Shut Up

VIA aimai, the campaign musings of Michael A. Cohen, proud white man:

Sixteen years ago, the most influential campaign speech of the last two decades was delivered at a hotel ballroom in Washington. It wasn’t broadcast on television and only a few hundred Americans heard it in its entirety. But when presidential candidate Bill Clinton appeared at the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition on June 13, 1992, and attacked an obscure rapper named Sister Souljah it fundamentally changed the popular perception of the Democratic Party.

I'm sorry, did you just say "the most influen..."

Standing only a few feet from Mr. Jackson, Mr. Clinton excoriated the young rapper, who had said: “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people.” Mr. Clinton declared, “if you took the words white and black and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”


His words were crucial in recasting the image of the Democratic Party. For years, Democrats had been perceived as captives to a host of special interest groups, from labor and teachers’ unions to women’s and gay rights groups. But none were seen as more influential, and in many respects, as damaging to the party than African-Americans and their titular leader, Mr. Jackson. Today, as the Republican Party has become increasingly captive to its own collection of conservative special interest groups, the lesson of the Sister Souljah speech is one that the party needs to eagerly embrace.

Talk about your Two Americas. I really didn't imagine that Repub...

Mr. Cohen has taught speechwriting and political rhetoric at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He also served in the U.S. Department of State as chief speechwriter for U.S. Representative to the United Nations Bill Richardson and Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat. He has worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Foreign Policy magazine, and as chief speechwriter for Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT).

Chin mullet and Melina Mercouri glasses. They didn't make his cv, but I assume he attaches the pic, as they must serve as what we used to call a Sander Vanocur Sideburns Pledge of Authenticity, something that apparently convinces your standard mark at a New America Foundation cocktailer that you must mean what you say, since otherwise you couldn't get away with a look that just might possibly still outrage a prospective spouse's great-grandmother at tea, assuming she can't get out much.

That is, of course, unfair to Vanocur, who was, and still is, a decent journalist and a Nixon Enemy, and whose muttonchops were an actual stick in the eye of his bosses in them days. And it's unfair to Cohen, but after that column I don't give a fuck. The thing about the I'm Too Old to Know Precisely How Many Years Out of Date that Look Is is that I'm really tired of hearing this sort of shit about what when on before they soiled their first diaper from people too convinced to look, and happily aware that an initial qualifier like "perceived" or "popular image"allows them to proceed as if they'd proved something.   The "image" of Democrats imprisoned by special interests became a nickel in the change purse of our political currency through the efforts of their political opponents, and it stuck to the extent that people were idiotic enough to imagine a teachers' union is a special interest, but a banking or manufacturing association is not.  In olden times this was occasionally referred to as How Democracy Is Supposed To Work. That was before we decided to vote based on which candidate looks like he might wax his own car, or, more contemporarily, which candidate is married to a woman who doesn't remind Jonah Goldberg of someone who might mastermind convenience store stick-ups. 

So the "image" of special-interest internment makes Clinton's comments the defining moment of the New Democratic Party (which would go on to achieve so much Greatness)  because they faced down Scary Black People. Not that we're saying Black People are scary, mind you. It's an image. Otherwise, Clinton's speech might today be seen as, oh, just another example of a politician plucking some low-hanging fruit while back-handing a constituency with no where else to go, a constituency which--I find this always comes as a surprise to people who don't often associate with Scary Black People--is no more in favor of murdering strangers on the street than any other, and much less so than some, and not the vital lesson on the importance of pandering to racists that it is today.  

And this guy wrote speeches for Chris Dodd.

I suppose now would be a good time to offer my apologies to the entire Internet community for imagining, months ago, that this sort of thing was going to be kept heavily under wraps, and that people with marginal racist issues had mostly learned how to be polite in public. I may have been more wrong about things in the past. I thought decaffeinated coffee would never fly. I thought there was a reachable bottom to the reality program market. I thought men would never want to look like Melina Mercouri in a Halloween costume.

I thought that a lot of the "racist" attacks on Obama were ginned-up nonsense from hyperactive supporters, and I still do. What I was not prepared for--and I suppose this is a species of lack of fellow-feeling--was just how goddam shit-your-pants frightening the candidacy of a dark-skinned male would be in a country where Oprah is the most powerful person in the entertainment biz, where Denzel Washington can be certified Sexiest Man Alive, where Charles Barkley would once consider running for office as a Republican. I don't care how you qualify it, saying, even imagining, that "African-Americans and their titular leader, Mr. Jackson" were a millstone around the special-interest-beholden Democratic neck until Bill Clinton made 'em sit down and shut off the boombox, is more than butt-ugly racism. It's butt-ugly stupidity.  And maybe you're not the guy to be telling other people what lessons they need to learn.

First As A Tragedy, Then As A Bunch Of Made Up Shit

HERE'S the thing about that Noonan column ("McCain: Old America: Patriotic/ Obama: New America: Do Your Own Thing") which I spent part of the weekend niggling like a loose tooth: the woman is about three years older than I, and it never occurs to me, reading her, that she could be any less than thirty years my senior. She's the Leon Redbone of political commentary, except without the good material.

It's been so long now that Nooners and her ilk have been paid, and celebrated, for being professionally disingenuous that they must find it impossible to be anything else, assuming there's some reason they'd try.  The requirement of speaking to a new set of circumstances in American political life has proven beyond them, and they've retreated into some stock of half-remembered schoolyard taunts, or, in Peggy's case, into a McGuffey's Reader version of an America she was, in fact, too young by a matter of decades to have actually lived through. By the time Peggy was old enough to think about these things for herself such an America was not just dead, but had died in a collision with Reality: the Great Depression ended the debate over laissez-faire capitalism, WWII ended the debate over racial discrimination, and the Pill had ended the debate over reproductive freedom. All, that is, at least to the extent that it was necessary to accept in some degree that one was a crackpot, or worse, to cling to the contrarian view, just as one must make some sort of accommodation in being a Biblical literalist, anti-evolutionist, or reader of professional reader of pet auras. Noonan, naturally, talks the talk:

In the Old America they were not enlightened about race and sex

because they always do. Admitting that one understands the basis for the destruction of the Old Order is important for appearance's sake, and allows one to maintain the whole thing was a Well-Intentioned Mistake, or a Crazed Act of Mass Trendiness, or the Malicious Vandalism of Nattering Nabobs.

We're not suggesting that "debate" doesn't rage on on all these "issues", just as it does over Evolution. Peggy Noonan may have said goodbye to girlhood in the late Sixties as if leaving the cloister, though she claims a later political awakening (they always do!). She could have found her Old America at the time by looking around, but it's more likely she found it by keeping her eyes closed.

We're close enough in age we may well have used the same history text in high school, and I distinctly remember learning about post-Great War isolationism, labor unrest (not the whole story, mind you), Progressivism, robber baronage, the exploitation of Chinese labor and the New York Draft Riots. I'm pretty sure Eugene Debs, Shay's Rebellion, Abolitionism, the Klan, a bowdlerized Helen Keller and a well-scrubbed Margaret Sanger strode the boards there, too. It can't have taken Peggy much of an effort to realize that what she's describing--regardless of how much of it qualifies as non-fiction--is the artifact of an era--in fact, an mish-mash of eras--which had already begun crumbling by the time she was a girleen. And that, of course, the situation may have looked very different were one observing it through the other end of the social, racial, or economic microscope (or were one a middle-class Catholic schoolgirl at a time or place when that was less than popular).

But the one that frankly stopped me in my tracks was

Old America: We have to have a government, but that doesn't mean I have to love it. New America: We have to have a government and I am desperate to love it.

We've said it too many times to remember, but it seems, if anything, to become even more accurate as time passes them by: this is the result of talking to yourselves for three decades. You've lost the ability to construct an argument and whatever cortical function it is that's supposed to make you care. The damage is, alas, permanent; some of your cohort may manage a fairly normal-appearing life by pretending to support New America and the promise of personal robots and the survival of bodily death. For the rest, hope is at hand: if we can just get you to admit the whole Reagan thing was a canard, and you were never meant to be anything but a cracked minority,  it's possible you may find happiness hating Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the duration of your second childhood.

The GOP: If They're Not Nominating A Corpse They're Trying To Resuscitate One

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Bush Loyalist Fights Foes of 'No Child' Law" June 12

FIRST off, let us say about the Reformer that he or she is, at least in the modern age, a close cousin of the Enthusiast, except the odds of the Reformer being a cynical, self-serving skunk are that much greater.

Celebrity Jeopardy! also-ran Margaret Spellings pops up with the toast this morning--she's busy running for governor of Texas on the Federal dime, in case you're wondering what's actually going on--just as we started combing our Bush archives for a possible Retrospective, an instructional journey into the giant impacted bolus of American politics I hope we'll all share someday soon. (Wish I'd done so a couple months back, as the stuff about the 2000 primary, and Bush Backer fears that it was Going On Too Long, has been trimmed of both pith and zest.) How fitting that one of the last Bush Insiders is squeezing the withered Federal dugs in an ostensible attempt to rescue the crown jewel of his domestic policy, the sorry-assed 2001 exercise in political chicanery (that fooled Ted Kennedy--who'd been in the Senate for forty years at that point!--for a time) which, basically, updated the 1995 Clinton education "reforms", the better for Republicans to make use of them. How fitting, and how inadequate a comeuppance. Even domestically.

Ted Kennedy was fooled into thinking the Bush administration was genuinely interested in bipartisan educational reform! I know a lot of liberals admire the man, and I know he's stood bravely atop the ramparts on more than one occasion, but maybe they should have been checking him for brain bubbles seven years ago. The very idea of Bush's candidacy should have been enough to convince anyone that the modern Republican party could not be trusted to make accurate change, let alone in any more serious operation;  if not, then the remarkable way Dick Cheney appended himself to it should have been, for Teddy, et. al., what a comet was to the Bronze Age rabble. And all that's before the 2000 election. This would point out one of the lessons to be learned, someday, from an examination of the Bush administration: that We, as a People, are remarkably slow to learn lessons.

"...with respect to how education fares compared with other domestic priorities, I think we’ve done well.”

-Secretary of Education Margaret Skillings

Sure. Just as, in the Land of Stinking Fresh Turd Piles, the Mostly-Dessicated Cow Flop is king.

We will, at some point this fall, elect a guy who says a lot of the right things about NCLB, but concludes, in that reasonable soul of his, that what the thing needs is a good reforming. (I suppose there's an off-chance that we, or Diebold, will elect the other guy, the one who believes real education should begin for all Americans on Day One of  boot camp.) We hope, against audacious hope, that he will not get his way, and that the Federal government will begin concentrating on issues of equal access and a well-rounded education, and away from semi-crypto-union busting and aid to religious schools. And a reasonable course in our own History to replace the current collection of fairy tales wouldn't hurt, either. Or maybe a nice Blue-Ribbon Panel on what sort of meddlesomeness is required to correct the problems thirty years of meddlesomeness have wrought. In this we trust in the support of the American people, who have shown, with regard to Iraq, that their interest in healthy living includes a regular program of speed-walking away from the messes they create while whistling vigorously.  If our elected officials have not learned what inevitable fate awaits God-playing corpse re-animators then  the very idea of literacy seems pointless.  

Where the Republican party has, for years, sought to make public schools fail, we hope to make them succeed, and our own simple proposal will soon be available to both campaigns as a .pdf. In the meantime, somewhat oversimplified, our suggestion is that, since voters can now be required to show picture ID to exercise their most basic rights, they could be required to take the NCLB test as well, and their results tabulated and quantified as the basic skill level required to be a good citizen. That ought to raise nearly every school in the country to the Excellent category overnight.

Flood News

• In a demonstration of How Far We've Come in the Times-led Newfound Respect for Middle American Values, at least so far as We're Given To Understand Them, on CBS yesterday the fact that several Midwestern states have been underwater for a week actually rated a sentence at the end of the tragic story about how it was hot in Manhattan.

• This, of course, is not merely the attitude of the Big City Fellers; local news hairdos who remained relatively stoic last week as a tornado ripped apart an apartment complex in a poor section of town were deeply touched Saturday at the four-hour heliocopter shot of an SUV trying to negotiate flooded streets in the suburbs. Meanwhile, like most renters, most of the displaced apartment residents had no renters' insurance, and can't return for their belongings because the place is structurally unsound, and has to be reinspected every time it rains, which is once every six hours or so for the last ten days. Compare flood insurance, whose absence from the average homeowner policy is perpetually treated as something the average homeowner couldn't possibly have anticipated.

• To his credit, Indiana Governor Mitch "Low Ground" Daniels toured the site on Day Two. Day One was reserved for his visit to Camp Atterbury, which sustained heavy damage, but which, being a federal facility, isn't going to want for a penny and doesn't need the Guv's help getting aid, though does have lots of guys in cammo standing around as decoration.

• I came in in the middle of the story, but I suspect it was in Johnson County (where government buildings were swamped) where the Prosecutor was trapped in his office by rising waters, discovered by rescuers who were unable to break the window necessary to effect his release until a baseball bat used as evidence at trial floated by.

Does This Come In Any Other Color?

THE regular reader is no doubt aware that this blog exists in the main as my desperate attempt to be liked, to fit in, and that all my comments to the contrary--these, for example--are merely a ruse designed to make it appear as though I myself am totally oblivious to the emotional locomotive driving endless hours of what would, otherwise, be totally wasted effort. This (the ruse) is why you generally do not see me jump in with my patented Look What A Clever and Slightly Tolerable Curmudeon I Am routine whenever there's a small prairie fire of irrational enthusiasm sweeping the nation and its internet, as, say, when the first American of admitted partial African descent* secures the Presidential nomination of a major party, or when Bill Buckley kicks off. Because that's exactly what you'd expect me to do. See?

However, I would appreciate it if some genuinely liked, truly in-the-know person out there might let me know how long the Festival of Self-Congratulations Over How Far We've Come is scheduled to last. Is it going straight through the Convention, or will there be three separate Platitudinal Events in the run-up to Inauguration Day? Will it keep going after that? The Historic First Really Good Inaugural Ball Dancer? The Historic First Pitch of the 2009 MLB season ("We're just moments away from that historic toss, Joe Morgan, and as an African-American yourself, do you think President Obama's natural athleticism can overcome that strong breeze coming in from Left?")? Will we combat the Barack Hussein Obama shit with an "H is for Historic" campaign? I need to figure out when I can say this stuff is driving me crazy.

By Michelle Obama's Pearls! People in the 19th century gladly sat (or stood) through eight-hour orations; four years between Presidential elections must've seemed no longer than the average ad campaign does to us, besides giving outgoing and incoming residents sufficient time to move their belongings. Today the passage of four years surpasses human understanding, and it's sufficient time for a new generation of voter to spring up like alfalfa, or a strip mall. Five years on, and the Iraq War is an orphan. Even John McCain is treating it more as something to get through, like a midterm, or a colonoscopy, and the only people who act like they remember how it started are the six guys who earn a tidy living telling Slate every six months why it was, again, that they changed their minds about it. Except Hitch, of course. One could almost begin to feel sorry for that sod.

Maybe we need to tie the terms of elected officials to some national standard of average attention span, instead of speeding along the turnpike, periodically entering tunnels so long that we not only come out of them purblind, but having forgotten why we got in the car in the first place. By Michelle Obama's Pearls! A People who don't remember Eisenhower's golf, or Kennedy's touch football, or Johnson's surgical scars,** Billy Beer, Jelly Bellies™ , or broccoli-phobia are not just doomed to repeat them, but to drag the rest of us along for the ride. And apart from a reasonable historical, or just plain good, sense, what about Bush II's Presidential cowboy boots, brush clearing, and alcohol-induced adult-onset sociopathy? Are those forgotten already?

And yet, at a time when, By Michelle Obama's Pearls! we Need It Most, we get this:

“When you are operating at a national and even global level,” said Mikki Taylor, the beauty director and cover editor of Essence magazine, everything signifies. “No gesture is too small from now on,” Ms. Taylor said. “It’s all information. We’re all taking something from this look.”

Enthusiasm is the basest human emotion. It's a measure of what sort of diseased minds get hold of our spiritual longings and turn them into cash cows that the supposed Seven Deadly Sins combined, throughout recorded history, do not measure up to the damage Enthusiasm can do on an average weekend. Enthusiasm is the Viagra™ of non-sexual intercourse. Worse, really, because Viagra™ is not, to my knowledge, generally employed by rapists, and because Enthusiasm regularly lasts more than four hours, though less than four years. The Enthusiast has a big, unearned hard-on, and he intends for you to Get It, one way or another. And Enthusiasm's weapons, unlike those of more supposedly Deadly sins, are all lethal: the broadaxe, the neutron bomb, the beauty director and cover editor.

Look, if you do not remember Bush the Nicknamer, Clinton the Sax Addict, or the national craze for lumberjack shirts that trailed Lamar Alexander like an exceedingly ugly waterskier, kindly return to your studies. If you do, or if these words spark some dim recollection, for god's sakes try to think two months in advance, for once. Unlike starlets, and boy singers, and reality-show harlots, there's not another America's Next Presidential Couple around the corner. Could you not do your damnedest to make us sick of this one by Halloween, when comical costumes will finish the job?  Please, please--I don't ask for much here, do I?--just kick your enthusiasm where it belongs, start asking questions, and stop talking about How Far We've Come, fer chrissakes; you're a college-educated careerist who just might possibly know something of Martin Luther King's bio, at best, and the only thing you've overcome is Unfashionable Kitchen Appliance colors. You may swear now you'll LUV OBAMA 4EVER, and I hope he'll give you reason to, but the whole thing ain't up to you. And in all that time there'll still be plenty of Republicans around who still deserve stomping on. Sheesh, even Peggy "Pulitzer Bait" Noonan knows this country was founded by the first people to toss a king out on his ear and refuse (however narrowly) to replace him with another.


____________

* For fuck's sake, we all are.  Obama's just a few steps closer to the source.

**Shown off, apparently, because there were international rumors he'd had a very different surgery. Cf. John McCain's medical document dump.

Friday Garden Blogging

Climbing rose whose name I've forgotten.


Hostas whose names I've forgotten.

Gruss an Aachen ("Jerry") rose, dead or alive.

Don't Go In The Basement

IN case you were wondering where I'd got to, it's Day Two of Big Basement De-Hydrolizing II: The Re-Wettening, which means it's the fifth straight day of clean-up, or the second since the first one was almost but not quite completed, or the one that Just Might Kill Me. The storms that rolled in around 2:30 in the AM Wednesday were the strongest sustained (five hours) ones I can remember, but then my memory isn't what it used to be. Decent road-show Lear straight through to morning, though. Through Herculean efforts (which have left me, today, walking like Vulcan) measurable standing water has been corralled into two areas; the rest is just wet. We've gone from twenty-second fill time on an unassisted Shop-Vac (12 gal.) nozzle dunk up to nearly three minutes. I time them on occasion. Really. I am the J. Alfred Prufrock of nozzle dunks.

Honorable mention in all this goes--don't get ahead of me--to local media coverage, which began Monday evening with wall-to-wall carpet narration of a storm system, or Possible Tornadic Event Horizon to the incontinent argotizer, which barely brushed the northern edge of their Viewing Area. (Here is all you'll ever need to know about Local Teevee News: they solved any potential problem about interrupting Jeopardy! so that some maroon who pays $200 for a haircut that looks like he slept on it could, basically, narrate himself watching the thing move across his computer screen, by splitting the screen, and showing Alex on one-half. I highly recommend you try it some time: watch Jeopardy! with the sound off. See if you can spot anything vital that's missing. If you can, you're unfit to be a modern teevee producer.)

Now, there's a short span here where I'm unclear about what went on over the air, because I went out to mow the lawn before the predicted Tuesday rains, and when I got back in my Poor Wife was still watching the goddam radar, only now it was showing a monster fucking Highly Probable Tornadic Event Potential whose Horizon was about fifteen miles west and aimed right at our heads. ("It just popped up," she said. "While they were speculating about how much rain Chicago was getting, I'm guessing," I muttered.) We sat mesmerized as the thing moved--more slowly than anticipated, if by "anticipated" you mean "occurring every two minutes as a part of the incontinent, brain-damaging chatter kept up by profession nincompoops"--slowly over us, manhandling people to the south and north but merely tearing major limbs off our trees and depositing them where they did no damage, and as the American Meteorological Society Approved Mouthpieces followed the damn thing to the outskirts of Dayton, name-checking every town in between. It was only the next morning we were to learn that a category 2 tornado had ripped a mile-long swath through a neighborhood two miles from where these jokers sat, warning Snack's Crossing and West Muckville of the exact moment they were scheduled to join in the festivities, just in case any viewers out there couldn't read the graphic in the fifteen minutes allotted.  

My wife says that the next morning they offered up some excuse as to why they knew just what radar code meant a possible tornado possibly developing, but had no idea for several hours that one had smashed down within earshot. This is, of course, the major accomplishment of the age: better explanations.

Well, that, and the other thing, the development of high-tech gizmos to the point that even their paid apologists can no longer pretend they impart any information at all to someone lacking a lifetime of study.  Potential weather disasters are now your best opportunity to watch some guy playing with a computer, and beyond counting lightning strikes, and putting up little fluorescent graphic mushrooms to indicate hailstones, they've got some dealie that turns clouds into a sort of three-dimensional pie chart that looks like some Lego™ figure out of the old "Money For Nothing" video and is roughly half as informative.  Whatever these people are paid, I suppose the ability--it must be innate; I doubt it could be learned--to avoid saying "What the fuck is this shit?" every time one is required to play with it makes 'em worth it, in some wardrobe-malfunction avoidance sense.

Now, here's the thing: I'm not a gardener who uses chemical controls, at least not unless something catastrophic was occurring, but if I were, and if, say, there was a problem with chafers, or corn smut, or tulip blight, I would respond to every occurrence in the same fashion. Not teevee weather. Faced with the same set of circumstances Wednesday (or worse, if anything) which happened to occur during their regularly scheduled celebration of barely-competent teleprompter following, do they go wall-to-wall to make sure the citizens of Petroleum, Donnybrook, and Mucus Lake are kept fully informed? Do not get ahead of me. No, the weather--though a major story, as it is every single fucking day of the year--is interrupted regularly for the pictures they've finally been able to get of the previous day's weather, plus the standard Health Scene reports on diseases or elective surgeries popular in New York, or wherever the feed they got came from, and the results of their having sent someone around with a microphone, ambushing streetwalkers who looked as though they might have a half-formed opinion on The Historical Candidacy of Barack Obama.

And then, since no amount of whipped cream is ever complete without more whipped cream, came the Wednesday morning storms, almost exactly as predicted, which were thundering like mushroom-mazed Valhalla and dumping inches of rain hourly with no seeming let up. And a throbbing knee had awakened me a half-hour before, and when I first heard the approaching disaster I switched on local news. Don''t get ahead of me. Enjoy your infomercial.

Oh, I Forgot. He Had A Meddlesome Priest Deferment.

Bill Kristol, "What Obama Left Out." June 2

Why, it's military service! Senator Obama neglected to mention military service!

You'd imagine Bill Kristol (b. December 23, 1952) would sympathize, seeing as how he's the same Bill Kristol who in 2003 twice told C-SPAN callers he was "too young for Vietnam" or "too young to be drafted for Vietnam" when called on his chickenhawk ways, despite the fact that he was actually in the last class of draftees sent to Vietnam. But you'd be wrong.

re: 2008 Elections

James B. S. Riley
Global Powders & Notions, LLC

General Delivery

Indianapolis, IN
June 3, 2008


Jesus Horatio Christ
Co-Founder
The One True Religion, Inc.
Heaven
Time Immemorial

Dear Jesus:

I gotta tell Ya, first off, that we had quite a discussion about that salutation here at Global Powders. People suggested everything from "Your Worshipfulness" to "Anointed One" to "You don't have to write Him, He hears everything you say." One guy even insisted Your name was Yehoshua, which led to ugly name-calling and some minor fisticuffs down in the cube farm; I suppose You're used to that sort of thing. I emailed Rod Dreher--I figured if anybody knew he would--but I haven't heard back yet.

Anyway, in the end I fell back on my unadorned Midwestern Protestant upbringing, since I'm pretty sure that's Your preference. But on the off-chance it isn't, no offense! okay? I mean, I've already got water in my basement. Frogs would bring the neighborhood association down on my ass. (Just kidding!)

Anyway, I suppose You know why I'm writing You. You've been Personally involved in every US Presidential election since 1976, and things have gone from bad to worse. And maybe that's Your preference--who am I to question it, huh?--but my god Your people are embarrassing themselves. I'm pretty sure by now You realize turning the Catholic bishops loose on John Kerry was a mistake of biblical proportions. New Coke™, even. I mean, jeez, they've only been civilized for a couple of generations at best, and You rile them up about the Eucharist all over again. Don't you vet these people? How'd one of 'em wind up at Trinity United doing a drag-show Joan Rivers? Haven't we suffered enough? Sometimes I think Your sense of humor is just too subtle for the room, Dude.

So, in conclusion, would it hurt You to sit the rest of this one out? I'm pretty sure we can fuck it up the rest of the way all by ourselves.

Sincerely,


James B.S. Riley

P.S. I'm enclosing some shots of my knee, if you've got a moment.

JBSR: dc
enclosure

Ghost Dancing With The Stars

And: If conservatives today are supposed to feel guilt (versus shame) over the historical record of conservative cowardice on segregation, then let us see liberals owning up to their guilt for having been wrong on communism. Shall we? Hello? [crickets chirping]

"Crunchy" Rod Dreher, major metropolitan editorialist

The left, while embracing [McClellan's] book's central assertions, will paint him as a weasel who belatedly 'fessed up. They're big on omertà on the left. It's part of how they survive.

Dispatches from Planet Peggy

I'VE mentioned this before, I know, but everything wrong with contemporary American culture can be traced to the excesses of the 60s and 70s, and specifically to Star Trek and the ascension of Babwa Walters to an evening anchor chair. The hell of it is neither was particularly liked, and both were soundly rejected by viewers; so soundly, in fact, that they neglected to kill either, after which both managed to spread like crabgrass, or maybe like some unholy experimental crabgrass x Brussels sprouts hybrid that escaped through an unlocked Nazi lab door one night.

Both had a cover story which should have been laughed into non-existence at the top (and nearly was). For Walters, of course, it was the empowerment of Woman, which was too noble an idea to be squandered on a talentless publicity flack. For Star Trek it was the idea of bringing science-fiction to a mass audience. There's nothing noble to be found anywhere in that one. (If America has taught us anything--and, god knows, She should--it's that some matters ought to be left to the guardianship of connoisseurs, whether Great [wine, cuisine, or literature, Miss Winfrey] or Small [cigars, pornography].)
What both presaged in the event was a magnitude of dumbing-down previously believed theoretically impossible.

Ronald Reagan was the Star Trek President. First off, his hair was a color not occurring naturally in this solar system, and it had been styled to appease the mating rituals of an unfathomably alien culture. And he had that whole vaguely turtle-ish thing going on with his head and neck, which always made me half-suspect he was going to burst out of his human pod at the appropriate moment and devour Michael Deaver. (Okay, so I was also halfway looking forward to that.) Then there were his public enthusiasms (horses, jellybeans, capitalism) which are fine in someone who's been on this planet less than twenty years, but are rather curious in someone nearly as old as John McCain.

What I meant though, really, was that his appeal was remarkably Trek-like: a series of utterly fantastical ideas, explicitly disassociated from painful modern reality, and asserted, on faith alone, to be the basis for a sort of flowering of universal peaceableness, great good health, and permanently wrinkle-free clothing, except that we'd all be in the military for our entire lives and constantly at war with some manifestation of evil or other that generally looked repulsive, which to a large segment of the viewing public sounding like just the sort of lark they'd been planning for the next decade or so, anyway.  And which a small but noisy minority of the citizenry took way too seriously.

And Peggy Noonan was his Baba.

The Left survives on omertà? Really? Did she just pluck the word out of the aether, or has she been saving it up and finally despaired of ever being able to use it outside her autobiography? Did she mean vendetta? She's been clucking over the Democratic knife fight for four months now (after briefly succumbing to Obama's charms). We're seven-and-a-half years into the worst Executive branch the country has ever seen, let alone been subjected to. At this point in the Clinton administration, five Democratic US Representatives had voted to impeach him over a blowjob. Find me five Republican members of Congress who've criticized the Bush administration.

Practically unthinkable damage to the reputation of the United States, one war a total disaster and another badly managed, torture abroad and spying at home, a PR-based response to the worst natural disaster in a century, and Lil' Scotty McClellan is the first Bush insider to raise a quibble. Omertà! Indeed, there are people on the Left--moi included--saying the Weasel has come home to roost, but that's because McClellan was a professional Weasel, who lied baldfaced to the American public in the service of one mentally incompetent boss, and another who's mentally unbalanced, and at the bidding of the Evil Genius who, it turns out, was 99% of the former and about 0% of the latter.  It's not because he now turns on his boss--which, by the way, I'm not required to have a public opinion on, since I didn't ask him to write a book and have no interest in reading it. But, okay: McClellan turned on his boss for money. I'd have rather he waited until after Bush was out of office, but then, I'd rather Bush was out of office already. If you can find a way to prevent all such occurrences in a society dedicated to the dirty buck, by all means suggest it. If you just think it shouldn't happen to your side, tough titties. Meanwhile, it's the Right calling Scotty a dirty rotten traitor, a phrase it employs roughly once per moon cycle.

Then we have Crunch Boy, the serial religionist and editorialist, the wordsmith who doesn't understand the distinction between communism and Communism but still pines for the day when there was one under every bed. It must have sounded like a fair cop: we'll own up to past racism (without acknowledging the extent to which it abetted our electoral successes for thirty years) if you admit to having once loved Joe Stalin. I guess it tells you something about Dreher that he would purport to believe this was some sort of equal trade. I guess it tells you something more that he would consider "communism" such a grave threat despite the fact that when the Soviet Union fell he had to be a lot more concerned with the battle over Unsightly Facial Blemishes than class warfare. So, we say, Rod, there's a distinction (however cryptic it may seem) between Leftist intellectuals admiring Communism from afar in the 20s and 30s, and people who have benefitted from segregation, racial hatred, and political fear-mongering in their own country. And that distinction is that the former are all dead, and the latter are all still in office.

WE combine Dreher and Noonan here, not because they both got under our skin this past week, but because they seemed to illustrate the latest tactic in Deflating Reagan Carnival Tent apologetics, the Sure We Were Dead Wrong But We're Still Owed Respect For Belatedly Admitting It gambit. That there's no one left listening is a matter of no importance; they've been talking to themselves for a quarter-century.

You'd Expect Obama To Have A Better Grasp of American History. And You'd Expect The American Right To Be More Familiar With Nazi Operations.

SHEESH, it's like a garden.  You can sweat into the ground all day (I don't, but you can), dry and put away the tools, get a good night's sleep, and wake up at dawn to find everything's infested with chafers.

And so it was that we walked away from The Internet Thing yesterday before R. Porrofatto, whom we heart, in case we haven't pointed it out recently, points out that Kernfluffle II's own Steve Gilbert has entered the "But Ohrdruf was more of a work-release program than a death camp" sweepstakes, along with Rand Simberg whom we find via Brave Indiana Blogger Doug Masson. Let's go right to the post-post illuminations Simberg was forced to provide since everyone else is an idiot:

[Late evening update]
Some have taken issue of my characterization of Buchenwald as "merely a slave labor camp."
This has to be taken in context. I'm not sure what part of "atrocious beyond human understanding" with regard to that camp the commenters don't understand.
I wasn't excusing it in any way. I was simply pointing out that in the historical context of war, in which civilians were generally enslaved or killed, and disposed of when they could no longer work, it was hardly abnormal. Auschwitz (and Treblinka, and Sobibor, and Chelmo, and Betzec, and Majdenek) were in a separate class, previously unknown, which gave rise to the term "genocide," in which the intent was to wipe out an entire people. I'm sorry that some don't get the point.
[Thursday morning update]
Well, I certainly seem to have stirred up a hornet's nest among some. Let me pick up the remains of the straw men that were strewn around and kicked apart here overnight.
For the record, I did not say, or imply, that Buchenwald was a summer camp. I did not say, or imply, that the leftist Hitler's crimes were a "drop in the bucket" compared to the leftist Stalin's. I did not say, or imply, that working people to death is not murdering them. I did not say, or imply, that anyone's death (including Anne Frank's) was less tragic because it occurred at Bergen-Belsen than at Auschitz. I did not say, or imply, that I would "smile with satisfaction" if I were at Buchenwald instead of Auschwitz.
I'm not sure how to have a rational discussion with anyone nutty enough to have managed to infer any of the above from what I actually wrote.
Also, for the record, I am not now, and have never been a Republican, or (AFAIK) a "right winger," unless by that phrase one means a classical liberal. As for "sitting down with my Jewish friends and discussing this," I not only have Jewish friends, but Jewish relatives by blood, or perhaps I should say had, because they include many who doubtless died in both types of camps.
[Update a few minutes later]
One other straw man. I did not say, or imply, that because of this single incident Barack Obama was unfit to be president of the United States. But it is part, albeit a small one, of a much larger tapestry.
[One more update]
To the people in comments asking me what I meant by this, or why I wrote it, I don't know how to better explain my points than I already have. If after having actually read it carefully, for comprehension, you still don't get it, or willfully choose to misinterpret it, I can't help you.
[Update again]
OK, I'll make one attempt, for those who think that I am somehow "minimizing" what happened at Buchenwald. Perhaps they don't understand the true meaning of the word "atrocious," as in the phrase I used, "atrocious beyond human understanding."
I wasn't using it in perhaps a more popular (and trivial) sense as "that movie or meal was atrocious." I was using it in its most literal sense, as in a place where actual atrocities occurred. The two words are related, you know?
[Update about 9:30]
If I change the phrase "merely a slave labor camp," which is what seems to be generating such irrational fury and umbrage, to "not a site for the extermination of a people on an industrial scale," will that mollify people? Probably not, but I'll do it anyway.
[Afternoon update]
I'm wondering how much of the rampant insanity, straw mannery and outrage in comments would have been avoided had I merely omitted the word "merely".

Funny. I was gonna suggest you keep "merely" and omit the rest of it.  

As we're fond of noting here, Mr. Simberg, words ain't cudgels. You have emerged from all this no more, and surely no less, astute in your own mind than you already were. The point of all the flapdoodle in-between escapes me.


Work-release applicants at Buchenwald.

I'm not sure where it is that "I'm not a right-winger, I'm a classical liberal" is the sort of riposte that wins bar bets, but then even supposing you believe it it's the opposite of convincing. Learn to speak the donkey's language, if you would; he'll never learn yours. Similarly, the business of "but I said it was atrocious beyond human understanding!" does not actually fool people who understood why you said it in the first place. This is not the sort of thing one should convince himself can be sidetracked by claims of misunderstanding, difference of opinion, or one's superior powers of intellect. That particular dodge has been worked ten thousand times, whether you know it or not. Nobody's a simple seeker of Truth; everybody's a Liar, but we all prefer other Liars to acknowledge it. You do not want to be the guy settin' up his tripes and keister, offering a little friendly sidewalk demonstration of what a simple game Three Card Monte is, when someone else just cleaned out the same crowd and skedaddled three minutes earlier. Respect the audience, even when it's hard to hide your own vastly superior abilities.

And don't try it if you've got more tells than Herbert Ross.

See, thing is, you already answered your own complaint in the original post, but you decided to keep on typing:

But it's not that easy to ignore Auschwitz.
That's because "Auschwitz" has become one of the most emotionally charged words in the English (well, OK, it's not English--it's German) language. It's one of the most emotionally charged words in any language, for anyone who is aware of what happened there, and few educated people aren't, regardless of their native language.

Indeed, though we suggest you take it easy on the fangs. "Auschwitz" has come to represent the Nazi extermination program, in part because only it and Majdanek among the extermination camps exist in some familiar physical form anymore.  Which, as I suggested, answers your complaint. Every believer in reincarnation was once Caesar, or Cleopatra, or--if they're aware those two were already taken--one of their top associates. Every owner of a pot-metal lamp with a glass shade on Antiques Roadshow has a Tiffany, and every cowboy statuette is a Remington. The simple fact, Mr. Simberg is, No, "educated" people are not all aware of what happened at Auschwitz, nor were they aware of whatever distinction you or Adolph Eichmann want to make between the death camps and the labor camps; looking around the internets over the past 48 hours proves this. For them "Auschwitz" is the most familiar symbol of the entire Nazi genocidal program. And, to that extent, they are correct and you are wrong, no matter what "facts" you try to marshal. Just as they were correct in seeing through your little charade. It's abundantly clear that a family tradition might ascribe to Auschwitz a relative's war experiences that took place somewhere else. It's even possible for the whole thing to have begun as a lie, but to have been propagated honestly thereafter.

It might surprise you, assuming you found this little speck of a site, to learn that we are, at least superficially, in some agreement. I think it should have occurred to Barack Obama that Auschwitz would have been liberated by the Soviets. Or if not him, someone on his staff. But then, I haven't been particularly enamored of his staff or his campaign, and it's particularly grating for me to listen to someone who insists he'll reform Our Failing Schools demonstrate he's something of a captive to one of their very worst features, namely, the pathetic job we do teaching history, aka, introducing students to a fictional stroll among European New World settlers, with footnotes for everybody else. Lots of Americans believe We won WWII on the beaches of Normandy. Lots believe We won WWI. Many apparently think treasonous slaveholding southerners in the 19th were behaving nobly. Our history curriculum does nothing to disabuse them of the notion. And the fact is that this enforced notion of a shared sense of America as always right, always victorious, and the Beacon of International Altruism has led us into colossal error time and again, and that it has been mostly--but not entirely--insisted upon by wingnuts classical liberals. And so, while I believe that the substitution of "Auschwitz" for "Buchenwald satellite camp" is entirely understandable in the everyday sense, I think that in theory, at least, it represents the continuation of ahistorical attitudes we need to begin to correct; however, as I personally see little risk that the next President intends to invade Germany out of some unfortunate intention to Set the Record Straight, I believe I'll save any concern for more serious misstatements, like imagining the Iranians are aiding Sunni insurgents, or calling Ronald Reagan "a great leader".

Relatively Short Answers, Considering The Source, To Offensive Rhetorical Questions

I HOPE by now--since you can't possibly come here for news--you've seen, via D. Aristophanes of the Sadlynauts, Kernfluffle II turns out a little less boffo at the box office, especially if you're Steve Gilbert:

—– Original Message —–
From: Steve Gilbert


To: markkitchell@yahoo.com


Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 6:14 AM

Subject: Any Record Of Charles W Payne?

Mr. Kitchell,
As you may have heard by now, Barack Obama has claimed that his great uncle Charlie Payne was a member of the 89th Div that liberated Buchenwald.
According to records his full name is either Charles W Payne or Charles T Payne (most likely the former), and he was born in 1924 — and he is still alive today.
He most likely was from Kansas at the time of enlistment.
Do you have any record of this gentleman?
Thank you,
Steve Gilbert
sweetness-light.com
PS - If you go to my website, you will see that I was probably the first to note the error in Mr. Obama’s first claims about his “uncle.”
Obama Claims His Uncle Liberated Auschwitz | Sweetness & Light
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/obama-claims-his-uncle-liberated-auschwitz

The reply was quick and to the point:

Please crawl back under the rock you came out from.
Good day
Raymond Kitchell, veteran 89th Inf Div

Which--don't get ahead of me--would not be the end of it to Mr. Gilbert's way of thinking. (Let us, while we're at it, pause for a moment to consider the roaming Googland truth seeker who publishes this response to begin with, and who won't take the subtle hint it provides. Is he the foolhardy [after seven Beam & Cokes] frat boy on the fourth-story window ledge? Or in staring down Hell Itself and the life of eternal assholitry, is he braver than any dogface from the 89th ever thought of being at the Mosel, the Rhine, at Eisenbach or Thuringia? You be the judge.)

No, instead Mr. Gilbert needed several more last words, which, for all I know, are still echoing, but this was the first:

I wonder how many people who visit the 89th Infantry site and support Mr. Kitchell’s work realize his politics are those of Cindy Sheehan?

Zing! Because, y'know, everyone with a sincere interest in all things military--Steve Gilbert, Case in Point--is a raging warhawk. Make that Republican warhawk.

This got me to thinkin' about how such ruderal cluelessness manages to survive to typing age. Even if you didn't grow up in an era where every boy's father had fought in one, if not two, wars (excepting "Big Russ" Riley, who was 4-F, had to slink home from the Induction Center because he'd already had his going-away party, and presents, and spent the war working in a defense plant and wearing the GI underwear one of his older brothers sent home intended as a post-war stash), you can find 'em on the History and Military channels, especially since you're so all-fired hepped-up about other people's service. There aren't too many combat veterans who're all that eager to strut their service around (they're a lot more likely to shed fresh tears, sixty years on), and not many more who're eager to see another generation face what they faced (and what you have no clue about), whatever their politics. Research that, motherfucker, though you might have to risk getting up from the keyboard, going out in the streets, and getting caught by a Press Gang.

How many people might realize Raymond Kitchell's politics "are those of Cindy Sheehan"?  A lot.  And a lot who wouldn't be surprised.  And probably many times more than would automatically assume that a US military veteran would naturally share a (rather more long-distance) warlust and  pathological hatred of uppity black men.  Maybe you could go out and meet some, asshole.

P.S.  On second thought, don't.