The Pubhouse Dialogues

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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A couple of propositions to ponder seriously as we enter the new year:

1) The Republican Party's contribution to every political debate for the last year or more has consisted of equal parts zilch, nada, bupkis, and kvetch, leavened with constant and abiding bad faith, and that is unlikely to change. As such, the Republican Party is, despite their continued presence in the media, for all intents and purposes irrelevant to the current political debate.

2) Given proposition 1 above, the main impediment to the progressive agenda is not the Republican Party-- it is the Democrats.

Those who accept the propositions above (and I'm far too old to believe that includes everyone) might wish to entertain the ensuing modest proposal: that this should be the year that progressives undertake and act upon an honest, comprehensive examination of their relationship with the Democratic Party on the grounds that if such a relationship were happening between, for instance, a couple in the apartment upstairs, the cops would have been called long since.

As abusive relationships go, this has been a doozy. The left has for generations provided the Democratic Party with its activist base. It has also for the last thirty years at least provided them with the first bargaining chips off the stack in negotiation after negotiation. On issue after issue, progressive interests and nominees have been sold down the river in the name of compromise and bipartisanship, often to no good end.

They have done so in the full expectation of continued progressive support, and have for the most part received it. The last time that expectation was questioned, during Ralph Nader’s 2000 run for President, resulted in howls of protest from the Gore campaign and the Party establishment that resound to this day and a sort of post-Nader guilt on the left that has impeded any further attempts to break away from the Party. (By the way, those who have spent the last decade warming themselves on daydreams of the never-was Gore Administration are cordially invited to the following cringe: January 20th as the first anniversary of the inauguration of President Joe Lieberman.)

The assumption at the time was that it was the responsibility of progressive voters to deliver their votes to the Democrats, rather than the Democrats’ responsibility to actually be deserving of that support. It is an assumption that continues, and one progressives should question, especially in light of the last year.

The health care reform effort, while only the most recent example of the skewed relationship between the Democrats and the left, is nonetheless an excellent one—progressive ideas such as single payer (still the best means of controlling costs and providing universal coverage) were compromised from the get-go, with those compromises themselves eroded into nothing over time, not to win the support of Republicans, but to ensure the support of Democrats. Other examples abound: the expansion of the Afghanistan action, the President's refusal to hold the past Administration accountable for unlawful conduct and the subsequent embrace of that same unlawful conduct by his own Administration, the "economic rescue" that enriched entrenched business interests at taxpayer expense. The next year is likely to bring more: compromises on global warming policy, fiscal policy, and the still unfinished health care bill are all likely to begin with the wholesale rejection of progressive principles and end with a series of half-measures, band-aids, and excuses, all devised by the Democratic Caucuses and White House without a shred of substantive Republican input.

Through it all, the Democrats will solicit progressive campaign funding, volunteer hours, votes, advocacy support and, inevitably, continued forbearance. Maybe this time, they shouldn't get it.

This is obviously much easier said than done. The progressive left is hardly a monolithic entity, atomized as it has been by years of single issue and identity politics, and I truly have no answer to the age old question of where else progressives can be applied. I do, however, know this: with the Republicans devoid of any real political content beyond reflexive ideology and reactive opposition, and with the Tea Party movement splintering them electorally, a threatened defection, or even resignation, on the left from the Democratic Party could conceivably reshape the corporatized, status quotidian two party system that has presided over our national decline for the better.

To paraphrase Harry Truman, maybe before we get hit on the head this next time we should think long and hard about who's hitting us. The enemies of our enemies are not only not necessarily our friends; they lately seem to have gotten pretty cozy with our enemies.

"It's. . .
Colder than the nipple on the witch's tit!
Colder than a bucket of penguin shit!
Colder than the hairs of a polar bear's ass!
Colder than the frost on a champagne glass!"
-- Thomas Pynchon,Gravity's Rainbow

Warning in advance-- I am likely to be in a shitty mood for the next little while. Luckily, I will be joined in this by many of my fellow Minnesotans. While everyone over the age of six is familiar with that let down feeling at the end of the holidays, here in the Precious Land of the Ever So Special January 2nd hits like an anvil pitched off a cliff and bounces around alarmingly until at least late March. It's not the end of the world, but you can definitely see it from here-- the snows of our coveted white Christmas compacted into glacial bits of road filth and frozen slush, no sanctioned celebrations on tap until Valentine's Day (Martin Luther King Day being, for most people, one of those weird Monday holidays that has as much to do with Dr. King and civil rights as Labor Day has to do with the working class), which tends to piss off as many people as it pleases, and the cozy feeling of being indoors away from the arctic air masses starting to show the first signs of congealing into terminal cabin fever.

Looking on the bright side under such conditions is both difficult and tedious, especially in a state culture that celebrates Lent without Mardi Gras, but strive we must. There are good things about a Minneapolis winter-- hockey, a number of good curry houses and Szechuan restaurants, Phillips Sno Shoe Grog, an excuse to share body heat if such an excuse is needed. The trick is to get to those good things without spending too much time outdoors. Should we live so long (four months? five?), we will eventually emerge into that day when the last of the ice melts and the lilacs start to bloom. In the meantime, you'll forgive us if we seem a little testy-- we're not unfeeling, just a bit numb at the extremities.

The Republicans are scared yet again. The unsuccessful attempt by a London educated, Al Qaeda trained young Nigerian to detonate a crotchload of plastic explosives on a Northwest Airlines flight landing in Detroit on Christmas day has dominated news coverage for the last week, largely because it has been seized on by conservative politicians and commentators keen on bringing back the War on Terror as an issue for the 2010 midterms and (with al Qaeda’s implicit cooperation—it will take more attacks to keep this going) the 2012 Presidential race, and threatens to dominate political debate and the legislative agenda for at least the first part of the coming year. While Janet Napolitano’s assertion that “the system worked” in the attempted Northwest Flight 253 attack was flatfooted and clumsy, the fact remains that, whether because of the valiant effort of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s fellow passengers, his own incompetence, or the gimcrack nature of his underpants and syringe bomb, there was no explosion and no harm came to the flight, its passengers, or the airport facility. Unfortunately for us, no political hay can be made from a counting of blessings and a sigh of relief that the attack was unsuccessful.

In point of fact, little political hay can be from this situation at all without a sort of white knuckled, adrenalized suspension of the sense of perspective that the Republicans have been advocating since Christmas Day. Historical perspective, of course, absolutely must go—whether the system worked or not, it is a system that was largely designed and implemented by the previous administration, who embarrassingly enough seem to have released the main leaders of the conspiracy from custody. For all the use of the word “unprecedented” in Republican talking points over the last week, the Richard Reid shoe bomb incident back in 2001 provides an apt basis for comparison, and turns to solid horseshit just about every criticism made thus far concerning the Administration’s reaction to the incident: that reaction, to the extent that it wasn’t triangulated to blunt right wing criticism, was both more prompt and more thoughtful than the Bush Administration’s after Reid. In essence, conservatives have chosen to criticize the President for not making a bigger deal of this, for not going on immediate high alert and issuing statements before the facts were in, for not responding with posturing and tough talk and “enhanced interrogation” and other grand displays of pointless activity. The danger, it seems, is that the Administration, and by extension the American people, just aren’t acting scared enough in the face of The Enemy.

Again, it should be pointed out that The Enemy failed every bit as badly as the system did, and a response commensurate to such a bungled attack probably shouldn’t include military high alerts and declarations of new war fronts. The Obama Administration’s decision to treat the attack as a criminal matter is neither unprecedented nor historically unsuccessful, and if left at that, would probably address the incident and its implications fairly completely.

It is, unfortunately, very unlikely to be left at that, and some of the postures and pointless activities the right has been exhorting for have already begun. We have already seen an attempt to respond to the incident with a new level of airline security theater, including new guidelines about passenger behavior that have already been rejected as unweildy and a call for more stringent use of both watch lists, scanner technologies, and searches that will probably turn out to be both outrageously expensive and an immense pain in the ass for the flying public. The time and attention of both the Congress and the Executive Branch are likely to be taken up with hearings, investigations, and attempted fixes on this issue for some time to come, conveniently distracting it from a long list of domestic priorities the right would rather not have to address. And the disruption of our society and our government, the implied aim of all terrorist attacks successful or not, will, as usual, be accomplished far more by the fearmongering of the candy ass opposition than by, in this case, the hapless young African with the burnt genitals.

Worse, the fantasy that there is such a thing as complete safety and that it is the government’s job to pursue and provide it for us will be perpetuated, to the detriment of dozens of other displaced priorities. A country that might have used the historical marker of a change in decade for a reasoned assessment of its situation will likely be spending the next little while with its leaders on an extended visit to the Neighborhood of Make Believe. Happy bloody New Year indeed.

***
While we’re handing out New Year’s greetings, here, belatedly, is mine to you. Thanks to all of you who have read and commented on this blog over the last year, and special big wet ones to those few of you who followed me here from other locations and other media. I’m especially grateful to all of you because despite the many strides that have been made in information technology in the last decade, a Google search of “EC Fish” will still get you thousands of entries about seafood and aquaculture in the European Community before the first mention of me. Thus your presence on this page is the result either of a happy accident, and bless those, or a concerted effort, and bless you. I hope that you can spend the year having fun with people you love, because in the final analysis, there’s hardly anything else worth having. Hang in there, y'all, and stay tuned...

** Those of you who haven't yet read TD Mischke's "A Christmas Story" in last week's City Pages are urged to do so. Mischke, whom I have prized this year both for generating rare and precious readable column inches in the Pages and for being a fellow member of the Pretentious Initials Club (honorary President EJ Dionne), has truly created a Christmas classic. It is a modern day "Yes, Virginia..." and gave me visions after I read it this weekend of clippings of the story being handed on from generation to generation. Yes, I am an anachronistic old fart, thanks for noticing.

**Major mea culpas: I was obviously wrong about the inability of the Senate to pass the health care reform package before Christmas, which barring the unforeseen they are now set to do late Christmas Eve. No surprise, really—I finally posted the damn thing after five solid days of having the developing news cycle turn my draft copy into counterfactual poo, so being bitten in the ass yet again by the story isn’t exactly unexpected. Somehow, as hard as I may try, I’m always really bad at estimating the depths of cynicism-- it would never have occurred to me that Ben Nelson’s supposedly principled head could be turned by the mere offer of perpetual Medicaid funding for Nebraska, or rather, turned more than it already had been by campaign contributions from his old friends and colleagues in the insurance industry. I wasn’t wrong about the final bill containing indefensible elements, however, and the chances of those elements being eliminated in conference seem fairly slim.

**In the spirit of the season, Senator Tom Coburn, Sunday night before the cloture vote: "What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can't make the vote tonight. That’s what they ought to pray." Sorry to bring it up during the Holy Days, but the longer I live the more the failure of God to strike certain people down where they stand convinces me of His nonexistence.

**This time of year I often find myself wondering what sort of effect it has had on Western culture that the major holiday of its dominant religion celebrates that religion's central figure as an infant.

Do yourself the biggest favor you could do this Holiday Season,love your loved ones.

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"What happened? Why did we suck? How can we not suck in the future?"
-- Henchman 24

"Money doesn't talk, it swears."
-- Bob Dylan

"And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers..."
-- Matthew 21:12 (King James Version)

By now it seems obvious that the Administration and Congressional leadership’s promise of a health care reform bill all wrapped up and under the tree in time for Christmas is as good as broken. This is probably for the best. It was socks, people (which any kid can tell you counts as a lousy present and any appreciator of “vintage erotica” can tell you implies inadequate coverage), and that wasn’t cheery wrapping paper, it was a collection of premium invoices and tax statements. The real present was not for us.

While it remains to be seen if this particular package will even be delivered in the bleak early days of the New Year, the unlikelihood of any sudden dramatic action on this issue (particularly with the Republicans’ use of such bits of the Judd Gregg How To Stall memo as the forcing of amendments to be read aloud) before then gives those of us who can ignore politics when it isn’t directly in their faces an opportunity to enjoy the holidays with their friends and loved ones unencumbered by the news, and those of us whose obsession with politics won’t let us goddamn leave it alone for a couple of weeks adequate opportunity to grind the lessons of this debacle down into a fine and bitter paste, to wit:

1) The Democrats do not, and never have had, sixty votes in this Senate. The count, after the Specter defection and Coleman’s Last Stand, was always this: fifty odd Democrats; Bernie Sanders (I-VT), an honest to God Socialist whose lack of anywhere better to go serves as an odd and disheartening symbol for the relationship of the left and the Democratic Party overall; Joseph Lieberman (I-CT), who should have been invited for an extended ride on the nearest ice floe right after his Republican Convention speech; and a passel of Senators from rural Southern and Midwestern states whose conservatism and fundamental disloyalty to the party and its principles make the continued holding of their seats by the Democrats a complete moot point. Having a sixty vote majority caucus has been, for the Democrats, like having a stretch Mercedes limo with a thrown rod sitting in the driveway: it’s big, it’s impressive, and it won’t get you anywhere.

2) The Senate is a deeply antidemocratic institution. The Senators mentioned above, all of whom have threatened at one time or another to overturn the will of their constituents and the majority of their peers, collectively represent less than five percent of the US population. Lieberman, who has threatened to do so single-handedly if need be, represents 1.15% of that population, and was re-elected by a minority of that.

3) The Senate is a deeply corrupt institution. The Senators alluded to above have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions from medical insurance companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers, and have, in the face of reliable polling, taken as a policy the bald statement “Screw you, citizens, who cares what you want?”

4) Much would be improved if Rahm Emanuel decided to, umm, “spend more time with his family.” My original iteration of this point actually involved a pedestrian traffic accident with a large public transport vehicle (The Curmudgeon’s involved his head on a pike on the White House lawn), which seems both uncharitable at the holidays and overly violent. It really doesn’t matter what takes him out of the government, it matters that something does. Why? Well, for one thing Emanuel, back when he was in charge of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, got the Party a swell deal on the stretch Mercedes limo that currently sits in its figurative driveway going nowhere, and this kind of value blind form-over-content politics, which he learned at the feet of Bill Clinton, characterizes his entire approach to government. Emanuel, whose appointment as Chief of Staff was greeted in certain circles with praise for his toughness and political savvy, can be best summed up at this point by his alleged statement concerning Lieberman—“Give him what he wants.” If politics is an art, Rahm Emanuel paints by numbers.

5) Maybe Barack Obama isn’t all that after all. While it would be nice to cast the majority of the blame on his staff (see Rahm Emanuel above), his leadership on this issue has been less than pathetic, and there can simply be no excuses made. The argument that is currently making the rounds that Congress must pass a health care bill no matter what it looks like in order to avoid hurting the President fails to take into account just how badly this process has hurt him already. His willingness to deal away key provisions of this effort to the Republicans and the insurance industry while earning the support of neither makes this supposedly keenly intelligent President look gullible and weak. The end result makes this supposed agent of change look like a champion of the status quo. His attempts to preserve his political capital by leaving the process to Congress and not deigning to address the lies employed by his opposition have resulted in a slow and smoldering erosion of that capital among the coalition that elected him in the first place.

While none have seen the final bill at this point, early indications are that it will contain any number of elements that should be seen as entirely unacceptable: an individual mandate without competition or cost control, an erosion of women’s rights, a provision allowing insurers to cap benefits, take your pick. Many of the elements being touted as so completely necessary as to require the bill’s passage, such as the elimination of insurance companies rights to deny benefits to those with pre-existing conditions, now exist completely detached from any elements that prevent the insurance companies from turning that coverage into another unaffordable cash cow. The point of the exercise was supposedly competition, affordability, and universal coverage. The result, it seems, has been none of the above.

Coal in our stockings, people. Let’s see if we can figure out in the coming year how we were bad enough to merit that.

Are you ready for a pussed out compromise?
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"It is the night with the Christmas trees and pie.
Jesus was born and so I get presents.
Thank you, Jesus, for being born."
--Cartman, South Park

I went to the laundromat the week before Thanksgiving. Laundromat mornings are a departure from my usual morning modus-- I leave the house before having any coffee, not wishing to be any more aware of the eight block forced full pack march it takes to get there than I have to be, and bring a go-cup. I was only a couple of sips in and only vaguely aware of my surroundings as I sorted my laundry (cold load-- stuff I care about; hot load-- stuff I don't), but began to realize that the laundromat was resounding with cries of "Christ! Oh Christ! Jesus Christ!"

It was another few ounces before I twigged to the fact that I was hearing not an angry and frustrated fellow laundromat patron, but Christmas music on the PA system. WLTE-FM here in Minneapolis has made a seasonal transition from “Lite FM” (1/3rd less aesthetic content) to all Christmas music, all the time, and the laundromat management had either decided to share a little premature holiday cheer with us or had simply neglected to change the station.

In either case, I was festooned with yuletide greatest hits for the next hour and a half, and in all that time I had heard absolutely nothing unexpected. All the usual suspects-- Frosty, Rudolph, Santa, Johnny Mathis, Andy Williams, even John Lennon (“Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”) and the Beach Boys (“Little Saint Nick”)-- present and accounted for. How, I wondered, would they be able to keep it up for the next forty days?

By becoming amazingly repetitious, I would guess. Christmas music can be pretty repetitious to start with-- I have seen a tape loop of the repeating four note theme from “Carol of the Bells” clear a fairly crowded room in under ten minutes-- and doubly so when that music must be both popular and, umm, ethnically cleansed. While Mathis and Nat “King” Cole are doubtless invited to the party, along with Jose Feliciano (whose “Feliz Navidad” now sounds kind of weird when it doesn’t end with the words “…and from Taco John’s”), I would be surprised to hear Chuck Berry’s “Run Run Rudolph", shocked to hear Charles Brown's "Merry Christmas, Baby", and completely floored if they played Run-DMC's "Christmas in Hollis." They are, apparently, dreaming of a white Christmas.

Speaking of amazingly repetitious, the day after Thanksgiving marked the beginning of the Holidazzle Parades. Parades, plural-- four a week, Thursday through Sunday, every week until the Sunday before Christmas Day. Why Minneapolis needs to stage fifteen parades when most cities make do nicely with just one is something of a mystery-- one might think it has something to do with the utter boredom inherent in Minnesota winters, but alleviating boredom by standing in the cold on the sidewalk on Nicollet Mall watching marching bands and floats is crazy even by Gopher State standards. The default answer in such situations hereabouts usually has something to do with our overwhelming specialness as a place and a people-- it's horseshit, of course, but it will have to do.

Sorry for the humbug. Honestly, I like the Christmas season as much as the next atheist-- starting about December 18th.

"No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master."
-- Hunter S Thompson

"The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic."
-- ibid, 11/20/2000

Considering the number of economic, political, and existential catastrophes we are facing down in the present day, it seems an inordinate amount of time, energy, and ink are being devoted to Sarah Palin. “… (A) ttention,” sayeth Frank Rich in the New York Times, “must be paid,” describing her as “far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama.”

Rich’s emphasis on branding is acute. Palin, and what, God help us, might be described as Palinism, has as much or more to do with consumer appeal as it does with civic concern. Palin neatly straddles the media info-tainment divide, and speculation on her plans for the future is neatly divided between those positing her as a talk show host and those who think she’ll run for President in 2012. This latter group is further subdivided between Democrats, who respond to the possibility by laughing and shouting “Bring it on”, and the hard right fringe, who lately respond to it by standing outside chain bookstores and chanting “Sa-Rah! Sa-Rah! Sa-Rah!”

I obviously identify much more with the first group than the second, but both groups make me uneasy. While I haven’t been above having a laugh at Caribou Barbie’s expense, and am frankly salivating at the prospect of writing about such a campaign, I’m a grizzled old fart--face it, I’ve had to-- and one of the lessons I’ve learned in the grizzling process is that just because something’s absurd doesn’t mean it won’t happen, particularly in American politics. The reason for this truism, of course, is the existence of the second group, who are completely and utterly out of their tiny little minds and thus both unpredictable and scary as hell.

There has been a vogue of late in left and center-left political commentary warning against exactly this kind of laughter. Those who follow Palin and other bits of walking chuckle-bait like Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and the Fox News and Tea Party crowds, we are told, are representing a deep and powerful populist rage and thus must be taken seriously. While I can see the point of these arguments, to me they beg the question “How do we do that, exactly?” What objective standards can we even apply to a group of people who celebrate abject ignorance as an expression of anti-elitism, who mistake their hatreds and prejudices for “good common sense”, who reject informed debate in favor of chanted slogans and shout-downs, and who take as their vanguard and standard-bearer a woman who has been thoroughly documented as a liar, a quitter, a proud ignoramus, a shameless opportunist, and a petty, vindictive public whiner? Take them seriously, hell— how can we even talk to them?

The good news is that we probably don’t have to. The Palin “movement” is a first class example of the Bright Shiny Object school of newsworthiness, and has already been granted attention and influence to a degree that is wildly out of proportion to its actual size. While some populist rage is certainly justified in this day and age, and could have its uses-- the recent strange bedfellows collaboration between Representatives Ron Paul (R-TX) and Alan Grayson (D-FL) to mandate an audit of the Federal Reserve springs to mind, and seems to offer a possible collaboration of left and right that has nothing to do with the milquetoast center-- the red faced, spittle flecked variety can probably be safely removed from most political calculations without throwing the result off too badly.

It is completely true, as some commentators have pointed out, that Palin and her followers aren’t going away any time soon, and more is the pity. Perhaps enough of them will chose to ignore the elitist advice of those highfalutin’ medical doctors that they'll simply pass from the scene of natural causes.

"If we glance at the pages of history, we will find that laws, which surely are, or ought to be, compacts of free men, have been, for the most part, a mere tool for the passions of some.”
--Cesare Beccaria

"I don't care about the Constitution."
--Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, 11/17/09

The Republicans are scared again. Last week's announcement by the Justice Department that five of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks would be tried in Federal District Court in New York City has inspired a torrent of hysterical protest from the right. "...(Extremely dangerous," said House minority leader John Boehner (R-OH), further speculating that an actual trial for the five could result in their release on the sort of "legal technicality" that used to get Charles Bronson, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the like packing their pistols and hitting the vigilante trail in the movies. "Political correctness run amok," said Rep. John "Prop Baby" Shadegg (R-AZ), in the course of since apologized for remarks asking how New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who had said that New Yorkers were not afraid of hosting terror trials) would feel if his daughter were kidnapped by terrorists. "An unnecessary risk," said former New York Mayor and self-styled terrorism expert Rudy Giuliani, further accusing the Administration of returning to a "pre-9/11" mindset. The trial will be “an intelligence bonanza for Al Qaeda…Prosecutors…forced to reveal …the methods and sources,” says former Bush Administration attorney and torture enabler John Yoo in the Wall Street Journal, despite a long record of terrorism cases tried with no such jeopardy occurring. It will give “the terrorists a forum from which to spout their propaganda,” says Annemarie McAvoy of Fox News, whose knowledge of courtroom protocol obviously stems from Law and Order reruns.

Why the fuss? Because terrorists, apparently, are possessed of malevolent magical powers, capable of presenting a clear and present danger to the populace at large even when held in high-security Federal custody. They are far more dangerous than, say, Charles Manson, Tim McVeigh, or the scores of high security violent inmates currently or formerly held in Federal custody nationwide. The mere possibility of the presence of these men, and other Guantanamo detainees, on US soil has had right wing commentators and politicians publicly wetting themselves for months.

Ridiculous? Absolutely. So what’s the real reason? Hard to say, but a various factors certainly come into play. First, a salient feature of the post-9/11 mindset advocated by Giuliani and others here seems to be a complete and utter lack of faith in our nation’s public institutions and the Constitution of the United States. 9/11 itself happened, this mindset implies, because we weren’t good enough to stop it— we made ourselves sitting ducks due to our devotion to such now outmoded concepts as due process, habeas corpus, and the Bill of Rights. Then Everything Changed. The Constitution and multiple international agreements suddenly became, to quote former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, “quaint.” It was completely necessary to abandon them lest we be killed in our beds by Evil Magic Muslims, and, incidentally, completely necessary to give broad extraconstitutional powers to the Executive.

Ridiculous? Yeah. 9/11 was hardly the first terrorist attack in the history of the world, and no other government, including our own before 2001, saw the complete abandonment of the basic tenets of their legal system as necessary to national survival. It was the government's response, not the attack itself, which was unprecedented, and the government, not the terrorists, who did damage to civil liberties and the rule of law—to what we poor naïve pre-9/11 mindset types think of as the American Way of Life.

The most likely reason? Politics. It should be noted that the objections to this trial are being raised by a minority opposition whose battle plan has been to gainsay every statement and action of the current Administration without regard to common sense or common weal. The exploitation of threats of violence for political purposes—that is to say, terrorism (look it up)—has been a feature of the Republican playbook since Nixon ’68, and there is an obvious hope here that enough fear mongering in this case will revive terrorism as an issue and drive enough members of a frightened populace back into the Republican fold to mitigate their current bid for electoral insignificance.

Ridiculous? I wish it was. The reason scaring people has been part of the Republican electoral agenda for so long is that it has worked time and time again. To consider falling for this kind of cynical manipulation as a feature of some kind of “pre-Obama mindset” is to grossly overestimate an electorate that ratified George W. Bush’s appointment as President in 2004.