The Pubhouse Dialogues

As amusing as the discovery of the Republican National Committee finance leadership meeting PowerPoint has been for the last couple of days, there’s really nothing about it that could be considered surprising. RNC fundraisers hold those who would donate to their party in complete contempt—well hell, who doesn’t? They seek to exploit fear to attain their ends—well, duh, they’re Republicans. They openly trade access for large donations, that is, peddle influence—yup, sounds like politics to me.

So, no, the contents of the presentation weren’t so surprising. What did surprise me was my reaction to it, specifically to the question “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House, or the Senate?” While its hardly a shock that the nexus of commerce and politics—what they used to refer to as “corruption” back when I was a lad—is more or less complete at this juncture, I had never really spent much time thinking of politics in terms of salesmanship before.

Salesmanship, the thing that sits a steak hungry nation down to a big, heaping plate of sizzle, changes everything. Suddenly, Republicans aren’t lying, really-- they’re being positive and confident about their product. That product is suddenly equivalent to a copper bracelet for arthritis pain or a ”natural male enhancement capsule” or a time share condo or a miracle absorbent cloth.


Mind you, confidence is the word from which we derive “con game,” sizzle isn’t particularly nutritious, and none of that shit works especially well. But sympathy for suckers is misplaced. In the sexist and anachronistic words of W.C. Fields, you can’t cheat an honest man. If this stuff is selling like gangbusters, the hucksters doing the selling are only half the story.

Hi honeys,

The reason I titled this the way I did was because I only had one foggy memory of the start of it and no memory of the event at all...

To understand the why of it happening at all a little background. I was an abused child. My mother hated me all my life and I did not know why until my father told me at 17 but by then it was too late. She hit me a lot. She used weapons of punishment. She verbally tormented me. She threw away my favorite things. She would lock me in my room. I finally fought back. She kept hitting me - at about 15 and I started picking up jars of things on the kitchen table and smashed them against the kitchen wall.In the end I was severely bruised, she was crying and there was broken glass EVERYWHERE.

My sister was allowed to hit me and I was not allowed to respond. So once when she kept lashing my with the wooden handles of her jump rope, I grabbed the rope and tied her to a pole in the basement. I was beaten so badly for that I had what I know now was my first psychotic break. She started hurting me severely and I knew I couldn't defend myself and so I locked myself in the bathroom and proceeded to tear at the tops of my hands until there was no skin left. The pain of those scabs was more horrible. (Unfortunately, this behavior has returned to the pain in my feet from black mold. I have gone back to tearing at my feet. So I am partly responsible for the lack of healing. I think I am angry that I have not had medical benefits for 5 years. Or dental and I really need to have my remaining teeth (1/2 the set taken out....my teeth were lost because there was no fluoride in the water and because my first husband (English and Scorpio) smacked me upside of the head so hard during an argument that he fragmented a major molar root on the right side of my face. Sadly, after 20 years of extensive dental saving attempts - when I had or could afford dental - missed the root problem and by the time it became completely infected, an oral surgeon had to remove it and actually asked if he could keep it because he had never seen anything like it. I told you I am a mutant and my body always tries to do impossible things... )

So....

My one foggy memory is this.... Mickey, my second and last husband (the doctors tell us I will be a widow by 60) whom I love more than my own life, well we had a very heated argument about something. In Chinese astrology he is a Tiger and I am a dragon - always fighting in Chinese art...
At some point I got scared and it started hitting childhood buttons. I felt myself start to panic and I started to withdraw....I saw Mickey on the phone and then our neighbors walked in and I became even more threatened and frighted. And then my mind passed out. I have no further memory.

Here is what Mickey told me - 17 years later - after my panic I with drew to the corner of the rooms and started crying and wailing. He tried to calm me but it only made it worse. He called our old friends and neighbors who live across the street. Once they came in I started babbling incoherently and did not know my own name. He says that I was terrified all the way through it (I still don't like him) but that Ann gave me tea tree oil and talked in the soothing (retired teacher) and I started to consider that A... might be my name. But I wasn't speaking in English words. More like Martian. LOL

After a while, Mickey came over to me and looked me straight in the eyes and told me that everything was all right and that he loved me more than his own life. He kept repeating it because I started to actually look back... Finally, I started crying and speaking English to him and he held me and rocked me and gradually I believed and I reached out for him and he held me and rocked me for hours as I kept crying.

But I came back.

Some people have a psychotic break and they never come back. Mickey had a client's secretary who "snapped" and started stamping the same envelope over and over and over until they fired her...

So I am grateful.

But I am also disturbed that some of my current behavior leans that way again. I put that down to extreme stress - my husband having a prognosis of no more than 2 years to live - dead by 61... Also I have a on where I am SAILING to the top with sales because I have very real people skills. I am particularly good with alternative people, disabled people, really sick people, old people and people in very difficult positions. I have been fired countless times for defending a client over boss or company. I am a Buddhist and a humanitarian. I can not abide liars or manipulators or abusive tempers or criminal people. My latest boss is cheating on his wife with my co-worker who is an actual "B". AND they are both lying about it. But I am a borderline genius (tested 145 IQ at Willis-Corroon now Willis Corp. And English owned 3rd largest broker in the world.) The new hire receptionist wants out NOW. She is an Irish natural health nut and masseur/aroma therapist. Her husband just lost his Fed Ex job but she told me (she is psychic off the charts just like me...) but she is going to leave because she overheard their (co-worker and boss) conversation about a client's "bulge" and she was as uncomfortable with that as I am. I am faithful and monogamous.)

Actually, I have a lady boss who has asked me to meet with her and checked with the district manager and discovered that I am the 6th top sales person in the NE/NW region. I am a cross-sell queen! But I am also thinking of leaving insurance because it has become so corrupt and cut throat. So...I you are in (or know someone who does, my international sisters) Cleveland ad you know and ethical boss who will let me work independently (I hate micro managers) I am willing to talk. I am going to leave this ob because of their affair. If the lady offers (on my terms) I will walk out. So I am immediately available. I have worked nearly a yeat (5/2) for abusive cheaters and it is hurting my health. If I could find a way to work at home, that would be my ideal but we have no start up money. I do know some fabulous opportunities but we don't have the deposit... Yet....

I wish you all good health, good times and prosperity. My religion is as the Dalai Lama says, "Kindness." Please be kind. So many people are craving that now. And please help Haiti if you can. Contribute to Doctors Without Borders - they are doing the most good. Oxfam and Save the Children are also good.

 

Happy news for Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel yesterday in the form of a Washington Post article (one of a series of recent hagiographies) offering the theory that if only the President listened more to this “force of political reason,” he’d be having an easier time of it politically. Emanuel, it is said, is largely ignored in favor of cultish Obamaists like Jarrett and Axelrod, but nonetheless bravely catches flak for the White House as a whole.

Heady stuff, to be sure, though Emanuel himself is said to be embarrassed by the attention (gosh, all that and humble too) and trying to avoid escalating internal conflicts. Sad, then, that I have to point out that these attempts to cast Emanuel not as a problem but as an unheeded solution come off as fairly typical products of Beltway mainstream media, larded with such choice cuts from the centrism’s greatest hits collection such as “going for the perfect at the expense of the plausible,” utterly dismissive of Progressives and the progressive agenda, and possessed of a fairly high horse shit content.

For starters, exactly what Obama initiative thus far introduced to Congress has constituted “the perfect”? The diluted stimulus package? The health care reform package that omitted even the slightest mention of the benefits of a single payer plan? In truth, just about everything that has made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to the hill seems to have been designed with an eye towards politics over policy, a distinction made in the Post yesterday by Ezra Klein as a handy means of introducing a bit of reality into the discussion, and has seemed to have Emanuel's fingerprints all over it.

Klein doesn't quite take it far enough, however. While Klein points out that health care reform would have passed long since were it not for the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, he fails to point out the degree to which that election exemplified ineptitude in the White House political operation-- Emanuel's bailiwick and supposed area of expertise.

While Emanuel was brought into the Administration as an experienced political hand with a unique understanding of Congress, his experience consists of time among the madly triangulating Vichy Democrats of the Clinton White House and his years as a northern Blue Dog in the House. Thus it is completely lost on him that a rather large portion of the decline in Obama's political capital has occurred not on the right, where Emanuel's political operation has been aiming its pitches, but on the left, among the people the Chief of Staff has characterized as "fucking retards." Emanuel is of a generation of Democrats who came of age in the Reagan/Bush hegemony and has been trained, Pavlov-style, to bark wildly at liberals and to assume the position and pucker up whenever a bell goes off in the conservative echo chamber. In this way, Obama's supposed pit bull has shown himself to be a very good doggie indeed, and this latest collection of media biscuits proves the point nicely.

And the tea baggers get a terrorist attack all to themselves

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Your Curmudgeon has been watching the blathering news take a back seat to Olympics (rightfully so- the Danish Women's Curling Squad wears skirts and stockings) and All Things Tiger (not so rightfully so, see the latest American Patrol entry).

In spare moments, I think I have caught the real clue about the Palin Panty-Wadding over the term "retard". The winktacular Caribou Barbie has been taking on somewhat of crusade over the word "retard".

To recap the unfolding of the story:

Rahm Emmanuel (who could best serve the nation by going to 'spend more time with his family', or alternately, rest his severed head on a pike on the White House lawn) called politcal lefties "fucking retards". Palin got upset, and wanted Rahm fired. Rahm apologized.

Rush Limbaugh used "retard" like it was fresh cracked black pepper on his piccata. Palin demurred. Rush continued to bloviate.

Family Guy used the word "retard". Palin's panties got sucked into a massive two-hole wad.

Now, at every juncture of this event, there has been commentary from left and right over this, ranging the spectrum predictably from fawning praise to cries of 'hypocrisy'.

Just as predictably, the above mentioned response have been thus far considerably far from the mark.

I don't think that hypocrisy is the prime motivator here. Just as the LBGT community took over the word "queer", the kinky community reclaimed "pervert", and the black community turned "nigger" into "the n-word"... the fRight wingnuts have been looking for a word to claim as their own- and in 'retard', they've found it.

Whether this move on the part of Palin et al is praiseworthy will remain as a mental exercise to the reader.

I’ve always tried to avoid the habit of talking to the television screen as if the people on it could actually hear you, a habit that both my father and grandmother indulged in incessantly, and were roundly teased for, when I was growing up. I was thus somewhat surprised this morning to find myself yelling “Who could possibly give a shit?” and “You dumb son of a bitch, what the hell are you thinking?” at David Shuster this morning.

I usually watch the MSNBC and CNN morning news over breakfast, flipping from one to the other to avoid the incessant commercials, and was doing so this morning when I saw the aforementioned Shuster end an otherwise productive interview with former DNC Chair Howard Dean by asking him what his advice would be to Tiger Woods. “Goddamn,” I thought. “What the hell?” I wouldn’t have been more flabbergasted if he’d asked Dr. Dean “If you could be any kind of animal, what animal would you be?”

Deciding to fortify my somewhat shaken brain with another cup of coffee and a Pall Mall on the porch, I returned to the television just in time to hear Shuster conclude his interview with his next guest with the same question. I then made like Dad and Granny for the next several minutes.

Both MSNBC and CNN proceeded to spend what bits of the rest of the morning not taken up with Tiger Woods’ fourteen minute apology to one and all with analysis of same. As usual when I’m watching TV news, I was much less interested in the questions they were considering than on the one they weren’t, which was this: What exactly makes any of this any of our goddamn business, much less a major news story? Role model, my ass—Tiger Woods is a personable if fallible young man who is very good at playing what I consider to be a particularly silly game. If, like John Ensign and Mark Sanford, he had made his career criticizing and attempting to legislate the morality of others, I might actually see the point of bringing up his personal life. Instead, he makes his living hitting a little white ball with a collection of sticks, and I really don’t. In a country in crisis that is fairly brimming with under reported news stories, I marvel at the amount of time and attention wasted on it.

And yes, I know that my recent media kick is starting to resemble Fish shooting at a barrel, and is bringing me dangerously close to qualifying for my own old school KGO award, but jeez, people….

My husband enlightened me to the fact that about 15 years ago I had a psychotic beak. I have no active memory of the event. That is one of the symptoms. LOL

"Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality, usually false ideas about what is taking place or who one isa(delusions) and seeing or hearing things that aren't there (hallucinations)."

This weekend I am gong to blog about it at Live Journal. According to Mickey, I did not know my own name and I was NOT speaking anything remotely like English. I made it back and most people don't. I have no memory of the event but that is a symptom of that kind of event.

One note....the mentally ill, including people who break down have been proven to also be more intelligent and sensitive...so I'll take it as a complement....

"Evan Bayh has decided to retire. He said he wants to spend more time scolding his family for moving too far to the left."
-- Ezra Klein, Washington Post 2/15/10

Senator Evan Bayh (Vichy D-IN) resigned suddenly yesterday, provoking a rain of bullshit that has resulted in visibility zero conditions in the political media. Bayh, who is probably the most conservative Democrat currently serving in the Senate, is characterized as a "moderate" and a "centrist" who is leaving because of his frustrations with Senate partisanship, giving the dual examples of the seven Senate Republicans who voted against the deficit commission and Harry Reid's scuttling of the bipartisan Baucus/Grassley jobs bill. Democrats, per the media, are stunned, and Republicans looking forward to taking his seat in the fall.

No time, of course, with all this news breaking to wonder whether or not the deficit commission and Baucus/Grassley bill are anything like an appropriate response to the current economic situation, or to wonder how exactly anyone will be able to tell the difference if a genuine Republican took Bayh's place, or to delve any deeper into the origins of Senate gridlock in the Republican strategy of reflexively voting against any and all Democratic initiatives. One typical attempt this morning: MSNBC's Contessa Brewer interviewing Senator Judd Gregg on the topic with nary a mention of his authorship of a widely circulated memo explaining in detail the tactics Senate Republicans could use to obstruct and delay health care reform.

Why bother with facts when you can further narratives? The Horse Race narrative (are Obama and the Dems in trouble?), the antipartisanship narrative (how dare those Democrats try to govern?), and the centrist meme (how bad can things be if a "moderate" like Bayh is bailing out?) are being ram-fed in joyous anticipation of the high drama and boffo ratings of "stunning upsets" in November. Self fulfilling prophecies anyone?

Perfected at last-- news that actually makes you stupider as you watch.

God it blows,god it blows,god it blows

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"But if logic wouldn't work
Neither would a magic wand..."
-- Phoebe Snow

Old friendships can pay off in big ways, as I was reminded of again last Thursday when one of my oldest dropped me a line that managed to sum up neatly some of the things that had been rattling around my brain lately. The Turk, who claims to be apolitical but sometimes can't seem to help himself, sent me a Bernie Sanders video and the following: "Suddenly the GOP are all anti-deficit again. Our whole political discourse, if it can be called that, seems to revolve around amnesia. Everything would be so different if the media and its consumers remembered basic stuff dating back as far as, oh let's say three years."

And selah. Notably lacking from the current discussion of the opposition's macroeconomically idiotic anti-deficit mania is the fact ("stupid things," per conservative icon Ronald Reagan) that deficit increases over the last thirty years have occurred preponderantly under Republican administrations, and that they've been in all cases whoppers. The Republicans have practiced a tax cut and spend anyway philosophy as a cornerstone of their something for nothing electoral strategy and their revised standard Clap For Tinkerbell economics.

Selah as well to the media reference. When it is considered news that Senator X said something, but not news that his utterance was stone cold chapter and verse counterfactual, reason itself goes begging.

"It's going to be a great year for Republicans," said David Brooks on this Sunday's Press the Meat, and if he's right, a lot of the reason for it is right there.

My advice to young people has always been this-- if you meet someone, even someone who seems otherwise attractive, whose favorite author is J.D. Salinger or Ayn Rand, leave that person's presence with all possible speed, screaming optional. Salinger's death at the age of 91 Wednesday does nothing to change this.

While his work as a narrative stylist is somewhat interesting before the subject matter drives this reader off the page, Salinger's celebration of stunted adolescence, particularly in the excruciating The Catcher In The Rye, has been a woeful cultural influence, contributing to, among other imitations and homages, Mark David Chapman, the twee quality that makes Wes Anderson's movies so difficult to watch, the movie "Purple Haze", and, arguably, the smug, entitled something for nothing ethos at the heart of modern conservatism (Dennis Miller's son's name? Why, Holden, of course).

Salinger, apparently, wrote what he knew, managing to spend his entire later career at the writerly equivalent playing the piano "in the goddamn closet", allegedly producing reams of material that he considered too precious to be put out into the nasty, phony world and parlaying his status as a recluse into a cult following that probably wouldn't have survived continued publication.

Some of this later work is likely to be released by his estate. Keep your eyes peeled for people who are excited by this prospect, and avoid those people.

UPDATE: I was talking with the lovely Em last night, who told me that when she was in high school she had avoided reading The Catcher In The Rye because it was popular and because it was expected of her, and hadn't read it to this day. Never having read it, she missed the irony inherent in her attitude towards it, but organic irony is the best kind.

In my ever-intermittent coverage of the subtitled translation of the events of the day, I offer this:

And yes, it truly just doesn't matter. The status quo will be what the ownership class decides it will be. Nothing- well, nothing that improves the state of affairs for the non-ownership class will happen.

Lest you delude yourself: owning a house doesn't make you part of the ownership class.
Being a 'politically active citizen' doesn't make you part of the ownership class.
Owning a retirement account, some stocks, or any other 'investment vehicle' doesn't make you a part of the ownership class.

Being simply a "have" instead of a "have-not" doesn't make you a part of the ownership class.

The ownership class sits upon massive dynastic wealth, livid in greed over the thought that anyone else has anything else. And the ownership class runs this show. The government? It is just another arm, another vehicle to express their control.

Think I am just angry? Just some foam-mouthed class warrior? Feh. Look at what is happening, look at where the money is going, and from where it comes. Look at how where the power lies within the structure, and notice too how it grows evermore concentrated.

There is no class war. It is over. We didn't win. And far too many are STILL too fucking stupid to realize it.

Watch politics for long enough, and the writing on the wall gets exceedingly easy to read. I came up from making breakfast for my sons on Sunday morning to find my youngest channel surfing past one of the Sunday morning network meme-fests, and in that mere snippet caught a sufficient whiff of doom to last me the rest of the day. David Gergen, whose experience in Republican Administrations and as a consultant to the Vichy Democrats of the Clinton White House makes him a walking, talking symbol of the beltway ideal of centrist bipartisanship, managed to get one sentence off before being cut off on the way up to the Cartoon Network, to the effect that the President needs to concentrate on "jobs and the deficit."

Great, I though, politics by oxymoron-- all the President needs to do is bring down unemployment while reducing spending in an economy that is currently relying on stimulative Federal spending for what little growth its achieving. Piece of cake.

My first reaction to the Brown election last week was "if they try to triangulate to this sucker, we are well and truly doomed," and less than a week later, we well and truly are. In the run up to the State of the Union address tomorrow, it has been announced that the central elements of the President's economic agenda will be middle class tax cuts and a domestic spending freeze that excludes the Pentagon, the State Department, and any other cuts that might set the Republicans off. Engraved invitations for a recessionary double dip are presumably on order.

Stay tuned...

"... That is, we knew ye,
But I would have to say, hardly..."
-- Jackie Rogers Jr. (Martin Short), SCTV

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true
Or is it something worse..."
-- Bruce Springsteen

The voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts last night gave Barack Obama a rather interesting present in commemoration of this, the first anniversary of his inauguration. Happy Anniversary, Mister President: I hope you like suck…

The upset victory of the Republican candidate in the Massachusetts special election is, as commemorative gifts go, oddly fitting. Martha Coakley, the losing Democrat, was considered a shoe-in going in to this race, largely for reasons of sentiment and “history” (this is, after all, the fabled Kennedy Seat), and campaigned accordingly, taking a nice long vacation in the Caribbean over the holidays and committing gaffe after gaffe due to simple inattention. By the time her campaign woke up to the fact that they were about to have their asses handed to them and sought White House coat tails, it was far too late to make a difference. In the end, Democrats tried to make the race less a vote on Coakley (who had already lost it) than a referendum on the continuation of the Obama agenda in Congress.

The results speak for themselves, and make for an interesting summation of the first year of the Obama Presidency. The sixty vote super majority, which a vote for Coakley would supposedly have protected, has for all practical purposes been nothing but an empty numerical boast (paging Senators Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu, Lincoln, and company), and the health care reform effort, which the election of Scott Brown supposedly dooms, emerged from the Senate a compromised botch that failed to address the real needs of real citizens. Sentiment and history—the President’s personal popularity, his status as the first African-American President, his effort to “win one for Teddy” by passing “historic” health reform—have been a lot of what this Presidency has been about so far. It hasn’t worked very well for him, either.

We all know what story this week needs talking about.

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