Excrement Remains Buoyant

Tunku Varadarajan, "In Praise of Peggy Noonan." October 19

Bill Kristol, "Here the People Rule". October 20

After an exhaustive Google search (well, I'm an impatient man), I have yet to determine the drunk who called Jimmy Stewart a drunk.
Any hints?

map106, in comments

OKAY, here's where I think I slipped the rails: this Goldberg floater from last Wednesday, which began with the contention--is there any need to mention, with Goldberg, that the utterly indefensible was stated as if it were a commonplace observation about today's barometric reading?--that in 1964 Barry Goldwater was demonized, and unfairly, to boot, as a sower of bigotry and hatred, and which somehow managed, in the following paragraphs, to make that look like one of Jonah's sounder and more sober historical judgments. I went that very evening across and down the dark and dangerous avenues of enforced American diversity--it's her drivers I'm afraid of--looking for William Manchester's Truman-damning The Glory and the Dream. Four bookstore's worth, and, Readers, the Moon was at full! Then I hit two more and the local library branch in the light of the following day, still with no success, before the requirement of driving downtown to the main branch slapped me back into sensibility. I was doing this to try to prove--just to myself, in all likelihood--that Goldberg was embellishing some wingnut half-truth he'd learned at his mother's knee, something which would, reportedly, have required him to be supine at the time, and required her to talk with her mouth full. Like I imagined this was the long-sought final nail in his coffin or something.

And, y'know, I don't give a shit about whether Truman called Dewey a Nazi, or what Goldberg might imagine that has to do with today's Democrats, especially considering that the GOP has been trying to appropriate The Man From Missouri for years, based, as far as I can tell, on the fact that his popular biography is now sufficiently divorced from Reality that he's an honorary Republican.  I just flew off the tracks.  I thought it was remarkable that Goldberg had the inside poop on the 1948 election when he knew nothing about '64.  Dewey/Truman was before my day, but I began my formal schooling just twelve years later, in the heat of the Nixon/Kennedy race, and I grew up in a reliably Republican state (as you may have heard lately).  And yet all anybody ever told me about Truman's last campaign, besides the Trib photo, was how Ol' Give 'Em Hell whistlestopped his way across the country blaming Congress.  If he'd'a been goose-stepping and Nazi-saluting across the Plains, holding his index finger under his nose while doing his Chaplin impression, I suspect somebody would have mentioned it to me a little sooner.  

Anyway, despite what you might have heard from that Eliot character, it's Autumn which is the toughest season, at least on the cranky geezer who used to get by on looks alone. Tempus fucking  fugit, pal, and ask Bill Kristol to translate for you next time you're knockin' back some brews. There's something about the short'ning of the days, the unexpected slant of the early morning light, the clouds of one's own breath, which remind the aging warrior he'd better get rid of his porn stash before that upcoming series of strokes.

So, map, I wasn't laboring to be obscure; this time, anyway, I'd had obscurity thrust upon me, albeit with my cooperation, and what I said, or think I said, or tried to say, is that were Colin Powell famous for miming gunplay on the Silver Screen his reputation would now rest on his having called Jimmy Stewart an ugly expletive in front of a nation of Oscar-viewers, just as the real-life Powell, whose fame once rested on a combination of fictional accomplishments and the expert camouflaging of his real ones, cannot but be known today as the guy who publicly soiled himself, his career, and his country in furtherance of a foolish and wasteful mission directed by a pack of demented weasels. And then, in the grand tradition of sell-outs, fuck-ups, and captured high-level Luftwafe staff everywhere, he insisted the whole thing was someone else's fault. For which he was celebrated, as he continues to be, by the Liberals and Progressives at The Huffington Post.

We're old, and resigned; all we meant was, mutatis mutandis, you don't see Gary Busey or Jan-Michael Vincent discussing this year's Best Foreign Film nominations with Charlie Rose. To my knowledge, which is anecdotal at best--I gave up on the Oscars when Oliver! won Best Picture--no one ever called Jimmy Stewart a c*nt from the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It was a fictional extrapolation for the purposes of making a point while being offensive. Just like Powell's UN speech.

While we're at it, someone ask 'em at HuffPo how Colin Powell is anything but Sarah Palin with a better speaking voice and 1/3 less bloodlust? Powell's attractiveness to the Right has always been as a sharpened stick to apply to the Librul Eye: the My Lai whitewasher and one-half of the diversity behind the Most Diverse Cabinet in History. Before the hullabaloo over Powell's endorsement--and Obama's deep appreciation for the "honor"--I had frankly been living with a hard bolus in the vicinity of my vitals, throbbing at me periodically that Disastrous Reality was leading Truth to make a comeback. This was not the sour digestion of the bitter old blogger who'd find himself without material in that event, but the street smarts of the experienced junky who knows America could never handle going Cold Turkey like that.

Perhaps you see my Problem; more likely you're living it, too, if without the violent mood swings. A massive Obama victory will prevent a McCain administration and send Palin back to America's Siberia, and it will, certainly not silence the Cornerites and the Red Staters, but perhaps induce some secret but undeniable prodigy of cancer in their collective bowel; and this is all to the good. But a narrow Obama victory would do the same thing, as well as tempering the glee of that species of HuffPundit who imagines the collapse of Movement "Conservatism" as the inevitable result of its collision with his own superior intellect, and whose dedication to the principles of Liberal Modernism incline him to prefer his pockets be picked and dentures swiped by Democratic politicians. Then, as if this weren't vertiginous enough for one electoral cycle, one comes upon the following sentences:

Peggy--and I trust she'll permit me to address her in this way, as I've known her for many years--is writing the prose of her life. She will be the first to admit that she erred occasionally in judgment in the early years of the Bush administration--but so did too many of us, as we gave an undeserving president (and administration) too many benefits of too many doubts. Now, however, she is writing with such transparent conscience that I believe that she captures, in her column, the American condition and the American voice.

This, by the way, is in praise of Friday's demi-denunciation of Sarah Palin, the same Sarah Palin she accidentally poor-mouthed over an open mike and then ran to retract clarify her feelings--largely her embarrassment at having said "bullshit" over the air--in a column which appeared the next day, or a full forty-eight hours ahead of schedule.  Then, as well as later, she allowed as how Councilwoman Palin had a certain je ne sais quois  that connected with the sort of people who don't know what that means, before deciding, last week, that maybe Palin was enough of an embarrassment to her party that it was safe to poor-mouth her in public this time.  That is, the woman who writes "the best op-ed column in America" not only takes six-weeks to finally decide that Sarah Palin's lip gloss is, indeed, all that separates her from mindless inbred mammalian violence, but it takes several changes of water in the meantime to get the stain out. And one has barely staunched the flow of blood from hitting the corner of the filing cabinet when he fell--Tunku Varadarajan, Oxon. is Clinical Professor of Business at NYU; we're afraid to ask what makes him Clinical--when Dr. William Kristol, Hahvahd, Ph.D., takes some of the 800-plus words America's Newspaper of Record grants him on a weekly basis, to spit out whatever it was he had to gargle after reading the same Noonanisms:

Now, the Pew poll I cited earlier also showed Barack Obama holding a 50 percent to 40 percent lead over John McCain in the race for the White House. You might think this data point poses a challenge to my encomium to the good sense of the American people.

It does. But it’s hard to blame the public for preferring Obama at this stage — given the understandable desire to kick the Republicans out of the White House, and given the failure of the McCain campaign to make its case effectively. And some number of the public may change their minds in the final two weeks of the campaign, and may decide McCain-Palin offers a better kind of change — perhaps enough to give McCain-Palin a victory.

William Kristol, born with a complete silver service for sixteen in his mouth--which evidence suggests resulted in hypoxia at that critical time--bravely stands shoulder to shoulder with The Little Guy, now that it seems clear that "Main Street" isn't rushing the gates and demanding atonement in blood, and specifically his, although he's keeping his Horace handy for when the whole thing blows over. As I said, America's in no condition to run into the Light, or even walk there without assistance. But there's no sense delaying having these ugly tumors excised and analyzed.

Shit Still Floats

Nothing survives being thought of.


--Oscar Wilde

WHO Asked Ya? 1) Colin Powell. Okay, so this is easy; despite personal responsibility for sinking his country's military, tossing, in the process, several trillions of its then-valued currency into a bottomless pit, and lying it into a war--which if nothing else (and there was plenty else) violated the principles of the Doctrine which bore his name--all because his supposed sense of "loyalty" and "duty" involved making excuses for George W. Bush and Donald F. Rumsfeld, and then, after it predictably turned to shit, trying to blame everyone else, the fact remains that a) he's booked on the Sundays, and b) there's been actual space in actual newspapers devoted to his impending possible endorsement of Barack Obama, as though there's anything he could say now which might influence a sentient being.  In a just world the man would be speaking to us via satellite from a country with no extradition treaty with the US, or the civilized world. Or not at all. 2) Chris Buckley. Who can possibly care? Who is it who's supposed to care about the goings on at The National Review who doesn't already read The National Review? Who familiar with that sorry vegetable cart of over-ripe juveniles can even propose a suitable scale for measuring the wits of its nits? Who even knew, or cared, that he wrote for the thing? Well, the last brave Bush stenographer from the once-bustling pool at the Times, for one, and the inexplicably gainfully employed Kathleen Parker, for the other. With any luck, that's it.

In either case, attention is paid here to someone merely for being publicly identified as a Republican; were their "fame" the result of genial afternoon chat-show hosting or the ability to lip-sync and pelvis-thrust, they would be readily acknowledged as, respectively, a) the washed-up former C-lister most famous for getting drunk at the 1978 Oscars and calling Jimmy Stewart "a fucking cunt" on air, and b) Nancy Sinatra. And this is treated as news, not because endorsing Obama, or rejecting John McCain, is remarkable, but because Republicans aren't supposed to do that sort of thing. This, in turn, the reader is supposed to accept as a commonplace, as something he was supposed to have learned in kindergarten, as it were, and move on to the juicy details. As though the hum of Republicanism's dynamo was so powerful one could never imagine The Enlightened separating themselves from it.  As though, in a political season and climate screaming recognition of Republicanism as a failed, duplicitous, and, baldly criminal enterprise whose sorry stock of rabble-rousing catchphrases is now depleted, it could still be treated as such outside a psychiatric ward.  

This is the depth of our problem. There is, apparently, nothing Republicanism can do which would cause it to be publicly acknowledged in polite, mass-market society, as the scabrous den of thieves, pickpockets, cauponizers, and molesters of young boys it plainly is. The public trust has been sold for a few shekels, and not as an isolated incident, but repeatedly, and as an integral part of the operation directly traceable to its very highest levels (and hell, for that matter, not even hidden). The foundations of the republic, let alone its laws, its reputation, and its recourse to the grammar of ethical behavior, have been treated as wisps of smoke. The "news" should not be staring, slack-jawed and toothless, at the spectacle of a shelf-brand Republican coming to the only available solution which even approaches sanity; the news should be that there still exist, like pre-contact Stone Age tribesmen, or deep-sea creatures thought long extinct, people who willingly identify themselves as Republican, and who profess shock that one of their number has decided to crawl out of the wreckage and seek help.

Which brings us back to Ms Parker, whose employment by the Post of Washington we cannot begin to fathom without intimations of clandestine Polaroids stashed in a safe-deposit box or lawyer's safe. Just as millions of Americans who cannot be bothered to have their personal biases tested by harsh realities, or who choose despite all contrary evidence to imagine unchecked capitalism as a Panglossian Pax Romana have recently learned the extent to which expertise is pretended at the highest levels, so too do we have to wonder, now, that there is someone at one of the ranking newspapers in the country whose job is to increase, or at least consider, paid circulation, who nevertheless grants prime space to a woman whose single idea is a wrong one, and that one poorly expressed. It seems plainly obvious to us that the world cannot possibly care about Kathleen Parker's take on some internecine squabbling at a charity-operation Royalist magazine any more than it cares what she breakfasted on, or in which house. Opinions vary; we'd be happy to accept this as news if the Post felt that revelations of the sort of blind hatred, racism, and clinically-diagnostic psychopathology that spews from the place on a daily basis was also of interest to the general reader.

Oh, You Still Here?

(BEFORE I forget, the Uverse DVR capsule description of Monday night's Daily Show said the guest was "columnist and former S.E.C. chairman Amity Shlaes."  And they say you can't teach a computer to write jokes!)

I tuned in last night just in time to see John McCain kick Barack Obama's ass. Something about how he "didn't care about a washed-up terrorist" but the connection "needed to be explained". Which, seeing as how the "connection" had already been explained about a thousand times, and seeing as how he was the one actually bringing the washed-up terrorist to the festivities, at least had the reassuring effect of demonstrating that Senator McCain has perfectly adapted to life on the other side of the Looking Glass.

Then I opened up the Usual Suspects this morning to find WaPo and Slate discussing whether McCain's "aggressive" and "hard-hitting" performance had been enough to turn his campaign around.

Please. The fact that the question was generally answered in the negative is merely evidence that these people are not so far gone as to require immediate transfer to a hospice. The fact that the question is being asked at all is the measure of how deep our real problems run.

And no, I'm not talking about anybody being in the tank for McCain; I'm not even talking, for now, about the fact that after eight years of The Emperor's Ever-Unchanging Wardrobe we can't call out a sorry, doddering pander or his aggressively ignorant running mate.

Instead, look at the script: 1) Last Showdown; 2) McCain hits Obama aggressively; 3) but Will It Be Enough?

To which we'd like to point out 1) the campaign's been going on for two years now. That's half a President's term of office. That's half a fucking ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It's, what? three or four new iPhones. We can't possibly expect people in this country to pay attention to anything that long, and since we can't, maybe it's time to eliminate Presidential "debates" altogether, and with it the notion that our elections ought to be decided in the same fashion--and by the same people--who judge Super Bowl commercials around the water cooler the following morning. If someone out there was actually waiting for the Third and Final Showdown to decide this race--of all fucking races--for him, he doesn't need encouragement from the Fourth Estate; he needs to have his voting privilege revoked. 2) McCain "hit" Obama on what, exactly? On Bill Fucking Ayers? On abortion? Forget the fact that he looked like your half-informed uncle after four beers doing so. In what alternative universe are these even presidential issues, and in it, as in this one, aren't they six months past their expiration date, or else a hopeless, and now impotent, reminder of the rabble-rousing that brought us Republican disaster after Republican disaster? John McCain's been in the Congress for twenty-five of the thirty-five years of single-issue reproductive fascism, and what's he ever done about it? Other than change his stance so he could pander to the Brownshirts whose "aggression" he now gives voice to? 3) Th' fuck is will it be enough? supposed to be? What sort of self-respecting journalist (sorry, I couldn't resist) would talk like that if he thought the mikes were off? McCain's toast. He's been toast for weeks, and Bad Economic News at the Worst Time is just the latest and most convenient excuse. Consider the ease with which our Free Press was convinced that Sarah Palin represented some entity known as The Real America. Compare with what The Real America tells pollsters it thinks about her qualifications for the job.

And consider, Good Reader, if you will, that the present autumnal coloration of our slow-motion national disaster (aka the "Reagan Revolution") began when idiotic Nader supporters declared that the impending doom which would be ushered in by placing in the Oval Office the only man in history to have actually induced Fetal Alcohol Syndrome in himself was what was required to make America sit up and take notice. Of course these people don't know the Real America any better than The Press or Councilwoman Palin do. The Hyperreal America, on the other hand--the one they do know, the one they frequently are--has responded to the Second Massive Financial Swindling of the Real America in a Generation by looking for new and more effective ways to keep the game afloat, and the mark's eye on the wrong hand.

Here's Slate's own Emily Yoffe, with apologies in advance for bottom trawling:

McCain scored some shots tonight. He made a strong point about Obama's wanting to "spread the wealth around" from Joe the Plumber, and I was surprised Obama didn't seem prepared for that. (And Rosa and Juliet, Joe said the business "makes" about $250,000 a year—we don't know if that's gross or net income, so we have no idea what his personal income would be. But in any case, I'm with Rachael in believing Joe's entitled keep most of it.) McCain was much better on the need to support the free-trade agreement with Colombia, which has been a strong U.S. ally. Obama's answer was weak and weasely. But none of this really makes any difference, because when you watch McCain for an extended period, there is something off about him. His angry facial tics, his strange shorthand, inside-Washington way of talking. Half the time, unless you already knew what he was talking about, you'd have no idea what he was talking about. There's a guy at my gym who's always muttering curses under his breath as he does his circuit, and I think of him as "Seething Man." McCain was Seething Man tonight, and Obama was "Reassuring Man," and people want reassurance now more than ever.

WHICH brings me back to yesterday, when, following Scott,  I started in on Jonah Goldberg's latest pathetic cry for help, not that it hadn't been done already, WO'C style.  The dedicated social archaeologist can always find another layer of inhabitation in Jonah's mind, though typically none yields anything but coprolites. There was studded among this piece , however, several chards of the cracked pottery from my particular area of interest, the Young Jonah Gets Drilled in U.S. History With Birch Society Flash Cards by his Sleezy Dam era, and I was working somewhat distractedly on it (sample:

DPL, 2008: "...the attempt to paint Goldwater as a hate-monger was idiotic and dishonorable."


BMG, 1964: "Every wife and mother, yes, every woman and girl, knows what I mean, knows what I'm talking about."

when I happened to open the WaPo for some reason, and found "How Palin Can Save The Mainstream Media" by Kathleen F. Parker, who as recently as, I think, right then was on Colbert running her "I'm an email bomb victim because I dared criticize Sarah Palin" routine into its second week. My brain simply shut down at that point as a self-preservation response.

Why, oh why, are these people given prime pieces of our public forum? We went through the bullshit Librul Media business in the Nixon administration--the fact that it was attached to the Nixon administration being enough reason for a society whose citizenry believes, in the main, that it is either one lucky two-digit number away from winning the wealth of Croesus, or about to be swept into the sky, naked, to some sort of Valhalla for people who love Jesus and keep their lawns nice, to have thereafter avoided it like the Plague--culminating in the "balance" which gave us George Eff Will commenting of Reagan's debate "victories" without revealing his, George Eff Will's, campaign position as a paid co-felon. "Conservative" commentators went from "outsiders" to insiders without an appreciable change in their affirmative action status, while people like Farmer Sam Donaldson and Texas Dan Rather were supposed to be speaking for the opposition. We are now exiting a generation-long cycle during which these "outsiders" not only became the "insiders", but did their goddamedest to defend remaining there by any sleezy, corrupt, anti-democratic, and criminal means at their disposal, and a few invented just for the purpose. In the meantime, what should not have come as a surprise to anyone paying even a slightly honest bit of attention, the whole thing turned to shit and left that Real America they used to claim to speak for holding the flaming bag. Why are they still here? Of what possible use are the scraping sounds produced as Kathleen Parker rearranges the two pieces of furniture that constitute her mental décor? And we're not even gonna bothering asking about Jonah. I'm not talking about stifling debate; it's just that for the people there now a stretch in Comment Jail is too lenient. And since they've already proven that the "conservative" position can be "articulated" by anyone you pick up off the street, assuming sufficient cupidity, let's do that.

The Reversal Of Relative Political Fortunes Does Not Suddenly Make You The Reality-Based Party

David Brooks, "Big Government Ahead". October 13

"KRUGMAN Wins Nobel Prize" was the headline, though not in the Times, which, online at least, was remarkably subdued about it. Maybe they don't like blowing their own horn, or maybe they're rightfully embarrassed that they let right-wing nitwits and the world's worst-ever ombudsman claw at him. Or maybe they just don't like him, I dunno. The dedicated sidewalk psychoanalyst has a lifetime of enjoyment ahead of him with the wreck of the USS Glorious Ronald Wilson Reagan Revolution, just as accident investigators are gonna find all sorts of curiosities among the flotsam. These people brought you Judith Miller, in case you've forgotten (and it's a measure of how utterly beyond the previous Worst Administration in History the Bush Crime Gang has gone when you consider that it's entirely understandable if you have forgotten). How many times, fer instance, is it necessary to read Gail Collins before you figure out she'd like to be a public intellectual like Bill Kristol, or a consummate prose stylist like Maureen Dowd? Left Blogtopia erupted over Kristol's Op-Ed sinecure, but, y'know, it's Krugman who got the Super Glue on the Keyboard treatment, not Kristol, the same way it's MoveOn that got publicly hammered by the "Democratic" Congress. Middle-aged fucking liberals in this country have been suffering from Reagan/Stockholm Syndrome for their entire adult lives; they can't be trusted.

Anyway, I know nothing about Economics, or rather, I know this: I saw one of its priests on the teevee this weekend explaining that it was called The Dismal Science because it has to look at unpleasant facts. Really. I think the segment ended before anyone could ask why it felt obligated to create some if the natural rate fell below a certain level. Anyhow, when I first saw that Krugman won the Nobel I looked up Milton Friedman, the father of Freedom. His was awarded in 1976, to which I could only reply that someone needs to explain to those Swedish refs that makeup calls are supposed to come during the same game, or at minimum, the same century.

(Speaking of the Gray Lady's Libs, we didn't have the energy yesterday to tackle Frank Rich's Sunday piece, which is another reason we thank our Explicitly Metaphorical Supreme Being there's Bob Somerby, who did it better and quicker than we'd have ever done. Yes, the McCain campaign is the one that's beyond the pale, excepting that Republicans destroyed the palings two generations ago. But the myth of Barack Obama as the wholly improbable African American candidate whose rise betokens a Novus Ordo Seclorum of post-racial harmony, excepting he might be assassinated--last seen gasping for breath as the Spring primary season advanced, and which Rich single-handedly tries to resuscitate--is just bollocks. And I'd have simply said it was bollocks, but Somerby digs up Rich mourning the passing of the Wholly Virtual Candidacy of Colin Powell back in 1995, and without noting the General's wholly improbable skin tone. The Gray Lady's Libs backed Colin Powell! for a couple of trendy weeks, probably just to break the monotony of sliming Bill Clinton three times in a row. Did something happen between 1995 and 2007 to re-preposterize an African-American candidacy? Or was the concept de-preposterized by Powell belonging to the anti-civil rights party, thereby validating him? Or have we simply gone too long with too many people who lie for a living? )

Which would bring us to David Brooks, except that between starting this piece last night and ending it, as it's now projected, sometime before the election, I ran into Roy running into David Frum's performance on Rachel Maddow's show.  David Frum was pleading for civility in politics, which gave me something of a new perspective: now that the Ghost Dance phase has reached its nadir, now that the Real Power behind those Gloriously Revolutionary Republican majorities is on view, in all its mis-matched finery and racist necktie-party glory, prissy little third-tier functionaries like Brooks and Frum want nothing to do with it. (It would, of course, be different if the plan were working.) Packing the ol' Ghost Shirt in mothballs isn't easy, and it must be that much tougher in light of the brief glimmer of mid-summer hope, not that McCain might win, but that Obama might lose, which was followed as if on cue by the bathos that is Sarah Palin.

So whaddya do when you find out you're not actually bulletproof, when the UFOs don't pick you up and the Messiah fails to show? When even doubling down, which never failed you before, just leaves you wandering around the stage muttering to yourself? Why, cue the organist, and gimme that olde tyme religion:

Obama will try to straddle the two camps — he seems to sympathize with both sides — but the liberals will win. Over the past decade, liberals have mounted a campaign against Robert Rubin-style economic policies, and they control the Congressional power centers. Even if he’s so inclined, it’s difficult for a president to overrule the committee chairmen of his own party. It is more difficult to do that when the president is a Washington novice and the chairmen are skilled political hands. It is most difficult when the president has no record of confronting his own party elders. It’s completely impossible when the economy is in a steep recession, and an air of economic crisis pervades the nation.


What we’re going to see, in short, is the Gingrich revolution in reverse and on steroids. There will be a big increase in spending and deficits. In normal times, moderates could have restrained the zeal on the left. In an economic crisis, not a chance. The over-reach is coming. The backlash is next.

I've been trying to come up with a name for this next phase, the one where "conservative" punditasters like Brooks get to pretend that nothing they've said for the past decade, from "Restoring Honor and Decency to the White House", through "Get Over It", "Irrational Bush Hatred", and "The Surge Is Working", right up to "Sarah Palin: Voice of the Working Stiff" ever crossed their lips. I'm reminded of the big launch party for Irrational Bush Hatred, when the likes of Rich Lowry and Chuck Krauthammer allowed as how, okay, maybe some people didn't care for Bill Clinton much, either, but it sure wasn't them. I'm reminded--every time I open one of his pieces--how Brooks said he needed to rethink Iraq, a year after it turned to shit, then never mentioned the process again until six or eight months later, when he was simply confirmed as Sadder But Wiser. (His acceptance of the Workingness of The Surge was instantaneous by comparison. Go figure, huh.) Maybe these guys should see Frank Rich for some tips.  David Brooks, restaurant critic, has a nice ring to it, I think.  

Breaking...Riley Finally Endorses Candidate!

Representative John Robert Lewis, Democrat of Georgia.

LET'S see if we can get one thing straight, even if it doesn't make a hair's difference in the long run: if we want to return decency to our campaigns, our debates, our daily lives, for that matter, we have to eliminate public stupidity. Not the sort of stupidity that fumbles to describe a half-understood public inanity like Barack Obama's dedication to the Qur'an before coming up with "He's a...a.....a Arab!" This sort of shit will be with us always, and I don't blame John McCain for leading a pack of hate-filled racist xenophobes. I blame him for being a Republican. The rest of it's just part of the package.

No, what I'm talking about isn't, so far as is known, directly traceable to one's mother's pre-natal diet of Lucky Strike Greens, Moon Pies, and Old Overholt, or one's own preference for mercury-laden fish slow-simmered in a battered aluminum frying pan. What I mean is the widespread demonstration that the nation's politicians, its scribes and headline fashioners, and a large percentage of its well-paid campaign functionaries cannot understand simple declarative sentences. Or, quite often, produce them in response.

Consider as the middle-aged man with a reasonable respect for the conventions of English sits down in front of the teevee news to learn that John Lewis, a man he regards as one of his country's heroes, has "compared John McCain to George Wallace." His semantic sense goes into overdrive. How so? By height? By volume? By their similar indifference to professional tailoring? By the partly-congruent repugnance of their spouses? What? And who th' fuck besides John Lewis even remembers George Wallace anymore? The answer to that one is, drum roll--John McCain, who demands an apology and declares the comparison "beyond the pale".

Two things here, while our mind is working quickly: one, the simple fact that John McCain is demanding an apology suggests to us, without checking, that Lewis said no such thing, which will be proven out. And two, what's outside our pale, if anything (and we are not so naive as to believe our politics have ever been gentle) has survived three decades of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, is Cindy McCain, a part-time political historian whose full-time job is "heiress", calling the Obama campaign "the dirtiest in American history" when it's not even the dirtiest one she's participated in, not until the Obama campaign manages to top push-polling about her husband's black love child. What's beyond the pale is a dim-bulb petty criminal parading around the campaign trail denouncing Obama for "palling around with terrorists".

Or that is, those things are beyond the pale of what's supportable either factually or rhetorically, as constructed by people who still care about such things.  And I didn't hear McCain rushing to apologize for them.

Just what th' hell are we supposed to imagine is Councilwoman Palin's role, exactly, if not shit stirrer? She stirred shit at the Convention, and she's stirred shit on the trail ever since, avoiding in the process any further embarrassing demonstrations of how utterly unqualified she is to be the industry's chosen representative on the Railroad Retirement Board. And so be it; if she's what the McCain campaign needed, so fucking be it. (Readers with long memories may recall her comparing herself to a lower mammal bred to latch onto anything and refuse to let go, which let to our last little national spasm from the Gee I Don't Understand English, Let's Make It Our Official Language brigades, which objected to her not being compared to a pig.) Palin represents nothing whatsoever beyond the Ill-Informed White Protestant with a Manufactured Sense of Personal Aggrievement. John Lewis represents an incredibly brave minority which fought murderous domestic fascists with ideals for a sword and its own craniums as a shield.

Lewis has every right to compare the tone of the McCain/Palin campaign to that of Wallace and all the other inciters of White violence in the name of collecting votes. Much of Wallace was an act, if you'd like to get right down to it, like all of Palin's appeal beyond her vaunted fearlessness in rooting out corruption.  (How's that one goin', by the way?  Was it insensitive of me to use "root" as a verb?) And unlike Wallace's case, the shit the McCain campaign's been stirring had long since settled to the bottom, at least officially. John Lewis has done us yet another service. He not only has the right to call things as he sees 'em, he's paid for that right many times over, the same way McCain paid for his military service. It's time to recognize the equivalence of that service. And it's time for McCain to either brush up on his English, or else to publicly acknowledge the reality of the party he belongs to, the same way his selection of the Councilwoman from Alaska acknowledged it tacitly.

Big poopy-headed Republicans betray David Brooks and their intellectual traditions, a one-note play in 735 acts and counting

David Brooks, "The Class War Before Palin". October 9

FIRST, I was about a month past my tenth birthday when The Beatles appeared on Sullivan, and like every other kid in American I resolved that night to grow my hair and learn to play guitar. As it turned out I wasn't very good at either (the difference is that today I still have a guitar! Boom! I'm here all week!). A year later I heard "Subterranean Homesick Blues" on the radio and decided there might be something more to this stuff, plus I now needed one o' them harmonica holder deals.

And here's my point: by the time I was old enough to drive, rawk  had devolved into Grand Funk Railroad shirtless hairtossing crapola, and by the time I was old enough to drive I could call bullshit. And I wasn't particularly smart then, and I'm not particularly smart now. Just bear that in mind as we strap on our goggles and follow David Brooks through yet another speleological crawl through the difference between his fantasy life and...other parts of his fantasy life.

"Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.

Yes, in pursuit of, if not as a smokescreen for, the class and religious prejudices he'd had since age eight. Look, let's just face it: as a "movement" of "dissident intellectuals" we may charitably say this one went three-and-out. Buckley became famous for an undergraduate screed which blamed his 20th century professors for their insufficient dedication to to Bronze Age superstitions which had been thoroughly debunked, if anyone really cared, in the 19th. He then went on to write eight hundred more. Quote one from memory, please. He used his family's money to become a celebrated salonnière for out-of-work fascists, and he used High Church Latin cognates to become a low comedian. His meditations on race, e.g., have not exactly aged well, and the inheritors of that intellectual yellow rag of his are not exactly the sort of people I'd want defending my intellectual heritage.  I suppose opinions vary.  The other two are middling academics and fellow proponents of a sort of cultural-academic soixante-neuf enforcement of certain selective recollections of 3rd century A.D. Paulists, with light editing.  Would they even be remembered today if they weren't fetish objects for the American Right?

"Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.

Except when it came to voting.

"Ronald Reagan was no intellectual, but he had an earnest faith in ideas and he spent decades working through them. He was rooted in the Midwest, but he also loved Hollywood. And for a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach.

Whoa. Y'see, Dave, this is the point in these things, every time, every last motherfucking time, where Mark Farner rips off his shirt and starts playing one of those four-note riffs that's supposed to pass for a guitar solo. You're forty-seven years old. You start in with a tenuous premise at best--that the Name Check Gang of "Conservative" "Intellectualism" produced works which, as a singular achievement in the history of Western Thought, managed to both preclude all disagreement and be roundly ignored by the great majority of academics, with the exception of those actively employed in discovering newer and better reasons why Exxon Mobil, its subsidiaries, and its top executives, should not pay taxes--and, inevitably, you have to tack your old dorm-room Ronald Reagan poster onto its shaky edifice. Give it th' fuck up. I doubt you had one, but even if you did your Foghat teeshirt no longer fits. Give it th' fuck up. Reagan was an affable-appearing dope, and a hired pitchman for the racist crypto-fascist Western lands plutocrats, not the genteel racist crypto-fascists of the National Review. You got took. You made a sophomoric mistake and, like far too many others of your peer group, you were rewarded handsomely provided you refused to grow up. Grow up. This crap is in tatters. Academic parlor revenge-taking on the New Deal turned out, remarkably, not to have ushered in the Second Coming of Edmund Burke, but the Second Helping of Boss Tweed. It frankly strains credulity to accept that you didn't realize this all the time; let's not make it worse by trying to convince us you can't see it even today.

"What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

First of all, Brooks, you weren't shy about spewing this stuff yourself when you thought there was some profit in it. You were pushing the Irrational Bush Hatred line along with the rest of the shills; you slimed Gore and Kerry in their turns, not for their ideas but for their fashion mistakes; now we're supposed to believe you look on your party's anti-intellectual slide with a mixture of rue and befuddlement?

Second, and again, Ronald Reagan was not anti-liberal intellectualism. He was an anti-intellectual, and not of the bright sort. Saying "Darwinism is just a theory" is not anti-liberal; it's just stupid. Yours is the party that celebrated Reagan's celebration of polluters--other than cows and trees--before it denied global climate change. The influence of Christian fundamentalism was greater during the Reagan era than it was in the twelve years after, leading up to George W. Bush. Let's just knock off the pretense that you've been frog-boiled on this one.

"This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

C'mon, really. Is this supposed to be remarkable in the party that embraced the Real Folks, brush-clearin' cowpoke from Phillips Academy? Did you actually follow the campaign, Dave? Romney changed his political persona to such an extent that we ought to have demanded DNA testing to prove he was the same Mitt Romney who'd been governor of Massachusetts. Giuliani fudged what he could, but his "librul" record in New Yawk was so well established in the "conservative" mind that his campaign figured they couldn't get away with denying everything. You might recall that campaign lasting almost to the moment the first votes were counted. The only thing odd about McCain choosing Palin is...Sarah Palin. It's certainly right in line with the "all my previous comments are up for sale" approach he's taken since 2004.

"Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

Because, for one, nobody else has so little to work with. You know what, Brooks? I take it all back. I think somebody bet you a week's pay you wouldn't write a column saying Palin was smart and her debate performance was impressive, and you took it. Which, really, sorta encapsulates the whole "conservative" experience, now that I think about it.

Okay, I Am Willing To Admit The Flintstones Chewable Contraceptives Were Over The Top

Jessica Bennett, "The Pornification Of A Generation". October 7

IT'S the week for pull quotes to tell more of the story than probably desired, apparently:

A new book traces the migration of porn
culture from adult theaters to the
mainstream--and asks what that means for kids.

So now the first thing I sez to myself here is, Adult theatres? I'm pretty sure the last one closed around 1979, or about the time the VHS Revolution brought porn directly into America's willing bedrooms.

Then I realized I'd forgotten about Pee Wee.

The book in question is Carmine Sarracino and Kevin Scott's The Porning of America. Now, it's possible that by "theater" Newsweek meant "bookstore" or "sex shop", what in Indiana were, for a glorious two-year period, known as Museums of Adult Literature, because one of The World's Third Worst State Legislature's periodic attempts to circumvent the First Amendment involved prohibiting the display of prurient materials, but exempting museums. This must've been twenty years ago, now, but it's still, by far, my favorite piece of crackpot legislation ever enacted anywhere. Apparently the legislators actually imagined that come January 1 every porn shop would have to close its doors. I believe the first inkling they got that the results would be other than expected was when the Yellow Pages arrived that October, and all the dirty bookstores were listed as Museums.  I'm not sure you can truly appreciate how great it was to be alive on that day, and every day until the next session, when they took the law out back and shot it in the dead of night. It was like Christmas morning every dawn. It was like walking the streets of a small town which had lost a bet, and everyone was wearing clown shoes. It was like every block hosted a live America's Funniest Home Videos, with men being hit in the groin by whiffle-bat-wielding toddlers, children with inverted ice cream cones on their heads, or Afghan hounds fucking energetically on the sidewalk in front of shocked minister's wives.  Everything was brighter, and funnier, even the stupidity. Especially the stupidity. Driving past one of the actual store signs put you at risk of collapsing in a heap and rolling the car into a ditch. If only the Legislature had returned and found some obscure state law prevented them from changing the name back for a hundred years.

Anyway, the question about "theaters" was relevant, because pretty soon this sort of thing gets around to making spurious claims that let you know where its real sympathies lie, as if you hadn't already figured that out for yourself:

It's too early to know exactly how kids who grow up in this hypersexualized environment will be affected in the long term

So either the authors believe that we've reached some new critical mass of sluttiness, previously undreamt, or all the people who've grown up with porn in the house since the mass consumer acceptance of home video, which would be the majority of people over the majority of the past three decades, don't count for some reason, probably involving the fact that most of them have grown up and pass for normal, thus compromising our righteous ire.

So then I jumped over to Amazon to check out the reviews, of which there are none aside from the Professional one.   But there are several quotes that appear to be book-jacket blurbs, and one is from Dr. Annie Sprinkle, and another from Al Goldstein, which led me to believe that either Newsweek was overplaying the Child/Porn Threat Level (shocking, I know) or both my legs were being pulled at once. Amazon did inform me that the book indeed traces the history of porn, but back to the Daguerrotype, not back to the raincoat matinee. We're more than willing to concede that few, if any, Victorian-era five-year-olds played with hooker dolls. We're just not willing to concede they were therefore better off than their modern descendants.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Professor Scott relates what led him to write the book in the first place:

The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had begged him for a Bratz doll—clad in spike heels, fishnets and miniskirt, enormous puppy-dog eyes protruding from her oversized head. Her sexy look seemed a little too sexy for a preschooler, so he and his wife bought her a different doll, which she was happy with. Except that a few months later, Bratz came out with Bratz Babyz. "If Bratz had looked like Barbie hookers, these looked like baby hookers," Scott says. Again, he convinced his daughter that My Little Pony was just as cool—and for a moment, the conversation ended. Until, of course, the Bratz came out with Bratz Ponyz. And then, says Scott, an English professor at a small college in Georgia, "I realized porn culture and I were in a death match for my daughter's soul."

Okay, so I'm the first to admit that in my effort to ignore to the best of my ability every disposable piece of crap foisted on the innocent in the name of Popular Culture and Even More Popular Cash Flow I may have missed something. But Bratz? They're, like, dolls, right? And they've got their own Saturday morning informercial? And a movie? Vaguely ethnic-looking, vaguely Street (is that the real problem)? They're dolls. Would you be freaking out if she wanted a Barbie? Or is that the "other doll" you gave her to sate her preschool acquisitiveness for the nonce?

I don't mean to dismiss such concerns out of hand, but, y'know, I have two nieces fast entering dating age. Their parents have been fairly strict in their upbringing, and the whole clan comes across as fairly chaste, if not prudish. And when they were younger we'd go over there Christmas morning and just be appalled at the fucking volume of fucking plastic disposable Must-Have Junk of the Moment, though little if any of it was ever even remotely sexualized. If they'd have been costumed as miniature demireps snorting piles of sugary Kidz Blo™ it wouldn't have been much worse. We've had several generations grow up, as the saying goes, in precisely this sort of mindless consumerist utopia--is it still too early to know how they might have been effected?  Or just too unprofitable to ask?

But Scott and his coauthor say it's not too soon—or too prudish—to sound the alarm, and to look critically at the sexualized culture we're exposed to every day. The authors don't suggest banishing porn to back alleys, however. Both grew up when people were crying out for sexual liberation. And, they contend, porn certainly played a role in achieving it. But somehow between then and now, porn themes have gone from adult entertainment to prime time, seeping into nearly every aspect of popular culture. Sarracino and Scott define "porning" as the way advertising and society in general have borrowed from the ideas and characteristics central to most American pornography: sex as commodity, sexuality as overt, narrow views of women and male-female relationships, bad girls and dirty boys, domination and submission.

What's sex got to do with it, really (try substituting "patriotic" or "militaristic" in the above)? Five-year-olds shouldn't be sexualized, and nine-year-old girls shouldn't be taught that Fashionable Penis Enticer is their best, let alone only, path to career advancement.

But here's an observation, and it's not based on nothing; I'm married to an urban high school teacher, who sees hundreds of hormonal train wrecks on a daily basis, including a wholly-unacceptable level of pregnancy: sex seems to be fairly popular. I don't really see that half-fucking-measures or wishy and washy greyscale renderings have had much, if any, effect, and I do believe that forty years of people roiling these waters over and over is enough time for that behavior to have been evaluated, and found counterproductive. It's time to fish, or go work in a bait shop.  I realize that my real beef here is probably with Newsweek, not the book, but still; this defense of sexual freedom business does not impress me much (it's sort of the ultimate I Got Mine argument, innit?). If you're going to write the young century's eighty-second published meditation on Porn, you're either for the underlying Sex part, in which case you at least sound normal, or you're Ben Shapiro, in which case only people who are crazier than you buy it. (And with as tiny a market slice as that you've gotta rely on multiple corporate purchases if you ever want to write another.)  So it sounds less like bona fides and more like good marketing skills.  If you're not going to directly address the people who are creating the problem, then at least explain to the rest of us what ought to be done about it without tearing down the World's Most Popular Amusement Park Ride. If my car breaks down I have one decision to make: is it worth it to repair it? I can't decide that unless I get an estimate. This is the ground the Religious Right, and its political arm, the GOP, has occupied for forty years, and the same ground people who attack public education hurl long-range artillery from: four hundred different views of The Problem, and no one willing to propose any solution not constructed entirely of Vapor, because every such solution is draconian, wildly unpopular, and probably unconstitutional, whatever that means these days, and instead of fixing the problem it would fix the wagons of the people who make a comfortable living off it. We'll note, again, that we're pretty skeptical about the empirical method being this much of a mystery, even to Professors of English (Economists, okay). You could begin by demonstrating that Bratz was in some percentage sexualizing your preschooler, instead of wholly feeding a penchant for grubbing at whatever shiny object is dangling in front of her at the moment, which we already know has been fully developed, and under your Watch.

#1 Threat

Katharine Mieszkowski,"Bear facts about John McCain". October 7

This should make for a riveting encounter.

--Kit Seelye, on tonight's debate

Didn't you hear me say "God Bless My Mother"? "God Bless George Washington"?  What kind of a' Indian would say a fool thing like that?

--Jack Crabbe

SO it turns out that John McCain--who I'm beginning to suspect is the first Presidential candidate in the history of the Republic not to reveal his history of electroshock therapy to himself--is running around mocking a $3 million government-funded study of grizzly DNA in Montana, despite having voted for it.

And despite the fact that it actually cost $5 million.

Or that it was Republican backed.

Or that it was funded in the hope that it might remove grizzlies from the Endangered list.

I've got a lot of other things I should be doing, so thank God this week, like every other in politics, is a good time to cultivate a talent for the obvious.

Look at how much information about the vertiginous decline of the United States of America under a generation of Republican control, from "Pitiful Helpless Giant" all the way to "Pitiful Helpless Giant Who's Messed Himself", resides in that single declarative sentence: 1) Self-styled Straight Talker--just the fact that that one flew as the 21st century dawned tells you something; 2) Ridiculing a bill he himself voted for; 3) Which was funded as a way to get around what tiny steps we take to preserve what's left of the natural world; 4) Because if there's anyone who has a right to chafe under the Federal chokehold it's the rugged individualist, freedom-lovin' High Plains libertarians of Montana, a state which in 2004 paid $4,807 per capita in total Federal tax burden, while receiving a mere $8,183 per capita in return; 4a) This being a matter which has not just elicited cheers from government-hating throngs of Republicans, but which was calculated to elicit them by professional campaign operatives; 5) Those budget-conscious crowds being the same ones who continue to cheer our blank-check disaster in Iraq, Where The Looting Never Stops™; 6) And where that $5 million would pay for, roughly, fifteen minutes of our stay, now rapidly speeding toward Year Number Six; 7) Meaning that if we'd just left one day later we could have funded ninety-six grizzly studies; 8) Which might make this a good time to point out that these are people making a math-based objection despite the fact that the salient feature of the "outrage" is their objection to funding science, however cheaply or how valuable, unless it leads to more efficient ways to kill people; 9) Which, we may as well point out while we're at it, none of the people in those cheering audiences is actually off doing themselves, despite the vital link to Preserving Freedom; 10) And the anti-science business does not translate into their making do with less technology or refusing to accept as an article of faith that Science will rescue future generations from the ravages they themselves are too lazy and/or self-centered to lift a finger to do anything about, it being a mere tic of their pervasive anti-intellectualism; 11) So pervasive, in fact, that her Jes' Folks butt-ignorance of simple reality has become the major selling point for Sarah Palin; 12) Who is the running mate chosen by John McCain; 13) Who's the guy griping about $5 million for what is by all accounts a successful field study; 14) Though it isn't going to change the status of the grizzly, which only an anti-intellectual would have hoped for in the first place; 15) Which is precisely the sort of person John McCain is banking on to win him the White House, so he can govern effectively in a time of crisis; 16) An argument which flies in the face of logic, though at this point I'm almost embarrassed to bring it up; 17) And though logic shouldn't be a problem to a man who's griping about a $5 million wildlife study instead of the $700 hammers and $1000 toilet seats the military buys by the truckload; 18) Which military is, of course, supposedly his area of expertise and particular High-Focus Double Maverick Oversight Powers.

By the way, that $5 million is roughly 1% of the cost of the Nowhere Bridge Councilwoman Palin once supported, and roughly 2% of the Federal money she kept anyway. USA! USA!  And at this point I'm for building the goddam thing, provided she and the rest of her party will agree to cross it.  Once.

The Strange Case Of The Post-Coital Pup

Peter Baker, "Tom Davis Gives Up". October 5

Martin, if dirt were trumps, what hands you'd hold!

--Charles Lamb

I'M worn out; if by some malfunction you looked in on this blog six or seven times this weekend you might've seen twelve or fourteen different layouts. I'd actually settled on one Friday night, tweaked it into the wee hours to get rid of the obligatory graphic tattooing and do what I could about the awful leading and just-off-desirable line length, added some of that patented Doghouse whimsy, and fell asleep reading a book. The next morning the remaining graphic elements had disappeared, the result, it turned out, of their linked pages exceeding bandwidth limitations. Repeated attempts to host them on my own, or manage some other workaround while remaining hopeless with Blogger's CSS were in vain, and I was reduced to actually trying to learn how to do what I was doing, which was only slightly more successful. I think the problem is more the scattergun fashion in which the producers of free Blogger templates write their code, and not the fact that dirt and I were born on the same day, but I remind you that I had finished matriculating before the first personal computer hit the market, and that prior to that time I had been given the choice of spending five credit hours per semester "learning" French, or spending five credit hours "learning" FORTRAN, but getting three credits for it, and that the former classes were filled with coeds, while the latter were filled with secret Star Trek admirers, since in those days no one with the slightest concern for being taken seriously would have openly admitted it. I ask you. And I remind you that the adolescents who chose the latter course, for reasons inexplicable beyond a soul-bending fear of the opposite sex, or, likely, any sex at all, now rule the world.

I eventually found the good people at Our Blogger Templates, whose stuff seems to come, so far as I could tell, mostly Tattooing Optional, and who've written clear code that takes advantage of New Blogger's tweakisms, for which I thank them sincerely. But it's still not something you do halfway, and I'm still tweaking away as I find things, though at least now it's tol'able and I didn't have to create a new blog just to test it.

So at some point early this AM I figured the thing was at least legible, exceeding my personal standards, and tried to go to bed, but my knees didn't want to. My current reading, Charles Van Doren (yes, that one)'s  A History of Knowledge, which had been missing between late 1996 and last week, when it was discovered on my Poor Wife's office shelves, marked in several places with her post-it note placemarkers (this despite the fact that I've mentioned to her my complete bewilderment over where the thing could possibly have gotten to at least four times in the intervening years; I suppose this suggests how she's managed to stay married to me) was far too heavy, physically heavy, for my weary bones to hold up properly. So I grabbed the Times, in an effort to see if any of their columnists had come up with something to say. Still no luck there, excepting Maureen Dowd, if for "something to say" you substitute "making gurgling sounds and blowing bubbles in the manner of an infant or someone recently shot in the throat". That done I picked up the Magazine, and found Baker's piece on Representative Davis, which saved me from Lisa Belkin's musings on Sarah Palin and parenting choices.

Or maybe "saved" is too strong a word. The two-page opening spread, 70% of which is a view of Davis through his propped-up shoes (there's a good image for ya, Tom. I vaguely remember Adlai Stevenson, sir. And you sir, ain't.) carries the subhead in 96 pt. type:

He was a star
in the Republican Party.
Now, like dozens
of his G.O.P. colleagues,
he's quitting
Congress, fed up with
his party, his president and
the process.

Please don't get ahead of me; I was busy making sidebar color choices while you were snug in your beds, or someone else's. There's a big blank space above that type, and I'm all for good graphic design, but maybe someone could have worked in "quitting Congress two years after his promised Contract with America pledge to limit Congresspersons to twelve years of service." Or 'service'.

And maybe someone--I really don't expect it to be the same guy who writes the article, not in the Times Magazine, especially--could take more than a cursory glance at what Davis has been up to for the span of seven elections?

Well, for starters--almost literally--he voted for the Citizen Legislature Act, before ignoring its provisions when his own time came (he'd have been grandfathered out anyway. I know, shocking, ain't it?). Voted for the three articles of Impeachment which passed, then said that maybe Republicans had "overplayed their hand". This is the voice of moderation, folks, and a guy who's now leaving The People's House because things have grown so ugly an' partisan an' trivialized an' all. Bush tax cuts (do we need to ask?): yea; huge deficits and impending fiscal collapse: pooches were screwed! Iraq war? Well, it wasn't a vote for war, exactly, and besides, you stand behind the President when he demands that sort of thing. And you keep standing behind him as chairman of the House Government Reform Committee (Davis is the guy who removed "Oversight" both from the title and the body), where you resolutely refuse to allow any questions about where the blank checks you kept signing had been cashed. How'd that one work out, you ask?  Davis just ruefully directs the questioner's gaze in the direction of Poochy.

And thank you, Tom Davis, moderate Republican, for being the reliable party functionary when Tom DeLay needed someone to subpoena Terri Schiavo and her attendant medical apparatus! Run, Poochy, run! "There are costs to being a leader," Davis notes. "You're not an independent actor." I was merely issuing orders!

The party has taken such a beating because of Bush and Congressional scandals that Davis took it upon himself to sound the alarm last spring in a 20-page memo to the Republican leadership, calling the atmosphere “the worst since Watergate,” even worse than 2006. “Failure to fundamentally change the G.O.P. brand can lock us into a long period of minority status,” he warned. The memo became public, and some Republican colleagues were irked with Davis. But none, he says, disputed his analysis.

He sounded the alarm last spring. Musta come as quite a shock to the rest of them Congressional Republicans.  You belong as the permanent minority party, Tom.  If you belong at all.

For Davis, who is 59, the decision to leave came after a series of personal blows. The loss of the majority in 2006 cost him his chairman’s gavel. His wife, Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, lost re-election as a Virginia state senator in 2007. And he gave up his ambition to run for the United States Senate this year when his state party decided to choose its nominee by a convention dominated by conservatives rather than a primary open to Davis’s independent supporters.

I guess they didn't hear the alarm.

C'mon, really. I need a nap, badly, but there's a difference between low-hanging fruit and slimy crap rotting on the ground with worms crawling through it an' shit. Being a major cog in the Republican Radical Wealth Re-Distribution Upward Scheme precludes one from being called "moderate", no matter how many stem-cell restrictions one voted against and, especially, no matter what guilty appeals one makes to reality now that the collapsed beams of the house are crushing his vitals. Piss off, Davis. That's as moderately as I can put it. If you'll notice, we're in deep shit now because of you economic, American exceptionalist, laissez-faire boondoggery, international adventurist Republicans who took marching orders from George W. Bush and Tom Fucking DeLay because That's How It Works.  That Jebus faction whose votes you been collecting for thirty years, and which most everybody the other side of the Piedmont already knows as crazy?  Not so much.  

Cathago Delenda Est

OKAY, so in the end I watched as much of the debate as I could stand, which was something over a minute. For one thing, my Poor Wife was tired, and went to bed around 8:30, and, as I may've mentioned before, is such a light sleeper that she's awakened by the barometer falling. So even downstairs I can't turn the sound up on the teevee enough to hear it, and I might've used headphones if I'd felt the thing was required viewing, except Slightly Evil Larry, the Cat Who Eats Plastic, chewed through the good ones, and headphones have that shielded core wire that has, like, milkweed strands running down the center and you can't reconnect it. At least I've never been able to. The backup pair were some lightweight Sennheisers which, once pressed back into service began disintegrating much like when the mutated Andromedia strain started eating rubber. Then there's the ultra-lightweights with the maddening short, and the last-resort noise-canceling earbuds. I'm not sure how they even got in the house; probably down the chimney like a squirrel. They were apparently designed for use by people who've had MP3 players surgically implanted in their chests. The on/off housing dealie weighs something like thirty times what the buds do, so it has a natural tendency to pull them out of your ears if you do anything rash, like moving or breathing, and this has the effect, oddly enough, of canceling the noise cancelation. Still they might be made to work, assuming you were to lie on the couch and keep telling yourself you had just had surgery on your cervical vertebrae, and the slightest movement could be fatal, except that getting far enough away from the television requires, in my case, the linking of two coiled lines which add, by my calculations, about a hundred pounds of torque on the buds. So one can basically just forget it. I'm not planning on buying new headphones anytime soon, unless President Obama makes mescaline legal.  

(Drug legalization.  It's the Dom Com Boom of the Late Naughts, and just when we need one.  Just sayin', Barack.)

Debates are like eggnog. I suppose they have their attractions, and they're fine if you like that sort of thing, but there's no way in hell I'll ever trust the people who peddle the stuff. If you like eggnog, why aren't you drinking it in February? Why isn't it still in the stores? Don't say "because it's too rich to drink except as a holiday treat"; this was going on back when the standard breakfast was three eggs and a flitch of bacon. It's a goddam ritual is all, and its sole purpose, a vestigial organ surviving from the Nixon/Kennedy kickoff, is to engender gaffes. Consider that in all that time the one President who was said to have won the thing, rather than to have had his opponent lose it by glancing at his watch, forgetting where Poland was, or sporting a suit color some hack journalist said was gauche, was Ronald Fucking Reagan, and you don't have to share my opinion of what that got us to admit he's the only one we know of who swiped his opponent's briefs, before swiping the country's. For chrissakes, we wound up with George W. Bush, twice, after debate performances that resembled some high school thespian's assay of King Lear, and there was no shortage of pundits claiming he won, every time, including that first debate with Gore where he appeared to be drunk. If we want to reform the process, we...well, we could do anything; it can't get any worse, but if we really want to reform the process we can start with better coverage, and quit giving the upper hand to citizens who want to pay twenty-minutes attention to th' teevee before congratulating themselves for having penetrated to the heart of the process. 

Look at how last night's exercise became a test of whether Sarah Palin could do better than abysmal. Who thinks this way in real life? No one who doesn't have money riding on the outcome, for starters. I saw somewhere in one of the endless breathless lead-ins to the thing where someone said the night would answer the question of whether Palin had the "capacity to grow". What? If you hired someone to deliver pizzas, and he has a minor fender-bender his first night, you might think, well, mistakes happen. If you hand him his first order and he sticks the ignition key up his ass, starts making "vrumm vrumm" noises, and then crashes through your picture window, you are not going to say, "Well, maybe next week he'll remember to wear pants."

Did you happen to catch Jon Stewart's interview with Peggy Noonan Wednesday (it's here ) ? Or maybe "interview", since he seemed to start talking to himself early on? He seemed to suggest that he feels personally betrayed by John McCain--or maybe he meant by Obama too--for the trivial tone of the campaign. Then he launched into a denunciation of political weasel words, singling out--this is to Noonan, remember--McCain's promise to the RNC that he'd "appoint strict constructivist judges" instead of saying he wouldn't let queers marry or women choose abortions. Noonan, when she replies at all, just blathers inanities, or, in other words, went into the default non-partisan mode she switches to when yet another of her political pronouncements loses a fight with reality. It was surreal; I couldn't believe he'd be saying this stuff to Noonan, whose entire career is based on weaseling, and whose party affiliation, if not her very political consciousness, is based on forty years of Roe v. Wade Kung-fu. This is why you trusted McCain even after he hugged George Bush, Jon. These people are liars. They wouldn't be Republicans otherwise. There's no sense in looking for common ground with Peggy Noonan when she's spent thirty years tilting or shifting the ground as required for the smallest temporal advantage. If you really think endless replays of "Nixon-McGovern" are the problem here (won't someone, please, swipe his bedside copy of Nixonland already?) then look at who perpetrates this stuff. I'm no fan of the Democratic party, but its sins are a handful of sand blown in your face by a stray breeze, where the GOP's is the Indiana Dunes dumped in your shorts. I may be old and feeble-minded, but if you want our politics to be about issues then for my money George McGovern was the last major party candidate who campaigned on them, and the "conservatives" who tagged him with "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion" were the template for everything that's followed and which you're complaining about now. It's not this country's problem to bring Peggy Noonan closer to sanity; our problem is that Noonan and her ilk are out there screwing things up for everyone just so they can snatch a few purses in the confusion. Plow 'em under and sow the ground with salt, or get used to it. They refused to even acknowledge setbacks; they've learned nothing from abject disaster (see Palin, Sarah Louise, Wild Popularity of).

Please Stand By

I'M not sure what exactly happened to the page layout here.  I was just trying out a floating width scheme, or whatever you call it, and then the browser crashed, and the file with what I imagined to be the old saved template--which I had been led to believe I hadn't changed yet anyway--turned out to be some sort of Blade Runner fanboy scheme, and when I went to get rid of that it turned out that the most recent New and Improved Blogger wouldn't return me to the old, original template--minus my carefully considered color combinations--unless I signed on to the New and Improved Blogger, which process wipes out the rest of what formatting had survived to that point.  So now I'm just glad the thing is not in Hindi.  I guess I'll find the time to fix it sometime soon; I was previously engaged in trying to find out where all my winter clothing has gone since last winter, which you might figure could wait, but then I realize that if I stop it might be six weeks before I start up again, and you don't.  Meanwhile, I don't complain about every little inconvenience with Blogger--it's fuckin' free, dude--but for the life of me I can't understand why every time they execute another suite of Improvements, which always turn out to be somewhat short of Earth shaking, usually more like earth piling, one is forced to sign on, figure out where they've hidden the HTML this time, and change it all back again.  I know, I know:  I was educated in a previous century.  Back then, all the telephones were black, didn't buzz incessantly while you were trying to carry on a conversation, and your fellow citizens couldn't carry them into bookstores where the half of the conversation they subjected total strangers to, at volumes approaching those formerly reserved for calling lost animals, raised the question of what a complete illiterate was doing in a bookstore, anyway.

Let Us Now Stop Considering Sarah Palin

THE other day the bookselling guest on Colbert was Nick Carr,  who frankly came off as a scold, and impatient with his host's humor injections, perhaps because he's just written the Why Johnny Can't Read of the Google era, and without pausing to consider who'd read it.  It's interesting that most works in the genre come from men entering the second half of middle age, when the memory of how literacy was doomed, doomed! because of their own supposed addiction to teevee, radio, the talkies, the flickers, the flivver, or the penny dreadful has faded, to be replaced by a recognition of the illiterate superficiality and sexual attractiveness of Today's Youts. And so on. And I say this as an unfashionable admirer of Marshall McLuhan, if no partner to his sunny disposition; yes yes yes, media shapes the way we relate to the world and our information about it. God and fiefdom shaped the 14th century serf. What are we to do about it? In the short term, given free access to free information, it seems there will always be people who realize that knowledge is complex, pluralistic, and seldom, if ever, easily unearthed, just as there will be those who read Ayn Rand. Perhaps it's a good idea to look up from this IT shit every now and again, and take a gander at the people who actually produce information, rather than just shuffle it around. Have a look at the biologists and paleontologists who give of their free time to combat religion-borne illiteracy.  We are not in danger of the whole wide world becoming wikipedia-mired morons with five-second attention spans; we may be in some slight danger of all our morons becoming Google addicts. I'm not sure where the real threat is there. That they'll get tired of Britney Spears that much quicker?

Which brings us to Sarah Palin. The Hunter's Moon is still two weeks away, and she's already all but disappeared; her brief pre-debate return as Slate obsession--she'd been kicked below the electronic fold not only by the financial crises but also the difficulties in selecting the proper household paper shredder and the cultural imperative of buying a Blu-Ray player so you can see The Godfather like you've never seen it before! or, rather, like you haven't seen it twenty times before--has the unmistakable air of seasonal change, or the forced conviviality of a divorced couple at their child's piano recital. 

You can't blame this on short attention spans; if anything, coverage of the Palin candidacy has demonstrated the argument for cultivating one in the modern age. Consider that the only time the national debate even touched on the real issue of her candidacy was when Chuck Todd, Mike Murphy, and Peggy Noonan thought they were off-mike. It's not Repetitive Google Disease that makes people anticipate Tiny Fey's appearance on SNL. It's the truncated and trivialized nature of the "real" coverage. It's Maureen Dowd, asking a critic of her public buffoonery whether he thought she should stoop to writing about the tax code. It's the Times and the Post reducing national elections to horse racing tout sheets. It's people who only tell the truth when they think no one's listening. 

Okay, so it was partly ill-luck; Palin had become a tabloid story within hours of her nomination. But the problem there is that tabloid coverage itself then became a story, which it assuredly is not. We can talk about whether Bristol Palin's pregnancy is an issue, whether it reflects on her parents, says anything about the hypocrisy of the aggressively pious. We can laugh or scowl or believe every word the tabloids print, but we cannot exercise prior censorship and we cannot proclaim Bristol Palin exempt from Sullivan by virtue (pardon) of dewy whiteness and acute embarrassment, unless we'd like to admit the State of Alabama had a right to attempt to bankrupt the Civil Rights Movement via lawsuit. And, assuming we're all so goddam sensitive about it, maybe back when the President of the United States was being hamstrung over a blowjob would have been a good time to speak up.

But this was not the worst of it, nor the end of it; such things never are. It was followed, closely, by the fact that Palin's palid teleprompter reading to a roomful of GOP conventioneers was cheered wildly. This was news, I suppose, for a night, but it wound up being treated as a coup, and as something of an answer to the criticism she'd received. A group of people who had gathered, not simply because they shared an identification with a political party which faced a serious uphill climb to November's election, but because they were devoted enough to work for it, even volunteer to work for it, cheered a speech which had been professionally crafted to push their (remarkably accessible) buttons, and this was treated as though the issue was in doubt until all the whoopin' and hollerin' commenced. Like we were holding our collective breath waiting to see if they'd stone the vile strumpet or something.

But tell me I'm wrong. Can anyone point to a non-Lefty-blogosphere source which was still questioning the vetting of a backwoods councilwoman and religious crackpot by the following Friday? If so I missed it. By that weekend there was talk of the ticket's real identity being Palin/McCain. (And the people who said this still have jobs.)  She was traveling around on McCain's flying supertanker, delivering her red-meat Republican collection of Bart Simpsonesque catch phrases. Convention bounce! Moose carcass! GILF! 

Democrats sweating bullets! (Which they were, and which tells you too much about Democrats.) But then, as it sometimes does, the old pre-Google "reality" of rocks and air and plants and ideas came up and smacked what had been such a promising product rollout. The McCain campaign realized she'd need to speak in public at some point. I suppose it's heartening to consider that they still, in 2008, thought this might be something of a problem, seeing as how inarticulate dunderhead had been testing well with Republican focus groups until recently. They tried to take her off the market just when T-shirt sales were really cranking, and when they brought her back she was no better, and some of her savvier fanboys noticed she appeared to be lip-syncing. 

Look, inarticulacy is not a crime; lots of people are petrified at the mere thought of public speaking, though few if any of them have degrees in communications from Nearly Random Series of Exit Ramps Community College ("Home of the Lodgers"). But vetting someone who makes George W. Bush look scholarly is. How'd we lose track of that for three weeks, and why did it take not one but two national interviews so utterly embarrassing that the birth of Bristol Palin's first or second child won't make the papers unless the head in the middle is black? * Lack of public speaking acumen is unfortunate in a political candidate when politics presumably still selects for it, but are we supposed to be surprised that Palin turns out to be incurious, ill-informed, and, by all appearances, convinced by a half-lifetime's experience and God's Special Providence that she can simply bull her way through either? Because maybe we should have taken a little closer look at Ronald Reagan's MO, huh? Even though it was hard to see through all the confetti. It's the soft bigotry of Jesus Praisin', Gun Totin', and Tax Cuttin'. Look at the people they've nominated to lead their tickets over the past thirty years. The smartest guy was the one who used to be a football player, and he turned out to be the only man in America who didn't get the Supply Side Economics joke. Fer chrissakes, John McCain had to shed 10 IQ points just to get the nomination. Doesn't anybody in the national Press read The Corner?

The lovely and talented s.z. brings us Palin's recent "interview" with Hugh Hewitt, in which the erstwhile pitbull with cosmetics rebrands herself as the candidate of all Unthinking Americans, not only aligning herself with Joe Six-Pack, but doing so twice in consecutive sentences, in case Joe's train of thought was derailed in a collision with the intervening predicate. There's not even any pretense anymore that she's running for an office serving all Americans. I remind you, Good Reader, that the Democratic candidate for President was roundly criticized for having attended the sort of church where an African-American preacher spoke like an African-American preacher, while Palin is yet celebrated for the seeming congruence of her mental landscape and the surrounding tundra, which few "normal" Americans will ever see, six-pack or no.

So forgive me for not liveblogging the Veep debate, or even watching it. The AP tells me that Palin has an opportunity to "restore her luster" tonight. If reporters are still being paid to say stupid shit like that short-term memory loss doesn't seem half bad, and transient memory eradication by intoxicant seems like a damn fine programming alternative.

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* My friend Gary's joke.