In Other News: Mata Hara Wasn't A Spy, The Titanic Hit An Iceberg, And The Pope Professes Roman Catholicism

[In case that's not legible, "After she was graduated from Smith College she joined the OSS..." begins the second sentence of her flyleaf bio in my hand-me-down Book Club 1968 edition.  If we'd been as eager to publicize what she really thought of Emeril Lagasse ("my garage attendant really enjoys his show") we'd be much better off as a nation.]

If We Can Threaten To Put Another Man On The Moon, Why Can't We Make Self-Anihilating Rhetoric Than Really Self-Anihilates?

AND Welcome Back, s.z. The Low-Hanging Pantload, via Scott:

Now, of course, this is a bit unfair in that Obama had planned his no doubt well-deserved vacation for a very long time. But presidential vacations are always well planned -- and often interrupted.

It's a new fucking world record in Stupid every time the man enters the pool! And, obviously, he doesn't even train. Maybe NASA developed a suit that prevents oxygen from getting to the brain. Although, if you look back, there's not much evidence his brain got much exercise in whatever era. Maybe they've discovered a way to wrap his body around an 8-year-old Chinese gymnast. (The physics would have been a snap.) Y'know, the supposed imperturbable fearlessness of the clueless? I'm pretty sure it's not performance-depressing drugs. I know a thing or two about those, and none of them can make you that stupid; it's a Hollywood myth. Still, drug testing for pundits: it couldn't hurt.

The remarkable thing about Goldberg is that he's sui-generis while remaining the very epitome of Triteness; though we shall find some, it doesn't require any context for us to appreciate the speed with which he burrows for the Gold here: a) Obama has been "trying to look Presidential" on the campaign trail (which, in Goldbergese, is an "odd strategy" for someone running for President. You figure it out); b) the Sovi Russians did something which he gets to claim as sparking a global crisis, on the basis of his inability to make distinctions or recognize proportions when necessary, and often when not; c) therefore, Obama should have cut his vacation short.

And gone where? And done what?

And in furtherance of your claim that he's trying to look Presidential. Jesus, not even I imagine the Obama campaign to be that incompetent.

But we are nothing if not time wasters here, provided it doesn't feel too much like work, so let's google "Goldberg Bush vacation" and see what the first link brings us, shall we?

Jewish World Review August 22, 2001 / 3 Elul, 5761
Report from the heartland: Bush's vacation not stalling nation
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- "THE president's on vacation; can America survive?"

This has been the not-too-subtle theme of the hundreds of stories about President Bush spending "too much," "a lot" or a "record-breaking amount" of time on his ranch in Texas. Dozens of news outlets have pointed out that Bush's vacation ties Richard Nixon's 30-day record for longest presidential respite. Of course, by heading back to Washington on the Friday before Labor Day instead of the following Monday, Bush is managing to avoid breaking the record after all.

Still, I wish he'd stuck it out. By going back to Washington early, Bush is surrendering to the psychological demands of the permanent government, particularly the press corps. There's a reigning mythology in the nation's capital that America is "driven" by the president, and when he's not at the wheel the whole country might smash into a light pole or a slow-moving cow.

Of course, in Goldberg's defense, 9/11 did change everything.  Especially the jocular view of that particular vacation.

Y'know, I've been watching this "Conservatism" scam for a long time now, and even at a young age I was aware of a goodly portion of what my Sunday School teachers called "hypocrisy", that mid-20th century theological concept now fallen out of favor. So that I was hardly surprised when Ronald Wilson "National Debt" Reagan quadrupled the federal deficit, or when he raised taxes and called it "revenue enhancement"; the salient point about Reagan, and Buckley, was not that they were public scoundrels, but that they got away with pretending not to be. And still one wonders how "movement" "Conservatism" could have gotten Here from There. There is, after all, still some gap between taking pride in concocting simplistic, bumper-sticker answers to complex problems and being too frat-boy Stupid and Proud of It to be troubled by intellectual honesty.

How To Speak Mush.

Michael Cooper, "War Puts Focus on McCain's Hard Line on Russia". August 12

His hard line has been derided as provocative, and possibly dangerous, by some so-called realist foreign policy experts, who warn that isolating Russia would do little to encourage it to change. But others, including neoconservatives who deem promoting democracy a paramount goal, see Mr. McCain’s position as principled, and prescient. Now, with Russia moving forcefully into Georgia as Mr. McCain seeks the presidency, his views are being scrutinized as never before through the prism of Russia’s invasion.

1) So-called realists? If there's some sense in which this does not, in fact, qualify as Real realism I for one would sure like to hear Mr. Cooper explain it. 2) Others, including neoconservatives? Here I'd just like Mr. Cooper to explain the construction. Is it intended to show that neoconservatives have garnered support from other points on the political spectrum? To deny that Mr. Cooper was singling them out for their so-called incoherent irrationalism? Why bring them into it at all, except as a kind of shorthand for conventional wisdom? There is one option, and one alone, for repelling the Russian army without availing ourselves of the one we no longer have: we could start WWXVI, at last count, in the name of spreading democracy. Let's hear the neoncons, and "others", say that. 3) Similarly, McCain's views have had all the scrutiny they require, in Iraq and Afghanistan, supposing that we need to actually poke our own eyes out in order to understand sightlessness. The only people who weren't scrutinizing it beforehand were the very people paid to do so, but who have a personal interest in a blustering, expansionist--and already dead and buried--US foreign policy.

Why, Yes, I Do Have To Ruin It For Everybody.

Pat Forde, ESPN, et. al. ad nauseam, "Michael Phelps, Greatest Olympian Ever".

C'MON. He's a swimmer. How many Golds would Carl Lewis have if, in addition to running the 100 and the 200 the normal way, he could pick up another running backwards, and a third by goose stepping, and another long jump medal for flapping his arms like a cartoon duck during his approach? For that matter, how many would Paavo Nurmi have won (in distance running!) if he hadn't been robbed of his ability to compete in more than two (for [bogus] excessive travel expenses! Phelps will get a $1 M bonus from Speedo if he takes eight Golds). In 1924 the Flying Finn won the 1500 and the 5000, setting world records in each, with 30 minutes in between races. The other day the teevee drones were protesting the brutality of the schedule which had Phelps swimming three laps in a single 24-hour period.

And look, this is not to say Phelps isn't one of the greats; it's just that someone who earns a living writing about Sport ought to show a little more respect for his field than the guy who earns a living writing about Malto, The Maltilicious Breakfast Ballast. I exempt the teevee yammerers, who are, in fact, precisely the guy who writes about Malto.

Al Oerter won four Golds in discus. Alexander Karelin won three Greco-Roman wrestling Golds, lost the fourth by a point (to Rulon Gardner, the Nancy Zerg of athletics), which was the only point he'd given up in a decade. Find whatever story you wish the Most Compelling, if you absolutely have to, but don't act like all questions have been banished. Swimmers, and gymnasts, and people who specialize in great bursts of speed over short distances have, not just an advantage, but a lock on total medal haul, not to mention that they get to tack on team medals and relays.   Act like you understand this, assuming it doesn't take all the fun out of sniffing the lead dog's butt.

And yes, I am a former middle-distance runner married to a competitive swimmer, and yes, she did get tired of hearing this around 1978 sometime.  Lucky guess. 

Neocon, n. L.20, Fr. dial. n'econnez? meaning "Don't you ever get tired of being wrong?"

William Kristol,"Will Russia Get Away With It?" August 11

One of several excess Kagans, "Putin Makes His Move". August 11

John Maverick McCain, International gibberish from the campaign trail (but I repeat myself!) August 11

THE good news, Reader, is that, even deprived of most of the modern communication inconveniences this weekend, save the fuzzy blue flickering of the video crystal set, one could almost feel, smell, even taste the bullshit on this one, suggesting that it's not the mere volume of the stuff on the internets that makes this virtually possible.

Okay, okay, so it's remarkably easy; all you have to do is note when television "journalists" start shamming gravitas, and you know The Steer of State has a bad case of the squirts. By the evening "news" all three nets were predicting the possibility of World War VII, or wherever we are now (keeping tabs on this being the one theoretical, though not compelling, reason we need a single Kagan). This practically guaranteed the crisis would be over by breakfast, and that the Sovi Russians would likely stop somewhere east of the Fulda Gap. And that the Kagans would not. Virtually, of course.

(The historically astute Reader may recall, if dimly, that these were the selfsame teleprompter maestri who, five-and-one-half years ago, treated a US invasion into the heart of the Middle East with Huzzahs! Off to teach the Hun a lesson he won't soon forget! Home before the leaves fall! Half a decade later, a world power acting regionally against its actual provocateur, not the most-easily plucked (!) target of  sham surrogacy, baldly risks rapid expansion into Global conflict. In pursuit of its economic and territorial expansionist aims! This, I suppose, is progress of a sort. It's too bad Putin didn't claim Saakashvili once tried to kill his father. I would have enjoyed seeing Charlie Gibson laughing that one off.)

Regardless, it's nice to be home, even if your freeloading uncle is lying on the couch, drinking your beer and yelling at the Libruls on the teevee:

The details of who did what to precipitate Russia's war against Georgia are not very important. Do you recall the precise details of the Sudeten Crisis that led to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia? Of course not, because that morally ambiguous dispute is rightly remembered as a minor part of a much bigger drama.

Thus Kagan, who, simply put, can't keep it in his pants anymore because he refuses to wear any. The details are not very important?  Was that for people who aren't familiar with your work?  The precise details of the Sudeten Crisis? Hell, I'll settle for the Post, and/or the Times, requiring some small recognition of the proportions of history before they kill any more trees for this shit.

Kristol, meanwhile, ever the stylist, coyly takes four paragraphs to get around to the Hitler analogy (Q: What do you call ninety seconds of neocon foreplay? A: Unprecedented selflessness.):

The good news is that today we don’t face threats of the magnitude of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Each of those regimes combined ruthless internal control, a willingness to engage in external aggression, and fervent adherence to an extreme ideology. Today these elements don’t coexist in one place. Russia is aggressive, China despotic and Iran messianic — but none is as dangerous as the 20th-century totalitarian states.

Look, Bill, we all realize the loss of the Soviet Union hit you hard. Not like the loss of a beloved pet, maybe; more like the guy with the dog that barked constantly moving out of the neighborhood, so that now you're no longer the leader of a gated community action committee, you're just the guy who's in the street every morning in his bathrobe, yelling about the power lines being too low. I understand, Bill. (Maybe too much.) It's time to let it go. It's time to enter the 21st century, and start making shit up about that. We're concluding--should we live that long, and no thanks to you--eight years of an administration which might has well have been photocopied from your image. Yes, yes, Bill, I know you were a relentless fucking Bush critic on the rare occasions you didn't get precisely what you wanted, and on the far, far less rare occasions when you did and it turned to shit and you needed an out, which, inevitably, was "they didn't do it my way enough." Now that Iraq is a roaring success maybe you could spend your twilight years in quiet reflection instead of eliminating all your perceived international enemies with the power of  your tiniest cerebral event.  

Will the United States put real pressure on Russia to stop? In a news analysis on Sunday, the New York Times reporter Helene Cooper accurately captured what I gather is the prevailing view in our State Department: “While America considers Georgia its strongest ally in the bloc of former Soviet countries, Washington needs Russia too much on big issues like Iran to risk it all to defend Georgia.”

You and whose Army, bub? Tell you what, if Grenada invades some bird-shit island we'll give you a call.

We really can't let this one go without the insights of the man who would be Commander-in-Chief of this game of Virtual Stratego™:

"Georgia is an ancient country, at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and one of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion. After a brief period of independence following the Russian revolution, the Red Army forced Georgia to join the Soviet Union in 1922."

One of the world's first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion! Anybody else smell Children's Crusade? At least we'd have the troops.

Plus, My One-Liner About Dita Beard Doing Their Repair Scheduling Went Right Over Everyone's Head.

FRIDAY afternoon, the one-week anniversary of our phone and IP services repairing themselves a day before AT&T line techs were scheduled to get to them, they all went dead again, necessitating another round of pay-phone visits (this time the automated phone repair line refused to give me any Talk To A Human option, which is now my single-issue requirement for this fall: the first guy who says he'll make automated help services illegal, unprofitable, or the object of constant White House ridicule has my vote. Period. Easy as that. ) The Automated Repair System told me My line was fine! when it tuned out to have been neatly severed across the street from me, in all likelihood by the marauding hordes of electric company line clearers who were working there at the time, but possibly by one of the two lawncare-obsessives whose properties the thing traverses. Let me repeat that: the automated system told me a line which had been cut in two was operating just fine from where it stood, and the problem was in my head, or my basement. This follows by less than two weeks the Human-Operated Repair System informing me that My line was fine! when, in fact, the dial-tone power was out for an entire city block. In that, at least, one could trace some sort of electron-level truth: the line may have been fine, just not capable of operating, although such razor-sharp distinctions are rarely enforced in American commerce. But this time My line was not fine! Severed is not fine, by anyone's definition, even eBay booksellers. I did not call the Automated Repair Line for some robo-machismo. "Hello, my phone doesn't work." "Well, walk it off, dude! It's fine!"

At one point in the festivities I was asked to choose my favorite from a selection of Problems for which "1" ("one") represented "My phone has no dial tone".  And--do not get ahead of me--after answering in the touch-tone binary affirmative I was next asked whether I was calling from that phone. I swear I'm not making that up.

I was fortunate, though, in that this weekend the "news" turned out to be exactly the sort of thing network teevee does best: matching the inspiring stories of young American athletes who have overcome all sorts of personal obstacles in order to become monomaniacal commercial pitchman candidates to sappy background music, while intimating that any other country's athletes which defeat them are cheating (it's possible--barely, I think--that there's some other country where Béla Károlyi would be given air time to declare, "But Chineses is exploiting little girls!" But it's dollars to doughnuts there's no other where it would be managed with the assumption that irony was not just lost on the audience, but totally unknown); assigning blame for the war in Abkhazia to Russia, on the grounds that no country which wants to become a US client state could possibly be at fault; John Edwards, of course, (sorry for assuming you've heard something about it; if not, do sit down first); and, finally, interviewing George W. Bush as though there's anyone left in America who wants to hear what he says, or tries to say.

(My Poor Wife had to watch the Opening Ceremonies with available, fuzzy, over-the-air reception; I peeked in from the other room occasionally, whenever her ooohs and ahs would crescendo. And here's a thought experiment for you: watch a replay while imagining you're an aphasic, and try to figure out why Matt Lauer and Bob Costas are buzzing over the whole thing. They never fucking shut up! Now imagine your aphasia is miraculously cured. Watch again and try to figure out what they were saying that was so damned important.)

I am, as I mentioned recently in the matter of Tommie Smith and John Carlos, a life-long Track and Field fan, from the days when the inspiring stories were Glen Cunningham and Wilma Rudolph, who overcame real obstacles, not the First Cousin Who Couldn't Stop Hiccuping For Seven Years or Beloved Family Pet Which Died variety, let alone the Rafer Johnsons and Jessie Owenses whose obstacles weren't the sort mentioned in polite society. My enthusiasm got dry-rot when choreographed flag strutting* became mandatory, lost structural integrity when professionalism replaced amateurism** (the Russians are cheating!"), and is all but gone in an era when the entire record book is suspect.† I will watch next week in the same way another man might pause before a display of GI Joes at a flea market.

Imagine what sort of world we'd have to enter if such behavior was not rewarded, where prominent, revenue-generating exposure of a sport's governing body was taken away for egregious misbehavior or unbridled greed, and handed to clean sports with competition for the love and beauty of Sport, not gilt. Imagine one where soft-core porn for the terminally repressed teevee viewer did not supplant real sports,†† at least during sports festivals.  Try to picture what it would take to produce a global competition where every winner demonstrated respect for the other competitors, instead of turning the thing into a pantomime of martial superiority, with overtones of colonialism.§ Then you have some idea of what Change entails.

Fuck it. Just gimme somebody to answer the goddam complaint phone.


__________

* How is it that the love of Sex, or Drugs, or Sex and Drugs, are psychological diagnostic categories, but the constant need for Reassurance by Bunting is not? Christ, if you masturbated as often as some people need flag displays you'd have no skin left on your hands, let alone Down There.

** I realize the Amateur Movement had a considerable number of problems, and was, in some instances, a complete sham, and that, furthermore, it was run, in the person of Avery Brundage, by the worst fascist dictator to not have his own standing army, but the idea that one corrects flaws in a system by throwing the damn thing on the landfill is simply beyond me; and the idea that one could advocate doing so and yet be unaware that the benefits would accrue to the very same people who were besmirching the old system beggars belief.

† I cannot understand how people excuse, condone, or even champion skullduggery in sport, especially those nameless leftists, cough cough, who do so when it's their ox whose abdomen has been exposed. How far beyond your own nose must you look to see how damaging that attitude is? It elected Ronald Reagan twice and George W. Bush once.

†† "Beach" "volleyball", the NASCAR of Olympic events. It's bad enough that the rules, and the point, of actual volleyball (now known as "indoor" volleyball to distinguish it from the slatternly, made-for-teevee impostor shaking its surgically-enhanced tits outside, as though the Catholic church started calling them "Female Nuns" to distinguish them from Sister Boom Boom) are, so far as I can tell, simply treated as minor inconveniences. I defer to no man in my appreciation of the female graces spilling out of half-hearted, minimally legal attempts at concealment, but this is the fucking Olympics, not a two-week Bud Light commercial (wait, what am I saying?). Women competing in pasties and a g-string is bad enough; everyone connected to the modern Olympic movement should be censured for that alone. But then the men, dressed as vacationing shoe salesmen from Ohio, are augmented by teams of precision pole dancers. This is the fucking Olympics! Reader, imagine you discovered, at a young age, a God-given talent for Team Handball, Canoeing, or Badminton. You hone your skills for a lifetime, giving up all other pursuits, free time, and the license of teenage hormonal insanity, granted only once, all to chase your Dream. You overcome all obstacles, including fourteen years sharing a room with your brother and his Uncontrollable Hiccuping. Finally you reach your place in the Olympic sun, only to be preempted by a Brazilian Wax competition put on solely for the enjoyment of people too repressed to buy porn. I ask you.

§ I don't have a footnote for that, you just don't get that many opportunities to type a §.

And I Can Say Without Exaggeration That This Is A Million Times Worse Than All Of Them.

Paul Krugman, "Know-Nothing Politics". August 7

Bob Somerby, "Stupidification has worked! " August 7

LEAVE us not let the poorly-run Obama campaign--still chugging from that vintage 1989 How To Beat Republicans By Being More Like Them that smelled so good to it in 2005 (you cannot drink the same bottle of wine twice!), still operating on the assumption that a good enough showing will make its man a viable V.P. candidate, still flummoxed by events on an almost daily basis (it is the central stuff of the Centrist Democrat, who stands athwart the fence and yells Stop! No, wait, Proceed with Caution! Have sex, but try not to enjoy it so much!)--blind us to the McCain campaign, which would be worse--difficult as that is to imagine--if it had Obama's money, and which has demonstrated, beyond any possibility of rebuttal, that our national political press corps, last seen playing Maverick's trombone so enthusiastically that there was only one arm and a pair of shoes visible, is worse than Hitler's.

Still, Stupidity Sells! and it's not self-policing.  If Krugman and Somerby tell you essentially the same thing, on the same day, do not nod your head as though you already understand. Listen and Learn! You do not finesse Stupid, you take his chips. You do not try to out-stupid Stupid, because you have a soul and he does not; you must not lose yours in the process. It may, at times, be necessary to take up the arsenal of Stupidity in order to defeat him, but that time is not when you find him passed out from huffing Freon. Bob?

Why has McCain been running this “stupid” campaign? Could it be for an obvious reason—because stupidifcation has worked in the past? In fact, in the spring of 1999, the Republican Party announced its plan to create such a clowning discussion. And with the help of the mainstream press corps, it has worked out quite well—until now.
What has happened since this plan was disclosed? We’ve had cheese-steak debates—and wind-surfing wars. We’ve had inane reductions of major issues. (Al Gore wants to eliminate the automobile as we know it!) We’ve been told that one Dem nominee looked French—and that another was raised at the Ritz. Through it all, the mainstream press corps has clowned along with almost every one of these inanities. Dowd can’t seem to remember that now. We’ll take a guess: John McCain can!

Anything to add, Paul?

What’s more, the politics of stupidity didn’t just appeal to the poorly informed. Bear in mind that members of the political and media elites were more pro-war than the public at large in the fall of 2002, even though the flimsiness of the case for invading Iraq should have been even more obvious to those paying close attention to the issue than it was to the average voter.

But it isn't just that Stupidity works, or that our Press corps can't tell the difference; it's that people are so willing to let it become the issue. There's a hundred volumes of outrage over the Paris Hilton ad; show me the Obama supporter who demands a campaign capable of grinding such Stupidity into the dust ("He's a pretty speechifier with no substance" has been out there for six months at least. It doesn't matter what you think about it; that's Voltaire's prayer. It matters what's done about it, which is a peculiar thing on which to have to lecture the same geniuses who believe "My proposal permits a small amount of offshore drilling" is some sort of political masterstroke.).

Tiregaugegate is a fine case in point: I hope there's somebody inside the campaign who's paid to cast a critical eye on this sort of thing, because somebody blew it. The candidate had a reasonable point, but it got stuck in his head and he blew both timing and delivery. He--it was purely a stumble of speech--made it sound like he cued the drumroll before revealing...Tire Pressure! Regular Tune-ups! It sounded ludicrous. (He's also reverted to unmodulated bullhorn speaking, from what I've heard. There needs to be someone on your staff who looks after these things and is fearless about them.) Had he been waving a prop gauge at the time the whole thing would have been a large positive. These things count; campaigns pay millions of dollars to get them right; you provided the money, or at least the seed fund.

Yes, yes, yesyesyes, the brutality of our campaigns explains occasional missteps and brain bubbles, but nevertheless, both sides pounce when they occur.  You cannot do so and decry it when it happens; Stupidity is on to that one.  We have a political environment where this sort of flapdoodle is more important than real issues--I'm hard-pressed to explain anymore why we don't deserve it--but that's not exactly news, and pointing this stuff out has about as much effect as pointing out the ludicrously long odds against human/Vulcan mating has had on the Star Trek franchise. I know no one could possibly have predicted it, but saying, "That's old-style politics" has not made this stuff go away--maybe three times would, if you had the Ruby Slippers on--and "post-partisanship", while a swell idea for someone running to be Vice-President, has not kept the election from turning into a debate over arugula. Quel surprise! John McCain may be a stiff, and he may have a limited upside (lucky you!), but being long on Stupidification isn't his weak spot.

Just Thank God You Don't Live In Indiana, Vol. XLIII

FOR reasons now lost--I've slept since then--I recently had the occasion to wiki up Pnin, and discovered the vintage cover above, which is, I suppose, laughable in its shamelessness, if that's the sort of thing you laugh about. I tend, even at my most agreeable, whenever that is, to view it as a serious argument for increased regulation of commerce, and, at most times--such as now, when Power Company surrogates are busy mutilating trees in my neighborhood, a necessary evil whose necessity seems less important to them than the opportunity to inflict mischief in the name of their Dark Master--a point on the very short continuum that terminates--I think it terminates--in the joyful stockpiling of multi-stage nuclear weapons on the grounds that this effectively deters their use in a way their total absence never could, and the attendant notion that the Freest Nation on Earth should positively bristle with armaments of every other sort in pursuit of keeping the world free of anybody else who might. It's been a while, but I don't recall there being three coeds total in Pnin, or any who, in 1953, dressed like Sandra Dee circa 1958.

[While I'm thinking about it--it must be the chainsaws--Somerby catches Keith Olbermann repeating Bob Herbert's pathetic Leaning Tower of Throbbing African Manhood remarks twelve hours, and several debunkings, later. Why is it you prefer to be lied to by "liberals"?]

Anyway, Senator Obama came to Northern Indiana yesterday, and strolled around with our congenitally disingenuous junior Senator, which leads even the New York Times to mush up its peas and hide them under the mashed potatoes:

The reasons for Mr. Bayh’s apparent presence in the inner circle of potential ticketmates are varied, and they say something about the nature of the 2008 race and the correlation of forces within the Democratic Party.
In contrast to Illinois, Mr. Obama’s home state, neighboring Indiana has not supported a Democrat for president since 1964, when it was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s landslide victory. But in this election, it is considered a battleground state. Many Republicans crossed over to vote Democratic in the May 2 primary, and there is some thought that putting Mr. Bayh on the ticket just might be enough to make this red state and its 11 electoral votes turn blue.
During the primary campaign, Mr. Bayh, 52, not only supported Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, he was also one of her national campaign co-chairmen and described her in an advertisement as having “a spine of steel.” But his roots and popularity in Indiana run deep. His father, Birch Bayh, served three terms in the United States Senate (losing in 1980 to Dan Quayle, the last Indiana native to serve as vice president). And Evan Bayh served two terms as governor of Indiana before being elected to the Senate in 1998.

So you may think you can imagine what our local "news" coverage was like. But I doubt it. To begin with, these are the same wig mannequins who were still squirming in their anchor seats about Indiana's historic primary! weeks after it became clear that as a result of Your Vote Counting This Time! our selection lost. This actually went on until a mid-July Miley Cyrus sighting effectively altered the news cycle. The artificial excitement generated by rumors of a place on the VP Short List (there's a Presidential election, sometimes worthy of the name, every four fucking years. Don't you people pay attention?) has been treated as though it reflects honor upon the entire state, and especially its dedicated crew of Potential Thirty-Second Home Town interviewers. Which means that the "Event" was treated almost exactly as would rumors of a real-life Hannah Montana romance, with lots of gauging the sincerity of back pats and measuring pupil dilation during eye contact. Wherever it was my Poor Wife stopped during the proceedings the reporter informed us that Obama had used Bayh's name twice! Once in the introduction! and again when he praised the confounding issue of Indiana's last, fearless, Democratic Senator for his work in limiting Loose Nukes, raising the question of whether The Candidate had confused him with Dick Lugar.

What in the world can possibly be interesting about this stuff, and why does it have to be covered by a bunch of sugar-buzzed youngsters who can't wait for Santa? It's like the quadrennial thrall of Swimming, or Speed Skating, but absent any bursts of excitement in the real event. Evan Bayh is the most worst of Indiana's two Senators, and the other one is an octogenarian Republican Eagle Scout who's spent thirty-five years in Washington working on his Foreign Policy badge. Bayh got elected on the strength of his father's name (one of the most accomplished legislators from Indiana in its 192-year history, and the man who lost to Dan Quayle. Democracy simply does not work.) and immediately turned into the Younger, Handsomer, Slightly More Aware of His Surroundings Ronald Reagan. Tax Cuts! Workfare!  At least Reagan left his party more energized than he found it.  Bayh left the Indiana Democratic party right where he found it:  nowhere.  You think McCain performed a cynical obeisance to Bush for the sake of his Presidential aspirations? Bayh's like a television suitor of Flavor Flav; there's not enough There there for cynicism to find a toe hold.  (If it's ever discovered he's been in the pocket of Big Anything the only wonder will be what they imagined they were paying for.) Aspiration shapes the man like helium shapes a balloon. Not just an Iraq War vote, he was a fucking podium invitee when Bush signed the thing. Four solid votes with the Acting President on FISA. And I saw, more than once yesterday, someone suggesting that a strike against Bayh (why is he being considered for anything other than Tar & Feathers?) was that Democrats would lose his seat, thus endangering their mastery of the United States Senate. As though that were a bad thing. Hey kid, wanna buy a dirty book?

Tuesday on Look, Here's The Thing!™

WaPo: "Anthrax Dryer A Key To Probe". August 5

Bruce E. Ivins, the government's leading suspect in the 2001 anthrax killings, borrowed from a bioweapons lab that fall freeze-drying equipment that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores, according to sources briefed on the case.

Look, Here's the Thing!: it might be nice if, three days after word got around that Ivins did not work with dry anthrax, the "explanation" that surfaces comes with some acknowledgment of the fact. Was this why reporters asked? Was it why "sources briefed on the case"--th' fuck is that, by the way? Is it more or less than "familiarity"?--brought this up now? Did someone actually inside the investigation just now cough up that lil' lunger of evidence? If so, was it prompted by news reports? Does it confirm, to any extent, that Ivins had no contact with supplies of dry anthrax, and thus is suspected of having concocted his own? None of these is particularly damning, which is all the more reason it'd be refreshing if the niceties would be followed, for once.

The device was not commonly used by researchers at the Army's sprawling biodefense complex at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked as a scientist, employees at the base said. Instead, sources said, Ivins had to go through a formal process to check out the lyopholizer, creating a record on which authorities are now relying. He did at least one project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that would have given him reason to use the drying equipment, according to a former colleague in his lab.

Look, Here's the Thing!: if Ivins had a perfectly good, job-related excuse for requisitioning the thing, in his own name, then, at the very least, it's not a real key to the mystery that he checked one out, is it? He didn't ask Joe in shipping to look the other way while he "borrowed one for the weekend" so he could "freeze-dry his own coffee". This, then, may be a Key to the Probe in the same sense that a large, buoyant piece of flotsam may be a Key to Not Sinking in the Aftermath of a Shipwreck. (The simile is not a haphazard one.)  At any rate, maybe paragraph three is a tad tardy on the Rounding Out with Relevant but Ameliorating Information the Charges Made in the Headline scale.

Eventually, through more elaborate DNA testing of the power and tissue cultures from the victims, they determined that the powder probably came from supplies made by Ivins, to which about 10 other people had access. Authorities last week cited "new and sophisticated scientific tools" that helped advance the investigation.

Look, Here's the Thing!: We like to apply something we call the So Long, Mom! Test in these circumstances. That is, given this explanation with your dear gray-haired momma, mutatis mutandis, in the role of actual suspect, would you pick up the phone and promise her you'll see her every visiting day?

Similarly, CBS News reported last night that Ivins lived near the shop where the envelopes were purchased (the rest of the Fort Detrick staff commuted from Maine, evidently), and had "an obsession with Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority" (which, full disclosure, is the Hellenistic attachment favored by my own Poor Wife) which, perhaps suspicious enough in itself, becomes doubly compelling when one learns a chapter of that organization may be found in Princeton, New Jersey, where some of the anthrax bombs were mailed! We've got the goods on you, Rico! Don't do anything stupid!

The nature of this obsession has not been explained, though it is said to have gone back to Ivins' college days in Cincinnati, a city which accepts the same denomination of stamps! Someone really needs to begin explaining how this guy came to be heading The Nonexistent US Bioweapons Program, or, alternately, why he wasn't tapped as Paul Bremer's assistant.

"Dry anthrax is much harder to work with," said one scientist familiar with Ivins's lab. A lyopholizer would fit inside the ventilated "biosafety cabinet" at the lab and could have been used without drawing notice, the scientist said. The machine could have processed a few small batches of anthrax liquid in less than a day, he said.

Look, Here's the Thing!: If he had the thing to work on a project, wouldn't the other people involved in the project have noticed that it was nowhere to be seen? Okay, maybe nobody wanted to rat.  The Empiricists' Code.  Maybe they just figured it was another one of Crazy Bruce's sorority-obsessed pranks.  It's the weekend.  Dr. Ivins must be headed up to Princeton with another thermos of Ames Strain Cosmos again!  Then again, maybe you could do the same thing on a hot plate.

Other biodefense experts noted that the drying step could have been carried out with equipment no more complicated than a kitchen oven. "It is the simplest . . . but it is the least reproducible," said Sergei Popov, a former Soviet bioweapons scientist who now specializes in biodefense at George Mason University. "If you go too fast you get 'sand,' " he said, referring to the coarser anthrax powder used in the first attacks, in September 2001.

Okey dokey, now that we understand the evidence may point to the use of an ad-hoc, easily obtainable mechanism, the freeze-dryer with Ivins' prints really looms large as the Key to the Whole Fucking Mystery.

The Army issued final rules last week that would cover workers who act in an aggressive or threatening manner. Those employees would be denied access to toxic or lethal biological agents under the revised regulations. Other potentially disqualifying personality traits include "arrogance, inflexibility, suspiciousness, hostility . . . and extreme moods or mood swings," according to the document.

Now if we can just figure out a way to have that disqualify you from being in a position to order its use.

Breaking News...Convict Still Sought...Authorities Considering Using Bigger Drum...More At 11:00...

Mr. Greenscreens, mostly by proxy:

TPM Reader RY keeps us posted ...

Disquieting Rasmussen numbers this morning--McCain's crying racism worked. 53% of Americans, including the same % of whites and half of all Democrats, thing that Obama's "dollar bill" remark was "racist." Only 22% think the Paris Hilton ad was racist--most of those being black people, of course (only 18% of white people took this view).

REALLY, now:  get some exercise, expose your skin to some sunlight, eat some green, leafy things. Take a few deep cleansing breaths. Busy your hands with something other than a keyboard. Take a few minutes and get your fucking story straight.

Back in the snows of New Hampshire, before he was buried by that first white avalanche, Barack Obama was leading an army of people who'd previously been turned off by politics, who were unfettered by participation in, or even a workable knowledge of, our Current Partisan Morass, and were boldly post-racial, unlike the wheezing, demented invalids of the old Democratic party, the one that had fought real racism tooth and nail and heroic non-violence and shotgun ambush, and won. Seven months later a majority of white Americans is parading around in hoods and bedsheets.

Running into this stuff for the umpteenth time I was reminded of the bit in Annie Hall, where Woody doesn't want Diane Keaton to smoke pot before sex because then he won't know if the laughs are genuine. How many times do you have to trot this stuff out for an easily entertained audience that's already convinced? (For that matter, how many times do you get to ignore whatever it is your candidate says, since Senator Obama had already said McCain's reply was not racist, but cynical?) This Racist! Racist! routine is neither smart, nor helpful, nor good politics. It may have seriously backfired against Hillary Clinton (down and out in New Hampshire, still fighting in Guam, thanks to the sudden appearance of the old-style racist Democrat, part of the still-kicking throngs who'd cast their first votes for Wilson, apparently), and it has become a constant stream of hot urea a full month before Labor Day.

Let's look, since I suppose we must, at that Rasmussen Poll. First off, it's stupid, if I'm not repeating myself. Second, it simply asks whether comments were "racist", without providing any definition. We are going to go waaaay out on a limb here and suggest that McCain supporters, and Republicans in general, have a strong, one might even say pathological, need to play the reverse racist, How Come There's No White History Month? minstrel routine at every public opportunity, as the Republican record on race is a source of Never-Ending Shame, and crypto-racism a source of Highly Reliable Votes. They went 2/3 for the "Obama comments were racist" line. We might bear in mind that these are self-described Republicans, and that of the people who respond affirmatively to the statement, "People never lie to pollsters and can't ever figure out what answers are preferable", 98% turn out to be "Someone who wants to make political hay out of the results". The remaining two percent were Employees of the Polling Firm.  And they all need to spend a month going door to door, demanding that the 90% of Americans who believe in God pony up for past-due collection Sundays.

So, let's say that the poll, which simply by being conducted manufactures the issue in some minds, has a marked suggestion that some large portion of the country does not share the definition of racism favored by some TPM correspondent with a hyperventilation problem, or else choses to toss the dart in some other direction. Perhaps this is news to you. If so, let me add my best wishes now that you've emerged from that decade-long coma.

I know, I know, these people are not running the Obama campaign, and Thank God for small favors, it's poorly enough run as it is. My one, self-described benign suggestion is that the continually-shifting "Progressive" rationale for the total embrace of a Centrist Democrat has, to this point, been getting shot down like the Iraqi air force, and maybe it's time to park it and try listening for once. And I don't mean like this:

The good news this morning? God Bless David Gergen! Really--he was on This Week and said (check the video or transcript for exact wording), "When McCain's camp calls Obama "The Messiah" and "The One", he's really calling him "upitty." I'm from the South, and we understand what that means. That's code." Jake Tapper looked like he had been pole axed. Donna Brazille knew what he was talking about, of course. But GS, George Will, and Tapper had to be bluntly told the the way the world works by Mr. Blandly Bi-partisan....


Here's the video:

Y'know, Mr. Blandly Bi-partisan (an odd epithet from an Obama supporter) worked for Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush I, and I'll be damned if I can recall a single instance of him denouncing, As A Native of the South, crypto-racist buzzwords back in their heyday, when they were flying like champagne corks at a Lee Atwater soirée. It's possible I was cowering in the basement at the time, but I'm still somewhat disinclined to give him credit for saying so now that his paychecks come from somebody else.   The idea that Republicans painting a Democrat as an "outsider...The Other" suddenly has racial overtones owes an apology to Joe McCarthy. And that really goes double if you can't bring it up without claiming he ran the fucking table, "pole-axing" Jake Tapper along the way, when he obviously did neither, and maybe it's just best to avoid posting the clip.  

It's a long way to November; you've been hearing this since January, but not listening. Now, the Celebrity thing is working--it doesn't matter whether you like it--and the "That's another word for Uppity" thing is not. And it doesn't matter whether you like it. The idea that McCain--like Hillary Clinton before him--should just stop campaigning and concede is infantile, and even if it worked to whatever extent in Democratic primaries, it's not going to work in the general. Americans take their decision in a Presidential election seriously. Not seriously enough to actually vote, generally speaking, and not seriously enough to actually inform themselves of the issues, but seriously enough to question where their vote, if any, should go. Like it or not the election is shaping up as a referendum on Barack Obama; like it or no he's being perceived as an attractive speechifier who's light on resumé and long on malleability. He needs to come out and articulate positive reasons for voters to support him, and to quit reacting to every piece of news and every magazine cover that comes down the pike. Nobody gives a fuck about that Dollar Bill shit except terminal insider wannabees; nobody fucking watches This Week, in warm weather, and nobody gives a fuck who David Gergen is or what he thinks of Charlton Heston, and the next person Mr. Blandishment "pole-axes" with one of his arguments will have the honor of being the first.  U.S. Fucking News and World Report only exists because high school debate teams use it in place of research.  Fortunately, there's a long way to November, and there's no one in American politics right now better able than Senator Obama to step up and make a case.  Now'd be a great time to start.  To this point he has stepped into the role of Celebrity, and he's left his chin open.  It's well past time that the campaign was turned upside down and the people who've been running him like it's 2005 and he's hoping to be somebody's Veep choice fell out. The hard appraisal's gonna come; if the candidate, and the campaign, and, to a small degree, his internet minions--too late there for any real calls for action--don't demand it, it'll be done by the toothless inbreds of Flyover America, so recently and miraculously risen from the Critical List.

The Blackwater T-Shirt Is A Nice Touch, Though

Feds Raid Culver City Medical Marihuana Dispensary

Like I always say, never sell to a man with a soul patch and an Uzi belted to his leg.  Unless you're selling Rush tickets.

UPDATE: 

rageahol said...
thats not an uzi, thats a plain ol standard issue glock, old guy.

Riley replies:

1) I actually considered putting a disclaimer up there to begin with, but I decided to let it go. 2) Generally speaking, "Uzi" is funny; "Glock" is not. 3) Riley has little if any use for gun culture, but knows enough about weapons not to have blown his fucking hand off. 4) Correctly identifying the weapon in question would have made him sound at least minimally knowledgeable, a condition to be avoided on several counts.  5) His eyesight has always been bad, but it's not that bad, yet. 6) The joke, such as it is, rests (or wobbles) on the three points of what a carnival pitchman might call his tripes:  a) that it is something I always say, making "Uzi" the appropriate period reference, and "Glock" an anachronism; b) that that great honking velcro holster contraption makes the man look like he strapped on a fucking howitzer in order to do battle with some aging hippies.  With glaucoma, no less; and c) the always risible dichotomy between the hipster accoutrements of the undercover cop and the ultimate display of the true cop mentality, wherein the frisson of the suggestion that one would attempt to make a "Buy", as they say on the street, of a little harmless weed while displaying a shoulder-launched anti-tank weapon on one's hip plays against the real-life frisson that, at least in retrospect, the soul patch is no less of a giveaway.  7) Similarly, I might have ignored the weapon altogether and said something like, "It proves the old adage, 'Never sell weed to that guy from Extreme who fronted Van Halen for six weeks", but, really, it's probably wisest at my age that I avoid cultural references altogether.  Rush was a leap.

SECOND THOUGHT:  If anyone wants to put up the money, I'll bet "DEA Evidence" boxes would be a big Xmas item in certain markets.

Another Astonishing Success Story For The FBI, Eh, Ms Viera?

AP: Anthrax Scientist Commits Suicide

WE'RE loath to do anything that might tarnish this blog's reputation for cool, dispassionate analysis of Today's Issues, but th' fuck if this case hasn't stunk from the start; th' fuck if the administration, The Washington Post, and the Judith Miller-owned New York Times weren't flogging the It's Entirely Possible That Saddam Hussein Did It! routine long after they or anyone else who'd paid attention worthy of the term "scant" could have believed it; and Bruce E. Ivins, lately deceased, was apparently running around the very "defense" labs we had more or less determined were the source of the stuff, able to operate his own unauthorized part-time evidence cleaning service as a sideline.

Don't get me wrong; the fact that Ivins was a suspect, the fact that he's said to have known that criminal charges were about to be filed against him, and the fact that he topped himself, supposedly as a result, do not make him guilty. They do not close the case. And they sure don't answer any gnawing questions about the investigation. By the same token, the fact that once again the Feds can't solve the highest of high-profile cases without stepping on their collective dick (Richard Jewell, anyone?), and they can't seem to suss the motive of murderous right-wing cranks (Eric Rudolph, anyone?), doesn't mean the case would have been solved easily otherwise, or that it was purposely sidetracked.

But then leave us recall that at the time the event was played as an extension of 9/11 by other means. And while 9/11 provided the cover for ill-conceived and criminally executed invasions, still ongoing, plus the recently-butressed repeal of the Fourth Amendment by voice vote and cloakroom deal, our yapping news spaniels just sorta lost interest in the case right around the time it became a dead-solid lock that the source of the anthrax was domestic (and, more than this, domestic government labs which we had insisted to that point did not exist anymore).

There were a finite number of reasonable suspects. They were people with security clearances, meaning they were subject to reexamination or removal. It's one thing to elude detection for longer than we might hope for in such circumstances; it's another to have been hoovering (sorry) up evidence right under the investigation's snout, especially in a case which, at least for public consumption, was part of the New Everlasting War On Terra.

Again, we no more trust news accounts than we do wingnut-tinged demonstrations of middle-aged estrus over the Fed's incredible accomplishments, and we'd never presume to question the inner workings of an investigation even if we did. But there's a minor throbbing in both temples this morning, one which seems to be suggesting that "murderous, terror-dealing unbalanced right-wing extremist sociopath with a security clearance" perhaps does not narrow down the master list quite as much as we'd like.