conceit of the idly wealthy, the inherited money operator of a string of dry-cleaning establishments, or the sinecured Washington Post comic-intellectual. Do things sometimes need a good shaking, a well-considered streamling, a sad reduction? Frequently. Does indiscriminately terrorizing every last employee accomplish good things? What does common sense say? I'm not sure where the idea that people work better when they're afraid of termination every hour of the day comes from, but I suggest it comes from people who want them to volunteer to work overtime without pay, or else the trainers of fighting dogs. Ditto the idea that the world is chockablock with better qualified people just waiting to take the jobs of anyone displaying insufficient obeisance. It's curious that in a society so enamored of its own militarism that this point should be lost. Grant didn't fire half the Army of the Potomac, or make every artillerist reapply for his job; he did what he was supposed to do and put their skills to better use. No doubt there are leaders out there who can beat your'n with his'n and hisn' with your'n. No doubt there are people out there with the individual teaching talent to improve a classroom or a schoolhouse worth of test scores. And no doubt they are exceedingly rare.   When did we exempt leaders from getting the most out of their charges?  (I believe the answer is "when Reagan took office".)

As for the unions--I'm not conversant with the contents of the IPS collective bargaining agreement, which the World's Third Worst State Legislature™ gelded a few years back (and only IPS's, by the way; that's America, toots), and at this point it remains a rumor (but from a knowledgeable source) that teachers are next on the list--there is certainly some amount of protection accorded by seniority, though it's not absolute. But even if there were none, who's stepping into that newly-cleared-of-deadwood verge? And who decides? Some bozo who can't be found in his own school half the time, but who knows how to play politics? That sounds like a solution, I suppose, if you don't know the first thing about it. Or if you're the sort who imagines wearing self-consciously anachronistic neckwear is a contribution to American letters.

Get Up Off'n Yer Sister And Hitch Up The Mule, We's A'Goin' To Th' Polls!

Monica Davey, "For Indiana Voters, Talk Of Change May Fall Flat"  Times, April 24

Adam Nagourney, "For Democrats, Questions Over Race and Electability," Times, April 24

KOKOMO, Ind. — With all the talk among the Democratic presidential hopefuls about change, they may wish to consider this as they wander Indiana: People here practically revolted a few years ago when their governor, Mitch Daniels, pushed to change to daylight saving time like most of the country.

OKAY, it shore nuff sounds kinda backward, Miz Davey, m'am, when you put it like that, but there's a simple explanation for that: Fuck You.

Indiana's practically on the Mississippi, yet we're on EDST time now (asterisk!). In my lifetime we've been on Central Time, Eastern Time, back to Central, back to Eastern, off Daylight Savings Time, and back on it, and if I wanted to be perverse about it I could have moved around the state and added a different time zone every month. In other words, it's something of a local issue, and while it may play well and provide a snappy lede for you to ape Mitch Daniels in declaring yourself far too intelligent to be saddled with such a prize collection of Gomers, you ain't, and neither's he, and the issue is not and never was fear of an unknown and unsuspected Cosmic retribution for Actually Changin' Somethin'.

Instead, you might consider what a tiny amount of reportage would have revealed, that, thanks to its forward-looking Governor and his fearless dedication to scientific principles 21st century realities the political pressure applied by Indianapolis television stations, which want to be on New Yawk Time, a Hoosier lucky enough to have a job, albeit one which requires he rise at 6AM every morning, now drives to work in the dark every day of the year, hoping he doesn't run over any children waiting for the school bus in the process, while anyone who'd like to see the sun set even later than it does in Indiana in midsummer has to fly to Norway. This may provoke a chuckle around the table at whatever Argentinean/Mongol fusion restaurant is popular with Timesmen this week, but a short walk in our clodhoppers might convince you that it's a matter of some importance to people actually living under the regime, regardless of their natcherl suspicion of city folk and their fancy ways.

Oh, and not to mention the fact that Daniels reneged on a campaign promise when he ramrodded the change, or that he seems to have violated federal law into the bargain and trampled the will of local governments for good measure. 'Cuz we's jes' scuggins here, and we shore don't want to stand in the way of a good story. 'Specially when the Times thinks enough of us to actually send an actual reporter lady to Kokomo so she can collect the same quote three times.

I'm sorry, but didn't the Times promise a couple years back that it was going to suck the dick of Red State America, con brio, as penance for its evil elitist past?

Somehow "Northern Indiana is one big suburb of Chicago, Central Indiana is Indianapolis writ small, and everything South is Kentucky" doesn't quite measure up. Especially when any Hoosier, except maybe the Chicagoians, can tell you anything south of US 40 is actually Alabama. Kentucky is progressive by our standards.

And unlike some other states, including Pennsylvania, Indiana has mostly been ignored in general elections, too. It has long been written off by both parties as so reliably Republican in presidential races as to not be worth much note. After 1936, a Democratic presidential candidate has won the general election here only once, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Well, let's examine our Tote Board of Shame, shall we? Again, it's undeniable, but how many Democrats won the Presidency in that seventy-two year period? FDR twice, Truman once, Kennedy once, Carter once, Clinton twice. Voting against any of them is not exactly a sign of rampant radical Republicanism, with the possible exception of FDR, but in 1940 he ran against favorite son Wendell Wilke, and in 1944...okay, I can't really explain voting for Dewey just as the war was won, but Ohio, Wisconsin, and the Plains states joined us, for some reason. Afterwards, you're talking about a state that went for Dewey over Truman (which has a nice ring to it, anyway), Nixon over Kennedy, Ford over Carter, and Bush/Dole over Clinton. I'm not particularly wild about it myself, but it hardly differentiates us from the remainder of the country that hasn't et in ho-tels.

We might add, out of what little pride we actually feel for Indiana politics, that Indiana's two Senators in the 1960s, Birch Bayh and Vance Hartke (both, according to the Times map of the world, from Kentucky), were champions of civil liberties and opponents of the madness in Indochina, and that while we're responsible for letting Dan Quayle out in public, neither Rudy Giuliani nor Alphonse "Al" D'Amato has ever held elective office in our jerkwater little state.

SO,  to quote Louisa May Alcott, while you're shoving that as far up your rectum as it'll go, let's turn to Adam Nagourney, and note that, once again, you know an anti-Democrat meme has reached rigor mortis when you find him fellating the corpse on the Times front page:

But just when it seemed that the Democratic Party was close to anointing Mr. Obama as its nominee, he lost yet again in a big general election state, dragged down by his weakness among blue-collar voters, older voters and white voters. The composition of Mrs. Clinton’s support — or, looked at another way, the makeup of voters who have proved reluctant to embrace Mr. Obama — has Democrats wondering, if not worrying, about what role race may be playing.

And, once again, if we may take a moment to respond, we'd like to do so with a farm implement.

Suppose we put it the other way 'round? Obama leads in delegates because young people in Red State America have been mazed by a decade's constant exposure to cell phone radiation, excessive iPod volume, and American Idol, exacerbating their natural tendency to confuse ass and chipmunk holes, plus all dem black folks iz votin' for one of their own? That sort of analysis would get you fired from the Times, unless it got you an Op-Ed column.

I'm through being insulted by this sort of shit, just as I'm over being dismayed as it was parroted in Left Blogtopia--whenever, that is, when Senator Obama has not done as well as expected. (At other points I seem to recall the insistence that he ought to be the nominee since "Hillary's supporters will all vote for him anyway.") I think it's beyond time to put up or shut up. From where I stand (cornfield), unless you want to count what some hyperventlilating Obamabloggers decided to make out of Bill Clinton comments, the issue of race has come primarily from the Press--which is not exactly friendly to Democrats, on balance--and secondarily from Obama surrogates, who seem to have missed the previous point.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama played down the racial aspects of the coalition Mrs. Clinton used to defeat him in Pennsylvania.
“Our problem has less to do with white working-class voters,” Mr. Obama told reporters Wednesday in Indiana. “In fact the problem is that — to the extent that there is a problem — is that older voters are very loyal to Senator Clinton.”
But the real test may come in the general election, should he win the Democratic nomination. Pennsylvania and Ohio will be two critical states this fall, and it will be difficult for any Democrat to win those states without the support from the Democrats that Mr. Obama is struggling to bring onto his bandwagon.

So just who was it decided to throw those older voters off the cliff fifteen months ago, the better to run as Mr. New Postpartisanship? Is your skin color now supposed to protect you from that decision? In point of fact, outside the confabulations of those same huffing hyperventilators, the only people I've heard saying we wouldn't have all the problems we have now except for the darkies were Republican members of the U.S. Senate, but I've since heard both sides of the aisle blaming the Dirty Hippies of Yore.   It's something short of convincing. What about Obama exempts him from responsibility for how his campaign has been run? Y'know, I don't have to believe in Wrightgate, or Bittergate, or Lapelgate to wonder why the man still talks the about a Social Security "crisis". I don't have to concern myself with "electability"--a concept being pushed by people who have been 100% wrong about everything in the campaign so far, and who seem to perpetually imagine the election will be held next week--to find his national security positions too centrist or his health care program inferior to his opponent's. I don't need skin color to decide for me that I won't support him in the primaries, or that I will in an election contested by John McCain. I didn't want to fight; Obama and the Obamatots did, and it's time they quit whining and start figuring out how to win elections as readily as they win arguments with imaginary racist geriatric farmers.

Goin' Medieval

David Brooks, "The Great Escape" April 22

THIS morning we were pondering a piece about whether Expelled is one of the Signs of the Apocalypse when we clicked innocently enough on Brooks' Tuesday column ("The Great Escape"? How Obama ducked the really tough questions in last weeks debate, we figured), which turned out, instead, to be a wistful rumination on the lost natural world of the European Middle Ages, and how much better modern society would be if the peasants were more easily frightened by comets n' shit.

The essay, which appeared in Books & Culture, is called “C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward, a chaplain at Peterhouse College at Cambridge. It points out that while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God. The medieval universe, Lewis wrote, “was tingling with anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonial, a festival not a machine.” [link added]

Over the past fifteen months that essay has given Brooks welcome moments of respite  from the seamy world of political campaigning. Because, y'know, no one is more importuned by the cheap carnival of American politics than the people who choose to cover it for a living, and no one is more bedeviled by "attack ads, tracking polls and which campaign is renouncing which over-the-line comment from a surrogate that particular day" than the people who greedibly digest that stuff so the rest of us can compost our little gardens with their excreta.  

The thing that always strikes me about these "wonder on the edge of science, as told by religious nostrum peddlers" bits is how often they flat get it wrong. Really, is it too much to ask of these people that they watch The Science Channel once in a while? Watch for a month if you like, and try to find an astronomer or astro-physicist who acts as if he or she stares "into a trackless vacuity, pitch-black and dead-cold" for a living. These people are animated. In fact, they're a little too eager to get ahold of my tax money to settle an office bet, if you ask me, but that's beside the point.

Good Lord, you should pardon the expression, even to the indolent Midwestern bump whose three hours of astronomy credits boil down, thirty years later, to being able to vow the uninitiated by identifying Betelgeuse and Rigel on a clear winter night, the glories of solar astronomy beat hell out of tales of a handsome and touchy and, well, flaming youth driving a gold chariot across the sky, whatever their relative merits as literary imagery. And I don't know about you, but the knowledge that the elemental structure of the Earth, and the life on it, required the collapse or cosmic explosion of untold, unseen other stars, of time as vast as that trackless vacuity, or that we can--by dint of our curiosity about how things are, not how God's self-appointed spokesmen insisted they must be, sometimes with the rhetorical assistance of skillfully applied hot pokers--listen in on what's left of the Big Bang, beats the hell out of anything dreamed up by a group of people who hadn't realized you don't throw buckets of shit out on the sidewalk every morning.

There’s something about obsessing about a campaign — or probably a legal case or a business deal — that doesn’t exactly arouse the imaginative faculties.

We know, Dave. We read your column.

The medievals had a tremendous capacity for imagination and enchantment, and while nobody but the deepest romantic would want to go back to their way of thinking (let alone their way of life), it’s a tonic to visit from time to time.

Y'know, somehow, it's always the people who object to paying the fare who want to ride farthest.

Not to mention the fact that this is less a bus from Point A to Point B than an imaginary unicorn-guided monorail circling some mental Disneyland. Brooks, like Lewis, doesn't see himself as a pox-ridden peasant sitting down to his plate of leftover umbles warmed on the manure fire, fearful about today's solar eclipse (and tomorrow's sixteen hours in the fields); they're the fat monks secure in the knowledge that Ptolemy explained it all. Except they have air conditioning.

Don't get me wrong: I'll listen to pre-modal music alongside Stravinsky, read Chaucer with as much pleasure as reading Pynchon, and I'll faint in front of a Byzantine mosaic right there next to Stendhal. It's not that we have nothing to learn from Meister Eckhart. In fact it's precisely the opposite: it's these ludicrous mental travelogues which assume a personal superiority in order to insist that we are in fact superior in every way except our peasants don't owe everything to their betters. It's one thing to argue this constitutes your ideal of Beauty, or political economy; it's quite another to insist that it repudiates everyone else's.

Great Minds Think Alike

I'M not quite sure how I landed on MSNBC Saturday night--an accidental button push by a thrashing shipwreck victim; my Poor Wife was off at a school function--but I was immediately greeted by David Gregory opining that the massively unfair shit being hurled at the two remaining Democratic Presidential hopefuls is their own damn fault for keeping the race going this long. With logic like that, how can you not be hooked?

It was The Tim Russert Show, something I trust MSNBC gets to air for free based on the discrepancy between what Russert is paid and what he delivers on Meet the Press; there's no other explanation for it. Seated next to Gregory was Chuck Todd, the pollster guy NBC is grooming as the next Pat Caudell (Lucky You, America of 2028!).


The reader is forgiven for not remembering that Mr. Riley was, he believes, the only person in America who actually watched a 2001 C-SPAN panel, moderated by Steve Roberts and including such journalistic co-conspirators as David "Dean" Broder and Kit "Too Bad 'Steno' Was Already Taken" Seelye, as they gave their profession straight As for its performance in the just-concluded 2000 Presidential elections. Reader, try to imagine a greater violation of the laws of Spacetime than according high marks to the coverage of Bush-Gore. Hell, try to imagine being a journalist and actually showing up for the panel instead of taking the opportunity to throw yourself out your office window.   And try to imagine what I've done, without success, in an attempt to eradicate the memory.

The following is my transcript of three minutes from the Russert show. I think it's a remarkable document on almost too many levels to count, but that the most remarkable thing about it is that it's hardly remarkable at all: this, in 2008, is the level of "political insider" discourse in the most powerful nation on Earth. I'm going to try not to interrupt any of the speakers, but I'm not making any promises:

RUSSERT: The response to the ABC debate with the liberal blogosphere has been extraordinary. Really racheted it up--Charlie Gibson went on World News Tonight--reported on it right after the debate. Wh, the number of...statements...on the ABC web site, tens of thousands. You [indicating Todd was up] 've been involved in a lot of NBC, MSNBC debate preparation. What's your analysis of what happened that night?

Okay, we may have mentioned this before, but you cannot watch Tim Russert for any appreciable length of time without noting how rare it is for a fully-formed, cogent and coherent idea to come out of the man's mouth. Yes, yes, we know that Nabokov had his lectures printed on index cards and read them verbatim; that was not his main line of work, and we have separate proofs of his genius. What's Russert's excuse? He doesn't add anything to the national discussion that couldn't be added by any other hump with three shots of Bushmill's Black in him, except Russert's known in better restaurants. It's all well and good to say, oh, everybody knows he didn't mean ABC was debating The Liberal Blogosphere!, but this is not a grammatical quibble, and Tim Russert is not a guy who suddenly finds a microphone thrust at him. How'd The Liberal Blogosphere get in there in the first place? Why do his questions so often sound less like questions and more like somebody reading the glossary in the back of the questions book? We think the answer is a) his mind is untidy, and not in an interesting, Quentin Crisp's apartment sort of way, but in a Gwyneth Paltrow caught without make-up sort of way; and b) he's managing the debate, much the way a poor zoo elephant practices abstract expressionism. In fact they both hold the brush the same way.

Now then, we don't have Lexus/Nexus, and god knows we haven't wasted any more time on Russert than necessary over the years, but we seem to recall that when Hillary Clinton, in the midst of an extraordinary, and extraordinarily naked, political bombardment referred to a Right Wing conspiracy of substantial proportions she was fitted for a tinfoil hat.  Yet when people howl that a Democratic Presidential debate, in the final days of a closely-fought campaign, is moderated by a pair of goofballs who imagine all America is asking about flag pins just before the electricity is shut off and the tractor repossessed, these same folks find it necessary to identify the hubub as coming from the mosh pit of Left Blogtopia.  Hmmm.  

You or I--or anyone who's ever been responsible for the actions of a three-year-old even for a moment--might ask whether the questioning was fair, or appropriate; given a certain level of partisanship we might ask if the reaction was excessive. We are highly unlikely to turn to a pollster and ask for his analysis of "what happened that night", because we already know what happened that night.  

But we are not Russert, though like him we now turn to Chuck Todd. A couple things before we dive in:  I've transcribed a number of teevee conversations over the years, and I'm not particularly good at it. I expect to go over and over things to make sure I've got them right (in longhand).  But I had never, ever, before been forced to transcribe someone's remarks phonetically. Frankly, the disorganization of Chuck Todd's thought processes would suggest some as yet undiscovered neuropathy if one did not already understand the sirens' song of the One-Eyed Bitch Goddess and her High Priest Russert's expense account dinners. I think if one had access to the MSNBC archives one might locate the exact moment when young Chuck's soul flew from his mouth and dissolved into dew. It's long gone now, never to return, something I hope the beginning of his comments can still make clear when turned into print; this is a man who still has to watch his shoes while he dances. It's not pretty, but it's not particularly sympathetic, either.

The other, related, thing is this: I tried to take this down accurately. Believe me, I've got a half-hour invested in the damn thing, easy. If you'd like, feel free to cut and paste

[sic]

wherever you feel necessary.

TODD: Well, I, I think that, y'know they, th...look, they made a deci...it's tough. And I think that my guess is that the ABC guys said to themselves there are two audiences for this debate. One is Pennsylvania voters, but the other, by the way, is superdelegates, so we better make sure we ask questions that both audiences want to have asked.

[Okay, I know I said I wasn't going to interrupt, but, what?]

And I think that when, and they went through and they feel like they asked all those questions, y'know, you do wonder if they changed the order a little bit, kept the same amount of time, but changed the order they probably wouldn't have got it, hit as much. But I think what's interesting about what you brought up is the intensity of "Obamanation", if uh, uh, I guess, to borrow a Red Sox Nation phrase, but they are a devoted group of people beyond which I don't think we've seen, really, we saw a tay, a taste of this in '04 with Bush and sort of his supporters, but I think what we're seeing a taste of is this is, this is just a glimpse of what the Democratic Party fight could look like if for some reason Clinton gets the nomination or appears to be grabbing the nomination away from Obama. MoveOn has already, y'know, pushed [the?] Obama support, y'know, they've already started a petition campaign against ABC and, other media outlets, y'know, apparently all of us are going to get hit by them. I, it, this is a intense group of supporters that may not...accept...a result that isn't Obama as the nominee to the point that they may destroy the Democratic Party.

Here's a thought experiment, assuming you survived all that: what sort of situation would cause you to give an answer like that? Untold riches? Pliant supermodels? A gun held on your family?

Okay, so Chuck Todd is to the Internet Quote Farmer what six producing zucchini plants are to the home cook. He's workin' the Russert Glossary Technique as best he can (superdelegates! Obamanation! MoveOn!),  Pennsylvania voters want to know about lapel pins and Bill Ayers (though why this shouldn't mean we ask the Senators about the Steelers' draft picks or Lindsay Lohan's sobriety goes unanswered).   In the midst of blathering about the unprecedented devotion of Obamanation we suddenly bring up George W. Bush '04, a man whose Republican halo had already begun to tarnish by that point, apparently because the script calls for MoveOn to be equated with the Swiftboaters, despite the fact that the Swiftboat shit was parroted by the nets while this is being discounted (at least sur la table Russert;  I happened to see the ABC coverage and Gibson was fair about it).  Then--in the grand tradition of distracting the rubes while the pickpockets work the crowd--a big fireworks finale consisting of...Obamanation destroying the Democratic Party! USA! USA!

Shit. Oh, here's David Gregory. Maybe he's not insane:

GREGORY: I've got a slightly different view of this, uh. One thing is I think that institutionally journalism is under fire, and, from both sides people are spending a lot of time attacking us and trying to divine our motives. And I'm not saying

[read: of course I am]

that we shouldn't be held to account and there's room for criticism in areas but, uh, I think this goes overboard, number one.

[and we've already be inundated with number two. sorry.]

Number two, I'm not quite certain that they approached it, uh, to the various audiences here. Look, Obama has been in trouble. He deserves some tough questions and scrutiny. There have been things that he has said and outside events that are really testing him. He is on the precipice of closing this deal and getting this nomination.

[precipice, n. L16 (Fr. précipice or L. praecipitiium, f. praeceps, praecip[it]-headlong, steep, or praecipitare PRECIPITATE v.) 1 A precipitate fall or descent. Freq. fig. L16-M17. 2 A high cliff, crag, or steep mountainside from which one might fall; a vertical or very steep rock face. E17. 3 fig A dangerous or hazardous situation. M17  Senator Obama currently occupies the verge of the nomination; should his final push fall short he will wind up merely dry-shod and wistful, not a crushed and lifeless snowboarder now lacking both common sense and motor skills.]

He should face some tough questions. Hillary Clinton has gotten a rough ride at various points because she's been losing. She went from this Inevitability Air [sic] to all of a sudden being on the ropes. The press as a body likes to dissect why that's happened.

You cover winners and losers differently. He has been ahead, she's been behind. This dynamic could change. He had all the sudden fallen behind. [sic] Why? Let's examine that. Let's ask these questions that you are going to be asked down the line. How do you handle these things? People may not like the content of these questions but how he deals with those questions, how he deals with distraction, with perception, with external events is every bit of what he's going to face when, if he becomes President of the United States. And I think it's illuminating for voters to get a sense of how he handles it.

Professor* Todd? You will note how the experienced streetwalker handles the really disgusting requests with aplomb. I was, of course, stopping and starting and going back to get all this, and I still could not ascertain the exact moment when Gregory realized he'd wandering into that "The Front Runner Gets The Rough Questions" minefield. That's an old pro at work, especially seeing as how his two very companions had used that as an excuse to gang-tackle Hillary last Halloween, and seeing as how a) they hadn't stopped in the interim, as she went from Inevitability Air to Also-Ran Stinkola, and b) her tough-gal response garnered nothing but catcalls, while Gregory was right in the middle of criticizing Obama for not being tough enough in response. It was clear that he did understand this by the time he'd said it, but he managed not just to keep going but uncork a fireworks display based on Journalism's Patriotic Duty, goddam it, and if it's old-fashioned to be a Patriot well then I'm proudly old-fashioned, goddam it! and never had to mention MoveOn a'tall.

And damn if we didn't stand up and salute the teevee after that.

We say again: if you answered all your six-year-old's questions like that, how long before she'd be hailing passing cars in an effort to get away? In fact, where'd the Question go, exactly? Is there really a MoveOn petition campaign to make ABC quit asking Barack Obama tough questions? Is it really possible that these guys don't get it? Isn't the answer to both those questions the same?


________
* Todd's speaker-bureau bio says, "Accompanying his extensive media presence is his work as a graduate level professor at the Johns Hopkins University." So far as I can tell, making allowances for the, uh, odd wording, this professorship is news to the Johns Hopkins University.