Wikileaks pisses off Hillary Clinton...and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...and Sarah Palin.

Now, let's say that I were an average American citizen, who—let's say—wants to hold democratically elected (directly or [usually very...] indirectly) figures in its government accountable for their habitual excesses and deceptions.

Let's say that I've noticed it's difficult to do this, as my government—like most governments—is a bloated, cynical, bureaucratic, militarist nightmare. So much so that it apparently has no center of gravity morally or even strategically.

Let's suppose that, furthermore, control over media—and, therefore, over public discourse—in the United States is monopolized by a handful of multinational corporations, all of whom in effect collude with governments in order to maximize the financial and political benefits that accrue to a fraction of 1 percent of the world's population—a tiny, wealthy elite with the greatest interest in maintaining the status quo, with all of its injustices and irrationalities.

Let's pretend for a moment that all of the preceding is true.

Wouldn't I be likely to conclude that a single piece of information that manages to piss off Hillary Clinton and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Sarah Palin...well, wouldn't I be likely to conclude that such a release of information is a good thing?

Miscellaneous Aphorisms & Observations

Dear Reader,

Below is a collection of twenty-four aphorisms and observations. This is a bit of a Crib From This tradition (albeit an extremely occasional one): It represents Our Blogger's attempt to resuscitate a dying form (or perhaps to deal it a final death-blow). Anyway, please enjoy: Comments are especially welcome (particularly if they are written while in a state of intoxication). Until next we meet, Dear Reader, I shall undertake to remain, as ever,

Your humblest and most obedient servant,
Crib From This

i.

On the nature of outrage. Outrage can be induced only by design.

ii.

To acknowledge reality. To the extent to which we acknowledge reality, we control it.

iii.

On authoritarianism. The authoritarian impulse is produced through the coupling of egoism and moralism.

iv.

On the nature of megalomania. The megalomaniac lives in a universe in which he is necessary.

v.

Concerning the word "lazy." Be careful with the word "lazy," one of the most overused words in the English language.

vi.

On problem-solving and imagination. The central task of problem solving is to imagine a world in which the problem no longer needs solving.

vii.

A thought experiment. Try assuming you're wrong. And try assuming you don't know why you're wrong.

viii.

On declaratives. The substance of a declarative is located in the questions it implies.

ix.

On how people view consensus. Beware of those for whom consensus implies validity.

x.

On fashion. Fashion is a devil, and as such must be given its due.

xi.

On changing yourself. There is no changing yourself without falling out of comfort with who you are.

xii.

On cleverness. Cleverness can be a double-edged sword. Especially for a child.

xiii.

To render decisions arbitrarily. There can be no interesting thoughts without arbitrary decisions.

xiv.

On egotism. The egotist lives in a universe in which he is useful.

xv.

On the nature of "wish-fulfillment." "Wish-fulfillment" is an oxymoron.

xvi.

On fascism. The fascist impulse arises from the coupling of moralism and narcissism.

xvii.

On Sarah Palin. The worst of Sarah Palin is not located in the contemptible things that she says, nor is it located in the cynical causes that she represents: It is that she was tailor-made for us to hate and, sure enough, we cannot help but hate her.

xviii.

On the nature of human weakness. No one is aware of his weaknesses except in an abstract and imprecise way. Were he truly aware of his weaknesses, he wouldn't exhibit them, and they thus would not be weaknesses.

xix.

On Fake Christianity. To be a human being is to be blind: to one's pride, weaknesses, motives and subterfuge. This is precisely why Evangelical or "Born-Again" Christianity is the most cynical kind of unbelief (more cynical by far than atheism): the renunciation of humility and self-doubt.

xx.

Concerning first- and second-order hypocrisy. To the Evangelical/"Born-Again" Christian, we say: "You're a hypocrite, and the stewards of your system of purported 'belief' are the worst kinds of hypocrites in the world. How can you live with yourself?"

She responds: "Everyone's a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite too. How can you live with yourself? At least I, having recognized and renounced my own hypocrisy, am setting out to purge from this world that which is unclean, to put into place the conditions under which man will be worthy of salvation."

Here the conversation ends, because we realize that within her self-enforced ignorance (which she calls, grotesquely, her "faith") resides a second-order hypocrisy: The worship of death.

xxi.

On home-schooling. This is the inherent problem with home-schooling: It reproduces the limitations of the parent—his delusions, demons, psychoses, prejudices, vectors of self-hatred—by transmitting them, simply and baldly, to his child. Home-schooling has been called child abuse, but it's worse than that: It's incest.

xxii.

On the role of "working hard" in formal education. Anything but "work harder." If a bright kid's performance is inconsistent for any number or reasons—be they developmental, socioeconomic, biological or cultural—telling him, "work harder" does little more than restate the problem. It's not good enough.

xxiii.

Concerning the need for comfort. Everyone expends her energies working chiefly toward the end of preserving and maximizing her own comfort. Comfort and leisure are not one and the same: When they coexist, more often than not, they are placed in inverse proportion to one another. In fact, a person is comfortable only insofar as she is (1) a lackadaisical thinker and (2) possesses an incurious disposition.

xxiv.

On the nature of atheism. Atheism can't be defended any more than Christianity can be. Polemicists who frame discussions of their belief or non-belief in the form of a defense are in fact saying nothing at all about their identified subject. Rather, they are advancing a political cause, the nature of which either they are attempting to occlude from credulous readers or about which they, with their adolescent minds, are themselves entirely uncomprehending.

The point about Sarah Palin is that she's amoral.

News about Sarah Palin: apparently she's blah blah blah blah blah.

Sarah Palin: theories as to why she apparently arouses hatred. I probably do hate her, and insofar as I do, I hate that I hate her. To inspire the hatred of others is to wield a peculiar kind of power. There's also a part of me that is in a sense unfazed by her personally, that sees in her a representation of many of contemporary America's most morally objectionable tendencies. It is these tendencies that I oppose with all my might, whether she's there to embody them or not. Right? ...

But, Sarah Palin: she's got to be a symptom of something rather than the other way around, right? Because what symptom could possibly be CAUSED by a Sarah Palin? No. She must be the symptom. The side effect.

Sarah Palin: a side effect. Like television commercials for various god-knows-what prescription medications marketed to Baby-Boomers, so that they don't have to poop at inopportune moments, or whatever it is. SIDE EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE SARAH PALIN. Sometimes these advertisements -- the funniest of them, to be sure -- devote, like, over half of their running-time to the announcer guy reading out laundry lists of scary-ass side effects, which MAY INCLUDE MUCUS, SEIZURE, BLOOD CLOT, LOSS OF HEARING, OR -- IN RARE CASES -- SARAH PALIN...

I don't hate Palin so much as I fear the consolidation of political power among those who love her.

Sarah Palin -- to paraphrase the Sex Pistols -- She ain't no human being!, but a constellation of images, allusions and gestures.

The mediated phenomenon "Sara Palin" evokes nostalgia among a large number of Americans -- although, as far as I can tell, not a majority of them -- for a past that does not exist/that never existed.

I am reminded of accounts I have read of what it was like to witness the ascendancy of National Socialism in the tempestuous final days of the Weimar Republic: the celebration of ignorance, of seething, unfocused resentments.

The final revenge of style over content.

Sarah Palin makes George W. Bush look like a civil libertarian. She makes Ronald Reagan look pro-education. Sarah Palin is worse than these men because, whereas their moral precepts were delusional, hers are non-existent.

She's amoral: she represents indifference toward morality, indifference toward the Constitution, indifference toward the quality of life -- and livelihoods -- of present and future generations, indifference toward science, indifference toward representative democracy, indifference toward the separation of the branches of government, indifference toward education, indifference toward art, toward culture, toward freedom, toward poverty, toward the pursuit of happiness, indifference toward the principles espoused by the Founding Fathers, indifference toward religion in its meaningful sense, indifference toward history, indifference toward ideas, and indifference toward suffering.

The only thing toward which she is not indifferent is Sarah Palin. She doesn't care about the people who celebrate her. The people who celebrate her do so in the sense that they live vicariously through her. She embodies a collective, incoherent and self-contradictory dream. This dream pines for the destruction of all things unfamiliar in the interest of preserving the self as the self construes itself.

We really should be explaining the Left objection to her in moral terms: Sarah Palin is amoral.

Sound the Death-Knell for Dixie (Part Two):David Brooks discovers GOP racism for the first time.

I'm going to talk a bit more about the politics of resentment. My reason is this: I continue to be amazed as to how simultaneously correct and naive recent comments by conservative journalist David Brooks on the future trajectory of his party have been. Brooks has predicted, both in his New York Times column and in his frequent appearances alongside Mark Shields on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer -- and I'm paraphrasing here but not exaggerating --, that it will take ten to fifteen years for the Republican Party to get its shit together intellectually and politically. The subtext of his commentary is -- and it's not as though he needs to say it -- that the GOP is being taken over by the pro-Sarah Palin 'grassroots' and all but ditched by its traditional (rich, suburban, etc.) base.

The columnist, conveniently, has failed to mention his own frequent and cloying forays into GOP-styled populism. In other words, Brooks could be said to deserve at least some of the blame for ushering in the party's new era. True, he is no Rush Limbaugh and has never sought actively to recruit the rural, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-elite, anti-intellectual, racist cadre, whose seeming ascendancy he now bemoans.

In contrast to the inbred hooliganism of Limbaugh/Hannity, Brooks -- to appropriate a device that appears in the concluding paragraphs of one of his recent columns -- commits a sin of omission. Until recent weeks -- around the time of the McCain/Palin rallies in which the GOP 'salt of the earth'-faithful screamed death threats intended for Obama, passed around an 'Obama'-labeled stuffed monkey toy and other racist knick-knacks, and called Obama a "terrorist," a "socialist," a "Muslim," and someone who "doesn't love this country the way you and I do" (oh wait, that last one was said repeatedly by Sarah Palin herself) -- I have never once seen Brooks point out that the GOP's cultivation of a mean-spirited, anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-elitism sentiment was beginning to lead down a slippery slope, which everyone could see in plain sight. Nope. Despite his supposed 'moderate' conservatism, not a single column inch. No, it took the advent of angry, racist mobs, televised and YouTubed for all to see, for David Brooks to level with his readers and finally admit that Palin was a cynical selection, condescending to the voters and dangerous for the country and to the office of the presidency. What gives, David?

To be fair, let's remember that for the last decade, Brooks has probably been too distracted to sound a note of caution regarding the GOP's ongoing brain drain and its inevitable consequences. Over the two terms of Bush/Cheney, Brooks has had a lot of neoconservative and neoliberal agenda-pushing to get through-- often by stealth, which eats up even more of a busy columnist's day. After all, the man's schedule was already so taxing as to include things like

• disseminating neoconservative and neoliberal ideology by masking it as snarky-but-lovable pop-sociology;
  
• applauding middle America for its unrefined taste (in more than one book whose title includes the word 'paradise');*
  
• being sure to time his fully formed policy stances in such a way as to perpetuate the illusion that careful deliberation and the measured weighing-of-options precedes their articulation;
  
• kissing the asses of Catholic people, in effect if not by design, playing 'good cop' to William's (both Kristol and Bennett) 'bad cop' in the pushing of neoconservative foreign policy adventures and the continued scorched-earth defunding of the domestic public sector;
  
• lamenting the disappearance of 1950's middle-brow reading culture, and other (pre-Palin) instances of the shameless peddling of cheap nostalgia;
  
• and panegyrizing George W. Bush's "self-confident" and "committed," leadership of the Iraq War -- as recently as July 2007, while enthusing over Bush's "unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea."

Jeez, David: you've managed to express what all of us feel deep down in our hearts, but what none of us could find the words to say: the rightness of Bush's Big Idea! So that's wherein lies George W. Bush's secret; how he pulls off being such a great and beloved president!

Brooks never had a negative word to say about Bush's neo-McCarthyist electoral strategy. Nor did he bother to wince along with the rest of us thinking human beings as we watched Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their crack squad of war criminals falsify intelligence, engage in character assassination of any/all figures of opposition, and censor dissent in the run-up to the Iraq War.

But no matter. Brooks appears recently to have updated his appraisal of George W. Bush, right about the time (early October, 2008) at which he felt compelled finally to come out and admit that Sarah Palin is BAD NEWS. Brooks made the following remarks at an event sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly, on October 9, 2008:

[Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican Party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at The National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Brooks is none too pleased about what he calls -- euphemistically -- the 'populist' turn his party has taken. What he's describing is the Republican Party's descent -- encapsulated in the whiny and incoherent failure that was the McCain presidential campaign -- into a movement lacking entirely a vision of how to govern, in what way, and for what reason (and for that matter, whether or not governance should be dismantled entirely). In other words, it's turned -- decisively and demonstrably -- into a party that caters to resentments. And little -- if anything -- more than that.

As I remarked previously, the most recent example of this type of non-ideological, non-forward-looking politics that comes to mind is the phenomenon of the Dixiecrats, whose rhetorical dichotomies -- which are circumscribed as simple-mindedly as possible, in the interest of maximum versatility and in order to appeal to simple-minded people -- of local v. global, religious v. educated, upstanding v. immoral, are exactly the same dichotomies that McCain and especially Palin (or rather, her hard-Right/neocon Handlers) set out to tap into. What's interesting about this essential connection to Dixiecrat politics is that it's come -- in more ways than one -- full circle. I'll elaborate on this in a moment. (And this is subject to which I shall return in subsequent posts.)

You might ask: OK, Tom we've heard you sound off about the cultural politics of resentment and the GOP. And we get what you mean about the Dixiecrats: they were resentful of (1) the industrial/increasingly cosmopolitan North for everything from the Emancipation Proclamation to Reconstruction, LBJ and the Civil Rights Bill -- the latter being the last straw; (2) they hated black people and were resentful of any measure resulting in the shaking-up of the Southern caste system, particularly because measures that treated with dignity persons of color were seen as decreasing the status of poor whites. (Or whatever...those kinds of things.)

But, you ask, how does this example map onto the structure or modus operandi of the current Republican Party? I mean, we know that McCain's campaign -- particularly that shrill, none-too-bright woman who dressed to kill -- was speaking a coded -- and sometimes not-so-coded -- language of racism at rallies, and in advertising and propaganda. But, what resentments are the Republicans, specifically, tapping into?

Aha! I respond. That's just it: the great thing about resentment is that it doesn't need to be attached to something specific. This is what I was attempting to describe in a recent post, in which I pointed out that resentment is not an idea, but rather, a cluster of emotions, reactions and instinctive postures of self-preservation. And the laundry list of resentments -- particularly among rural, uneducated white voters -- to which McCain and Palin catered as -- eventually -- the exclusive centerpiece of their campaign needn't be pinned down in all that much detail in order for us to see objectively that it existed.

But just to demonstrate the extensiveness of this laundry list, let's try our hand at a thought experiment: let's just accept for the moment, arguendo, that I'm correct in saying that the racism that bubbled to the surface in dramatic fashion during the McCain/Palin rallies evidences the fact that there are lingering resentments among parts of the South (and rural north) connected straightforwardly to historical Southern secessionist and segregationist mentalities. Remember, there need only be a subconscious hint of this lingering attitude for my Dixiecrat thesis to have legs.

Now, let's take a step back and think of political attitudes that have developed more recently in the rural north and in the South (and perhaps, until this past election, in lower-middle-class [or extremely nouveau riche outer suburbs). Think of the decades of careful and well-funded Right wing inculcation and brainwashing that descended upon these areas. For instance, Rush Limbaugh, whose audience expanded considerably with the advent of the Clinton administration. More and more Limbaugh clones flood the AM airwaves across the fruited plains. Then comes Fox News. Then comes George W. Bush: even more divisive a figure, and even more than Clinton mired in the rhetoric, Doublespeak and umbrage-taking of the 1960's. (I will shortly be posting an item that fleshes out my thinking on the culture wars, particularly during the Clinton and Bush II administrations.)

Now: think of how simple a task it would be to attach myriad contemporary political issues to the coattails of these lingering resentments. Anyone among us can rattle off the obvious themes that map onto the basic structure: xenophobia, hatreds that often come along with especially ignorance saturated species of militarism, racism, reverse classism, resentment of the educated, various forms of anti-Semitism, suspicion toward people with credentials, distrust of people with accents, anti-feminism, fear of gays and lesbians, fear of gay marriage, disdain for people who are more educated than they are, disdain of academia generally (for its supposed 'liberalism'), disdain for 'mainstream media' generally (for their supposed 'liberalism'), and finally, much-stoked militant opposition to, quote-unquote, "activist judges," a specious concept in and of itself, and anyway, a concept which very few of those who fear it have any understanding at all.

So, basically, although it seems clear to me that the Dixiecrat political posture is the one that feeds Rightist populist rhetoric, the Republican Party can and does steer it in whatever direction it wants, in the service of any in a spectrum of ideological ends that has -- per se -- no material, cultural or political relationship to anything the Dixiecrats would have recognized or even comprehended. And -- despite Brooks's apparent surprise in noticing this -- the Republicans have been up to this for a long time.

So, among the poor and lower-middle-class racists whom McCain courted, the underlying resistance to Obama had to do with nothing more than the fact that he is black and has a funny name. But McCain's henchmen didn't need to say anything close to that, and they didn't need to THINK that in order to take political advantage of entrenched racist sentiment.

I had a history professor once who said -- cornily (but pithily) -- "there are no bad guys in history." There are no 'bad guys' in politics, either. There are just 'instinctive politicians', or 'tough politicians', or 'savvy strategists'. You see? The so-called 'elites' in the press have their own euphemisms, too; rhetoric that prevents the reporters themselves from having to think of it for the ugly thing it in fact is. How often have you heard 'mainstream media' praise Karl Rove for his

acumen at tapping into our nation's overflowing wellspring of religious- and racial-bigotry, and converting this bigotry into political capital.

See what I mean? Media inoculate themselves from harsh truths more rampantly than even voters do, and to a much greater extent than to which media inoculate their viewers. And Obama was an 'other'. That is all he needed to be, and strategically that's the only slight-of-hand McCain's people needed to pull off in order to court effectively the racist vote.

'We don't know about his history and background'. 'He needs to give the full story on his relationship with ACORN'. 'Why hasn't Mr. Obama come clean about the full extent of his relationship with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, with whom, my friends, and let us make no mistake, Mr. Obama so dangerously pal-ed-around'. 'Barack Obama: too radical for America'. 'Barack Hussein Obama'. 'That One'.**

This racist side of the GOP is by no means new. Whatever the psychological tricks that David Brooks needs to play in order to convince himself that he was not a willing participant in the GOP's longstanding Deal with the Devil: tapping into the voting power of this angry mob. Sure, this mob is resentful (as it had been previously) of quote-unquote liberal ideas, espoused and propagated by the quote-unquote liberal media, and forced upon our children by quote-unquote liberal academe. But it's also resentful of ideas, resentful of media, and resentful of academe. AND IT HAS BEEN, ALL ALONG. Every bit as much as it has been racist all along.

In an upcoming post, I will continue to discuss the reasons why I feel Obama's victory might possibly mark the end of Dixiecrat politics. But just to give you a taste of the sweet elixir of victory, let's return to the dismayed David Brooks, in conversation with Mark Shields and Jim Lehrer on the November 7 broadcast of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer [emphasis is mine]:

JIM LEHRER: Both of you, first to you, Mark, end of this week, three days after the election, any lingering pieces of wisdom that you have not shared with us up until now, in other words, something that struck you that has not been said?

MARK SHIELDS: Just a couple of quick things, Jim. One is that the Republican Party is facing a real problem in those four western states of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Arizona. ... because the estrangement from the Latino community, which is a growing part of the electorate, and estrangement from westerners in general.

But the other thing is that the only age cohort in the entire electorate that John McCain carried were voters over the age of 65. Voters under the age of 30 voted 2 percent plus Democrat in 2000. They voted 12 percent plus Democrat in 2004 and by 35 percent in 2008. And you see it moving up the ladder to 30- to 44-year-olds, as well. So the formula I use is probably a little bit of an overstatement, but right now the Democrats, young Democrats, are moving from a room of their own to an apartment of their own hopefully to a home of their own, while Republicans are moving from their own home to the rest home to the funeral home. And...

JIM LEHRER: Oh, my.

MARK SHIELDS: And that's a problem for the Republicans.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I guess I completely agree. If you're in a shrinking group, you're probably Republican. The growing groups are Democratic. The thing that strikes me -- and this has become a big debate, especially in the Democratic Party -- what sort of victory was it? Andy Kohut was on the program yesterday, said it was a victory for the middle. The middle asserted itself. That's how I read the returns, which suggests sort of a measured way ahead for Obama. Other people, however, say, no, it was a realigning election like 1980 with Reagan. It was a liberal victory. We should pursue a more liberal agenda, and interpreting that result has become a big debate.

JIM LEHRER: All right.

MARK SHIELDS: Oh, excuse me. Just one thing. Voters do want a more active government, a lot more than they did in 2000 and even 2004.

DAVID BROOKS: I disagree. But we'll get to that.

MARK SHIELDS: Well, those are the exit polls.

JIM LEHRER: Thank you, Mark. Thank you, David. ...

______________
* If the 2004 Plotz piece to which I have referred leaves you hungry for more fun at the expense of Brooks at his pandering worst, see these contemporaneous -- roughly speaking -- pieces by Nicholas von Hoffman (whose discussion of Brooks's tendency to flatter/legitimate the ignorance of the our country's vast uneducated populations is not dissimilar to the point I keep trying to articulate about the manipulative function of resentment in politics) and Michael Kinsley, from the latter of which I cannot resist quoting:

The Brooks sociological method has four components: fearless generalizing, clever coinage, jokes and shopping lists. ... Brooks defends his generalizations as poetic hyperbole ... When he says that a store in a suburban mall is ''barely visible because of the curvature of the earth,'' that is poetic hyperbole. When he claims that it is impossible to spend more than $20 for dinner in a Red Lobster, that is just wrong, and mystifyingly so. ... [T]he difference between sociology and shtick.
At the very least, Brooks does not let the sociology get in the way of the shtick, and he wields a mean shoehorn when he needs the theory to fit the joke. Among some of the formerly young, ''the energy that once went into sex and raving now goes into salads.'' O.K., that's funny. So is essentially the same joke a few pages later, when Brooks writes that ''bathroom tile is their cocaine.'' Except that now he's referring to a different one of his demographic slices, which undermines the claim to sociology. And when another joke surfaces three times, it undermines the shtick as well. The ''16-foot refrigerators with the through-the-door goat cheese and guacamole delivery systems''? Ha ha. A large Home Depot salesman ''looking like an S.U.V. in human form''? Ha ha ha. S.U.V.'s ''so big they look like the Louisiana Superdome on wheels''? Enough already.
''In America, it is acceptable to cut off any driver in a vehicle that costs a third more than yours. That's called democracy.'' True? Funny? Wouldn't the joke work just as well the other way? ''. . . a third less than yours. That's called capitalism.'' And if it works both ways as a joke, it must not work at all as a sociological insight.

These criticisms leveled against Brooks resonated in 2004, and -- comparatively-- this resonance has expanded by several orders of magnitude in November 2008. They underscore Brooks's tendency to be noncommittal, to equivocate and change his positions in a manner that smacks of tactical shifting. Plotz's discussion of Brooks's position(s) on the Iraq War -- which Brooks supported initially, along with many chatterers who were supposedly to his left, but more-or-less abandoned wishy-washily as a cause worthy of column inches when the issue became muddled and overcomplicated. These kinds of shifts, the tendency to evade personal accountability for having supported unambiguously a policy that ended up causing international chaos, the unprecedented scaling back of American civil liberties, the deaths of thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, conforms to the kind of neocon modus operandi with which we typically identify intellectually dishonest neoconservative charlatans like the unrepentant sniffer-of-Palin's-panties William Kristol, for whose Weekly Standard the nominally and temperamentally more moderate David Brooks did, after all, write, before landing his New York Times gig.

But beyond even Brooks's occasional proclivity for baffling fence-sitting: cultural politics have sure taken a turn for the toxic (to say the absolute least) since 2004, hasn't it? His veneration of the armies of red-blooded, poor, uneducated, simple-minded "Joe Six-Packs" strewn majestically across fly-over country looks pretty fucking naive -- not to mention hypocritical and even dangerous -- in the era of Sarah Palin's shrill racism- and hate-fueled brand of borderline-fascistic populism, no?

So: David, when exactly did stoking the flames of regressive, repressive, reactionary, xenophobic, 'Know-Nothing' and (let's face it, fundamentally anti-democratic) populism switch from being optimistic/patriotic to being "anti-intellectual"?

Also, in retrospect, it's too bad about the "Louisiana Superdome on wheels" line, no? I mean, it's simple bad luck, and I'm not going to pin it on him. But it's awfully poignant, ¿non?



** Heh. Look. The expression 'the other' has such a effete/academic sound to it. But, in establishing the use-value of this term as a means by which to describe identifiable, real-world phenomena, need we look any further than this weird-ass phrase that was uttered by McCain in reference to Obama at the second debate of the general election? You're not going to find a more obvious example of the othering of one's political opponent than this. I mean, it's not even 'that guy' or 'my opponent'. An entire human being, collapsed into the unadorned, monosyllabic 'one'. And not 'this one': 'that one'. Now, lest we get in over our heads in the amateur-psychology/cultural studies department, before we attach too much significance to the utterance of this mind-bending phrase, it is also important to keep in mind that John McCain is a babbling old coot.

A recent email exchange about Powell's Obama endorsement, veering into discussion of the unconscious assumptions that comprise American "comon sense."

Below is a recent thread of email correspondence between a friend of mine and Yours Truly. I was going to use its raw material as a basis upon which to descant, but in the interest of not wanting to go to that trouble, I have decided instead simply to reproduce it.

It is, of course, redacted, to protect the identities of those whose permission has not been sought. (Permission has been obtained. From Stephen Schlei, anyway. But the full identity of 'Kevin' shall remain, for the moment, a mystery...)

From: Steve
Subject: Powell endorses Obama
To: Tom
Date: Sunday, October 19, 2008

I'm sure you've heard about this already. Both of the videos on this page are incredible:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/19/colin-powell-endorses-oba_n_135895.html

In my lifetime I don't believe I've heard a Republican speak more eloquently.

My brother and I were talking about politics, and he brought up an interesting point. I was (am) appalled by the way Americans misunderstand a socialized health care system, and vote against their own interests to support an ideology (capitalism) that doesn't give a fuck about them. We were talking about some other stuff too, but here's what my brother had to say about it, and I think he's on to something:

My theory: people attach themselves not to the ideals and practices of what would apply to them, but to their perceived and possible future situation (that happens to be much better). They won't vote for a healthcare plan that will increase their meager benefits because they believe that they are losing the possibility of benefits that the rich can afford (which they could possibly have one day). It's the same reason no one stops gambling in Vegas, even when they're up. They don't see it as a growth from their starting position, but rather a pittance compared to a huge win.

It's why ordinary people defend big business. It's why they like trickle down economics. It's the entire foundation of the GOP's low class voting base.

I think the Republicans have been selling that dream world for a long time, where you too can be a millionaire (and who should stand in your way?) and all babies are born to loving families.

Steve


On Mon, Oct 20, 2008, Tom wrote:

Yeah, I totally agree with you and Kevin. I have become very interested over the last few years in the period in US history stretching from the beginnings of the US industrial revolution through to the Gilded Age. Part of the reason I have been investigating this period is because it contains the origins or perfection of many of the myths upon which the GOP (and really, in a wider sense, all of us, because they sit, often unexamined, in the American consciousness, I think) and its ideology are based:

• the myth of meritocracy, of 'classlessness';
• our particular American attitude toward private ownership;
• a preference for empirical and positivistic thinking over critical or theoretical thinking,
• suspicion toward intellectualism and even contempt for ideas more generally (which, as David Brooks points out, sees its apotheosis in the person of Sarah Palin);
• Social Darwinism;
• the equation of social justice with 'charity' and suspicion of 'wealth redistribution';
• the equation of everything from education to religion to friendship to governance with private consumption;
• the assumption that 'status' or wealth are earned and/or deserved, rather than conferred;
• the idea of the inexorability of progress;
• suspicion toward 'expertise'; and
• the tendency to blame oneself for one's own poverty, squalor or misfortune.

We could of course go on with such a list forever, but its upshot is that almost every one of these myths seems more or less grounded in the task of masking from view -- that is, both from the view of those who are successful/happy and those who are unsuccessful/unhappy -- the pervasiveness and power of the very structural inequalities that the myth seeks to negate. If (and to the extent that) you benefit from the system, you're living in denial of your complicity in injustice and harm done to others. If (and to the extent that) we get screwed by the system, it provides for us the means by which we acclimatize ourselves to our surroundings, to our fate.

And so it makes sense to think that some of these poor-to-lower-middle-class racists at McCain/Palin rallies are so very offended at the idea of that these myths will be exposed for what they are. They've lived their entire lives aspiring to something that the system tells them can be theirs one day, be it in the form of success later in life or in the form of success for one's children. But it's a very precise set of aspirations that they've been sold throughout their lives, and they are -- and long have been -- resentful of the idea that someone will take it away from them.

As far as I can tell, the only answer to this huge problem is education. Well, there's one other answer, which is sad, but true (sad AND true!): these people are a dying breed. They don't have the power they once had because they don't enjoy the decent middle-class wages they once had but most importantly they don't have the numbers. And the final irony is that it's the GOP which has been the most aggressive force in destroying them: it's the GOP's doing that is turning their neighborhoods into ghost towns. Thanks for the thought-provoking email. Hope all is well...

Best,
Tom


On Mon, Oct 20, 2008, Steve wrote:

Your ideas are great, and I love the way you put them. The subject deserves serious attention. This idea of the American Dream is so strong a myth that it is a reality, or a form of reality -- not the one most people would like if they could pull back the veil. ....

... Anyway, I can't believe how positive I feel about the prospect of Obama winning the election. It'll be like a great weight is lifted from this country, and I think I'll actually walk down the street differently (I'm not kidding!). McCain is down in the polls, and I'm hoping the negativity we've seen recently means they don't have anything up their sleeves which could significantly sway the election. The GOP is desperate and floundering. To me, Powell's statements have been the nail in the coffin, and have revealed to the world just how out of touch the Republicans are. We can only hope that they get so thoroughly crushed in this election that they have no choice but to start changing their party line. ...

Steve


From: Kevin
Date: Tue, Oct 21, 2008
Subject: Re: Powell endorses Obama
To: Steve

Tom precisely explains the extent to which the American Dream has served to suppress progress in this country. I just watched Sick Around the World and it's clear that the only things that have stopped us from pursuing a universal health care system are the myths that Tom listed.

Take the 'myth of meritocracy.' On NPR there was a social analyst that was researching ideological differences between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives, on the whole, subscribe to the idea of fairness in the world. The (particularly brutal) example he gave was that conservatives tend to assign blame to rape victims: that they were 'asking for it' by their attire, social activities, acquaintances, etc. Therefore the rape had some sort of logical justification. Applied to health care, it isn't that people are unjustly denied healthcare by businesses who can choose not to supply it, it's that these people do not work hard enough to earn better jobs that do offer health care. Therefore they don't deserve it - it's only fair.

On a side note, the 'suspicion of expertise' is an interesting one. A study (lost the link, sorry) has shown that people become more insistent about false assumptions if they are given proof to the contrary. For example, let's say a group of people have a 30% certainty that Iraq has WMDs. If they are given the reports and investigative results that clearly show no evidence of WMDs or WMD production, their certainty goes UP to 65%.

It explains why the GOP only has to plant ideas (which to us seem ludicrous) and they gain so much traction. If you insist that Obama associates himself with terrorists, when the campaign produces factual evidence to the contrary it works to your advantage. In this case, you have to give credit to Obama's campaign managers who have masterfully dealt with these attacks. (This also applies to the healthcare thing - those who have fears about waiting lists and expensive govt. run programs will only be more insistent after watching the Frontline episode.)

I'm curious to see if Tom's right about these people being a dying breed. I have faith in the fact that we're moving away from a television-based society to the Internet addicted information junkies of today. Multiple news sources can only be a good thing from here on out, and counters the effect made by choosing only one news source that shares your world view. But I do have fears that the strength of the temptations created by these persistent myths will only continue to fester and grow. I mean, come on. If ever the pendulum was pulled WAY out of line to the absolute limit of bad judgment, it's now after 8 years of GWB and a full on economic collapse. We should be seeing it flying the other direction, but instead we're having to push as hard as we can.

Kevin


From: Steve
Date: Tue, Oct 29, 2008
Subject: Re: Powell endorses Obama
To: Tom

Sorry, I meant to forward on my brother's response to the response you wrote that I forwarded to him. I feel like I'm moderating here. The program "Sick Around the World" that he mentions is a Frontline episode that you can watch off of their website. It's really interesting, and talks about how universal health care works in 5 or 6 other countries, so check it out.

The reason this popped back into my mind is that I was thinking about how much racism there is in this country and how standardized and widespread it is. This "American dream" fallacy supports those racist theories. African Americans aren't economically underprivileged because they're still recovering from hundreds of years of inequality that was only truly addressed 40 years ago, they're just lazy. And all the crime in the ghettos? That's because black people are morally inferior. In this country they have all the same opportunities as me, and look at where they've gotten themselves.

Steve

Transcript of Colin Powell's Oct. 19 Obama endorsement.

I'm tardy in getting to this, but behold -- if you've not yet done -- Four-Star General Colin Powell, in a moment of eloquence. Appearing on NBC's Meet The Press on October 19, Powell endorsed Barack Obama for the Presidency of the United States. Powell, recall, was and is a steadfast Republican, having served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H.W. Bush and as Secretary of State under George W. Bush.

Powell's most recent act of significance had been making the Bush Administration's case for the invasion of Iraq before an assembly of the United Nations on February 5, 2003. His case had, of course, been based upon the notion that Iraq presented an imminent threat to world peace, in that it was close to obtaining 'weapons of mass destruction'. That this notion was based upon faulty, patchy and forged evidence was clear for all to see in a matter of weeks.

Anyway, Powell's done much to redeem himself, I think, with this Obama endorsement. Not simply because it was he who made the endorsement (although that's not to be sneezed at), but because he stated his case so eloquently. Excerpt:

In the case of Mr. McCain, I found that he was a little unsure as to deal with the economic problems that we were having and almost every day there was a different approach to the problem. And that concerned me, sensing that he didn't have a complete grasp of the economic problems that we had. And I was also concerned at the selection of Governor Palin. She's a very distinguished woman, and she's to be admired; but at the same time, now that we have had a chance to watch her for some seven weeks, I don't believe she's ready to be president of the United States, which is the job of the vice president. And so that raised some question in my mind as to the judgment that Senator McCain made.

On the Obama side, I watched Mr. Obama and I watched him during this seven-week period. And he displayed a steadiness, an intellectual curiosity, a depth of knowledge and an approach to looking at problems like this and picking a vice president that, I think, is ready to be president on day one. And also, in not just jumping in and changing every day, but showing intellectual vigor. I think that he has a, a definitive way of doing business that would serve us well. I also believe that on the Republican side over the last seven weeks, the approach of the Republican Party and Mr. McCain has become narrower and narrower. Mr. Obama, at the same time, has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people. He's crossing lines--ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines. He's thinking about all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values.

And I've also been disappointed, frankly, by some of the approaches that Senator McCain has taken recently, or his campaign ads, on issues that are not really central to the problems that the American people are worried about. This Bill Ayers situation that's been going on for weeks became something of a central point of the campaign. But Mr. McCain says that he's a washed-out terrorist. Well, then, why do we keep talking about him? And why do we have these robocalls going on around the country trying to suggest that, because of this very, very limited relationship that Senator Obama has had with Mr. Ayers, somehow, Mr. Obama is tainted. What they're trying to connect him to is some kind of terrorist feelings. And I think that's inappropriate.

Now, I understand what politics is all about. I know how you can go after one another, and that's good. But I think this goes too far. And I think it has made the McCain campaign look a little narrow. It's not what the American people are looking for. And I look at these kinds of approaches to the campaign and they trouble me. And the party has moved even further to the right, and Governor Palin has indicated a further rightward shift. I would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, but that's what we'd be looking at in a McCain administration. I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards--Purple Heart, Bronze Star--showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way. And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I'm troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.

So, when I look at all of this and I think back to my Army career, we've got two individuals, either one of them could be a good president. But which is the president that we need now? Which is the individual that serves the needs of the nation for the next period of time? And I come to the conclusion that because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and his rhetorical abilities--and we have to take that into account--as well as his substance--he has both style and substance--he has met the standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president. I think he is a transformational figure. He is a new generation coming into the world--onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I'll be voting for Senator Barack Obama.

Read or watch the entire endorsement on MSNBC's Web site.

All right, Hitch, you did the right thing in the end.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that Christopher Hitchens endorsed Obama a few days ago, despite having previously -- inanely -- acted as cheerleader for the Palin/McCain freak show. For a number of years now, it has ceased to matter what Hitchens has had to say. I say that and yet, I had expressed -- in less than gentlemanly terms -- my dismay when Hitchens sleep-walked his way through a preposterous hatchet-job against Obama in a recent installment of his column in Slate. So I guess it must matter, at least a little bit.

So, I'll give credit where credit is due. Hitchens concludes his article with three paragraphs that I believe articulate the moral necessity of voting for Obama in this election, irrespective of which section of the political spectrum you occupy in normal times. Because McCain is really that unhinged, Palin is really that vapid and idiotic, and the times are not normal.

Moreover, given the interventionist economic measures pursued by our Republican White House, the huge deficits for which Bush is responsible (like his father and Reagan before him), anyone who espouses a "free market" ideology will have to look elsewhere than the Republican Party this year for their candidate. so these laissez faire types may as well line up behind such conservatives as Hitchens, David Brooks, George Will, and, satisfyingly, Christopher Buckley (son, of course, of William F., and who has, as a consequence, parted ways with the National Review, the publication his father founded), and make the only morally tenable decision available to them when they're inside the voting booth.

Anyway, here are Hitchens's concluding paragraphs, in which he doesn't mince words:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.

Read the rest of Hitchens's endorsement, in Slate.

Libertarian-conservative Andrew Sullivan speaks eloquently about the phenomenon that Barack Obama represents, denounces Sarah Palin resoundingly.

In conventional circumstances, I have disagreed with lots of stuff that Andrew Sullivan has had to say. For instance, he was in favor of invading Iraq, and he's got some 80-style libertarian economic views that could be described as fairly loony.

But recently, Sullivan's been an enthusiastic proponent of Barack Obama's candidacy, while he's trashed assiduously and resoundingly John McCain's dirty, racist campaign.

Observe him in the the clips of Real Time with Bill Maher posted below making his case for the importance of the historic Obama campaign, especially McCain's VP selection of Sarah Palin, which Sullivan decries as "a farce." Hallelujah.



Here's the juicy and true anti-Palin part:

Questions......about Sarah Palin.

• Can you call yourself a 'maverick', and still be a maverick?
  
  
• To be a maverick, don't you have to do something maverick-like? Can your maverickness be planned out for you ahead of time, and like, devised by your advisers and even scripted? Is that still maverickness? Or is it maybe a new species of maverickness that isn't, maybe, all that maverick-like?
  
  
• Is saying stuff about "my connection to the heartland of America" the same thing as having a connection to the heartland of America?
  
  
• Is this

You mentioned education and I'm glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?

really the wisest and/or most tasteful thing to say to a man whose first wife and one-year-old baby were killed in a car crash?

• Is saying things like: "Oh, yeah, it's so obvious I'm a Washington outsider. And someone just not used to the way you guys operate" the same thing as being a Washington outsider? Is it the same thing as convincing people that one is a Washington outsider? Is it the same thing as arguing coherently that all species of 'Washington outsiderdom' are created alike? Or that one's particular version of 'Washington outsiderdom' is an attribute favorable to one's suitedness to holding the office of the vice presidency?
  
  
• When 'ordinary people' say that they want someone who's going to fight on their behalf, do they mean that they want that person to talk and act exactly the same way as they do?
  
  
• Are people really happy to witness a VP candidate engaging in all manner of colloquial speech? Are people awaiting brain surgery put at ease when they discover that the brain surgeon who will conduct the operation talks, acts and thinks just like "Joe Sixpack" next door?
  
  
• Do people who truly live in the world of "Joe Sixpack" actually use the phrase "Joe Sixpack?" Isn't, after all, "Joe Sixpack" a derogatory, or at the very least, condescending term that originated in elite New York City advertising firms, or in the offices of elite Hollywood studio executives?
  

The transcript.

(Joe Biden did a very impressive job last night. Once again, the media declared the debate to have been a 'tie'. And this provided further confirmation of what J and I have long surmised: the media are at least two steps behind the Obama campaign. I've certainly never seen such an intelligently conducted campaign on behalf of a Democratic nominee. It's fucking astounding. Obama and his people know exactly what they're doing, and it's intoxicating to watch.)

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....)

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.

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.)

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.