You People Detest Boomer Politics So Much, Why Is It Your Nose That's Still In Bill Clinton's Crotch?

Peter Baker,"Acid Test: Memories of Bill Clinton's Impeachment, as Obama's Staff Faces Scandal in Illinois". December 14

OR Hugh Fucking Hefner's, for that matter. What demographic's keeping that show afloat?

And who, exactly, is responsible for dreaming up this turd of a think-piece?

Ten years ago this week, Bill Clinton became the first elected president ever impeached by the House of Representatives, the culmination of a sex-and-lies scandal that consumed the nation and fractured the political system. Although he was eventually acquitted by the Senate, the scars run deep even as veterans of that showdown return to power under a new president promising to repair the breach that still divides Washington.

First, eventually acquitted? It took, like, ten minutes; certainly less time than it took Rehnquist to design that stupid robe of his. Unless you want to start counting from the time the bloated corpse of impeachment was found floating belly up in the Tidal Basin, in which case (since we're so interested in historical precedent that we needed to find a way to make Clinton sound like the first President to be impeached) Bill Clinton was the first President, elected, succeeding, appointed, or breathing, to ever be acquitted before the fucking impeachment took place. Baker wrote The Breach, the ultimate Beltway insider tick-tock about the Clinton impeachment; you'd imagine he'd have a little better grasp on the timeframe.

As key members of Mr. Clinton’s defense a decade ago, Mr. Podesta, his chief of staff; Mr. Emanuel, his senior adviser; and Mr. Craig, his special counsel, bring the lessons of that searing moment to the table as they now serve in President-elect Barack Obama’s inner circle. They learned the imperatives of moving quickly, closing ranks, controlling information and never conceding an inch when the president faces a threat, strategies employed with varying degrees of effectiveness back then.

For crying out fucking loud, Gregory Craig was born in 1945; he was practicing law in DC during Watergate. John Podesta (b. 1949) worked in the Carter Administration. Rahm Emanuel was born in 1959. No doubt the hunting of President Clinton--which had been in full swing for seven years by the time impeachment rolled around--informs something of their present approach to responding to Slimy Partisan Politics and the Newspapers of Record which Enable Them; God knows it gave 'em all enough practice. But I'm going to wager here that each man is familiar with the broader picture of the partisan low-road in America from 1980 on, possibly even including the continuing fucking attacks on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, fer chrissakes. If so this would apparently disqualify any of them for writing for the Times.

And look: even if we were able to make the case for Clinton's impeachment as some sort of Prime Mover of Modern Partisanship. so fucking what?  Which party threw a succession of haymakers at the other's groin? It wasn't an eight-year stalking of lying under oath; it was eight years trying to resuscitate a land-deal swindle (with the Clintons as swindlees), the facts of which were already quite clear when the Times decided (for some reason) to reopen the case to mark the beginning of the Clinton presidency. In fact it is the very measure of how things work that you can reprint this nonsense as 2008 draws to a close without being pitchforked by an enormous mob of people eternally pissed off about your role in ginning the whole thing up in the first place. "[M]oving quickly, closing ranks, controlling information and never conceding an inch", are those some sort of Clinton administration discovery? How can anyone with a passing familiarity with Democratic politics in the Era Begun with the Impeachment of Bill Clinton miss the fact that the Democratic rank-and-file, at least, clamor for more of that sort of Republican-esque, hit-back-twice-and-never-apologize behavior, and blame passivity in the face of underhanded Republican tactics, at least in part, for their big losses in 1980 through 1988? How can anyone discuss current partisanship without reference to Lee Atwater, at the least? Other than working for the Times, of course?

If there's one thing, one thing that wasn't already understood about the Republican party by the time impeachment rolled around it was the degree to which it stood ready to burn everything to the ground using its own marrow for tinder, rather than admit error, let alone defeat. In other words, it served as a preview of the Bush administration, which we may or may not have just barely survived, and which, I'd like to remind the Times, was marked by large-scale capitulation ("cooperation") from Democrats even as it fell into the subbasement of Harry Truman's approval numbers.  

Why would Podesta, Emanuel, and Craig be informed by those tactics? Because, whether they employ them with glee or dolor, they're necessary. Because in no case will it ever take more than ten minutes before what's left of the Republican party tries to exploit whatever flimsy excuse for ginned-up outrages comes its way. And because it won't be more than a week before the New York Times has linked it, no matter how, to Bill Clinton's cock.

Friday Bush Farewell Tour Vol. II: Well, That's Settled

I DON'T suppose even the most ardent Republican hater could have imagined just how awful a Chief Executizer George W. Bush would turn out to be, seeing as how "unprecedented" only begins to cover it, but even so, for me, the "acceptance" speech that terrible December 13 eight years ago--whether God in His Infinite Crankiness could have made it Friday the 13th, and if so why He didn't, is one for the theologians--maybe He was in a snit because we'd ignored the Boil thing--still represents a nadir of sorts;. I listened--no, I'm serious--intending to give the man a chance; within a couple minutes I had vowed never to forgive or forget what he said. And though he could have made me eat those words, even by just turning out to be a moderate Republican problem-solver, I felt confident that what the man had made of this "opportunity"--facing what was unquesionably the most gravid acceptance speech in the history of the Presidency, he gave birth to a misshapen two-headed microencephalic, the mindless homilies of a State Treasurer's victory celebration with one of his own empty stump speeches growing out of its back--told just about everything you'd want to know about him. That he proved so much worse in reality is due to a combination of factors, not all driven, but none overcome, certainly, by his multi-faceted lack of talent. And if one knew even then the boundless evil that is Karl Rove, or Dick Cheney, or that informs the banality of the Bush Crime Family; even though one suspected (in fact, had seen) the capacity of the mass-market Press for puffing and fluffing a President with no discernible positive qualities; even as the cocktail proved more toxic than all these combined, a Gestalt of noxiousness, still, the cold hard slap in the face of December 13, when we fully confronted the reality that not only had a man been appointed President of The Most Powerful Nation On Earth For Some Of The Next Eight Years, but that the man in question was completely hollow.

Let's follow along, shall we? No doubt with better reading comprehension than his?

Thank you all.

(APPLAUSE)

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Good evening, my fellow Americans. I appreciate so very much the opportunity to speak with you tonight.

Okay, so I don't want to get all nit-picky right at the start, but it's now five weeks since you lost the popular vote, and your fellow Americans have seen or heard you twice in that time, leaning on a fence while your team talked to reporters. It's not as though you didn't know where the camera trucks were parked.

Mr. Speaker, Lieutenant Governor, friends, distinguished guests, our country has been through a long and trying period, with the outcome of the presidential election not finalized for longer than any of us could ever imagine.

Though, as it turned out, not nearly long enough. Never would have been preferable. Hopeless deadlock and turmoil would have been a major improvement.

Vice President Gore and I put our hearts and hopes into our campaigns. We both gave it our all. We shared similar emotions, so I understand how difficult this moment must be for Vice President Gore and his family.

Okay, this is where I simply abandoned hope, though maybe it's just me. What th' fuck does Hallmark have to do with this? This is perhaps what might have been said between them, given that George W. Bush has no talent whatever for word usage, (unless you consider mangling a talent) but it just seemed too creepy by half to me. The man had at least seen professional athletes, right?  I mean, you say, "Wow, that 2-1 slider just hung up a little bit, and I was just trying to get my bat on it, you know?  I never thought it'd get out of the park." You do not say, "Well, my first thought was that his wife and kids were probably watching. My heart goes out to them." It's a parody of Nice, and it comes from a man who obviously thinks politics is all about entitlement, and in case of a tie, decided by a pissing contest.

And this was supposed to be an address to the public, and god knows the public had suffered, too; millions of its component parts had just seen their votes flushed down the toilet in the most jaw-droppingly partisan act ever to occur in the annals of American jurisprudence. They will wait in vain for their condolences from this jerk.

Add to it that the entire sentiment rings doubly false. It makes it sound like Gore was faced with a heart-breaking but necessary concession; he could have chosen to denounce the gang of lying bastards led by Bill "Light Opera" Rehnquist. But Gore, sadly for the rest of us, had chosen the honorable thing. The other thing, of course, is that George W. Bush had no freakin' idea in the world what Al Gore was going through; Bush had never lost anything in his life other than his dignity, his balance, and his driving and flying privileges.

He has a distinguished record of service to our country as a congressman, a senator and a vice president.

This evening I received a gracious call from the vice president. We agreed to meet early next week in Washington and we agreed to do our best to heal our country after this hard-fought contest.

And, as usual, George W. Bush was as good as his word. What, do you imagine, did Al Gore have to offer to get Bush to promise "to do his best"? Do you think "spend the first six weeks claiming Clinton trashed the White House" or "give everybody nicknames" were Gore's prescriptions for national healing?

Tonight I want to thank all the thousands of volunteers and campaign workers who worked so hard on my behalf.

And here I remember thinking, "Is this a fucking Oscar speech?" I mean, thank your supporters at the end, or on your own time, but not before you address the majority of voters, you know, the ones who voted for the other guy?

I also salute the vice president and his supports for waging a spirited campaign. And I thank him for a call that I know was difficult to make. Laura and I wish the vice president and Senator Lieberman and their families the very best.

Again with the fucking phone call! And that "spirited campaign", which is how you describe something that finished eight points back, not ahead of you.

I have a lot to be thankful for tonight.

Yeah, we know. And at our expense.

I'm thankful for America and thankful that we were able to resolve our electoral differences in a peaceful way.

Okay, it's not fair to blame George W. Bush for this, and God knows that politicians, especially Republican politicians, seem to imagine that the American public needs more reassurance than a child heading into major surgery, but then again, maybe if Bush were actually familiar with any other country on the face of the earth--and no, a lost weekend in Nuevo Laredo doesn't count--this might sound a little more convincing.

I'm thankful to the American people for the great privilege of being able to serve as your next president.

I want to thank my wife and our daughters for their love. Laura's active involvement as first lady has made Texas a better place, and she will be a wonderful first lady of America.

(APPLAUSE)

Okay, again with the tangents, which might have been appropriate if he'd been speaking to a bunch of drunken Bush Pioneers at the Houston Marriott after winning on election night. He wasn't.

I am proud to have Dick Cheney by my side, and America will be proud to have him as our next vice president.

(APPLAUSE)

Indeed. It was an historic night; the last time the name "Dick Cheney" elicited applause.

Tonight I chose to speak from the chamber of the Texas House of Representatives because it has been a home to bipartisan cooperation. Here in a place where Democrats have the majority, Republicans and Democrats have worked together to do what is right for the people we represent.

It's the fucking Texas State Legislature. Using that as an example of your bipartisan outreach is like saying you've worked with leading Civil Rights leaders because you had lunch with J.C. Watts.

Blah blah Texas, blah, Texas blah blah [snip]
(APPLAUSE)

The spirit of cooperation I have seen in this hall is what is needed in Washington, D.C. It is the challenge of our moment. After a difficult election, we must put politics behind us and work together to make the promise of America available for every one of our citizens.

I am optimistic that we can change the tone in Washington, D.C.

I believe things happen for a reason, and I hope the long wait of the last five weeks will heighten a desire to move beyond the bitterness and partisanship of the recent past.

Our nation must rise above a house divided. Americans share hopes and goals and values far more important than any political disagreements.

And with that promise began the transfer of power to the greatest collection of lying political hacks and criminal sociopaths ever assembled in a single city, an administration which would set the tone in its first hours by ginning up reports of White House vandalism and gifts to the American people unlawfully removed by the previous occupants.

Republicans want the best for our nation, and so do Democrats. Our votes may differ, but not our hopes.

"Nope, whatever our various choice of race, creed, or political philosophy, at heart we're all just lookin' to line our own pockets. And I pledge to you mine will be the most American administration in history in that regard."

I know America wants reconciliation and unity. I know Americans want progress. And we must seize this moment and deliver.

Together, guided by a spirit of common sense, common courtesy and common goals, we can unite and inspire the American citizens.

Examples? Anyone?

And let me say, without giving the rest away, that by now I was thoroughly convinced that Bush had no intention whatsoever of addressing directly the millions of voters, the majority of voters, who'd voted for the other guy and seen the election swiped by a banana republic of a state run by his brother and a Supreme Court run by pimps, pickpockets, and sexual degenerates. The more the motherfucker told me he was intending to inspire our commonality the more I was convinced it was a good time to start hoarding gold.

Together, we will work to make all our public schools excellent, teaching every student of every background and every accent, so that no child is left behind.

Together we will save Social Security and renew its promise of a secure retirement for generations to come.

Together we will strengthen Medicare and offer prescription drug coverage to all of our seniors.

I gotta tell ya, when I found my copy of the speech and I saw that I was dumbfounded to learn he'd actually said something that night that proved to be close to the truth. Though of course all the rest of it proved to be worse than wrong.

Together we will give Americans the broad, fair and fiscally responsible tax relief they deserve.

Together we'll have a bipartisan foreign policy true to our values and true to our friends, and we will have a military equal to every challenge and superior to every adversary.

Together we will address some of society's deepest problems one person at a time, by encouraging and empowering the good hearts and good works of the American people.

This is the essence of compassionate conservatism and it will be a foundation of my administration.

Thus do all Americans stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and wave goodbye to the Good Ship Compassionate Conservatism, which vanished mysteriously the minute it got out of sight.

These priorities are not merely Republican concerns or Democratic concerns; they are American responsibilities.

During the fall campaign, we differed about the details of these proposals, but there was remarkable consensus about the important issues before us: excellent schools, retirement and health security, tax relief, a strong military, a more civil society.

We have discussed our differences. Now it is time to find common ground and build consensus to make America a beacon of opportunity in the 21st century.

Though in the event he only managed to make it a target of opportunity.

I'm optimistic this can happen. Our future demands it and our history proves it. Two hundred years ago, in the election of 1800, America faced another close presidential election. A tie in the Electoral College put the outcome into the hands of Congress.

After six days of voting and 36 ballots, the House of Representatives elected Thomas Jefferson the third president of the United States. That election brought the first transfer of power from one party to another in our new democracy.

Shortly after the election, Jefferson, in a letter titled "Reconciliation and Reform," wrote this. "The steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor; unequivocal in principle, reasonable in manner. We should be able to hope to do a great deal of good to the cause of freedom and harmony."

At this point I remember I had passed beyond lividity into a great pacific calm of the sort one probably experiences just before shooting up a post office.

The Election of 2000 resembled 1800 only in that the party on the losing end of the popular vote had the juice where it counted and was able to bollox things up; in all other regards it was nothing like it. Jefferson was the overwhelming winner of the popular vote and was understood by the voters to be the Republican/Democrat choice for President, with Burr for Veep. But they wound up tied, turning the thing over to the still-Federalist-controlled House. 1800 was a sea-change in Congress as well, whereas in 2000 Bush's party lost seats in both chambers. In 1800 the logjam in the Electoral College was precisely the result of the way the law was then written; in 2000 the election was decided by a Court which had no Constitutional basis for inserting itself. And, for that matter, in 1800, though somewhat delayed, the House did finally see fit to do what was understood as right. I'm sure you can compare that one with 2000 without my help.

The real precedent, of course, as frequently remarked upon at the time, was the Stolen Election of 1876, which gave the country Rutherford B. Hayes, the disastrous withdrawal of Federal troops enforcing the Reconstruction, and the first use of Federal troops to gun down striking workers. The latter two became traditions which lasted well into the 20th century; the precedent of throwing an illicitly-appointed President out on his ass after one term sadly remained a one-time, 19th century event.

Of course, it's tough to come up with a really good platitude about 1876, and comparing Bush to the great, near-great, highly-regarded, or simply fictionally competent would remain a parlor game for the Right throughout both his first and second ignominies. Jefferson, Churchill, Wilson, John Wayne, Flash Gordon, and Jesus all made appearances; later it was Truman, Hoover, Imelda Marcos, and Ham, the First Chimp in Space. That was after they'd run out of uses for him.

I have something else to ask you, to ask every American. I ask for you to pray for this great nation. I ask for your prayers for leaders from both parties. I thank you for your prayers for me and my family, and I ask you to pray for Vice President Gore and his family.

I was pretty certain by this time that we didn't have a prayer.

I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation.

The president of the United States is the president of every single American, of every race and every background.

Whether you voted for me or not, I will do my best to serve your interests and I will work to earn your respect.

I will be guided by President Jefferson's sense of purpose, to stand for principle, to be reasonable in manner, and above all, to do great good for the cause of freedom and harmony.

The presidency is more than an honor. It is more than an office. It is a charge to keep, and I will give it my all.

We are, mercifully, at the end of the thing, except for his parting "Thanks, and may God show you more mercy in the future than He's shown tonight" bit. And he's never once looked me, or any other Gore voter, in the eye. He's never once acknowledged that we might have any reason to be irate about this turn of events; it's just a Tough Loss. I'd have forgiven him, really, if he'd simply acknowledged losing the popular vote. That's all I asked. I grant you the forgiveness wouldn't have survived his inaugural speech, but that, too, was ungraciousness personified. Like all that business about Gore, and his feelings, and his need for prayers: if someone with human feeling is touched by such an act he responds with genuine emotion, not with his best good wishes and an offer to do lunch. It was clear, then and there, even before the sliming of the Clintons began in earnest, what this guy was all about. I can't say that I was caught slack-jawed when the first three months of his administration was consumed by cheap attacks on his predecessor. And I sure understood the desire to keep the actual President as far away from microphones as possible.

1. Affect A Monocle. 2. Don A Boater. 3. Three Words: Rickrack Is Back.

Jack Shafer, "Unsolicited advice for David Gregory". December 9

The media fuss wasn't so much about the importance of who was good enough to sit in Russert's chair but—like the over-coverage of Russert's death, funeral, and memorial service—another demonstration of the Washington press corps's extraordinary high regard for itself. All the conjecture reinforced the notion that the people who ask politicians questions are so very, very important. But Meet the Press draws an average of only 3.7 million viewers, making it a TV flyspeck compared with ABC's Dancing With the Stars, which recently drew an audience of 21 million....

The most difficult aspect of a Sunday-morning show is source maintenance. Until Sunday show moderators obtain subpoena power, they've got to keep politicians feeling good about themselves or else they won't come on. Russert was a master of source maintenance, which made his show a destination for politicians. For all his legendary hardness as an interviewer, most of Russert's pitches were hittable. For example, throwing up on a screen those trademark graphics that proved that his interview subject had flip-flopped was completely overrated. A politician had contradicted himself? Is a hypocrite? Double wow. As Tom Carson wrote for Esquire in 2004, "Russert rarely shows much interest in which position is wrong." This shtick was completely beatable.

I HAVE no idea why it is that moments of close agreement so often bode ill. It's like your table is on its third round, and some guy says, "You know, Katherine Hepburn is the most overrated actor in the history of cinema," and you're just about to permit yourself to think that he might have some depth heretofore hidden, when he adds, "Let's all strip down, coat ourselves with Crisco, and get arrested while urinating on her grave."

Look, Jack: you came so close to the target there that there can't be any question of your recognizing it. For almost twenty years Russert played the Monday Headline game. He dedicated an hour of the nation's airtime each Sunday morning--ostensibly the one hour remaining on the nation's air devoted to in-depth political discussion--to an endless search for the sort of stupid gotchas he tried to pull on Hillary Clinton using a quote from her husband (later excused on the grounds that "the Press always gangs up on the front-runner", remember?). He was an educated man in a powerful position, not just the clowning moderator for a measly 3.7 million viewers. He was the VP of NBC News and its Washington Bureau Chief through a period where severe staff contractions, plus his gargantuan ego*, made him seem like the voice of NBC News--particularly after the equally vacuous Tom Brokaw left--and as MSNBC turned into Russert's own children's choir. And yet, with a place on some portion of the American power grid lasting a quarter-century, Russert never once seems to have questioned whether this is the way politics ought to proceed. Gotcha! He's the most massive tuber inside the Beltway, but it never occurs to him that bartering The Game for access is wrong or unnecessary.

So, tell us, Jack: what should the new guy do about it?

Get rid of the Russert regulars. Who hasn't heard enough from James Carville and Mary Matalin by now? Hasn't plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin run out of gas? Doesn't William Safire phone it in? Can't NBC do the right thing and give Andrea Mitchell her own show?

Quick, somebody hide the Crisco! I'm gonna hope that your Inner Kathy Griffin took over there. "The right thing" regarding Mrs. Greenspan is for some NBC insider with a shred of human decency to turn over the evidence so it can be put before a Grand Jury. As for the rest, y'know, I think a better suggestion is that we Get Over people Getting Over people. The problem with the above--maybe excepting Safir(e), since his problems are legion--is that they basically can be guaranteed to play right along with the supposed middle ground of American experience while giving the illusion of wide-ranging opinion. Well, that and Matalin's buggy as August ditchwater. Please, let us stick to the analysis and rid ourselves of people because they've settled comfortably into a role we do not need, and never did, not because some guy I'm tired of is tired of them.

And why does the mere sight of David Broder, Bob Shrum, E.J. Dionne, or Peggy Noonan on television make me want to kill myself?

Well, sometimes we oughtn't fight our impulses, but, y'know, I hope it's because they're all professional clowns, not simply the number of times they've been on or an unfashionable age bracket, as defined by someone younger who'd like one of those seats.

Blacklisting these usual guests from the Meet the Press round table and recruiting a younger band of participants would mark the passing of an era and acknowledge the arrival of a young president. It's not even a very radical step. Russert was known to experiment with formula, adding Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh to the mix

[emphasis mine]The Crisco's locked up, right? Jesus, how 'bout recruiting a panel of mulattoes? Or people with prominent ears? Maybe secret Muslims. And yeah, more shake-'em-up ideas like adding Drudge and Limbaugh, which, in any reasonable world, would have landed Russert in prison.

Invent a great gimmick. Russert had a dozen gimmicks. He had the flip-flop graphic. He had Buffalo. The Bills. His blue collar. The whiteboard. His dad.

Three-point-Seven Million Americans Can't Be Wrong!

Gregory needs a similar signature, and I've got just the thing. Good politicians are evasion artists, able to field a difficult question without answering it and making it sound as though they did. When confronted with such maneuvers, Gregory could pursue his prey with three follow-up questions. If the politician didn't answer satisfactorily, Gregory could give his best grin and say, "Senator, that's three and you're out" and move on to the next question. If deployed artfully, "That's three and you're out" could become the most feared phrase in political reporting and just maybe it could get politicians to respond truthfully.

Okay, let's just stop, since, among other things, it's obvious that we've written an article with advice for David Gregory, and we ran out of ideas before we reached #2. How about this: we blow up everything that is vile, double-dealing, fatuous, fallacious, and unnecessary about Russertism, Jack Welch worship, Sunday "news" thumbsucking, and "American journalism" in general, and, in acknowledging not the Shining Promise of a New President but the horrific consequences of the Old One, his party, and the cozy relationship with the mainstream Press that made it all possible, we try to atone for that somewhat? Say for thirty minutes out of every unnecessary hour? That we find people who were willing to criticize Russert while he was alive, not sling shit about his funeral; that we have newspaper reporters function as newspaper reporters, instead of inept semi-entertainers; that we look up from our expense vouchers long enough to recognize why it is people turn to the internets and--even at their current pathetic levels--away from The Sundays and the nets in general, and start putting everyone on notice? We play this shadow game of fact-checking politicians who're speaking extemporaneously, but we never quizzed Tim Russert about his carefree approach to epistemology. Three strikes and you're out? Could we have booted Timmeh from that October debate for making the whole thing about Hillary?  Kicked him off his own show for going on about Louis Farrakhan long after he'd thrown four straight in the dirt? Matt Drudge and Rush Limbaugh got exposure at Meet the Press. When did their filthy stinking lies ever get exposed?

Maybe, forty years after the birth of Happy Talk news and Faux Balance and America is a Center-Right Country ™ Brand reportage, we could experiment with covering the news again. Maybe we could ban the trivialities and the tabloidisms, and ban anyone who doesn't observe the ban while we're at it. Three-point-seven. That's about as many Americans as watch the average network program because they can't find the fucking remote in order to change it. Maybe we could forget all about how much slucing is required to get the average lying politician to agree to appear, and see how many Americans would tune in for some truth for a fucking change. How's that for a gimmick? Maybe, just maybe, we could try solving the problem of "rarely show[ing] much interest in which position is wrong." by, I dunno, showing an interest in it.

Look, it ain't about fashion, and for fuck's sake it ain't about minor failings and too much cozy insiderism, or a long fascination with Bill Clinton's dick. Not any more. Russert fucking screwed the pooch with the aluminum tubes story; he stovepiped the Cheney/Judy Miller/Jack D. Ripper business. With thousands, hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of lives in the balance, he sat at his desk and waited for a phone call that never came. And that's his story; like a bad movie trailer, that's the best the man could do. For godsakes, the fucking story was attributed to unnamed White House sources; you wouldn't buy a small appliance under those circumstances, and you, unlike Mr. Insider Washington, had no way of knowing that Scooter Libby was Judy Miller's Aspen clone. We're talking about something which should have been a Klaxon for skepticism, even though skepticism needed no warnings in that environment; yet Tim Russert waited for his phone to ring. (And who, knowing enough to debunk that story that morning [and the reality is it didn't take much] would have bothered to call Tim Russert? (Here's the Moyers piece at Crooks and Liars; the video, unfortunately, cuts off Bob Simon appearing immediately after to explain how easy it is to pick up a telephone in this day and age. The full program is here.)

I'm sorry, but the idea that careerist journalists, who seem not just immune to questions about their own performance over the last two decades, but willing to pass out Gold Stars for achievement, are going to change their own culture is like my thinking that yelling into my own hat will do it. The difference there being that I don't pretend it will.

__________

* rumored

Honestly, That's The First Time I've Ever Heard Of Someone Unintentionally Insulting Rod McKuen.

David Brooks, "This Old House". December 9

He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

--Ecclesiastes, Or, The Preacher

Well thank God for David Brooks, then.

--Jimbo Riley

AND Dear Lord, he's back at that exurbs thing like a dog returning to its sick. This is either the result of Late Onset Complete and Utter Failure Syndrome (taken, in some quarters, for Premature Obama Derangement, but I'm sticking with my diagnosis), or Desperate Thrashing In Search Of Continued Employment. Whichever the case, either get the man a good editor or into treatment, or both; surely, unlike MoDo, there's someone on the Times staff who still believes his schtick.

The 1980s and 1990s made up the era of the great dispersal. Forty-three million people moved every year, and basically they moved outward — from inner-ring suburbs to far-flung exurbs on the metro fringe. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh declined by 8 percent in those years, but the developed land area of the Pittsburgh area sprawled outward by 43 percent.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act, and soon Americans from coast-to-coast had steam coming out of the tops of their heads.

I know, I know, we've been over this before. Real sociology is bad enough, though it must be given credit for more-or-less avoiding the fascist impulses of its closest cousin. Pop sociology is tennis with the net down, eyeless linesmen, and no balls.

People in cities moved outward! It seems less like a polished gem of cultural observation and more like an imperative of simple geometry. I suppose they could have gone Up, or Down, or Stayed In One Place; each of which would then have Told Us Something Significant about Up or Down or Stasis. It's like Thurber's vain struggles with the microscope in Biology 101: Mr. Brooks, you do realize you've just drawn a picture of your own eyeball?

And again, we're fine with these pastoral frolics of his; we simply object to the venue. But then we actually live in that America which Brooks occasionally pretends to visit. And we can pretty much tell you that Exurb-Bound America in the 80s and 90s was tryin' to get far enough away from the Nigras that only a few of them would show up at its children's school in the next fifteen years, and those would have 4.2 speed in the 40 or good penetration off the dribble. The End.

Did anyone ever call Brooks on this? I don't mean on the internets, I mean during his decade and counting on PBS and NPR. The man has built an entire career based on studiously avoiding the obvious...

If you asked people in that age of go-go suburbia what they wanted in their new housing developments, they often said they wanted a golf course. But the culture has changed. If you ask people today what they want, they’re more likely to say coffee shops, hiking trails and community centers.

...while substituting this passive-aggressive, updated-for-the-Go-Go-Eighties And Not Since version of Hippies vs. Straights for an easily amused audience. Not to mention one which did not want to be reminded why it really fled the suburbs for the supersuburbs.

People overshot the mark. They moved to the exurbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds. So in the past years there has been a new trend. Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape.

There are restaurant and entertainment zones, mixed-use streetscape malls, suburban theater districts, farmers’ markets and concert halls. In addition, downtown areas in places like Charlotte and Dallas are reviving as many people move back into the city in search of human contact. Joel Kotkin, the author of “The New Geography,” calls this clustering phenomenon the New Localism.

And James "Doghouse" Riley, who hasn't got anything to sell that wasn't available at this summer's yard sale, calls it "White upper-middle class trendoids doing something different with their money than white upper-middle-class trendoids did fifteen years ago, and some guy in the newspaper discovering it eight years later. Which is, like, really, really unprecedented."

This is, admittedly, anecdotal, but then it's at least an anecdote, not something I extrapolated from a magazine while I was waiting for them to call my reservation. As someone who lived in a series of downtown neighborhoods that ranged from "trendoid transitional" to "sketchy", I've seen a remarkable, perhaps remarkably crazy, resurgence of the northside of my benighted village in the ten years I've been a suburbanite. The area north of the old, old monied residential areas of downtown, which were largely gentrified in the late-70s through the 80s, saw a housing explosion which had a lot more to do with Old Speculation than New Localism. To a guy approximately my height and weight who used to walk through areas of somewhere between ramshackle and condemned fine old houses, the difference between the latest go-round and the earlier was that this time in the place of individual rehabbers you got tax-break contractors coming in and turning whole neighborhoods into Victorianesque McMansions. I don't know anybody who lives there, which is to say it's a young couples' game, but I suspect that if the housing bubble burst anywhere in this city of neighborhoods, it's there, and that people who imagined they were going to sell for big profit and move across the county line when those children they planned to have someday were old enough to go to school are now considering the cost of a vasectomy. White flight is right where it landed. It isn't going away, and it sure isn't crawling back to the city shamefaced, shit-faced, or otherwise faced. It is, it goes without saying, demanding that a light rail system be built for it, to relieve the congestion and shorten the commute it caused and accepted in the first place, as small price to pay for getting away from the coloreds.

Barack Obama has said that he would start an infrastructure project that will dwarf Dwight Eisenhower’s highway program. If, indeed, we are going to have a once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment, it would be great if the program would build on today’s emerging patterns. It would be great if Obama’s spending, instead of just dissolving into the maw of construction, would actually encourage the clustering and leave a legacy that would be visible and beloved 50 years from now....

the Obama stimulus plan could help localities create suburban town squares. Many communities are trying to build focal points. The stimulus plan could build charter schools, pre-K centers, national service centers and other such programs around new civic hubs....

But alas, there’s no evidence so far that the Obama infrastructure plan is attached to any larger social vision. In fact, there is a real danger that the plan will retard innovation and entrench the past.

Okay, in response, let me just say, "Fuck you." If we need advice about where the next fifty years are headed, maybe we should look elsewhere, rather than to the guy who last prediction lasted twenty, and that by his own scorecard.

If the Middle Class now finds itself in a leaky lifeboat with a serious list on a moonless North Atlantic night while suffering the first signs of hypothermia, maybe it could begin by thinking about the underclass it willingly threw overboard for the sake of a little extra leg-room, back when the sun was shining and the wind was fair. You Broke It, You Bought It, and don't act like you didn't see the sign. I'm sorry for the Middle Class. I are one. And I've been screaming about Reaganism for thirty years, but still, fair's fair. We're enduring the moral repugnance of bailing out Wall Street thieves and pirates, not simply because there are Wall Street thieves and pirates, nor the corporate shill politicians who enable them, but because the Middle Class consciously, and repeatedly, voted in their favor. To say now that massive federal works program designed--at least partly--to repair the damage--in whatever portion--ought to concentrate on building bridges so SUV-commanding exurbanwhites can get to daycare more efficiently is the sliming on the cake. Charter schools? Fuck you. Repair the damage you've done over the past forty years by turning urban schools into political footballs and surrogates for segregation. No more top-down entitlements, no more tax subsidies for Lifestyle Shopping Experiences while schools go begging and honest people go broke. Either the economy continues to spin down the toilet, in which case the Middle Class will soon become the Underclass, and full recipients of the back of the hand they offered when times were good; or the economy will stabilize, and it will be time for the people who enabled this to start paying an overdue bill.

For a country which feels so strongly about religious conviction that it routinely lies to pollsters asking how often it goes to church, you might think the day would dawn when it decided to actually wash away, rather than wish away, its stain. That's no doubt too much to hope, but I don't see why a loathsome toad and former Bush page boy like David Brooks should still be offering us his vision of the future, and still sitting at the New York Times instead of on some trendy 21st century version of the dunking stool. At taxpayer expense, fine. 

Olio

• Isn't there a war zone we can ship Tom Brokaw off to now? I caught the second half-hour of his Meet the Press swan song interview with the President-elect, who, incidentally, he called "Mr. President" at one point, though the transcript has him saying "Mr. President-elect" all the way down. I realize that with Brokaw "elect" sounds something like "wec" or "we-oh" spoken as quickly as possible and with the tongue soldered to the lower front teeth at the rootline, but I distinctly...

• Wait, am I the only one who's disturbed by the whole "what to call the President-elect" business? The professional teleprompter readers on my teevee sure don't seem to be, to the extent that they seem wholly indifferent to the concept, or maybe they're just not mentally up to it. I'll provisionally trust this guy, because he's got perfect protocol hair (scroll down). He says it's "President-elect" and "Mr."

Now the problem I have with this--you knew there'd be one, right?--is that Senator Obama has not yet been elected anything; we-all elected Electors. And sure, minor quibble, but I'm not the one who stands on formality. Protocol does. Protocol is all minor fucking quibbling. I'm fine with "Mr. President-elect", but missing any opportunity to remind the American people that they are not free to elect the highest officer in the land seems a shame.

What I do have a problem with is the news-hairdos who skip the honorific and go right to the "Mr.", and, especially, the use of bare-nekkid "Obama" (I'm looking at you, CNN, but probably because you're the only one I've caught so far). The last-name business ought to be reserved for when we're officially tired of the guy, and should be left out of reporting altogether. This is especially galling since the blatant informality/cryptic insult/faux-democratic leveling is, without fail, coming from the mouth of the sort of person who'd take loud umbrage if you refused to let her cut in front of you in line at the bank, on the grounds that she's on television and you aren't.

• Where was I? Oh, Brokaw. As I say, I tuned in at the bottom of the hour, so I missed him suggesting Jack Fucking Welch as Auto Czar, apparently because, since it was his Last Day, he feared there might be a viewer or two still uncertain as to whether he (Brokaw) had a shred of decency. Someone who'd missed the last fifteen years of his pandering literary career, say.

Look at the transcript, if you must. It's not that Brokaw could have phoned it in; that's hardly newsworthy. It's that he could have phoned it in last February and had The Help spruce it up a little with some topicality. Twenty minutes at the top talking about the economy and bailouts, which never rises above headline depth, and which began with "How are you different from FDR?" Dear God, just once, just once to have a Mr. President-elect who'd say, "Gee, I dunno, Tom. You're the professional teller of Fairy Tales."

• Oh, if only we could harness the awesome power of the American Left and use it for good! Here, for example, the Internets' Answer to SMERSH cruelly pummel Mr. President-elect Obama over his cabinet choices, imperiling the delicate sprout of our national recovery and new-found good will. At least Politico has the sense to call them Liberals; the other day one of the blogs I roll had Jane Hamsher singing "L'Internationale" because she'd rather see Joe Lieberman's scrotum on the wall than his ass back in his seat.

Okay, so we learned last January that hoards of self-styled progressives seemed metaphysically certain they'd learned the lessons of 1972, while displaying a textbook case of fugue amnesia when it came to the Clinton years and the election of 2000. Symptoms appear to include repeated fevered attempts to emulate monolithic Republicanism. No criticism! You'll ruin it for everybody! Barack Obama must continue to pretend he's a Centrist, or else his fragile landslide victory might still come apart! Never mind that no Leftist worthy of the name could have ever mistaken Mister Senator President-elect for a liberal. But there's a guy who writes for a trades-union site who said mean things! Y'know, it ain't my party, but, Th' fuck did you imagine it to be? You took on the support of Mr. Obama as both leader of the nation and head of his party, and you're already freaking out before the Solstice? Good God, the Republicans pretty much have this sort of thing down to a science; when Marc Raciot proved unacceptable to the religious nuts as Attorney General, he was replaced by John Ashcroft before you could say Exposed Female Breast.

Look, there is one genuine piece of advice I can offer in this life, my only special area of expertise, and I don't say it very often, so listen up: The Buzz never lasts. Worrying about it makes it less enjoyable, trying to prolong it makes it go away that much faster. The Democratic Congress didn't fall to Bush-level approval numbers between '06 and '08 because it was too liberal, but because it didn't perform as expected. It bodes ill for people who prefer one side rather than the other pick their pockets. It isn't I who's criticizing Tim Geithner or Larry Summers, because I never had any illusions it'd be any different. It ought to be you who is, maybe; at the very least recognize that you signed on to manage Democrats, not Pentacostals.

• There's your problem right there. Mr. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger gets high marks in the Environmental Activist press for going to Poland to mouth platitudes about Green Laws. Yes, the same Mr. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger who owns eighteen Hummers, but doesn't even drive the one he converted to hydrogen anymore out of his newfound respect for the environment. Well, that, plus the fact that the CHP drives him everywhere, plus the fact that there aren't any Hydrogen Refilling Stations, unless you're traveling an endless loop from Sacremento to Long Beach. And yes, it's the same Governor of California who six weeks ago put the kibosh on, among other things, a pollution tax on carriers entering California ports and a law banning toxic chemicals in food packaging. But hoo-ray! He said something!

• h/t Digby:

"Having lived with this very right wing Republican group that runs the House most of the time, the notion of trying to deal with them as if we could be post-partisan gives me post-partisan depression."

--Rep. Barney Frank

"Choo-Choo". As In "Railroad".

Look, it's not my usual practice to defend guys who've
appended "von" to their names just to impress society dames.

--James B.S. Riley

Enid Nevy, "Sunny von Bulow, Focus of Society Drama, Dies". December 7

Guest expert: Dr. Michael Baden, Bulow defense expert and author of Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner (Random House, 1989).

LET'S us start with what can, and should, be agreed upon: Martha Sharp "Choo-Choo" "Sunny" Crawford-von Auersperg-"von" Bulow was found deeply unconscious on the morning of December 21, 1980; she was taken into hospital, but her coma was never reversed. Mrs. Bulow's children from her first marriage hired a private investigation team, which discovered the mysterious black bag Mrs. Bulow's maid had claimed to have seen several times, containing an exotic form of valium, amobarbitol, and a syringe with insulin residue. A Rhode Island grand jury indicted Claus Bulow for attempted murder. He was tried and convicted. The conviction was overturned, the state retried him, and he was found not-guilty.

So now let's have a brief word about fact vs. belief. Some people believe Claus Bulow tried to murder his wife. The presumption of innocence belongs before the Bar; we are not required to be agnostic inside our own skulls. But most of us feel that the Newspaper of Record ought to, at the very least, consider the matter in light of the ultimate finding of fact, instead of acting as though the first trial revealed theological certainties which were then negated by the bête noir of all those Charles Bronson actioners, the criminal released on a niggling technicality.  And we feel this, it should go without saying, despite the almost daily evidence that it does nothing of the sort:

The appeal was guided by Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, and the conviction was overturned on the grounds that certain information had not been made available to the defense and that there had been no search warrant when pills were sent for testing.

Mr. von Bülow was acquitted in 1985 after a second trial in Providence, R.I., where his chief defense counsel was Thomas P. Puccio.

That's it; we are then treated to several column inches detailing the "facts" of the case as presented by Maria Schrallhammer, Mrs. Bulow's long-time maid and a woman who admitted in the second trial that she'd lied at the first. We have the suspiciously European-seeming contents of the peripatetic black bag, but no mention of the fact that its provenance is entirely mysterious, nor that it was available to the suspiciously European-sounding von Auerspergs for several months before it was located. Nor that the maid had originally neglected to mention she'd seen the insulin.

That bag is the dog that didn't bark.

(By the way, we'll also note here--and, again, anyone checking this blog for legal advice ought to see a mental health professional as quickly as possible--that should you find yourself convicted of a crime you did not commit, and faced with the decision whether to appeal on grounds of "niggling little legal technicalities" or the findings of Paul Drake Jr, P.I., which conclusively prove your alibi, take the former. That's what appeals are won on.)

Okay, here's Dr. Baden's take: Mrs. Bulow had actually been admitted to hospital while comatose three times between December 1979 and one year later. The first episode was diagnosed as bronchial pneumonia; afterwards her doctor discovered hypoglycemia. The second, in early December 1980, was caused by acute aspirin toxicity. She'd swallowed at least 60 tablets due to a "sinus headache". Baden says this was an obvious suicide attempt, and one which almost worked. The Times report says exogenic insulin was found, or suspected; Baden says no.

On December 21 Claus found his wife unconscious on the bathroom floor. The window was open to the 5ºF. weather, and she was seriously hypothermic. Based on certain facts about the discovery, including an open medicine chest, the EMTs suspected barbiturate overdose. But somehow, at the hospital, her low blood sugar became the basis of her treatment; they may not have known she was naturally hypoglycemic. They didn't treat for overdose which Baden says should have been SOP. They put her on a glucose IV. Then someone managed to futz up the blood samples in the lab, which included a lab tech tossing out one of two samples. The first two results were contradictory. The third, weeks later, showed a high insulin level, but not--according to Baden--an unreasonably high one given that she'd been pumped full of glucose. But the reading would eventually be used to charge Bulow with attempted murder.

But the dog didn't bark. The attending physicians had misdiagnosed her, then discounted the alcohol and barbituates levels when they were returned (she had "only" 0.01 BAL, but that was several hours after she'd ingested anything; Baden puts her at 0.12 when she lost consciousness). The insulin vial is "remembered", and the dirty syringe is "discovered", after her insulin levels became the focus of her treatment. But that's not what sent her into her final coma.

The Baden book came to me by recommendation, and it's a great read. I've never read the Dershowitz book; I'm not that interested in the case as such, so I don't know how much of Baden's medical testimony, if any, it includes. But the fact is that not only was Bulow eventually found not guilty, there are explanations out there which not only suggest reasonable doubt, but which suggest the final verdict was the right one. It's also possible, in the mathematical sense, that the Times sorry tabloid recitation is actually the correct one. But that don't make it right.

Looking For The Right Gift For That Grade Schooler On Your List?

Yes, anodized O.D. It complements any school color scheme.  One-hand operation with the Carson flipper means you won't have to interrupt that tetherball match.  And if your school lunches are anything like mine were, you're bound to appreciate the combo edge when cornbread muffins are on the menu again.

Friday Bush Farewell Tour Blogging

I'VE been going through my Bush archives.  Okay, so that makes me sound more organized than I'll ever be able to pretend to be; it's a political dump file that dates back to Whitewater. or, roughly, whenever it was I got enough storage to actually keep stuff (ask your parents), with a mind toward giving the man a proper send-off, as opposed to the Bush Farewell Tour hosted by the likes of Charlie Gibson. By the way, the thing I find fascinating about that--not fascinating enough to watch, mind you, beyond what clips Jon Stewart decides to use--is that mass market "news" has been excusing itself for nigh-on thirty years now for its tabloid-worthy coverage by claiming the dictates of the Free Market. So, okay, who th' fuck wants to hear from George W. Bush any more? I can't imagine that yet includes even that portion of the audience which believes the presence of Laura Bush adds something (other than her creepy, Mother's Little Helper vibe; we're about to suggest that a certain event in late 2000 C.E., pictured above, should have caused America to pack up its 0.9 shootin' irons per capita and surround the Supreme Court, demanding Al Gore win Florida. But the simple fact is that no man's immediate family, let alone extended Crime family, ever argued more convincingly that he had no business being President of his local Jaycees, let alone a developed country, and we should have realized it long before Election Day).

Anyway, it's been interesting to note that practically everything I have dating to Campaign 2000 comes from Salon, or from some USENET (ask your parents) poster who laboriously stole someone's copyright for the greater good. Weren't no blogs in my day, sonny! It's also interesting to note that there was considerably--considerably--more criticism of George W. Bush, the man, the campaign, and the record, than I recalled. This may in part be because of what I was choosing to save, but there is a real sense that through 1999 and into the primaries Bush was being held reasonably accountable for his positions and his record, and not just his unfamiliarity with the most-common language used in America. There's actual anger in some Republican circles at South Carolina; there's Molly Ivans ridiculing Bush's campaign expense/ vote count ratio in Michigan; there are claims, from Republicans, that Democratic crossover votes are buoying Bush, and assurances that after his sliming of the Media Darling in SC the Press will be all over him. And then there's nothing. Nothing except Bushisms, the apparent suggestion that George W. Bush was lagging behind in the critical Grammatically Correct Americans demographic.

Then Al Gore invented the Internet.

It's difficult, maybe impossible, to accurately describe the campaign of 2000, let alone its culmination, without employing the word "theft". And, pace Kevin Drum and his readers, Bob Somerby is not a crazy old coot who's gone 'round the bend because of it; he's dead right. Once you've caught your leg in a bear trap, moving on may still be a concern, but there are others. The great majority of the people who committed fraud in the nation's Press in 2000 are still at their jobs, still disseminating, trivializing, juvenilizing, forcing everything to fit into their comfortable upper-class scripts. They don't apologize for helping put Bush in office; hell, they awarded themselves Gold Stars for the coverage. Campbell (Mrs. Dan Senor) Brown boogied the night away at Bush 2000 headquarters; once 2008 was clearly a Democratic year she went from baking cupcakes to throwing them.  She's suddenly a Feminist, the sort of Feminist who slags the President-Elect because he won't play the Hillary Clinton Is A Drama Queen game with her. You have to be an embarrassment on the order of Judith Miller to even receive a demotion. In fact, you have to be Judith Miller; there are enough other embarrassments at the Times alone to fill two new Tina Brown vanity websites.

Okay, so how Bush got there, and what he did once he was there, are two different things, but it can be a little difficult for the seasoned dyspeptic to sort them out, or care. And I'm sure I mentioned this before, but in the horrible month between the Election and the Selection, George W. Bush, the Man Who Would Be Exponentially The Worst President Ever, not only ducked the Press--appearing, I believe, exactly twice--but who, when he did turn up, showed evidence that his own skin was trying to reject his body. And while we may not be the most politically savvy, or informed, nation on earth, we are, hands down, that nation which, alone among countries whose primary language has an alphabet, believes quite literally in angels, demons, visitations from Beyond the Grave, extraterrestrials, card readers, palm readers, tea-leaves readers, entrails readers, table tappers, phrenologists, planetary omens, appearances of the Holy Family on baked goods, backwards messages on records, and half-off coupons. How th' fuck we missed that boil is forever beyond me.

Back Home Again

CARMEL, Indiana--home of Crooked Stick GC, where in 1991 Long John Daly leapt upon national stage, though "leapt" here is figurative--sits in the half-light of a late fall morning just eight miles from here, and even at this hour one can almost hear someone scheming to deprive someone else of a considerable chunk of his savings. It's what they do up there when it's too cold to golf.

Carmel--it's pronounced CAR-muhl, which used to be the way you could spot outsiders, but that's been the standard waggish pronunciation, like tar-zhay for Target™, for so long I catch myself doing it sometimes--is the Queen of Hamilton County, which keeps repeating that it's the Fastest Growing County in Indiana as though that meant Still Plenty o' Good Arable Bottom Land Left and not McMansions and strip malls everywhere there isn't already a golf course. They don't add And The Wealthiest nearly as often, unless they're sure you're one of their kind or are interested in leasing some prime retail space. But they're entitled to that one, too.

As I recall it, Indiana was the first state in the nation to complete its portion of the Interstate Highway system, including 465, the ring around what was then mostly suburban or still rural Marion county, which the city of Indianapolis would annex in short order. This facilitated White Flight right out of the county, and the sleepy little village of Carmel, and the nearby, even sleepier, whistle stops of Fishers and Westfield, were among the major beneficiaries, doubly so since Indianapolis' Old Money has always resided on the Northside.

It's a solid Republican area--in fact "solid" seems to weak a word there--and has been, probably, since Lincoln won the War, as John Prine once put it. This circumstance was not noticeably altered by the influx of thousands of middle-to-upper class white people.

You can add to the mix Central Indiana's own Chinatown; the sharpers who ran the Water Company from the 1920s picked Hamilton County as the spot for their new reservoir(s) (at one point the plan--Caution: Army Corps of Engineers At Work!--was to flood a full third of the county). In the end Congress refused to fund the plan, and the Water Company had to content itself with the profits from land around the reservoir they rather astutely turned into a housing development before the county could take it over for a nature preserve. Fishers and Westfield were a little slower getting into the game, but now it's a race to annex the most land before it's all gone, the better to collect water and sewage charges for the rest of perpetuity.

It's been a grand enough spectator sport for the occasional viewer with a sardonic outlook and no tax liabilities at stake, wondering when the whole damn thing would blow up and who'd catch the shrapnel. Long-time readers of this blog with nothing important on their minds might even remember our coverage of the tail end of the Connor Prairie Boondoggle, in which an outdoor laboratory-type living history museum wholly owned by Earlham College, a Quaker institution in Richmond, IN, was wrested from it with the help of Indiana's Republican Attorney General Steve Carter, who stepped in when a lot of Fishers muckety-mucks thought its full commercial potential wasn't being realized. Carter had absolutely no standing to get involved, but he did have an eye towards higher office and a nose for where the campaign contributions required to get there might be located, which is at least 9/10 of the law. As a result, Earlham parted with the museum, which is now in the hands of the sort of people who spend every moment, up to two hours daily, raising funds by selling the wealthy tax-deductible dinners, and--coincidentally, we're sure--a small section of land has been set aside for a much-needed condominium development. At the end of this season the Racist Star glowingly reported that fundraising efforts had set a new record, which is about as surprising as finding that porn sites had proven popular with frat boys. Our personal involvement is limited to the fact that the move to expel the insufficiently commercial Friends was spearheaded by Berkley Duck III, Esq., whom we wouldn't have had the courage to invent.

[Full disclosure:  we used to live near the county line, and a scant three decades ago I used to blissfully bicycle my way across rolling flat-ass fields and past the sleepy train-stop hamlet of 800 people.  Now you take your life in your hands driving through the place in anything smaller than a Lincoln Navigator.]

But if we imagined that the inevitable distant explosion we hoped to live long enough to hear someday would be caused by insufficient infrastructure, shoddy home construction, empty retail space, or, at the outside, water riots, we've had to content ourselves mostly with the six-to-eight legal battles over incontinent annexation that've been going on for a decade now. That is, we did, until late last week.

Because now word has arrived that Car-MEHL has a bit of spending difficulty, unrelated to the general economic malaise.  It's  more in the vein of Predictable Result of Guaranteed One-Party Republican Rule for Generations. A little over a year ago the soon-to-be-facing-the-necessity-of-buying-airtime-for-eight-solid-months-of-campaign-ads Daniels administration agreed to pay the city $90 mil to take over four miles of Keystone Avenue (Highway 431). Carmel Mayor Jim Brainard announced that this was sufficient funding to allow the city to build six more of its beloved traffic roundabouts, which are sort of a public transportation version of domed stadiums, except with speeding morons coming at you from three directions at once. Evidently what Carmel loves about traffic roundabouts is that they are so utterly unfamiliar to anyone who doesn't (or wouldn't be allowed to) live there that a large percentage of outsiders is likely to die horrible flaming late-model-domestic-vehicle deaths, or stay the hell away after a loved one has. It's a sort of PC replacement for their long-standing tradition of arresting anyone caught driving while Black. The damn things are bad enough when you're traveling Carmel's own surface streets; now they're putting them in on a major north-south thoroughfare which used to belong to the state, which, of course, had previously stymied anything that looked like change, progress, or just vaguely European.

Or that is they were, until Brainard (who'd been reelected--there's a shocker--a year ago while promising not a cent of Carmelite money was needed) turned up asking for $58 million worth of those cents, as the project was 1/3 completed and the money 1/2 gone. And it turned out that, oh--seat belts fastened?--he sorta might have known about this all along, and that $112 million had been the low-ball figure he'd actually been given.

Brainard, to his credit--his credit as a Republican politician, I mean--insists that he never tried to low-ball the plan to his constituents, but was merely misinformed. And overly optimistic that $112 mil could be made to look like $90 mil if one simply wished hard enough, and whistled while crossing any graveyards. And he says he withheld the shortfall until now because he wanted to make sure all the numbers were in before he said anything. The city council, for its part, begins feigning shock, shock! at this wholly unexpected turn of events it had been helping to keep quiet since February.

This comes on the heels of the public collapse six weeks ago of the private-funding cover story for the $80 million asterisk Carmel Performing Arts Center. $70 mil of that public money is already spent; the $40-60 million expected to pay for the limestone façade and skylight, and other classy upgrades, which was supposed to come from private fundraising, is so far roughly $38-$58 million short of its goal. The Redevelopment Commission has ponied up a needed $45,000,000.

Now, again, the only thing that's surprising, to me, is that this was learned not thirty years after the fact, when a dead call-girl's diary was opened or a papier-mâché bridge collapsed, but here and now, about a seated government. And the most entertaining feature, thanks to the Racist Star's new practice of putting reader comments right at the end of stories, instead of making you click a link for them, and thereby having time to steel yourself, has been the die-hard Republican excuse mongering, which has included "this shouldn't be news in an Indianapolis paper!" (the old Love It Or Leave It ploy with a special reverse twist), and the suggestion--which comes, mind you, from someone standing in the wreckage of Reagan-Friedmanomics and, possibly, with a view from his office window of the fifth publicly-finanaced sports palace we've built in the last thirty years, or maybe just the spot where we've torn down one or are tearing down another--that Brainard had somehow "turned into a Democrat."  

Caucasians

Steven Kurutz, "White Russians Arise, This Time at a Bowling Alley". December 2

IT'S a jackpot, of sorts, as a little side trip unexpectedly takes us to the corner of Food Fadism Boulevard and Boy, The World Sure Was Stupid Before I Came Along Avenue, and all thanks to the Coens. Martin Doudoroff of cocktaildb.com, who describes himself as "a cocktail enthusiast and technology consultant":

Lebowski adherents may have vaulted the White Russian to icon status, but serious cocktail enthusiasts still deride it for being simplistic and overly sweet — a confection designed to appeal to unserious drinkers.

“It’s hard to think of a more boring drink, except, perhaps, when it’s spraying from the Dude’s mouth...."

Believed to date to the 1950s or early 1960s, the White Russian has no great origin story; its culinary precursor is the Alexander. Having been popular in the disco ’70s, the cocktail is, in the words of Mr. Doudoroff, “a relic of an era that was the absolute nadir of the American bar.”

Okay, first: we find it imperative that the modern American old enough to drive, smart enough to read, and emotionally stable and hormonally-balanced enough not to try to turn everything he learns into a pick-up line, refrain as much as possible from throwing the word "nadir" around indiscriminately. Perhaps this is in part because in the 20th century we used to describe the Reagan administration that way.

Second: this is not my milieu by any means, and I freely grant Tequila Sunrise, Harvey Wallbanger (both pre-Disco), and Piña Colada (definitely Disco, though in fairness you needed something to cut the bitterness of all that blow, I suppose), the iconic White Russian and alcohol-poisoning-in-a-glass Jelly Bean or Long Island Ice Tea. But nadir? From a guy who allows himself to be described as "an historian" in print? (I'm sorry, "a" historian. Does the Times even have a style book anymore?) Forget the Tiki monstrosities of moribund Fifties and Sixties Ring-a-ding-Dingdom; how about the intervening Eighties, with their penchant for junior-high smuttiness (Give me a Blowjob! Gimme a Screaming Orgasm! Har, har, har.) humping mechanically in a ménage à trois with boring sweetness and instant Rohypnolesque intoxication (both the above mix Kahlua and Bailey's; the Blowjob adds whipped cream, while an Orgasm requires vodka). How about the following decade of Jello shots, body shots, drinks mixed right in your mouth, and Frozen Margaritas? Who you callin' nadir? For that matter, adding vodka to Red Bull, or every conceivable cordial to vodka and calling the result an Xtini does not exactly strike me as having transformed the Naughts into the height of cafe society, let alone Paris between the Wars.

Only the rarest of palates achieves expertise before middle age! We suppose this to be doubly difficult at minimum if one confines oneself to a field such as Mixology or The Western, where classical standards are non-existent and the odds of actually learning something useful before the subject renders you unconscious are long. You, sir, have mastered the art of knowing what's popular in your own time. Congratulations. If you have not yet received your Cultural Gold Star for having found the Austin Powers series delightfully anachronistic, I promise to look into it, if you promise to leave.

Now, then. Full disclosure: my drink is coffee, where I approach Voltaire in daily consumption. My alcoholic consumption tends to good wine, good bourbon, or first-rate Scotch, taken as God intended. On occasions when reduced speed is desirable it's bourbon, brandy, or apple brandy with gingerale. I can handle, on occasion, a Bloody Mary early or an X.O. Armagnac late. Coffee drinks in cold weather, vodka and lemonade in hot, splash of grape juice if you've got it. The latter is my Poor Wife's regular drink, but she's a public school teacher and can be excused anything.

And I've got no objection to the occasional Bailey's rocks or, yes, White Russian taken as a dessert. What I do object to is the sort of unqualified snobbery (and basic fraudulence) which sneers at anything "sweet" and puts sugar in its tea. The palate changes around age 25 from the infant's desire for sweetness (sweet things, in the wild, are not poisonous) toward the complex and the bitter and the longer-lasting. This does not simultaneously make you a genius, and sneering at "sweet" amounts to an unpleasant combination of the reformed alcoholic's agressive teetotalling and the second grader's abuse of the kindergartner.

Anyway, let's go to the tape, specifically, the CocktailDB.com list of Top 25 Drink Choices:

1. the Vesper Martini, which owes more to the connoisseurship of action movies than gourmandise.

2. French 75. A fine old name, and 2 teaspoons of fine sugar.

3. Alabama Slammer. Aside from the refined imagery of the name, Southern Comfort, Amaretto, and sloe gin. Not exactly for diabetics.

4. Brandy Flip. Cream. Egg. Sugar. Clarified butter optional.

5. Smith and Kerns. A boring White Russian, minus vodka, topped with soda.

6. Cuba Libre. Rum and coke, plus lime. Not at all boring.

7. Apple Martini. Look, first, it's vodka and schnapps, which is what Nabokov might have called a parody of a cocktail. If you like 'em, fine, but the simple fact that "cocktail purists" did not scream loud, long, and sufficiently until this whole "X Martini" thing was eliminated is an indelible black mark.

8. Whiskey sour, which adds some sour to its sugar, and which the CocktailDB would have you make with straight lemon juice instead of learning to make a proper sour mix. Pikers.

9. Manhattan. Finally a real cocktail.

10. Alaska cocktail. Gin, orange bitters, and Yellow Chartreuse, which is the sweeter version of Green Chartreuse.

Et. seq. People talk dry; people drink sweet, and no one ever went broke sneaking some sugar into his Chardonnay (eh, Mr. Kendall? How's that, Mr. Jackson?). I certainly don't accuse Mr. Doudoroff of actually drinking these things, but a dash of perspective never ruined any recipe I'm familiar with.

Malled

I'm laughin' now, but it ain't funny.

--Tom Turnipseed, first victim of Lee Atwater

OKAY, so, I'm not a shopper.  You might've guessed. I'm not quite so opposed to shopping as my socialist/anarcho-syndacalist/Luddite/contempto-elitist alter-ego might lead you to believe, or as he might wish; truth is it's really just the inertia.

Like any sensible person with a trip around the block to his credit, I'm aware that a) Capitalism is out to get me, personally, and b) this is nothing personal, at least not for the Capitalists themselves. For example, between this chair and the nearest Off-Ramp Mall there used to be two "sporting goods" stores, not counting a nearby Target, or the Wal*Mart I'll never enter, where a selection of doppelgängers and congruencies of such goods can be found. Now, thanks to mindless avarice, there are two counting a newly more-nearby Target and that Wal*Mart, and once I get to the Mall I find a retailer of sweatshop-manufactured apparel masquerading as a Sporting Lifestyle Specialist, the aptly-named Dick's, which I would forgive its faults on the grounds that it drove the once-even-worse local geniuses of Galyan's out of business, except that 1) Galyan's CEO Joel Silverman then wound up tapped to run Indiana's BMV, which he did as abysmally as he'd run Galyan's, and 2) somehow this didn't cost Mitch Daniels his reelection. So no gratitude from me. As far as I can tell, the main thing that came out of all that is that BMV employees wound up with a dress code that requires them to go to work looking like Joel Silverman does on his way to the links. Excepting, of course, that Silverman had a couple free closets worth of that get-up he'd amassed via regional sales-rep supplicants.  Not that it isn't a great look, though, golf shirts and khakis.  It makes you look as though you almost are dressed to break a sweat or do something useful, except you have no intention of ever doing either.  Like a golfer. 

And I had to go there yesterday--there was no real alternative--and I figured while I was there I might as well check out a particular store that might carry something I was thinking of as an Ift-gay for the Or-pay Ife-way, if you take my meaning. Dick's has its own entrances to the Mall, so I can't even tell you what year I last stepped anywhere else in the place. Probably the year I bought the Lava Lamp.

I made it through the intervening Food Court by pulling my sweatshirt up and breathing through it, shallowly, though I might as well not have bothered, since I came out into the Endless Plain of the Kiosk. They were stacked up, almost literally, from one end of the place to the other, or at least as far as I could see; I wasn't curious enough to go further. And they contained, without exception, the biggest collection of crap merchandise, useless geegaws, and celebrations of unwarranted vanity I have ever seen in my life, and I've been to several carnivals and once sat in the same room for ten minutes while my mother watched the Home Shopping Network.

And--I hesitate to mention it, really--the entire place seemed geared for "consumers" too young to drive or be gainfully employed except as Disney stars or child prostitutes. Which is precisely the taste the merchandise reflected.

Yes, yes, I'm old. Got it. But I couldn't help thinking back to my own mid-Boomer youth, where it required a great deal of effort--this is the era now popularly imagined to have been controlled by dirty hippies, mind you, though admittedly it's also the Midwest--it took a great deal of effort, I say, to avoid having someone dress you like Joel Silverman. There was nothing in the entire place anyone over the age and IQ of 22 could possibly have wanted; even if the shit somehow had managed to have taste, you wouldn't want it. Chains, jewel-encrusted cellphone skins, jewel-encrusted license-plate holders, jewel-encrusted cell phone plans; it was a freakin' phantasmagoria of Awful even allowing for the quote taste endquote of the target audience. I mean, fine, I know things are tough all over, but don't responsible adults buy clothes anymore? The most tasteful stuff I saw was at Dick's, the jackets, parkas, workout clothes, hats, gloves, booties, and thermal underwear in woodland camo, or else with THE NORTH FACE scrawled across them by some corporate-shill tagger with severe visual-field impairment. 

I did press on to my destination, fourteen Kiosks of Krap down the road, which trip took me past not one, not two, but three barkers with neck tattoos and no apparent awareness of soap. Maybe if they jewel-encrusted it.

Anyway, somewhere between Tattoos #2 (Carnival Geek settled in for the winter) and #3 (Recently Paroled Sniffer of Playground Swing Seats), and on my way to a bonus headache from whatever "fragrance" the mall was assaulting shoppers with via the HVAC ducts, it occurred to me, like a moment of seemingly impossible clarity in the middle of a twenty-car pile up: one needs to navigate through the modern age as though everyone one meets has had six or seven drinks, beginning when he or she woke up, probably within the hour. It explains everything.

Okay, Maybe It's Just Me, But It's Hard To Understand How We're Supposed To Stay In Afghanistan Longer Than The Afghans

Noah Feldman, "Fighting the Last War?" November 30

OR, How to sound like a moderate and a Bush administration functionary at the same time.

If Experience is the name people give to their mistakes (and wasn't Oscar, like, the Simpsons of the 19th century?), I'm left to wonder what name to give to the fact that I'm still taking nourishment and breathing without assistance despite the fact that the very people who got us into twin military disasters in this very decade are now the ones called upon to explain to us a) how Iraq is no longer a failure, and b) the quickest way to duplicate that not-failure in Afghanistan (which generally involves explaining that we can't, without explaining that the major snag is less the applicability of military strategy and more the difficulties involved in Simply Declaring Victory twice in a row).

Because I've seen it all before, but it used to involve a Decent Interval, like the one between the failure of excuse mongering in Vietnam and the election of Ronald Reagan, or the end of racist opposition to civil rights and, well, the election of Ronald Reagan. Not that any of that stuff had gone away, exactly, in the interim, but it had suffered electoral defeat and fallen into disrepute, before being rebranded; Iraq and Afghanistan--partly through the simple expedient of Just Keeping Them Going Forever--have suffered, by comparison, mostly a couple years of the David Brooks Don't-Make-Eye-Contact-Maybe-They'll-Go-Away technique before he and like-minded fellows were able to pop back up and start asserting the very same premise that got us there (both theres) in the first place, with the same apodictic fervor of the tent-show evangelist as before.

Enter Feldman, once the 32-year-old assistant law professor (with a Ph.D in Islamic studies) tapped by the Coalition Provisional Authority (see "Holy" "Roman" "Empire") to write the Iraq constitution, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Feldman gives us his bona fides; simply calling for another surge would be unserious, would ignore existential differences in the two situations, and, besides, might wind up as yet another flaming shit bag American Adventurism would have to hire someone to clean off its brogues after boldly stepping in:

Yet despite the surface similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan, the differences run deep, as Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, has acknowledged. The very words policymakers use when discussing Iraq — “nation,” “tribe,” “radical,” “Islamist,” even “Al Qaeda” — mean different things in the Afghan context. In the complex world of counterinsurgency, getting these subtleties of anthropology and sociology right determines success or failure.

To begin with, now, the regular Reader knows we're nothing if not joyously trans-partisan around here, so let us hop up and down in delighted agreement here: yes, indeedy, "Al Qaeda" (is that the Times' Magazine style book at work?) means something different in Afghanistan--it means "al-Qaeda (et. al.)", whereas in Iraq it meant "Scary Extra-Bold Headlines".

We're also happy to acknowledge the importance of anthropology (though we continue to maintain that sociology ought generally to stick to helping major international corporations choose the most popular colors for toothpastes and condom packaging) to counterinsurgency, though somewhere short of "deterministic". But then for some reason there's a nagging little voice asking "Why?" If The Surge was so successful, or productive of non-failure-type results, and if it comes right out of the (Petraeus-penned) Army counterinsurgency manual, why fuss over details?

The sheiks knew their authority would be enhanced if they could deliver patronage from the U.S. and the Iraqi government — after all, that is how they secured their power from the era of British colonial rule right up through the reign of Saddam. You could almost say the Iraqi tribal structure was built for the very purpose to which the U.S. counterinsurgency eventually put it.

By contrast, Afghanistan’s tribes — a term that covers everything from large confederations to cousin-networks and extended families — are not natural vehicles for creating loyalty to a central government. To the contrary, for many years the tribal confederations have functioned as proxies for foreign powers. As a result, the tribes are past masters at playing international interests against one another. Even if we can revive the traditional tribal structures, the result might be more chaotic than the situation now; a tribal strategy is as likely to increase internal conflict as to effect reconciliation.

I'm sorry, but "everything from large confederations to cousin-networks and extended families" does not describe Iraqi social structure?

Though this is nothing compared to the fact-esque truthiness of that historicity lesson. Iraq's tribal leaders are innate deal-makers, having dealt with the British for thirty years! (not to mention, or oddly not mention, for some reason, four-hundred years under the Ottoman Turks), and then Saddam; Afghans have an entirely different mindset, since they were only subjected to British influence from 1838-1919 (admittedly fighting three wars in that time), not to mention the Mongols, Mogols, Persians, Indians, Russians, and the Seljuk Turks, not to mention political dominance by the rough-majority Pashtun. So just how is it that foreign domination in Afghanistan (and eighty years of independence) creates a sort of natural-born insurgency, while foreign domination (and fifty-years of military strongmen following an installed monarchy) in Iraq creates natural-born poker players?

There are two ways to change the incentives of the many Pashtuns who until now have supported the Taliban based on the reasonable belief that they may someday return to power. One is to wage war more effectively, protecting villages from Taliban reprisals and persuading everyone that we will never allow the Taliban or other extremists to resume control. This would give Pashtuns a collective reason to seek accommodation with the U.S.-backed government.

But military advantage may prove elusive. The other way to change the calculus is to offer Pashtun leaders, Taliban or otherwise, something meaningful in exchange for promising to give up sheltering Al Qaeda and to allow basic freedoms, especially for women and girls. There may not be many Taliban leaders who are willing to renounce their ideology. But it is not too soon to start asking what, if anything, Pashtun leaders would be prepared to accept in such a deal, and if the members of the coalition could live with it in exchange for the chance to phase out the military occupation.

Let's put it another way: nothing is impossible to the man who doesn't have to do it himself, especially if he's paid to theorize about it, and hopeless acts of sacrifice by others are preferable to admitting that one was, in fact, standing directly behind the Pooch in question at the moment of that passive-voice coitus.

In three years, President Obama will have to evaluate the situation as his re-election campaign begins. If the Taliban in Afghanistan fight the coalition to a standstill while their Pakistani counterparts improve their position, he will face considerable pressure to bring American troops home. But in that scenario, withdrawal would invite a Taliban victory on both sides of the border, and the Taliban will have even less incentive to compromise than they do currently. The time for change is now, lest Afghanistan become the quagmire that Iraq was once said to be.

Said to be? Nay, Professor, was, and continues to be, ameliorated only by an apparently reduction in violence, a certain reduction in our reporting of violence, and absolutely no suggestion that there's a functioning central government which will maintain power or operate democratically once we're gone. It may be that no one hands out grant money for extended meditations on the odds on unscrambling an egg, but let us say, flat out: a massive fucking failure engendered by American military hubris, dating to a foolish, let alone erroneous, belief that we somehow stood outside the bounds of History, with a mandate to impose Pax Britannica II. There is no, absolutely no evidence the world is hungering for another one, and plenty of evidence (in fact, all available) that we can't do it anyway. That is not to say that the advance of democracy, real democracy, isn't desirable; perhaps in some of our lifetimes the day will dawn when, for example, Iraqi and Afghan women will once again be granted the freedoms they enjoyed under Saddam Hussein and the Soviet-dominated PDPA, respectively. If you catch my drift.