McCain campaign, in bid to more closely resemble reality TV show, chooses airline stewardess as would-be VP.

Are you fucking

kidding me?

Reasons why McCain's selection of a quasi-Canook cocktail waitress as his running mate is either an act of desperation or cry for help:

• She's a cocktail waitress.
• Or a airline stewardess, or whatever.
• She's dumb.
• Her political career -- such as it is (and it isn't!) -- consists of mayoral offices in towns with populations equal to the number of people currently standing at the Belmont El stop, and having done so at the behest of oil companies that use her as their little doe-eyed puppet to screw the American people out of their own natural resources.
• Her husband looks like a child molester:
  
  
• Not only that, but he works for BP.
• She has no qualifications and in fact has never set foot outside the United States. Check out this -- sorry, it's difficult to type because I'm laughing so hard -- time line in the The New York Times, which documents her lifetime of formidable achievements -- which include graduating from journalism school at the University of Idaho, playing Division 3 basketball at some piece of shit Alaskan college, and apparently (winning I'm not kidding about this) some kind of local beauty contest. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
• The number of disgruntled Hilary-supporters who would actually vote for this woman, who's rabidly "pro-life" (and even though she's not hypocritical about it -- what with the five babies or whatever, and the baby recently born with Down's syndrome -- she's still pro-life which is hella-NOT what Hilary supporters are). Plus any women with even a vague feminist impulse can't support this biatch. Why? Because she's obviously dumb as a goddamn brick!
  
• They look terrible together. As if McCain's fucking Botoxy socialite bitch of a wife didn't make him look bad enough, now he looks even more like some creepy old man, collecting young girls to stand next to him (and make him look old, which doesn't help him). Observe:
  
  Say NO to this, America! It's so fucking creepy!
  
• She's .... uh ... not qualified to be president. And as Rahm Emanuel pointed out, it's not like ol' Johnny's not #1 in the most likely to die while in office category.
• I mean, seriously, could you imagine if this bimbo became president? And no, I'm not equating "looks" (which she supposedly has? says somebody, not sure who) with stupidity. I'm equating stupidity with stupidity.
• And I'm not equating inexperience with unsuitability for office. I'm equating the combination of inexperience and stupidity with unsuitability for office.
• And, you see, Barack Obama -- to the extent he's "inexperienced" -- is also smart, inspiring, on-the-ball, the galvanizer of a nationwide movement....I mean, he's Barack Fucking Obama, and this chick is just some dumb cheerleader from butt-fuck nowhere, with a dumbass husband who looks like he's inbred or something. I don't want that motherfucker anywhere near the White House. He would stain the furniture just by looking at it.
• Isn't America sick of all of this fucking Conservative Christian bullshit? Can't all of the Fascists-For-Jesus people just go away?
  
• She's into hunting and NASCAR and all that other redneck bullshit. Isn't America sick of all the redneck shit yet? I mean, come on.
• And also the fucking oil people? Aren't we sick of having motherfuckers who work for oil companies setting our fucking foreign policy? Examples in the current Administration of people who RECENTLY WORKED for oil companies (off the top of my head): Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush. AREN'T PEOPLE SICK OF THESE FUCKING ASSHOLES? You want more of this shit, Conservative Christian America? Need more oil CEOs setting your policy for you?? We are a country of dumbass masochistic assholes, and we seem to get what we deserve.
• Apparently John and Sarah hadn't spoken to one another until like a couple of days ago, and then, only briefly. No surprise.
• Just no.
• Were the two of them to win the presidency, satire as a form of humor and communication would cease entirely to be distinguishable from reality. It's already close enough now, with Bush and his cowboy hats and his "Mission Accomplished" airplane stunt.
  
• She's Dan Quayle in drag.*

* Not my joke. I can't remember where it came from. But it's good, no?

Some Hates/Loves (ala Westwood & McLaren)

Sex was the name of the boutique owned and operated by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in the 1970s, located at 430 King's Road, London. McLaren, of course, became the manager of the Sex Pistols before his megalomania, incompetence and clashes of ego with John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon precipitated the band's disintegration.

Although Westwood and McLaren were in the business of selling clothes -- designed by Westwood, who appropriated period and street fashions -- the couple's real stock in trade was anti-establishmentarianism. They set out to tap into a growing and restless market of misfits; unemployed kids from the projects, as well as refugees of lower-middle-class suburbs, occupying condemned buildings in the economic and cultural wasteland of inner-city London. Westwood and McLaren attracted a clientèle whose sense of fashion was united its contempt for the hypocrisy, excess and bourgeois myopia of anything related to hippie culture.

Neither McLaren nor Westwood has ever been noted primarily for possessing business acumen. They frequently remodeled their store and changed its inventory out of boredom rather than to capitalize on sales. Initially calling their shop Let It Rock, which peddled Teddy Boy regalia, they moved on to edgier and funnier pastures with the advent of Sex, which specialized in rubber clothing, assorted accoutrements and paraphernalia, and -- most importantly -- tee-shirts emblazoned with snarky or confrontational slogans.

One such tee-shirt declared: "You’re gonna wake up one morning and know which side of the bed you’ve been lying on!" Beneath this manifesto appeared a list of pop culture and political references under the headings Hates and Loves. It is in the spirit of that pioneering tee-shirt that I shall undertake to improvise some Hates and Loves of my own. Or, rather, some Nos and Yeses. And since negation is an act of creation, let us begin with the former:

No!
audiophilia
blinders
blogs
Brooklyn
cant
ear fatigue
determinism as despair
Jim Derogatis
'expertise' as a stand-in for persuasiveness
Sasha Frere-Jones
Nancy Franklin
Jonathan Franzen
the herd
the hive
Sam Harris
Hilary
Christopher Hitchens (soused fatso, turncoat, fascist)
Peter Hitchens (bigot & mouth-breather)
Marx, mis- and shallow readings of
meritocracy, the concept of
NPR
.mp3s
'objectivists', from The Unabomber to Alan Greenspan
Peter, Bjorn and John (or whatever it's called)
scientism
Spiritualized
standardized tests (& all other forms of eugenics)
Stereolab after Sound-Dust
Sid Vicious
David Foster Wallace since 1999

Yes!
Anthony Braxton
Lester Bangs
Barack
cigarettes
cigarettes, jazz-
John Coltrane
daydreaming
eloquence
Brian Eno
Thomas Frank
good luck, not underestimating the importance of
historicism
the Hohner Pianet, model T
jazz
Mark Kozelek
Herbert Marcuse
Marx
Sean O'Hagan
Jim O'Rourke
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
The Last Metro
Lewis H. Lapham
John Lydon
Spacemen 3
thought
vinyl
.wav files
Slavoj Žižek

Why progressives should vote for Obama

In an article that appears in the current issue of The Nation, Christopher Hayes does a pretty good job of describing why I think it should be fairly obvious to anyone who is progressive (or lefter) that Barack Obama is a candidate worth supporting. Hayes's analysis, which I'll get to in a moment, endorses implicitly what I believe to be the best response to question:

But why should I support Barack when his platform is indistinguishable from Hilary's? Just because of his rhetoric?

My answer is: yes--with one caveat--because of his rhetoric! All of the most important things that presidents do have to do with rhetoric: how to set the terms of a discussion, how to be convincing, how to establish and maintain moral authority, how to say things that people don't want to hear, how to speak to lots of different kinds of people without condescending to some and sucking up to others. And thus my caveat: the idea that the political platforms of Obama and Clinton are 'indistinguishable' carries weight only insofar as we ignore the embeddedness of rhetoric in all aspects of presidential leadership. Of course rhetoric is too small a word to encompass the qualities enacted through Obama's gifts as a communicator, through his very persona, through the fact that historical circumstances combine with very existence a moment of profound possibility.

And I must insist that descriptions of Obama as "charismatic"--as it's used in reactionary rags like The New York Times--is pretty much a term of diminution. Such a term serves to deemphasize Obama's brilliance, savvy and astonishing fitness to rise to the challenge of our troubled political moment and focus attention instead upon his mere appeal. More specifically, upon the novelty of this appeal--folded into which is the unprecedented alignment of people/interests to whom he appeals--particularly as perceived by the James Carvilles of the world. Career technicians or "experts" who have build their "expertise," relevance and livelihoods upon rhetorics, logics and configurations of voters that are now disintigrating before our eyes. In fact, it's this very disintegration that is so vexing and even scary to these professionals.

A better description of Obama would take stock of the political, moral and rhetorical realignment that constitutes this moment--a moment that I think we should all admit is Obama's moment--and that points to the ways in which he and he alone is positioned to take the reigns. "Charismatic?" That description hardly captures it. Obama is a brilliant and empathic communicator. And it helps that Obama is a brilliant and empathic communicator while also being a brilliant and empathic person.

Anyway, this paragraph from Hayes's article does a pretty good of showing how Obama's skills as a communicator apply to the context of foreign policy, and differentiate him from Hilary in all of the ways that matter most (italics mine):

[F]oreign policy is where the President's agenda is implemented more or less unfettered. It's here where distinctions in worldview matter most--and where Obama compares most favorably to Clinton. The war is the most obvious and powerful distinction between the two: Hillary Clinton voted for and supported the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and Barack Obama (at a time when it was deeply courageous to do so) spoke out against it. In this campaign, their proposals are relatively similar, but in rhetoric and posture Clinton has played hawk to Obama's dove, attacking from the right on everything from the use of first-strike nuclear weapons to negotiating with Iran's president.

Continuing on the topic of foreign policy, the rhetorical differences between the two candidates aligns with and bespeaks another important distinction between the candidacies of Obama and Clinton: namely the kinds of people each will be likely to appoint to advisory and Cabinet positions during his or her presidency (an aspect of a candidacy of which the example of George W. Bush's administration should make us all the warier):

Her hawkishness relative to Obama's is mirrored in her circle of advisers. As my colleague Ari Berman has reported in these pages, it's a circle dominated by people who believed and believe that waging pre-emptive war on Iraq was the right thing to do. Obama's circle is made up overwhelmingly of people who thought the Iraq War was a mistake.

As Hayes points out: Hilary's got the ideological militarism thing going on among her likely appointees/brain trust.

The single most important reason to get off your ass and vote for Obama, one that has to do both with his skills as a communicator and his stance on Iraq is that he's the only candidate by a mile whom we can trust to restore and preserve the rule of law:

"We need to bring to a close this sad chapter in American history, and begin a chapter that passes the might of our military to the freedom of our diplomacy and the power of our alliances. And while we are at it, we can close down Guantanamo and we can restore habeas corpus and we can lead with our ideas and our values."

- Barack Obama, Richmond, Virginia, May 8

God DAMN. That's the voice of someone who's got a chance of becoming president. Let's do this, people! No excuses. Now is not the time for the lethargy that tempts you to demur; now is not the time for the masochism that compels you--like high fiber cereal--toward Clinton. The Clintons' time is done. Bill was the candidate for a certain moment. But, Barack Obama is the candidate for this moment. Fuck the assholes, and give this man your vote!!!