I'll Say It Again: All I Did To Deserve This Democratic Party Was Vote For Its Candidate In 1972.

Brent Budowsky, "Realignment dead, dealignment now". September 15

Here is how Obama blew it: Many Americans who endured the pain of a rip-off recession now endure the pain of a rip-off recovery. For them, life under a Democratic president and Congress means trading one rip-off for another, giving them neither hope, nor change, nor an end to their pain.
2008 was a 1932 moment. But the power of eloquence ends when the reality of people’s lives does not change. If a president reads a book about Franklin Roosevelt and then names Timothy Geithner to the Treasury, America gets Geithner, not Roosevelt, and more status quo, not change.

Under Obama, as under George W. Bush, we will have banner headlines about historic Christmas bonuses for bankers and Wall Street that will enflame the nation, alongside headlines about 10 percent unemployment, declining home values, mounting foreclosures, skyrocketing credit card rates and a war that will require more troops without a plan for success.
Generations of Americans will pay for the bailouts, while those who took them have historic paydays and those who pay for them endure the pain under Obama, as they did under Bush.

QUESTION: are there two Brent Budowskys who worked for Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander? Because eighteen months ago, the other Brent Budowsky was so convinced that Barack Obama was the man Democrats needed to put in office that he regularly accused Hillary Clinton of everything but digging up Vince Foster and shooting him again, said in February that she should drop out of the race lest she damage the Democratic Party, compared her to George W. Bush, and claimed she planned to elect John McCain and a right-wing Supreme Court unless she got the nomination.

Geithner? What part of "Larry Summers is advising the Obama campaign" didn't you understand? Apart from the FISA stab in the back, and the attendant "security" decisions, which can be attributed to, with apologies to Sudden Sam Clemens, the natural fascist impulses which have infected every President since Truman, what has Obama done as President he didn't promise to do as a candidate, back when it was so damned important he be proclaimed by acclamation in February?

I don't give a fuck if you want to bail on the man now, although I think it should be noted in your Permanent Record. I'd just like to know now why you imagined then that shutting off debate--to the extent there ever is one, granted--was such an imperative? Let alone imagining--in 2009!--that Congressional Democrats have let you down (working for Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander gave you the idea that once back in power Democrats planned to storm the Bastille?). Someone who says now that Barack Obama didn't turn out to be the combination of FDR, RFK, and GOD he thought he was voting for ought to learn to pay closer attention, and temper his future words with some acknowledgement that his previous claims of omniscience were an exaggeration. And anyone who whines about the destruction of the Democratic Party one season, and jumps ship the next, is a scoundrel.

Don't Be Humble. You're Not That Great.

David Brooks, "Greatest Generation, Kanye West, The Sixties, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah". September 15

OKAY, first, that mock title is unfair, as it implies that Brooks has lost or abandoned his talent for hiding his wingnut stenography behind the bland, the faux-genial, and the pseudo-learned. The real title is "High-Five Nation", and it's one of those columns Brooks seems to crank out quarterly which combine his sidewalk sociology, "moderate" social "views", and conviction that we'd all be a lot better off if those people out there were more orderly, like Markets. And--what distinguishes this form from its more familiar cousins--he does so without referencing Burke or some genuine popularizer of sociological or psychological expertise (I kid!) whose article or book he just tumbled onto.

And two things happen when you read one of them--okay, three, if you count nodding off--namely, you go along agreeing with him in a sort of general, Andy Rooney-without-the-boffo-delivery sort of way, and, two, you wait for the payoff which never arrives, but which, you realize at some point--maybe even some time after you finish the thing--just sorta seeped out, or is dribbling down your metaphorical leg.

Let's just take a moment here to express anew our love of Glenn Greenwald, who said, last week:

This is why I have very mixed feelings about the protests of conservatives such as David Frum or Andrew Sullivan that the conservative movement has been supposedly "hijacked" by extremists and crazies. On the one hand, this is true. But when was it different? Rush Limbaugh didn't just magically appear in the last twelve months. He -- along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms -- have been leaders of that party for decades. Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr's sex report, "Angry White Male" militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster's murder, Clinton's Mena drug runway, Monica's semen-stained dress, Hillary's lesbianism, "wag the dog" theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks.

Toss Brooks in with Frum and Sully and you've got three Reagantots--okay, two Reagantots and a Lady Thatcher impersonator--born in the Sixties, but before they became The Sixties, who either never noticed who they were sharing a party with, or who found some sort of excuse for ignoring it in public.

Just bear that in mind as Brooks takes us on an imaginary journey to the land so favored by "Conservatives", the Land Just Far Enough Away That Most Listeners Won't Quite Catch You Lying About It. Everything Brooks says should be accompanied by a label that reads Caution: When It Counted This Man Was Practically Indistinguishable From The Rabid Bigots He Tries To Disavow. As opposed to Sullivan, whose label would read "Was Indistinguishable".

On Sunday evenings, my local NPR station airs old radio programs. A few weeks ago it broadcast the episode of the show “Command Performance” that aired the day World War II ended. “Command Performance” was a variety show that went out to the troops around the world.

On V-J Day, Frank Sinatra appeared, along with Marlene Dietrich, Jimmy Durante, Dinah Shore, Bette Davis, Lionel Barrymore, Cary Grant and many others. But the most striking feature of the show was its tone of self-effacement and humility. The allies had, on that very day, completed one of the noblest military victories in the history of humanity. And yet there was no chest-beating. Nobody was erecting triumphal arches.

Now, nothing wrong with the sentiment, but we've already begun to ask ourselves whether Brooks is too young to remember the controversy over The Wall, too incurious to have wondered about the Soviet-heroic statuary at its base, too concerned with suburban mores to have followed the hubbub over the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit, and actually oblivious to the bulk of the members of that party he's aligned himself with the past quarter-century, with its Flag Burning amendments and $1M victory in Iraq parades and forty-year rear-guard action against the hippies who spit on returning Vietnam vets? Th' fuck named everything that couldn't run away after Reagan?

(Meanwhile, speaking of imaginary histories: audiences in 1945 were well aware that Sinatra was the object of considerable derision for his 4-F classification, that Grant had been vilified for not returning to Britain when it entered the war, and so might've kept the braggadocio to a minimum in any event; Durante, Barrymore, and Crosby were too old, and Burgess Meredith had only recently returned from an Army Air Force stint. They had all seen sacrifice, destruction, and loss, and the senselessness of two World Wars. They were solicitous of the feelings of the GIs who'd been going through this for four years, who'd've thrown away a trunkful of medals to have one buddy come back to life, of the thousands who had already returned, largely the wounded, and of the millions who would come home shortly to families anxious about how they'd re-adapt. They remembered what had happened to the Bonus Army a dozen years before. Maybe they behaved with greater decorum in those days; maybe that was even beginning to extend to African-Americans to some degree. Maybe they were less susceptible to, and less subjected to, obfuscation of political realities. And maybe they weren't just social automatons, but people who had a lot of reason to be somber, and enough knowledge of war and its aftermath not to be mindless cheerleaders.)

And there was something else. When you look from today back to 1945, you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line. Humility, the sense that nobody is that different from anybody else, was a large part of the culture then.

Why is it always necessary to add "provided you were White and Male"?

But that humility came under attack in the ensuing decades. Self-effacement became identified with conformity and self-repression. A different ethos came to the fore, which the sociologists call “expressive individualism.” Instead of being humble before God and history, moral salvation could be found through intimate contact with oneself and by exposing the beauty, the power and the divinity within.

Okay, sorry; I sorta glossed over that bit of sociologicalistic double-talk earlier. But, sheesh. Is it that it's impossible to look this sort of thing up once you're indoctrinated with it, or is it that arguing this way is the best you've got? The overwhelming urge to experience something approaching stability was, in the late 40s and 50s, a perfectly understandable impulse for a population which had experienced two world wars and the most serious economic depression in the nation's history. How does that make stability, and the concomitant social conformity of the era, some sort of default condition? Labor had been fighting Capital for the preceding seventy years (a history Brooks has already denied ever hearing about). People rushed from the farms to the cities in the first quarter of the 20th century. Everybody in the Fifties thought we'd be driving atomic cars and eating food cooked by robots in a decade, too. And they thought Milton Berle was funny. God help us if that's the default setting for the human condition.

Everything that starts out as a cultural revolution ends up as capitalist routine. Before long, self-exposure and self-love became ways to win shares in the competition for attention. Muhammad Ali would tell all cameras that he was the greatest of all time. Norman Mailer wrote a book called “Advertisements for Myself.”

And how, aside from all those weekend idylls spent discussing Burke with like-minded "classical liberals", does this always come to be the story of how people with vaguely dissatisfying personal habits ruined it for everybody?

Mailer was on Leyte. You weren't. I guess he had as much right to reject his social milieu as you have now to bemoan the loss of its cardboard advertising display. Ali was a product of the Jim Crow South. You weren't. Cameras weren't trained on him because he was some species of free-range Megalomaniac. They were on him because he was the heavyweight champion of the world, and, arguably, the greatest ever. His (comic) persona served him well, even if it occasionally got the better of him, and is hardly distinct from, say, Dizzy Dean's in the 30s or Jack Johnson's in the first years of the century.

And, really, is the cult of Celebrity really the fault of the people who carve out fifteen-minute slices, or the mass-market media that force-feeds them to us? If Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Jon and Kate, and Octomom faced execution by lethal injection based on a simple majority vote, how many do you suppose would survive? How much of their antics is in fact the work of professional publicists, publishing concerns, and media conglomerates? Y'know, David, a more cynical devotee of praeteritio than myself might ask why it's always the icons of the Civil Rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam war, and their dirty hippie associates, who're responsible for American's Loss of Faith-Based Obeisance, while the avatars of Televangelism, the Op-Ed columnist proponents of Entrepreneurial Heroism, in fact the whole, neon-lit, whirling edifice of the abiding American Monomaniacal Quest for Short-Term Profits, get off scott-free?

This isn’t the death of civilization. It’s just the culture in which we live. And from this vantage point, a display of mass modesty, like the kind represented on the V-J Day “Command Performance,” comes as something of a refreshing shock, a glimpse into another world. It’s funny how the nation’s mood was at its most humble when its actual achievements were at their most extraordinary.

But not as funny as the fact that this comes from someone who routinely lionized George W. Bush for the concept of perpetually warring civilizations at the same time he was managing to lose two wars to countries with no military forces. Y'know, sometimes it feels like the urge to memorialize everything Murican has a tinge of self-hypnosis to it.

Hey, You Can't Argue With A Successful Track Record

Lindsey Graham, Joseph I. Lieberman, and John McCain, "Only Decisive Force Can Prevail in Afghanistan". September 13

JUST for fun, Reader, imagine for a moment this piece authored, or "authored", by three responsible thinkers pondering the continuing US military effort in Afghanistan, rather than three of the biggest mirror-gazers in the United States Senate (consider! what prodigies of ego-wanking it would take to rank in the Top Five among reality-show contestants! There are 100 U.S. Senators!). If it helps any, go ahead and imagine the results published somewhere other than The Op-Ed Section Where Peggy Noonan Is the Voice of Sanity.

What, exactly, would falsify the idea that only decisive force can prevail in Iraq? (And we're trying to be generous, here, in overlooking the implications of that pleonasm in the title, for the nonce, anyway. As we shall see, self-fulfilling prophecy will hover around the piece like mosquitoes in swampland, and going in without DEET is just a moment's showing off we'll regret even before the actual slapping frenzy takes hold.) Would you anticipate some consideration of what "Prevail" means? Or the actual consequences of "Not Prevailing?" Perhaps a broad suggestion of what "Decisive Force" would mean in terms of numbers, or "Prevail" in terms of months or years? If so, then, you have pretty much defined what's missing in the actual exercise.

Growing numbers of Americans are starting to doubt whether we should have troops in Afghanistan and whether the war there is even winnable.

Translation: George Eff Will said so in a WaPo column.

We are confident that not only is it winnable, but that we have no choice. We must prevail in Afghanistan.

"We're confident that we have no choice."

We went to war there because the 9/11 attacks were a direct consequence of the safe haven given to al Qaeda in that country under the Taliban.

Okay, look, I realize that Nine 'Leven is for you what watching A Hard Day's Night or thinking about Westlake Drive-In and the back seat of my Dodge Valiant is for me. But, c'mon. My memories may be a little rosy after forty years, but yours ought to be a little clearer. We went to war in Afghanistan because the Paleolithic religious nuts who'd seized power in their country refused to turn over Osama bin-Laden fast enough to suit the Paleolithic religious nuts who'd seized power in ours. That they certainly did not have the power to have captured and handed them over, even if they had had the will to do so, may be regarded as immaterial, since we knew they couldn't and would have been pissed at the missed opportunity to bomb the shit out of someone. "The Taliban" enters into the equation in the same sense that "indiscriminately taking revenge on brown people, or Muslims of whatever stripe" does; they were in our way, and bloodlust isn't slaked by nuance, Charlie. It might be noted here, however inconveniently, that we didn't exactly catch bin-Laden, either, that the guy who planned the thing was in Kuwait, the guy who financed most of it in Dubai, and most of the participants were Saudis. Also, the guy who ignored the "Bin-Laden Determined To Strike US" memo was in Texas. We didn't drop any bombs on any of them, though doing so might have led to some immediate improvements. The whole thing could have unfolded in the United States of America, for that matter, and much of it did, under the lazy eye of the G-Men.

We remain at war because a resurgent Taliban, still allied with al Qaeda, is trying to restore its brutal regime and re-establish that country as a terrorist safe haven.

We're fighting an insurgency we created by invading, failing our mission--in part because we reduced American forces at a critical moment so we could prepare for failing in Iraq, which had nothing to do with it--then sticking around forever trying to save face. We call it the "Taliban" for the same reason Velveeta calls its product "Cheese"; because we may not always know what sells, but we sure as hell know what doesn't. We're still there because the successor to the Mastermind of Total Fuck Ups thought demonstrating militancy in Afghanistan would show voters his anti-Iraq war rhetoric wasn't due to Incipient Pacifist Disease, or, worse, Rationality.

It remains a clear, vital national interest of the United States to prevent this from happening. Yet an increasing number of commentators, including some of the very same individuals who opposed the surge in Iraq and called for withdrawal there, now declare Afghanistan essentially unwinnable. Had their view prevailed with respect to Iraq in 2006 and 2007, the consequences of our failure there would have been catastrophic.

There are things we know (or agree to pretend we do), and there are things we imagine, (or prefer to pretend we do). It is a little-recognized fact, apparently, that there are actual resources available to English speakers which can differentiate between them. For example: we don't know that beginning a staged withdrawal from Iraq in 2006 or 2007 would have had any consequences whatsoever. And we never will know that, because we didn't do so. What we do know is that going there in the first place was a disaster, that it was conducted under false pretenses and with a negligence beyond criminal, that our failure to define our mission or conduct ourselves sensibly engendered an insurrection there, too, and that all of that was vehemently supported every step of the way by Senators Graham, Lieberman, and McCain. We do not know the extent to which our "success" is a product of a successful PR campaign, aided by the fact that the public sickened of the thing sometime around the Third Set of New Lyin' Justifications and tuned out, how much, if any, of the reduction of violence is due to a "new" military paradigm, how much due to paying off Sunni insurgents, how much due to the Iraqi's realization that our time there is short, and how much 100% bullshit. Nor do we have any idea what will happen once we're gone, in a hundred years or so, by some estimates. Though this would not prevent "some" commentators, of roughly my height and shoe size, from offering dollars to doughnuts the results will be less than optimal. But only if the three of you agree to choke on the doughnuts if you win.

Similarly, the ramifications of an American defeat in Afghanistan would not only be a devastating setback for our nation in what is now the central front in the global war on terror, but would inevitably further destabilize neighboring, nuclear Pakistan. Those who advocate such a course were wrong about Iraq, and they are wrong about Afghanistan.

See comment above. Further, those who supported a headlong bull rush into the Graveyard of Imperial Armies and now express concern about unintended effects on "neighboring, nuclear Pakistan" are lying sacks of shit.

The growing calls for withdrawal reflect, more than anything, our failure to show progress in the war. After eight years of fighting, the American people see rising casualties and no sign that the tide is turning in our direction.

Their doubts are natural and understandable, and we must respond to them directly and clearly. Our problems in Afghanistan are not because the Taliban are invincible or popular. They are neither. Rather, our problems result from what was, for years, a mismanaged and underresourced war.

In other words, the problem in Afghanistan is not the lack of military progress in defeating the Poorest Most Godforsaken Nation on Earth and its Non-Existent Military; the problem is that we went about it precisely the way that Senators Graham, Lieberman, and McCain voted to. Repeatedly.

Our mistakes are infuriating, but they are also reversible.

That's what we tried to tell Connecticut, and look how that worked out.

We have an exceptional new commander on the ground, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who has begun a top-to-bottom overhaul of all aspects of our war policy and put forward a dramatically new civil-military strategy that clearly identifies failed policies and prioritizes the proven principles of counterinsurgency, including protecting civilians, creating legitimate and effective governance, and boosting economic development. With Gen. McChrystal, together with a new ambassador and a new deputy commander, we believe we now have the team on the ground that can win this war.

And this time, we mean it.

However, we need more than the right team and the right strategy. This team must also have the resources it needs to succeed—including a significant increase in U.S. forces.

Okay, fun's fun, but where th' fuck are they supposed to come from this time? Can we retrieve some of the money all three of you voted repeatedly to toss down the shit hole for a "Missile Defense System"? Maybe a feasibility study on the prospects of finding somebody willing to be lowered down there? Y'all voted repeatedly to stop redeployment of non-essential troops from Iraq. You've got access to the CBO, the Pentagon, and Senator McCain is the greatest military mind of his generation. How many troops, how much will that cost, and when do we win? And where does the money come from? Might you hazard a wild fucking guess?

More troops will not guarantee success in Afghanistan, but a failure to send them is a guarantee of failure.

It's funny, but I could have sworn you were the guys just telling me it was "decisive".

We recognize that a decision to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan will be politically difficult here at home. Some will say we can't afford it. Others will warn the president of "quagmire" and urge him to send either no new forces, or fewer than Gen. McChrystal recommends—perhaps with the promise of "re-evaluating" further deployments later on.

It is precisely this middle path—which the previous administration pursued for too long in Iraq—that is a recipe for quagmire and collapse of political support for the war at home. Mr. Obama was right when he said last year that "You don't muddle through the central front on terror . . . You don't muddle through stamping out the Taliban."

And see however many times we've noted above that it was followed with your support, even if Smoochy McCain did grouse about it not going as well as if he were Commander-in-Chief, before he had to fellate Bush in public.

As for the "middle ground", if I may prevail upon you gentlemen to wait until my head stops revolving: Christ on a cracker, the full-on Death from the Skies crusades were of 2001-2005 vintage. It wasn't until the President was safely back in office that he fired Rumsfeld and slowly began fighting an insurgency like an insurgency. Gearing up to fight the Iraq war properly would have taken years, and it would have required a draft. Meaning Bush wouldn't have been around in 2005 with the luxury to change his mind. If we can just conjure up the "decisive force" now, why didn't any of you geniuses insist on doing so back then? As in, when it might have made a difference.

We have reached a seminal moment in our struggle against violent Islamist extremism, and we must commit the "decisive force" that Gen. McChrystal tells us carries the least risk of failure.

And this time, we mean it.

In the interim, the president and his allies—and we count ourselves among them on this issue—must invest significantly greater effort to explain why, as the president recently put it, Afghanistan is a "war of necessity."

Sheesh, somebody just gave you 1000 words of prime Op-Ed real estate. * Could you have made a start here?

Additional U.S. resources must be accompanied by significant and meaningful benchmarks that hold the government of Afghanistan and our own government accountable. We must ensure that Afghan leaders are doing their part to combat the corruption and insecurity that undermine the counterinsurgency effort.

And this time…nah, we don't mean that this time, either. Had ay goin' though, didn't we?


___________
* albeit in Bizarro World

You Can Never Have Too Many Widgets

For The First Time In Recorded History A Human Being Has Uttered An Utterly Unambiguous Statement To Which He Is Unequivocally Bound. Okay, Since FDR.

David Brooks,"The Dime Standard". September 10

WE do not do Shorters, alas:

Best of all for those of us who admire the political craft was the speech’s seductive nature and careful ambiguity. Obama threw out enough rhetorical chum to keep the liberals happy, yet he subtly staked out ground in the center on nearly every substantive issue in order to win over the moderates needed to get anything passed.

First, Obama rested the credibility of his presidency on what you might call the Dime Standard. He was flexible about many things, but not this: “I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future. Period.”
This sound bite kills the House health care bill. That bill would add $220 billion (that’s 2.2 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the first 10 years and another $1 trillion (10 trillion dimes) to the deficit over the next 10 years.

There is no way to get from the House bill to deficit neutrality. The president’s speech guarantees that the more moderate Senate Finance Committee bill will be the basis for the negotiations to come.

The Dime Standard also sets off a political cascade. Since the Congressional Budget Office is the universally accepted arbiter in such matters, the Democrats have to produce a bill that the C.B.O. says is deficit-neutral, now and forever. That means there will be a seller’s market for any member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, who has a credible amendment to cut costs. It also means the Democrats will have to scale back coverage and subsidy levels to reach the fiscal targets.

[emphasis mine] Y'know, I like to imagine that if this blog had a point, that point would be "The English language, in printed form (not exclusively, but as examined here) does not notably serve as an instrument for bashing in your opponents' brains, unless it be printed on a mallet. And despite the regular violation of that self-evident truth, which would lead you to expect some degree of statistical variation, we find almost without exception that the delusional cudgel-wielder is, in fact, smacking his own conk without realizing." This is why I find David Brooks so difficult to ignore.

Brooks seems genuinely to imagine that he routinely Puts One Over on the rest of us. As though, at some point in the 2012 campaign, having written the obligatory two columns, one praising the immense oratorial and political skills of the President, the other decrying a Republican field which is insufficiently identical to himself, Brooks will not decide the time has come to spring his "but healthcare reform DID add a dime to the deficit!" possibly adding "as Megan McArdle pointed out last night on ABC's 20/20", and the suddenly flummoxed reader will say, "Wait! He's right! Y'know, back in Aught Nine, when he wrote that column, I thought it was just Brooks' analysis of the President's speech. But now I see it was a carefully-constructed, air-tight argument proving that this is how Obama intended his entire Presidency to be evaluated, as a referendum on whether he lived up to one line in a speech he gave. I'm mean, Brooks already proved it was the single greatest speech of his Presidency, right? So this fall I'll be pulling the lever for whatever microcephalic gun nut the Republican party comes up with!

And the following Friday, the corpse of Jim Lehrer turns to the shade of Mark Shields, and says, "What about David's point here, Mark?"

You wanna call the President a liar? Fine by me, but at least have the decency to blurt it out and then blame your Wide Stance or Prescription Medication like a normal Republican. How many goddam campaign pledges, position papers, and nicotine-related resolutions has he violated so far? How many did the last President? Or the one before him? Where's a balanced budget the Reagan administration sent to Congress? Sheesh. You're an Op-Ed columnist for the goddam New York Times; act like it's something other than your first day out of convent school. How many ways are there, roughly, to interpret that statement? How many ways to fudge data, when you're the Fudgemaker-in-Chief? Ketchup is a vegetable. Arsenic is a flavoring agent. I don't give a fuck if you come back and beat Barack Obama over the noggin with this from now to 2016. I just wish that you, and the Times, would begin to act like the rest of us have enough intelligence to insult.

Why I Love The Internets

WHAT Lance said.

The debate is between those who think the job of the government is to make the already rich and powerful more rich and powerful, the Republicans, and those who think the job of the government is to make more of us rich and powerful. It's between those who think the job of government is to serve the interests and protect the money of rich businessmen and those who think it is the job of government to increase the odds of more of us who want to wheel and deal, buy and sell, becoming rich businesspersons. It's between those who think that the government shouldn't get involved with the business of buying and selling except in the cases when it's to save the money and privileges of those who've already made their wads from buying and selling and those who think that the government should always be working to increase the buying and selling of everything and anything because that's the way to spread the money around.

Reagan won.

Read, as they say, the Whole Thing.

It's beyond my poor power to add anything, but, then, that's never stopped me before. Reagan won by hanging around long enough that his natural entourage of True Believers, snake-oil manufacturers, bloodthirsty draft dodgers, and business executives (that is, various combinations of the first three) were joined by sufficient numbers of Americans fed up that it was no longer 1951. And he succeeded, or "succeeded", as is absolutely clear in retrospect, by convincing large numbers of voters that sugar-coated dog turds were in fact the delicious Tootsie Rolls of their youth.

And he could not have succeeded if the opposition party pushed back.

I'm not saying that Mammon Rapine Quisling Bigot and Cheney, LLC, wouldn't have won out in the end, anyway. Or that it hadn't actually won the war during the Truman administration. I'm saying that perhaps, today, 1 in 3 or 1 in 5 Teabaggers might be more concerned about their health, and their futures, and their children's health and futures, being stolen by Wall Street sharpers than they are about the President's birth certificate. Democrats didn't simply avoid making forceful arguments to counter Reaganism. They adjured. They ran screaming from the potential loss of campaign contributions and sinecured seats, and cosy franking and banking privileges, and they lost them anyway. For twenty-five years. And at the same time they lost the ability to make an argument and have a wide swatch of what came to be known as Red State America take it seriously.

Y'know, a handful of international traders nearly (or maybe not nearly) wrecked the global economy, in large measure because we took our hands off the wheel, and because we considered enforcing what was left of our sensible, hard-earned regulation of such shenanigans little more than a leg-pull (and because of forward-thinking, eh, Governor?). And we promptly bailed them out under threat of exponential disaster. If this is not being gobsmacked, what is? Democrats should have established a fifty-year reign atop it, or at least until a future generation willfully blinded itself to the reality. Instead they run in terror of being called Socialists--or they conveniently go through the motions. Tough guys. Like Rahm Emanuel.

You're in politics. How'd you get bamboozled by a faux-genial GE spokesmodel like The Gipper unless you agreed to? How do you get shouted down today by a "minority" party? I'll grant you that the Republican trick of getting absolute adherence from the very people whose gold teeth it was swiping is less likely with Democrats. But it's Scissors, Rock, and Paper. If True Belief took every pot we'd all be facing Mecca five times a day.

This may, by the way, explain my obsession with local news, assuming "obsession" and "American age-group record for indolence" go together. It's like tuning in a gaggle of Reagans every night, cheerleaders for a vast system of mutual swindling based on no one mentioning the Grift. There are still three or four holdovers from the Seventies around, people I personally remember as having come on in their youth like little Woodsteins (or Jeff Greenfields), friends of the Little Guy, speaking the Truth to You Know Who, who are now contented aluminum siding pitchmen. Today two African-American women occupy 25% of the main anchor slots on Indianapolis' two top channels; an African-American male is half the team at the also-ran. It's a city which is 25% African-American only because it annexed the white suburbs to the county line in 1969 in order to dilute the voting bloc. It's a city that was once run by the Klan. And listening to the publicly-licensed users of the public airwaves you're about as likely to hear anything approaching a minority take on the "news" as you are to hear any of 'em slagging their network's prime-time lineup. It's as though the whole point of diversity is increasing visual interest. Not to mention that the Pom-Pom routine is now marrow deep; having spent the gubernatorial election year praising Indiana's relative (and fabulous) economic miracle they've been mostly at a loss on how to cover its skyrocketing unemployment (and how to sham empathy), and have settled on just assuming everyone knows so they can get to the Economic Bright Spot corner (really; 8 has a graphic), where they tout a potential forty new jobs in Muncie, with a long-term prospect of forty more.

You'd worry about the hidden costs to everyone's colon health, except that 8 has a nice series of promos about their new iPhone ap. Another reason to treat yourself once you land that telemarking job in Terre Haute.

That's Done. Now Can We Please Get Back To The Business Of Keeping Students From Learning Anything About US History?

HOUSEKEEPING: one, my Poor Wife managed to escape the hoards of newly-minted Maoists, or whatever it was the President was creating yesterday, and made it home safely. Thanks for asking. Two, strange as it seems, I meant The Asphalt (one of the greatest, maybe the greatest, Noir) Jungle, not the switchblade soap opera Blackboard, which would seem to be more appropriate, though my classroom film was a crime caper, after all. I had meant it to evoke the absurdity of watching sham Hell's Kitchen proto-punks--imagine today's young audiences confronted by a crack-smoking Katrina and the Waves--before bicycling home to a street which had been carved through a working farm eighteen months earlier. They should have been warning us about precociously-breasted young nubiles who dated older hippie guys, since that's where the dope came from. In fact, they should have just warned us about precociously-breasted young nubiles, period.

Which, excuse the reverie, reminds me that I spent my final two years in The Chalkboard Mall stalked by a relentless Chemistry teacher/ amateur shamus who was--his interrogation subjects routinely informed me--absolutely convinced that I was the School Pusher. Dude, you coulda just asked me! Me and my no-account friends pooled our lunch money so we could buy the occasional $15 ozzie of weed the FBI Crime Lab couldn't have found any THC in. Of course, if he'd have really been interested in fighting crime he could have busted a hot car ring, half a dozen bootleggers, and god knows what else, but no.

And I was a good student. And I'd been in his class as a sophomore, where I was the only one paying attention, aside from the goody-two-shoes who sat immediately in front of his desk, and the Foreign Exchange student who cracked us up every time he said "Al-lu-MIN-ee-um". He never confronted me directly, but he gave me the eyeball two or three times a day, between classes, since my locker was directly opposite his classroom and he was really big on the whole hall monitoring routine.

We did have one little confrontation the spring of my junior year, which is the only example I can recall of actually living that fantasy where you go back to school in a sixteen-year-old's body, but with a mature mind prepared to give these Nazis what for. I had Physics right across the hall from him that year, and I was always the first one in the room. He strolled in one day and gave me the well-practiced Junior G-Man look.

"Doesn't your father ever make you get a haircut?" he asked.

"My father's dead," I spit back.

Actually, he's still kicking at 89. I'd stolen the line from my girlfriend, whose father was dead, having been whittled down by medical science over the previous couple years, and who had received a call a year after his demise, and four after his divorce from the home's adult resident, which was answered by his precociously-breasted nubile youngest daughter. The request to speak to Mr. Baughman was answered, as above, "No, he's dead," to which the woman, momentarily taken aback, sputtered, "Oh, I'm sorry. I'll call back later."

Anyway, a deep bow and a hearty secret teenaged reprobate handshake for the "about 100" students of Pendleton (IN) Heights High School who walked out of class yesterday to protest the school's refusal to let them watch the President's speech. For which, of course, they were all given Detention, the Lethal Injection of tiny minds, just so they all understood that artificial, uninformed, politically-motivated, television-buffoon-driven protests, real, imagined, or fabricated, would be given a full and friendly hearing by the school's administration, but that its students could just Shut Th' Fuck Up.

And here's the thing about all that Speech nonsense. I don't know what coverage was like on your local carnival of teleprompter misreading, but it couldn't have been any worse than mine. Solid fucking week of Speech coverage interlaced with H1N1 Panic. Controversy! It was like a condensed version of The Great Property Tax Revolt of Aught Seven. Night after night of verb-tense-challenged "parents" explaining why their personal political opposition to Barack Obama ought to be the guiding principle of all public instruction the next three years. Okay, "explaining" is too strong there.

The disgusting part was the rapidity, and apparent eagerness, with which local schools announced their decisions to block the thing. Y'know, it was your decision whether to show it. I didn't give a fuck one way or t'other, but the White Flight Doughnut counties around Indianapolis were dumping the thing faster'n a proposal to import toxic sludge from New York City. There wasn't even any pretense of honest examination, nor letting cooler heads decide, nor avoiding raw political manipulation. Hell, there wasn't any recourse to the school itself deciding how the school day would be spent. It was pure, placard-waving, Don't worry, we're not going to allow your children to be indoctrinated horseshit. The principal of Center Grove High School (Motto: A Five-Star Waste of Good Pastureland!), Greenwood, IN (Motto: The Cul-de-Sac-laden Crown Jewel of the "Everything South of US 40 is Dixie" District), Johnson County, where the Negro-hoard-fleeing Indianapolis whites who instinctively turned South ran to, told the local hairdos that she would preview the speech and edit it if necessary. Y'know, just he case he let an Ofay slip, or urged her young charges to give the crack cocaine a whirl, or mentioned decent medical care for all.

Could you just shut th' fuck up when you've every reason to? This is what colors my perceptions, Ken. Those people were not responding to the question of appropriateness of the bully pulpit interrupting the school day. If Zombie Ronald Reagan had asked to make a speech they'd have run out and bought new giant screens. They couldn't even acknowledge that they were bowing to political pressure without bothering to hear any other side. They couldn't even be bothered to leave the impression that school curriculum was their responsibility, not Glenn Beck's. It was, simply, a quick affirmation that whatever the nuttiest of wingnuts believes is legitimate in Republicanland.

And I like to think I at least consider how my own opinions color what I hear on the idiot box, but this is one of those times when it's damn near impossible to see any justification. The locals ran this stuff for a week. They never had any problem finding some "spokesman" for "concerned" "parents" to fill the time. But somehow I had to turn to the internets to learn that Reagan had delivered an overt stump speech with children as a backdrop. (Not that he ever really did anything else.) The entire issue was framed by the loudest screamers among the bunch who resoundingly lost the last election to this guy, including, they kept telling me at the time, Red State Indiana for the first time in 45 years. Controversy! And having helped see to it that urban legend and political underhandedness would rule the day in the Doughnut counties, the locals were reduced to finding a Marion county school to serve as an example of the Parents May Opt Their Children Out alternative, noting that at Pike Township's New Augusta Academy about 30 students out of 800-plus were excused. Thirty. It suggests that every last fucking one of their parents had been interviewed by local news in the preceding five days.

Just Say No

DOC Stripes points us to Popehat's Why I Oppose President Obama's Speaking to the Nation's Schoolchildren. More irritability ensues.

I was--you might find this a little farfetched--already irritable on the subject of the public schools, having just yesterday managed once again to come in in the middle of something on the Sundance Channel (Motto: The Only Cable Network Which Does Not Endlessly Repeat Its Programming!), that something being Ron Mann's documentary Grass. Having gone through all this a mere month ago with A Skin Too Few, a documentary on Nick Drake, I'm already reasonably certain that 1) it will be replayed late this month; 2) that date is so far off that it will not appear on the DVR schedule until the odds that I will forget to check for it have risen considerably; and 3) that recourse to the Sundance Channel website is fine if you're a big fan of viewing two pages over and over, each of which links to the other, or if Giving Up is something you find difficult to accomplish without help. Either I'm missing something important, or they are, which means for the individual, of course, that you're left yelling at the Hold music.

What I did catch of Grass included clips from two of the three anti-marihuana films I was shown in my own high school days. The first two came as I, neophyte doper, joined dozens of other aspiring sophomores in getting the fucking State-Mandated Hygiene Class out of the way at the same summer school session where one took Driver's Ed; this was convenient for the school, too, as it could just rotate the stable of dumbass coaches whose teaching competence was stretched to the limit by the requirements of answering questions about contacting the syph from toilet seats and showing car-crash snuff films, respectively. And who needed the work as they were otherwise unemployable.

Hygiene had recently been renamed Health & Safety as part of the NASA-inspired movement to match post-war standards and practices with late pre-war technical knowledge. This mostly involved swapping Old Gold and Chocolate Brown textbook covers for something with bold orange stripes, a process which apparently left no money for upgrading the stock of classroom films. And so it was that one fine summer day I spent two hours in a windowless classroom watching a pair of Harry Anslinger classics from the early 50s, with Asphalt Jungle JDs in black leather smoking reefers they'd obtained from the Panama-hatted Pusher who hung around the schoolyard, which led, of course, directly to heroin addiction when the Kick just wasn't enough anymore. But not before, high on happy weed, the punks stole a case of Cokes and, lacking openers, smashed the bottles on a handy window sill and manically drank down the broken glass without noticing. The ensuing "discussion" was led by the Wrestling coach, a man who had received his drug abuse education direct from Art Linkletter and Joe Friday, and whose teams posted a combined dual-meet record of 3-39 the three years I was there. I was tempted to say, "Wow, I've had really bad cottonmouth before, but Coke's too goddam sweet," but had decided, I think wisely, to hold off getting known as a wiseass until I'd gained twenty-five pounds.

This followed, by two years and one school system, the "Sex" "Ed" film I--and the rest of my gender-separated class--had been shown as a 7th grader, in which a Panama-hatted pervert lured teenaged boys into his ranch-style home, located conveniently across the street from where someone was teaching himself how to hold a 16mm camera. What happened after that was entirely unclear; I blamed the editing. One of my fellows, who'd seen the thing in a different period, informed me that afterward the teacher had advised his charges that if anyone ever tried to play with them they should just piss on him. I suspected a leg pull, but those were simpler times.

By 1971 they'd noticed the Sixties, and Nixon had ponied up for a film that Told It Like It Was, starring Sonny and Cher, in which a thirty-eight year old man with a Moe Howard haircut who had turned a marginal songwriting ability, a showbiz sense borrowed from William Castle, and a half-Cherokee jailbait girlfriend into the world's most unfortunate pop career, and no, I'm not forgetting Gary Glitter, solemnly informed Today's Youth that if they took drugs they'd miss out on the best part of being a teenager, namely, preparing to become housewives, actuaries, and hopeless alcoholics. Babe.

Which is to say, I agree wholeheartedly that Presidential platitudes are probably a waste of good study hall time, and that politically motivated speeches like Reagan's (h/t Roy) are worth objecting to. And I do wish the administration, having tried to make a virtue of pretending the entire Republican party--let alone its base, which Ronald Reagan shrewdly de-institutionalized in the 1980s--could be reasoned with, would at least figure out how to de-Malkinize its press releases. But then, students are forced to waste time on all sorts of things.

It’s not just the fact that he’s doing it. That’s part of it — and I’ll get to that in a second. What’s really pissing me off is that it’s highlighting how hopelessly and insipidly partisan our national discourse is. On the one hand, the loudest voices decrying the speech are offering bizarre hyperbole about how Obama is going to indoctrinate our children in Marxist ideology, and suggesting that only sheep will let their children listen. On the other hand, you’ve got the smirking, eye-rolling folks who are suggesting that if you don’t support the speech you must be stupid or a Glenn-Beck-level frothing nutcase. I’ve tried discussing this and explaining my viewpoint several places, only to have supporters of the speech furiously attack strawmen they have erected rather than reading what I actually wrote.

Our national discourse--could we please stop pretending it's sunk to New Lows, or that such is even theoretically possible?--isn't helped by False Equivalence Syndrome, which holds that what some guy said on the internets cancels out an organized and systematic anti-Obama campaign run by a cable network. It's the old "story on A-1, correction on A-17" routine. The story is the bizarro world of Kenya Hussein Obama, Marxist Nazi indoctrinator. It's not "should Presidents take up school children's time?" They probably shouldn't, but when they do they should be accorded the same respect that every other President who's chosen to do so received. In particular, the argument over "political content" was ripped to shreds by Reagan's performance. At the same time, citizens should be accorded their full First Amendment rights, and, as Wolcott said the other day, if Obama was half the CommieNazi he's portrayed it's the muzzling of his opponents we'd be talking about. This should not rise to the level of mob-induced school cowardice, which is my main concern, by the way. Bear in mind that this is the end of the political spectrum which howled in protest at the teacher "being fired" for "posting a picture of President Bush", although none of that was actually so, and which routinely posits any show of timidity, equanimity, or cultural diversity in the public schools as a "PC Police" action.

The President has unequal access. Not news. Sometimes used in ways that suggest, at the least, unfair advantage. Also not news, and true of every President, if we're going to be honest about it. We get to complain about it when we don't like him, without losing our right to clam up when we do. Also all well and good. But when we decide that now would be a good time to raise a principled objection, we shouldn't be surprised to be splashed with a little tar.

Suffice it to say that I think our political leaders have no business using a captive audience of schoolkids to make a stump speech. The nation’s students are not the property of the government. The government is there for them, not vice-versa.

You'd like to think so, but the task would be more difficult if you'd have spent ten days arguing the suspension of 150 students at Richmond (IN) High School over violations of a Dress Code lots of people (including a lot of Richmond parents) considered draconian, if not plain bizarre (no stripes!), and which had been sprung on them two weeks before school began. Let's just say that a surprising number of our fellow citizens believe Sit Down, Shut Up, and Do As You're Told is the most important lesson we can impart to public school students, and that a depressingly large percentage of them believe it's the best preparation for Life, and the most important determinant of future employment prospects.

Look, a speech by the President is by its nature political

And, by the nature of the Office, stereotypically American, which might explain the "anti-American ideals" routine hurled at him, except it's too common to require explanation.

That’s okay for adults who are voluntarily present at the speech. But it’s not appropriate for children who are there involuntarily.

How many times did George W. Bush--or his co-President--use the military as a backdrop?

Not only is student attendance compelled 180 days a year, and frequently directed by people with all sorts of ulterior motives, but the distinction between This President and The President is being blurred here to create political prisoners. When I was in high school our band--it was renowned--was chosen to play for a Nixon appearance in town. Height of Vietnam. I knew people in the band who hated Nixon as much as I did, but they were thrilled to death at getting to play for the President of the United States. Protesting his appearance, or the things he has to say, is distinct from trying to eliminate the symbolic power of the office. Which I'd actually be happy to help achieve if it were a neutral act, but it ain't. As Stanislaw Lec said, "When smashing monuments, take care to save the pedestals. They always come in handy."

The fact that this form of using kids as props is so common as to be banal is not a reason to support it; it simply means that we should put the speech in a larger context. But social attitudes towards government are built slowly, over time, one incident at a time. We have to start somewhere in making the point that politicians are there to serve us, not vice versa. It’s reasonable to start with kids, and it’s reasonable, when politicians decide to make a big deal of something, to make an issue of it in return.

Look, I've been urging the Obama organization to purge itself of tone-deaf hagiographers since back when he trailed Hillary Clinton. But concession to "principle" in this case wouldn't establish a new paradigm of government, or re-establish an old one; it would damage this President and benefit his opponents, the ones whose disastrous Era of Misfeasance he was elected to help us shovel our way out of. And they have clearly demonstrated the principle to which they owe allegiance. It's the principle of Whose Ox Is It?

Yes We Can't!

BRENDAN points us at Wolcott and ruins my holiday.

Okay, so it didn't ruin my holiday (best described by my Poor Wife a couple days ago: "It's Saturday night and I'm watching The Weather Channel."); my neighbors' (the Garrisons, owners and operators of Parker Garrison, the five-year-old who used to stalk me until he found out we didn't have a laptop he could play with) biennial home maintenance spasm took care of that, shortly after 9 AM of a peaceable Sunday morning yesterday, when Garrison pere started banging on the fascia of his attached garage. I say "he", but in truth it was "whatever family member or friend he'd roped into doing the actual work", since he does almost none of it himself. In fact they seem to be some undiscovered cult of Reverse Menonites.

It's the first Sunday in September. Fun haah-sunt got time for zuh vaiting game, bub. There's the little matter of drying herbs and taking cuttings and turning out compost and preparing potted plants to be hardened off and everything else to be bedded down, plus all the stuff that went undone in August because you're basically sick of gardening by August. And Sunday is the day when--not by acclamation, since the neighborhood yobbos would be up shooting off firecrackers if they weren't still passed out from the previous night's dedicated research into the effects of corn beer, corn liquor, and Taco Bell's late menu on the juvenile mind, and if they could afford to husband the ordnance--mornings are generally quiet until the first lawnmower goes off around 11. So I'm stuck with the job, but the peace and quiet I'd anticipated two more hours of has now become a guy next door banging on lumber while said lumber's owner handles the standing around and watching part.

And do not mistake me, here--the Garrisons are nearly perfect neighbors, nice people who rarely, if ever, go outside and whose two well-mannered children are apparently allowed to play video games to their heart's content. Their indifference to suburban standards of grounds maintenance is especially refreshing given the excesses of the shirtless lawn Nazi opposite and his annual eight-month regimen of Agent Orange applications, and since it makes my own studied indifference look merely quirky. And I have considered that he might have some sort of physical infirmity, or a fear of heights, or--and this one is not entirely dismissed yet--some mental incapacity for the jobs at hand, but he's seen atop his roof each autumn, using a leaf blower to clear his gutters (said leaf blower is never used for any other purpose, as, say, removing accumulated leaves from his lawn before that percentage of them which don't wind up in my yard turn to duff). And he jogs. Any suburbanite who jogs while visible can at least be considered fit enough to get with the program, in both the Physical and Willing to Swallow the Zeitgeist Whole senses.

So it was just the petty, skull-splitting frustration of my expectations of an AM's pacific horticulture which had informed the cosmic irritation of the never-ending festival of lies, cowardice, and pre-natal exposure to heavy metals which is domestic American politics.

The history and velocity and modus operandi of conservative attacks on elected Democrats are out there in the screaming daylight open and yet time and again they find themselves in a passive, stationary, unprepared position, getting pounded into mush, going down in--well, it's too early and wimpy to talk about defeat. But stale defeatism is definitely loose in the air.

I just don't understand how an informed middle-aged American of reasonable mien and perceptive politics writes that sentence. What possible expectation do we have of Democrats behaving any other way? Why in the world should the Democratic party be given the sort of consideration we give battered women? They aren't trapped by circumstances beyond their control; they have chosen, since 1972, to cringe and cower, even when they're handed the reins of power and asked to drive us out of Republican messes. Is there some point at which we begin to suspect that maybe this really is the Democratic party, that maybe they want it this way? After all, the current Democratic power structure seems as much a product of the Reaganaut "America is a center-right country" mindset as Jonah Goldberg is a product of Fluoridation is a Commie Plot routine. And equally facile in overcoming it.

It was one thing to be lectured about electoral politics by a bunch of twenty-five-year-old political geniuses whose claim to insight was that they hated the Bush administration; it's another to have an entire political party still throwing rocks at a cartoon version of George McGovern. Many of the people who now howl, or hoot, about being called "socialist" are yet convinced that some time before their own births the Democratic party, possibly while high on 'shrooms, nominated the Trotsky of the Prairie for President, and thus are happy to accord "their" party's leadership the right to placate a cartoon version of Ronald Reagan's America, biennially, in order to get elected and return to doing the bidding of their corporate masters and the slightly more moderate wing of their own class. Anyone who objects is referred to how much worse the alternative is. Why is that? How many "progressive" bloggers were seen masturbating in public at the thought of a "filibuster-proof" Senate majority? How many disciples of Markos Moulitsas spent last year accusing Hillary Clinton of racism, in the fantastical belief that this would get the Centrist Democrat they preferred elected? And where are they today? Banging keyboards in their outrage over Teabaggers? They're the voters you were just telling me were so vital to a Democratic party victory over the tattered remnants of a Republican party.

Did you really need to learn this lesson again? You had the opportunity to hold the "antiwar candidate"'s feet to the fire, and you didn't, and now you want to blame the Neanderthal wing of the other party. This in contradistinction to blaming the reelection of a canny, polarizing criminal psychopath in 1972 on "The Left", and blaming Ronald Reagan--once he was safely off in the corner, blowing spit bubbles--for Democratic majorities facilitating his radical wealth redistribution programs. The same pile of toxic moronity that kept Dick Cheney from being the first national political figure to record negative approval numbers is still driving the public debate. Congratulations on that big electoral sweep.

Part of the crazy cognitive dissonance of this summer is the rabid conviction the tea baggers and conservative bloggers possess that Obama is a suave-talking, solid-core radical socialist who practices Chicago-thug hardball, when in fact if Team Obama was the steamroller they claim, they never would have acquired the momentum they've mustered this summer--a true Lenin would have squashed them out of the gate and hardly would have allowed this much slippage this fast.

I'm sorry, but aren't we talking about the guy who was running, a year ago, on his admiration for Ronald Reagan? Oh, right; he later explained he didn't mean Reagan's policies, he meant Reagan's efficaciousness. So which one is he emulating now?

This is not to say that the Obama administration, or national health care in particular, is doomed to failure, though certainly in the latter case we are now forced to ask how it avoids it; it's simply to ask how we managed to get here so fucking fast, and what concessions to the Right the geniuses who led us to this point propose will get us out of it. The Republicans turned their once-in-a-generation opportunity into twenty-five years on top, though not of accomplishment; the Democrats now look like they'll be lucky to make twenty-five months. The President may in the end get us a decent health-care system by dint of personal will, but he's going to have to float there on the backbones of jellyfish. Maybe it's all an elaborate Rope-a-Dope routine, but why? If you don't wanna be a bully, why'd you buy the pulpit?

Ready For My Close-Up Vice Presidential Audition, Mr. DeMille

Corection: Wednesday we mentioned Mitch Daniels' two poses,

Pensive and Surly. We failed to include Mufti,which is basically Surly

when he needs the protective coloration of a seed cap. We regret the mistake.

I KNOW many of you were concerned that Indiana's Bonzai Governor Mitch "Below Average" Daniels would spend a second straight forlorn week in his office, trying to find another group of state employees to pass out certificates of Long-Term Employment Due To Union Protections Which Prevented The Daniels Administration From Firing Everyone Above Entry-Level Pay Grade to, and posing for more pin shots. You may rest easy; Mitch found a way to turn his current Presidential campaign-by-proxy concern (covering his tracks on Indiana education) with the process of aligning himself with out-of-work Republicans desperate to start ruining things again, his penchant for free-wheeling staged "discussions" of his side of an issue, and his love of Photo-ops, by inviting former Florida governor and Lehman Brothers advisor Jeb "He's Still Alive?" Bush to town to explain how he single-handedly improved Florida's public education test scores by kicking all the featherbedding union lesbians in the ass.

Bush outlined the changes he made in Florida that included a stronger accountability system that gives schools letter grades such as A or F, more charter schools and ability to transfer to other public or private schools, flooding schools with reading resources and requiring students to pass a state reading test before they could be moved from third to fourth grade.

Daniels said he would like Indiana to adopt everything Bush described -- and more.

Okay, class, we're going to go over this for as long as it takes for everyone to get it, and, Mr. Daniels, if you'll stop selling reefer to your classmates and listen it might help. There is one and only one test which is given to students throughout the country, in Grades 4 and 8: the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Mr. Daniels! It is not, as we apparently have to keep reminding you, some sort of Absolute Scale on which all educational performance may be graded, but it is a uniform test, and it does avoid the problem of states lowering test standards for political purposes, not that we're accusing anyone, or his brother. That, in fact, once we reduce education to assessments of competence in those areas which are amenable to the process of assigning numerical values we have already accepted an argument under the pretense of examining one. Anybody? Okay, maybe that's too advanced for the room.

Now, then, let's take a peek at the state figures for Florida, shall we? Mr. Daniels, stop that this instant! or I'll take away your booster seat. Oh, look: why, in Grade 4 reading Florida has gone from just 53% of students scoring at Basic competence levels or above to a remarkable 70% in the past eighteen years. Observations? Yes, Mr. Daniels?

"Indiana started at about that time 20 points ahead of Florida." "If we had progressed at the rate Florida did, we would be a national leader."

I see. Well, in fact, Mr. Daniels, had Indiana progressed at the rate Florida did in that time, we'd now have 119% of our students scoring at the Basic competence level or above, which, indeed, would lead the nation by a substantial margin. This raises the question of how you did on the Math section, though it does answer a lingering question about your tenure at OMB. Instead, sir, what we have here is a prime illustration of the theory of If You're Lying Face Down In A Shithole There's No Way To Go But Up. Though we should not allow this to color our appreciation of Florida's praiseworthy rise to near-competence.

Speaking of Math, and if we've recovered momentarily from the Blinding Miracle that Jebbie Wrought, let's take a look at those Indiana numbers, shall we? Basic competence levels in Grade 4 Reading have indeed remained flat since 1992, though the number scoring at the Proficient level or above increased by 10%. Not exactly a small potatoe, Mr. Quayle, particularly since, unlike Florida, the state has scored above the national average all that time. And Indiana Grade 4 Basic level Math achievement has gone from 60% to 89%, and Grade 8 from 56% to 76%, all the while remaining above the national averages. Which means, Mr. Daniels, in case you were raising that finger to count with, not wag, that Indiana's "miracle" exceeds Florida's if you just bother to look at the data points in the next column. I'm sure that was an honest omission, and I'm sure you'll now wish to acknowledge that not doing what Florida does is an even better idea.

Mr. Daniels, I've warned you before. If you don't stop misbehaving every time someone disagrees with you I'm going to sit you between two normal-sized children for the class picture.

Whine Selection

Regina Schrambling, "Don't Buy Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking: You will never cook from it". August 28

ONE: I did, a lot; still do on occasion, though I don't often cook from anything much anymore. I spent a couple years cooking several times a week from Julia's book (what? Simone Beck is chopped foie gras?), as well as Louis Diat's and Henri-Paul Pellaprat's. I didn't come out the other side a cuisinier, but I did come out knowing how to cook.

TWO: this piece, like the movie and the Blogging Event which inspired it, are not for me. Just so's we all understand one another. Had it occurred to me, in 1978, to write a book about the "experience", or Ur-blog it by calling ten people and telling them about it, utilizing up-to-the-minute, NASA-developed touch tone dialing, I would have sat down with a cold cloth until the idea passed. When I first heard about the Julie character blogging her way through Mastering the Art I thought, oh, great idea! Then I dialed up a connection and read some. End of great idea. I am not the audience for this sort of thing. I do not care if that audience is hoodwinked repeatedly because of its devotion to quotidian pop-culture manias, unless they are perpetrated by Politics, Commerce, or come through my walls and disturb my reading.

THREE: I don't understand why it should require much experience of the culture before one simply throws up one's hands, preparatory to meeting each and every media-driven mass trampling of what was once a perfectly fine flower bed, bothering no one and giving pleasure to the few who knew it well, with a fittingly Gallic shrug. Don't Buy "Mastering the Art"! Sheesh, lady, the people who have to be told that are never going to learn the lesson. The people who peddle books are never going to stop putting movie stars or muppets or Whatever Sells on whatever stack of wood pulp they have in stock. Can you get a Passion of the Christ Bible at Half-Price Books? Wouldn't particularly surprise me. I think we ought to be thankful there's no Burger King Limited Time Only Chicken Cordon Bleu sandwich and special Julie & Julia commemorative cup deal going on.

Okay, so, it's Slate, and so the perpetual pretense that one is commenting on something real, rather than spinning the same old cog in the Perpetual Zeitgeist Machine, has to be maintained. But look, supposing you dissuade some poor-impulse-control buyer from ponying up $25 here. What happens? The money's gonna be spent on the next gimcrack down the block, which, odds say, will probably be absolutely worthless, not just practically so. Whereas all those Volume Ones are going to wind up at garage sales across this great land, probably within the next twelvemonth, and possibly inspire some kid someday to do some real cooking.

So, before we start (sadly, yes), Ms Schrambling, if you really have a problem with people buying a cook book so far over their heads, and so beyond the minimal amount of effort they are likely willing to put into the practice, I suggest you take it up with Ms Powell, who used the thing as a prop.

Thanks to my consort, I have owned the two-volume set of Mastering the Art since 1984, the year after I graduated from restaurant school, but even I have never cooked from it. My copy of Volume 1 is tattered, but only because I've used it for reference over the decades—it is infallible as a sourcebook. I would think the problem is my short attention span, given that I grew up cooking from my mom's 1950s Betty Crocker cookbook and was trained professionally using recipes that had been distilled to their essence so that technique could be taught fast. But Julia's recipes were written for a rigorous cook with endless patience for serious detail.

I wish this flabbergasted me more than it does. It's not for want of trying on Ms Schrambling's part. I'm hoping that "recipes distilled to their essence so that technique could be taught fast" is merely the product of a tin ear--hers, or her instructor's--but I fear the worst.

Recipes aren't distilled because they're teaching "technique". They're distilled because they're teaching restaurant cooking, which is a form of fast food. I do hope your instructors understood that. It must be finished to order. Depending on the establishment, and the clientele, a one- or two-hour lag might be acceptable, but what has really happened is that a complex (if desired) series of events has taken place, utilizing a division of labor, in order to simplify the final preparation. You do not walk into a fine dining establishment, order the Poulet rôti, and wait while the captain relays the message to the guy who takes the chicken out of the locker, trusses it, and bastes it for the next 2-1/2 hours. Or not many.

Neither can I understand the "don't cook from it, but use it as a reference" routine. That's what Larousse is for. Mastering the Art isn't a compendium. It's a collection of recipes for the home.

Okay, so if you know how to cook every cookbook is a reference work, and if you've got The Girls on the shelf, and damn am I tired of coming up with ways to avoid pasting the full title in again and again, you might use it that way. But this is all from The Repertoire. If you've never followed a recipe, what do you need it as a reference of?

Listen, I'll admit I have about ten bones to pick with the whiz-bang American food culture since 1975 for every morsel I find savory, but this is a big one: the idea that the World of Betty Crocker and the Go-Go American lifestyle exempt us from putting in the time and effort required to learn something of great worth. Americans give themselves a free pass on this sort of thing, and then turn around and ask why anyone would go to such bother. How th' fuck are you supposed to know?

Consider the boeuf bourguignon depicted so romantically in the movie, which has had restaurant chefs and amateurs alike breaking out their "9- or 10-inch fireproof casseroles" in the hottest month of the year. The ingredients and instructions for its recipe span three pages, and that is before you hit the fine print: The beef stock, braised pearl onions, and sautéed mushrooms all require separate procedures. Step 1 involves making lardons and simmering them for 10 minutes in a precise amount of water; seven steps later, the fat is finally skimmed off the sauce, which is either boiled down to thicken or adjusted with liquid if it's too thick.

First: Americans are excused for having short attention spans and no patience, but they aren't presumed to live in air-conditioned bubbles during the hot months? Sure. Two: I've got a 1977 printing. The recipe runs across three pages, but would come pretty close to fitting on two, with its introductory paragraph and wine and vegetable accompaniments intact. You slam into the onion braising and mushroom frying just after the casserole hits the oven, what would probably end page one of a dedicated pamphlet, and the horrible ordeal of stock skimming assaults you soon after. In other words, it's listed in the actual order in which you actually do actual things in the actual recipe. (And fer chrissakes, you don't need a "precise" amount [it's an exacting "1.5 quarts", by the way, not "10 to the third mole at 25º C.") of water; you need an ample amount so the lardons don't stick together when simmering.)

I mean, I crank out a lot of good lo' Fanny Farmeresque beef stew and pot roasts during the winter. How many steps are they, and how much mess? Even tossing the latter in a crock pot requires prepping onions, carrots, potatoes, turnips, garlic, and green beans, and even using one of the reasonably good shelf stocks available now (but not then) you're still advised to strain and deglaze before serving. How much less do you want to do? Toss everything into a pot and pray Betty sorts it out? Maybe cooking isn't for you at all, let alone trying to knock out haute cuisine.

And this is considered an entry-level recipe. Everything in the tome looks complicated, which of course guarantees the results will work but also makes cooking feel like brain surgery. Even simple sautéed veal scallops with mushrooms involve 18 ingredients and implements and two pages of instruction.

This is a fabrication. Seriously. And aided by the horrible American convention that one identify dishes by naming however many ingredients one cares to. This is, after all, the country when someone savoring the precious nectar of a '61 Chateau Petrus can be said to be "drinking a Merlot".

There is a recipe for Escalopes de Veau à la Crème which involves: veal, butter, shallots, white wine, brown stock, cream, and mushrooms. How much less work do you want? There are two, a Provençal dish with brown sauce, and Blanquette de Veau à L'Ancienne, which are more complicated. So what? Someone making a classic Blanquette de Veau is not sautéing veal and mushrooms, except in the sense that Joe Dimaggio was playing a kid's game. Throw veal and mushrooms in a pan and turn on the heat if you want. Perfectly acceptable, perhaps quite good, but not an excuse, in a food writer, for missing the distinction between true gastronomie and the production of ballast for a Stevedore, as Rex Stout once said.

If after 26 years of cooking for a living, I am worn out just reading those recipes, I can only imagine how a newbie who can barely identify a whisk will do,

Maybe he'll be less unwarrantedly jaded about it. Maybe she won't have been held prisoner by Betty Crocker in her youth.

let alone how someone who has never seen Dover sole in his supermarket could cook sole meunière, the other iconic Julia dish that restaurants and home cooks have been reflexively celebrating since ogling it in the film. It's a plot point, and the recipe is not in the book, although others for sole are, helpfully indexed under "poisson.")

Ah, well, you can always buy Volume II, with the complete index in comforting English. Lady, why shouldn't someone trying to master the art of French cooking learn some simple French culinary words and phrases? Do you gripe if you sit down at the piano and the instructions are in Italian?

Ms Powell's work can stand on its own merits, if any. But the infestation of food writing and broadcasting over the past three decades, dedicated to the idea that knowing this month's magazine-approved Trend trumps the requirement of doing any real work, is, well, un-fucking-palatable.

Olio

• The remains of the Sunday Indianapolis Racist Beacon are five columns wide, still include a Metro section (but not, my Poor Wife moans, Femme Fare, the fondly, if perhaps slightly emotionally and occasionally crankily remembered collection of advice columns, wedding announcements, and hamloaf recipes aimed at The Distaff Side), which itself still includes Behind Closed Doors, a page-dominating guided tour of Insider Indiana poop.

And perhaps they were fresh out of poop at the close of August, because this week the thing--which barely extended below the fold, to begin with--featured a four column, 5-1/2 x 7-1/4 inch picture of Mitch (The Spork) Daniels, fist resting pensively on his enormously productive cranium. The picture accompanied the story--it was not the lead story, by the way, and there were only two--that Mitch Daniels hadn't done anything that week.

I am not making that up. "Just a Quiet Week for Daniels". Two paragraphs were taken up by quoting from the series of platitudes he'd hurled at state employees being honored for spending thirty-five years on the public dole, during his one public appearance of the week. Two more graphs set up the Mark Sanford joke at the end. The Mark Sanford joke. I'm not making that up, either.

Daniels appears to have been sitting in a wing-back chair, so even his Homo floresiensis-scale forearm seems squeezed in at an odd angle, like he asked the photographer to hold off while he selected a pose from his repertoire of two (Pensive Brainy Guy, Rage-Fueled Brainy Guy), decided on the former with slight overtones of the latter, and tried to work it into position. The arm of a full-grown human would have passed completely behind the head with the fist sticking out the other side, like he was doing Yoga, which, I believe, still tests poorly with likely Republican Presidential primary voters.

[UPDATE: I finally gave up looking online and scanned the thing, as seen below. For tech heads eager to learn how this is accomplished: 1) crank up old G3 Mac; 2) load Photoshop; 3) pull down File/Import menu; 4) remember the reason you're using the old G3 Mac is that the scanner doesn't work with OS X; 5) restart with System 9; 6) relaunch Photoshop; 7) scan; 8) remember that the G3 quit accepting hot-swapped USB connections, like the memory stick you need to transfer the thing to your desktop, in late Fall, 2006, which is why it always starts up in OS X, because you're always switching back; 9) save scan, restart in OSX; 10) remember, too late, that you can never find the System 9 desktop, which is where you saved the thing, while in OS X; 11) manage to find it; 12) Voilà! Plug and play.



It should be noted that the above is still faster than using the Racist Beacon's "search" feature, which is not simply the absolutely worst one on the internets, but a stunning rebuke to any and every mention of the efficiencies of outsourcing, privatization, specialization, and the theoretical possibility that literacy levels can decline. Though I have to admit it is a perfect accompaniment to what is quite possibly the world's worst commercial website. Matt Tully has been the Racist Beacon's political columnist since 2005, having joined the "paper" in 2002. Aside from those rare occasions when his column gets a home-page blurb, I defy anyone to find it in less than three clicks. And when you finally give up and try the search box, it asks you--after a suitable wait reminding you what it's like to be placed on Hold by the world's most understaffed Tech desk--whether you meant Matt Dully.]

• Meanwhile, on Monday night the World's Worst City-County Council east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio voted to prohibit holding signs or speaking to drivers within 50 ft. of a stoplight or stop sign, a matter squarely aimed at Panhandlers and other Unsightlies, and almost certainly in violation of their First Amendment rights. Although if I see 'em frog-marching the guy in the chicken suit from in front of the Chick-fil-A on 82nd St. I may have to rethink my absolutism.

But two things, here: one, the measure had been brought back to life after a woman claimed she was carjacked by a guy at an intersection while she was trying to give him a sawbuck. We have no reason to disbelieve her, though it should be pointed out that she looked capable of beating the shit out of a phalanx of deadbeats with only her rolled-up copy of Jailhouse Tattooing Quarterly. And, two, the Racist Beacon saw fit to inform its readers that the 15-13 vote was "mostly along party lines" without bothering to mention the, you know, exceptions. So I went searching, wound up at the Council site, which didn't have details, either, but which was busy touting the $300,000 it had saved the City last year by not meeting. Which I'm all in favor of, but they might wanna get it back to cover the cost of the litigation they just committed us to.

And I clicked the link, being an inquisitive sort, and learned that, among other cost-cutting measures:

Equipment was purchased to perform previously outsourced work in-house

This from the same bunch which just voted a 10% cut in the Parks budget, which will partly be made up by outsourcing work perviously performed in-house. I wonder if ad-men every worry that they're overestimating the intelligence of the public?

• 14:58…14:59…

Former Miss California sues over firing

By ANTHONY McCARTNEY, AP Entertainment Writer
Mon Aug 31, 5:58 pm ET


LOS ANGELES – Former Miss California USA Carrie Prejean sued pageant officials Monday for libel, slander and religious discrimination, accusing them of telling her to stop mentioning God even before her controversial remarks against gay marriage.

Oh, do tell!

Upset, too, that somebody revealed the California authorities had paid for her God-given breast implants. Not enough to sue The Donald, though. (That's the sort of priceless legal advice she could have used before the pageant.)

And, look: we don't care about Ms Prejean & Associates; we think her First Amendment rights should be no more abridged than anyone else's, and we think she has every right to sue if she feels she's been wronged. The fact that we find her a tiresome, small-minded opportunist of the common sort is no more material than the fact that if she were merely stating her grievances by sign, rather than suing for an unspecified dollar amount, within the Indianapolis city limits she could wind up in the pokey.

Nah. I just wanted to steal the comment from World O'Crap, the one whose author I forgot to note and am now too lazy to look up, to the effect that we shouldn't let the fact that it travelled past capped teeth and a re-sculpted proboscis, with the assist of lungs slightly impeded by the Maxim-aired sandbags bolted atop them, blind us to the important point she makes about God's natural law.

• Alex Koppleman, "The Beatles Rockband: finally, a video game even old people can get excited about".

Y'know, sonny, if I gave a shit about you, what you say, video games, or crap-flavored crap in general, I'd beat you to death with my fucking cane. If my prostate would allow me to get out of the chair fast enough.

And good luck with that Aughts nostalgia thing when your time comes. The Sarah Palin full-function home android should be a real hoot. And the Blu-Ray nostalgia shops.