I Quit

PIERCE, on Paul 2.0.

Posting May Be Light

ROY:

When the dust settles I'm afraid it'll be Romney with a briefcase and a fountain pen, trying gosh-darned hard to get America to switch insurance companies.

I'm no prognosticator, which means, above all, that I don't have to phone in one of these cutesy faux-self-deprecations at year's end (designed, you'll note, to reinforce the Offical Pundit Script even as they supposedly highlight what pundits got wrong. Imagine a real column in which Dana Milbank confesses his errors. It would take the entire year to do it. The wisdom of confining oneself to "predictions" when doing such things is shown by the fact that Weigel doesn't have to admit anything nearly as embarrassing, or self-revealing, as his paean to Michele Bachmann's knowledgeable and polished initial debate performance).

I have no idea what Romney's path to the nomination looks like. I know he has unlimited funds, God bless America, and a collection of opponents who couldn't govern a home daycare operation without one or two swingset strangulations per annum. That may be all he needs, or he may be so personally devoid of personhood that support coagulates around one particular non-Romney in response. You heard it here first.

What I do know is this: the supposed Teabagger Agenda is just the corporate agenda, and Romney's the corporate candidate. And so's Obama. Some of us think the 5-10% difference between them is important, vital even; that difference, for the Republican rank-and-file is what the headline writers call The Culture Wars. And they are busy fighting a protracted partisan conflict over whether that shit needs to be saved to rile up the yokels, or spread across every front page in America.

In a sense, then, the Republican party has become the Democratic party, with an entrenched leadership machinegunning the human waves of the unwashed and their sharpened sticks. Meanwhile Democrats get to keep up their thirty-year rope-a-dope attempt to become the Thinking Man's Corporate Lackey party.

Can someone remind me what the intervening three decades of hubbub was all about, again?

Ken Layne, American

There's a shower room where you do not want to drop your soap.

IN Egypt earlier this year, the cops refused to attack the people. East Germany and then the whole Iron Curtain collapsed when the local cops wouldn’t smash heads when Erich Honecker ordered it. What about America? Where are the cops who walked off the job rather than attack their neighbors drowning in debt and despair?

Go Do Something Good

SCOTT and Mary could use a little help. Go, click on the donate button in the top left corner, and feel good about yourself for once. I know I did. At least I think that's what that sensation was.

Recommended Reading

PROFESSOR Stripes notes the difference between the 18th and 21st century for Half-Governor Palin, although the odds of that taking with someone who doesn't understand the difference between modern Israelis and ancient Israelities is probably nil.

That Blogosphere Thing

THANKS to Brendan we're adding Leonard Pierce's place to the blogroll just as soon as we work up the energy to do so.

Kumbaya

THIS is Edroso at his most luminous, not that those moments are all that rare. But there are times when his writing is prehensile, when it seems like conception and thought and action are a single wave on the pond. Fuck it, I wish I'd written this, is what:

The "eliminationist" tropes we've been hearing about recently are part of the problem, but so are the less violent notions we see them parroting every day: That Obama is a Muslim, an alien, a psychopath, and consciously trying to destroy the United States; that Teddy Roosevelt was a dangerous radical; that America's scientists are engaged in a deliberate conspiracy to bankrupt the nation via global warming fraud; that deficits, which were harmless and even kinda fun under Reagan, are under Obama a menace to the future of our famous statues; etc. etc. etc.

The cumulative impact of this kind of magical thinking may or may not lead to assassinations, but it certainly weakens the sufferer's ability to respond to even obvious problems in any reasonable way. And in the long run this is more dangerous to the Republic than the grrr-lookit-me-I'm-a-Minuteman blood-lust we're currently focused on. The wingnut looks, for example, upon millions of citizens financially unable to visit a doctor when they're sick, and the first thing he asks himself is, "How can we defend these people from socialism?" He sees the stock market doing great while ordinary people can't find jobs, and surmises, "This Administration is anti-business." Etc.

Even if you embarrass them (fond hope!) into talking less about guns and revolution, you aren't touching the real problem. I'm not confident that it's curable. The best we can do is keep them away from sharp objects and the levers of power.

Comments, too; a lot of which disagree with his assessment. If you're getting there late, as I did, it's a daunting five pages or more, but worth it. I went through saying, "Oooh, I'm gonna feature that one tomorrow" at least seven or eight times.

If I can, or must, return to the fog-shrouded swamps of my own cerebral landscape, then I agree with everybody, and don't, and don't know what to make of it, except I'm sure we're all on the wrong page, or something. The levers of power are broken, or else over my lifetime they've been reconnected to operate a country not my own. And you can't trust a repairman; they're all certified by the same people who broke (or swiped) the thing. I have a sense--I started blogging specifically from the sense--that this is a center-left country at its heart which has been seized by issues as defined by the Right, and that the proper response--of Liberals, who seek to make things better, not scabrous mongrels like myself--was to show America, aggressively, since that's all it understands any more, which side it was really on. Instead, after twelve years of responding to Reaganism the way the French responded to the Wehrmacht (and that's probably unfair. To the French.), they more or less codified the differences (let's elect a President who really cares!) and then offered to split them if the other side would just play nice.

So much of our politics seems to be a debate about how best to remove most of the pieces of eggshell from our omelette, and none about figuring out how to properly crack an egg. If you're concerned about eliminationist rhetoric--and you have every reason to be--then you should be hopping mad at the Obama administration (as you very possibly are) for the failed policy of Timid Response, and hopping mad that it could have been voted into power in a pivotal year without the extraction of a promise to Do Something about the madness of the Republican party. The timidity of the 110th Congress (in fairness, Pelosi wouldn't have had the votes for impeachment even if she'd had the political courage; in fairness, it's always the Left which is saying "in fairness"); the USADOUBLEGOODPATRIOTAct, The Iraq War Resolution, the 2000 Elections: it isn't long before the litany predates most voters. If you think a toxic political environment was a contributing factor in the Giffords shooting, then the failure to confront it--going back to Nixon, at least, in some quarters--is inculpatory.

Instead, when this sort of thing gets noted, it's Jon Stewart winging an opening segment Monday because it's no time to be funny, and pointing fingers at James Carville for blaming Palin, as though Carville was as major a factor in the Democratic party as Palin is in hers, and, in Norbizness' absence, the official spokesman for The Left. Dreaming a World where none of this exists is not the same as confronting it where it does. Carville may be dead wrong, and/or gauche, but what he said is not entirely unwarranted; for that you have to go to the people who dragged out "The President once said 'bring a gun to a knife fight'". Palin, and the Teabaggers, and the Right, and the Republican party are responsible for their rhetoric. They are responsible--not solely, but unanimously--for the complete lack of gun control in this violent land. They may be unfairly hoist on a canard here, but Who Controls How An Issue Is Raised? I wish we'd have a rational discussion about economic exploitation or basic justice every day of the year, not just when Wal*Mart gets caught looting timecards or "extraordinary rendition" hits the headlines. I wish we wouldn't have a discussion about our Toxic Political Environment only when it's time to urge "both" "sides" to shut up. I wish Charlie Manson didn't represent Youth Culture, Altamont didn't represent Rock n' Roll, and Len Bias didn't represent What Happens On Your First Hit Of Coke. I wish I could still buy a Betacorder.

I wish a loon with a semi-auto Glock shooting up innocent people--Congresswomen or no--was reason enough to discuss gun violence and gun culture. It's not. So I'll take what I can get.

PSA

I'M late in mentioning Jay B.'s Edrosothon only because I wasn't certain there hadn't been some small misunderstanding; the Internet's Best Journal-ist mentioned the loss of a sublet, nothing more. I was more than happy to toss in a paltry handful of coins to a man who'd never go without a beer if he were in want, I were nearby, and he knew I'd said that, but I didn't think it was time to sound a general alarm. And besides, if you waste time here without reading Roy or Scott and s.z. then there's no talking sense to ya.

But the need is real, so go help out if you haven't already. You might've noticed this isn't a just world. You may even have noticed that I seem okay with the concept. And I am, because while Time is Infinite, matter is finite, and thus, I'm sure, we will each of us get the opportunity to pinch David Brooks really hard for every weaselly phrase he utters. That doesn't mean we can't also improve the here and now and unfairly fucked up.

PSA

WORLD O' Crap, which is directly responsible for the existence of this blog, but does really good work otherwise, can presently be found at that link, and not the one on my blogroll which I'll get around to correcting with my usual alacrity.

I ♥ The Internets

OMG! Ponies! at Gawker:

If it's okay for the Palins to say "faggot," then it's okay for the LGBT community to say "retard".

PSA

DO get over to World O'Crap and help out the loveliest couple on the internets if you can. Thanks.

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.

Just Wow.

Kia, at Roy's.

My New Favorite Professor

IS Dr. James Stripes, and not just because I am totally stealing his comment that Fred Hampton advocated only the same thing Charlton Heston did, with the (as it turns out, fatal) misapprehension that it might apply equally to African-Americans. (This blog, by the way, is always quick to point out that Heston was one of the Hollywood names who marched with Dr. King back when that was not particularly a wise career move.) Rather, it's because his new blog, Patriots and Peoples discusses issues in American history raised by a comparison of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Schweikart and Allen's A Patriot's History of the United States, a great idea in the first place, and the writing is lively, plus I seem a lot smarter by linking to it, except now I have to stop pretending I know anything about the subject. I would have mentioned it sooner, and gotten to Half-Price Books to find cheap copies, except my toe hurts, and if you think that's a joke, you try it.