Link: Frontline's "The Warning" will detail the roles of Rubin, Greenspan, Summers & Geithner in enabling financial crisis.

More information and "sneak peak" video hyperlinks can be found at the blog DownWithTyranny,

whose author writes:

[...] Tonight at 9PM PBS is debuting The Warning by Mark Kirk. I heard him being interviewed on the radio this morning. It promises to be a blockbuster of a program and if you ever wonder how all these highly paid smart guys dragged the whole country-- if not much of the world-- into ruin, you really ought to try to watch. Kirk's goal is to open the black box and unearth "the hidden history of the nation's worst financial crisis since the Great Depression." [...]

HYPOCRITES!! (Part II): Health care, Medicare Part D and generational politics.

At the conclusion of Part I of this discussion, I mentioned the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Republicans who oppose a public health insurance option, yet have nothing negative to say about Medicare and Social Security, which, when combined with Medicaid, represent by far the most expensive government entitlement programs currently in existence.

The Republicans, like the Democrats, would never be caught opposing these unfunded programs because they are massively popular with the most active and influential sectors of the electorate: the elderly. As the Baby Boomers continue to age -- and increasingly bottleneck the system -- this popularity of these programs is unlikely to decline.

So, somehow, these government-administered entitlements do not get mentioned in the same breath as Congressional/Obamian health insurance reform when hard-Right ideologues and thugs hit the pavement or spread lies over the Internet about death panels and whatnot.

Thing is: Many of those who decry health reform as "socialistic" are themselves willing and continuing recipients of Medicare and Social Security Benefits. Thus, I should like suggest that these people are a bunch of crusty old self-centered whiners and liars, and that we ought to declare a generational war!

Doesn't it shame them that they would deny to succeeding generations the same entitlements from which they themselves have benefited, from the Social Security Act to the GI Bill to Medicare to Medicaid, up to and including the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit for those 65 years of age and older that was passed, without funding and in between the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever to be passed into law?

Nothing -- including military spending! -- even comes close to the costliness of these programs. Apparently, Americans 65 and older are simply more deserving of this bounty than those of my generation. My generation, by contrast, has been weathering an inhospitable economic and educational environment. Ours is an age in which the notion of class mobility has long been a cruel joke. Our experience is one of the accumulation of debts, of forgoing health insurance, of meager opportunities.

I'm not arguing that the Great Depression was a walk in the park. I am, however, arguing that, in the wake of the Social Security Act, the radical expansion of opportunities for higher education represented in the GI Bill and in the proliferation of colleges and universities in order to accommodate the Baby Boom, the United States enjoyed a sustained period of economic, social and cultural progress.

Anyway, in my limited experience with such things, the clearest, most objective and most focused discussion of the recent political-historical context of Republican flip-flopping on government-coordinated public health insurance plans is contained in a recent episode of the PBS series Frontline, titled: Ten Trillion and Counting. (You may wish to click here for a link to streaming video of the entire episode, which is well worth your time.)

The piece actually tackles the subject of the United States' skyrocketing national debt. but its discussion of George W. Bush's passage of Medicare Part D -- sandwiched between the passage of the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy in United States history -- could not be more relevant to our present discussion. Here is that section of the episode:



Here's part of the transcript:

FORREST SAWYER: It finally passed by five votes.
[on camera] Why would a small government conservative initiate a program that is so massive?
JACKIE CALMES, The New York Times: Politics.
FORREST SAWYER: What do you mean?
JACKIE CALMES: There's no group that votes at the rate and in the numbers as those over 55, and 65 and over certainly. And Democrats, as well as Republicans, want to please seniors, and that's why our entire budget is tilted towards programs for seniors.
FORREST SAWYER: [voice-over] The reason that the Bush administration could pass Medicare part D was that the Republican Congress in 2002 had let a rule called "pay as you go" lapse. It was a rule established by the first President Bush and a Democratic Congress to enforce fiscal discipline.
GREGG IP: His father endured some very serious political pain to do the right thing to get the deficit down. And one of the steps was that a rule called "pay-go," or pay as you go. And this rule basically meant that if you wanted to introduce a new tax cut or a new spending program, you had to find a way to pay for it with an offsetting tax increase or spending cut. Well, in 2002, that rule expired.
ALICE RIVLIN, Dir., Office of Management & Budget, 1994-96: In the Clinton years, we had the "pay-go" rule, pay as you go, and that meant we couldn't pass a lot of good-sounding ideas, including Medicare prescription drugs. It's not that nobody thought of that in the '90s. A lot of people thought of it. But we couldn't pay for it. To pay for it, we would have had to have done a tax increase or cut out some other spending in major proportions, and nobody wanted to do that, so we didn't do it.
FORREST SAWYER: But the Bush administration did do it. With "pay-go" no longer restraining spending, they had pushed through Medicare part D, a program that's projected over time to cost as much as $8 trillion.
DAVID WESSEL: They did not come up with a way to raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else to pay for it, so they just passed this thing. It goes into law. It's a promise to elderly people that we'll pay- subsidize their drugs, and we borrow every year to pay for it. And in the end, it's more expensive than the war in Iraq because the war in Iraq ends at some point. Certainly, it will end now that Obama's president. But the prescription drug benefit will go on forever.
FORREST SAWYER: It will go on forever because it's a promise made by the federal government to its citizens. Seniors are entitled to this benefit, just the as they are entitled to Social Security and Medicare itself. These entitlements are all enormously popular, but they're also enormously expensive. Medicare part D alone will cost $60 billion this year.
JACKIE CALMES: The expense of that over time, unfunded liabilities for the government, at a time when more people are reaching retirement age and qualifying for Medicare, added more to the long-term obligations of the government than all of Social Security.
FORREST SAWYER: Medicare part D was the largest spending bill the president signed, but there were dozens of others. During his first five years as president, with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, George Bush never vetoed a spending bill. Fiscal conservatives in his own party accused him of being the biggest spender since World War II.

I think this is worth bringing up next time one finds himself in a bar, confronted by someone who insists that Obama is a socialist or that the Democrats are the big spenders... It was, after all, Bill Clinton who balanced the budget.

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.

Obama is right not to intervene in Iran protests.Why the GOP's demand for 'stronger' response is self-centered & opportunistic.

It is increasingly clear that Obama has been correct all along in refusing to weigh in 'more forcefully' on the Iranian protests in the wake of the rigged reëlection of Ahmadinejad. I find convincing the point of view that Obama has, in effect and by design, already weighed in, in the most consequential way possible, on the issues at play in the present Iranian situation. That is, with his Cairo speech, he emboldened in an unprecedented way the resolve of forces of resistance in Iran.

Obama's speech was successful specifically because he eschewed the self-centered, Cold War-style rhetoric favored by the administration of George W. Bush. The GOP's predilection for musty and mechanistic cant evinces a Cold War-era conception of what it means to be pro-democratic in one's interactions with the international world in that it perceives the line between a free Occident and a repressed Orient to divide exclusively competing military and economic alliances. In other words, it pays no attention to what freedom and democracy actually mean.

By contrast, Obama, in his Cairo speech, spoke to Iranians -- and to inhabitants of the Middle East broadly -- with respect for their capacity for self-governance. It should be no surprise that, upon a population as highly educated as that of substantial portions of Iran, Obama's direct, serious-minded and non-patronizing address should have exercised a galvanizing effect.



An individual going by the name math4barack formulates the connection between Obama's Cairo speech and the events in Iran (from the Daily Kos):

The Iranian Revolution. First and foremost, it must be emphasized that this is an internal revolution. It comes from the people, the people that live there. They deserve all the credit. They are the ones who are putting their lives on the line and they are the ones who are providing the images and video. Nevertheless, without President Obama (ie under President Bush or President McCain), this revolution would not have been successful. For, both President Bush and a President McCain would have made the protesters look like Western, American pupptets [sic] by speaking intemperately.

Back on June 15, a blogger called Kalash offered an analysis that appears to support this favorable reading of Obama's approach (by way of an item in Media Nation):

The election results remind us that the will of the people is not the deciding force in Iranian politics. All candidates were screened by the Supreme Council. The leading challenger was Mir Hossein Mousavi. He is now seen as a "reformist" but that is a relatively meaningless term. Afterall [sic], he was once considered a radical.

[...]

Mousavi withdrew from political life in 1989. His resurgence has been interesting to watch as supporetrs [sic] have flocked to him in defiance of the current government. But there was no reason to expect much to change in Iran if he had emerged victorious. He is no Barack Obama. He is one of the boys, otherwise he wouldn't have been allowed to run.

Whether or not Mousavi had the election stolen from him, it seems clear the ruling class has made a calculating move. Anti-American sentiment is one of the strongest cards those wretched clerics hold. By merely softening the tone Tehran hears from Washington, Obama has weakened their hand considerably. But re-instating Ahmadinejad ensures that US-Iranian relations will continue down a rocky road. What happens next is crucial. If Obama takes a firm position as a result of what's happening, the mullahs may emerge victorious.

That would be a real shame. The system of governance in Iran is terrible. There is no democracy to speak of. The people are ruled by despotic men of 'faith' who do nothing to advance their country's interests. Aside from keeping Iran in the headlines, Ahmadinejad has done nothing to improve his country's standing in the international community. It should come as no surprise that so many Iranians are opposed to him.

[...]

Hopefully what is happening right now is a homegrown phenomenon. Iran needs another revolution if it is to rid itself of the backwards theology pulling the strings. Mousavi is hardly the right person to lead such a movement, but what's important is that the people rise up. The process won't be easy. We may be witnessing the beginning of something huge… It won't happen overnight, but the "Islamic Republic"' is bound to fall one day or another.

The people of Iran deserve better than Ahmadinejad and the clerics who give him his orders. The current regime is a complete disaster, but the media tends [sic] to focus more on the less important issues. In other words, this is not about Israel. Iran's position on Zionism and the question of Palestine is a just one. The problem is the lack of civil freedoms and democracy, not nuclear weapons.

John McCain, whose latest stunt aimed at getting people to pay attention to him consisted last week of joining the GOP chorus clamoring for Obama to use "stronger rhetoric" against Iran has since expressed appreciation for Obama's more recent comments that stressed the United States' opposition to any infringement upon rights of protest and of fair political representation, as well as restating the exceedingly good point that to turn the United States into a foil for Iran would undermine and disrespect the very cause for which the protesters are fighting.

A close look at McCain's aforementioned comments -- made on the CBS program Face The Nation -- gives weight to the view that the Republican call for "stronger rhetoric" is both politically opportunistic and evidence of a worldview that is obsessed not with actual events in the world -- not with, for instance, the success of the Iranian protesters' plea for substantive democratic rights:

"America's position in the world is one of moral leadership," the senator said. "It's not about what takes place in the streets of Iran. It is about what takes place in America's conscience."

Not about what takes place in the streets of Iran, but about America. Go figure. Thanks for clarifying, Angry Johnny. That speaks volumes.

Filmaker Eugene Jarecki, author of The American Way of War: Tavis Smiley interview

Tavis Smiley interview with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, who directed, among other things, The Trials of Henry Kissinger.

Jarecki's book, titled The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men, and a Republic in Peril, is a historical account of the United States military establishment, its accumulation of political and economic influence in the wake of World War II, and its relation to American foreign policy adventures, the drastically increased power of the Executive Branch and the curtailing of the civil liberties of American citizens.

I have no idea whether or not the book is any good, and it's not that Jarecki is necessarily the most articulate person in the world. What I like is that he is straightforward and unpretentious, and he describes clearly and succinctly the problems and and possible solutions. I believe that the possibility of political change emerging from a bottom-up movement hinges on whether or not you can explain to your aunt what's at stake in two short sentences. Jarecki speaks in a way that your aunt can understand (and yes, I'm bored out of my mind at work):

Tavis: And what I mean to get to is this -- we were talking about the Bush doctrine a moment ago; this whole notion of we strike first if we think you are going to do something to us -- we'll ask questions later on. There hasn't been, to my mind, at least, a whole lot of criticism of that. He got pretty much what he wanted from this Democratic Congress, so I've not seen -- there have not been hearings.

For all the complaining about George W. Bush and he's got to go and eight years is enough, there's not been a lot of talk, as you know, about this Bush doctrine and whether it's wrong for America. And the reason why that concerns me is because no president ever -- I can't think of a single president who wants to give back executive power.

If one executive grabs a hold to it, the next one surely is going to hold on to it. You see where I'm going with this?

Jarecki: You're asking an extremely important question, and I'll say for the record that my book looks at what the Bush administration did in a historical context. So to some extent, when you read the book, it's not a Bush-bashing book; it's a book that really says here's the Iraq war, and in fact a lot of it is new that happened but a lot of it is not so new.

Some of it is an extension of things that came before; a slippery slope that sort of started around World War II and has led us on this path to sort of permanent war making, the way we're finding ourselves. But at the same time, I have to say that the reforms that I seek, and the book talks about some of the reforms that I think are crucial, none of them can happen unless the Bush administration is held accountable for the crimes and wrongdoings and errors of the past eight years, and it is a moral failure in America that not more people are talking about that.

It's a moral failure that the church and that the general clerical community is not talking about it, and it's an obvious failure of Washington that Washington has so lost its moral compass that these kind of transgressions can happen, from torture to a misbegotten war, to people dying, people getting maimed, and we're sitting here not having those national conversations.

Tavis: So how do you scale back, then, from the creep that the Bush administration has essentially gotten away with, this notion of the Bush doctrine? If one president can get away with this -- we hit you first, we ask questions later -- why, with all due respect to Obama, why couldn't Obama or anybody after Obama -- again, nobody wants to give that up. So how do you reel that back in, is my question?

Jarecki: Sure. Well, I think it comes from --

Tavis: Can you put the genie back in the bottle?

Jarecki: I think you can, and it comes from you and me. And revolutions throughout history have put genies back in bottles. It would have seemed impossible to tell the colonists of America that they would triumph over the British empire and put that genie back in that bottle. It would have seemed impossible to tell the black South Africans that they would triumph over a system of apartheid; put that genie back in the bottle.

So the fact is this can be done, but it's never done, as you point out very astutely -- it's never done from the executive down. Change is not trickle-down; change is trickle-up. ...

Read the transcript or watch video.

I have like three or four posts of substance that are in progress. So, soon there'll be something more interesting upon which to feast your eyes.

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

CAN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TRUST JOHN McCAIN??? *

* Yeah, well....I mean, the answer's no, the American People can't.

Washington Post: The White House endorsed CIA waterboarding policy in classified memos in 2003-2004

Condoleezza Rice:
Authorize torture?

No problem! Where do I sign?

Richard "Dick" Cheney: The Constitution
exists solely to make it easier for me to
lie. Disagree? Let's see if you disagree
under torture, muthafucka!

According to the Washington Post, the George W. Bush White House gave the explicit thumbs-up to the secret CIA torture of terrorism suspects:

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first -- and, for years, the only -- tangible expressions of the administration's consent for the CIA's use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for "policy approval."

The rest of the article documenting this charming matter can be found here.

Our United States President: Never seen a torture I didn't approve of -- in writing!

Stop the creeping fascism of the GOP! Seriously. Let's stop these cynical, racist, authoritarian, totalitarian motherfuckers before it's too late. Who else is going to stop them? Antonin Scalia?

I grew up during the Reagan Administration.That's not the reason to elect Barack Obama, but we should elect him anyway.

...And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's take-off. I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.

I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program. And what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.

We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue...

-- Ronald Reagan, 'The Space Shuttle "Challenger" Tragedy Address',
televised on 28 January 1986.

I grew up during the Reagan Administration, followed by four years of George H.W. Bush, passing into my adolescence during the Bill Clinton years. For now, I want to ramble about the twelve years of Reagan/Bush, both the things about those years that I remember from having lived through them and the things I remember about them from having lived subsequent to them. We can talk about the Clinton years at another time (or maybe we just shouldn't talk about them ever!).

I. The world was flat.

It was a time, Dear Reader, of a mass-cultural FLATTENING, during which the consciousness (and conscience) each and every American was slowly but surely DUMBED-DOWN until he became a castaway on his own self-involved, lazy-brained isle of ostensible plenty. The expanding use of plastics in the creation and packaging of cheap consumer junk ushered in a new and more profitable era in planned obsolescence. It was the time during which the Cold War reached the apotheosis of its self-sustaining outlandishness: I'm referring, of course, to the 'Star Wars' missile defense initiative. (Which only ever existed on paper, in tax dollars, and in the meticulously-TelePrompted, content-bereft cadences of Reagan's slow-motion national addresses... Of course, Bush, Cheney, Condi and Co. are clamoring for Star Wars 2.0: 'DA RETURN!!'.)

It was a time of unthinking acquiescence to received wisdom; of consensus formed through every man, woman and child's desire to count himself among the espousers of the consensus-view, of bloated, diet-trend-chasing conventionally and of political and economic group-think. A time that found us aiming our frustrations, criticisms, guilt complexes, and intellectual energies inward; publicly, we adopted the hard-driving but collegial manner of an Atomized Individual Economic Actor after Milton Friedman's own heart. Foot-soldiers in the Reagan Revolution. Power suits. Gay Republicans. The ascendancy of identity politics in academe. Myopia, hypocrisy. Bedazzlement with the shiny gadgetry of Empire. The Magic of Spielberg™, and his big-budget authoritarian morality plays. Disney, and such cinematic achievements as Flight of the Navigator.

II. Politics of Bush/Cheney condones openly the undermining of the moral authority (and coherence) of the USA's democratic project.

But I'll allow that the era of Coke, Diet Coke, Caffeine-free Coke, Caffeine-free Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, New Coke and Coke Classic had something going for it that eight years of George W. Bush lacks. It pertains to W.'s style of governance (if we can call it either style or governance...), or rather, what it lacks. The Reagan years had as one of its pillars a public face that sought to be seen as serving the interests of the rule of law rather than setting the rule of law aside as bothersome or even naive. A set of communications-directives that took pains not simply to lie to the American people, but to tell all of the right lies. That took as a given the necessity of being seen not only to respect the United States Constitution, but to be seen as actively upholding it.

I know this might seem like a minor point -- after all, I'm talking only about rhetoric and propaganda -- but for me it's one of the most distressing things about our current situation. Sure, back in the 80's there was Iran Contra and a billion sketchy/criminal military adventures, but at least the bastards bothered to lie in such a way as to offer most credulous or self-preoccupied people in this country the psychological bulwark of plausible deniability. Joe Briefcase could go on believing sincerely that the values of the United States -- you know, as inscribed in the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights? -- set the parameters of Executive Branch activity in -- at the very least -- its objective, tone and spirit.

That really does make a difference, because at least in those days, the racists and xenophobes from -- I don't mean to generalize, 'cause there are plenty of exceptions to this regional truism -- the South couldn't openly rally around the cause of preserving measures and policies that are essentially fascistic, both in their intent and in their means of execution. For instance, when it is revealed that the has CIA waterboarded a couple of people under the cloak of secrecy, that pisses me off now, and it would surely have pissed me off during the 80's and 90's. The sudden revelation that actual torture is being conducted by the United States would have caused much bigger shock waves among the ocean of citizens of the United States than this exact revelation -- except on a much greater scale -- has caused today. (Or, there'd have been at least a shock wave!)

3. Moral revulsion vs. despotic authoritarianism.

However, Reagan-era GOP politicians had a way of turning this very shock to their advantage by mircomanaging the nature and focus of the cognitive dissonance experienced by the public. When a credulous population becomes privy to knowledge that doesn't quite seem to be at home among the other things its government has said it has done or would do; when, the vast majority of broadcast- and written-news sources are hopelessly compliant, anodyne, condescending and middlebrow (everything from The CBS Evening News to Larry King to David Brooks), well, Sir, Joe America just goes ahead and brushes it off as an anomaly! Supposing that there had been some kind of exposé published in Harper's Magazine in, like 1985; most of us could -- and therefore, would -- surely convince ourselves -- subconsciously if not consciously -- that the sordid practice that had been unearthed represented a contemptible yet isolated practice, and that all of the requisite channels would surely be pursued in bringing its gang of perpetrators to justice (!).

To be sure, it of course wouldn't have been true that the practice was isolated, and I don't deny for a moment that there are unnerving harms that accrue from the kind of false consciousness that plausible deniability taps into. But, I have to say that by contrast, it is far more disturbing to witness, as we do today, rednecks -- both unreconstructed and in their exurban, Jesus-loving, middle-management-type Joe America incarnation -- rallying around the cause of actually justifying depraved, wicked, and -- I would honestly (and perhaps naively) have assumed throughout my entire life, heretofore -- Un-American practices.

What's shocking to witness is that in the current era of Bush/Cheney, when the veil is lifted from such an onslaught of depravity, cynicism and hypocrisy, the effect is (1) an upsurge in masochistic/patriotic fervor for despotism among lots of (although surely not all) uneducated people, and (2) one of little more than a widespread gross-out and disdain from onlookers who feel totally helpless to change the political and moral tide in the United States. Of course, I identify myself, for better or worse, as one of this second group of onlookers. I was raised, after all, in a nominally middle class (by which I mean upper-middle class) home during the Disneyland 80's. My sense of anguish and doom at the state of things in this country often reaches extremes of hopelessness, nausea and existential confusion.

So I and others who are disgusted by the things that are being revealed about our government, and about the Bush/Cheney Executive Branch in particular, are at this point just trying to cope with all of this evil and madness -- and I'm quite sure that our reaction is shared by the vast majority of people, which is not always the same thing as the vast majority of voters. And anyway, this group is fractured in so many ways, and politicians and advertisers are doing their best to keep our conception of our self-interest fractured (of which, more commentary soon [hint: a significant ray of hope that we can consolidate our power lies in the candidacy of Barack Obama]).

Meanwhile, we watch the first group -- a contingent of uneducated poor people from Alabama or wherever -- whose identification with militarism comes from its lack of access to life options other than either joining the military or working at Quickie-Mart, whose blood lust comes partly from ignorance (which could have been spared them if there were decent schools for them to attend), partly from sexual repression (which is deepened by the stranglehold of extreme, hyperconservative, evangelical quasi-Christianity), and partly from a deep class resentment, the true, economics-based nature of which US culture has taught it not to be able to identify, in favor of cultural resentment, liberation-consumerism, xenophobia and the taking of pride in one's own backwardness.

It's gross...

IV. Let's consolidate our political power to put an end to the USA's dalliances with despotism under Bush & Cheney.

I guess my thought is this: is there a way for people who feel as disgusted as I do to create political solidarity among the widest group of voters that I possibly can? I mean, I know anecdotally that there are plenty of people in the country, both my age, older and younger, who are equally upset about this stuff on an equally visceral, existential level. In other words, all of us who feel this way -- irrespective of what other political views of cultural values we hold in common, irrespective of whether we prefer going to cocktail parties or bible-study meetings -- feel it with passion and don't know exactly how to stop the unchecked, onward march of the immorality and self-destructiveness of the present political course of the United States.

V. Barack Obama's 8/28/08 speech begins successfully to consolidate support for rebuilding the USA's moral authority.

Well; as it happens, most of the preceding rant was written a few days before this post. But I think that we have a figure around whom we can rally support for rebuilding American moral authority, and saving the idea of democracy so that it can live to see another day. That figure is, of course, Barack Obama. And contrary to the unthinking and flippant commentary of rightwing hired goons like David Brooks (who used the term "underwhelmed" in his characteristically simple-minded reaction on PBS -- screw you, you fake moderate liar; you're nothing but Rush Limbaugh in a three piece suit...), Barack's speech last night was amazing.

What many commentators (Brooks included) seemed to miss was this: the point of having upwards of 80,000 people assembled at the speech was not because of the impact it would have on Obama's rhetoric; it's because of the reaction shots! Anybody who paid any attention could see that witnessing that many people -- a group that was genuinely and unmistabably diverse -- being moved to tears by their shared purpose, values, goals and sense of urgency sends a very powerful set of signals indeed to a very broad cross-section of the United States population.

I thought it was breathtaking. Here it is:

Dick Cheney is a charlatan, demagogue & crook:Who honestly doubts that our VP ordered the CIA to lie to us?

Remember the run-up to the Iraq War? Remember how it was -- much like today -- a depressing, infuriating time? Everywhere you turned, you found unwelcome reminders that a gang of sleazy assholes -- a.k.a., the Bush Administration -- were running the country, that they quite obviously were eager to invade Iraq, and that they would find a way to do so no matter what? We knew that they were lying to us: that was never in question. What is tantalizing, however, is the prospect that actual concrete evidence and testimony might pop up that would make the nature of these lies comprehensible to our credulous fellow citizens.

Journalist Ron Suskind wouldn't need to try very hard to convince me and most intelligent people I know that the White House -- and Dick Cheney, specifically -- ordered the CIA to forge a document in order to steer popular will in the direction of supporting the invasion of Iraq. Suskind's new book The Way of the World, trotted out a couple of days ago amidst a deftly-coordinated publicity blitz, claims precisely this.

Remember the infamous "top secret memo" -- this stuff is actually quite hilarious -- purportedly containing proof not only that 9/11-pilot, al-Qaeda terrorist Mohammed Atta was "trained by Saddam," but conveniently, in the same memo(!) that Saddam had purchased a uranium shipment from Niger -- or, as George W. Bush put it, in his greatest "I'm too dumb to be a liar!!!" moment -- "from Africa"?

Anyway, that memo was revealed to be a forgery within, like, two days of Bush's retarded speech. But the Administration and its neocon minions had garnered the necessary momentum to invade Iraq.

About this forged memo, Suskind reveals something totally believable to my ears, but also quite astonishing. Here's a reprint of a note he posted on the Web site The Huffington Post:

The Forged Iraqi Letter: What Just Happened?
Ron Suskind

What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way:

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization." *

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

So, here we go again: the administration is in full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn't remember any such thing -- just like he couldn't remember "slam dunk" -- and reporters are scratching their heads. Everything in my book is on the record, with many sources. And so, we watch and wait....

Hear Suskind explain further on NPR's Fresh Air. When two of Suskind's sources, former CIA director George Tenet, whom we know already to be a blowhard, and CIA official Robert Richer chickened out on their previous testimony, Suskind followed up by sharing some of the transcripts of his interviews, which...ahem...say precisely what Suskind had portrayed them as saying. Suskind's introduction reveals just how weird and suspicious Richer's retraction is:

Rob Richer received a copy of The Way of the World on Monday night, August 4, the day before publication. On Tuesday, he said he had read key portions of the book and was comfortable with what they contained. Later that day, though, he issued the following the statement:

"I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbash as outlined in Mr Suskind's book."

A quick excerpt of the partial transcript:

Ron: The intent--the basic raison d'etre of this product is to get, is to create, here's a letter with what's in it. Okay, here's what we want on the letter, we want it to be released as essentially a representation of something Habbush says. That's all it says, that's the one paragraph. And then you pass it to whomever to do it. To get it done.

Rob: It probably passed through five or six people. George probably showed it to me, but then passed it probably to Jim Pavitt, the DDO, who then passed it down to his chief of staff who passed it to me. Cause that's how--you know, so I saw the original. I got a copy of it. But it was, there probably was--

Ron: Right. You saw the original with the White House stationery, but you didn't--down the ranks, then it creates other paper.

Rob: Yeah, no, exactly. But I couldn't tell you--again: I remember it happening, I remember a terrible brief kinda joking dialogue about it, but that was it.

. . .

Ron: Now this is from the Vice President's Office is how you remembered it--not from the president?

Rob: No, no, no. What I remember is George saying, 'we got this from'--basically, from what George said was 'downtown.'

Ron: Which is the White House?

Rob: Yes. But he did not--in my memory--never said president, vice president, or NSC. Okay? But now--he may have hinted--just by the way he said it, it would have--cause almost all that stuff came from one place only: Scooter Libby and the shop around the vice president.

Ron: Yeah, right.

Rob: But he didn't say that specifically. I would naturally--I would probably stand on my, basically, my reputation and say it came from the vice president.

Ron: Right, I'm with you, I'm with you. But there wasn't anything in the writing that you remember saying the vice president.

Rob: Nope.

Ron: It just had the White House stationery.

Rob: Exactly right.

Ron: That's fine, White House stationery's fine. Everything's from there. You know, that's the center point. But not OVP's Office. It's just the White House. It comes from the White House. That's plain and simple.

Rob: And you know, if you've ever seen the vice president's stationery, it's on the White House letterhead. It may have said OVP. I don't remember that, so I don't want to mislead you. . . .

If you want to dig into this stuff even more deeply, I direct you to a fantastic article by Salon.com's Joe Conason. Conason does a remarkably thorough job of verifying some of Suskind's claims while simultaneously providing loads of background and connecting of existing dots.

Here's a link to the original piece that broke the news of the existence of the memo, a piece that hangs hysterically and credulously on every fucking word of what was soon thereafter revealed to be a sloppily executed forgery. It's written by neocon hired gun Con Coughlin in UK's The Telegraph. Awfully strange isn't it, as Conason observes, that it should first have fallen into the hands of a neocon like Conason, and so soon after it was "discovered."

I agree entirely with this piece in the UK's Guardian on The White House's implausible deniability.

I find it howlingly hilarious to imagine people being shocked, positively shocked!! by the revelation that the White House told the CIA to lie to the American people. Anybody who was paying attention knew that the months preceding the invasion of Iraq saw the American moo-cow masses (I include myself in that number, although the nature of such campaigns suggest that they are not aimed to in any way convince me of anything!!) subjected to an unrelenting, blitzkrieg of a disinformation campaign.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I find these kinds of exposé stories to be plodding and dull in the extreme. But the idea that Suskind's findings could wake up the mooingest of moo cows to what you and I have long known to be true....well, that's tantalizing. It's not often that I find myself wanting to see someone -- even a political figure -- "taken down," his legacy discredited, his name shamed, his lies exposed. Unless, of course, that political figure is a Republican.

I can't say honestly that I wouldn't enjoy seeing that fat, fraudulent lying crook Dick Cheney go down in a great big ball of flames. It's pretty hard not to hate the motherfucker, isn't it?


* Emphasis mine.