Randomized Palin response generator!Also: Alaska's Shrillest represents the Boomers' potential betrayal of my generation.

Have you seen this yet?

This brilliant Web site, called Interview Sarah Palin, produces randomized responses to various typical interview questions about the economy, foreign policy, the separation between church and state, etc., etc.

Here's an example of the kind of question and response the site generates:

Q: How will you fix the economy?

Our economy and putting it back on the table. I think if you really think that I have understood the world is and how important it is in this nation at this time. People are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing and kind of grab it all or capture it all and pretend like they have all the time, I'll tell you, I still can't answer that I am the executive of. And there in Russia Diplomacy is about reform of government and these regulatory agencies back on the right reasons and serving for the other day and giving him my commitment, as John McCain's running mate, that we work with our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia.

The Web site's creator(s) explains that its "...answers are computer generated based on probabilities calculated from Sarah Palin's actual speech," producing results that are "surprising [sic] close to her actual answers."

As proof of this similarity in outcome, the site provides an example of a typical real-life Palin interview response, taken from her recent hilarious (and frightening) interview with CBS's Katie Couric (for whom I have begun to have tremendous respect, based upon the panache and professionalism with which she interviewed this truly absurd human being who wants to be second in line to the White House):

COURIC: Why isn't it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy? Instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That's why I say, I like ever American I'm speaking with were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the tax payers looking to bailout. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up the economy - Helping the - Oh, it's got to be about job creation too. Shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americas. And trade we've got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive scary thing. But 1 in 5 jobs being created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

Wow. No wonder arch-conservative publications like The National Review have called for Palin to step aside.

It really is quite shocking. Not only the extent to which Palin's responses tend to bear no discernible traces of a relation to the question posed; also that she clearly is reciting -- with varying degrees of success/accuracy -- talking points, words, phrases, etc. that she had been taught to memorize in intensive coaching sessions conducted by Bush's/Cheney's handlers. (I have heard that it is literally Bush's and Cheney's handlers that conduct these coaching sessions.)

What's scary is that she's not even cogitating. There is very little indication that Palin even bothers to try to comprehend the question itself. She's relying on muscle memory; certain words or phrases trigger one kind of response or another, much like the simple computer programs that I used to write back in the 1980's, using the BASIC programming language on my family's Apple IIc. The programs I would write would usually be a prank of one kind or another, tricking my credulous friends and family (in an era in which computer illiteracy was still the norm) into thinking they had wiped out all of the computer's memory, or something. Just simple stuff like: if keystroke x, then y; if keystroke v, then w; if keystroke z, then x; etc., etc.

Another way of saying this is that the level of intellectual competence that Palin demonstrates in her interviews is equivalent, roughly, to that of a Tickle-Me Elmo. (Remember those?) And, come to think of it, in a similar vocal register.

I guess that's the genius of the Interview Sarah Palin Web site. It spotlights the extent to which Sarah Palin is like a rusty old Apple IIc personal computer. This fits in unsurprisingly with the overall fact of Palin's existence: she's not a candidate; she's not even a human being. She's a cluster of images, projections, psychological associations, emotional triggers and mental short-cuts. She's a brand, like Pepsi. But without the cola. The (il)logic of the McCain/Palin ticket is that it is selling a bizarre kind of nostalgia for a time that never was and, in any case, could never again be.

My God Would We Be Fucked, were this ridiculous Palin gambit to actually work. It looks less and less likely that it will work, with each passing day. But it's still scary as hell. If McCain were to win, I believe that entire generations of Americans under the age of -- say -- 45 -- an already-disillusioned and cynical group of voters of which I am a part and which for the most part lacks a voice, lacks money and lacks representation -- will truly lose all faith in the idea of functioning, representative democracy in the United States of America. My god, that would be depressing.....

A McCain/Palin win would represent the ultimate betrayal of my future, at the hands of a myopic, ideologically tone-deaf and frivolous Baby Boom generation.

(Sorry to leave you on such a sour note....)

Obama kicked ass last night and everybody knows it.

I wrote the following paragraphs as a comment on a blog called Media Nation, in which I agreed with an article the blogger had written that the media -- particularly in Washington -- have given too much credit to McCain's performance in last night's presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi, and it's not a surprise that polls are now showing that the public -- particularly undecided voters -- see it the same way I do. What was I doing, you ask, commenting on somebody's blog? My answer is that I've become a complete and utter dork, and it's this election business that done me in.

Those who credit McCain with continually "putting Obama on the defensive" miss the point.

The pundit caste has made a cliche of this notion of "putting the other guy on the defensive." The problem with cliches, of course, is that people forget what they mean. Some of the commentary on last night's debate exemplifies this tendency. This tactic means nothing by virtue of its deployment per se, but rather, as a means by which to gain certain advantages. If those advantages don't accrue to you, then putting the other guy on the defensive means nothing.

McCain's attacks/challenges to Obama's credibility were, one after another, disposed of quickly and tidily by Obama. Obama appeared calm the entire time, while McCain looked at all times to be straining to come up with novel forms of slander. Oftentimes, McCain's soliloquies would stray far off the topic, and he appeared to be hogging microphone time, while Obama patiently waited, exchanging polite glances with Lehrer.

Lastly: while Obama expressed, at appropriate times, his agreement with one or another premise of McCain's answers, while interjecting his differences, McCain appeared at all times to be nervously guarding his territory against ANY possibility that Obama could utter something credible. This had the effect of making Obama appear all the more 'presidential', calm and reasonable. Obama was careful to mitigate McCain's rhetorical excesses and over-the-top insinuations with fair-minded, calm rebuttals.

The overall effect, in other words, is that McCain's assiduousness in striving to "play offense" MADE HIM LOOK DEFENSIVE. Like an impetuous child, throwing a tantrum. The overly nasty and petty nature of many of McCain's attacks became in and of themselves REAFFIRMATIONS of Obama's credibility, savvy and strength of judgment and character.

Think of it this way: poor McCain, in patting himself on his back for his own 'maverickness' and even his own service to his country, his endless repetitions, his inability EVER to cede ground to his opponent, looked like someone who, nervously and twitchily, is scared to death that you're not going to believe him, and even that HE's worried about losing the ability to believe HIMSELF.

I think the media completely missed most of what matters about the debate; they are far too generous in their appraisal of McCain's performance.

In my view, the debate was nothing short of a triumph for Obama. He looked like a responsible adult. McCain looked like an inflexible old coot. I can't imagine a single swing-voter being swayed by McCain's performance. Obama, on the other hand, showed his stuff. He came across as competent, credible and--perhaps most importantly--honest.

Thomas Frank on how and why the Republican Party has spent the last 30 years dismantling the country's public infrastructure.

Author and journalist Thomas Frank, speaking recently in Portland, Oregon. He discusses his latest book The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule for about half an hour, after which he takes audience questions.

Frank really hits his stride in this video, by which I mean he delivers a healthy and satisfying dose of eloquent and morally indignant populism. Exactly what I needed to get me through another day of Bailout-talk, with all of the lying, insulting, hypocritical, patronizing cant from Bush, Paulson and Bernanke. Enjoy:

Citing McCain's "boiling moralism & bottomless reservoir of certitude," conservative George Will questions McCain's fitness to occupy Oval Office.

A recent Crib From This post discussed the growing number of conservative journalists and Republican politicians who have expressed serious reservations about supporting McCain or have withdrawn their support outright. On last Sunday's This Week on ABC, longstanding conservative columnist/commentator George Will described McCain's recent behavior as "unpresidential," concluding that "John McCain showed his personality this week...and made some of us fearful."

Will reaffirms his criticisms of McCain's temperament and character in today's Washington Post:

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama. ....

For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law's restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17; and the New York Times of Sept. 19.)....

By a Gresham's Law of political discourse, McCain's Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a "dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions." This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence, was airing an ad warning that Obama favors "massive government, billions in spending increases." ....

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

This is not mild criticism. That it comes from perhaps the most stalwart, respected and intellectually honest figure in American conservatism is a significant development. I mean, seriously. If George Will is starting to lean toward supporting Obama, it means there's hope that pretty much any conservative -- even my parents -- could be convinced to support the Democratic candidate in November.

Hitchens, why don't you fly your bloated, jowly, neocon-dick-sucking face back to the parochial isle whence you came, you fucking limey twit turncoat?

I hate it when this formerly admirable journalist sounds off about something of which he has no right to step within 100 yards: namely, the kind of presidential campaign Barack Obama is conducting or should conduct or shouldn't conduct. And much of the reason for this is that Hitchens lacks a subtle, historically grounded, and socially conscious understanding of the peculiarities of American race relations.

He also suffers increasingly from a lack of subtlety more generally. That's right, Hitch has been painting with a broader and broader brush as he has aged. Which makes it seem likely that he's been thinking less precisely as his faculties continue to fail him in his drift toward the frailty of old age. Remind you of someone?

Chris "Twit" Hitchens is responsible for an incoherent mouthful of Republican propaganda in today's Slate, which is called: "Is Obama Another Dukakis? Why is Obama so vapid, hesitant, and gutless?"

Immediate questions that come to mind: Like Dukakis, how, exactly? "Vapid, hesitant, and gutless" in relation to what? According to what metric?

Hitchens's article provides nothing in the way of answers to these questions. That's because his article is a mere provocation. It's a mercenary job. One of his Masters called him up and said, "Hey, Hitch, d'ya mind assaulting Obama with one of those unspecific, insinuative, wishy-washy character assassination pieces you do so well? You know, the kind where you fail to provide a clear point of reference, or context of any kind, but instead engage in a kind of verbal jousting match with a fictitious opponent of your own devising? Just to help us with our numbers. Thanks a lot. Yours truly, Wolfy."

Obama should continue on exactly the track he's pursuing, which is not overstating his case, not pandering and promising lots of treats to interest groups like the BLOATED, FAT, LIMEY NEOCONS FOR BUSH CLUB, and not polemicizing and taking moral umbrage. In the manner, for example, of someone who comes to mind...HINT: he sold out his own democratic socialist values for greater fame, prestige and wealth, and he did so by supporting a war that is an act of colonialism and deceit, in the latter of which he is complicit.

Hitchens has become a Republican stooge, through and through. We haven't forgotten, Hitch. Shut up or go back to the land of tea and scones, where nostalgia for colonialism is still in the air, and where you can practice your polemical brand of atheism -- which everyone knows is really thinly veiled anti-Islam racism -- all day and night in your own private English garden. God save the Queen!

Talkin' Dirty Secrets Keepin', Executive Branch Authoritarianism Pushin', Disaster Capitalism Evincin', Patriot Act Recallin', Bailout Blues!

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson
("Hank" to his friends. So let's stick with Henry).

Q. Should Congress pass into law the $700 billion Wall Street bailout -- otherwise known as The Bailout, otherwise known as the Temporary Asset Relief Plan -- proposed by Secretary of State Henry Paulson (and supported, obviously, by all of the Bushies and the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke), in its current form?

A. No, if estimates by Daniel Bruno Sanz, and numerous other experts, predict correctly what fate will befall the value of the not-so-Almighty US dollar. (i.e.: free fall) (Huffington Post).

A. No, because it's "an enormously expensive plan that doesn’t seem to address the real problem," according to Paul Krugman, in whose view Senator Chris Dodd's counterproposal is vastly superior, and which "has a real chance" of edging out Paulson's, due to the paternalism, arrogance and pushiness of Paulson's demand for full Executive Branch control, with zero oversight (more on this in a moment). (New York Times Web site)

You want full immunity from any & all future prosecution??
Say it ain't so, Henry. We thought you were different.

A. No, because, first and foremost, Paulson's proposal gives the Executive Branch FULL CONTROL over the allocation of the $700 billion, with ZERO OVERSIGHT and FULL IMMUNITY FROM OVERSIGHT AND EVEN PROSECUTION. Patriot Act, anyone? Just fucking read this sentence, for which some sneaky little fuck in the Bush Administration wins the Totalitarian Fascist of the Year Award (actually, let's just award it to Paulson; oh, and the boldface is mine):

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Yes. That day has really come, America, where your Executive Branch is actually saying: "Just hand over to us all of the control over everything, and just trust us, we'll fix everything behind closed doors. All we need is this $700 billion! Please just sign on the dotted line immediately."

If you're not angry, America, you should be. You respond: "But, I'm too busy to pay attention to this. I've got a job and a wife and a car and mouths to feed, and...." All the more reason you should be angry, America. All the more reason you should be angry....

Here's a taste of what Yves Smith, contributing to Naked Capitalism, which is a fantastic blog for those of us who are looking for straightforward explanations of the Bush Administration's economic shenanigans, has to say about it this sneaky little provision, in a post titled "Why You Should Hate the Treasury Bailout Proposal":

This puts the Treasury's actions beyond the rule of law. This is a financial coup d'etat, with the only limitation the $700 billion balance sheet figure. The measure already gives the Treasury the authority not simply to buy dud mortgage paper but other assets as it deems fit. There is no accountability beyond a report (contents undefined) to Congress three months into the program and semiannually thereafter. The Treasury could via incompetence or venality grossly overpay for assets and advisory services, and fail to exclude consultants with conflicts of interest, and there would be no recourse. Given the truly appalling track record of this Administration in its outsourcing, this is not an idle worry.

But far worse is the precedent it sets. This Administration has worked hard to escape any constraints on its actions, not to pursue noble causes, but to curtail civil liberties: Guantanamo, rendition, torture, warrantless wiretaps. It has used the threat of unseen terrorists and a seemingly perpetual war on radical Muslim to justify gutting the Constitution. The Supreme Court, which has been supine on many fronts, has finally started to push back, but would it challenge a bill that sweeps aside judicial review? Informed readers are encouraged to speak up.

Nouriel Roubini does not think it passes the smell test:

`He's asking for a huge amount of power,'' said Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University. ``He's saying, `Trust me, I'm going to do it right if you give me absolute control.' This is not a monarchy.''

A. No, because the proposal is fundamentally dishonest, and furthermore, would not work. Smith goes on to articulate a significant (and in a couple of respects, shocking) substantive (again, the boldface is mine) problem:

...The Treasury has been using the formula that it will buy assets at "fair market prices". As we have noted, there is simply huge amounts of cash ready to bottom fish in housing-related assets (we saw an estimate of $400 billion a couple of months ago). The issue is not lack of willing buyers; it's that the prospective sellers are not willing to accept prices that reflect the weak and deteriorating prospects for housing.....

...[T]he plan makes no sense unless the Orwellian "fair market prices" means "above market prices.".....Confirmation of our view came from a reader by e-mail:

I worked at [Wall Street firm you've heard of], but now I handle financial services for [a Congressman], and I was on the conference call that Paulson, Bernanke and the House Democratic Leadership held for all the members yesterday afternoon. It's supposed to be members only, but there's no way to enforce that if it's a conference call, and you may have already heard from other staff who were listening in.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that, behind closed doors, Paulson describes the plan differently. He explicitly says that it will buy assets at above market prices (although he still claims that they are undervalued) because the holders won't sell at market prices. Anna Eshoo pressed him on how the government can compel the holders to sell, and he basically dodged the question. I think that's because he didn't want to admit that the government would just keep offering more and more.

I don't think that our leadership has been very good during this negotiation (or really, during any showdowns with this administration) at forcing the administration to own their position. If Paulson wants this plan, then he needs to sell it to the public, and if he sells a different plan to the public (the nonsense buying-at-market-price plan) then we should pass that. I'd rather see the government act as a market maker for the assets to get them transferred over to private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds and other willing holders. And if we need to recapitalize these companies, it seems like the cheapest way for the taxpayer is to go in and buy up the distressed debt and then convert that to equity.

So unlike the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took on dodgy assets which had fallen into the FDIC's lap due to the failure of thrifts, and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, which was established in 1934 after the housing market had bottomed, this program is going to swing into action with the clear but not honestly disclosed intent of buying assets at above market prices when future markets and the analysts with the best track records on forecasting this decline (you can add Robert Shiller, CR at Calculated Risk, and Nouriel Roubini to the list) believe it has considerably further to fall.

A. No. But also, Naomi Klein warns us to be equally wary of alternative far-Right proposals, particularly those of Newt Gingrich, that seek to use this moment's crisis as an opportunity to shotgun through legislation that would push agendas of privatization, reverse what few social justice safeguards we may still recognize in this country, and -- of course -- to deregulate the private sector even further, including the repeal of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This is serious and twisted shit. Excerpt of Klein's piece, which draws upon her convincing theory of 'disaster capitalism' (Huffington Post):

I wrote The Shock Doctrine in the hopes that it would make us all better prepared for the next big shock. Well, that shock has certainly arrived, along with gloves-off attempts to use it to push through radical pro-corporate policies (which of course will further enrich the very players who created the market crisis in the first place...).

The best summary of how the right plans to use the economic crisis to push through their policy wish list comes from Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. On Sunday, Gingrich laid out 18 policy prescriptions for Congress to take in order to "return to a Reagan-Thatcher policy of economic growth through fundamental reforms." In the midst of this economic crisis, he is actually demanding the repeal of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which would lead to further deregulation of the financial industry. Gingrich is also calling for reforming the education system to allow "competition" (a.k.a. vouchers), strengthening border enforcement, cutting corporate taxes and his signature move: allowing offshore drilling.

Drill, Baby Drill! God damn, am I sick of the Grand Old Party. I mean, although I have always found his politics to be barbaric, its underlying principles deeply racist in character, in a weird way I have always found Newt Gingrich to be essentially a principled and intellectually honest man. (Keep in mind, this is in comparison to the majority of the bullshit artists of the Far Right.) Having said that, this is one of those moments in which I'd like nothing more than to punch him right smack dab in the middle of that fat, smug, pink, greasy cracker face of his.*

Newt Gingrich: "What about the plantation-owners??"

_______________
* What's gotten into me today?

Not the John McCain we used to know:Conservatives are beginning to dump him like milk that's gone sour.

With the unveiling of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate, there were a number of conservative journalists and commentators who expressed immediately everything from incredulity to shock to outright derision. And then there were those who gleefully whored themselves out to the cause of the GOP's latest desperation tactic, writing fawning, preposterous propaganda that pandered and condescended shamelessly to its readership. You know, par for the course when it comes to lying, fanatical GOP brown shirts...ahem..I meant brown-nosers with no shred of journalistic integrity to uphold in the first place.

With the passage of time, and particularly after the broadcast of her surreal interview with ABC's Charles Gibson -- during which she was revealed to be even more ignorant and dumb than we had feared previously* -- Sarah Palin's stock has continued to plummet, both among quote-ordinary voters-unquote and the more intellectually honestho members of the Republican pundit caste. One by one, each of these conservative journos -- the ones capable of speaking in complete sentences -- have thrown up their hands and admitted that the jig is up, this Palin thing is one pig that just won't fly. Among them:

• David Brooks, The New York Times, 9/15/08,
  
• David Cohen, The Washington Post, 9/17/08, and
  
• Through The Huffington Post, watch the ABC News This Week panel agree unanimously that, in light of his behavior since the financial crisis began, McCain's age is becoming an unavoidable problem, as are his judgment and character. Veteran ultraconservative George Will is the hardest of them all on McCain, saying, among other things: "John McCain showed his personality this week...and made some of us fearful," 9/21/08.
  

And now, they're joined by Republican politicians who tell the truth and recognize that it would be insanity to let that crazy woman continue to ruin our lives (I nicked that phrase from Gypsy Sun & Rainbows, [thanks, Gypsy Sun & Rainbows]), let alone sit within a heartbeat of the presidency. Among them:

• Senator Chuck Hagel, as reported by The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 9/19/08.
• Congressman Wayne Gilcrest, as reported by Politico, 9/18/08.
  

[Updated 9/21/08]

____________

* And throughout which Palin came across as phony, hollow, opportunistic and dishonest. Not to mention self-centered, but we already knew that in spades.

Crib From This unveils titular 'depression' reference #2.

I seriously wish I were exaggerating in using the 'D Word'. And I hope it turns out that I am.

I, doubtless like many others, have for the last couple of days been conducting a self-education in economics in order to better comprehend various of the enormous ongoing fiscal crises. I have been scurrying around, to and fro, hither and thither on the Web site of The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, and also some instances of financial bloggery. It brings me no particular joy, but hey, even Karl Marx had go about the ugly business of teaching himself economics...

One Web site / blog that I have found to be exceedingly instructive not only for its candor -- the Federal Reserve, the Executive and Legislative Branches and the media have been drastically understating the severity of the situation in order not to cause panic, mass liquidations of accounts, etc. --, but for its lucidity. It's called Naked Capitalism, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. It's hype.

So, I would like to recommend a few of items that have been posted today on Naked Capitalism, items that are characteristically candid and lucid. Here's how I'll give it to you: I've got good news and bad news.

First the good news: there isn't any.

And the bad news is:

1) The Fed's bailout of AIG to the tune of $85,000 has done nothing to slow the downward spiral of the credit markets (the mysterious, opaque, unregulated markets I blathered about in my previous post).

2) On the basis of a strange article in The Chicago Tribune, Naked Capitalism contributor Yves Smith expresses concern that Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of The Federal Reserve, has no idea what he's doing.

3) Morgan Stanley appears poised to take a cue from Lehman Brothers. Which is to say, tank.

4) Or possibly a merger with Wachovia? And Washington Mutual (a.k.a. WaMu) is likely to tank any day now.

By the way, did you know that we may well be on the verge of a second Great Depression?

First of all: if you are like me and tend not to understand anything about the economy, you owe it to yourself as a citizen, but more importantly as a voter in the upcoming presidential election, and even more importantly as someone who can help inform undecided voters (a constituency that J has often remarked that she doesn't "get," and I agree that it's one of life's great mysteries, like how come anyone likes this person?), to listen to today's highly informative episode of Fresh Air, hosted by Terri Gross.

Warning! In addition to being highly informative, this listening experience exposes to the listener the cynicism, corruption and incompetence that has caused the shocking shockwave of economic strife, Sturm und Drang and the like that has befallen the United States of America. And in this respect, it's pretty infuriating. But, it's the good kind of infuriating, wherein you finally feel like you have a basic sense of what the fuck is going on with Ye Grande Olde Economie, thanks to the success of decades of Grand Old Party ideological warfare. This is the ultimate consequence of the Reagan Revolution, and you got what you wanted, America! Assholes....

But anyway, subject yourself to this unusually informative radio program, and you'll come away armed with the kind of terrifying knowledge that energizes you to spread the word, or perhaps to spread your wings and fly, or perhaps simply to start bar fights. Not surprisingly, you'll also be equipped with a convincing yet subtle set of basic arguments as to why anybody who cares at all about the economy had better get off her ass and vote for Barack Obama.*

As if the fact that no less formidable paragon of bleeding-heart Marxism than Alan Greenspan recently said that the country "can't afford" John McCain's economic platform isn't all the proof we needed? Speaking of which, enjoy this simple but eloquent cartoon, which came to my attention through the blog of the, erm, festively monikered Barack OBlogger:

(By the way, I've discovered that there are a number of political cartoons on the Web site of the Ventura County Star that are after my own bleeding heart in a sort of simple, satisfying old-school way. The cartoonist is Steve Greenberg.)

Terri's guest is the very lively and lucid Michael Greenberger, a professor of law at the University of Maryland, and the former Director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In which capacity "he was responsible for supervising exchange traded futures and derivatives" (michaelgreenberger.com). What this means is that he knows lots and lots about the shady, irresponsible business practices that is causing the economy to tank, and he describes it from the perspective of a regulator. And from that perspective, things don't look good. (I wonder which perspective John McCain is viewing it from?)

Turns out the Republican Party economic ideology of deregulating everything and its mother, as practiced and expanded continually during all GOP presidencies since Reagan, and which McCain fully and ernestly intends to continue, has profoundly fucked the country. Shadiest of all has been the Bush/Cheney administration, which has been eager at every turn to run up larger and larger and larger deficits, and which espouses explicitly (and, at times, furtively) a policy of opacity: in other words, the administration has clamored, maneuvered, lied and used subterfuge at every opportunity to hide from the American people the true state of the country's finances, as well as the inevitable consequences of their irresponsible behavior with respect to the bottom line of an average American household.

For example: did you know that Cheney/Bush, in attempt to hide the yearly deficit expenses of the Iraq War -- which according to The Washington Post is certain to exceed $3 trillion --, tried to keep these expenses off the books? Specifically off of Congress's yearly report to the American taxpayer of spending and deficits. Fortunately, that plan was thwarted by Congress. And sure enough, the Bush Administration also wanted to keep the Federal Reserve's $200 billion taxpayer-funded bail-out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac off the books. The idea, you see, is that if that menacing figure of $200 billion -- which is being supplied out of the pockets of the taxpayers -- is prevented from appearing on the books, then the taxpayers wouldn't have to go through the psychological turmoil of knowing that it is indeed they who are strapping to their backs the burden of this awesome sum. Thankfully, Congress again told Cheney/Bush: "Fuck off."

And now, here's something that's sure to put an even bigger bounce in your taxpaying step. In today's Fresh Air interview, Greenberger explains that the Fed's $85 billion loan to bail out insurance giant AIG is backed up by -- that is to say, it uses as collateral -- AIG's considerable assets. In the Fed's public statements, it has used this fact as a means by which to reassure the US taxpayer that he won't have to shoulder this burden.

But wait, what do AIG's 'assets' consist of, exactly? The assets that are being used to back up the US Government's $85 billion loan? Why, AIG's assets consist of the insurance policies of its customers. Bet that makes holders of AIG policies feel cozy and warm. Or perhaps, a bit toasty.

Now, these policies are for the most part held not by AIG itself, but by smaller, subsidiary companies under AIG's umbrella. Wow. So, what does that mean, that the risk is spread around a lot or something? I'm going to answer no, even though I don't really understand my own question (you have to forgive me, because I'm of necessity reconstructing Greenberger's

comments from memory, as the Web version of the show to which I have provided a hyperlink will not begin functioning until later in the day on which I'm typing these words).

Turns out that AIG, like apparently everyone else, held a lot of subprime mortgage-backed securities. Remember: this means that it invested a significant percentage of the life insurance policies of its customers in those sketchy-ass subprime mortgage loans. So, when the housing sector tanked -- as it would do inevitably, given that the sector was skyrocketing exclusively due to incompetent oversight and lack of governmental regulation (of which, if you want more, vote for John McCain, who's always been in favor of more and more DE-regulation and shows no sign of changing tack in any sense other than rhetorically) -- so AIG's fortunes tanked.

But here's what's even more sinister: Greenberger describes an additional reason for AIG's southward turn: credit-default swaps. Credit-default swaps are a kind of insurance policy against defaults on loans, particularly risky loans (like subprime mortgages, etc.). If that doesn't make sense, and I'm sure it doesn't, just listen to Greenberger talking to Terri Gross, and it will become clear. So: anyway, despite occasional clamors from responsible people, the federal government has made it its policy to exercise virtually no regulation and no oversight with respect to credit-default swaps, or CDS. Therefore, there is zero obligation of transparency on the part of the entities involved with these transactions.

AIG has made a regular and frequent part of its business to issue CDS, a practice that is apparently unusual for insurance companies; for an insurance company to make such risky investments would be unthinkable in an environment with the appropriate oversight, transparency and regulation. Especially since oftentimes, if not in the majority of instances, the buyers of these swaps did so to protect against the risk of a default or bankruptcy on subprime mortgages!

This unregulated, mysterious CDS market is several times the size of the stock market!

Wow. If McCain manages to fucking win this election -- I know this is a clichee, but --, I'm sorry but anybody with any sense would pack up and leave for Canada. We can avoid that, but only if we stay in the faces of those who are undecided in this election and explain to them what the consequences will be if McCain wins.

Not to mention that in this economy, if the American people were to vote the same party of the last eight years into office all over again, it would be the biggest act of collective masochism the world has ever seen.

Okay; off to take a shower to wash away the self-righteousness..... But it just won't wash awaaaay / No, it doesn't ever wash awaaaayaayayayay, / Darlin', pleaeeeeeeese. To be sung in the style of Bryan Adams, ca. 'Everything I Do I Do It For You'. And that's a wrap.

_________________
* And, also to remind Barack supporters to register to vote ; it's unbelieveably easy and quick to put the requisite paperwork together, thanks to this kickass feature on Barack Obama's Web site. Remember: this election could very easily turn on whether or not a sufficient number of young people show up at the polls on election day. So don't hold back out of politeness: remind your friends; get in their faces and make sure they vote.

David Foster Wallace: 1962-2008

When J, having discovered the news in yesterday's New York Times, told me that David Foster Wallace committed suicide on Friday, I found myself shuddering in disbelief. The only previous occasion upon which I have reacted viscerally to the death of an artist -- one whom I'd known through his or her work exclusively -- was when Mary Hansen, longtime vocalist for the band Stereolab, was killed tragically in an accident at the age of 36. It took me a little while -- and some red wine, and some wallowing sessions to the tune of Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup -- to get over my anger with the bastards for that one.

Wallace, like Hansen, was an artist whose work has at times affirmed my desire to go on living. I passed through a couple of periods as a young man during which Wallace's stories and novels -- especially Infinite Jest -- performed the lofty task of confirming for me the existence of human life somewhere outside of my apartment. Or maybe confirming the existence of human life somewhere in my skull. I don't know; something like that. I'm not a writer the way Wallace was -- I write songs well, but paragraphs and stuff don't come naturally to me --, and that's not just in the sense that Wallace was obviously a genius and I'm not. It's in the sense that it always seemed that he kept 'craft' at arm's length. I don't know whether this is true, or if it was maybe an impression that he cultivated; I'm not sure it makes much of a difference.

Maybe it was that Wallace was trying to and sometimes succeeding at rising above 'craft'. Maybe it was that he was uncomfortable with 'craft' and needed continually to diffuse its pretensions, embed jokes somewhere in the bricks and mortar of his sometimes elaborate, nonlinear plot structures. (Structures which have been described as resembling everything from Möbius strips to parabolas.) I always had this sense that in some of his best and worst work, he was really just trying to find ways of pulling back the Wizard-of-Oz-ian curtain and saying, "Hi; how's it going? The world's profoundly fucked, don't you think? Yeah, me too."


Wallace declared in interviews his interest in devising strategies by which to appropriate the irony and subversive politics of postmodern smart-asses like Pynchon, but to fashion from this raw material a kind of fiction that could be evocative of the human experience (if not necessarily linear), morally engaged and emotionally resonant. And as Wallace's early novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way makes clear, he wasn't interested in building metafictive roller coaster rides in the style of of John Barth, a tiresome and wanky strategy that probably still found favor with Wallace's creative writing MFA faculty, whom he derided as square and as obsessed with a notion of form as an ideal in its antiseptic self.

Wallace seemed to be struggling in his fiction to find ways of coping with life, or at least to document and annotate real and hypothetical attempts to cope with life. Another way of saying whatever it is I'm trying to get at is that he seemed as a writer to be always on the lookout for ways of curing his loneliness, our loneliness. From what little I actually know about him as a person, he was someone who was always struggling with depression and various forms of anxiety. The publication and critical success of a novel he had written as an undergraduate lavished upon him a level of attention that's not all that healthy for a young man to receive, and he become involved with hard drugs, which he kicked apparently with the help of Narcotics Anonymous (although, it seems just as likely that he attended these NA meetings as research for his second and final novel Infinite Jest, one of whose narrative threads involves drug addition and NA). In an essay 'E Unibus Pluram', Wallace describes in some detail that his problem with television is that it's so damn entertaining that it's hard for him to stop watching. He addressed this issue by living without a working television set in his house, apart from a small one with a built-in VCR and no reception, on which he would watch weekly episodes of Ally McBeal, taped for him by friends. Furthermore, he lacked Internet access from his home computer and therefore routinely carried his work on a floppy disk to a computer in different building in order to email it to his editor.

In a way, it's strange that his death affects me as it does, given that I have almost nothing in common with Wallace as a human being, and he probably wasn't the kind of person I'd take to hanging out with. He was reportedly a genius at doing certain kinds of obscenely complicated logical proofs: basically, somewhere in the gray area between mathematics and philosophy; a zone in which the material is so difficult, so beyond my grasp and attention span that I find it most practical simply to prefer Continental philosophy. He was born into one of those well-connected, WASPy families -- of which most of us are equal parts jealous and resentful -- with old-school academic parents, in which things like proper grammar and etymology were spoon-fed to him and his siblings in the form of parlor games. It sounds like a textbook example of a family whose hypereducated brats are as likely to end up having a nervous breakdown as they are to ascend to the heights of some academic or professional field.

Wallace did both. Perhaps as a consequence of being told repeatedly that he was a boy-genius, he developed what I guess you could call a smart-kid rebellious streak, characterized in part by virtuoso displays of sarcasm and wordy arrogance. The difference between his rebellious streak and those of most arrogant, WASPy professor's sons, is that, from all appearances, Wallace had a reverence for and understanding of mischief, an art that is all-too-often bungled by children/young adults of privilege and cultural savvy, who tend to be dilettantish and noncommittal when it comes to most forms of fun. If you want to do it the right way, there's an ethics to being a rebellious kid; you have certain responsibilities to those around you. It's like those gay indie-rock bands that act 'cute' and 'ironic', as if no one's ever done that before; as if everyone doesn't know that they're still a bunch of asshole frat boys. It has to do with whether you are giving something back to your audience of greater substance than simply the opportunity to live vicariously through you.

I'm surmising that Wallace understood and revered mischief on the basis both of interviews and of some of the more rollicking and madcap episodes in his two novels, Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System. I've never seen anyone comment on this, but it occurs to me that in both of these novels, particularly the former, Wallace's depictions of adolescence, undergraduate life, and young adulthood are singularly evocative. Depictions that are not exactly 'realistic' so much as hyper-real, fractured and faithful to the task of capturing the sharpness of focus with which young people see adults for the self-serving hypocrites that they are, part and parcel of which is the ability of young people to police the hypocrisies of their peers, to play fair and to insist upon fair play. This insistence upon fairness, this willingness to cut one's fellow down to size for his benefit, this anarchistic, decentered anti-system of justice that protects friendship from meaninglessness: is this not what we're describing when we use the word mischief?

I now know something that I've suspected for a while now: that I'm never going to get to read a third David Foster Wallace novel. I hadn't been all that interested in his newer stories and essays; he seemed to have gotten himself locked into a kind of holding pattern: the same plodding, technical-manual diction; long declarative sentences; a character's memories narrated in a past perfect tense monotone; a faint tint of themes and allusions, conjured through a delicate threading-together of textures, colors and half-formed thoughts -- a skill at which Wallace's virtuosity is matched in contemporary story-telling only by that of David Lynch --, the results of which could still give you the chills, but the technique for which was becoming sadly predictable, and even tedious. Some of the stuff in Consider the Lobster and Oblivion was great, of course. But I remember thinking that maybe I had moved on a bit from Wallace, or maybe he was perilously close to repeating himself, or maybe the warmth, energy and humor that I had found in Girl With Curious Hair and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and his novels was beginning to elude his writerly grasp. The final possibility, at least, would now appear to have been confirmed in spades.

"Wallace was one of the ones who made it." That's how J put it yesterday as we were trying to pin down why the news of his death -- and the nature of his death -- packed such a seismic punch. "He was one of the ones who made it," she said, "but apparently, it didn't seem that way to him." It was more assuring and life affirming than we realize, I think, to know that David Foster Wallace was out there. It meant that one of the good ones made it. And yet, having gotten there, he was still struggling with such pain and such despair that it had become unendurable. We have lost an important ally in the fight against the charlatans and the liars. God damn, Dave, we're going to miss you.

He was 46 years old.

Sarah Palin: a lip-smacking summary & dismissal.Palin, McCain roasted on a rotisserie built from their own lies!

The architecture of the Information Age is hyperlinks, and you'll encounter hyperlinks aplenty as you gorge yourself on the virtuosic, hyperlink-studded slab of awesome served up by Rosa Brooks, a contributor to Slate's womynist blog The XX Factor.

"Put Lipstick on Sarah Palin...," by Rosa Brooks

Keep the faith, comrades! We'll win this thing yet. (I think I should go to bed.)

John McCain is a neocon. And he's advised by the neocons. To vote for John McCain is to beg for 12 continuous years of neoconservatism.

That's right, Ladies and Gentlemen. You know, at first, when John McCain said that he was the candidate of "CHANGE," I thought: That's great!! That way, no matter who wins the election in November, we'll have "CHANGE!" And isn't the need for "CHANGE" something we can all agree on?

Remember Bill Kristol? Yeah, that Bill Kristol; the guy whose tactics for pushing the United States into Iraq included intellectual dishonesty, the adopting of his trademarked self-righteous facial expression of moral superiority, the relentless running of misleading, highly speculative and tendentious and sometimes downright mendacious articles in his ultra-neocon publication The Weekly Standard in order to advance the perception in Washington that war with Iraq was inevitable? The hypocrite who will open his big, smug, wealthy-donor teat-suckling mouth and rattle off a series of just-received GOP talking points in a manner that masquerades as well-informed, individual expertise? The guy who's now, with other neocons, marching us toward a military confrontation with Iran?

The Bill Kristol who accepted millions of dollars in funding from shady ultraconservative organizations like the Bradley Foundation and the Olin Corporation in order to form think tanks like the Project for a New American Century (a.k.a. "PNAC," which also included Paul Wolfowitz, Randy Scheunemann, Robert Kagan, Richard Pearle, William Bennett, Gary Schmitt, Thomas Donnelly, and most of the other celebrity neocons you can think of), in which policy positions and propaganda points on how to push our country into war with Iraq and then Iran were laid out in detail?

You know, the guy featured herein:



(By the way, this must be among Stephen Colbert's greatest-ever moments.)

A vote for John McCain is a vote for Bill "Lies with a Straight Face" Kristol. That Bill Kristol. The William Kristol of The Weekly Standard who now has his own column in the formerly respectable New York Times. (Hope it doesn't seem like I'm worked up about this...)

That must be the "CHANGE" that McCain/Bush is talking about. McCain/Bush. Bush/McCain. La la dee da. McCain/Bush/Bush/Bush/McCain/Mcain. Neoconservatives, the ones who have fashioned our foreign policy for the past eight years, the ones who figured out how to trick us into invading Iraq -- even though most of us weren't tricked because. after all, we saw right through what they were doing. But of course, the thing is, well....we didn't have...uh...any power to stop them.

Nor would we, as it happens, have any power to stop the neocons like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan and Randy Scheunemann (of whom, more in a moment) under a President McCain. Robert Kagan, by the way, is one of McCain's official foreign policy advisers, a man who would be certain to hold some kind of important position in a McCain administration [which would be indistinguishable, after all, from the Bush administration]. McCain, acting upon the advice of Kagan, will be sure to send us to Iran as quickly as you can say "Gone are our civil liberties, which will continue to be gone forever if you vote for John McCain."

Don't believe me about Kagan? Robert Kagan -- unlike Bill Kristol, toward whom any ad hominem is fair game as far as I'm concerned -- is an amiable enough bloke, but unfortunately, he's eager for us to go to war with Iran and...apparently...Russia. Here's just an introduction to the man and his plan. Remember, he's one among many of John Neocon McCain's neoconservative foreign policy advisers:



Like I said, not as unctuous or viscerally offensive as Kristol. But he's got war on his mind. He can taste it on his tongue. He can feel it in the ripples of fat that cascade up and down his chiny-chin-chin.

So, wait. George W. Bush's 'foreign policy', so to speak, was/is conducted by neocons, in whose number we must include, of course, Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan, Randy Scheunemann, Richard Pearle, et al. And don't forget Condi. But anyway, so...the "CHANGE" we'd experience under Neocon John McCain...This must be a species of "CHANGE" with which I'm as of yet unacquainted. Its exact nature is kind of elusive, isn't it? I mean, as "CHANGE" goes, McCain's version is kind of...um...static, isn't it?

Presumably, the "CHANGE" that McCain is talking about is......Is he just talking about the fact that, under a McCain administration, we'd live each and every day of our lives quaking with the fear that that cloying, screechy-voiced, sociopathic, book-burning bitch could become our president? That would, of course, represent a "CHANGE." I continue, as before, to find it difficult to believe that the GOP faithful really want that person to win.

Anyway. My vote goes, as before, to Barack Obama.

For more discussion of McCain's neoconservatism, and his ties with assorted neoconservatives, particularly Robert Kagan and Randy Scheunemann, see:

• The Atlantic Monthly's Andrew Sullivan on McCain's preexisting shady intelligence-gathering and fiscal dealings with hard-core neocon Randy Scheunemann--who is now McCain's Senior Foreign Policy Adviser--and McCain's and Scheunemann's longstanding desire to ignite a conflict between Georgia and Russia, with the United States intervening militarily on Georgia's behalf.
• A piece, featured on therealnews.com, on Randy Scheunemann, "John McCain’s Senior Foreign Policy Adviser, Lobbyist, and a former director of the neo conservative Project for a New American Century." Journalist Chip Berlet reports:

...Scheunemann would play a very major role in shaping McCain's foreign policy... We have in the past had Henry Kissinger and all kinds of other high-profile people, like Zbigniew Brzezinski [inaudible]. It's hard to predict if Scheunemann would play that role, but he wouldn't play that role in as pragmatic a way as Kissinger or Brzezinski played. I mean, we're talking about a very aggressive, pro-militarist, pro-interventionist neoconservative ideologue here who made Kissinger and Brzezinski seem almost like Buddhists in comparison.

...[Under Scheunemann, we can expect] an aggressive kind of foreign policy for the United States which claims the right to intervene diplomatically, and then militarily, in any struggle around the world by constructing that struggle as having an important national security issue involved, so that no matter where there is some kind of trouble, through this McCain foreign policy, controlled by Scheunemann one presumes, we're going to claim the right to intervene instantly, first with sanctions and then with tanks and jets and bombs, to suggest that people need to sort of get in line with our needs. And this is a very, obviously, arrogant foreign policy, and what it's going to do is to continue to separate the United States from the world diplomatic community, which has already grown quite unhappy with the kind of bullying that the United States feels comfortable with. And it'll only get worse in that sense, in terms of an aggressive militarism rooted in this neocon idea of exporting "global democracy," quote-unquote. (Check out the rest of the report.)

• Michael I. Nimon on McCain and his Neocon approach to Georgia in Artvoice (Buffalo, NY)
• Philip Giraldi, "John McCain and the Neocon resurgence"
• Jacob Heilburn on the Neocon canonization of John McCain in The Huffington Post
• Alec Baldwin (yeah, that one) describes the neoconservatism of Sarah Palin in The Huffington Post

Bush & McCain are both Republicans: the party of lies, torture, warmongering, destruction of public infrastructure, widening gap between rich & poor.

John McCain and George W. Bush are members of the same political party.
(Let's all remind our friends, relatives, colleagues and coworkers.)

Polemic of the day, from Downbeaten Wife Contributed by Jenny Ludwig

Taking a break between loads of Tom's laundry this morning, pondering my (post?)modern femininity as I scrubbed the corners of the kitchen with my fingernails and chopped onions with the other hand, I suddenly recalled this video clip of Palin at her most pious and most stubborn, responding to questions about her stance on abortion with that perfect Miss Congeniality smile, giving the interviewer nothing but sweetness yet refusing to give an inch:



Palin responds to several successive interview question as if there were no--and indeed is not ever any--gray areain sexual politics, as if being "pro-life" were equivalent to what she calls "choosing life" (and this video dates from long before McCain picked her for duck-duck-grey duck). As she flatly refuses to even acknowledge the differences between the situations that the interviewer offers, repeating "I would choose life" with the complacency and saccharine kindness that only the self-righteous can muster, it occurred to me that, unlike other conservative thinkers that I have known--indeed, unlike even the zealots and near-Nazis that I've known--Palin actually thinks that her deeply warped ideas describe the world, that you don't need anything more than an adage and a strong will to make the world as you think it should be, and, most importantly, that if you govern the world as you would govern the world you want, that the world will come to match the government you offer. Palin has forgotten that it's the dealer's game, and the odds are with the callous world, which invariably overpowers the insufficient and brittle structures we invent. The repeated lesson of history is that reality's great gambit is to overpower and undermine attempts to contain it through description; it wins every time against the theorized, the dreamed, the written, the desired, the proclaimed, the denied, the imagined and the depicted.

What has this to do with gender politics? you ask. Amber made a great quip last night, which she meant as a kind-of serious throwaway: When I said "pro-life," she responded, "Or, as I like to say, anti-choice." This reversal of the key terms of the abortion debate reveals the degree to which (as per far too often) it is the "anti-choice" lobby that has established the terms of the debate. Who, after all, wouldn’t "choose life"? It is primarily Sarah Palin's complacency--the complacency of the chosen-—that makes me so fucking angry about her nomination, but also the way that central questions about gender politics and government are obscured by the tepid debate about Palin's gender, womanhood recast as the glory of motherhood, which makes a woman stronger rather than weaker. Palin trumps Clinton through her ever-productive womb and her mobilization of the sexual appeal of that fertility through the production of an ahistorical femininity. In this arena, a world whose changes are immaterial to the highly motivated, women’s rights (rather than her own nomination) are a kind of affirmative action; if women had been strong enough, they would never have been kept down by unchecked fecundity.

But the great power of Obama's promise is that he can roll with the punches, that he is going to look around before he decides what to do, that--in contradistinction to my vision of Palin--not just government but ethical behavior and responsible relationships with other people overall depend on the capacity to look at what is actually outside of you before you decide what to do or say. To be certain, Palin's gender has no relation to her politics whatever and it's more laughable than insulting to imagine a Hillary Clinton supporter voting for this Stalinist bitch, but she is being presented as someone who is able to cope with the modern world without giving up her value system. [NB: Palin doesn't, of course, describe herself as a feminist and as this quite elegant discussion on Slate points out, this is not what our mothers fought for--for our right to choose; to return to work the day after giving birth and to be so fucking awesome we neither want nor need any physical, household, bodily, familial or emotional help]. But, aside from the fact that--and I paraphrase from The View--you can't exchange a vagina for a vagina, even one whose fertility is unchecked, the larger point is that Sarah--and Bristol--Palin''s rights and abilities to have the children they want, to keep the babies that may not have been foreseen, to decide that motherhood is what they want, that they don't want to use birth-control or wouldn't ever terminate a pregnancy, are never and have never been in jeopardy. Pro-choice is not (as my Dad is unfortunately though occasionally wont to say) "pro-abortion"; rather, it supports the right to choose either way.

This occurs to me partly because I--like most of my peers--spent decades understanding Roe v. Wade as central to my own life. I never lived in a time or a place when I didn't know that free, safe and private advice, support, and--did I so want--an abortion were available to me. When I was seventeen (or twenty-seven), if I had gotten pregnant, I would have gotten an abortion, as most of my friends who got pregnant did. Now, however, at the grand old age of 33, when I am much less likely to make such grand mistakes than at 17, I know that I would never have an abortion. My relationship with Roe v. Wade has shifted; the rights it endows are for mychildren and grandchildren, not for me. And, of course, for Sarah Palin's three daughters.

The idea that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is related to Sarah Palin's parenting is absurd; the Christian Right finally got one thing right when they admitted that seventeen-year-old girls get pregnant all the time, in every country in the world, every state in the Union (even those that might want to secede), and even in the most evangelical of evangelical households. And, frankly, most seventeen-year olds get pregnant because they don't use birth control even when they do have sex-ed classes, curfews, moms who don't work or regale their children with stories of when they marched on Washington and piles of condoms for the taking in guidance offices and clinics.

But, Palin's "I am pro-life" goes far beyond the question of an unplanned pregnancy, elaborating a policy stance into a lifestyle choice. Her daughter, therefore,--her seventeen-year old high-school senior of a daughter--is not just having this child, she is getting married and raising that child. I'm going to show my age, but, in my day, if you didn't want to get an abortion (and in my parents, when you couldn't), you went to stay with Aunt Susy for a year, to attend a different school and get some "rest". Then you came back and finished high-school. If Bristol Palin was sacrificed for this campaign, it is not only in that her personal life was made public for her mother's benefit, nor even that she "chose" to bear this child—and I don’t think any of us believe she had any real "choice"—to ratify her mother’s ethical stance, but because she "chose" to marry and keep the child, to extend the Palin clan to a third generation. Her entire life was sacrificed for Palin’s ideals. And that, perhaps, is my point. I think Sarah Palin was lucky as hell that Bristol was the one who got knocked up. She seems like a sweet kid, but very much sculpted by her mother and bearing the brunt of the intense parental scrutiny, protectiveness and pressure that only the oldest girl in a family can feel. So, she said she'd keep the kid and marry the boy, and, frankly, she probably wasn't going to leave Wasilla anyway.

But Sarah Palin has three & daughters, and one of those daughters is going to show her, in the worst and most painful way possible, how much her ideologically-restrictive, Stalinist, depressingly provincial tight-fist rule costs. If Bristol were a slightly different child, was given a bit more or a bit less freedom, went to better or even worse schools, spent her childhood in Anchorage or Washington, was a year or too older or younger, she wouldn't have agreed to bear that child; she would have run away, or aborted it by herself or drank and smoked herself and it into oblivion; and one of Sarah Palin's daughter is going to be that child. Piper Palin may spend the next ten years of her life in Washington; it will be 2015 or so before she's thinking about sex, and we don't even know what the world will look like. But Sarah Palin, who will not let herself or is not able to imagine any kind of world that she can't control if she is given a chance, will still be laying out the same rules and the same reasons and expecting them to resound as they did before.

But doesn't that seem unlikely? Maybe Piper won't want to give up her scholarship to college or just because mom says so. Maybe one of Palin's daughters will be raped in the big city, or some older boy or relative will use her and leave her. For whatever reason, if Sarah Palin makes her two younger daughters live in a world
where sex-ed is unnecessary and abortion is illegal, one of them won't want to have the child that will inevitably be conceived. And Sarah will watch her world--the one she has constructed so painstakingly and bolstered with the center of her arrogant little soul--, along with any other worlds she could even imagine, come smashing down around her head as she watches one of her daughters bleed out on her pale-pink bathroom floor, with a hanger sticking out of her cootch, because there wasn't a single goddamn doctor or nurse in Alaska who would give her an abortion.

__________________

* A good friend of the author and of the author's husband, too. -- Ed.

Jon Stewart / George Orwell expose eery similarity between totalitarian 'doublethink' and Republican 'talking points'.

Jon Stewart, on The Daily Show, September 3, 2008 (thanks are due to Jennifer Anne for bringing the existence of this video to my attention):





Passages from George Orwell's 1984, describing 'doublethink':

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them . . . . To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

His [Winston's] mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved using doublethink.

I think that the GOP has thrown in the towel: Palin is a nightmare who appeals only to a narrow base of inbred racist mean people.

Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican Convention was (and is) an obnoxious, mean-spirited, hollow, divisive self-parody. Her voice is unbearable: it's screechy and self-congratulatory. Her opinions are repugnant and also stupid. Not to mention that she's a thinly veiled racist. "But small-town America will love her!!" some idiot on Charlie Rose says. No they won't, I respond. The only ones who will love her are the ones who already are inclined to love her. She does nothing to increase the number of votes that McCain will get, and in fact, one of the myriad ways in which she hurts McCain is that she makes him appear even more irrelevant that he already is.

Let's face it, people: the Republicans are sitting this one out. Just as when George H.W. failed to get his second turn, the GOP knows that it's not going to win this election, and so instead, it's concentrating on galvanizing the solidarity of its base. It's leaving a huge deficit that will be sure to cripple Obama's ability to push through his domestic agenda, and the Sarah Palinites will remain true to the cause, and they're have abortion, guns and "the liberal media" on their mind.

By the way: WHO ACTUALLY STILL USES THE PHRASE "THE LIBERAL MEDIA??" Answer: nobody. Not anybody who knows what they're talking about. But the GOP is playing the game it's played in one way or another since Nixon. It's going to feed on the weepy, self-centered "victimization" and "marginalization" of white, unsophisticated, lower- and lower-middle-class white people. Particularly born-again Christians. That is the only group of people in the world who think the media are "liberal" after the Iraq War. And that's because they're basically fascists: uneducated and confused about the world. And they are precisely the people for whom the low-rent spectacle of this year's Republican Convention has been staged.

They're not trying to win this thing. They're setting their sights on future elections.

Further bric-a-brac upon which I rest my thesis:

Sarah Palin has chosen to exploit her own daughter's pregnancy: and when "family values" types do this kind of thing, we have the right, my friends, to point and to laugh our little Left-liberal-blogosphere-asses off. So take that, Rudy "Looks, Sounds and Thinks Like A Dumber and Meaner Benito Mussolini" Giuliani. But beyond that, whatever bullshit sympathy accrues to the Stupid Alaskan Bitch from an understanding, partner-in-white-born-again-Christian-victimization Christian Right, it's simply not going to be durable enough to carry her and much less to carry McCain to a general election victory. I mean, could you actually picture this freak show in the White House/VP mansion? I just don't fucking think so.

Also, thanks to Gypsy Sun & Rainbows for first bringing my attention to this tasty little morsel, which I think gives us a pretty good idea of what Republicans across the country are saying behind closed doors, even as they churn out bullshit lies in their columns about how very earthy Sarah "I BURN BOOKS, WHICH IS ALSO WHAT ADOLF HITLER (A NAZI) DID" Palin is.

This really is a new low for politics in my lifetime. I mean like, for real. It's just so cynical and full of hate. And we have the Republicans to thank for wasting our time with it.

Sarah Palin: not just dumb, but evil. And the embodiment of a lunatic fringe fringier & more lunatic than known previously to exist.

• When she was mayor of Alaska, Sarah Palin attempted to BAN LIBRARY BOOKS, Time, "Mayor Palin: A Rough Record":

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

• Did you hear that? I said that Sarah Palin attempted to BAN LIBRARY BOOKS, New York Times, "Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual":

Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.

Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.

The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.

• And, in addition to attempting to BAN BOOKS -- you know, like what they did in NAZI FUCKING GERMANY? -- Sarah Palin is a mean-spirited, vindictive, ideologically rapacious nightmarish RNC-funded opportunist who refuses to accept the idea of Christians assuming public office if they are not born-again Christians (New York Times, "Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual"):

The traditional turning points that had decided municipal elections in this town of less than 7,000 people — Should we pave the dirt roads? Put in sewers? Which candidate is your hunting buddy? — seemed all but obsolete the year Ms. Palin, then 32, challenged the three-term incumbent, John C. Stein.

Anti-abortion fliers circulated. Ms. Palin played up her church work and her membership in the National Rifle Association. The state Republican Party, never involved before because city elections are nonpartisan, ran advertisements on Ms. Palin’s behalf.....Ms. Palin and her passion for Republican ideology and religious faith overtook a town known for a wide libertarian streak and for helping start the Iditarod dog sled race.

“Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” said Mr. Stein, who lost the election. “But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’ ”

“I thought: ‘Holy cow, what’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’m Jewish or Islamic?’ ” recalled Mr. Stein, who was raised Lutheran, and later went to work as the administrator for the city of Sitka in southeast Alaska. “The point was that she was a born-again Christian.”

Dear Reader: I beg of you: don't let the Republicans pull this country back into a never-ending fascistic culture-war hell.

VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA TO PUT AN END TO ALL OF THIS NONSENSE. AND CONVINCE YOUR FRIENDS TO DO SO TOO. If we don't win this one for the Constitution, the rule of law, a respect for reason, the sciences and the humanities, an understanding of the primacy of quality education as a moral and economic necessity, we are going to endure decades of listening to idiots like Sarah Palin. DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO OUR COUNTRY! DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOUR AND MY CHILDREN. VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA.